On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
yup, polls are relevant. But whatever happened to old-fashioned analysis of the social structure to figure out where the stress points are?
What do you think are stress points today? There is a good deal of agreement on the Iraq War, but that has not proven a stress point yet as far as American workers are concerned, for a majority of them are not directly impacted by it.
a lot of this represents a recent shift due to the growing power of the Christian Wrong, rather than being a permanent feature of the US political terrain.
Well, nothing is permanent, for sure, but Christianity has proven more staying power than state socialism, which didn't last a century. :-> So, they are likely to be around, for a foreseeable future. Moreover, some of the increase in ambivalence about abortion, which can be voiced by the irreligious as well, originates in sources other than conservative Christians: increased contraceptive availability and usage, which raises the idea of "women's responsibility" not to get pregnant involuntarily higher in the minds of many than before; technological advancement that has made younger fetuses viable; technological advancement that has led to more frequent visualizations of fetuses. Moreover, while conservatives have and will continue to fail to overturn Roe v. Wade, they have been very successful at limiting access. Pro-choice liberals and leftists have not come up with any practical approach to reversing the limits on access (in contrast to countering wholesale attacks on the legal right to abortion). -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
