Voted Jill Stein in Wisconsin. I'll have no regrets if Trump takes Wisconsin: the Democratic Party didn't earn my vote. If more people voted like us, the US's fomentation of endless war would stop.
And they won't, which you know, because that's not the world we live in. So your vote is, practically speaking, a vote for your own self-righteousness at the expense of, just name one constituency, the generations of poor women who stand to lose any semblance of reproductive rights. But if that's ok with you, I guess that's ok with you.
Really? You're going to shame & blame the voter? How very Democratic Party of you!
Here's the difference between us: I voted for the candidate that I believe would be the best president and best represent my interests. You have nothing to say but finger-waving and the invocation of "poor women"-- the very same that Barack Obama abandoned when he broke his promise that the "first law that he would sign" would be the enshrinement of a woman's right to an abortion.
Best wishes today. Good luck with another feckless candidate who doesn't stand for anything as far as I can tell.
It's people like you that are driving people like me away from the Democratic Party. Enjoy your exclusive club of virtuous, right-minded betters.
I'm accepting the available choices for what they are while keeping in mind the people whose lives stand to be most affected by those choices. If that means I'm "invoking poor women"--Ok, I guess? Nowhere did I defend the Democratic party, Barak Obama, or any other. I share all of the misgivings Freddie described.
You voted for who you thought would be best for your interests. Ok. I think we agree. But you voted for a pipedream, and by making that choice, you are also choosing not to do what you can--and as a Wisconsin voter, unlike most voters, you actually have a consequential voice--to vote for people whose welfare is directly at stake. You can call me all the names you want, use as much self-righteous invective as makes you feel special and principled, but the fact remains that Jill Stein will never be president and Donald Trump very well might be, and whether you blame the system (or, somehow, me), you have helped him.
It's strange that you'd wish me luck, because the result of this election is not a personal consequence. Maybe that's actually where we disagree? I see my vote as a personal choice manifested as a communal act; you see yours as a personal statement of values. I genuinely wish reality supported your version.
"[Y]ou have helped him [Trump]." Again, blaming the voter! In your cramped, binary view of the world, you are essentially suggesting that perhaps I should have just voted for Trump. Because there is no way I was going to vote for Harris.
There's nothing self-righteous about my dislike for Harris. She simply doesn't represent my values or interests.
By the way, how has voting for the Democratic Party been working for you or, er, your "communal manifestation"? Are you getting what you hoped for? You know, there's a word to describe someone who keeps doing the same thing even though it doesn't work.
But there are other choices. Choices that you seem to have a hard time accepting or even recognizing are real--and that will hopefully impact this election. Yes, my vote counts. And if enough people like me vote our conscience, I promise that it will effect you personally, whether you like it or not.
Your narrow, fatalistic view about "the world we live in" is a guaranty that nothing will change. Your sort of "practical" thinking amounts to a practice of futility.
I'm absolutely "blaming the voter." Voters make choices that yield outcomes. That's how it works. I blame Trump voters for electing Trump. I blame Hilary Clinton for ignoring swing states in 2016, and I blame Joe Biden for not bowing out earlier and giving us a chance at choosing a better candidate. You seem to be making a syntactical comparison to victim blaming, but holding people responsible for their choices is not some sort of cardinal sin or form of societal oppression. Your vote is private, but if you announce it proudly on a forum like this one, as you did, it becomes fair game for scrutiny. If I praised your vote for Jill Stein, I think you'd be fine with that. It works both way. If you don't want to "blamed," keep it to yourself. And if you'd replied that "I'm pro-life, I don't care about upholding reproductive rights, or the Clean Water Act, or a functioning federal bureaucracy that isn't fully staffed by right-wing stooges," I'd say, OK, you cast your vote faithfully and we just disagree on the issues. But I'm guessing that as a Jill Stein supporter, you do care about those things.
I guess I have hard time imagining many people find a presidential candidate wholly represents their interests and values. I think voting is and should be more complicated that. A second Trump administration may well be in my personal self-interest, but I would still vote against him after weighing the pros and cons of who he is and intends/will likely do in office. Values are great, but outcomes matter.
I actually haven't always voted Democrat or supported the mainstream Democrat. In fact, in the past, I've felt much the way you've described feeling here. But I've never been able to vote in a swing state, so the consequences of my vote have always been less than yours.
I agree there are other choices; I'm critical of yours. While I wouldn't call it fatalism--I think it's probably closer to pessimism or maybe cynicism--no, I don't think things will ever "change" if by change you mean we'll somehow vote our way into a US electoral system that reflects a great diversity of views. I sincerely wish we did; nothing of history or today, barring a catastrophic shift of unspeakable carnage, will make that possible. I don't know how many elections you've voted third party, but, to use your own logic, "there's a word to describe someone who keeps doing the same thing even though it doesn't work."
In order to shore up his campaign while Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton also presided over the execution of a severely mentally disabled man, who when asked about why he hadn't eaten the dessert portion of his last meal, replied that he was "saving it for later". He is a deeply unpleasant man in every respect.
I am aware that he became mentally disabled following a suicide attempt that occurred after the crime, but I don't really think that that matters, and I think there are established legal principles that would agree.
Here's what the state of Texas, not exactly squeamish about executing people, has to say on the matter:
"A person is incompetent to be executed if he does not understand 1) that he is to be executed and that the execution is imminent, and 2) the reason he is being executed."
(I'm aware that most of the cases discussed here are more recent that Rector, but I don't have the time to go down the rabbit hole of finding out what the legal consensus regarding competency to face execution was in the 90s - if somebody else finds anything I'd be interested to know.)
Your argument that he should not have been executed sounds like the old joke about the man who killed his parents and asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan.
If you think that Texan law is too soft on death row inmates I don't know what to tell you...
I'm opposed to the death penalty in principle, but even amongst supporters of the death penalty it's more or less accepted that you shouldn't execute people who don't have a clue as to what is going on.
I can about gauarantee that Clinton could not care less about Rector or his mental capabilities.
I further can guarantee that many who make excuses for their beloved fat boy would not be making those same excuses if Rector were to have been put to death by a governor from the other team.
After the suicide attempt Rector had the mental capabilities of a child. As has been mentioned he saved the dessert from his last meal for "after" the execution. The guards on death row wrote in the log that in the days leading up to his execution they could hear Rector crying in terror at night in his bunk.
Too me there was no option other than the Stein/Ware option. She's the only candidate where the altruistic gene is dominant. Trump and Harris and Biden and many others carry the recessive gene(s).
They certainly are among people who seek high office. And don't kid yourself, if the Green party had a realistic chance at winning the presidency, they would be no different.
Oh no doubt, power corrupts. But at the very least it could end the current power duopoly and force them to engage with a third dancer. Anything that helps to break up the Lib/Con deathgrip is good in my opinion.
You know, it's one of the base reasons Trump had, and still has, widespread appeal. Because he's a party outsider and at least has the potential to shake things up. What's remarkable about him and his supporters is that he's a pathological bullshitter and they still like him. That a lot of people still willingly back him, fully knowing he's a pathological bullshitter, speaks volumes on how fed up tons of Americans are with the way our country is run now. They would rather see a manchild clown take a baseball bat to Washington than vote for another party stooge. That seems to be where we are now.
As a Nader voter, I don't disagree but to note that Jill Stein really, really sucks. Voting for her, and pumping up her numbers, enables the counter narrative that props up a pathetic 3rd party. Could we get Bernie to start mentoring a viable candidate?
So, I'm voting for Harris, since she is the better option as compared to Trump, and since a bigger (potential) popular vote victory would run counter to the inevitable MAGA arguments about a stolen election and because I never want to see Stein's name on a ballot again.
I fully understand, and took that approach in 2000 when I voted for Nader. What I learned from that experience: presidential elections are not morality tests so vote for the least bad option. And, if you want better candidates, get involved in the next primary (yes, I know about how Harris was picked for this election and no I didn't like it either).
We see presidential elections in very different ways.
I am comfortable saying that the world would be a worse place with Trump as president rather than Harris. And I see no evidence that a vote for Stein will have any impact whatsoever on the selection of candidates for the next election.
I am voting for Trump. I have never voted for a winning presidential candidate before since I always vote third party and I live in a state where the outcome is not in doubt.
But for some reason I was seized by a desire to vote for the winning candidate at least once in my life, so I marked Trump even though he has no chance of winning my state. Irrational, I know.
If not for my flight of fancy though I would have voted for Stein.
I should wait a couple days but screw it, I'll say it now. Pretty funny you think this year is your chance to finally pick a winner and you pick Trump. Good luck.
He is a slight favorite not only in the polling averages but also in all of the models (Nate Silver, 538, The Economist, etc.). Plus the betting markets. Plus the early voting is looking pretty good for Republicans.
"the level of vitriol that is being directed at her by Democratic partisans is ridiculous."
Actually, it's exactly to be expected it would be whipped up to this level by the ringleaders, given the stakes of what could be a full accounting if it ever makes it to MSM. That is, of the activities the monsters who run the intelligence, state, and even defense organizations, along their corporate and NGO partners-in-crime. Time to get a clue, or actually, a large number of them...
Him going against the party would have completely demolished his bid for the nomination in the next contest. Provoking a majority of Democrats isn't the way to get nominated by them---he works within the system and is not a revolutionary.
Exactly. "Our Revolution", well... just isn't. You can't win if you don't play, and if you haven't noticed, Bernie doesn't, as he iis nothing but a shepherd for "good-cop" side of GloboCap.
I'm voting Nader for the fifth time. (1) One's single vote will *never* matter. (2) If people actually studied sufficiently and voted their consciences, we would never arrive at this point again. I think promoting that perspective, even just here, matters *far* more than my vote in a sea of millions, between these two oligarch-selected monstrosities. The only difference between the horrific consequences of either is whether you want the totalitarianism to settle in by (mental) fire or ice.
I don’t think we will “never arrive at this point again” until we enact ranked-choice voting. Under a winner-takes-all election system, a third party will never be viable and will only ever help conservatives get into power. Unless of course enough third party votes also get taken from Trump. But I don’t see any conservatives voting for Stein this time, so I don’t think that will happen.
I'm mostly just sick of pretending. Pretending that was have any meaningful say in how this country is run. You have the two major parties, both right-wing to varying degrees, and a bunch of potemkin 3rd parties which have no political power to speak of and this is by design. The Democrats love punching left, because I would cynically say this is there true purpose. To discipline the left and dictate the boundaries of acceptable political opinion, to draw a line in the sand representing the left most boundary of the overton window. I've been through a lot of a elections where I didn't care for the candidates over the years and my politics have changed plenty in that timeframe.
However, I just can't remember an election where the whole process was so nakedly a sham. What pisses me off the most is that we still see it fit to get on our high horses and lecture the rest of the world about a lack of adherence to democratic principles. As if we treated any of that seriously at home, as if we had any qualms about backing ethnic cleansing when it was political expedient, as if our government treated any of that as more than a marketing slogan.
We are like the USSR in its twilight years. We have the empty slogans, the mere trappings of the official political ideology that no one believes in anymore, and even if they do they know it has precious little to do with why the government makes the choices it does. All that's left is a going through the motions in a progressively more hollow and cynical fashion. Voting out of pure contempt for the electoral process itself.
But isn't the issue the electoral system? You're suggesting this is some worsening phenomenon, but I'm not sure that's true at all.
"The Democrats love punching left, because I would cynically say this is there true purpose. To discipline the left and dictate the boundaries of acceptable political opinion, to draw a line in the sand representing the left most boundary of the overton window."
