Let me address just one of the issues raised. Harvard. Trump's actions against Harvard has nothing to do with tactics against democrats and everything to do with Harvard becoming a breeding ground for assholes. An institution that should have never received government funding in the first place now definitely should not get government funding. Trump recognizing this and acting is nothing short of great leadership. Something few other politicians would have the cajones to do.
The democrats politicized every supposedly non-partisan institution, and are now butthurt that these institutions are being treated as political entities.
it really is amazing, all these people and institutions stepped onto the political playing field and never expected an opponent to show up and give them a fight. total clueless arrogance.
They had good reason to think they would have no opposition. Their experience was a parade of pusillanimous empty suits like GWB, Mitt Romney, Michael Steele etc. who were afraid of being called mean.
Also, I think another factor is that gentry liberals (the kind who run or work in upscale academia and the media) don't know any conservatives—they don't even know anyone who has a different opinion on anything!—so their policies seemed as right, proper and natural to them as the change of seasons. Despite always crowing about their tolerance and their gilded educations, modern liberals seem to have no ability to accept that other people have different worldviews, values and priorities. It's less a blind spot and more of an ideological lobotomy.
Modern liberals have become such unthinking ideological conformists, quasi-cult members (this is mandatory to maintain their social and professional lives), that all they know is that everyone not in their tribe is a racist, fascist threat to Our Democracy™, who needs to be muzzled. Social media and its algorithms plus the Orange One has destroyed their ability to think clearly.
this is spot on. I was recently hanging out with my successful liberal friends and listening to them seethe about Elon, Abbott etc. after listening patiently, I carefully asked them why they believed in their present position. immediately they began to backtrack, stammer and repeat things like, “well, not always” or “I mean, not totally, but…”
the point being that just mildly scratching beneath the surface renders them helpless. because they have never had to explain their beliefs to anyone. they don’t really understand themselves as it’s always emotion driving the car.
My wife and i can't stop laughing about all the AWFLs we know and how they went almost overnight from "You must buy an EV to save the planet! Don't you care about the planet!?" to "Burn Tesla to the ground!" and "Elon is a Nazi!"
They've pledged their brains and souls to the crowd-sourced hive mind that emanates from their screens—and still imagine themselves as intellectually gifted free thinkers!
Right, I don't think they know most ordinary Democrats either (besides the help). They really live in a bubble, especially the DC types I know. They watch MSNBC/CNN and read the NY Times uncritically. They are surprised when they hear the DEI stuff, trans, open borders, and even abortion on demand are actually not that popular with run of the mill low to moderate income people of all races who consider themselves Democrats (or independents). As I have said elsewhere, they have counted on their media dominance in order to fool people into sticking with them. As new media reaches more people, fewer people are fooled and abandon the Ds. Of course, the Rs and/or Trump can overplay their own hands or dogmatically stick to a prowar and pro bad trade deals in the name of mythical free trade (to name two things) or abuse their own power (and no, I do not think deporting the "Maryland dad" counts for me).
I like this comment. As an old school Dem mentored by older old school Dems, I wonder what my now passed on friends would think about today’s “Democratic Party.” I believe they would be put off by the party cultural values (“former” men in women’s sports, for example), and totally exasperated by Dem strategy ( we need better “messaging”).
No, D-wads, you just suck. Because you don’t even pretend to like us anymore. Nor even value our votes, because you came up with a way to mass produce those in 2020.
That is because the left strawmans unauthorized opinions in order to attack them and otherize people who have that opinion.
If you have been taught that the only reason anyone opposes DEI is because of racism or opposes carbon taxes because they are ignorant of science you have an excuse to dismiss conservatives as ignorant / evil.
I think part of the reason they have painted themselves into a corner ideologically is because the right understands the left WAY better than the left understands the right, and their debating skills have atrophied.
The left could get away with that when they could gatekeep information, but they can't anymore, and they don't know what to do.
Your comment about the Right understanding the Left better than the Left understand the Right...is completely on the money.
Ditto their inability to make a reasoned argument.
The Left (at least for now) sets the daily agenda, via corporate media, led by the NY Times. And so, that's the starting point for most of the daily conservative analysis and debate.
The Left's laughable knowledge of the Right comes from Non-Player Characters like David Brooks. Neither MSNBC nor CNN has had any credible representation of the viewpoint of the Right until Scott Jennings came along.
So, yeah, they have a lot of catching up to do...once they realize that they're dangling off the edge of a cliff from a branch that won't hold too much longer.
The thing is that the liberals are soft right and not anywhere on the left. They always have been.
And once the Democrats helped the Republicans exterminate, imprison, or expatriate the actual left (socialists, communists, unionists and the like) they were just the leftmost thing remaining. FDR, incorrectly seen as a leftist saint, was a rich dude whose greatest accomplishment, in his own words, was "saving capitalism." Bernie Sanders, seen as "radical" by some, is a millionaire who shepherds would-be-leftists into the Democratic party. There is no US left.
Many of them are extremely wealthy trust fund leftists.
I’d imagine that they don’t understand a desire for upward mobility and property ownership as opposed to equal outcomes/equity and public housing projects.
(--nor do they know any lower middle class, working poor, or alienated communities. Zero ground level truth there; only "i quietly american'ed read it in a book.")
"...modern liberals seem to have no ability to accept that other people have different worldviews, values and priorities."
This notion is reinforced after elections when certain constituencies don't behave as expected. Modern liberals often lament that they "voted against their own best interests." Because of course, these rubes aren't smart enough to have the correct best interests for themselves.
Should we expect exaggerated blowback but against churches instead of colleges?
And would that really be a problem? Would it really be a problem if the gov't stopped subsidizing churches? Attendance is down. Church-based abstinence programs haven't raised the birth rate significantly. Stranger danger increasingly means senior church members of any congregation. But those churches are fundamental (pun intended) to one of the three legs of Regan's stool and if we pull that out, conservatives are totally ass-to-floor.
Apparently not taxing Churches is subsidizing? I believe many of the Ivy League churches, (Universities) actually receive funds, as in real money, as well as tax benefits, visa and educational freedoms. How is that a comparative argument?
How does the government subsidize churches? Are you referring to their tax-free status? That is not the same thing.
"Stranger danger increasingly means senior church members of any congregation"? Prove it. Yes, many church people have abused children, but "increasingly" and "any congregation"? I'd like to see some proof of these assertions.
And if you're referring to Ronald Reagan, you spelled his name wrong.
Not sure where you live, but in South Carolina the Catholic church is booming. We're opening new churches all over the state. Thousands of college students are joining the church and being baptized.
I think if the left tried to do that, they would have to apply it to all religions, not just Christianity. And that would be a difficult minefield for the left to navigate.
Sirota, like Sanders, is a sheepdog for the Democrats. Criticize them to the high heavens but in the end, herd them into the meat packing plant. Or, as we used to say, guide them into the Roach motel. The Democrats are conformists and collectivists. I finally saw the light and made my escape from the cattle truck. I jumped the fence and high tailed it out of there. There are only two industries in the US; mining and agriculture. Everything else comes from these two. Trump gets this and respects it. He's at home in a big city hotel and a small town MacDonalds. The Democrats (and , as you know, I used to be one,) are maddeningly paternalistic towards the people they should be grateful to.
I respect Sirota and I used to subscribe regularly. But his relentlessly liberal positions often belie a careful analysis, which I find to be the case with most who are very wedded to legacy liberal positioning.
"Liberals are offended by Trump’s lack of manners in pulling off extreme versions of what their own party icons have done, but many Americans seem to cherish the Joker-like quality of Trump’s antics. They seem to appreciate that — unlike establishment Democrats — Trump at least doesn’t use a dog whistle to trick anyone. He uses a bullhorn to proudly broadcast and brag about his malfeasance — all while offering a captivating and distracting culture war along the way."
The sheer history of staggeringly monstrous/retarded foreign policy coming out of Harvard and other Ivy League grads also deserves some critical examination. Why does Harvard produce so many really smart people who push really bad foreign policy, and then keep on pushing it because they get promoted rather than held accountable when they create another new clusterfuck of a blowback situation?
Yeah, when a family friend is on the board of Raytheon, and Aunt Barbara is a senior fellow at a thinktank funded by Lockheed, it's quite easy for them to get sucked into the MIC when so many people in their family and friends network are already there.
"Why does Harvard produce so many really smart people...?"
I cannot accept this statement wholesale. Being "Highly-educated" (or Expensively-educated, or Exclusively-educated) does not necessarily equate to being Well-educated. Some of the "smartest" people I have known (my cousin the Oxford grad, e.g.) have been shown to lack all kinds of plain-old common sense.
My grandfather once said about my cousin: "I await the outcome of this classical (Oxford) education with trepidation"- this from a Scottish farm Veterinarian...
It's the function of the place. Harvard, and many other 'elite'(elitist?) institutions are more State Dept and Govt entities than places of education, etc. Chomsky et al have spoken on this for decades
I agree. The breakdown of the politics of the professors, teachers and staff in these universities tells the story. If they can not achieve the most rudimentary appearance that they have a diversity of ideas being discussed in their halls, then they need to simply get their funding from ACTBLUE.
Matt - I appreciate what you are doing here. But, many of us (at least those like me who came to you from the left) flocked to Racket because we are well aware of the mind-numbing, factually-challenged Democrat partisanship that people like David peddle. We came becaue we read "Hate, Inc" and despised and despaired of the picture of media it painted. Your readers aren't in the bubble, but beyond it. You are injecting bubble-dom into Racket where it did not previously exist by having people like David contribute.
Ah c'mon, let a hundred flowers bloom. We Racket readers can survive dissent, our minds will not be hijacked by David Sirota. I agree with Matt's critique. He is magnanimous in publishing Sirota's essay, three cheers.
Sure, but your monthly subscription fee likely contributed to this drivel. I have no objection whatsoever to the marketplace of ideas. I would never advocate for the censorship of David or his viewpoints. But it's a waste of time and Racket readers' money to invite him to write here.
You could get what Sirota was selling for free by turning on MSNBC. Sirota wrote that Trump's approval ratings are historically low where did he get that from.
I don't know . . . we gotta understand what these people think. How they move. This guy Sirota is probably the perfect representative of a certain kind of highly intelligent well-meaning person who is unable to wrest himself from the tribal indoctrination that has similarly fallen upon so many Democrats.
Eh, then maybe Matt should pick someone who is a serious analyst and not a regurgitator of partisan talking points. I’ve respected Ruy Teixeira for being a critical voice on the left in the Trump era and a serious analyst to boot.
What about the old adage,"Time is Money"? Luckily I was able to discern the BS quickly as not to waste mine, but feel for those that respect Taibbi enough to read through the whole article.
Anyone concerned about saving vs. wasting time should immediately throw their iPhone under a steamroller. After that, they'll never worry about time again, because they'll have hours and hours per day.
