I think what I knew as “liberalism” is vanishing. I watched “Mighty Ira” with my wife a few months back. She is very smart and well educated. But she is also 14 years younger than me. I was surprised by her reaction to the documentary— she was “uncomfortable” with Ira’s commitment to free speech, and she was “much more sympathetic” to the Holocaust survivor who opposed Ira’s free speech absolutism. I realized at that point that there really is a generational difference in attitude toward the ideas of “liberalism.” It confounds me.
Garbage in, garbage out.The younger generations weren't taught why "I don't agree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" matters. And not just because censorship can be used to silence marginalized groups, but because marginalized groups are now using it to silence everyone else. Liberalism lost sight of the fact that everyone's rights are equally important. My friend's daughters have never heard of the Magna Carta. Civil rights were huge for liberals, the assassination of Kennedy and King and Kennedy devastating. When the Democrats' shifted orientation to minorities to the seeming exclusion of others, alienated blue collar workers flocked to Reagan, then Clinton gained power. NAFTA devastated blue collar workers of all stripes,and the environment, and killed off the Rust Belt. When in the Senate, Al Gore had sponsored legislation outlawing archaic steel- jaw traps. As vice- president, he reversed himself and sent Cantor to fight the EU ban on leghold trapped skins. Disillusioned doesn't cover it. When the takeover of academia was complete, the CT-infused Democrat base doubled down on identity. To be fair, I must add that in real time Giuliani's changes in the city were needed. As a kid driving into the city for work in a tiny car, I was several times accosted while sitting at a light waiting to get into the Lincoln Tunnel. Once, at 10 at night, five guys started rocking the car and wouldn't let me go when the light changed. So I gunned it and ran over their feet. My friend was mugged four times. All that fear stopped on a dime, when Giuliani got in. Human beings were on the receiving end of bad, violent, or threatening behavior, and they-- we -- mattered too. It is now blazingly apparent that Democrat- run cities degrade the rule of law, without which cities and ultimately society breaks down. We're seeing the complete takeover of the Democrats by racialist radicals. The liberals are now illiberal, the ACLU is infected, guys like Glasser are dinosaurs. Multi- racial volunteer groups like FAIR are trying to rise to the challenge of defending speech and fighting coerced ideological oaths. The Republicans are feckless, worrying instead about masks, which they view as the civil liberty issue of our time. You can't get any dumber. God help us.
A lot of people weren't alive or didn't live in NYC or other big cities during the 70's or 80's. They can't comprehend how dangerous it really was. I get brushed off when I try to explain what it was like with looks of dismay and accused of "exaggeration". I would love to put people in a time machine and zap them back to !977-78 Times Square just after dark to see how long they could last before begging me to bring them back.
Maybe your wife sees that a lot of liberal ideas that you remember so fondly are now on the cusp of being used by some very illiberal forces. This isn’t the same country that existed when Earl Warren was running the Supreme Court.
Letting a couple of Nazis march seems like much less of a threat when you have confidence that your government is keeping a wary eye on them. After experiencing Trump, formerly liberal voters are far less trusting that a Nazi march isn’t a more serious threat.
Which just means that you fell for the propaganda of the DNC. Functionally, Trump was a 90's moderate Democrat. His actual political positions are nearly indistinguishable even though his style differed. As such, he tore away blue collar supporters from the Democrat base. The DNC was sandwiched between their new, shiny identity politics which tolerate no dissent and the loss of a significant part of their base. So they chose to try to make Trump completely unpalatable. Everything he did would be Hitleresque even when it wasn't or even when it was a policy position they had held themselves in the not so distant past.
There were plenty of reasons to oppose Trump and his policies, but they chose to fight him with lies and bombast. The Steele dossier, Russiagate, the "very fine people" lie, etc...
It’s very frustrating in that it appears to “always” be the lie that is chosen.
They make concentration camps seem like a poorly planned, over crowded summer camp and Hitler a buffoon scores of purple haired man bun cool kids could take out with a zinger on Twitter.
First of all, the government does not “let” anyone march, the right of the people to peaceably assemble is specified in the Constitution, and there is no political litmus test for which people are “allowed” to do so.
Second, do you really believe that a meaningful number of Trump voters are Nazis? If so, I would be interested to know, out of the roughly 75 million people who voted for Trump, what percentage do you believe are Nazis? And also, were those Nazis also around when Obama was elected in 2012, or did they magically appear during Obama’s second term?
Many people I know voted against Trump, not for Biden. The fringe is exploiting that anti-vote to “transform” the US. I didn’t vote for either, because I knew a puppet Biden win would embolden censors and take silencing to new heights.
This is proof positive that people absolutely suck at judgements about probability of outcomes. It's the same reason people buy lottery tickets. Voting for the status quo is what everyone wants. Why? Because any attempt to change things makes matters worse, every time. Now some senile dude with a team of totalitarians is going to remake our lives with a one vote majority.
Progressives think they have been forced to dilute (and by dilute I mean carpet bomb) their traditionally held liberal ideals BECAUSE TRUMP, not seeing that we all got Trump BECAUSE PROGRESSIVES.
At this point, my vote is a perversion of Buckley's theory. Instead of the most electable conservative, i'll vote for the most electable monkey wrench, left or right. Whatever pains the elites, that's my vote.
Could not agree more, unfortunately I don't think we will get another billionaire, egotistical enough to absorb the slings and arrows,with a high q rating.
Let's not forget that trump won the nomination at least partly because hillary preferred him as an opponent.
I just finished a book on Antifa, a sympathetic history, Mark Brady, and in the first paragraph Antifa was self defined as an illiberal oppositional force to fascism. Nazis are illiberal forces-but so are the far left, by self definition. Groups like BLM or the msm types who parrot their agenda refuse to acknowledge this fact. If a group self defines as Marxist, they are specifically rejecting liberal democracy and democratic norms/institutions.
Carroll Quigley, bill clinton's favorite professor and mentor at Georgetown,and also official historian of the CFR said
"Hitlers economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions."
Meaning hitlers real crime was kicking out the banksters.
Churchill said explicitly,we aren't at war with hitler,or with national socialism,but with the entire economic might of germany.
Go read jewish historian Brian mark rigg's book about hitlers 150k jewish soldiers, including 10-20 generals and admirals.
Go read Israeli historians martin van crevelds book called the fairer sex and see how well germany treated it's women.
Realize britain bombed german civilians for months before germany retaliated in kind.
By 1939 hitler had killed maybe 1,000 people( night of the longknives, first pogrom)
Stalin had killed 2-20 million depending upon who's source you believe.
World jewry declared war on germany in 1933( google it)
Germany in the interwar period was arguably the most debauched place on earth, largely due to hyperinflation, prostitution was so prevalent that they had something like 33 different kinds of prostitutes, and the hyperinflation was largely due to the reparations imposed at versailles, nevermind that germany was the last to mobilize.
And ww1 was largely because the british saw Germany's railroad to baghdad as a threat to the british navy's high seas hegemony.
Google operation keelhaul,where after the war,US and british soldiers rounded up between 1-5 million people who fled Russia ,during the war,loaded them onto cattle cars,and sent them back to stalin to be either gulaged of killed
The british invented the concentration camp during the boer war in south africa
Go find out what britain's two opium wars with the Chinese were about( the right if the british/sassoon family ) to dump opium into china ,no matter the consequences.
Churchill repeatedly told bomber harris to use chemical weapons against german civilians,to which he refused,not really out of morality but out of fear that he not churchill would be blamed,after the war.
Go read up on all the american mrngele's, like cornelius rhoads in puerto rico, or the horrible experiments done on phillipinos by american medical doctors
Go read Ron unz's article at unz.com about all the cooperation between zionists in israel and nazi germany
Google havarra /transfer agreement
Go read theodore herzl the inventor of zionism ,talk about how antisemitism would have to be ginned up to get any appreciable number of jews to move.
Well, the country those old-style liberals knew was one with segregationist governors, dogs and batons loosed on peaceful civil rights marchers, judges and juries that were guaranteed to let off church bombers and lynchers — and they often knew a thing or two about real Nazis. The idea that we face some kind of new threat since 2016 that justifies suppression of bad guys’ speech is, I’m afraid, TDS.
You honestly believe that the entire center of US power resides in one building, who's occupants meet around 100 days per year? An idiot mob charged into a building to take selfies to post online, scream and yell and break things - nothing even remotely resembling a coup.
Trump wrote on 1/5: "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." It would have been an attempted coup if Pence had not counted certain states.
(A bare URL is a URL cited as a reference for some information without any accompanying information about the linked page. In other words, it is just the text out of the URL bar of your browser copied and pasted. It is subject to link rot.
I have always described myself as a Jew who would march with Hitler in defense of free speech, and it was Glasser who put me on that path. And, I certainly would have stood in Charlotte with the torch carriers and "fine people" against the Nazis of Antifa.
But I do think you are wrong regarding the TV and film of the seventies and eighties and how conservatives and liberals were portrayed. This was the era of NYC coming out of one of the worst urban decays, with zero conservatives putting them in that position. Remember the Guardian Angles? Or, on the west coast, SF had the street patrols, gay men who were taking back the night, as that city, the city of my father's birth had gotten so shitty. As it is currently.
There was a reason that liberalism was portrayed as weak and damaging; we were suffering through the remains of the bad policy that it left in its wake. And make no mistake that I am a conservative, I come from an old Jewish Berkeley family, was a Democrat when that was the only way to convey how important free speech, due process, and other civil liberties were.
We have to remember that no matter how important liberalism may seem, it does need to have its excesses tempered with the other half of our politics. As we are currently seeing. And yes, it took me decades to learn that lesson.
Actually, I think it's more accurate to describe them as the "fascists of antifa". As their tactics are more easily and recognizably fascist/proto-fascist, while Nazism represents essentially the platform of an entire national government, and full totalitarian and genocidal state. Antifa's tactics of "informal uniforms", attacking often with the tools at hand, agitating for violence, concealing identities, insisting lack of specific affiliation with a particular party or government--all these things are more fascist or revolutionary socialist or even anarchist than Nazi.
Pre-Hitler, the fascists, or National Socialists, or street thugs, or whatever you want to call them, we a huge menace on the streets of Germany. And though they did develop a leader who sharpened them into the statist machine that became the Nazis, I don't think it is far-fetched to refer to these street thugs who are LARPing Kristallnacht as such. We could also refer to them as Night Riders, after the early Klan members, but too many would think you are talking about Hasselhoff.
Using Nazi point people in the direction to see what these little shits (another appropriate term) really are and what direction they are leaning toward.
The woke really do resemble Nazis in many ways. It's not a perfect metaphor but certainly a lot closer than BUSH=NAZI or the Trump screeds. The focus on race is one key element, the totalitarian viewpoint is another.
Again, Nazi is very specific (and over-used). Fascist or anarchist or revolutionary or some combo term (proto-fascist, anarchorevolutionary, identity agitators) might work better. But antifa is basically becoming the shorthand for its own tactics and superficial utopian/dystopian goals.
You know something else, one of the dudes I knew back when was a survivor of the camps. Charlie was his name, had the number tattooed on his arm still, never removed it. Used to pull out the glass Manischewitz bottle filled with ice water every time I came over. Charlie died in the 80s. He would have had a very dim view of what is going on today. Like my grandfather, he was of the opinion that there was no difference between totalitarians, they were all evil.
They had to deal with a street fighting racialist totalitarian force that gained political power and got their fever dreams realized. They'd understand. You, on the other hand...
Matt, you have just explained perfectly why I was on the left in the 80s, in college and law school and I'm on the right now. I'd argue that I haven't changed that much. On critical issues, the sides have switched.
Disagree that the right & left have switched sides. The broader left in America has simply moved to the right since the 80s.
There is not party for people who hold actual liberal values. I'd argue Bernie's success in 16 and 20 was because many of us saw someone who actually *had* some of those traditional liberal values that for a 40 year old like me, simply haven't existed in my voting lifetime.
You want to argue the national Democratic party has abandoned these values? You'll get no argument from me. But this idea that the party who created "free speech zones" to protest the Iraq War, who tortured Arabs as policy, who has made curtailing voting access a national platform, etc. etc. --- the idea that *those* guys are the true liberals? I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous on its face.
You kinda had me going on the torture and free speech zones, which I agree with you on, but that was a long time ago, and a whole lot has changed since then.
But requiring voter identification and more security for mail-in voting is "curtailing voter access? Now who's ridiculous? Take a look at global standards on voting. The election run last year here was much looser than allowed in most developed countries.
The Georgia law shortens vote by mail periods, reduces ballot drop boxes, shortens run-offs, and for some reason disallows people from being brought water while they wait in line. Does that sound like they're trying to *expand* voting access or limit it after they lost a few elections to a better organized opponent?
