Political allies don't have to like each other
January 30, 2025 7:49 AM   Subscribe

"Instead of expecting to be coddled with praise and pulled punches all of the time, activists need to grow a spine and fight the right even if they hate their allies."
posted by A forgotten .plan file (90 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
FUCKING YES.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:53 AM on January 30 [13 favorites]


(I definitely think people should read the entire article because the conclusion that's drawn is not the one implied by the summary)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:02 AM on January 30 [15 favorites]


oh, we're going to see who read the article and who didn't, aren't we...
posted by AlSweigart at 8:10 AM on January 30 [15 favorites]


"We can always expect Democrats to bow to pressure from the left" is not a sentiment I would have expected to see at this point in American politics. To be clear, that's a paraphrase, not a quote, but...surprising to see nonetheless. He does realize how much reaching across the aisle goes on, when it comes to Democrats accommodating Republicans, right?
posted by mittens at 8:10 AM on January 30 [3 favorites]


"We can always expect Democrats to bow to pressure from the left"

That seems to be the opposite of his point, which is that (i) liberals do actually oppose the right on their own principles on many things and so don't need to be cajoled into doing it by leftists; and (ii) liberals will take actions that align with leftist goals (e.g., withdrawing from Afghanistan) for reasons completely independent from anything leftists want, do, or say.

Although (ii) implies that it literally doesn't matter if leftists act or even exist with regard to what policies get pursued. Which is true but it's odd to see someone so explicitly stating that they are utterly impotent and useless.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:15 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


Yeah, apologies if the pull quote isn't working. tbh I was out and about this morning elsewhere and one particular feed I follow has been rampant with "stupid shitlibs" posts from cosplaying socialists for the past week. It was beginning to have an effect on me until the overreach, animosity and bankruptcy of one post trying to own a liberal was so profound that I took a step back and thought, "I really do need to just get over myself and get to the next neighborhood coalition meeting. They're not gonna like what I have to say on some of this, and lord knows I'm gonna be told some things I don't want to hear, but I need to get over these resentments." So I was kinda talking to myself there.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 8:16 AM on January 30 [17 favorites]


god I have this one die-hard Hillary fan friend who is chock full of this "stop criticizing the just-right-of-Reagan neoliberal Dems" attitude and it's so exhausting when she starts ranting about it
posted by egypturnash at 8:19 AM on January 30 [11 favorites]


Humans are so bad at distinguishing criticism from slurs.
posted by Bryant at 8:29 AM on January 30 [6 favorites]


Humans are so bad at distinguishing criticism from slurs.

That's actually why I disagree with his point.

It does actually matter how you treat people and present yourself. If someone is treating you poorly and mocking you while presenting a valid point, it's going to affect how you take the point. Maybe in the realm of Pure Logic it shouldn't but in actual human reality it does. I'm not commenting on any specific political tactics or whether or how leftists should criticize liberals but this idea this person is peddling that the way you treat others while trying to persuade them should have no effect is just silly. It's just not how human beings work including, I'd wager, this author.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:36 AM on January 30 [16 favorites]


Stop treating coalitions like personal relationships!
I have unfortunate news about human psychology.

Interesting as a position piece, but as a lefty who’s worked among a wide range of political orientations to build coalitions, I can’t say I’ve found the attitude he takes effective. But it might work better for some people than others.
posted by brook horse at 8:40 AM on January 30 [12 favorites]


this idea this person is peddling that the way you treat others while trying to persuade them should have no effect is just silly

That was just different enough a read that I went back and re-read. I think he's overstating for effect in a way one should not when trying to make a case for pragmatic coalition-building: The very broadest conception of 'left' — "a few redeemable blue dogs all the way over to just shy of the most sectarian Marxist-Leninist tendencies" — isn't socially or culturally able to mirror what the right more or less does pull off.

And he's an old school socialist. That particular type has adapted poorly to people who've come up in activism in the last 15-20 years. I was sort of one of that type in the '90s, and even then we struggled to be effective coalition partners for things that have become even more acute since: Disdain for identity politics, "consumerism," and people being animated for the "wrong" reasons.

But I don't read him saying "be obnoxious jerks, nobody cares." I read him saying "be fine believing what you believe and for pity's sake knock off the 'shitlib' blither-blather and just say what you mean and explain what you need. It's okay to disagree."

From my particular experience, a lot of the voice modulation disorders that come from being in disagreement go away if you accept disagreement as part of the cost of doing business, and that has a calming effect overall.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 8:47 AM on January 30 [17 favorites]


It would be easier to view liberals in this context as allies if they'd actually grow a spine and start, you know, resisting. Instead they'll let the actual left do the heavy lifting, take the hits and then they'll wade in and take the credit come election time. Time to put the 'co' in coalition if you don't want the slurs.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:47 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


I think it's a little more complicated than that. We all do things for our own reasons regardless of criticism. But it's *always* a dick move to disingenuously claim that your reasons for doing something were conditional on people not having been sufficiently nice to you. I think this comparison is particularly appropriate:
You see this in the Angela Nagle style arguments about how “cancel culture” forces people to leave the left, as if me calling someone a racist casts a spell on them where they have no choice but to react by lurching right.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:06 AM on January 30 [8 favorites]


"stupid shitlibs" posts from cosplaying socialists

I just assume they are fascist trolls until proven otherwise.

Fighting between far left, left and centre-left helps fascism immensely. If cops feel comfortable taking the very public risk of stacking bricks before a protest, it's logical to assume fascists would happily hide behind the anonymity of the internet to facilitate that conflict where ever possible.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:11 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


"Fighting between far left, left and centre-left helps fascism immensely."
This. I've been doing a lot of reading about how and why fascists purposely divide right and left, but the same thing is true of divisions within the left, too. Divisions create space for fascists to fill with spit, lies, confusion and hate.
posted by Violet Blue at 9:35 AM on January 30 [12 favorites]


If someone is treating you poorly and mocking you while presenting a valid point, it's going to affect how you take the point.

Think of the last time someone told you, "You attract more flies with honey than vinegar!"

Was this person someone who valued your interests, or someone who very politely valued your compliance and your silence?
posted by AlSweigart at 9:35 AM on January 30 [11 favorites]


I think the final paragraph sums up the author's main point pretty well:
Liberals are always going to use these guilt-trips and thinly-veiled threats of betrayal as ways to silence criticism from socialists, but socialists shouldn’t capitulate to them. All we need from liberals is for them to oppose the right, and whether or not they do that is going to be determined by national-scale historical and political factors, not by petty interpersonal dynamics.
What I think this sorta misses is that it's worth distinguishing when the disagreement is over a goal/desired outcome, and over tactics. What is counterproductive is name-calling someone who shares your goal(s), but simply differs on how they think is best to get there. This is certainly more likely to happen in online spaces - it is certainly far easier to call someone "spineless" than try to have a conversation of why they think their tactic is better, and what concerns they have about your tactic. And with regard to tactics, I think it's good to keep an openness to the fact that nobody really ever knows the precise best tactic, because nobody can predict the future.