I've read dozens of comments calling Sirota's take "drivel" and what not... and yet no one ever explains what exactly it is that they disagree with (except that they can't bear to have Trump criticized even a little).
The top comment on this post is a substantive critique of the higher education issue. I made several comments about issues with David’s erroneous description of Trump’s approval rating, and the superficiality of his criticism vis a vis misinformation. Those are two easy examples. This must be a reading comprehension issue on your part.
"Substantive"? He just says "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes." Profound!
I really don't care much about popularity polls one way or the other. As for your own analysis, all you did is call Sirota's opinions "drivel" and "regurgitation", which is par for the course when Trumpkins are confronted with a dissenting opinion.
The idea that Trump uses "culture war" as a distraction no less so than the Democrats do appears to be pretty sound to me. I certainly don't notice any improvement in our standard of living since the Queen was elected. (Unless seeing people dragged into vans is your preferred entertainment.)
Very poor reading comprehension again if you actually attempted to decipher the thread about Harvard. I don’t have discussions with petulant partisans. I’m also not a “Trumpkin”. Don’t really like the guy and never have.
The reaction here is hardly surprising. Sirota's article, though it mentions disaffected independents in passing, actually targets centrist Dems, who have become disaffected with their party.
The Democratic party is polling terribly with its own members. Can't really blame them after Biden and Harris. But after two runs by Sanders, the party has fortified itself against its own populist wing. I suspect that Sirota's hope is in vain and the Democratic elite will cling to power as long as they can-- even if it means losing elections.
They're going to struggle to unwind two decades of integrating the HR ladies into the apparatus of the Democratic party. It's not just a voter problem, it's that so much of the party infrastructure would fall apart if liberal progressive white women weren't donating their own money, working the phone banks, doorknocking, etc. In exchange for doing so much of the legwork for Democrats, they expect their voices to dominate the party agenda, and boy they sure do.
These aren't women who are sympathetic to the actual working-class, and certainly not to working-class men. If the party worked hard to cater to working-class people and working-class men, they'd quickly discover massive internal resistance from a legion of coldly hostile (mostly white) women afraid that their pet grievance issues weren't going to be the party's number one priority.
Amen. You must live here in California. I see it every day. They wear it on their sleeve, and wind their hatred of DJT into completely unrelated discussions, just because they're so amped up. Yes, it will take a LONG time for this crop of what Schlicter calls the leftist wine women to either chill out or go away. And guess what? Leftist CA families and indoctrination centers, er, schools are still churning out new ones every day.
I don't live in California, but I often interact with colleagues and vendors from California. Been to a few conferences in San Fran, although the last one was about five years ago. I took walks around the city and saw firsthand the situation with the junkies and homeless.
I work in marketing, so I have to hide my opinions, because my profession is dominated by leftist wine women and girlbosses. It would be career suicide to let them know I had zero interest in voting for morons with no accomplishments who offered me, a straight married white guy with two boys, absolutely nothing.
I dunno. He seems to be at the Kübler-Ross "bargaining" stage. He may just get over the party. I'd even say that the future of our country depends on people like Sirota getting there.
But it's such a piece of crap article, and for Matt to treat it as "a meaningful contribution to bringing down the temperature on both sides, blah, blah, blah..." is aggravating. Especially where Sirota treats AOC and Bernie as the voices of an authentic, working class populism. They've spent their lives theorizing about the working class from their penthouses and lake houses, and neither would know an honest day's work if it came up and bit them on the ass.
I didn't come from the left, I consider myself left. Progressives listen to David Sirota and here he sounds more like Bernie than ever. Unwilling to complete sever with the oligarchy because he knows someday he will need them. Matt's comments are really deep criticisms IMO and a warning to any progressives who might be believing this crap. We will know a "real alternative" when we see it because it will tone down the culture war and focus on building consensus to get progressive policies in place that people actually want. Only until that happens will we see trust building back up. David says there are alternatives. Where TF are they?
Kudos. I'm pretty conservative (now) but still harbor strong positive feelings for "JFK-style liberalism".
I'm open for new ideas. Not slurs or personal attacks but good-faith, honestly contributed ideas. Bring 'em on!
As you note well, "Where TF are they?"
My own feeling is that the left is best served by opening up the private sector at the "lower levels". I don't claim to know how to do this but small business has been the job creation engine forever.
While I think Marx was grossly out of his depth in prescribing economic structures and policies, he was a brilliant historian and analyst and the societal manifestation of "alienation" seems all around us.
My opinion is that Marx's economic prescriptions have been used by totalitarians-in-disguise who see the dictatorship of the proletariat as a convenient means to their desired ends (i.e., their gaining control over society). They claim to be Marxists but just use it as camouflage.
And, yes, I'll go a step further than you and say that Bernie/AOC going on a private-jet tour while lamenting "oligarchs" is priceless self-parody.
Small businesses have represented less and less of the US GDP since 1971 - and every year since the working class and the middle class and the government have all gone deeper in debt while the top 1% has gotten wealthier beyond belief. I think it was almost 10 years ago when big corporations finally overtook small business as the "number one economic engine". Nice idea, too late. And before you attack Marx, you better start with corporations taking over the country when their power and rights were legally enshrined to be more important than citizens. We live in a fascist state - the perfect merger of government and corporations. Marx would laugh his ass off at any criticisms of him right now. He was trying to avoid this and was pretty clairvoyant about it. Who cares if he was wrong or right about how to fix it during his time - we got all new problems today.
Actually, I wasn't attacking Marx, I was "attacking" the people who call themselves Marxist. That is, I was noting that Marxism has, in my opinion, largely been used as a tool by people who were really interested in totalitarian control.
Viz: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
That is, they claim to be Marxist but just somehow never got past that whole "dictatorship" part.
I freely admit I have not read "Das Kapital". I find brevity to be a useful and remarkably accurate predictor.
The Bill of Rights takes up maybe two pages, double-spaced. All that brilliance could be conveyed so simply.
I'll also admit that I haven't read (all of) the "Federalist Papers" but would like to do so.
The bits of "Das Kapital" I've looked at are, in humble opinion, a pretty turgid slog.
Not that Marx was wrong in identifying problems, both extant and possible, I just don't "get" what he was proposing.
You are correct that there have been numerous hegemonic incursions in our economic system, both in terms of monetary and fiscal policy.
The creation of corporations as "entities" has a lot of positive aspects (I'm essentially a one-man corporation though it's not worth much...yet :-)
However, that being said, the legal changes in 1913 and 1917 in the creation of the Federal Reserve, corporate non-profits (the predecessors of NGOs) and the explosion of the financial industry post-1980 are cause for concern. I believe it was in the late 1980s that the earlier gains of the middle class were erased and massive concentration of wealth became its greatest since prior to the Great Depression.
The off-shoring of industry has been a sore point for many people, myself included, for many years.
How prophetic Ross Perot now seems when he spoke of the "giant sucking sound" when warning about NAFTA in 1992.
Most people are probably not going to be entrepreneurs, and that's okay. But that's also why we need(ed) a solid jobs and industrial base to keep people occupied. Even if there is a bit of "alienation" in industrial jobs. My first job after high school was in a small factory. I think a lot of people there were remarkably connected to their work even though they might just be forming or fabricating one part, welding one type of connector, etc.
Certainly, it is absolutely critical that we discuss these issues!
I've had productive discussions with my accountants over the years about providing a free corporate filing for every American as part of an "anti-corporation" campaign (one of the reasons I prefer that term to anti-oligarchy is because all of these pro-corporation dems like Sanders and Sirota seen to be ok with billionaires who play nice with progressives and somehow that shields them from being called an oligarch). Corporations are the primary economic tool used to shield the individual exploiters profiting on the exploitation and it is corporate law and corporate accountability that needs to be overhauled. Not pie in the sky talk about oligarchs.
I read it while taking History of Economic Thought in graduate school in the spring of 1976, I think. The professor, William L Breit, also lectured for about 3 weeks on Marx.
I had tried to read Marx in high school 10 years earlier, and some of his stuff before in graduate school, but kept falling asleep. Breit’s lectures and Freedman’s book, which largely consists of excerpts of Marx with a simplified summary, opened up his ideas to me. Be that as it may, what is the most widely misunderstood idea about Marx is the belief that he thought labor was paid less than its value. According to Marx capitalists pay labor its value.
The funniest thing about Marxists is that you cannot really catch them in a contradiction. Their reply is always, “ of course, it is the dialective.” The was extensive debates about contradictions in Marx’s ideas in the late 19th century with Engels providing the main defense usually coming up with a tautological argument to defend Marx.
Like I told some liberals who tried to jump on Bernie and AOC for flying private:
You tell me how one gets from SLC to Bakersfield to Folsom to Boise in one day, including travel to and from airports and venues and the time to spend at the venues while flying commercial. Good luck with that.
That is a valid point. I should have been more specific.
To that end, a question: what is the need for Bernie and AOC to do this? What exactly are they trying to prove?
If it's that Trump is much more tied with "oligarchs" than the Democrats (the party of AOC), that strikes me as profoundly disingenuous.
In fact, I'm not sure exactly what they're claiming.
Is it that somehow "oligarchs" are taking advantage of the system? My sense is that DOGE's work has been to reveal waste and fraud, just as claimed. I am confident we could reduce the budget significantly by identifying and eliminating that waste and fraud. Now, whether or not "we" have the fortitude to do so even after it's been identified...that's another question.
I've never been a fan of Bernie. Spent too much time around universities to go for the college coffeeshop radical stuff.
Specifically, the "everything is a right" (yes, I'm being unfair and generalizing) is a ploy to lure in the unaware and the "uncritical thinking".
I've never gotten much of a sense that either Bernie or AOC have any sensible alternatives or proposals.
But your point is definitely true, air travel today (which I vigorously avoid) sounds horrible.
I view this stupid Oligarchy Tour as a means for enraged Trump-hating grouches to get together and enjoy a group orgasm of rage. It's just a slightly refined version of Two Minutes Hate, in which Trump substitutes for Emmanuel Goldstein.
I travelled too much for business, to too many different places. After 9/11, it all went to shit. I used to hate only American Airlines, now I hate them all (except Singapore Airlines). And what's with airports? Did the city fathers of every city that ever built an airport insist on unique (read: confusing) architecture? Denver and Atlanta are similar, and everything else is different. Retirement road trips much better.
Yes, @Paul Thronson, what "progressive policies" actually have been implemented and performed well for the genuine greater good, without compromising our Constitutional rights of individual sovereignty and sidelining the poor? Please, expound on that!
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail -- unless you like the idea of 1 or 2 young workers being forced to support each retiree.
It is in desperate need of reform, but no politicians have the courage to fix it, because any mention of such a task elicits hysterical shrieks that "They're trying to kill grammy!"
