There was a time, years ago, when I would have wondered what the hell was going on in your head to make you think some complete and utter bullsh*t like that, so I'd have engaged, but it's 2024, people are dying, and I'm too angry to care about why people like you are so god awful.
I think pretty much all the Berniecrats vote Dem. Some of them even run for office (one of Austin's congressmembers was just here with Bernie and AOC as part of his reelection campaign). But yeah, their influence, to the extent that it was ever real, is waning, and a party of Harrises and Cheneys would probably freeze them out entirely.
I'm not saying they don't need them to win, because they probably do. I'm just saying that I've heard a lot of liberals say that it's just a temporary coalition, and I don't think that's necessarily true. If I were a liberal, I'd be much more worried.
I think the Abbott's of the world realized that if they want to continue to let Oracle and Samsung and Space X and their friend with 20 car dealerships make a ton of money in Texas with few regulations (especially environmental ones) and some help from the state's Enterprise Fund, they're going to have to at least look, on the outside, like they're full MAGA. I think this really does create limits on the business side, though at least in the short term, businesses seem to think that those limits are outweighed by the pluses (seriously, Space X could create an uninhabitable wasteland down in South Texas, and Tesla could do so in Central Texas, without an environmental regulator in sight). But yeah, if you want to help people increase their profits from within the GOP right now, you gotta at least wear a MAGA mask, if not embrace it wholeheartedly (it's always difficult to tell, even with Trump, where the mask ends and the real person begins).
There are gonna be a lot of conservatives who want nothing to do with the MAGA mask. Some of them maybe find it distasteful, others have principles (at least one or two, right?), and others may believe, probably correctly, that in the long run MAGA is not great for profits.
Abbott has shown he can shift on a dime, so if MAGA loses control of the party, he'll have no problem shifting right back into being early-Aughts Rick Perry. I think others (pretty much anyone in Florida) may have welded the mask to their faces, to the extent that they have real faces at all.
Riffing off this, you reminded me of the reason I don't think the Harris-conservative right coalition (the Cheneys, Alberto Gonzalez, etc.) is as benign as a lot of liberals seem to:
Greg Abbott is a very good illustration of what conservativism means in the MAGA-run Republican Party: he was a classic Texas "business" Republican like Perry and Bush before him, a guy who would throw the culture-war obsessed base (now MAGA) a bone or two now and then, but whose primary focus was making Texas as friendly to (big) business as is physically, logically, and metaphysically possible (to the detriment of a whole lot of other state government services, but more on that in a bit). Then the pandemic hit, and the response became a culture war issue for MAGA, which caused them to turn on Abbott (censures and votes of no confidence in county parties, e.g.), who panicked and almost instantaneously reinvented himself as MAGA: he redoubled his previously mostly bone-throwing efforts to make it seem like the border was open and criminals were flowing in by the bazillions; he went all in on abortion; he went full anti-trans; etc., etc. He's still a business Republican to the extent that one can be MAGA and a business Republican (MAGA does put limits on it, of various sorts, but also makes being anti-any environmental protections easier, which, e.g., Space X has been able to take advantage of), but he leads with MAGA, and there's no going back for him or the state Republican Party generally, at least until MAGA loses its stranglehold on the party in Texas and beyond.
The lesson of Abbot and the Texas Republican Party behind him is this: if you are a staunch conservative in the old Texas sense, and you find the MAGAs distasteful, you won't have any meaningful representation in the party for the foreseeable future. You are now basically the GOP equivalent of disgruntled Berniecrats, and like them, you have two main choices, plus a third that isn't really available to left-liberals: you can stick with the GOP, and try to change it from within, knowing that this will be a long and painful struggle; you can start a third party, and resign yourself to irrelevance; or, unlike the Berniecrats, you can join the other party.
