I think there is a fundamental distinction between politicians using "populism" and activists. I don't think it is the role of politicians to push fringe ideas or policies issues that are unpopular. Let activists and communities play that role and when they are finally "popular" pols can embrace them. I think political leadership among pols on innovative or unpopular or less known issues is tangential. It's not up to pols to make something popular imho.
I think the problem is that activists increasingly drive the political narrative as least as much as politicians do, so drawing a clear line there is misleading. Joe Biden never said or embraced 'defund the police', presumably doesn't believe it in any sense. But he still has to account for it politically because activists help define the contours of the contemporary left.
Good point. I agree it's all in a political ecosystem. i was thinking more about electoral strategy ala Shor. And just to be clear, I am not endorsing that activists take on defund the police let alone disparity framing. For example, reparations is a politica loser (not to mention unworkable and is a liberal policy that embraces tort fixes to problems) that many leftists support. Since big foundations/big tech fund most activists in the NPIC, you end up getting policy issues that are not universalist or popular outside of blue cities with large educated classes. I don't see foundations ever supporting social democracy; they prefer progressive neoliberalism. Only a union rebirth can save the Dem party imho but it is hard to see it happening anytime soon, and even unions are embracing too much idpol lately as public sector unions make up a larger share of membership. The formula of moderate on social issues and social democratic on economic issues seems like the right one, yet i can name one pol that adopts this ideology. 2016 Bernie might be the closest.
How should pols relate to activists, though? In Clinton's 'Sister Souljah' moment, dissing an activist helped a pol. But set against that the possibility of dissed activists running a spoiler candidate, as in Gore vs. Nader. And as the years go by with government becoming essentially a plutocracy, activists become less and less willing to shut up and vote blue, or red for that matter.
I honestly think lefties have a lot to learn from the Trump moment. Sure, we hate him. But he took over a major political party and built a huge popular base that isn't going anywhere no matter how hard folks try to repress it, and isn't that exactly what lefties want to accomplish?
I do too, and it has ticked me off no end since the very beginning - because a lot of what Trump used to get that base should have been lefty concerns. I knew he would win when he visited Baton Rouge, while our side was busy defining 'white privilege' and calling a lot of those people deplorables.
Dems can hate Trump because he beat their priorities, but I think lefties have the more difficult challenge of both hating him and realizing that he beat them by selling their own goods.
The popular narrative is that the D's are now the party of urban, upper middle class professionals, the PMC that Mr. deBoer talks about. The working class has defected to the R's. Trump was the inflection point of that demographic shift. I'm not sure that working class concerns get a lot of play in the Democratic Party now and my guess is that they will be even less central in a decade or two.
For some reason, I decided to watch some clips from the 2012 presidential debates. Obama's message was pretty clear: Romney is rich and therefore bad. He cruised to an electoral victory with that message despite high unemployment.
Now Obama isn't a socialist, he's barely even a liberal. But I would much rather our actual left-of-center focus on that sort of message rather than the race-centric one. I think most social policies would disproportionately benefit non-whites (e.g. medicare for all), but selling them that way will never work outside the media class
At the end of the day, the GOP wants to end democracy, or limit its effectiveness, and indulge plutocrats with their economic policies. This is not a widely popular plan. So they're going to need (a) frontmen like trump, spouting faux populism and racial dog-whistling that help divide-and-conquer, (b) ammo to pull the latter strategy off.
Yup, Frank's "What's the matter with Kansas" goes into that. And remarkably little has changed since 2004, except the culture war is more race based than religion based
1) The left, left-liberal consensus, woke left, etc is first and foremost a subculture, not a political movement and more specifically wants to embrace a counter-cultural aesthetic. This is not coincidentally why it's like catnip to Brooklyn hipsters, because it's just the extension of cultural proclivities into the political sphere.
2) This leads to making asinine, purposefully obnoxious political statements to separate the ingroup from the outgroup. They function as a shibboleth, no different than a mohawk, goth clothing, or skinny jeans. This is, not coincidentally, why there is a very obvious and very specific aesthetic popular among radlibs (or whatever term you prefer for them).
As a corollary, they hate "population" because politics is a clique for them and the hate the idea that normies can get in. Then they are no longer special. They hate this idea and actually don't want to get popular. They want to lose and take specific and obvious actions to make sure they lose on purpose. They may not admit it but that is 100% the point and always has been.
Agreed. In terms of actual politics, you'd want your ideas to be as popular as possible. You'd want them popular among the people you hate
But fashion? You want to be unique. You want it to say "I'm not like you, fucking normies." Stuff like "abolish the police" does that.
There's also the libertarian version do this "abolish drivers licenses" or whatever, they have neither political nor cultural power so we can sit back and laugh.
I talk about Pierre Bourdieu too much but it's hard to overstate the effect reading Distinction had on me. It blew my mind. Maybe it was what I needed in my life at the time. I'd already seen the writing on the wall and knee the nascent radical left was going to crash and burn...hard. I was trying to understand why. I knew it was because of it's own internal dynamics. The failure comes from within. Now I finally understand why.
There isn't anything wrong with being a normie except to the ones who who frame these ideas. And the real secret is that the ones they think are normies aren't at all. I do something that radlibs would snark at--. I am a ham radio operator. There are nearly a million of us. We would look normal to the radlibs, but have amazing powers in time and space and technical expertise you would not believe. None of the operators I know would care one bit what someone in Brooklyn thought of them. But tornado, hurricanes, floods, fires-- they will organize the communications as volunteers and try to help everyone regardless of politics.
Yep! You’ve absolutely captured the incentives that lead to these extreme views. At best, these extremists are rationally aiming to drive ad views and paid subscriptions with their inflammatory rhetoric. At worst, they’re just looking for the dopamine hit from likes and retweets. In no case are they attempting to productively impact the political process. Further, I don’t believe this behavior is unique to the left. I’ve seen enough “dunks” on righthoids to know they have their own groups of extremists that aren’t focused on productive political change.
This is an excellent observation--- "in no case are they attempting to productively impact the political process." That would be precinct work, signing up voters, folding and mailing information packets. Same with my union. But it is not exciting or glamorous. Not too much dopamine doing the ground games.
In Russia there was a history of communal work in villages but there was still family structure. To move this topic forward it helps to understand how land was allocated after the freeing of the serfs during the lead up to 1917....anyone who thinks it was a sharp division needs to read further.
And once you have a baby the whole thing changes.
You mention Black families with good insight. Latino families are extraordinarily family oriented and abolishing the family does not appeal to Hispanics. There's a lot to respond to in this post.
Regarding the family, a fringe idea might be to reverse the ban on marrying within the family (biologically appropriately distant), which some scholars believe ended "kinship" with significant changes on how most people experienced life.
Interesting ... enlightening for me, in the sense that I was/have/hold "the family" in a binary thinking pattern. Family good—anti-family bad. Perhaps there's a sweet spot with family. Friends from southern Asia tell me of the badness which comes from too close family (about 1/3 of marriages are cousin marriages). The corruption is described to me, as its not the greedy Boss-Hog style corruption we think of, but nepotism corruption. Where you have to hire your lazy thieving cousin to be the trolley conductor even though you know he'll skim the fares. You have to hire him because he's your brother-in-law, and more so, because your grandma told you to, and your mom is using threatening words. So you hire him. He of course skims the fares—thus your public transit system has less money for maintenance. You also had to let the repair contracts to another cousin, and he's skimming, as are his employees, so things don't get fully maintained. Thus everything in the system is slowly spiraling down to shit. As my friend said about Karachi: "The English left us a perfectly good trolley system, they left us a perfectly good water system. But because of corruption we couldn't maintain them. So now, we have no trolleys, and water comes in a truck to our household cistern."
One particularly troubling development in the Left is that there has been a shift away from coalition building and having a broad base supportive of specific policy objectives.
I think that this has largely coincided with the evaporation of the labor movement in the private sector and to the degree that labor is still a force it is due to public sector unions who may broadly align with the PMC, government, and corporate press and are often in opposition to public interests (i.e. teachers' unions).
As a result of the waning influence of private unions, the Left now, by and large, favors administrative control to enact its policies and would prefer not to have to engage in retail politics and selling its ideas. That's why Trump's judicial appointments were such an existential crisis - I think the Left senses that its policies and rhetoric are primarily designed to move hearts and minds and policy WITHIN institutions and bureaucracies. But they are alienating externally and it would be better to bypass the public with judicial control, bureaucratic mechanisms, tech/corporate censorship, etc.
Shor is an anomaly in that he has some self awareness of the degree to which his social and economic class is unlikeable, divorced from the social and economic reality of most Americans, and fixated on status production masquerading as technocratic competence. This can be applied to a variety of pitfalls for progressives: Zero COVID hysteria, radicalization in grade school education disseminated from the Ed schools, global warming rent seeking, etc.
The net result is that one class after another of the 'ascendant coalition' is being alienated. Taibbi's reporting from Loudon illustrates what is happening with Asians. Anyone who has spent time in Florida, Texas, or the Southwest knew the Democrats were skating on thin ice with Hispanics.
So what can the Democratic Party and progressives do? Wait and hope for another bogeyman like Trump who will function as a huge fig leaf for their arrogance, corruption, and incompetence? Wait for the second coming of Bernie? I don't think they really know because, again, they run aon closed loop and are so arrogant that no improvement is possible until well after things are clear to everyone else and there is a huge liability. See for example, COVID policy where lockdowns imposed huge costs for less affluent in the pursuit of a zero COVID fantasy entertained only by a deranged elite.
