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.
Bad policy is subjective. I could not vote for continuation of any of these policies:
Animals
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64. Rolled back a roughly 40-year-old interpretation of a policy aimed at protecting migratory birds. The rule imposed fines and other penalties on companies who accidentally kill birds through their actions, including oil spills and toxic pesticide applications. In August 2020, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the regulation, reinstating the protection. But, in January, the administration moved forward with a final rule anyway.
Interior Department | Read more »
65. Cut critical habitat for the northern spotted owl by more than three million acres in Washington state, Oregon and Northern California, opening up the land to timber harvesting.
Interior Department | Read more »
66. Changed the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, making it more difficult to protect wildlife from long-term threats posed by climate change.
Interior Department; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
67. Weakened critical habitat protections under the Endangered Species Act by making it easier to exclude certain areas, including for public-works projects such as schools and hospitals, and for public lands leased to non-government businesses.
Interior Department | Read more »
68. Ended the automatic application of full protections for ‘threatened’ plants and animals, the classification one step below ‘endangered’ in the Endangered Species Act.
Interior Department | Read more »
69. Relaxed environmental protections for salmon and smelt in California’s Central Valley in order to free up water for farmers.
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more »
70. Removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list.
Interior Department | Read more »
71. Overturned a ban on the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands.
Interior Department | Read more »
72. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges.
Congress | Read more »
73. Reversed an Obama-era rule that barred using bait, such as grease-soaked doughnuts, to lure and kill grizzly bears, among other sport hunting practices that many people consider extreme, on some public lands in Alaska.
National Park Service; Interior Department | Read more »
74. Amended fishing regulations to loosen restrictions on the harvest of a number of species.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
75. Removed restrictions on commercial fishing in a protected marine preserve southeast of Cape Cod that is home to rare corals and a number of endangered sea animals. The Trump administration suggested changing the management or size of two other marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean.
Executive Order; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
76. Proposed revising limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that can be unintentionally killed or injured with sword-fishing nets on the West Coast. (The Obama-era rules were initially withdrawn by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but were later finalized following a court order. The agency said it planned to revise the limits.)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
77. Loosened fishing restrictions intended to reduce bycatch of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. Nonprofits have filed a lawsuit challenging the rollback.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
78. Overturned a ban on using parts of migratory birds in handicrafts made by Alaskan Natives.
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.
Nothing there is an out and out lie, but it's slanted toward a viewpoint and lacks context. If there's a lie there, you need to point it out rather than libel.
You need a whole lot of references - "Google it" doesn't count. I know the Brits did invent concentration c amps in the Boer War, which was extremely ugly and between white colonists, and similarly on the Opium War. But those are the only examples I've seen elsewhere.
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.
JOHNSON: How many firearms were confiscated in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds that day?
SANBORN: To my knowledge we have not recovered any on that day from any other arrests at the scene at this point.
JOHNSON: Nobody has been charged with an actual firearm weapon in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds?
SANBORN: Correct.
JOHNSON: How many shots were fired?
SANBORN: I believe the only shots fired were the ones that resulted in the death of the one lady.
Now here is a list of all the people that were arrested for gun possession. The place they were arrested and the date of the arrest is at the bottom of the page. None were arrested in the capitol on Janurary 6th.
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.
100% of Portland residents are the Antifa understanders!
My friends and I have attended protests alongside Antifa folks. I know these people personally. It’s not an organization with a charter and a leader, it’s a banner. It’s improvisational. It means anti-fascism and nothing more. The word “Antifa” has been exaggerated by comical proportions to mean “all those rowdy protesters I hate.”
Jolly, I’m not going to fight with you. I didn’t participate in BLM protests. The Antifa banner existed long before those protests/riots/call them whatever you like. What happened in those communities was tragic. I watched the fallout and saw something more like a natural disaster than a revolution. These things happen as institutions disintegrate. You should direct your rage at the institutions, not people. Relax, and enjoy your hair.
The banner was a Communist thing when there was a visible, acknowledged Fascism to fight. It's like the three revivals of the Klan - each was different but all used the same symbology. Blaming the 1930s antifascists for the acts of today is at the very least unfair, not that it makes a difference.
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.
You mean like their uniforms? Their clearly stated and unwavering desire for ethnic cleansing? Their one godlike leader? Concentration camps? Door to door checking of ID papers?
There’s a really simple test you can use to make sure you don’t end up looking like an idiot by comparing a group or person to nazis: How would you feel saying it to a Holocaust survivor?
Sure, yeah. A couple months of spontaneous protests and riots are totally comparable to the most horrific crime of the 20th century. Pardon me, I have to go roll my eyes so hard they burst through the back of my skull.
HBI said it's "not a perfect metaphor". Here you are, arguing as if he said it was a perfect metaphor. We are lucky that in the US it's not so easy to push totalitarian racial ideology. Diversity certainly counts for something.
You have something physically wrong with your eye sockets. Please see a physician. Breaking windows is a known antifa tradition going back to Seattle in 1999.
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...
Except BLM is a multiracial uprising that didn’t actually change anything material, not on a large scale. That’s why this comparison is so delusional. BLM was rapidly co-opted by monopoly corporations and legislators, used as a human shield to justify their consolidation of power. Power is the enemy, not people. Even if your Holocaust survivor friend would’ve disliked this cultural trend, I seriously doubt he’d liken it to life in Hitler’s Germany or a concentration camp.
"Except BLM is a multiracial uprising that didn’t actually change anything material, not on a large scale."
True enough--because there were a lot of grifters in on the front end (at the top levels), which makes corporate-co-option very easy. Antifa is a bit different, seeming more amorphous and much fonder of violence, attracting the sorts of personalities that the brownshirts or the fascistas (the blackshirts) did at the outset. Which is I think what probably leads to the comparisons. Although I agree it's best to avoid such metaphors, and rather use a generally agreed-upon descriptor and highlight actual tactics and strategies and actions.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody really read the Georgia bill including and especially Joe Biden or any Democrat on the face of the planet..lol.. People (particulary in the media) just make up their own facts and "truths" to satisfy what they need to comfort them emotionally and make them feel right nowadays. People have become so used to pretending lies are truths facts hardly matter anymore.
I'm a liberal but appreciate you rationally talking facts and details about the voting law rather than throwing out (Democratic) talking points like sasinsea. Democrats are no more the party of fact than Republicans when it comes to their sacred cow issues. They become hysterical drama queens and this is not helping minority groups they claim to care about.
Niemoeller was a martyr like the early Catholics were ("Christians to the lions...") or those Buddhist monks who torched themselves in Vietnam were. It's hard to gauge the impact of a martyr. I mean his postwar poem is useful but his actual life resisting Nazis is notable for its lack of impact on the state itself. They put him in a concentration camp for 7 years and virtually no one noticed except the camp guards who harassed him mercilessly.
Jersey should have been deep blue in that post. I should know, as I was born and lived there for 35 years.
Fair points. I'd read up after Biden was making a few bad claims about it and trusted those sources. Will check some stuff out this weekend. Care to critique the larger point about your claim that the right is the new liberals or we just gonna skip past that?
People on the right are standing up for free speech, due process (including for men on campus), and equal justice under law. Talking about people like Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson. DeVos under Trump promulgated regulations to protect free speech and due process on campus, and Biden has pledged to reverse those.
With a few honorable exceptions, the people on the left have now turned against these things. When I was a young man, it was people like Ed Meese and the Moral Majority who wanted to curtail free speech and due process. So yes, on the matters most important to me--civil liberties-- the right is now clearly better. The sides have switched.
It's worthy of note that PBS featured Lisa DesJardin interviewing Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling last week, and Sterling was able to make some absolutely spot-on, cogent points about why Georgia's new proposals on voting regulations did not equate to an anti-democratic effort at (racist!) voter suppression, the way that partisan Democrats have alleged, falling all over each other with hyperbole:
Sterling: "in this law, we move to a thing that actually is a better election administration item, which is using a voter I.D. number, their driver's license number, or their last four of their Social and their date of birth to identify the person, as opposed to a subjective signature match, which kind of undermined many people's faith in how that signature matching was done. By having a binary, objective measure, it makes it easier and will likely lower rejection rates for those ballots...those very same people [allied with the Democrats] sued us to get rid of signature verification just last year, and they lost..."
