Fantastic debate Matt with RJ Eskow. Enjoyed your main points and the McEnroe reference too-
Recap:
1) Marcuse's position was that democracy is to be managed by a smart few and it is they who get to mow the fairways of discussion and manicure the greens of policy; and that it is necessary to take away the right of some to have a voice and self determination in their own lives for their own good.
2) He exaggerates Democratic Totalitarianism; and the notion that Freedom is non-existent - love how you combat via Master & Margarita and with the truth is often murky and unclear and not something that should wait for a small group of academics to agree upon.
**** If anyone has spent more than 10 minutes in departmental/faculty staff meeting with 25 Phd's who think they know something and want to show off for all to see, you'd know that this solution by Marcuse is doomed from the start. Might explain some of the alcoholism in academe too.
3) Marcuse's insincere solutions and analysis ("working people and their material needs being met") -- as he banked resources like a hyper-capitalist was a good point and thank fuck you brought up that Marcuse had one foot in the left when it is convenient to sell books and make money, and the other foot in authoritarianism. His "new left" is devoid of many of the best arguments of Marx and Engels.
While having little evidence and not trusting Wikipedia at all (Aaron Mate, 2021 Useful Idiots podcast) it read that he spent some post-war time with OWI (OSS) when he first emigrated to the United States.
One speculates the "New Left" , could very well be a faux construction of the Left excluding Marxism (as a condition of his emigration) and the beginning kernel of the 3rd way Pete Peterson corporate democrats (who like Marcuse started off with very few assets and by the end had amassed millions), often by selling their people out in the end.
Finally, I really enjoyed how Taibbi expresses that a small turbo-group of elite academics advocating for oppressed people on the surface, while imposing their version of progress from above has some parallels in our current cancel culture.
Matt, if it does not take the life force out of you, keep doing this kind of work. It's brilliant. Love the play by play academic discussions especially how they are being twisted and used now.
Would be interested on your take on Marx - but that is a long term project I suspect.
Not sure if you've ever run across this before, but it appears the CIA (might have been?) actively encouraging post-modernism back in the 1960's specifically to weaken "down to earth" regular Marxism.
We could feed him selected passages he could have fun with. Like this (one of my favorites, where he's just ~roasting~ the financial press of his era.)
"If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature — abstinence of the capitalist. [30] The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he “lends (!) the instruments of production to the labourer,” that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus-value out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly puts it, instead of dissipating “their value” in luxuries and other articles of consumption. [31] How the capitalists as a class are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist."
I am an American Jew whose families emigrated to the US from Germany and Holland in the 1840's.I aIso spent a career(42 YEARS+) teaching at a SUNY graduate center and emerged with a deep LOATHING for academia and most of my colleagues.I loved Matt's attack on that swine. Suffice to say,If it hadn't been for the power of US capitalism ,Marcuse and his buddies would have ended up in soap dishes- SOME GRATITUDE.My family fought in the civil War as well as world wars one and two not to make the world safe for the Frankfurt School.I have no sense of humor about Marcuse.
Looks like you teach some very interesting classes. Wish I lived near Buffalo, so I could sit in on one of them! Such a diverse group, I see if the syllabi are online so I can do some reading. Thanks for posting!
I agree with RJ regarding the definition of the left. The anti-imperialist left refers to the Democratic Party hangers on at sh*tlibs for a reason. They refer to themselves as the left while embracing the national security state and its anti-democratic leanings.
Regarding totalitarianism, a good follow up to Marcuse might be Sheldon Wolin’s “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Chris Hedges whom you have interviewed with a number of times refers to him often. I think it speaks to what Marcuse attempted clumsily to address. As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist. It’s when someone like Julian Assange comes along and obliterates their cover of liberal democracy and human rights that the true nature of the beast is revealed without any pretense of the rule of law.
«As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist.»
That's the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian: authoritarian regimes allow for dissent as long as it does not matter, totalitarian ones want to prevent all dissent however minor and insignificant.
However as your write even merely authoritarian regimes push hard to prevent dissent that is not minor and insignificant, e.g. the vicious campaigns against keynesian economists in the 1940 and 1950s, or those against the trumpians today.
In the UK a mild Bernie Sanders style politician, Jeremy Corbyn, was subjected to monstrous abuse by the press and many in his own party, using different arguments but otherwise pretty similar to the viciousness against Donald Trump (who deserved it more, but still).
The issue here seems to me Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative", which was less of a claim and more of a goal; relatedly the notion that "whig"/neoliberal ideology is the "end of history", the best possible system, and therefore any dissent that is not about the details is illegitimate.
The problem for neoliberals/neocons is that warmongering globalist neoliberalism is not popular among voters, who prefer social-democracy, nationalism or internationalism, and resent their tax money and lives being spent far away to support "out bastards" or take out "their bastards". Because of that unpopularity people as different as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, JM Keynes, Jeremy Corbyn etc. must be suppressed. The range of "safe" politicians allowed goes from Bush to Obama, from Blair to Cameron. Even someone as loyal to finance as Boris Johnson in the UK is regarded with suspicion, but then there is a much more significant fraction of the UK ruling class that is still "tory" than in the USA.
But the crushing of 3rd Party Alternatives is specific - the Ds crush any to the left - to ensure progs, lefties, etc. "have no alternative" - they want to own lefty voters without enacting any lefty (non-corp) policies or programs - and, unfortunately, too many on the left buy this horse crap - we have parties on the left on the ballot but we don't vote for 'em - too scared to "spoil it" for the Ds - would be downright laughable if it weren't so effective ....
I have been aware of the propaganda think-tanks funded by big wealth, and of IEA specifically, for a long time. As to this two additional note:
* Ken Lay of Enron "fame" endowed (funded) 35 (thirty five) professorships (in accounting, international economics, etc.) at various universities. People like him are why universities are very careful to get rid of anyone who might upset such generous donors.
* I think that it was the IEA that published in the 1970s that published the critical study that showed that *at the same level of income/wealth/status* people who owned cars, share based pension accounts, and real estate voted more for the right than people who used public transport, had defined benefit pensions, and rented houses. Thus decades of thatcherite and reaganista policies to eliminate the latter.
You are such a wonderful writer, Matt. Your sincere voice, your heart, and your intellect come out every time you touch the keyboard. I appreciate your self-reflection and your continuing this fruitful intellectual debate.
Thanks to you, I just finished reading “Repressive Tolerance,” and I must say, you're right about the seemingly insane turn it takes around the middle towards what sounds like Mao’s cultural revolution made for America, and yes, I think there’s a direct link from Marcuse’s “discriminating tolerance” to Kendi’s “anti-racist discrimination” and much of the hysterical intolerance of the Social Justice left today. BUT, this essay is a rich masterpiece of Hegelian thought, and like all Hegelian essays, that extreme moment in the essay is just that, a moment in the movement of the dialectic, the radical anti-thesis to the thesis of tolerance. You failed to note the Aufhebung in the final paragraph, where he states: “HOWEVER, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is NOT a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy.”
Marcuse’s entire career was dedicated to preventing the rise of another repressive dictatorship out of existing democracy. Yes, he believed it was an “objective truth” (I don't like that language either) that the Nazi’s and the Right stood for repression, cruelty and autocracy and that the Left stood against repression, cruelty and autocracy, but the pragmatic question is whether any of his ideas can be used to effectively ward off the rise of another repressive dictatorship in the U.S.
Looking back on Germany, he writes: “The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”
The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy, but he still controls the Republican party and is continuing to inspire an unprecedented hatred of “liberals" (they have no problem with black and brown people who hate liberals too). I believe we are already in a slow-motion civil war and that simple “free speech” won’t save us in this new media environment. I think we can discard Marcuse’s radical antithesis (just as he did at the end of his essay), but I’m wondering what others think should be done about what he would call the “clear and present danger” that is Trumpism. What does it mean to be “tolerant” of Trump’s aggressive, anti-democratic Big Lie? When does tolerating his intolerance, his hate speech and lies against "liberals," become a form of repression? Are his followers really just proud American individualists thinking for themselves, or are they being manipulated by lies that no American should tolerate?
"The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy"
JFC, Bradley. I guess I'm an unreasonable person. I didn't see any coup against our democracy happen. I saw a lot of time and money burned at two inconclusive impeachment trials when the country has much bigger, more serious problems that the legislature could be trying to address, but no.
A bigger and funnier question for me is that a lot of people who were like "Russia rigged the 2016 election" are now like "The 2020 election is indisputable, perfectly legitimate, and how dare anyone suggest otherwise!" I guess election technology advanced a lot in 4 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lost in the whole controversy about the 2020 election results is the rigged 2016 DNC primary that was the basis of the spurious Russiagate allegations which ultimately were intended to deflect attention from the Clinton campaign's deceitful maneuvers to anoint her as the Democratic nominee.Everyone(including Trump & Bernie Sanders) should have demanded a standardized procedure in national elections(including primaries) after that, including the right of each party to inspect any machines used in the process. Without such reform we'll never know who is the actual winner in any electoral contest.
I agree the the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged against Bernie, but I don't buy the conspiracy theory that the Democrats somehow changed all those votes for Biden while neglecting to change any votes, on the same ballots, to give themselves the senate. It defies logic, and there's been no credible evidence that's withstood investigation. None. But just like Hitler's Big Lie that the Jews stabbed the German's in the back in WWI, no evidence is needed for the myth to gestate and spread over the years and then be put to use in a right-wing coup or civil war when the time is right.
I think this fashionable move of mocking anyone who draws analogies to Hitler's rise is silly. I compared what Marcuse wrote to Mao's cultural revolution, which I think is eerily similar to the woke tribunals I've seen on college campuses, and no one bats an eye.
There have been other instances of the Big Lie used to pave the way to autocratic coups, but Hitler's was the ur text, and if we don't learn from how he deceived the Germans into distrusting evidence and hating the Jews, what good is history? Trump's Big Lie is deceiving his millions of followers into distrusting the known facts about the election and hating "liberals" and "RINOs" and everyone not loyal to him.
Of course there are differences between Trump and Hitler, and every other strong-man dictator, but the similarities are what we need to note. I think he's an extremely dangerous demagogue. You haven't given me any reason to think otherwise.
Godwin's law has been an accepted part of internet etiquette for 30+ years. It has become so mainstream that the term was added to the oxford english dictionary a decade ago, and is hardly some trendy fashion. It's a self defense mechanism for discussion groups meant to mute pearl clutching doomsday prognosticators with so little substance to their argument that they can only appeal to an absurd slippery slope fallacy.
I think the "similarities" are mostly superficial. At worst, Trump was a cartoon version of a 20th century strongman tilting at windmills amidst a 21st century inverted totalitarianism, to which he posed no real threat. He was what we should have always known him to be: a reality TV personality and a real-estate hustler who was able to exploit just enough anti-establishment sentiment to get elected. Failing to ride the wave to re-election, his reactionary "army" of the disenchanted cosplay misfits would have been repelled, if not squashed, easily with even the most rudimentary police reaction. Theater. Does he have political sway with lots of people, particularly on the right? Sure. Is he capable of being American Hitler? Not remotely.
It would depend on whether you were going short or going long on the pool. I contend that going short is the play for a skilled gambler nowadays; the risk is high but the reward is commensurately high.
The truth is I'm thoroughly turned off by the dispute between two corrupt incompetents. I didn't even vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary this time around because I was disgusted by his not challenging the results in 2016. There is no question of "the good being the enemy of the perfect". There is NO good in this f*ucked up system. Nevertheless, since I somehow still believe in making a commitment I voted green because at least Jill Stein challenged the 2016 vote. However, I no longer remember the name of the guy on the ballot that replaced her. Did I throw away my vote? Sure, but it should be remembered that Lincoln was a minority party president and I prefer to cling to a remote hope rather than to surrender myself to total cynicism.
"I didn't even vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary this time around because I was disgusted by his not challenging the results in 2016."
I voted for Sanders in the 2020 primary with much less enthusiasm than I did in the 2016 primary; he had already proven himself as someone who would get steamrolled and take it. Your non-vote counted for exactly as much as my vote.
I hope you enjoyed the evening with a movie, popcorn, and a beer instead.
Even Mitch McConnell admitted that there can be no doubt that "Trump was morally and practically responsible" for the attack on the Capital in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power. If you are one of those who believes, without any credible evidence, after all the recounts and investigations and court cases, that the election was stolen, then we can't talk, because I don't think you're using sound evidence-based reasoning and I'm certain nothing could change your mind.
Well, I disagree....if you haven't got any evidence-based reasoning to back up your disagreement, then there's no "reason" for the rest of us to honor it. This is exactly the kind of anti-reason, feelings-based culture that "wokeness" is all about. Tell someone that just because they feel something to be true doesn't make it true and you've "invalidated" their existence somehow. If we can't agree on basic facts and reasonable inferences from those facts, then we've no basis for democracy any more. This is Trump's legacy.
All I’m saying is, when you tell someone that you’re not going to listen to them because they’re a retard. You are shaking hands with the least rational biological construct in existence, the ego.
There are millions of them who believe the Big Lie and Qanon. How are we to go about "listening to them" in a way that will disabuse them of these lies? I'm at a loss.
"If we can't agree on basic facts and reasonable inferences from those facts, then we've no basis for democracy any more. This is Trump's legacy."
Pretty sure bullshittery and Barnumism well predates Donald J. Trump in the U.S. of A. We have a long and revered tradition of electing carnival barkers to national office.
He may not have been the first liar in American history, but he was the most relentless, prolific, and influential. He convinced millions that their votes were stolen from them, without any evidence, and sent them to the Capital to "fight like hell" and "stop the steel" so he could remain in power. His corruption and lies (or "alternative facts" as Kellyann Conway called them) are well documented, so I'm sorry, Grisha, I'm intolerant of corruption and lies, especially from a president.
«believes, without any credible evidence, after all the recounts and investigations and court cases, that the election was stolen»
The obvious hint is that the surges in voting of 18% for the Republican candidate and 22% for the Democratic one are both unprecedented (and ridiculous in an epidemic year), that some surges in Democratic districts were much higher, and the obvious impression is that there was quite a bit of cheating in both Republican and Democratic areas, and the Democratic ones were better at it. If the 2016 election was stolen by Putin, and that was a story that was investigated by Mueller's huge team in excruciating detail and enormous expense, and was run for years, the allegation that the 2020 was stolen is so much more credible than that. When the trumpians look at the Mueller investigation and the 2,000-3,000 stories by the NYT on the 2016 election "steal" and compare with the "nothing to see here, move on, this was the fairest election of them all" for 2020, they get very angry, and I can't fault them for that.
As to the recounts they are pointless if there was ballot stuffing or ballot suppression, there were virtually no investigation on the scale of Mueller's, and mentioning the court cases seems to me pure bad faith because they were thrown out not on the merit, but on a technicality (that those making them did not have standing).
No, all that has been thoroughly investigated and debunked, just like the claims that climate change is a conspiracy. We investigated Russia's influence, and though Trump told them to interfere and they did and he applauded them for it, we have to accept the results of the investigation, just as Trump's people need to accept the results of the investigations of the 2020 election. But they won't, he's convinced them that 2+2=5 and that in fact it's the Democrats who are Orwellian and insane. There's no reasoning with them at this point, nothing that will change their minds. We've never seen mass delusion on this scale in our country. This is dangerous.
I do not believe the election was stolen; Trump turned enough voters off that he lost the election to Biden.
But to claim as you do that it was "thoroughly investigated and debunked" is as big a lie as any of Trump's claims. The claim that widespread fraud impacted the election was immediately dismissed out of hand by the Democrats and their media wing. Trump was unable to bring any legally admissible evidence to court, and so his cases were largely dismissed. But the idea that that election fraud was ever investigated is ridiculous. We're still only 4 months away from the election - any kind of credible investigation would still be going. We spent three years investigating the Russia-gate hoax fabrications - but somehow you think we "debunked" election fraud cases in three months? Okay ...
And then we have your own significant misstatements of fact. To take Trump's joke on a campaign stop that he hoped Russia had Hillary's emails as "urging" them to do so (and that they did) is asinine, at best. (For the record, there was zero evidence of the Russian hacking claim - and, in fact, there is still zero evidence legally admissible that Russia hacked the DNC servers or Hillary's private, illegal email server. That whole thing came out of a throwaway line from a Clinton staffer trying to deflect attention from the contents of those emails - i.e., that the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign to tilt the primary in her favor with the cooperation of CNN. Wikileaks' Julian Assange has consistently said it was not Russia that provided the DNC file leaks, but a disgusted DNC staff member. Assange has never been found to have lied about a source of a leak before. He could be lying - but, again, your contention that this is some kind of undisputed fact is laughable. Anyway, Trump was clearly making a joke about Clinton's claim that the Russians had hacked her emails.)
Your statement of fact that Trump lied more than any other president in history is highly questionable. It is possible that you are right - but we'd have to actually go through every press release of ever administration, every campaign stop, every letter, etc. You just blithely assert, though, that this is an unquestionable fact based on .... I don't know?
It is something that is eminently quantifiable, but until someone does the research, it's just a guess. Not a fact.
In short (well, not that short, to be honest), you're a mirror image of those you spend so much time here asserting your personal superiority to.
Reading your posts leaves me feeling like I've been in one of Dr. Hartley's group therapy sessions ...
I don't know what your point is with all this whataboutism, and I'm not getting side tracked here. If you don't think Democrats had good reasons to be pissed off about Kavanaugh and suspicious about the Trump team's relations with Russia, you're free not to tolerate those who want to cling to these issues, but no good reasons to believe that Biden stole the election have been presented. The states have conducted their own recounts and investigations, headed largely by Republicans who themselves voted for Trump, and they lost in 61 court cases, with many Trump appointed judges, because they didn't bring any credible claims. You can't just demand more "credible" investigations without giving good reasons why more are necessary or why the ones conducted already weren't credible, and "because Trump convinced all these people" is not a good enough reason.
The judges for the most part didn't rule on evidence. They wanted it out of their courts, for the reasons cited below. Not that I blame them. A judge overturning an election is in a very bad place most of the time. Reminds me of why so many judges are armed.
Let's talk reality. How do you prove voter fraud? I mean, in the case of a dead person voting, that's easy. But what about duplicate ballots? Multiple registrations? Poll worker collusion? Just as a few example scenarios. These things would require confessionals by those performing the fraud, since we don't have things like Voter ID in most places in the country where fraud is alleged, no cameras watching the poll workers and the voters, etc. You're not going to get the kind of evidence you'd want without a pre-arranged sting operation - and the evidence of it happening is ephemeral. Election Day comes and goes, and whatever time required for counting remaining ballots, and it's over.
You're left with statistics and general bad feeling on the part of those who are pretty certain it happened but aren't able to prove it because of the issues noted above. Anyway, you can call it a Qanon conspiracy all you want, but if half the voting public thinks the fix is in, you have a big problem that won't be solved by calling us all conspiracy theorists. When the ballot box is considered corrupt, you move on to the next box.
Nothing at all would convince that half of the public whom Trump convinced to believe his conspiracy theory, nothing. You will always be able to come up with a reason why the recounts etc weren't valid, like why climate change isn't real. That's how conspiracy theories work for those who buy them. Way easier to fool them than to convince them they've been fooled. Even without any of the recounts and investigations, the conspiracy simply defies logic: why would the Democrats change all those votes for Biden but neglect to change any, on the same ballots, so that they'd win the senate too?
We are in big trouble. Millions of people have bought a lie and there will be no way to convince them otherwise, and since they believe their votes were stolen from them, they will be mad as hell and ready to fight their brainwashed liberal neighbors the minute Trump says it's time. We've seen ample evidence that this is what's going down, all those militias training throughout rural America, the practice runs in Michigan, the level of organization behind 1/6. This is what Marcuse was trying to warn us could happen.
«"Trump was morally and practically responsible" for the attack on the Capital in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power.»
Was he also responsible for inciting this violent attack on and occupation of the Capitol to stop a constitutional vote and intimidate senators in changing their vote in 2018?
«At the vote confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6, woman after woman screamed out in protest from the Senate gallery and was carried away by guards. [...] People were pounding in outrage on the closed entrance to the Senate floor. [...] U.S. Capitol Police said a total of 164 people were arrested that day for “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding.” [...] The depth of opposition to Kavanaugh was revealed when on Oct. 4 over a thousand people from throughout the country, mostly women, demonstrated on Capitol Hill. [...] At the Senate Hart Office Building, crowds saying “NO” to sexual assault and to the reactionary agenda that Kavanaugh represents flooded the atrium and every floor. Over 300 chanting, militant protesters were arrested that day. [...] There were too many acts of indignation and outrage at Kavanaugh’s nomination to list them all. [...] Outrage against Kavanaugh broke out initially on July 9 at the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill [...] During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings the first week in September, over 227 demonstrators were arrested.»
«Protesters opposed to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court targeted the offices of swing vote Republican senators Thursday to pressure them to vote against President Donald Trump's nominee [...] About two dozen people were arrested outside the office of Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, according to a police officer on the scene. Defiantly blocking the hallway in front of Corker's office, [...] The senator was not there, his staff said. The protesters then moved down the hall to the office of Sen. Susan Collins»
So you think those who protested Kavanaugh's appointment, after the GOP broke our constitutional norms and blocked Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, had no valid reasons, whereas those who stormed the Capital to stop the transfer of power did? At any rate, the Kavanaugh protestors were arrested for their civil disobedience. This has nothing to do with Trump's Big Lie that incited the coup attempt on 1/6/21.
«those who protested Kavanaugh's appointment [...] valid reasons [...] arrested for their civil disobedience.»
And here everybody can see the real story: if an assault on and occupation of the Capitol is done by people on our side it is a "civil disobedience" by some freedom fighters, if is done by people on their side is a "coup attempt" by terrorists. Great news from America! :-)
You think what Trump's mob did on January 6th was civil disobedience, and that those women who protested in the Kavanaugh hearing without hurting anyone, knowing they'd be arrested, staged an "assault on and occupation of the Capital"? This whataboutism is ridiculous. Trump's claim that the election was stolen is a lie that he began telling months before the election even happened, with absolutely no evidence or reasoning to back it up. It's been completely debunked, and we shouldn't tolerate his continuing to drum it into the minds of millions of Americans who, for some reason, actually trust him.
Not one Kavanaugh protestor was charged with interfering with the duties of Congress - which is exactly what they were doing; no different from the Jan. 6 takeover of the Capitol. During the Kavanaugh storming, offices were occupied, Senators were evacuated, etc.
And nobody at the Kavanaugh hearing was protesting Garland (who should have had a hearing) - they were protesting allegations of sexual abuse (many of which were later withdrawn or proven false; the main one, even, was seriously undercut when supporting witnesses either refuted the accuser's testimony or had no recollection of what they were alleged to have witnessed).
The double-standard in charges being brought in the two incidents will provide rich material for defense attorneys.
Mitch McConnell doesn't speak for everyone and definitely not for me. You are one of those who believes that there is no "credible evidence" about election malfeasance simply because the media have been claiming so since November 4, long before any evidence had been brought to light. Recounts simply recounted the same ballots, and the considerable evidence from witnesses to malfeasance has never been heard, since the courts rejected the lawsuits on technical grounds.
I do not know whether the election was rigged, but neither do you. Since every election in this century that resulted in a Republican President has been challenged by Democrats, it defies belief that Democrats now "know" that the 2020 election was pure as the driven snow, particularly since so many states unilaterally changed their election rules in a way that reduces rather than enhances the custody of every vote.
And there is something that can possibly change my mind - a proper forensic audit of the election in those states where counting was stopped late on the 3rd when Trump was leading in 5 of 6 remaining states, and by morning Biden had pulled ahead in all of them. Was it due to mail-in votes being counted? There is one really good way to find out.
