As the dust starts to settle on the primaries

I want to flag the following three articles for what they say on the implications of the Democratic primary season that concluded this past Tuesday.

My friend Bob McElvaine has a blog on Huffington Post now. And at least a large part of Thursday, this new post was in the feature spot on the left where Arianna Huffington's latest normally is: America's 40 Years War at an End 06/05/08. It's about the evolution of the "culture war". He also manages to use the phrase "harmonic convergence" in the first paragraph, a nice touch indicating on which side of the barricades he's used to being. Bob is a real optimist, though. He's hoping for an immediate armistice in the "culture war". I tend to think it's more likely that Dick Cheney would surrender himself to the International Criminal Court and ask to be prosecuted for war crimes. But we can always hope. Bob goes after the "culture warriors" meme about liberal "elitism" in this one, so he's not advocating unilateral disarmament in this thing. And he also mentions Andrew Jackson as one of the great champions of "the People", another reason to read his post. This is a memorable line: "the Republican Party has been running as the anti-Sixties party for four decades now".

The other 18 million by Joan Walsh Salon 06/05/08. An excellent discussion of the sexism issue in the Democratic primaries, focusing particularly on the sorry role played by our badly dysfunctional national media.

The Meaning of Box 722 by Rick Perlstein, The Big Con blog 06/05/08 gives us a sobering look into raw white racism circa 1966. This is a good one, especially in seeing how institutional racism in the form of racial restrictions in housing interacts with personal racism.

Tags: culture war, joan walsh, rick perlstein, robert mcelvaine

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