I recently came across a post by an activist group bemoaning that Derek Chauvin was being kept in solitary in prison, which apparently constituted privileged treatment in their eyes. Their point was, still no justice!!!
And I’m like, seriously? First, cops in jail are always kept separate from everyone else because being shanked is not part of their sentencing. Second, what more do they want done to Chauvin for it to be “justice”? Put him in a hair shirt then let him be murdered in prison? He was found guilty on all counts. That’s the most justice that can be given in our system.
I also heard a lot of negative commentary about how the prosecutor said “this is not an anti police case” or something along those lines (i watched the whole trial but i can’t remember the exact quote). And again, it’s NOT. Chauvin is not a proxy for American policing. He was an individual man on trial for the murder of another individual man. The fact that he was found guilty could be built upon because it offers a toe hold against egregious police crimes. But it’s not going to be built upon if we’re complaining that the prosecutor didn’t prosecute all of American policing, or that Chauvin isn’t being publicly stoned to death.
You are so right, Freddie. It seems that huge swaths of liberals/SJWs are so fixated on the panic and outrage that they aren’t taking the small victories when they come and building on them. To use a popular term, it’s trauma these folks want to *live* in, rather than do the work of dealing with it and moving forward.
The bewildering thing to me is that the overwhelming response of liberals to Trump has just been scolding. I admit that Trump's victory was a complete shock because I live in a liberal bubble, but my response was that was realizing I had been living in a bubble so I sought out explanations for what had happened. That response probably explains a lot of people in major cities that ended up joining DSA or Bernie's 2020 run, but unfortunately that's not the majority. The majority still, after a full Trump term, seem to think that reciting the right platitudes and denouncing the right things is how we prevent this all from happening again. The idea seems to be that during Obama we didn't scold enough? That's why his two terms led us to Trump?
Excellent piece. I despise the Orange One too, but I'm equally disheartened by what he's done to many of my fellow liberals. Just nonstop freakouts. I watched helplessly as one hobbyist space after another became consumed by woke yelling. I quit Twitter in 2018, and I felt so alienated, like I was one of the bad guys for questioning this mentality, that I started seeing a therapist to work through my worsening depression.
Now that Trump is gone, most of my Facebook feed has calmed down. But there's still a few stragglers who won't shut up about him. It's almost like they miss him, and they miss the fight. They can yell at Ted Cruz or Majorie Taylor Greene, but it's not the same. They want the hard shit, not a vape substitute.
As for me, I'm like "No. Fuck this. I won't live my life in constant fear." So I've gotten more apolitical lately as a result of burnout. Sorry, but I'm sick and tired of politics being wedged into every area of life.
You've hit some of the nails right on their heads: the record of the Bush administration, the emotional tone of many Democrats focussing on inside-DC outrages, etc. Nevertheless I think you've missed something very big in dismissing the "this is not normal" reaction. You write "Marxism asserts the preeminence of fundamental economic structures in the flow of history" as if that suffices to lay the basis of your argument. Instead it sounds eerily like Ernst Thaelmann in 1933, saying that ultimately victory would be assured because people work in factories.
History need not follow grand schema, particularly ones emerging from the miasma of idealist German philosophy. The future of our species can be decided by a quantum fluctuation in a $0.47 chip in a nuclear attack detection system.
The key problem with the liberal reaction is not so much that they exaggerate the possible looming catastrophes but that they fail to focus on the politically practical ways out. As you say, we need to focus on shared economic interests and not on splintering identities.
The irony here is that capitalism is the answer, not the problem. Bezos, Wall Street, the CIA are NOT capitalism but oligarchy. Socialism would pour fuel on this fire and lock them into complete rule, which is what you see in all socialist countries; a tyrannical state in league with an elite class that do their bidding. AOC would bring about oligarchy on steriods, although I guess we would all get crappy schools and sub-par healthcare, while the elites got their own tier of services. Equity and all.
We need something more like Denmark, an extemely capitalist state with strong anti-trust and and a strong safety net for all. The irony here being, the populist Republicans are better set to do this, especially now that the clown car of Trump is gone. (I say this as a liberal woman married to a Dane having spent a fair amount of time there.)