Bwahahaha! The SS as Ponzi scheme meme has been so thoroughly debunked so many times, it’s always a treat to see it bought out of the ideological slime every now and then.
What are policies people want done? Popular policies would be better and cheaper healthcare, better education, lower taxes, cheaper housing ... can you think of any on your own?
The policies that make things cheaper tend to come from libertarian economists, not Democrats. Most Dem policies lead to price increases, either by restricting supply or causing inflation.
So? I guess if your mission is to paint "blue man bad" "red mad gud" congrats. But the truth is that there are major differences between the people in those parties and the people elected from those parties. Not sure your point.
No. The point is that the people that promise "cheaper" stuff, have no clue on how to make things cheaper - because they are vehemently opposed to the biggest force in promoting price reduction - the law of supply and demand.
Planned economies always fail. Subsidizing electric vehicles or college tuition may feel like it makes something cost less - but all it does is push the price up for everyone. Capping retail pricing leads to shortages. Taxing unwanted behaviors are regressive to the max.
That we are in the year 2025, and idiots like Mamdani in NYC and others think that "rent freezes" and "government stores" are solutions to high cost of living is astoundingly stupid.
I appreciate reading sirota if for no other reason than to be reminded of the empty husk these people choose to be. And it is a choice. Unwilling to question any assumptions or to open their eyes to see that the people they believe in betray the very values guys like sirota think guys like Bernie and AOC represent. Remarkable self delusion.
Matt, your intro to his article is a lot more coherent than his whole article. I’m not going to repeat the comment I already made on David’s article, but it’s pretty much garbage. Your intro does a good enough job of laying to waste his total misdiagnosis, and I will add that if he thinks the solution is a new anti-oligarchy movement headed by Bernie and AOC, he is clueless and delusional.
Sure, Sirota's not even left, but were/are you? Not enough "leftists" ask themselves. Actual left is not afraid of class politics or of being openly anti-capitalist.
This is far from the first time that Matt's seemed more concerned with subscriber count than subscriber souls. He's sometimes really funny. I read him.
Matt - I appreciate hearing other viewpoints, as long as they aren't so obviously biased. Yes, it's good to hear what other people think, and I patiently listen to all sorts of leftists/libs here in California telling me what they think. However, I really thought David's article was an attempt by someone who really doesn't understand DJT to sum it up in what he thought was a fair and balanced article -- and he failed. I think YOU do a good job of curating a thoughtful discussion of current happenings, and of those who are similarly objective (or who at least are a little bit less obvious in their loathing of anything DJT related.) So, for me, the article was a swing and a miss. He doesn't get it, because he's blinded by his bias.
I've been known to read a piece over at The Nation or Mother Jones, and even nod my head in agreement. I can't say that for anything ever published at Jacobin - that is a brain-dead zone if there ever was one.
Ditto here on the occasional Mother Jones piece. Jacobin is largely loony-tunes level but have had some okay articles concerning the origin of the Ukraine war; particularly, early in the conflict, they had some writers that wrote how the west had been fomenting unrest for years ("Maidan", anyone?) and that the push for NATO inclusion was disastrous. I don't have a link to the article that made me think, "Okay, Jacobin has actually published something not entirely crazy!"
But they are almost universally crazy -- that's what makes things tricky and arguably proves the adage, "the exception proves the rule." :-)
He did. The US 'couped' him away, despite a sizable portion of the population wanting him Prez; then stuck Z in there, played more games using NATO as a cudgel, which is expressly NOT its function... and here we are.
This is a very sober rejoinder to Sirota's ridiculous piece, which amounted to an anti-Trump jeremiad built on one false, confirmation bias flattering, assumption after another.
There are very few American media figures who actually have the ability to accurately analyze and deal with politics are they are with any level of seriousness, and Matt Taibbi is one of them (Michael Tracey, when he's not being weird, is another). David Sirota is not.
I give Matt props for giving his friend an afternoon at the podium, but Sirota's piece was so shoddy that this "brief note of introduction" was worth more than the piece itself.
The left has been prosecuting the culture war since Free To Be You And Me. They have occasions where they tone it down, and periods where they go on the offensive. The last two times they went overboard, they ushered in Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
The idea that the left could embrace an abundance agenda is preposterous. What is the core competency of the left? The thing they do better than anything else? Litigate. Litigation is kryptonite to abundance.
The biggest problem for the democrats attracting the working class is that most blue collar workers are men, and the democrat party is fundamentally a female party.
I'll disagree slightly - it isn't the Democrats are a female party, they are a feminist party. And feminists despise non-feminist women just as much as any other zealot who sees someone they think should be a fellow-believer but isn't.
Left Democrat intransigence on abortion is the real problem. Rebranding their stance as "women's reproductive health" is offensive to every human being, female or male, who wrestles with the challenge of an unwanted or unexpected pregnancy. That little critter in the womb is, in spite of the left's pretending otherwise, a human being in potential. So rather than accept that most people have a natural revulsion against the idea of terminating a potential life, they simply ignore this fundamental human issue and insist it's merely a matter of a person's health. This is a full-blown lie, and all the left's lies spread out from it like a poison flood.
"Keep it between a woman and her doctor" sounds reasonable though in practice it means "allow termination of healthy babies at any stage for any reason." Supposed limitations after viability nearly always have an exception for "health of the woman," a loophole big enough to sail a battleship through. Although late term abortions are rare compared to other abortions, they're still an order of magnitude more numerous than murders by rifle (scary looking or otherwise), which we're supposed to believe are horrifyingly common.
Both sides are intransient on abortion. One wants zero limits on abortion including during labor, while the other side wants to follow women around to make sure they don't take Plan B the night after, and they also want to force rape victims to carry, while at the same time putting zero limits on the other "abortion," the live IVF embryos not implanted to be used in research or destroyed. As one woman-hating legislator stated about his anything goes hypocrisy on IVF, "It's not in a woman's body."
Although I think that your characterizations of the positions generally held by people on either "side" of the issue are misleading, they nonetheless point out the problem. There are valid concerns held by all people of good will on a very thorny matter.
As we are commenting here on Sirota's essay and Matt's reaction to it, it is the left's method of dealing with abortion that I was addressing. They not only pretend that the concerns of the people on the right are negligible and inconsequential, they hide their true intentions behind glossy and misleading rhetoric. So why the intransigence and the endless mendacity? If abortion is so wonderful and trivial, why not just come out and say so?
I am curious as to how you know that the unnamed legislator that you refer to is a woman-hater.
Feminism is the North Star ideology for the democrats; agreed. But the Hive Mind / Borg / Longhouse structure is fundamentally female and pre-dates feminism.
I'll throw in my 0.02 on this issue... Democrat voters value following rules and more pointedly, obedience. They see pointing this point out as rude, crude and trumpian. I am consistently in awe to see what appear to be normal rational people behaving and talking and believing utter horse shit as deeply disturbing. These people really believed Biden was track sharp, ignoring their eyes, ears and common sense to get there. Very 1984ish behavior.
I disagree. It's easy to call any female with an opinion one doesn't like a feminist, but the reality is the democratic party is full of queer theory acolytes (both male and female), no matter what you or they call themselves. The left-wing feminists have mostly left the party and become independent, while the middle-of-the-road feminists (like me) have become a member of the new republican party formed by Trump.
True, the term feminist has a certain elasticity. I'm a feminist in the sense that I wouldn't deny women the vote - which was the first great feminist victory. Successive waves have pushed the meaning beyond any sane consideration.
Sirota is frozen in the 90s, his world is gone and dead but he thinks he can somehow bring it back to life.
Liberals have this terrible blind spot where they think that their preferred social poliicies (such as Gender Theory for kids and DEI litmus tests for hiring and college admins) are natural, right as rain, "compassionate" and more or less proper etiquette—yet when people react against these things, they're just being bigots starting a "culture war". Modern liberals simply have no ability to see how aggressive, condescending and often authoritarian they are, mostly I think because for them politics is their great faith that provides meaning and purpose, thus they can never admit fault or take a good long look in the mirror and see that they can be just as grubby, dishonest and power-mad as their political opponents.
David Sirota has nothing new to add and he might as well be talking about an imaginary country, as the one he describes no longer exists.
It's amazing how far into crazytown it got after Bernie's run in 2016. He had a very strong message that appealed to the working-class and the people left behind in the modern economy, brought huge crowds....and then Hillary and the fembots ran a full court press calling them Bernie bros, implying anyone who thought Clinton sucked must be a sexist.
Somehow we went from huge crowds cheering for speeches calling for better economic policies, to pro-trans mania where the mentally ill gender goblins and anyone who identifies as anything but straight constantly cry about how they're oppressed even as they continue to burn record amounts of money creating terribly written "inclusive" films and television that perform very poorly.
Any time a progressive makes a declarative statement about how they'll always fight for the rights of ugly men in dresses to be in women's locker rooms, or how they'll always resist the deportation of criminal illegal aliens, they're losing an opportunity to make an argument for economic policies that actually matter.
I'm kind of convinced that the whole pro-trans, pro-homeless junkies occupying public parks, and anti-deportation crowd are the victims of a massive psyop. These are incredibly unpopular, societally damaging policies they're publicly championing...and that kills any chance of getting moderates to come vote for the candidates these people say they support.
Agreed that these divisive tactics are globalist tools that work well only so long as they can maintain power by subrosa or explicit censorship and lawfare. See the EU. If they can't, they can't win.
Took the words right from my keyboard: it's only culture war when the right notices and reacts. I just don't know if they genuinely believe their craziness is default & normal, or if it's a cynical tactic.
The politicians and the theorist class can be cynical actors, as they always have one eye on accruing power and wounding enemies, but this is a small number of people. Most of everyone else has just been slowly gradually ideologically indoctrinated by their devices and media consumption.
To be fair, everyone has an eye on accruing power and wounding enemies. Nobody is in the business of wanting to be powerless and having their enemies strong to attack them.
oh yeah, "accruing power and wounding enemies" is part of politics and always has been and always will be—but the theorist class pulled off their coup and seized the means of cultural production by pretending to be scholars but being instead ruthless political actors, conquering one dept at a time by hiring only fellow believers while chasing away non-believers and by defending their enterprise from writers who exposed their charlatanary, like Alan Sokal and Steven Pinker among many others.
The theorist class has an explicit political program and pursues it more ruthlessly than just about any actual politician.
If you're looking for a "creator of culture-war controversies", look at Trump's (first) predecessor.
Race relations became inflamed during Obama's term ("If I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin", Ferguson MO and appointing Al Sharpton as racial mediator, etc.), the trans-orthodoxy was codified (twice!) into Obamacare, there was the "Apology Tour", etc., etc., etc.
"Cancel Culture" followed Obama as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, I suspect we're largely arguing on details here.
"Neoliberal cuck and a betrayer of the working class."
We're definitely in agreement on that! Very well put!
