This is actually a long a comment I made within the thread of thirty three and a third's "Alec Baldwin Tweets on #FightFor15 Recalls “White Moderate” MLK Dreaded/NeoLib 1% Bubble, posted yesterday," 4/22.
Quoted from the LP himself: "Last week while thousands of people, myself and some friends included, marched through NYC, after a rally attended by and hosting politicians such as Eric Shneiderman, Scott Stringer and Latisha James, Baldwin showed some of his true neoliberal colors as he tweeted away about his own inconvenience. An op-ed in the NY Times confronted it, 'A Response to Alec Baldwin’s Complaints That a Living Wage Rally Snarled Traffic.'"
“Life in NY is hard enough as is. The goal is to not make it more so. How does clogging rush hour traffic from 59th St to 42 do any good?”
“Oh, I support their cause. The timing of their event wasn’t what good NYers would do....”
“ NY’s ethos dissolves every day that individuals or groups put their needs/goals ahead of everyone else’s.”
“There are ways to rally people to your cause without inconveniencing an entire City.”
My thoughts:
Plenty of people felt same about Civil Rights marches, I'm sure.
Yet there are tons of D's who feel the same as Alec. I've seen the complaints here on DK. Limousine liberals, wannabes and other progressives with superficially developed principles and disdain for or fear of public conflict, confrontation, and agitation, don't want change if it inconveniences their lifestyles or could possible jeopardize their social standing. Arguments over movies, golf swings and the best tax sheltering strategies, sure. Holler over whether or not people are using your parking space. Fine. But let's not engage (fight back) in the Class War.
And sure as hell don't ask them to ruin a perfectly good Saturday to march around in public--when they could be getting ahead by working or schmoozing over a round of golf or relaxing in front of the tv; where friends, family, associates, bosses, employees, customers, vendors, etc., might actually see them standing up for something the court of public opinion has not already definitively ruled on. They'll express their support in the safety, er, privacy of the voting booth, perhaps even the occasional guarded parlor conversation among vetted confidantes, and no where else. Expose allegiance to ideas and causes not otherwise and by other people made ironclad-safe for establishment expression and support through the blood, sweat and tears of others in the public square?
Don't be ridiculous. That's unthinkable. Undignified. Uncivil. Unrealistic. Immature even.
Smart adults know and embrace what's best for them.
Smart people know not to rock the boat if they want to protect their future earnings potentional.
All you have to is point out how "impactical" bucking the system is, how inevitable the status quo is, how very much like a unicorn democracy and "justice" are. Let the process of change take place in the dark where it poses no personal threat to them and not in the light where it could be honest and disruptive, er, unseemly and unhelpful to one's social networking schemes.
Otherwise, public opinion and the powers that might be paying attention to changing currents in order to in the public's good grace--entirely for business purposes, mind you--can move at mother-fucking glacial speeds for all these "liberals"/"progressives" care.
And so public opinion and progress do take forever and at the great expense of the principled few, whether it's abolition, suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, women's rights, environmental protection, LGBT rights, economic justice (and the social ills/health attached to it), no difference. Let others do the work, people who can be disparaged as self-aggrandizing martyrs, like Ralph Nader, Jesselyn Raddick, or Edward Snowden. And let those people either do it in private somehow, without all the fuss and "attention-seeking," or through official channels designed specifically to thwart them, so that the adults can step forward in safety when the work's all done and, predictably, take the credit and bask in useful public approval.
It's been this way with every movement. So why would anyone expect it to be different for overcoming Reaganomics-on-steroids? Why should we expect "progressive" establishment opportunists to live their principles when it could hurt their deal? Isn't that what the Third Way is all about? Embracing the opposition's Voodoo, which even George H.W. Bush could recognize as a fraud (but not today's mainstram Democrat!), to use the strategery of being an adult and thus working within (and thus being co-opted by) the establishment system>?