No, it's not just "the media" that tells me there's no credible evidence that the election was "stolen"--the election officials (most of them Republican) in every state where the vote was challenged have looked into and debunked every plausible claim so far. It's not up to those of us who don't believe in unicorns to provide evidence that unicorns don't exist, it's the believers who have to come up with credible evidence. If "considerable evidence from witnesses to malfeasance" exists, as you say, what is it? Or did you just hear that it exists from the Trumpist media?
Biden pulled ahead in the final hours of counting, exactly as predicted, because more Democrats voted by mail, and Trump lost just as all the polls predicted (except that he did better than expected, again). If Democrats were somehow able to steal the election for Biden, why didn't they steal if for the Democratic candidates for the senate who were on those same ballots? It defies logic, and we still haven't seen any evidence! I would love to believe in unicorns, but you have to give me a legitimate reason to, otherwise it's not my fault for going with the assumption they don't exist.
Propaganda predates Hitler's rise by quite a long way. One of the pioneers was Edward Bernays who was an Austrian-American who did a lot of his most influential work in the 1920s in New York. "Trump's version of Hitler's Big Lie" is just the latest iteration of good old American propaganda.
So propaganda predates Hitler, his Big Lie is the most famous and it's instructional. If you think noting the similarities between Hitler's Big Lie and Trump's is just "good old American propaganda," I guess that means you don't think Trump is perpetrating a dangerous mass fraud to further his hold on power.
I'm through trying to convince people on this thread. As Jonathan Haidt shows in The Righteous Mind, the human brain is a an elephant of emotional and intuitive bias being ridden by a tiny little jockey of reason adept at justifying whichever way the elephant's bias makes him want to turn. None of us are immune, but I sure hope people with my bias against Trump's Big Lie defeat people with your bias that says that's all just propaganda.
Trump's assertion that the election was "stolen" is a poor choice of words on his part. What happened is that Democratic operations managers were able to cleverly manipulate the voting rules and procedures in a manner that completely altered the complexion of how our elections have traditional been conducted.
In the state of Georgia, Democratic organizations such as Fair Fight Action were able to get regulation changes at the local level such that the outcome would be skewed in the Left's favor. The unprecedented use and manipulation of absentee balloting was the key to the new construct.
The most notorious concoction of this was the newly-minted "Souls to the Polls" campaign where absentee ballots were filled in by entire church congregations who were then bused in mass to Sunday absentee ballot boxes.
Some might say this is a way to empower those who might otherwise not participate in the system. Others will say that this is a nefarious manipulation of our democratic traditions designed to Cancel the outcome of the will of the people had our election norms been preserved.
Many of these changes in election procedures should have been subjected by legislative over-site, but were not. Thus, legislatures in a number of states have introduced bills to curtail the abuse, including Sunday ballot stuffing.
The factors you mention are not necessarily a bad thing as long as the process is monitored in accordance with Legislative intent AND the results are auditable and certifiable. Unfortunately, the Executive Branch officials that ran these elections have refused to allow audits and have certified outcomes despite hundreds of testimonials and eyewitness accounts of process irregularities. None have been adequately investigated. Consequently there is a cloud over the elections in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
I have to laugh, because after the November election, when tRumpian attempts to prove the results were flawed were thrown or laughed out of courts by the scores, Georgia held ANOTHER election for two US senators on January 5.
"I refuse to believe Democrats won unless they jump through all of our theoretical and arbitrary hoops" is just the 2020 way of saying what was said in 2000: "Sore-Loserman."
The Jan 5 election had watchers and observers everywhere. And the Democrats won again. "Adequate investigation" my a$$.
Well, I live in Wisconsin, and my google search shows countless stories debunking the claims of voting irregularities in Wisconsin. If Trump's own government agencies looked into the claims of fraud and said this was "the most secure election in our nation's history," then people who want more investigations have to present evidence that more investigations are warranted. Otherwise, we've got a new precedent that every election can be denounced as stolen by the losing side who can then tie the nation up in endless investigations, thus stalling the transfer of power forever and/or making everyone on their side believe that the government is illegitimate.
You're right, I'm fully aware of how the new media algorithms try to keep us all in our own custom-designed bubbles, so if you've got links to credible stories about wide-spread (or any) voter fraud in Wisconsin, please share.
Georgia is my home state. The biggest factor in November and the January run-off elections was a much higher proportion of younger voters -- 18 to 30 -- by far, than any of the surrounding states.
In 2016, I was surprised that Cobb County, which was once Newt Gingrich territory, narrowly went for Hillary Clinton. Many of the Baptist ministers in these parts made it plain they could not support tRump -- foreshadowing a major disagreement among the white evangelical ranks.
For November 2020, due to the pandemic, we had about eight early voting locations, and several weeks to show up and cast one's ballot. Waits were anywhere from 30 to over 90 minutes on average. Only one of the locations was served by Cobb's public bus system, and that site always had the longest waiting times.
While waiting in line at my location -- with it extending alongside the sidewalk -- someone drove up and asked (shouted): "How long y'all been waiting?"
Someone in line yelled back "Four years!" -- And folks around erupted in laughter and applause.
Haha, what a spectacular demonstration of Newspeak! The Democrats fought back against GOP vote suppression strategies to insure that everyone who wanted to legally vote could vote despite the pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reviewed Trump's claims and called the election "the most secure in U.S. history," and yet your revision calls it a "nefarious manipulation of our democratic traditions."
Nice try. It's truly amazing how the people who spent four years denouncing Democrats whom they insisted (wrongly) never accepted the election of Trump are now engaged in an unprecedented attempt to deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden's election. Just like in 1984, "the Party" requires intellectuals like yourself to massage the Big Lie into a narrative that the masses can swallow without gagging.
And btw, the claims of "ballot stuffing" have been widely debunked, as have all of Trump's other claims. No evidence of widespread fraud capable of changing the election's outcome has been produced, but it's just like with people who believe in unicorns: they insist that just because they have no evidence of their existence doesn't mean they don't exist. But it's not on the rest of us to prove the non-existence of unicorns any more than it's on us to prove the non-existence of widespread voter fraud (or "nefarious manipulation," as your Newspeak would have it). If Trump had any case at all, he would have proved it by now, but all he has is the myth of the Big Lie, and he's banking on keeping it alive in the minds of his supporters.
Well, your pompous run-on response speaks of BS notions of Newspeak, Big Lies, and Unicorns, none germane to the issue . Stay tuned. Expect the states that were tricked by the Dem rule changes to enact legislation to correct things.
Germaine to your issue: how can the GOP "correct things" when there was no evidence of voter fraud in need of correction? "Correct things" is Newspeak (a euphemism) for voter suppression, which the GOP has made an art of to maintain its power despite the majority of citizens opposing them. They systematically make it harder for POC and young people to vote wherever they have the power to do so, because POC and young people lean left, whereas Democrats make it easier for everyone (left and right) to vote. Who's more fair and democratic?
So - if the pastor of a large church with a devout following instructs his flock to vote in a certain way, then sends out emissaries to contact the membership saying " we vote this way" -sign here- and collects all ballots and submits them en-mass via a Sunday voting box.. And said church has an alliance with many like-minded churches across the state and America, all conducting the same operation. The result is ballot tally time signatures flowing as statistically predictable until the large Biden 99% batch comes through on Sunday afternoon. You may call it "Vote Outreach". I call it a gross manipulation of our voting tradition. If you are able-bodied and able to vote in person - do so.
Okay Metal, I've tried googling "sunday ballot stuffing" and I get nothing. Send me a link to the story you're talking about, if you have one, but this doesn't sound any worse than the way the Evangelical Christian right has been rallying all their people to vote GOP for years. Are you saying that Christians choosing to vote together at the same time should be illegal, or that Christian pastors shouldn't be allowed to preach who they think their members should vote for, or both?
I have a hunch that if this is one of the things Trump tried to claim was cheating, it was already adjudicated as fair and legal. I don't like that Evangelical and Catholic Christian leaders have instructed their members to vote Republican for years one bit, but it doesn't seem to be any of my business, even if they all fill out their mail in ballots together in church and then drop them in the same box at the same time.
And the crucial thing about your re-description of the Big Lie here is that it makes Trump out to be an honest American who just chooses his words poorly, while continuing to make Democrats out to be sneaky, nefarious, manipulative alterers of tradition.
Essential to Trump's Big Lie is the demonization of his enemy, i.e., "liberals" and all who would enable their nefarious plot against America. He spent four years stoking this hatred, and now his people are so angry that many of them are ready to kill and/or die for him.
The importance of Hitler is that he recognized that people are far more likely to swallow an enormous lie than a small one, far more likely to believe that one set of people is engaged in a massive, evil conspiracy than to believe this or that minor fib about them. Myths don't require evidence, they are in fact stronger without them, because evidence can always be debated. If enough people can be made to believe that liberals are despicable people who are trying to steal their country, they will be ready to do what it takes to stop them when the dear leader calls on them to do so. For now, they're standing back and standing by. I wish honest conservatives would come out and denounce this myth.
"Essential to Trump's Big Lie is the demonization of his enemy, i.e., "liberals" and all who would enable their nefarious plot against America."
This stuff has been going on for decades pre-Trump. It's at least a hundred years old, arguably older. Trump is somehow uniquely culpable?
BTW, apparently "insurrectionists" are similarly engaged in a nefarious plot against America. Lots of nefarious plots against America goin' on; the enemy is within. I hope you're appropriately frightened.
There's always been dissent and partisan animosity, but I don't believe you can't see that Trump has escalated the hatred and the lying beyond what it's ever been. And "plots against America...within"? Trump says that's what lefties like me are doing, but it's a lie, a projection, gaslighting--he's the one who tried to overturn an election deemed fair by all the election officials and courts, he's the one drumming the Big Lie into his supporters, telling them to "stand back and stand by" because it will soon be time to "fight like hell" and "take back our country."
So yes, he may not have started the partisan hatred, but IMO he is uniquely culpable, and I never said I would tolerate a lying demagogue sewing hate on a massive scale to further his own power. You can tolerate that shit if you want to, Grisha.
It's not doing things that would incite a shooting war. How about that? A lot of what I see that passes for opinion in the media seems to act as if that isn't a possibility. It is a real danger.
PS: It isn't just Trump that thinks the election was stolen. Those of us with wide experience in the Northeast, at least, have known about the dead voting and the other abuses for many years now. Nixon 1960 was a pretty egregious example from the past. Perhaps we're tired of putting up with it.
But just like with Qanon's claims, there's been no credible evidence presented that the election was stolen. 61 judges, including judges appointed by Trump, threw their claims out of court. His own justice department and homeland security departments said there was no evidence of fraud. So what is it you're tired of putting up with, and why should the rest of us be sympathetic?
«His own justice department and homeland security departments said there was no evidence of fraud.»
Of all the examples of delusional propaganda this is particularly laughable: how can one claim that the security and justice were Trump's own, to the readers of "TK News" that has amply documented how both kept backstabbing Trump for years, with titles like "The Color Revolutions Come Home", "We're in a permanent coup", "The intelligence community needs a house-cleaning", ...
I know, I know, it's like Trump says: everyone who disagrees with him is part of the deep state, even his own appointees, even his own vice president. So what if we have governmental agencies in charge of investigating the facts?--if they say the facts are against Trump, then they are by definition deep state liars. 2+2=5, or whatever Trump now says it is. Go ahead and have your final say and let's end this conversation.
You seem not to understand that a newly-elected President says "Jump" and the institutions which predate him immediately say "How high?" That's how it's supposed to work, right?
And this leads to an important point: when candidates were chosen by "the machine" in "smoke filled rooms" instead of primaries they tended to be experienced "machine politicians", people with their own power base in both politics and the federal administration. Since primaries the presidential candidates tend to be inexperienced "looks presidential" people without any power base in their own party, never mind experience or a power based in the federal administration, and they tend to be more ex-governors than ex-senators or ex-representatives. People like J Carter or R Reagan, or more recently BH Obama (or B Clinton or GW Bush) who are pretty much PR figures. GH Bush had his own power base in government, but not in politics. That's why "machine" people like Cheney or Rumsfeld had so much influence.
J Biden looks like a partial exception, for he has a long experience in politics and in part in the federal administration, but he has no faction of his own, he has always been a lightweight, and is so obviously currently just fronting for the "New Democrat" faction just like B Clinton and BH Obama did.
"J Biden looks like a partial exception, for he has a long experience in politics and in part in the federal administration, but he has no faction of his own, he has always been a lightweight"
I still don't know WTF the actual puppet masters think they are achieving with Biden; to me he looks incredibly, obviously weak.
I'm reaching Philip K. Dick levels of paranoia here. Either the people in charge are inept fools scrambling for a temporary handhold at the edge of a cliff, or they are secret geniuses playing nth-dimensional chess. I don't see a middle-of-the-road explanation.
Tell me one Judge slick that looked at the evidence.
Zero. No court considered hearing the evidence, slick.
We are all informed we have no standing.
Slick.
Judges that refuse hearings are not the same as judges that consider the evidence then reject the evidence.
There are hundreds of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury about the fraud, as well as the youtube videos, as well as everyone who has a TV saw the count mysteriously halt at 1030 PM in the swing states with Trump ahead, then at 3 am Biden immediately leaped ahead by a huge influx of votes.
But you already know all that, slick.
Then at the first sign of any real dissent you PANICKED and your Pretender was sworn in at gunpoint, with the guns facing the nation. > and here fools you drew the sword, and the only person killed or who had or used a gun was the thug with a badge who shot Ashli Babbitt.
In short slick, you stole an election, killed to protect the theft and ringed the Capitol with troops to ensure Biden was sworn in. Along the way you informed the people your vote doesn’t count, and they have no standing before the law.
You are a liar slick, and now you have killed, and now you have drawn the sword.
No judges looked at the "evidence" because Trump's lawyers didn't bring any, they brought only frivolous conspiracy theories. They were reprimanded by Trump appointed judges for wasting the court's time. The claims that swing states mysteriously stopped the count at 10:30 have been debunked (see Politifact, Reuters etc), as have all the other claims (see for instance https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/nine-election-fraud-claims-none-credible/). But people who believe in conspiracy theories are never phased by debunking and fact checking, they'll just keep coming up with new claims to support their narrative.
If you have a link to evidence of hundreds of affidavits about the fraud, please give me the link, I'd like to see whether they've been debunked or not. And please explain, since the Democrats (and all those Republican election officials in swing states) went to all this trouble to steal the election, why they didn't also steal the election for the Democratic senate candidates who were on the same ballot?
"better 1000 Bradley Butterfields then Jew haters like the long warred. You will be replaced you scumbag"
Whoa! This is the kind of Troll Fight shit I live for. If I were a worthwhile entrepreneur, like Vince McMahon, I would readily hit "the long warred" over the head with folding metal chair and call it a day. $$$
"In fact our only possible replacement would be the Spanish."
Pretty sure the Spanish just want to stay up late, drink wine and eat tapas at this point. Running an empire is fucking exhausting; it takes a few hundred years to get past the hangover.
The Brits are still all fucked up. I fear for my fellow Americans. Sometimes you have to swallow a lot of aspirins and spend all day in bed.
"I voted for Trump twice and I totally disagree with him in both in fact and opinion."
This is a remarkable statement. I do not intend my own response to be negative or condescending in any way. I think your rationale may go some way towards explaining Trump's "inexplicable" electoral popularity, and if you wish to explain further, I hope you will do so.
The "America" that Matt waxes jingo balls about in his summation of why Marcuse-the-immigrant should have appreciated America was:
The America that was ramping up a racist imperialist war against a nation of farmers in SE Asia;
The America that was tolerant of the men who bombed churches in Alabama;
The America that denied voting rights to a huge number of citizens based on their skin color;
The America that tolerated McCarthyism cuz communists are bad;
The America that denied financial autonomy to half its citizens cuz women;
The America that had a mainly "northern European whites only" immigration policy;
In sum, the America that existed in 1964.
Matt may imagine that he would have been celebrating that America, but for those of us alive and conscious at the time it looked pretty intolerable from a left perspective. But then my understanding of "left" has to do with socialism, not elite-driven neoliberal identity politics.
I've been in this business 30 years and been a persistent critic of the United States, of its past and its present - spent ten years on systemic financial inequality, wrote multiple books on racism in the justice system, have been heavily critical of efforts to whitewash exactly the monstrous behavior in Vietnam you reference.
For all that, there's a reason hundreds of millions of people across the centuries have come here, usually fleeing even worse political situations, and it's not "jingo balls" to occasionally point out why.
The problem I have with Marcuse, and frankly with a lot of leftists, is their vision of progress isn't about improving the American experiment (which, again, I've been almost exclusively critical of my whole career), but going backward, and making it worse - taking away the many things about this country that actually work, beginning with the system of individual rights.
I spent nearly 15 years an expat, living and working in heavily non-white countries. One thing you do learn is that non-whites are just as capable of being oppressive people as any racist bogeyman in the US (the western progressive's obsession with race completely ignores the severe forms of discrimination commonplace in most of the word - class, ethnicity, caste, religion, tribalism, which quite often supersedes race in many places). The other thing you quickly learn is how much better people are treated in the United States compared to most of the world.
By which I mean the common, everyday America. The enormous swathes of lower middle class/working class Americans working at everyday jobs and living quiet humdrum lives.
The whole American promise was that people could escape the class, religion, or ethnic divides of the old world and come to this country to be their own man or woman. And it was true enough, for if it wasn't a perfect place or a perfect promise, American history is still a story of working towards the ideas of its promise. That's why the American individualism, the whole "no one is gonna tell me what to do," is so culturally important to Americans. Because when people start telling you what to do, and you comply out of fear, then it becomes a society of oppressors.
And that's the problem with much of the progressive left, in their desire to castigate and judge people for not living up to their ideals, they've come to see this individualism and even basic rights such as freedom of speech and press and all the promises of diversity in ideas and tolerance it espouses, as a threat and a proponent of all the problems they see in American society rather than solutions.
It does seem like the modern Democrats and progressive left are recreating a new class system but one that is based on holding the correct thoughts rather than ancestry, and it's a class system because it justifies treating different people differently based on their views, in short, some are now more "equal" and therefore get more "freedom" than those who hold the wrong views, who will have entirely different standards applied to them and lesser freedoms and lack of equality. We already see this pervasive everywhere in the cultural sphere, in how topics and ideas are handled and treated by those who control the media and most of the written word in this country. And we also see it among the growing acceptance by the establishment classes that you must adhere to a certain orthodoxy to be accepted and tolerated, with all the implications that comes with it. To be an individual is only a threat rather than a virtue.
In late 70's I took a job at San Antonio Express News driving a truck every morning around 3-4 a.m. with bundles of newspapers to the carriers at different locations. 7 days a week, you got your birthday off, that was it. Upside was you got paid for a 40 hour week even if it only took you 25 or 30 and if you were in school as I was it didn't interfere with those hours. Naturally, not a lot of white boys were signing up for that gig unless they were in shoes like me at the time. My girlfriend was Hispanic and got me in even though I was the only white boy amongst that entire delivery crew and her Mexican friend that was in charge had tons of reservations about hiring me. I took the stink eye from the other guys and knew in Summer I was getting the truck that had the window that wouldn't go down and in winter I was getting the shit box truck with the window that wouldn't roll up. Pendejo, Puta was something I just got used to being called and ignored. I only had one physical altercation on the loading dock but it was short and not the worst fight I'd ever been in. The point is discrimination as you point out isn't exclusive to any one race or country or even here in pockets of our country. As a side note to this experience it didn't suck forever. After awhile they just got used to me and there was an incident where I helped get another drivers disabled truck back to the barn after seeing him stuck on the side of the freeway on my way back from a run. It also helped that through osmosis (and my GF) I got fairly good at speaking TexMex Spanish. By the second year gringo boy was still gringo boy but I wasn't getting the stink eye anymore. I was even making friends with a couple of Mexican guys that were around my age and we'd do taco runs blasting UFO and I'd listen to them complain about other older Mexican guys there on the dock that were 'pendejos' now, not me..lol. I guess I had assimilated. Back then though I had no clue that was what had happened. I was just happy I wasn't getting shit at what was already a shitty job. Discrimination and Assimilation are weird bedfellows for sure. I'm just glad I learned this the way I did vs through a bogus college course ..
One of my closet work mates is an ex-pat Zambian. We worked pretty closely for about 10 years. In fact he was my 2020 protest vote write in. The last two years it was just the 2 of of us so we talked a lot. I would mostly pump him for info on Africa. He was usually very accommodating.
Periodically he would show me videos. Very disturbing videos.
One was an obvious phone camera video that showed an attractive young black woman in a print dress lying on, what appeared to be, a city street, rocking back & forth & moaning. I could see cars & trucks passing at the very top of the frame.
From off camera a black man entered the frame carrying, what appeared to be, a large hunk of concrete. He proceeded to smash the concrete down on the woman. She continued rocking & moaning as the man picked up his cudgel & walked off screen. Then another man entered from the other side of the frame, dressed like an office worker out for a lunchtime stroll. He almost moonwalked in backwards and then delivered about 10 good kicks to the woman's head. At that point I handed it back and said 'What the fuck pal?" He explained that she'd been accused of adultery & that was the man's family beating her. He said it was a common occurrence. I asked him how it ended. He said they killed her.
Another video showed a large group of black folk encircling a smaller group of black folk in a slightly depressed area at the circle's center. Some of the people in the center area had tires around their heads. 2 women in the outer circle were spraying some kind of liquid on the people in the center.
I couldn't figure out what I was watching. My friend told me to keep watching, I'd figure it out.
He was right.
At one point a few people in the outer circle started throwing lit matches at the people in the center. When the folk in the center burst into flame I understood that the liquid was lighter fluid. Again I gave him a rousing "what the fuck?" He explained it was all over immigration & was tribally rooted. I asked him what happened to them & he said they were all immolated.
He also told me stories about his treatment by American blacks. When he first moved here he lived in an all black neighborhood. He said that his neighbors constantly told him to never trust white people. They'll lie to you, steal from you & even kill you.
After a year in that neighborhood he discovered that the only people lying to him, stealing from him & trying to hurt him were all black. He moved to a predominantly white area & has never had a problem.
He told me one story that had a punchline I never expected.
My friend & his wife were shopping in a store called Gabriel's. These were remainder clothes stores that moved into ex grocery stores or department stores where they just dumped all of the clothes on tables & the shopper had to root through them hoping they'd find something in their size that wasn't damaged or faulty in some way.
My friend's wife had found a dress that she liked & put it in their shopping cart. They then walked away from the cart to root elsewhere. As they returned to their cart they watched a black woman take the dress out of their cart & put it in her cart. When they confronted the woman about it she looked at them & said "You people need to go back where you came from."
Ba-da-boom!
He taught me that African American's professed love for their lost homeland was more affect than actuality.
A friend of mine, white female, worked in an African country through the Peace Corps. She once was driving past a man dying on the road, having been hit by car. His family was there. Her instinct to stop and help was nixed by the Africans with her, telling her that if she stopped, the family or other passers-by would accuse her of trying to kill him, and she would be in big trouble with the police. Utterly inhuman.
"and it's a class system because it justifies treating different people differently based on their views, in short, some are now more "equal" and therefore get more "freedom" than those who hold the wrong views, who will have entirely different standards applied to them and lesser freedoms and lack of equality"
I like the use of the word 'now' in that bit of alt-right boilerplate. Like, before "now" everyone was equal and had the same amount of freedom as everyone else. I recommend Lewis Lapham and his take on class in America for a corrective to this "presentist" hilarity.
