To start with, I don't know much (if anything) about Slavoj Žižek so if his views or opinions are overtly radical or controversial in some way, please let me know. I don't listen to a lot of...
To start with, I don't know much (if anything) about Slavoj Žižek so if his views or opinions are overtly radical or controversial in some way, please let me know.
I don't listen to a lot of philosophy tube but this video happened to appear in my Youtube recommendations during my indoor cycle session and I came away with a few thoughts and feelings. For one, his description that we are slowly sliding towards soft fascism not through a violent overthrow, but by leaders like Trump embracing perversion over hypocrisy. In other words, traditional politicians at least pretended to respect democratic norms, whereas Trump and others gain power precisely by breaking norms and flaunting it. The democratic response of fact checking, pointing out the wrongs, and feeling like they finally had their gotcha moment, only fuels the perception that the ‘establishment’ is desperately trying to stop him. Žižek argues that this is not only ineffective but that it is actively reinforcing Trump’s appeal.
I think this perspective tracks to what I am seeing. My first though was when I watched the video of Democratic members of Congress holding a press conference outside USAID. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be calling attention to it, but who was their audience? It feels like these events should be happening not in front of government buildings, but in the very communities that rely on USAID-funded programs. They need to relay directly to the people that live there how the tactics of DOGE are going to impact their lives. A shining example of this is if you look into some of the subreddits where there are large farming communities, there is a ton of talk about how the lack of funding from grants that were promised from USDA are no longer coming to fruition, and as a result these farmers may be on the brink of bankruptcy. Speaking in front of a US agency that is being presented as "The Establishment" does not feel like it is going to move the needle on public outrage. Right now, right-wing media is framing Musk and the administration as anti-elitist warriors, when in reality, they are billionaires consolidating power and squeezing working people.
Žižek’s point, if I understand correctly, is that exposing corruption isn’t enough. Democrats need to stop playing defense and start reframing members of the Trump administration as the exact kind of self-serving elites that working-class voters should actually be angry at.
This is only one part of the talk so I encourage others to listen to it since it covers a broad variety of topics such as rogue states, quantum superposition and historical indeterminacy, and AI. I have more thoughts, but I will likely need to digest and research more of what was talked about before sharing an opinion on those topics specifically.
The fundamental problem with the Democrats is that they have no ideology. They've devolved into a reactionary party that attempts to defend decorum (most Americans care very little about political...
The fundamental problem with the Democrats is that they have no ideology. They've devolved into a reactionary party that attempts to defend decorum (most Americans care very little about political decorum at this point, myself included) and a status quo that people were deeply dissatisfied with. They have no real solution for what I would consider the three absolutely core problems: the debt, growing financial inequality (this is an issue of the balance of power and agency, not inequality in welfare. Reducing inequality in individual welfare through expansive and eventually unsustainable GDP growth is NOT the solution), and money in politics (Citizens United happened and is now the law of the land, what do we do now? You can't just repeatedly say get money out of politics and have no plan. A slow, multi-generational overhaul of the SCOTUS is NOT a plan).
Is the problem that they have no ideology or that they have no plan? I don't really understand this argument, because political parties don't exist in isolation. I have no love for the Democrats,...
Is the problem that they have no ideology or that they have no plan?
I don't really understand this argument, because political parties don't exist in isolation. I have no love for the Democrats, but they've increasingly felt like the only game in town as the Republicans have gone off the deep end. The deficit is a bipartisan effort at this point (and nobody cares anymore?), and the other two things you mention have mostly accumulated during Republican administrations (e.g. Reagan's dismantling of the regulatory state and the Bush and Trump tax cuts). So the answer seems to be to.. try to keep those guys out? And yet a wide swath of people who don't listen to Fox News stayed home in 2024 and let them back in, now in metastasized form. I really don't understand what people are thinking. Sure, the Democrats have problems. But they don't need to give you a plan, they just need to outrun the bear, no? And yet they lost. I've been very bemused these recent months. People think not voting for Democrats hurt the Democrats, but to me it seems they're hurting themselves far more than a small number of political elites. It's our jobs, our govt. services, our chances of getting vaccines. We seem to be cutting our collective noses to spite our face.