The author focuses on politicians - and yeah, professional politicians generally (well, historically) operate less on pettiness and more on political expediency for their broad goals. But voters are different - people debating whether or not to join a union are different - any sort of organizing/coalition building work requires a bit more openness and listening skills.
posted by coffeecat at 9:43 AM on January 30 [14 favorites]


Think of the last time someone told you, "You attract more flies with honey than vinegar!"

Was this person someone who valued your interests, or someone who very politely valued your compliance and your silence?


This is frame is frequently misused and it conditions people to treat sound tactical advice as some sort of capitulation to fascists. I used to buy it early in my allyship journey until someone I was trying to support broke down and asked me what I wasn't saying. Carefully couching my words, I explained my concerns to her about how she was going about something, because it was self-destructive, burning her credibility, and endangering people she was bringing along.

She scolded me a little for pulling my punches. "I want to be effective, not deferred to. You understand something about this space I don't, and if you think I'm setting myself up for failure you should say so. That's being a good ally."

Allyship, at least how it was taught to me, is about providing access to your power and privilege. Some of that power and privilege accrues from understanding spaces and people in ways that marginalized people might not, because they haven't had the access or cultural conditioning.

Tone policing is a thing for sure, but I think you state your case too broadly. It's the failure state of deference politics.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 10:02 AM on January 30 [18 favorites]


I've been through my own version of this recently - left a socialist group that I had been part of for over a decade because I got tired of the endless, petty shit-talking of whatever random "shitlib" someone had beef with each week - which included regularly mocking and talking shit about local people who were attending our meetings and trying to get involved. (There were also extenuating factors - including some health issues I've been experiencing which led to me being repeatedly guilt-tripped and/or yelled at for not showing up to meetings. I got called "passive aggressive" for waiting a week to raise some concerns in person at a meeting rather than calling a member of the group directly while I was literally in the hospital. In general, there was definitely not a practice of "respectfully disagreeing with another person's political perspective or opinions about strategies and tactics" and instead a lot of "immediately call people out based on some aspect of their identity/privilege when you disagree with them"). When I eventually couldn't take it anymore, I stepped down from my leadership role in the group, which was met with an epic, 2-hour guilt trip along the lines of the tone of this article (i.e. "toughen up and put the movement ahead of your own feelings/health issues"). I have... a lot of conflicted feelings about the "left" these days which are obviously heavily tied up in my experiences with this particular group, but it has been a sad and lonely time to be without a "political home." The comments in this post/thread have been really validating - so thank you all!

One thing that I think the author of this piece misses a bit is that not all socialist groups operate in the same way. He's basically advocating that, no matter how dysfunctional a socialist organization may be, you should keep showing up even if you don't "like it," and I'm not sure I agree with this. I think we can all stand to toughen up a little bit, but it's also worthwhile to push our organizations on the left to function better. In my own situation, I have been exploring and looking for other groups that are functioning better (meaning, there are some basic structures in place to keep the group on task and focused on strategy, and there's clear and intentional leadership - I find the "decentralized leadership" bs to basically be an excuse for the de facto leaders to avoid taking any accountability when there's conflict within the group). Would love to hear others' experiences of finding (if you have) leftist groups that are not rife with petty infighting.
posted by sleepingwithcats at 10:11 AM on January 30 [10 favorites]


I definitely think people should read the entire article

No way I'm clicking on a Substack link unless I know and trust the author.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:15 AM on January 30


The TL;DR is that everyone who isn't a fascist has a vested interest in fighting fascism and it is in our collective interest not to give up or sabotage each other while we fight it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:18 AM on January 30 [9 favorites]


Archive.is link for anyone who doesn't want to give Substack a click.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:26 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


You see this in the Angela Nagle style arguments about how “cancel culture” forces people to leave the left, as if me calling someone a racist casts a spell on them where they have no choice but to react by lurching right.

This is glibly stated so you're supposed to think it's the most ridiculous idea in the world, but it seems fairly obvious to me that calling people racists repeatedly will likely result in some of them aligning themselves politically with the group that doesn't call them racists. Leaving aside whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it seems silly to suggest that this doesn't happen.

More generally, it feels like the author is failing to draw the distinction between professional politicians (who probably don't care that much how nice you are to them) and regular people (who absolutely do care how nice you are to them). In between, there's a lot of grey area and that's where you need to tread carefully.
posted by ssg at 10:33 AM on January 30 [12 favorites]


Humans are so bad at distinguishing criticism from slurs.

In my experience Australians are a lot better at it than Americans, so I think it's more a cultural thing than a human thing. And cultures can be shifted.

If you're a centrist and you find yourself offended by some leftist complaining yet again about how useless centrists are, perhaps you could take that as an opportunity to practice letting the leftist look like the asshole instead of wasting more of everybody's time by responding in kind. It's not like anything a centrist can say is going to erase the decades-long centrist record of consistently punching left harder than they ever punch right.

It's not all about you unless you choose to make it all about you, and in the present political climate, that kind of ego-driven response is the most counterproductive available.
posted by flabdablet at 10:40 AM on January 30 [9 favorites]


it seems fairly obvious to me that calling people racists repeatedly will likely result in some of them aligning themselves politically with the group that doesn't call them racists

You're ignoring the possibility that someone who's repeatedly called out as racist might in fact be a racist. We've all been called out for saying hurtful shit, but most of us learn from the experience and try to do better next time.

I think this is part of growing a spine. If you're willing to completely abandon your principals or withdraw your support in revenge for someone criticizing you or making you feel a little bit uncomfortable, how much of an ally were you to begin with?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:48 AM on January 30 [9 favorites]


It's not all about you unless you choose to make it all about you, and in the present political climate, that kind of ego-driven response is the most counterproductive available.

Seems like the exact opposite is true, actually: in the present political climate when building coalitions to amass enough political power to actually fight the ascendant right is critically important the absolute last thing you want to do is alienate potential allies and this "it ain't about you, buttercup, suck it up" attitude is almost purpose-built to do that.

This talk of "disagreement" is also pretty disingenuous: "I told this guy he was a bootlicking fascist shitlib and then he wouldn't even listen to what I had to say! It's sad some people can't handle disagreement."
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:56 AM on January 30 [8 favorites]


The way I'm reading this piece, it seems like the point he's making is "Democrats are not swayed by the left but sometimes they do okay things anyway" (paraphrasing) which, okay, cool, but it doesn't really seem actionable and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I also think this touches on but doesn't really dive into the fact that part of the reason it's hard for Democrats and the left to work together is that they want different things. There's a common enemy but I don't think there's much of a shared goal -- the closest is defeating Republicans or the far-right but even those, while having a lot of overlap, are different things.

