Eh…it depends on how you define “the poor.” The decline in immigration due to the pandemic did lead to a surge in wages and working conditions at the bottom. But many legal and almost all illegal immigrants were significantly worse off than even poor Americans.
<gasp> Oh no...a Reformer! How dare you claim anything was good before the 21st century! Call the police!...I mean, call the emotional support arbitrators!!
"If he wanted to provide real student debt relief he would let students file for bankruptcy on their loans, not forgive a small fraction of them."
I agree that would be a good decision, but, unfortunately, it is not Biden's decision to make. Congress would need to change the law, and such a change won't happen while the filibuster exists. It sucks, but it's not Biden's fault that it isn't changing. In any case, there's no way students do better under Ron DeSantis.
Why did this law (not allowing bankruptcy for student loans) get implemented in the first place? Anyone know the history on this? That seems like such an obviously draconian measure to me.
It's remarkable to me the impact the high price of Higher Ed has on a whole host of other things: housing affordability, loan defaults, interest accumulation, and just basic consumer purchasing power...at least early on. And I feel like simply trying to alleviate the insanely high cost in the first place would be so much more helpful for these things.
It's actually been difficult to discharge student loans in bankruptcy since 1979. The Republicans (and select Democrats like Joe Biden) made it even more difficult in 2005.
To be fair, the Squad and the rest of the champagne socialists are not really radicals. They want to trick the public into thinking they are so that people will support democrats.
`I might vote for DeSantis in 2024 because Biden hasn't done anything for poor & working class people (if he wanted to provide real student debt relief he would let students file for bankruptcy on their loans, not forgive a small fraction of them).'
It feels a bit icky to be defending Democrats so much lately on this board, but what solely-Republican/Republican-inspired initiative/law has explicitly benefited the working class since at least the 1980s?
As Mark pointed out Biden can't do what you're asking. Do you know why? Because Republicans oppose now, and have consistently opposed, discharging of students loans in bankruptcy. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate opposed the `Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005'---all nays were Democratic votes. It was a Republican bill!
Joe Biden certainly did a lot more for student loan borrowers than previous Republicans (and Democrats) in reforming the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which previously had a ~99% rejection rate despite people thinking/being promised that they were covered by the program (and planning their post college career based on it).
"...what solely-Republican/Republican-inspired initiative/law has explicitly benefited the working class since at least the 1980s?"
That's mangling the conservative position, which favors small government and a minimum of economic regulation as a means of economic prosperity.
Regarding student loan forgiveness: if there is no specific payment mechanism it's coming out of the general fund and at that point it's regressive. I make about $200k a year. Why exactly should a waitress or landscaper pay off my student loans?
In the entirety of the federal regulatory apparatus the Republicans can't be bothered to find a single issue that unquestionably benefits most workers yet they can be relied upon to consistently find ways to unburden Wall St? Very convenient that their position always necessitates policies that happen to benefit Wall St/Big Business/etc. much more directly than workers.
Feel free to not apply for loan forgiveness---it's optional. (Wait, shouldn't you be ineligible for loan forgiveness at $200k or is that the household income?) As a practical matter a waitress or landscaper is probably not paying any federal income taxes and, in fact, receives more in benefits than they pay for in taxes if they did. More concretely, we all pay for things we don't agree with. Why do I have to pay taxes to fund defense contractors when I don't agree with our military expenditures? Those engineers at Lockheed are making a lot more than I am (despite the fact that I've taught more than a few of them). I don't have kids, why do I have to support the Department of Education or pay for local bonds for the school district? Why do I have to pay for insurance for wealthy elderly people?
Because this is a liberal democracy and the populace has some say over how taxes are used and I've bought into the system.
How is that any different that the Democrats? Glass Steagall was repealed under Clinton.
My individual income is $200k--now. Back when I got out of school I was very comfortable--and still eligible under the $250k household cap. The fact that the threshold for household income is so high is a dead giveaway that this is a political ploy. If the issue is individuals burdened with debt why extend the program to the wealthy? And in what universe is a waitress or a landscaper not paying any federal income tax? And what benefits do you think the working poor receive to offset the taxes that they pay?
The problem with this tax is that it's REGRESSIVE. All taxes are not equal. I have an idea--let's condemn a bunch of low income housing and build a luxury hotel over those razed homes. The net benefit to the community will probably outweigh the damage to the lives of a bunch of poor people. There is always a need for new freeways--let's just build a few through some poor inner city neighborhoods. Again, a net positive for the community. Or how about some chemical factories?
The only acceptable means for funding Biden's debt program would have been to tax Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Since he couldn't do that he made everyone--including waitresses, landscapers, bus boys--foot the bill. That is unacceptable.
As I noted elsewhere in another thread in this post, only Democrats were opposed to that bill (Gramm-Leach-Bliley, all Republicans) in the Senate, and only one Democratic senator voted for it. Immense pressure was exerted by the Clinton administration in the House and yet a number of Democrats (and about five Republicans) opposed it. It's a Republican bill and represents the apotheosis of neoliberal policies by the Clintonites, was loudly complained about then and ever since by the left.
We can argue about the cutoff income for loan forgiveness but it's true that some families making $250k per year are under financial pressure because of their local cost of living (like those in the DMV, CA, NYC) and will be afforded substantive relief through the program.
Mitt Romney was not wrong when he said that ~47% of the country doesn't pay federal income taxes, as I've pointed out in a previous post. If a waitress, landscaper, etc. is making less than ~$45k then they're not likely paying any (or very little) in federal income taxes (payroll, yes). And I'm fine with that because I believe in progressive taxation---I'm glad to offer this subsidy to low income workers. Low income workers may be eligible for earned income tax credit, medicaid, and a host of grants to attend school. As a low income graduate student I once paid no federal taxes and in fact received a credit (cash) of a couple of thousand dollars!
No new taxes have been levied to pay for this program. So it's `regressive' in exactly the same way increasing the defense budget every year is `regressive.' According to your thinking all spending that isn't covered by payments to the government for that budget period is regressive.
As I've said elsewhere here, it *is* overwhelmingly the wealthy who are paying for program as they pay the majority of taxes.
Absent Clinton's support the Glass Steagall repeal would have never happened. And what populist economic measures have been championed by any Democratic president? Clinton was also one of the principal backers of NAFTA and other trade measures that drove blue collar jobs abroad. What, for example, did Obama ever do? Talk about how "those jobs are never coming back"?
" federal income taxes (payroll, yes)."
How is this a distinction with any meaningful difference?
How many low income earner will end up going to graduate school? Especially now as high college tuition costs are increasingly spurring a class divide in the college educated?
Student loan forgiveness is regressive because it disproportionately benefits one wealthier segment of the population at the expense of the less fortunate. Time and time again we have heard that college degree earners make more over their lifetime than those with only a high school diploma. Is that true or isn't it? If yes then those individuals who have chosen to attend college have made the deliberate calculation that some debt upfront is justified in the context of greater lifetime earnings. What is the justification for government to subsidize high earners, as compared to welfare mom's or the homeless?
So let's say that the government plans to institute a subsidy program for luxury yachts. Anyone who purchases their own yacht will be eligible for a government check.. The fund will be paid for with a general tax based on income. So a waitress might kick in $10 for the pay the rich fund while a lawyer might contribute $1000. Regressive or not?
I think Biden got it right on the Student Loan forgiveness program. It was enough to get a lot of people off the hook, but not so much that it rewarded people who took out huge loans for a great big party.
The legislation to allow Medicare to bargain with Big Pharma is a huge step in the right direction.
He's a celebrity now. It apparently takes a lot of something to avoid celebrity going to your head (not a problem I will ever have to worry about, and I am quite glad - the only (former) celebrity I know got seriously fucked up from the experience, which was fortunately fairly brief).