My point is that prior to the Obama terms, race relations were essentially a non-issue. Specifically, post- the Rodney King/LA riots that occurred under GHW Bush.
I honestly do not recall race being an issue during either the Clinton or Bush terms. I'm open for correction.
Post-Obama we got DEI, cancel-culture and "speech wars". The hyper-sensitivity was not present during the Clinton or Bush terms. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong.
Specifically, Obama's comments on Trayvon Martin were not helpful nor well thought through.
Similarly, his remarks on the Gates issue that resulted in the idiotic "Beer Summit" were made hastily and without understanding of the circumstances of the situation (i.e., that Gates's neighbors called the police because they thought a break-in was underway in Gates's residence which turned out to be Gates trying to break into his own residence because the lock was jammed).
Last, that Obama would appoint Al Sharpton of all people as a "racial mediator" :
Sharpton has arguably been the single most incendiary, and certainly the most prominent, racial provocateur of the last half-century.
Obama indicated he wanted someone people could "trust". Which people?
I argue that alone was profoundly ill-advised. Racial tensions seemed to me to have been inflamed during his tenure, which ostensibly contradicted the image that was presented during the "magical" 2008 campaign.
But I respect your opinion, I just differ. Trump is an "equal opportunity offender": he offends lots of people across the board. If you had told me in the early 90's that I'd wind up voting for him for president three times, I would have thought you crazy.
At this point, I find his willingness to confront people to be part of his charm. I'd note that Trump is arguably a little loose but then he's also mischaracterized when his comments are generalized and/or misinterpreted (e.g., regarding Colin Kaepernick and black quarterbacks in general). Also, I believe Trump garnered more minority votes than previous Republican candidates, which is at least anecdotal.
Last, I ran a search on "CP5" but nothing that came up could possibly be what you were referring to. What is CP5?
Race relations have always been an issue; this is America after all.
Trump garnering more minority votes is more a product of Democratic Party ineptitude and working class betrayal than anything else.
Agree with your take on Sharpton, disagree on Martin and Gates. I don’t care about whether comments were helpful or well thought out, I only care about truth and justice.
We were, and still are, a racist country. Our particular brand of racism is inextricably linked to our capitalist economic system. But, I believe, the work of anti-racism identity politics is detrimental to solving our racial issues. That only comes with solving the economic/wealth extreme disparity that is killing us.
No politics but class politics. All this culture war analysis, from every direction, is a distraction, imo.
Yes! The PMC are the gatekeepers for the tippy top. I have a couple friends in academic circles and they'll concede the class issues, but then go all in on the favored identity politics du jour that allow the ultra-wealthy and large corporations to hide behind a phony sense of 'we care' -- but not really do anything structural that will affect their bottom line, of course.
Thank you for being fair and balanced by publishing David’s essay. BUT, to put it as nicely as possible, he gets it all wrong. He tries to frame Trumps popularity and the demoncrats on an esoteric level. It is way more obvious than that.
We reject demoncrats because:
1. Opening the border to let millions of unvetted illegals to flood the country so the dems can have future voters because they are killing their voters with abortion and legalized drugs.
2. Defunding the police and letting criminals out of prison or not prosecuting in the first place.
3. Legalizing hard drugs and encouraging addiction which leads to squalor and crime.
4. Giving certain minorities preferential treatment cause you know whites are ALL RACIST!!
5. Authoritarian cancel culture which drove Joe Rogan and Elon musk to the “dark side.”
6. Desire to destroy our economy to save the planet from natural variability which is a cover for global wealth redistribution.
7. Promoting drug addicted homelessness which is turning parts of our once beautiful cities into 4th world dystopian hell scapes.
My thumb is getting tired…lol
So Tell low resolution thinker David to write an essay addressing this small list.
They say they need a Joe Rogan, but they had him, and could still have him now since he'll talk with anybody about anything. However that last part is precisely the problem for them, since the dems believe in strong guardrails on discourse, set and enforced by them, in order to prevent the harms of misinformation. Joe Rogan's very appeal is exactly what they can't tolerate about him. They may be starting to realize they need to change, but I don't think they're capable of it yet, as this neurotic control freakery is too much a part of who they are.
If they had permission to speak freely, too many Democratic voters would start asking uncomfortable questions like "How the fuck did they sell us Adam Schiff and Kamala Harris and all these goddamn mediocre midwits as the leaders we should be looking up to?"
When they're not allowed to speak freely without being excommunicated, the guardrails are determined by paid shills and party loyalists who ensure that Democrats in the good graces of the DNC are always amazing people doing hard work for the benefit of the little people...as they attend another MET gala in a $20,000 dress.
Yep, the Dems and Progressives are VERY rigid, as inflexible as a piece of PVC tubing. It's sad, but operating solely on "virtue" and "correctness" breeds severe mediocrity as well as delusion. Dems/Progs see and engage life from the ideal vs. the real, therefore they don't achieve any real success and thwart themselves, thus taking their anger out on conservatives and independently-minded fellow Americans. They need to leave childhood/adolescence and grow up and face the real world.
"The rage was there already; Trump didn’t invent it. He just had an ear for it, while Democrats refused to listen even to legitimate complaints without condescension, a tendency which has now cost them two elections. "
This has been so obvious that it still boggles my mind that it needs to be continually debated and explained.
Take me: I'm sympathetic to a lot of progressive ideas. I'm just not sympathetic to employing massive numbers of heavy-handed bureaucrats who always find the least efficient way to address any problem they're responsible for solving. Add in the utterly useless web of NGOs, which appear to mostly be a government-funded jobs program for untalented liberal women, and I'd say progressives have a lot of housecleaning to do if they want my support for pretty much anything.
"Conservatives" are disparaged for opposing change. They are not and cannot be aggressors in a battle over culture, because the aggressors are definitionally trying to change things.
It's also worth noting that if a separate article serving as a disclaimer for Sirota's piece needs to be published, then we're already admitting something about Sirota's piece, aren't we?
Had a tough time with his piece. He appears to think from within the "trump-derangement" bubble in which "everything about the orange man is bad" and reasons from the first principle that he, Trump, is inherently corrupt. It's hard to give his thoughts serious consideration when he argues from the get-go from such entrenched views.
"I know David’s essay is meant to imagine a new long-term political approach...."
Maybe that's what he told you when he pitched you the idea. Spoiler alert: He lied.
Sirota is a naked partisan, Trump-addled hater who fooled you into publishing a delusional screed attacking Normal Americans who are sick of what his ilk have foisted on America since Clinton.
"...food for thought..."??!!
No, no nourishment for the mind in his stuff-all-the-disdain-you-can effluent.
Please don't do that again.
The Sirotas of America are all over NPR/PBS/AP/CBS/ABC/CNN/etc/etc. I pay to avoid them, and to consider your thoughts and analysis.
His piece was horrible. The idiotic Democrats could have easily reached out to Trump, buttered him up(kissed his ass) and got a lot of “deals”/legislation to their liking. Trump is not an ideologue. Instead they committed treason with the Russian collusion operation. Treason they still haven’t paid for.
Not much food for thought...but ok. Written by a TDS person, so I tend to discount them since it's not even handed at all. The censorship and bureaucratic control over everything we do makes leftists authoritarian/totalitarian, and they are closer to an oligarchy than Trump ever has been. We need to know who comes in here at our borders, or let in by socialist ivy league universities encouraging antisemitism. He's correcting the law breaking of Biden's open border. And he's definitely all about the middle class and even the poor. The kind of huge government control that guy (and Bernie) had in mind represents a total lack of freedom.
Let me address just one of the issues raised. Harvard. Trump's actions against Harvard has nothing to do with tactics against democrats and everything to do with Harvard becoming a breeding ground for assholes. An institution that should have never received government funding in the first place now definitely should not get government funding. Trump recognizing this and acting is nothing short of great leadership. Something few other politicians would have the cajones to do.
The democrats politicized every supposedly non-partisan institution, and are now butthurt that these institutions are being treated as political entities.
it really is amazing, all these people and institutions stepped onto the political playing field and never expected an opponent to show up and give them a fight. total clueless arrogance.
They had good reason to think they would have no opposition. Their experience was a parade of pusillanimous empty suits like GWB, Mitt Romney, Michael Steele etc. who were afraid of being called mean.
Also, I think another factor is that gentry liberals (the kind who run or work in upscale academia and the media) don't know any conservatives—they don't even know anyone who has a different opinion on anything!—so their policies seemed as right, proper and natural to them as the change of seasons. Despite always crowing about their tolerance and their gilded educations, modern liberals seem to have no ability to accept that other people have different worldviews, values and priorities. It's less a blind spot and more of an ideological lobotomy.
Good observation. They think they know about conservatives because they read about them in the NY Times. No further investigation necessary.
Modern liberals have become such unthinking ideological conformists, quasi-cult members (this is mandatory to maintain their social and professional lives), that all they know is that everyone not in their tribe is a racist, fascist threat to Our Democracy™, who needs to be muzzled. Social media and its algorithms plus the Orange One has destroyed their ability to think clearly.
A free subscription to the New York Post news feed would do them a lot of good. It’s my media go to.
this is spot on. I was recently hanging out with my successful liberal friends and listening to them seethe about Elon, Abbott etc. after listening patiently, I carefully asked them why they believed in their present position. immediately they began to backtrack, stammer and repeat things like, “well, not always” or “I mean, not totally, but…”
the point being that just mildly scratching beneath the surface renders them helpless. because they have never had to explain their beliefs to anyone. they don’t really understand themselves as it’s always emotion driving the car.
their world is a mile wide and an inch deep.
My wife and i can't stop laughing about all the AWFLs we know and how they went almost overnight from "You must buy an EV to save the planet! Don't you care about the planet!?" to "Burn Tesla to the ground!" and "Elon is a Nazi!"
They've pledged their brains and souls to the crowd-sourced hive mind that emanates from their screens—and still imagine themselves as intellectually gifted free thinkers!
Right, I don't think they know most ordinary Democrats either (besides the help). They really live in a bubble, especially the DC types I know. They watch MSNBC/CNN and read the NY Times uncritically. They are surprised when they hear the DEI stuff, trans, open borders, and even abortion on demand are actually not that popular with run of the mill low to moderate income people of all races who consider themselves Democrats (or independents). As I have said elsewhere, they have counted on their media dominance in order to fool people into sticking with them. As new media reaches more people, fewer people are fooled and abandon the Ds. Of course, the Rs and/or Trump can overplay their own hands or dogmatically stick to a prowar and pro bad trade deals in the name of mythical free trade (to name two things) or abuse their own power (and no, I do not think deporting the "Maryland dad" counts for me).
I like this comment. As an old school Dem mentored by older old school Dems, I wonder what my now passed on friends would think about today’s “Democratic Party.” I believe they would be put off by the party cultural values (“former” men in women’s sports, for example), and totally exasperated by Dem strategy ( we need better “messaging”).