It's of course not just Georgia. The Wisconsin GOP, for example, is pushing a bill so they'd split their electoral college numbers. In this last election, in spite of more Wisconsinites (Wisconsonians? whatever) voting for Biden, Trump would get 6 of 10 electoral votes here. Another victory for democracy.
I could go on. And the voting access/voting rights examples was just one of many blatantly illiberal maneuvers pushed by the GOP on a national level. Just remember the amount of high-level GOP pols pushing the idea that the election was "stolen" just a few months ago. The Roberts court is dominated by the right and has enshrined corporate personhood.
Again: the point here is that your assertion that the right and left had switched was silly. They haven't. The right in America has moved more right. So has the left. It blows.
Read the law and comment on that rather than making out-of-context criticisms. You're probably right, it shortens vote by mail periods. Vote by mail as implemented in Georgia destroyed audit integrity. It's still more than twice as long as deep-red New Jersey's. Ballot drop boxes are equalized by population in precincts, voting districts, counties. In 2020 private individuals paid for extra ballot drop boxes only in areas favoring Democrats. Sounds like an improvement in equity.
Nothing prohibits people from bringing water to people in line; it prohibits it being provided by politicians and their advocates from a distance less than a bunch of yards. It's closing a loophole exploited to allow politicking otherwise illegal. But I think you already realized that. Shorter run-offs sound great to me. I don't understand the downside. Perhaps you could wokesplain it to me.
Dividing electoral votes along congressional district lines brings power closer to the people. The so-called bosses of the politicians. I can understand why you're scared of that. Don't be frightened, just walk toward the light. And use it to read the law instead of spreading misinformation about it.
Each of the last two presidential elections has left half the country distrusting the system. In 2016 the result was protested non-stop by #THERESISTANCE and allies for more than four years, with a vow to prevent Trump from governing. They succeeded. In 2020 unconstitutional changes in election laws by states without legislative approval, partisan barring of poll observers, providing immensely greater access to voting, but only in Democrat precincts, a money advantage of five-to-one, a united Big Tech blockading news unfavorable to Democrats, a near-lockstep upending of the playing field by
print media in Democrats' favor, forcing use of mail-out unrequested ballots and ballot harvesting (both of which destroy the audit integrity), resulted in Biden winning but Democrats inexplicably losing seats in the House. Not seen before. The half of the country that didn't trust the election's fairness was told to sit down and shut up, the President was impeached on charges never remotely proved, our capital city in military occupation, with members of the military accused of racism and sexism based only on the color of their skin - I accept Biden as my President, and I never voted for Trump. I want election laws and processes examined not for fraud, but for vulnerability to fraud. I'm now labeled a racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted right-wing bigoted Trump supporter. And here I was under the delusion that I was a lifelong liberal. Today's level of intolerance by the authoritarian left comes to mind every night while changing for bed, showing the scars from police batons incurred during civil rights marches in the 1960s. The sit-ins were no fun, either. But, don't take my word for it. According to cancel culture, Obama was an oppressor. Quickly, look up Martin Niemoeller before he's disappeared.
Lol. Please post the parts of the Georgia law about drop boxes and early voting periods. I'd suggest you read the law yourself and not rely on someone else telling you what it says. That would cut down a bit on misinformation being posted and insure other commenters don't view you as a liar.
Since Carter, the Democratic Party has moved openly and explicitly to the Right, chasing the money - Clinton was perfectly clear about that. In the process, they've driven the Republicans, who know they have to maintain a difference, into Crazyville. Good strategy, I guess, enormously lucrative, but it's left a gaping void on the Left, which the Green Party has been trying to fill, so far with no luck.
On issues, the majority of Americans are far, far to the left of the Dems. As Thomas Frank pointed out, they simply have no one to vote for, as long as they accept the 2-Party, so they've taken to voting on "cultural" issues - which, conveniently, the plutocrats don't care about. So the 2-Party can go on piling up its filthy lucre while going on about God, guns, and LBGTQ - some of which are justice issues I care about, but they're being used to distract everybody from the massive theft o f the economy.
«The Georgia law shortens vote by mail periods, reduces ballot drop boxes, shortens run-offs, and for some reason disallows people from being brought water while they wait in line.»
I will start to believe that the Democratic or Republican really mean it when they want to improve election when either proposes something like:
* Frequent pervasive state-funded proactive registration of voters.
* A $20 compensation for taking the time to get a voter identity card, with mass mailings and even proactive teams going out to ask people to get them.
* A $10 compensation for those taking the time to vote in person, to discourage easily "managed" postal votes.
* Lots of state funded voting places open for two days, at least one of them a weekend day, so there are no queues.
Most civilized countries do most of these things, or even make non-voting punished by a fine or worse.
I want voter ID laws and everyone to have an ID. Neither party will ever suggest this though; they never take a common sense stand to end wedge issues. They need wedge issues to distract us from the substantial issues.
“ because many of us saw someone who actually *had* some of those traditional liberal values that for a 40 year old like me, simply haven't existed in my voting lifetime.”
While I agree with you that some people may have seen some of those traditional values, I’m more of the belief now that most Bernie supporters were there only for what it could get THEM - particularly health care and a higher minimum wage (which more directly impacted his younger supporters) - and not really based on values or principles. In that way they fit perfectly into the “new liberal” mentality that was part of the counter counter-revolution that got its start somewhere in the 70s, built its strength in the Reagan years, and was then solidified by Clinton.
One of the things I have found interesting in Adam Curtis’ films, and particularly in the reactions of people who hate them, is the resistance to the idea that there are actually ideas, principles, values behind actions - even if unknown to the actor.
«the resistance to the idea that there are actually ideas, principles, values behind actions - even if unknown to the actor.»
That point seems to me both overdone and useful because:
* Overdone because politics is primarily about interests, not ideas, and usually the ideas are chosen to support those interests. And even when interests are not the primary driver, what matters for most people is outcomes rather than principles, and the principles are chosen to drive those outcomes.
* However many people value ideas and principles, even if when they collide with their interests and preferred outcomes the latter win. In particular I think that simplistic theology is mostly “behind actions - even if unknown to the actor”.
Two relevant quotes as decoration:
OW Holmes: “If you’re weak on the facts and strong on the law, pound the law. If you’re weak on the law and strong on the facts, pound the facts. If you’re weak on both, pound the table.”
JM Keynes: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
The Keynes quote is really good. I take issue with your first bullet point:
“Overdone because politics is primarily about interests, not ideas, and usually the ideas are chosen to support those interests.”
I’m not sure how it can be said that politics is “primarily” about interests and not ideas. We might find ourselves in a chicken and egg situation - maybe even to the Robert Sapolsky level of questioning any free will or any meaningful statement on acting on interest or principle. :)
“And even when interests are not the primary driver, what matters for most people is outcomes rather than principles, and the principles are chosen to drive those outcomes.”
I don’t disagree with this, and think it is in keeping with the intent of what I wrote - and the Keynes quote you provided. And I see a lot of problems with this even for pragmatic/outcome oriented people. It results in little victories, skirmish and battle victories, at the expense of the war. This is not to say that you don’t sometimes take the small victory! Not at all. It’s that doing that too often can, and does, lead to losing track or important “whys.”
Certainly people vote for a variety of reasons and I'm sure some of his voters wanted a higher minimum wage because they were making said minimum wage. I just don't think that the desire to stop being taken advantage of makes them selfish or anything. Wanting a fair shake in our economy is a pretty reasonable reason to vote for a politician. I personally voted for him in 16 and 20 for very different reasons.
(Related: the new Curtis doc is quite good and really thought provoking---really enjoyed it.)
I don’t disagree. And I certainly don’t disagree with people voting to not be taken advantage of - even if it is a single issue. I’m just not so certain that a lot of his voters won’t quickly abandon their concern about say, minimum wage, as soon as they get along in their careers and start making more money. I see a lot of similarities between the Boomer and the current younger people - seeing another hippie to yuppie transformation isn’t hard for me to imagine.
Bernie supporters don't care about american empire,they just want s bigger slice( not arguing anybody else's supporters are any better other than maybe Tulsi)
It’s that lack of concern about empire, at a meaningful and committed level, that is one of my greatest concerns. Beyond the scope of Bernie supporters I’m seeing more and more approval of empire, and not just by the USA, from people who have traditionally been anti-imperialism/militarism advocates.
There's a big difference between the Skokie thing and what's going on now. Nazis in Skokie were a very unpopular, extreme fringe element whose ideas were totally rejected by the vast majority of Americans then as they would be now. So fighting for their right to march may have been pro-liberty in the abstract, but hardly anyone would have been directly injured had they been stopped.
Today you have establishment media and major colleges censoring not extreme, fringe views but views that are held by sizable percentages, sometimes even majorities, of the public. I don't have to list examples. That's not tolerating unpopular opinions, it's suppressing *popular* opinions. Whole different thing. Not a civil rights issue. A political, consent-of-the-governed issue, which calls for a lot more than some kind of revitalized ACLU.
I think that Tender Morsel is just denoting that the scale is on a completely different level. The point is definitely not wrong even if you are right as well.
"But the team was disappeared, “kidnapped” to Los Angeles by owner Walter O’Malley, described by Glasser as one of history’s three great villains, the other two being Hitler and Genghis Khan (“I've always rooted for the San Andreas Fault to take care of the Dodgers in Los Angeles ever since,” Glasser quips)."
I guess Ira never met Larry Summers, Jabba the Hut of economists....
Matt's writings here remind of three takeaways:
A. Purposeful construction of the left-right divide over the last 40 years in this country has led us to react to individual feelings/reactions instead of how the substance of the issue may be used against us.
B. I am reminded of how big the Hidden Argument in our daily lives really is (Do we believe that people are smart enough to enact democracy and find ways to manage conflict or do we buy into the media narrative and elite agenda to make/to believe people are stupid and need a separate class of wealthy assholes to tell us what to do). This is the single biggest conflict in our society NOT being discussed. Thanks Matt.
C. The anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s has been silenced (via assassination, consumerism, distraction, and internal disruptions of large groups being dismantled by individualism and neoliberal policies).
If we want to any kind of change we'll have to address the best ways to challenge the current regimes (left or right). And we need to move away from the Bullshit Mountain patriotism of love this country or leave it type of ignorance. We need to stop glorifying "freedom" in a country where democracy is being squashed by a PMC bent on interviewing to the be the elites microphones and stenographers.
Point C. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of MLK’s assassination - you will hear nothing from any mainstream Blue about his anti-military, anti-imperialism message. And notice how the Blues (sorry, I’m just tired of trying to distinguish and clarify “liberal”, “left”, etc.) are more and more whitewashing China’s imperialistic/militaristic overtones and actions. The same things they would criticize from the US, is okay from China. (Of course social media scores and control is super-great for both countries!). But nothing pointed this out more than watching how the Blues supported most of Trump’s foreign policy in militaristic and imperialist endeavors, best seen in the Two Party standing ovation for Juan Guaidó in Venezuela but also support for the Bolivian (*cough* CIA) coup), increasing Trump’s military budgets, etc. There were some mostly facade disagreements over non-action points, but it is amazing how comfortable they were with most of this “unhinged existential threat’s” foreign policy.
And point C. *Siiiiiiiiiigh* I’m not sure that enough of the populace is capable of governing itself at this point and participating meaningfully and competently in a democracy. If they aren’t too stupid they are too ignorant - and willingly ignorant. It is not just that there is way too much Twitter or sound-bite level “comprehension” and discussion, it’s that the understanding that this superficial understanding is NOT enough isn’t there - and this is NOT exclusive to any age group or generation or Blue/Red side.
The question is - how do we get more people to smarten up quickly before the elites are making all the decisions and the “democracy” is even more of a sham than it is now?
We cannot really control "other" people. That's what distinguishes us from the elites. We have to find ways to interrupt their noise/propaganda and consistently challenges their lies. They have some problems too - and will make mistakes. People have to pay attention and we have to find ways to connect with people we do not agree with on every subject. The more people who put pressure on the system, outcomes, the more likely that some of their weaknesses be exposed. CoVid is a prime example.
Democracy is something each generation has to fight for, or it gets subsumed by the corporate state. The 1920's are a very good example - and there are lessons to learn from the 60s too. Mostly, what we can do is help people avoid propaganda, get into the substance of power's aims and resist in ways that cause errors for elites.
The problem with the agenda of getting more people to smarten up -- as you put it, is that you do not want to replicate the authoritarian that people are stupid. There is no easy internet board solution to satiate your question. And in fact, I believe that more struggle, and difficulty is ahead --- I think the idea of hope is overplayed --- as it can co-opted and used against a motivated electorate creating more cynicism. Platitudes indeed. You have any ideas sport?
A is over as long as a controlled media keeps it that way. The lessons Goebbels taught us are still in mind today.
B has a simple answer: no, people are not smart enough, and keeping those who are smart enough under control is child's play for the totalized society.