`Gender ID is a metaphysical religious belief, and I am no happier about Gender Ideologues forcing their religious beliefs on me than I am about evangelicals doing the same.'
Somehow I doubt that the party/movement that implies (declares) LGBTQ people and their allies are sexually grooming children, that TQ persons are evil, and all of `this' is a result of LGB persons getting the right to marry, are the right group of people to be relying on for answers to very difficult questions like how we humanely and fairly incorporate TQ people into women's spaces and sports and how the mental and physical health of gender questioning youth should be addressed.
> all of `this' is a result of LGB persons getting the right to marry
Weirdly, it sort of is. Right after we won, big orgs like Stonewall and HRC pivoted to gender, and the analogy (“it’s the next gay rights”) was effective, especially in the UK.
Whether that’s good or bad is not something we debate here, and I respect the rule.
But if we hadn’t won marriage (yet), everything would look different now. And I shudder to imagine how the gay marriage debate would go in these woke times. We’d probably set ourselves back 20 years in the red states, while the blue states went overboard with tax breaks and dedicated venues….
I agree with you but I don't think conservatives are looking at it the same way that we are. For them it's that allowing LGB to marry inevitably leads to Drag Queen Story hour, all of the other stuff we don't debate, and the downfall of western civilization. I think most of us can be supportive of LGB marriage and TQ rights and still think that there are difficult issues to resolve. To (social) conservatives LGB marriage is the origin of the present evil and it would be better if it were rolled back and, if not, bestiality and pedophilia per force must follow and be allowed.
If you think that the Democrats "are the right group of people to be relying on for answers to very difficult questions like how we humanely and fairly incorporate TQ people into women's spaces and sports", you should realize that the Democrats' proposed legislation does no such thing: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5
Mark, I've been involved in discussions with you about this before and we disagree about the protections against abuse that that bill includes (and I assure you that I'm worried about abuses as well). Since we don't discuss specifics of this issue here, the point I was trying to make above is that because you're a liberal, even though I disagree with you on this issue and find your earlier rhetoric painful, I still feel that you're someone I can talk with because you don't think TQ people are evil and thus we can arrive at a compromise. You don't demonize people and are amenable to evidence, as I am.
>I might vote for DeSantis in 2024 because Biden hasn't done anything for poor & working class people
The expanded, monthly payments for the child tax credit were absolutely something. The extra 800 bucks a month was nice for me, but the extra 500 my brother got was really helpful for him. It would have been a great policy to lock in permanently, and I was sorry to see it go.
What comparable policy do you imagine DeSantis passing? The only thing I can see him doing that would affect my brother is killing off Medicaid expansion, which would mean he loses his health insurance.
All diversity committees ever minted, all the corporate inclusion statements and unisex johns, none of that changes the way the economic pie is sliced.
*Strongly* disagree. The things you describe have provided a significant increase in the section of the economic pie going to Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D'Angelo, Melina Abdullah, Patrisse Cullors (those last two are BLM Los Angeles and may not have a national profile), ...
It seems probable that there are a reasonable number of grifters associated with the more hardcore gender activist groups too, but since to date there haven't been any riots (excuse me - "uprisings") associated with the far fringe of gender activism there's a little less opportunity to extort protection money.
Not a joking matter IMHO. Yea, like the poor, the grifters we will always have with us, but some grifters are more equal (i.e., damaging in disproportion to the fraction of the dollars/status pie they and their apparatus redirect and/or destroy) than others.
I’ve been trying very hard to follow my own logic -- that there’s no meaningful lever on this system right now, CERTAINLY no electoral lever, ergo no “responsibility of the citizen to be informed” -- to its clear conclusion and drop out of following national political news. It’s gone about as well as I’d expect so far -- I definitely still know way no or than the average voter, but I tend to get the bad news closer to when it happens, instead of months of “well this bad thing could happen but we hope it won’t, it would be irresponsible to let something that bad occur” in the lead-up.
Meanwhile I continue to follow geopolitics because that intuitively has no lever. Watching the US bully North Korea, I can see there’s unwise action, but in a much clearer “are you sure you don’t wanna be a liiittle more detailed in that telegram, Kaiser?” war.
I loved this exhortation, to: "Take your own perspective seriously." It's a discordance I cannot get past in many movements - in most Christian-political fusion movements I grew up around, and more recently in BLM and various other "Great Awokening" movements.
If you actually believed in our corruption and the supremacy and implacability of the forces of evil/greed/lust/racism, you'd not adopt the strategy you're devoted yourself to - of insisting you can prevail by electoral means, with establishment support and righteous contempt for those who doubt or question you.
It's not an unattractive or even necessarily wrong approach. But it is a triumphantalist one, and inconsistent with what the activists and preachers claimed to believe and to have based their theory on
I really wish there was a good name for this group. I'm always trying to distinguish between essentially this group and normie Dems and there isn't really a good way. "Liberal" includes a lot of normie Dems - Biden is arguably a liberal. "Progressive" suffers from the same problem. I tend to use "Left" but that is potentially confusing, both because it sometimes implies the entire left side of the political spectrum, and sometimes implies people who are to the left of the Dem party.
So I have this very half-baked theory that links the current left-of-lib "why don't the democrats enact socialist policies that are transparently and perpetually contrary to their stated goals?" crowd with the ongoing - for lack of a better term - self-infantilization thing. By the "self-infantilization thing," I mean precisely the endless accommodation demanding you've written about in the past - the way it has become ever more empowering to insist one has no power. It extends far beyond disability/mental health spaces (where it is consistently most visible and most innovated) - and dovetails with the "you can never be a good man/white person/straight person/whatever so why try?" issue you've also touched on. The modern progressive or progressive-adjacent position is one of insistent helplessness. The disabled and mentally ill need the world constantly adjusted to their needs, including when those needs conflict with other people's needs - the most loudly helpless wins. Violence and political action and artistic movements and everything else that is committed by or mostly by people of color is actually the long arm of white supremacy. The European imperialists somehow taught the Japanese; without whitey, there was only ever helplessness. Trans people stage die-ins over books they don't like. I say this as a disabled (legally anyways - I'm really chronically ill) lesbian - these are communities that have my sympathy, but they are currently invested beyond measure in their despair. There is no action to be taken, only complaints to be filed. Somebody else must fix it, post-haste.
It's LAZY! I think it's truly lazy. I want to be more clever and interesting, but I truly think an intense and abiding laziness grips the current progressive twitter intelligentsia. What other explanation is there for insisting that things like being nice to your friends or washing your daughter's hair is "[emotional] labor"? What other explanation is there for the waves of people who come out to say that they HAVE to cross the picket lines when Uber/Lyft/InstaCart/Amazon etc. strikes, because they're disabled and bedbound and helpless and alone and weak? What other explanation is there for the scores of grown adults insisting things like replying to emails or doing the dishes drains them to nothing due to ADHD? (This particular mutation of ADHD, of course, never strikes the working poor.) I think it's the failure of Occupy - its lack of central organizing, goals, or ACTION beyond public sitting - writ large (which was certainly borne out by the 2020 "uprisings"). It's baffling and of course only doomed to fail.
Of COURSE such people are entranced by semi-radical sounding promises from democrats on the campaign trail. They don't WANT a leftist coalition to accomplish their goals, they want the democrats to do it for them. Of COURSE they insist Kamala Harris, fighting forest fires with slave labor, is a symbol of imperialism toppled - they don't want to do the work! I know I sound like a whiny old man but I'm 29 and have occupied progressive spaces since 2011 - I went to an extremely liberal artsy liberal arts college in New York, I attended graduate school in a very liberal field (education) in NYC, I'm a teacher in the same city.