I think I do agree with what I think is the thesis of the piece as I'm reading it, the idea that liberals and leftists are doing different things for different reasons but sometimes those overlap and we should stay out of each other's way while we're fighting a common enemy, but I don't think this actually said very much nor did it say it very clearly. I have additional feelings and thoughts about reasons this doesn't happen in practice but in theory, at this moment, it seems fine.
posted by an octopus IRL at 11:05 AM on January 30 [3 favorites]


If you're willing to completely abandon your principals or withdraw your support in revenge for someone criticizing you or making you feel a little bit uncomfortable, how much of an ally were you to begin with?

People suck, dude. But ideological purity doesn't seem to be a winning political strategy. So in the real world, how do you build a big enough tent to make real change? Just saying people should be better doesn't seem to work, for some reason.
posted by ssg at 11:15 AM on January 30 [9 favorites]


You're ignoring the possibility that someone who's repeatedly called out as racist might in fact be a racist.

Not sure the contrary is implied, but rather that sometimes it is advantageous to be able to ally temporarily with somebody who is in fact (at least passively) racist to work towards a political goal you do have in common.
posted by atoxyl at 11:24 AM on January 30 [8 favorites]


It's interesting how quickly we've swung from "we all have a degree of internalized racism" to "the world is easily divided into racists and non-racists".
posted by ssg at 11:43 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


Started typing and deleted several things. I guess the TL;DR is that I find the contemporary American left to be incoherent and incapable of strategic thought. Generations of extreme marginalization have created a situation where they have no incentive to cooperate. And look, it was the Democrats who did that. They did it on purpose. They do, in fact, punch left far harder than they ever punch right. The whole thing is a depressing morass.

This writer is at least trying to be a mature voice, saying not to get too caught up in name calling or emotional reactions, and that's good. The left needs to hear that. But I agree with others that he doesn't have much to say beyond that. There is no path to effective coalition building presented.

At this point, though, I don't know what an effective coalition would look like. I don't know what effective activism looks like, and I don't see a path back to relevance for a Democratic Party that is in deep conflict with its own base, and with young people generally.

Like I said, it's depressing.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:50 AM on January 30 [13 favorites]


My favorite season of Revolutions remains the Revolutions of 1848, because it is the masterclass on what liberals and socialists can achieve when they work together, and how quickly it falls apart when they immediately succumb to infighting.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:56 AM on January 30 [6 favorites]


Enjoyable read, thanks!

Obviously this is not Spain in the 1930s but coincidentally I was reading Orwell last night and found the echoes in this and Spilling The Spanish Beans interesting:
The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the “liberal” bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The “liberal” bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop [...] For clearly he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy goods...

Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front (or, in the Communist Press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e., capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism...

[T]he real struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connection it is most important to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. [...] Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending – not in so many words, but by implication – that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, “mass sadism,” the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylum-ful of homicidal maniacs.

Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilise public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois “democracy,” meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor...
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:58 AM on January 30 [16 favorites]


That final paragraph is so good.

Liberals are always going to use these guilt-trips and thinly-veiled threats of betrayal as ways to silence criticism from socialists, but socialists shouldn’t capitulate to them. All we need from liberals is for them to oppose the right, and whether or not they do that is going to be determined by national-scale historical and political factors, not by petty interpersonal dynamics.

The first time that I saw that many of my supposed allies toward the centre of the left - allies in general direction, you'd think, if not allies in detail and degree - would rather see our opposition win than meaningfully accommodate those to their left was more of a shock than I like to admit. It is not a coincidence that that approach has helped lead us to where we are now.

I can't say I'm hopeful they'll work with people like me even now, but my hope is my problem, and really the least important thing. Where we're at politically is far bigger and more important than my vaporised hope. And united opposition is its only answer.
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 12:12 PM on January 30 [7 favorites]


At this point, though, I don't know what an effective coalition would look like. I don't know what effective activism looks like, and I don't see a path back to relevance for a Democratic Party that is in deep conflict with its own base, and with young people generally.

I'm not sure, either. The one thing that feels like it could be useful would be to edge around centrist "popularism" and try to organize around popular social programs. Some work was done during the runup to the general election on what messaging was landing in Pennsylvania. The things that got Democrats toward making up ground were more around universal social programs, not "democratic norms" messaging. A lot of socialists are happy to call that "populist" messaging, but populism is a pretty poisoned term for understandable reasons, and I wouldn't die in that ditch.

And the Democratic leadership doesn't like universal social programs. Its time in the wilderness during the opening phases of the neoliberal era disciplined it into means testing, "workfare," and keeping labor at arm's length. These things are simply the realist position for '90s-era New Democrat/DLC types. Obama didn't break that grip, he just disrupted the succession planning.

Worse, "economic anxiety" is a poisoned topic. My very liberal leaning Facebook friends are reposting "fuck you and your price of eggs" memes faster than DNC proxies can produce them.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 12:15 PM on January 30 [4 favorites]


My liberal representative, Doggett, gets soooooooo mad at the left. So, so mad. He also votes the way I would like him to most of the time. He has a moral center and policy goals, and he works towards those goals independent of if his constituents are annoying. That's the kind of behavior the author wants. The problem that the author doesn't touch on is that there are many politicians who are not in this career because of actual legislative goals. A current example would be John Fetterman. Who is he fighting for? It changes depending on who has done a good job lobbying him recently. Whatever his intrinsic goal is that led him to join Congress, it's not dependent on actual political goals. He's not giving anything up if he moves to a different political stance because someone was mean to him. I don't think that it's worth trying to catch the "flies" like Fetterman or Sinema with honey because the left doesn't have money, and money will always be the sweetest honey. There's no amount of sucking up that we can do to be able to rely on someone who can be bought.
posted by tofu_crouton at 12:42 PM on January 30 [6 favorites]


A basic problem with leftists is they simply don't believe that liberals or moderates are sincere. They see them as sell-out or cowardly leftists, or as masquerading conservatives and apoliticals who want political power in places where Republicans rarely win office. Accordingly, anything that requires leftists to treat liberals and moderates as sincere will fail.
posted by MattD at 12:57 PM on January 30 [5 favorites]


The only effective coalition building I've seen between leftists and liberals has been focusing on specific incremental goals they agree on. Work together on Medicare expansion, improving the child tax credit, building public transportation, what have you. Pick an actual thing you want to happen in the world and make it happen.

(Yes, not all liberals -- or leftists! -- want all of those things. Work with the ones who do. Ignore the others.)

As for the politicians, you pick your issues and lobby them. And if they don't help accomplish your goals, you get your groups together and primary them. But you need to be able to put together a broad enough coalition to back a candidate to do that.

This works a lot better IME when you're collaborating in an issue-based organization focused on the relevant topic. It works better in person among your neighbors. It works better on your local politicians and on your House reps than on the President.

I don't know how to make it work on big open online forums. I'm tempted to say it's not worth trying, but the fascists have used online forums to radicalize their base effectively. So there's clearly work to be done there.