C is not just silenced, it's dead. And I mean quite literally; I was born in 1969 and those who lived through the 60s as something close to adults are dropping like flies.
There's only one way to overthrow a totalitarian government. It's analogous to that quote about all power growing from the barrel of a gun.
A study of how Mao came to the position he did, or how Lenin did, should be instructive here. It's really, really hard. Hitler benefited from a discredited government most Germans didn't want, but even his path involved prison and many years in the wilderness.
The real question not being asked here is: how do you do this and not end up with another totalized and totalitarian society? That answer is not clear to me.
People are smart enough, the problem is that so many people have been indoctrinated and manipulated by neoliberal propaganda for so long that we create a loop of confirmation that people are stupid. But when we actually study human behavior, what we see are people's need not being met - and using what is in their environment to feel better (bricoleur of sorts). Yes, the public is smart enough for democracy - but we live in a culture that creates crapification for masses and the only the finest cheeses, brunches and wines for the elite. Of course people will aspire to do better, but that gets confused with aligning with the elite and their gnosticism in exchange for a shot at a better life. Its pretty sick. But I am of the belief that people are smarter than we give them credit for... if not we are truly fucked.
"C. The anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s has been silenced (via assassination, consumerism, distraction, and internal disruptions of large groups being dismantled by individualism and neoliberal policies)."
The "anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s" is a hyperreality. It was hyperreality even when it actually took place as a set of performative and self-indulgent delusional movements. That's why today's liberalism seems so shallow and pointless. It's a further abstraction of the base reality, a hyperreality so distant from reality that there is no reality undergirding it and the people involved wouldn't recognize it if they came in contact with it.
Very Adam Curtis. There were some policy victories as well as a much clearer idea of the deep state that Eisenhower warned us about - (cointelpro, assassinations and intelligence community home and abroad, connections between large US corporations and the plunder of Africa, S America etc..). And also, the anti-war movement, while surreal and drug induced, was a form of criticality that our public had not engaged in some time. In fact, it shattered households and ruined relationships -- those who were comfortable backing elite decision-makers and those who knew how incompetent they were. So, your comment is well taken, but I see it as mess of progress and regression.
I was leaning more towards Baudrillard. Curtis is fine but his analyses tend to be too one-note for me in his assumption that capitalism and hyperindividualism is to blame for all the ills of society. Hypernormalization is an inferior conceptualization compared to Baudrillard's hyperreality.
I won't argue that there weren't political wins and losses. My point is primarily that Taibbi's idea of "where have all the liberals gone" is misguided. The same failings that he sees around him today inhabited the liberals of yesteryears. The hedonism. The self-indulgence and self-absorption. The myopia and pettiness. The xenophobia. All that was at the heart of the counterculture along with the good characteristics. The difference is primarily that there were real problems being attacked back in the 60s/70s. Those problems have since been transformed into hyperobjects to perpetuate a forever struggle that can be monetized and support a massive industry of political activism.
When I say that the counterculture was a hyperreality, I mean that it was primarily comprised of middle to upper class people who were well educated pretending and acting out their conceptions of older, authentic conflicts and movements. The Weathermen pretending that they were the Tupamaros, for example. The laughable "back to the earth movement" where city or suburban kids pretended to be farmers and communists. Not really farmers and communists, though. Their fictionalized IDEA of farmers and communists.
From there to today all we've seen is compounding abstraction, with people pretending to act out their IDEA of the counterculture and civil rights movements. But it's not real. None of it is real. On some subconscious level they know that it isn't real and that is why it isn't truly satisfying.
Seen in this way, all the energy liberals pour into society today is simply funneled into a hyperreality, a simulation, a monetized game whose outcome changes nothing authentic because there is nothing authentic for most people to access. All progress and regression is illusion. The worst part is that capitalism itself has become hyperreal. Money is hyperreal. The stock market is hyperreal. Geopolitics is hyperreal.
And the Wachowskis stole the idea for The Matrix from Phillip K. Dick. Heh.
Might have to reflect upon that for a bit - as I can identify with a large part of this disillusionment, but there is something (I cannot quite get to it yet) that is dispiriting in a Nihilistic (there is nothing we can do about this anyway) kind of vibe. Maybe not. Going to reflect for a bit on this one.
Corporatist D “liberals”/Ds don’t even realize what the hell they are getting in bed with vis a vis the new “woke” movement. I just finished reading “Antifa” by Mark Bray, a sympathetic analysis and history of Antifa as a movement, from the 1930s onward. The opening paragraph of the book specifically rejected the liberal consensus on free speech-it said “We reject Voltaire’s notion of I may disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”. Commendable intellectual honesty, but horrifyingly dangerous, and symbolic of the fire that Ds/liberals like to flirt with, w/out understanding the root motivations. Or, as an Antifa type quoted saying later in the book “If you think our attitude about the 1st Amendment is wrong now, just wait until the People’s Revolution”.
Alex P Keaton and Tony Montana-as characters-understood this back in the 80s, with their embrace of Friedman and unabashed capitalist zeal. When Tony Montana said “I kill Communists for fun. For a green card I carve him up real nice”, he is getting to the heart of the matter. The enemy doesn’t play by your rules-and needs to Glasser/baby boom hippy liberals were afraid to look at the true face of leftist thought-and thus act shocked when it’s methods are co-opted by corporations and the State.
I listened to Glasser on Joe Rogan recently and his whining about Trump as an “existential threat” to the nation showed where he and the old liberals minds are at. Being a stereotypical other borough loud moth is a worse crime than coopted cultural Marxism for corporate PR/HR. Noam Chomsky gets it, Ira Glasser doesn’t.
This gets to the heart of much of my fears re the new left. They are rejecting the enlightenment wholesale. There were incredibly great and useful reasons behind the thinking such as free speech; they were putting the pieces back together from the religious wars that wracked Europe, so to speak. And these rights flow from ideas such as that.
With the Nazis of Antifa gaining acceptance on the left and the corresponding damage they are causing to our society, we are seeing a greater need for these ideals. And make no mistake, these are the true morals of our country, and as such need to be upheld at every opportunity. Having congresspeople making vague notions of "hate speech" and that it needs to be looked at, is so fucking offensive that the mere idea of it needs to be gloriously and uproariously laughed out of the commons, while those in favor needs be placed in the figurative pillories.
"Corporatist D “liberals”/Ds don’t even realize what the hell they are getting in bed with vis a vis the new “woke” movement".
Good post. I tend to think they were very conscious of what they were doing, all the way back to the first Clinton administration. He ran on being a centrist democrat, but really the entire power structure, like Matt says, felt they more in common with conservative corporates and could live with the other stuff (as we really turned the corner into Neoliberalism). This is when we really start to see the term 'homo economics' and 'its the economy stupid'. Probably pissed the Bush's and far right off, as he was stepping into their turf. The "woke" movement is something they use as a trident to triangulate groups against one another, as well as a form of Neoliberal political theatre.
Allende was an interesting character, because the Soviet Union was urging him to get brutal to suppress his enemies, and he refused to do it; that helped lead to his own death. He was an honorable man. But you're forgetting people like Abimael Guzman. He killed a lot as it was, but if he'd ever managed to take over Peru, there would have been the biggest bloodbath that continent had ever seen. He was (and far as I know still is, as he sits in prison) an explicit admirer of the Khmer Rouge.
Thank you, Matt. Wonderful piece. Great points about liberalism. However I don't think you get satire - Family Ties was satire. I don't think you get satire at all, actually. We all have our weak points and that seems to me to be yours. You're too damn earnest for your own liberal good. How much stronger liberalism was when it could laugh at themselves. This is why liberalism is dead. We aren't allowed to laugh at our own liberal beliefs and god forbid you do. We need a show like Family Ties now.
Nice, I had forgotten about Al Bundy... I guess the key thing Matt is getting to, though, isn't about TV shows in particular. The key questions are more along the lines of:
Is it liberal to demand that those who have opinions different then you should have economic opportunities closed off to them?
Is it liberal to strive to shut down platforms that offer freer speech simply because you can't exert control over them?
Is it liberal to focus solely on things that might affect minority friends you went to elite colleges with, like not getting Oscars or getting harrassed or assaulted in the streets (both bad, don't get me wrong) to the exclusion of things that affect less privileged minority citizens, like getting killed in crossfire of a gang shooting or sex trafficked to a massage parlor and then shot?
I would argue that these things are clearly not liberal, but they are all "elitist". In the US we have a political myopia caused by the two-party system where we don't have parties that reflect single demographics like a worker's party, we always have coalition parties by default. Historically we've graded them on left-right and a bit on elite versus non-elite. The change now is the Democratic party shift to elitism, and the elite mostly being in a massive social media and media-fueled bubble.
It will last only as long as they can keep the voters distracted or confused. The MSM loses more of its ability to lie every day, as they keep overplaying their hand by more and more. There is enough interest in true liberalism out there, and enough self-interest in the working class, to vote them out of power. Hopefully then they self correct, but we shall see.
I didn’t see the Fox son in Family Ties as the rebel. Rebel signifies a free spirited separation from the norm. Fox’s character couldn’t be farther from a free spirit. He was presented as having hitched his wagon to a far more formulaic and heartless star. He was obviously cast as a quirky goofball who didn’t get what was important in life because he was too ambitious, in a clownish way. He was the butt of all jokes on that show. Sure, he was lovable, but only at times he acted more “liberal,” when we were reminded he still had humanity in him, no doubt thanks to his hippie parents, and despite his right lean, not because of it.
Thank you, Matt, for responding to my comment. As a fan of your writing I'm honored. I think your perspective on 80s tv and movies is interesting but I see that era as still part of an old Hollywood. Having grown up in SoCal I saw Hollywood at that time as made up of narcissists who craved attention and sometimes they make great tv shows and films and gave great performances out of that desire. I think their goal was more to be loved and make money than control the political conversation. I don't see that era of tv and movie makers as calculating. Today they are. It's weird to me that these woke tv shows and movies lay so many eggs, but Hollywood insists on continuing trying to shove their wokeness down our throats. You could say the same thing about ads and magazine covers, like Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit issue. There's a difference between Hollywood responding to the zeitgeist - and trying to control it. The 80s were the former, today is the latter. Thanks again. So delighted to be subscribing to you!
The producer of Family Ties, Gary David Goldberg, you probably already knew this, was born in Brooklyn. He lived in California, I guessed he died there in 2013 - not because of the San Andreas fault though. Interesting threads being weaved in this article.
All in the Family was a great show. And hilarious. While Archie's Place and the Gloria spin-off were just tedious. Jeeze, the quality drop between All in the Family and Archie's Place was precipitous. Norman Lear never got his comedy mojo back after that, either, IMO.
I think you are on to something. The left nowadays acts like every little point of minutiae is an existential struggle against Satan himself, so nothing can be off message, even the truth or humor.
Agree. The strongest people I know have a sense of humor about themselves. They can roast themselves better than anyone. What has frightened me most is the earnestness of liberals. Earnestness is death to true liberalism.
Perfect take. Social humor used to mean "punching up" at the powerful and pompous. Now, because lampooning general archetypes of large groups is verboten (although no single person embodies all archetypes of the group), comedies "punch down," without jokes, at the inept, realistic behaviors of sad, failing individuals. How does this represent moral superiority?
Hear you, but I’m not solely talking about online. I’m talking about the broader zeitgeist, and it leaves some free thought to be desired.
I believe very few mean ill, but at high levels, with functioning people, they are overloaded on appeals to tolerance and emotion, and often all but ignore nature and it’s inconvenient facts.
This has happened several times throughout history, and the resolution isn’t typically what is desired.
Earnest? No. He is sardonic. I think. For example: "the monstrous aristocratic bore, Aaron Sorkin." Way to skewer that pontificating gassbag. Thank you.
>Meanwhile, Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character, who worshipped Milton Friedman instead of Salinger and kept a portrait of Nixon where most kids kept the Blue Oyster Cult poster, was the rebel.
This is a false binary. Friedman’s message was not anti-liberal or anti-government programs. It was anti-government programs that did not achieve the results upon which they were predicated, which is invariably, every single one of them.
How does what Matt wrote equate to a false binary? Milton Friedman is one of the key figures ushering in the public relations and economic of neoliberalism. The Chilean economic disaster has his fingerprints all over it, as well as an entire body of economic work which privileges individualism, certain kinds of government programs (ahem undoing the work of the New Deal), and was a formative proponent of tinkering with and controlling the money supply as a means of stability (often targeting the growth rate of money supply). This view is typically referred as "monetarism".
None of this has one iota to do with what Matt is saying, which is culture was being shaped in ways that we only now recognize as Neoliberal propaganda -- not left-right battles between people who do not really understand the topics being discussed.
I never saw Friedman as a part of the culture war. He was an economist. He championed programs that actually worked. Programs that achieved the results they sought to achieve. It isn’t his fault that rarely of ever did that. Was he supposed to ignore the actual results?