Here's what makes Denmark work along with which US party is most likely to implement. Please note than when I say (R) I mean populist R and not the neocon Romneys and McCains who are virtually indistinguishable from Clinton, Obama types.
1. Strong borders and strict immigration enforcement. (R)
2. High barriers to benefits without work; ie welfare work requirements (they will train you to work but work is a requirement for benefits for all but the most disabled). (R)
3. Very nearly a flat tax.. all but the poorest pay taxes. (R)
4. A low corporate tax rate. (R)
5). A heavy reliance on oil extraction for financial security. (R)
6) Support of small business and entrepreneurism rather than corporate control. (shifting to R)
7) Cultural homogeneity (you can be any color or gender you want but you are required to speak Danish and follow Danish culture to live in Denmark.) (R)
8) Highly religiously tolerant. (D - but the hatred of all things Christian no matter how positive and the love of all things Muslim no matter how abhorrant means they are losing ground here.)
9) High personal taxation. (D)
10) High amounts of government transparency and local control over tax allocation. (R)
Trump was the wrong person to lead this populist uprising, but there is a reason he gained minority votes across the middle class. The Scandavian model looks a lot more like what Republicans are evolving into. The populist left would cement the worst aspects of our current system of oligarchy into place despite their best intentions in my opinion.
Thank you for that Freddie, you’re helping me understand why I liked Trump so much. Trump’s affect was the key ingredient. It drove the liberals insane and his supporters reveled in their derangement.
The commentator George Will criticized Trump in a thoughtful column. Trump responded by saying people only think he’s smart because he wears glasses. That’s it! That captures it, that’s what the hat was all about. It was that simple.
Trump was a hero to a certain type of person like me. He was a hero to people who think the elite were self-serving, greedy and endlessly self-righteous. The elite use their education as a cudgel for beating up the working class. They believe it’s a meritocracy and they are deserving of their fate and we are deserving of our fate. Such nasty little pricks and then along comes the bloviating Trump monster. It was hilarious: colon hydrotherapy.
I use the past tense because Trump is an old man (5 years?) and is not really the issue. The working class will need a new champion and the elite are committed to ensuring it never happens again: the rabble were roused. Underneath Trump hate is distain for the working class, the uneducated. Trump: “I love the uneducated “. The elite are vicious, righteous, true believers.
Don't you think you're being a little generous to call it "group therapy?" I thought that was supposed to help people be better, not make them want to be worse.
You are too smart to buy the Marxist claptrap. Read "From Marx to Mises" by Steele and see what you think.
I don't have any solution to what you call "capitalism," and its problems are real; but if there's anything that's clear, it's that Marxism and communism bring us from unpleasant dream to nightmare.
Great post. I once polled my millennial friends on the "worst president" in their lifetimes, and a vast majority said Trump with only a couple choosing Bush or Reagan. For the first 3 years, especially, this made no sense for all the reasons you stated -- Bush and Reagan both have staggering body counts on their hands, while Trump was too disinterested in the world to start wars.
When covid-19 happened, I thought, holy shit, he's starting to live up to his reputation -- letting people die from neglect, actively encouraging his supporters to reject masks and precautions. Now his supporters refuse to be vaccinated. Our pandemic body count didn't have to be this high. But I suppose you have to compare it to a counterfactual world where President Hillary Clinton was in charge, with a Congress desperate for her to fail and Republicans ignoring her advice out of spite. Deaths might not have been much lower. She wouldn't have hung hospitals out to dry, though. She would have tried.
Bush and Reagan have more blood on their hands, to be sure, but I can forgive people for histrionics after living through 2020... or I would if they cared about senseless deaths more than crass Tweets, Russia, and January 6th.
Oh man, that tweet linking to Snyder. I think it was Corey Robin who made a tweet listing all the times over and over that Snyder made apocalyptic claims about Trump, like every year predicting that THIS will be the year that Trump does a Reichstag Fire to permanently seize power. Trying to remember if he then had to do some absurd mental gymnastics to try to explain away how/why Trump never actually used the emergencies that actually did happen like COVID to take control.