No, D-wads, you just suck. Because you don’t even pretend to like us anymore. Nor even value our votes, because you came up with a way to mass produce those in 2020.
That is because the left strawmans unauthorized opinions in order to attack them and otherize people who have that opinion.
If you have been taught that the only reason anyone opposes DEI is because of racism or opposes carbon taxes because they are ignorant of science you have an excuse to dismiss conservatives as ignorant / evil.
I think part of the reason they have painted themselves into a corner ideologically is because the right understands the left WAY better than the left understands the right, and their debating skills have atrophied.
The left could get away with that when they could gatekeep information, but they can't anymore, and they don't know what to do.
Your comment about the Right understanding the Left better than the Left understand the Right...is completely on the money.
Ditto their inability to make a reasoned argument.
The Left (at least for now) sets the daily agenda, via corporate media, led by the NY Times. And so, that's the starting point for most of the daily conservative analysis and debate.
The Left's laughable knowledge of the Right comes from Non-Player Characters like David Brooks. Neither MSNBC nor CNN has had any credible representation of the viewpoint of the Right until Scott Jennings came along.
So, yeah, they have a lot of catching up to do...once they realize that they're dangling off the edge of a cliff from a branch that won't hold too much longer.
The thing is that the liberals are soft right and not anywhere on the left. They always have been.
And once the Democrats helped the Republicans exterminate, imprison, or expatriate the actual left (socialists, communists, unionists and the like) they were just the leftmost thing remaining. FDR, incorrectly seen as a leftist saint, was a rich dude whose greatest accomplishment, in his own words, was "saving capitalism." Bernie Sanders, seen as "radical" by some, is a millionaire who shepherds would-be-leftists into the Democratic party. There is no US left.
Many of them are extremely wealthy trust fund leftists.
I’d imagine that they don’t understand a desire for upward mobility and property ownership as opposed to equal outcomes/equity and public housing projects.
(--nor do they know any lower middle class, working poor, or alienated communities. Zero ground level truth there; only "i quietly american'ed read it in a book.")
It's arrogance.
They are their own heroes and a lot of them believe they've already saved the world once or twice.
"...modern liberals seem to have no ability to accept that other people have different worldviews, values and priorities."
This notion is reinforced after elections when certain constituencies don't behave as expected. Modern liberals often lament that they "voted against their own best interests." Because of course, these rubes aren't smart enough to have the correct best interests for themselves.
"voted against their own best interests."
god, i really hate this one.
so incredibly arrogant and condescending.
you can never tell anyone what their "best interests" are, sometimes you don't even know what your own best interests are!
A lot like Alden Pyle!
I agree, but wish to add this:
Michael Steele is what you get when you cross a weenie with weasel.
I am just so tired and fed up with the “threats to our democracy!” BS….. what does that really mean to them?!?!?
It's just an updated blasphemy/heresy charge, a modern version of "That atheist has denied our God! Burn him!"
Should we expect exaggerated blowback but against churches instead of colleges?
And would that really be a problem? Would it really be a problem if the gov't stopped subsidizing churches? Attendance is down. Church-based abstinence programs haven't raised the birth rate significantly. Stranger danger increasingly means senior church members of any congregation. But those churches are fundamental (pun intended) to one of the three legs of Regan's stool and if we pull that out, conservatives are totally ass-to-floor.
Apparently not taxing Churches is subsidizing? I believe many of the Ivy League churches, (Universities) actually receive funds, as in real money, as well as tax benefits, visa and educational freedoms. How is that a comparative argument?
What are you babbling about?
How does the government subsidize churches? Are you referring to their tax-free status? That is not the same thing.
"Stranger danger increasingly means senior church members of any congregation"? Prove it. Yes, many church people have abused children, but "increasingly" and "any congregation"? I'd like to see some proof of these assertions.
And if you're referring to Ronald Reagan, you spelled his name wrong.
Dah-um! Sharp as a scalpel there, BW! Take Drew DOWN!
Not sure where you live, but in South Carolina the Catholic church is booming. We're opening new churches all over the state. Thousands of college students are joining the church and being baptized.
Pretty large chasm between a constitutionally protected institution and the other constitutionally suspect institution.
Serious Q: Why would the government subsidize churches? ‘Separation of church and state!’, they howled…
I think if the left tried to do that, they would have to apply it to all religions, not just Christianity. And that would be a difficult minefield for the left to navigate.
s/Regan/Reagan/
whoops
But to Sirota Trump doing so is STARTING a culture war not reflecting its longstanding existence. There's the rub.
It is just a variation of the "Republicans Pounce" narrative the left has been running for decades.
Sirota, like Sanders, is a sheepdog for the Democrats. Criticize them to the high heavens but in the end, herd them into the meat packing plant. Or, as we used to say, guide them into the Roach motel. The Democrats are conformists and collectivists. I finally saw the light and made my escape from the cattle truck. I jumped the fence and high tailed it out of there. There are only two industries in the US; mining and agriculture. Everything else comes from these two. Trump gets this and respects it. He's at home in a big city hotel and a small town MacDonalds. The Democrats (and , as you know, I used to be one,) are maddeningly paternalistic towards the people they should be grateful to.
I respect Sirota and I used to subscribe regularly. But his relentlessly liberal positions often belie a careful analysis, which I find to be the case with most who are very wedded to legacy liberal positioning.
There's not much fresh analysis in this article just the repeating of tropes reordered to make them look original and insightful.
I like this analysis, obvious though it may be:
"Liberals are offended by Trump’s lack of manners in pulling off extreme versions of what their own party icons have done, but many Americans seem to cherish the Joker-like quality of Trump’s antics. They seem to appreciate that — unlike establishment Democrats — Trump at least doesn’t use a dog whistle to trick anyone. He uses a bullhorn to proudly broadcast and brag about his malfeasance — all while offering a captivating and distracting culture war along the way."
Editor Russell Lynes published his essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" in the February 1949 Harper's.
Availability?
Library should have it.
Here is preview https://www.jstor.org/stable/40255171
Yes, that's where I found it today. I first read it years ago for a class.
Thank you.
The sheer history of staggeringly monstrous/retarded foreign policy coming out of Harvard and other Ivy League grads also deserves some critical examination. Why does Harvard produce so many really smart people who push really bad foreign policy, and then keep on pushing it because they get promoted rather than held accountable when they create another new clusterfuck of a blowback situation?
My theory is they get sucked up by the MIC, which is in the business of forever wars.
Yeah, when a family friend is on the board of Raytheon, and Aunt Barbara is a senior fellow at a thinktank funded by Lockheed, it's quite easy for them to get sucked into the MIC when so many people in their family and friends network are already there.
Alden Pyle, once more!
"Why does Harvard produce so many really smart people...?"
I cannot accept this statement wholesale. Being "Highly-educated" (or Expensively-educated, or Exclusively-educated) does not necessarily equate to being Well-educated. Some of the "smartest" people I have known (my cousin the Oxford grad, e.g.) have been shown to lack all kinds of plain-old common sense.
My grandfather once said about my cousin: "I await the outcome of this classical (Oxford) education with trepidation"- this from a Scottish farm Veterinarian...
It's the function of the place. Harvard, and many other 'elite'(elitist?) institutions are more State Dept and Govt entities than places of education, etc. Chomsky et al have spoken on this for decades
I agree. The breakdown of the politics of the professors, teachers and staff in these universities tells the story. If they can not achieve the most rudimentary appearance that they have a diversity of ideas being discussed in their halls, then they need to simply get their funding from ACTBLUE.
"Hate, Inc." I bought that book for my brother to read. I recommended to many friends. Great book!
> actions against Harvard [have] . . . everything to do with Harvard becoming a breeding ground for assholes.
Please explain "becoming."
Sure, we have Gary Trudeau and Conan but surely these are outliers (as are all Lampoons).
When you know you're right
Interesting how most Libs immediately took it as a personal insult though. Speaks volumes about Harvard culture.
Absolutely agree!!!!
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you-too bad( not) that Harvard got a new zookeeper.
Matt - I appreciate what you are doing here. But, many of us (at least those like me who came to you from the left) flocked to Racket because we are well aware of the mind-numbing, factually-challenged Democrat partisanship that people like David peddle. We came becaue we read "Hate, Inc" and despised and despaired of the picture of media it painted. Your readers aren't in the bubble, but beyond it. You are injecting bubble-dom into Racket where it did not previously exist by having people like David contribute.
Ah c'mon, let a hundred flowers bloom. We Racket readers can survive dissent, our minds will not be hijacked by David Sirota. I agree with Matt's critique. He is magnanimous in publishing Sirota's essay, three cheers.
Sure, but your monthly subscription fee likely contributed to this drivel. I have no objection whatsoever to the marketplace of ideas. I would never advocate for the censorship of David or his viewpoints. But it's a waste of time and Racket readers' money to invite him to write here.
You could get what Sirota was selling for free by turning on MSNBC. Sirota wrote that Trump's approval ratings are historically low where did he get that from.
Like a lot of politicos, they like to make shit up.
Yes. This is egregious misinformation that should on its own disqualify David as a serious source and reveal him as a partisan hack. Just look up the RCP average to see that Trump is as popular as he has ever been: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating#
MSNBC is not free.
If you think it is, you've missed their monetization model.
I think he means when compared to previous presidents.
I don't know . . . we gotta understand what these people think. How they move. This guy Sirota is probably the perfect representative of a certain kind of highly intelligent well-meaning person who is unable to wrest himself from the tribal indoctrination that has similarly fallen upon so many Democrats.
Intelligent and well-meaning could include most of us, across the political spectrum. We also tend to clan up.
Your point???
Matt didn't raise prices, so he's not wasting any of my or your money to expand the offerings.
Plenty of Matt's readers are still in a bubble. One of two bubbles. You should spend more time in comments.
Eh, then maybe Matt should pick someone who is a serious analyst and not a regurgitator of partisan talking points. I’ve respected Ruy Teixeira for being a critical voice on the left in the Trump era and a serious analyst to boot.
What about the old adage,"Time is Money"? Luckily I was able to discern the BS quickly as not to waste mine, but feel for those that respect Taibbi enough to read through the whole article.
Anyone concerned about saving vs. wasting time should immediately throw their iPhone under a steamroller. After that, they'll never worry about time again, because they'll have hours and hours per day.
Or they will vote Joe Biden for a second term.
Ignorance is bliss?
I've read dozens of comments calling Sirota's take "drivel" and what not... and yet no one ever explains what exactly it is that they disagree with (except that they can't bear to have Trump criticized even a little).
Absolutely! Taibbi is a center left voice, yet attracts a disproportionate number of Trumpets. Go figure
The top comment on this post is a substantive critique of the higher education issue. I made several comments about issues with David’s erroneous description of Trump’s approval rating, and the superficiality of his criticism vis a vis misinformation. Those are two easy examples. This must be a reading comprehension issue on your part.