Lisa DesJ: "...You know what is making headlines, of course, is this ban on handing out food and water at the polls. I understand you made the argument that, in the last election, there may have been some activists who used giving out water as an excuse to talk to voters.
First, do we know that that happened? And, second, if so, why not just enforce the campaign ban? Why eliminate giving out food and water?"
Gabriel S.: "Well, the main thing is, it's been used as a work-around to get around that law.
And the irony of this, as we looked it up, this is actually the law in the president's home state of Delaware right now. So, this is not some new thing that's been brought out. This is pretty standard across the country to avoid those kind of loopholes where people can go and campaign and try to influence voters in the line.
And that's been the law in this state for decades. This was a work-around. People sort of abused it. It's hard to enforce for elections officials and sheriffs. Like I said, it's the law in the president's home state of Delaware. So I'm surprised that shock isn't being held for his own state legislature, who passed the same thing."
(Yes, that's the same Gabriel Sterling who told the Election Steal Fanatics last November that yes, Joe Biden really did win the state of Georgia in a valid election with no evidence of fraud, and would the Trumpist goon squad please stop threatening his staff with their paranoid meltdowns.)
Now I'll present the two Partisan Templates for the way DesJardin's interview with Sterling gets recollected. You know, the takeaway. The information that gets lodged in long-term memory.
Partisan Democrats: they love PBS, of course. But when PBS presents content as disruptive of the Democratic Party Narrative as that, it literally goes in one ear and out the other, like the interview never happened.
Partisan Republicans: PBS never ran an interview like that, because ugh, PBS...they lean liberal, and therefore everything they feature MUST be serving the agenda of Cancel Culture orthodoxy. So they couldn't have.
I’ll tell you how this law will be used. Voting access will increase in places where there is currently no problem, namely small rural counties. The numerical limits that have been baked into this bill are targeted to reduce access in the larger counties, that - oh my - happen to have a large Democrat registration.
The voting lines that are experienced in the larger counties are the result of past efforts to limit who much access voters have to voting sites. The problem will get worse when less mail-in voting is allowed. When the lines get longer, the legislature will claim that the county elections officials are incompetent and will replace them with Republican hacks, per provisions in this law. That will create even less access for voters in those counties.
No bill like this will ever say it is discriminatory. That would be struck down by courts. The bill has been structured to treated large counties unfairly, knowing that they vote for Democrats. Allowing a state takeover of their election boards will permanently entrench a Republican power structure on Georgia, regardless of how the residents would like to vote.
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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 Democrats have pulled off a great hoax. In the early 1960s they represented some of the best of liberalism, inspiring liberals (including me) to join the party. Under Johnson they moved from being liberal to acting and talking like liberals for cynical illiberal reasons. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are examples. They still claimed to be liberals.
The Great Society was neither liberal nor conservative, but a move in the direction of authoritarianism. It said all the liberal things, but accomplished racist objectives by imposing a belief in an external locus of control on inner-city African-Americans. This bound the black vote to the Democrats; that this was the objective is made clear by failure even to acknowledge the Moynihan Report, which was prophetic beyond anything ever devised by Nostradamus.
Then came the Big Lie: If you're a social liberal you cannot be a fiscal conservative. Libertarians belie that, understanding that social liberalism is a luxury that can only be afforded by the fiscally conservative. Most of us are idealists, liberals, in our youth, and we flocked to the "liberal" party that was becoming anything but. Few people enter the poorly-paid profession of journalism except idealists, and having made a choice, were embarrassed to admit they'd been hoodwinked. There was no one left to call out the Democrats.
«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.
In some european countries there are regular national army (certainly not local reserves or militia) sentries at every polling station for the two days they are open, including overnight, and when ballot boxes are move to counting office they are escorted by army teams and the counting is also protected by them.
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.
Point taken. I guess I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea that a large swath of people don’t have IDs. IDs are necessary for many transactions in our lives including buying alcohol or cigarettes or getting a job, getting on a plane, cashing checks, getting government assistance like SS, Medicare and Medicaid etc. If this is the case, then we should focus on getting free IDs to people so they function in every day life, including the vote. This is the standard in most countries, to have ID to vote. Pakistan is instituting biometrics for the vote.
Completely agree. It's possible that people who don't have ID may not have gotten access to other things that could help them too. My wife does volunteer tax help, and is astonished by the number of people she encounters who could have been receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit and other benefits for years but weren't filing tax returns and didn't know it could actually bring them money, rather than taking it away.
In general, any political solution relies on a presumption of good will on the part of your opponents; anything else is in the nature of a short-term truce.
This is why when someone says "we should solve the problem via negotiation" I am very skeptical. People who do not trust each other or who have unexpressed motives aren't negotiating anything except a better starting point for the next phase of conflict.
Having experienced that part of the world up close and personally, liberal values take a beating when faced with a culture that actively rejects them.
I was against the Iraq war - and Afghanistan from the very beginning precisely for that reason. There was no way that the US general public was going to tolerate the things that would have to be done to win such a war. First, 20+ years in place. I actually underestimated the time required, and that was a weird feeling in 2001 or 2002 telling people it would be a 20 year occupation. Second, tossing out our ideas of liberal values and meeting the opponent on their own level. This conversation just adds additional confirmation, as if I needed any, that it was all a mistake.
The question comes to mind however, what happens when this crew or another similarly savage one comes to visit us? Liberal values were only sustained due to superiority of Western warmaking capability driven by technology. When that is no longer true, what then? Either values will have to take a hit or we'll have to deal with subjugation. War is war.
NB: I thought we should have pasted Afghanistan with nuclear weapons, border to border, and left Iraq alone, incidentally, with just a cordon sanitaire. Why even have the deterrent if you're going to tolerate attacks? And why give the Afghans a pass for letting attacks on other nation-states emanate from their borders. They chose poor leaders. A nation-state sized nuclear holocaust would serve as an example for all time and eliminate the threat of warmaking emanating from such nations in the future. The citizens/subjects thereof would take care of the problem themselves to avoid the threat of annihilating force.
Instead, we chose stupid, and about 5,000 US deaths and over 20,000 wounded are the result, repeating what the Soviets tried and failed at. And everyone knows the emperor has no clothes.
“ 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.”
Of course I like it too, but I add that I think that the "defunct economists" were themselves usually the slaves of some defunct theologians.
«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»
I make a difference between politics, which is about power and money, and debates about politics, which are often about metaphysics like idea (sometimes subjectively sincerely, sometimes hypocritically). As to chicken-and-eggs it's the same with the ideas of "structure" and "superstructure".
But look at politics as it is practice, actually-existing politics: politics requires budgets and efforts, across long periods, so it is driven by big donors and big vested lobbies, and they don't spend dozens of billions every year to merely support ideas, but as investments on which they want big returns in terms of power and money. Even upper-middle and middle class people vote mostly for power and money (someone wrote that "residential real estate is the american national religion"), and of course lower class and underclass people often vote for better wages and social insurance.
To achieve power and money most lobbies also push ideas (usually of the "jam tomorrow" type to fool the gullible), but in the same way as my first quote: they choose the "law" if that helps their interests, the "evidence" if that is better for their interests, and they just "pound the table" if they don't have ideas that fit their interests.
The impression that politics is a debate of ideas is sometimes called "wykehamism" in England, from the nickname of a prep school (Winchester): that politics is or should be a debate about the best possible ideas among enlightened people. That is pretty much also clintonian/blairite "technocracy".
PS: As to chicken-and-egg I might agree that "culture" (a specific and wide generalization of "ideas") is ultimately the driver of much behaviour, in the long term, as in the long term what obtains power and money is not so clear, because of what JM Keynes called "radical uncertainty", and "culture" ultimately seems to me a set of survival heuristics as NN Taleb and some anthropologists argue, but in the short-medium term the practice of politics is primarily about power and money.
