There's a lot to unpack in your comment. I agree with you there's a pretty serious issue with silencing and fingerpointing on the american left. A refusal to hear any opinion that does not...
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. I agree with you there's a pretty serious issue with silencing and fingerpointing on the american left. A refusal to hear any opinion that does not explicitly agree with whatever the left's stance is on the issue-du-jour. This is a big problem online as it doesn't allow for nuanced opinions, because so many leftists are so afraid that the person they're talking to might be on "the other side".
I think it boils down to that: You're either with us or against us, there's no such thing as nuance, there's no such thing as "trying to understand where others are coming from", there's only good on our side, evil on the other. This is a fight, join us soldier. (And obviously, it's like this on both the american left and right, I just happen to think it's especially ridiculous coming from the left)
I think this has had a devastating effect on online discourse. Removing nuance removes empathy. If you're not trying to understand "the other side", you're just in a contest of trying to point out how much worse they are today than they were yesterday, and the day before. And obviously there's a lot of people who benefit from that divide, fanning the flames and pointing fingers... but everyone just follows along and nods. It doesn't help when the object of ridicule is fanning the flames themselves (POTUS), but this all existed pre-Trump as well.
Say, okay, you're refusing to hear a Nazi on the grounds that he's a Nazi. The problem is Nazis don't come at you with Nazi arguments, they come at you with reasonable arguments in order to pull you into madness. And it's exactly like you said: If that criticism isn't allowed on the left and you're immediately flagging anyone who criticizes you as a nazi, then any reasonable person who has those arguments is left to discuss them with nazis.
On top of this, there's a tendency to use tactics as a game of escalation. In the Obama era there were a lot of people on the left defending the government's expansion of power, increased surveillance, etc. All sorts of things which should make anyone think twice about "Hey, won't that backfire the minute my preferred party isn't in power anymore?" and... well, you know the rest.
The only thing to balance out this madness is that the GOP is just as stupidly focused on the short term and they're using the same tactics, so now it's going to backfire the other way around. sighs is it futile to hope for a return to normalcy?
Man there's a lot more I want to reply to but I have to go in a bit. This is a pretty important topic and I quite like that it's possible to discuss it here at the very least. One more thing though:
I know lots of young, poor, progressive women who could give a shit about #MeToo because they're too fucking poor to legally fight their bosses sexual harassment/abuse.
I think #MeToo has taken off the way it has partly because it does empower those young/poor women who don't have the means to fight back legally, as well. When credibility is an issue in the first place, it's a pretty big deal, even if you don't have money. And it extends far beyond just work relationships but also towards teaching men & women to stand up to an abusive partner in general. Not caring about that feels a bit short sighted.
Jane Mayer's Dark money that outlines how billionaires have systematically worked to mainstream their radical right-wing views of unlimited capitalism though the use of tax-deductible donations...
Jane Mayer's Dark money that outlines how billionaires have systematically worked to mainstream their radical right-wing views of unlimited capitalism though the use of tax-deductible donations and non-profit foundations is way more compelling.
Take the "beachhead strategy" of John M. Olin and his millions of donations. Olin systematically provided endowments to academics to put time and research into his views to gradually mainstream them.
The idea was to create loads of books and research, and not in the least experts. That's why leftist views don't get media time: they aren't represented nearly as heavily among prize winners of academic prizes, as professors at the Ivy Leagues.
Mayer notes that Huntington's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies received $8,4 million from the Olin foundation between 1990 and 2001. Of 88 Olin fellows at Harvard this financed, 56 went on to teach at Cornell, University of Chicago Dartmouth, georgetown Harvard MIT Penn and Yale. Others became public figures, leaders in think tanks etc. When the Olin foundation had spent its endowments in 2005, Mayer writes that it ran 11 separate programs at Harvard to create new generations of absolute free-market ideologist academics.
Additional Olin endowments for research projects led to John Yoos "torture memo" that was the basis for George W. Bush's interrogation techniques for terror suspects. John R. Lott jr. wrote More guns, less crime on an Olin stipend. That's the academic underpinning of practically all laws that've weakened gun control in the recent records.
According t Mayer, the Olin foundation founded 83 percent of all costs for Law and Economics programs to mainstream that fringe libertarian view of constitutional law as the field grew from 1985 to 1989. That's $68 million and additionally over $50 million to top law schools like Columbia Cornell Gergetown and the University of Virginia in the same time period.
Fund the experts. The media loves using experts.
The reason the liberal opinion-makers and policy is losing in the public debate is the inequality of spending and the complacency of liberals.