"Substantive"? He just says "Harvard is a breeding ground for assholes." Profound!
I really don't care much about popularity polls one way or the other. As for your own analysis, all you did is call Sirota's opinions "drivel" and "regurgitation", which is par for the course when Trumpkins are confronted with a dissenting opinion.
The idea that Trump uses "culture war" as a distraction no less so than the Democrats do appears to be pretty sound to me. I certainly don't notice any improvement in our standard of living since the Queen was elected. (Unless seeing people dragged into vans is your preferred entertainment.)
Very poor reading comprehension again if you actually attempted to decipher the thread about Harvard. I don’t have discussions with petulant partisans. I’m also not a “Trumpkin”. Don’t really like the guy and never have.
That seems to me a fair question, which I hope Matt will be transparent and answer: Did Sirota receive any payment for this piece?
The reaction here is hardly surprising. Sirota's article, though it mentions disaffected independents in passing, actually targets centrist Dems, who have become disaffected with their party.
The Democratic party is polling terribly with its own members. Can't really blame them after Biden and Harris. But after two runs by Sanders, the party has fortified itself against its own populist wing. I suspect that Sirota's hope is in vain and the Democratic elite will cling to power as long as they can-- even if it means losing elections.
They're going to struggle to unwind two decades of integrating the HR ladies into the apparatus of the Democratic party. It's not just a voter problem, it's that so much of the party infrastructure would fall apart if liberal progressive white women weren't donating their own money, working the phone banks, doorknocking, etc. In exchange for doing so much of the legwork for Democrats, they expect their voices to dominate the party agenda, and boy they sure do.
These aren't women who are sympathetic to the actual working-class, and certainly not to working-class men. If the party worked hard to cater to working-class people and working-class men, they'd quickly discover massive internal resistance from a legion of coldly hostile (mostly white) women afraid that their pet grievance issues weren't going to be the party's number one priority.
Amen. You must live here in California. I see it every day. They wear it on their sleeve, and wind their hatred of DJT into completely unrelated discussions, just because they're so amped up. Yes, it will take a LONG time for this crop of what Schlicter calls the leftist wine women to either chill out or go away. And guess what? Leftist CA families and indoctrination centers, er, schools are still churning out new ones every day.
I don't live in California, but I often interact with colleagues and vendors from California. Been to a few conferences in San Fran, although the last one was about five years ago. I took walks around the city and saw firsthand the situation with the junkies and homeless.
I work in marketing, so I have to hide my opinions, because my profession is dominated by leftist wine women and girlbosses. It would be career suicide to let them know I had zero interest in voting for morons with no accomplishments who offered me, a straight married white guy with two boys, absolutely nothing.
Agree 100% that this is a battle between the HR Ladies and normal people. May the Normals win!
Cat ladies, HR women, and the laptop class.
Well, men want to lead, women want to control. At least that's my experience in the corporate world.
I hope so. I want two political parties that aren't full of nutjobs and grifters.
I know, I know, I'm an idealist dreamer, unmoored from reality.
And folks like Sirota will cling to the sinking ship like barnacles.....
I dunno. He seems to be at the Kübler-Ross "bargaining" stage. He may just get over the party. I'd even say that the future of our country depends on people like Sirota getting there.
Hmmm. Interesting. Also accurate
Let a hundred flowers bloom. That turned out so well.
But it's such a piece of crap article, and for Matt to treat it as "a meaningful contribution to bringing down the temperature on both sides, blah, blah, blah..." is aggravating. Especially where Sirota treats AOC and Bernie as the voices of an authentic, working class populism. They've spent their lives theorizing about the working class from their penthouses and lake houses, and neither would know an honest day's work if it came up and bit them on the ass.
I didn't come from the left, I consider myself left. Progressives listen to David Sirota and here he sounds more like Bernie than ever. Unwilling to complete sever with the oligarchy because he knows someday he will need them. Matt's comments are really deep criticisms IMO and a warning to any progressives who might be believing this crap. We will know a "real alternative" when we see it because it will tone down the culture war and focus on building consensus to get progressive policies in place that people actually want. Only until that happens will we see trust building back up. David says there are alternatives. Where TF are they?
Kudos. I'm pretty conservative (now) but still harbor strong positive feelings for "JFK-style liberalism".
I'm open for new ideas. Not slurs or personal attacks but good-faith, honestly contributed ideas. Bring 'em on!
As you note well, "Where TF are they?"
My own feeling is that the left is best served by opening up the private sector at the "lower levels". I don't claim to know how to do this but small business has been the job creation engine forever.
While I think Marx was grossly out of his depth in prescribing economic structures and policies, he was a brilliant historian and analyst and the societal manifestation of "alienation" seems all around us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
My opinion is that Marx's economic prescriptions have been used by totalitarians-in-disguise who see the dictatorship of the proletariat as a convenient means to their desired ends (i.e., their gaining control over society). They claim to be Marxists but just use it as camouflage.
And, yes, I'll go a step further than you and say that Bernie/AOC going on a private-jet tour while lamenting "oligarchs" is priceless self-parody.
Small businesses have represented less and less of the US GDP since 1971 - and every year since the working class and the middle class and the government have all gone deeper in debt while the top 1% has gotten wealthier beyond belief. I think it was almost 10 years ago when big corporations finally overtook small business as the "number one economic engine". Nice idea, too late. And before you attack Marx, you better start with corporations taking over the country when their power and rights were legally enshrined to be more important than citizens. We live in a fascist state - the perfect merger of government and corporations. Marx would laugh his ass off at any criticisms of him right now. He was trying to avoid this and was pretty clairvoyant about it. Who cares if he was wrong or right about how to fix it during his time - we got all new problems today.
Actually, I wasn't attacking Marx, I was "attacking" the people who call themselves Marxist. That is, I was noting that Marxism has, in my opinion, largely been used as a tool by people who were really interested in totalitarian control.
Viz: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
That is, they claim to be Marxist but just somehow never got past that whole "dictatorship" part.
I freely admit I have not read "Das Kapital". I find brevity to be a useful and remarkably accurate predictor.
The Bill of Rights takes up maybe two pages, double-spaced. All that brilliance could be conveyed so simply.
I'll also admit that I haven't read (all of) the "Federalist Papers" but would like to do so.
The bits of "Das Kapital" I've looked at are, in humble opinion, a pretty turgid slog.
Not that Marx was wrong in identifying problems, both extant and possible, I just don't "get" what he was proposing.
You are correct that there have been numerous hegemonic incursions in our economic system, both in terms of monetary and fiscal policy.
The creation of corporations as "entities" has a lot of positive aspects (I'm essentially a one-man corporation though it's not worth much...yet :-)
However, that being said, the legal changes in 1913 and 1917 in the creation of the Federal Reserve, corporate non-profits (the predecessors of NGOs) and the explosion of the financial industry post-1980 are cause for concern. I believe it was in the late 1980s that the earlier gains of the middle class were erased and massive concentration of wealth became its greatest since prior to the Great Depression.
The off-shoring of industry has been a sore point for many people, myself included, for many years.
How prophetic Ross Perot now seems when he spoke of the "giant sucking sound" when warning about NAFTA in 1992.
Most people are probably not going to be entrepreneurs, and that's okay. But that's also why we need(ed) a solid jobs and industrial base to keep people occupied. Even if there is a bit of "alienation" in industrial jobs. My first job after high school was in a small factory. I think a lot of people there were remarkably connected to their work even though they might just be forming or fabricating one part, welding one type of connector, etc.
Certainly, it is absolutely critical that we discuss these issues!
I've had productive discussions with my accountants over the years about providing a free corporate filing for every American as part of an "anti-corporation" campaign (one of the reasons I prefer that term to anti-oligarchy is because all of these pro-corporation dems like Sanders and Sirota seen to be ok with billionaires who play nice with progressives and somehow that shields them from being called an oligarch). Corporations are the primary economic tool used to shield the individual exploiters profiting on the exploitation and it is corporate law and corporate accountability that needs to be overhauled. Not pie in the sky talk about oligarchs.
The best book about Marx’s economics ( at least through about 1976) is by Robert Freedman called Marx on Economics. This is a link to it on Archive: https://archive.org/details/marxoneconomics0000robe
I read it while taking History of Economic Thought in graduate school in the spring of 1976, I think. The professor, William L Breit, also lectured for about 3 weeks on Marx.
I had tried to read Marx in high school 10 years earlier, and some of his stuff before in graduate school, but kept falling asleep. Breit’s lectures and Freedman’s book, which largely consists of excerpts of Marx with a simplified summary, opened up his ideas to me. Be that as it may, what is the most widely misunderstood idea about Marx is the belief that he thought labor was paid less than its value. According to Marx capitalists pay labor its value.
The funniest thing about Marxists is that you cannot really catch them in a contradiction. Their reply is always, “ of course, it is the dialective.” The was extensive debates about contradictions in Marx’s ideas in the late 19th century with Engels providing the main defense usually coming up with a tautological argument to defend Marx.
Like I told some liberals who tried to jump on Bernie and AOC for flying private:
You tell me how one gets from SLC to Bakersfield to Folsom to Boise in one day, including travel to and from airports and venues and the time to spend at the venues while flying commercial. Good luck with that.
That is a valid point. I should have been more specific.
To that end, a question: what is the need for Bernie and AOC to do this? What exactly are they trying to prove?
If it's that Trump is much more tied with "oligarchs" than the Democrats (the party of AOC), that strikes me as profoundly disingenuous.
In fact, I'm not sure exactly what they're claiming.
Is it that somehow "oligarchs" are taking advantage of the system? My sense is that DOGE's work has been to reveal waste and fraud, just as claimed. I am confident we could reduce the budget significantly by identifying and eliminating that waste and fraud. Now, whether or not "we" have the fortitude to do so even after it's been identified...that's another question.
I've never been a fan of Bernie. Spent too much time around universities to go for the college coffeeshop radical stuff.
Specifically, the "everything is a right" (yes, I'm being unfair and generalizing) is a ploy to lure in the unaware and the "uncritical thinking".
I've never gotten much of a sense that either Bernie or AOC have any sensible alternatives or proposals.
But your point is definitely true, air travel today (which I vigorously avoid) sounds horrible.
I view this stupid Oligarchy Tour as a means for enraged Trump-hating grouches to get together and enjoy a group orgasm of rage. It's just a slightly refined version of Two Minutes Hate, in which Trump substitutes for Emmanuel Goldstein.
I travelled too much for business, to too many different places. After 9/11, it all went to shit. I used to hate only American Airlines, now I hate them all (except Singapore Airlines). And what's with airports? Did the city fathers of every city that ever built an airport insist on unique (read: confusing) architecture? Denver and Atlanta are similar, and everything else is different. Retirement road trips much better.
Can you expound on the "get progressive policies in place"?