As for big national offices like the President... well, there are a lot more liberals in this country than leftists, so I suspect they'll continue to skew liberal. Speaking as a leftist, I find that disappointing, but to the extent I can do anything about those offices I'll support the liberal as opposed to the alternative. You have to pick things that actually move the needle.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 1:01 PM on January 30 [7 favorites]


This put me in Rant mode. I think the article relies heavily on picking a fight with some Dems they call activists. I'm a Social Democrat, if you want to call me a liberal as a slur, go nuts, but I think it feeds the Right's appetite for meaningless poo-flinging.

We're getting creamed. Every time I hear We Won't Go Back, I cringe, because we have fucking lost Roe V. Wade and women in Red States are actually dying from the denial of the barest minimum of reproductive care. The Extreme Right has dragged us to the Right. They were able to block an adequate bipartisan Immigration bill and weaponized immigration as a campaign issue, with the horrifying results in the news. The Extreme Right is well-organized, well-funded, disciplined, and has an agenda they are pretty successfully ramming down our throats. The Right controls the narrative. People believe at least 2/3 of their message, much of which is wildly false; the rest is mostly false. Truth and facts are absolutely degraded. Abortion, Immigration, and Trans/Queer Rights are distractions to keep people from noticing the Fascism. And the money grab. Occupy Wall Street was pretty awesome, but C level salaries are higher than ever, the wealthiest are wealthier, the homeless are more numerous, personal debt is at an all time high. The current Administration is a caricature of oligarchy.

The Left, at all levels, got so busy calling people racist, they couldn't manage to elect a pretty terrific Black Woman. Now the Administration is rolling back Civil Rights at a fast clip. We are so fucking outplayed by the Right, as they enact laws that suppress voting, esp. among non-whites, as they gerrymander appallingly, close polling places, try to steal elections, require voter ID.

The news media is broken. WaPo and LATimes have lost editorial control. The NYTimes is a lapdog hounding Joe Biden out of town while calling the Orange Fascist's power grab Tuesday 'confusing.' Don't get derailed here, it was good that he left the race; I think he's cogent but too frail for another term. These newspapers are portrayed as Left; they are not. The news is being reshuffled, truth, facts, science are degraded concepts.

Afghanistan? My kid spent a year there getting shelled and getting PTSD. I do not give a fuck why we got out; I am thankful it got done. Yes, how stuff gets done matters. But not to the exclusion of everything else. I protested war in Iraq when it started, most of the US was howling for blood.

I'm active with my local Dems, who are unable to move an inch, but we're trying to dynamite them into motion, with some slow progress. Local GOPers are active and getting candidates elected to local and state office. I was invited to take over a regional Dems group. Hell, yes! We supported candidates, canvassed, all the stuff, with limited success. We started a new Indivisible chapter to give structure to an active group. We're recruiting candidates to run for local and state office. I will keep fighting the Right and I'll work with everybody. LiberalsPeople are always going to use these guilt-trips and thinly-veiled threats of betrayal as ways to silence criticism from socialists other people, but socialists we shouldn’t capitulate to them. All we need from liberals people is for them to oppose the Right, and whether or not they do that is going to be determined by national-scale historical and political factors, not by petty interpersonal dynamics.

I think we are in real trouble in the US, and from what I read, a lot of the world agrees. It's been Complacency in the Left that is screwing us. Get off your couches. I realize I'm doing too much back-patting, I apologize. I'm so angry, frustrated, terrified.
posted by theora55 at 1:26 PM on January 30 [20 favorites]


we are in real trouble in the US

So too, everyone else in the West, when they can use the internet to Pinochet any country at will.

My liberal representative, Doggett, gets soooooooo mad at the left

Depends on what he's pointing to. If it's abolish NATO/Israel/police, he is right to do so. Those are all highly untenable niche ideas tailor made to sabotage steady progress. The fascists may not have invented them, but they sure do want to tie any and all opposition to them. That's how they won the center.
posted by CynicalKnight at 2:28 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]


A basic problem with leftists is they simply don't believe that liberals or moderates are sincere.

Literally the comment right before yours features me, a leftist, talking about how sincere my liberal rep is. I don't think that using broad strokes is helpful and might in fact be a huge part of the problem. The very thing we are discussing is how to form diverse coalitions, with many political gradients within them.

I also don't like giving people cover behind broad labels. The forty-six Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act, for instance, have names and histories and should be treated differently from others who fall under the broad term "Democrat."
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:58 PM on January 30 [7 favorites]


The left whines about liberals as much as it does because liberals actually pay attention. Think through the implications of that.
posted by Galvanic at 3:32 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]


Its because they thought liberals believed in some of the same things, but then reality hits them. Like the genocide support.
posted by Iax at 3:41 PM on January 30 [4 favorites]


We’re just gonna slide right past the fact that Beijer is a brigading sack of shit I guess?
posted by sinfony at 4:20 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Its because they thought liberals believed in some of the same things, but then reality hits them. Like the genocide support.

Oh, no, the whining starts even before that.
posted by Galvanic at 4:44 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Before when? 1776?
posted by CPAnarchist at 5:50 PM on January 30


> (I definitely think people should read the entire article because the conclusion that's drawn is not the one implied by the summary)

I would have if SubStack didn't require my email to finish the article. :(

I'm reaching the point where, if I'm not on a site regularly, I'm not signing up or signing in or giving them info. Not worth the aggro anymore.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:34 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


The only effective coalition building I've seen between leftists and liberals has been focusing on specific incremental goals they agree on. Work together on Medicare expansion, improving the child tax credit, building public transportation, what have you. Pick an actual thing you want to happen in the world and make it happen.

There is one overarching issue that has been making all of those goals recede over the horizon ever faster for the last forty years, and that's the unconstrained increase in wealth inequality brought on by laissez-faire economics having won the public policy debate in the mid 80s.

Wealth inequality now exists at a level not seen since feudal times or arguably ever. The reason the cost of living is so high now is that ordinary people are asset-poor, and the reason that governments struggle to do anything about that is that privatization has been fashionable for long enough that governments are now asset-poor. The only group remaining who are not vastly more asset-poor than they were before the Thatcher/Reagan/Friedman hostile takeover is a relatively tiny group of obscenely wealthy families whose income is entirely passive - these people don't get paid for contributing to the world, merely for owning it.

The only way that the lives of ordinary people are ever going to improve is if asset ownership can be broadened, so that it once again becomes realistic for ordinary people to aspire to formerly ordinary goals like owning a home or having work that pays well enough to fund that. The only sustainable way to broaden asset ownership is by implementing taxation policy that acts as a disincentive to concentration and hoarding. This requires building an appropriate level of assets taxes into the system so that the deck becomes stacked less absurdly heavily in favour of the biggest private players.

It ain't the immigrants, it's the inequality.

The only voices within the Democratic Party who have been putting this essentially irrefutable case over the last twenty years have been on its left flank. Sanders and Warren have been on about this since approximately forever, but despite both of them being quite skilled at making an argument without calling anybody a useless lying pandering two-faced self-serving sack of shit, Party leadership has been absolutely consistent in ignoring and marginalizing their voices and seeking to exclude new talent that might potentially support them internally. The Squad exists despite the best efforts of the DNC, not because of them.