It looks like a whole lot of them, and importantly, some with influence and connections, have chosen this last option, and Harris has not only embraced them, but campaigned to capture more of them by openly shifting her rhetoric to the right on issues like immigration. This might of course be temporary, particularly if Trump loses and his influence begins to wane as he gets older and can no longer exercise the same control over the party he has for the last 8 years, but I'd bet a whole lot of non-MAGA conservatives who've committed to voting for Harris have noted the shift in her rhetoric, and are thinking less about how they transition back into the GOP in a year or two than about whether what they're part of is a party realignment, and if so, how they can begin to influence the direction of the Democratic Party from within.
Don't be surprised if, over the next few years, a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party begins in earnest, not between more centrist liberals and the small but vocal liberal left, but between conservatives and centrist liberals, with progressives and former Berniecrats increasingly left out in the cold (though they'll still be blamed for election failures, of course).
I assume you mean the kids who wear them in the U.S./Europe? I know a bunch of them (I own one, and have for like 25 years). I don't know any of them who think this, though I'm sure you could find one here or there. They probably also think we should leave this country and European Australians should leave theirs, because these people are 19 and have not yet thought about much of anything clearly. But hell, I know a bunch of 19 year olds who have Keffiyehs and don't think this way, so it's not most of them even when they're not fully cooked.
I think this analysis is lacking, for a variety of reasons -- not only are we talking about very different political contexts, but also "post-COVID" is 4 or 5 years, man, that's not a pattern -- but it's undeniable that in Europe and the U.S., the far right is ascendant, and everywhere but the U.S. so is the far left*, should tell us something about how people see the world before them, and how mainstream political parties, including the Republicans and Democrats here, are handling it, which is to say, pretty much universally poorly.
I suppose in that case, the most interesting question is, by historical analogy, are we in the 17th century, the 19th century, or the early 20th century, or something new entirely? And if it's the early 20th century, what can we do? Because we're already failing the "New Categorical Imperative" on a relatively small scale, and the analogy suggests we might soon fail it on a large one.
*Whether the American far left's brief and weak moment is over, or whether, because unlike in Europe there hasn't really been a U.S. far left of any note since the 60s, if not since the 40s, it is merely nascent, is something we'll discover over the coming decade or two, I imagine.
Certainly not. I'm just not seeing it from pro-Palestinian groups or individuals, except from some extremists in the region. In the U.S. and Europe, you're much likely to see the reverse, and the reverse is in fact pretty much majority Israeli opinion and pretty close to official state policy at this point as well, if we're to take their politicians, military leaders, and cabinet members seriously.
I readily submit that more people are voting for Trump because he's Trump than Harris because she's Harris (and not just because she's a Democrat or not Trump). This has been the same in each of the 3 elections he's been in. It goes without saying that this does not reflect well on the country's electorate, but many things don't.
There is no unified left among leftists interested in gaining power here: there are libertarians (ironically, the classic kind, not the relatively new American kind), various kinds of communists, democratic socialists, social democrats, and so on.
The DSA (an amalgam of pretty much all of those different flavors, but mostly DemSocs and SocDems) wants to run candidates to the Democrats' left as Democrats, and move the party to the left. They've failed, I think, and there's now active discussion among them about creating a third party, which I consider a tacit admission of defeat and irrelevance. There's a good 3-part write-up on the DSA movement in Prometheus about the movement's failure, if you're interested.
The communists have a handful of different groups of varying sizes (some in the hundreds, some in the 5 digits, nothing bigger than that).
The libertarians are primarily in favor of some kind of dual power strategy (check out Noel Ignatiev's blog), and work with a lot of mutual aid groups and co-ops. There are libertarians who disagree, but I think they're in a largely unheard minority within that tendency.
Anyway, take your pick. No matter what the strategy, the active left remains small, probably no more than 100-200 thousand active people, with more hangers-on/fellow travelers. They (and I) remain convinced that there is a lot of latent leftism in the American public more generally, though, so the real question is not how they gain power, but how they awaken that latent leftism. That's a long conversation.