I don’t disagree. The reality is most politics as practiced is about power or personal gain - even if played out on a global scale by the powerful and acquiesced to by their followers. It is a power-money game. And always has been. The level of detachment from what “should” be behind politics, however, the principles, reasons, ideas, seems to have eroded, and is continuing to erode, to an even more perilous state - approaching the point of meaningless where we’re just monkeys throwing their poo at each other. (Or maybe Vonnegut’s humans in Galapagos - evolved to the point of being immobile seal-like creatures just listening to each other’s farts). The acceptance of debate by the broad public is part of the problem. Fuck debate. I’m old, old school on this and want nothing to do with the rhetoricians, debaters, and sophists. Too much is about “winning” at word play - and even that word play and what constitutes “winning” or a “better” point has been Twitterized to adolescent levels. Most of our politicians are lawyers (rhetoricians) so it really shouldn’t be a surprise.
Aristotle’s famous, “Man (human) is a political animal” is a good example. That statement is so often misquoted and not understood as merely meaning humans are political - engaging in politics and political arrangements. But it is the culmination of an argument that requires not just Aristotle’s Politics to understand, but the Ethics, Logic, De Anima, and Metaphysics. What the fuck are we, what’s going on, why the hell are we doing it, and for what purpose?! It’s not that I expect people to go on these deep philosophical or spiritual journeys - but some level of awareness has to be had or our doom is going to be even doomier!
Maybe to spin Eliot, the world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with a shallow quip and knee-jerk.
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?
I can play the same game you are, like when you write “...what we can do is help people avoid propaganda...” I can start in on how we all know “help” is really just an euphemism for “control” and be sure to point out that authoritarian regimes always start with “helping” the implied “lesser” people.
So yeah, I do have a suggestion - stop playing rhetorical games; call people on it when they do. Ask people to define their terms and context and provide support/ideas for what they propose. Evolve past rhetoric, debate, and “gotcha” games and actually discuss in argumentative form looking for sound, not merely valid, and certainly not invalid or vacuous, arguments. If people are unwilling to attempt actually discussing in an intelligent, adult manner move along to someone else who is at least willing to try and operates in good faith.
First. Help us understand your definition of rhetorical games?
For me here, when I post, I bring content to the table (references, ideas from important thinkers, and a knowledge of our historical and financial past). That does not mean I am here offer all of the answers. In fact, I think people like Matt Taibbi are at the forefront of leading people to where we need to be. He uses rhetoric quite well. So you'll have to be more specific by the games being played. I am quite interested in this topic, not because of your reference, but there are a large number of games being played on Matt's thread and I enjoy calling people out when it is obvious they are deliberately playing games.
Asking people to define terms and specifics only works when you have some amount of trust in the poster -- that your time is not wasted on a troll farm in Duluth. And who the fuck knows what you consider to be vacuous Incarnadine? You may be very accomplished, eloquent and have points but work for the American Enterprise Institute or you could be a pain in the ass asking questions to the wrong person, but have a real fire to make change. Its hard to know.
Good faith is important, and that's why I responded to each of your comments, but I did not really care for your platitudes comment -- and your replies seem to carry with it a hidden adversarial tone.
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.
"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."
History in Central and South America tell a different story. When the State (why capitalized?) has killed people en masse, it's almost always been the right who has co-opted its mechanisms with help from Uncle Scam. In fact "they don't play by the same rules" nonsense is just one of many false excuses that politicians, both Democrat and Republican as well as the "liberal" corporate media in the USA use to justify or cover up US government backed coups, death squads and sanctions. I'd put the body count of politicians like Allende or Chavez or Maduro at about 1/1000th of those killed by right wing governments. https://yachana.org/teaching/resources/interventions.html
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.
What makes me sad is that now it's clear that no one will ever help the black underclass. The black middle and upper class is rising, which is a great thing, but they are using their voice for themselves, to end their occasional harassment by police for example. People on the right who proclaim that BLM folks don't actually think all black lives matter because they aren't weighing a black life lost to gang violence the same as one lost to police violence are missing the point. They believe the police violence could happen TO THEM. Getting shot by rival gang members will not happen to the black middle class, so they are not worried about it. White liberals don't know anyone from college who could be affected, either, so they could care less about it, too. It still only affects people with zero political voice at all, sadly. It's an abject state of affairs.
This is a dehumanizing ideology. It dehumanizes everyone. The victims matter only when they serve the narrative, and that depends on the race of the perpetrator. In the 80s I lived in a pristine suburb -- could've stopped driving into the city any time I wanted. The people living with random violence every day have no choice, no media behind them, no Black Lives Matter. They need and want more police, not fewer--they've said so, and city councils cuts the budget, anyway, This is all an ugly "performative" dog and pony show, sociopathic in so many ways. The media is responsible for so much of what is unfolding, I'd rather quit my job, a thousand times, than grovel to keep it.
Defund the police, blm, is mostly white people telling blacks what they should prefer, just like they can't have school choice in any real amounts because of teachers unions .
But you have to admit this has all been a windfall for black actors who do commercials because most couples in commercials these days are all mixed race. The subtext appears to be that black folk need to hitch their caboose to a white engine if they want middle class success. Probably reading too much into it.
I did see the latest iteration of Law Order where the young Italian mobster(evidently not an ethnic stereotype) kills his father, also a mobster, because dad wasn't woke enough to like the young mobster's black wife.
Nothing like using an entertainment cudgel to beat a social control agenda into an audience's head. Personally I'd rather watch a test pattern. Sadly 24 hour nonstop television has killed the test pattern, arguably TV's greatest programming creation.
Qanon idiots BELIEVE Hillary Clinton was/is running a pedo ring out of pizzerias. If you can’t get past paranoiac beliefs-like Qanon or the fact that suburban cops are hunting suburban blacks engaged in everyday activities-I don’t feel sorry for you. Rationality matters. Deal with it. The suburbs aren’t a drug corner in West Chicago or Detroit.
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?
That, along with all the low-hanging traits of every politically identifiable group online, is a product of the medium. The discourse has been poisoned by this stupid means of communication and its fucked out rewards system. In real life—free from built-in bias and silos, disconnected from their bid to brand themselves and become the cynosure of every comment thread—most people are dependably good and willing to self-deprecate. Including irritating online blue wavers. Get them in person and their humanity is evident. Reduce them to convenient straw men and you’re playing the same rigged game they are.
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.
Friedman's theories would have worked much better in Chile if Pinochet just had more helicopters with the capacity to hold more occupants and bigger doors to drop more of them into the ocean.
Yeah, it’s silly to ascribe Friedman’s economic policy to killing Commies but the “economic” history mcelrjoy has read, if I had to guess from the comments, has much more to do with politics than economics. It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason. Some just did it more forcefully than others. Of course, the Commies would have murdered Pinochet and anyone that appeared educated. But since they lost it is easy to play victim.
"It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason."
LOL, only if you define "entire first world western civilization" as USA-backed/funded former colonial interests trying to hold onto land and resources that didn't belong to them, and which had historically ALWAYS been policed for them by the US military - or - the US CIA and the corporate/energy interests with which it was deeply integrated.
The Monroe Doctrine pre-dated communism, my friend.
Using the word "actually" does not miraculously take an inaccurate statement and make it accurate. Keynes is not responsible for this - he died in 1946. He considered himself a socialist and believed in fixing problems in the economy (practical solutions) to economic problems.
He certainly would not have advised the President to unwind anti-trust laws or prosecute air traffic controllers for unionizing, nor would he have allowed Gramm-Leach-Bliley to be passed allowing the single best piece of financial legislation to be gutted (Glass Steagall Act of 1932) which eventually lead to TBTF (too big to fail) banks being bailed out after fucking over just about everyone in our country.