I don’t know how Matt meant this sentence but that is how I read it. Friedman or Salinger. One or the other. That is a binary is it not? BTW - individualism, upon which the US was founded, is not neoliberal and the New Deal was a disaster as proven by the economic data. Any New New Deal will be 1,000 times worse.
You do realize that his policies, and their mutations have given rise to the problems we have now economically --- bubbles, fraud, markets seen as all-knowing machines, economics being seen as "scientific", instead of a social science. I could think of 50 different examples of how the economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School have fucked over working families in ways that are irreparable. So, they did not work. Its a fiction.
He was a chief economic advisor to the Pinochet regime. You know, the one we decided to prop up and remove Allende for, which created mass death in the southern cone (ala Brazil, Argentina, dirty wars). Not sure you could get more cultural than that.
You know, we can separate finance/economics into some anti-septic basket of non-complicity, when it is precisely this group of people who rose from obscurity during the Golden period of economic 1947-1970, to becoming the new masters of the universe (Nobel prizes, U of Chicago and Republican party celebrity). Whitewashing Milton Freidman is not a great start to this thread.
US was not founded upon individualism, it was founded upon the idea a white male democracy -- which because it did not include women until 1920 or African Americans (1965), really morphed into conflictual battle over capital, slaves, and resources. Individualism in the modern sense was ushered in as a particular marketing theme to thwart the anti-authoritarian movements of the 60s and 70s.
Even more, the idea was the people will not argue with their government or leaders if they are so subsumed in the process of individualization -- finding out who one is and then buying a product to fix the deficiencies. It was brilliant and totally neoliberal. If you want some citation of where this comes from, the movie the Corporation is a good start or the book The Road to Mount Pelerin fleshes out the goals of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Are you seriously arguing we should support government programs that achieve the opposite result of what they claimed they would achieve? Why do you hate poor people?
So, why don’t you exchange your Social Security for a crackpot private account scheme that Friedman pushed on Chile. All the workers money was chewed up in financial industry fees. It was a complete disaster, except for the fund managers.
I would prefer to do with my earnings what I choose as opposed to a program whose assets have been illegally plundered. I won’t see a dime of what they have taken from me. At least if I lost it through my own actions I would have myself to blame.
Ha! That’s just it. None of them worked. That was his point. That doesn’t mean the government isn’t capable of creating public assistance programs that worked. They just never do so.
You didn’t see Friedman as part of the culture war? I did. He was the face of so-called “free market” economics as it battled against the post-Keynesian model that had been bedrock in the Democratic Party since FDR. Friedman and Ken Galbraith had competing TV shows trying to sway cultural attitudes. Friedman was protested upon receiving the faux Nobel prize in economics. I think Friedman was a huge figure in emerging culture wars.
So if all government programs do not achieve their intended results, isn’t being against those programs (the ones that don’t achieve their intended results) the same as being anti-government programs?
“All” was hyperbole. The federal government has done some things that didn’t end up being worse than the cure but that is a rarity, progressively so. I have no confidence they could do anything now that can fix all the mistakes. I don’t even think they want to at this point. Most of them just want to grift and retire with the golden benefits package they voted for themselves. Friedman was active back when the genie was still somewhat in the bottle.
I am pro what you are trying to accomplish here, though I'm not clear on how to go about it. What is the link rot of which you speak; I speculate that it is a link that becomes unfollowable, but I don't see how describing the link separately will prevent that. Or am I on a very wrong track?
You can search a title after the link disappears but you can't search the dead link. I mean it's not fool proof--of course if I were going to go full librarian I would ask for title, publisher, date, etc. but I didn't want to over do it. There is a bot in Wikipedia which scours it for link rot and so much! All the work to put something together and then it loses veracity with dead links.
Yes I did know that, my folks actually visited that estate a few years ago. Ford and Edison were camping buddies too, they went on trips together quite often.
It's hard to believe that Ford & Edison did so much and then had leisure to go to what was then quite a remote place for winter. Neighbors. Never fails to make me amazed.
I like this Post. Good stuff, Matt. Ebbets Field as a metaphor for once-grand old-school liberalism works.
But I don't think framing speech as uniquely a core old-school liberal value eroded by cultural changes is convincing. It was old-school conservative too. The "blunt right wing" cultural message was more about economic efficiency and power of free enterprise unencumbered by unions and self-dealing management -- whether one agrees or not, and I largely don't.
As you note, even Buckley applauded the ACLU's values while arguing only that "you've gone too far". Speech absolutism was the strange attractor that pulled ACLU-style far-left and constitution-loving far-right so close they could touch. It wasn't just a liberal value.
But it is dead now. Why? In my view it's an artefact of a vast loss in cultural self-confidence, largely driven by economic stress. I don't believe economic data -- particularly since 2008 -- paints an accurate picture of social conditions. It's no coincidence that protests from Occupy Wall Street to BLM have blown up in the past decade. In 1977 America, when Mr. Glasser's ACLU defended Nazis) a blue-collar man could have a house, car and family. Young people today have nowhere near those economic opportunities. There's a sense of betrayal, abandonment and humiliation -- and it's legitimate. The anger lashes out and finds scapegoats and villains to ventilate the pain. Racists, white nationalists, hate speakers, "extremists", Trump supporters, etc. etc. Anything but humans or countrymen with whom one disagrees, they are demons, all of them.
Free speech becomes the privileged weapon demons use to taunt, humiliate and oppress the innocent. It becomes a clear and present danger, the antithesis of freedom. And then the demonic possession is complete.
The scene where 96 year old Ben Stern tells Mr. Glasser how proud he is: that's amazing and brilliant stuff, that's such an iconographic portrait of the arc of psyche from fear to self-confidence to liberation to recognition that yes, Mr. Glasser was right all along. The way to prevent Nazis is to let them speak and to let everyone else speak. Trusting in natural moral sentiments to sort it all out better, as you point out too, than the alternatives.
I don't think that's a particularly old-school liberal value, but it certainly is a core American value in our founding documents and philosophies. I recall a famous quote from Vincent Van Gogh about painting which I relate from memory because I can't find it online that "a painter can't take up where another left off. He has to start from the beginning, with the same integrity and the same interest." I suppose that's also a metaphor for the human experience and it's true for all forms of freedom -- speech included.
One hopes the current crop of liberals will reflect with integrity and interest on the origins of free speech. If not, Sisyphus in some future age will have to push that boulder up hill, one more time. And those alive then will look back on now with scathing contempt for the cowards and dull blind souls who squandered their magnificent philosophical inheritance and so badly impoverished the future.
Rights, once lost, will cost blood to regain. A lot of blood. If that's a Sisyphean analogy, great, but it seems strangely clean of misery and death to me.
Beautiful words. Thank you. You are right about the economic stresses having more impact than anyone is admitting or focusing on. Having grown up in the rust belt, my view is that offshoring all of those jobs, breaking the back of heavy industry and the communities they fed - broke the country. Maybe it was necessary to embrace globalism to help lift up the poor in other countries and enrich middle managers and MBAs. But, I fear it may cost us America.
Matt, great piece. I’m not entirely sure if you are a fan of Glasser’s style of liberalism, but it sounds like you definitely prefer it to what’s happening now. For the record, I’m a former “The West Wing” writer — Sorkin had to share his only writing Emmy for the show with me, and it tickles me to see how you view the show. I guess I’m a bigger fan of yours than you are of it, but that’s ok. I would love to talk with you about consulting on a new series I’m working on... one about the media... if I hear back from you, great, if not, that’s ok too.
Were you trying to say DC politics are as stupid as most wars when you put “Brothers in Arms” as the background song during the climactic car trip to the Capital?
Also, this article has me just begging you to do an article on the West Wing and the garbage toxic influence it has had on politics and the left in general, since I've been waiting AGES for someone to call that turd sandwich out for the damage it's done to the modern left and politics in general.
Those guys are fucking fools. They literally attack people based on nose size and other physical characteristics. Great if you want to discuss issues with spoiled 10 year old boys.
Chapo is decent from what I've heard of them. At least they aren't like Pod Save America; a bunch of wealthy trust fund brats who actively hate working class folks and preach the idea that the left needs to go full fascy so shitstains like Favreau and his cronies can go back to being spoiled courtesans who spend their days finding new ways to do evil in God's eyes.
Lol. All I know about Pod Save America is what Matt and Katie joke about beating them in ratings on Useful Idiots. I don’t listen to political podcasts too much - useful idiots one of the exceptions but now that they’ve gone subscription that won’t be much - maybe subscribe for a month here and there and binge?
Fundamentally, I think the left has finally surrendered to a stream of thought that was always present, if not dominant, in liberalism...namely that some people cannot be trusted to make their own choices and make up their own mind based on available information.
It's always been a facet of progressivism, that those in power know better than those they are ruling. But now, it's become the central tenet to the point that the only proper way to manage things is to prevent the unwashed from being exposed to the wrong think, wrong speech, wrong people.
What's horrifying about it is that they think they are doing good by behaving in this way...which makes them far more dangerous than if they recognized the evil in what they do.
And yes, it’s a dangerous time to be a free thinker. Liberalism is surely dead.
The Dmocrats are coalition of globalist billionaires and intervention hawks that keep loyal voting blocs through uber-identity swords and shields. The Republicans are too stupid to recognize this. We’ll crash and burn, and who knows what comes out the other side, but my doge coins are on something less than a tolerant utopia.
I agree with most of the comment, but I think the Republicans, rather than being wholly stupid, are just content to play the part of the loyal opposition. Note how the establishment GOP fought the Tea Party with such fervor. It was a threat to their grift.
Totally agree. I used Republican too broadly, but was more referring to the political body and funders. Their voters, whether Trump folks or Tea Party, largely despise them.
I think what I knew as “liberalism” is vanishing. I watched “Mighty Ira” with my wife a few months back. She is very smart and well educated. But she is also 14 years younger than me. I was surprised by her reaction to the documentary— she was “uncomfortable” with Ira’s commitment to free speech, and she was “much more sympathetic” to the Holocaust survivor who opposed Ira’s free speech absolutism. I realized at that point that there really is a generational difference in attitude toward the ideas of “liberalism.” It confounds me.
Garbage in, garbage out.The younger generations weren't taught why "I don't agree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it" matters. And not just because censorship can be used to silence marginalized groups, but because marginalized groups are now using it to silence everyone else. Liberalism lost sight of the fact that everyone's rights are equally important. My friend's daughters have never heard of the Magna Carta. Civil rights were huge for liberals, the assassination of Kennedy and King and Kennedy devastating. When the Democrats' shifted orientation to minorities to the seeming exclusion of others, alienated blue collar workers flocked to Reagan, then Clinton gained power. NAFTA devastated blue collar workers of all stripes,and the environment, and killed off the Rust Belt. When in the Senate, Al Gore had sponsored legislation outlawing archaic steel- jaw traps. As vice- president, he reversed himself and sent Cantor to fight the EU ban on leghold trapped skins. Disillusioned doesn't cover it. When the takeover of academia was complete, the CT-infused Democrat base doubled down on identity. To be fair, I must add that in real time Giuliani's changes in the city were needed. As a kid driving into the city for work in a tiny car, I was several times accosted while sitting at a light waiting to get into the Lincoln Tunnel. Once, at 10 at night, five guys started rocking the car and wouldn't let me go when the light changed. So I gunned it and ran over their feet. My friend was mugged four times. All that fear stopped on a dime, when Giuliani got in. Human beings were on the receiving end of bad, violent, or threatening behavior, and they-- we -- mattered too. It is now blazingly apparent that Democrat- run cities degrade the rule of law, without which cities and ultimately society breaks down. We're seeing the complete takeover of the Democrats by racialist radicals. The liberals are now illiberal, the ACLU is infected, guys like Glasser are dinosaurs. Multi- racial volunteer groups like FAIR are trying to rise to the challenge of defending speech and fighting coerced ideological oaths. The Republicans are feckless, worrying instead about masks, which they view as the civil liberty issue of our time. You can't get any dumber. God help us.
A lot of people weren't alive or didn't live in NYC or other big cities during the 70's or 80's. They can't comprehend how dangerous it really was. I get brushed off when I try to explain what it was like with looks of dismay and accused of "exaggeration". I would love to put people in a time machine and zap them back to !977-78 Times Square just after dark to see how long they could last before begging me to bring them back.
I'd just like them to experience an aggressive squeegee guy; those dudes disappeared virtually the day Giuliani took office.
The "people's toll"
Maybe your wife sees that a lot of liberal ideas that you remember so fondly are now on the cusp of being used by some very illiberal forces. This isn’t the same country that existed when Earl Warren was running the Supreme Court.
Letting a couple of Nazis march seems like much less of a threat when you have confidence that your government is keeping a wary eye on them. After experiencing Trump, formerly liberal voters are far less trusting that a Nazi march isn’t a more serious threat.