Trump actually picked up Hispanic votes in 2020. His unexpectedly strong performance is what got people to sit up and take notice. He wasn't a particularly good boogey man in 2020 in terms of frightening minorities into the Democratic camp in 2020 and I doubt he will be one in 2024.
Yeah, I don't think even the performative 'literally Hitler!' hysterics on the Left even bought their own schtick although it did get clicks, move books, etc.
My general take:
I do think that Trump was a liability in purple suburbs where social status is a primary concern. For these voters Trump was embarrassing of course among college educated white women in 2016 but then also more white men in 2020. I think that was Trump specific.
I also think that there was a lot of Trump fatigue and that some people wanted him to go because they were tired of hearing about him all the time and they were promised a 'return to normalcy' which Biden obviously hasn't been able to deliver.
With the Hispanic vote though I just don't think it's that difficult: they identify ethnically and nationally and probably didn't like the Trump insults, but they're working class, Catholic, and socially conservative on the whole and did better than any other ethnic group economically under Trump. Was is it that Democrats have to offer Hispanics specifically? I don't have any special knowledge on the subject but when I go to baseball games it's Hispanic dads with their families. When I go to restaurants it's Hispanic dads with their families. What is the Democratic party offering that guy specifically?
Based on my viewing of "In the Heights", we could offer that guy's daughter more ways to move up in the world that don't involve shipping her off to Stanford to get massively alienated from both the PMC milieu she's "rising" into and her own family at the same time.
All this stuff makes more sense when you assume that both big coalitions in the US, left and right, don't want to achieve big majorities. They just want 51%, and will latch onto various tacked-on, philosophically indefensible goals in order to please oddball special interests and avoid inadvertently rising above "51".
That seems very risky given that elections can depend on last-minute news? I don’t see why any sane politician wouldn’t prefer winning by a comfortable margin.
I don't think that's possible given the two party system and the underlying diversity of the country. The D's and R's are already bizarre political chimeras with little resemblance to the politics of the media voter.
They prefer 51 to 49 but prefer 49 to 80. 80 is functionally a disaster, given the actual incentives in how these coalitions are built. They penalty for 49 isnt that bad, you'll get a win in 2 or 4 years, 8 years tops. The important thing is to never have to deliver on promises made to a big majority, and to keep lots of special interests happy so they'll do favors for you and your family members.
What evidence is there for this? Safe seats seem to be valued, and I think most politicians would be happy to be FDR. But it's not possible in a polarized country.
Constant pattern of a 51/49 split and a promised “permanent majority” which never arrives is the evidence. What individual politicians want doesn’t matter, what matters is the structural design of the system and the coalitional logic it incentivizes. Consider how the Democrats have started pushing Asians into the arms of the other party. They’re doing that because they don’t actually want to win more than 51 percent of the country.
Even the Communist Manifesto engages in that same "motte-bailey" Freddie refers to in this post. The relevant CM paragraph opens "abolish the family" (bailey) but hastens to specify they merely mean the "bourgeois family" or the "family based on private gain" (motte). This slipperiness in thinking, advocacy and praxis, which is usually not even conscious or "cynical", runs very, very deep on the left, all to the way back to its historical roots. Who could fail to notice the exact same motte-bailey in the left's rhetoric on borders, police, sex, the idea of "merit", and so forth?
There is some merit in a bold promise, though. Did Huey Long *really* mean Every Man A King? Was every man now a hereditary monarch? And just men!? Well, where would we get enough scepters, who's going to draw the coats of arms? Shorthand is alright. Slogans are powerful. Taste the rainbow (note: not actually a rainbow.)
The problem arises when the slogan itself is what's disagreeable, not the bowdlerized version. Taste the rainbow works because it sounds good. "Literally combust when you taste how rainbow-y this is, so you actually die in real life" doesn't sound good, even if you stand there and explain to your customers that they're idiots and *obviously* that doesn't mean they're actually going to die in real life.
The other failure is when you overpromise on something pithy, then fail to deliver and it can come back to haunt you. That's why the Right made such hay with "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." And going back to GHWB: "read my lips: no new taxes" doesn't lend itself well to a bunch of well-ackshullys.
You can only prop up memetic failures like this if you have complete, disciplined control of messaging, which the fashionable left only has on those occasions its aims coincide with those of global capitalism (e.g. BLM, gender stuff.) Abolishing the family isn't really on the table yet, so the obvious problems with it - it's weird and nobody likes it - can't be gaslit away.
I agree with everything you say here, but it troubles me - because I am also against 'negotiating with yourself' as a strategy.
Trying to reconcile this opposition within myself, I realized that the context in which I dislike negotiating with oneself is that of butting-heads contract negotiations, in which I think it's vital to ask for what you really want. Obviously, a very different situation from electoral politics. Except, really?
I remember being furious with Obama for negotiating with himself about health care. So much of our politics *does* seem to boil down to butting-heads contract negotiations, once the politicians are elected. So I think activists can be forgiven for losing track of the extent to which voters matter, when after all voters only matter at all on election day, and even the preferences they reveal on that day will have almost no effect on what the elected officials actually do.
As much as I disagree with the current loud right and a lot of their tactics, I have to admire that they are getting out there to the school board meetings and primarying local politicians, and actually acting as if voters have a role to play in politics and ignoring them has consequences.
I think that makes sense when there are actual negotiations to do, but negotiation isn’t what politicians do with voters, is it? I suppose closest to negotiation would be “floating trial balloons” to see if some stance s actually popular with voters, or trying out ideas using polls?
I agree, negotiation isn't what politicians do with voters, so the 'don't negotiate with yourself' rule probably doesn't apply.
What politicians do with voters, though... what is it, really, when they will govern according to their biggest donors' wishes? Freddie complains that poli junkies are not taking this seriously, but who can?
As I understand it, big donors get their phone calls answered, which means they get to make an argument for what they want. That doesn't mean it's persuasive, though.
“Abolish the family” might sound like something that will never happen (because it won’t happen) but some activists on the left are increasingly hostile to parents / parenting in a way that voters notice and loathe. I’ve been thinking about what happened in the Virginia election, especially after reading Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Loudon County – parents were shut out and demonized by school officials, and they were pissed and voted for Republicans.
I’ve also been troubled by the story of 2 teachers in California who bragged about the tactics they used for their LGBTQ club at their middle school (and have since been suspended from the club pending an investigation). The short version is that people are angry because they stalked the kids’ online activity to recruit members, and because of their efforts to conceal kids’ participation from parents. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Two-California-teachers-were-secretly-recorded-16732562.php
As a gay person, I’m obviously sympathetic to adolescents who are afraid to tell their parents they might be queer. Supportive teachers meant a lot to me and my queer friends. So I’m generally supportive of teachers providing a safe environment and not tattling to parents.
But what bothers me is how these teachers seemed to relish building a secret community that shut parents out. They didn’t encourage any kids to talk to their parents (surely not every single one was abusive?) They sound like they’re enjoying the fact that kids confide in them instead of Mom and Dad, because they get to feel morally superior and they don’t have to worry about anyone challenging their amateur diagnoses of troubled children.
Parents aren’t wrong to think some on the left are actively working to undermine them. When the family is perceived as a problem (parents aren’t woke) some activists are happy to sideline them in favor of their politics. “Abolish the family” won’t happen like “abolish the police” won’t happen, but the slogan reminds voters of real things going on that they hate.
Something similar happen with, 'abolish with police.' Everyone wants improved policing but there is some small but vocal segment (documented by Shellenberger) that likes seeing chaos and views chaos that comes from no policing as a just punishment upon society for its sins.
It's precisely things like this that led me to believe the slippery slope argument is not only not "fallacious" but valid nearly 100% of the time. We've gone from "who cares what consenting adults get up to in the bedroom?" to state-sanctioned gender experimentation on children in one generation. So when someone tells me - "no, abolish the family doesn't *really* mean abolish the family!" or "no, defund the police doesn't *really* mean defund the police!" I make the uncharitable but prudent decision to think them a liar. It seldom steers me wrong. When it does, that's regrettable, but I would prefer that to the alternative.
I generally agree with you on both abolish the police and abolish the family; however, my read of your example of "who cares what consenting adults get up to in the bedroom" leading to gender experimentation seems...off somehow. Should we have denied consenting adults the right to do what they please in their own bedrooms because it leads to gender experiments on children? That's the nature of the "slippery slope" fallacy: allowing one thing inevitably leads to others (like allowing homosexual marriage leads to allowing marrying minors or close relatives, so we shouldn't allow homosexual marriage).
We should have, collectively, me included, not ascribed a motive of bigotry to those who said in earnest that (for example) gay rights were a slippery slope. They clearly and obviously were. If it's still possible to defend gay rights despite that fact - I believe it is - then that's the work that should be done. And further I believe that it's incumbent on those who want wide-scale societal changes of attitude to reassure those who are nervous about it that they're *not* ready to push them off the top of the slope. That is, I think it's the duty of the gay rights lobby not just to advocate for gay rights but also to say "also we're not putting our foot in the door for incest." Is that unfair of me? Perhaps. But I struggle to see a better way that doesn't lead immediately to a slippery slope. Rights-based ethicists will disagree, naturally.
I guess my stance overall is that if you wish to deny someone the right to do something that does not appear to harm anyone, it's incumbent upon you to argue why they should be denied. If your argument boils down to "well, if I let *you* do this, I have to let this *other* harmful behavior also occur, thus I cannot let you do this" then your argument is invalid unless there is no method by which one can distinguish the two. Defining the limits of what is allowed is all part of the conversation. That one thing *might* lead to another is not a valid argument. If you want to say "I will not let you do what you want *unless you agree to place X limitations on it which will prevent harmful behavior" then I've got no problem with it.
