Sat June 30, 2018 9:05 pm
LoathedVermin72 wrote:If the Dems run fucking Joe Biden I swear to god...
Sun July 01, 2018 12:14 am
Sun July 01, 2018 11:48 am
Mon July 02, 2018 5:28 am
Mon July 02, 2018 6:53 am
BurtReynolds wrote:DemSocs working hard to re-elect Trump
Mon July 02, 2018 11:02 am
tragabigzanda wrote:BurtReynolds wrote:DemSocs working hard to re-elect Trump
Mon July 02, 2018 1:47 pm
Mon July 02, 2018 2:58 pm
McParadigm wrote:If “things people write on signs at rallies” is how we are evaluating party platforms, then the Republican Party talking point set that won them a congressional majority was “hang in there Obama (picture of a noose),” “A village in Kenya is missing its idiot,” and “If a man can marry another man then legal marriage to dogs is next. No wonder Killary’s excited!”
Tue July 03, 2018 9:35 am
Populists and anti-humanists have entered into an ad hoc coalition in their fight against the liberal establishment. For now, at least, the people lovers and the people loathers have found common cause.
In the framework of overlaid populist and anti-humanist movements, many of the most baffling events of the past few years start to make sense. “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” asked Donald Trump, channeling Noam Chomsky, of the disgraced Fox host Bill O’Reilly in 2016. While the alt-right adopted the style and attitudes of the left-wing counterculture, mainstream Democrats adopted slogans of 1950s Republicans and launched their own Cold War-style campaign against sweeping, sinister Russian subversion of domestic political institutions and the national fiber. Crosscurrents of populism and anti-humanism are running through evangelical support for Trump, progressive puritanism, liberals defending an FBI-led “resistance,” Sean Hannity’s crush on Julian Assange, Steve Bannon calling himself a “conservative Leninist,” as well as the resurgence of marginal strains of Stalinism, Maoism, Third Position fascism, National Bolshevism, and assorted political cults flickering throughout a social-media driven attention economy operating on the rubble of the liberal establishment’s journalism wing.
Listen to the modern prophets and you’ll hear that liberalism is dying, democracy is in crisis, and capitalism is ready to explode. “We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time,” Saul Bellow wrote in Herzog. Fifty-four years later and the doomsday sentimentalism the novel dismissed as “mere junk from fashionable magazines” is back in full bloom. And yet the fool’s bet is, in the long run, the only sure thing.
Attacks on liberal norms and liberal values correspond roughly to the populist and anti-humanist currents. Though it’s critical to distinguish between these modes, which have different goals and motivations, they are nearly inextricable at the moment. Both populism and anti-humanism erode traditional left-right political categories and the stable model of politics organized around centrist consensus. Each attacks the norms of the liberal establishment. And each participates in a counterestablishment style, its tone ranging from righteous to cynically vicious as the signal bounces around, growing more distorted with each relay between progressive radicals, neo-reactionaries, neo-left materialists, elite universities, talk radio hosts, and the White House.
Before 2016, liberalism had enjoyed more than a half-century as the shared meta-ideology of the American “political center.” The consensus encompassed a broad power-sharing arrangement between mainstream Democrats and Republicans, and between progressives, neoliberals, and neoconservatives, who competed with each other while excluding groups that violated certain core beliefs, mainly around market capitalism and the rights of individuals. The consensus enforced not only a stable left-right political paradigm but also a foundational liberal humanism that both parties broadly shared. As that center hollowed out it not only threw off the political balance, it threatened the underlying liberal humanist beliefs on which its ethical claims and legitimacy rested.
The anti-humanist critique of Enlightenment rationalism as inherently totalitarian fits quite well with the racial epistemology and authoritarianism of the alt-right. As a result, nominally antithetical political claims can sound indistinguishable—resting as they do on common philosophical sources... Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.”
And so, welcome to the new carnival of American life, in which a class of degenerate moralists on the alt-right claims the counterculture mantle to launch screeds against sexual immorality while clashing with a class of radical bureaucrats, supposedly representing the powerless, who enforce edicts about sexual behavior using the force of the state, brought to you by a new class of oligarchs who own the monopolistic digital platforms on which all of this excitement is processed and monetized.
A social order has evolved in which form betrays substance. A hard-won American ethos of tolerance and respect for the individual devolved into a progressive-plutocrat alliance that characterizes the worst of the neoliberal dispensation, and is loathed by much of the country. It produces a backlash.
Tue July 03, 2018 11:17 am
Mon July 09, 2018 2:43 am
Bi_3 wrote:Finally someone calls out Bernie for being a right wing nut job who doesn’t understand young people and socialism:
https://newrepublic.com/article/149378/bernie-sanders-not-left
Mon July 09, 2018 2:59 am
simple schoolboy wrote:Bi_3 wrote:Finally someone calls out Bernie for being a right wing nut job who doesn’t understand young people and socialism:
https://newrepublic.com/article/149378/bernie-sanders-not-left
Open borders plus a generous welfare state... this Democratic Socialism thing is going to be lit.
Mon July 09, 2018 8:29 am
Mon July 09, 2018 10:38 am
McParadigm wrote:simple schoolboy wrote:Bi_3 wrote:Finally someone calls out Bernie for being a right wing nut job who doesn’t understand young people and socialism:
https://newrepublic.com/article/149378/bernie-sanders-not-left
Open borders plus a generous welfare state... this Democratic Socialism thing is going to be lit.
It’s pretty hard to overstate how much conservatives inadvertently worked to set the stage for this to occur.
I was just reading a paper on people’s perceptions of the word “socialism” over time. By weaponizing the word in response to every single democratic proposal, especially ones that later became incredibly popular like the ACA, they’ve effectively desensitized people to it. Young people have basically no negative response to the word at all, and even middle-age unaffiliated voters consistently misunderstand what it is and have increasingly neutral opinions of it. Socialism is now just seen as a meaningless political attack word.
Mon July 09, 2018 6:33 pm
you'd think so-called progressives would learn from that and stop calling anyone who dares to disagree with them a racist sexist nazi bigot. It's already backfired spectacularly.
But I don't think it has much if anything to do with conservatives. Socialists have been calling themselves liberal for so long (and with no resistance from actual liberals) that no one knows the difference anymore.
And without a Soviet menace around, it's more likely people won't see the negatives.
the removal of basic economics from high school classrooms, and the removing the Euro-centric nature of social studies
Mon July 09, 2018 7:09 pm
Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.
Mon July 09, 2018 7:10 pm
Mon July 09, 2018 7:19 pm
--- wrote:Financial literacy and basic economics are not the same thing.
Mon July 09, 2018 7:37 pm
McParadigm wrote:--- wrote:Financial literacy and basic economics are not the same thing.
I did to mean to equate them, though in a way I guess I did. It’s the closest parallel I have, as I find no reference to economics in the collected national standards, 1950-1999 document I have.
Mon July 09, 2018 7:45 pm