How can you people take yourselves seriously?
BTW I utterly loathe "modern Democrats" and people in the US who consider themselves a "progressive left". Just as was the case when Spiro Agnew and the Republican right successfully demonized the term "liberal", contemporary American pundits of both the "left" and the right have twisted the meaning of 'left', 'socialism' and 'Marxist" to mean just another variety of liberalism that can be accomodated by capital, ie your masters.
If everyone were as perfect as you, we wouldn't need a government, we wouldn't need philosophy, free speech or a free press. We'd wake up each morning in a utopia. Each day would be a dream of humanist love and cooperation. Even the angles would envy mankind!
You can instruct us by example. Verbal beatings won't do it. They just make you seem more like us. LOL.
He had a miniature, first edition of Das Kapital inserted in his ass right after birth. He's just a channel for the great one's observations. Basically he's Mohammad.
"I've been in this business 30 years and been a persistent critic of the United States, of its past and its present - spent ten years on systemic financial inequality, wrote multiple books on racism in the justice system, have been heavily critical of efforts to whitewash exactly the monstrous behavior in Vietnam you reference."
And I have read those books and learned from them. As an investigative reporter you do a great job of digging into details and bringing them to light with well-narrated individual instances that cast a glaring light on the specific system you are examining. I also just like your style.
But it remains true that "individual rights" work where they work and testify to hollow gesturing where they don't.
How do we do away with "systemic financial inequality" within a capitalist system that prioritizes "individual rights" when individual rights are precisely the defense against any attempt to undo that inequality? What determined the difference in "individual rights" between the people who got their mortgages foreclosed and were defenestrated by bankers and the bankers who got massive bonuses for fucking up the global financial system?
They're all just "individuals" after all, possessed of rights. One small group was possessed of money and the other larger group was not. Wealth determines how relevant your individual rights are in American capitalism.
The same holds true for the instances of "racism in the justice system" you evince. The people suffering injustice at the hands of the system are individuals and as such possessed of formal rights. They just don't have the money to activate those rights, ie make them mean anything at all.
I'm not an American, so the few hundred million of you doing well enough out of global capital doesn't really alter my perception of how capitalism and it's ad campaign "individual rights" is working out for the other 6 billion humans on the planet. I realize most American "leftists", even those owning to the label "socialist" are pretty much unaware of and indifferent to people living in other countries until they become "immigrants" and activate the rhetoric of rights you all love so much. Meanwhile bomb the shit out of the fuckers because the business of American is the arms business. And ain't no pinkofag gonna tell me I can't do my business as I see fit. I got individual rights.
In the part of the world where I live, people live on $6 a day, work upwards of 10 hours a day, get shot and beaten for striking and lack any political representation at all. Liberals, with their fetish for "human rights" and what they call "democracy", call for gay marriage, free speech and free and fair elections in spite of the simple fact that none of these "individual rights" have ever served to address the fundamental problem of poverty and exploitation that puts the t-shirts on American backs.
People move to America to escape poverty, Matt. Always have and always will so long as the global north can hold onto its domination of the rest of the planet. Individual rights and $5 will get you a triple mocha at Starbucks. Under capitalism you'd better get the $5 first or you're fucked.
So you work in a place where people get shot and beaten for striking, but here, where you don't, is the problem?
As for the difference between homeowners and banks, that was an issue not terribly connected to civil liberties. Prosecutors just didn't exercise discretion to prosecute certain kinds of fraud. And one of the arguments I made in the book was that other aspects of the rule of law are diluted when some people in the corporate context get to buy their way out of criminal prosecution, and others don't.
But free speech is a big deal, and so is right to trial by jury, right to assemble, to free press, to freedom of religion, to freedom against unreasonable search, even the right to a civil trial by jury. In every other place I've lived, at least one of those rights is absent in a serious way. And in the States, those rights do work, or did anyway. There's a huge difference between writing for a fringe media outlet and being ignored, or writing something dissenting and being shot or removed from publication, which happens elsewhere. You have issues with Lockheed-Martin, so do I, but the solution isn't putting Sy Hersh or James Burton under the control of a media regulator (or a de facto one in a group of tech companies).
There are a lot of arguments about America's lack of fundamental protections against poverty. I have mixed feelings about that question but even if I didn't, even if there was a constitutional provision guaranteeing sustaining employment for instance, the solutions you'd be talking about would be along the lines of stripping personhood from companies so that they don't enjoy the same rights as people. What's gained by taking the individual right to free speech away?
I was thinking of Vietnam when I sketched that place. You know, the place that underwent 30 years of war in an attempt to throw off imperialist powers like the French with their liberte egalite fraternite bullshit and then the Americans with their democracy freedom and rights bullshit.
I'm not sure why you are unable to process that for socialists, like Marcuse, capitalism is the problem and America is its beating heart in the world as presently configured. American workers no longer need to be beaten and shot because American capital relies on workers in countries where relative poverty makes it possible for smaller capitalists and their government allies to beat and shoot workers indiscriminately.
Lucky Americans. Plus the fact that the culture of narcissism that you apparently found a defensible construct means that Americans are self-obsessed value-free consumers who so long as their t-shirts and electronics stay cheap don't give two fucks about what it takes to keep them in their mall utopia.
But this is pointless, As a liberal and an American you are constitutionally blind to what seems obvious to a socialist; your tyranny free lives are a function of wealth, not some great experiment in individual rights. That is why you can't put "prosecutorial discretion" into a box labelled "denial of fundamental rights" and have to talk about legality.
As is the case with most "rights" discourse it is just a feint to avoid recognizing a political question. And by political question I mean one that can only be solved by changing the system of rulers not by playing musical chairs with a selection thereof.
If you had read Marcuse and the others who wrote the essays that exercised your jingo balls so extremely a little more closely you would have noticed that no one was suggesting "taking the individual right to free speech away" but restricting that right in the case of certain toxic actors on the right. You also would have noticed that there was a passage suggesting that no matter how useless and indeed counterproductive individual rights were under capitalism they would need to be maintained while the body politic struggled to make those rights mean what they only appear to mean in the American system as it existed in the mid-60s.
I can't wait to see you defending a born-again George Wallace standing on a platform going on about the nigras and the need for whites to defend their culture while calling for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". Then when a howling pack of white thugs wade in with baseball bats and truncheons to beat the living shit out of protesters or bomb a church and kill some kids and no one goes to jail, you suggest that "discretionary prosecution" has nothing to do with civil liberties.
Because that was America that the authors of Repressive Toleration were writing into. not the one where a bunch of privileged millennials get all scared for their safety cuz someone said 'retard' and then convince their employer to fire said retard abuser.
In this as in everything else in capitalist wonderland America, the bottom line is not the right of retards to hear themselves referred to by their preferred pronouns but profit, that bottom line. Rights are neither here nor there.
To MichaelJohnWilson Ah yes, now I see. I lived in other countries for over 45 years and heard almost nothing but anti-Americanism, even as their culture adopted pretty much every aspect of America as soon as they could get their hands on it.
There is a deep resentment of America elsewhere and it has less to do with America's violation of another country's sovereignty (and ability to violate the rights of their citizens) and much more to do with its wealth. It comes down to sheer mere envy, the eternal rallying cry of the socialist. It is oh so easy to find the flaws in the only country in the world that daily confirms its admittedly uneven dedication to the idea of true individual human rights and the freedom to use your mind to better yourself and your family. The continual commitment to that ideal is what has brought unprecedented prosperity to America and elicits envy in socialist idealists like you, who pretend you don't want that prosperity, even though along with true freedom this is what makes it possible to pull more people out of poverty than socialism ever could.
America is an ongoing experiment in self-government, and like all science, its mistakes are what direct Americans to new ideas for betterment of life for its citizens, and also why half the world is on our southern border trying to get in. They don't want to overthrow the experiment and replace it with your failed theories of socialism, they want the freedom of an imperfect Constitution and a country forever trying to live up to its ideals, and the novel ideas and technological and true social progress that only its freedom can or will create.
You're a horrible writer. Stick to one style. You go from post-modern language torture to dorm room pothead to the right to offend "retards". Do better and write shorter.
This is what you all wrought by making Chomsky God. Has anyone ever asked Ol' Chompers what nation in the world is, or has been, a just one? Or are you all crying along with him and Abby Martin and self-flagellating about the uniquely evil America?
Matt, why not give some of your time, energy and ink to the other ways "individual rights" are under attack? I'd have thought you'd be at least as troubled by corporate personhood and equating money with speech as you are with a "Leftist's" assault on America's Bill of Rights.
This is all supposed to be about a review of a book and a few articles written almost 6 decades ago but has instead turned into a screechy collection of the usual anti-Marxist rantings from American semi-literates.
Not sure what prompts Matt to place himself so squarely in that line of virtual idiocy.
This is the tone I adopt when I minister to people in the soup lines. Except I used your previous characterization: retards. Gets them over to my side every time. I think you're due back at Trots HQ now. Say "fascist" over and over and over.
Matt, you are with us on the right. You just haven't realized it yet. You are trying to defend individual rights on the side that has abandoned the concept.
There are some jerks on our side, as there always will be everywhere. But the vast majority of us want the best for all Americans, of all races and beliefs. We have concluded that the way you get there is through vigorously protecting individual rights.
Sometimes there is a role for government, but so many of our tragedies are caused by misguided or malevolent government actions, from the destruction of the black family starting in the 1960s to the monopoly power of Amazon (did you know they had a patent on the "method" of one-click shopping for 20 years, until 2017, so a lot of their market dominance came from a legally enforced monopoly?)
I think you have a visceral and sentimental attachment to identifying as a man of the left, as I did until about 7 years ago. But when I really got to know people on the other side, I found out that the left was lying about them.
It's an altar call for Matt, who sounds like one of those Black Toms on YouTube who preach the gospel of the anti-woke (while also preaching laissez-faire economics as being fine for the prison system). Maybe we can get him on our side. Were there women in the English Dept. who just wouldn't date you? Have you accepted Jordan Peterson as your lord and savior? Do you reject the evil ways of Satan and his handmaidens, AOC and Susan Sarandon?
When the Big Tech titans were hauled before Congress, Democrats slammed them for not engaging in enough censorship, and demanded to know their plans to do more. And not a single member of Congress from that side of the aisle dissented from that view. So yes, if you support civil liberties, you're on the right now, whether you realize it or not.
It shouldn't be a left-right issue, and up until recent years it wasn't. But now it is. If you don't see that, you still haven't grasped what "progressives" have become. You'll find out soon enough.
We need a good defense of individual rights against the illiberal left, but you can do better than praise American tradition and exceptionality. I mean, the 1st amendment is not adequate for the digital age, effectively only the rights of the internet companies are protected.
"The problem I have with Marcuse, and frankly with a lot of leftists, is their vision of progress isn't about improving the American experiment ... but going backward, and making it worse."
This is really close to the crux of the dilemma. The "American experiment" is a pretty vast and nebulous "thing," In manufacturing processes, which are much more tangible and well-defined, "improvement" can only come about through what W. Edwards Deming called "profound knowledge." (He identified its areas.)
Otherwise, we're just tampering with the system (the experiment) with good intentions, which could also end up making things much worse.
I don't know why, but when I read the words "repressive tolerance," it reminds me of one of the bits of wisdom the military taught me: "You get ulcers when you start to worry about how clean to wipe the asses of the people who shit on you."
Question? Where is the perfect country where all of these things existed in that time period? I often feel like the US gets compared to these mythical utopian countries. As if the history of the entire world isn’t rife w/ war, famine, injustice, strife and every other atrocity. I believe modern humanities problem is a lack of historical knowledge.
My biggest problem with the left wing of the political spectrum, is they are very good at seeing all of the problems in society but refuse to admit when things have improved. When holding up society to some perfect utopia, we will always fail to meet it.
His followers are following his true path, which is the path the USSR was forced to walk until in their madness the little Marcuse's tried to make Stalin walk it.
"Nobody who knows anything about history wants the USA to walk the USSR's path..." Regardless of their knowledge of history or perhaps knowing it exactly there are a great many people who want the white kulaks of America to walk exactly the path the Ukrainian Kulaks walked. That path being racial and ethnic genocide, from the point of view of the White Elites Class based warfare of the Upper against the Lower Whites.
Which of course it is...2021 is Marxism stood on it's head with the Intellectual Vanguard getting rid of the proles, which is true to history if not Marxist theory. Really the ultimate in snobbery for the discerning striver, and Marcuse is perfect for them.
I think you're trapped in economics here and ignoring the racialism of the Left, indeed it's genocidal battle-cry of 2020's Burning/Looting/Murder and rioting was "Erase Whiteness." In actual history there was usually an ethnic component to the Communist genocides - see Cossacks 1925 at 500K dead, Ukraine 1930-1934, the genocide of the Khmer against the other Cambodian groups etc etc.
As far as American style Capitalism ie Globalism I'm against it.
That they fund Burn, Loot and Murder and Antifa - the -fa these days seeming to be the still bewildered American Kulaks - doesn't add to it's charms. We can agree to agree on this matter, I don't care for globalism ala American style Capitalism either and even on pure economic grounds it wants to turn the world into a Roman Estate with them the Roman Bonus class. I'm against that anyway...and frankly I think the anti-white pogroms and building repression against my people [non-elite whites] is because we're in the way. The rest of our sins don't matter, including the blood guilt of inherited sins. We and our antiquated and medieval Constitution are in the way of gathering yet more wealth and power, that's all.
It's heartening to see that Matt's fans include those prepared to defend white people against the genocidaires manning grad studies departments across the globe!
I will admit that there are varying degrees of repression and vilification above but there was debate in the USSR and NSDAP as well, the moderates did not win the day.
Sure, you don't hate white people, you're just a socialist.
That's why 4 of your 7 points are racialist.
But it's not racism against white people, just 'justice.'
And it will always be 1964 for you leftists.
Until in our desperation and yes need to survive we make it 1933.
But don't worry, we shan't sue.
Remember this when we have 1933 Germany from Seattle to Stockholm Sweden which is a more likely result than whatever dream you were dreaming, and why shouldn't we?
Dreaming is free. Anyway, I'm starting a website focused on the 1950s. Nothing but cool jazz, pastels, classic Chevys, and Ike, whom we like despite some missteps.
Holy smoke dude, were you in a Coma in 2020? That is the actual Left.
I can agree that historically good results and even good policies came from the *historical left* but that seems to have ended in the 1960s along with said old left.
As for me recounting and where I recount from WRONG in a word, but how would you know I don't get my info from Corporate media. Bad guess, happens to all of us I suppose.
Almost no Americans have an experience of the left, not like Europeans do, because of all the so-called advanced democracies, the U.S. government persecuted the left and labor most. Consequently, and is apparent here and everywhere else, "Marxism" or "Left" have no meaning outside of the dictionary of the moment.
I think what is most telling about post-modernists is the contention that there is no objective reality. So what? Heisenberg said as much. We can only describe reality within a realm of certainty. Said another way, George E. Box, regarded by some as the greatest statistician of the 20th century, stated: "All models are false. Some are useful." This does not mean that postmodernist "philosophy" provides any means for better modeling the universe in which we live.
Rather postmodernism is simply a form of sophistry intended to change the game by creating a new set of rules. It even provides the freedom to create new rules in the process since, after all there is no "objective reality". A not so subtle strategy which, when absent rationale arguments, one imperiously declares that rational and logical argument cannot be employed.
Since the models created by post-modernists are not subject to debate or criticism is this not the perfect example of a recursive argument? Postmodernism and Marxist theory are simply rhetorical techniques to be employed in power shifting. Their purpose is political and not scientific. They do not lead to greater knowledge but rather serve as tools for closet aristocrats to seek power and once obtained rule by diktat over the benighted masses. Those experiments have been tried and failed miserably.
Disagree - anyone who has read Marx's Capital I, II, & III learns a great deal about economics, history, and society. Real lasting change in a capitalist society will require critiques of crony capitalism or end phase of capitalism that Marx has supplied.
The problem is the link to communism (in East) and the historical significance of that devolution (inside and outside of the US), instead of sticking with how we might make changes to our system using Marxist criticism of the worst pieces of crony capitalism(of course this is before the corporate coup d'etat that took place in the 80s and 90s where all the levers of power were sold out to business/industry).
Now with propaganda like Russiagate, or siding with Juan Guaido in Venezuela, the US has situated itself that any concept from China or Russia is some sort of conspiracy or power grab -- deluding themselves and some Americans into thinking to throw the baby out with the bathwater (in terms of anything linked to "communist historical culture).
«who has read Marx's Capital I, II, & III learns a great deal about economics, history, and society»
Even more so they may have learned a lot about the history of thought on the political economy, something that is often (deliberately) left out of education in Economics.
Excellent point - I find the exact same thing when teaching family finance - the history of our financial culture is one of the least understood parts of our education. The history of the Federal Reserve, How money is made, how the state interacts with client banks, and our history with the dollar, gold standard, and world's reserve currency. Then we take a look at what our budget looks like and the national debt (https://www.usdebtclock.org/ )- and we see how $27 Trillion national debt was $2.9 Trillion 30 years ago.
A 10 fold increase in our debt while we participated in about 10 wars and income inequality expanded a record setting paces we have seen in 50 years. For a capitalist country we do a pretty shitty job of talking about the political economy and family finances (confusing the two at turn to mask the public theft).
Seconded, although I do agree with Rick about postmodernism being nothing but sophistry. The fact that it's sometimes called "neoMarxism" when applied to socio-political issues is absurd; it's the antithesis of Marx's thought processes, which were very matter-of-fact and (usually, but not always) down-to-earth.
When Pomo gets thrown around and pummeled - I tend to think of it more as a part of dialogue with objectivism instead of something isolated on its own.
History is almost always a reaction to the last series of events (financial crises are great examples --- the solutions to solving inflation, or credit access or financialization or bid-rigging indexs, or accounting practices linked to fraud) are inextricably linked to the predecessor policy. To judge it separately apart from the choices at the time, especially 30, 50 years later means people do not fully understand the game behind the game. (not unlike an umpire strikes zone -- those who follow that umpire know already --- but anyone who comes in and compares it to other umpires will undoubtedly find fault).
How this relates to Pomo is that I see like Tony Benn. If we can create theory to harm people and enrich an entire class of undeserving frauds, then we can create theory and practices to help remove those barriers to class and privilege.
MT is a basketball guy if I am not mistaken - played in Russia; he reports being good from 15 feet and liking to rebound. I am more of Soccer person with a streak of Hoosier basketball (and flit between the baseball and football as more entertainment kind of thing).
Not sure the world needs two 50 something men writing about umpires at this point in history as baseball is a dying American sport in a lot of ways. It used to be when I was growing up you could get a game just about every summer night in the Midwest corn fields. But now its different. - I suspect that there is some overlap between Make it up as you Angel Fernandez or Country Joe West and the personalities we see in the political, economic sphere.
"History is almost always a reaction to the last series of events..."
That is an interesting comment. There is some truth to this, I suppose since history can and should be a learning experience. An experience which hopefully permits us to avoid the mistakes of the past. Doesn't seem to work out does it.
I think of history as being very important and I will admit I have failed at reading Marx's Das Kapital. It is simply too ponderous for my taste. I've never been one to contend that all of Marx is garbage though I'm not sure he is a particularly good economist. I can read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations but Marx, for me it is just too much. Perhaps I haven't tried sufficiently.
That said, I'll throw out the following for debate:
Both Smith and Marx were early cognitive scientists. Without the benefit of knowledge concerning DNA, quantum mechanics, epigenetics, functional MRI and many of today's tools, they set about the Herculean task of describing human behavior and why people do what they do. Smith was writing at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Marx was deep into it. Marx may have provided excellent examples of criticisms of "Capitalism"; however, how good was he really as an economist? Smith attempted to describe the merits of a market economy. He also drew heavily from history. Many of his insights resonate today. One of his profound insights:
"A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants."
Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations.
Now prior to unleashing wrath and demonization about a lack of empathy for servants bear with me. Smith was most interested in what made humans happy and satisfied with their lives. He articulated two classes of labor: 1) productive and 2) unproductive. Menial servants were part of the "unproductive" group. So were lawyers, philosophers (like himself), physicians, opera singers, Royals, the military, and financiers. In Smith's construct you could be very high in the social hierarchy and still grouped with an individual who helped with your luggage at the train station or airport. Social status had nothing to do with it but was instead incidental and tangential. Why were they "Unproductive"? A bit simplistic perhaps; however, their services created nothing of material (physical) usefulness or value. More importantly their existence was entirely dependent upon the surplus material wealth created by "productive labor". Without much knowledge of human anthropology and doubtless unaware of specifics of Humanity's journey from hunter gathers to agriculturalists and beginning industrialists he certainly understand that there was a driving force in all of this. It was wealth (what humans perceive as valuable to their lives). Whether it was hunting grounds, sources of fresh water, pasture land, rich tillable soil, or access to water and eventually steam power, the wealth creating ability of a civilization led to its diversity and if managed well, its happiness. Smith, I suspect, always viewed the glass as half full.
Marx it seems was more a "glass is half empty" sort. He understood well the negative aspects of the Capitalist civilization he lived in. He saw the oppression, the malfeasance, and thievery of a ruling class. These were, however, human traits that long predated Capitalism. The Magna Carta is a good example of a bunch of barons getting together and putting limits on the Divine Right of Kings. Sure they were land owners and "wealthy" for their time but they also resisted arbitrary and "privileged" seizure of their wealth.
Is this not just the same-old-same-old story played over and over again? Humans display both demons and angels of light. During the 20th century the most brutal and murderous regimes were those who practiced totalitarianism. Nazi Germany with its Social-capitalist model (fascism), Russia under Stalin and China under Mao. Nazism was crushed. Russia imploded and China broke with some of it ideology and seems to be sort of maybe (and maybe not), an authoritarian quasi-Capitalist civilization. Of the latter, I'm not so sure given Xi's penchant for supporting state industries and further consolidating power in the CCP.
So, my concern is with the model. Here is a model:
"If we can create theory to harm people and enrich an entire class of undeserving frauds, then we can create theory and practices to help remove those barriers to class and privilege."
Be very careful what you wish for. What is the definition of "theory". For some it is a tool for getting what they desire. For Western civilization it has been since the start of the Scientific Revolution, a methodology for creating and testing models which best describe reality. Some like to consider it a path to "truth".
Now is "Capitalism" a theory? I think it is a "bad word". Of course it is not a theory, it is moniker. At best it should be reserved for the meaning that Smith used the word for. It is simply a measure of wealth. Now "markets", that can be considered a theory in a scientific sense. It is in some respects a testable hypothesis. So far during the 20th century, at least, socialism/communism failed miserably in creating wealth. Markets worked far better. The fact that I have the luxury to engage in these sorts of debates is evidence for this.
Marx leaned heavily on Smith. Did you know that when Smith talked about "free markets" he was referring to "freedom from economic rents"? He was opposed to things like landlords and (in the current world, would have been talking about) medical insurance companies. He noted that markets worked best when they were free from economic rents.
If Marx himself is too dry for you (and it is tedious reading at times, reading Capital vol 1 & 2) maybe check out Michael Hudson, Marx's most direct living intellectual "heir". He wrote this around 2005 or so, back when then-orthodox economists like Greenspan were saying markets were too rational for a housing bubble to be real.
Thank you, I will attempt it. I had heard that Marx did "lean heavily on Smith". Smith certainly favored productive labor as the source to true wealth. Something the United States lost sight of since the beginnings of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
I'm asking you to advocate for the thinking of Karl Marx. The best you can do is retreat into a form of tangential criticism. Many an academic of postmodernist thought employs the same tactics.