I think it's bizarre. But there's a prevailing sense that endless self-infantilization will somehow work in the end, and it stresses me out. I know this is disorganized and more than a little mean - I'm supposed to be grading and haven't slept much. But I think there's a total paralysis of actual ACTION in the modern progressive semi-left (and left!!). It's all about reaction - defend her, get her fired, etc. - without a plan, without a goal, without a sense that if we want something done we might just have to actually do it.
IDK where I'm going with this. Hopefully it's semi-coherent.
I'm talking about the endless tweets about how being an adult with ADHD means being completely free of interpersonal responsibilities because of ADHD. My point isn't that ADHD doesn't make it hard to reply to emails or do the dishes - it sure does! - my point is that the insistence that it is fully crippling comes from very specific circles.
Laziness is not very convenient for me, since the alterative is that I've got it wrong and the world will be brought into a righteous age with ritualized helplessness at the vanguard (boy would I love to be wrong and see a righteous age arrive, given certain values of righteous). Laziness is very inconvenient as it makes ME feel helpless. I want to be clear that I on the side of the marginalized - racially, socially, economically. I want what the same people I'm describing profess to want, but... If the goal is to look as good as possible while doing as little as possible, how is anyone going to animate a movement?
Not really sure what your point is but hopefully I've at least semi-addressed it.
They're not my ideological opponents, that's my point. They're my ideological allies - specifically, they're the people who more-or-less believe what I believe (vis a vis healthcare, housing, capitalism, etc.) who have the biggest platform on the (inter)national stage. Hence my despair.
I think Lazy is close, but I would offer a more precise term that you already alluded to when you say "self-infantilization": Childish. Or at least Immature.
I think most of these people are simply childish. They want everything on their own terms. Anything that happened before them is not important. They are unwilling to 'wait' for progress to happen, it has to be now. And when confronted with reasonable or otherwise alternate points of view, they almost immediately cry foul and demand punishment.
They are like a grade school classroom, except they themselves are running the school.
Isn't this because so much of being 'radical left' is just being 'radical left' online? Aka performing rather than doing radical left work. Like FdB says of the Democrats, attacking these people is like stepping on a rake because they'll never actually be the thing we'd like.
At their caricatured hearts, the Left believes everyone's problems are caused by the environment, and the Right believes everyone's problems are caused by a lack of hard work/discipline. Obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle but it can lead to a disdain by the left for even attempting to fix things individually and, at the same time, a disdain on the right for accepting even the mildest forms of "some people have it worse than others."
It's actually mostly the other way around. When individuals, families, small groups, and communities are thick on the ground taking care of the small stuff, society (and thus government) isn't distracted by trying to solve everyone's tiny problems and can think and aim for the big stuff. Dissolution and chaos at the grass roots, by contrast, sucks everything down into a morass of quotidian bullshit and dysfunction from which nothing can escape
I don't think everyone on the right believes this. I think it would be fairly conventional wisdom on the right that if you grow up in a single parent home with a mother who has no work history and peers that sell drugs or steal cars, you have a better than average chance of acquiring bad habits and behaviors and ending up not unlike those around you.
Hard work and discipline can help an individual overcome these types of obstacles, but an average person would be better off without having to face them.
I think the real difference between left and right is the right's skepticism that government can do much about this reality. They think the left is going to use a bunch of taxpayer money to create a bureaucracy that will sit in air-conditioned office blocks writing memos that solve none of these problems.
Even your seemingly benign comment here lends itself to a typical conservative response: hard work and discipline can solve most things, and government can't. The former is rarely true in terms of the lower class, and the latter is, all things considered, rarely untrue.
Bill Maher was talking to Bill Burr the other day, and Burr was going off about how the federal gov is pretty much a bunch of bull-shitters who just screw over average joe's all the time, and that will never change. Maher countered easily with a simple anecdote: somewhere there's a guy working in an office who is making life better for people.
Maher's point is simply that not nearly everyone in gov are greedy sycophants only out for themselves, but rather that there are legions of unknown and unheralded public officials quietly doing their job trying to make the world a better place. And that those people are really the majority of federal employees, the one's who are wisely and dutifully spending our tax dollars. It's mostly the greedy asshats that get press, and tank the rep of everyone else.
Problem is those greedy asshats can cause so much damage per capita these days that they are actually managing to screw up just about everything for everybody else. Fun fact: most people that go into government are decent, hard-working, and compassionate people. It's when they start getting a lot of power that the temptations become heavy.
"Even your seemingly benign comment here lends itself to a typical conservative response: hard work and discipline can solve most things..."
I think talented people with a good work ethic/personality traits can and frequently do overcome life obstacles. Take one look at the gulf in intergenerational economic mobility between immigrants and native born in the U.S. and you will see the problem is not that poverty itself is intractable, it's the nature of why one is impoverished that can be daunting.
"Maher's point is simply that not nearly everyone in gov are greedy sycophants only out for themselves, but rather that there are legions of unknown and unheralded public officials quietly doing their job trying to make the world a better place."
Greedy sycophants would not be the first description I would use of most federal bureaucrats. Most people are just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. The difference between public and private workers is the design of the button by their employer - does pecking it do something productive or does it just make the food come out? The simpler the task, the more the button design suggests itself, so if the task is to deliver a letter from A to B, the federal government might do so less efficiently than a private business, but it will still accomplish the job. But if you assign it complicated tasks like improving education outcomes or providing job training to the under-employed, the button design will prioritize continued congressional funding, not achieving the supposed objectives of the program.
I've spent my life interacting with federal financial regulators and no belief in government can survive that experience.
Michael Lewis wrote a book called the Fifth Column. As a book it was rushed out and not of his usual quality, but he went through some of the federal bureaucracies and the important work they actually did.
Fifth Risk, not Column. I didn't read it, but note that the Federal government spends over $4 trillion a year. Finding enough tasks they accomplish to fill a short book is not quite the accolade you might think it is.
I think it has to do with the “tendency for interpersonal victimhood.” The train of thought goes like this: I have been put down/marginalized/hurt by society - this is wrong - someone needs to Make This Right. Which is pointless, even if the initial condition was was genuinely morally wrong. Because those in power generally don't care. And those who are doing the hurting DEFINITELY don't care. Yeah, it sucks that marginalized people have to be the ones putting in the effort to convince the people who marginalized them that they deserve to be part of the game, but that's the only way it gets better.
I'd add my own hypothesis: a lot of the new "left-of-liberal" and "progressive" sphere, including the ones who call themselves radical, are rooted in the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). They get this incredibly skewed idea that "radical" change is about charity: good people (which inevitably means *rich* people) give up resources they have to support Radical Social Justice (which inevitably means them at their nonprofit). Since the point is to appeal for external charitable funding, you're not *supposed* to build a sustainable mass movement/party/organization of the working class that can act under its own power and within a budget.
Victims of "top-down" thinking; you don't need to do the hard work of building coalitions if you can just get the right people at the top to change the law your way. this is effective at getting "diversity initiatives" and other token efforts, but lousy at any kind of systemic change.
> This particular mutation of ADHD, of course, never strikes the working poor.
Or teachers, even at liberal arts colleges (unless you count them among the working poor, which is getting more accurate every day). I can just imagine the fury around here if one day the students didn't get their personalised comments on Essay Draft 1 back in time to work them into Essay Draft 2 because the teacher was struggling with her ADHD.
Ok, thanks for the salutary reminder. Here’s a proposal for all you like-minded out there. Remodel the point of departure. The ongoing clash of the 2 party titans isn’t serving our democracy very well, and, in the larger historical sense, it remains a pearl of great price. It could be preserved by expansion: a bigger House, which hasn’t been expanded in 100 years. It could be invigorated by proportional allocation of electoral votes - like Maine and Nebraska- on the basis of congressional district counts. Stuff like that. A third party fighting for a place at the table might outflank the Titans that way. Just sayin’...