Lastly, he would then not have advised Treasury or the Federal Reserve to allow free, cheap money to prop up the banks as a means of falsely showing profits (allowing executives to make massive bonuses) or fail to regulate home foreclosure policies by banks -- in which we saw such massive bank fraud that there were entire towns or foreclosure mills forging signatures on bank documents --- so that they could foreclose on American homes faster or falsely. So, Keynes is not responsible for Enron, LIBOR rigging, or algorithmic programs which front run trades on exchanges making owners billions. The financialization of the economy would not have happened under his leadership (changing usury laws, and leverage amount for trades).
However, Milton Friedman's argument (Hayek assisted) from the NTC (neoliberal thought collective) founded at Mount Pelerin in 1947 developed over time into "free trade" "smaller government" and the "slow stead increase in the money supply" plus using quantitative and mathematical models to hide the inherent nature of the economic policies that were scoffed at during the 1947-1970. So, yes he is the architect of the problematic economy we have now --- because most industry's have matured, been privatized, the marrow has been sucked out and now we do not produce things as a culture (except weapons, drugs and debt).
Not Germaine to your main argument but....in practical terms, if’n you were King.... would you allow air traffic be subject to the whims of a union like schools currently are? They did take an oath not to strike.
Allow power grids to shut down unexpectedly because of unworkable generation and delivery models?
How do you feel about China’s participation in world trade, publicly traded corps without GAAP compliance and essential products like pharmaceuticals being farmed out to a hostile foreign competitor?
I sometimes believe destroying American exceptionalism is a goal.
The Keynesian models seem to have lost credibility due to stagflation and volckers success by doing the exact opposite of what Keynes would have prescribed for the Fed. I think we can primarily blame this on the switch to monetarism, since Reagan gets all the credit for what volcker did. I think this has a lot to do with abandoning Keynes for neoliberalism and making it tenable to the public.
In an email addressed to me you identified bcc recipients and the entire email text. The latter does not bother me; the former does. You evidently have my email address and somehow made your way through what should have been multiple layers of security, or someone forwarded that email to you. Please e-mail me again and identify yourself.
I'm happy to engage in reasoned discourse with you or anyone. We don't appear to disagree on much. I just want/need to know how you got possession of the e-mail. If it was forwarded to you from one of the bcc recipients that's innocent. If not, then there are vulnerabilities to explain.
Not my job to educate you here. Compared to what is the last vestige of someone who knows a little about a lot but does not seem to get beyond the surface level of policy, history, or the areas of conflict (how they came to be etc..). If you want to cling onto your own world view with a modicum of understanding, that is your choice, but do not ask me to constantly edit your work and fill in the gaps please.
Ultimately, you are bullshitting, it needs to be called out. It's your job to post accurately.
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?
Well, we have a long history in our country of it lifting people out of poverty, except now the government is captured by business interests and government programs are designed to fail (drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub). This is a feature of neoliberalism --- not public spending.
If one starts with Powell Memo and works forward from 1970, you would find the corporate takeover of institutions, government, thinktanks, and consolidating that power in certain industries like media, healthcare, finance, real estate, pharma, and technology.
And it is no wonder that this consolidation has to led to oligopolies in most industries (Apple, Google, FB, and Amazon) or (Pfizer, JNJ, Merck, LLY) or (Goldman Sachs, BofA, Blackrock) or (Disney/GE/Viacom/Fox).
You have the wrong narrative of what's happened in this country.
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.
And how have those assets been illegally plundered. The program has almost no assets. It is a pay-as-you-go system with a very small trust fund that was temporary. What kind of paranoid nonsense have you been reading.
I spent 10 years as investment advisor at one of the TBTF firms during one of the most profitable periods in world history- so I run into this a lot. People who purport to know more about how the system works than actually really do.
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.
Social Security has worked as intended, and there is no comparable private program that can achieve the same goal for less.
And before you compare apples and oranges by talking about investment accounts, you should understand that Social Security was never intended to function like an investment account, or it would have required 30+ years of pre-funding before anyone got a check.
Sure, if it’s intention was to create another government revenue steam from which politicians could grift. Other than being mandatory, which is unAmerican, it was not to be touched. That was a LIE. It hasn’t kept up with inflation either. Another LIE. It also was never meant to go to those that didn’t pay into it. Yet another LIE.
It’s not that public assistance programs don’t “work”. They certainly achieve a result that the champions of them sought. It is just usually the opposite of the goal they claim to have sought to get support to pass them. For example, incentivizing single parenthood to “help” families while it destroys families. The politicians pushing this had every intention of destroying families while claiming the goal was the opposite. The data is overwhelming that their “help” did the opposite.
The concept is political, sure and there is always money to be made on a valuable investment. The superior education one receives in a charter school, however, isn’t political. Unless you want more uneducated citizens that is. Teacher’s Unions love uneducated citizens.
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.
Americans have a weird definition of liberalism because there's no labor party in the US. In the rest of the world, liberalism means the ideology of free enterprise and is a discourse of the rich. That's why, when the US government says it's defending freedom around the world, the main freedom to them is the right to exploit labor. The rest is secondary or even unimportant
Yes. The ultiimate upshot of this terminological confusion is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion of politics with Americans in general. The righturds on Matt's subscriber list, and there are so so many, use "left" as a descriptor for any and all varieties of liberalism that offend their sense of privilege. "Socialism" has been bastardized to mean New Deal Liberalism w Benefits and there are actually American trans activists who call themselves "communists" based on their screeching insistence that they are women and women aren't. Go figure.
Just don't expect to have a reasonable conversation.
«a weird definition of liberalism because there's no labor party in the US. In the rest of the world, liberalism means the ideology of free enterprise»
In the USA the socialdemocratic "left" is called "progressives" (sometimes) and it was a significant component of the Democratics and for a while post-WW2 even of the Republicans. You probably know that technically the term "left" was used to describe the republican fourth estate (the bourgeoisie) when the "right" were the monarchical feudalists.
I keep trying to explain here that the Democratics and the "woke" are actually right-wing radicals aka whigs aka libertarians with authoritarian characteristics, but not many get it.
«the main freedom to them is the right to exploit labor.»
The support for the "woke" I think is meant to go way beyond that: the ultimate goal probably is to normalize absolute property rights and unlimited freedom of contract so that "agreeing" to lifetime debt servitude or to sell your body for parts to save your family become normalized too.
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.
Poor Walter Mondale. By all accounts, a decent enough person.
...and totally outmoded; a '50s Dem in the '80s. His autobiography is instructive.
I always think of Fritz as T-Rex, doomed to extinction yet waving his stubby little arms in outrage. "Where's the beef???"
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.
I can't stand either party. However, I think the Left is destroying the US.
Bad policy is subjective. I could not vote for continuation of any of these policies:
Animals
Completed
64. Rolled back a roughly 40-year-old interpretation of a policy aimed at protecting migratory birds. The rule imposed fines and other penalties on companies who accidentally kill birds through their actions, including oil spills and toxic pesticide applications. In August 2020, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the regulation, reinstating the protection. But, in January, the administration moved forward with a final rule anyway.
Interior Department | Read more »
65. Cut critical habitat for the northern spotted owl by more than three million acres in Washington state, Oregon and Northern California, opening up the land to timber harvesting.
Interior Department | Read more »
66. Changed the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, making it more difficult to protect wildlife from long-term threats posed by climate change.
Interior Department; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
67. Weakened critical habitat protections under the Endangered Species Act by making it easier to exclude certain areas, including for public-works projects such as schools and hospitals, and for public lands leased to non-government businesses.
Interior Department | Read more »
68. Ended the automatic application of full protections for ‘threatened’ plants and animals, the classification one step below ‘endangered’ in the Endangered Species Act.
Interior Department | Read more »
69. Relaxed environmental protections for salmon and smelt in California’s Central Valley in order to free up water for farmers.
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more »
70. Removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list.
Interior Department | Read more »
71. Overturned a ban on the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands.
Interior Department | Read more »
72. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges.