"Laced with agenda" - What does that mean?
"It does not belong" - Why does it not belong?
"Clouded" - Define "clouded".
"Constipated" - now that is a subjective quasi-moralistic opinion if there ever was one. Even Koko the Gorilla was good at using intestinal metaphors.
Marx was about the rubber meeting the road. He wrote on behalf of workers, attempting to do so in language workers of the time could understand. He might have failed.
"Academic Marxism" is pretty close to a contradiction in terms.
I like Mike Davis's books, especially "City of Quartz" (haven't read them all).
My question is: what is the point of Mike Davis? What has he done, concretely, to upend the the thing he critiques? Or does he more enjoy his comfortable job as an academic?
The "point of Mike Davis" is to remind us that writers like Matt are working from within the liberal tradition they critique, without doing anything concrete to upend the thing they both criticize and defend?
That is a huge exxxxxxagggggeration: post-modernism is essentially an attempt to point out that The Enlightenment, however valuable in overcoming pre-modern thought, and in its own merit, was not the "end of history", but was in large part shaped by the ideology of the newly emerging commercial/industrial/professional ruling classes, and that therefore we must look at the shibboleths of modernism with critical judgement, like the modernists looked at those of the pre-modern era.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I know of no fans of the enlightenment who think it was the end of history, and so much post-modern thought was and is actively anti-science, it think it deserves scorn more than anything.
Actually they operate on different assumptions and probably work best together. Objectivism assumes one can know reality, that answers exist based upon some rules, principles or scientific theorems. Postmodernism assumes that reality is in the eye of the beholder, and that reality is not fixed, certain, there are exceptions to every rule.
One uses the scientific method preferencing quantitative data and the replication of methods and data. The other does the same but opens up spaces for qualitative data (case studies, interviews, ethnography, and family/histories) to express what is not being discussed or left out of traditional research methods. This creates a rift and has caused an entire generation of academics to either align with the traditional power systems gatekeeping academe (objectivism) and the new generation academics of the 60s/70s who were inspired by movements and what is happening in people's reality (Howard Zinn, Paolo Freire, Edward Said) that was not being captured by the historical power centers of tenured professors. So Pomo was useful at one point as a resistance to the 1950s Eisenhower-esque power structures at Ivy league institutions who were shaping the next generations of leaders.
For people to hear that their parents, their country or that Darwin or God did not have all the answers --- that we all are operating on incomplete knowledge was empowering in the beginning.
But just like everything else in this culture, too much of anything turns into a problem (smoking, drinking, eating and Pomo'ing). Academics started following their interests and trying to build theory or formulate new ideas in a sea of change in our culture. Unfortunately, it became a distraction in some cases and in others did not fulfill the promise of a committed 30 years of work --- solutions for Americans that are valuable -----> especially around labor, finance, debt and the history of predation in the US.
That meant some were co-opted by the old guard objectivism that was clear our leaders did not have solutions for (see the right wing in the last 30 years), and a generation of scholars developing their ideas as they went (cue the DNC and corporate dems) --- and if there were people with good ideas (Elizabeth Warren and bankruptcy bill --- they got pounded in the fight and then gave up on real change, exchanging for position in society).
So, Pomo is not anti-science and it is not the panacea promised either. The best research questions probably find a way to mix what is known and build upon that --- using all sorts of methodologies. Why limit yourself. Unfortunately, young academics are expected to make choices early on in their study (are you going to go your own way and risk it or will you play ball, follow the rules, and slowly build the research base of your field)?
I wouldn't say anything Zinn wrote was postmodern, though. He was just a good historian who meticulously went through the entirety of the historical record with many topics, and made the case that "the orthodoxy", as taught to children was, in fact, wrong.
"Objectivism assumes one can know reality, that answers exist based upon some rules, principles or scientific theorems. Postmodernism assumes that reality is in the eye of the beholder, and that reality is not fixed, certain, there are exceptions to every rule."
What evidence do you have to support this? If anything, physics in the 20th century clearly demonstrated that absolute "Objectivism" (are we alluding to Ayn Rand here) is false.
Nevertheless, I'm very much embroiled in the methodology for creating knowledge every single day. The methods are extremely important just like the assumptions in any model.
I return to the following attributed to George E. Box.
"All models are false. Some are useful."
In this regard be very careful what you wish for and the assumptions that you employ. Giving undue weight to a particular variable based upon a decidedly false assumption is a recipe for disaster. Useful science embraces and applauds nuance. It is also very sensitive to the impact of nuance.
Postmodernist thought seems mostly a tactic for Powershifting. So much of Marxist Theory seems to be a methodology for assailing entrenched and admittedly inequitable power relationships. As such it is not so much about making more pie as it is sharing pie.
I'm not entirely sure what the phrase "Marxist Theory" is specifically referring to, to be honest.
Stuff like this?
"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor,..."
Heisenberg's uncertainty theory deals with the relationship between measuring location and momentum in a quantum system. You're probably thinking more about relativism and multiple worlds theories. Either way, please don't compare quantum physics to postmodernism. They have nothing in common, and the comparison only serves to lend undeserved credibility to postmodernism.
One of the greatest achievements of physics in the 20th century was the realization that there is no "God's eye view" of the universe. There are limits to our knowledge. A very direct expression of this is Heisenberg's uncertainty. I would never compare postmodernism to Heisenberg in a favorable way.
I appreciate that you followed up and continued the conversation. Not enough folks do that today, your self-reflection is refreshing and so needed in today's discourse.
I think my main problem with your review is that you buried the lede a little. I was at an appropriate school to witness the flowering of deconstructionism and Straussianism and a half dozen other philosophies that engendered the mess we are in today, albeit sometimes via circuitous genealogies.
And all of them were rooted in the same sentiment: the resentment of intellectual elites at having lost their aristocratic patronage in the age of the common man. The desire to rule came first, the excuses came after. It is impossible to understand identity politics without understanding that first.
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that one's angry first take ad a reviewer might have missed something important. I'm sure I speak for many when I applaud Matt for this willingness to go a bit deeper and to back off from some earlier positions where a lesser mind and character might have doubled down.
I have had arguments with left friends about the American political tradition and whether King's idea of the unfulfilled promise was too generous and there really isn't anything worth salvaging or building from. I'm on the side of starting with what is good in our traditions as King, and I'm hearing Matt, also agree on. The liberal tradition under capitalism has indeed turned speech freedom rights etc into gross parodies of themselves. But something in the tradition remains - and I think it is in the very freedom that Marcuse venerates, and the spirit of rebellion in the New Left that he was so closely associated with. Marcuse predicted the tradition and values could never in themselves save this country and he is in my mind correct - our rampant corruption where speech and money are interchangeable and corporations are legal individuals is a dramatic worsening of what Marcuse witnessed but he was absolutely correct in anticipating it was inevitable. It is social movements and personal and collective rebellion that can save us, not the belief that liberal values and rights in and of themselves can. The liberal tradition has proven itself too easily twisted by capital and domination. In Marcuse's time it was the Vietnam war and nuclear threat that made that obvious; today the evidence is dramatically starker.
While we can rightly question double standards on violence and virus spreading when it comes to BLM protests and we can rightly look at how the protestors become political pawns and currency in media narratives- and have made near zero impact on national politics as we elected the architect of racism Biden and the architect of racist prosecuting Harris - Marcuse is correct when he says No, just voting and assembling peacefully and writing op eds in a liberal pluralistic framework is not enough. Breaking the law, uprising, shaking up business as usual and throwing sand in the gears is a big part of what is needed. In Marcuses time the anti-protesters claimed the liberal tradition had established channels that needed to be respected, but thank god activists didn't respect them because we gained more freedom and humanity from their willingness to revolt. Without street revolt and the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement we would have nuked southeast asia ignored poverty and racism at home and be much worse as a nation and world. That was the line Marcuse stood on when critiquing the hypocrisy of a liberal tradition that would keep people off the streets during a genocidal war. In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment. They do it for the wrong reasons and they promote anti-freedom and let the corporate economy off the hook, but the insurrectionary impulse today is a symptom of the established liberal tradition blocking genuine awakening, genuine realize that yes the media lie and yes politicians are corrupt and no business and usual is not the way forward. Of course the fox TV and newsmax and qanon are trash but if we offer a weak liberal tradition instead, just vote democrat and be glad we are making headway in the culture wars, we are just endorsing a status quo that needs overthrow, not functioning.
It's heartening to see one of my favorite journalists take a second more measured look after stumbling with a self acknowledged angry first pass. Matt has always had the courage to break through the tribalism and see the deeper failings, a quality the New Left and Marcuse brought at a time when the entire political spectrum was pro war and pro nuclear weapons and pro going slow on racism and poverty. Matt seems to share a real affinity with this original New Left spirit. Disagreeing on the American tradition and where it fits in is a more legitimate debate than trying to box Marcuse where he doesn't belong. Thanks Matt for stepping up and having the honesty to look more deeply and to recognize that a hot take and anger don't need to be your final word.
"In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment."
Only Lukacs sided with the Soviets. The rest of the Frankfurt School disowned him. They recognized the failures of both Marxism and capitalism but the importance of continuing to think critically to keep totalitarianism from happening again. They would have been happy, like Bernie Sanders, to make America more like Sweden.
Yes, I watched the debate and was impressed by the substance and civility. Meanwhile, my respect for Matt as a journalist went from 10 on a scale of 10 to an 11.
“ He wrote in Repressive Tolerance about the uselessness of submitting information to “the people” in any jumble of “contesting opinions,” because doing so implies that “the people are capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.” “
I think we’re far more at the point of a majority of Americans understanding “the uselessness of submitting information to ‘the Government’ in any jumble of contesting policies, because doing so implies that “the Government is capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
I know that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns, and attempts to inform local government officials about aspects of policy matters they have not considered, and have no interest in ever considering. They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants. So the effort is useless.
«after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns [...] in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants»
Why should they pay any attention to people who want them to make decisions for free, when there are people who are prepared to pay large sums for them?
You have then two options: change the system so that it is no longer pay-per-play (good luck with that!), or find ways to pay for decisions to be made on the basis of "issue research, public information", which is what the labor unions of old did. My usual quote from an interview with Ralph Nader:
“RALPH NADER: Do you want me to go through the history of the decline and decadence of the Democratic Party? I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.
The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money.
Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area? And they did.”
The image I have is of the "New Democrats" in the 90's - they were tired of eating hot dogs with Joe Hardhat at the local diner - they saw the Reps eating pate de foie gras at the Ritz Carlton and decided they wanted some of that ....
Agreed. Obama, from law review editor to state senator to post-presidency, has shown to be much more interested in celebrity and the trappings of power than actually doing hard work that improves people's lives.
A quote posted by another commenter from a 2001 book ("Class Notes" by Adolph Reed), showing that he has been entirely consistent since well before achieving national prominence:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.”
Bringing things full circle, here's some short, required reading, from what was intended to be the intro to Animal Farm (but wasn't usually published in the West). In case anyone has yet to run across it.
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
"They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants."
Yeah, this.
Everybody I know who is politically active and trying to organize at the city/county level is just exhausted. I hate to be a defeatist, but damn, it's ugly. I can't blame anyone for quitting when they lose over and over again.
We very well might have convinced local elected leadership - leaders we ourselves installed, and just enough of them to make a bare majority) - to shut it down.
But yes, it is beyond exhausting, dealing with what some call the "politrixters".
I've spent my entire career fighting agency-industry corruption; it is endemic in ag and wildlife sectors; in the latter, industry tells government what to do.
It’s kinda always been like that with periods with the occasional honest person somehow getting in power and then they are cockblocked, destroyed or they give up.
We won't talk or vote or protest our way out of this for sure.
To petition the government is pathetic at this point.
That's the victim begging the predator for mercy.
On the other hand....when the other side is 0.5 steps from running to the last plane out and only wants to steal as much as they can while they still can.... we can't quite call that 'hopeful' but open runaway thievery might be telling, yes?
Because all social progress is based on the ability to produce more with less labor, the masses are intelligent enough to see that we can not continue to expand in this way indefinitely. Having most of the population unable to purchase would have doomed US earlier but the private business sector no longer needs US to purchase they have the whole rest of the world because they were systematically given them the US technology to produce what we used to produce here for less there.
You are correct. The government is planning to do what is diametrically opposed to a free society, simply pay everyone to stay at home until they have no capitol or worth and then hire us back at the new going 2nd world rate and the whole world will be second world rate... ultimate equality.
You will no longer decide where you work or what you want to do and will have no capitol to start your OWN business because the government will OWN all business.
"We have to update the global rules of the road, and we have to do it in a way that maximizes benefits for everyone, because it’s overwhelmingly in our interest that China prosper, that Mongolia prosper. We have to " level the playing field.”
“You mean, Mr. Biden, you are more concerned about making sure China and Mongolia prosper than American workers?"
" The present pandemic is a “golden opportunity” for radical change. And if Al Gore, Prince Charles, the elites, and the rest of the World Economic Forum can convince enough people that attempting to stop climate change is also worth dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control, then radical – and catastrophic – change is exactly what we’re going to get."
“ The core idea of Repressive Tolerance is that one can build freedom by way of unfreedom, and this strikes me as an idea that’s not just very unlikely to be correct, but deeply un-American. It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Great writing Matt. Elequently said. God Bless American assholeism!
Marcuse is probably right about the inability of the common man to make decisions about what is right and wrong, if his views are being properly summarized. The main issue with his thesis is: who decides what is valid opinion and what gets censored? I personally don't trust anyone to make that choice, and would rather tolerate the stupid and the demagogues that prey on them.
I'm not sure any human is fit to many decisions on what's right and wrong, especially in absolute terms. But I do believe that most people are capable of discerning what's in their best interest, and their voices deserve to be heard.
I'm guessing that a lot of common men/women were and still are getting the power and water restored in Texas as we thinkers ruminate about whether Marcuse's philosophy that they are just too stupid and unread to be included in a conversation about how best to be ruled is correct.. or shall we allow these ignorant rubes a say and go against this idea? Ahh..let us scratch our chins in the warm glow of our laptops and contemplate this... Hey WTF my power just went out!...Ma!, the power
And there have been a couple of minor cooling phases since the big melt. If the eventual consequences were not so dire, the way the media and the masses flock to fabricated threats would be rather funny. Instead, as their attention is focused on the official threat, via government edict, the real threats slip past the masses; until one day they ask, "Gee, when did this happen?".
Texas relies on wind-generated power more than any other state in the U.S., and that was a major source of grid instability. In other words, they went too far appeasing the climate change believers, and that's what caused this mess.
That’s what Abbott and his fellow politicians are saying, but there is reporting that the electric council decided not to spend money on winterizing any of its power generators, wind, gas, or coal. The gas generators froze first. The wind generators do come with winterizing packages, but Texas didn’t buy them.
Wow, never would've guessed Texas was far and away the most progressive state in our country in actually implementing wind power instead of just talking about it endlessly
Lol.. my post wasn’t really about Tx specifically (circumstances there just fit at the moment)but anywhere that needs “common” people to do things that many others that fancy themselves to be intellectually superior can’t or won’t do. Telling people like that they don’t have the same rights to free speech or a contrary political opinion because they’re too dumb and well, you’re just better at making those decisions for them.. well, as T Sowell said “It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you don’t stop and think”
Listen, I know it's arrogant to tell them they can't speak freely or do what they want politically, but I think my initial post covered that. I'm not going to pretend they aren't stupid to make someone feel better, though. They're fucking dumb. Dumb in the city - the arrogance of those is a sight to behold, so convinced they have the right answers - and dumb in the country.
I also think religion is stupid but I don't spend a lot of time telling people that. People get to have their own illusions. It is a similar situation - the organized nature of it has certain benefits for society, but the whole fairytale metaphysics aspect of it is bunk.
I think that is Matt's point, in our system, the only way to arrive at a decision is to allow people a voice and to trust that enough ideas get through the filters in place. Because capital requires us to spend money to make profits, they have to at least pretend to listen --- it is in these spaces where change is born.
I'm ok with disagreeing with you on the first point. I put a qualifier in there "probably". I'm not feeling good about my fellow man today, but another day, i'll wax poetic on the common American.
Back in the 90s I ran a small book typography business in New York. If you've ever run a business, you know there's three problems: 1) Getting the work, 2) Doing the work, 3) Getting paid for the work. If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be.
I had a range of clients. Some paid like clocks. Some fought a bit. Some seemed to think paying was for little people.
The worst were the "liberals". I remember one (who I won't mention) who ran a small press built on family money and published the kind of books humanists/leftist/progressives would love. I'd work my rear off on a project and send an invoice. Nothing would happen. I'd call. Talk to the office manager. Nothing. Six months would go by. Nothing. Then somehow a check would materialize. I needed the business and the money. So I endured the cycle as best I could.
The office manager was another liberal humanist from an Eastern women's college. The cafe/literary type who reads books for a living. When she left the job after a year or so they owed her half a year of back pay. She took them to small claims court. hahah.
The business book publishers paid like clocks. There you go.
I knew a old-school Brooklyn guy who ran a small print shop downtown. He understood my payment problems. He offered to put me in touch with someone who could visit an office and rough somebody up. No kidding! He was serious.
That's life in the streets. Everybody wants justice. Everybody wants fairness. Everybody wants empathy. Everybody wants love.
But too few give it. You get a lecture instead. And when it's time to get paid, you don't even get that. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. When you've mastered that, tell us how you did it. That would be worth listening to.
"If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be."
I learned this as a damn' runt paperboy and I wasn't even running the business. Broadly, there were two categories of customers; the "clocks," as you call them, and those who pretended they weren't home when you were trying to cash the bill.
How rare- speech countered with civil, even affable, speech. The Marcuse piece rankled because it exposed, somewhat muscularly, the hypocrisy of would-be redeemers waging war against inalienable rights and certain, large groups of people. No worries: ever so democratically, they will choose panels of unelected intersectionals to manage us.
This is about power. Otherwise, especially given the state of the globe, see concentration camps, China, no one can be dumb enough to take a hatchet to successful Western civilization and associated freedoms. If anyone is, it’s a breakdown in basic comprehension, the effluent of an untested, nasty ideology that allows undisguised gender and racial animus to masquerade as intellectualism. DiAngelo or Kendi vs. Locke, Voltaire, Einstein, King, even Chomsky. The dumbness is compounded by its circularity: anyone who objects to the racket is, of course, dumb.
How else to explain allowing a newspaper magazine project written by non-historian intersectional activists and deemed a “falsification” of American history by major, and liberal, U.S. historians, to override hundreds of years of actual scholarship. No worries here, either. In a mind-bending gesture of conceit, the Times magazine editor, also not an historian, decided that he would judge its merits. There is plenty of information –Tulsa, for example – that we Americans need to learn and recognize, and welcome. That’s not what this is about.
Indeed. Have not the greatest atrocities of mankind been done “for the greater good”?
Every would be authoritarian or totalitarian thinks they are on the right side of history (see, Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao). When you have total and absolute conviction that you and you alone have the angels on your side that’s when atrocities ensue. “Sometimes we have to break some eggs to make an omelette”.
Fantastic debate Matt with RJ Eskow. Enjoyed your main points and the McEnroe reference too-
Recap:
1) Marcuse's position was that democracy is to be managed by a smart few and it is they who get to mow the fairways of discussion and manicure the greens of policy; and that it is necessary to take away the right of some to have a voice and self determination in their own lives for their own good.
2) He exaggerates Democratic Totalitarianism; and the notion that Freedom is non-existent - love how you combat via Master & Margarita and with the truth is often murky and unclear and not something that should wait for a small group of academics to agree upon.
**** If anyone has spent more than 10 minutes in departmental/faculty staff meeting with 25 Phd's who think they know something and want to show off for all to see, you'd know that this solution by Marcuse is doomed from the start. Might explain some of the alcoholism in academe too.
3) Marcuse's insincere solutions and analysis ("working people and their material needs being met") -- as he banked resources like a hyper-capitalist was a good point and thank fuck you brought up that Marcuse had one foot in the left when it is convenient to sell books and make money, and the other foot in authoritarianism. His "new left" is devoid of many of the best arguments of Marx and Engels.
While having little evidence and not trusting Wikipedia at all (Aaron Mate, 2021 Useful Idiots podcast) it read that he spent some post-war time with OWI (OSS) when he first emigrated to the United States.
One speculates the "New Left" , could very well be a faux construction of the Left excluding Marxism (as a condition of his emigration) and the beginning kernel of the 3rd way Pete Peterson corporate democrats (who like Marcuse started off with very few assets and by the end had amassed millions), often by selling their people out in the end.
Finally, I really enjoyed how Taibbi expresses that a small turbo-group of elite academics advocating for oppressed people on the surface, while imposing their version of progress from above has some parallels in our current cancel culture.
Matt, if it does not take the life force out of you, keep doing this kind of work. It's brilliant. Love the play by play academic discussions especially how they are being twisted and used now.
Would be interested on your take on Marx - but that is a long term project I suspect.
Cheers!
Your assessment of academia, and the required substance abuse for anyone who finds themselves reluctantly involved in it, is frighteningly familiar.
Not sure if you've ever run across this before, but it appears the CIA (might have been?) actively encouraging post-modernism back in the 1960's specifically to weaken "down to earth" regular Marxism.
See: https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/the-cia-assesses-the-power-of-french-post-modern-philosophers-read-a-newly-declassified-cia-report-from-1985.html
and...
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
I also would encourage Matt to keep his opinions about Marx to himself. LOL
No good tends to come out of either dissing or praising The Bearded One. Heh.
"No good tends to come out of either dissing or praising The Bearded One."
I think you got that shit right.
Not me.. I want Matt to review Das Kapital, all three volumes!
We could feed him selected passages he could have fun with. Like this (one of my favorites, where he's just ~roasting~ the financial press of his era.)
"If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature — abstinence of the capitalist. [30] The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he “lends (!) the instruments of production to the labourer,” that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus-value out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly puts it, instead of dissipating “their value” in luxuries and other articles of consumption. [31] How the capitalists as a class are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist."
(from vol 1: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm )
Jesus. It's like a thumbtack slurpee. I trust it's a bit more graceful in German?
I'll check it out. Thanks.
I am an American Jew whose families emigrated to the US from Germany and Holland in the 1840's.I aIso spent a career(42 YEARS+) teaching at a SUNY graduate center and emerged with a deep LOATHING for academia and most of my colleagues.I loved Matt's attack on that swine. Suffice to say,If it hadn't been for the power of US capitalism ,Marcuse and his buddies would have ended up in soap dishes- SOME GRATITUDE.My family fought in the civil War as well as world wars one and two not to make the world safe for the Frankfurt School.I have no sense of humor about Marcuse.
Looks like you teach some very interesting classes. Wish I lived near Buffalo, so I could sit in on one of them! Such a diverse group, I see if the syllabi are online so I can do some reading. Thanks for posting!
I agree with RJ regarding the definition of the left. The anti-imperialist left refers to the Democratic Party hangers on at sh*tlibs for a reason. They refer to themselves as the left while embracing the national security state and its anti-democratic leanings.
Regarding totalitarianism, a good follow up to Marcuse might be Sheldon Wolin’s “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Chris Hedges whom you have interviewed with a number of times refers to him often. I think it speaks to what Marcuse attempted clumsily to address. As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist. It’s when someone like Julian Assange comes along and obliterates their cover of liberal democracy and human rights that the true nature of the beast is revealed without any pretense of the rule of law.
Was thinking the same thing - Wolin v Marcuse would be wonderous.
«As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist.»
That's the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian: authoritarian regimes allow for dissent as long as it does not matter, totalitarian ones want to prevent all dissent however minor and insignificant.