So I agree Democrats don't have much ideology, but they don't need much. And I agree they don't have a plan -- because the hole is now extraordinarily deep. A plan would be a generational miracle if we get it, but it feels counter-productive to expect someone to come in and explain how we can fix everything without taking a generation to do it. At this point I'll settle for someone who can keep the lights on. But apparently a lot of people have higher standard than me. And they chose.. this? I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
The fact that the Democrats' only compelling argument for their existence is "we're not the Republicans" is a major reason why they can't outrun the bear. They need to find ways to at least seem...
The fact that the Democrats' only compelling argument for their existence is "we're not the Republicans" is a major reason why they can't outrun the bear. They need to find ways to at least seem like a compelling option in their own right, rather than solely existing as the "less shit than the Republicans" placeholders to manage to effectively win over voters and drive turnout. Solely running on people's dislike of the other party without any coherent ideology of your own other than "we're not as extreme as they are" is demonstrably not working.
No matter how extreme they get? Because they're sure working on it. At some point, "change nothing" is going to start looking pretty good. Sooner for some than others.
No matter how extreme they get? Because they're sure working on it. At some point, "change nothing" is going to start looking pretty good. Sooner for some than others.
I think it's been demonstrated to be a pretty fucking stupid electoral strategy given how much it has not worked. Doubling down on it as the Republicans step further and further over the line...
I think it's been demonstrated to be a pretty fucking stupid electoral strategy given how much it has not worked. Doubling down on it as the Republicans step further and further over the line isn't going to improve that.
I'm not that interested in what the strategy of the Democrats should be. I'm interested in what my strategy should be as a disempowered voter who doesn't watch Fox News. Suppose we care about...
I'm not that interested in what the strategy of the Democrats should be. I'm interested in what my strategy should be as a disempowered voter who doesn't watch Fox News. Suppose we care about @thearctic's 3 goals. Complaining about the Democrats doesn't feel like it has much planning behind it in service of that ideology.
Your initial questions were about whether the Democrats' failures when it comes to presenting a coherent ideology actually mattered, and my comments have been in response to that question -- they...
Your initial questions were about whether the Democrats' failures when it comes to presenting a coherent ideology actually mattered, and my comments have been in response to that question -- they matter because the Democrats are not winning elections. Pivoting to ask whether criticizing the Democrats' electoral strategy is an effective way to advance our actual political goals is moving the goalposts. And even in that case, I'd say it does have utility, because a progressive party that actually wins elections is pretty pivotal to accomplishing those things going forward.
From my perspective I've been asking the same question throughout. Is complaining about Democrats an effective response to the world we find ourselves in. The way I see it, we're past the point...
From my perspective I've been asking the same question throughout. Is complaining about Democrats an effective response to the world we find ourselves in.
The way I see it, we're past the point where political parties can help us much. There are only 2, we're all mostly disenfranchised above the local level because everything's gerrymandered to heck and back. We have to find other interventions in the system. But intervening in a system is a delicate activity and it helps to hold most things as stable as one can. Voting the bums out to bring in someone 10x worse doesn't feel like an effective intervention, and it's going to make any other changes we want to make less effective.
I'll stop here. You seem to be sure that you have the answer. I hope you're right. I don't know what else we can do, but now the noise also makes it hard to think.
I disagree, at least in the short term with respect to Trump's norm-breaking. I don't need an ideology to stop at a red light, and I'd think less of anyone who runs said red light without an...
The fundamental problem with the Democrats is that they have no ideology.
I disagree, at least in the short term with respect to Trump's norm-breaking. I don't need an ideology to stop at a red light, and I'd think less of anyone who runs said red light without an obvious emergency.
Trump's norm breaking is at minimum a threat to the idea of the United States government as a stable, professional gestalt, and at worst it's a threat to the principle of rule of law. Ideologies in an industrialized country with a democratic system only make sense under this kind of stability since any ideological policy worth its salt is long-term. It will do no good to (e.g.) increase capital taxes if the rich know they only need stall four years for the wheel to turn such that all will be forgiven – or at least not enforced.