If the Democratic Party is even slightly serious about becoming seen as something other than TweedleD then it needs to distinguish itself clearly from TweedleDumb by addressing the single biggest issue underpinning pretty much all of today's public immiseration. If instead it continues to shrink away from any proposal that reads even vaguely leftist as if it were a slug tasting salt, it's going to take longer for the rubes to see through fascism than any of us can afford.
posted by flabdablet at 9:14 PM on January 30 [19 favorites]


I would have if SubStack didn't require my email to finish the article. :(

Sorry that happened. I tested in an incognito window to make sure I wasn't passing along a link that would do that. Just to check, SubStack does sort of obscure the ability to click through by making the link smaller than the giant signup form.
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 9:17 PM on January 30


in the present political climate when building coalitions to amass enough political power to actually fight the ascendant right is critically important the absolute last thing you want to do is alienate potential allies

The thing about that is, anybody who actually is a potential ally is not going to be somebody who reacts to policy proposals with a barrage of personal fragility. History clearly demonstrates that people who display that behaviour are simply not reliable. Weeding them out early by using a bit of robust language as a shibboleth saves a lot of time and effort that we frankly no longer have the luxury of being able to waste.
posted by flabdablet at 9:29 PM on January 30 [5 favorites]


A point I would make that is, let's say . . . related to that made by the article is this:

Almost always, in order to get our priorities accomplished, we need to lobby and pressure and cajol and armtwist (and everything else) politicians on our side of the aisle harder than we do those in the opposite party.

We often have the idea that we need to use those tactics on the other side, the "bad guys", and when "our guys" are finally voted into office, we can just automatically expect our agenda to move forward like magic.

Politics simply does not work that way.

Even on topics that politicians naturally support, things they personally want to do, they have a very, very hard time making any headway on them without a huge groundswell of popular support - ideally, strongest from their own strongest supporters - pushing them along the way.

There are a few reasons for this. But high among them is that politicians are always elected by a large and diverse coalition of supporters. They make many promises and have many priorities - usually related to various interest groups among their supporters - along the way.

Once in office, any officeholder has only limited time and attention. You might have 20 or 50 or 100 items on your agenda or "campaign promise list". In reality, you have capacity to maybe move 2 or 3 of them significantly at any given time. And maybe you have another 5 or 10 on the back burner, ready to move up to highest priority if an opportunity arises.

So the election is over and 95% of your supporting coalition heads home to celebrate, slap each other on the back about "job well done", and relaxes with a beer until the next election.

Guess where their priorities end up, on the list of 1-3 on the front burner, 5-10 on the back burner, and the remaining 90 left closed up in the back cupboard?

And guess what happens to the priorities of that 5% of your supporting coalition that makes a point to keep active and keep the pressure on, via personal visits, messages, rallies, general organizing, continued donations, or whatever the case may be?

Yup, their priorities are the ones moved to the front of the priority list, and those are the ones that actually have a chance of moving forward.

(Even in this case, there is no guarantee. But they have a chance - while the priorities locked away in the back cupboard don't.)

Elections are only the first part of the political battle, and lobbying the politicians who are ostensibly on your side is vastly more important than those in the opposing party.

In Re: to the article, this kind of lobbying of the leaders on your own side is often interpreted as backstabbing, internecine warfare, and all that. We have to be adult enough, and smart enough, to see a little beyond that. Often the most vociferous disagreements are among those who are basically on the same side of things, but have different ideas about the details or implementation.

The intent and seriousness of such disagreements, however, should not be overexaggerated. The "other guys" are still the common enemy, and disagreements with them run far, far deeper.

And people who spend all day arguing heatedly with each other over relative nuances can still form a completely united front in opposition to the other side's complete nonsense.

But absolutely, we must speak up and lobby our own side most of all. It is the only way to move our priorities forward in a political system. It is normal, healthy, and necessary.
posted by flug at 3:34 AM on January 31 [6 favorites]


BTW you have seen exactly the dynamic I describe above play out in the Republic Party over the past 40 years or so.

The right-est of the right-wing nutters have lobbied, pushed, cajoled, and pressured. In literally every way possible.

And they have succeeded: They have pushed the whole party right, right, and more right. Far more to the right than most of their voters.

You can see how politicians from the local to the national vie against each other to see who can be the most extreme. That is how they please what they see as the core of their voters.

I'm aware of this personally because I've seen it happen to people I've personally known for years, who were (and maybe still are, at their core) pretty normal and reasonable people.

But under the pressure of the political system, the necessity of fundraising, the right-wing media environment, Trumpism and all the rest, they are basically forced to become radicalized if they wish to survive. They have become something I wouldn't even have recognized 10 years ago. But you can see why they have done so - it's necessary for their political survival.

On the left, it seems like that dynamic is almost the reverse. Candidates spend most of their time trying to attract Republican voters, and are skittish about being seen as doing anything to the please the far or even center Left.
posted by flug at 3:40 AM on January 31 [7 favorites]


He's right that socialists shouldn't be afraid of saying what they really think about liberals.

I'm not sure what he thinks of liberals saying what they really think about socialists.
posted by Brachinus at 6:36 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


Doesn't matter what he thinks about it; they're gonna do it anyway. Punching left after a setback or a win is 100% reliable centrist behaviour.

Propaganda works.
posted by flabdablet at 8:58 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
posted by aiq at 9:05 AM on January 31




Punching left after a setback or a win is 100% reliable centrist behaviour correct, in this case.

"a new survey conducted by YouGov suggests Biden’s support for Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza played a surprisingly large role in the choice of those previous Biden supporters not to vote."

This is the success of Russian/Chinese faux-left propaganda pushing so hard on this. They got as many people as possible as mad as possible so they would refuse to vote. Harris is not "paying a price" here. The folks being rounded up by ICE are paying a price. The embarrassingly naive Abandon Harris supporters who thought Trump would help Gaza are paying the price. Gaza itself will paying be the price in spades.

Pro Palestine activists have been played, just like Freedom Convoy, QAnon, and all the other niche anger groups steered to attack Trump opposition.
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:21 PM on January 31 [5 favorites]


They got as many people as possible as mad as possible so they would refuse to vote.

But that casts the administration as somehow powerless in the face of propaganda. If the pro-Palestine movement were some sort of astroturfed Russia operation, then the administration had plenty of time and resources to make that case. They chose another path, to ignore the increasing numbers of people appalled by what they saw in major media sources, and to remain unresponsive to their concerns. We saw that happen for a solid year. We talked about it a lot. We're still talking about the aftermath of it.

It was a great illustration of why the piece in the FPP makes no sense. We don't have to like each other to work together--well, sure, but Democrats were not willing to try the "work together" part to begin with, when it came to Palestine. It's hard to remember another issue where they have been so unyielding to pressure from their own voters.
posted by mittens at 1:54 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]


powerless in the face of propaganda

That's very much the case. Propaganda fed to both left and right, tailored to appeal to their specific grievances, overwhelmed the center from both sides and swamped reality.

plenty of time and resources to make that case

Many alarms were rung.

the pro-Palestine movement were some sort of astroturfed Russia operation

Not the movement itself, no, any more than protestors throwing cop-supplied bricks make the entire protest a cop sponsored event. In both cases, the provocateur influence amplifies anger and directs it in a way that sabotages the ultimate goal of the protest.