However as your write even merely authoritarian regimes push hard to prevent dissent that is not minor and insignificant, e.g. the vicious campaigns against keynesian economists in the 1940 and 1950s, or those against the trumpians today.
Interesting, juxtaposing keynesians and trumpians ...
In the UK a mild Bernie Sanders style politician, Jeremy Corbyn, was subjected to monstrous abuse by the press and many in his own party, using different arguments but otherwise pretty similar to the viciousness against Donald Trump (who deserved it more, but still).
The issue here seems to me Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative", which was less of a claim and more of a goal; relatedly the notion that "whig"/neoliberal ideology is the "end of history", the best possible system, and therefore any dissent that is not about the details is illegitimate.
The problem for neoliberals/neocons is that warmongering globalist neoliberalism is not popular among voters, who prefer social-democracy, nationalism or internationalism, and resent their tax money and lives being spent far away to support "out bastards" or take out "their bastards". Because of that unpopularity people as different as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, JM Keynes, Jeremy Corbyn etc. must be suppressed. The range of "safe" politicians allowed goes from Bush to Obama, from Blair to Cameron. Even someone as loyal to finance as Boris Johnson in the UK is regarded with suspicion, but then there is a much more significant fraction of the UK ruling class that is still "tory" than in the USA.
But the crushing of 3rd Party Alternatives is specific - the Ds crush any to the left - to ensure progs, lefties, etc. "have no alternative" - they want to own lefty voters without enacting any lefty (non-corp) policies or programs - and, unfortunately, too many on the left buy this horse crap - we have parties on the left on the ballot but we don't vote for 'em - too scared to "spoil it" for the Ds - would be downright laughable if it weren't so effective ....
"Because of that unpopularity people as different as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, JM Keynes, Jeremy Corbyn etc. must be suppressed."
Excellent comment. I have nothing of value to add but... a link to Adam Curtis! https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.htm
That "Curse of TINA" is excellent indeed, and I had seen it mentioned in a blog entry by George Monbiot, a somewhat erratic UK columnist:
https://www.monbiot.com/2018/07/21/invisible-hands/
I have been aware of the propaganda think-tanks funded by big wealth, and of IEA specifically, for a long time. As to this two additional note:
* Ken Lay of Enron "fame" endowed (funded) 35 (thirty five) professorships (in accounting, international economics, etc.) at various universities. People like him are why universities are very careful to get rid of anyone who might upset such generous donors.
* I think that it was the IEA that published in the 1970s that published the critical study that showed that *at the same level of income/wealth/status* people who owned cars, share based pension accounts, and real estate voted more for the right than people who used public transport, had defined benefit pensions, and rented houses. Thus decades of thatcherite and reaganista policies to eliminate the latter.
You are such a wonderful writer, Matt. Your sincere voice, your heart, and your intellect come out every time you touch the keyboard. I appreciate your self-reflection and your continuing this fruitful intellectual debate.
Thanks to you, I just finished reading “Repressive Tolerance,” and I must say, you're right about the seemingly insane turn it takes around the middle towards what sounds like Mao’s cultural revolution made for America, and yes, I think there’s a direct link from Marcuse’s “discriminating tolerance” to Kendi’s “anti-racist discrimination” and much of the hysterical intolerance of the Social Justice left today. BUT, this essay is a rich masterpiece of Hegelian thought, and like all Hegelian essays, that extreme moment in the essay is just that, a moment in the movement of the dialectic, the radical anti-thesis to the thesis of tolerance. You failed to note the Aufhebung in the final paragraph, where he states: “HOWEVER, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is NOT a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy.”
Marcuse’s entire career was dedicated to preventing the rise of another repressive dictatorship out of existing democracy. Yes, he believed it was an “objective truth” (I don't like that language either) that the Nazi’s and the Right stood for repression, cruelty and autocracy and that the Left stood against repression, cruelty and autocracy, but the pragmatic question is whether any of his ideas can be used to effectively ward off the rise of another repressive dictatorship in the U.S.
Looking back on Germany, he writes: “The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”
The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy, but he still controls the Republican party and is continuing to inspire an unprecedented hatred of “liberals" (they have no problem with black and brown people who hate liberals too). I believe we are already in a slow-motion civil war and that simple “free speech” won’t save us in this new media environment. I think we can discard Marcuse’s radical antithesis (just as he did at the end of his essay), but I’m wondering what others think should be done about what he would call the “clear and present danger” that is Trumpism. What does it mean to be “tolerant” of Trump’s aggressive, anti-democratic Big Lie? When does tolerating his intolerance, his hate speech and lies against "liberals," become a form of repression? Are his followers really just proud American individualists thinking for themselves, or are they being manipulated by lies that no American should tolerate?
"The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy"
JFC, Bradley. I guess I'm an unreasonable person. I didn't see any coup against our democracy happen. I saw a lot of time and money burned at two inconclusive impeachment trials when the country has much bigger, more serious problems that the legislature could be trying to address, but no.
A bigger and funnier question for me is that a lot of people who were like "Russia rigged the 2016 election" are now like "The 2020 election is indisputable, perfectly legitimate, and how dare anyone suggest otherwise!" I guess election technology advanced a lot in 4 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lost in the whole controversy about the 2020 election results is the rigged 2016 DNC primary that was the basis of the spurious Russiagate allegations which ultimately were intended to deflect attention from the Clinton campaign's deceitful maneuvers to anoint her as the Democratic nominee.Everyone(including Trump & Bernie Sanders) should have demanded a standardized procedure in national elections(including primaries) after that, including the right of each party to inspect any machines used in the process. Without such reform we'll never know who is the actual winner in any electoral contest.
I agree the the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged against Bernie, but I don't buy the conspiracy theory that the Democrats somehow changed all those votes for Biden while neglecting to change any votes, on the same ballots, to give themselves the senate. It defies logic, and there's been no credible evidence that's withstood investigation. None. But just like Hitler's Big Lie that the Jews stabbed the German's in the back in WWI, no evidence is needed for the myth to gestate and spread over the years and then be put to use in a right-wing coup or civil war when the time is right.
And here's the Nazi comparison ... was anyone running a pool on how long it would take him to drag Hitler into this?
I think this fashionable move of mocking anyone who draws analogies to Hitler's rise is silly. I compared what Marcuse wrote to Mao's cultural revolution, which I think is eerily similar to the woke tribunals I've seen on college campuses, and no one bats an eye.
There have been other instances of the Big Lie used to pave the way to autocratic coups, but Hitler's was the ur text, and if we don't learn from how he deceived the Germans into distrusting evidence and hating the Jews, what good is history? Trump's Big Lie is deceiving his millions of followers into distrusting the known facts about the election and hating "liberals" and "RINOs" and everyone not loyal to him.
Of course there are differences between Trump and Hitler, and every other strong-man dictator, but the similarities are what we need to note. I think he's an extremely dangerous demagogue. You haven't given me any reason to think otherwise.
Godwin's law has been an accepted part of internet etiquette for 30+ years. It has become so mainstream that the term was added to the oxford english dictionary a decade ago, and is hardly some trendy fashion. It's a self defense mechanism for discussion groups meant to mute pearl clutching doomsday prognosticators with so little substance to their argument that they can only appeal to an absurd slippery slope fallacy.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810105009431
I think the "similarities" are mostly superficial. At worst, Trump was a cartoon version of a 20th century strongman tilting at windmills amidst a 21st century inverted totalitarianism, to which he posed no real threat. He was what we should have always known him to be: a reality TV personality and a real-estate hustler who was able to exploit just enough anti-establishment sentiment to get elected. Failing to ride the wave to re-election, his reactionary "army" of the disenchanted cosplay misfits would have been repelled, if not squashed, easily with even the most rudimentary police reaction. Theater. Does he have political sway with lots of people, particularly on the right? Sure. Is he capable of being American Hitler? Not remotely.
It would depend on whether you were going short or going long on the pool. I contend that going short is the play for a skilled gambler nowadays; the risk is high but the reward is commensurately high.
The truth is I'm thoroughly turned off by the dispute between two corrupt incompetents. I didn't even vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary this time around because I was disgusted by his not challenging the results in 2016. There is no question of "the good being the enemy of the perfect". There is NO good in this f*ucked up system. Nevertheless, since I somehow still believe in making a commitment I voted green because at least Jill Stein challenged the 2016 vote. However, I no longer remember the name of the guy on the ballot that replaced her. Did I throw away my vote? Sure, but it should be remembered that Lincoln was a minority party president and I prefer to cling to a remote hope rather than to surrender myself to total cynicism.
"I didn't even vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary this time around because I was disgusted by his not challenging the results in 2016."
I voted for Sanders in the 2020 primary with much less enthusiasm than I did in the 2016 primary; he had already proven himself as someone who would get steamrolled and take it. Your non-vote counted for exactly as much as my vote.
I hope you enjoyed the evening with a movie, popcorn, and a beer instead.
True, but I think you missed the point.
Even Mitch McConnell admitted that there can be no doubt that "Trump was morally and practically responsible" for the attack on the Capital in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power. If you are one of those who believes, without any credible evidence, after all the recounts and investigations and court cases, that the election was stolen, then we can't talk, because I don't think you're using sound evidence-based reasoning and I'm certain nothing could change your mind.
When someone disagrees, they are either misinformed, stupid, or under some unholy influence. This is the default policy of our ego
Well, I disagree....if you haven't got any evidence-based reasoning to back up your disagreement, then there's no "reason" for the rest of us to honor it. This is exactly the kind of anti-reason, feelings-based culture that "wokeness" is all about. Tell someone that just because they feel something to be true doesn't make it true and you've "invalidated" their existence somehow. If we can't agree on basic facts and reasonable inferences from those facts, then we've no basis for democracy any more. This is Trump's legacy.
All I’m saying is, when you tell someone that you’re not going to listen to them because they’re a retard. You are shaking hands with the least rational biological construct in existence, the ego.
There are millions of them who believe the Big Lie and Qanon. How are we to go about "listening to them" in a way that will disabuse them of these lies? I'm at a loss.
Buddha has logged on.
"If we can't agree on basic facts and reasonable inferences from those facts, then we've no basis for democracy any more. This is Trump's legacy."
Pretty sure bullshittery and Barnumism well predates Donald J. Trump in the U.S. of A. We have a long and revered tradition of electing carnival barkers to national office.
He may not have been the first liar in American history, but he was the most relentless, prolific, and influential. He convinced millions that their votes were stolen from them, without any evidence, and sent them to the Capital to "fight like hell" and "stop the steel" so he could remain in power. His corruption and lies (or "alternative facts" as Kellyann Conway called them) are well documented, so I'm sorry, Grisha, I'm intolerant of corruption and lies, especially from a president.
I remember Crossfire. It used to actually be even worse.
«believes, without any credible evidence, after all the recounts and investigations and court cases, that the election was stolen»
The obvious hint is that the surges in voting of 18% for the Republican candidate and 22% for the Democratic one are both unprecedented (and ridiculous in an epidemic year), that some surges in Democratic districts were much higher, and the obvious impression is that there was quite a bit of cheating in both Republican and Democratic areas, and the Democratic ones were better at it. If the 2016 election was stolen by Putin, and that was a story that was investigated by Mueller's huge team in excruciating detail and enormous expense, and was run for years, the allegation that the 2020 was stolen is so much more credible than that. When the trumpians look at the Mueller investigation and the 2,000-3,000 stories by the NYT on the 2016 election "steal" and compare with the "nothing to see here, move on, this was the fairest election of them all" for 2020, they get very angry, and I can't fault them for that.
As to the recounts they are pointless if there was ballot stuffing or ballot suppression, there were virtually no investigation on the scale of Mueller's, and mentioning the court cases seems to me pure bad faith because they were thrown out not on the merit, but on a technicality (that those making them did not have standing).
No, all that has been thoroughly investigated and debunked, just like the claims that climate change is a conspiracy. We investigated Russia's influence, and though Trump told them to interfere and they did and he applauded them for it, we have to accept the results of the investigation, just as Trump's people need to accept the results of the investigations of the 2020 election. But they won't, he's convinced them that 2+2=5 and that in fact it's the Democrats who are Orwellian and insane. There's no reasoning with them at this point, nothing that will change their minds. We've never seen mass delusion on this scale in our country. This is dangerous.
I do not believe the election was stolen; Trump turned enough voters off that he lost the election to Biden.
But to claim as you do that it was "thoroughly investigated and debunked" is as big a lie as any of Trump's claims. The claim that widespread fraud impacted the election was immediately dismissed out of hand by the Democrats and their media wing. Trump was unable to bring any legally admissible evidence to court, and so his cases were largely dismissed. But the idea that that election fraud was ever investigated is ridiculous. We're still only 4 months away from the election - any kind of credible investigation would still be going. We spent three years investigating the Russia-gate hoax fabrications - but somehow you think we "debunked" election fraud cases in three months? Okay ...
And then we have your own significant misstatements of fact. To take Trump's joke on a campaign stop that he hoped Russia had Hillary's emails as "urging" them to do so (and that they did) is asinine, at best. (For the record, there was zero evidence of the Russian hacking claim - and, in fact, there is still zero evidence legally admissible that Russia hacked the DNC servers or Hillary's private, illegal email server. That whole thing came out of a throwaway line from a Clinton staffer trying to deflect attention from the contents of those emails - i.e., that the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign to tilt the primary in her favor with the cooperation of CNN. Wikileaks' Julian Assange has consistently said it was not Russia that provided the DNC file leaks, but a disgusted DNC staff member. Assange has never been found to have lied about a source of a leak before. He could be lying - but, again, your contention that this is some kind of undisputed fact is laughable. Anyway, Trump was clearly making a joke about Clinton's claim that the Russians had hacked her emails.)
Your statement of fact that Trump lied more than any other president in history is highly questionable. It is possible that you are right - but we'd have to actually go through every press release of ever administration, every campaign stop, every letter, etc. You just blithely assert, though, that this is an unquestionable fact based on .... I don't know?
It is something that is eminently quantifiable, but until someone does the research, it's just a guess. Not a fact.
In short (well, not that short, to be honest), you're a mirror image of those you spend so much time here asserting your personal superiority to.
Reading your posts leaves me feeling like I've been in one of Dr. Hartley's group therapy sessions ...
I don't know what your point is with all this whataboutism, and I'm not getting side tracked here. If you don't think Democrats had good reasons to be pissed off about Kavanaugh and suspicious about the Trump team's relations with Russia, you're free not to tolerate those who want to cling to these issues, but no good reasons to believe that Biden stole the election have been presented. The states have conducted their own recounts and investigations, headed largely by Republicans who themselves voted for Trump, and they lost in 61 court cases, with many Trump appointed judges, because they didn't bring any credible claims. You can't just demand more "credible" investigations without giving good reasons why more are necessary or why the ones conducted already weren't credible, and "because Trump convinced all these people" is not a good enough reason.
The judges for the most part didn't rule on evidence. They wanted it out of their courts, for the reasons cited below. Not that I blame them. A judge overturning an election is in a very bad place most of the time. Reminds me of why so many judges are armed.
Let's talk reality. How do you prove voter fraud? I mean, in the case of a dead person voting, that's easy. But what about duplicate ballots? Multiple registrations? Poll worker collusion? Just as a few example scenarios. These things would require confessionals by those performing the fraud, since we don't have things like Voter ID in most places in the country where fraud is alleged, no cameras watching the poll workers and the voters, etc. You're not going to get the kind of evidence you'd want without a pre-arranged sting operation - and the evidence of it happening is ephemeral. Election Day comes and goes, and whatever time required for counting remaining ballots, and it's over.
You're left with statistics and general bad feeling on the part of those who are pretty certain it happened but aren't able to prove it because of the issues noted above. Anyway, you can call it a Qanon conspiracy all you want, but if half the voting public thinks the fix is in, you have a big problem that won't be solved by calling us all conspiracy theorists. When the ballot box is considered corrupt, you move on to the next box.
Nothing at all would convince that half of the public whom Trump convinced to believe his conspiracy theory, nothing. You will always be able to come up with a reason why the recounts etc weren't valid, like why climate change isn't real. That's how conspiracy theories work for those who buy them. Way easier to fool them than to convince them they've been fooled. Even without any of the recounts and investigations, the conspiracy simply defies logic: why would the Democrats change all those votes for Biden but neglect to change any, on the same ballots, so that they'd win the senate too?
We are in big trouble. Millions of people have bought a lie and there will be no way to convince them otherwise, and since they believe their votes were stolen from them, they will be mad as hell and ready to fight their brainwashed liberal neighbors the minute Trump says it's time. We've seen ample evidence that this is what's going down, all those militias training throughout rural America, the practice runs in Michigan, the level of organization behind 1/6. This is what Marcuse was trying to warn us could happen.
«"Trump was morally and practically responsible" for the attack on the Capital in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power.»
Was he also responsible for inciting this violent attack on and occupation of the Capitol to stop a constitutional vote and intimidate senators in changing their vote in 2018?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/04/politics/kavanaugh-protests-us-capitol/
https://www.workers.org/2018/10/39345/
«At the vote confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6, woman after woman screamed out in protest from the Senate gallery and was carried away by guards. [...] People were pounding in outrage on the closed entrance to the Senate floor. [...] U.S. Capitol Police said a total of 164 people were arrested that day for “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding.” [...] The depth of opposition to Kavanaugh was revealed when on Oct. 4 over a thousand people from throughout the country, mostly women, demonstrated on Capitol Hill. [...] At the Senate Hart Office Building, crowds saying “NO” to sexual assault and to the reactionary agenda that Kavanaugh represents flooded the atrium and every floor. Over 300 chanting, militant protesters were arrested that day. [...] There were too many acts of indignation and outrage at Kavanaugh’s nomination to list them all. [...] Outrage against Kavanaugh broke out initially on July 9 at the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill [...] During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings the first week in September, over 227 demonstrators were arrested.»
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142161696
«Protesters opposed to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court targeted the offices of swing vote Republican senators Thursday to pressure them to vote against President Donald Trump's nominee [...] About two dozen people were arrested outside the office of Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, according to a police officer on the scene. Defiantly blocking the hallway in front of Corker's office, [...] The senator was not there, his staff said. The protesters then moved down the hall to the office of Sen. Susan Collins»
So you think those who protested Kavanaugh's appointment, after the GOP broke our constitutional norms and blocked Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, had no valid reasons, whereas those who stormed the Capital to stop the transfer of power did? At any rate, the Kavanaugh protestors were arrested for their civil disobedience. This has nothing to do with Trump's Big Lie that incited the coup attempt on 1/6/21.
«those who protested Kavanaugh's appointment [...] valid reasons [...] arrested for their civil disobedience.»
And here everybody can see the real story: if an assault on and occupation of the Capitol is done by people on our side it is a "civil disobedience" by some freedom fighters, if is done by people on their side is a "coup attempt" by terrorists. Great news from America! :-)
You think what Trump's mob did on January 6th was civil disobedience, and that those women who protested in the Kavanaugh hearing without hurting anyone, knowing they'd be arrested, staged an "assault on and occupation of the Capital"? This whataboutism is ridiculous. Trump's claim that the election was stolen is a lie that he began telling months before the election even happened, with absolutely no evidence or reasoning to back it up. It's been completely debunked, and we shouldn't tolerate his continuing to drum it into the minds of millions of Americans who, for some reason, actually trust him.
Not one Kavanaugh protestor was charged with interfering with the duties of Congress - which is exactly what they were doing; no different from the Jan. 6 takeover of the Capitol. During the Kavanaugh storming, offices were occupied, Senators were evacuated, etc.
And nobody at the Kavanaugh hearing was protesting Garland (who should have had a hearing) - they were protesting allegations of sexual abuse (many of which were later withdrawn or proven false; the main one, even, was seriously undercut when supporting witnesses either refuted the accuser's testimony or had no recollection of what they were alleged to have witnessed).
The double-standard in charges being brought in the two incidents will provide rich material for defense attorneys.
But what about that enigmatic fire extinguisher. This was the big difference
Do you cite Mitch often?
Mitch McConnell doesn't speak for everyone and definitely not for me. You are one of those who believes that there is no "credible evidence" about election malfeasance simply because the media have been claiming so since November 4, long before any evidence had been brought to light. Recounts simply recounted the same ballots, and the considerable evidence from witnesses to malfeasance has never been heard, since the courts rejected the lawsuits on technical grounds.
I do not know whether the election was rigged, but neither do you. Since every election in this century that resulted in a Republican President has been challenged by Democrats, it defies belief that Democrats now "know" that the 2020 election was pure as the driven snow, particularly since so many states unilaterally changed their election rules in a way that reduces rather than enhances the custody of every vote.
And there is something that can possibly change my mind - a proper forensic audit of the election in those states where counting was stopped late on the 3rd when Trump was leading in 5 of 6 remaining states, and by morning Biden had pulled ahead in all of them. Was it due to mail-in votes being counted? There is one really good way to find out.
No, it's not just "the media" that tells me there's no credible evidence that the election was "stolen"--the election officials (most of them Republican) in every state where the vote was challenged have looked into and debunked every plausible claim so far. It's not up to those of us who don't believe in unicorns to provide evidence that unicorns don't exist, it's the believers who have to come up with credible evidence. If "considerable evidence from witnesses to malfeasance" exists, as you say, what is it? Or did you just hear that it exists from the Trumpist media?
Biden pulled ahead in the final hours of counting, exactly as predicted, because more Democrats voted by mail, and Trump lost just as all the polls predicted (except that he did better than expected, again). If Democrats were somehow able to steal the election for Biden, why didn't they steal if for the Democratic candidates for the senate who were on those same ballots? It defies logic, and we still haven't seen any evidence! I would love to believe in unicorns, but you have to give me a legitimate reason to, otherwise it's not my fault for going with the assumption they don't exist.
Propaganda predates Hitler's rise by quite a long way. One of the pioneers was Edward Bernays who was an Austrian-American who did a lot of his most influential work in the 1920s in New York. "Trump's version of Hitler's Big Lie" is just the latest iteration of good old American propaganda.
So propaganda predates Hitler, his Big Lie is the most famous and it's instructional. If you think noting the similarities between Hitler's Big Lie and Trump's is just "good old American propaganda," I guess that means you don't think Trump is perpetrating a dangerous mass fraud to further his hold on power.
I'm through trying to convince people on this thread. As Jonathan Haidt shows in The Righteous Mind, the human brain is a an elephant of emotional and intuitive bias being ridden by a tiny little jockey of reason adept at justifying whichever way the elephant's bias makes him want to turn. None of us are immune, but I sure hope people with my bias against Trump's Big Lie defeat people with your bias that says that's all just propaganda.
Nope, he isn't.
I too must be an "unreasonable person." Maybe Marcuse had Bradley in mind when describing the "rational person" -- the decider.
Trump's assertion that the election was "stolen" is a poor choice of words on his part. What happened is that Democratic operations managers were able to cleverly manipulate the voting rules and procedures in a manner that completely altered the complexion of how our elections have traditional been conducted.
In the state of Georgia, Democratic organizations such as Fair Fight Action were able to get regulation changes at the local level such that the outcome would be skewed in the Left's favor. The unprecedented use and manipulation of absentee balloting was the key to the new construct.
The most notorious concoction of this was the newly-minted "Souls to the Polls" campaign where absentee ballots were filled in by entire church congregations who were then bused in mass to Sunday absentee ballot boxes.
Some might say this is a way to empower those who might otherwise not participate in the system. Others will say that this is a nefarious manipulation of our democratic traditions designed to Cancel the outcome of the will of the people had our election norms been preserved.
