That sounds like a very silly argument. Given that there have been four assassination of American Presidents, and in all four cases power passed to the Vice President per the Constitution (and we have no evidence the VPs were involved), then it’s perfectly sensible not to call those “coups”. Not to mention the fact that no one refers to the assassinations of, say, Anwar Sadat, Indira Gandhi, or Ranasinghe Premadasa as “coups”.

110: Rootless, you’re not going to hijack another thread in order to turn the discussion into one of your silly hobbyhorses, of which there seem to be exactly two. Knock it off or I’ll ban you.

Well, I am at a loss of what to call it, but Robins, Doug Henwood, Counterspin-to-TheNation …
http://killiansaid.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-i-left-left.html

The progressive left is not an “it,” not a “the,” and “a” political program does not exist. Rather, a broad, internally conflicted constellation with multiple overlapping “programs.” I, among many, have been wandering around in there for 50 years, and will remain.

And that’s the most glaring problem with the progressive left – it has a political program that is little more than sneering at people who are willing to work. Everything effective is so pathetically morally compromised that one has no alternative but to object to it and clarify the moral, political, intellectual, and other failings of those involved.

And people don’t want to be pinko radicals because that implies they ought to do something about it. That in turn means they have to confront two scary things; first, that there may be bad personal consequences (people stop talking to you; you lose your job; your wife leaves you…) and second that, even if against the odds you make some progress, the ruling class takes revenge by wrecking the whole shebang.

The only problem with the Civil War is it didn’t fully liquidate the southern aristocracy, but rehabilitated them under Johnson.

There was a This American Life episode many years back called, I think, “Smoke-Filled Room” with a story about how agricultural commodities companies were caught colluding to fix prices. And Ira Glass’s comment was smthg to the effect of: ‘You would think that a scheme to fix prices would be more subtle than a bunch of guys sitting in a smoke-filled room, deciding what the price of milk should be. There must be something else to it. But that’s pretty much what it was: a bunch of guys sitting in a room saying “so how much should milk cost?” and working it out.’ If there is corruption and price-fixing and secret meetings with representatives of powerful industries, it has to look like something. But to believe that there are actual smoke-filled rooms just seems too credulous.

ChapatiMystery once pointed that if a head of state is assassinated in a third-world country, it’s a coup d’etat, but if you describe the Kennedy assassination that way you’re a conspiracy theorist because those things don’t happen here. That seems like yet another variant on the theme.

“Of course our politics is corrupt. Just don’t ask me how.” Because if you accept all the explanations, that makes you a pinko radical. “But of course I don’t trust the government.” I feel like anti-intellectualism has a lot to do with this, but also a kind of high-brow disdain for straightforward explanations.[4]

fn 1: educated ice @92, Couldn’t you say that politicians are expected to be pure-as-driven-snow idealists, and that they’re also supposed to ‘get things done’ (which means horse-trading, pragmatism, compromise/corruption), and they get blamed for whichever one they’re not doing enough, sometimes blamed for both at the same time?
fn 2: Hofstadter was mentioned in the OP, is this ‘reverse-paranoia’ something he talks about?
fn3: There, I did it! I brought up Israel and Palestine in a thread on American politics! Israel Israel Israel Israel!! Palestine Palestine Palestine! OOooooo I’m so bad.
fn4: Am I just paraphrasing Hofstadter at this point? I should read Paranoid Style so I’ll know…

I find the racism in Masur’s critique somewhat repugnant, but I am sympathetic, in general, to the cause of social history and representing the roles of ordinary people, and think it is useful, if people are led, on the occasion of this film, to think about how the oppressed can act in their own interest, and collectively, to challenge their oppression, and not depend on the moral character or good intentions of a single individual.

In the defense of Kushner and Speilberg, any two and half hour movie is going to leave out a lot; what’s included has to be focused: every scene, every line and gesture, must tell. I wonder what Masur thinks should have been excluded.

Necessarily, a film about a legislative process is going to focus on those in the legislature. There were no black faces on the floor of the House, and imagining some would have been a falsification. The critical votes and voices were those of the least enthusiastic, the most conflicted, the least committed to the cause. The inframarginal passion of the abolishnists hardly mattered at all, except as portrayed by the case of Thaddeus Stevens, to the extent that it might scare the horses.

If Kushner and Speilberg were to show the effect of the activism of blacks, they might have shown, not more of the activism itself, as Masur advocates, but something more of the effect of that activism — a legislator, say, whose racist assumptions may have been undermined by the examples of black soldiery. Blacks remained throughout, a marginalized minority, even if the central issue concerned them most vitally, and they appeared as actors, as much or more through the imaginations of white actors, than as central and active figures conducting their own motion — that’s just historical fact, which Kushner and Speilberg transferred to drama, with considerable sensitivity for the power of imagination.

For our own time, the least plausible aspect of the film is also the least plausible aspect of the political events themselves: that a conservative party or politician might actually try to do the right thing, might actually want to do something other than cut a rich man’s taxes or excuse a powerful business its crimes.

You have a very skewed and truncated conception of the “left” and “left politics.”