As someone who's actually encountered someone to your left l, well, ever, here's what I'm seeing in the group chats and Slacks. The left is divided into 4 groups:
(1) Those who are holding their noses and voting for Harris, even when they live in states she can't win or can't lose.
(2) Those who are not going to vote for Harris, because she was a cop, and because she's part of an administration materially supporting genocide and has been clear she'll continue to do so in office.
(3) Those who wouldn't vote for her in solidly red or blue states (because of the cop and genocide things), but will in swing states.
(4) Those who don't participate in national elections (a lot of these people do vote for local stuff).
I am seeing a lot of conversations with (1) and (3) trying to convince (2) to vote for her, but with little success. Attempts to convince (4) to vote at all are always half-hearted.
I don't know which part of this, or my saying she's like Biden and Hilary Clinton, is racist or sexist, but the fact that she's performing almost exactly like they are against the same opponent seems to back me up there.
Liberals who were gonna vote for Biden anyway being excited about getting to vote for someone more alive than Biden is great and all, but doesn't seem to translate into a sustained enthusiasm by anyone, or even a clear advantage in the polls. The excitement for Obama was so extreme that he beat a candidate everyone thought was a shoe in, and then carried that momentum through the general. There's a qualitative and quantitative difference.
Man, what that there were commie parts of the Democratic Party.
Though I hope people keep calling Dems commie. I think part of the reason "socialist" and "communist" are such defanged epithets among young voters is that conservatives have been calling normie libs "socialists" and "communists" for decades, and without the Cold War, using the terms for pretty benign ideas and un-radical people renders those terms near meaningless, or even positive.
Let's try to imagine a person who is moderately conservative in most areas, probably anti-woke, though maybe just in the sense that they feel like wokeness is preachy and goes too far. This person likely thinks both parties are too extreme right now (you hear that a lot, even here), and is distrustful of the divisive rhetoric coming at him (it's almost certainly a he) from both directions. They saw January 6, and may even have been really disturbed by it that day, but it ended with no real damage done to the process, and MAGA has since that day been pretty tame even though they continue to believe the election was stolen. How do you convince them that January 6 is not a one-off event by sore losers, but actually a fundamental attitude towards Democracy and our Consitutional order held by Trump and his followers? What do you tell them he'll do, and how do you convince them you're not just trying to get Harris/Dems elected in saying so?
I think this person is somewhat common. I don't think Harris has done much to win that person over.
My n is, I admit, relatively small, maybe two dozen people over the last 4 years, but the non-Trumpists I've talked to who aren't particularly worried about Trump seem to think January 6 was a big nothingburger, and has been completely overblown by liberals. I'm not saying they're right, just saying that's what I've seen them say. I assume everyone who thinks January 6 was a big deal is voting for Harris, and you can't get many swing voters or stay-at-homers with it.
My own position on January 6 is more complicated, but I posted on Facebook (I never do politics on Facebook) that day that I thought it would be the first of many acts of right wing violence. So far I've been mostly, but not entirely wrong about that, which would probably make it even more difficult for me to argue with the non-concerned swing voters that January 6 shows our democracy is facing an existential threat.
I am not talking about red-brown alliances, and besides, we have Harris with Cheney, which is about as close as mainstream American politics has seen to a red-brown alliance.
Wait, it just struck me: do you think Obama's movement was a red-brown alliance? Or are you getting red-brown from somewhere else?
Getting into the knowability (and falsifiability) of counterfactuals is a philosophical path we probably don't need to go down, here. I'm fine with you disagreeing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
There was a time, years ago, when I would have wondered what the hell was going on in your head to make you think some complete and utter bullsh*t like that, so I'd have engaged, but it's 2024, people are dying, and I'm too angry to care about why people like you are so god awful.