Congress | Read more »
73. Reversed an Obama-era rule that barred using bait, such as grease-soaked doughnuts, to lure and kill grizzly bears, among other sport hunting practices that many people consider extreme, on some public lands in Alaska.
National Park Service; Interior Department | Read more »
74. Amended fishing regulations to loosen restrictions on the harvest of a number of species.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
75. Removed restrictions on commercial fishing in a protected marine preserve southeast of Cape Cod that is home to rare corals and a number of endangered sea animals. The Trump administration suggested changing the management or size of two other marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean.
Executive Order; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
76. Proposed revising limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that can be unintentionally killed or injured with sword-fishing nets on the West Coast. (The Obama-era rules were initially withdrawn by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but were later finalized following a court order. The agency said it planned to revise the limits.)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
77. Loosened fishing restrictions intended to reduce bycatch of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. Nonprofits have filed a lawsuit challenging the rollback.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more »
78. Overturned a ban on using parts of migratory birds in handicrafts made by Alaskan Natives.
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.
Another case of Hillary's bad judgement. Any normal Republican would have lost to her.
It's very likely that more and more outlandish candidates will get serious looks in the future. It'll be another symptom of our decline.
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.
Nothing there is an out and out lie, but it's slanted toward a viewpoint and lacks context. If there's a lie there, you need to point it out rather than libel.
This one’s egregious enough to pass from “distortion” to “lie”:
“World jewry declared war on Germany in 1933”
(But I defend his right to say it! ;)
Care to elaborate
Or is that just code for things you don't like?
You need a whole lot of references - "Google it" doesn't count. I know the Brits did invent concentration c amps in the Boer War, which was extremely ugly and between white colonists, and similarly on the Opium War. But those are the only examples I've seen elsewhere.
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.
Yes. In the capitol.
First. Here is testimony from the FBI:
JOHNSON: How many firearms were confiscated in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds that day?
SANBORN: To my knowledge we have not recovered any on that day from any other arrests at the scene at this point.
JOHNSON: Nobody has been charged with an actual firearm weapon in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds?
SANBORN: Correct.
JOHNSON: How many shots were fired?
SANBORN: I believe the only shots fired were the ones that resulted in the death of the one lady.
Now here is a list of all the people that were arrested for gun possession. The place they were arrested and the date of the arrest is at the bottom of the page. None were arrested in the capitol on Janurary 6th.
https://www.thetrace.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-firearms-arrests-proud-boys/
Thank you much
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.
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.
“Nazis of Antifa”
This is the phrasing of a devoted cable news subscriber, wholly out of touch with young people and ground level political realities.
Yeah...
I live an hour from Portland. Antifa are the fucking Nazis.
100% of Portland residents are the Antifa understanders!
My friends and I have attended protests alongside Antifa folks. I know these people personally. It’s not an organization with a charter and a leader, it’s a banner. It’s improvisational. It means anti-fascism and nothing more. The word “Antifa” has been exaggerated by comical proportions to mean “all those rowdy protesters I hate.”
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?
Jolly, I’m not going to fight with you. I didn’t participate in BLM protests. The Antifa banner existed long before those protests/riots/call them whatever you like. What happened in those communities was tragic. I watched the fallout and saw something more like a natural disaster than a revolution. These things happen as institutions disintegrate. You should direct your rage at the institutions, not people. Relax, and enjoy your hair.
The banner was a Communist thing when there was a visible, acknowledged Fascism to fight. It's like the three revivals of the Klan - each was different but all used the same symbology. Blaming the 1930s antifascists for the acts of today is at the very least unfair, not that it makes a difference.
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.
“The woke really do resemble Nazis in many ways.”
You mean like their uniforms? Their clearly stated and unwavering desire for ethnic cleansing? Their one godlike leader? Concentration camps? Door to door checking of ID papers?
There’s a really simple test you can use to make sure you don’t end up looking like an idiot by comparing a group or person to nazis: How would you feel saying it to a Holocaust survivor?
The scripted chanting and kristallnacht techniques are familiar, though.
Sure, yeah. A couple months of spontaneous protests and riots are totally comparable to the most horrific crime of the 20th century. Pardon me, I have to go roll my eyes so hard they burst through the back of my skull.
HBI said it's "not a perfect metaphor". Here you are, arguing as if he said it was a perfect metaphor. We are lucky that in the US it's not so easy to push totalitarian racial ideology. Diversity certainly counts for something.
You have something physically wrong with your eye sockets. Please see a physician. Breaking windows is a known antifa tradition going back to Seattle in 1999.
Gleichschaltung, too.
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...
Except BLM is a multiracial uprising that didn’t actually change anything material, not on a large scale. That’s why this comparison is so delusional. BLM was rapidly co-opted by monopoly corporations and legislators, used as a human shield to justify their consolidation of power. Power is the enemy, not people. Even if your Holocaust survivor friend would’ve disliked this cultural trend, I seriously doubt he’d liken it to life in Hitler’s Germany or a concentration camp.
BLM has nothing to do with race. BLM is a political movement using race as a fulcrum.
"Except BLM is a multiracial uprising that didn’t actually change anything material, not on a large scale."
True enough--because there were a lot of grifters in on the front end (at the top levels), which makes corporate-co-option very easy. Antifa is a bit different, seeming more amorphous and much fonder of violence, attracting the sorts of personalities that the brownshirts or the fascistas (the blackshirts) did at the outset. Which is I think what probably leads to the comparisons. Although I agree it's best to avoid such metaphors, and rather use a generally agreed-upon descriptor and highlight actual tactics and strategies and actions.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody really read the Georgia bill including and especially Joe Biden or any Democrat on the face of the planet..lol.. People (particulary in the media) just make up their own facts and "truths" to satisfy what they need to comfort them emotionally and make them feel right nowadays. People have become so used to pretending lies are truths facts hardly matter anymore.
What's a shame is that the truth is so easily accessible. Tells you what the authoritarian left thinks of the serfs.
I'm a liberal but appreciate you rationally talking facts and details about the voting law rather than throwing out (Democratic) talking points like sasinsea. Democrats are no more the party of fact than Republicans when it comes to their sacred cow issues. They become hysterical drama queens and this is not helping minority groups they claim to care about.
Niemoeller was a martyr like the early Catholics were ("Christians to the lions...") or those Buddhist monks who torched themselves in Vietnam were. It's hard to gauge the impact of a martyr. I mean his postwar poem is useful but his actual life resisting Nazis is notable for its lack of impact on the state itself. They put him in a concentration camp for 7 years and virtually no one noticed except the camp guards who harassed him mercilessly.
Jersey should have been deep blue in that post. I should know, as I was born and lived there for 35 years.
Deep-red to describe NJ was a prompt for people to double-check the facts. Congratulations.
Someone is feeding you BS, and you're swallowing it. https://morning.thedispatch.com/p/the-morning-dispatch-understanding
Fair points. I'd read up after Biden was making a few bad claims about it and trusted those sources. Will check some stuff out this weekend. Care to critique the larger point about your claim that the right is the new liberals or we just gonna skip past that?
People on the right are standing up for free speech, due process (including for men on campus), and equal justice under law. Talking about people like Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson. DeVos under Trump promulgated regulations to protect free speech and due process on campus, and Biden has pledged to reverse those.
With a few honorable exceptions, the people on the left have now turned against these things. When I was a young man, it was people like Ed Meese and the Moral Majority who wanted to curtail free speech and due process. So yes, on the matters most important to me--civil liberties-- the right is now clearly better. The sides have switched.
It's worthy of note that PBS featured Lisa DesJardin interviewing Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling last week, and Sterling was able to make some absolutely spot-on, cogent points about why Georgia's new proposals on voting regulations did not equate to an anti-democratic effort at (racist!) voter suppression, the way that partisan Democrats have alleged, falling all over each other with hyperbole:
Sterling: "in this law, we move to a thing that actually is a better election administration item, which is using a voter I.D. number, their driver's license number, or their last four of their Social and their date of birth to identify the person, as opposed to a subjective signature match, which kind of undermined many people's faith in how that signature matching was done. By having a binary, objective measure, it makes it easier and will likely lower rejection rates for those ballots...those very same people [allied with the Democrats] sued us to get rid of signature verification just last year, and they lost..."