My opinion is essentially the opposite of yours. I think the fundamental problem with Democrats is that they saw signs of an existential threat to the American system, and they talked about existential threats to the American system, but they acted like the 2024 election was just an ordinary race to be decided on the basis of tax and spending policies.
If you are a politician who sincerely thinks that the nation is facing an existential threat, whether foreign invasion or domestic coup, you put aside your differences with your normal opponents to form something like a unity government. Ideological disputes have to wait for the crisis to pass, or else there will be no government left to fight over. With that mindset, Harris should have been running slightly to the right of McCain, not as a typical progressive.
As attributed to Ben Franklin, the United States is a republic – if it can keep it. Conventional politicians have slept on the latter half of that for a couple of decades now, and we're now in the 'find out' stage.
Inequality in welfare is just the difference in the physical well-being of people based on what they can afford. A world in which everyone has a solid middle class life but people like Musk or...
Inequality in welfare is just the difference in the physical well-being of people based on what they can afford. A world in which everyone has a solid middle class life but people like Musk or Bezos are worth a few trillion dollars would have low welfare inequality but high financial inequality.
He makes a good point about hypocrisy being preferable to the shameless pursuit of every political desire. Though I'm not sure it is preferable. The lie was already so obvious before the...
He makes a good point about hypocrisy being preferable to the shameless pursuit of every political desire. Though I'm not sure it is preferable. The lie was already so obvious before the politicians realized they don't need to bother coming up with lies anymore.
My notion of it is that excess openness is not necessarily complete honesty - you can be "open" and avoid lies whilst still reserving some space to backtrack/manoeuvre around a certain topic....
My notion of it is that excess openness is not necessarily complete honesty - you can be "open" and avoid lies whilst still reserving some space to backtrack/manoeuvre around a certain topic. Political hypocrisy was often times a tactic to avoid (well deserved) pushback on ideas which didn't float well with the public, and although undesirable, it demonstrated that politicians were ashamed of what they were doing to some degree, and were ultimately limited on how openly/quickly/strongly they could pursue their goals.
Nowadays, it seems like such pushback has abated, or faulty behaviour is otherwise excused in the name of "well, at least he's being honest about it". A lot of times, overly prosaic straight-to-the-point and open language fails to leave avenues for further communication, and strains political collaboration in the future. Furthermore, it means that politicians are no longer afraid of the ramifications of their actions, and will openly declare them because no system is in place to keep them in check.
For instance, if you're part of a certain party, and you have a long term goal of vanquishing a rival party/demography, you wouldn't be expected to say this out loud. When you say this, you polarise the situation further, your supporters are fired up by your statements, and no meaningful work can be done to attain a compromise. Saying this out loud basically says "we will not leave us any space to backtrack on this, we're making ourselves clear, and we will spare no effort to obtain our goals. Dialogue is now impossible". Although this is part symptom/part indirect cause of our current political situation, this is in no means desirable, at least in my view.
To start with, I don't know much (if anything) about Slavoj Žižek so if his views or opinions are overtly radical or controversial in some way, please let me know.
I don't listen to a lot of philosophy tube but this video happened to appear in my Youtube recommendations during my indoor cycle session and I came away with a few thoughts and feelings. For one, his description that we are slowly sliding towards soft fascism not through a violent overthrow, but by leaders like Trump embracing perversion over hypocrisy. In other words, traditional politicians at least pretended to respect democratic norms, whereas Trump and others gain power precisely by breaking norms and flaunting it. The democratic response of fact checking, pointing out the wrongs, and feeling like they finally had their gotcha moment, only fuels the perception that the ‘establishment’ is desperately trying to stop him. Žižek argues that this is not only ineffective but that it is actively reinforcing Trump’s appeal.