I agree with your stance. Where we probably agree is that I think this response suffices: "I think, although of course cannot prove, that while what you're asking for is reasonable in isolation, it's a harbinger of immensely harmful things that will follow it, whether or not that's what you want at this precise moment, which, if we're both being honest, it probably is." That's really the crux of it: I can afford not to be the most logical or reasonable person in the room because ultimately I know that if I hold myself to such standards as hyper-rational and hyper-fair I'll be bamboozled every time by those with no such scruples... such as those who've successfully pushed the race and gender catastrophes we now live with every day.
I'm not interested in what's valid. I'm not interested in what's fallacious. I'm interested in looking at what actually happens in real life, and that's why I won't be held to abstract dorm room rules of order.
Yes, that is where we disagree. I expect a better argument for the denial than "it could conceivably lead in this negative direction, and I'm afraid it will." I don't know if that makes me a rights-based ethicist, but I'm unwilling to penalize unharmful behavior on the basis of fear absent a compelling argument. I do not find your fear of what might happen compelling.
I do not believe that makes you a bigot. Merely willing to sacrifice a known injustice in service of avoiding a different possible injustice.
Ultimately, I suppose you aren't really trying to persuade those like me (or at least you don't really care whether or not we are persuaded); our support isn't really worth much compared to winning the much larger section of society who don't even need a particularly good rationalization in favor of their point if they have the appropriate level of fear; for them, almost any rationalization will do if the emotion is there.
Edit: also, while I do disagree with you, it is not with malice. I respect you and your arguments; I don't think you're operating in bad faith.
So much in the world has gone wrong because people want to convert people to how they think. We shouldn't proselytize for religion, for politics, for food choices or sexuality. I have seen the marginalization of people who don't believe what other people want them to-- over and over. If we think we have a good idea we need to explain it in a convincing fashion and others may be drawn to it. Look at the beginning of air travel. A few braved it, then showed it could work, then others followed.
Yes, the building of secret communities is a strange motivation and I do not understand it. Suppressing one's inclination to make others think like them, not act like a cult may not be easy for some but it should be recognized by others for what it is. With no followers the idea will wither (or not if it is a good idea).
Young people are easily led by those they see as powerful (a teacher) and the one in power needs to eradicate that impulse. It's heady to some, but harmful to those they try to recruit.
O, it is but I disagree with that. I was a member of the YSA (worked for Big Red Fred if anyone remembers him) and never go anybody's way now, but do like these discussions. It's like being a lapsed Catholic.
I felt like this should have been the way to go with vaccines. Get them and live your best life and eventually others will want to too. Instead the reluctant were pressured and insulted so much that the issue got even more polarized, and discussion of other issues, like potential therapeutic treatments, vaccine leakiness, and the likeliness if not inevitability of future mutations were banished from rational discussion as anti-vax misinformation. It’s funny how the left claims to be against punitive discipline in criminal justice, education, and child-rearing but loves punitive discipline when they are trying to get their way.
The anti-punitive discipline thing doesn’t seem to have many actual principled adherents among the broad left. Like if you ask what society should do with someone who commits a hate crime or hits a woman the answer will be to castrate and lock them in solitary confinement until they starve.
A right-wing site I follow highlighted three more teachers who boasted about doing such things on tiktok. This is apparently the gift that keeps on giving.
Blerg. I understand that some kids can’t talk to their families—I didn’t tell mine until I was 19–but it’s a sad situation, not something to brag about for likes.
I deliberately didn't focus on trans kids to avoid derailing the comments, but I will say that I believe some well-intentioned adults are too quick to try to separate kids from parents who won't use their 12 year old's new pronouns (for example). Whatever the outcome of the child's gender exploration, the goal should be to keep the family intact when possible (unless the child is unsafe, of course). A lot of parents come to accept their LGBTQ kids over time, and that's the outcome that is best for everyone.
For the record, the piece in question reports the teachers statements that they weren't stalking the students or generally monitoring their internet use/searching for recruits, but that the monitoring software made it visible and when they happened to notice students searching for terms, they made a note to invite them. That's not great, but it's not the same thing as stalking. Nor is there any indication of active efforts to hide student participation beyond general privacy which is apparently standard.
However, I'm not real in love with this (not from one of the teachers):
Like Askew, Agamao said he understood why parents would be worried that they might not know what’s going on in their child’s life at school, but that that doesn’t mean they have a right to it.
“I think our students have a right to certain privacies simply out of self-preservation,” he said. “If your child feels loved and accepted in their home, they’ll have no problem telling you these things.”
I mean, there's an obvious line where teachers have independent responsibilities to the students, but there's also a duty to not inappropriately interfere in the parent-child relationship. Hard to tell if this was inappropriate or not, but we'll see what the investigation reveals.
It's sooooo untrue that kids will always confide in their parents if the home is loving. Adolescents and teenagers are eager for independence and validation from adults outside the family. Kids can have perfect liberal parents and still keep secrets, especially when adults are encouraging it and making them feel important. This is how some kids wind up in secret relationships with predatory adults, etc.
I read that article and I’m trying to understand what’s “troubling” about it. I mean the fact that the teachers might get fired is troubling, but I don’t think that’s what everyone else here is mad about. Otherwise it seems like a tempest in a teapot unless you have socially right-wing priors.
What bothers me is the entire attitude toward parents, like the “mind trick” to keep sixth graders from talking to their parents about what they learned. How they’re aggressive about recruiting kids to come and stay in the club, while taking steps to hide it from parents. If you really care about queer kids, you should want parents to be involved unless it is truly unsafe.
I’m a gay person who told my English teacher I was queer before I told my parents, and I’m very grateful for her. But she didn’t have the contempt for parents that these teachers seem to have. I don’t like the mentality (also seen in Loudon County on race) that if parents aren’t woke, cut them out of the equation.
Except in context what they’re saying is that they gave an anti-bullying presentation of which gender-based discrimination was only a small part but because it was the last part that is the only thing that got communicated to the parents which led to backlash, so to avoid the backlash they decided to frontload that part the following year. Doesn’t seem very nefarious to me. I guess “Jedi mind trick” isn’t the best choice of words but honestly that’s how any profession talks about their clients behind closed doors, teachers/therapists/lawyers whatever. It really seems like people are putting the worst possible gloss onto something that’s pretty innocuous.
That’s fair. And I’m a parent, so that’s probably why their attitude bugs me so much. But when they work with peoples children, and they’re bragging about hiding the club from parents, the reaction shouldn’t surprise them.
After 15+ years of being involved in far left/rad left/woke left/whatever you want to call it left organizing and activism, I walked away from basically my entire social circle and 90% of my friends over this issue. I don’t think I’m particularly valuable as an activist (I was only ever the person who took the notes and made the coffee, and I was happy being that person), but I do think that my story isn’t crazy unusual, and I think that maybe the people engaging in this sort of craziness should think a little more about how many more of the note-takers and coffee-makers of the world the left really can afford to lose.
When I try to tell this story I get two common reactions. One is the motte and bailey: “no one” is making the crazy arguments I cite to, and I must be either stupid or deluded to think that they are.
The other is a No True Scotsman argument: I must not have really been committed to any of it in the first place. I was secretly conservative all along!
What actually happened was that the craziness of much of the rhetoric started me off with questioning my entire belief structure.
Much like a fundamentalist Christian might start asking themselves whether Noah *really* took two of every kind of animal onto a literal ark that floated on the face of the earth for however many days (and if so where did they store all the food???), and find that one question leads to another and suddenly the entire edifice of their faith has been lost, I found myself asking whether it was *really* my internalized privilege and white fragility that made me want to cry when I was called out in front of 300 people for mixing up the words systemic and systematic, and from there I found the entire structure of belief collapsing.
Some of my beliefs have been retained to be sure, since I did in fact sincerely believe much of it: I would like to see higher caps on immigration from Central America, as a random example.
But I can’t imagine ever being able to actually work on the issue with lefty activists ever again because the degree of purity testing is so high. Everyone is an activist for everything and wants to test everyone else on the subject, so I doubt I could attend an organizational meeting on immigration policy without being required to nod along with all sorts of opinions I no longer hold.
I confine my volunteering to soup kitchens etc these days, which is fine, and again it’s not like I think I am some terrible loss to activism; I just took the notes and made the coffee.
But it seems significant to me that I was driven out, first because it happened to me and I lost a lot of friends and I’m not over it yet, but also because if you can drive out a fifteen year note-taking veteran, who else are you driving out, or never bringing in? Is this really the way to change the world?
And because I do still care about a lot of the concrete goals, I possess a fury born of heartbreak that the only responses I typically get are either pretending that nothing untoward is happening, or suggesting I must have been a cuckoo in the nest all along.
1) if you’ve been convinced that your longtime role in activism is unimportant, there’s proof right there that the activist group is cannibalizing itself.
2) Noah was on the boat for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s a lot of animal manure.
Don't forget there's more than one way to be a political activist. Since 2018 I've been spending hundreds of hours every year encouraging people to show up and vote for Democratic candidates, but I've done it all by sitting at my laptop and sending text messages.
Unlike other forms of activism, this is an almost completely solitary activity. There's a little chit-chat in the Slack rooms but it's all very practically oriented: not debates about ideology but "How should I respond to this voter's concerns about X?" I'm not the most gregarious person in the first place so this suits me fine, but there's more to it than that.