Many of these changes in election procedures should have been subjected by legislative over-site, but were not. Thus, legislatures in a number of states have introduced bills to curtail the abuse, including Sunday ballot stuffing.
The factors you mention are not necessarily a bad thing as long as the process is monitored in accordance with Legislative intent AND the results are auditable and certifiable. Unfortunately, the Executive Branch officials that ran these elections have refused to allow audits and have certified outcomes despite hundreds of testimonials and eyewitness accounts of process irregularities. None have been adequately investigated. Consequently there is a cloud over the elections in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
I have to laugh, because after the November election, when tRumpian attempts to prove the results were flawed were thrown or laughed out of courts by the scores, Georgia held ANOTHER election for two US senators on January 5.
"I refuse to believe Democrats won unless they jump through all of our theoretical and arbitrary hoops" is just the 2020 way of saying what was said in 2000: "Sore-Loserman."
The Jan 5 election had watchers and observers everywhere. And the Democrats won again. "Adequate investigation" my a$$.
Well, I live in Wisconsin, and my google search shows countless stories debunking the claims of voting irregularities in Wisconsin. If Trump's own government agencies looked into the claims of fraud and said this was "the most secure election in our nation's history," then people who want more investigations have to present evidence that more investigations are warranted. Otherwise, we've got a new precedent that every election can be denounced as stolen by the losing side who can then tie the nation up in endless investigations, thus stalling the transfer of power forever and/or making everyone on their side believe that the government is illegitimate.
"my google search shows countless stories debunking the claims of voting irregularities in Wisconsin."
*** "google search" ***
About that...
You're right, I'm fully aware of how the new media algorithms try to keep us all in our own custom-designed bubbles, so if you've got links to credible stories about wide-spread (or any) voter fraud in Wisconsin, please share.
Your mind seems made up already.
Georgia is my home state. The biggest factor in November and the January run-off elections was a much higher proportion of younger voters -- 18 to 30 -- by far, than any of the surrounding states.
In 2016, I was surprised that Cobb County, which was once Newt Gingrich territory, narrowly went for Hillary Clinton. Many of the Baptist ministers in these parts made it plain they could not support tRump -- foreshadowing a major disagreement among the white evangelical ranks.
For November 2020, due to the pandemic, we had about eight early voting locations, and several weeks to show up and cast one's ballot. Waits were anywhere from 30 to over 90 minutes on average. Only one of the locations was served by Cobb's public bus system, and that site always had the longest waiting times.
While waiting in line at my location -- with it extending alongside the sidewalk -- someone drove up and asked (shouted): "How long y'all been waiting?"
Someone in line yelled back "Four years!" -- And folks around erupted in laughter and applause.
Haha, what a spectacular demonstration of Newspeak! The Democrats fought back against GOP vote suppression strategies to insure that everyone who wanted to legally vote could vote despite the pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reviewed Trump's claims and called the election "the most secure in U.S. history," and yet your revision calls it a "nefarious manipulation of our democratic traditions."
Nice try. It's truly amazing how the people who spent four years denouncing Democrats whom they insisted (wrongly) never accepted the election of Trump are now engaged in an unprecedented attempt to deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden's election. Just like in 1984, "the Party" requires intellectuals like yourself to massage the Big Lie into a narrative that the masses can swallow without gagging.
And btw, the claims of "ballot stuffing" have been widely debunked, as have all of Trump's other claims. No evidence of widespread fraud capable of changing the election's outcome has been produced, but it's just like with people who believe in unicorns: they insist that just because they have no evidence of their existence doesn't mean they don't exist. But it's not on the rest of us to prove the non-existence of unicorns any more than it's on us to prove the non-existence of widespread voter fraud (or "nefarious manipulation," as your Newspeak would have it). If Trump had any case at all, he would have proved it by now, but all he has is the myth of the Big Lie, and he's banking on keeping it alive in the minds of his supporters.
Well, your pompous run-on response speaks of BS notions of Newspeak, Big Lies, and Unicorns, none germane to the issue . Stay tuned. Expect the states that were tricked by the Dem rule changes to enact legislation to correct things.
Germaine to your issue: how can the GOP "correct things" when there was no evidence of voter fraud in need of correction? "Correct things" is Newspeak (a euphemism) for voter suppression, which the GOP has made an art of to maintain its power despite the majority of citizens opposing them. They systematically make it harder for POC and young people to vote wherever they have the power to do so, because POC and young people lean left, whereas Democrats make it easier for everyone (left and right) to vote. Who's more fair and democratic?
So - if the pastor of a large church with a devout following instructs his flock to vote in a certain way, then sends out emissaries to contact the membership saying " we vote this way" -sign here- and collects all ballots and submits them en-mass via a Sunday voting box.. And said church has an alliance with many like-minded churches across the state and America, all conducting the same operation. The result is ballot tally time signatures flowing as statistically predictable until the large Biden 99% batch comes through on Sunday afternoon. You may call it "Vote Outreach". I call it a gross manipulation of our voting tradition. If you are able-bodied and able to vote in person - do so.
Okay Metal, I've tried googling "sunday ballot stuffing" and I get nothing. Send me a link to the story you're talking about, if you have one, but this doesn't sound any worse than the way the Evangelical Christian right has been rallying all their people to vote GOP for years. Are you saying that Christians choosing to vote together at the same time should be illegal, or that Christian pastors shouldn't be allowed to preach who they think their members should vote for, or both?
I have a hunch that if this is one of the things Trump tried to claim was cheating, it was already adjudicated as fair and legal. I don't like that Evangelical and Catholic Christian leaders have instructed their members to vote Republican for years one bit, but it doesn't seem to be any of my business, even if they all fill out their mail in ballots together in church and then drop them in the same box at the same time.
And the crucial thing about your re-description of the Big Lie here is that it makes Trump out to be an honest American who just chooses his words poorly, while continuing to make Democrats out to be sneaky, nefarious, manipulative alterers of tradition.
Essential to Trump's Big Lie is the demonization of his enemy, i.e., "liberals" and all who would enable their nefarious plot against America. He spent four years stoking this hatred, and now his people are so angry that many of them are ready to kill and/or die for him.
The importance of Hitler is that he recognized that people are far more likely to swallow an enormous lie than a small one, far more likely to believe that one set of people is engaged in a massive, evil conspiracy than to believe this or that minor fib about them. Myths don't require evidence, they are in fact stronger without them, because evidence can always be debated. If enough people can be made to believe that liberals are despicable people who are trying to steal their country, they will be ready to do what it takes to stop them when the dear leader calls on them to do so. For now, they're standing back and standing by. I wish honest conservatives would come out and denounce this myth.
"Essential to Trump's Big Lie is the demonization of his enemy, i.e., "liberals" and all who would enable their nefarious plot against America."
This stuff has been going on for decades pre-Trump. It's at least a hundred years old, arguably older. Trump is somehow uniquely culpable?
BTW, apparently "insurrectionists" are similarly engaged in a nefarious plot against America. Lots of nefarious plots against America goin' on; the enemy is within. I hope you're appropriately frightened.
There's always been dissent and partisan animosity, but I don't believe you can't see that Trump has escalated the hatred and the lying beyond what it's ever been. And "plots against America...within"? Trump says that's what lefties like me are doing, but it's a lie, a projection, gaslighting--he's the one who tried to overturn an election deemed fair by all the election officials and courts, he's the one drumming the Big Lie into his supporters, telling them to "stand back and stand by" because it will soon be time to "fight like hell" and "take back our country."
So yes, he may not have started the partisan hatred, but IMO he is uniquely culpable, and I never said I would tolerate a lying demagogue sewing hate on a massive scale to further his own power. You can tolerate that shit if you want to, Grisha.
It's not doing things that would incite a shooting war. How about that? A lot of what I see that passes for opinion in the media seems to act as if that isn't a possibility. It is a real danger.
PS: It isn't just Trump that thinks the election was stolen. Those of us with wide experience in the Northeast, at least, have known about the dead voting and the other abuses for many years now. Nixon 1960 was a pretty egregious example from the past. Perhaps we're tired of putting up with it.
But just like with Qanon's claims, there's been no credible evidence presented that the election was stolen. 61 judges, including judges appointed by Trump, threw their claims out of court. His own justice department and homeland security departments said there was no evidence of fraud. So what is it you're tired of putting up with, and why should the rest of us be sympathetic?
«His own justice department and homeland security departments said there was no evidence of fraud.»
Of all the examples of delusional propaganda this is particularly laughable: how can one claim that the security and justice were Trump's own, to the readers of "TK News" that has amply documented how both kept backstabbing Trump for years, with titles like "The Color Revolutions Come Home", "We're in a permanent coup", "The intelligence community needs a house-cleaning", ...
I know, I know, it's like Trump says: everyone who disagrees with him is part of the deep state, even his own appointees, even his own vice president. So what if we have governmental agencies in charge of investigating the facts?--if they say the facts are against Trump, then they are by definition deep state liars. 2+2=5, or whatever Trump now says it is. Go ahead and have your final say and let's end this conversation.
You seem not to understand that a newly-elected President says "Jump" and the institutions which predate him immediately say "How high?" That's how it's supposed to work, right?
JFK barely said "jump." It was more like "hop."
And this leads to an important point: when candidates were chosen by "the machine" in "smoke filled rooms" instead of primaries they tended to be experienced "machine politicians", people with their own power base in both politics and the federal administration. Since primaries the presidential candidates tend to be inexperienced "looks presidential" people without any power base in their own party, never mind experience or a power based in the federal administration, and they tend to be more ex-governors than ex-senators or ex-representatives. People like J Carter or R Reagan, or more recently BH Obama (or B Clinton or GW Bush) who are pretty much PR figures. GH Bush had his own power base in government, but not in politics. That's why "machine" people like Cheney or Rumsfeld had so much influence.
J Biden looks like a partial exception, for he has a long experience in politics and in part in the federal administration, but he has no faction of his own, he has always been a lightweight, and is so obviously currently just fronting for the "New Democrat" faction just like B Clinton and BH Obama did.
"J Biden looks like a partial exception, for he has a long experience in politics and in part in the federal administration, but he has no faction of his own, he has always been a lightweight"
I still don't know WTF the actual puppet masters think they are achieving with Biden; to me he looks incredibly, obviously weak.
I'm reaching Philip K. Dick levels of paranoia here. Either the people in charge are inept fools scrambling for a temporary handhold at the edge of a cliff, or they are secret geniuses playing nth-dimensional chess. I don't see a middle-of-the-road explanation.
Commenting here is a waste of time that would be better spent playing pool.
Yet here you and I are doing it.
Rack 'em up?
Tell me one Judge slick that looked at the evidence.
Zero. No court considered hearing the evidence, slick.
We are all informed we have no standing.
Slick.
Judges that refuse hearings are not the same as judges that consider the evidence then reject the evidence.
There are hundreds of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury about the fraud, as well as the youtube videos, as well as everyone who has a TV saw the count mysteriously halt at 1030 PM in the swing states with Trump ahead, then at 3 am Biden immediately leaped ahead by a huge influx of votes.
But you already know all that, slick.
Then at the first sign of any real dissent you PANICKED and your Pretender was sworn in at gunpoint, with the guns facing the nation. > and here fools you drew the sword, and the only person killed or who had or used a gun was the thug with a badge who shot Ashli Babbitt.
In short slick, you stole an election, killed to protect the theft and ringed the Capitol with troops to ensure Biden was sworn in. Along the way you informed the people your vote doesn’t count, and they have no standing before the law.
You are a liar slick, and now you have killed, and now you have drawn the sword.
You must be confusing us with the West Bank.
We’re not.
No judges looked at the "evidence" because Trump's lawyers didn't bring any, they brought only frivolous conspiracy theories. They were reprimanded by Trump appointed judges for wasting the court's time. The claims that swing states mysteriously stopped the count at 10:30 have been debunked (see Politifact, Reuters etc), as have all the other claims (see for instance https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/nine-election-fraud-claims-none-credible/). But people who believe in conspiracy theories are never phased by debunking and fact checking, they'll just keep coming up with new claims to support their narrative.
If you have a link to evidence of hundreds of affidavits about the fraud, please give me the link, I'd like to see whether they've been debunked or not. And please explain, since the Democrats (and all those Republican election officials in swing states) went to all this trouble to steal the election, why they didn't also steal the election for the Democratic senate candidates who were on the same ballot?
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18693929/king-v-whitmer/
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.350905/gov.uscourts.mied.350905.1.15.pdf
the above a small sample BB, but unlike factcheck.org sworn under penalty of perjury.
what's funny is the Dominion software if the damn Dems had read the manual would have let them do all this in the background.
Here you are , the Dominion user manual. The good stuff is in chapter 3 - like adjudication, rank choice voting, etc.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/DVS-DemocracySuite511/documentation/2-03-EMS-FunctionalityDescription-5-11-CO.pdf
"better 1000 Bradley Butterfields then Jew haters like the long warred. You will be replaced you scumbag"
Whoa! This is the kind of Troll Fight shit I live for. If I were a worthwhile entrepreneur, like Vince McMahon, I would readily hit "the long warred" over the head with folding metal chair and call it a day. $$$
Who said I was a Jew Hater? I just pointed out this isn't the West Bank.
Apparently that observation hit home.
As far as being replaced...yes, nothing genocidal there...yes we've heard that one before... we may be replaced, but not by you.
In fact our only possible replacement would be the Spanish.
Who are far and away the most Supremacists Whites in America, and has for ah the Question...oh my goodness.
It's probably not a good idea to replace us.
But I don't hate. I just understand. The middle east was most instructive, suddenly there's context.
Cheers !
"In fact our only possible replacement would be the Spanish."
Pretty sure the Spanish just want to stay up late, drink wine and eat tapas at this point. Running an empire is fucking exhausting; it takes a few hundred years to get past the hangover.
The Brits are still all fucked up. I fear for my fellow Americans. Sometimes you have to swallow a lot of aspirins and spend all day in bed.
"I voted for Trump twice and I totally disagree with him in both in fact and opinion."
This is a remarkable statement. I do not intend my own response to be negative or condescending in any way. I think your rationale may go some way towards explaining Trump's "inexplicable" electoral popularity, and if you wish to explain further, I hope you will do so.
The "America" that Matt waxes jingo balls about in his summation of why Marcuse-the-immigrant should have appreciated America was:
The America that was ramping up a racist imperialist war against a nation of farmers in SE Asia;
The America that was tolerant of the men who bombed churches in Alabama;
The America that denied voting rights to a huge number of citizens based on their skin color;
The America that tolerated McCarthyism cuz communists are bad;
The America that denied financial autonomy to half its citizens cuz women;
The America that had a mainly "northern European whites only" immigration policy;
In sum, the America that existed in 1964.
Matt may imagine that he would have been celebrating that America, but for those of us alive and conscious at the time it looked pretty intolerable from a left perspective. But then my understanding of "left" has to do with socialism, not elite-driven neoliberal identity politics.
Marcuse was a leftist, Matt. So am I.
So sue us. Or do a hit job.
I've been in this business 30 years and been a persistent critic of the United States, of its past and its present - spent ten years on systemic financial inequality, wrote multiple books on racism in the justice system, have been heavily critical of efforts to whitewash exactly the monstrous behavior in Vietnam you reference.
For all that, there's a reason hundreds of millions of people across the centuries have come here, usually fleeing even worse political situations, and it's not "jingo balls" to occasionally point out why.
The problem I have with Marcuse, and frankly with a lot of leftists, is their vision of progress isn't about improving the American experiment (which, again, I've been almost exclusively critical of my whole career), but going backward, and making it worse - taking away the many things about this country that actually work, beginning with the system of individual rights.
I spent nearly 15 years an expat, living and working in heavily non-white countries. One thing you do learn is that non-whites are just as capable of being oppressive people as any racist bogeyman in the US (the western progressive's obsession with race completely ignores the severe forms of discrimination commonplace in most of the word - class, ethnicity, caste, religion, tribalism, which quite often supersedes race in many places). The other thing you quickly learn is how much better people are treated in the United States compared to most of the world.
By which I mean the common, everyday America. The enormous swathes of lower middle class/working class Americans working at everyday jobs and living quiet humdrum lives.
The whole American promise was that people could escape the class, religion, or ethnic divides of the old world and come to this country to be their own man or woman. And it was true enough, for if it wasn't a perfect place or a perfect promise, American history is still a story of working towards the ideas of its promise. That's why the American individualism, the whole "no one is gonna tell me what to do," is so culturally important to Americans. Because when people start telling you what to do, and you comply out of fear, then it becomes a society of oppressors.
And that's the problem with much of the progressive left, in their desire to castigate and judge people for not living up to their ideals, they've come to see this individualism and even basic rights such as freedom of speech and press and all the promises of diversity in ideas and tolerance it espouses, as a threat and a proponent of all the problems they see in American society rather than solutions.
It does seem like the modern Democrats and progressive left are recreating a new class system but one that is based on holding the correct thoughts rather than ancestry, and it's a class system because it justifies treating different people differently based on their views, in short, some are now more "equal" and therefore get more "freedom" than those who hold the wrong views, who will have entirely different standards applied to them and lesser freedoms and lack of equality. We already see this pervasive everywhere in the cultural sphere, in how topics and ideas are handled and treated by those who control the media and most of the written word in this country. And we also see it among the growing acceptance by the establishment classes that you must adhere to a certain orthodoxy to be accepted and tolerated, with all the implications that comes with it. To be an individual is only a threat rather than a virtue.
In late 70's I took a job at San Antonio Express News driving a truck every morning around 3-4 a.m. with bundles of newspapers to the carriers at different locations. 7 days a week, you got your birthday off, that was it. Upside was you got paid for a 40 hour week even if it only took you 25 or 30 and if you were in school as I was it didn't interfere with those hours. Naturally, not a lot of white boys were signing up for that gig unless they were in shoes like me at the time. My girlfriend was Hispanic and got me in even though I was the only white boy amongst that entire delivery crew and her Mexican friend that was in charge had tons of reservations about hiring me. I took the stink eye from the other guys and knew in Summer I was getting the truck that had the window that wouldn't go down and in winter I was getting the shit box truck with the window that wouldn't roll up. Pendejo, Puta was something I just got used to being called and ignored. I only had one physical altercation on the loading dock but it was short and not the worst fight I'd ever been in. The point is discrimination as you point out isn't exclusive to any one race or country or even here in pockets of our country. As a side note to this experience it didn't suck forever. After awhile they just got used to me and there was an incident where I helped get another drivers disabled truck back to the barn after seeing him stuck on the side of the freeway on my way back from a run. It also helped that through osmosis (and my GF) I got fairly good at speaking TexMex Spanish. By the second year gringo boy was still gringo boy but I wasn't getting the stink eye anymore. I was even making friends with a couple of Mexican guys that were around my age and we'd do taco runs blasting UFO and I'd listen to them complain about other older Mexican guys there on the dock that were 'pendejos' now, not me..lol. I guess I had assimilated. Back then though I had no clue that was what had happened. I was just happy I wasn't getting shit at what was already a shitty job. Discrimination and Assimilation are weird bedfellows for sure. I'm just glad I learned this the way I did vs through a bogus college course ..
You should write a longer essay about this experience. You're a good writer and you evoke this specific time and place so well:)
One of my closet work mates is an ex-pat Zambian. We worked pretty closely for about 10 years. In fact he was my 2020 protest vote write in. The last two years it was just the 2 of of us so we talked a lot. I would mostly pump him for info on Africa. He was usually very accommodating.
Periodically he would show me videos. Very disturbing videos.
One was an obvious phone camera video that showed an attractive young black woman in a print dress lying on, what appeared to be, a city street, rocking back & forth & moaning. I could see cars & trucks passing at the very top of the frame.
From off camera a black man entered the frame carrying, what appeared to be, a large hunk of concrete. He proceeded to smash the concrete down on the woman. She continued rocking & moaning as the man picked up his cudgel & walked off screen. Then another man entered from the other side of the frame, dressed like an office worker out for a lunchtime stroll. He almost moonwalked in backwards and then delivered about 10 good kicks to the woman's head. At that point I handed it back and said 'What the fuck pal?" He explained that she'd been accused of adultery & that was the man's family beating her. He said it was a common occurrence. I asked him how it ended. He said they killed her.
Another video showed a large group of black folk encircling a smaller group of black folk in a slightly depressed area at the circle's center. Some of the people in the center area had tires around their heads. 2 women in the outer circle were spraying some kind of liquid on the people in the center.
I couldn't figure out what I was watching. My friend told me to keep watching, I'd figure it out.
He was right.
At one point a few people in the outer circle started throwing lit matches at the people in the center. When the folk in the center burst into flame I understood that the liquid was lighter fluid. Again I gave him a rousing "what the fuck?" He explained it was all over immigration & was tribally rooted. I asked him what happened to them & he said they were all immolated.
He also told me stories about his treatment by American blacks. When he first moved here he lived in an all black neighborhood. He said that his neighbors constantly told him to never trust white people. They'll lie to you, steal from you & even kill you.
After a year in that neighborhood he discovered that the only people lying to him, stealing from him & trying to hurt him were all black. He moved to a predominantly white area & has never had a problem.
He told me one story that had a punchline I never expected.
My friend & his wife were shopping in a store called Gabriel's. These were remainder clothes stores that moved into ex grocery stores or department stores where they just dumped all of the clothes on tables & the shopper had to root through them hoping they'd find something in their size that wasn't damaged or faulty in some way.
My friend's wife had found a dress that she liked & put it in their shopping cart. They then walked away from the cart to root elsewhere. As they returned to their cart they watched a black woman take the dress out of their cart & put it in her cart. When they confronted the woman about it she looked at them & said "You people need to go back where you came from."
Ba-da-boom!
He taught me that African American's professed love for their lost homeland was more affect than actuality.
A friend of mine, white female, worked in an African country through the Peace Corps. She once was driving past a man dying on the road, having been hit by car. His family was there. Her instinct to stop and help was nixed by the Africans with her, telling her that if she stopped, the family or other passers-by would accuse her of trying to kill him, and she would be in big trouble with the police. Utterly inhuman.
"and it's a class system because it justifies treating different people differently based on their views, in short, some are now more "equal" and therefore get more "freedom" than those who hold the wrong views, who will have entirely different standards applied to them and lesser freedoms and lack of equality"
I like the use of the word 'now' in that bit of alt-right boilerplate. Like, before "now" everyone was equal and had the same amount of freedom as everyone else. I recommend Lewis Lapham and his take on class in America for a corrective to this "presentist" hilarity.
How can you people take yourselves seriously?
BTW I utterly loathe "modern Democrats" and people in the US who consider themselves a "progressive left". Just as was the case when Spiro Agnew and the Republican right successfully demonized the term "liberal", contemporary American pundits of both the "left" and the right have twisted the meaning of 'left', 'socialism' and 'Marxist" to mean just another variety of liberalism that can be accomodated by capital, ie your masters.
If everyone were as perfect as you, we wouldn't need a government, we wouldn't need philosophy, free speech or a free press. We'd wake up each morning in a utopia. Each day would be a dream of humanist love and cooperation. Even the angles would envy mankind!
You can instruct us by example. Verbal beatings won't do it. They just make you seem more like us. LOL.
He had a miniature, first edition of Das Kapital inserted in his ass right after birth. He's just a channel for the great one's observations. Basically he's Mohammad.
Jesus Christ you're a fucking asshole. What's your address?
Well said.
"I've been in this business 30 years and been a persistent critic of the United States, of its past and its present - spent ten years on systemic financial inequality, wrote multiple books on racism in the justice system, have been heavily critical of efforts to whitewash exactly the monstrous behavior in Vietnam you reference."