"
Yes, it's still a problem.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
I think pretty much all the Berniecrats vote Dem. Some of them even run for office (one of Austin's congressmembers was just here with Bernie and AOC as part of his reelection campaign). But yeah, their influence, to the extent that it was ever real, is waning, and a party of Harrises and Cheneys would probably freeze them out entirely.
"
I'm not saying they don't need them to win, because they probably do. I'm just saying that I've heard a lot of liberals say that it's just a temporary coalition, and I don't think that's necessarily true. If I were a liberal, I'd be much more worried.
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My answer would be probably not many, which is one of the biggest criticisms of the Democrats i can imagine.
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I think the Abbott's of the world realized that if they want to continue to let Oracle and Samsung and Space X and their friend with 20 car dealerships make a ton of money in Texas with few regulations (especially environmental ones) and some help from the state's Enterprise Fund, they're going to have to at least look, on the outside, like they're full MAGA. I think this really does create limits on the business side, though at least in the short term, businesses seem to think that those limits are outweighed by the pluses (seriously, Space X could create an uninhabitable wasteland down in South Texas, and Tesla could do so in Central Texas, without an environmental regulator in sight). But yeah, if you want to help people increase their profits from within the GOP right now, you gotta at least wear a MAGA mask, if not embrace it wholeheartedly (it's always difficult to tell, even with Trump, where the mask ends and the real person begins).
There are gonna be a lot of conservatives who want nothing to do with the MAGA mask. Some of them maybe find it distasteful, others have principles (at least one or two, right?), and others may believe, probably correctly, that in the long run MAGA is not great for profits.
Abbott has shown he can shift on a dime, so if MAGA loses control of the party, he'll have no problem shifting right back into being early-Aughts Rick Perry. I think others (pretty much anyone in Florida) may have welded the mask to their faces, to the extent that they have real faces at all.
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See?
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Riffing off this, you reminded me of the reason I don't think the Harris-conservative right coalition (the Cheneys, Alberto Gonzalez, etc.) is as benign as a lot of liberals seem to:
Greg Abbott is a very good illustration of what conservativism means in the MAGA-run Republican Party: he was a classic Texas "business" Republican like Perry and Bush before him, a guy who would throw the culture-war obsessed base (now MAGA) a bone or two now and then, but whose primary focus was making Texas as friendly to (big) business as is physically, logically, and metaphysically possible (to the detriment of a whole lot of other state government services, but more on that in a bit). Then the pandemic hit, and the response became a culture war issue for MAGA, which caused them to turn on Abbott (censures and votes of no confidence in county parties, e.g.), who panicked and almost instantaneously reinvented himself as MAGA: he redoubled his previously mostly bone-throwing efforts to make it seem like the border was open and criminals were flowing in by the bazillions; he went all in on abortion; he went full anti-trans; etc., etc. He's still a business Republican to the extent that one can be MAGA and a business Republican (MAGA does put limits on it, of various sorts, but also makes being anti-any environmental protections easier, which, e.g., Space X has been able to take advantage of), but he leads with MAGA, and there's no going back for him or the state Republican Party generally, at least until MAGA loses its stranglehold on the party in Texas and beyond.
The lesson of Abbot and the Texas Republican Party behind him is this: if you are a staunch conservative in the old Texas sense, and you find the MAGAs distasteful, you won't have any meaningful representation in the party for the foreseeable future. You are now basically the GOP equivalent of disgruntled Berniecrats, and like them, you have two main choices, plus a third that isn't really available to left-liberals: you can stick with the GOP, and try to change it from within, knowing that this will be a long and painful struggle; you can start a third party, and resign yourself to irrelevance; or, unlike the Berniecrats, you can join the other party.