I firmly believe that one of the reasons left-wing politics is so ugly is that people treat activism as a form of sociability: a way to meet new friends or lovers or what have you. I understand the appeal of being part of a passionate, like-minded group of people but the downsides are almost certainly bigger than the upsides.
But thanks to technology we no longer need to mix things that shouldn't be mixed. You can make the world a better place while sitting alone in your apartment, and find your friends some other way.
My friend signed up to do that, and was given a whole mess of Hispanic names from Miami. She still wrote the letters (in english), but it didn't look like a winning strategy for the dems.
Ted Kaczinsky, also known as the Unabomber, argued that the organized Left comprised 'oversocialized' individuals. 'Oversocialized' here means a strong internal drive towards adherence to accepted in-group morality.
Because such a morality is by definition widely-held and societally-approved, the urge to police and to condemn is turned upon the turncoat and the outgroup.
(This is why the recent success stories of liberal activism are things like the 'Black Lives Matter' movement and whatever gender stuff they're up to now; those are completely compatible with the dominant culture's mores, whereas things like economic redistribution and a less belligerent foreign policy are not.)
This isn't to disagree with you; rather it's to say that the urge to make a social gathering of politics is, perhaps, better understood as a need to make social that social, moral impulse.
Hey, maybe this is why "abolish the police" gets so much traction on the left.
When you ask who's going to stop crime after the police are abolished, the answer is always something like "oh, the community will take care of it". I think I see why that feels plausible to people who are "oversocialized" and have an unhealthy need to belong to an in-group.
If the whole world were as tight-knit and as intolerant of deviance as a DSA chapter, there would hardly be any crime in the first place. And when people did commit crimes, "the community" could punish them with nothing more than ostracism and it would be a very effective deterrent. "Oversocialized" people experience ostracism as absolute hell, and they have trouble imagining that not everyone feels the same way.
That makes sense to me. It seems plausible. And the thing is, it's not even an unhealthy impulse, not necessarily. Every society needs its limits, its taboos, its methods of enforcement. It makes sense to have a group ethos. It makes sense to make people aware of what these limits are if, for whatever reason, they can't just grok them intuitively. But like everything else, it's a tool, it's an instrument, and what really matters is what those limits are and how they are enforced.
What is undeniable is that the current mix the fashionable Left has posited is simply not attractive to voters.
Ostracism was a very effective means of punishment for deviant behavior as recently as… the Middle Ages. Perhaps build back better should have included a wall around every city. Kill someone? Out you go! Be gone!
"When you ask who's going to stop crime after the police are abolished, the answer is always something like 'oh, the community will take care of it'."
This has always been something of an interesting question to me because we already have the answer: police did not come before crime or before the community. Crime and community existed. Police were *an* answer to that question that we arrived at through communal means. "The community" created the police. If we abolish the police and then allow the community to come up with a solution to crime, I daresay it will fairly closely resemble some fairly recognizable form of "the police."
That suggests to me that perhaps the answer is not to remove the police, but to make changes to how they do what they do to better reflect the needs of the community.
It's very hard to view BLM as a success story. There's been essentially no decline in the number of police killings but a massive spike of crime and a law and order backlash. The only tangible success BLM has had has been getting everyone to say they support BLM.
Amy, are you familiar with this database from Washington Post about police shootings.....? You have to subscribe to Post......to open it. But essentially, in 2020, it says that 17 unarmed black men were shot (remember, it's only shootings) for all the US.
Fair. I've commented on other posts of Freddie's saying that the stated aim was fraudulent from the get-go. The word grift is overused but BLM Inc. absolutely was and is a grift and in *that* sense it's been a massive success. That is what I meant.
I'm sorry that happened to you, and glad you've found ways to volunteer where the good you can do and the kindness you can show are what matters. I firmly believe that long after performative righteousness has canceled itself and been revealed for the frivolity it is, kindness and charity will be honored and be making the world better.
I feel very much the same. I did so much of the less visible work on many issues.For years and years-- only to be castigated by the newer more vocal people (some of whom were educated using scholarship funds I had fought to raise and endow) and I believe my first fall was the pronoun-- mistakenly using "she" for a person named Ann. The point being not to ever use any gendered pronoun. I thought, "was this the hill to die on?" Like you I believe in the issues with all my heart but the rules....In a way it reminds me of growing up Catholic and believing the values of the Sermon on the Mount then having to go to confession for eating meat on Friday during Holy Week.
There are many ways to be good in the world and the peer group you lose when you go your own way isn't worth the pain in your heart.
My experience is that people who object to point 4 are usually not doing so in good faith. "Why do you care what's happening in this college/this city/this subculture? You're just looking to be offended!" Well, no - what's happening in vanguard organizations is often a canary in the coalmine for the broader culture. Elite colleges have been at the bleeding edge of our current race and gender hysteria, for example. So to deny that we have a duty, much less a right, to keep an eye about what these influential bodies are doing is obscurantism, plain and simple.
There are similar dynamics at play on Twitter. Certainly as a platform it lends itself tremendously well to dogpiling and bullying. But I've seen cases where simply engaging with someone's argument, that they themselves have written and voluntarily put out into the world, is cast instead as some kind of unsporting attack. Again - obscurantism.
It's a strange tack in a democratic system to hide one's policies in such a way.
I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with David Shor, and he’s always been talking about campaigning, not governing. Shor’s point is that you can still do unpopular (but necessary) things, just don’t talk about them in the campaign and wait until you are in power.
Republicans know this. They don’t talk about tax cuts for the rich during their campaigns (because they know it’s unpopular) but as soon as they get in power they just implement.
"Shor’s point is that you can still do unpopular (but necessary) things, just don’t talk about them in the campaign and wait until you are in power."
Oh, this is what I was referring to above. Do you have a reference for this? I went looking for it in an interview and found kind of the opposite, but I have the same sense that he said this.
Much of the sturm and drang over popularism (and many other issues) seems to stem from a desire in parts of the woke left to hold the following three ideas simultaneously:
1. The only legitimate governance is democratic governance, informed by the voice of a majority of the people.
2. A majority (or at least a very large, significant minority) of the voting populace is racist.
3. Racists are inherently illegitimate and don't deserve a voice.
This leads to an implicit assumption that the racists can and should be exiled, and once this happens, finally a majority will support the right policies. Popularism provokes anger by basically pointing out that this is not actually an option
I think that could be generalized even more than that. A lot of lefties have incredibly specific ideas about what a post revolution world should look like. But belief in radical democracy is also a core component. So trying to square the circle where they want a democratic society that also has a lot of policies/structures that are currently wildly unpopular generates some significant cognitive dissonance.
My problem with the left was so few could do life things. And the real working class-the ones who wire the house, hang a door, install HVAC--seem to value individualism. In -House of the Dead- Dostoevsky writes the need for even the most hardened lifer to have a bit of freedom. I've been reading about the Russian Civil War and you are right on target.
Could it be that these people value individualism because their work is individualistic? A lot of those kinds of people run their own small business or work for someone else but would like to be their own boss in the future. They're also doing highly skilled work and their reputation is on the line if they fuck up. It's not at all like working at Walmart or doing unskilled work in a factory.
Huey Long built roads and had big public works projects. He won a case against Standard Oil in the Supreme Court. He built the tallest State Capitol. He's buried there. He was assassinated there and his Share the Wealth Campaign might have made him president. He's not forgotten.
I think this is right. That’s why you find leftist intellectuals advocating, apparently seriously, the idea of an Epistemocracy, where the “low-information voter” (which really means “stupid”) is suppressed.
I think there is a fundamental distinction between politicians using "populism" and activists. I don't think it is the role of politicians to push fringe ideas or policies issues that are unpopular. Let activists and communities play that role and when they are finally "popular" pols can embrace them. I think political leadership among pols on innovative or unpopular or less known issues is tangential. It's not up to pols to make something popular imho.
I kind of agree with this but also am unclear the voters can tell the difference in the information ecosystem that exists.
I think the problem is that activists increasingly drive the political narrative as least as much as politicians do, so drawing a clear line there is misleading. Joe Biden never said or embraced 'defund the police', presumably doesn't believe it in any sense. But he still has to account for it politically because activists help define the contours of the contemporary left.
Good point. I agree it's all in a political ecosystem. i was thinking more about electoral strategy ala Shor. And just to be clear, I am not endorsing that activists take on defund the police let alone disparity framing. For example, reparations is a politica loser (not to mention unworkable and is a liberal policy that embraces tort fixes to problems) that many leftists support. Since big foundations/big tech fund most activists in the NPIC, you end up getting policy issues that are not universalist or popular outside of blue cities with large educated classes. I don't see foundations ever supporting social democracy; they prefer progressive neoliberalism. Only a union rebirth can save the Dem party imho but it is hard to see it happening anytime soon, and even unions are embracing too much idpol lately as public sector unions make up a larger share of membership. The formula of moderate on social issues and social democratic on economic issues seems like the right one, yet i can name one pol that adopts this ideology. 2016 Bernie might be the closest.
How should pols relate to activists, though? In Clinton's 'Sister Souljah' moment, dissing an activist helped a pol. But set against that the possibility of dissed activists running a spoiler candidate, as in Gore vs. Nader. And as the years go by with government becoming essentially a plutocracy, activists become less and less willing to shut up and vote blue, or red for that matter.
I honestly think lefties have a lot to learn from the Trump moment. Sure, we hate him. But he took over a major political party and built a huge popular base that isn't going anywhere no matter how hard folks try to repress it, and isn't that exactly what lefties want to accomplish?
I think there's a good chance that the base gets reactivated for Trump's 2024 campaign.
