Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
New York is far too big to be called an "establishment" city. Brooklyn alone is home to groups such as the Ausar-Auset Society and the Hebrew Israelites. Portland is more or less arm-chair liberals with PhDs that practice civil disobedience. They chain themselves to trees when they get upset, and after they've spent their hour in jail, they plan their next flight to the Serengeti, on which they will undoubtedly give their children multi-racial dolls to play with as they run up and down the aisle in first class.
LOL....
good post. Of course NYC is too big for that, as I said it has very large elements, I'm just talking an overall picture.
Of course NYC is too big for that, as I said it has very large elements, I'm just talking an overall picture.
San Francisco has liberals, yes, but not many radicals. And by "radical," I mean people who really have a seething disdain for the establishment (law enforcement, government, etc). Philly, as long as I can remember, has always been that way, and the distrust of government grew even stronger once it was revealed that the FBI had bugged the mayor's office. After that, the black muslims came out in full force.
New York is far too big to be called an "establishment" city. Brooklyn alone is home to groups such as the Ausar-Auset Society and the Hebrew Israelites. Portland is more or less arm-chair liberals with PhDs that practice civil disobedience. They chain themselves to trees when they get upset, and after they've spent their hour in jail, they plan their next flight to the Serengeti, on which they will undoubtedly give their children multi-racial dolls to play with as they run up and down the aisle in first class.
Besides, San Francisco and Portland are probably even more establishment than NYC. How "radical" is a Berkeley professor who has his pockets laced by the "establishment?" It's like Cornel West who claims to be so "radical," but yet teaches at Princeton University. If he were so radical, why doesn't he go to Cuba to teach?
Brooklyn, Harlem and some of the minority neighborhoods may be anti-establishment, but NYC in general is home to wall-street and is the home-base of the very mainstream media that the radicals hate.
Don't forget about the white supremacist groups, who pretty much share the same sentiment as MOVE, Black Hebrews, NOI, etc. Dallas, SoCal, The Rural Northeast, Rural South, Portland, all are huge home-bases for Neo-Nazi Skinheads. Then you got The Klan, Christian Identity, National Socialist Movement, Volksfront, etc. All of these groups are SUPER fringe and anti-establishment.
It's gotten to the point(actually since Marcus Garvey did it way back in the 30's I believe) that some of these groups leaders, like Tom Metzger and Farrakhan have spoken at large each others meetings because both sides believe in self-segregation and have so much in common from that aspect, and believe that the government and the mainstream media is a deterrent to that goal of self-segregation and freedom of speech for both sides.
So it's not un-common to see a White Nationalist like Metzger speaking at a Radical Black Supremacist rally and vice-versa. They both share the same goal.
I think the (radical) Sleeping Giant will be awakened in the next few years with the coming 2012 elections and economic conditions. New York and Washington, and perhaps even a few non-usual suspects. We shall see.
For the first time in my life, I'm actually worried about this myself.
If the democrats stay in power, then many on the right will feel as though all is lost and this nation - as well as the world at large - is doomed... conservative media already had reached a fever pitch in '08... I hate to see the pitch it'll reach if he wins again. I can fairly easily see right fringe groups having their day, with a larger number of somewhat-less fringe but still fairly far-leaning people on the same end of the compass being apologists for them.
I can see the inverse happening, though to a lesser degree, if Bachmann or Perry (or any other Tea Party candidate) were to win - Romney isn't generally as extreme as them in beliefs and I see much of what he does say that is more radical as mere pandering to the fringe constituency. I wouldn't be surprised to see more left fringe groups feeling as though "now is the time;" that being said, the days of the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and general left-fringe terrorist groups is largely over. I think that there would have to be an extremely large and unconstitutional social upset before the college activist crowd started buying up AK47's again.
It's gonna be a fun few years here
Although once upon a time, San Francisco and Oakland may have been more "radical," nowadays, not so much (and I can say this with absolute certainty having lived there). Though activist culture is certainly alive and well in both, if one city in the Bay Area were to be a hotbed of activism, it'd be Berkeley.
I also think that people are solely identifying leftism as radical, when right now, the most forceful radical movement in the US is a deconstructionist movement on the right, and is very decentralized. Rather than being locally-grown activists, they descend on whatever city is going to be pivotal at that moment from all over that region.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