They chose ... to remain unresponsive to their concerns

That's not accurate. They tried to do what they could - weak sauce as it was -without losing the absolutely enormous block of pro-Israel voters. If they had done the moral thing and abruptly cut off all support for Israel, the propagandists would have had a field day with that and the Dems would have lost by a landslide. If they had been re-elected, on the other hand, the progressive wing would then have a mandate to push harder and would have made gains. Now we'll never know.

To pull my derail back on track to the theme of the post: my purpose is to warn. Anti-Trumpist anger, both domestic and foreign, can and will be cultivated and redirected to sabotage opposition and boost Trumpism even more. It has worked extremely well up till now, and their work is not done.
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:22 PM on January 31 [3 favorites]


There's no way Netanyahu was going to agree to a ceasefire with Biden in a position of power and influence. That is why it was scheduled for January 19. That is why the ADL, under Jonathan Greenblatt, handwaved away Elon's Nazi salute. The Dems certainly erred in their handling of the Gaza atrocities and public perception of their stance, but I would bet a large amount of money that there was huge pressure from Israel, the ADL and AIPAC to stay in line. Was heeding that a good idea? It was not! But hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, getting so many people who probably would have voted D to not vote was a major win for that whole contingency.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:27 PM on January 31 [3 favorites]


Was heeding that a good idea? It was not! But hindsight is 20/20.

It wasn’t hindsight. The mealy mouthed centrists were pointing it out all the way through. The level of stupid of those who helped Trump get elected to punish Biden for Gaza is just off the charts.

And I love the leftists saying it’s perfectly fine to hammer the shitlibs because of how the evil shitlibs do it to them. So it’s a bad and wrong thing to do and we'll definitely do it as well? Well done.
posted by Galvanic at 4:32 PM on January 31 [2 favorites]


But ideological purity doesn't seem to be a winning political strategy.
posted by ssg


It is the most losing strategy of them all.

All politics, in every system of governance ever, is about compromise between ideals and reality. The prizes go to those who can make the best compromises, however shitty they may be in the short term. It will never be otherwise. Sooner the purists accept that and start bargaining for the best compromise possible, the better for them and their causes, and for everybody else.

Doubly so in first-past-the-post electoral systems.

I am not optimistic.
posted by Pouteria at 7:11 PM on January 31 [4 favorites]


So it’s a bad and wrong thing to do and we'll definitely do it as well? Well done.

Complaining vociferously about other people behaving as one routinely does oneself is never a good look.

This is the success of Russian/Chinese faux-left propaganda pushing so hard on this. They got as many people as possible as mad as possible so they would refuse to vote.

Watching a genocide unfold in real time with full-throated support from both "sides" of US politics has been nothing short of sickening. It takes a true cynic to dismiss the resulting gutfelt despair and alienation as "getting people mad" and some remarkably shallow motivated reasoning to sheet home the responsibility for it to Russian and Chinese propaganda, faux-Left or otherwise.

People whose families have been killed as they watch by Israeli troops using US bombs need no help from Russia or China to decide who to hold responsible for that, and characterising the resulting disinclination to vote as somehow the fault of the faux Left, let alone the actual Left, is frankly delusional.
posted by flabdablet at 11:38 PM on January 31 [3 favorites]


The level of stupid of those who helped Trump get elected to punish Biden for Gaza is just off the charts.

Perhaps you could try substituting "despair, hopelessness, desperation, frustration and grief" for "stupid" and see how that sits with you.
posted by flabdablet at 11:46 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]


This is the success of Russian/Chinese faux-left propaganda pushing so hard on this

This is an incredibly stupid take, sorry. Anyone who was paying attention at the time could have told you that Biden supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians was incredibly unpopular among a significant percentage of traditionally Democratic voters. All people had to do was look at social media and see Israeli troops posting videos of Palestinians squashed with tanks, Israeli soldiers posing with the personal items of people they'd killed, etc. No "Russian/Chinese propaganda" required, just empathy and horror at Israel's actions (which seem to be utterly alien concepts to anyone making this frankly ridiculous argument).

The first time that I saw that many of my supposed allies toward the centre of the left - allies in general direction, you'd think, if not allies in detail and degree - would rather see our opposition win than meaningfully accommodate those to their left

This was the decision the Harris campaign made with her position on Gaza; this is what handed Trump the election, and they were fine with that. The Democratic Party as a collective decided beating Trump was less important than continuing to support genocide. Doesn't give me much hope for any meaningful coalition building, honestly, not with people who thought campaigning with Liz Cheney and chasing "never Trump" Republicans was a good idea.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:38 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]


A perspective persists that some kind of purist lefty, often brainwashed by foreign propaganda and/or petulantly seeking to punish Biden and the centrists, decided to fight and die on the Gaza hill and (it's often implied) deserves everything coming to them as a result of the TFG election victory.

I'm reading the way you people write this, over and over, and while your contempt is obvious there's also the projection of something and it feels familiar but I can't quite get it into focus. It's time to let go and focus on the future. Please.
posted by ginger.beef at 7:44 AM on February 1


And united opposition is its only answer.

There are reasons why this won't happen in the US. The main one is because it requires a candidate, not a set of beliefs that nobody cops to. Another one is that ticket splitting is a trend all over the map, causing a lot of puzzlement. Yet another is because the right can undo such coalitions with least effort by undermining a solid candidate by amplifying any opposing sentiment they choose from a leftward direction. It will split, no matter what anyone says. Blame will given to the once solid candidate for not drifting left, which assumes a fixed return on a body politic that is not static. Like Trump's tariffs, the return from adjustment is not fixed, because people don't buy the product when the price offends them.

Then there is a issue of who defines what left is, because it's noted in US poll data that nobody gives it a definition. That's because it is an emotional ideology, an orthodoxy of sorts, which is not workable in any coalition. If someone was raised in a household where liberals were despised and orthodoxy ruled, they will be tempted by a replacement certainty for their former stale dogma, because emotionally surrendering childhood certainty is the most difficult. That orthodox certainty is not found in liberalism, because it was always an opposition to the same kind of cultural authority. It was always seeking equality in daily living, here and now, and not waiting around for voters to convert to a divine political doctrine before it can hope to become right of law.

The bad news is that Harris didn't lose because of anything she could control in the last two months as an unknown. The opposition was years on the making, in front and behind the scenes with both calculated silence and strategic bombast. The opposition ran an ad in all swing states introducing her, where she explains from an old interview (before she had a national political advisor perhaps) her willingness to give prisoners gender-affirming surgery. They ran it day and night tens of thousands of times, and anyone checking the polls after the first weeks knew it was working to write her off in swing states.
posted by Brian B. at 8:32 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]


There isn't enough sympathy for Biden and Harris for the position they were in, which was mostly a terrible one.