What does this even mean? It sounds good, but what does it actually mean to say the Democrats' true purpose is to 'discipline the left.' It's a political party and their goal is to win elections. Leaving aside how effective they are at that, the idea that they're ACTUALLY conspiratorially in place just to tamp down the left legitimately makes no sense. Now, the Democrats definitely do try to weaken the most leftist voices in their coalition, but they do that for an obvious reason: the loudest leftist voices hurt them electorally. Or at least they believe they do. I certainly believe they do, and that's because I think this country is a center-right country. It's no surprise that the party that has the most disparate groups making it up reflects that broadly.
I thought the meaning was straightforward. I think you're playing dumb, honestly, making that paragraph out to be poorly defined when I think it was crystal clear.
It's comically naive to think the only goal of Democrats is to win elections. The list of left leaning policies with broad popular support among a majority of voters they have either opposed or neglected to support is too long to list. This idea that they're a center right party because that's what it takes to win is both insulting and the world's biggest cop out.
No, what's really going on is they are packaging the issues of their doners, their wealth and well connected backers, as the interests of the public at large. Oh sure, they'll make a big production out of caring about appealing to voters so long as those two groups interests aren't in conflict. If they are, you can forget it. The Democrats also exist to give the left just enough of a sense of being listened to that they can be herded back into the pen and accept the status quo.
I don't think that was crystal clear, but leaving that aside, no, I don't agree with you.
I do, in fact, think the Democrats broadly reflect the general political position of the AVERAGE of the coalition that makes up the Democratic party. I also believe that it suck that this is our system, and we'd be much better served with a parliamentary style system. The degree to which our system is 'winner-take-all' makes it nearly impossible for it to look any other way, in my opinion.
This isn't even necessarily an argument against the way congress is set up (the Senate is deeply organized against popular sovereignty) or the very backwards electoral college although both of those things are a problem, to be sure.
I'm making a much more basic point. You can't allow the degree of inequality we have the US and can't allow private citizens to amass as much wealth and power as they have and expect them not to control the political system in a way which benefits them. So long as we, collectively as a society, allow wealth and power to be concentrated in that small of a group the idea we could ever vote that same power away simply isn't plausible.
And we haven't. The last time this country made a genuine attempt to flatten things socially and economically was FDR, or LBJ and Civil Rights/Great Society at the latest.
I think your 2nd paragraph is totally fair. I also think the citizens of this country COULD very easily work on flattening it out despite what the donor class wants.
While this isn't that dramatic, I believe Harris is proposing a much more progressive tax for Americans making over 400k a year. Folks on the right, and yes, even some folks in the center react to that like it's communism, which is obviously insane.
Our country is full of children, and the parties reflect that. Maybe that's my personal, broader point: we get the political parties we deserve.
I highly doubt any progressive income tax changes will come to pass. I think blaming voters is a little like victim blaming. A poorly informed, disengaged, and disillusioned citizenry are not problem for the rich and powerful. In some ways they actually benefit because these same citizens are far less likely to mount any kind of organized political action.
I'm something of a fatalist/determinist, with big philosophical influences like Spinoza. I bring this up because the main idea is to see society as one large machine on the whole of which the political system and the political parties themselves are just parts (even if they appear to be opposed on the surface). There are concrete ways in which certain groups of people benefit from the current state of affairs and it is in their interest to see that they continue that way.
"It's a political party and their goal is to win elections." Not clear. More and more, I suspect that election-winning comes in second place behind fundraising.
"I just can't remember an election where the whole process was so nakedly a sham."
Although this last exercise was the most naked, it's been a sham three elections in a row: Bernie was repeatedly ripped off in 2016, finally revealed much later in the lawsuits; Biden was resurrected by the Super Tuesday massacre (Buttigieg and Klobuchar) in 2020 (along with several stooge candidates earlier to dilute the pool); and then of course the 6-month long bait-and-switch of 2024.
I voted for Stein in 2016. Two people separately - completely separately, they don’t know each other - angrily and entirely seriously told me I was a misogynist for not voting for Clinton.
The holier-than-thou attitude from people like that is incredibly gross and off base. I'll also say that it goes both ways. When Joe Biden was going to be the 2020 nominee and I wrote something positive about him, including pressuring Obama to support marriage equality and how it impacted me, I had a leftist friend publicly explode on me for being a "bougie piece of shit", and he made snide remarks belittling my marriage like "Well I'm glad you were able to consolidate your assets."
I don't take this view seriously, but if you do then the tally of atrocious things Democrats have done, and to which you have thereby contributed, absolutely pales in comparison.
Yes. (Good things Democrats do - bad things democrats do) > (good thing Republicans do - bad things republicans do). I vote Democrat because I believe the country is better off when they are in charge. Why do you vote?
Because I observe that the country is worse off when the Democrats are in charge. I observe that Washington state, having become a one-party state, is worse off now than it was when I returned in 1978 after a serving overseas. I observe that major metropolitan areas, which have been under nearly exclusive Democrat rule for many years, have higher rates of poverty and crime. You may believe things are better when Democrats are in charge, I observe that they aren't.
"I vote Democrat because I believe the country is better off when they are in charge."
Yup, that's what they love. Stockholm-syndrome voters who will never punish them, because the other half of the country is insane, stupid, and/or evil, and thus Hitler is always just around the corner.
I vote to make the negative number for each party smaller.
If Harris wanted my vote she could have renounced Biden's bear hug strategy with Israel, which would have certainly made that number closer to positive. As it is, if Democrats lose because of their support for Israel, I expect them recalibrate and move to where their base and the country is and then let Republicans be the party that defends ethnic cleansers. That will vastly increase the `Good things Democrats do'.
"He had codified discrimination against gay servicemembers with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that had no reason to exist"
I would disagree here. As a permanent policy, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) is, of course, stupid. However, it changed the conversation by serving as a stepping stone. Before, if a gay person was discharged from the military, one could simply say that they weren't supposed to be there. After DADT, it was understood that gays were de facto allowed in the military, so long as they adhered to a stupid rule. And when discharges for being found gay happened, the focus was on the stupid rule that caused the discharges, with a lot of hand-wringing on why we were shooting ourselves in the foot with that stupid rule. Eventually, there was enough ire against the stupid rule that it was abandoned, leading to full inclusion of gays in the military -- plus we now have enough experience of gays serving semi-openly under DADT to know that the justifications for keeping gays out were obvious BS.
I suspect that if Clinton had simply allowed gays in the military upfront, their admittance in the military would have become a direct target of Republicans and a political football, with the rule for admittance switching back and forth as the presidency changed parties.
Yeah, I remember it pretty well. It was seen as a progressive and risky move for Clinton to back DADT, given the resistance to it from people like Colin Powell and broad swathes of the military and the public. So it's a kinda cheap shot from Freddie. But G-d it was a dumb rule.
So commenter Stony how many asshol*s in congress are whores to AIPAC money. Howany ate sociopathic baby killers by backing with our tax dollars apathied death star Isreal.
Moral outrage mixed with ignorance is just dangerous, the fuel of violent mass movements. If you want to influence the system positively you have to know how it works, and it also helps if you know how to do basic proofreading.
At this point, a vote for the Cookie Monster is better than either Harris or Trump. For me it's the ridiculous 2-party system that is at the heart of this issue, not the candidates or parties themselves.
Every election cycle they hand off the keys to the kingdom to each other: "See you in 4 years Jack." "Not if it's 8 years Jane!" And they both have a big laugh, walk down the Mall together, and talk about which lobbyists they're going to brunch with today. The 2-party system is a friggin' joke man.
We'll never have a decent democracy with the way the elections work now, so why not do everything one can to change that?
I don't give a shit, bro. Jill Stein is not responsible for slaughter in Gaza. Kamala Harris and the Democrat machine are. So I won't be vorting for them.
You know, there's a reason the Irish have been one of the most steadfast supporters of Palestinians in recent decades. And it's not because they just wanted to vote the opposite of the Brits at any given UN vote. It's because they have a visceral understanding of what it's like to have an unflinching bootheel on your neck for multiple generations. They understand that pain and anger.
So while certainly no one in their right mind should condone Hamas for what they did, and have done over the years...one can very easily understand the 'why' of it with just a rudimentary reading of the history of that region. It's really not that difficult to empathize with their place in the world.
I suppose you saw the slaveholders killed in Nat Turner's Rebellion as victims, and weep hot satly tears for the poor Germans killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The reason that Jill Stein isn't responsible for Gaza is because she isn't responsible for *anything*, since she does not hold any elected office nor has she ever been a serious candidate for one. She's a backseat driver without a license. If you feel so passionately about the situation in Gaza, wouldn't you want to allocate influence to someone who actually knows things?
I also thoroughly disagree that somehow the situation in the Middle East is the fault of the Democrats, but setting that aside, they're constrained in how they can respond to it by:
1) Netanyahu's election meddling (such as threats to strike Iranian oil fields, whiny messaging about the administration not writing enough blank checks, etc).
2) The coalition's stalling, stringing along, and sabotage of hostage negotiations.
3) Escalation by Iran's proxies, which Israel of course has to respond to.
4) Domestic political reality and third rails (Dems can't just scorch Israel - even if it would be fair to - for the same reason the Green party is never going to advocate repealing the 2nd amendment).
Notably, they'll have a lot more latitude if Harris wins, so I hope you reconsider, since stopping bloodshed is good.
This is kind of an uninformative response. Sinwar was killed with less than 3 weeks to go before the election. You actually don't spell out the link between his death and the diplomatic openings it created, but one is that it allows the coalition to sell a hostage deal to the public after riding high on a "win". But why wouldn't they just wait until after the election, if it's so close, and they can maybe roll the dice on an even more compliant administration? This is an easy inference just from regularly consuming news, so presumably the administration *knows this*, and is also waiting until after the election before pushing too hard. Netanyahu still has the power to influence the outcome in his favor, unless you cartoonishly expect Harris to just announce support for disarming Israel on the eve of the election, throwing everything into chaos and potentially endangering Palestinian lives further.
Expanding on my reply because nuance and knowledge are important: the last time major clashes occurred, in May 2021, Biden ended it after 11 days. Note where May 2021 stands in relation to major U.S. elections. Every actor embroiled now - American, Israeli, and Iranian - is influenced by electoral calculi, now more so than in any recent conflict. It's just foolish to discount that in any analysis of those parties' decision-making.
What? No, Iran definitely wants Trump to lose. This is just misinformation. You don't even have to believe that they're trying to assassinate him; last time Trump was in power he reneged from the JCPOA, which is the main reason Raisi won the 2021 election.
He is in Connecticut, which he explained. So his vote doesn’t matter, yet you are so whipped up with TDS you are beating him up anyway. Listen, even if I did live in a swing state, I would not vote for the democrats. Even though I perfectly realize that Trump is a monster.
I don't think this reply contributes much, but since he made an announcement of his voting intentions and the defiant principles underlying them (and kept his comments open), that presumably invites public commentary. Insofar as his vote is a statement of values, I'm saying it could be a better statement of better values.
It says "User was temporarily suspended for this comment." at the top of my comment (why?), but if this message goes through, then I guess I'm not suspended.
I'm not sure if this is an accusation but I've committed to a lifetime boycott of all generative AI. I even draw my own Substack thumbnails when others just use Dall-E or whatever.
"we live in reality, where major parties have to follow the most responsible electoral strategy"
No. That is just one *interpretation* of a proper response to the situation. Another is to encourage everyone to vote their conscience. Otherwise, it is a Stockholm-syndrome rationalization. Because unless we start to actually *punish* Democrats by being willing to leave the marriage, they will continue to abuse us with impunity. Goodness knows the judicial system won't do it.