"The Democrats" is doing a lot of work here. I've had this discussion a lot within DSA, and it's worth being explicit about what you mean by the term. If you're writing off the 81 million who voted for Biden, you should give up on any hope off a mass movement. If you're talking about Democratic officeholders (or the kinds of people who get elected as Democrats), there's clear evidence that can be changed as dramatic realignments have occurred after major changes like the New Deal or the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of US thought writing off the Democratic Party as irredeemable is dominated by Chicago 1968 which operated under completely different rules that we've dealt with since Citizens United in 2010.
Any national political movement is in danger of either being "in thrall to moneyed interests", crushed by them, or both. Both BLM and the environmental movement have obvious examples of each - people who ended up in mansions and people who ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Avoiding the Democratic Party doesn't protect you from that except to the extent that you remain too small to ever be a threat.
This is a really good point. Some degree of corruption and hypocrisy is endemic to politics and everyone is human. You don’t have to look far in the progressive movement for evidence of this (BLM and Women’s March being prominent recent examples of movements that got corporate endorsements but effectuated very little policy change).
I was a senior in college during the 1992 Clinton Bush election. Among the big group of people I ran around with, I was the only person that paid attention to politics and that was passing at best. Literally, we never talked about politics. 80% of the people were lucky if they could explain the difference between a republican and a democrat let alone what side they came down on. Nerds and policy wonks watched CNN. I met a guy at a bar that was a hard core lefty (I was conservative leaning) and we totally hit it off because I came across somebody who at least paid attention.
Fast forward to today and my fifth grader gets in political arguments at the lunch table. I think in America, we just put too much faith in people that are far too ordinary to compel the change we would like to see, whatever that might be.
It's funny to read this column because it reads just like complaints on the right. Complaints about "establishment" "RINO" etc. Both sides of the argument are completely convinced that the other side is far better at outfoxing their side. The reality is that the only thing that really ever changes in this country is the rhetoric and your tax rate.
Wow, 1992 sounds like a dream. I hate how politics has become our national pastime. I would rather talk about literally anything else, but sadly it seems to be a lot of people's primary interest these days.
While I agree with the central point of this post (social media proximity breeds conflict and close losses breed disappointment), I think the following is ungenerous:
"What I find so strange about the left-of-liberals of the world is that they constantly say, “The Democrats are so feckless and corrupt! Why won’t they support my radical agenda?” And the obvious answer is because they’re feckless and corrupt, dummy!"
I mean...maybe a lot of establishment Democrats sincerely believe France-levels of taxation and government interference lead to France-like outcomes. Maybe it's not fecklessness and corruption, but actual belief that pre-Thatcher/Reagan policies had swung too far to be globally competitive and a return to them is a mistake, hence the focus on more symbolic/shambolic change and hot button cultural issues.
Right, not suggesting that some politicians aren't personally corrupt. Plainly, a number of them are, but the point of the FdB line I quoted appears to be that establishment Democrats secretly agree with Progressives' policy objectives but are corrupted by big business into not actually enacting Progressives' economic agenda. I'm gently suggesting that this is wrong. Establishment Democrats are at rough peace with the Reagan-ite shifting of the Overton window, even if you wouldn't know it from (some of the) rhetoric (some of the time).
The last two left-of-left presidential nominees were McGovern and Mondale. In what may not be a coincidence, the only two blow-out elections since WW2 were...McGovern and Mondale.
I had a similar reaction: I don't exactly love the current system, but if I could change it all with a wave of my hand, it wouldn't be to socialism. Nor would most centrist Democrats.
France-like outcomes don't look so bad at the moment. Nobody I ever talk to from France thinks they live in a shithole country or feels overawed by visiting America.
It's not a shithole. No Western European country is. But it's a clearly less dynamic economy, experiencing lower growth and higher structural unemployment. It has a lower GDP per capita today than it did in 2008.
I think your essays are way more important than your vote. For example my views on mental illness have been expanded greatly because of you. If you think of our system as bottom-up, not top-down, than your observations of the differences between radicals and Dems makes complete sense. The Democrats are a political party, they are constricted to winning elections, they do not, and can not act as a force for change. They are not leaders, and I really don't want them to be. They are lead by, well, us. Change our minds and you'll change the actions of the D's and the R's.
Well said. I think missing from Freddie's analysis is the idea that the center Democrats or center liberals have policy disagreements with the radical left, and the radical left doesn't run the party, so they need to persuade the center left (or *some* other part of the left) that their policies are worth the costs.
One can be fooled into thinking the center left is more progressive than it is by polling them about universal health care or other radical left policies without comparing those policies to other priorities or to the costs of enacting them.
I do think they are a force for change, just incremental change. Obamacare was incremental change. They had to gut a lot of it in order to get it passed, but it was a start. Now the portion of allowing Medicare to dicker with pharma got put in.
Still Obamacare allowed me to have health insurance the last ten years. Private pay was a nightmare. I would have been uninsured and likely bankrupt.
I was trying to say that the parties are not the *cause* of the change, they just carry out the change. It's the voters who ultimately cause change (so are the force for change). I guess this is sort of an obvious point, but I find a lot of people focus on the parties themselves as if changing a party will change the outcomes, when I think it is probably a better bet to change the underlying constituencies' attitudes and the parties will just go along. Manchin doesn't vote against certain things because he personally feels one way or another about it, it's because his constituency does. Gay marriage is a good example. It was only when the majority of the country was OK with it that the exact same politicians who were against it "changed their minds" and were for it.
I was one of those Hillary democrats who hated the "Bernie bros." I left the party in 2020. Here's the thing: I'd be all in on everything people like AOC are doing. Or even Bernie. But my problem is that it always has to be on a national level. The problems for people in this country are different per states. The Democrats don't seem to care about the problems of the Black community in, say, St. Louis but they're all up in Yale University's grill about antiracism. That I don't get. I'd be all in if they focused their efforts in places that really need the help IMO like Georgia or Chicago. Or even New York. Or hell, here in California. If you drive down Laurel Canyon into the valley it doesn't look like the blue state it's supposed to be. I'm not even talking about homelessness, which is everywhere, but the working class poor who live in crap neighborhoods. It's not that different from the divide in New Orleans between the Garden District and across town. So in red states, you figure, you'd expect that. But what about blue states? Why doesn't Gavin Newsom care about poverty in this very rich state? That is the part I find frustrating about the Democrats.
I don't remember "the radicals" being the only ones opposing the Iraq war.
Eh…it depends on how you define “the poor.” The decline in immigration due to the pandemic did lead to a surge in wages and working conditions at the bottom. But many legal and almost all illegal immigrants were significantly worse off than even poor Americans.
It's kinda like helping the homeless; we tried the Dems way, and it sucked. Did. Not. Work.
Time to bypass the bullshit and try something that doesn't have a track record of failure.
<gasp> Oh no...a Reformer! How dare you claim anything was good before the 21st century! Call the police!...I mean, call the emotional support arbitrators!!
Allowing bankruptcy on student loans requires a change in law, which Republicans will block.
"If he wanted to provide real student debt relief he would let students file for bankruptcy on their loans, not forgive a small fraction of them."
I agree that would be a good decision, but, unfortunately, it is not Biden's decision to make. Congress would need to change the law, and such a change won't happen while the filibuster exists. It sucks, but it's not Biden's fault that it isn't changing. In any case, there's no way students do better under Ron DeSantis.
Why did this law (not allowing bankruptcy for student loans) get implemented in the first place? Anyone know the history on this? That seems like such an obviously draconian measure to me.
Thanks.
Interesting.
It's remarkable to me the impact the high price of Higher Ed has on a whole host of other things: housing affordability, loan defaults, interest accumulation, and just basic consumer purchasing power...at least early on. And I feel like simply trying to alleviate the insanely high cost in the first place would be so much more helpful for these things.
It was, if I remember correctly, a bargaining chip Bill Clinton extended to help secure some unrelated piece of legislation.