Honestly, the catastrophization is based on something real, an understanding that this system just doesn't work, and it's probably not going to be solved. It's just borne of a certain optimism about the system of government the US was formed with- that if you just elected someone, it would change the fundamental dysfunction the US constitution. Unfortunately, it's not the case. Combined, especially, with an economic system dominated by capital, it's doomed to fail. It's nice to see, for example, some of the constituencies in the Democratic coalition realizing the structural disadvantages they have in the US system, but I don't think that's going to be common enough to really make changes.
For example, the extolling of the power of state governments is interesting because the economic forces are well beyond the power of any one to control. The Governor of West Virginia and its legislature are simply not capable of making any kind of meaningful change for the people of the state, even if they were actually inclined toward it. But somehow, this is considered in the system equal to say, California. There's this ideal that it reflects local issues, but once again, many states have complex, diverse electorates inside them and pretty much all of the big, nationally influential state governments rule over so many different constituencies.
Of course some of the poorest of the country are going to not have the same reverence for the US constitution that the "glorious middle class" does. It was not made to give the poor representation, anything they have is almost by accident. It guarantees them almost nothing. Instead it pits rural against urban through the geographical disadvantages given to the urban populations.
Also, the FPTP and winner-take-all electoral systems run heavily against trying to do something with a new party. There's not really a way to win a little and build up, you have to do it all at once and everything in this country runs against that.
When someone says "Trump is the worst President in American history" I find I can safely ignore everything else they have to say about politics or history or America. It reveals either a lack of knowledge or morality.
The liberal rehabilitation of George Bush is absolutely infuriating. I grew up during the Bush years and remember the politics of the era very well. Liberals have no moral ground to stand on if they elect to forgive and ignore such an objectively worse president, in really every way. The only thing that Bush didn't do was be mean online, and that's the REAL, deep seated reason that Trump drove liberals insane- he was directly mean to them. Trump knocked over their block tower in political daycare. Liberals have a cheap adherence to tiny rules that they love enforcing, Trump bucked the trend.
Could the characterization of Republicans as 'monsters' be counterproductive here? In American terms, Trump governed as a moderate, and certainly hewed far closer to neoliberalism than he did to populism. (I know you're not defending neoliberalism - quite the opposite - but bear with me.) If this renders someone monstrous then a good 40% of the country is monstrous. And, much as you say that Bush has been rehabilitated... well, I was around then, I remember that he was A Monster then, and seeing how easily A Monster has become A Wise Elder Statesman makes me far less apt to care about monsters in the future. After all, they're everywhere, they're 40% of the country, and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of penalty for being one, at least not after a few years and a dozen headlines have elapsed.
It strikes me as a very self-defeating starting point. There are people on my side of the internet who genuinely believe that "white genocide" is a mainstream Democratic position. Obviously this is a cranky belief, but more than that... well, now what? You believe that 40% of the country wants you dead? Then you've already lost before you've started. You can't overcome that, especially when virtually nobody agrees with you. The same would apply to broad-brush patholigization of ones' opponents. It doesn't lead to action and it makes people throw up their hands in hopelessness.
Aside from that, I loved this article (as a Trump supporter) and I can see so much relevance of it on my own side as well.
"Donald Trump will be dead within five years. He has no political heir, and I would argue can have none."
"I demand the right to also point out that the Democrats certainly seem to be failing to do what’s necessary to prevent the next Trump, who will likely have a functioning brain and will thus be far more dangerous."
Don't these two statements conflict? Is there going to be a next Trump or not? Or are you using some definition of "political heir" here that maybe I'm not aware of? For my part, I think it's pretty clear that people like Hawley are indeed positioning themselves as the next Trump, using many of the same tactics Trump used.
Also, I think Democrats are doing things to prevent the next Trump. These include passing laws and trying to get laws passed that would make real life better for millions of people, including the American Jobs Plan, the American Families Plan, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the MORE Act, etc. They're trying to use government to help people, however imperfectly.