Yes, @Paul Thronson, what "progressive policies" actually have been implemented and performed well for the genuine greater good, without compromising our Constitutional rights of individual sovereignty and sidelining the poor? Please, expound on that!
Let’s start with social security.
People say Medicare is pretty good too.
Though most of those people probably don't have personal experience with it. . .
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail -- unless you like the idea of 1 or 2 young workers being forced to support each retiree.
It is in desperate need of reform, but no politicians have the courage to fix it, because any mention of such a task elicits hysterical shrieks that "They're trying to kill grammy!"
Bwahahaha! The SS as Ponzi scheme meme has been so thoroughly debunked so many times, it’s always a treat to see it bought out of the ideological slime every now and then.
I'd worry about fixing the Pentagon if I were you. Talk about "doomed to fail" . . . . .
I'd be happy to get on a zoom call and have this discussion.
What are policies people want done? Popular policies would be better and cheaper healthcare, better education, lower taxes, cheaper housing ... can you think of any on your own?
The policies that make things cheaper tend to come from libertarian economists, not Democrats. Most Dem policies lead to price increases, either by restricting supply or causing inflation.
So? I guess if your mission is to paint "blue man bad" "red mad gud" congrats. But the truth is that there are major differences between the people in those parties and the people elected from those parties. Not sure your point.
No. The point is that the people that promise "cheaper" stuff, have no clue on how to make things cheaper - because they are vehemently opposed to the biggest force in promoting price reduction - the law of supply and demand.
Planned economies always fail. Subsidizing electric vehicles or college tuition may feel like it makes something cost less - but all it does is push the price up for everyone. Capping retail pricing leads to shortages. Taxing unwanted behaviors are regressive to the max.
That we are in the year 2025, and idiots like Mamdani in NYC and others think that "rent freezes" and "government stores" are solutions to high cost of living is astoundingly stupid.
The key modifier was "that people actually want."
I appreciate reading sirota if for no other reason than to be reminded of the empty husk these people choose to be. And it is a choice. Unwilling to question any assumptions or to open their eyes to see that the people they believe in betray the very values guys like sirota think guys like Bernie and AOC represent. Remarkable self delusion.
I'm always interested in Matt's analysis. Others', not so much.
This is a prime example of what I mean when big voices make decisions that goes against what their audience wants of needs. It’s as if the voices are trying to persuade the audience to new ideas: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-do-people-justify-evilwhen-its
Bwah! Sounds to me like you are afraid of a liberal invading your Safe Space.
Matt, your intro to his article is a lot more coherent than his whole article. I’m not going to repeat the comment I already made on David’s article, but it’s pretty much garbage. Your intro does a good enough job of laying to waste his total misdiagnosis, and I will add that if he thinks the solution is a new anti-oligarchy movement headed by Bernie and AOC, he is clueless and delusional.
Sure, Sirota's not even left, but were/are you? Not enough "leftists" ask themselves. Actual left is not afraid of class politics or of being openly anti-capitalist.
This is far from the first time that Matt's seemed more concerned with subscriber count than subscriber souls. He's sometimes really funny. I read him.
I must say I agree!
I could not have said it better. As a matter of fact you said it so much more politely than the response I was preparing to write.
yes agree
Matt - I appreciate hearing other viewpoints, as long as they aren't so obviously biased. Yes, it's good to hear what other people think, and I patiently listen to all sorts of leftists/libs here in California telling me what they think. However, I really thought David's article was an attempt by someone who really doesn't understand DJT to sum it up in what he thought was a fair and balanced article -- and he failed. I think YOU do a good job of curating a thoughtful discussion of current happenings, and of those who are similarly objective (or who at least are a little bit less obvious in their loathing of anything DJT related.) So, for me, the article was a swing and a miss. He doesn't get it, because he's blinded by his bias.
I've been known to read a piece over at The Nation or Mother Jones, and even nod my head in agreement. I can't say that for anything ever published at Jacobin - that is a brain-dead zone if there ever was one.
Ditto here on the occasional Mother Jones piece. Jacobin is largely loony-tunes level but have had some okay articles concerning the origin of the Ukraine war; particularly, early in the conflict, they had some writers that wrote how the west had been fomenting unrest for years ("Maidan", anyone?) and that the push for NATO inclusion was disastrous. I don't have a link to the article that made me think, "Okay, Jacobin has actually published something not entirely crazy!"
But they are almost universally crazy -- that's what makes things tricky and arguably proves the adage, "the exception proves the rule." :-)
Maidan-Ukraine didn’t want to be turned into Belarus. If Putin had his own Lukashenko in power in Kiev he never would have invaded……
He did. The US 'couped' him away, despite a sizable portion of the population wanting him Prez; then stuck Z in there, played more games using NATO as a cudgel, which is expressly NOT its function... and here we are.
This is a very sober rejoinder to Sirota's ridiculous piece, which amounted to an anti-Trump jeremiad built on one false, confirmation bias flattering, assumption after another.
There are very few American media figures who actually have the ability to accurately analyze and deal with politics are they are with any level of seriousness, and Matt Taibbi is one of them (Michael Tracey, when he's not being weird, is another). David Sirota is not.
I give Matt props for giving his friend an afternoon at the podium, but Sirota's piece was so shoddy that this "brief note of introduction" was worth more than the piece itself.
I think that was entirely Matt's point. Matt was able to tease out the lazy, built-in, narrative flaws of the entire non-MAGA punditry.
(plus he's got Walter to help with trying to understand Trump mania! :)
Just sayin’. Opening paragraphs recite all the legacy media and Bernie talking points (any difference?).
The left has been prosecuting the culture war since Free To Be You And Me. They have occasions where they tone it down, and periods where they go on the offensive. The last two times they went overboard, they ushered in Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
The idea that the left could embrace an abundance agenda is preposterous. What is the core competency of the left? The thing they do better than anything else? Litigate. Litigation is kryptonite to abundance.
The biggest problem for the democrats attracting the working class is that most blue collar workers are men, and the democrat party is fundamentally a female party.
I'll disagree slightly - it isn't the Democrats are a female party, they are a feminist party. And feminists despise non-feminist women just as much as any other zealot who sees someone they think should be a fellow-believer but isn't.
Left Democrat intransigence on abortion is the real problem. Rebranding their stance as "women's reproductive health" is offensive to every human being, female or male, who wrestles with the challenge of an unwanted or unexpected pregnancy. That little critter in the womb is, in spite of the left's pretending otherwise, a human being in potential. So rather than accept that most people have a natural revulsion against the idea of terminating a potential life, they simply ignore this fundamental human issue and insist it's merely a matter of a person's health. This is a full-blown lie, and all the left's lies spread out from it like a poison flood.
"Keep it between a woman and her doctor" sounds reasonable though in practice it means "allow termination of healthy babies at any stage for any reason." Supposed limitations after viability nearly always have an exception for "health of the woman," a loophole big enough to sail a battleship through. Although late term abortions are rare compared to other abortions, they're still an order of magnitude more numerous than murders by rifle (scary looking or otherwise), which we're supposed to believe are horrifyingly common.
It's amazing how the pro-life women are just erased isn't it? It's like they cannot possibly exist (at least in some peoples' minds).
Both sides are intransient on abortion. One wants zero limits on abortion including during labor, while the other side wants to follow women around to make sure they don't take Plan B the night after, and they also want to force rape victims to carry, while at the same time putting zero limits on the other "abortion," the live IVF embryos not implanted to be used in research or destroyed. As one woman-hating legislator stated about his anything goes hypocrisy on IVF, "It's not in a woman's body."
Although I think that your characterizations of the positions generally held by people on either "side" of the issue are misleading, they nonetheless point out the problem. There are valid concerns held by all people of good will on a very thorny matter.
As we are commenting here on Sirota's essay and Matt's reaction to it, it is the left's method of dealing with abortion that I was addressing. They not only pretend that the concerns of the people on the right are negligible and inconsequential, they hide their true intentions behind glossy and misleading rhetoric. So why the intransigence and the endless mendacity? If abortion is so wonderful and trivial, why not just come out and say so?
I am curious as to how you know that the unnamed legislator that you refer to is a woman-hater.
Feminism is the North Star ideology for the democrats; agreed. But the Hive Mind / Borg / Longhouse structure is fundamentally female and pre-dates feminism.
That is what I mean by a female party.
Following Lorenzo Warby's work, are you?
No, will have to check it out
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/worshipping-the-future
thanks
I'll throw in my 0.02 on this issue... Democrat voters value following rules and more pointedly, obedience. They see pointing this point out as rude, crude and trumpian. I am consistently in awe to see what appear to be normal rational people behaving and talking and believing utter horse shit as deeply disturbing. These people really believed Biden was track sharp, ignoring their eyes, ears and common sense to get there. Very 1984ish behavior.
I disagree. It's easy to call any female with an opinion one doesn't like a feminist, but the reality is the democratic party is full of queer theory acolytes (both male and female), no matter what you or they call themselves. The left-wing feminists have mostly left the party and become independent, while the middle-of-the-road feminists (like me) have become a member of the new republican party formed by Trump.
True, the term feminist has a certain elasticity. I'm a feminist in the sense that I wouldn't deny women the vote - which was the first great feminist victory. Successive waves have pushed the meaning beyond any sane consideration.
um, they kinda despise everyone.
That makes much sense
Excellent clarification on the difference there between between a female party and feminist party.
You are a very good friend.
Sirota is frozen in the 90s, his world is gone and dead but he thinks he can somehow bring it back to life.
Liberals have this terrible blind spot where they think that their preferred social poliicies (such as Gender Theory for kids and DEI litmus tests for hiring and college admins) are natural, right as rain, "compassionate" and more or less proper etiquette—yet when people react against these things, they're just being bigots starting a "culture war". Modern liberals simply have no ability to see how aggressive, condescending and often authoritarian they are, mostly I think because for them politics is their great faith that provides meaning and purpose, thus they can never admit fault or take a good long look in the mirror and see that they can be just as grubby, dishonest and power-mad as their political opponents.
David Sirota has nothing new to add and he might as well be talking about an imaginary country, as the one he describes no longer exists.
It's amazing how far into crazytown it got after Bernie's run in 2016. He had a very strong message that appealed to the working-class and the people left behind in the modern economy, brought huge crowds....and then Hillary and the fembots ran a full court press calling them Bernie bros, implying anyone who thought Clinton sucked must be a sexist.
Somehow we went from huge crowds cheering for speeches calling for better economic policies, to pro-trans mania where the mentally ill gender goblins and anyone who identifies as anything but straight constantly cry about how they're oppressed even as they continue to burn record amounts of money creating terribly written "inclusive" films and television that perform very poorly.
Any time a progressive makes a declarative statement about how they'll always fight for the rights of ugly men in dresses to be in women's locker rooms, or how they'll always resist the deportation of criminal illegal aliens, they're losing an opportunity to make an argument for economic policies that actually matter.