This response courts instant gratification. "What do we want?" / "Trump to go away!" / "When do we want it?" / "NOW!!" We must have our "fix", yet, for the third time, this election's "fix" is *whatever* they stick in front of us, which is barely examined. So, we're about to elect the heavily-compromised puppet Harris, who was swapped out for the heavily-compromised puppet Biden (when he got simply too demented to cover it up), doing whatever our owners want, with some red meat (or is it Oliver's porridge?) thrown out now and then to calm the crowd ("I'm between you and the pitchforks", a still-illustrious leader once said), always with a slick sales pitch. Could a more lame response possibly be devised? Time to get our heads out of our owners' propaganda echo chamber.
You misread my comment. This is not a "vote for the lesser of two evils"* post. I am saying that Stein is egregiously bad and a vote for her is awful on its own merits. It is so bad that it would degrade any party trying to appeal to her voters, because they would have to extend olive branches to the unreachable and (rightly) lose 10 times as many votes in the process.
It would still be bad even if she was the only candidate on the ballot (for more reasons than the apocalyptic mental image you just formed of her being some one-party despot). If someone "votes their conscience" for a 3-time presidential candidate who doesn't know how many members of congress there are, then their conscience is the problem; they just value the wrong things.
*(Though yes you should always do that, since literally the Iranian diaspora does that and they have it way worse than you).
...The fact that she doesn't know how many members of congress there are wasn't a good enough reason? That seems like a fair qualification to expect of a candidate who's been running for president since 2012. It was literally the first thing I mentioned. Did you think it was a joke? Here's a source: https://www.salon.com/2024/09/12/jill-stein-schooled-on-in-brutal-breakfast-club-interview/
It's a pretty basic aspect of the U.S. system of government, tied to the number of electoral votes (538 isn't just coincidentally really close to 535), and something one should know if they're 74 years old, American, and have been running for president since 2012. This isn't the first example of her being deeply uninformed, it's just the most recent and blatant one.
While painfully unoriginal, this is an incredibly anodyne and non-hostile comment. The thought process behind temporarily suspending someone for making such a comment is not a particularly healthy one.
If you defend someone's free speech while also taking shots at them, it comes off as a bit hollow. Also, why did you think it was "painfully unoriginal"? Admittedly I'm taking that a bit personally, but none of the other comments covered the same territory, and I made an effort not to just repeat the standard talking points.
Because a Democratic party supporter telling a leftist that Trump aligns with their views even less, while explaining the strategic realities of a two-party system and the strategic tradeoffs of tacking to the base versus the center, is, in fact, painfully unoriginal. Not necessarily invalid, mind you, just unoriginal. Of course, reasonable people can take the opposite position and believe that only actually showing the Democratic party how many votes they are losing on their left side will convince them that they risk losing those votes.
You're living in a dreamscape where candidates declare policy according to public opinion and then, if elected, enact it. These days, the Democrats don't even bother with phase one.
Leftists can't win elections in most of the country. They also had a larger platfrom in the years following George Floyd, and managed to become even less popular due to a constant focus on identity politics and personal grievance.
I'll vote for Kamala tomorrow and I won't feel any sense of righteousness. But I also won't lose any sleep.
Focus on identity politics was a counter-leftist strategy employed by the Democratic Party to thwart class-based politics, which does have broad appeal in this country as Bernie Sanders clearly had shown before he caved and let himself be infected by the same virus.
Trump's class-based politics too, though. That often seems to be the liberal objection to him: he's coarse, he has his steak well-done, he doesn't read books, he's rude. He's of the wrong class. A lot of people like that.
CRT and DEI ignore class structure almost entirely, so I don't think it makes much sense to attribute them to Marxism, but you also kind of make a fair point.
We should cop to the fact that all sorts of self proclaimed leftists supported the identitarian social justice turn that the democratic coalition took years before the party itself even embraced it (that part really started to pick up when it became a an effective way for the democratic establishment to delegitimize Bernie and the "Bernie bros").
It took quite a while for sensible leftists to even recognize that opposition to the "isms" was being hijacked for nefarious purposes and begin organizing to combat this turn, and those of us who have been trying are still thoroughly on the back foot and immensely outnumbered by left-liberals who don't seem to even understand that anything's gone wrong.
To some extent this (disastrous) failure was understandable, though. When a new ideology with totalitarian leanings is established through emotional blackmail, cancel campaigns, and weaponized allegations of sexism, racism, transphobia, etc., it's not an easy force to combat.
I won't claim to be an expert on any of the steps you've outlined here, but The Frankfurt School was also heavily influenced by Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.
I'm paging through the end notes of a Horkheimer and Adorno book (Dialectic of Enlightenment) that I never got around to reading right now and they reference, Plato, Diogenes, Spinoza, Weber, Baudelaire, Goethe, Kant, and Leibniz, just to name a few.
For that matter, these guys were responding to the rise of Nazi Germany after they escaped.
So sure, you can draw a lineage back to Marx, but I think the development of these things is a lot more complicated than you're letting on.
Being from an academic heritage of critical theory originating from Marxism doesn’t mean there can’t be other influences for crying out loud.
Wasn’t Marx heavily influenced by Hegel?
It can be distilled as: “academics used Marxist analysis on other parts of society than material class in critical theory, which was then applied to law, and then to race, and then to an HR department near you.”
“Trump’s victory may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. His election is the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation by the Democratic Party of any programmatic orientation to the working class, which Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed as “a basket of deplorables” and Biden recently referred to as “garbage.”
Focused on the flim-flam of identity politics — i.e., the politics of more or less affluent sections of the middle class seeking a more favorable distribution of the wealth among the top 10 percent — the Democratic Party convinced itself that it had found an alternative to the politics that prioritized class. This intellectual regression was promoted and justified in the academy by the various forms of anti- and pseudo-Marxist philosophies (Frankfurt School and Post-Modernism) that were embraced by a generation of ex-radical students in the aftermath of 1968.
In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Leftwing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class.
The pseudo-left replaced calls for equality with demands for equity. This was closely connected to the relentless harping on racial and ethnic differences, and, with it, a contempt for the genuinely democratic traditions of the United States. This found noxious expression in the 1619 Project. All this has been accompanied by a general cultural degradation, the promotion of every form of backwardness.
To the extent that the Biden administration had an agenda, its number one item was the escalation of military conflict with Russia and China. Its endorsement of the Gaza genocide — among the greatest crimes in the history of the new century — has been entirely bound up with its militaristic global strategy.
The disastrous consequences of Trump’s victory can be averted only by “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy that unites global humanity.”
- David North (WSWS editor and chairman of the Socialist Equality Party
Being British, we don't have the Bernie-would-have-won comfort blanket: we had our Bernie and he didn't win. I no longer feel like leftist parties can ever win and centre-left or centre-right, depending on how you define it, is the best we can get. We could argue about why that is but the usual argument, that various unfair factors prejudice the playing field – for us our right-wing tabloids, for you guys Fox News, always big business and monetarism – begins to seem a bit Trumpian. Maybe we don't win because nobody really likes what we have to offer.
Yeah, this is the post-2019 narrative about Corbyn's loss. (There wasn't a post-2017 narrative about Corbyn's loss, because from 2017 to 2019 it was happily assumed by his supporters that he'd win overwhelmingly next time.)
Leaving aside the details, isn't this a fine example of that phenomenon Freddy identified the other day, the Appeal to the Ref? "Ref, that election wasn't fair, Jeremy was undermined by an enemy within! It wasn't an immaculate campaign and election!" But there's no ref and there's no such thing. If Corbyn was undermined by Blairite within his party, if his triumph was toppled by fifth columnists – the same claim made by supporters of Boris and of Liz Truss – then it's his fault because he wasn't good enough at politics.
After enough time, all it takes is the right economic downturn thrown in that soup sandwich and it might just make a good revolt of the masses.
Most of us are thoroughly placated by our petty digital lives of course. But if you hit hard enough in the right spot (the wallet), with a little luck one can 'wake the dragon' as Viserys says.
Interesting point RE "our Bernie", but Corbyn wasn't running against a right-wing anti-establishment populist. I'm not confident Sanders would have won, but it seems like a different situation.
I agree with the rest of your comment (cards on table, I'm left-wing but not Momentum left). I find the complaints about unfairness from the losing side after the election frustrating and childish. It's the media's fault. It's the electorate's fault. It's the winning party's fault. It's not that it's necessarily untrue, but: that was the battlefield you entered, right? That was the ground you were fighting on, and you knew it?
That Momentum spokesperson gave a textbook example of this after Corbyn lost: "we won the argument, but lost the election". A statement by someone who has no interest in examining WHY they lost, and how they can do better next time.
You don't think Boris Johnson was a right-wing anti-establishment populist? Yes, he was thoroughly of the establishment but he successfully posed as anti-establishment and, to be fair to the prick, he tore up its norms whenever it suited him.
Johnson? He's closer to that (image-wise, as you say) than almost any other Tory I can think of, but I don't think he sells that the way Trump does.
A lot of people rolled their eyes at Trump being anti-establishment. He's a billionaire, after all. But he comes off as working-class culturally, as far as I can tell from across the pond. His accent, his tastes. When he won, there was a lot of middle-class sneering along the lines of "he wants McDonald's for breakfast every day". And I thought: yes, just like a lot of people who like him. Feature, not bug. And, of course, that if his original campaign had a central message at all, it was "stick it to those snooty college-educated liberals".
Whereas BoJo, to my mind, comes off more as a rebel within the establishment. Wasn't he literally in the Bullingdon Club? But he always entertained people by making a joke of the whole thing, being if anything exaggeratedly posh and classically educated. And willing to give offence, which people read as straight-talking.
I know what you mean. But I think Trump appeals as "one of us" on one side of a class war, and Johnson doesn't. His schtick was more about being the posh version of Jeremy Clarkson.
Those aren’t leftists. They’re liberals. Bernie was a leftist and the party screwed him twice by legal and illegal means: remember how the fake “leftists” deployed identity politics against him? Same thing with Corbyn in the UK.
“He would then go on to sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which criminalized gay marriage, an act that he called one of the proudest of his political life.”
Not even close to accurate. “Denying federal recognition of” and “criminalizing” are two completely different things.
There’s hyperbole and then there’s just being wrong.
I got hung up on “was that really his proudest achievement” and didn’t even notice the criminalization part.
What’s interesting is the counter factual. If Republicans had won, would America have had crime and welfare policies that would have been better from a leftist perspective? Would we be better off today from a leftist perspective?
Clinton largely did what was very popular at the time re: crime, welfare, and the gays. Had he said/done unpopular things he would not have won primaries or elections.
I grew up with the idea Clinton was a pinko-commie ruining America, so it’s always amusing to see the opposite perspective.
Freddie, I woke up at 3:20 AM this morning in a disarrangement. Thought about what feeling grounded used to be like. I've now read "On the Occasion of This Election" and got what I needed. I will be voting Green Party. Cant thank you enough.
Ted Nugent once said something like "I don't care if your thing is jumping into a vat of peanut butter mixed with goat urine, just don't splash any on me."
Marriage Equality is the result of a Supreme Court decision, while Obama was out there opposing marriage Equality because "God is in the mix" when it comess to marriage.
I don't know what to tell you if you do not understand that the Democrats did not support marriage equality and that the reason we have it is that the Supreme Court (and a conservative court at that!) made it the law of the land. Obama was always a lagging indicator, taking credit for things that he opposed until someone else made them real.
I loathe Bill Clinton; he is definitely a conservative and a predatory creep. I have no love for the Democratic party, or Kamala Harris for that matter. The problem is that Bill Clinton was elected president (twice) *because* he is a conservative: in giving him the nomination and the White House, the electorate continued their pattern of electing conservatives.
It seems like the premise in this column is that a party (the Democrats) could be the vehicle that persuades voters to vote for a leftist. I'm not a political scientist, but I'm doubtful. The fault looks to me like it is with us leftists for failing to pull enough people away from the deeply rooted conservatism in the US. Or, put another way, the fault is that American society shares a regrettable reactionary spirit that has had an upsurge in electoral politics in the last 35 years.