I do too, and it has ticked me off no end since the very beginning - because a lot of what Trump used to get that base should have been lefty concerns. I knew he would win when he visited Baton Rouge, while our side was busy defining 'white privilege' and calling a lot of those people deplorables.
Dems can hate Trump because he beat their priorities, but I think lefties have the more difficult challenge of both hating him and realizing that he beat them by selling their own goods.
The popular narrative is that the D's are now the party of urban, upper middle class professionals, the PMC that Mr. deBoer talks about. The working class has defected to the R's. Trump was the inflection point of that demographic shift. I'm not sure that working class concerns get a lot of play in the Democratic Party now and my guess is that they will be even less central in a decade or two.
For some reason, I decided to watch some clips from the 2012 presidential debates. Obama's message was pretty clear: Romney is rich and therefore bad. He cruised to an electoral victory with that message despite high unemployment.
Now Obama isn't a socialist, he's barely even a liberal. But I would much rather our actual left-of-center focus on that sort of message rather than the race-centric one. I think most social policies would disproportionately benefit non-whites (e.g. medicare for all), but selling them that way will never work outside the media class
At the end of the day, the GOP wants to end democracy, or limit its effectiveness, and indulge plutocrats with their economic policies. This is not a widely popular plan. So they're going to need (a) frontmen like trump, spouting faux populism and racial dog-whistling that help divide-and-conquer, (b) ammo to pull the latter strategy off.
Yup, Frank's "What's the matter with Kansas" goes into that. And remarkably little has changed since 2004, except the culture war is more race based than religion based
Nope, they just need to rig elections. Which they are busy doing.
Is this just the ideological table-setting we'll need for talking about Kamala Harris's eventual nomination train wreck?
I have two main ideas:
1) The left, left-liberal consensus, woke left, etc is first and foremost a subculture, not a political movement and more specifically wants to embrace a counter-cultural aesthetic. This is not coincidentally why it's like catnip to Brooklyn hipsters, because it's just the extension of cultural proclivities into the political sphere.
2) This leads to making asinine, purposefully obnoxious political statements to separate the ingroup from the outgroup. They function as a shibboleth, no different than a mohawk, goth clothing, or skinny jeans. This is, not coincidentally, why there is a very obvious and very specific aesthetic popular among radlibs (or whatever term you prefer for them).
As a corollary, they hate "population" because politics is a clique for them and the hate the idea that normies can get in. Then they are no longer special. They hate this idea and actually don't want to get popular. They want to lose and take specific and obvious actions to make sure they lose on purpose. They may not admit it but that is 100% the point and always has been.
Hence "abolish the family." We're so fucked.
Agreed. In terms of actual politics, you'd want your ideas to be as popular as possible. You'd want them popular among the people you hate
But fashion? You want to be unique. You want it to say "I'm not like you, fucking normies." Stuff like "abolish the police" does that.
There's also the libertarian version do this "abolish drivers licenses" or whatever, they have neither political nor cultural power so we can sit back and laugh.
I talk about Pierre Bourdieu too much but it's hard to overstate the effect reading Distinction had on me. It blew my mind. Maybe it was what I needed in my life at the time. I'd already seen the writing on the wall and knee the nascent radical left was going to crash and burn...hard. I was trying to understand why. I knew it was because of it's own internal dynamics. The failure comes from within. Now I finally understand why.
Sounds like an interesting book. I need to make a big used book purchase sometime.
Thanks, I found the first chapter of Distinction at MIT. Even the intro to the first chapter is enlightening.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to check it out.
There isn't anything wrong with being a normie except to the ones who who frame these ideas. And the real secret is that the ones they think are normies aren't at all. I do something that radlibs would snark at--. I am a ham radio operator. There are nearly a million of us. We would look normal to the radlibs, but have amazing powers in time and space and technical expertise you would not believe. None of the operators I know would care one bit what someone in Brooklyn thought of them. But tornado, hurricanes, floods, fires-- they will organize the communications as volunteers and try to help everyone regardless of politics.
Yep! You’ve absolutely captured the incentives that lead to these extreme views. At best, these extremists are rationally aiming to drive ad views and paid subscriptions with their inflammatory rhetoric. At worst, they’re just looking for the dopamine hit from likes and retweets. In no case are they attempting to productively impact the political process. Further, I don’t believe this behavior is unique to the left. I’ve seen enough “dunks” on righthoids to know they have their own groups of extremists that aren’t focused on productive political change.
This is an excellent observation--- "in no case are they attempting to productively impact the political process." That would be precinct work, signing up voters, folding and mailing information packets. Same with my union. But it is not exciting or glamorous. Not too much dopamine doing the ground games.
In Russia there was a history of communal work in villages but there was still family structure. To move this topic forward it helps to understand how land was allocated after the freeing of the serfs during the lead up to 1917....anyone who thinks it was a sharp division needs to read further.
And once you have a baby the whole thing changes.
You mention Black families with good insight. Latino families are extraordinarily family oriented and abolishing the family does not appeal to Hispanics. There's a lot to respond to in this post.
Regarding the family, a fringe idea might be to reverse the ban on marrying within the family (biologically appropriately distant), which some scholars believe ended "kinship" with significant changes on how most people experienced life.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholic-church-ban-in-the-middle-ages-loosened-family-ties/
Interesting ... enlightening for me, in the sense that I was/have/hold "the family" in a binary thinking pattern. Family good—anti-family bad. Perhaps there's a sweet spot with family. Friends from southern Asia tell me of the badness which comes from too close family (about 1/3 of marriages are cousin marriages). The corruption is described to me, as its not the greedy Boss-Hog style corruption we think of, but nepotism corruption. Where you have to hire your lazy thieving cousin to be the trolley conductor even though you know he'll skim the fares. You have to hire him because he's your brother-in-law, and more so, because your grandma told you to, and your mom is using threatening words. So you hire him. He of course skims the fares—thus your public transit system has less money for maintenance. You also had to let the repair contracts to another cousin, and he's skimming, as are his employees, so things don't get fully maintained. Thus everything in the system is slowly spiraling down to shit. As my friend said about Karachi: "The English left us a perfectly good trolley system, they left us a perfectly good water system. But because of corruption we couldn't maintain them. So now, we have no trolleys, and water comes in a truck to our household cistern."
Good point. There may be plenty of downsides to a kinship family model. And it may not fit today's Western world very well.
One particularly troubling development in the Left is that there has been a shift away from coalition building and having a broad base supportive of specific policy objectives.
I think that this has largely coincided with the evaporation of the labor movement in the private sector and to the degree that labor is still a force it is due to public sector unions who may broadly align with the PMC, government, and corporate press and are often in opposition to public interests (i.e. teachers' unions).
As a result of the waning influence of private unions, the Left now, by and large, favors administrative control to enact its policies and would prefer not to have to engage in retail politics and selling its ideas. That's why Trump's judicial appointments were such an existential crisis - I think the Left senses that its policies and rhetoric are primarily designed to move hearts and minds and policy WITHIN institutions and bureaucracies. But they are alienating externally and it would be better to bypass the public with judicial control, bureaucratic mechanisms, tech/corporate censorship, etc.
Shor is an anomaly in that he has some self awareness of the degree to which his social and economic class is unlikeable, divorced from the social and economic reality of most Americans, and fixated on status production masquerading as technocratic competence. This can be applied to a variety of pitfalls for progressives: Zero COVID hysteria, radicalization in grade school education disseminated from the Ed schools, global warming rent seeking, etc.
The net result is that one class after another of the 'ascendant coalition' is being alienated. Taibbi's reporting from Loudon illustrates what is happening with Asians. Anyone who has spent time in Florida, Texas, or the Southwest knew the Democrats were skating on thin ice with Hispanics.
So what can the Democratic Party and progressives do? Wait and hope for another bogeyman like Trump who will function as a huge fig leaf for their arrogance, corruption, and incompetence? Wait for the second coming of Bernie? I don't think they really know because, again, they run aon closed loop and are so arrogant that no improvement is possible until well after things are clear to everyone else and there is a huge liability. See for example, COVID policy where lockdowns imposed huge costs for less affluent in the pursuit of a zero COVID fantasy entertained only by a deranged elite.
"So what can the Democratic Party do?"
Trump actually picked up Hispanic votes in 2020. His unexpectedly strong performance is what got people to sit up and take notice. He wasn't a particularly good boogey man in 2020 in terms of frightening minorities into the Democratic camp in 2020 and I doubt he will be one in 2024.
Yeah, I don't think even the performative 'literally Hitler!' hysterics on the Left even bought their own schtick although it did get clicks, move books, etc.
My general take:
I do think that Trump was a liability in purple suburbs where social status is a primary concern. For these voters Trump was embarrassing of course among college educated white women in 2016 but then also more white men in 2020. I think that was Trump specific.
I also think that there was a lot of Trump fatigue and that some people wanted him to go because they were tired of hearing about him all the time and they were promised a 'return to normalcy' which Biden obviously hasn't been able to deliver.
With the Hispanic vote though I just don't think it's that difficult: they identify ethnically and nationally and probably didn't like the Trump insults, but they're working class, Catholic, and socially conservative on the whole and did better than any other ethnic group economically under Trump. Was is it that Democrats have to offer Hispanics specifically? I don't have any special knowledge on the subject but when I go to baseball games it's Hispanic dads with their families. When I go to restaurants it's Hispanic dads with their families. What is the Democratic party offering that guy specifically?
Based on my viewing of "In the Heights", we could offer that guy's daughter more ways to move up in the world that don't involve shipping her off to Stanford to get massively alienated from both the PMC milieu she's "rising" into and her own family at the same time.