I recently came across a post by an activist group bemoaning that Derek Chauvin was being kept in solitary in prison, which apparently constituted privileged treatment in their eyes. Their point was, still no justice!!!
And I’m like, seriously? First, cops in jail are always kept separate from everyone else because being shanked is not part of their sentencing. Second, what more do they want done to Chauvin for it to be “justice”? Put him in a hair shirt then let him be murdered in prison? He was found guilty on all counts. That’s the most justice that can be given in our system.
I also heard a lot of negative commentary about how the prosecutor said “this is not an anti police case” or something along those lines (i watched the whole trial but i can’t remember the exact quote). And again, it’s NOT. Chauvin is not a proxy for American policing. He was an individual man on trial for the murder of another individual man. The fact that he was found guilty could be built upon because it offers a toe hold against egregious police crimes. But it’s not going to be built upon if we’re complaining that the prosecutor didn’t prosecute all of American policing, or that Chauvin isn’t being publicly stoned to death.
You are so right, Freddie. It seems that huge swaths of liberals/SJWs are so fixated on the panic and outrage that they aren’t taking the small victories when they come and building on them. To use a popular term, it’s trauma these folks want to *live* in, rather than do the work of dealing with it and moving forward.
The bewildering thing to me is that the overwhelming response of liberals to Trump has just been scolding. I admit that Trump's victory was a complete shock because I live in a liberal bubble, but my response was that was realizing I had been living in a bubble so I sought out explanations for what had happened. That response probably explains a lot of people in major cities that ended up joining DSA or Bernie's 2020 run, but unfortunately that's not the majority. The majority still, after a full Trump term, seem to think that reciting the right platitudes and denouncing the right things is how we prevent this all from happening again. The idea seems to be that during Obama we didn't scold enough? That's why his two terms led us to Trump?
Excellent piece. I despise the Orange One too, but I'm equally disheartened by what he's done to many of my fellow liberals. Just nonstop freakouts. I watched helplessly as one hobbyist space after another became consumed by woke yelling. I quit Twitter in 2018, and I felt so alienated, like I was one of the bad guys for questioning this mentality, that I started seeing a therapist to work through my worsening depression.
Now that Trump is gone, most of my Facebook feed has calmed down. But there's still a few stragglers who won't shut up about him. It's almost like they miss him, and they miss the fight. They can yell at Ted Cruz or Majorie Taylor Greene, but it's not the same. They want the hard shit, not a vape substitute.
As for me, I'm like "No. Fuck this. I won't live my life in constant fear." So I've gotten more apolitical lately as a result of burnout. Sorry, but I'm sick and tired of politics being wedged into every area of life.
You've hit some of the nails right on their heads: the record of the Bush administration, the emotional tone of many Democrats focussing on inside-DC outrages, etc. Nevertheless I think you've missed something very big in dismissing the "this is not normal" reaction. You write "Marxism asserts the preeminence of fundamental economic structures in the flow of history" as if that suffices to lay the basis of your argument. Instead it sounds eerily like Ernst Thaelmann in 1933, saying that ultimately victory would be assured because people work in factories.
History need not follow grand schema, particularly ones emerging from the miasma of idealist German philosophy. The future of our species can be decided by a quantum fluctuation in a $0.47 chip in a nuclear attack detection system.
The key problem with the liberal reaction is not so much that they exaggerate the possible looming catastrophes but that they fail to focus on the politically practical ways out. As you say, we need to focus on shared economic interests and not on splintering identities.
The irony here is that capitalism is the answer, not the problem. Bezos, Wall Street, the CIA are NOT capitalism but oligarchy. Socialism would pour fuel on this fire and lock them into complete rule, which is what you see in all socialist countries; a tyrannical state in league with an elite class that do their bidding. AOC would bring about oligarchy on steriods, although I guess we would all get crappy schools and sub-par healthcare, while the elites got their own tier of services. Equity and all.
We need something more like Denmark, an extemely capitalist state with strong anti-trust and and a strong safety net for all. The irony here being, the populist Republicans are better set to do this, especially now that the clown car of Trump is gone. (I say this as a liberal woman married to a Dane having spent a fair amount of time there.)
