…to remember the late, great John Kenneth Galbraith this week, let’s look at what his almost-as-great son James sez about the state of the nation. James writes in Mother Jones that the U.S. has become a “predator state,” with its upper classes feeding off of the declining living standards of everyone else.

Galbraith fils depicts a nationwide, pervasive culture of corruption. It’s a disease that can’t be simply lanced off like a boil by removing a few politicians from power. It’s more like marrow cancer, something parasitic, deeply rooted, and ultimately fatal to both parasite and host.

I tend to agree with this downbeat diagnosis.

Getting rid of Bush and/or Cheney won’t get rid of the whole rotten-to-the-core right-wing machine running all three branches of the federal government; it won’t get rid of the machine’s media whores; and it sure won’t get rid of the machine’s well-heeled sponsors.

I’d even call Bush expendable to the machine as it’s currently constituted. One fiercely obedient puppet ruler could easily be replaced by another.

So what is to be done? Galbraith fils asks that question at the end, and doesn’t answer it.

But I have a glimpse of what it would take. I saw that glimpse Monday afternoon.

The participants in Pro-Immigration March II: The Sequel had been coached beforehand, by Web sites and by preachers and by Espanophone talk radio, to present themselves as patriotic Americans who wanted to fully participate in their newly-chosen homeland. The participants followed this instruction with gusto. They chanted “U, S, A.” They waved American flags. They carried signs proclaiming their pride in their work in and for this land.

Several years ago (1994, to be precise), I wrote, “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”

That’s what the immigration advocates are attempting to do.

They’re presenting themselves as less cynical, more hopeful, and more constructive than the selfish boars now in charge of the federal apparatus.

In so doing, they created a protest march where the usual hangers-on and would-be leaders of protest marches (the Bob Avakian cult, et al.) looked like the backward-thinking nostalgists they were. They rendered the entire patchouli-reeking carcass of post-1970 “counterculture” politics superseded, a “version 1.0” to be remembered and archived but no longer relied upon in everyday use.

The May Day marches, like their April forebearers, proclaim a new “new left.”

A left based on active effort, rather than hedonism.

On unity-in-diversity, rather than separatist “identity politics.”

On working-class solidarity, rather than the supposed superiority of an enlightened few.

On folks getting together to liberate themselves, rather than depending upon some “vanguard” caste to take charge on their behalf.

On building a viable future, rather than bringing back some “spirit of the Sixties.”

There’s a heckuva lotta work still to do in the years to come, both in electoral politics and beyond it.

But we now have the rhetorical and cultural means with which to do it.