i used to live in what is now eric cantor's district in va, and i taught while in grad school at randolph-macon in ashland, where cantor's conquerer brat (and his opponent in the general election!) teach. cantor's defeat shocks me as much as anyone else. but i think it is incredibly hopeful. brat won despite being outspent 40-1 or something and one of his lines is "dollars don't vote; people do." he sounds fundamentalist (describing his victory as "miracle from god", which is a bit scarily grandiose). and running against immigrants makes me kind of sick. but he also ran against economic inequality, believe it or not. you can see both who cantor is and part of why he lost here, where they describe how unhappy 'big business' is about his loss. they're unhappy because eric cantor is their little errand boy (quite a repulsive one, too). running against "the establishment" now is running against the government-corporate monster.
if you continue to try to understand what is happening or what people want in terms of left/right, you miss every single actual fact. and if you conflate the tea party with the club for growth or something, you're believing the pitiful attempts of groups like that to annex the grassroots energy. none of those groups rallied behind brat. if you're on the left, you have got to stop expressing your preference for "mainstream" republicans, on the sadly incoherent or entirely empty grounds that they are to the left of the tea partiers, or else you are just the chamber of commerce or the chamber of hillary = goldman-sachs. the spectacle of people who regard themselves as on the left wanting to put the whole economy at the service of citibank while squawking about inequality is one of the many delightfully amusing features of today's politics.
the left-right spectum is a manipulative tool. you will have to vote for hillary because she's to the left of whomever, thus betraying all your professed principles, or a goodly portion of them. in mega-corporate boardrooms here and there, they are snickering about that. they are rapacious capitalists dedicated to putting all the money on a barge and shipping it to the high end of the hierarchy. and they control the american left.
