Re: Atlantic’s list of the Top 100 most influential figures in American history 

December’s issue of the Atlantic Monthly has an article listing “The Top 100 most influential figures in American history.”

By the end of the 21st century I’m confident such a list will include some Green Party candidate in some high-profile campaign (Matt Gonzalez winning the governorship of California in 2018??, Ben Manski coming in a close second in the presidential race of 2020??), a campaign which becomes looked back upon as the key moment when the longstanding, anomalous, only-two-parties American political system is broken open for good and becomes thereafter a true multiparty system.

Meanwhile, some comments on the current list:

“No. 17 Ronald Reagan: The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War’s end.”

These two things - the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conservative realignment - are, of course, related. The failure of the 100-year-long movement for human liberation called Socialism led to the success of pols like Reagan, Thatcher, and Chirac ... touting “TINA” (the idea that “There Is No Alternative” to the status quo; see Addendum below on Gabriel Kolko’s new book called After Socialism).

“No. 96 Ralph Nader: He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.”

Interesting the extent to which it has become the conventional wisdom that Nader’s impact was responsible for the election of W.

Even though that’s wrongheaded and a notion we have to counter at every opportunity, it does show that third party impact is lurking in the American consciousness as a significant issue. Therefore we should also take every opportunity to frame it around our own perspective of implementing IRV and proportional representation to resolve the issue.

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Addendum:

After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought
by Gabriel Kolko

Paperback: 195 pages
Publisher: Routledge (October, 2006)

Does socialism have a future in 21st Century society? If not, what is the future for progressive politics?

After Socialism deals with the collapse of socialism both as an idea and movement. This book analyzes the economic and social realities that require a critical but much more intelligent alternative of coping with the enormous, mounting challenges that the world confronts. This is a major contribution to contemporary social and political thought written by one of the world’s leading critical historians. Gabriel Kolko asks difficult questions about where the Left can go in a post-Cold War world where neoliberal policies appear to have triumphed in both the West and the former Soviet bloc.

In trying to answer these questions, he discusses:

. the origins and development of socialist ideas
. the contemporary dynamics of the global economy dominated by American military, cultural and political might
. the failures of contemporary capitalism
. the poverty and economic and financial instability - in the United States and industrial nations as well as the Third World - that make our contemporary world so precarious.

After Socialism is a synthesis of Kolko’s past work and a critical assessment of why and how critical social thought can be reconstructed. While avoiding the temptations of either pessimism or utopianism, Kolko manages to offer an original and practical solution addressing the question: “which way forward?”.

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Counterpunch 11/25/06

Factors in Our Colossal Mess (excerpts)

By Gabriel Kolko

These are dismal days for those who attempt to run the affairs of the world. But how should we understand it?

It would be a basic error to look at our present situation as if it were rationally comprehensible. The limits of rational explanations are that they assume rational men and women make decisions and that they will respect the limits of their power and behave realistically. This has rarely been true anywhere historically over the past century, and politics and illusions based on ideology or wishful thinking have often been decisive. This is especially the case with the present bunch in Washington.

We are right to fear anything, particularly a war with Iran that would immediately reel out of control and have catastrophic consequences not only to the region but globally. We are also correct to see limits to the power of irrational people, for the United States is strategically weak. It loses the big wars, as in Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq - even though its tactical victories often prove to be very successful - but also ultimately destabilizing and ephemeral. Had the U.S. not overthrown the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1954 it is very likely the mullahs would never have come to power and we would not now be considering a dangerous war there.

We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914. Since I have just published an entire book, After Socialism, and detailed its innumerable myopias and faults, I need not say more than that it is no longer is a threat to anybody. The fakirs who lead the parties who still use “socialism” as a justification for their existence have only abolished defeats at the hands of the people from the price capitalism pays for its growing follies. That confidence - freedom from challenge by the unruly masses - is very important but it is less and less sufficient to solve the countless remaining dilemmas. The system has become increasingly vulnerable, social stability notwithstanding, since about 1990 and the formal demise of “communism”.

The failure of socialist theory is much more than matched by the failure of capitalism because the latter has the entire responsibility for keeping the status quo functioning - and it has no intellectual basis for doing so. The crisis that exists is that capitalism has reached a most dangerous stage in destructiveness - and no [as yet significant] opposition to it exists. This malaise involves foreign affairs and domestic affairs - vast greed at home and adventure overseas. If the foreign policy aspects are largely American-originated, the rest of the world tolerates or sometimes collaborates with it. Its downfall is inevitable, perhaps imminent.

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