Which just means that you fell for the propaganda of the DNC. Functionally, Trump was a 90's moderate Democrat. His actual political positions are nearly indistinguishable even though his style differed. As such, he tore away blue collar supporters from the Democrat base. The DNC was sandwiched between their new, shiny identity politics which tolerate no dissent and the loss of a significant part of their base. So they chose to try to make Trump completely unpalatable. Everything he did would be Hitleresque even when it wasn't or even when it was a policy position they had held themselves in the not so distant past.
There were plenty of reasons to oppose Trump and his policies, but they chose to fight him with lies and bombast. The Steele dossier, Russiagate, the "very fine people" lie, etc...
Yes, and now we're seeing Biden continue many things Trump started-- as you say, the only real difference was style.
It’s very frustrating in that it appears to “always” be the lie that is chosen.
They make concentration camps seem like a poorly planned, over crowded summer camp and Hitler a buffoon scores of purple haired man bun cool kids could take out with a zinger on Twitter.
I thought of Trump as an 80s Democrat in many respects, but mostly agree.
Trump as the reincarnation of Mondale was kind of wild. The older you get the more surreal everything becomes.
That’s really good stuff, worthy of Matt himself.
First of all, the government does not “let” anyone march, the right of the people to peaceably assemble is specified in the Constitution, and there is no political litmus test for which people are “allowed” to do so.
Second, do you really believe that a meaningful number of Trump voters are Nazis? If so, I would be interested to know, out of the roughly 75 million people who voted for Trump, what percentage do you believe are Nazis? And also, were those Nazis also around when Obama was elected in 2012, or did they magically appear during Obama’s second term?
Many people I know voted against Trump, not for Biden. The fringe is exploiting that anti-vote to “transform” the US. I didn’t vote for either, because I knew a puppet Biden win would embolden censors and take silencing to new heights.
Voting against personality at the expense of bad policy. Not a wise choice.
This is proof positive that people absolutely suck at judgements about probability of outcomes. It's the same reason people buy lottery tickets. Voting for the status quo is what everyone wants. Why? Because any attempt to change things makes matters worse, every time. Now some senile dude with a team of totalitarians is going to remake our lives with a one vote majority.
Progressives think they have been forced to dilute (and by dilute I mean carpet bomb) their traditionally held liberal ideals BECAUSE TRUMP, not seeing that we all got Trump BECAUSE PROGRESSIVES.
At this point, my vote is a perversion of Buckley's theory. Instead of the most electable conservative, i'll vote for the most electable monkey wrench, left or right. Whatever pains the elites, that's my vote.
Could not agree more, unfortunately I don't think we will get another billionaire, egotistical enough to absorb the slings and arrows,with a high q rating.
Let's not forget that trump won the nomination at least partly because hillary preferred him as an opponent.
Nazis marching WERE “illiberal forces.” I did have confidence in liberal ideas. Still do.
I just finished a book on Antifa, a sympathetic history, Mark Brady, and in the first paragraph Antifa was self defined as an illiberal oppositional force to fascism. Nazis are illiberal forces-but so are the far left, by self definition. Groups like BLM or the msm types who parrot their agenda refuse to acknowledge this fact. If a group self defines as Marxist, they are specifically rejecting liberal democracy and democratic norms/institutions.
Someone will have to identify the constituency for liberal ideas in today's world.
Carroll Quigley, bill clinton's favorite professor and mentor at Georgetown,and also official historian of the CFR said
"Hitlers economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions."
Meaning hitlers real crime was kicking out the banksters.
Churchill said explicitly,we aren't at war with hitler,or with national socialism,but with the entire economic might of germany.
Go read jewish historian Brian mark rigg's book about hitlers 150k jewish soldiers, including 10-20 generals and admirals.
Go read Israeli historians martin van crevelds book called the fairer sex and see how well germany treated it's women.
Realize britain bombed german civilians for months before germany retaliated in kind.
By 1939 hitler had killed maybe 1,000 people( night of the longknives, first pogrom)
Stalin had killed 2-20 million depending upon who's source you believe.
World jewry declared war on germany in 1933( google it)
Germany in the interwar period was arguably the most debauched place on earth, largely due to hyperinflation, prostitution was so prevalent that they had something like 33 different kinds of prostitutes, and the hyperinflation was largely due to the reparations imposed at versailles, nevermind that germany was the last to mobilize.
And ww1 was largely because the british saw Germany's railroad to baghdad as a threat to the british navy's high seas hegemony.
Google operation keelhaul,where after the war,US and british soldiers rounded up between 1-5 million people who fled Russia ,during the war,loaded them onto cattle cars,and sent them back to stalin to be either gulaged of killed
The british invented the concentration camp during the boer war in south africa
Go find out what britain's two opium wars with the Chinese were about( the right if the british/sassoon family ) to dump opium into china ,no matter the consequences.
Churchill repeatedly told bomber harris to use chemical weapons against german civilians,to which he refused,not really out of morality but out of fear that he not churchill would be blamed,after the war.
Go read up on all the american mrngele's, like cornelius rhoads in puerto rico, or the horrible experiments done on phillipinos by american medical doctors
Go read Ron unz's article at unz.com about all the cooperation between zionists in israel and nazi germany
Google havarra /transfer agreement
Go read theodore herzl the inventor of zionism ,talk about how antisemitism would have to be ginned up to get any appreciable number of jews to move.
Half truths and lies.
Well, the country those old-style liberals knew was one with segregationist governors, dogs and batons loosed on peaceful civil rights marchers, judges and juries that were guaranteed to let off church bombers and lynchers — and they often knew a thing or two about real Nazis. The idea that we face some kind of new threat since 2016 that justifies suppression of bad guys’ speech is, I’m afraid, TDS.
Tell it brother. We could have become another Myanmar if the coup at the Capital succeeded.
You honestly believe that the entire center of US power resides in one building, who's occupants meet around 100 days per year? An idiot mob charged into a building to take selfies to post online, scream and yell and break things - nothing even remotely resembling a coup.
Lord save our fragile democracy from those Duck Dynasty hillbillies!
Trump wrote on 1/5: "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." It would have been an attempted coup if Pence had not counted certain states.
A coup? Without one single person carrying a gun? How would that have been possible? Please explain that feat of magic.
Was there really nobody carrying a gun? Do you mean of those that went inside?
Got a source?
If true,thank you sincerely for the edification.
Be safe and be well.
Oh please. Falling for that flimsy propaganda are we?
It's interesting to me that Alinsky tactics are ok unless people supporting Trump do them.
ATTENTION everyone.
Help prevent link rot. Please put the title of your link when you provide a link.
Like this:
Wikipedia:Bare URLs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bare_URLs
(A bare URL is a URL cited as a reference for some information without any accompanying information about the linked page. In other words, it is just the text out of the URL bar of your browser copied and pasted. It is subject to link rot.
Thank you.
"link rot" meaning it's only good for x-number of days?
more that the site where it links goes down or someone doesn't renew the platform. I find them in Wikipedia articles all the time.
I have always described myself as a Jew who would march with Hitler in defense of free speech, and it was Glasser who put me on that path. And, I certainly would have stood in Charlotte with the torch carriers and "fine people" against the Nazis of Antifa.
But I do think you are wrong regarding the TV and film of the seventies and eighties and how conservatives and liberals were portrayed. This was the era of NYC coming out of one of the worst urban decays, with zero conservatives putting them in that position. Remember the Guardian Angles? Or, on the west coast, SF had the street patrols, gay men who were taking back the night, as that city, the city of my father's birth had gotten so shitty. As it is currently.
There was a reason that liberalism was portrayed as weak and damaging; we were suffering through the remains of the bad policy that it left in its wake. And make no mistake that I am a conservative, I come from an old Jewish Berkeley family, was a Democrat when that was the only way to convey how important free speech, due process, and other civil liberties were.
We have to remember that no matter how important liberalism may seem, it does need to have its excesses tempered with the other half of our politics. As we are currently seeing. And yes, it took me decades to learn that lesson.
Actually, I think it's more accurate to describe them as the "fascists of antifa". As their tactics are more easily and recognizably fascist/proto-fascist, while Nazism represents essentially the platform of an entire national government, and full totalitarian and genocidal state. Antifa's tactics of "informal uniforms", attacking often with the tools at hand, agitating for violence, concealing identities, insisting lack of specific affiliation with a particular party or government--all these things are more fascist or revolutionary socialist or even anarchist than Nazi.
Pre-Hitler, the fascists, or National Socialists, or street thugs, or whatever you want to call them, we a huge menace on the streets of Germany. And though they did develop a leader who sharpened them into the statist machine that became the Nazis, I don't think it is far-fetched to refer to these street thugs who are LARPing Kristallnacht as such. We could also refer to them as Night Riders, after the early Klan members, but too many would think you are talking about Hasselhoff.
Using Nazi point people in the direction to see what these little shits (another appropriate term) really are and what direction they are leaning toward.
Yeah...
I live an hour from Portland. Antifa are the fucking Nazis.
Antifascist by way of fascism.
Tell me, does it feel good standing next to the new Klan? Getting your racism on while destroying black communities?
Such exaggerations happen with everything.
The woke really do resemble Nazis in many ways. It's not a perfect metaphor but certainly a lot closer than BUSH=NAZI or the Trump screeds. The focus on race is one key element, the totalitarian viewpoint is another.
Again, Nazi is very specific (and over-used). Fascist or anarchist or revolutionary or some combo term (proto-fascist, anarchorevolutionary, identity agitators) might work better. But antifa is basically becoming the shorthand for its own tactics and superficial utopian/dystopian goals.
The scripted chanting and kristallnacht techniques are familiar, though.
You know something else, one of the dudes I knew back when was a survivor of the camps. Charlie was his name, had the number tattooed on his arm still, never removed it. Used to pull out the glass Manischewitz bottle filled with ice water every time I came over. Charlie died in the 80s. He would have had a very dim view of what is going on today. Like my grandfather, he was of the opinion that there was no difference between totalitarians, they were all evil.
Agreed.
But now do comparisons of Trump to Hitler (and “Trumpism” whatever that is to fascism).
They had to deal with a street fighting racialist totalitarian force that gained political power and got their fever dreams realized. They'd understand. You, on the other hand...
Matt, you have just explained perfectly why I was on the left in the 80s, in college and law school and I'm on the right now. I'd argue that I haven't changed that much. On critical issues, the sides have switched.
Disagree that the right & left have switched sides. The broader left in America has simply moved to the right since the 80s.
There is not party for people who hold actual liberal values. I'd argue Bernie's success in 16 and 20 was because many of us saw someone who actually *had* some of those traditional liberal values that for a 40 year old like me, simply haven't existed in my voting lifetime.
You want to argue the national Democratic party has abandoned these values? You'll get no argument from me. But this idea that the party who created "free speech zones" to protest the Iraq War, who tortured Arabs as policy, who has made curtailing voting access a national platform, etc. etc. --- the idea that *those* guys are the true liberals? I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous on its face.
You kinda had me going on the torture and free speech zones, which I agree with you on, but that was a long time ago, and a whole lot has changed since then.
But requiring voter identification and more security for mail-in voting is "curtailing voter access? Now who's ridiculous? Take a look at global standards on voting. The election run last year here was much looser than allowed in most developed countries.
The Georgia law shortens vote by mail periods, reduces ballot drop boxes, shortens run-offs, and for some reason disallows people from being brought water while they wait in line. Does that sound like they're trying to *expand* voting access or limit it after they lost a few elections to a better organized opponent?
It's of course not just Georgia. The Wisconsin GOP, for example, is pushing a bill so they'd split their electoral college numbers. In this last election, in spite of more Wisconsinites (Wisconsonians? whatever) voting for Biden, Trump would get 6 of 10 electoral votes here. Another victory for democracy.
I could go on. And the voting access/voting rights examples was just one of many blatantly illiberal maneuvers pushed by the GOP on a national level. Just remember the amount of high-level GOP pols pushing the idea that the election was "stolen" just a few months ago. The Roberts court is dominated by the right and has enshrined corporate personhood.
Again: the point here is that your assertion that the right and left had switched was silly. They haven't. The right in America has moved more right. So has the left. It blows.
Read the law and comment on that rather than making out-of-context criticisms. You're probably right, it shortens vote by mail periods. Vote by mail as implemented in Georgia destroyed audit integrity. It's still more than twice as long as deep-red New Jersey's. Ballot drop boxes are equalized by population in precincts, voting districts, counties. In 2020 private individuals paid for extra ballot drop boxes only in areas favoring Democrats. Sounds like an improvement in equity.
Nothing prohibits people from bringing water to people in line; it prohibits it being provided by politicians and their advocates from a distance less than a bunch of yards. It's closing a loophole exploited to allow politicking otherwise illegal. But I think you already realized that. Shorter run-offs sound great to me. I don't understand the downside. Perhaps you could wokesplain it to me.