Gaza was in political terms a no-win situation for them - no position they could take after October 7th wouldn't leave them worse off than before October 7th.

The cultural issues, same thing. They'd dodged them because Republicans, even Trump in 2016 and 2020, were unable or unwilling to foreground them. But once Trump got over that hump - another no-win situation. Back-pedal on DEI or transgender rights and they underline Trump's point and piss off the base; double-down on DEI or transgender rights and they underline Trump's point a different way and don't add anything to their votes.

The thing for which they are richly deserving blame continues to be inflation, which from the beginning of their term to the end, they steadfastly failed to recognize as a problem of excessive demand and insufficient supply, and consistently proposed to "solve" by programs that increased demand without increasing supply.
posted by MattD at 11:38 AM on February 1 [3 favorites]


The cultural issues, same thing

Sorry, but I have nothing but contempt for anyone who refers to the existence of trans people as a "cultural issue". (This is a big part of why I fucking hate liberals.)
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:52 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]


A perspective persists that some kind of purist lefty ... deserves everything coming to them as a result of the TFG election victory.

Nobody here has said that. I certainly have not.

No one deserves what is coming, not even the Trump supporters. There is no virtue in deriving satisfaction from the incineration of Hitler supporters in Dresden.


The Democratic Party as a collective decided beating Trump was less important than continuing to support genocide

That is irrational emotional hyperbole and entirely false.

I fucking hate liberals.

I am glad you are commenting and reading this FPP then, because it was clearly meant for you.
posted by CynicalKnight at 12:56 PM on February 1 [2 favorites]


Complaining vociferously about other people behaving as one routinely does oneself is never a good look.

Yes, indeed.

Perhaps you could try substituting "despair, hopelessness, desperation, frustration and grief" for "stupid" and see how that sits with you.

Okay, I tried it, and came right back to “stupid”

Oh, and the effing Democrats dumped their incumbent President in a completely unprecedented way to try and beat Trump so all you are the far left who’ve never actually won a national election (oh is that Bernie Sanders?) should contemplate that.
posted by Galvanic at 2:03 PM on February 1


True, I don’t think the Afghanistan withdrawal was affected by the anti-war left, but I would give Trump’s withdrawal timeline a lot of credit here for making it happen and making it messy, by removing any element of surprise or negotiation.

I have sometimes left groups that I might have done good work with because I see them as toxic or imbalanced toward hate. If I’m just getting to know you and most of what you say is vitriolically shredding some third party I don’t know, I will assume it is a you problem. There are lots of other people I can do good work with, so I have no reason to stick around for drama or give you the opportunity to gossip about me in a similar manner.

That is partly because I am blunt and say what I think. I expect that it will annoy some people, and I want to find partners I can have respectful disagreements with, not people who will just try to cancel me. As an example, I think many people here will not like the idea that even talking about how much you hate rich people will either give me the ick or raise orange flags, depending on how it’s worded. I sometimes see desire for harm expressed toward older folks whose retirement nest egg takes the form of a single rental apartment, because they are part of the “landlord class.” As a younger person, it’s hard for me to fully empathize, but I would think of that person as a worker facing precarity.

Everyone has a different capacity to do good in the world, based on their capabilities, information, emotional capacity, financial resources etc., and I hope we can try to inspire each other to action, not judge each other.
posted by puffinaria at 4:34 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]


All politics, in every system of governance ever, is about compromise

Hard agree...

between ideals and reality.

...not so much. I see the compromises that define the political game as being between negotiating entities, not between ideals and reality. Reality doesn't negotiate, and behaving as if it will is pretty much the definition of insanity.

The prizes go to those who can make the best compromises, however shitty they may be in the short term.

Hard agree...

It will never be otherwise.

Not the whole picture, though. Politics regularly goes through periods where an ascendant ideology is so dominant that compromise is relegated to fiddling about at the margins while the big stuff is handled via the raw exercise of power. We're in such a period now.

Compromise, in the political sense, happens where people with conflicting opinions on what to do about reality negotiate in good faith toward an outcome that both sides can live with. But there has been precious little good faith in US politics since Newt Gingrich first showed the Republicans how intransigence, demonization of dissent and shameless abuse of process would work better for them. The Democrats have kept on behaving as if he'd never done that; they seem so stuck in idealism about the way party politics is supposed to work as to ignore the reality of how it actually does now.

On the public policy front, it seems to me that the main thing that has gone wrong in the US (and, by extension and influence, in the world at large) over the last half-century has been the total dominance of laissez-faire neoliberal economics, a set of interlocking right-wing ideas premised on the claim that allowing free markets to operate with as little interference from governments as possible will necessarily yield the best social outcomes, and that attempts to regulate them and/or constrain their worst excesses amount to "distortions" that must axiomatically reduce their "efficiency" in ways that are both unjust and wasteful.

The Clinton Administration marked the complete capitulation of Democratic Party policymakers to neoliberalism, and what we've seen since then from the Republicans has been increasingly desperate attempts at brand differentiation based on increasingly vicious confected culture wars rather than any serious public policy disagreement.

Neoliberal economics is a handful of tiny kernels of useful insight buried in a huge steaming pile of reeking horseshit, and rooting public policy in it obviously makes everything worse for everybody but a small coterie of obscenely wealthy families, but the US public has simply not been presented with any opportunity to vote against it. The only real choice the public has had since Clinton has been which side of the culture wars to be on.

The Tea Party movement started out as a bit of astroturfing to further those culture wars, an attempt to deflect and corral the growing sense of resentment against the increasingly obvious failures of neoliberal economics to give the little guy anything even close to a break. But it got out of hand and just ate the Republican Party, with the result that that party is now completely in thrall to the grifters who originally funded the TP, the incompetents who actually took its "principles" seriously, and the asshats who cannot be dissuaded from saying the quiet parts out loud.

With the loudest such asshat now installed in the Oval Office, culture wars devised as a party marketing tool have morphed into an actual war against trans people particularly and anybody doing anything deemed "woke" more generally. Meanwhile, an actual genocide with bipartisan US support proceeds apace in the Middle East.

And yet, to the extent that the Grift Party even has an economic strategy, it's still neoliberal: free market good, taxes bad! Well, except for tariffs, because President Camacho thinks those are somehow not taxes on account of as how the name is different.

Sooner the purists accept that and start bargaining for the best compromise possible, the better for them and their causes, and for everybody else.

To the extent that I agree with this, the purists I think it's best addressed to are the free-market, minimal-government kind who have actually had their hands on the levers of power for most of my lifetime. Trouble is, though, that there is currently nobody that any of those people feel any need to compromise with. Neoliberal economics is still the driving force behind the ship of state, even as the reality-based community continues to sound all kinds of alarms about its imminent collision with the multiple icebergs that the ship's officers persistently refuse to see dead ahead.