And I have read those books and learned from them. As an investigative reporter you do a great job of digging into details and bringing them to light with well-narrated individual instances that cast a glaring light on the specific system you are examining. I also just like your style.
But it remains true that "individual rights" work where they work and testify to hollow gesturing where they don't.
How do we do away with "systemic financial inequality" within a capitalist system that prioritizes "individual rights" when individual rights are precisely the defense against any attempt to undo that inequality? What determined the difference in "individual rights" between the people who got their mortgages foreclosed and were defenestrated by bankers and the bankers who got massive bonuses for fucking up the global financial system?
They're all just "individuals" after all, possessed of rights. One small group was possessed of money and the other larger group was not. Wealth determines how relevant your individual rights are in American capitalism.
The same holds true for the instances of "racism in the justice system" you evince. The people suffering injustice at the hands of the system are individuals and as such possessed of formal rights. They just don't have the money to activate those rights, ie make them mean anything at all.
I'm not an American, so the few hundred million of you doing well enough out of global capital doesn't really alter my perception of how capitalism and it's ad campaign "individual rights" is working out for the other 6 billion humans on the planet. I realize most American "leftists", even those owning to the label "socialist" are pretty much unaware of and indifferent to people living in other countries until they become "immigrants" and activate the rhetoric of rights you all love so much. Meanwhile bomb the shit out of the fuckers because the business of American is the arms business. And ain't no pinkofag gonna tell me I can't do my business as I see fit. I got individual rights.
In the part of the world where I live, people live on $6 a day, work upwards of 10 hours a day, get shot and beaten for striking and lack any political representation at all. Liberals, with their fetish for "human rights" and what they call "democracy", call for gay marriage, free speech and free and fair elections in spite of the simple fact that none of these "individual rights" have ever served to address the fundamental problem of poverty and exploitation that puts the t-shirts on American backs.
People move to America to escape poverty, Matt. Always have and always will so long as the global north can hold onto its domination of the rest of the planet. Individual rights and $5 will get you a triple mocha at Starbucks. Under capitalism you'd better get the $5 first or you're fucked.
As your work eloquently testifies.
So you work in a place where people get shot and beaten for striking, but here, where you don't, is the problem?
As for the difference between homeowners and banks, that was an issue not terribly connected to civil liberties. Prosecutors just didn't exercise discretion to prosecute certain kinds of fraud. And one of the arguments I made in the book was that other aspects of the rule of law are diluted when some people in the corporate context get to buy their way out of criminal prosecution, and others don't.
But free speech is a big deal, and so is right to trial by jury, right to assemble, to free press, to freedom of religion, to freedom against unreasonable search, even the right to a civil trial by jury. In every other place I've lived, at least one of those rights is absent in a serious way. And in the States, those rights do work, or did anyway. There's a huge difference between writing for a fringe media outlet and being ignored, or writing something dissenting and being shot or removed from publication, which happens elsewhere. You have issues with Lockheed-Martin, so do I, but the solution isn't putting Sy Hersh or James Burton under the control of a media regulator (or a de facto one in a group of tech companies).
There are a lot of arguments about America's lack of fundamental protections against poverty. I have mixed feelings about that question but even if I didn't, even if there was a constitutional provision guaranteeing sustaining employment for instance, the solutions you'd be talking about would be along the lines of stripping personhood from companies so that they don't enjoy the same rights as people. What's gained by taking the individual right to free speech away?
I was thinking of Vietnam when I sketched that place. You know, the place that underwent 30 years of war in an attempt to throw off imperialist powers like the French with their liberte egalite fraternite bullshit and then the Americans with their democracy freedom and rights bullshit.
I'm not sure why you are unable to process that for socialists, like Marcuse, capitalism is the problem and America is its beating heart in the world as presently configured. American workers no longer need to be beaten and shot because American capital relies on workers in countries where relative poverty makes it possible for smaller capitalists and their government allies to beat and shoot workers indiscriminately.
Lucky Americans. Plus the fact that the culture of narcissism that you apparently found a defensible construct means that Americans are self-obsessed value-free consumers who so long as their t-shirts and electronics stay cheap don't give two fucks about what it takes to keep them in their mall utopia.
But this is pointless, As a liberal and an American you are constitutionally blind to what seems obvious to a socialist; your tyranny free lives are a function of wealth, not some great experiment in individual rights. That is why you can't put "prosecutorial discretion" into a box labelled "denial of fundamental rights" and have to talk about legality.
As is the case with most "rights" discourse it is just a feint to avoid recognizing a political question. And by political question I mean one that can only be solved by changing the system of rulers not by playing musical chairs with a selection thereof.
If you had read Marcuse and the others who wrote the essays that exercised your jingo balls so extremely a little more closely you would have noticed that no one was suggesting "taking the individual right to free speech away" but restricting that right in the case of certain toxic actors on the right. You also would have noticed that there was a passage suggesting that no matter how useless and indeed counterproductive individual rights were under capitalism they would need to be maintained while the body politic struggled to make those rights mean what they only appear to mean in the American system as it existed in the mid-60s.
I can't wait to see you defending a born-again George Wallace standing on a platform going on about the nigras and the need for whites to defend their culture while calling for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". Then when a howling pack of white thugs wade in with baseball bats and truncheons to beat the living shit out of protesters or bomb a church and kill some kids and no one goes to jail, you suggest that "discretionary prosecution" has nothing to do with civil liberties.
Because that was America that the authors of Repressive Toleration were writing into. not the one where a bunch of privileged millennials get all scared for their safety cuz someone said 'retard' and then convince their employer to fire said retard abuser.
In this as in everything else in capitalist wonderland America, the bottom line is not the right of retards to hear themselves referred to by their preferred pronouns but profit, that bottom line. Rights are neither here nor there.
To MichaelJohnWilson Ah yes, now I see. I lived in other countries for over 45 years and heard almost nothing but anti-Americanism, even as their culture adopted pretty much every aspect of America as soon as they could get their hands on it.
There is a deep resentment of America elsewhere and it has less to do with America's violation of another country's sovereignty (and ability to violate the rights of their citizens) and much more to do with its wealth. It comes down to sheer mere envy, the eternal rallying cry of the socialist. It is oh so easy to find the flaws in the only country in the world that daily confirms its admittedly uneven dedication to the idea of true individual human rights and the freedom to use your mind to better yourself and your family. The continual commitment to that ideal is what has brought unprecedented prosperity to America and elicits envy in socialist idealists like you, who pretend you don't want that prosperity, even though along with true freedom this is what makes it possible to pull more people out of poverty than socialism ever could.
America is an ongoing experiment in self-government, and like all science, its mistakes are what direct Americans to new ideas for betterment of life for its citizens, and also why half the world is on our southern border trying to get in. They don't want to overthrow the experiment and replace it with your failed theories of socialism, they want the freedom of an imperfect Constitution and a country forever trying to live up to its ideals, and the novel ideas and technological and true social progress that only its freedom can or will create.
You're a horrible writer. Stick to one style. You go from post-modern language torture to dorm room pothead to the right to offend "retards". Do better and write shorter.
tl:dr
ts:dc
LOL bari weiss is in this purgatory too. When you say leftist d-bags or whatever, I know you have nothing to say. Way to paste in those links though.
C'mon Matt. I know you believe in free speech and that bad speech maybe can be successfully met with good speech, but even this is over the line.
He uses his middle name. He cannot be gainsaid. I don't make the rules, I just point them out when I smell bullshit.
This is what you all wrought by making Chomsky God. Has anyone ever asked Ol' Chompers what nation in the world is, or has been, a just one? Or are you all crying along with him and Abby Martin and self-flagellating about the uniquely evil America?
Matt, why not give some of your time, energy and ink to the other ways "individual rights" are under attack? I'd have thought you'd be at least as troubled by corporate personhood and equating money with speech as you are with a "Leftist's" assault on America's Bill of Rights.
This is all supposed to be about a review of a book and a few articles written almost 6 decades ago but has instead turned into a screechy collection of the usual anti-Marxist rantings from American semi-literates.
Not sure what prompts Matt to place himself so squarely in that line of virtual idiocy.
This is the tone I adopt when I minister to people in the soup lines. Except I used your previous characterization: retards. Gets them over to my side every time. I think you're due back at Trots HQ now. Say "fascist" over and over and over.
Matt, you are with us on the right. You just haven't realized it yet. You are trying to defend individual rights on the side that has abandoned the concept.
There are some jerks on our side, as there always will be everywhere. But the vast majority of us want the best for all Americans, of all races and beliefs. We have concluded that the way you get there is through vigorously protecting individual rights.
Sometimes there is a role for government, but so many of our tragedies are caused by misguided or malevolent government actions, from the destruction of the black family starting in the 1960s to the monopoly power of Amazon (did you know they had a patent on the "method" of one-click shopping for 20 years, until 2017, so a lot of their market dominance came from a legally enforced monopoly?)
I think you have a visceral and sentimental attachment to identifying as a man of the left, as I did until about 7 years ago. But when I really got to know people on the other side, I found out that the left was lying about them.
It's an altar call for Matt, who sounds like one of those Black Toms on YouTube who preach the gospel of the anti-woke (while also preaching laissez-faire economics as being fine for the prison system). Maybe we can get him on our side. Were there women in the English Dept. who just wouldn't date you? Have you accepted Jordan Peterson as your lord and savior? Do you reject the evil ways of Satan and his handmaidens, AOC and Susan Sarandon?
When the Big Tech titans were hauled before Congress, Democrats slammed them for not engaging in enough censorship, and demanded to know their plans to do more. And not a single member of Congress from that side of the aisle dissented from that view. So yes, if you support civil liberties, you're on the right now, whether you realize it or not.
You're wrong. What we're all talking about is not a right/left issue. That's the whole point.
It shouldn't be a left-right issue, and up until recent years it wasn't. But now it is. If you don't see that, you still haven't grasped what "progressives" have become. You'll find out soon enough.
We need a good defense of individual rights against the illiberal left, but you can do better than praise American tradition and exceptionality. I mean, the 1st amendment is not adequate for the digital age, effectively only the rights of the internet companies are protected.
"The problem I have with Marcuse, and frankly with a lot of leftists, is their vision of progress isn't about improving the American experiment ... but going backward, and making it worse."
This is really close to the crux of the dilemma. The "American experiment" is a pretty vast and nebulous "thing," In manufacturing processes, which are much more tangible and well-defined, "improvement" can only come about through what W. Edwards Deming called "profound knowledge." (He identified its areas.)
Otherwise, we're just tampering with the system (the experiment) with good intentions, which could also end up making things much worse.
I don't know why, but when I read the words "repressive tolerance," it reminds me of one of the bits of wisdom the military taught me: "You get ulcers when you start to worry about how clean to wipe the asses of the people who shit on you."
Question? Where is the perfect country where all of these things existed in that time period? I often feel like the US gets compared to these mythical utopian countries. As if the history of the entire world isn’t rife w/ war, famine, injustice, strife and every other atrocity. I believe modern humanities problem is a lack of historical knowledge.
My biggest problem with the left wing of the political spectrum, is they are very good at seeing all of the problems in society but refuse to admit when things have improved. When holding up society to some perfect utopia, we will always fail to meet it.
All God's Creatures Are Terrible
The Left or left's syllabus is pretty fucking dire. Put Chomsky in the ground already.
And many of these items have been identified and corrected. Would a Marcuse regime have any self-correcting mechanisms?
Marcuse wanted to correct us out of existence.
His followers are following his true path, which is the path the USSR was forced to walk until in their madness the little Marcuse's tried to make Stalin walk it.
Let's take a break here and listen to the *a propos* "Two Little Hitlers" by Elvis Costello. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trgIWENOdQ
Genuine question: what are examples of totalitarian and discriminating measures against "white males" in our society?
I am aware of “culture wars.” Not going to answer the question? It was genuine.
You're arguing with a bot.
"Nobody who knows anything about history wants the USA to walk the USSR's path..." Regardless of their knowledge of history or perhaps knowing it exactly there are a great many people who want the white kulaks of America to walk exactly the path the Ukrainian Kulaks walked. That path being racial and ethnic genocide, from the point of view of the White Elites Class based warfare of the Upper against the Lower Whites.
Which of course it is...2021 is Marxism stood on it's head with the Intellectual Vanguard getting rid of the proles, which is true to history if not Marxist theory. Really the ultimate in snobbery for the discerning striver, and Marcuse is perfect for them.
I think you're trapped in economics here and ignoring the racialism of the Left, indeed it's genocidal battle-cry of 2020's Burning/Looting/Murder and rioting was "Erase Whiteness." In actual history there was usually an ethnic component to the Communist genocides - see Cossacks 1925 at 500K dead, Ukraine 1930-1934, the genocide of the Khmer against the other Cambodian groups etc etc.
As far as American style Capitalism ie Globalism I'm against it.
That they fund Burn, Loot and Murder and Antifa - the -fa these days seeming to be the still bewildered American Kulaks - doesn't add to it's charms. We can agree to agree on this matter, I don't care for globalism ala American style Capitalism either and even on pure economic grounds it wants to turn the world into a Roman Estate with them the Roman Bonus class. I'm against that anyway...and frankly I think the anti-white pogroms and building repression against my people [non-elite whites] is because we're in the way. The rest of our sins don't matter, including the blood guilt of inherited sins. We and our antiquated and medieval Constitution are in the way of gathering yet more wealth and power, that's all.
It's heartening to see that Matt's fans include those prepared to defend white people against the genocidaires manning grad studies departments across the globe!
Indeed.
"I'm Dreaming of a White Genocide" was the song played to warn Americans in Saigon that it was time to get aboard the helicopters. #themoreyouknow
Erase whiteness ?
The statues and history being toppled, condemned?
1619?
CRT?
The NYT has no standing?
CRT has no standing?
Lloyd Austin SECDEF has no standing?
I will admit that there are varying degrees of repression and vilification above but there was debate in the USSR and NSDAP as well, the moderates did not win the day.
“No standing?”
Cmon
I read "humxn" and I was like "WTF?!"
Then I did some research and it all made sense: https://abetterplaceconsulting.com/why-humxn-is-not-misspelled/
"Humans are bipedal; I am an individual with six legs."
Doesn't anyone remember Leonard Jeffries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin_theory
"Marcuse was a leftist, Matt. So am I. So sue us."
Little point in that. Leftists tend not to have much money. Marcuse apparently had a tidy little bundle at the end.
Bernie Sanders has 2 houses and a coat. Fucken hypocrites everywhere, eh?
And mittens. Privilege!
Are you talking about Marcuse or Matt?
Sure, you don't hate white people, you're just a socialist.
That's why 4 of your 7 points are racialist.
But it's not racism against white people, just 'justice.'
And it will always be 1964 for you leftists.
Until in our desperation and yes need to survive we make it 1933.
But don't worry, we shan't sue.
Remember this when we have 1933 Germany from Seattle to Stockholm Sweden which is a more likely result than whatever dream you were dreaming, and why shouldn't we?
Why shouldn't we?
Dreaming is free. Anyway, I'm starting a website focused on the 1950s. Nothing but cool jazz, pastels, classic Chevys, and Ike, whom we like despite some missteps.
Please allow me to subscribe to your Substack
[bear trap closes around foot]
ouch, painful
Holy smoke dude, were you in a Coma in 2020? That is the actual Left.
I can agree that historically good results and even good policies came from the *historical left* but that seems to have ended in the 1960s along with said old left.
As for me recounting and where I recount from WRONG in a word, but how would you know I don't get my info from Corporate media. Bad guess, happens to all of us I suppose.
shhhhh
So, I know numerous Americans who say they don't personally know anyone who voted for Trump. I guess Trump voters must not exist then, right?
LOL you are
Almost no Americans have an experience of the left, not like Europeans do, because of all the so-called advanced democracies, the U.S. government persecuted the left and labor most. Consequently, and is apparent here and everywhere else, "Marxism" or "Left" have no meaning outside of the dictionary of the moment.
I think what is most telling about post-modernists is the contention that there is no objective reality. So what? Heisenberg said as much. We can only describe reality within a realm of certainty. Said another way, George E. Box, regarded by some as the greatest statistician of the 20th century, stated: "All models are false. Some are useful." This does not mean that postmodernist "philosophy" provides any means for better modeling the universe in which we live.
Rather postmodernism is simply a form of sophistry intended to change the game by creating a new set of rules. It even provides the freedom to create new rules in the process since, after all there is no "objective reality". A not so subtle strategy which, when absent rationale arguments, one imperiously declares that rational and logical argument cannot be employed.
Since the models created by post-modernists are not subject to debate or criticism is this not the perfect example of a recursive argument? Postmodernism and Marxist theory are simply rhetorical techniques to be employed in power shifting. Their purpose is political and not scientific. They do not lead to greater knowledge but rather serve as tools for closet aristocrats to seek power and once obtained rule by diktat over the benighted masses. Those experiments have been tried and failed miserably.
Disagree - anyone who has read Marx's Capital I, II, & III learns a great deal about economics, history, and society. Real lasting change in a capitalist society will require critiques of crony capitalism or end phase of capitalism that Marx has supplied.
The problem is the link to communism (in East) and the historical significance of that devolution (inside and outside of the US), instead of sticking with how we might make changes to our system using Marxist criticism of the worst pieces of crony capitalism(of course this is before the corporate coup d'etat that took place in the 80s and 90s where all the levers of power were sold out to business/industry).
Now with propaganda like Russiagate, or siding with Juan Guaido in Venezuela, the US has situated itself that any concept from China or Russia is some sort of conspiracy or power grab -- deluding themselves and some Americans into thinking to throw the baby out with the bathwater (in terms of anything linked to "communist historical culture).
«who has read Marx's Capital I, II, & III learns a great deal about economics, history, and society»
Even more so they may have learned a lot about the history of thought on the political economy, something that is often (deliberately) left out of education in Economics.
Excellent point - I find the exact same thing when teaching family finance - the history of our financial culture is one of the least understood parts of our education. The history of the Federal Reserve, How money is made, how the state interacts with client banks, and our history with the dollar, gold standard, and world's reserve currency. Then we take a look at what our budget looks like and the national debt (https://www.usdebtclock.org/ )- and we see how $27 Trillion national debt was $2.9 Trillion 30 years ago.
A 10 fold increase in our debt while we participated in about 10 wars and income inequality expanded a record setting paces we have seen in 50 years. For a capitalist country we do a pretty shitty job of talking about the political economy and family finances (confusing the two at turn to mask the public theft).
Seconded, although I do agree with Rick about postmodernism being nothing but sophistry. The fact that it's sometimes called "neoMarxism" when applied to socio-political issues is absurd; it's the antithesis of Marx's thought processes, which were very matter-of-fact and (usually, but not always) down-to-earth.
When Pomo gets thrown around and pummeled - I tend to think of it more as a part of dialogue with objectivism instead of something isolated on its own.
History is almost always a reaction to the last series of events (financial crises are great examples --- the solutions to solving inflation, or credit access or financialization or bid-rigging indexs, or accounting practices linked to fraud) are inextricably linked to the predecessor policy. To judge it separately apart from the choices at the time, especially 30, 50 years later means people do not fully understand the game behind the game. (not unlike an umpire strikes zone -- those who follow that umpire know already --- but anyone who comes in and compares it to other umpires will undoubtedly find fault).
How this relates to Pomo is that I see like Tony Benn. If we can create theory to harm people and enrich an entire class of undeserving frauds, then we can create theory and practices to help remove those barriers to class and privilege.
Will you and MT collaborate on a book about umpires (sports and economic), pretty please? I'm too ignorant of the topic.
Incidentally, I am trademarking Umpire Squid (TM) right now. Just so you know.
The Cuse or The Curse --- from Syracuse basketball to Herbert Marcuse 1 on 1 dimension man to man defense :)
LOL!
MT is a basketball guy if I am not mistaken - played in Russia; he reports being good from 15 feet and liking to rebound. I am more of Soccer person with a streak of Hoosier basketball (and flit between the baseball and football as more entertainment kind of thing).
Not sure the world needs two 50 something men writing about umpires at this point in history as baseball is a dying American sport in a lot of ways. It used to be when I was growing up you could get a game just about every summer night in the Midwest corn fields. But now its different. - I suspect that there is some overlap between Make it up as you Angel Fernandez or Country Joe West and the personalities we see in the political, economic sphere.
Russia? Everyone knows of his past fame as the "Mongolian Rodman"..take a lap Mac :)
I know nothing of sports, and can't really contribute there.
I do sense that Paul Krugman is something of an umpire in economics, though. Love him, hate him, or anything in between, it seems to be the case.
...b..but.. Crazy Crab!
Oh, my! That does sound cool.
It's the only good idea I ever had.
"History is almost always a reaction to the last series of events..."
That is an interesting comment. There is some truth to this, I suppose since history can and should be a learning experience. An experience which hopefully permits us to avoid the mistakes of the past. Doesn't seem to work out does it.
I think of history as being very important and I will admit I have failed at reading Marx's Das Kapital. It is simply too ponderous for my taste. I've never been one to contend that all of Marx is garbage though I'm not sure he is a particularly good economist. I can read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations but Marx, for me it is just too much. Perhaps I haven't tried sufficiently.
That said, I'll throw out the following for debate:
Both Smith and Marx were early cognitive scientists. Without the benefit of knowledge concerning DNA, quantum mechanics, epigenetics, functional MRI and many of today's tools, they set about the Herculean task of describing human behavior and why people do what they do. Smith was writing at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Marx was deep into it. Marx may have provided excellent examples of criticisms of "Capitalism"; however, how good was he really as an economist? Smith attempted to describe the merits of a market economy. He also drew heavily from history. Many of his insights resonate today. One of his profound insights:
"A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants."
Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations.
Now prior to unleashing wrath and demonization about a lack of empathy for servants bear with me. Smith was most interested in what made humans happy and satisfied with their lives. He articulated two classes of labor: 1) productive and 2) unproductive. Menial servants were part of the "unproductive" group. So were lawyers, philosophers (like himself), physicians, opera singers, Royals, the military, and financiers. In Smith's construct you could be very high in the social hierarchy and still grouped with an individual who helped with your luggage at the train station or airport. Social status had nothing to do with it but was instead incidental and tangential. Why were they "Unproductive"? A bit simplistic perhaps; however, their services created nothing of material (physical) usefulness or value. More importantly their existence was entirely dependent upon the surplus material wealth created by "productive labor". Without much knowledge of human anthropology and doubtless unaware of specifics of Humanity's journey from hunter gathers to agriculturalists and beginning industrialists he certainly understand that there was a driving force in all of this. It was wealth (what humans perceive as valuable to their lives). Whether it was hunting grounds, sources of fresh water, pasture land, rich tillable soil, or access to water and eventually steam power, the wealth creating ability of a civilization led to its diversity and if managed well, its happiness. Smith, I suspect, always viewed the glass as half full.
Marx it seems was more a "glass is half empty" sort. He understood well the negative aspects of the Capitalist civilization he lived in. He saw the oppression, the malfeasance, and thievery of a ruling class. These were, however, human traits that long predated Capitalism. The Magna Carta is a good example of a bunch of barons getting together and putting limits on the Divine Right of Kings. Sure they were land owners and "wealthy" for their time but they also resisted arbitrary and "privileged" seizure of their wealth.
Is this not just the same-old-same-old story played over and over again? Humans display both demons and angels of light. During the 20th century the most brutal and murderous regimes were those who practiced totalitarianism. Nazi Germany with its Social-capitalist model (fascism), Russia under Stalin and China under Mao. Nazism was crushed. Russia imploded and China broke with some of it ideology and seems to be sort of maybe (and maybe not), an authoritarian quasi-Capitalist civilization. Of the latter, I'm not so sure given Xi's penchant for supporting state industries and further consolidating power in the CCP.