Dividing electoral votes along congressional district lines brings power closer to the people. The so-called bosses of the politicians. I can understand why you're scared of that. Don't be frightened, just walk toward the light. And use it to read the law instead of spreading misinformation about it.
Each of the last two presidential elections has left half the country distrusting the system. In 2016 the result was protested non-stop by #THERESISTANCE and allies for more than four years, with a vow to prevent Trump from governing. They succeeded. In 2020 unconstitutional changes in election laws by states without legislative approval, partisan barring of poll observers, providing immensely greater access to voting, but only in Democrat precincts, a money advantage of five-to-one, a united Big Tech blockading news unfavorable to Democrats, a near-lockstep upending of the playing field by
print media in Democrats' favor, forcing use of mail-out unrequested ballots and ballot harvesting (both of which destroy the audit integrity), resulted in Biden winning but Democrats inexplicably losing seats in the House. Not seen before. The half of the country that didn't trust the election's fairness was told to sit down and shut up, the President was impeached on charges never remotely proved, our capital city in military occupation, with members of the military accused of racism and sexism based only on the color of their skin - I accept Biden as my President, and I never voted for Trump. I want election laws and processes examined not for fraud, but for vulnerability to fraud. I'm now labeled a racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted right-wing bigoted Trump supporter. And here I was under the delusion that I was a lifelong liberal. Today's level of intolerance by the authoritarian left comes to mind every night while changing for bed, showing the scars from police batons incurred during civil rights marches in the 1960s. The sit-ins were no fun, either. But, don't take my word for it. According to cancel culture, Obama was an oppressor. Quickly, look up Martin Niemoeller before he's disappeared.
Someone is feeding you BS, and you're swallowing it. https://morning.thedispatch.com/p/the-morning-dispatch-understanding
Winning is irrelevant if no one trusts the process.
Lol. Please post the parts of the Georgia law about drop boxes and early voting periods. I'd suggest you read the law yourself and not rely on someone else telling you what it says. That would cut down a bit on misinformation being posted and insure other commenters don't view you as a liar.
You're confusing the left with Democrats.
Since Carter, the Democratic Party has moved openly and explicitly to the Right, chasing the money - Clinton was perfectly clear about that. In the process, they've driven the Republicans, who know they have to maintain a difference, into Crazyville. Good strategy, I guess, enormously lucrative, but it's left a gaping void on the Left, which the Green Party has been trying to fill, so far with no luck.
On issues, the majority of Americans are far, far to the left of the Dems. As Thomas Frank pointed out, they simply have no one to vote for, as long as they accept the 2-Party, so they've taken to voting on "cultural" issues - which, conveniently, the plutocrats don't care about. So the 2-Party can go on piling up its filthy lucre while going on about God, guns, and LBGTQ - some of which are justice issues I care about, but they're being used to distract everybody from the massive theft o f the economy.
«The Georgia law shortens vote by mail periods, reduces ballot drop boxes, shortens run-offs, and for some reason disallows people from being brought water while they wait in line.»
I will start to believe that the Democratic or Republican really mean it when they want to improve election when either proposes something like:
* Frequent pervasive state-funded proactive registration of voters.
* A $20 compensation for taking the time to get a voter identity card, with mass mailings and even proactive teams going out to ask people to get them.
* A $10 compensation for those taking the time to vote in person, to discourage easily "managed" postal votes.
* Lots of state funded voting places open for two days, at least one of them a weekend day, so there are no queues.
Most civilized countries do most of these things, or even make non-voting punished by a fine or worse.
If voter ID is the real issue, which is doubtful, then let's work on a free ID campaign.
I want voter ID laws and everyone to have an ID. Neither party will ever suggest this though; they never take a common sense stand to end wedge issues. They need wedge issues to distract us from the substantial issues.
In general, assuming unexpressed bad motives on the part of your political opponents can make lead you astray,
I would be on board with that.
Not all, bud. Frum & Max Boot definitely did. Marc Thiessen's still holding strong to both Bush 2's torture program and that Trump dream though.
Paging Max Boot!
“ because many of us saw someone who actually *had* some of those traditional liberal values that for a 40 year old like me, simply haven't existed in my voting lifetime.”
While I agree with you that some people may have seen some of those traditional values, I’m more of the belief now that most Bernie supporters were there only for what it could get THEM - particularly health care and a higher minimum wage (which more directly impacted his younger supporters) - and not really based on values or principles. In that way they fit perfectly into the “new liberal” mentality that was part of the counter counter-revolution that got its start somewhere in the 70s, built its strength in the Reagan years, and was then solidified by Clinton.
One of the things I have found interesting in Adam Curtis’ films, and particularly in the reactions of people who hate them, is the resistance to the idea that there are actually ideas, principles, values behind actions - even if unknown to the actor.
«the resistance to the idea that there are actually ideas, principles, values behind actions - even if unknown to the actor.»
That point seems to me both overdone and useful because:
* Overdone because politics is primarily about interests, not ideas, and usually the ideas are chosen to support those interests. And even when interests are not the primary driver, what matters for most people is outcomes rather than principles, and the principles are chosen to drive those outcomes.
* However many people value ideas and principles, even if when they collide with their interests and preferred outcomes the latter win. In particular I think that simplistic theology is mostly “behind actions - even if unknown to the actor”.
Two relevant quotes as decoration:
OW Holmes: “If you’re weak on the facts and strong on the law, pound the law. If you’re weak on the law and strong on the facts, pound the facts. If you’re weak on both, pound the table.”
JM Keynes: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
The Keynes quote is really good. I take issue with your first bullet point:
“Overdone because politics is primarily about interests, not ideas, and usually the ideas are chosen to support those interests.”
I’m not sure how it can be said that politics is “primarily” about interests and not ideas. We might find ourselves in a chicken and egg situation - maybe even to the Robert Sapolsky level of questioning any free will or any meaningful statement on acting on interest or principle. :)
“And even when interests are not the primary driver, what matters for most people is outcomes rather than principles, and the principles are chosen to drive those outcomes.”
I don’t disagree with this, and think it is in keeping with the intent of what I wrote - and the Keynes quote you provided. And I see a lot of problems with this even for pragmatic/outcome oriented people. It results in little victories, skirmish and battle victories, at the expense of the war. This is not to say that you don’t sometimes take the small victory! Not at all. It’s that doing that too often can, and does, lead to losing track or important “whys.”
Certainly people vote for a variety of reasons and I'm sure some of his voters wanted a higher minimum wage because they were making said minimum wage. I just don't think that the desire to stop being taken advantage of makes them selfish or anything. Wanting a fair shake in our economy is a pretty reasonable reason to vote for a politician. I personally voted for him in 16 and 20 for very different reasons.
(Related: the new Curtis doc is quite good and really thought provoking---really enjoyed it.)
I don’t disagree. And I certainly don’t disagree with people voting to not be taken advantage of - even if it is a single issue. I’m just not so certain that a lot of his voters won’t quickly abandon their concern about say, minimum wage, as soon as they get along in their careers and start making more money. I see a lot of similarities between the Boomer and the current younger people - seeing another hippie to yuppie transformation isn’t hard for me to imagine.
Well said
Bernie supporters don't care about american empire,they just want s bigger slice( not arguing anybody else's supporters are any better other than maybe Tulsi)
https://original.antiwar.com/chris_ernesto/2015/11/13/bernie-war-and-the-empires-pie/
It’s that lack of concern about empire, at a meaningful and committed level, that is one of my greatest concerns. Beyond the scope of Bernie supporters I’m seeing more and more approval of empire, and not just by the USA, from people who have traditionally been anti-imperialism/militarism advocates.
There's a big difference between the Skokie thing and what's going on now. Nazis in Skokie were a very unpopular, extreme fringe element whose ideas were totally rejected by the vast majority of Americans then as they would be now. So fighting for their right to march may have been pro-liberty in the abstract, but hardly anyone would have been directly injured had they been stopped.
Today you have establishment media and major colleges censoring not extreme, fringe views but views that are held by sizable percentages, sometimes even majorities, of the public. I don't have to list examples. That's not tolerating unpopular opinions, it's suppressing *popular* opinions. Whole different thing. Not a civil rights issue. A political, consent-of-the-governed issue, which calls for a lot more than some kind of revitalized ACLU.
> but hardly anyone would have been directly injured had they been stopped.
The value and concept of liberty would have been injured. That’s the point of the entire piece.
I think that Tender Morsel is just denoting that the scale is on a completely different level. The point is definitely not wrong even if you are right as well.
Taibbi writes:
"But the team was disappeared, “kidnapped” to Los Angeles by owner Walter O’Malley, described by Glasser as one of history’s three great villains, the other two being Hitler and Genghis Khan (“I've always rooted for the San Andreas Fault to take care of the Dodgers in Los Angeles ever since,” Glasser quips)."
I guess Ira never met Larry Summers, Jabba the Hut of economists....
Matt's writings here remind of three takeaways:
A. Purposeful construction of the left-right divide over the last 40 years in this country has led us to react to individual feelings/reactions instead of how the substance of the issue may be used against us.
B. I am reminded of how big the Hidden Argument in our daily lives really is (Do we believe that people are smart enough to enact democracy and find ways to manage conflict or do we buy into the media narrative and elite agenda to make/to believe people are stupid and need a separate class of wealthy assholes to tell us what to do). This is the single biggest conflict in our society NOT being discussed. Thanks Matt.
C. The anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s has been silenced (via assassination, consumerism, distraction, and internal disruptions of large groups being dismantled by individualism and neoliberal policies).
If we want to any kind of change we'll have to address the best ways to challenge the current regimes (left or right). And we need to move away from the Bullshit Mountain patriotism of love this country or leave it type of ignorance. We need to stop glorifying "freedom" in a country where democracy is being squashed by a PMC bent on interviewing to the be the elites microphones and stenographers.
Cheers Matt.
Point A. Absolutely.
Point C. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of MLK’s assassination - you will hear nothing from any mainstream Blue about his anti-military, anti-imperialism message. And notice how the Blues (sorry, I’m just tired of trying to distinguish and clarify “liberal”, “left”, etc.) are more and more whitewashing China’s imperialistic/militaristic overtones and actions. The same things they would criticize from the US, is okay from China. (Of course social media scores and control is super-great for both countries!). But nothing pointed this out more than watching how the Blues supported most of Trump’s foreign policy in militaristic and imperialist endeavors, best seen in the Two Party standing ovation for Juan Guaidó in Venezuela but also support for the Bolivian (*cough* CIA) coup), increasing Trump’s military budgets, etc. There were some mostly facade disagreements over non-action points, but it is amazing how comfortable they were with most of this “unhinged existential threat’s” foreign policy.
And point C. *Siiiiiiiiiigh* I’m not sure that enough of the populace is capable of governing itself at this point and participating meaningfully and competently in a democracy. If they aren’t too stupid they are too ignorant - and willingly ignorant. It is not just that there is way too much Twitter or sound-bite level “comprehension” and discussion, it’s that the understanding that this superficial understanding is NOT enough isn’t there - and this is NOT exclusive to any age group or generation or Blue/Red side.
The question is - how do we get more people to smarten up quickly before the elites are making all the decisions and the “democracy” is even more of a sham than it is now?
We cannot really control "other" people. That's what distinguishes us from the elites. We have to find ways to interrupt their noise/propaganda and consistently challenges their lies. They have some problems too - and will make mistakes. People have to pay attention and we have to find ways to connect with people we do not agree with on every subject. The more people who put pressure on the system, outcomes, the more likely that some of their weaknesses be exposed. CoVid is a prime example.
Democracy is something each generation has to fight for, or it gets subsumed by the corporate state. The 1920's are a very good example - and there are lessons to learn from the 60s too. Mostly, what we can do is help people avoid propaganda, get into the substance of power's aims and resist in ways that cause errors for elites.
I said nothing about controlling other people.
The rest of your response is really just platitudes.
The problem with the agenda of getting more people to smarten up -- as you put it, is that you do not want to replicate the authoritarian that people are stupid. There is no easy internet board solution to satiate your question. And in fact, I believe that more struggle, and difficulty is ahead --- I think the idea of hope is overplayed --- as it can co-opted and used against a motivated electorate creating more cynicism. Platitudes indeed. You have any ideas sport?
A is over as long as a controlled media keeps it that way. The lessons Goebbels taught us are still in mind today.
B has a simple answer: no, people are not smart enough, and keeping those who are smart enough under control is child's play for the totalized society.
C is not just silenced, it's dead. And I mean quite literally; I was born in 1969 and those who lived through the 60s as something close to adults are dropping like flies.
There's only one way to overthrow a totalitarian government. It's analogous to that quote about all power growing from the barrel of a gun.
A study of how Mao came to the position he did, or how Lenin did, should be instructive here. It's really, really hard. Hitler benefited from a discredited government most Germans didn't want, but even his path involved prison and many years in the wilderness.