They didn't feel like they needed books or experts to justify their policies. They were right and everyone would just get it. The politicians and funding political campaigns was surely way more important since science was settled.
The issue isn't that liberalism lacks a challenger from the left. It's that the liberals failed and continue to fail at understanding the media and how to get the folks who already say they support their takes on the issues to go out and vote.
There are so many strange and simply wrong claims made in this piece mixed in with sensible generalizations and smart observations. This claim is just preposterous. It's only a month since The...
There are so many strange and simply wrong claims made in this piece mixed in with sensible generalizations and smart observations.
The Republican Party operates with a level of coherence and conviction Democrats could never match, because it is driven by an ideological vision with much clearer abstract principles. Both parties believe their programs serve practical ends. Republicans believe tax cuts and deregulation increase economic growth, just as Democrats believe Obamacare helps people afford insurance and that regulating air pollution increases health. The difference is that practical reasons are the only justification for liberal policy — if Obamacare did not help people afford medical care, or pollution regulations did not improve air quality, they would have no liberal justification at all.
Conservatives have a deeper justification: They believe small government increases human freedom, regardless of whether it “works” in any empirical sense.
This claim is just preposterous. It's only a month since The Economist reiterated a manifesto for liberalism. Democrats believe that their definition of liberalism of the leftish kind, is all about fairness. Isn't that just as strong a moral justification as anything on the right?
What the Democrats have been unable to do in this millennium, is to show off their grander vision. At the same time as demography is changing in ways that should lead any competent Democratic party to win huge electoral victories, just like Labour in the UK post-Brexit, should be crushing. Polling the issues, the voter data says it should be a walkover.
Why are socially democratic parties under-performing so heavily?
The Democrat answer to the right-wing is simple: in their view, the private market isn't always the best solution.
And in the US, the example is so big and so obvious. The US spends more than everyone else on healthcare, yet the healthcare outcomes are worse than in many other western countries.
How do the Democrats not manage to show off those facts so systematically that the issue becomes a no-brainer? How did Team Obama bungle Healthcare.gov so terribly bad?
How has the Democratic party managed to lose the working class so the Republicans are the "labor party" of Us politics?
How are the Republicans getting people to vote so systematically against their own economic interests? The Democrats are quite simply losing the public debate. On every front even though the deck is stacked in their favor based on what voters say they think of the issues.
The main tenet of the piece is that liberalism needs to be challenged by someone to their extreme.
This idea is stupid.
How could being challenged on all fronts be better than having a safe flank to the left?
The Democrats aren't winning the public debate with a single opponent. How can they possibly be better off having to fight two different battles at once?
I mean, without Sanders staying in a lost race at least a month after everyone knew he had lost was a prerequisite for Trump standing a chance in the general election. Ralph Nader put George W. Bush in the White House.
You think more spoiler candidates leads to more winning? Look to European politics. the pattern is clear everywhere: not having to work with fringe parties sniping you from the extreme leads to winning of elections.
Perhaps the most common defining trait distinguishing socialists from liberals is not any specific program, but a belief that capitalism is irredeemable.
This about sums the whole misunderstanding up: the whole basis of liberalism is that the market is wrong on many issues. And that the market gets things really wrong without proper government constraints (labor rights, environmental restrictions, anti-monopolist rights, ,consumer rights etc.). Especially when economies of scale add large economic advantages.
To be sure, this calculation might be totally wrong. One can imagine a Corbyn-style trap, where socialists gain control over the party, drive away moderates, and refuse to compromise with the electorate. Or worse, a more socialist-influenced Democratic party might simply contribute to escalating polarization, and one side or another would eventually resort to the outright authoritarianism Trump’s vote-suppressing, FBI-intimidating party is edging right up to already. (Perhaps one day chunks of this essay will be mockingly read aloud to me by my fellow gulag inmates.) In a two-party system, the optimal number of ideologically extreme parties is zero. But given that pushing that number below one is not an option in the short term, there is a case to be made that two is better than zero.
The Corbyn-trap is a reality. Again, George W. , Trump.
When you have a populist party spouting nonsense from an extreme position in the political landscape, the answer surely isn't to move farther to the left to polarize politics even more in an attempt to force people to choose extreme left or extreme right.
Surely the answer is owning your comparative reasonableness and showing a strong, non-wavering defense for common sense, common good, basic fairness, and policy with great track records in different states. If you have to pick between crazy and other crazy, who knows what'll happen. If you pick between crazy and fiercely reasonable, you're just can't lose elections.
Where's the vision? Where's forceful moderation, a strong defense of the middle ground?