I think this perspective tracks to what I am seeing. My first though was when I watched the video of Democratic members of Congress holding a press conference outside USAID. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be calling attention to it, but who was their audience? It feels like these events should be happening not in front of government buildings, but in the very communities that rely on USAID-funded programs. They need to relay directly to the people that live there how the tactics of DOGE are going to impact their lives. A shining example of this is if you look into some of the subreddits where there are large farming communities, there is a ton of talk about how the lack of funding from grants that were promised from USDA are no longer coming to fruition, and as a result these farmers may be on the brink of bankruptcy. Speaking in front of a US agency that is being presented as "The Establishment" does not feel like it is going to move the needle on public outrage. Right now, right-wing media is framing Musk and the administration as anti-elitist warriors, when in reality, they are billionaires consolidating power and squeezing working people.
Žižek’s point, if I understand correctly, is that exposing corruption isn’t enough. Democrats need to stop playing defense and start reframing members of the Trump administration as the exact kind of self-serving elites that working-class voters should actually be angry at.
This is only one part of the talk so I encourage others to listen to it since it covers a broad variety of topics such as rogue states, quantum superposition and historical indeterminacy, and AI. I have more thoughts, but I will likely need to digest and research more of what was talked about before sharing an opinion on those topics specifically.
The fundamental problem with the Democrats is that they have no ideology. They've devolved into a reactionary party that attempts to defend decorum (most Americans care very little about political decorum at this point, myself included) and a status quo that people were deeply dissatisfied with. They have no real solution for what I would consider the three absolutely core problems: the debt, growing financial inequality (this is an issue of the balance of power and agency, not inequality in welfare. Reducing inequality in individual welfare through expansive and eventually unsustainable GDP growth is NOT the solution), and money in politics (Citizens United happened and is now the law of the land, what do we do now? You can't just repeatedly say get money out of politics and have no plan. A slow, multi-generational overhaul of the SCOTUS is NOT a plan).
Is the problem that they have no ideology or that they have no plan?
I don't really understand this argument, because political parties don't exist in isolation. I have no love for the Democrats, but they've increasingly felt like the only game in town as the Republicans have gone off the deep end. The deficit is a bipartisan effort at this point (and nobody cares anymore?), and the other two things you mention have mostly accumulated during Republican administrations (e.g. Reagan's dismantling of the regulatory state and the Bush and Trump tax cuts). So the answer seems to be to.. try to keep those guys out? And yet a wide swath of people who don't listen to Fox News stayed home in 2024 and let them back in, now in metastasized form. I really don't understand what people are thinking. Sure, the Democrats have problems. But they don't need to give you a plan, they just need to outrun the bear, no? And yet they lost. I've been very bemused these recent months. People think not voting for Democrats hurt the Democrats, but to me it seems they're hurting themselves far more than a small number of political elites. It's our jobs, our govt. services, our chances of getting vaccines. We seem to be cutting our collective noses to spite our face.
So I agree Democrats don't have much ideology, but they don't need much. And I agree they don't have a plan -- because the hole is now extraordinarily deep. A plan would be a generational miracle if we get it, but it feels counter-productive to expect someone to come in and explain how we can fix everything without taking a generation to do it. At this point I'll settle for someone who can keep the lights on. But apparently a lot of people have higher standard than me. And they chose.. this? I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
The fact that the Democrats' only compelling argument for their existence is "we're not the Republicans" is a major reason why they can't outrun the bear. They need to find ways to at least seem like a compelling option in their own right, rather than solely existing as the "less shit than the Republicans" placeholders to manage to effectively win over voters and drive turnout. Solely running on people's dislike of the other party without any coherent ideology of your own other than "we're not as extreme as they are" is demonstrably not working.
Do they not know how bad that looks? No wonder they lost. If that's not a blinding example of not having any ideology, I don't know what is.
No matter how extreme they get? Because they're sure working on it. At some point, "change nothing" is going to start looking pretty good. Sooner for some than others.
I think it's been demonstrated to be a pretty fucking stupid electoral strategy given how much it has not worked. Doubling down on it as the Republicans step further and further over the line isn't going to improve that.
I'm not that interested in what the strategy of the Democrats should be. I'm interested in what my strategy should be as a disempowered voter who doesn't watch Fox News. Suppose we care about @thearctic's 3 goals. Complaining about the Democrats doesn't feel like it has much planning behind it in service of that ideology.