Lovely.
And Biden helped make it worse in 2005 when he helped pass the law that expanded the scope to private student loans.
I think the final law was passed under George W. Bush, in 2005, although Congress had been tightening things up in the 90s as well.
Obviously, I disagree with that policy change. To say the least.
https://www.gq.com/story/joe-biden-bankruptcy-bill
A good history: https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-history
It's actually been difficult to discharge student loans in bankruptcy since 1979. The Republicans (and select Democrats like Joe Biden) made it even more difficult in 2005.
I believe the problem with bankruptcy for student loans was the incentive for students to wrack up debt, then dispense with it through bankruptcy.
Is it unimaginable that some unscrupulous, lazy person would take out a few hundred thousand dollars in debt, then say I can't repay this?
“ not forgive a small fraction of them”
The median balance is something like $25k. So no, $10k isn’t a small fraction.
To be fair, the Squad and the rest of the champagne socialists are not really radicals. They want to trick the public into thinking they are so that people will support democrats.
`I might vote for DeSantis in 2024 because Biden hasn't done anything for poor & working class people (if he wanted to provide real student debt relief he would let students file for bankruptcy on their loans, not forgive a small fraction of them).'
It feels a bit icky to be defending Democrats so much lately on this board, but what solely-Republican/Republican-inspired initiative/law has explicitly benefited the working class since at least the 1980s?
As Mark pointed out Biden can't do what you're asking. Do you know why? Because Republicans oppose now, and have consistently opposed, discharging of students loans in bankruptcy. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate opposed the `Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005'---all nays were Democratic votes. It was a Republican bill!
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/256/actions
The only ones now talking about changing this are Democrats.
https://fortune.com/2022/10/11/bill-discharge-student-loan-debt-bankruptcy/
Joe Biden certainly did a lot more for student loan borrowers than previous Republicans (and Democrats) in reforming the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which previously had a ~99% rejection rate despite people thinking/being promised that they were covered by the program (and planning their post college career based on it).
"...what solely-Republican/Republican-inspired initiative/law has explicitly benefited the working class since at least the 1980s?"
That's mangling the conservative position, which favors small government and a minimum of economic regulation as a means of economic prosperity.
Regarding student loan forgiveness: if there is no specific payment mechanism it's coming out of the general fund and at that point it's regressive. I make about $200k a year. Why exactly should a waitress or landscaper pay off my student loans?
In the entirety of the federal regulatory apparatus the Republicans can't be bothered to find a single issue that unquestionably benefits most workers yet they can be relied upon to consistently find ways to unburden Wall St? Very convenient that their position always necessitates policies that happen to benefit Wall St/Big Business/etc. much more directly than workers.
Feel free to not apply for loan forgiveness---it's optional. (Wait, shouldn't you be ineligible for loan forgiveness at $200k or is that the household income?) As a practical matter a waitress or landscaper is probably not paying any federal income taxes and, in fact, receives more in benefits than they pay for in taxes if they did. More concretely, we all pay for things we don't agree with. Why do I have to pay taxes to fund defense contractors when I don't agree with our military expenditures? Those engineers at Lockheed are making a lot more than I am (despite the fact that I've taught more than a few of them). I don't have kids, why do I have to support the Department of Education or pay for local bonds for the school district? Why do I have to pay for insurance for wealthy elderly people?
Because this is a liberal democracy and the populace has some say over how taxes are used and I've bought into the system.
How is that any different that the Democrats? Glass Steagall was repealed under Clinton.
My individual income is $200k--now. Back when I got out of school I was very comfortable--and still eligible under the $250k household cap. The fact that the threshold for household income is so high is a dead giveaway that this is a political ploy. If the issue is individuals burdened with debt why extend the program to the wealthy? And in what universe is a waitress or a landscaper not paying any federal income tax? And what benefits do you think the working poor receive to offset the taxes that they pay?
The problem with this tax is that it's REGRESSIVE. All taxes are not equal. I have an idea--let's condemn a bunch of low income housing and build a luxury hotel over those razed homes. The net benefit to the community will probably outweigh the damage to the lives of a bunch of poor people. There is always a need for new freeways--let's just build a few through some poor inner city neighborhoods. Again, a net positive for the community. Or how about some chemical factories?
The only acceptable means for funding Biden's debt program would have been to tax Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Since he couldn't do that he made everyone--including waitresses, landscapers, bus boys--foot the bill. That is unacceptable.
As I noted elsewhere in another thread in this post, only Democrats were opposed to that bill (Gramm-Leach-Bliley, all Republicans) in the Senate, and only one Democratic senator voted for it. Immense pressure was exerted by the Clinton administration in the House and yet a number of Democrats (and about five Republicans) opposed it. It's a Republican bill and represents the apotheosis of neoliberal policies by the Clintonites, was loudly complained about then and ever since by the left.
We can argue about the cutoff income for loan forgiveness but it's true that some families making $250k per year are under financial pressure because of their local cost of living (like those in the DMV, CA, NYC) and will be afforded substantive relief through the program.
Mitt Romney was not wrong when he said that ~47% of the country doesn't pay federal income taxes, as I've pointed out in a previous post. If a waitress, landscaper, etc. is making less than ~$45k then they're not likely paying any (or very little) in federal income taxes (payroll, yes). And I'm fine with that because I believe in progressive taxation---I'm glad to offer this subsidy to low income workers. Low income workers may be eligible for earned income tax credit, medicaid, and a host of grants to attend school. As a low income graduate student I once paid no federal taxes and in fact received a credit (cash) of a couple of thousand dollars!
No new taxes have been levied to pay for this program. So it's `regressive' in exactly the same way increasing the defense budget every year is `regressive.' According to your thinking all spending that isn't covered by payments to the government for that budget period is regressive.
As I've said elsewhere here, it *is* overwhelmingly the wealthy who are paying for program as they pay the majority of taxes.
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
Absent Clinton's support the Glass Steagall repeal would have never happened. And what populist economic measures have been championed by any Democratic president? Clinton was also one of the principal backers of NAFTA and other trade measures that drove blue collar jobs abroad. What, for example, did Obama ever do? Talk about how "those jobs are never coming back"?
" federal income taxes (payroll, yes)."
How is this a distinction with any meaningful difference?
How many low income earner will end up going to graduate school? Especially now as high college tuition costs are increasingly spurring a class divide in the college educated?
Student loan forgiveness is regressive because it disproportionately benefits one wealthier segment of the population at the expense of the less fortunate. Time and time again we have heard that college degree earners make more over their lifetime than those with only a high school diploma. Is that true or isn't it? If yes then those individuals who have chosen to attend college have made the deliberate calculation that some debt upfront is justified in the context of greater lifetime earnings. What is the justification for government to subsidize high earners, as compared to welfare mom's or the homeless?
Isn't the United States general fund raised through the progressive income-tax system? How is that regressive?
So let's say that the government plans to institute a subsidy program for luxury yachts. Anyone who purchases their own yacht will be eligible for a government check.. The fund will be paid for with a general tax based on income. So a waitress might kick in $10 for the pay the rich fund while a lawyer might contribute $1000. Regressive or not?
I think Biden got it right on the Student Loan forgiveness program. It was enough to get a lot of people off the hook, but not so much that it rewarded people who took out huge loans for a great big party.
The legislation to allow Medicare to bargain with Big Pharma is a huge step in the right direction.
Not that it is necessarily relevant, but I am like 99.9% sure that Beto is not even close to a billionaire. The guy does love losing elections though.
He's a celebrity now. It apparently takes a lot of something to avoid celebrity going to your head (not a problem I will ever have to worry about, and I am quite glad - the only (former) celebrity I know got seriously fucked up from the experience, which was fortunately fairly brief).
`Gender ID is a metaphysical religious belief, and I am no happier about Gender Ideologues forcing their religious beliefs on me than I am about evangelicals doing the same.'