Lisa DesJ: "...You know what is making headlines, of course, is this ban on handing out food and water at the polls. I understand you made the argument that, in the last election, there may have been some activists who used giving out water as an excuse to talk to voters.
First, do we know that that happened? And, second, if so, why not just enforce the campaign ban? Why eliminate giving out food and water?"
Gabriel S.: "Well, the main thing is, it's been used as a work-around to get around that law.
And the irony of this, as we looked it up, this is actually the law in the president's home state of Delaware right now. So, this is not some new thing that's been brought out. This is pretty standard across the country to avoid those kind of loopholes where people can go and campaign and try to influence voters in the line.
And that's been the law in this state for decades. This was a work-around. People sort of abused it. It's hard to enforce for elections officials and sheriffs. Like I said, it's the law in the president's home state of Delaware. So I'm surprised that shock isn't being held for his own state legislature, who passed the same thing."
(Yes, that's the same Gabriel Sterling who told the Election Steal Fanatics last November that yes, Joe Biden really did win the state of Georgia in a valid election with no evidence of fraud, and would the Trumpist goon squad please stop threatening his staff with their paranoid meltdowns.)
Now I'll present the two Partisan Templates for the way DesJardin's interview with Sterling gets recollected. You know, the takeaway. The information that gets lodged in long-term memory.
Partisan Democrats: they love PBS, of course. But when PBS presents content as disruptive of the Democratic Party Narrative as that, it literally goes in one ear and out the other, like the interview never happened.
Partisan Republicans: PBS never ran an interview like that, because ugh, PBS...they lean liberal, and therefore everything they feature MUST be serving the agenda of Cancel Culture orthodoxy. So they couldn't have.
I’ll tell you how this law will be used. Voting access will increase in places where there is currently no problem, namely small rural counties. The numerical limits that have been baked into this bill are targeted to reduce access in the larger counties, that - oh my - happen to have a large Democrat registration.
The voting lines that are experienced in the larger counties are the result of past efforts to limit who much access voters have to voting sites. The problem will get worse when less mail-in voting is allowed. When the lines get longer, the legislature will claim that the county elections officials are incompetent and will replace them with Republican hacks, per provisions in this law. That will create even less access for voters in those counties.
No bill like this will ever say it is discriminatory. That would be struck down by courts. The bill has been structured to treated large counties unfairly, knowing that they vote for Democrats. Allowing a state takeover of their election boards will permanently entrench a Republican power structure on Georgia, regardless of how the residents would like to vote.
“Welcome to The Dispatch. We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles.”
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 Democrats have pulled off a great hoax. In the early 1960s they represented some of the best of liberalism, inspiring liberals (including me) to join the party. Under Johnson they moved from being liberal to acting and talking like liberals for cynical illiberal reasons. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are examples. They still claimed to be liberals.
The Great Society was neither liberal nor conservative, but a move in the direction of authoritarianism. It said all the liberal things, but accomplished racist objectives by imposing a belief in an external locus of control on inner-city African-Americans. This bound the black vote to the Democrats; that this was the objective is made clear by failure even to acknowledge the Moynihan Report, which was prophetic beyond anything ever devised by Nostradamus.
Then came the Big Lie: If you're a social liberal you cannot be a fiscal conservative. Libertarians belie that, understanding that social liberalism is a luxury that can only be afforded by the fiscally conservative. Most of us are idealists, liberals, in our youth, and we flocked to the "liberal" party that was becoming anything but. Few people enter the poorly-paid profession of journalism except idealists, and having made a choice, were embarrassed to admit they'd been hoodwinked. There was no one left to call out the Democrats.
«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.
In some european countries there are regular national army (certainly not local reserves or militia) sentries at every polling station for the two days they are open, including overnight, and when ballot boxes are move to counting office they are escorted by army teams and the counting is also protected by them.
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.
Charles Barkley is right!
In general, assuming unexpressed bad motives on the part of your political opponents can make lead you astray,
Point taken. I guess I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea that a large swath of people don’t have IDs. IDs are necessary for many transactions in our lives including buying alcohol or cigarettes or getting a job, getting on a plane, cashing checks, getting government assistance like SS, Medicare and Medicaid etc. If this is the case, then we should focus on getting free IDs to people so they function in every day life, including the vote. This is the standard in most countries, to have ID to vote. Pakistan is instituting biometrics for the vote.
Completely agree. It's possible that people who don't have ID may not have gotten access to other things that could help them too. My wife does volunteer tax help, and is astonished by the number of people she encounters who could have been receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit and other benefits for years but weren't filing tax returns and didn't know it could actually bring them money, rather than taking it away.
In general, any political solution relies on a presumption of good will on the part of your opponents; anything else is in the nature of a short-term truce.
This is why when someone says "we should solve the problem via negotiation" I am very skeptical. People who do not trust each other or who have unexpressed motives aren't negotiating anything except a better starting point for the next phase of conflict.
I would be on board with that.
Shouldn't you be more skeptical?
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.
That list is much longer than those two.
Rubin, Kristol, Brooks, even Shapiro when it mattered, I’m sure I left others out, including McCain’s crew of grifting misfits.
Having experienced that part of the world up close and personally, liberal values take a beating when faced with a culture that actively rejects them.
I was against the Iraq war - and Afghanistan from the very beginning precisely for that reason. There was no way that the US general public was going to tolerate the things that would have to be done to win such a war. First, 20+ years in place. I actually underestimated the time required, and that was a weird feeling in 2001 or 2002 telling people it would be a 20 year occupation. Second, tossing out our ideas of liberal values and meeting the opponent on their own level. This conversation just adds additional confirmation, as if I needed any, that it was all a mistake.
The question comes to mind however, what happens when this crew or another similarly savage one comes to visit us? Liberal values were only sustained due to superiority of Western warmaking capability driven by technology. When that is no longer true, what then? Either values will have to take a hit or we'll have to deal with subjugation. War is war.
NB: I thought we should have pasted Afghanistan with nuclear weapons, border to border, and left Iraq alone, incidentally, with just a cordon sanitaire. Why even have the deterrent if you're going to tolerate attacks? And why give the Afghans a pass for letting attacks on other nation-states emanate from their borders. They chose poor leaders. A nation-state sized nuclear holocaust would serve as an example for all time and eliminate the threat of warmaking emanating from such nations in the future. The citizens/subjects thereof would take care of the problem themselves to avoid the threat of annihilating force.
Instead, we chose stupid, and about 5,000 US deaths and over 20,000 wounded are the result, repeating what the Soviets tried and failed at. And everyone knows the emperor has no clothes.
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.”
«The Keynes quote is really good»
Of course I like it too, but I add that I think that the "defunct economists" were themselves usually the slaves of some defunct theologians.
«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»
I make a difference between politics, which is about power and money, and debates about politics, which are often about metaphysics like idea (sometimes subjectively sincerely, sometimes hypocritically). As to chicken-and-eggs it's the same with the ideas of "structure" and "superstructure".
But look at politics as it is practice, actually-existing politics: politics requires budgets and efforts, across long periods, so it is driven by big donors and big vested lobbies, and they don't spend dozens of billions every year to merely support ideas, but as investments on which they want big returns in terms of power and money. Even upper-middle and middle class people vote mostly for power and money (someone wrote that "residential real estate is the american national religion"), and of course lower class and underclass people often vote for better wages and social insurance.
To achieve power and money most lobbies also push ideas (usually of the "jam tomorrow" type to fool the gullible), but in the same way as my first quote: they choose the "law" if that helps their interests, the "evidence" if that is better for their interests, and they just "pound the table" if they don't have ideas that fit their interests.
The impression that politics is a debate of ideas is sometimes called "wykehamism" in England, from the nickname of a prep school (Winchester): that politics is or should be a debate about the best possible ideas among enlightened people. That is pretty much also clintonian/blairite "technocracy".