Is it gauche to bring up cultural machismo in the Hispanic population? The left gives them the term toxic masculinity and Pajama Boy. https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/why-everyone-hates-the-educated-left
Just a small note, I did wait for the second coming of Bernie, and it happened! He arrived and told me to vote for Joe Biden.
The burning question left for me is: while you were chewing that cheeseburger were you pondering Torreto’s American Muscle or O’Conner’s imports?
All this stuff makes more sense when you assume that both big coalitions in the US, left and right, don't want to achieve big majorities. They just want 51%, and will latch onto various tacked-on, philosophically indefensible goals in order to please oddball special interests and avoid inadvertently rising above "51".
That seems very risky given that elections can depend on last-minute news? I don’t see why any sane politician wouldn’t prefer winning by a comfortable margin.
I don't think that's possible given the two party system and the underlying diversity of the country. The D's and R's are already bizarre political chimeras with little resemblance to the politics of the media voter.
I doubt it would happen for the presidency, but there are plenty of safe seats where incumbents coast to victory.
They prefer 51 to 49 but prefer 49 to 80. 80 is functionally a disaster, given the actual incentives in how these coalitions are built. They penalty for 49 isnt that bad, you'll get a win in 2 or 4 years, 8 years tops. The important thing is to never have to deliver on promises made to a big majority, and to keep lots of special interests happy so they'll do favors for you and your family members.
What evidence is there for this? Safe seats seem to be valued, and I think most politicians would be happy to be FDR. But it's not possible in a polarized country.
Constant pattern of a 51/49 split and a promised “permanent majority” which never arrives is the evidence. What individual politicians want doesn’t matter, what matters is the structural design of the system and the coalitional logic it incentivizes. Consider how the Democrats have started pushing Asians into the arms of the other party. They’re doing that because they don’t actually want to win more than 51 percent of the country.
Even the Communist Manifesto engages in that same "motte-bailey" Freddie refers to in this post. The relevant CM paragraph opens "abolish the family" (bailey) but hastens to specify they merely mean the "bourgeois family" or the "family based on private gain" (motte). This slipperiness in thinking, advocacy and praxis, which is usually not even conscious or "cynical", runs very, very deep on the left, all to the way back to its historical roots. Who could fail to notice the exact same motte-bailey in the left's rhetoric on borders, police, sex, the idea of "merit", and so forth?
There is some merit in a bold promise, though. Did Huey Long *really* mean Every Man A King? Was every man now a hereditary monarch? And just men!? Well, where would we get enough scepters, who's going to draw the coats of arms? Shorthand is alright. Slogans are powerful. Taste the rainbow (note: not actually a rainbow.)
The problem arises when the slogan itself is what's disagreeable, not the bowdlerized version. Taste the rainbow works because it sounds good. "Literally combust when you taste how rainbow-y this is, so you actually die in real life" doesn't sound good, even if you stand there and explain to your customers that they're idiots and *obviously* that doesn't mean they're actually going to die in real life.
The other failure is when you overpromise on something pithy, then fail to deliver and it can come back to haunt you. That's why the Right made such hay with "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." And going back to GHWB: "read my lips: no new taxes" doesn't lend itself well to a bunch of well-ackshullys.
You can only prop up memetic failures like this if you have complete, disciplined control of messaging, which the fashionable left only has on those occasions its aims coincide with those of global capitalism (e.g. BLM, gender stuff.) Abolishing the family isn't really on the table yet, so the obvious problems with it - it's weird and nobody likes it - can't be gaslit away.
I agree with everything you say here, but it troubles me - because I am also against 'negotiating with yourself' as a strategy.
Trying to reconcile this opposition within myself, I realized that the context in which I dislike negotiating with oneself is that of butting-heads contract negotiations, in which I think it's vital to ask for what you really want. Obviously, a very different situation from electoral politics. Except, really?
I remember being furious with Obama for negotiating with himself about health care. So much of our politics *does* seem to boil down to butting-heads contract negotiations, once the politicians are elected. So I think activists can be forgiven for losing track of the extent to which voters matter, when after all voters only matter at all on election day, and even the preferences they reveal on that day will have almost no effect on what the elected officials actually do.
As much as I disagree with the current loud right and a lot of their tactics, I have to admire that they are getting out there to the school board meetings and primarying local politicians, and actually acting as if voters have a role to play in politics and ignoring them has consequences.
I think that makes sense when there are actual negotiations to do, but negotiation isn’t what politicians do with voters, is it? I suppose closest to negotiation would be “floating trial balloons” to see if some stance s actually popular with voters, or trying out ideas using polls?
I agree, negotiation isn't what politicians do with voters, so the 'don't negotiate with yourself' rule probably doesn't apply.
What politicians do with voters, though... what is it, really, when they will govern according to their biggest donors' wishes? Freddie complains that poli junkies are not taking this seriously, but who can?
As I understand it, big donors get their phone calls answered, which means they get to make an argument for what they want. That doesn't mean it's persuasive, though.
Influence isn't quite the same as power.
I was thinking of the 2014 study that showed that average voters did not get their policy preferences unless rich voters shared those preferences.
“Abolish the family” might sound like something that will never happen (because it won’t happen) but some activists on the left are increasingly hostile to parents / parenting in a way that voters notice and loathe. I’ve been thinking about what happened in the Virginia election, especially after reading Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Loudon County – parents were shut out and demonized by school officials, and they were pissed and voted for Republicans.
I’ve also been troubled by the story of 2 teachers in California who bragged about the tactics they used for their LGBTQ club at their middle school (and have since been suspended from the club pending an investigation). The short version is that people are angry because they stalked the kids’ online activity to recruit members, and because of their efforts to conceal kids’ participation from parents. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Two-California-teachers-were-secretly-recorded-16732562.php
As a gay person, I’m obviously sympathetic to adolescents who are afraid to tell their parents they might be queer. Supportive teachers meant a lot to me and my queer friends. So I’m generally supportive of teachers providing a safe environment and not tattling to parents.
But what bothers me is how these teachers seemed to relish building a secret community that shut parents out. They didn’t encourage any kids to talk to their parents (surely not every single one was abusive?) They sound like they’re enjoying the fact that kids confide in them instead of Mom and Dad, because they get to feel morally superior and they don’t have to worry about anyone challenging their amateur diagnoses of troubled children.
Parents aren’t wrong to think some on the left are actively working to undermine them. When the family is perceived as a problem (parents aren’t woke) some activists are happy to sideline them in favor of their politics. “Abolish the family” won’t happen like “abolish the police” won’t happen, but the slogan reminds voters of real things going on that they hate.
Something similar happen with, 'abolish with police.' Everyone wants improved policing but there is some small but vocal segment (documented by Shellenberger) that likes seeing chaos and views chaos that comes from no policing as a just punishment upon society for its sins.
Shellenberger? So I should actually read "San Fransicko" for good insights into how progressive politics goes on the local level?
It's precisely things like this that led me to believe the slippery slope argument is not only not "fallacious" but valid nearly 100% of the time. We've gone from "who cares what consenting adults get up to in the bedroom?" to state-sanctioned gender experimentation on children in one generation. So when someone tells me - "no, abolish the family doesn't *really* mean abolish the family!" or "no, defund the police doesn't *really* mean defund the police!" I make the uncharitable but prudent decision to think them a liar. It seldom steers me wrong. When it does, that's regrettable, but I would prefer that to the alternative.
You'll notice I said think, not say.
Well, I disagree with that advice. Have a good day!
I generally agree with you on both abolish the police and abolish the family; however, my read of your example of "who cares what consenting adults get up to in the bedroom" leading to gender experimentation seems...off somehow. Should we have denied consenting adults the right to do what they please in their own bedrooms because it leads to gender experiments on children? That's the nature of the "slippery slope" fallacy: allowing one thing inevitably leads to others (like allowing homosexual marriage leads to allowing marrying minors or close relatives, so we shouldn't allow homosexual marriage).
What am I missing?
We should have, collectively, me included, not ascribed a motive of bigotry to those who said in earnest that (for example) gay rights were a slippery slope. They clearly and obviously were. If it's still possible to defend gay rights despite that fact - I believe it is - then that's the work that should be done. And further I believe that it's incumbent on those who want wide-scale societal changes of attitude to reassure those who are nervous about it that they're *not* ready to push them off the top of the slope. That is, I think it's the duty of the gay rights lobby not just to advocate for gay rights but also to say "also we're not putting our foot in the door for incest." Is that unfair of me? Perhaps. But I struggle to see a better way that doesn't lead immediately to a slippery slope. Rights-based ethicists will disagree, naturally.
I guess my stance overall is that if you wish to deny someone the right to do something that does not appear to harm anyone, it's incumbent upon you to argue why they should be denied. If your argument boils down to "well, if I let *you* do this, I have to let this *other* harmful behavior also occur, thus I cannot let you do this" then your argument is invalid unless there is no method by which one can distinguish the two. Defining the limits of what is allowed is all part of the conversation. That one thing *might* lead to another is not a valid argument. If you want to say "I will not let you do what you want *unless you agree to place X limitations on it which will prevent harmful behavior" then I've got no problem with it.
I agree with your stance. Where we probably agree is that I think this response suffices: "I think, although of course cannot prove, that while what you're asking for is reasonable in isolation, it's a harbinger of immensely harmful things that will follow it, whether or not that's what you want at this precise moment, which, if we're both being honest, it probably is." That's really the crux of it: I can afford not to be the most logical or reasonable person in the room because ultimately I know that if I hold myself to such standards as hyper-rational and hyper-fair I'll be bamboozled every time by those with no such scruples... such as those who've successfully pushed the race and gender catastrophes we now live with every day.