Somehow I doubt that the party/movement that implies (declares) LGBTQ people and their allies are sexually grooming children, that TQ persons are evil, and all of `this' is a result of LGB persons getting the right to marry, are the right group of people to be relying on for answers to very difficult questions like how we humanely and fairly incorporate TQ people into women's spaces and sports and how the mental and physical health of gender questioning youth should be addressed.
> all of `this' is a result of LGB persons getting the right to marry
Weirdly, it sort of is. Right after we won, big orgs like Stonewall and HRC pivoted to gender, and the analogy (“it’s the next gay rights”) was effective, especially in the UK.
Whether that’s good or bad is not something we debate here, and I respect the rule.
But if we hadn’t won marriage (yet), everything would look different now. And I shudder to imagine how the gay marriage debate would go in these woke times. We’d probably set ourselves back 20 years in the red states, while the blue states went overboard with tax breaks and dedicated venues….
I agree with you but I don't think conservatives are looking at it the same way that we are. For them it's that allowing LGB to marry inevitably leads to Drag Queen Story hour, all of the other stuff we don't debate, and the downfall of western civilization. I think most of us can be supportive of LGB marriage and TQ rights and still think that there are difficult issues to resolve. To (social) conservatives LGB marriage is the origin of the present evil and it would be better if it were rolled back and, if not, bestiality and pedophilia per force must follow and be allowed.
If you think that the Democrats "are the right group of people to be relying on for answers to very difficult questions like how we humanely and fairly incorporate TQ people into women's spaces and sports", you should realize that the Democrats' proposed legislation does no such thing: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5
Mark, I've been involved in discussions with you about this before and we disagree about the protections against abuse that that bill includes (and I assure you that I'm worried about abuses as well). Since we don't discuss specifics of this issue here, the point I was trying to make above is that because you're a liberal, even though I disagree with you on this issue and find your earlier rhetoric painful, I still feel that you're someone I can talk with because you don't think TQ people are evil and thus we can arrive at a compromise. You don't demonize people and are amenable to evidence, as I am.
>I might vote for DeSantis in 2024 because Biden hasn't done anything for poor & working class people
The expanded, monthly payments for the child tax credit were absolutely something. The extra 800 bucks a month was nice for me, but the extra 500 my brother got was really helpful for him. It would have been a great policy to lock in permanently, and I was sorry to see it go.
What comparable policy do you imagine DeSantis passing? The only thing I can see him doing that would affect my brother is killing off Medicaid expansion, which would mean he loses his health insurance.
"Centrist identitarian" is basically the Liberal Party of Canada (and a non-zero portion of the NDP).
They're the same thing!
If you think the hard left was impressed by this, you might need to talk to someone on the left about this.
All diversity committees ever minted, all the corporate inclusion statements and unisex johns, none of that changes the way the economic pie is sliced.
*Strongly* disagree. The things you describe have provided a significant increase in the section of the economic pie going to Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D'Angelo, Melina Abdullah, Patrisse Cullors (those last two are BLM Los Angeles and may not have a national profile), ...
It seems probable that there are a reasonable number of grifters associated with the more hardcore gender activist groups too, but since to date there haven't been any riots (excuse me - "uprisings") associated with the far fringe of gender activism there's a little less opportunity to extort protection money.
Lol.
Not a joking matter IMHO. Yea, like the poor, the grifters we will always have with us, but some grifters are more equal (i.e., damaging in disproportion to the fraction of the dollars/status pie they and their apparatus redirect and/or destroy) than others.
The "Will Pencil" mistake in the email sent out was a vestige of an earlier draft did not get corrected somehow. Sorry about that.
Is Will Pencil the new Noah Bertalsky?
I do recommend reading iPencil.
Funny enough, I think Will Pencil is an appropriate name for this theoretical fellow.
It’s perfect. He’s a pencilneck. Possibly a Pecksniff.
I’ve been trying very hard to follow my own logic -- that there’s no meaningful lever on this system right now, CERTAINLY no electoral lever, ergo no “responsibility of the citizen to be informed” -- to its clear conclusion and drop out of following national political news. It’s gone about as well as I’d expect so far -- I definitely still know way no or than the average voter, but I tend to get the bad news closer to when it happens, instead of months of “well this bad thing could happen but we hope it won’t, it would be irresponsible to let something that bad occur” in the lead-up.
Meanwhile I continue to follow geopolitics because that intuitively has no lever. Watching the US bully North Korea, I can see there’s unwise action, but in a much clearer “are you sure you don’t wanna be a liiittle more detailed in that telegram, Kaiser?” war.
Well said and in my view correct on all points.
I loved this exhortation, to: "Take your own perspective seriously." It's a discordance I cannot get past in many movements - in most Christian-political fusion movements I grew up around, and more recently in BLM and various other "Great Awokening" movements.
If you actually believed in our corruption and the supremacy and implacability of the forces of evil/greed/lust/racism, you'd not adopt the strategy you're devoted yourself to - of insisting you can prevail by electoral means, with establishment support and righteous contempt for those who doubt or question you.
It's not an unattractive or even necessarily wrong approach. But it is a triumphantalist one, and inconsistent with what the activists and preachers claimed to believe and to have based their theory on
I really wish there was a good name for this group. I'm always trying to distinguish between essentially this group and normie Dems and there isn't really a good way. "Liberal" includes a lot of normie Dems - Biden is arguably a liberal. "Progressive" suffers from the same problem. I tend to use "Left" but that is potentially confusing, both because it sometimes implies the entire left side of the political spectrum, and sometimes implies people who are to the left of the Dem party.
Watching the Star Wars Andor series. The Empire just got re-elected except in Florida.
So does anyone have a different plan? Or should we expect the same going forward?
Are there any groups I should pay attention to who are trying something new and interesting?
So I have this very half-baked theory that links the current left-of-lib "why don't the democrats enact socialist policies that are transparently and perpetually contrary to their stated goals?" crowd with the ongoing - for lack of a better term - self-infantilization thing. By the "self-infantilization thing," I mean precisely the endless accommodation demanding you've written about in the past - the way it has become ever more empowering to insist one has no power. It extends far beyond disability/mental health spaces (where it is consistently most visible and most innovated) - and dovetails with the "you can never be a good man/white person/straight person/whatever so why try?" issue you've also touched on. The modern progressive or progressive-adjacent position is one of insistent helplessness. The disabled and mentally ill need the world constantly adjusted to their needs, including when those needs conflict with other people's needs - the most loudly helpless wins. Violence and political action and artistic movements and everything else that is committed by or mostly by people of color is actually the long arm of white supremacy. The European imperialists somehow taught the Japanese; without whitey, there was only ever helplessness. Trans people stage die-ins over books they don't like. I say this as a disabled (legally anyways - I'm really chronically ill) lesbian - these are communities that have my sympathy, but they are currently invested beyond measure in their despair. There is no action to be taken, only complaints to be filed. Somebody else must fix it, post-haste.
It's LAZY! I think it's truly lazy. I want to be more clever and interesting, but I truly think an intense and abiding laziness grips the current progressive twitter intelligentsia. What other explanation is there for insisting that things like being nice to your friends or washing your daughter's hair is "[emotional] labor"? What other explanation is there for the waves of people who come out to say that they HAVE to cross the picket lines when Uber/Lyft/InstaCart/Amazon etc. strikes, because they're disabled and bedbound and helpless and alone and weak? What other explanation is there for the scores of grown adults insisting things like replying to emails or doing the dishes drains them to nothing due to ADHD? (This particular mutation of ADHD, of course, never strikes the working poor.) I think it's the failure of Occupy - its lack of central organizing, goals, or ACTION beyond public sitting - writ large (which was certainly borne out by the 2020 "uprisings"). It's baffling and of course only doomed to fail.
