I've gotta say; I don't think I've ever seen a political party go from "we're just your basic plutocrat-fluffing Tories with a side of pandering to racists" to "OOGABOOGAWHAKKANOKKABOOGALOOOOO!!!!" so quickly.
The GOP is fucking utterly bugnuts. Crazy. Oop-shoobie. Flip City. I wouldn't trust them any further than I could throw them at this point; it looks like 90% of the entire goddamn party is completely off the rails and willing to overthrown the Republic to keep their Orange God-King on the throne.
That's NOT what I warned about back in 2016. That's a whole new level of crazy, and I have no idea how the hell you run a popular republic with that. I don't think you can. It's like you have two partners, and one wants to make a nice soup and the other wants to do human sacrifice and if their partner tries to stop them they'll shit in the soup-pot.
There's REALLY no way to make that work.
But, short of putting the entire 75 million or so of them in a cage...how DO you make it work?
Hang on, because I have an uneasy feeling we're about to find out.
11 comments:
The parade of political craziness is a constant surprise to me.
However, is there something in particular which has drawn your ire?
(Your "seriously" link does not go anywhere).
Try the link again (fucking Blogger's new interface kinda sucks)
Thanks kindly for updating the link.
More of the same blather.
Democrats and Republicans "shape" each other.
Given the intense contempt directed towards millions of American voters from Democratic leaders and pundits, is it surprising that the animosity is returned?
Trump and Trumpism is an outcome of the political system. Not an aberration.
"Democrats and Republicans "shape" each other."
You keep saying this, or some version of this, what is basically a "both sides do it" argument.
Okay, I'll bite.
Prove it. Prove that the U.S. "left" - the party that runs from Sanders and Warren through Biden and Manchin - is "shaped" by the party that runs from Rand Paul through Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst to Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.
How is that an "outcome of the political system"? Which system? What about "the system" produces that outcome? And how?
No, don't hand-wave. Show me examples. Show your work. Be specific? How the fuck does "the system" somehow end up with AOC, Warren, and Sanders on one side and ONLY one side, and Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, and Louie Gohmert on the other.
Take you time. I'll wait here.
Bottom line: you can't.
I'll say this again.
The U.S. "Left" should be "leftier". The fact that it's not isn't the "fault" of the U.S. Right, but the fault of the U.S. public, which is stupid and credulous and can be stampeded by scare-words like "socialist".
The U.S. "Right" was always fascist-curious back when the openly racist and other-toxic-"ist"s were more evenly distributed between the parties, but since the rectification of names that began after 1968 has become openly authoritarian, and since (as Charlie Pierce likes to say) Reagan fed it the monkey brains of "government is the problem" and "no new taxes" has become increasingly outright lunatic and in thrall of magical/fantasy thinking.
In other words, the Democratic Party should be better about things like offshoring, inequality, and job creation.
The Republican Party circa 2020 is a cult, a nutty cult that refuses to accept anything but it's nuttiness; it will see the world as crazy as it is or it'll burn the bastard down.
The Democratic Party can be saved from it's worst Manchin instincts if the voters will start electing genuine lefties.
The Republican Party is lost. It can only be destroyed, and, if need be, replaced by a sane "conservative" party willing to accept a reasonable social contract that isn't The Return of 1889.
There's no "both sides" to that. It's - and I've said this before, too, but - the difference between a cup of piss and a cup of poison.
One is distasteful. The other is deadly. You can survive the one in order to improve life on the other side. You can't with the other.
But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise...so; lemme hear your proof for your contention that Both Sides are the Product of The Political System.
The Democratic party is NOT a party of the left.
The moment that Bernie (A solid centrist in most other countries) looked like he might win, the democratic party united in opposition and picked an ancient relic in cognitive decline.
The Democrats are the party of the coastal elites. The professional managerial class lead by Wall Street and Silicon valley billionaires. The kinds of people that are always know better than anyone else. Experts and pundits who regard the people who live in "flyover" country with mild horror and dripping contempt.