I'm not interested in what's valid. I'm not interested in what's fallacious. I'm interested in looking at what actually happens in real life, and that's why I won't be held to abstract dorm room rules of order.
"where we probably *DISagree", I should say.
Yes, that is where we disagree. I expect a better argument for the denial than "it could conceivably lead in this negative direction, and I'm afraid it will." I don't know if that makes me a rights-based ethicist, but I'm unwilling to penalize unharmful behavior on the basis of fear absent a compelling argument. I do not find your fear of what might happen compelling.
I do not believe that makes you a bigot. Merely willing to sacrifice a known injustice in service of avoiding a different possible injustice.
Ultimately, I suppose you aren't really trying to persuade those like me (or at least you don't really care whether or not we are persuaded); our support isn't really worth much compared to winning the much larger section of society who don't even need a particularly good rationalization in favor of their point if they have the appropriate level of fear; for them, almost any rationalization will do if the emotion is there.
Edit: also, while I do disagree with you, it is not with malice. I respect you and your arguments; I don't think you're operating in bad faith.
So much in the world has gone wrong because people want to convert people to how they think. We shouldn't proselytize for religion, for politics, for food choices or sexuality. I have seen the marginalization of people who don't believe what other people want them to-- over and over. If we think we have a good idea we need to explain it in a convincing fashion and others may be drawn to it. Look at the beginning of air travel. A few braved it, then showed it could work, then others followed.
Yes, the building of secret communities is a strange motivation and I do not understand it. Suppressing one's inclination to make others think like them, not act like a cult may not be easy for some but it should be recognized by others for what it is. With no followers the idea will wither (or not if it is a good idea).
Young people are easily led by those they see as powerful (a teacher) and the one in power needs to eradicate that impulse. It's heady to some, but harmful to those they try to recruit.
"We shouldn't proselytize for...politics."
I swear to you I'm asking this question in good faith: isn't this the exact opposite of what Freddie is advocating for here?
O, it is but I disagree with that. I was a member of the YSA (worked for Big Red Fred if anyone remembers him) and never go anybody's way now, but do like these discussions. It's like being a lapsed Catholic.
I felt like this should have been the way to go with vaccines. Get them and live your best life and eventually others will want to too. Instead the reluctant were pressured and insulted so much that the issue got even more polarized, and discussion of other issues, like potential therapeutic treatments, vaccine leakiness, and the likeliness if not inevitability of future mutations were banished from rational discussion as anti-vax misinformation. It’s funny how the left claims to be against punitive discipline in criminal justice, education, and child-rearing but loves punitive discipline when they are trying to get their way.
The anti-punitive discipline thing doesn’t seem to have many actual principled adherents among the broad left. Like if you ask what society should do with someone who commits a hate crime or hits a woman the answer will be to castrate and lock them in solitary confinement until they starve.
A right-wing site I follow highlighted three more teachers who boasted about doing such things on tiktok. This is apparently the gift that keeps on giving.
Blerg. I understand that some kids can’t talk to their families—I didn’t tell mine until I was 19–but it’s a sad situation, not something to brag about for likes.
The LGBQ part doesn't bother me at all, but the T part is terrifying: https://pitt.substack.com/p/a-history-lesson-on-families
I deliberately didn't focus on trans kids to avoid derailing the comments, but I will say that I believe some well-intentioned adults are too quick to try to separate kids from parents who won't use their 12 year old's new pronouns (for example). Whatever the outcome of the child's gender exploration, the goal should be to keep the family intact when possible (unless the child is unsafe, of course). A lot of parents come to accept their LGBTQ kids over time, and that's the outcome that is best for everyone.
Wait until more Reps start talking about Let's Go Brandon! Today! Quit! = LGBTQ
Read this article and tell me more about how trans activists are the ones who are breaking up families.
https://thegarrisonproject.org/trans-children-separation/
For the record, the piece in question reports the teachers statements that they weren't stalking the students or generally monitoring their internet use/searching for recruits, but that the monitoring software made it visible and when they happened to notice students searching for terms, they made a note to invite them. That's not great, but it's not the same thing as stalking. Nor is there any indication of active efforts to hide student participation beyond general privacy which is apparently standard.
However, I'm not real in love with this (not from one of the teachers):
Like Askew, Agamao said he understood why parents would be worried that they might not know what’s going on in their child’s life at school, but that that doesn’t mean they have a right to it.
“I think our students have a right to certain privacies simply out of self-preservation,” he said. “If your child feels loved and accepted in their home, they’ll have no problem telling you these things.”
I mean, there's an obvious line where teachers have independent responsibilities to the students, but there's also a duty to not inappropriately interfere in the parent-child relationship. Hard to tell if this was inappropriate or not, but we'll see what the investigation reveals.
It's sooooo untrue that kids will always confide in their parents if the home is loving. Adolescents and teenagers are eager for independence and validation from adults outside the family. Kids can have perfect liberal parents and still keep secrets, especially when adults are encouraging it and making them feel important. This is how some kids wind up in secret relationships with predatory adults, etc.
It is mind boggling that this needs to be said, but thanks for saying it.
I read that article and I’m trying to understand what’s “troubling” about it. I mean the fact that the teachers might get fired is troubling, but I don’t think that’s what everyone else here is mad about. Otherwise it seems like a tempest in a teapot unless you have socially right-wing priors.
There are longer quotes from the teachers in the substack piece. I didn’t want to link to it directly because the framing in the newspaper is more balanced, but here it is: https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/how-activist-teachers-recruit-kids
What bothers me is the entire attitude toward parents, like the “mind trick” to keep sixth graders from talking to their parents about what they learned. How they’re aggressive about recruiting kids to come and stay in the club, while taking steps to hide it from parents. If you really care about queer kids, you should want parents to be involved unless it is truly unsafe.
I’m a gay person who told my English teacher I was queer before I told my parents, and I’m very grateful for her. But she didn’t have the contempt for parents that these teachers seem to have. I don’t like the mentality (also seen in Loudon County on race) that if parents aren’t woke, cut them out of the equation.
Except in context what they’re saying is that they gave an anti-bullying presentation of which gender-based discrimination was only a small part but because it was the last part that is the only thing that got communicated to the parents which led to backlash, so to avoid the backlash they decided to frontload that part the following year. Doesn’t seem very nefarious to me. I guess “Jedi mind trick” isn’t the best choice of words but honestly that’s how any profession talks about their clients behind closed doors, teachers/therapists/lawyers whatever. It really seems like people are putting the worst possible gloss onto something that’s pretty innocuous.
That’s fair. And I’m a parent, so that’s probably why their attitude bugs me so much. But when they work with peoples children, and they’re bragging about hiding the club from parents, the reaction shouldn’t surprise them.
Oh I don’t think the reaction is surprising at all, I think it demonstrates why they were trying to be discreet in the first place lol
After 15+ years of being involved in far left/rad left/woke left/whatever you want to call it left organizing and activism, I walked away from basically my entire social circle and 90% of my friends over this issue. I don’t think I’m particularly valuable as an activist (I was only ever the person who took the notes and made the coffee, and I was happy being that person), but I do think that my story isn’t crazy unusual, and I think that maybe the people engaging in this sort of craziness should think a little more about how many more of the note-takers and coffee-makers of the world the left really can afford to lose.
When I try to tell this story I get two common reactions. One is the motte and bailey: “no one” is making the crazy arguments I cite to, and I must be either stupid or deluded to think that they are.
The other is a No True Scotsman argument: I must not have really been committed to any of it in the first place. I was secretly conservative all along!
What actually happened was that the craziness of much of the rhetoric started me off with questioning my entire belief structure.
Much like a fundamentalist Christian might start asking themselves whether Noah *really* took two of every kind of animal onto a literal ark that floated on the face of the earth for however many days (and if so where did they store all the food???), and find that one question leads to another and suddenly the entire edifice of their faith has been lost, I found myself asking whether it was *really* my internalized privilege and white fragility that made me want to cry when I was called out in front of 300 people for mixing up the words systemic and systematic, and from there I found the entire structure of belief collapsing.
Some of my beliefs have been retained to be sure, since I did in fact sincerely believe much of it: I would like to see higher caps on immigration from Central America, as a random example.
But I can’t imagine ever being able to actually work on the issue with lefty activists ever again because the degree of purity testing is so high. Everyone is an activist for everything and wants to test everyone else on the subject, so I doubt I could attend an organizational meeting on immigration policy without being required to nod along with all sorts of opinions I no longer hold.
I confine my volunteering to soup kitchens etc these days, which is fine, and again it’s not like I think I am some terrible loss to activism; I just took the notes and made the coffee.
But it seems significant to me that I was driven out, first because it happened to me and I lost a lot of friends and I’m not over it yet, but also because if you can drive out a fifteen year note-taking veteran, who else are you driving out, or never bringing in? Is this really the way to change the world?
And because I do still care about a lot of the concrete goals, I possess a fury born of heartbreak that the only responses I typically get are either pretending that nothing untoward is happening, or suggesting I must have been a cuckoo in the nest all along.
1) if you’ve been convinced that your longtime role in activism is unimportant, there’s proof right there that the activist group is cannibalizing itself.
2) Noah was on the boat for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s a lot of animal manure.
You could chuck the dung overboard, ain’t like you have more pressing stuff on the agenda than wielding a shovel.
Storing enough feed and stopping the lions from snacking on the gazelles would be headaches though.
