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How To Be A Hack, Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution Edition

[ 78 ] February 5, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Glenn Harlan Reynolds plays a little of the ol’ both sides do it:

The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. So it was after the 2004 election when liberals talked revolution, and so again after 2012, when secession petitions flooded the White House.

You don’t remember large numbers of liberals talking about revolution after the 2004 elections? Silly you! Consider the powerful evidence that Reynolds adduces:

  • A first year grad student writing a letter to Cary Tennis, indulging some fantasies about becoming a revolutionary that he or she are enormously unlikely to carry out.
  • That is all.

Very convincing!   This is a fine tradition for Reynolds, although I thought it was the St. Petersburg Democratic Club, whatever that was, not random anonymous grad students, who spoke for The Left.   I’ll have to update my settings accordingly.

Comments (78)

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  1. sharculese says:
    February 5, 2013 at 11:01 am

    Well, at least, whether he intended to or not, he’s tacitly admitting that his he-man fantasies are total bullshit.

    Reply
  2. rea says:
    February 5, 2013 at 11:24 am

    Also, note: you can find a handful on the left who talk revolution. But on the right, you find them buying up guns and explosives, while babbling about “Second Amendment remedies”.

    Reply
    • c u n d gulag says:
      February 5, 2013 at 12:27 pm

      Yeah, and they have to make sh*t up about Obama, and all we lefties had to do was point to W and his lifelong record of failure and ineptitude.

      They send out racist and unfunny “joke” e-mails about President Obama.

      But by now, even they realize that W was a joke.
      Only no one’s laughing after the devastation he caused.

      Reply
  3. Todd says:
    February 5, 2013 at 11:59 am

    How quickly you forget the 20 seconds of B-roll on election day in November on FoxNews showing one member of the Black Panther Party in front of one Philadelphia polling place, quietly and courteously opening the door for voters.

    This is how they got the Tsar!

    Reply
  4. Loud Liberal says:
    February 5, 2013 at 12:12 pm

    I have a more practical solution. Build an impenetrable, “Chinese Wall” on the Texas border, THE NORTHERN BORDER. Keep those damn Texans out. But first, expel Texas from the Union. They want it, we want it. It should be easy. The only thing Texas is good for is as a nuclear waste dump site anyway. By expelling Texas, we won’t have to worry about the EPA (not that Texas worries much about the captured EPA now), or other pesky regulators. And, better, we could impose a nuisance tax on country music imports.

    Reply
  5. Tnap01 says:
    February 5, 2013 at 12:27 pm

    Firstly he wasn’t just “any 1st year Grad student”, he was also a Barista at the local underground coffee shop (“Fair trade just as Che wanted”)
    and secondly – Ward Churchill.

    Reply
  6. Winchester says:
    February 5, 2013 at 12:40 pm

    Resistance is possible, it must engage in that full-spectrum battlespace that has become the space of life. This means engaging the operative logic of preemption on its own terrains. This in turn means, in the most literal sense, a struggle for the future (perhaps through practices of slowness, against the preemptive addiction to rapid response?). It also means engaging it on the level of affect: reclaiming legitimation in a different affective key.

    Not the key of hope. Hope is more of a deferral of the present to the future than it is a way of bringing the future into the present according to a different operative logic. To hope is to look dreamy-eyed toward the future — cringing with the half-acknowledged certainty that when the future comes, in this broken world, it will be enough to make you cry. The only way to keep up the spirit is to defer to the future again, eyes wet with hope all over again.

    Hopefully, there’s a limit to our capacity for deferral.

    Maybe there’s an affective posture that has the same reality-producing power that preemption has, but to different effect. Perhaps there’s a counter-affective posture to preemption that we can find right here in the present.

    I can’t say that I know what that might be. It’s not for me to decide in any case. It’s for all of us to collectively invent. But my hunch would be that it might involve a little thing called generosity. Not inculcated as a personal quality, but practiced as a political procedure.

    Brian Massumi, in Remains of the Day.

    Among the pragmatic ways of resisting:

    – declare a Tax Strike;
    – don’t give up your guns;
    – stop subsidizing cable TV; it’s mostly porn, violence and Marxist agitprop anyway.

    Reply
  7. Ahistoricality says:
    February 5, 2013 at 1:53 pm

    Nearly irrelevant question. Is citing Reynold’s middle name supposed to signify something? Are there other Glenn Reynolds out there that we need to protect from association with legal “scholarship” and hackish political epigramism? Or is “Harlan” supposed to signify something negative (Appalachian or Southern), the way “Hussein” is emphasized by those who wish to highlight the non-standard background of our president?

    Reply
    • ScrewyCanuck says:
      February 5, 2013 at 1:59 pm

      It’s foreshadowing: all serial killers have three names.

      Reply
    • Julian says:
      February 5, 2013 at 2:00 pm

      I think Reynolds’ middle name is used because Reynolds himself has his middle name in the USA Today byline (or else USA Today requires authors to disclose and use their middle names).

      Reply
      • Cody says:
        February 5, 2013 at 2:06 pm

        ^ I think this is it. It stood out to me as soon as I opened the article that for some odd reason his middle name was there.

        Just a little jab in there!

        Reply
    • rea says:
      February 5, 2013 at 2:09 pm

      Or is “Harlan” supposed to signify something negative

      It’s actually a positive reference. Reynolds’ dad, if I recall correctly, was something of a liberal activist.

      Reply
      • Scott Lemieux says:
        February 5, 2013 at 2:16 pm

        Amazingly, the younger Reynolds was a student of Charles Black. Apparently, he forgot more than he knew.

        Reply
      • Warren Terra says:
        February 5, 2013 at 4:21 pm

        The younger Justice Harlan was – according to Wikipedia, I don’t actually know anything – supposedly good on some civil rights issues but truly awful on voting rights. According to the description at Wikipedia, and reading between the lines, under the younger Harlan poor black and urban folks might as well not try to meaningfully vote in the South.

        Reply
        • rea says:
          February 5, 2013 at 5:56 pm

          The younger Harlan was conservative on a lot of things, although he’d be on the left wing of the Court today. But it was the first Justice Harlan who got “Harlan” accepted as a not-uncommon first (or middle) name.

          Reply
    • Murc says:
      February 5, 2013 at 2:41 pm

      I assumed it was because “Glenn Harlan Reynolds” sounds more stereotypically southern than just Glenn Reynolds.

      It’s the sort of name a Kentucky Colonel would have, or a crooked judge, or a country lawyer.

      Reply

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