The real question not being asked here is: how do you do this and not end up with another totalized and totalitarian society? That answer is not clear to me.
HBI, I think you are dead wrong on B.
People are smart enough, the problem is that so many people have been indoctrinated and manipulated by neoliberal propaganda for so long that we create a loop of confirmation that people are stupid. But when we actually study human behavior, what we see are people's need not being met - and using what is in their environment to feel better (bricoleur of sorts). Yes, the public is smart enough for democracy - but we live in a culture that creates crapification for masses and the only the finest cheeses, brunches and wines for the elite. Of course people will aspire to do better, but that gets confused with aligning with the elite and their gnosticism in exchange for a shot at a better life. Its pretty sick. But I am of the belief that people are smarter than we give them credit for... if not we are truly fucked.
"C. The anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s has been silenced (via assassination, consumerism, distraction, and internal disruptions of large groups being dismantled by individualism and neoliberal policies)."
The "anti-establishment culture of the 60s and 70s" is a hyperreality. It was hyperreality even when it actually took place as a set of performative and self-indulgent delusional movements. That's why today's liberalism seems so shallow and pointless. It's a further abstraction of the base reality, a hyperreality so distant from reality that there is no reality undergirding it and the people involved wouldn't recognize it if they came in contact with it.
Very Adam Curtis. There were some policy victories as well as a much clearer idea of the deep state that Eisenhower warned us about - (cointelpro, assassinations and intelligence community home and abroad, connections between large US corporations and the plunder of Africa, S America etc..). And also, the anti-war movement, while surreal and drug induced, was a form of criticality that our public had not engaged in some time. In fact, it shattered households and ruined relationships -- those who were comfortable backing elite decision-makers and those who knew how incompetent they were. So, your comment is well taken, but I see it as mess of progress and regression.
Fair enough either way.
I was leaning more towards Baudrillard. Curtis is fine but his analyses tend to be too one-note for me in his assumption that capitalism and hyperindividualism is to blame for all the ills of society. Hypernormalization is an inferior conceptualization compared to Baudrillard's hyperreality.
I won't argue that there weren't political wins and losses. My point is primarily that Taibbi's idea of "where have all the liberals gone" is misguided. The same failings that he sees around him today inhabited the liberals of yesteryears. The hedonism. The self-indulgence and self-absorption. The myopia and pettiness. The xenophobia. All that was at the heart of the counterculture along with the good characteristics. The difference is primarily that there were real problems being attacked back in the 60s/70s. Those problems have since been transformed into hyperobjects to perpetuate a forever struggle that can be monetized and support a massive industry of political activism.
When I say that the counterculture was a hyperreality, I mean that it was primarily comprised of middle to upper class people who were well educated pretending and acting out their conceptions of older, authentic conflicts and movements. The Weathermen pretending that they were the Tupamaros, for example. The laughable "back to the earth movement" where city or suburban kids pretended to be farmers and communists. Not really farmers and communists, though. Their fictionalized IDEA of farmers and communists.
From there to today all we've seen is compounding abstraction, with people pretending to act out their IDEA of the counterculture and civil rights movements. But it's not real. None of it is real. On some subconscious level they know that it isn't real and that is why it isn't truly satisfying.
Seen in this way, all the energy liberals pour into society today is simply funneled into a hyperreality, a simulation, a monetized game whose outcome changes nothing authentic because there is nothing authentic for most people to access. All progress and regression is illusion. The worst part is that capitalism itself has become hyperreal. Money is hyperreal. The stock market is hyperreal. Geopolitics is hyperreal.
And the Wachowskis stole the idea for The Matrix from Phillip K. Dick. Heh.
A lot of meaty substance in that post TE.
Might have to reflect upon that for a bit - as I can identify with a large part of this disillusionment, but there is something (I cannot quite get to it yet) that is dispiriting in a Nihilistic (there is nothing we can do about this anyway) kind of vibe. Maybe not. Going to reflect for a bit on this one.
Corporatist D “liberals”/Ds don’t even realize what the hell they are getting in bed with vis a vis the new “woke” movement. I just finished reading “Antifa” by Mark Bray, a sympathetic analysis and history of Antifa as a movement, from the 1930s onward. The opening paragraph of the book specifically rejected the liberal consensus on free speech-it said “We reject Voltaire’s notion of I may disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”. Commendable intellectual honesty, but horrifyingly dangerous, and symbolic of the fire that Ds/liberals like to flirt with, w/out understanding the root motivations. Or, as an Antifa type quoted saying later in the book “If you think our attitude about the 1st Amendment is wrong now, just wait until the People’s Revolution”.
Alex P Keaton and Tony Montana-as characters-understood this back in the 80s, with their embrace of Friedman and unabashed capitalist zeal. When Tony Montana said “I kill Communists for fun. For a green card I carve him up real nice”, he is getting to the heart of the matter. The enemy doesn’t play by your rules-and needs to Glasser/baby boom hippy liberals were afraid to look at the true face of leftist thought-and thus act shocked when it’s methods are co-opted by corporations and the State.
I listened to Glasser on Joe Rogan recently and his whining about Trump as an “existential threat” to the nation showed where he and the old liberals minds are at. Being a stereotypical other borough loud moth is a worse crime than coopted cultural Marxism for corporate PR/HR. Noam Chomsky gets it, Ira Glasser doesn’t.
This gets to the heart of much of my fears re the new left. They are rejecting the enlightenment wholesale. There were incredibly great and useful reasons behind the thinking such as free speech; they were putting the pieces back together from the religious wars that wracked Europe, so to speak. And these rights flow from ideas such as that.
With the Nazis of Antifa gaining acceptance on the left and the corresponding damage they are causing to our society, we are seeing a greater need for these ideals. And make no mistake, these are the true morals of our country, and as such need to be upheld at every opportunity. Having congresspeople making vague notions of "hate speech" and that it needs to be looked at, is so fucking offensive that the mere idea of it needs to be gloriously and uproariously laughed out of the commons, while those in favor needs be placed in the figurative pillories.
The enlightenment was all white people. Racist.
"Corporatist D “liberals”/Ds don’t even realize what the hell they are getting in bed with vis a vis the new “woke” movement".
Good post. I tend to think they were very conscious of what they were doing, all the way back to the first Clinton administration. He ran on being a centrist democrat, but really the entire power structure, like Matt says, felt they more in common with conservative corporates and could live with the other stuff (as we really turned the corner into Neoliberalism). This is when we really start to see the term 'homo economics' and 'its the economy stupid'. Probably pissed the Bush's and far right off, as he was stepping into their turf. The "woke" movement is something they use as a trident to triangulate groups against one another, as well as a form of Neoliberal political theatre.
You're right about the 1980s. What about Venezuela now?
Allende was an interesting character, because the Soviet Union was urging him to get brutal to suppress his enemies, and he refused to do it; that helped lead to his own death. He was an honorable man. But you're forgetting people like Abimael Guzman. He killed a lot as it was, but if he'd ever managed to take over Peru, there would have been the biggest bloodbath that continent had ever seen. He was (and far as I know still is, as he sits in prison) an explicit admirer of the Khmer Rouge.
Thank you, Matt. Wonderful piece. Great points about liberalism. However I don't think you get satire - Family Ties was satire. I don't think you get satire at all, actually. We all have our weak points and that seems to me to be yours. You're too damn earnest for your own liberal good. How much stronger liberalism was when it could laugh at themselves. This is why liberalism is dead. We aren't allowed to laugh at our own liberal beliefs and god forbid you do. We need a show like Family Ties now.
I thought Family Ties was a lot funnier than All in the Family. Just making the point that the politics of 80s TV was aimed in a certain direction.
I was always more of a Married With Children guy personally.
Nice, I had forgotten about Al Bundy... I guess the key thing Matt is getting to, though, isn't about TV shows in particular. The key questions are more along the lines of:
Is it liberal to demand that those who have opinions different then you should have economic opportunities closed off to them?
Is it liberal to strive to shut down platforms that offer freer speech simply because you can't exert control over them?
Is it liberal to focus solely on things that might affect minority friends you went to elite colleges with, like not getting Oscars or getting harrassed or assaulted in the streets (both bad, don't get me wrong) to the exclusion of things that affect less privileged minority citizens, like getting killed in crossfire of a gang shooting or sex trafficked to a massage parlor and then shot?
I would argue that these things are clearly not liberal, but they are all "elitist". In the US we have a political myopia caused by the two-party system where we don't have parties that reflect single demographics like a worker's party, we always have coalition parties by default. Historically we've graded them on left-right and a bit on elite versus non-elite. The change now is the Democratic party shift to elitism, and the elite mostly being in a massive social media and media-fueled bubble.
It will last only as long as they can keep the voters distracted or confused. The MSM loses more of its ability to lie every day, as they keep overplaying their hand by more and more. There is enough interest in true liberalism out there, and enough self-interest in the working class, to vote them out of power. Hopefully then they self correct, but we shall see.
I agree.
I didn’t see the Fox son in Family Ties as the rebel. Rebel signifies a free spirited separation from the norm. Fox’s character couldn’t be farther from a free spirit. He was presented as having hitched his wagon to a far more formulaic and heartless star. He was obviously cast as a quirky goofball who didn’t get what was important in life because he was too ambitious, in a clownish way. He was the butt of all jokes on that show. Sure, he was lovable, but only at times he acted more “liberal,” when we were reminded he still had humanity in him, no doubt thanks to his hippie parents, and despite his right lean, not because of it.
Precisely. The show was a vehicle to chide/reeducate.
Thank you, Matt, for responding to my comment. As a fan of your writing I'm honored. I think your perspective on 80s tv and movies is interesting but I see that era as still part of an old Hollywood. Having grown up in SoCal I saw Hollywood at that time as made up of narcissists who craved attention and sometimes they make great tv shows and films and gave great performances out of that desire. I think their goal was more to be loved and make money than control the political conversation. I don't see that era of tv and movie makers as calculating. Today they are. It's weird to me that these woke tv shows and movies lay so many eggs, but Hollywood insists on continuing trying to shove their wokeness down our throats. You could say the same thing about ads and magazine covers, like Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit issue. There's a difference between Hollywood responding to the zeitgeist - and trying to control it. The 80s were the former, today is the latter. Thanks again. So delighted to be subscribing to you!
The narcissism and craving for attention is still there ..the talent and creativity not so much
Hey Polly, good points, good to see you active on site.
I can only assume you were a huge fan of Steve Urkel, as we all were.
The producer of Family Ties, Gary David Goldberg, you probably already knew this, was born in Brooklyn. He lived in California, I guessed he died there in 2013 - not because of the San Andreas fault though. Interesting threads being weaved in this article.
All in the Family was a great show. And hilarious. While Archie's Place and the Gloria spin-off were just tedious. Jeeze, the quality drop between All in the Family and Archie's Place was precipitous. Norman Lear never got his comedy mojo back after that, either, IMO.
They were mailing it in for more $$
Just a thought , not very politically motivated Show but faulty towers to me is the epitome of British comedy .
Plus the Episode of the German guests was one of the funniest skits I’ve ever seen .
Any program with Rob Whiner is destined for the septic tank!
I grew up with Family Ties and my response to the show at the time was that Alex P. Keaton's conservatism was the brunt of the jokes.
I think you are on to something. The left nowadays acts like every little point of minutiae is an existential struggle against Satan himself, so nothing can be off message, even the truth or humor.
Agree. The strongest people I know have a sense of humor about themselves. They can roast themselves better than anyone. What has frightened me most is the earnestness of liberals. Earnestness is death to true liberalism.
You are right. One of the greatest comedians was Jack Benny, who always made himself the target of the comedy.
Rochester!!!!
Perfect take. Social humor used to mean "punching up" at the powerful and pompous. Now, because lampooning general archetypes of large groups is verboten (although no single person embodies all archetypes of the group), comedies "punch down," without jokes, at the inept, realistic behaviors of sad, failing individuals. How does this represent moral superiority?
Hear you, but I’m not solely talking about online. I’m talking about the broader zeitgeist, and it leaves some free thought to be desired.
I believe very few mean ill, but at high levels, with functioning people, they are overloaded on appeals to tolerance and emotion, and often all but ignore nature and it’s inconvenient facts.
This has happened several times throughout history, and the resolution isn’t typically what is desired.
Earnest? No. He is sardonic. I think. For example: "the monstrous aristocratic bore, Aaron Sorkin." Way to skewer that pontificating gassbag. Thank you.
I think Matt is both earnest AND sardonic. He is large. He contains multitudes. :-)
I think Families Ties was more about irony. All in the Family was satire.
A satire that still had the exact impact Matt describes.
Odd; Matt IS a satirist.
>Meanwhile, Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character, who worshipped Milton Friedman instead of Salinger and kept a portrait of Nixon where most kids kept the Blue Oyster Cult poster, was the rebel.