PS: As to chicken-and-egg I might agree that "culture" (a specific and wide generalization of "ideas") is ultimately the driver of much behaviour, in the long term, as in the long term what obtains power and money is not so clear, because of what JM Keynes called "radical uncertainty", and "culture" ultimately seems to me a set of survival heuristics as NN Taleb and some anthropologists argue, but in the short-medium term the practice of politics is primarily about power and money.
I don’t disagree. The reality is most politics as practiced is about power or personal gain - even if played out on a global scale by the powerful and acquiesced to by their followers. It is a power-money game. And always has been. The level of detachment from what “should” be behind politics, however, the principles, reasons, ideas, seems to have eroded, and is continuing to erode, to an even more perilous state - approaching the point of meaningless where we’re just monkeys throwing their poo at each other. (Or maybe Vonnegut’s humans in Galapagos - evolved to the point of being immobile seal-like creatures just listening to each other’s farts). The acceptance of debate by the broad public is part of the problem. Fuck debate. I’m old, old school on this and want nothing to do with the rhetoricians, debaters, and sophists. Too much is about “winning” at word play - and even that word play and what constitutes “winning” or a “better” point has been Twitterized to adolescent levels. Most of our politicians are lawyers (rhetoricians) so it really shouldn’t be a surprise.
Aristotle’s famous, “Man (human) is a political animal” is a good example. That statement is so often misquoted and not understood as merely meaning humans are political - engaging in politics and political arrangements. But it is the culmination of an argument that requires not just Aristotle’s Politics to understand, but the Ethics, Logic, De Anima, and Metaphysics. What the fuck are we, what’s going on, why the hell are we doing it, and for what purpose?! It’s not that I expect people to go on these deep philosophical or spiritual journeys - but some level of awareness has to be had or our doom is going to be even doomier!
Maybe to spin Eliot, the world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with a shallow quip and knee-jerk.
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?
I can play the same game you are, like when you write “...what we can do is help people avoid propaganda...” I can start in on how we all know “help” is really just an euphemism for “control” and be sure to point out that authoritarian regimes always start with “helping” the implied “lesser” people.
So yeah, I do have a suggestion - stop playing rhetorical games; call people on it when they do. Ask people to define their terms and context and provide support/ideas for what they propose. Evolve past rhetoric, debate, and “gotcha” games and actually discuss in argumentative form looking for sound, not merely valid, and certainly not invalid or vacuous, arguments. If people are unwilling to attempt actually discussing in an intelligent, adult manner move along to someone else who is at least willing to try and operates in good faith.
How’s that for you skippy?
First. Help us understand your definition of rhetorical games?
For me here, when I post, I bring content to the table (references, ideas from important thinkers, and a knowledge of our historical and financial past). That does not mean I am here offer all of the answers. In fact, I think people like Matt Taibbi are at the forefront of leading people to where we need to be. He uses rhetoric quite well. So you'll have to be more specific by the games being played. I am quite interested in this topic, not because of your reference, but there are a large number of games being played on Matt's thread and I enjoy calling people out when it is obvious they are deliberately playing games.
Asking people to define terms and specifics only works when you have some amount of trust in the poster -- that your time is not wasted on a troll farm in Duluth. And who the fuck knows what you consider to be vacuous Incarnadine? You may be very accomplished, eloquent and have points but work for the American Enterprise Institute or you could be a pain in the ass asking questions to the wrong person, but have a real fire to make change. Its hard to know.
Good faith is important, and that's why I responded to each of your comments, but I did not really care for your platitudes comment -- and your replies seem to carry with it a hidden adversarial tone.
It is in your court 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.
Yeah. Good post by TE; maybe they're right.
I'm just not quite willing to roll over yet. I can sleep when I'm dead.
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.
"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."
History in Central and South America tell a different story. When the State (why capitalized?) has killed people en masse, it's almost always been the right who has co-opted its mechanisms with help from Uncle Scam. In fact "they don't play by the same rules" nonsense is just one of many false excuses that politicians, both Democrat and Republican as well as the "liberal" corporate media in the USA use to justify or cover up US government backed coups, death squads and sanctions. I'd put the body count of politicians like Allende or Chavez or Maduro at about 1/1000th of those killed by right wing governments. https://yachana.org/teaching/resources/interventions.html
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.
What makes me sad is that now it's clear that no one will ever help the black underclass. The black middle and upper class is rising, which is a great thing, but they are using their voice for themselves, to end their occasional harassment by police for example. People on the right who proclaim that BLM folks don't actually think all black lives matter because they aren't weighing a black life lost to gang violence the same as one lost to police violence are missing the point. They believe the police violence could happen TO THEM. Getting shot by rival gang members will not happen to the black middle class, so they are not worried about it. White liberals don't know anyone from college who could be affected, either, so they could care less about it, too. It still only affects people with zero political voice at all, sadly. It's an abject state of affairs.
This is a dehumanizing ideology. It dehumanizes everyone. The victims matter only when they serve the narrative, and that depends on the race of the perpetrator. In the 80s I lived in a pristine suburb -- could've stopped driving into the city any time I wanted. The people living with random violence every day have no choice, no media behind them, no Black Lives Matter. They need and want more police, not fewer--they've said so, and city councils cuts the budget, anyway, This is all an ugly "performative" dog and pony show, sociopathic in so many ways. The media is responsible for so much of what is unfolding, I'd rather quit my job, a thousand times, than grovel to keep it.
Way more american blacks want more policing , than want less.
https://copinthehood.com/progressive-misbelief-2/
Defund the police, blm, is mostly white people telling blacks what they should prefer, just like they can't have school choice in any real amounts because of teachers unions .
But you have to admit this has all been a windfall for black actors who do commercials because most couples in commercials these days are all mixed race. The subtext appears to be that black folk need to hitch their caboose to a white engine if they want middle class success. Probably reading too much into it.
I did see the latest iteration of Law Order where the young Italian mobster(evidently not an ethnic stereotype) kills his father, also a mobster, because dad wasn't woke enough to like the young mobster's black wife.
Nothing like using an entertainment cudgel to beat a social control agenda into an audience's head. Personally I'd rather watch a test pattern. Sadly 24 hour nonstop television has killed the test pattern, arguably TV's greatest programming creation.
Qanon idiots BELIEVE Hillary Clinton was/is running a pedo ring out of pizzerias. If you can’t get past paranoiac beliefs-like Qanon or the fact that suburban cops are hunting suburban blacks engaged in everyday activities-I don’t feel sorry for you. Rationality matters. Deal with it. The suburbs aren’t a drug corner in West Chicago or Detroit.
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?
That, along with all the low-hanging traits of every politically identifiable group online, is a product of the medium. The discourse has been poisoned by this stupid means of communication and its fucked out rewards system. In real life—free from built-in bias and silos, disconnected from their bid to brand themselves and become the cynosure of every comment thread—most people are dependably good and willing to self-deprecate. Including irritating online blue wavers. Get them in person and their humanity is evident. Reduce them to convenient straw men and you’re playing the same rigged game they are.
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.
Friedman's theories would have worked much better in Chile if Pinochet just had more helicopters with the capacity to hold more occupants and bigger doors to drop more of them into the ocean.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/sports/soccer/in-chiles-national-stadium-dark-past-shadows-copa-america-matches.html
This is worth watching too. Guatemala. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10313876/
Yeah, it’s silly to ascribe Friedman’s economic policy to killing Commies but the “economic” history mcelrjoy has read, if I had to guess from the comments, has much more to do with politics than economics. It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason. Some just did it more forcefully than others. Of course, the Commies would have murdered Pinochet and anyone that appeared educated. But since they lost it is easy to play victim.
"It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason."
LOL, only if you define "entire first world western civilization" as USA-backed/funded former colonial interests trying to hold onto land and resources that didn't belong to them, and which had historically ALWAYS been policed for them by the US military - or - the US CIA and the corporate/energy interests with which it was deeply integrated.