It looks like a whole lot of them, and importantly, some with influence and connections, have chosen this last option, and Harris has not only embraced them, but campaigned to capture more of them by openly shifting her rhetoric to the right on issues like immigration. This might of course be temporary, particularly if Trump loses and his influence begins to wane as he gets older and can no longer exercise the same control over the party he has for the last 8 years, but I'd bet a whole lot of non-MAGA conservatives who've committed to voting for Harris have noted the shift in her rhetoric, and are thinking less about how they transition back into the GOP in a year or two than about whether what they're part of is a party realignment, and if so, how they can begin to influence the direction of the Democratic Party from within.
Don't be surprised if, over the next few years, a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party begins in earnest, not between more centrist liberals and the small but vocal liberal left, but between conservatives and centrist liberals, with progressives and former Berniecrats increasingly left out in the cold (though they'll still be blamed for election failures, of course).
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
By your statements here, I'd wager you and they share that last bit in common.
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The Keffiyeh Kidz?
I assume you mean the kids who wear them in the U.S./Europe? I know a bunch of them (I own one, and have for like 25 years). I don't know any of them who think this, though I'm sure you could find one here or there. They probably also think we should leave this country and European Australians should leave theirs, because these people are 19 and have not yet thought about much of anything clearly. But hell, I know a bunch of 19 year olds who have Keffiyehs and don't think this way, so it's not most of them even when they're not fully cooked.
On “What If Trump Wins?”
I think this analysis is lacking, for a variety of reasons -- not only are we talking about very different political contexts, but also "post-COVID" is 4 or 5 years, man, that's not a pattern -- but it's undeniable that in Europe and the U.S., the far right is ascendant, and everywhere but the U.S. so is the far left*, should tell us something about how people see the world before them, and how mainstream political parties, including the Republicans and Democrats here, are handling it, which is to say, pretty much universally poorly.
I suppose in that case, the most interesting question is, by historical analogy, are we in the 17th century, the 19th century, or the early 20th century, or something new entirely? And if it's the early 20th century, what can we do? Because we're already failing the "New Categorical Imperative" on a relatively small scale, and the analogy suggests we might soon fail it on a large one.
*Whether the American far left's brief and weak moment is over, or whether, because unlike in Europe there hasn't really been a U.S. far left of any note since the 60s, if not since the 40s, it is merely nascent, is something we'll discover over the coming decade or two, I imagine.
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
Certainly not. I'm just not seeing it from pro-Palestinian groups or individuals, except from some extremists in the region. In the U.S. and Europe, you're much likely to see the reverse, and the reverse is in fact pretty much majority Israeli opinion and pretty close to official state policy at this point as well, if we're to take their politicians, military leaders, and cabinet members seriously.
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Who knew freedom meant genocide?
On “What If Trump Wins?”
I don't think you'll convince many people by telling them that they're willfully ignoring things you want them to pay attention to.
"
I readily submit that more people are voting for Trump because he's Trump than Harris because she's Harris (and not just because she's a Democrat or not Trump). This has been the same in each of the 3 elections he's been in. It goes without saying that this does not reflect well on the country's electorate, but many things don't.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
As far as I can tell, latinx is pretty much completely gone already.
On “What If Trump Wins?”
There is no unified left among leftists interested in gaining power here: there are libertarians (ironically, the classic kind, not the relatively new American kind), various kinds of communists, democratic socialists, social democrats, and so on.
The DSA (an amalgam of pretty much all of those different flavors, but mostly DemSocs and SocDems) wants to run candidates to the Democrats' left as Democrats, and move the party to the left. They've failed, I think, and there's now active discussion among them about creating a third party, which I consider a tacit admission of defeat and irrelevance. There's a good 3-part write-up on the DSA movement in Prometheus about the movement's failure, if you're interested.
The communists have a handful of different groups of varying sizes (some in the hundreds, some in the 5 digits, nothing bigger than that).
The libertarians are primarily in favor of some kind of dual power strategy (check out Noel Ignatiev's blog), and work with a lot of mutual aid groups and co-ops. There are libertarians who disagree, but I think they're in a largely unheard minority within that tendency.