Only american exceptionalism would lead anyone to think that the DNC has to somehow reinvent the wheel rather than looking at how things work in other states and countries. How've they even tried to develop the Democratic platform since losing first the House of representatives and then the Senate? It just looks like flailing.
It's not even about campaign finance. That's where the Democrats lost. The real game-changing money is being spent thought tax-deductible donations to foundations and non-profits that finance...
It's not even about campaign finance. That's where the Democrats lost.
The real game-changing money is being spent thought tax-deductible donations to foundations and non-profits that finance research, scholarship, develop experts and lifelong careerists in think tanks and civic society.
The billionaires supporting the Democrats, and that don't support political campaigns at all are basically all in the non-profit game because it lets them earmark how the government spends money they'd otherwise just be giving up as tax.
I mean sure, it's a completely different story in say Norway where 66 % of all political funding comes from the government so the playing field is more fair.
The real money from the super rich is to be won from places like The giving pledge.
The agendas of the working class and the super rich aren't always disparate. That's a strawman found on the far left fringes in many western social democracies. Billionaires are dumping money into public health, hunger, environment, vaccines etc. by the billions.
But they haven't built the apparatus of the right wing: you get more bang for your buck through education, outreach, research grants and the like than funding raw politics. When you have money to spare, do both.
It would be ironic of the rawest most unadulterated capitalists weren't spending their political budgets way more cynically than the liberals. In many locales the liberal apparatus doesn't even realize it's playing the wrong field.
to say the least, this article is difficult to characterize. in some respects it's alright, in others it's trash, and in any case what is good and bad in it probably varies a lot based on where...
to say the least, this article is difficult to characterize. in some respects it's alright, in others it's trash, and in any case what is good and bad in it probably varies a lot based on where you stand politically. this is fairly long, so here are a few of the more discussable/debatable/questionable bits:
Now, for the first time in decades, real socialism — as opposed to the scare term — has become an extant force in American politics. As a person of very-much-liberal (and very-much-not-socialist) sympathies, I might be expected to see this as a threat. Instead I see the potential rise of socialism as a way for liberalism to restore its vitality.
Perhaps the most important unresolved question is whether socialists can add energy and resolve to progressive politics without threatening democratic values. Socialists, like conservatives, tend to define freedom as a certain economic outcome (for conservatives, freedom from government; for socialists, freedom from capitalism). Liberals, in contrast to both, define freedom as a process, the following of democratic norms and rules. There are of course both conservatives and socialists who follow the rules of the democratic game even at the expense of their agenda. Trump has shown the willingness of conservatives to exploit authoritarian demagoguery in the pursuit of their agenda. The ascendant socialist faction displays a militancy that can bleed into contempt for democracy.
And yet it can be difficult to tell where transgressive fantasy violence ends and the real kind begins. In August, the left-wing street-fighting cult antifa beat up a Bernie Sanders supporter in Portland, mistaking him for a reactionary because he was toting an American flag. Antifa is an offshoot that hardly represents socialism, but left-wing activists frequently defend it as a valued ally, or lash out at anybody who criticizes it.
The Trump era, with its authoritarian rhetoric and bludgeoning of political norms, has encouraged supporters of political violence, who present drastic methods as the only possible defense against incipient fascism. Trump has merely stoked a militant spirit that was already firing up elements on the socialist left before he came along. Nearly three decades after the Cold War ended, socialists have shed their defensiveness about communism. Previous generations of socialists defined themselves by where one stood vis-à-vis Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, and by what point in history (if any) they believed the revolutionary movement in Russia veered off course.
The newer socialists treat that as distant, mostly irrelevant history. They are unhaunted by the fear that declaring a large swath of the polity to be an enemy class can justify stripping them of their political rights. Few socialists are eager to follow Marxism’s bloody 20th-century path. But neither do very many of them worry about joining with people who might be.
It is disturbing that pro-democratic sentiment within DSA has been challenged to the point where it is the concern of a faction. But that should not be taken as proof that socialist politics is doomed to veer into extremism and political irrelevance. There is a powerful self-correcting dynamic that is already evident: As socialist politics gets closer to actual power, it is forced to broaden out. DSA-endorsed Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed the party’s governor candidate Andrew Cuomo in November, to the dismay of DSA’s tactical maximalists. Sanders himself is a political liberal who has denounced antifa violence and the habit of campus leftists to shut down right-wing speakers. If socialists are to expand their tiny foothold in American politics, they will have to shear off their politically illiberal edges. A successful socialist movement will need to be guided by a spirit of broad social empathy, not the ethos of dehumanization and shaming favored by its online vanguard.