The Monroe Doctrine pre-dated communism, my friend.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america
It’s not silly to connect Friedman to Chile/Pinochet. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/
Actually those are mainly due to Keynes
Using the word "actually" does not miraculously take an inaccurate statement and make it accurate. Keynes is not responsible for this - he died in 1946. He considered himself a socialist and believed in fixing problems in the economy (practical solutions) to economic problems.
He certainly would not have advised the President to unwind anti-trust laws or prosecute air traffic controllers for unionizing, nor would he have allowed Gramm-Leach-Bliley to be passed allowing the single best piece of financial legislation to be gutted (Glass Steagall Act of 1932) which eventually lead to TBTF (too big to fail) banks being bailed out after fucking over just about everyone in our country.
Lastly, he would then not have advised Treasury or the Federal Reserve to allow free, cheap money to prop up the banks as a means of falsely showing profits (allowing executives to make massive bonuses) or fail to regulate home foreclosure policies by banks -- in which we saw such massive bank fraud that there were entire towns or foreclosure mills forging signatures on bank documents --- so that they could foreclose on American homes faster or falsely. So, Keynes is not responsible for Enron, LIBOR rigging, or algorithmic programs which front run trades on exchanges making owners billions. The financialization of the economy would not have happened under his leadership (changing usury laws, and leverage amount for trades).
However, Milton Friedman's argument (Hayek assisted) from the NTC (neoliberal thought collective) founded at Mount Pelerin in 1947 developed over time into "free trade" "smaller government" and the "slow stead increase in the money supply" plus using quantitative and mathematical models to hide the inherent nature of the economic policies that were scoffed at during the 1947-1970. So, yes he is the architect of the problematic economy we have now --- because most industry's have matured, been privatized, the marrow has been sucked out and now we do not produce things as a culture (except weapons, drugs and debt).
Wow Coco. just wow!
Not Germaine to your main argument but....in practical terms, if’n you were King.... would you allow air traffic be subject to the whims of a union like schools currently are? They did take an oath not to strike.
Allow power grids to shut down unexpectedly because of unworkable generation and delivery models?
How do you feel about China’s participation in world trade, publicly traded corps without GAAP compliance and essential products like pharmaceuticals being farmed out to a hostile foreign competitor?
I sometimes believe destroying American exceptionalism is a goal.
The Keynesian models seem to have lost credibility due to stagflation and volckers success by doing the exact opposite of what Keynes would have prescribed for the Fed. I think we can primarily blame this on the switch to monetarism, since Reagan gets all the credit for what volcker did. I think this has a lot to do with abandoning Keynes for neoliberalism and making it tenable to the public.
In an email addressed to me you identified bcc recipients and the entire email text. The latter does not bother me; the former does. You evidently have my email address and somehow made your way through what should have been multiple layers of security, or someone forwarded that email to you. Please e-mail me again and identify yourself.
I'm happy to engage in reasoned discourse with you or anyone. We don't appear to disagree on much. I just want/need to know how you got possession of the e-mail. If it was forwarded to you from one of the bcc recipients that's innocent. If not, then there are vulnerabilities to explain.
Bill, do you mean me?
Compared to what?
Not my job to educate you here. Compared to what is the last vestige of someone who knows a little about a lot but does not seem to get beyond the surface level of policy, history, or the areas of conflict (how they came to be etc..). If you want to cling onto your own world view with a modicum of understanding, that is your choice, but do not ask me to constantly edit your work and fill in the gaps please.
Ultimately, you are bullshitting, it needs to be called out. It's your job to post accurately.
Seriously? You claim Friedman’s policies are the cause of all our problems and you can’t even say what would work in its place?
Also, still waiting to hear if you think we should support government programs that result in the opposite of what they claim to fix.
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.
Can Substack just add an edit function already?
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?
Well, we have a long history in our country of it lifting people out of poverty, except now the government is captured by business interests and government programs are designed to fail (drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub). This is a feature of neoliberalism --- not public spending.
If one starts with Powell Memo and works forward from 1970, you would find the corporate takeover of institutions, government, thinktanks, and consolidating that power in certain industries like media, healthcare, finance, real estate, pharma, and technology.
And it is no wonder that this consolidation has to led to oligopolies in most industries (Apple, Google, FB, and Amazon) or (Pfizer, JNJ, Merck, LLY) or (Goldman Sachs, BofA, Blackrock) or (Disney/GE/Viacom/Fox).
You have the wrong narrative of what's happened in this country.
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.
And how have those assets been illegally plundered. The program has almost no assets. It is a pay-as-you-go system with a very small trust fund that was temporary. What kind of paranoid nonsense have you been reading.
I spent 10 years as investment advisor at one of the TBTF firms during one of the most profitable periods in world history- so I run into this a lot. People who purport to know more about how the system works than actually really do.
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.
Social Security has worked as intended, and there is no comparable private program that can achieve the same goal for less.
And before you compare apples and oranges by talking about investment accounts, you should understand that Social Security was never intended to function like an investment account, or it would have required 30+ years of pre-funding before anyone got a check.
Sure, if it’s intention was to create another government revenue steam from which politicians could grift. Other than being mandatory, which is unAmerican, it was not to be touched. That was a LIE. It hasn’t kept up with inflation either. Another LIE. It also was never meant to go to those that didn’t pay into it. Yet another LIE.
Cop out.
It’s not that public assistance programs don’t “work”. They certainly achieve a result that the champions of them sought. It is just usually the opposite of the goal they claim to have sought to get support to pass them. For example, incentivizing single parenthood to “help” families while it destroys families. The politicians pushing this had every intention of destroying families while claiming the goal was the opposite. The data is overwhelming that their “help” did the opposite.
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.
This is a dubious point. Charter schools are very political and their worth depends on your politics. Hedge fund scumbags love charter schools....https://www.ansaroo.com/question/how-do-hedge-funds-make-money-from-charter-schools
The concept is political, sure and there is always money to be made on a valuable investment. The superior education one receives in a charter school, however, isn’t political. Unless you want more uneducated citizens that is. Teacher’s Unions love uneducated citizens.
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!!!!!
What programs?
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.
Thank you. I admire your OCD; when you consider how many links are out there it's a wonder anyone gets through.
We have discussed the Wayback Machine before. You should test that out before giving up. Many links can be recovered there.
Yes, many but not all-- and don't forget to donate!
Donate to Wayback machine: https://archive.org/donate/?origin=wbwww-TopNavDonateButton
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Americans have a weird definition of liberalism because there's no labor party in the US. In the rest of the world, liberalism means the ideology of free enterprise and is a discourse of the rich. That's why, when the US government says it's defending freedom around the world, the main freedom to them is the right to exploit labor. The rest is secondary or even unimportant
Yes. The ultiimate upshot of this terminological confusion is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion of politics with Americans in general. The righturds on Matt's subscriber list, and there are so so many, use "left" as a descriptor for any and all varieties of liberalism that offend their sense of privilege. "Socialism" has been bastardized to mean New Deal Liberalism w Benefits and there are actually American trans activists who call themselves "communists" based on their screeching insistence that they are women and women aren't. Go figure.
Just don't expect to have a reasonable conversation.
«a weird definition of liberalism because there's no labor party in the US. In the rest of the world, liberalism means the ideology of free enterprise»
In the USA the socialdemocratic "left" is called "progressives" (sometimes) and it was a significant component of the Democratics and for a while post-WW2 even of the Republicans. You probably know that technically the term "left" was used to describe the republican fourth estate (the bourgeoisie) when the "right" were the monarchical feudalists.
I keep trying to explain here that the Democratics and the "woke" are actually right-wing radicals aka whigs aka libertarians with authoritarian characteristics, but not many get it.
«the main freedom to them is the right to exploit labor.»
The support for the "woke" I think is meant to go way beyond that: the ultimate goal probably is to normalize absolute property rights and unlimited freedom of contract so that "agreeing" to lifetime debt servitude or to sell your body for parts to save your family become normalized too.