As Edsall concedes, this changing face of the electorate has had the effect of radicalizing the GOP. “For whites with a conservative bent,” he writes—and isn’t that the very definition of the Republican base?—
the
shift to a majority-minority nation [i.e., a nation in which minorities
will make up the majority] will strengthen the already widely held view
that programs benefiting the poor are transferring their taxpayer
dollars to minority recipients, from first whites to blacks and now to
“browns.”
...
What the country faces, they write, isn’t a problem with partisanship in the abstract; it’s a problem with one party:
However
awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to
acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has
become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the
inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise;
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and
science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it
is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s
most pressing challenges.
I googled "Zizek" and "Inception" and it came up with this blog post at The Parallex by a Sarahana.
Yet we watch a movie like Inception, and giddily wonder, What would Zizek say about Inception? We don't know yet, but a learned soul on the internet, who goes by "Berlusconi Youth", has dreamed up a plausible response:
Ish not thish "limbo" Lacan’s unbearable Real?
Ish not thish dream from which the only escape ish death not, indeed, the actuality of global capitalishm?
Ish not thish "idea" that, you know, ish planted and growsh like a cansher not the revolutionary kernel?
Ish not the role of the democratic-progressive Leninisht vanguard Party to plant thish revolutionary kernal in the mindsh of the mashes?
What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let’s take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality -- which is to say in the true appearance -- Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’. Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.