Of COURSE such people are entranced by semi-radical sounding promises from democrats on the campaign trail. They don't WANT a leftist coalition to accomplish their goals, they want the democrats to do it for them. Of COURSE they insist Kamala Harris, fighting forest fires with slave labor, is a symbol of imperialism toppled - they don't want to do the work! I know I sound like a whiny old man but I'm 29 and have occupied progressive spaces since 2011 - I went to an extremely liberal artsy liberal arts college in New York, I attended graduate school in a very liberal field (education) in NYC, I'm a teacher in the same city.
I think it's bizarre. But there's a prevailing sense that endless self-infantilization will somehow work in the end, and it stresses me out. I know this is disorganized and more than a little mean - I'm supposed to be grading and haven't slept much. But I think there's a total paralysis of actual ACTION in the modern progressive semi-left (and left!!). It's all about reaction - defend her, get her fired, etc. - without a plan, without a goal, without a sense that if we want something done we might just have to actually do it.
IDK where I'm going with this. Hopefully it's semi-coherent.
I'm talking about the endless tweets about how being an adult with ADHD means being completely free of interpersonal responsibilities because of ADHD. My point isn't that ADHD doesn't make it hard to reply to emails or do the dishes - it sure does! - my point is that the insistence that it is fully crippling comes from very specific circles.
couldn't agree more
Laziness is not very convenient for me, since the alterative is that I've got it wrong and the world will be brought into a righteous age with ritualized helplessness at the vanguard (boy would I love to be wrong and see a righteous age arrive, given certain values of righteous). Laziness is very inconvenient as it makes ME feel helpless. I want to be clear that I on the side of the marginalized - racially, socially, economically. I want what the same people I'm describing profess to want, but... If the goal is to look as good as possible while doing as little as possible, how is anyone going to animate a movement?
Not really sure what your point is but hopefully I've at least semi-addressed it.
They're not my ideological opponents, that's my point. They're my ideological allies - specifically, they're the people who more-or-less believe what I believe (vis a vis healthcare, housing, capitalism, etc.) who have the biggest platform on the (inter)national stage. Hence my despair.
I think Lazy is close, but I would offer a more precise term that you already alluded to when you say "self-infantilization": Childish. Or at least Immature.
I think most of these people are simply childish. They want everything on their own terms. Anything that happened before them is not important. They are unwilling to 'wait' for progress to happen, it has to be now. And when confronted with reasonable or otherwise alternate points of view, they almost immediately cry foul and demand punishment.
They are like a grade school classroom, except they themselves are running the school.
be careful not to cut yourself on that edge
Isn't this because so much of being 'radical left' is just being 'radical left' online? Aka performing rather than doing radical left work. Like FdB says of the Democrats, attacking these people is like stepping on a rake because they'll never actually be the thing we'd like.
At their caricatured hearts, the Left believes everyone's problems are caused by the environment, and the Right believes everyone's problems are caused by a lack of hard work/discipline. Obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle but it can lead to a disdain by the left for even attempting to fix things individually and, at the same time, a disdain on the right for accepting even the mildest forms of "some people have it worse than others."
It's actually mostly the other way around. When individuals, families, small groups, and communities are thick on the ground taking care of the small stuff, society (and thus government) isn't distracted by trying to solve everyone's tiny problems and can think and aim for the big stuff. Dissolution and chaos at the grass roots, by contrast, sucks everything down into a morass of quotidian bullshit and dysfunction from which nothing can escape
(Weary voice) yes (sorrowful smile)
Exactly. I don't know why we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
I don't think everyone on the right believes this. I think it would be fairly conventional wisdom on the right that if you grow up in a single parent home with a mother who has no work history and peers that sell drugs or steal cars, you have a better than average chance of acquiring bad habits and behaviors and ending up not unlike those around you.
Hard work and discipline can help an individual overcome these types of obstacles, but an average person would be better off without having to face them.
I think the real difference between left and right is the right's skepticism that government can do much about this reality. They think the left is going to use a bunch of taxpayer money to create a bureaucracy that will sit in air-conditioned office blocks writing memos that solve none of these problems.
Even your seemingly benign comment here lends itself to a typical conservative response: hard work and discipline can solve most things, and government can't. The former is rarely true in terms of the lower class, and the latter is, all things considered, rarely untrue.
Bill Maher was talking to Bill Burr the other day, and Burr was going off about how the federal gov is pretty much a bunch of bull-shitters who just screw over average joe's all the time, and that will never change. Maher countered easily with a simple anecdote: somewhere there's a guy working in an office who is making life better for people.
Maher's point is simply that not nearly everyone in gov are greedy sycophants only out for themselves, but rather that there are legions of unknown and unheralded public officials quietly doing their job trying to make the world a better place. And that those people are really the majority of federal employees, the one's who are wisely and dutifully spending our tax dollars. It's mostly the greedy asshats that get press, and tank the rep of everyone else.
Problem is those greedy asshats can cause so much damage per capita these days that they are actually managing to screw up just about everything for everybody else. Fun fact: most people that go into government are decent, hard-working, and compassionate people. It's when they start getting a lot of power that the temptations become heavy.
As the left likes to say about cops - "the full saying is 'one bad apple spoils the barrel.'"
"Even your seemingly benign comment here lends itself to a typical conservative response: hard work and discipline can solve most things..."
I think talented people with a good work ethic/personality traits can and frequently do overcome life obstacles. Take one look at the gulf in intergenerational economic mobility between immigrants and native born in the U.S. and you will see the problem is not that poverty itself is intractable, it's the nature of why one is impoverished that can be daunting.
"Maher's point is simply that not nearly everyone in gov are greedy sycophants only out for themselves, but rather that there are legions of unknown and unheralded public officials quietly doing their job trying to make the world a better place."
Greedy sycophants would not be the first description I would use of most federal bureaucrats. Most people are just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. The difference between public and private workers is the design of the button by their employer - does pecking it do something productive or does it just make the food come out? The simpler the task, the more the button design suggests itself, so if the task is to deliver a letter from A to B, the federal government might do so less efficiently than a private business, but it will still accomplish the job. But if you assign it complicated tasks like improving education outcomes or providing job training to the under-employed, the button design will prioritize continued congressional funding, not achieving the supposed objectives of the program.
I've spent my life interacting with federal financial regulators and no belief in government can survive that experience.
Michael Lewis wrote a book called the Fifth Column. As a book it was rushed out and not of his usual quality, but he went through some of the federal bureaucracies and the important work they actually did.
Fifth Risk, not Column. I didn't read it, but note that the Federal government spends over $4 trillion a year. Finding enough tasks they accomplish to fill a short book is not quite the accolade you might think it is.
I think it has to do with the “tendency for interpersonal victimhood.” The train of thought goes like this: I have been put down/marginalized/hurt by society - this is wrong - someone needs to Make This Right. Which is pointless, even if the initial condition was was genuinely morally wrong. Because those in power generally don't care. And those who are doing the hurting DEFINITELY don't care. Yeah, it sucks that marginalized people have to be the ones putting in the effort to convince the people who marginalized them that they deserve to be part of the game, but that's the only way it gets better.
I'd add my own hypothesis: a lot of the new "left-of-liberal" and "progressive" sphere, including the ones who call themselves radical, are rooted in the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). They get this incredibly skewed idea that "radical" change is about charity: good people (which inevitably means *rich* people) give up resources they have to support Radical Social Justice (which inevitably means them at their nonprofit). Since the point is to appeal for external charitable funding, you're not *supposed* to build a sustainable mass movement/party/organization of the working class that can act under its own power and within a budget.
Victims of "top-down" thinking; you don't need to do the hard work of building coalitions if you can just get the right people at the top to change the law your way. this is effective at getting "diversity initiatives" and other token efforts, but lousy at any kind of systemic change.