That’s a lot of dung shoveling for just 8 people.
Gary Larson (The Far Side) drew a cartoon where Noah discovers the lions have eaten the unicorns.
the whole scheme allows a whole lot of evil ducks and fish.
Don't forget there's more than one way to be a political activist. Since 2018 I've been spending hundreds of hours every year encouraging people to show up and vote for Democratic candidates, but I've done it all by sitting at my laptop and sending text messages.
Unlike other forms of activism, this is an almost completely solitary activity. There's a little chit-chat in the Slack rooms but it's all very practically oriented: not debates about ideology but "How should I respond to this voter's concerns about X?" I'm not the most gregarious person in the first place so this suits me fine, but there's more to it than that.
I firmly believe that one of the reasons left-wing politics is so ugly is that people treat activism as a form of sociability: a way to meet new friends or lovers or what have you. I understand the appeal of being part of a passionate, like-minded group of people but the downsides are almost certainly bigger than the upsides.
But thanks to technology we no longer need to mix things that shouldn't be mixed. You can make the world a better place while sitting alone in your apartment, and find your friends some other way.
My friend signed up to do that, and was given a whole mess of Hispanic names from Miami. She still wrote the letters (in english), but it didn't look like a winning strategy for the dems.
Open Progress Text Troop (they have the best texting software IMHO) and Movement Labs (bigger, busier).
You can google the name of your political party and you county and contact them.
Ted Kaczinsky, also known as the Unabomber, argued that the organized Left comprised 'oversocialized' individuals. 'Oversocialized' here means a strong internal drive towards adherence to accepted in-group morality.
Because such a morality is by definition widely-held and societally-approved, the urge to police and to condemn is turned upon the turncoat and the outgroup.
(This is why the recent success stories of liberal activism are things like the 'Black Lives Matter' movement and whatever gender stuff they're up to now; those are completely compatible with the dominant culture's mores, whereas things like economic redistribution and a less belligerent foreign policy are not.)
This isn't to disagree with you; rather it's to say that the urge to make a social gathering of politics is, perhaps, better understood as a need to make social that social, moral impulse.
Kaczynski may have some unusual views about how socialized counts as "oversocialized"
Well, we definitely wouldn't want to countenance anything unusual.
The word oversocialized, like oversexed means (needs more and more), as opposed to what it appears to mean (receives too much).
'Ted Kaczinsky, also known as the Unabomber, argued...' is probably another statement David Shor would suggest we generally avoid.
Right. This isn't a political campaign. This is a discussion on an article.
Hey, maybe this is why "abolish the police" gets so much traction on the left.
When you ask who's going to stop crime after the police are abolished, the answer is always something like "oh, the community will take care of it". I think I see why that feels plausible to people who are "oversocialized" and have an unhealthy need to belong to an in-group.
If the whole world were as tight-knit and as intolerant of deviance as a DSA chapter, there would hardly be any crime in the first place. And when people did commit crimes, "the community" could punish them with nothing more than ostracism and it would be a very effective deterrent. "Oversocialized" people experience ostracism as absolute hell, and they have trouble imagining that not everyone feels the same way.
That makes sense to me. It seems plausible. And the thing is, it's not even an unhealthy impulse, not necessarily. Every society needs its limits, its taboos, its methods of enforcement. It makes sense to have a group ethos. It makes sense to make people aware of what these limits are if, for whatever reason, they can't just grok them intuitively. But like everything else, it's a tool, it's an instrument, and what really matters is what those limits are and how they are enforced.
What is undeniable is that the current mix the fashionable Left has posited is simply not attractive to voters.
Ostracism was a very effective means of punishment for deviant behavior as recently as… the Middle Ages. Perhaps build back better should have included a wall around every city. Kill someone? Out you go! Be gone!
"When you ask who's going to stop crime after the police are abolished, the answer is always something like 'oh, the community will take care of it'."
This has always been something of an interesting question to me because we already have the answer: police did not come before crime or before the community. Crime and community existed. Police were *an* answer to that question that we arrived at through communal means. "The community" created the police. If we abolish the police and then allow the community to come up with a solution to crime, I daresay it will fairly closely resemble some fairly recognizable form of "the police."
That suggests to me that perhaps the answer is not to remove the police, but to make changes to how they do what they do to better reflect the needs of the community.
Just out of curiosity, have you spent much time working in DSA chapters?
It's very hard to view BLM as a success story. There's been essentially no decline in the number of police killings but a massive spike of crime and a law and order backlash. The only tangible success BLM has had has been getting everyone to say they support BLM.
Amy, are you familiar with this database from Washington Post about police shootings.....? You have to subscribe to Post......to open it. But essentially, in 2020, it says that 17 unarmed black men were shot (remember, it's only shootings) for all the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
Fair. I've commented on other posts of Freddie's saying that the stated aim was fraudulent from the get-go. The word grift is overused but BLM Inc. absolutely was and is a grift and in *that* sense it's been a massive success. That is what I meant.
The most tanglible success it has had is raking in billions, I believe, in corporate contributions.
I'm sorry that happened to you, and glad you've found ways to volunteer where the good you can do and the kindness you can show are what matters. I firmly believe that long after performative righteousness has canceled itself and been revealed for the frivolity it is, kindness and charity will be honored and be making the world better.
I feel very much the same. I did so much of the less visible work on many issues.For years and years-- only to be castigated by the newer more vocal people (some of whom were educated using scholarship funds I had fought to raise and endow) and I believe my first fall was the pronoun-- mistakenly using "she" for a person named Ann. The point being not to ever use any gendered pronoun. I thought, "was this the hill to die on?" Like you I believe in the issues with all my heart but the rules....In a way it reminds me of growing up Catholic and believing the values of the Sermon on the Mount then having to go to confession for eating meat on Friday during Holy Week.
There are many ways to be good in the world and the peer group you lose when you go your own way isn't worth the pain in your heart.
Brava, but my impression is the Latinx stuff is alive and well. Just not among Hispanics. 😉
Jesus. That whole experience sounds like a twisted religious cult. I hope you're feeling better. We've all dealt with similar dynamics I think.
Hi Rosemary. I don't know if you are seeing these replies, but if you are, can you email me at ami@idealist.org? Thank you!
I was very nervous about getting involved in local politics precisely because of this.
Your situation hasn't happened to me, and I'm not sure it ever will, but the gnawing fear is always there.
My experience is that people who object to point 4 are usually not doing so in good faith. "Why do you care what's happening in this college/this city/this subculture? You're just looking to be offended!" Well, no - what's happening in vanguard organizations is often a canary in the coalmine for the broader culture. Elite colleges have been at the bleeding edge of our current race and gender hysteria, for example. So to deny that we have a duty, much less a right, to keep an eye about what these influential bodies are doing is obscurantism, plain and simple.
There are similar dynamics at play on Twitter. Certainly as a platform it lends itself tremendously well to dogpiling and bullying. But I've seen cases where simply engaging with someone's argument, that they themselves have written and voluntarily put out into the world, is cast instead as some kind of unsporting attack. Again - obscurantism.
It's a strange tack in a democratic system to hide one's policies in such a way.
I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with David Shor, and he’s always been talking about campaigning, not governing. Shor’s point is that you can still do unpopular (but necessary) things, just don’t talk about them in the campaign and wait until you are in power.
Republicans know this. They don’t talk about tax cuts for the rich during their campaigns (because they know it’s unpopular) but as soon as they get in power they just implement.
"Shor’s point is that you can still do unpopular (but necessary) things, just don’t talk about them in the campaign and wait until you are in power."
Oh, this is what I was referring to above. Do you have a reference for this? I went looking for it in an interview and found kind of the opposite, but I have the same sense that he said this.
Much of the sturm and drang over popularism (and many other issues) seems to stem from a desire in parts of the woke left to hold the following three ideas simultaneously:
1. The only legitimate governance is democratic governance, informed by the voice of a majority of the people.
2. A majority (or at least a very large, significant minority) of the voting populace is racist.
3. Racists are inherently illegitimate and don't deserve a voice.
This leads to an implicit assumption that the racists can and should be exiled, and once this happens, finally a majority will support the right policies. Popularism provokes anger by basically pointing out that this is not actually an option
I think that could be generalized even more than that. A lot of lefties have incredibly specific ideas about what a post revolution world should look like. But belief in radical democracy is also a core component. So trying to square the circle where they want a democratic society that also has a lot of policies/structures that are currently wildly unpopular generates some significant cognitive dissonance.
My problem with the left was so few could do life things. And the real working class-the ones who wire the house, hang a door, install HVAC--seem to value individualism. In -House of the Dead- Dostoevsky writes the need for even the most hardened lifer to have a bit of freedom. I've been reading about the Russian Civil War and you are right on target.
Could it be that these people value individualism because their work is individualistic? A lot of those kinds of people run their own small business or work for someone else but would like to be their own boss in the future. They're also doing highly skilled work and their reputation is on the line if they fuck up. It's not at all like working at Walmart or doing unskilled work in a factory.
Yes, you are right about that. They have a reputation built on past work and word of mouth.
I taught in Louisiana for a while where memories of the Kingfish still remain. That was a different kind of popularism.
What were those memories like?
Huey Long built roads and had big public works projects. He won a case against Standard Oil in the Supreme Court. He built the tallest State Capitol. He's buried there. He was assassinated there and his Share the Wealth Campaign might have made him president. He's not forgotten.
I think this is right. That’s why you find leftist intellectuals advocating, apparently seriously, the idea of an Epistemocracy, where the “low-information voter” (which really means “stupid”) is suppressed.