That said, there are sound reasons, evident in past and present history, to think that the US could become a much less conservative society. The path to that future would almost certainly go through the Democratic party, at least initially. A Dem party with AOC as a prominent voice (media skill is vital to legislative success in the 21st century) is a better party than a party with the guy she replaced. A Dem party with more of the Democratic Socialists pulled in by Sanders is a better party than the Clinton Dem party.
The conditions for left organizing and persuading will be much, much better under Harris than Trump. The Labor Relations Board, the courts, the personnel in federal agencies (and the survival of some agencies), the political possibilities in the states, on and on: under a Trump administration, making any gains for the left will be much, much harder.
My take: leftists should vote for Harris. Especially but not exclusively in swing states. I'm not persuaded that a vote is an *expression* of personal meaning––of individual conscience, political philosophy, or personal values. At the instant you pull the lever, a vote is a mere integer and the expressive value of your reasons for voting become all but negligible. Your vote will either increase a viable candidate's raw number or weaken it.
(Deliberately abstaining from voting is a more meaningful personal expression because it means you do not give value to electoral politics per se––something I might well contemplate if I were Palestinian American.)
Perot was to the right of Clinton, which only confirms that Clinton won because the electorate in the aggregate wanted a conservative.
How do leftists have leverage when they vote for Jill Stein? When they reduce the vote count for Harris, they directly increase the Republican's chances of leveraging executive power to ruthlessly crush the left: to to further gut the Labor Relations Board, suppress the vote on the left in future elections, and hand even more political power to polluters, judges, and Christian nationalists.
Sorry, I can't see how if I have leftist views, and even express them to try to persuade others, that somehow have the ability to hold a metaphorical gun to the head of DNC.
If they have to "earn" my vote by adopting all of my policy preferences "or else," then they ignore the vote of other people with different preferences. Alas, I don't matter more than those other discrete voters––that's how elections work.
The time to vote for a Green party or Working Families party candidate is the primary election––then you actually have leverage to defeat Dem candidates or get the Democratic party to move left.
That's the opposite of the logic. Trying to persuade is my use of speech to bring people over to the left. Voting is not speech; it is my attempt to bring about a better set of conditions for left organizing and persuasion.
I live in New York, where Stein wasn't on the ballot - the state changed rules in 2020 making it nearly impossible for 3rd party candidates to qualify. With my anarchist-left leanings (think James C. Scott's perspective on how states make society legible to control it), I did something unexpected: I voted Trump.
I've never held my nose before, but this marks the third election where Democratic Party elites have sidestepped democratic will to install their preferred candidate. As Christopher Lasch warned decades ago, we're watching a "professional-managerial class" operating in "devastating alliance" against democratic interests. Trump, whatever his faults, has actually won primary contests against competitors twice now. In a competitive state, I'd likely make the same choice if the anti-Democratic Party machinery fought to keep Stein off the ballot (while simultaneously fighting to keep Kennedy on ballots despite his dropping out, purely to hurt Trump).
Both parties have troubling relationships with free speech, but only one has begun challenging the institution of the First Amendment itself, calling it an impediment to progress. The managerial elite maintain their power by claiming exclusive authority to determine what constitutes acceptable discourse - something Vice President Harris herself has suggested when discussing who should be "allowed" to speak about certain topics. One party may be anti-expert, but the other has become so slavishly pro-expert that they've essentially decided only credentialed voices deserve protection.
The Democratic calls to regulate AI at this stage perfectly exemplify this dynamic. As someone working in tech, I align with Peter Thiel here: "The real AI risk is a totalitarian world government... Global compute governance would be very heavy-handed, creating a dystopian one-world nanny-state government." The greater danger isn't AI itself, but the rich and powerful dictating how the masses can use AGI while reserving unrestricted usage for themselves.
Marx's later work, particularly "Critique of the Gotha Program," warns of a mature capitalism where we're technically post-scarcity but capital accumulation prevents actual abundance. With AGI on the horizon (maybe 10-20 years out, current AI being glorified auto-complete), this risk becomes concrete. The only viable path is open source development, and while Trump may not be ideal here, he serves as a conservative counterweight to hyperliberal tech shops building these technologies.
Feedback loops creating tension and distributing power are our best tools for defining next-wave governance. Large permanent governments consistently fail to serve citizens effectively - as Downs noted in Inside Bureaucracy, bureaus primarily focus on self-preservation after achieving their initial mandate. The solution isn't more centralized control, but distributed power and genuine democratic participation.
FYI: NYState has now a long list of official Write-in Candidates - If you write in one of their names they will be counted. If you write in a name who is not on the list it will be counted as VOID. Dr Jill Stein, Cornell West and Claudia de la Cruz are the three I recognized of the many names on the list. RFK Jr was not the list. Dems were successful in booting him off. I'd been trying to determine what was up with "write-ins" for many weeks then it became clear once voting started here. I had wondered was it possible that Dems were able to VOID any and all write in votes. Their efforts to eliminate all third candidates angered me so that at times I feel like holding my nose and voting Trump as a stronger protest than Jill Stein vote in NY State, but will likely vote for Stein-- a Jewish Woman...for the 3rd time. But even if Trump wins he might not be so bad as he will be entering the office with the intention of leaving a decent legacy...rather than thinking about his being elected for another term and he may have learned something from how he fell victim to swampy sycophants in his first term. And I think Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr may have something interesting to offer. Plus he said he wants to eliminate tax on overtime and my occasional overtime pay gets taxed like a MoFo
Bluntly, fuck NYS for making me write in Jill Stein. I was never going to vote for Genocide Harris, but this rubs me the wrong way with respect to the down ballot Dems I would otherwise vote for.
I like deBoer's blog, but labelling people you disagree with "genocidal" is not arguing with them, it is to try to shame them into silence. And silencing people the left dislikes does not work anymore, as left-wing Jonathan Pie pointed out in an iconic video eight years ago. Pie was one of the few who predicted Trump in 2016, and now he predicts another win, on BBC this time:
My view of the Democrats is FAR less cynical, as a closeted gay high school/college kid during the George W Bush years. While Republicans were trying to enact a federal ban on same-sex marriage, state bans on gay adoption, and often fell in line with Jerry Falwell and James Dobson who demonized gay people regularly (even pushing conversion therapy), the Democrats fought back. My first vote was for John Kerry in 2004, and I still remember wanting to cheer when he said point blank in a debate that being gay was not a choice, and called out Dick Cheney for ducking the issue when it impacted his own daughter. Meanwhile Bush pleaded ignorance on the choice question and pivoted right to blocking equality under the law with religious dogma.
Then during Obama’s first term we finally saw the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and with pressure from gay rights groups he finally endorsed marriage equality before the 2012 Election Day, after which the Dems lined up to make it part of the official platform. Then in the second term we saw a domino effect as more states took it on and became legal nationwide.
Obama waited until it was absolutely, 100% politically safe to declare himself in favor of gay marriage. It was one of the biggest acts of political cowardice of my lifetime.
You're right that he waited until it was safe. But you also regularly criticize liberals for not understanding the "is" versus "ought" distinction, and not meeting people where they are. Should he have supported it before his first run in 2008, when it was still a losing issue? He took the annoying but acceptable path of not endorsing marriage but not supporting bans either. And after being elected Obama appointed two of the five Supreme Court Justices during his first term who made marriage equality nationwide a reality during his second term. I think it's safe to say that if John McCain had won in 2008 that wouldn't have been the case, and Mitt Romney was still running on a federal marriage amendment in 2012.
This is interesting because I think it is probably the perfect microcosm of this entire issue/debate. There are two ways to look at Obama not coming out for gay marriage (and I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive, but how one views it tells us a lot about how one views politics, I suppose):
1. Cowardice - He was for gay marriage. He wouldn't say so. If he would have been vocal about his support, it could have possibly pushed it along even faster.
2. Pragmatic - He was for gay marriage privately, but could not come out in favor of it publicly for fear of losing important swing voters. The calculus was that by slow playing it, he assured himself a better chance of being elected. By making sure he was elected, he actually made it more likely that gay marriage would become the law of the land.
I see things the second way. I suppose that doesn't mean it wasn't cowardly, but didn't his elections speed up gay marriage becoming legal?
I agree completely with this take, and don't understand why Freddie doesn't. Since he frequently critiques liberals for not understanding the "is" versus "ought" distinction, and it feels like he's doing the thing he criticizes others for here.
Same, and I find Freddie's response to be surprisingly bitter and spiteful. Obama played the long game and won! Enjoy the tangible, material improvement in the life of gay people!
This is just conjecture, but it's hard to imagine a conservative holding a grudge against a Republican politician for say, not supporting the end of Roe V Wade or something until it became more popular.
Agreed. Elsewhere in the comments Freddie responded to me over gay equality asking if that was the “only” thing I could point to. It was one or two notches below grumbling about a landmark case like Brown v. Board of Ed and saying “Is that all?”
Voting Jill Stein in Florida.
Voted Jill Stein in Wisconsin. I'll have no regrets if Trump takes Wisconsin: the Democratic Party didn't earn my vote. If more people voted like us, the US's fomentation of endless war would stop.
And they won't, which you know, because that's not the world we live in. So your vote is, practically speaking, a vote for your own self-righteousness at the expense of, just name one constituency, the generations of poor women who stand to lose any semblance of reproductive rights. But if that's ok with you, I guess that's ok with you.
Really? You're going to shame & blame the voter? How very Democratic Party of you!
Here's the difference between us: I voted for the candidate that I believe would be the best president and best represent my interests. You have nothing to say but finger-waving and the invocation of "poor women"-- the very same that Barack Obama abandoned when he broke his promise that the "first law that he would sign" would be the enshrinement of a woman's right to an abortion.
Best wishes today. Good luck with another feckless candidate who doesn't stand for anything as far as I can tell.
It's people like you that are driving people like me away from the Democratic Party. Enjoy your exclusive club of virtuous, right-minded betters.
I'm accepting the available choices for what they are while keeping in mind the people whose lives stand to be most affected by those choices. If that means I'm "invoking poor women"--Ok, I guess? Nowhere did I defend the Democratic party, Barak Obama, or any other. I share all of the misgivings Freddie described.
You voted for who you thought would be best for your interests. Ok. I think we agree. But you voted for a pipedream, and by making that choice, you are also choosing not to do what you can--and as a Wisconsin voter, unlike most voters, you actually have a consequential voice--to vote for people whose welfare is directly at stake. You can call me all the names you want, use as much self-righteous invective as makes you feel special and principled, but the fact remains that Jill Stein will never be president and Donald Trump very well might be, and whether you blame the system (or, somehow, me), you have helped him.
It's strange that you'd wish me luck, because the result of this election is not a personal consequence. Maybe that's actually where we disagree? I see my vote as a personal choice manifested as a communal act; you see yours as a personal statement of values. I genuinely wish reality supported your version.
"[Y]ou have helped him [Trump]." Again, blaming the voter! In your cramped, binary view of the world, you are essentially suggesting that perhaps I should have just voted for Trump. Because there is no way I was going to vote for Harris.
There's nothing self-righteous about my dislike for Harris. She simply doesn't represent my values or interests.
By the way, how has voting for the Democratic Party been working for you or, er, your "communal manifestation"? Are you getting what you hoped for? You know, there's a word to describe someone who keeps doing the same thing even though it doesn't work.
But there are other choices. Choices that you seem to have a hard time accepting or even recognizing are real--and that will hopefully impact this election. Yes, my vote counts. And if enough people like me vote our conscience, I promise that it will effect you personally, whether you like it or not.
Your narrow, fatalistic view about "the world we live in" is a guaranty that nothing will change. Your sort of "practical" thinking amounts to a practice of futility.