I'm kind of convinced that the whole pro-trans, pro-homeless junkies occupying public parks, and anti-deportation crowd are the victims of a massive psyop. These are incredibly unpopular, societally damaging policies they're publicly championing...and that kills any chance of getting moderates to come vote for the candidates these people say they support.
Agreed that these divisive tactics are globalist tools that work well only so long as they can maintain power by subrosa or explicit censorship and lawfare. See the EU. If they can't, they can't win.
Took the words right from my keyboard: it's only culture war when the right notices and reacts. I just don't know if they genuinely believe their craziness is default & normal, or if it's a cynical tactic.
The politicians and the theorist class can be cynical actors, as they always have one eye on accruing power and wounding enemies, but this is a small number of people. Most of everyone else has just been slowly gradually ideologically indoctrinated by their devices and media consumption.
And by their lack of life experience.
--often including their never having had to build anything & having practice only in "critiques" of the works and lives of others.
and no skin in the game, no consequences for any mistakes.
To be fair, everyone has an eye on accruing power and wounding enemies. Nobody is in the business of wanting to be powerless and having their enemies strong to attack them.
oh yeah, "accruing power and wounding enemies" is part of politics and always has been and always will be—but the theorist class pulled off their coup and seized the means of cultural production by pretending to be scholars but being instead ruthless political actors, conquering one dept at a time by hiring only fellow believers while chasing away non-believers and by defending their enterprise from writers who exposed their charlatanary, like Alan Sokal and Steven Pinker among many others.
The theorist class has an explicit political program and pursues it more ruthlessly than just about any actual politician.
Sirota sure nailed you, Mr. Gender Theory/DEI.
If you're looking for a "creator of culture-war controversies", look at Trump's (first) predecessor.
Race relations became inflamed during Obama's term ("If I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin", Ferguson MO and appointing Al Sharpton as racial mediator, etc.), the trans-orthodoxy was codified (twice!) into Obamacare, there was the "Apology Tour", etc., etc., etc.
"Cancel Culture" followed Obama as far as I'm concerned.
Obama as race inflamer always cracks me up. Idiocy punditry personified.
That Obama personifies the idiot pundit?
Obama was a neoliberal cuck and a betrayer of the working class.
Race inflamer? Couldn’t come close to Trump on that count.
Trayvon vs. CP5? Puhlease.
Okay, I suspect we're largely arguing on details here.
"Neoliberal cuck and a betrayer of the working class."
We're definitely in agreement on that! Very well put!
My point is that prior to the Obama terms, race relations were essentially a non-issue. Specifically, post- the Rodney King/LA riots that occurred under GHW Bush.
I honestly do not recall race being an issue during either the Clinton or Bush terms. I'm open for correction.
Post-Obama we got DEI, cancel-culture and "speech wars". The hyper-sensitivity was not present during the Clinton or Bush terms. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong.
Specifically, Obama's comments on Trayvon Martin were not helpful nor well thought through.
Similarly, his remarks on the Gates issue that resulted in the idiotic "Beer Summit" were made hastily and without understanding of the circumstances of the situation (i.e., that Gates's neighbors called the police because they thought a break-in was underway in Gates's residence which turned out to be Gates trying to break into his own residence because the lock was jammed).
Last, that Obama would appoint Al Sharpton of all people as a "racial mediator" :
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/04/10/301458435/obama-and-al-sharpton-an-odd-couple-who-make-political-sense
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/03/how-obama-sharpton-alliance-began-jillian-kay-melchior/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Sharpton#Barack_Obama
Sharpton has arguably been the single most incendiary, and certainly the most prominent, racial provocateur of the last half-century.
Obama indicated he wanted someone people could "trust". Which people?
I argue that alone was profoundly ill-advised. Racial tensions seemed to me to have been inflamed during his tenure, which ostensibly contradicted the image that was presented during the "magical" 2008 campaign.
But I respect your opinion, I just differ. Trump is an "equal opportunity offender": he offends lots of people across the board. If you had told me in the early 90's that I'd wind up voting for him for president three times, I would have thought you crazy.
At this point, I find his willingness to confront people to be part of his charm. I'd note that Trump is arguably a little loose but then he's also mischaracterized when his comments are generalized and/or misinterpreted (e.g., regarding Colin Kaepernick and black quarterbacks in general). Also, I believe Trump garnered more minority votes than previous Republican candidates, which is at least anecdotal.
Last, I ran a search on "CP5" but nothing that came up could possibly be what you were referring to. What is CP5?
Central Park Five.
Race relations have always been an issue; this is America after all.
Trump garnering more minority votes is more a product of Democratic Party ineptitude and working class betrayal than anything else.
Agree with your take on Sharpton, disagree on Martin and Gates. I don’t care about whether comments were helpful or well thought out, I only care about truth and justice.
We were, and still are, a racist country. Our particular brand of racism is inextricably linked to our capitalist economic system. But, I believe, the work of anti-racism identity politics is detrimental to solving our racial issues. That only comes with solving the economic/wealth extreme disparity that is killing us.
No politics but class politics. All this culture war analysis, from every direction, is a distraction, imo.
Yes! The PMC are the gatekeepers for the tippy top. I have a couple friends in academic circles and they'll concede the class issues, but then go all in on the favored identity politics du jour that allow the ultra-wealthy and large corporations to hide behind a phony sense of 'we care' -- but not really do anything structural that will affect their bottom line, of course.
Hey Matt
Thank you for being fair and balanced by publishing David’s essay. BUT, to put it as nicely as possible, he gets it all wrong. He tries to frame Trumps popularity and the demoncrats on an esoteric level. It is way more obvious than that.
We reject demoncrats because:
1. Opening the border to let millions of unvetted illegals to flood the country so the dems can have future voters because they are killing their voters with abortion and legalized drugs.
2. Defunding the police and letting criminals out of prison or not prosecuting in the first place.
3. Legalizing hard drugs and encouraging addiction which leads to squalor and crime.
4. Giving certain minorities preferential treatment cause you know whites are ALL RACIST!!
5. Authoritarian cancel culture which drove Joe Rogan and Elon musk to the “dark side.”
6. Desire to destroy our economy to save the planet from natural variability which is a cover for global wealth redistribution.
7. Promoting drug addicted homelessness which is turning parts of our once beautiful cities into 4th world dystopian hell scapes.
My thumb is getting tired…lol
So Tell low resolution thinker David to write an essay addressing this small list.
They say they need a Joe Rogan, but they had him, and could still have him now since he'll talk with anybody about anything. However that last part is precisely the problem for them, since the dems believe in strong guardrails on discourse, set and enforced by them, in order to prevent the harms of misinformation. Joe Rogan's very appeal is exactly what they can't tolerate about him. They may be starting to realize they need to change, but I don't think they're capable of it yet, as this neurotic control freakery is too much a part of who they are.
If they had permission to speak freely, too many Democratic voters would start asking uncomfortable questions like "How the fuck did they sell us Adam Schiff and Kamala Harris and all these goddamn mediocre midwits as the leaders we should be looking up to?"
When they're not allowed to speak freely without being excommunicated, the guardrails are determined by paid shills and party loyalists who ensure that Democrats in the good graces of the DNC are always amazing people doing hard work for the benefit of the little people...as they attend another MET gala in a $20,000 dress.
Yep, the Dems and Progressives are VERY rigid, as inflexible as a piece of PVC tubing. It's sad, but operating solely on "virtue" and "correctness" breeds severe mediocrity as well as delusion. Dems/Progs see and engage life from the ideal vs. the real, therefore they don't achieve any real success and thwart themselves, thus taking their anger out on conservatives and independently-minded fellow Americans. They need to leave childhood/adolescence and grow up and face the real world.
💯 this!
Please continue to expand the vapid ‘reject’ list. It cracks me up in its hyperbolic absurdity.
"The rage was there already; Trump didn’t invent it. He just had an ear for it, while Democrats refused to listen even to legitimate complaints without condescension, a tendency which has now cost them two elections. "
This has been so obvious that it still boggles my mind that it needs to be continually debated and explained.
Take me: I'm sympathetic to a lot of progressive ideas. I'm just not sympathetic to employing massive numbers of heavy-handed bureaucrats who always find the least efficient way to address any problem they're responsible for solving. Add in the utterly useless web of NGOs, which appear to mostly be a government-funded jobs program for untalented liberal women, and I'd say progressives have a lot of housecleaning to do if they want my support for pretty much anything.
I was taken by his claim that Trump has historically low approval ratings but the democrats rating were even lower.
"Conservatives" are disparaged for opposing change. They are not and cannot be aggressors in a battle over culture, because the aggressors are definitionally trying to change things.
It's also worth noting that if a separate article serving as a disclaimer for Sirota's piece needs to be published, then we're already admitting something about Sirota's piece, aren't we?
Any media pundit who knee-jerk applies this "observation" of what ails Democrats and how to regain voters they've lost is simply not worth reading:
“swinging disillusioned voters away from the authoritarian right.”
The authoritarian right. Yes, please, David Sirota, continue offering your insightful commentary and the Rs will continue to benefit.
Gosh, if only the Trump cabinet had the amazing knowledge, work ethic and effectiveness as Biden's did. Bwahahaha...
Had a tough time with his piece. He appears to think from within the "trump-derangement" bubble in which "everything about the orange man is bad" and reasons from the first principle that he, Trump, is inherently corrupt. It's hard to give his thoughts serious consideration when he argues from the get-go from such entrenched views.
"I know David’s essay is meant to imagine a new long-term political approach...."
Maybe that's what he told you when he pitched you the idea. Spoiler alert: He lied.
Sirota is a naked partisan, Trump-addled hater who fooled you into publishing a delusional screed attacking Normal Americans who are sick of what his ilk have foisted on America since Clinton.
"...food for thought..."??!!
No, no nourishment for the mind in his stuff-all-the-disdain-you-can effluent.
Please don't do that again.
The Sirotas of America are all over NPR/PBS/AP/CBS/ABC/CNN/etc/etc. I pay to avoid them, and to consider your thoughts and analysis.
Well put, Sir
His piece was horrible. The idiotic Democrats could have easily reached out to Trump, buttered him up(kissed his ass) and got a lot of “deals”/legislation to their liking. Trump is not an ideologue. Instead they committed treason with the Russian collusion operation. Treason they still haven’t paid for.
Not much food for thought...but ok. Written by a TDS person, so I tend to discount them since it's not even handed at all. The censorship and bureaucratic control over everything we do makes leftists authoritarian/totalitarian, and they are closer to an oligarchy than Trump ever has been. We need to know who comes in here at our borders, or let in by socialist ivy league universities encouraging antisemitism. He's correcting the law breaking of Biden's open border. And he's definitely all about the middle class and even the poor. The kind of huge government control that guy (and Bernie) had in mind represents a total lack of freedom.