Anyway, take your pick. No matter what the strategy, the active left remains small, probably no more than 100-200 thousand active people, with more hangers-on/fellow travelers. They (and I) remain convinced that there is a lot of latent leftism in the American public more generally, though, so the real question is not how they gain power, but how they awaken that latent leftism. That's a long conversation.
"
As someone who's actually encountered someone to your left l, well, ever, here's what I'm seeing in the group chats and Slacks. The left is divided into 4 groups:
(1) Those who are holding their noses and voting for Harris, even when they live in states she can't win or can't lose.
(2) Those who are not going to vote for Harris, because she was a cop, and because she's part of an administration materially supporting genocide and has been clear she'll continue to do so in office.
(3) Those who wouldn't vote for her in solidly red or blue states (because of the cop and genocide things), but will in swing states.
(4) Those who don't participate in national elections (a lot of these people do vote for local stuff).
I am seeing a lot of conversations with (1) and (3) trying to convince (2) to vote for her, but with little success. Attempts to convince (4) to vote at all are always half-hearted.
I don't know which part of this, or my saying she's like Biden and Hilary Clinton, is racist or sexist, but the fact that she's performing almost exactly like they are against the same opponent seems to back me up there.
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Keeping the lights on is important. Doing nothing but is a kind of conservatism.
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Liberals who were gonna vote for Biden anyway being excited about getting to vote for someone more alive than Biden is great and all, but doesn't seem to translate into a sustained enthusiasm by anyone, or even a clear advantage in the polls. The excitement for Obama was so extreme that he beat a candidate everyone thought was a shoe in, and then carried that momentum through the general. There's a qualitative and quantitative difference.
"
Man, what that there were commie parts of the Democratic Party.
Though I hope people keep calling Dems commie. I think part of the reason "socialist" and "communist" are such defanged epithets among young voters is that conservatives have been calling normie libs "socialists" and "communists" for decades, and without the Cold War, using the terms for pretty benign ideas and un-radical people renders those terms near meaningless, or even positive.
"
Let's try to imagine a person who is moderately conservative in most areas, probably anti-woke, though maybe just in the sense that they feel like wokeness is preachy and goes too far. This person likely thinks both parties are too extreme right now (you hear that a lot, even here), and is distrustful of the divisive rhetoric coming at him (it's almost certainly a he) from both directions. They saw January 6, and may even have been really disturbed by it that day, but it ended with no real damage done to the process, and MAGA has since that day been pretty tame even though they continue to believe the election was stolen. How do you convince them that January 6 is not a one-off event by sore losers, but actually a fundamental attitude towards Democracy and our Consitutional order held by Trump and his followers? What do you tell them he'll do, and how do you convince them you're not just trying to get Harris/Dems elected in saying so?
I think this person is somewhat common. I don't think Harris has done much to win that person over.
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My n is, I admit, relatively small, maybe two dozen people over the last 4 years, but the non-Trumpists I've talked to who aren't particularly worried about Trump seem to think January 6 was a big nothingburger, and has been completely overblown by liberals. I'm not saying they're right, just saying that's what I've seen them say. I assume everyone who thinks January 6 was a big deal is voting for Harris, and you can't get many swing voters or stay-at-homers with it.
My own position on January 6 is more complicated, but I posted on Facebook (I never do politics on Facebook) that day that I thought it would be the first of many acts of right wing violence. So far I've been mostly, but not entirely wrong about that, which would probably make it even more difficult for me to argue with the non-concerned swing voters that January 6 shows our democracy is facing an existential threat.
"
I am not talking about red-brown alliances, and besides, we have Harris with Cheney, which is about as close as mainstream American politics has seen to a red-brown alliance.
Wait, it just struck me: do you think Obama's movement was a red-brown alliance? Or are you getting red-brown from somewhere else?
"
Getting into the knowability (and falsifiability) of counterfactuals is a philosophical path we probably don't need to go down, here. I'm fine with you disagreeing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.