You need all the luck that you can get.
I'm absolutely "blaming the voter." Voters make choices that yield outcomes. That's how it works. I blame Trump voters for electing Trump. I blame Hilary Clinton for ignoring swing states in 2016, and I blame Joe Biden for not bowing out earlier and giving us a chance at choosing a better candidate. You seem to be making a syntactical comparison to victim blaming, but holding people responsible for their choices is not some sort of cardinal sin or form of societal oppression. Your vote is private, but if you announce it proudly on a forum like this one, as you did, it becomes fair game for scrutiny. If I praised your vote for Jill Stein, I think you'd be fine with that. It works both way. If you don't want to "blamed," keep it to yourself. And if you'd replied that "I'm pro-life, I don't care about upholding reproductive rights, or the Clean Water Act, or a functioning federal bureaucracy that isn't fully staffed by right-wing stooges," I'd say, OK, you cast your vote faithfully and we just disagree on the issues. But I'm guessing that as a Jill Stein supporter, you do care about those things.
I guess I have hard time imagining many people find a presidential candidate wholly represents their interests and values. I think voting is and should be more complicated that. A second Trump administration may well be in my personal self-interest, but I would still vote against him after weighing the pros and cons of who he is and intends/will likely do in office. Values are great, but outcomes matter.
I actually haven't always voted Democrat or supported the mainstream Democrat. In fact, in the past, I've felt much the way you've described feeling here. But I've never been able to vote in a swing state, so the consequences of my vote have always been less than yours.
I agree there are other choices; I'm critical of yours. While I wouldn't call it fatalism--I think it's probably closer to pessimism or maybe cynicism--no, I don't think things will ever "change" if by change you mean we'll somehow vote our way into a US electoral system that reflects a great diversity of views. I sincerely wish we did; nothing of history or today, barring a catastrophic shift of unspeakable carnage, will make that possible. I don't know how many elections you've voted third party, but, to use your own logic, "there's a word to describe someone who keeps doing the same thing even though it doesn't work."
In order to shore up his campaign while Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton also presided over the execution of a severely mentally disabled man, who when asked about why he hadn't eaten the dessert portion of his last meal, replied that he was "saving it for later". He is a deeply unpleasant man in every respect.
I am aware that he became mentally disabled following a suicide attempt that occurred after the crime, but I don't really think that that matters, and I think there are established legal principles that would agree.
Here's what the state of Texas, not exactly squeamish about executing people, has to say on the matter:
"A person is incompetent to be executed if he does not understand 1) that he is to be executed and that the execution is imminent, and 2) the reason he is being executed."
https://www.tdcaa.com/journal/competency-to-be-executed/
(I'm aware that most of the cases discussed here are more recent that Rector, but I don't have the time to go down the rabbit hole of finding out what the legal consensus regarding competency to face execution was in the 90s - if somebody else finds anything I'd be interested to know.)
Your argument that he should not have been executed sounds like the old joke about the man who killed his parents and asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan.
If you think that Texan law is too soft on death row inmates I don't know what to tell you...
I'm opposed to the death penalty in principle, but even amongst supporters of the death penalty it's more or less accepted that you shouldn't execute people who don't have a clue as to what is going on.
I can about gauarantee that Clinton could not care less about Rector or his mental capabilities.
I further can guarantee that many who make excuses for their beloved fat boy would not be making those same excuses if Rector were to have been put to death by a governor from the other team.
Thanks, important information.
After the suicide attempt Rector had the mental capabilities of a child. As has been mentioned he saved the dessert from his last meal for "after" the execution. The guards on death row wrote in the log that in the days leading up to his execution they could hear Rector crying in terror at night in his bunk.
Too me there was no option other than the Stein/Ware option. She's the only candidate where the altruistic gene is dominant. Trump and Harris and Biden and many others carry the recessive gene(s).
The greed, power, and ego genes are the dominant ones. The Altruism genes seem to be as rare as redheads, unfortunately for all of us.
They certainly are among people who seek high office. And don't kid yourself, if the Green party had a realistic chance at winning the presidency, they would be no different.
Oh no doubt, power corrupts. But at the very least it could end the current power duopoly and force them to engage with a third dancer. Anything that helps to break up the Lib/Con deathgrip is good in my opinion.
You know, it's one of the base reasons Trump had, and still has, widespread appeal. Because he's a party outsider and at least has the potential to shake things up. What's remarkable about him and his supporters is that he's a pathological bullshitter and they still like him. That a lot of people still willingly back him, fully knowing he's a pathological bullshitter, speaks volumes on how fed up tons of Americans are with the way our country is run now. They would rather see a manchild clown take a baseball bat to Washington than vote for another party stooge. That seems to be where we are now.
Not only does power corrupt, power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats.
In fact, power inevitably winds up in the hands of sociopaths, because sociopaths are the ones who will do Whatever It Takes to get power.
"Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed." - C. Wright Mills
'Recessive' in genetics doesn't mean 'bad'.
"Stein/Ware" is my favorite brand of hipster cookware. I just ordered one of their molcajetes.
As a Nader voter, I don't disagree but to note that Jill Stein really, really sucks. Voting for her, and pumping up her numbers, enables the counter narrative that props up a pathetic 3rd party. Could we get Bernie to start mentoring a viable candidate?
So, I'm voting for Harris, since she is the better option as compared to Trump, and since a bigger (potential) popular vote victory would run counter to the inevitable MAGA arguments about a stolen election and because I never want to see Stein's name on a ballot again.
I fully understand, and took that approach in 2000 when I voted for Nader. What I learned from that experience: presidential elections are not morality tests so vote for the least bad option. And, if you want better candidates, get involved in the next primary (yes, I know about how Harris was picked for this election and no I didn't like it either).
Things can always be worse.
We see presidential elections in very different ways.
I am comfortable saying that the world would be a worse place with Trump as president rather than Harris. And I see no evidence that a vote for Stein will have any impact whatsoever on the selection of candidates for the next election.
Agreed. I think Mr deBoer, who is often so perceptive, has a grievously mistaken take here.
As a Republican though I would have preferred anybody besides Trump. Maybe he will leave office early and Vance, who is pretty sane, can take over.
Exactly this.
I can understand not voting for Stein. But the level of vitriol that is being directed at her by Democratic partisans is ridiculous.
Hey Slaw- you're voting for Trump, correct?
I feel pretty comfortable saying that the MAGA crew really doesn't need to worry about the level of vitriol outside their own glass houses.
I am voting for Trump. I have never voted for a winning presidential candidate before since I always vote third party and I live in a state where the outcome is not in doubt.
But for some reason I was seized by a desire to vote for the winning candidate at least once in my life, so I marked Trump even though he has no chance of winning my state. Irrational, I know.
If not for my flight of fancy though I would have voted for Stein.
In a fake democracy all voting is irrational.
I should wait a couple days but screw it, I'll say it now. Pretty funny you think this year is your chance to finally pick a winner and you pick Trump. Good luck.
He is a slight favorite not only in the polling averages but also in all of the models (Nate Silver, 538, The Economist, etc.). Plus the betting markets. Plus the early voting is looking pretty good for Republicans.
Good call @Slaw.
"the level of vitriol that is being directed at her by Democratic partisans is ridiculous."
Actually, it's exactly to be expected it would be whipped up to this level by the ringleaders, given the stakes of what could be a full accounting if it ever makes it to MSM. That is, of the activities the monsters who run the intelligence, state, and even defense organizations, along their corporate and NGO partners-in-crime. Time to get a clue, or actually, a large number of them...
Sanders is a eunuch.
Not with that voice.
Yeah, Bernie "Hillary will make a great president!" Sanders is real revolutionary.
Him going against the party would have completely demolished his bid for the nomination in the next contest. Provoking a majority of Democrats isn't the way to get nominated by them---he works within the system and is not a revolutionary.
He's not even a socialist for that matter.
Exactly. "Our Revolution", well... just isn't. You can't win if you don't play, and if you haven't noticed, Bernie doesn't, as he iis nothing but a shepherd for "good-cop" side of GloboCap.
He's a social democrat, which if you're an actual socialist I suppose you would see as merely being a good cop for global capitalism.
What's *your* excuse?
I'm voting Nader for the fifth time. (1) One's single vote will *never* matter. (2) If people actually studied sufficiently and voted their consciences, we would never arrive at this point again. I think promoting that perspective, even just here, matters *far* more than my vote in a sea of millions, between these two oligarch-selected monstrosities. The only difference between the horrific consequences of either is whether you want the totalitarianism to settle in by (mental) fire or ice.
I don’t think we will “never arrive at this point again” until we enact ranked-choice voting. Under a winner-takes-all election system, a third party will never be viable and will only ever help conservatives get into power. Unless of course enough third party votes also get taken from Trump. But I don’t see any conservatives voting for Stein this time, so I don’t think that will happen.
I'm mostly just sick of pretending. Pretending that was have any meaningful say in how this country is run. You have the two major parties, both right-wing to varying degrees, and a bunch of potemkin 3rd parties which have no political power to speak of and this is by design. The Democrats love punching left, because I would cynically say this is there true purpose. To discipline the left and dictate the boundaries of acceptable political opinion, to draw a line in the sand representing the left most boundary of the overton window. I've been through a lot of a elections where I didn't care for the candidates over the years and my politics have changed plenty in that timeframe.
However, I just can't remember an election where the whole process was so nakedly a sham. What pisses me off the most is that we still see it fit to get on our high horses and lecture the rest of the world about a lack of adherence to democratic principles. As if we treated any of that seriously at home, as if we had any qualms about backing ethnic cleansing when it was political expedient, as if our government treated any of that as more than a marketing slogan.
We are like the USSR in its twilight years. We have the empty slogans, the mere trappings of the official political ideology that no one believes in anymore, and even if they do they know it has precious little to do with why the government makes the choices it does. All that's left is a going through the motions in a progressively more hollow and cynical fashion. Voting out of pure contempt for the electoral process itself.
But isn't the issue the electoral system? You're suggesting this is some worsening phenomenon, but I'm not sure that's true at all.
"The Democrats love punching left, because I would cynically say this is there true purpose. To discipline the left and dictate the boundaries of acceptable political opinion, to draw a line in the sand representing the left most boundary of the overton window."
What does this even mean? It sounds good, but what does it actually mean to say the Democrats' true purpose is to 'discipline the left.' It's a political party and their goal is to win elections. Leaving aside how effective they are at that, the idea that they're ACTUALLY conspiratorially in place just to tamp down the left legitimately makes no sense. Now, the Democrats definitely do try to weaken the most leftist voices in their coalition, but they do that for an obvious reason: the loudest leftist voices hurt them electorally. Or at least they believe they do. I certainly believe they do, and that's because I think this country is a center-right country. It's no surprise that the party that has the most disparate groups making it up reflects that broadly.
I thought the meaning was straightforward. I think you're playing dumb, honestly, making that paragraph out to be poorly defined when I think it was crystal clear.
It's comically naive to think the only goal of Democrats is to win elections. The list of left leaning policies with broad popular support among a majority of voters they have either opposed or neglected to support is too long to list. This idea that they're a center right party because that's what it takes to win is both insulting and the world's biggest cop out.
No, what's really going on is they are packaging the issues of their doners, their wealth and well connected backers, as the interests of the public at large. Oh sure, they'll make a big production out of caring about appealing to voters so long as those two groups interests aren't in conflict. If they are, you can forget it. The Democrats also exist to give the left just enough of a sense of being listened to that they can be herded back into the pen and accept the status quo.
I don't think that was crystal clear, but leaving that aside, no, I don't agree with you.
I do, in fact, think the Democrats broadly reflect the general political position of the AVERAGE of the coalition that makes up the Democratic party. I also believe that it suck that this is our system, and we'd be much better served with a parliamentary style system. The degree to which our system is 'winner-take-all' makes it nearly impossible for it to look any other way, in my opinion.
