Commenter Archive

Have we given Ukraine ICBMs, or does he mean the short-range tactical ballistic missiles Ukraine has already fired into Russia (ATACMS)? The distinction is massive, obviously.

It was an IRBM. Still nuclear capable, but not quite as scary if you're not in Eastern Europe.

Honestly, as someone who believes that gender is a social construct in a fairly extreme sense, I don't think that most people who use it, either to say that it is a social construct or to say that it isn't, understand that "social construct" doesn't = not real.

I mean, I think they want medicare for all, too, based on polls, but I imagine I'm cherry picking polls, even if unconsciously.

I'm just amazed at how much every commentator thinks what "swing voters" actually want just happens to be what the commentator wants.

I'm sure what the Democrats need is more right wing takes from people who can't stand them. "Why not just be the Republican Party-lite? I mean, it's failed every time, but if you want swing voters, the key is to not distinguish yourself from the other party."

The puns are back!

Citing Brianna Wu suggests that you're not online enough to know about Wu's right turn.

I think the role of wokeness in Democrats' electoral fortunes is vastly overestimated by extremely online people who for whatever reason feel like wokeness is anti-them personally, for whatever reason. It's a form of insecurity, resulting in projection.

There is a related, broader narrative among conservatives, which I first saw during the first Obama term, which says that by talking about race at all, Democrats are dividing people by race. Meanwhile, conservatives were showing up to political rallies during the '08 election with monkey dolls standing in for Obama, but they weren't creating any racial divisions.

Do you disagree that it does reflect on them or are you asking about the mechanism of it doing so?

I don't see why it should reflect on them.

Get more pinko friends. My god, my feed is nothing but “self-care in these troubled times” advice posts.

My Facebook consists of three groups of people: people I went to primary/secondary school with, people I went to undergrad/grad school with, and people I have known since grad school. The last group is pretty much entirely pinko, not a liberal, much less a conservative in the group. The middle group is liberals, leftists, and (American-style) libertarians. The first group, though, is almost all MAGA with a few moderate liberals here and there. And from the MAGAs, I get to see a bunch of the extended MAGA ecosystem (from replies, shares, memes, etc.).

If we're going by Facebook, then I don't think the problem is cancel rhetoric, because what I see from conservatives is closer to eliminationist rhetoric.

Twitter might be an issue, but what % of voters pay attention to Twitter?

HR is something else. I don't know how that relates to the Democrats, though.

I just don't think wokeness and cancelling people is a salient part of mainstream Democratic discourse. Yeah, it's big on Twitter, and maybe in some universities, but I don't recall any wokeness or cancellation talk from Harris, or from Biden before her, or from Bernie ever. You might say the "basket of deplorables" remark is a cancel not persuade remark, but other than that, I don't even remember much from Clinton, and I doubt there's anyone here who thinks less of Clinton than I do.

I think the most amazing thing about liberal election post-mortems is that you hear the same thing every time they lose, and have as far back as I can remember (OK, at least since 2000): The Democrats have a messaging problem. Everyone likes what the Democrats are selling, but the Democrats aren't selling at well. Many articles and books have been written selling various messaging fixes. The writers of these articles and books have then served on Democratic campaigns. It's a great racket, and allows the Democrats to never, ever make a change to what they're selling no matter how often they lose.

Yeah, that's my point, she's expected to, while Trump can do the "weave" or whatever he calls losing his train of thought mid-sentence.

Oh, to be clear, I just mean among political junkies, of which everyone in this thread is by definition.

And Vance definitely isn't prehistoric. He's awkward, but in the way that rich people and grad students (who are mostly rich people, to be fair) are awkward.

This sort of double standard between what we expect of Republican vs Democratic political candidates in terms of articulateness and coherence dates back long before Trump. Liberals are expected to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs, while Republicans can speak in prehistoric grunts and fart sounds.

What's amazing is that after every election cycle, a bunch of liberal journalists accuse Democrats of losing because they speak in paragraphs while the people only have the ability to comprehend grunts and fart sounds. Hell, this was the primary narrative of the 2000 election aftermath (well, after hanging chads, at least).

