I’ve been thinking tonight about the accumulating and apparently accelerating cycle of social crises and conflicts of the past several years. Specifically I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the rightist “Tea Party” movement, which may have reached its high-water mark with the nomination of Rand Paul as the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky. Most notable to me is the stridently pro-corporate, pro-business nature of Paul’s rhetoric. This exposes to some degree the contradiction between the rightist nature of the Tea Party, and the string of corporate abuses that have provided much of the social discontent on which the Teabaggers have sought to advance.
This is also the first, tentative and provisional, step in my long contemplated effort to develop a larger social and ideological critique of the current social crisis, both in the US and globally. I’m sure I’ll backtrack, reassess, recorrect some good portion of this and what will follow, but for the first time I feel at least sufficiently confident of my understanding to begin putting words on paper, or on electron as the case may be.