This isn't even necessarily an argument against the way congress is set up (the Senate is deeply organized against popular sovereignty) or the very backwards electoral college although both of those things are a problem, to be sure.
I'm making a much more basic point. You can't allow the degree of inequality we have the US and can't allow private citizens to amass as much wealth and power as they have and expect them not to control the political system in a way which benefits them. So long as we, collectively as a society, allow wealth and power to be concentrated in that small of a group the idea we could ever vote that same power away simply isn't plausible.
And we haven't. The last time this country made a genuine attempt to flatten things socially and economically was FDR, or LBJ and Civil Rights/Great Society at the latest.
I think your 2nd paragraph is totally fair. I also think the citizens of this country COULD very easily work on flattening it out despite what the donor class wants.
While this isn't that dramatic, I believe Harris is proposing a much more progressive tax for Americans making over 400k a year. Folks on the right, and yes, even some folks in the center react to that like it's communism, which is obviously insane.
Our country is full of children, and the parties reflect that. Maybe that's my personal, broader point: we get the political parties we deserve.
I highly doubt any progressive income tax changes will come to pass. I think blaming voters is a little like victim blaming. A poorly informed, disengaged, and disillusioned citizenry are not problem for the rich and powerful. In some ways they actually benefit because these same citizens are far less likely to mount any kind of organized political action.
I'm something of a fatalist/determinist, with big philosophical influences like Spinoza. I bring this up because the main idea is to see society as one large machine on the whole of which the political system and the political parties themselves are just parts (even if they appear to be opposed on the surface). There are concrete ways in which certain groups of people benefit from the current state of affairs and it is in their interest to see that they continue that way.
I doubt that the average frustrated democrat (or republican) has any real position on anything, other than tribal loyalty.
"It's a political party and their goal is to win elections." Not clear. More and more, I suspect that election-winning comes in second place behind fundraising.
"I just can't remember an election where the whole process was so nakedly a sham."
Although this last exercise was the most naked, it's been a sham three elections in a row: Bernie was repeatedly ripped off in 2016, finally revealed much later in the lawsuits; Biden was resurrected by the Super Tuesday massacre (Buttigieg and Klobuchar) in 2020 (along with several stooge candidates earlier to dilute the pool); and then of course the 6-month long bait-and-switch of 2024.
If we insisted on ranked choice voting it would be an improvement, though still far from perfect.
https://www.uniteamerica.org/
I voted for Stein in 2016. Two people separately - completely separately, they don’t know each other - angrily and entirely seriously told me I was a misogynist for not voting for Clinton.
The holier-than-thou attitude from people like that is incredibly gross and off base. I'll also say that it goes both ways. When Joe Biden was going to be the 2020 nominee and I wrote something positive about him, including pressuring Obama to support marriage equality and how it impacted me, I had a leftist friend publicly explode on me for being a "bougie piece of shit", and he made snide remarks belittling my marriage like "Well I'm glad you were able to consolidate your assets."
If you do not care for their opinion, then there is nothing that they can do to you.
I have no idea what your views of women are nor do I care but, if you were in a swing state, you contributed to the end of abortion rights in America.
I don't take this view seriously, but if you do then the tally of atrocious things Democrats have done, and to which you have thereby contributed, absolutely pales in comparison.
Yes. (Good things Democrats do - bad things democrats do) > (good thing Republicans do - bad things republicans do). I vote Democrat because I believe the country is better off when they are in charge. Why do you vote?
Because I observe that the country is worse off when the Democrats are in charge. I observe that Washington state, having become a one-party state, is worse off now than it was when I returned in 1978 after a serving overseas. I observe that major metropolitan areas, which have been under nearly exclusive Democrat rule for many years, have higher rates of poverty and crime. You may believe things are better when Democrats are in charge, I observe that they aren't.
"I vote Democrat because I believe the country is better off when they are in charge."
Yup, that's what they love. Stockholm-syndrome voters who will never punish them, because the other half of the country is insane, stupid, and/or evil, and thus Hitler is always just around the corner.
I vote to make the negative number for each party smaller.
If Harris wanted my vote she could have renounced Biden's bear hug strategy with Israel, which would have certainly made that number closer to positive. As it is, if Democrats lose because of their support for Israel, I expect them recalibrate and move to where their base and the country is and then let Republicans be the party that defends ethnic cleansers. That will vastly increase the `Good things Democrats do'.
Abortion rights have not ended in America. Abortion is still legal in most states and everywhere a referendum has been held, abortion rights have won.
"He had codified discrimination against gay servicemembers with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that had no reason to exist"
I would disagree here. As a permanent policy, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) is, of course, stupid. However, it changed the conversation by serving as a stepping stone. Before, if a gay person was discharged from the military, one could simply say that they weren't supposed to be there. After DADT, it was understood that gays were de facto allowed in the military, so long as they adhered to a stupid rule. And when discharges for being found gay happened, the focus was on the stupid rule that caused the discharges, with a lot of hand-wringing on why we were shooting ourselves in the foot with that stupid rule. Eventually, there was enough ire against the stupid rule that it was abandoned, leading to full inclusion of gays in the military -- plus we now have enough experience of gays serving semi-openly under DADT to know that the justifications for keeping gays out were obvious BS.
I suspect that if Clinton had simply allowed gays in the military upfront, their admittance in the military would have become a direct target of Republicans and a political football, with the rule for admittance switching back and forth as the presidency changed parties.
It's 2024. Your predilection for nuance will be noted on your record.
I almost spilled my coffee reading this, though I should know better by now.
Yeah, I remember it pretty well. It was seen as a progressive and risky move for Clinton to back DADT, given the resistance to it from people like Colin Powell and broad swathes of the military and the public. So it's a kinda cheap shot from Freddie. But G-d it was a dumb rule.
I voted for Jill Stein in Virginia.
Go, Freddie! Nobody has said it better.
Can you explain the joke to me :(
Oh, that sort of thing.
So commenter Stony how many asshol*s in congress are whores to AIPAC money. Howany ate sociopathic baby killers by backing with our tax dollars apathied death star Isreal.
People
Planet
**Peace**
Moral outrage mixed with ignorance is just dangerous, the fuel of violent mass movements. If you want to influence the system positively you have to know how it works, and it also helps if you know how to do basic proofreading.
Stein's credentials notwithstanding...
At this point, a vote for the Cookie Monster is better than either Harris or Trump. For me it's the ridiculous 2-party system that is at the heart of this issue, not the candidates or parties themselves.
Every election cycle they hand off the keys to the kingdom to each other: "See you in 4 years Jack." "Not if it's 8 years Jane!" And they both have a big laugh, walk down the Mall together, and talk about which lobbyists they're going to brunch with today. The 2-party system is a friggin' joke man.
We'll never have a decent democracy with the way the elections work now, so why not do everything one can to change that?
So if the Dems don't represent my values and do not legislate my policy priorities, why should I vote for them?
I don't give a shit, bro. Jill Stein is not responsible for slaughter in Gaza. Kamala Harris and the Democrat machine are. So I won't be vorting for them.
You know, there's a reason the Irish have been one of the most steadfast supporters of Palestinians in recent decades. And it's not because they just wanted to vote the opposite of the Brits at any given UN vote. It's because they have a visceral understanding of what it's like to have an unflinching bootheel on your neck for multiple generations. They understand that pain and anger.
So while certainly no one in their right mind should condone Hamas for what they did, and have done over the years...one can very easily understand the 'why' of it with just a rudimentary reading of the history of that region. It's really not that difficult to empathize with their place in the world.
I suppose you saw the slaveholders killed in Nat Turner's Rebellion as victims, and weep hot satly tears for the poor Germans killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Fuck off.
The reason that Jill Stein isn't responsible for Gaza is because she isn't responsible for *anything*, since she does not hold any elected office nor has she ever been a serious candidate for one. She's a backseat driver without a license. If you feel so passionately about the situation in Gaza, wouldn't you want to allocate influence to someone who actually knows things?
I also thoroughly disagree that somehow the situation in the Middle East is the fault of the Democrats, but setting that aside, they're constrained in how they can respond to it by:
1) Netanyahu's election meddling (such as threats to strike Iranian oil fields, whiny messaging about the administration not writing enough blank checks, etc).
2) The coalition's stalling, stringing along, and sabotage of hostage negotiations.
3) Escalation by Iran's proxies, which Israel of course has to respond to.
4) Domestic political reality and third rails (Dems can't just scorch Israel - even if it would be fair to - for the same reason the Green party is never going to advocate repealing the 2nd amendment).
Notably, they'll have a lot more latitude if Harris wins, so I hope you reconsider, since stopping bloodshed is good.
This is kind of an uninformative response. Sinwar was killed with less than 3 weeks to go before the election. You actually don't spell out the link between his death and the diplomatic openings it created, but one is that it allows the coalition to sell a hostage deal to the public after riding high on a "win". But why wouldn't they just wait until after the election, if it's so close, and they can maybe roll the dice on an even more compliant administration? This is an easy inference just from regularly consuming news, so presumably the administration *knows this*, and is also waiting until after the election before pushing too hard. Netanyahu still has the power to influence the outcome in his favor, unless you cartoonishly expect Harris to just announce support for disarming Israel on the eve of the election, throwing everything into chaos and potentially endangering Palestinian lives further.
Expanding on my reply because nuance and knowledge are important: the last time major clashes occurred, in May 2021, Biden ended it after 11 days. Note where May 2021 stands in relation to major U.S. elections. Every actor embroiled now - American, Israeli, and Iranian - is influenced by electoral calculi, now more so than in any recent conflict. It's just foolish to discount that in any analysis of those parties' decision-making.
What? No, Iran definitely wants Trump to lose. This is just misinformation. You don't even have to believe that they're trying to assassinate him; last time Trump was in power he reneged from the JCPOA, which is the main reason Raisi won the 2021 election.
He is in Connecticut, which he explained. So his vote doesn’t matter, yet you are so whipped up with TDS you are beating him up anyway. Listen, even if I did live in a swing state, I would not vote for the democrats. Even though I perfectly realize that Trump is a monster.
I don't think this reply contributes much, but since he made an announcement of his voting intentions and the defiant principles underlying them (and kept his comments open), that presumably invites public commentary. Insofar as his vote is a statement of values, I'm saying it could be a better statement of better values.
You need to reread what he wrote. Paraphrasing, he said if he lived in a state where it mattered, he’d hold his nose and vote for holocaust Harris.
I read and understood that part just fine, and I wrote everything keeping those assumptions in mind.
Your exercise in victim blaming makes about as much sense as blaming Poles for German scorched earth antipartisan operations.
If Harris wins, I look forward to the excuses that you will make for her as she changes nothing.
...Which victim am I blaming?
Why was this guy suspended? Seems a valid fair take.
He's not suspended
It says "User was temporarily suspended for this comment." at the top of my comment (why?), but if this message goes through, then I guess I'm not suspended.
I'm not sure if this is an accusation but I've committed to a lifetime boycott of all generative AI. I even draw my own Substack thumbnails when others just use Dall-E or whatever.
"we live in reality, where major parties have to follow the most responsible electoral strategy"
No. That is just one *interpretation* of a proper response to the situation. Another is to encourage everyone to vote their conscience. Otherwise, it is a Stockholm-syndrome rationalization. Because unless we start to actually *punish* Democrats by being willing to leave the marriage, they will continue to abuse us with impunity. Goodness knows the judicial system won't do it.
