Normally we'd format this with "excerpt" and Dr. D's commentary, but James' position paper is SO interesting that we felt compelled to let it stand alone, using this as my own part of the body text.
Also, that will allow Dr. D to comment on this one on an exactly-equal footing with anyone else interested. What possible applications do you draw from James' analysis? About half of the major issues in Sunday's debate will relate to this basic philosophy as stated - and you could feasibly support either candidate, at times, if you agreed with the principles.
James, as usual, goes with finesse and tact and flexibility. He's got to use very soft punches, almost gentle shoves to the shoulder, in today's hot-button environment. Especially at BJOL where the readership is skewed far to one side, and the readers are as intelligent as they are, ahhh ... strident about their positions.
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This is exactly the question raised by my favorite columnist, who shall remain unnamed and who you probably wouldn't guess. :- )
Consider a large donor to either party, or even consider the NYT reporter who hangs around that donor's periphery. The first-gen immigrants that this donor INTERFACES with. Isn't it likely that such a relationship is going to be -- so to speak -- the gardener, who after doing the gardening drives home to a different neighborhood?
The party apparatchik, the superdelegate, the banker, whoever, isn't going to drive home to live on the same street as the first-gen immigrant. The apparatchik simply isn't going to be in the hot zones of the Blue Lives Matter / Black Lives Matter fight, is not going to be one of the people killed in the quasi-Civil War.
Me myself, I'm also one of the privileged. My station is life is that of the RNC or DNC party apparatchik. I'm privileged, I live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, I'm not going to feel unsafe driving out to the local mini-mart for a 1 a.m. snack.
My 25-year-old daughter, however, just attempted to live in Hilltop Tacoma as the only white girl in a ghetto-like apartment complex. That lasted a week, with her calling home and whispering through her smartphone so the people wouldn't hear her through the walls and break her door down.
My brother was an Ivy League professor who was a kind man, and he believed with all his heart that he and his friends were the people intelligent and compassionate enough to decide policy that affects Hilltop and Watts and San Diego, for that matter.
I'm pretty well the opposite of him. The Founding Fathers had the idea of a government by the people, of it, and for it; they felt that the popular vote was the ultimate CHECK AND BALANCE on a government's inherent lust for fascist control.
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We're teetering on the brink of quasi- if not semi-Civil War, and it would be nice to see more voice for the common person -- as reflected in a poll on immigration policy, for example -- and less voice for the media elites. This means listening harder to border patrol agents, to poor black folks in Chicago, to police in Chicago, to Mexican families living on the border and to those non-Mexicans living in the same. To listen to both sides carefully as to what THEY say about immigration policy, when uncoached by RNC/DNC talking points.
And to listen to the people who are in the fight, on any issue, to the people on the scene.
Other opinions welcome as always.
Warmly,
Jeff