The bit about Harris criticizing Biden on busing, when in fact she had opposed busing, or her saying she was for Medicare for All, and then saying, "Actually I just didn't understand the question," definitely distinguishes her from Fetterman, a person who has left no doubt about his support for genocide.

This may not seem like a big deal now, but perhaps no one in the last 20 years has made progressive liberals feel more betrayed than Fetterman, so they definitely won't show up for him again.

I think Fetterman and Obama give the lesson, one the Democratic nominees in 2016 and 2024 did not heed: if you want to win as a Democrat, you have to mobilize progressives. I'm not saying you have to cater to them 100%, but you have to make sure they show up not on election day, but for the months prior to it. This pushed Obama to the win, particularly in the '08 primary and general, and pushed Fetterman to the win in his only election to the senate. Even Biden benefitted from a lesser progressive mobilization in '20, both because they hated Trump and because he tacked left during his campaign (and to a lesser extent during his first year or so in office).

Feterman has a problem, though: he may, currently, be the most hated non-Republican among progressives. Hell, he may be more hated than a good portion of Republicans. Having him in a position of high visibility within the party, whether as a DNC chair or minority whatever, or worse, as a presidential nominee, pretty much guarantees a lack of progressive enthusiasm. The Dems have twice shown they can't win by courting the center/moderate right while pretty much ignoring the liberal left; Fetterman is a good way to prove that a third time.

I'm sure the documentary will show a campaign bursting with vibes.

Well I messed that html up. Sorry about that.

a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/">Dissent has some good post-mortems, the best of which is probably Exit Right:

In these ways, Harris repeated not only Hillary Clinton’s errors but many of the same ones that she herself had made in her ill-starred 2019 presidential campaign, which opportunistically tacked left rather than right, but with equal insincerity and incoherence. Who remembers that campaign’s biggest moment, when she attacked Biden for his opposition to busing and what it would have implied for a younger version of herself, only to reveal when questioned that she also opposed busing? Or when she endorsed Medicare for All, raising her hand in a debate for the idea of private insurance abolition, only to later claim she hadn’t understood the question? Voters, then as now, found her vacuous and unintelligible, a politician of pure artifice seemingly without ideological depths she could draw from and externalize.

Though it lays most of the blame on Biden's (and the Democratic Party generally's) feet.

Hey, they worked their way to a record-breaking season.

I mean, it's pretty straightforward: he was accused of sexual assault and harassment; he admitted the bad behavior (without, necessarily, agreeing that it was assault), apologized, and went underground. What's interesting to me, and why I think it would be in the book, is that it's the sort of behavior that, had it occurred a year earlier, probably wouldn't have had any consequences for him on the left, even short term.

Things changed so much over the course of 2017 that, two years later, the ISO, a popular and reasonably effective far left group , was destroyed by its poor handling of similar accusations against one of its handling of a sexual assault accusation against one of its leaders from 2013 (notably pre-2017 changes).

Someday, probably in the reasonably near future, someone's going to write a book about the year 2017 in the American left, and there will be paragraphs in it about Kriss, because he's representative of one one of the dynamics of the 2017 upheaval.

Anyway, he represents a segment of the left that we heard very little from between 2018 and 2024, but will probably hear a lot more of between 2025 and 2028, and both the tone and content of that essay is pretty representative.

For other examples, might I recommend Catherine Liu, the BungaCast and What's Left of Philosophy podcasts, and if you're truly brave, Sublation Media.

I don't like or listen to Rogan, but I think he's pretty firmly cemented his status as an outside voice (even if a bad one). If the Dems want a "liberal Joe Rogan," they're going to have to accept that such a person is also going to have to be an outside voice, and that means he's probably going to not like the Democrats most of the time.

And there's a big audience for such a person. In 2016, left groups of various sorts grew not because there were suddenly a bunch of Marxists in the U.S., but because there were a lot of fairly normie libs who realized the Democratic Party really sucks. They build alternative media, alternative political organizations, and in some cases, ran their own candidates (even won in some places). The mainstream Democratic Party doesn't like this, but if they want the liberal equivalent of Rogan, they're going to have to accept it, and maybe even change in ways that makes the new liberal version of Rogan more likely to endorse them.