The reality-based community itself, meanwhile, remains so marginalized that we're almost never even allowed to come close to an opportunity to start hammering out compromises.

So I have no objection at all to loud leftist voices making even quite overblown arguments against neoliberal economics or for the upholding of humanitarian law. As politics currently stands, the only path to power left for the Left lies in shifting the Overton window. Assets taxes levied on wealthy families and paying more than lip service to both international and domestic humanitarian law will never become things that are available to compromise on until there's substantial public demand for them.
posted by flabdablet at 8:04 PM on February 1 [3 favorites]


>between ideals and reality.

...not so much. I see the compromises that define the political game as being between negotiating entities, not between ideals and reality. Reality doesn't negotiate, and behaving as if it will is pretty much the definition of insanity.


Perhaps I could have phrased that as between goals and practical limitations, in which there is some flexibility on how far reality can be pushed before it bites back. Which can be some way – see North Korea.

Beyond that, basically agree with the rest of your comment.
posted by Pouteria at 9:24 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]


Which can be some way – see North Korea.

I do see North Korea.

I'm on the fence about which is more alarming, though: the idea that the Heritage Foundation is deliberately trying to replicate it at scale, or that it simply lacks the self-awareness to understand that that's what Project 2025 amounts to.
posted by flabdablet at 9:33 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]


Also, if China doesn't rapidly step in with generous offers to fill the gaps created by TFG's moronic foreign aid freeze, WtP is nowhere near the strategic opportunist I've always understood him to be.
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]


China is having increasingly serious problems with its economy, and is undergoing a massive and very costly military expansion program, together which are going to seriously limit its capacity to take up the opportunity created by the USA abandoning this space.
posted by Pouteria at 10:03 PM on February 1


Sure, but given how horrendously expensive military expansion really is, any country with a genuine interest in world domination will get much more bang for every buck it redirects toward soft power especially when the dominant player in that space has just handed it the opportunity on a plate. If we don't see Belt and Braces and Road appearing pdq I will be surprised, and if they do it and it doesn't net them a pretty hefty economic boost I'll be even more so.
posted by flabdablet at 10:30 PM on February 1


The choice was ”Nazi” or “Not Trump” and some people actually found that decision difficult. I will never ever understand the logic behind that thinking. I didn’t in 2016, I didn’t in 2024, and every time someone tries to justify it to me I hear the whine of arrogant self-righteousness. They were informed, they were warned, they were begged and pleaded with and they chose. How can I ever expect coalition with someone whose reasoning is so faulty?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:24 PM on February 4 [5 favorites]


"any country with a genuine interest in world domination will get much more bang for every buck it redirects toward soft power"

Indeed. Many appalling claims in this interview with Edward Luttwak but one that stuck with me was that thanks to one child policy, it is going to be very difficult for China to sustain an army in combat. (I was thinking about making an FPP of this link but worried it could be trolling).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:08 PM on February 4


The choice was ”Nazi” or “Not Trump” and some people actually found that decision difficult. I will never ever understand the logic behind that thinking.

It was never really about logic, though, was it? It was about overwhelm.

If you've lost family as a direct result of the choices and stated policies of an incumbent administration, you're just not going to have the dispassionate equanimity required to make the (fully correct!) judgement call that the proposed alternative administration would likely be much, much worse.

The choice was indeed Nazis or Not Nazis - from the point of view of a dispassionate observer. But from the point of view of people whose families and friends have been literally blown to pieces with the full-throated support of very nearly the whole US Government, the choice was: can I live with casting a vote for any of the monsters who did that?

Expecting people in that position to be able to frame it any other way was unreasonable before the election, and adding to their grief and loss with a great steaming pile of Told You So at this point is just inhumane.
posted by flabdablet at 10:30 PM on February 4


How can I ever expect coalition with someone whose reasoning is so faulty?

Different worldview, different reasoning. Moral supremacy (an emotional superiority) is incompatible with liberalism. The former comes from an indoctrination since childhood while the latter is humbled by the historical gravity pulling on the human condition (therefore more interested in curbing human pride and shame rather than reasserting social authority). Ending traditional dominance over gender, reproduction, environment, and individual expression also has nothing to do with seizing production and becoming capitalists by another name.
posted by Brian B. at 7:38 AM on February 5


bottom line, you gotta vote. It's democracy. Many people have died through history to get you this freedom. And given the imperfect system we have, the only rational choice is to vote for whoever you think has the best chance of beating who you fear the most.

It would be better if it were otherwise. It isn't.

Some say, "To hell with that, I'm voting my conscience." I tend to counter with, "Well when [dangerous asshole] gets in because the counter vote got split by folks like you, let that be on your conscience."
posted by philip-random at 1:21 PM on February 5


The choice was indeed Nazis or Not nazis

Yes, it was, and so many people failed the question whatever your hand waving.
posted by Galvanic at 3:53 PM on February 5


I rather like Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's take on this:
Friends: I do not want to see any kvetching about people on the left who didn't vote for Harris. Those mistakes didn't decide this. White supremacists & whoever else wouldn't vote for a Black woman did this. Misogynoir. The enemy is WHITE SUPREMACY and FASCISM. Solidarity time. Now. Shore up.

And if you really want to go all in on Stein voters instead of, say, TRUMP voters, ask yourself what the fuck that's about? Who you so invested in letting off the hook, here, and why???

I understand the fury at people who stayed home. I understand the fury at Stein voters. But I'm saying: The time for all that was before the election. Now we are all here in this hellhole together and we have to activate everyone to fight WHITE SUPREMACY. Our energy reserves and focus matter.

We MUST learn something, finally, from the successes of the Right. They would lose and organize. Lose and work with people they couldn't stand. Lose and make it happen anyway. We don't have time to plan for the decades for now takeover. It's happened. We have to mobilize yesterday with everyone.

Even if we're still salty. Even if we're still fuming. Even if. We have to focus our attentions on what we are doing now, today, to link arms across communities to beat the kleptocrat autocrats in power because they're here and dangerous. It's go time, even if we'd rather yell about November.

It doesn't matter whether or not you're correct, is what I'm saying. Right now we have to be efficient. Strategic. Effective. Impactful.

I know it sucks, and I'm sorry. But it's true.

Do we have to figure out how to make something different happen next time? Yes. That's called *proactive planning for the future.* (And we have to talk about voter suppression!) But now we're in crisis. We gotta make sure that there are elections again first. Infighting won't get us there.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:32 AM on February 6 [3 favorites]


And if you really want to go all in on Stein voters instead of, say, TRUMP voters

The remarkable thing is that I can do both. Amazing, that.
posted by Galvanic at 12:04 PM on February 6 [1 favorite]


What we actually do matters much more than what we can.
posted by flabdablet at 12:49 AM on February 7


What we actually do matters much more than what we can

And now you're arguing over verbs.
posted by Galvanic at 1:35 PM on February 7


By golly these are some good crackers.
posted by flabdablet at 10:00 PM on February 7


Enjoy the cheese.
posted by Galvanic at 3:28 PM on February 8


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