This response courts instant gratification. "What do we want?" / "Trump to go away!" / "When do we want it?" / "NOW!!" We must have our "fix", yet, for the third time, this election's "fix" is *whatever* they stick in front of us, which is barely examined. So, we're about to elect the heavily-compromised puppet Harris, who was swapped out for the heavily-compromised puppet Biden (when he got simply too demented to cover it up), doing whatever our owners want, with some red meat (or is it Oliver's porridge?) thrown out now and then to calm the crowd ("I'm between you and the pitchforks", a still-illustrious leader once said), always with a slick sales pitch. Could a more lame response possibly be devised? Time to get our heads out of our owners' propaganda echo chamber.
You misread my comment. This is not a "vote for the lesser of two evils"* post. I am saying that Stein is egregiously bad and a vote for her is awful on its own merits. It is so bad that it would degrade any party trying to appeal to her voters, because they would have to extend olive branches to the unreachable and (rightly) lose 10 times as many votes in the process.
It would still be bad even if she was the only candidate on the ballot (for more reasons than the apocalyptic mental image you just formed of her being some one-party despot). If someone "votes their conscience" for a 3-time presidential candidate who doesn't know how many members of congress there are, then their conscience is the problem; they just value the wrong things.
*(Though yes you should always do that, since literally the Iranian diaspora does that and they have it way worse than you).
...The fact that she doesn't know how many members of congress there are wasn't a good enough reason? That seems like a fair qualification to expect of a candidate who's been running for president since 2012. It was literally the first thing I mentioned. Did you think it was a joke? Here's a source: https://www.salon.com/2024/09/12/jill-stein-schooled-on-in-brutal-breakfast-club-interview/
It's a pretty basic aspect of the U.S. system of government, tied to the number of electoral votes (538 isn't just coincidentally really close to 535), and something one should know if they're 74 years old, American, and have been running for president since 2012. This isn't the first example of her being deeply uninformed, it's just the most recent and blatant one.
While painfully unoriginal, this is an incredibly anodyne and non-hostile comment. The thought process behind temporarily suspending someone for making such a comment is not a particularly healthy one.
If you defend someone's free speech while also taking shots at them, it comes off as a bit hollow. Also, why did you think it was "painfully unoriginal"? Admittedly I'm taking that a bit personally, but none of the other comments covered the same territory, and I made an effort not to just repeat the standard talking points.
Because a Democratic party supporter telling a leftist that Trump aligns with their views even less, while explaining the strategic realities of a two-party system and the strategic tradeoffs of tacking to the base versus the center, is, in fact, painfully unoriginal. Not necessarily invalid, mind you, just unoriginal. Of course, reasonable people can take the opposite position and believe that only actually showing the Democratic party how many votes they are losing on their left side will convince them that they risk losing those votes.
You're living in a dreamscape where candidates declare policy according to public opinion and then, if elected, enact it. These days, the Democrats don't even bother with phase one.
Leftists can't win elections in most of the country. They also had a larger platfrom in the years following George Floyd, and managed to become even less popular due to a constant focus on identity politics and personal grievance.
I'll vote for Kamala tomorrow and I won't feel any sense of righteousness. But I also won't lose any sleep.
Bringing reality in response to Freddie’s overheated screed. Thanks.
Focus on identity politics was a counter-leftist strategy employed by the Democratic Party to thwart class-based politics, which does have broad appeal in this country as Bernie Sanders clearly had shown before he caved and let himself be infected by the same virus.
Trump's class-based politics too, though. That often seems to be the liberal objection to him: he's coarse, he has his steak well-done, he doesn't read books, he's rude. He's of the wrong class. A lot of people like that.
Incredible revisionist history.
Tons of leftists support CRT and DEI and trace their academic intellectual heritage back to Marxist influences.
Marx would have despised identity politics. That is petit burgeois superstructure surface phenomena in his book.
But then he was explicit about not being a Marxist, too.
CRT and DEI ignore class structure almost entirely, so I don't think it makes much sense to attribute them to Marxism, but you also kind of make a fair point.
We should cop to the fact that all sorts of self proclaimed leftists supported the identitarian social justice turn that the democratic coalition took years before the party itself even embraced it (that part really started to pick up when it became a an effective way for the democratic establishment to delegitimize Bernie and the "Bernie bros").
It took quite a while for sensible leftists to even recognize that opposition to the "isms" was being hijacked for nefarious purposes and begin organizing to combat this turn, and those of us who have been trying are still thoroughly on the back foot and immensely outnumbered by left-liberals who don't seem to even understand that anything's gone wrong.
To some extent this (disastrous) failure was understandable, though. When a new ideology with totalitarian leanings is established through emotional blackmail, cancel campaigns, and weaponized allegations of sexism, racism, transphobia, etc., it's not an easy force to combat.
Doesn’t matter what you think makes sense.
The chain of influence is known here and based on explicit academic work:
Marx -> Frankfurt School -> critical legal theory -> critical race theory -> DEI
Marxists are free to criticize other Marxists for doing it wrong but that doesn’t change the common heritage.
I won't claim to be an expert on any of the steps you've outlined here, but The Frankfurt School was also heavily influenced by Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.
I'm paging through the end notes of a Horkheimer and Adorno book (Dialectic of Enlightenment) that I never got around to reading right now and they reference, Plato, Diogenes, Spinoza, Weber, Baudelaire, Goethe, Kant, and Leibniz, just to name a few.
For that matter, these guys were responding to the rise of Nazi Germany after they escaped.
So sure, you can draw a lineage back to Marx, but I think the development of these things is a lot more complicated than you're letting on.
“A lot more complicated than you’re letting on”
Being from an academic heritage of critical theory originating from Marxism doesn’t mean there can’t be other influences for crying out loud.
Wasn’t Marx heavily influenced by Hegel?
It can be distilled as: “academics used Marxist analysis on other parts of society than material class in critical theory, which was then applied to law, and then to race, and then to an HR department near you.”
“Trump’s victory may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. His election is the disastrous outcome of the long-term and very deliberate repudiation by the Democratic Party of any programmatic orientation to the working class, which Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed as “a basket of deplorables” and Biden recently referred to as “garbage.”
Focused on the flim-flam of identity politics — i.e., the politics of more or less affluent sections of the middle class seeking a more favorable distribution of the wealth among the top 10 percent — the Democratic Party convinced itself that it had found an alternative to the politics that prioritized class. This intellectual regression was promoted and justified in the academy by the various forms of anti- and pseudo-Marxist philosophies (Frankfurt School and Post-Modernism) that were embraced by a generation of ex-radical students in the aftermath of 1968.
In the United States, the new anti-Marxism blended with the longstanding tradition of anti-communism. Leftwing politics, of the sort connected to working class militancy, disappeared. The grievances related to identity displaced any serious concern with the massive concentration of wealth in a small segment of society at the expense of the working class.
The pseudo-left replaced calls for equality with demands for equity. This was closely connected to the relentless harping on racial and ethnic differences, and, with it, a contempt for the genuinely democratic traditions of the United States. This found noxious expression in the 1619 Project. All this has been accompanied by a general cultural degradation, the promotion of every form of backwardness.
To the extent that the Biden administration had an agenda, its number one item was the escalation of military conflict with Russia and China. Its endorsement of the Gaza genocide — among the greatest crimes in the history of the new century — has been entirely bound up with its militaristic global strategy.
The disastrous consequences of Trump’s victory can be averted only by “a new birth” of genuinely socialist politics, based on the working class and animated by an international strategy that unites global humanity.”
- David North (WSWS editor and chairman of the Socialist Equality Party
As socialists go, I like David North.
Good luck with the blue collar unions though and a return to class-based left-wing politics. We're in a weird spot now for sure.
Being British, we don't have the Bernie-would-have-won comfort blanket: we had our Bernie and he didn't win. I no longer feel like leftist parties can ever win and centre-left or centre-right, depending on how you define it, is the best we can get. We could argue about why that is but the usual argument, that various unfair factors prejudice the playing field – for us our right-wing tabloids, for you guys Fox News, always big business and monetarism – begins to seem a bit Trumpian. Maybe we don't win because nobody really likes what we have to offer.
Yeah, this is the post-2019 narrative about Corbyn's loss. (There wasn't a post-2017 narrative about Corbyn's loss, because from 2017 to 2019 it was happily assumed by his supporters that he'd win overwhelmingly next time.)
Leaving aside the details, isn't this a fine example of that phenomenon Freddy identified the other day, the Appeal to the Ref? "Ref, that election wasn't fair, Jeremy was undermined by an enemy within! It wasn't an immaculate campaign and election!" But there's no ref and there's no such thing. If Corbyn was undermined by Blairite within his party, if his triumph was toppled by fifth columnists – the same claim made by supporters of Boris and of Liz Truss – then it's his fault because he wasn't good enough at politics.
Never argue with the median voter (as they say).
After enough time, all it takes is the right economic downturn thrown in that soup sandwich and it might just make a good revolt of the masses.
Most of us are thoroughly placated by our petty digital lives of course. But if you hit hard enough in the right spot (the wallet), with a little luck one can 'wake the dragon' as Viserys says.
Interesting point RE "our Bernie", but Corbyn wasn't running against a right-wing anti-establishment populist. I'm not confident Sanders would have won, but it seems like a different situation.
I agree with the rest of your comment (cards on table, I'm left-wing but not Momentum left). I find the complaints about unfairness from the losing side after the election frustrating and childish. It's the media's fault. It's the electorate's fault. It's the winning party's fault. It's not that it's necessarily untrue, but: that was the battlefield you entered, right? That was the ground you were fighting on, and you knew it?
That Momentum spokesperson gave a textbook example of this after Corbyn lost: "we won the argument, but lost the election". A statement by someone who has no interest in examining WHY they lost, and how they can do better next time.
Of course, Trump in 2020 was this x1,000.
You don't think Boris Johnson was a right-wing anti-establishment populist? Yes, he was thoroughly of the establishment but he successfully posed as anti-establishment and, to be fair to the prick, he tore up its norms whenever it suited him.
Johnson? He's closer to that (image-wise, as you say) than almost any other Tory I can think of, but I don't think he sells that the way Trump does.
A lot of people rolled their eyes at Trump being anti-establishment. He's a billionaire, after all. But he comes off as working-class culturally, as far as I can tell from across the pond. His accent, his tastes. When he won, there was a lot of middle-class sneering along the lines of "he wants McDonald's for breakfast every day". And I thought: yes, just like a lot of people who like him. Feature, not bug. And, of course, that if his original campaign had a central message at all, it was "stick it to those snooty college-educated liberals".
Whereas BoJo, to my mind, comes off more as a rebel within the establishment. Wasn't he literally in the Bullingdon Club? But he always entertained people by making a joke of the whole thing, being if anything exaggeratedly posh and classically educated. And willing to give offence, which people read as straight-talking.
I know what you mean. But I think Trump appeals as "one of us" on one side of a class war, and Johnson doesn't. His schtick was more about being the posh version of Jeremy Clarkson.
So killing displaced Palestinian men woman children babies will give you pleasent dreams: how empathetic you be🤐
You consciously vote for an open genocide. Own it.
Those aren’t leftists. They’re liberals. Bernie was a leftist and the party screwed him twice by legal and illegal means: remember how the fake “leftists” deployed identity politics against him? Same thing with Corbyn in the UK.
“He would then go on to sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which criminalized gay marriage, an act that he called one of the proudest of his political life.”
Not even close to accurate. “Denying federal recognition of” and “criminalizing” are two completely different things.
There’s hyperbole and then there’s just being wrong.
Damn. Good catch.
I got hung up on “was that really his proudest achievement” and didn’t even notice the criminalization part.
What’s interesting is the counter factual. If Republicans had won, would America have had crime and welfare policies that would have been better from a leftist perspective? Would we be better off today from a leftist perspective?
Clinton largely did what was very popular at the time re: crime, welfare, and the gays. Had he said/done unpopular things he would not have won primaries or elections.