The wiz kids who designed the modern economy, promising wonderful benefits and ended up with the rust belt, corporations that captured all the gains from productivity such that families now must have two incomes to maintain a decent standard of living. Life has gotten harder for many many people and the Democratic response is always some variation of "learn 2 code, nube!"
The Clintons and the "deplorables" truly do define each other. Think of wing-nut Republican talking points as a form of "expensive tribal signaling". Sort of like bird plumage, except that it marks you as being Not Part of the Democratic Professional Managerial class.
Finally, look at the latest hijinks in Congress, Sanders and Hawley are fighting for a stimulus check in opposition to the leadership of both parties, while Richie Neal(D) has just promoted a "fix" to surprise medical billing that making the private equity owners of the medical providers sing in joy.
Your problem is that you mistake "the Left" from "What the US electoral system produces as "Left".
You're right in that in a parliamentary system the US Democratic Party is the rough equivalent of a Christian-Democrat or centerist party.
The US isn't a parliamentary system, and if you try to work it as one - by, for example, running as a third party, all you do is splinter whichever part of the electorate you represent and allow the OTHER umbrella party to run the table. That's happened every time a significant third party has emerged here, such as the election of 1860, or 1968.
The US Democratic Party as it stands is further to the left than it's been since the early New Deal. The DLC/DNC sorts of leaders like Pelosi and Biden (and Clinton, who, if you recall, isn't even IS the actual "leadership" anymore...) are balanced on the right by people like Manchin and on the left by people like Warren and AOC. This isn't the Dixiecrat Party of 1960.
But the whole tenor of your argument just refutes itself. "Coastal elites" don't vote en masse. "Coastal elites" don't GOTV or phonebank. "Coastal elites" don't vote in Democratic primaries in South Carolina or Georgia.
The "democratic party" didn't "unite" to "pick and ancient relic". Democratic voters ran away from Sanders as fast as they could, both because they wanted a safe old familiar face (fucked up but very human) and because thinking that the inevitiable Republican Party "SOCIALIST!!!!" smear that would bounce off Biden would work against Sanders (which it would).
Nope. It's the other way around. The resulting shape of the Democratic party is the result of 1) how the US FPTP election system works - you get two big umbrella parties and not a bunch of little tightly-focused ideological parties - and 2) because of the median politics of Democratic voters.
So if you want to change that...you have to change the voters.
And to do that you have to work, constantly, to hammer truly lefty, progressive messages, and you're always going to have a harder time because while the major media outlets like CNN and The New York Times will ALWAYS caveat the shit out of a Democratic proposal for Universal Basic Income or laws restricting capital flight ("How will you pay for it!?! What about...?!?") they won't do anything of the sort for a Republican tax-cut scheme or a fucking idiotic "border wall".
(con't)
(from above)
Until about 1970 we HAD those lefty voices. Hell, we had ACTUAL lefties, socialists and communists - that was how we got the original New Deal; FDR warned the richies that if they didn't give the People something they'd be hanging from lampposts as they had in St. Petersburg - and genuine lefty papers and broadsheets. You had hard-left unions and union families who would no more vote Republican than they'd give a free meal to a scab.
All that's gone like the dodo.
Occupy and the Sanders "Our Revolution" are perfect microcosms of the failure of the hard Left to realize the reality of US politics that the teabaggers and now the QANuts totally get.
You don't move the political needle in this country by performative politics. "Protest" and street theater and speechifying don't do it. Meaningless protest votes don't.
Hard, solid, ugly, repetitive, grunt-work electoral graft. THAT's what does it. Running your partisans for every shitty little local election. Having a constant presence at every local party meeting. Getting your people on every fucking school board, every newsroom, every community meeting, finding a consistent, coherent message and hammering it home EVERY FUCKING TIME.