Here's what makes Denmark work along with which US party is most likely to implement. Please note than when I say (R) I mean populist R and not the neocon Romneys and McCains who are virtually indistinguishable from Clinton, Obama types.
1. Strong borders and strict immigration enforcement. (R)
2. High barriers to benefits without work; ie welfare work requirements (they will train you to work but work is a requirement for benefits for all but the most disabled). (R)
3. Very nearly a flat tax.. all but the poorest pay taxes. (R)
4. A low corporate tax rate. (R)
5). A heavy reliance on oil extraction for financial security. (R)
6) Support of small business and entrepreneurism rather than corporate control. (shifting to R)
7) Cultural homogeneity (you can be any color or gender you want but you are required to speak Danish and follow Danish culture to live in Denmark.) (R)
8) Highly religiously tolerant. (D - but the hatred of all things Christian no matter how positive and the love of all things Muslim no matter how abhorrant means they are losing ground here.)
9) High personal taxation. (D)
10) High amounts of government transparency and local control over tax allocation. (R)
Trump was the wrong person to lead this populist uprising, but there is a reason he gained minority votes across the middle class. The Scandavian model looks a lot more like what Republicans are evolving into. The populist left would cement the worst aspects of our current system of oligarchy into place despite their best intentions in my opinion.
Thank you for that Freddie, you’re helping me understand why I liked Trump so much. Trump’s affect was the key ingredient. It drove the liberals insane and his supporters reveled in their derangement.
The commentator George Will criticized Trump in a thoughtful column. Trump responded by saying people only think he’s smart because he wears glasses. That’s it! That captures it, that’s what the hat was all about. It was that simple.
Trump was a hero to a certain type of person like me. He was a hero to people who think the elite were self-serving, greedy and endlessly self-righteous. The elite use their education as a cudgel for beating up the working class. They believe it’s a meritocracy and they are deserving of their fate and we are deserving of our fate. Such nasty little pricks and then along comes the bloviating Trump monster. It was hilarious: colon hydrotherapy.
I use the past tense because Trump is an old man (5 years?) and is not really the issue. The working class will need a new champion and the elite are committed to ensuring it never happens again: the rabble were roused. Underneath Trump hate is distain for the working class, the uneducated. Trump: “I love the uneducated “. The elite are vicious, righteous, true believers.
Don't you think you're being a little generous to call it "group therapy?" I thought that was supposed to help people be better, not make them want to be worse.
You are too smart to buy the Marxist claptrap. Read "From Marx to Mises" by Steele and see what you think.
I don't have any solution to what you call "capitalism," and its problems are real; but if there's anything that's clear, it's that Marxism and communism bring us from unpleasant dream to nightmare.
Great post. I once polled my millennial friends on the "worst president" in their lifetimes, and a vast majority said Trump with only a couple choosing Bush or Reagan. For the first 3 years, especially, this made no sense for all the reasons you stated -- Bush and Reagan both have staggering body counts on their hands, while Trump was too disinterested in the world to start wars.
When covid-19 happened, I thought, holy shit, he's starting to live up to his reputation -- letting people die from neglect, actively encouraging his supporters to reject masks and precautions. Now his supporters refuse to be vaccinated. Our pandemic body count didn't have to be this high. But I suppose you have to compare it to a counterfactual world where President Hillary Clinton was in charge, with a Congress desperate for her to fail and Republicans ignoring her advice out of spite. Deaths might not have been much lower. She wouldn't have hung hospitals out to dry, though. She would have tried.
Bush and Reagan have more blood on their hands, to be sure, but I can forgive people for histrionics after living through 2020... or I would if they cared about senseless deaths more than crass Tweets, Russia, and January 6th.
Oh man, that tweet linking to Snyder. I think it was Corey Robin who made a tweet listing all the times over and over that Snyder made apocalyptic claims about Trump, like every year predicting that THIS will be the year that Trump does a Reichstag Fire to permanently seize power. Trying to remember if he then had to do some absurd mental gymnastics to try to explain away how/why Trump never actually used the emergencies that actually did happen like COVID to take control.