I grew up with the idea Clinton was a pinko-commie ruining America, so it’s always amusing to see the opposite perspective.
In 1992, Republicans had held the presidency for the last 12 years and had won 5 of the past 6 elections. It was a different time.
Freddie, I woke up at 3:20 AM this morning in a disarrangement. Thought about what feeling grounded used to be like. I've now read "On the Occasion of This Election" and got what I needed. I will be voting Green Party. Cant thank you enough.
Is policy to the right of 1981? Gay marriage is legal. Healthcare access is vastly expanded.
Ted Nugent once said something like "I don't care if your thing is jumping into a vat of peanut butter mixed with goat urine, just don't splash any on me."
lol, mind explaining the relevance?
That's Nugent's argument for gay marriage.
Glad to have him on the side of the angels on this one then, I guess haha
I'm just saying there's a conservative argument for gay marriage as well.
Technically libertarian, rather than conservative, I think.
Marriage Equality is the result of a Supreme Court decision, while Obama was out there opposing marriage Equality because "God is in the mix" when it comess to marriage.
If you really think they don’t pay attention to politics, I don’t know what to tell you
I don't know what to tell you if you do not understand that the Democrats did not support marriage equality and that the reason we have it is that the Supreme Court (and a conservative court at that!) made it the law of the land. Obama was always a lagging indicator, taking credit for things that he opposed until someone else made them real.
I loathe Bill Clinton; he is definitely a conservative and a predatory creep. I have no love for the Democratic party, or Kamala Harris for that matter. The problem is that Bill Clinton was elected president (twice) *because* he is a conservative: in giving him the nomination and the White House, the electorate continued their pattern of electing conservatives.
It seems like the premise in this column is that a party (the Democrats) could be the vehicle that persuades voters to vote for a leftist. I'm not a political scientist, but I'm doubtful. The fault looks to me like it is with us leftists for failing to pull enough people away from the deeply rooted conservatism in the US. Or, put another way, the fault is that American society shares a regrettable reactionary spirit that has had an upsurge in electoral politics in the last 35 years.
That said, there are sound reasons, evident in past and present history, to think that the US could become a much less conservative society. The path to that future would almost certainly go through the Democratic party, at least initially. A Dem party with AOC as a prominent voice (media skill is vital to legislative success in the 21st century) is a better party than a party with the guy she replaced. A Dem party with more of the Democratic Socialists pulled in by Sanders is a better party than the Clinton Dem party.
The conditions for left organizing and persuading will be much, much better under Harris than Trump. The Labor Relations Board, the courts, the personnel in federal agencies (and the survival of some agencies), the political possibilities in the states, on and on: under a Trump administration, making any gains for the left will be much, much harder.
My take: leftists should vote for Harris. Especially but not exclusively in swing states. I'm not persuaded that a vote is an *expression* of personal meaning––of individual conscience, political philosophy, or personal values. At the instant you pull the lever, a vote is a mere integer and the expressive value of your reasons for voting become all but negligible. Your vote will either increase a viable candidate's raw number or weaken it.
(Deliberately abstaining from voting is a more meaningful personal expression because it means you do not give value to electoral politics per se––something I might well contemplate if I were Palestinian American.)
Bill Clinton was elected because of H. Ross Perot.
And leftists in swing states should especially vote Green. Leverage is worthless if you never use it.
Perot was to the right of Clinton, which only confirms that Clinton won because the electorate in the aggregate wanted a conservative.
How do leftists have leverage when they vote for Jill Stein? When they reduce the vote count for Harris, they directly increase the Republican's chances of leveraging executive power to ruthlessly crush the left: to to further gut the Labor Relations Board, suppress the vote on the left in future elections, and hand even more political power to polluters, judges, and Christian nationalists.
You use your leverage to make a party earn your vote, rather than take it for granted. If you pull out a gun, you better be prepared to use it.
I would call Perot a "populist". He siphoned off votes mainly from Bush/Dole, but wasn;t running to the right of Bush or Dole.
Sorry, I can't see how if I have leftist views, and even express them to try to persuade others, that somehow have the ability to hold a metaphorical gun to the head of DNC.
If they have to "earn" my vote by adopting all of my policy preferences "or else," then they ignore the vote of other people with different preferences. Alas, I don't matter more than those other discrete voters––that's how elections work.
The time to vote for a Green party or Working Families party candidate is the primary election––then you actually have leverage to defeat Dem candidates or get the Democratic party to move left.
The vote is the gun to the head. Not your persuasion.
Otherwise, you logic appears to be "content yourself with crumbs!"
That's the opposite of the logic. Trying to persuade is my use of speech to bring people over to the left. Voting is not speech; it is my attempt to bring about a better set of conditions for left organizing and persuasion.
This, voting is not a moral act, and I’m so tired of people acting like it is.
I live in New York, where Stein wasn't on the ballot - the state changed rules in 2020 making it nearly impossible for 3rd party candidates to qualify. With my anarchist-left leanings (think James C. Scott's perspective on how states make society legible to control it), I did something unexpected: I voted Trump.
I've never held my nose before, but this marks the third election where Democratic Party elites have sidestepped democratic will to install their preferred candidate. As Christopher Lasch warned decades ago, we're watching a "professional-managerial class" operating in "devastating alliance" against democratic interests. Trump, whatever his faults, has actually won primary contests against competitors twice now. In a competitive state, I'd likely make the same choice if the anti-Democratic Party machinery fought to keep Stein off the ballot (while simultaneously fighting to keep Kennedy on ballots despite his dropping out, purely to hurt Trump).
Both parties have troubling relationships with free speech, but only one has begun challenging the institution of the First Amendment itself, calling it an impediment to progress. The managerial elite maintain their power by claiming exclusive authority to determine what constitutes acceptable discourse - something Vice President Harris herself has suggested when discussing who should be "allowed" to speak about certain topics. One party may be anti-expert, but the other has become so slavishly pro-expert that they've essentially decided only credentialed voices deserve protection.
The Democratic calls to regulate AI at this stage perfectly exemplify this dynamic. As someone working in tech, I align with Peter Thiel here: "The real AI risk is a totalitarian world government... Global compute governance would be very heavy-handed, creating a dystopian one-world nanny-state government." The greater danger isn't AI itself, but the rich and powerful dictating how the masses can use AGI while reserving unrestricted usage for themselves.
Marx's later work, particularly "Critique of the Gotha Program," warns of a mature capitalism where we're technically post-scarcity but capital accumulation prevents actual abundance. With AGI on the horizon (maybe 10-20 years out, current AI being glorified auto-complete), this risk becomes concrete. The only viable path is open source development, and while Trump may not be ideal here, he serves as a conservative counterweight to hyperliberal tech shops building these technologies.
Feedback loops creating tension and distributing power are our best tools for defining next-wave governance. Large permanent governments consistently fail to serve citizens effectively - as Downs noted in Inside Bureaucracy, bureaus primarily focus on self-preservation after achieving their initial mandate. The solution isn't more centralized control, but distributed power and genuine democratic participation.
FYI: NYState has now a long list of official Write-in Candidates - If you write in one of their names they will be counted. If you write in a name who is not on the list it will be counted as VOID. Dr Jill Stein, Cornell West and Claudia de la Cruz are the three I recognized of the many names on the list. RFK Jr was not the list. Dems were successful in booting him off. I'd been trying to determine what was up with "write-ins" for many weeks then it became clear once voting started here. I had wondered was it possible that Dems were able to VOID any and all write in votes. Their efforts to eliminate all third candidates angered me so that at times I feel like holding my nose and voting Trump as a stronger protest than Jill Stein vote in NY State, but will likely vote for Stein-- a Jewish Woman...for the 3rd time. But even if Trump wins he might not be so bad as he will be entering the office with the intention of leaving a decent legacy...rather than thinking about his being elected for another term and he may have learned something from how he fell victim to swampy sycophants in his first term. And I think Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr may have something interesting to offer. Plus he said he wants to eliminate tax on overtime and my occasional overtime pay gets taxed like a MoFo
Bluntly, fuck NYS for making me write in Jill Stein. I was never going to vote for Genocide Harris, but this rubs me the wrong way with respect to the down ballot Dems I would otherwise vote for.
I like deBoer's blog, but labelling people you disagree with "genocidal" is not arguing with them, it is to try to shame them into silence. And silencing people the left dislikes does not work anymore, as left-wing Jonathan Pie pointed out in an iconic video eight years ago. Pie was one of the few who predicted Trump in 2016, and now he predicts another win, on BBC this time:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024cxt
Harris is supporting the genocide.
And no one is silencing you.
You won't see "The Write-in List" on the Ballot but it's online somewhere to be googled
My view of the Democrats is FAR less cynical, as a closeted gay high school/college kid during the George W Bush years. While Republicans were trying to enact a federal ban on same-sex marriage, state bans on gay adoption, and often fell in line with Jerry Falwell and James Dobson who demonized gay people regularly (even pushing conversion therapy), the Democrats fought back. My first vote was for John Kerry in 2004, and I still remember wanting to cheer when he said point blank in a debate that being gay was not a choice, and called out Dick Cheney for ducking the issue when it impacted his own daughter. Meanwhile Bush pleaded ignorance on the choice question and pivoted right to blocking equality under the law with religious dogma.
Then during Obama’s first term we finally saw the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and with pressure from gay rights groups he finally endorsed marriage equality before the 2012 Election Day, after which the Dems lined up to make it part of the official platform. Then in the second term we saw a domino effect as more states took it on and became legal nationwide.
Others can discount that, but I definitely won’t.
Obama waited until it was absolutely, 100% politically safe to declare himself in favor of gay marriage. It was one of the biggest acts of political cowardice of my lifetime.
You're right that he waited until it was safe. But you also regularly criticize liberals for not understanding the "is" versus "ought" distinction, and not meeting people where they are. Should he have supported it before his first run in 2008, when it was still a losing issue? He took the annoying but acceptable path of not endorsing marriage but not supporting bans either. And after being elected Obama appointed two of the five Supreme Court Justices during his first term who made marriage equality nationwide a reality during his second term. I think it's safe to say that if John McCain had won in 2008 that wouldn't have been the case, and Mitt Romney was still running on a federal marriage amendment in 2012.
This is interesting because I think it is probably the perfect microcosm of this entire issue/debate. There are two ways to look at Obama not coming out for gay marriage (and I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive, but how one views it tells us a lot about how one views politics, I suppose):
1. Cowardice - He was for gay marriage. He wouldn't say so. If he would have been vocal about his support, it could have possibly pushed it along even faster.
2. Pragmatic - He was for gay marriage privately, but could not come out in favor of it publicly for fear of losing important swing voters. The calculus was that by slow playing it, he assured himself a better chance of being elected. By making sure he was elected, he actually made it more likely that gay marriage would become the law of the land.
I see things the second way. I suppose that doesn't mean it wasn't cowardly, but didn't his elections speed up gay marriage becoming legal?
I agree completely with this take, and don't understand why Freddie doesn't. Since he frequently critiques liberals for not understanding the "is" versus "ought" distinction, and it feels like he's doing the thing he criticizes others for here.
Same, and I find Freddie's response to be surprisingly bitter and spiteful. Obama played the long game and won! Enjoy the tangible, material improvement in the life of gay people!
This is just conjecture, but it's hard to imagine a conservative holding a grudge against a Republican politician for say, not supporting the end of Roe V Wade or something until it became more popular.
Agreed. Elsewhere in the comments Freddie responded to me over gay equality asking if that was the “only” thing I could point to. It was one or two notches below grumbling about a landmark case like Brown v. Board of Ed and saying “Is that all?”
Bigger than pledging to stay between the banks and the people with pitchforks, and then following through?
Or how about "we tortured some folks"? Oh really? So what are the torturers' names? When are the indictments?