> This particular mutation of ADHD, of course, never strikes the working poor.
Or teachers, even at liberal arts colleges (unless you count them among the working poor, which is getting more accurate every day). I can just imagine the fury around here if one day the students didn't get their personalised comments on Essay Draft 1 back in time to work them into Essay Draft 2 because the teacher was struggling with her ADHD.
Ok, thanks for the salutary reminder. Here’s a proposal for all you like-minded out there. Remodel the point of departure. The ongoing clash of the 2 party titans isn’t serving our democracy very well, and, in the larger historical sense, it remains a pearl of great price. It could be preserved by expansion: a bigger House, which hasn’t been expanded in 100 years. It could be invigorated by proportional allocation of electoral votes - like Maine and Nebraska- on the basis of congressional district counts. Stuff like that. A third party fighting for a place at the table might outflank the Titans that way. Just sayin’...
"The Democrats" is doing a lot of work here. I've had this discussion a lot within DSA, and it's worth being explicit about what you mean by the term. If you're writing off the 81 million who voted for Biden, you should give up on any hope off a mass movement. If you're talking about Democratic officeholders (or the kinds of people who get elected as Democrats), there's clear evidence that can be changed as dramatic realignments have occurred after major changes like the New Deal or the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of US thought writing off the Democratic Party as irredeemable is dominated by Chicago 1968 which operated under completely different rules that we've dealt with since Citizens United in 2010.
Any national political movement is in danger of either being "in thrall to moneyed interests", crushed by them, or both. Both BLM and the environmental movement have obvious examples of each - people who ended up in mansions and people who ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Avoiding the Democratic Party doesn't protect you from that except to the extent that you remain too small to ever be a threat.
I think context makes it pretty clear who he's talking about when he says "The Democrats."
This is a really good point. Some degree of corruption and hypocrisy is endemic to politics and everyone is human. You don’t have to look far in the progressive movement for evidence of this (BLM and Women’s March being prominent recent examples of movements that got corporate endorsements but effectuated very little policy change).
I was a senior in college during the 1992 Clinton Bush election. Among the big group of people I ran around with, I was the only person that paid attention to politics and that was passing at best. Literally, we never talked about politics. 80% of the people were lucky if they could explain the difference between a republican and a democrat let alone what side they came down on. Nerds and policy wonks watched CNN. I met a guy at a bar that was a hard core lefty (I was conservative leaning) and we totally hit it off because I came across somebody who at least paid attention.
Fast forward to today and my fifth grader gets in political arguments at the lunch table. I think in America, we just put too much faith in people that are far too ordinary to compel the change we would like to see, whatever that might be.
It's funny to read this column because it reads just like complaints on the right. Complaints about "establishment" "RINO" etc. Both sides of the argument are completely convinced that the other side is far better at outfoxing their side. The reality is that the only thing that really ever changes in this country is the rhetoric and your tax rate.
Wow, 1992 sounds like a dream. I hate how politics has become our national pastime. I would rather talk about literally anything else, but sadly it seems to be a lot of people's primary interest these days.
Political parties are like your favorite sports team. We spend a lot more time worrying about them than they do about us.
While I agree with the central point of this post (social media proximity breeds conflict and close losses breed disappointment), I think the following is ungenerous:
"What I find so strange about the left-of-liberals of the world is that they constantly say, “The Democrats are so feckless and corrupt! Why won’t they support my radical agenda?” And the obvious answer is because they’re feckless and corrupt, dummy!"
I mean...maybe a lot of establishment Democrats sincerely believe France-levels of taxation and government interference lead to France-like outcomes. Maybe it's not fecklessness and corruption, but actual belief that pre-Thatcher/Reagan policies had swung too far to be globally competitive and a return to them is a mistake, hence the focus on more symbolic/shambolic change and hot button cultural issues.
That's policy. When I think of corruption with regards to Democratic politics it's Hunter Biden, Marc Rich, etc.
Right, not suggesting that some politicians aren't personally corrupt. Plainly, a number of them are, but the point of the FdB line I quoted appears to be that establishment Democrats secretly agree with Progressives' policy objectives but are corrupted by big business into not actually enacting Progressives' economic agenda. I'm gently suggesting that this is wrong. Establishment Democrats are at rough peace with the Reagan-ite shifting of the Overton window, even if you wouldn't know it from (some of the) rhetoric (some of the time).
For me the issue is which Democrats are you talking about: the DLC crew (Clinton, Obama) or the left wing?
I think I have been clear that I am talking about establishment Democrats.
Historically control over the party has oscillated between centrist, pro-business D's and their more socialist brethren.
The last two left-of-left presidential nominees were McGovern and Mondale. In what may not be a coincidence, the only two blow-out elections since WW2 were...McGovern and Mondale.
Kristen Sinema keeping the carried interest loophole for financial titans.
I had a similar reaction: I don't exactly love the current system, but if I could change it all with a wave of my hand, it wouldn't be to socialism. Nor would most centrist Democrats.
France-like outcomes don't look so bad at the moment. Nobody I ever talk to from France thinks they live in a shithole country or feels overawed by visiting America.
It's not a shithole. No Western European country is. But it's a clearly less dynamic economy, experiencing lower growth and higher structural unemployment. It has a lower GDP per capita today than it did in 2008.
I think your essays are way more important than your vote. For example my views on mental illness have been expanded greatly because of you. If you think of our system as bottom-up, not top-down, than your observations of the differences between radicals and Dems makes complete sense. The Democrats are a political party, they are constricted to winning elections, they do not, and can not act as a force for change. They are not leaders, and I really don't want them to be. They are lead by, well, us. Change our minds and you'll change the actions of the D's and the R's.
Well said. I think missing from Freddie's analysis is the idea that the center Democrats or center liberals have policy disagreements with the radical left, and the radical left doesn't run the party, so they need to persuade the center left (or *some* other part of the left) that their policies are worth the costs.
One can be fooled into thinking the center left is more progressive than it is by polling them about universal health care or other radical left policies without comparing those policies to other priorities or to the costs of enacting them.
I do think they are a force for change, just incremental change. Obamacare was incremental change. They had to gut a lot of it in order to get it passed, but it was a start. Now the portion of allowing Medicare to dicker with pharma got put in.
Still Obamacare allowed me to have health insurance the last ten years. Private pay was a nightmare. I would have been uninsured and likely bankrupt.
I was trying to say that the parties are not the *cause* of the change, they just carry out the change. It's the voters who ultimately cause change (so are the force for change). I guess this is sort of an obvious point, but I find a lot of people focus on the parties themselves as if changing a party will change the outcomes, when I think it is probably a better bet to change the underlying constituencies' attitudes and the parties will just go along. Manchin doesn't vote against certain things because he personally feels one way or another about it, it's because his constituency does. Gay marriage is a good example. It was only when the majority of the country was OK with it that the exact same politicians who were against it "changed their minds" and were for it.
I was one of those Hillary democrats who hated the "Bernie bros." I left the party in 2020. Here's the thing: I'd be all in on everything people like AOC are doing. Or even Bernie. But my problem is that it always has to be on a national level. The problems for people in this country are different per states. The Democrats don't seem to care about the problems of the Black community in, say, St. Louis but they're all up in Yale University's grill about antiracism. That I don't get. I'd be all in if they focused their efforts in places that really need the help IMO like Georgia or Chicago. Or even New York. Or hell, here in California. If you drive down Laurel Canyon into the valley it doesn't look like the blue state it's supposed to be. I'm not even talking about homelessness, which is everywhere, but the working class poor who live in crap neighborhoods. It's not that different from the divide in New Orleans between the Garden District and across town. So in red states, you figure, you'd expect that. But what about blue states? Why doesn't Gavin Newsom care about poverty in this very rich state? That is the part I find frustrating about the Democrats.