This is a false binary. Friedman’s message was not anti-liberal or anti-government programs. It was anti-government programs that did not achieve the results upon which they were predicated, which is invariably, every single one of them.
How does what Matt wrote equate to a false binary? Milton Friedman is one of the key figures ushering in the public relations and economic of neoliberalism. The Chilean economic disaster has his fingerprints all over it, as well as an entire body of economic work which privileges individualism, certain kinds of government programs (ahem undoing the work of the New Deal), and was a formative proponent of tinkering with and controlling the money supply as a means of stability (often targeting the growth rate of money supply). This view is typically referred as "monetarism".
None of this has one iota to do with what Matt is saying, which is culture was being shaped in ways that we only now recognize as Neoliberal propaganda -- not left-right battles between people who do not really understand the topics being discussed.
I never saw Friedman as a part of the culture war. He was an economist. He championed programs that actually worked. Programs that achieved the results they sought to achieve. It isn’t his fault that rarely of ever did that. Was he supposed to ignore the actual results?
I don’t know how Matt meant this sentence but that is how I read it. Friedman or Salinger. One or the other. That is a binary is it not? BTW - individualism, upon which the US was founded, is not neoliberal and the New Deal was a disaster as proven by the economic data. Any New New Deal will be 1,000 times worse.
You do realize that his policies, and their mutations have given rise to the problems we have now economically --- bubbles, fraud, markets seen as all-knowing machines, economics being seen as "scientific", instead of a social science. I could think of 50 different examples of how the economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School have fucked over working families in ways that are irreparable. So, they did not work. Its a fiction.
Actually those are mainly due to Keynes
Compared to what?
He was a chief economic advisor to the Pinochet regime. You know, the one we decided to prop up and remove Allende for, which created mass death in the southern cone (ala Brazil, Argentina, dirty wars). Not sure you could get more cultural than that.
You know, we can separate finance/economics into some anti-septic basket of non-complicity, when it is precisely this group of people who rose from obscurity during the Golden period of economic 1947-1970, to becoming the new masters of the universe (Nobel prizes, U of Chicago and Republican party celebrity). Whitewashing Milton Freidman is not a great start to this thread.
US was not founded upon individualism, it was founded upon the idea a white male democracy -- which because it did not include women until 1920 or African Americans (1965), really morphed into conflictual battle over capital, slaves, and resources. Individualism in the modern sense was ushered in as a particular marketing theme to thwart the anti-authoritarian movements of the 60s and 70s.
Even more, the idea was the people will not argue with their government or leaders if they are so subsumed in the process of individualization -- finding out who one is and then buying a product to fix the deficiencies. It was brilliant and totally neoliberal. If you want some citation of where this comes from, the movie the Corporation is a good start or the book The Road to Mount Pelerin fleshes out the goals of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
we "cannot" separate (2nd paragraph) - I hate not being able to edit.
Are you seriously arguing we should support government programs that achieve the opposite result of what they claimed they would achieve? Why do you hate poor people?
So, why don’t you exchange your Social Security for a crackpot private account scheme that Friedman pushed on Chile. All the workers money was chewed up in financial industry fees. It was a complete disaster, except for the fund managers.
I would prefer to do with my earnings what I choose as opposed to a program whose assets have been illegally plundered. I won’t see a dime of what they have taken from me. At least if I lost it through my own actions I would have myself to blame.
Please provide "programs that worked" that uncle Milton championed..............
Ha! That’s just it. None of them worked. That was his point. That doesn’t mean the government isn’t capable of creating public assistance programs that worked. They just never do so.
He liked something similar to the earned income tax credit.
I suppose charter schools would be one I would concede actually work. But most of those are locally originated.
You didn’t see Friedman as part of the culture war? I did. He was the face of so-called “free market” economics as it battled against the post-Keynesian model that had been bedrock in the Democratic Party since FDR. Friedman and Ken Galbraith had competing TV shows trying to sway cultural attitudes. Friedman was protested upon receiving the faux Nobel prize in economics. I think Friedman was a huge figure in emerging culture wars.
ChiCom Official-Look at our glorious 100k peasant dam building project!
Milton Friedman-Why are they all using wooden shovels and wheelbarrows instead of bulldozers!?!
ChiCom-We are committed to providing full employment for our people!!!
MF-If it’s job security you are after, why not give them spoons to dig with instead!!!!!
So if all government programs do not achieve their intended results, isn’t being against those programs (the ones that don’t achieve their intended results) the same as being anti-government programs?
“All” was hyperbole. The federal government has done some things that didn’t end up being worse than the cure but that is a rarity, progressively so. I have no confidence they could do anything now that can fix all the mistakes. I don’t even think they want to at this point. Most of them just want to grift and retire with the golden benefits package they voted for themselves. Friedman was active back when the genie was still somewhat in the bottle.
I was just yanking your chain a bit :-), I generally agree with you
Whaddaya mean? You can have all the free speech you want as long as you agree totally with the latest edicts of the "woke" mob.
“You can buy a Ford in any color you like, as long as it’s black”-Henry Ford
Did you know Ford and Edison lived next to each other during winters in Ft. Myers, FL?
Edison and Ford Winter Estates: https://www.edisonfordwinterestates.org/
I am pro what you are trying to accomplish here, though I'm not clear on how to go about it. What is the link rot of which you speak; I speculate that it is a link that becomes unfollowable, but I don't see how describing the link separately will prevent that. Or am I on a very wrong track?
You can search a title after the link disappears but you can't search the dead link. I mean it's not fool proof--of course if I were going to go full librarian I would ask for title, publisher, date, etc. but I didn't want to over do it. There is a bot in Wikipedia which scours it for link rot and so much! All the work to put something together and then it loses veracity with dead links.
Yes I did know that, my folks actually visited that estate a few years ago. Ford and Edison were camping buddies too, they went on trips together quite often.
It's hard to believe that Ford & Edison did so much and then had leisure to go to what was then quite a remote place for winter. Neighbors. Never fails to make me amazed.
I like this Post. Good stuff, Matt. Ebbets Field as a metaphor for once-grand old-school liberalism works.
But I don't think framing speech as uniquely a core old-school liberal value eroded by cultural changes is convincing. It was old-school conservative too. The "blunt right wing" cultural message was more about economic efficiency and power of free enterprise unencumbered by unions and self-dealing management -- whether one agrees or not, and I largely don't.
As you note, even Buckley applauded the ACLU's values while arguing only that "you've gone too far". Speech absolutism was the strange attractor that pulled ACLU-style far-left and constitution-loving far-right so close they could touch. It wasn't just a liberal value.
But it is dead now. Why? In my view it's an artefact of a vast loss in cultural self-confidence, largely driven by economic stress. I don't believe economic data -- particularly since 2008 -- paints an accurate picture of social conditions. It's no coincidence that protests from Occupy Wall Street to BLM have blown up in the past decade. In 1977 America, when Mr. Glasser's ACLU defended Nazis) a blue-collar man could have a house, car and family. Young people today have nowhere near those economic opportunities. There's a sense of betrayal, abandonment and humiliation -- and it's legitimate. The anger lashes out and finds scapegoats and villains to ventilate the pain. Racists, white nationalists, hate speakers, "extremists", Trump supporters, etc. etc. Anything but humans or countrymen with whom one disagrees, they are demons, all of them.
Free speech becomes the privileged weapon demons use to taunt, humiliate and oppress the innocent. It becomes a clear and present danger, the antithesis of freedom. And then the demonic possession is complete.
The scene where 96 year old Ben Stern tells Mr. Glasser how proud he is: that's amazing and brilliant stuff, that's such an iconographic portrait of the arc of psyche from fear to self-confidence to liberation to recognition that yes, Mr. Glasser was right all along. The way to prevent Nazis is to let them speak and to let everyone else speak. Trusting in natural moral sentiments to sort it all out better, as you point out too, than the alternatives.
I don't think that's a particularly old-school liberal value, but it certainly is a core American value in our founding documents and philosophies. I recall a famous quote from Vincent Van Gogh about painting which I relate from memory because I can't find it online that "a painter can't take up where another left off. He has to start from the beginning, with the same integrity and the same interest." I suppose that's also a metaphor for the human experience and it's true for all forms of freedom -- speech included.
One hopes the current crop of liberals will reflect with integrity and interest on the origins of free speech. If not, Sisyphus in some future age will have to push that boulder up hill, one more time. And those alive then will look back on now with scathing contempt for the cowards and dull blind souls who squandered their magnificent philosophical inheritance and so badly impoverished the future.
Rights, once lost, will cost blood to regain. A lot of blood. If that's a Sisyphean analogy, great, but it seems strangely clean of misery and death to me.
that's the boulder I mean. you got my drift.
Pushing this fucking boulder up this fucking hill all the time really fucking sucks. I'd almost rather have vultures eating my liver.
Beautiful words. Thank you. You are right about the economic stresses having more impact than anyone is admitting or focusing on. Having grown up in the rust belt, my view is that offshoring all of those jobs, breaking the back of heavy industry and the communities they fed - broke the country. Maybe it was necessary to embrace globalism to help lift up the poor in other countries and enrich middle managers and MBAs. But, I fear it may cost us America.
Outstanding comment.
Matt, great piece. I’m not entirely sure if you are a fan of Glasser’s style of liberalism, but it sounds like you definitely prefer it to what’s happening now. For the record, I’m a former “The West Wing” writer — Sorkin had to share his only writing Emmy for the show with me, and it tickles me to see how you view the show. I guess I’m a bigger fan of yours than you are of it, but that’s ok. I would love to talk with you about consulting on a new series I’m working on... one about the media... if I hear back from you, great, if not, that’s ok too.
I thought WW was kind of Hallmark for liberals and only watched a few episodes.
It was a hallmark for a type of self-identifying liberal. I found it repugnant while considering myself “liberal.”
A WW writer still working in Hollywood who subscribes here and wants to consult with Matt for a new project.... You are giving me hope, Richard.
What do you think of Hate, Inc.?
Were you trying to say DC politics are as stupid as most wars when you put “Brothers in Arms” as the background song during the climactic car trip to the Capital?
Once "Hate Speech" was accepted as valid, it was just a matter of time.
Also, this article has me just begging you to do an article on the West Wing and the garbage toxic influence it has had on politics and the left in general, since I've been waiting AGES for someone to call that turd sandwich out for the damage it's done to the modern left and politics in general.
Seek out Chapo Trap House on YouTube. They dissect Sorkin with panache.
The great podcast “Citations Needed” also did a great takedown of The West Wing.
Those guys are fucking fools. They literally attack people based on nose size and other physical characteristics. Great if you want to discuss issues with spoiled 10 year old boys.
Chapo is decent from what I've heard of them. At least they aren't like Pod Save America; a bunch of wealthy trust fund brats who actively hate working class folks and preach the idea that the left needs to go full fascy so shitstains like Favreau and his cronies can go back to being spoiled courtesans who spend their days finding new ways to do evil in God's eyes.
Lol. All I know about Pod Save America is what Matt and Katie joke about beating them in ratings on Useful Idiots. I don’t listen to political podcasts too much - useful idiots one of the exceptions but now that they’ve gone subscription that won’t be much - maybe subscribe for a month here and there and binge?
Got links to particular videos where they do so?
Here is a link to Citations Needed’s West Wing episode: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-51-how-the-west-wing-poisoned-the-liberalmind
Search youtube: Chapo Sorkin. They devoted a whole show to him. Another show to West Wing. Another to Chicago Seven.
Fundamentally, I think the left has finally surrendered to a stream of thought that was always present, if not dominant, in liberalism...namely that some people cannot be trusted to make their own choices and make up their own mind based on available information.
It's always been a facet of progressivism, that those in power know better than those they are ruling. But now, it's become the central tenet to the point that the only proper way to manage things is to prevent the unwashed from being exposed to the wrong think, wrong speech, wrong people.
What's horrifying about it is that they think they are doing good by behaving in this way...which makes them far more dangerous than if they recognized the evil in what they do.
They also don't seem to realize that it's the very foundation of racism (and all other -isms). We're better than you. You're too dumb to know it.
Interesting read, I hadn’t known about Glasser.
And yes, it’s a dangerous time to be a free thinker. Liberalism is surely dead.
The Dmocrats are coalition of globalist billionaires and intervention hawks that keep loyal voting blocs through uber-identity swords and shields. The Republicans are too stupid to recognize this. We’ll crash and burn, and who knows what comes out the other side, but my doge coins are on something less than a tolerant utopia.
I agree with most of the comment, but I think the Republicans, rather than being wholly stupid, are just content to play the part of the loyal opposition. Note how the establishment GOP fought the Tea Party with such fervor. It was a threat to their grift.
Totally agree. I used Republican too broadly, but was more referring to the political body and funders. Their voters, whether Trump folks or Tea Party, largely despise them.