And, most importantly, figuring out how to make it work. Yes, life is harder for the not-plutocrat family. Pretending that some magic beans are going to bring back $30/hour factory jobs isn't going to reverse that. Sane tax policy is. Sensible financial regulations and fierce enforcement are. Green New Deals will.
But that's GOTTA start at the voter level. The Occupy and Our Revolution people thought that "messaging" would do that. It won't. You and me and every grunt-level political worker organizing and getting out voters who will TRULY vote progressive is how you do that. Then the "democratic party" will have no alternative, any more than the GOP had when the MAGAts took the wheel; they'll have to follow or die.
But citing Sanders and Hawley - whose motivations couldn't be more dissimilar regardless of their cooperation in Congress - as "both sides do it" is just a facile misprision of the political situation in this country.
And if you want specific proof...go look down at the "Petard" post before this one. It's just (chef's kiss) perfect as an illustration of the problem.
We had a perfectly binary choice here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland.
One the one had we had a terrific lefty "Bernie" sort of candidate for Portland mayor; Sarah Iannarone. Anti-cop. Pro-Green New Deal. Urban planner with great ideas for dealing with the apparent flood of homeless people in the Portland metro.
On the other, the "Biden" candidate, Ted Wheeler. Notional "liberal", but in practice an avid cop-fluffer, utter lackey to the downtown "Portland Business Alliance", and otherwise just a total fucking empty suit. Status-quo, empty of any real ideas of how to do things better or smarter...or just DIFFERENT.
So what did we do?
Well, first, we ran Tessa Raiford, a terrific lefty and founder of "Don't Shoot PDX", as a write-in candidate in the general. She is an outstanding person, a Black leader who would be a great mayor if she had been running against Wheeler alone.
As it was, she split off about 13% of the vote, all from Iannarone, who lost 40% to 46% for Wheeler. The cops, the white people in the West Hills, the newspapers and TV, and the PBA, all went hard for Wheeler. The overwhelmingly white voters were scared and tired of scary Antifa and Black people and went with the safe guy.
There was no need for "coastal elites" or party apprachiks to torque the funding - shit, Wheeler had to illegally fund his own campaign, he was being outraised by so much - or skew the voting or whatever. It was just people, white Portlanders, who were unwilling to take a risk, who went with the nice, safe, neoliberal guy.
That's fucked up. But that's what you're dealing with.
I hear you, but it is also clear that the Democrats have a dripping contempt for at least 40% of the electorate. I suggest that this contempt makes it extremely unlikely that you will gain votes from that section of America. What that leaves is a core Democratic constituency and a thin "undecided" group of voters. To win an election you need to promote turnout in your demographic, suppress turnout in the opposing demographic and try to grab as many of the relatively few votes who are "in the middle".
This is what I mean by the parties defining each other. If you put up a picture of the American electorate and remove the Republican voters you see a picture of the Democratic voters (slightly smeared by the few who flip and flop between elections).
Which 40% is that?
Is it the MAGAts?
The Democratic Party has Warren and Sanders and AOC and folks like my Senator Merkeley who have all the populism that the Trumpendross pretend to have only for real. If you elect them they'll gut the oligarchy to the degree they can.
So where were the MAGAts changing their registration to flock to Sanders in the primaries in 2016? In 2020? Where was the massive groundswell for support for Liz Warren? Where was that 40% when we needed them?
I'll tell yo uwhere; baying for fucking Trump.
If that's their gig then they DESERVE contempt. If they're too fucking stupid to see that their corporate masters are jerking them around by the racism and religion and gunhumping...what ELSE is there?
I'd LOVE for them to realize this, but we've tried to tell them again and again and their response is "FUCK OFF AND DIE LIBERAL SCUM!".
The notion that there's some massive populist-but-not-racist-and-not-every-other-"ist"-thing out there seems thoroughly refuted by the lack of cross-aisle appeal of the genuinely lefty candidates like Sanders.
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