Your initial questions were about whether the Democrats' failures when it comes to presenting a coherent ideology actually mattered, and my comments have been in response to that question -- they matter because the Democrats are not winning elections. Pivoting to ask whether criticizing the Democrats' electoral strategy is an effective way to advance our actual political goals is moving the goalposts. And even in that case, I'd say it does have utility, because a progressive party that actually wins elections is pretty pivotal to accomplishing those things going forward.
From my perspective I've been asking the same question throughout. Is complaining about Democrats an effective response to the world we find ourselves in.
The way I see it, we're past the point where political parties can help us much. There are only 2, we're all mostly disenfranchised above the local level because everything's gerrymandered to heck and back. We have to find other interventions in the system. But intervening in a system is a delicate activity and it helps to hold most things as stable as one can. Voting the bums out to bring in someone 10x worse doesn't feel like an effective intervention, and it's going to make any other changes we want to make less effective.
I'll stop here. You seem to be sure that you have the answer. I hope you're right. I don't know what else we can do, but now the noise also makes it hard to think.
Yup, the old guard (Pelosi et al) are clutching pearls rather than leading.
I disagree, at least in the short term with respect to Trump's norm-breaking. I don't need an ideology to stop at a red light, and I'd think less of anyone who runs said red light without an obvious emergency.
Trump's norm breaking is at minimum a threat to the idea of the United States government as a stable, professional gestalt, and at worst it's a threat to the principle of rule of law. Ideologies in an industrialized country with a democratic system only make sense under this kind of stability since any ideological policy worth its salt is long-term. It will do no good to (e.g.) increase capital taxes if the rich know they only need stall four years for the wheel to turn such that all will be forgiven – or at least not enforced.
My opinion is essentially the opposite of yours. I think the fundamental problem with Democrats is that they saw signs of an existential threat to the American system, and they talked about existential threats to the American system, but they acted like the 2024 election was just an ordinary race to be decided on the basis of tax and spending policies.
If you are a politician who sincerely thinks that the nation is facing an existential threat, whether foreign invasion or domestic coup, you put aside your differences with your normal opponents to form something like a unity government. Ideological disputes have to wait for the crisis to pass, or else there will be no government left to fight over. With that mindset, Harris should have been running slightly to the right of McCain, not as a typical progressive.
As attributed to Ben Franklin, the United States is a republic – if it can keep it. Conventional politicians have slept on the latter half of that for a couple of decades now, and we're now in the 'find out' stage.
Would you care to expand more on what you mean about inequality?
Inequality in welfare is just the difference in the physical well-being of people based on what they can afford. A world in which everyone has a solid middle class life but people like Musk or Bezos are worth a few trillion dollars would have low welfare inequality but high financial inequality.
He makes a good point about hypocrisy being preferable to the shameless pursuit of every political desire. Though I'm not sure it is preferable. The lie was already so obvious before the politicians realized they don't need to bother coming up with lies anymore.
My notion of it is that excess openness is not necessarily complete honesty - you can be "open" and avoid lies whilst still reserving some space to backtrack/manoeuvre around a certain topic. Political hypocrisy was often times a tactic to avoid (well deserved) pushback on ideas which didn't float well with the public, and although undesirable, it demonstrated that politicians were ashamed of what they were doing to some degree, and were ultimately limited on how openly/quickly/strongly they could pursue their goals.
Nowadays, it seems like such pushback has abated, or faulty behaviour is otherwise excused in the name of "well, at least he's being honest about it". A lot of times, overly prosaic straight-to-the-point and open language fails to leave avenues for further communication, and strains political collaboration in the future. Furthermore, it means that politicians are no longer afraid of the ramifications of their actions, and will openly declare them because no system is in place to keep them in check.
For instance, if you're part of a certain party, and you have a long term goal of vanquishing a rival party/demography, you wouldn't be expected to say this out loud. When you say this, you polarise the situation further, your supporters are fired up by your statements, and no meaningful work can be done to attain a compromise. Saying this out loud basically says "we will not leave us any space to backtrack on this, we're making ourselves clear, and we will spare no effort to obtain our goals. Dialogue is now impossible". Although this is part symptom/part indirect cause of our current political situation, this is in no means desirable, at least in my view.