So, my concern is with the model. Here is a model:
"If we can create theory to harm people and enrich an entire class of undeserving frauds, then we can create theory and practices to help remove those barriers to class and privilege."
Be very careful what you wish for. What is the definition of "theory". For some it is a tool for getting what they desire. For Western civilization it has been since the start of the Scientific Revolution, a methodology for creating and testing models which best describe reality. Some like to consider it a path to "truth".
Now is "Capitalism" a theory? I think it is a "bad word". Of course it is not a theory, it is moniker. At best it should be reserved for the meaning that Smith used the word for. It is simply a measure of wealth. Now "markets", that can be considered a theory in a scientific sense. It is in some respects a testable hypothesis. So far during the 20th century, at least, socialism/communism failed miserably in creating wealth. Markets worked far better. The fact that I have the luxury to engage in these sorts of debates is evidence for this.
Marx leaned heavily on Smith. Did you know that when Smith talked about "free markets" he was referring to "freedom from economic rents"? He was opposed to things like landlords and (in the current world, would have been talking about) medical insurance companies. He noted that markets worked best when they were free from economic rents.
If Marx himself is too dry for you (and it is tedious reading at times, reading Capital vol 1 & 2) maybe check out Michael Hudson, Marx's most direct living intellectual "heir". He wrote this around 2005 or so, back when then-orthodox economists like Greenspan were saying markets were too rational for a housing bubble to be real.
https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/RoadToSerfdom.pdf
Thank you, I will attempt it. I had heard that Marx did "lean heavily on Smith". Smith certainly favored productive labor as the source to true wealth. Something the United States lost sight of since the beginnings of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
Oh dear me. Off topic, clouded, constipated and lacking clarity - laced with agenda and trying too hard to inject it into places it does not belong
Off topic?
I'm asking you to advocate for the thinking of Karl Marx. The best you can do is retreat into a form of tangential criticism. Many an academic of postmodernist thought employs the same tactics.
"Laced with agenda" - What does that mean?
"It does not belong" - Why does it not belong?
"Clouded" - Define "clouded".
"Constipated" - now that is a subjective quasi-moralistic opinion if there ever was one. Even Koko the Gorilla was good at using intestinal metaphors.
What's Pomo?
Post-Modernism
Ahh. Doh! Thanks!
Marx was about the rubber meeting the road. He wrote on behalf of workers, attempting to do so in language workers of the time could understand. He might have failed.
"Academic Marxism" is pretty close to a contradiction in terms.
I think he succeeded with a lot of people. I'm pretty sure the UK's NHS, and Canada's Medicare, would never have existed if not for him.
Mike Davis is an academic and a Marxist. His rubber meets the road.
Now there's a contradiction.
I like Mike Davis's books, especially "City of Quartz" (haven't read them all).
My question is: what is the point of Mike Davis? What has he done, concretely, to upend the the thing he critiques? Or does he more enjoy his comfortable job as an academic?
The "point of Mike Davis" is to remind us that writers like Matt are working from within the liberal tradition they critique, without doing anything concrete to upend the thing they both criticize and defend?
«about postmodernism being nothing but sophistry»
That is a huge exxxxxxagggggeration: post-modernism is essentially an attempt to point out that The Enlightenment, however valuable in overcoming pre-modern thought, and in its own merit, was not the "end of history", but was in large part shaped by the ideology of the newly emerging commercial/industrial/professional ruling classes, and that therefore we must look at the shibboleths of modernism with critical judgement, like the modernists looked at those of the pre-modern era.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I know of no fans of the enlightenment who think it was the end of history, and so much post-modern thought was and is actively anti-science, it think it deserves scorn more than anything.
Actually they operate on different assumptions and probably work best together. Objectivism assumes one can know reality, that answers exist based upon some rules, principles or scientific theorems. Postmodernism assumes that reality is in the eye of the beholder, and that reality is not fixed, certain, there are exceptions to every rule.
One uses the scientific method preferencing quantitative data and the replication of methods and data. The other does the same but opens up spaces for qualitative data (case studies, interviews, ethnography, and family/histories) to express what is not being discussed or left out of traditional research methods. This creates a rift and has caused an entire generation of academics to either align with the traditional power systems gatekeeping academe (objectivism) and the new generation academics of the 60s/70s who were inspired by movements and what is happening in people's reality (Howard Zinn, Paolo Freire, Edward Said) that was not being captured by the historical power centers of tenured professors. So Pomo was useful at one point as a resistance to the 1950s Eisenhower-esque power structures at Ivy league institutions who were shaping the next generations of leaders.
For people to hear that their parents, their country or that Darwin or God did not have all the answers --- that we all are operating on incomplete knowledge was empowering in the beginning.
But just like everything else in this culture, too much of anything turns into a problem (smoking, drinking, eating and Pomo'ing). Academics started following their interests and trying to build theory or formulate new ideas in a sea of change in our culture. Unfortunately, it became a distraction in some cases and in others did not fulfill the promise of a committed 30 years of work --- solutions for Americans that are valuable -----> especially around labor, finance, debt and the history of predation in the US.
That meant some were co-opted by the old guard objectivism that was clear our leaders did not have solutions for (see the right wing in the last 30 years), and a generation of scholars developing their ideas as they went (cue the DNC and corporate dems) --- and if there were people with good ideas (Elizabeth Warren and bankruptcy bill --- they got pounded in the fight and then gave up on real change, exchanging for position in society).
So, Pomo is not anti-science and it is not the panacea promised either. The best research questions probably find a way to mix what is known and build upon that --- using all sorts of methodologies. Why limit yourself. Unfortunately, young academics are expected to make choices early on in their study (are you going to go your own way and risk it or will you play ball, follow the rules, and slowly build the research base of your field)?
That's how I see it.
That actually makes perfect sense.
:)
I wouldn't say anything Zinn wrote was postmodern, though. He was just a good historian who meticulously went through the entirety of the historical record with many topics, and made the case that "the orthodoxy", as taught to children was, in fact, wrong.
"Pomo is not anti-science"
"Objectivism assumes one can know reality, that answers exist based upon some rules, principles or scientific theorems. Postmodernism assumes that reality is in the eye of the beholder, and that reality is not fixed, certain, there are exceptions to every rule."
What evidence do you have to support this? If anything, physics in the 20th century clearly demonstrated that absolute "Objectivism" (are we alluding to Ayn Rand here) is false.
Nevertheless, I'm very much embroiled in the methodology for creating knowledge every single day. The methods are extremely important just like the assumptions in any model.
I return to the following attributed to George E. Box.
"All models are false. Some are useful."
In this regard be very careful what you wish for and the assumptions that you employ. Giving undue weight to a particular variable based upon a decidedly false assumption is a recipe for disaster. Useful science embraces and applauds nuance. It is also very sensitive to the impact of nuance.
https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/
Postmodernist thought seems mostly a tactic for Powershifting. So much of Marxist Theory seems to be a methodology for assailing entrenched and admittedly inequitable power relationships. As such it is not so much about making more pie as it is sharing pie.
I'm not entirely sure what the phrase "Marxist Theory" is specifically referring to, to be honest.
Stuff like this?
"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor,..."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
Heisenberg's uncertainty theory deals with the relationship between measuring location and momentum in a quantum system. You're probably thinking more about relativism and multiple worlds theories. Either way, please don't compare quantum physics to postmodernism. They have nothing in common, and the comparison only serves to lend undeserved credibility to postmodernism.
One of the greatest achievements of physics in the 20th century was the realization that there is no "God's eye view" of the universe. There are limits to our knowledge. A very direct expression of this is Heisenberg's uncertainty. I would never compare postmodernism to Heisenberg in a favorable way.
Jacob Bronowski said it very well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXwj4jMnWZg
I appreciate that you followed up and continued the conversation. Not enough folks do that today, your self-reflection is refreshing and so needed in today's discourse.
I think my main problem with your review is that you buried the lede a little. I was at an appropriate school to witness the flowering of deconstructionism and Straussianism and a half dozen other philosophies that engendered the mess we are in today, albeit sometimes via circuitous genealogies.
And all of them were rooted in the same sentiment: the resentment of intellectual elites at having lost their aristocratic patronage in the age of the common man. The desire to rule came first, the excuses came after. It is impossible to understand identity politics without understanding that first.
Yes! This “resentment of intellectual elites” explains absolutely everything.
...it's almost as if the "intellectual elites" don't really care for slovenly democracy all that much.
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that one's angry first take ad a reviewer might have missed something important. I'm sure I speak for many when I applaud Matt for this willingness to go a bit deeper and to back off from some earlier positions where a lesser mind and character might have doubled down.
I have had arguments with left friends about the American political tradition and whether King's idea of the unfulfilled promise was too generous and there really isn't anything worth salvaging or building from. I'm on the side of starting with what is good in our traditions as King, and I'm hearing Matt, also agree on. The liberal tradition under capitalism has indeed turned speech freedom rights etc into gross parodies of themselves. But something in the tradition remains - and I think it is in the very freedom that Marcuse venerates, and the spirit of rebellion in the New Left that he was so closely associated with. Marcuse predicted the tradition and values could never in themselves save this country and he is in my mind correct - our rampant corruption where speech and money are interchangeable and corporations are legal individuals is a dramatic worsening of what Marcuse witnessed but he was absolutely correct in anticipating it was inevitable. It is social movements and personal and collective rebellion that can save us, not the belief that liberal values and rights in and of themselves can. The liberal tradition has proven itself too easily twisted by capital and domination. In Marcuse's time it was the Vietnam war and nuclear threat that made that obvious; today the evidence is dramatically starker.
While we can rightly question double standards on violence and virus spreading when it comes to BLM protests and we can rightly look at how the protestors become political pawns and currency in media narratives- and have made near zero impact on national politics as we elected the architect of racism Biden and the architect of racist prosecuting Harris - Marcuse is correct when he says No, just voting and assembling peacefully and writing op eds in a liberal pluralistic framework is not enough. Breaking the law, uprising, shaking up business as usual and throwing sand in the gears is a big part of what is needed. In Marcuses time the anti-protesters claimed the liberal tradition had established channels that needed to be respected, but thank god activists didn't respect them because we gained more freedom and humanity from their willingness to revolt. Without street revolt and the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement we would have nuked southeast asia ignored poverty and racism at home and be much worse as a nation and world. That was the line Marcuse stood on when critiquing the hypocrisy of a liberal tradition that would keep people off the streets during a genocidal war. In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment. They do it for the wrong reasons and they promote anti-freedom and let the corporate economy off the hook, but the insurrectionary impulse today is a symptom of the established liberal tradition blocking genuine awakening, genuine realize that yes the media lie and yes politicians are corrupt and no business and usual is not the way forward. Of course the fox TV and newsmax and qanon are trash but if we offer a weak liberal tradition instead, just vote democrat and be glad we are making headway in the culture wars, we are just endorsing a status quo that needs overthrow, not functioning.
It's heartening to see one of my favorite journalists take a second more measured look after stumbling with a self acknowledged angry first pass. Matt has always had the courage to break through the tribalism and see the deeper failings, a quality the New Left and Marcuse brought at a time when the entire political spectrum was pro war and pro nuclear weapons and pro going slow on racism and poverty. Matt seems to share a real affinity with this original New Left spirit. Disagreeing on the American tradition and where it fits in is a more legitimate debate than trying to box Marcuse where he doesn't belong. Thanks Matt for stepping up and having the honesty to look more deeply and to recognize that a hot take and anger don't need to be your final word.
"In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment."
Please do keep going.
"They do it for the wrong reasons"
What would be the right reasons?
What are the right reasons for wanting to spit on the US establishment?
Why, it’s whatever the anointed enlightened ones say it is of course.
The Critical Theorists just wanted Americans to enjoy all the same freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
Only Lukacs sided with the Soviets. The rest of the Frankfurt School disowned him. They recognized the failures of both Marxism and capitalism but the importance of continuing to think critically to keep totalitarianism from happening again. They would have been happy, like Bernie Sanders, to make America more like Sweden.
Yes, I watched the debate and was impressed by the substance and civility. Meanwhile, my respect for Matt as a journalist went from 10 on a scale of 10 to an 11.
[Nigel Tufnel voice] "This one goes to 12."
“ He wrote in Repressive Tolerance about the uselessness of submitting information to “the people” in any jumble of “contesting opinions,” because doing so implies that “the people are capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.” “
I think we’re far more at the point of a majority of Americans understanding “the uselessness of submitting information to ‘the Government’ in any jumble of contesting policies, because doing so implies that “the Government is capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
I know that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns, and attempts to inform local government officials about aspects of policy matters they have not considered, and have no interest in ever considering. They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants. So the effort is useless.
«after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns [...] in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants»
Why should they pay any attention to people who want them to make decisions for free, when there are people who are prepared to pay large sums for them?
You have then two options: change the system so that it is no longer pay-per-play (good luck with that!), or find ways to pay for decisions to be made on the basis of "issue research, public information", which is what the labor unions of old did. My usual quote from an interview with Ralph Nader:
“RALPH NADER: Do you want me to go through the history of the decline and decadence of the Democratic Party? I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.
The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money.
Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area? And they did.”
The image I have is of the "New Democrats" in the 90's - they were tired of eating hot dogs with Joe Hardhat at the local diner - they saw the Reps eating pate de foie gras at the Ritz Carlton and decided they wanted some of that ....
Agreed. Obama, from law review editor to state senator to post-presidency, has shown to be much more interested in celebrity and the trappings of power than actually doing hard work that improves people's lives.
A quote posted by another commenter from a 2001 book ("Class Notes" by Adolph Reed), showing that he has been entirely consistent since well before achieving national prominence:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.”
Animal Farm anyone?
Two legs better.
Bringing things full circle, here's some short, required reading, from what was intended to be the intro to Animal Farm (but wasn't usually published in the West). In case anyone has yet to run across it.
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/
(read the whole thing!)
:D
"They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants."
Yeah, this.
Everybody I know who is politically active and trying to organize at the city/county level is just exhausted. I hate to be a defeatist, but damn, it's ugly. I can't blame anyone for quitting when they lose over and over again.
I'm involved in hyper-local politics. We're currently doing this: https://billmoyers.com/story/when-a-community-says-no-to-big-oil/
We very well might have convinced local elected leadership - leaders we ourselves installed, and just enough of them to make a bare majority) - to shut it down.
But yes, it is beyond exhausting, dealing with what some call the "politrixters".
Thanks for the link.
“Box town is 99% black with a high % of home ownership…They want to build an oil pipeline through this historic neighborhood. Why?”
Why indeed. Corporations seem to dislike it when you own your property outright instead of having a note with a bank.
Eminent domain - in the name of a "public good" which the takers have the right to define ....
They PUBLICLY said that neighborhood was "the path of least resistance" !!!
And Memphis has the largest supply of pristine aquifer water in the world, and:
"Memphis has a dense urban population near faults capable of producing major earthquakes.
A high probability of a moderate earthquake in the near future"
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/urban/memphis/
And this path runs right over a known WEAK spot in the aquifer!
It is just bonkers for any politician to allow this.
I've spent my entire career fighting agency-industry corruption; it is endemic in ag and wildlife sectors; in the latter, industry tells government what to do.
It’s kinda always been like that with periods with the occasional honest person somehow getting in power and then they are cockblocked, destroyed or they give up.
We won't talk or vote or protest our way out of this for sure.
To petition the government is pathetic at this point.
That's the victim begging the predator for mercy.
On the other hand....when the other side is 0.5 steps from running to the last plane out and only wants to steal as much as they can while they still can.... we can't quite call that 'hopeful' but open runaway thievery might be telling, yes?
Because all social progress is based on the ability to produce more with less labor, the masses are intelligent enough to see that we can not continue to expand in this way indefinitely. Having most of the population unable to purchase would have doomed US earlier but the private business sector no longer needs US to purchase they have the whole rest of the world because they were systematically given them the US technology to produce what we used to produce here for less there.
You are correct. The government is planning to do what is diametrically opposed to a free society, simply pay everyone to stay at home until they have no capitol or worth and then hire us back at the new going 2nd world rate and the whole world will be second world rate... ultimate equality.
You will no longer decide where you work or what you want to do and will have no capitol to start your OWN business because the government will OWN all business.
"We have to update the global rules of the road, and we have to do it in a way that maximizes benefits for everyone, because it’s overwhelmingly in our interest that China prosper, that Mongolia prosper. We have to " level the playing field.”
“You mean, Mr. Biden, you are more concerned about making sure China and Mongolia prosper than American workers?"
https://www.worldviewweekend.com/news/article/8-tenets-new-world-order-revealed-and-every-one-them-ballot-nov-3
This is what the uneducated MEGAS saw.
" The present pandemic is a “golden opportunity” for radical change. And if Al Gore, Prince Charles, the elites, and the rest of the World Economic Forum can convince enough people that attempting to stop climate change is also worth dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control, then radical – and catastrophic – change is exactly what we’re going to get."
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/504499-introducing-the-great-reset-world-leaders-radical-plan-to
“ The core idea of Repressive Tolerance is that one can build freedom by way of unfreedom, and this strikes me as an idea that’s not just very unlikely to be correct, but deeply un-American. It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Great writing Matt. Elequently said. God Bless American assholeism!
Marcuse is probably right about the inability of the common man to make decisions about what is right and wrong, if his views are being properly summarized. The main issue with his thesis is: who decides what is valid opinion and what gets censored? I personally don't trust anyone to make that choice, and would rather tolerate the stupid and the demagogues that prey on them.
I'm not sure any human is fit to many decisions on what's right and wrong, especially in absolute terms. But I do believe that most people are capable of discerning what's in their best interest, and their voices deserve to be heard.
*make decisions. Argh I hate auto complete.
I'm guessing that a lot of common men/women were and still are getting the power and water restored in Texas as we thinkers ruminate about whether Marcuse's philosophy that they are just too stupid and unread to be included in a conversation about how best to be ruled is correct.. or shall we allow these ignorant rubes a say and go against this idea? Ahh..let us scratch our chins in the warm glow of our laptops and contemplate this... Hey WTF my power just went out!...Ma!, the power
When did the climate start changing? Prior to that, was it static?
And there have been a couple of minor cooling phases since the big melt. If the eventual consequences were not so dire, the way the media and the masses flock to fabricated threats would be rather funny. Instead, as their attention is focused on the official threat, via government edict, the real threats slip past the masses; until one day they ask, "Gee, when did this happen?".
That goes against AFM guidelines.
Texas relies on wind-generated power more than any other state in the U.S., and that was a major source of grid instability. In other words, they went too far appeasing the climate change believers, and that's what caused this mess.
That’s what Abbott and his fellow politicians are saying, but there is reporting that the electric council decided not to spend money on winterizing any of its power generators, wind, gas, or coal. The gas generators froze first. The wind generators do come with winterizing packages, but Texas didn’t buy them.
https://mailchi.mp/gregpalast/texas-gets-layd
Thanks SH. Interesting article, especially with a debate about Marcuse going on in the background!
Hmmm - I read somewhere that wind is a minor source of power in Texas ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas
Wow, never would've guessed Texas was far and away the most progressive state in our country in actually implementing wind power instead of just talking about it endlessly
Lol.. my post wasn’t really about Tx specifically (circumstances there just fit at the moment)but anywhere that needs “common” people to do things that many others that fancy themselves to be intellectually superior can’t or won’t do. Telling people like that they don’t have the same rights to free speech or a contrary political opinion because they’re too dumb and well, you’re just better at making those decisions for them.. well, as T Sowell said “It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you don’t stop and think”
Listen, I know it's arrogant to tell them they can't speak freely or do what they want politically, but I think my initial post covered that. I'm not going to pretend they aren't stupid to make someone feel better, though. They're fucking dumb. Dumb in the city - the arrogance of those is a sight to behold, so convinced they have the right answers - and dumb in the country.
I also think religion is stupid but I don't spend a lot of time telling people that. People get to have their own illusions. It is a similar situation - the organized nature of it has certain benefits for society, but the whole fairytale metaphysics aspect of it is bunk.
"Marcuse is probably right about the inability of the common man to make decisions about what is right and wrong"
disagree
"I personally don't trust anyone to make that choice, and would rather tolerate the stupid and the demagogues that prey on them."
agree
I think that is Matt's point, in our system, the only way to arrive at a decision is to allow people a voice and to trust that enough ideas get through the filters in place. Because capital requires us to spend money to make profits, they have to at least pretend to listen --- it is in these spaces where change is born.
I'm ok with disagreeing with you on the first point. I put a qualifier in there "probably". I'm not feeling good about my fellow man today, but another day, i'll wax poetic on the common American.
Perhaps you contain multitudes!
Back in the 90s I ran a small book typography business in New York. If you've ever run a business, you know there's three problems: 1) Getting the work, 2) Doing the work, 3) Getting paid for the work. If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be.
I had a range of clients. Some paid like clocks. Some fought a bit. Some seemed to think paying was for little people.
The worst were the "liberals". I remember one (who I won't mention) who ran a small press built on family money and published the kind of books humanists/leftist/progressives would love. I'd work my rear off on a project and send an invoice. Nothing would happen. I'd call. Talk to the office manager. Nothing. Six months would go by. Nothing. Then somehow a check would materialize. I needed the business and the money. So I endured the cycle as best I could.
The office manager was another liberal humanist from an Eastern women's college. The cafe/literary type who reads books for a living. When she left the job after a year or so they owed her half a year of back pay. She took them to small claims court. hahah.
The business book publishers paid like clocks. There you go.
I knew a old-school Brooklyn guy who ran a small print shop downtown. He understood my payment problems. He offered to put me in touch with someone who could visit an office and rough somebody up. No kidding! He was serious.
That's life in the streets. Everybody wants justice. Everybody wants fairness. Everybody wants empathy. Everybody wants love.
But too few give it. You get a lecture instead. And when it's time to get paid, you don't even get that. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. When you've mastered that, tell us how you did it. That would be worth listening to.
"If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be."
I learned this as a damn' runt paperboy and I wasn't even running the business. Broadly, there were two categories of customers; the "clocks," as you call them, and those who pretended they weren't home when you were trying to cash the bill.
How rare- speech countered with civil, even affable, speech. The Marcuse piece rankled because it exposed, somewhat muscularly, the hypocrisy of would-be redeemers waging war against inalienable rights and certain, large groups of people. No worries: ever so democratically, they will choose panels of unelected intersectionals to manage us.
This is about power. Otherwise, especially given the state of the globe, see concentration camps, China, no one can be dumb enough to take a hatchet to successful Western civilization and associated freedoms. If anyone is, it’s a breakdown in basic comprehension, the effluent of an untested, nasty ideology that allows undisguised gender and racial animus to masquerade as intellectualism. DiAngelo or Kendi vs. Locke, Voltaire, Einstein, King, even Chomsky. The dumbness is compounded by its circularity: anyone who objects to the racket is, of course, dumb.
How else to explain allowing a newspaper magazine project written by non-historian intersectional activists and deemed a “falsification” of American history by major, and liberal, U.S. historians, to override hundreds of years of actual scholarship. No worries here, either. In a mind-bending gesture of conceit, the Times magazine editor, also not an historian, decided that he would judge its merits. There is plenty of information –Tulsa, for example – that we Americans need to learn and recognize, and welcome. That’s not what this is about.
Indeed. Have not the greatest atrocities of mankind been done “for the greater good”?
Every would be authoritarian or totalitarian thinks they are on the right side of history (see, Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao). When you have total and absolute conviction that you and you alone have the angels on your side that’s when atrocities ensue. “Sometimes we have to break some eggs to make an omelette”.