Honestly, the catastrophization is based on something real, an understanding that this system just doesn't work, and it's probably not going to be solved. It's just borne of a certain optimism about the system of government the US was formed with- that if you just elected someone, it would change the fundamental dysfunction the US constitution. Unfortunately, it's not the case. Combined, especially, with an economic system dominated by capital, it's doomed to fail. It's nice to see, for example, some of the constituencies in the Democratic coalition realizing the structural disadvantages they have in the US system, but I don't think that's going to be common enough to really make changes.
For example, the extolling of the power of state governments is interesting because the economic forces are well beyond the power of any one to control. The Governor of West Virginia and its legislature are simply not capable of making any kind of meaningful change for the people of the state, even if they were actually inclined toward it. But somehow, this is considered in the system equal to say, California. There's this ideal that it reflects local issues, but once again, many states have complex, diverse electorates inside them and pretty much all of the big, nationally influential state governments rule over so many different constituencies.
Of course some of the poorest of the country are going to not have the same reverence for the US constitution that the "glorious middle class" does. It was not made to give the poor representation, anything they have is almost by accident. It guarantees them almost nothing. Instead it pits rural against urban through the geographical disadvantages given to the urban populations.
Also, the FPTP and winner-take-all electoral systems run heavily against trying to do something with a new party. There's not really a way to win a little and build up, you have to do it all at once and everything in this country runs against that.
When someone says "Trump is the worst President in American history" I find I can safely ignore everything else they have to say about politics or history or America. It reveals either a lack of knowledge or morality.
The liberal rehabilitation of George Bush is absolutely infuriating. I grew up during the Bush years and remember the politics of the era very well. Liberals have no moral ground to stand on if they elect to forgive and ignore such an objectively worse president, in really every way. The only thing that Bush didn't do was be mean online, and that's the REAL, deep seated reason that Trump drove liberals insane- he was directly mean to them. Trump knocked over their block tower in political daycare. Liberals have a cheap adherence to tiny rules that they love enforcing, Trump bucked the trend.
Could the characterization of Republicans as 'monsters' be counterproductive here? In American terms, Trump governed as a moderate, and certainly hewed far closer to neoliberalism than he did to populism. (I know you're not defending neoliberalism - quite the opposite - but bear with me.) If this renders someone monstrous then a good 40% of the country is monstrous. And, much as you say that Bush has been rehabilitated... well, I was around then, I remember that he was A Monster then, and seeing how easily A Monster has become A Wise Elder Statesman makes me far less apt to care about monsters in the future. After all, they're everywhere, they're 40% of the country, and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of penalty for being one, at least not after a few years and a dozen headlines have elapsed.
It strikes me as a very self-defeating starting point. There are people on my side of the internet who genuinely believe that "white genocide" is a mainstream Democratic position. Obviously this is a cranky belief, but more than that... well, now what? You believe that 40% of the country wants you dead? Then you've already lost before you've started. You can't overcome that, especially when virtually nobody agrees with you. The same would apply to broad-brush patholigization of ones' opponents. It doesn't lead to action and it makes people throw up their hands in hopelessness.
Aside from that, I loved this article (as a Trump supporter) and I can see so much relevance of it on my own side as well.
"Donald Trump will be dead within five years. He has no political heir, and I would argue can have none."
"I demand the right to also point out that the Democrats certainly seem to be failing to do what’s necessary to prevent the next Trump, who will likely have a functioning brain and will thus be far more dangerous."
Don't these two statements conflict? Is there going to be a next Trump or not? Or are you using some definition of "political heir" here that maybe I'm not aware of? For my part, I think it's pretty clear that people like Hawley are indeed positioning themselves as the next Trump, using many of the same tactics Trump used.
Also, I think Democrats are doing things to prevent the next Trump. These include passing laws and trying to get laws passed that would make real life better for millions of people, including the American Jobs Plan, the American Families Plan, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the MORE Act, etc. They're trying to use government to help people, however imperfectly.