To be sure, this calculation might be totally wrong. One can imagine a Corbyn-style trap, where socialists gain control over the party, drive away moderates, and refuse to compromise with the electorate. Or worse, a more socialist-influenced Democratic party might simply contribute to escalating polarization, and one side or another would eventually resort to the outright authoritarianism Trump’s vote-suppressing, FBI-intimidating party is edging right up to already. (Perhaps one day chunks of this essay will be mockingly read aloud to me by my fellow gulag inmates.) In a two-party system, the optimal number of ideologically extreme parties is zero. But given that pushing that number below one is not an option in the short term, there is a case to be made that two is better than zero.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment. I agree with you there's a pretty serious issue with silencing and fingerpointing on the american left. A refusal to hear any opinion that does not explicitly agree with whatever the left's stance is on the issue-du-jour. This is a big problem online as it doesn't allow for nuanced opinions, because so many leftists are so afraid that the person they're talking to might be on "the other side".
I think it boils down to that: You're either with us or against us, there's no such thing as nuance, there's no such thing as "trying to understand where others are coming from", there's only good on our side, evil on the other. This is a fight, join us soldier. (And obviously, it's like this on both the american left and right, I just happen to think it's especially ridiculous coming from the left)
I think this has had a devastating effect on online discourse. Removing nuance removes empathy. If you're not trying to understand "the other side", you're just in a contest of trying to point out how much worse they are today than they were yesterday, and the day before. And obviously there's a lot of people who benefit from that divide, fanning the flames and pointing fingers... but everyone just follows along and nods. It doesn't help when the object of ridicule is fanning the flames themselves (POTUS), but this all existed pre-Trump as well.
Say, okay, you're refusing to hear a Nazi on the grounds that he's a Nazi. The problem is Nazis don't come at you with Nazi arguments, they come at you with reasonable arguments in order to pull you into madness. And it's exactly like you said: If that criticism isn't allowed on the left and you're immediately flagging anyone who criticizes you as a nazi, then any reasonable person who has those arguments is left to discuss them with nazis.
On top of this, there's a tendency to use tactics as a game of escalation. In the Obama era there were a lot of people on the left defending the government's expansion of power, increased surveillance, etc. All sorts of things which should make anyone think twice about "Hey, won't that backfire the minute my preferred party isn't in power anymore?" and... well, you know the rest.
The only thing to balance out this madness is that the GOP is just as stupidly focused on the short term and they're using the same tactics, so now it's going to backfire the other way around. sighs is it futile to hope for a return to normalcy?
Man there's a lot more I want to reply to but I have to go in a bit. This is a pretty important topic and I quite like that it's possible to discuss it here at the very least. One more thing though:
I think #MeToo has taken off the way it has partly because it does empower those young/poor women who don't have the means to fight back legally, as well. When credibility is an issue in the first place, it's a pretty big deal, even if you don't have money. And it extends far beyond just work relationships but also towards teaching men & women to stand up to an abusive partner in general. Not caring about that feels a bit short sighted.
Jane Mayer's Dark money that outlines how billionaires have systematically worked to mainstream their radical right-wing views of unlimited capitalism though the use of tax-deductible donations and non-profit foundations is way more compelling.
Take the "beachhead strategy" of John M. Olin and his millions of donations. Olin systematically provided endowments to academics to put time and research into his views to gradually mainstream them.
The idea was to create loads of books and research, and not in the least experts. That's why leftist views don't get media time: they aren't represented nearly as heavily among prize winners of academic prizes, as professors at the Ivy Leagues.
Mayer notes that Huntington's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies received $8,4 million from the Olin foundation between 1990 and 2001. Of 88 Olin fellows at Harvard this financed, 56 went on to teach at Cornell, University of Chicago Dartmouth, georgetown Harvard MIT Penn and Yale. Others became public figures, leaders in think tanks etc. When the Olin foundation had spent its endowments in 2005, Mayer writes that it ran 11 separate programs at Harvard to create new generations of absolute free-market ideologist academics.
Additional Olin endowments for research projects led to John Yoos "torture memo" that was the basis for George W. Bush's interrogation techniques for terror suspects. John R. Lott jr. wrote More guns, less crime on an Olin stipend. That's the academic underpinning of practically all laws that've weakened gun control in the recent records.
According t Mayer, the Olin foundation founded 83 percent of all costs for Law and Economics programs to mainstream that fringe libertarian view of constitutional law as the field grew from 1985 to 1989. That's $68 million and additionally over $50 million to top law schools like Columbia Cornell Gergetown and the University of Virginia in the same time period.
Fund the experts. The media loves using experts.
The reason the liberal opinion-makers and policy is losing in the public debate is the inequality of spending and the complacency of liberals.
They didn't feel like they needed books or experts to justify their policies. They were right and everyone would just get it. The politicians and funding political campaigns was surely way more important since science was settled.
The issue isn't that liberalism lacks a challenger from the left. It's that the liberals failed and continue to fail at understanding the media and how to get the folks who already say they support their takes on the issues to go out and vote.
There are so many strange and simply wrong claims made in this piece mixed in with sensible generalizations and smart observations.
This claim is just preposterous. It's only a month since The Economist reiterated a manifesto for liberalism. Democrats believe that their definition of liberalism of the leftish kind, is all about fairness. Isn't that just as strong a moral justification as anything on the right?
What the Democrats have been unable to do in this millennium, is to show off their grander vision. At the same time as demography is changing in ways that should lead any competent Democratic party to win huge electoral victories, just like Labour in the UK post-Brexit, should be crushing. Polling the issues, the voter data says it should be a walkover.
Why are socially democratic parties under-performing so heavily?
The Democrat answer to the right-wing is simple: in their view, the private market isn't always the best solution.
And in the US, the example is so big and so obvious. The US spends more than everyone else on healthcare, yet the healthcare outcomes are worse than in many other western countries.
How do the Democrats not manage to show off those facts so systematically that the issue becomes a no-brainer? How did Team Obama bungle Healthcare.gov so terribly bad?
How has the Democratic party managed to lose the working class so the Republicans are the "labor party" of Us politics?
How are the Republicans getting people to vote so systematically against their own economic interests? The Democrats are quite simply losing the public debate. On every front even though the deck is stacked in their favor based on what voters say they think of the issues.
The main tenet of the piece is that liberalism needs to be challenged by someone to their extreme.
This idea is stupid.
How could being challenged on all fronts be better than having a safe flank to the left?
The Democrats aren't winning the public debate with a single opponent. How can they possibly be better off having to fight two different battles at once?
I mean, without Sanders staying in a lost race at least a month after everyone knew he had lost was a prerequisite for Trump standing a chance in the general election. Ralph Nader put George W. Bush in the White House.
You think more spoiler candidates leads to more winning? Look to European politics. the pattern is clear everywhere: not having to work with fringe parties sniping you from the extreme leads to winning of elections.
This about sums the whole misunderstanding up: the whole basis of liberalism is that the market is wrong on many issues. And that the market gets things really wrong without proper government constraints (labor rights, environmental restrictions, anti-monopolist rights, ,consumer rights etc.). Especially when economies of scale add large economic advantages.
The Corbyn-trap is a reality. Again, George W. , Trump.
When you have a populist party spouting nonsense from an extreme position in the political landscape, the answer surely isn't to move farther to the left to polarize politics even more in an attempt to force people to choose extreme left or extreme right.
Surely the answer is owning your comparative reasonableness and showing a strong, non-wavering defense for common sense, common good, basic fairness, and policy with great track records in different states. If you have to pick between crazy and other crazy, who knows what'll happen. If you pick between crazy and fiercely reasonable, you're just can't lose elections.
Where's the vision? Where's forceful moderation, a strong defense of the middle ground?
Only american exceptionalism would lead anyone to think that the DNC has to somehow reinvent the wheel rather than looking at how things work in other states and countries. How've they even tried to develop the Democratic platform since losing first the House of representatives and then the Senate? It just looks like flailing.
It's not even about campaign finance. That's where the Democrats lost.
The real game-changing money is being spent thought tax-deductible donations to foundations and non-profits that finance research, scholarship, develop experts and lifelong careerists in think tanks and civic society.
The billionaires supporting the Democrats, and that don't support political campaigns at all are basically all in the non-profit game because it lets them earmark how the government spends money they'd otherwise just be giving up as tax.
I mean sure, it's a completely different story in say Norway where 66 % of all political funding comes from the government so the playing field is more fair.
The real money from the super rich is to be won from places like The giving pledge.
The agendas of the working class and the super rich aren't always disparate. That's a strawman found on the far left fringes in many western social democracies. Billionaires are dumping money into public health, hunger, environment, vaccines etc. by the billions.
But they haven't built the apparatus of the right wing: you get more bang for your buck through education, outreach, research grants and the like than funding raw politics. When you have money to spare, do both.
It would be ironic of the rawest most unadulterated capitalists weren't spending their political budgets way more cynically than the liberals. In many locales the liberal apparatus doesn't even realize it's playing the wrong field.
to say the least, this article is difficult to characterize. in some respects it's alright, in others it's trash, and in any case what is good and bad in it probably varies a lot based on where you stand politically. this is fairly long, so here are a few of the more discussable/debatable/questionable bits: