people ask "what happened to Matt Taibbi" because he used to write about the material things that you say are what should be foremost in any left wing conversation. He does not do that now. Just go to his substack and look for the materialism! It's not there. He's gone from writing about Goldman Sachs' political influence to writing about fucking Ivermectin being a free speech issue. It's pathetic and it has very little to do with the left (is Taibbi even on the left?). It has to do with a guy getting old and rich and slightly canceled himself for some dumb things he wrote twenty years ago. It's not about ideology, it's just about Matt.
All your criticisms are fair, I just don't see the point in lumping this all under the umbrella of "left". It's true that a DSA Twitter account will never tweet "we should support poor white people", but that's because it's needlessly provocative. It doesn't mean it's not something lots of people believe, including almost everyone that was working to get Bernie elected last year. The people that don't believe that just aren't leftists, and putting a hammer and sickle in their bio on twitter doesn't make them one. Anyone can be anything on social media, it doesn't make it true.
Major institutions were working very hard to censor discussion of ivermectin. Taibbi is opposed to censorship, as am I. That ivermectin doesn't work is no more reason to censor it than the fact that the day acceptance movement said scientifically false things is a reason to censor them.
Which "major institutions were working very hard to censor discussion of ivermectin", exactly? Private companies that decided they didn't want to host false and potentially dangerous information on their sites? Is that not a moral position for the public good? I think it is, and I applaud them for doing so. There were still plenty of platforms (I think you've heard of substack?) that were willing to host that false and dangerous info. Not to mention Fox News, the world's largest and most popular news gathering and disseminating organization, which everyone on the left somehow thinks doesn't exist.
I have written before that I don't think that anybody really knows if masks work, much less drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What's the harm in pointing out that these questions typically take decades and multiple studies to sort out?
You have been consistently wrong about masks. Basic physics shows that they work, as have large numbers of detailed studies, which you consistently reject.
As for drugs, there are all sorts of bad consequences of a large fraction of the public believing something works when there is no evidence that it does, including inducing shortages of those drugs for the ailments for which they do work, as well as unnecessary counter-productive busy work for the medical community that has to battle that misinformation.
The promotion of ivermectic was the precise equivalent of shouting fire in a public theater.
Your very first statement shows that you misunderstand my argument. I have always argued that it is perfectly reasonable for masks to work at one scale due to basic physics and at the same time be completely useless in the real world due to the inability of human beings to adhere to protocol for any large period of time.
And what real world studies demonstrate that masks are efficacious? The only ones I am aware of (by which I mean RCT's carried out in the wild) have shown limited benefits at best and more often shown masking to be completely useless.
When Trump first advocated for the use of HCQ there was endless hand wringing about potential shortages--shortages that failed to materialize because pharmaceutical companies donated large stocks of the drug to aid the fight. In terms of hypotheticals this is one scenario that has consistently failed to materialize.
I think you go a bridge too far when you use the word "censorship" here. Major institutions make decisions about what to cover all the time. Nobody is entitled to have their ideas broadcast to the public at large, the fact that the media and various social media platforms decided not to broadcast that stuff doesn't amount to censorship.
Incorrectly characterizing ivermectin as a veterinary medicine isn't censorship. There are a bunch of drugs that see dual use in both humans and veterinary contexts--including most antibiotics. Are you seriously going to turn down antibiotics after a surgery just because your dog would get the same exact drug if he needed to go under the knife?
Describing ivermectin as a "horse dewormer" isn't foregoing coverage at all though, is it? My point pertains to HOW the issue is covered. Technically suggesting that ivermectin is poisonous or not meant for human consumption is not censorship. It is still very, very problematic though.
why on earth would someone need to put the qualifier "white" in that sentence, instead of just saying "we should support poor people"? you're begging people to address a problem that doesn't exist and goading people into saying things that intentionally exclude non white people. It's moronic grievance politics, that's why. It's not a real problem if you are care about anything except culture war, which I admit I am starting to question on this particular blog.
It’s a response to the current theme on the left of NOT giving thought or importance to “white” people. And by doing so, the left is pushing those poor white people away. Because the left is almost literally saying that contingent does not matter *to them.*
if you see the sentence "we should support poor people" and see white people as being discriminated against then I think our politics are just different, sorry.
I don't see that. But I also don't see "we should support poor people" without qualifiers. Therefore it has become necessary to explicitly state who ought to be supported. That's not my doing, and as a humanist, that's not my politics. But it's where we are.
I think you're being willfully obtuse about the current political economy of the left. There are plenty of people who very explicitly believe that we should NOT help poor white people, as some twisted version of equity. Search around on Tumblr or Twitter. Go for it. I understand that you're not one of them, but that's not really the question, is it?
I'll take your word for it, but I don't think think some posts on Tumblr qualify as a problem with the left. If you're talking about the non profit/commentator complex that is essentially an arm of the Democratic Party, sure I don't disagree. They're not the left, they never have been, why are we saying the left doesn't care about all these things that they do care about? Are we seeing labor unions tweet that they don't care about poor white people? of course not. Is Bernie saying that? of course not.
But Bernie, and his followers, moved significantly towards the politics of the nonprofit industrial complex between 2016 and 2020. That is always the drift; whatever socialist movement exists in this country keeps getting more and more woke, because its followers are sick of being called racist. And those fringe Tumblr and Twitter communities keep winning the mainstream. If I had talked about defunding the police in 2016, people would have called that a powerless fringe too. And then....
I'll take your word on it again, just because I don't remember the rhetoric of 2016 Bernie that well. But the movement behind Bernie only grew from 2016-2020 it seems to me? Like far from being cast aside for his regressive views or whatever, he nearly won in 2020.
Maybe the socialists have gotten more woke, I don't know. I do know that there is an active defund movement in DSA, which seems based not wokeness but in the material reality of cities' spending incredible amounts of money on militarized, unaccountable police forces. That seems like a pretty left wing project to me, even if David Shor thinks it's not popular or whatever.
also worth mentioning Bernie pretty explicitly said he's not a defund the police guy lots of times. I suspect it was based more on political expediency than material politics though, but we have come to another point in our discussions where I point out that the right wing has power in this country and "political expediency" does not always mean being more woke.
Yeah that’s the thing: in everyday life, I don’t have those kind of bullshit political interactions, but I’m an at home parent in a diverse middle class neighborhood. But the moment I started “doing the work” that stuff came up FAST. If I were involved in other political or politically adjacent circles, I’d have more real life examples. But here is one: https://jozua.substack.com/p/pride-isnt-for-the-working-class
I've heard these sentiments from every woke person I know in real life. Some variation of "These people have all the privilege of being white and still fail." It's because they have no working theory of how economics or exploitation work.
Exactly. It's this very thing that is driving me away from the modern left. It's disgusting how far this is from the civil rights left, of which I was an ardent advocate (liberal not marxist). I hate the slicing and dicing intersectionality "only these people matter because of "x" oppression." WTF? If you (not you, DanT) are not about fighting for all human beings to have rights and opportunities, you've lost me.
And as you implied, they are arguing from a position of ignorance on economics and exploitation but apparently, actually knowing something no longer matters as long as you can pose as if you know something and steer the conversation away from any rational inquiry into the basis of your argument. They are masters of deflection.
The word I haven't heard anyone use in this conversation is "revenge." The radical left is about the politics of revenge right now and they are having a moment. And nothing will sway them from having this moment. Social media has given them a powerful megaphone - and instead of using it to effect actual change - they are using it to feed egos. How typically human. And, how f'n useless.
Taibbi's longform work on GS was also subsidized by a major magazine for months (years?). That support dried up when Rolling Stone figured out, only slightly ahead of most other major outlets, that op-eds about Lana Del Ray earned just as many clicks at a fraction of the cost. The Ivermectin beat is sometimes the best you can do as an indie journalist--major investigstive reporting is a boring money pit, no matter how important.
yeah i don't understand how people continue to enjoy litigating these endless culture war battles and i hate how any serious consideration of the pros and cons of identitarianism or materialism have been flattened into these "woke" or "anti-woke" consumer identities. like once you understand that racism and sexism are everywhere, you shouldn't need to have it pointed out that they're also in the latest political news story or marvel movie and conversely once you understand the negative aspects of identity politics you shouldn't feel the need to weigh in on every single invocation of it.
This is false. I subscribed to his Substack up until a few weeks ago and you're misrepresenting what's on there. A large percentage of his writing over the past year is free speech related (which is of course the context in which Ivermectin is being covered). His Substack also includes stories about financial fraud and misdoings I've seen nowhere else.
Literally the second most recent article is an interview with David Sirota regarding the failed response to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Which is about.... Goldman Sachs' political influence.
That would seem like you're misrepresenting your facts, which deserves to be corrected for other people reading these comments.
yes, I saw that Sirota was on there, but that post was an exception. Just because you call something "free speech" doesn't make it so, it's just culture war.
Again, you seem to have made up your mind, and I don't care what your opinion of Matt Taibbi is, but I do wish to counter the misrepresentations you're making for others. So let's do that.
Since June 18th, the word "Ivermectin" has appeared in 9 articles on Matt Taibbi's Substack. In chronological order:
The first is an article entitled "Why Has Ivermectin Become a Dirty Word?" and is free for anyone who wishes to read it and make their own judgment. The article talks a LOT about Ivermectin, mainly in the form of quotes from a doctor who was banned by YouTube. This quote at the end is relevant:
"Ivermectin may never be proven effective as a Covid-19 treatment, but its story has already appeared as a powerful metaphor of the Internet’s transformation. Once envisioned as a vast democratizing tool, which would massively raise global knowledge levels by allowing instant cross-global communication between all people, it’s morphed instead into a giant unaccountable bureaucracy for suppressing dialogue, run by people with an authoritarian vision for information flow."
So, yes, this is pretty clearly an article about speech issues.
The next article comes the next day and is an interview with Bret Weinstein. It's from a series called "Meet the Censored" and is pretty obviously about people who have been censored from the Internet. So, yeah, that's two.
The next article, June 25th, is entitled "Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be Right Wing?" And it's paywalled so I'll just say you're right about this one.
It shows up again on July 2nd in an article with the following title and subheading: If Private Platforms Use Government Guidelines to Police Content, is that State Censorship?
YouTube's decision to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein raises serious questions, both about the First Amendment and regulatory capture.
So there's another one clearly about speech issues.
It shows up in a July 10th article which is rounding up articles from the past few weeks.
It then shows up again on September 2nd in another Meet the Censored this time with an Ivermectin critic who was erroneously censored by YouTube because the algorithm thought he was pro-Ivermectin. Really odd article for someone pushing Ivermectin to write.
It shows up again on September 9th in an article about the Rolling Stone Oklahoma/Ivermectin story. Which is NOT a free speech article. It's media criticism.
Then it appears twice more. One is a reference in an article about how news has become religion (which I can't quote because it's paywalled) and one in his article on media coverage of vaccines. That article contains two references to Ivermectin. One is notice that a Bloomberg report on another drug brought it up even though the drug is unrelated. The other is when he states this drug is "being suspected of Ivermectinism" which is a wonderful reference for those of us familiar with the Soviet Union.
That's it. That is the entirety of every reference on his Substack to Ivermectin. A grand total of one article that could be considered about the drug rather than media criticism, censorship, or passing references.
A search of "Goldman Sachs" turns up 8 articles this year, including ones titled "Let the Apes Have Wall Street" and "Will Goldman Sachs penis envy crash the economy again?"
If you hate Ivermectin so much that even the mere mention of it makes you repulsed at a writer, that's completely fair. If you think its very mention should be banned from the internet I find your politics distasteful but defend your right to express that. But to claim that a writer who writes about people being censored from the Internet is "culture warring" because he covered Ivermectin is just wrong and needed to be called out.
Thanks for this. I would hazard that Trump's support for Ivermectin at one point is why people lose their gourds over it. Just another form of TDS.
I don't think MT cares one way or another over Ivermectin. He cares deeply about those who have decided they are the new arbiters of reality shutting down needed debate and conversation about this topic (or any topic for that matter). It is the shutting down of debate that MT cares about. He is an old school liberal and is horrified (as am I) about the creeping totalitarianism of elements of the far left.
I don't always agree with him. But I LOVE that he is willing to writing about things that MSM journalists tiptoe around. He is willing to confront hard truths head on. I will always support him as long as he does this. Plus, he is an incredible writer - some of his phrasings are better than sex. YMMV. ;-)
I hope we all recognize and appreciate how much effort, thought, and honesty went into producing DanT's post. If all our public discourse when like this, there would be no culture war.
The issue isn't free speech. Yglesias, who is hardly a conservative, when writing about the lab leak kerfuffle pointed out that the argument that it was a leaked bioweapon was apparently invented whole cloth by liberal journalists who either didn't understand what "gain of function" is or didn't care. It's the same deal with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, where what matters is not the actual merits of the drug but who is advocating for it.
I’ll just say re: Taibbi: (a) it’s boring picking on Trump; he’s a narcissist with no character or intellect and the people who think he’s a great leader are dumb or liars. Insofar as there are smart Trumpists, and there are, they’re not fans of Trump. They pine for Orban. And they have little cultural power. (B) many of the smartest people in the world are part of the wine left; I’m plenty smart but there are countless wokies who leave me in the dust. I find it fascinating, endlessly fascinating, that so many smart people find what seems to me to be a crude ideology to not only be true, but obviously true, and not extreme enough. (C) Taibbi has lots of former friends and acquaintances in this movement, as do I. That compounds the fascination and frustration. (D) Taibbi believes that the woke movement is a cover for capital, no? So this is part of a materialist analysis — the economic base is propping up a superstructure, as usual.
That was supposed to be: "many of the smartest people in the world are part of the woke left", not the "wine left", but I admit, there's a lot of overlap between those two groups.
I want to note the more controversial element of moral absolutism that the Left no longer embraces (but should): cross-cultural absolutism. There ARE cultural practices (like whaling) that should not exist. Something being apart of somebody's culture in zero ways makes it worth perserving or defending.
Yup. Would today’s world be better if the Aztecs had won? A culture that aggressively practiced human sacrifice, horrific war crimes and human sacrifice, but now armed with modern technology? Kind of terrifying, right?
i don't disagree with the larger point about cultural relativism but i can't say i agree that the europeans who were burning witches, torturing jews, and indiscriminately murdering and enslaving their way across the new world were any better. who's to say what hypothetical civilization would have turned out better over 500 years?
I will defer to the expertise of a comparative historian if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that the Aztec practices I mentioned were more consistently and frequently engaged in than the European ones. Also, there appeared to be more internal pushback- even Columbus was criticized by his contemporaries for his over the top brutality. It’s hard to say - maybe there was internal dissent brewing within the Aztecs that outsiders weren’t able to see? But from what I’ve read it seems that if you are talking about reforming brutal practices, the Aztecs had further to go than the Europeans.
sure. i think one of the hardest things to quantify in history are the impact of institutionalized bad practices (like human sacrifices) vs non institutionalized but culturally pervasive bad ones (like considering any non-european as less than human). the former appears more immediately repulsive to us, but also institutions can be abolished and gone within a generation or two, while attitudes are much more tricky to change and their effects show up in diffuse ways.
there's a book i just finished that's a counterfactual history where an inca emperor unifies and conquers europe, so this sort of thing has been on my mind i guess.
Whaling is your go to example!? I definitely agree but that's a funny one to point out when there are so many other egregious examples.
I'm reminded of Sam Harris talking about about a discussion he had with a woman: In her opinion a culture that removed the eyes of every third child for religious reasons would not be morally wrong. And she was one of Obama's bioethics advisors.
A better example would be something like the (relative) silence in the West about practices such as female genital mutilation compared to say 30 years ago.
This ^^^. The way the modern left demonizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes me ashamed. She is a perfect example of their intolerance for any dissent from the prevailing narrative.
Absent a religious foundation I think it's tough enough to make an argument for moral absolutes in the first place. But to advance an argument about whaling, which is completely dependent on cultural differences in what's viewed as a proper food stuff (dogs for example), seems especially problematic.
Whaling has literally zero to do with what is and isn't proper food and everything to do with the fact that it's pretty obviously immoral to hunt critically endangered animals.
The Makah just won the legal right to start hunting whales again, after a period of years, precisely because they had to endure a lengthy environmental review to ensure that the specific species of whale that they are targeting is not threatened.
Plus some critically endangered animals needs to go. Smallpox, for example.
But...that's manifestly untrue. What whaling exists today almost exclusively targets minke whales, narwhals, beluga, and pilot whales...none of which are endangered.
You'd have a much stronger point if you brought up the bush meat trade in Africa, or the demand for animal parts in China, both of which are rapidly bringing many charismatic megafauna to the verge of extinction.
Generally agree. Moral absolutism absent an external source for "right" and "wrong" seems a tough nut to crack. Not that's it's stopped us from trying.
"But I have been organizing and protesting in radical left spaces since I was a teenager, I have diligently done the reading that was considered an essential part of socialist practice for most of our history, and I have written and thought through the left’s issues my entire adult life."
Apologies if you've listed this elsewhere but, could you tell me some of the essential reading? Where should one start? Thank you.
Maybe one day, if there's enough interest, we can discuss classic socialist texts here. I mainly read them in grad school, which was really a mixed blessing. It forced me to slog through long texts and understand them well enough to write papers – but the group discussion was critical and dismissive because it was a conservative discipline.
I was about 23 when we were assigned the Marx-Engels reader (that red book) and I remember thinking “Wow, this makes so much sense.” Then I got to class and the neoliberal prof was sneering at it while all my classmates tried to impress him by sneering at it too, and I felt embarrassed for liking it. But I still have it along with my margin notes. I'd be ready.
I've had that exact book sitting on every bookshelf I've had since the age of 17. Until this moment I wasn't aware it was a common printing.
Of course, sitting next to that dog eared Marx Engels reader is the more reddish brown Lenin Reader absolutely falling apart from overuse. Which I believe reveals everything anyone would ever need to know about my outlook on the world.
I think it’s common to assign it in college, since I encountered it at 2 different universities. I just looked back at my margin notes and I kept writing stuff like “exploitation of grad students.” Oh 23yo Carina… 🙃
I think the abandonment of mass politics is the most depressing aspect. It ties in with the previous points, of course, but people don't even attempt to build coalitions.
I seem to use Minneapolis as examples often on here, but I'm very annoyed with my City Council election happening here. The Council Member representing my Ward is the far left of the Council and the only leftist on the Council. He's facing other leftist challengers and at least one moderate. Why this bothers me is that these other leftist candidates are going after his seat rather than a more moderate Council Member. Even if one of these new leftists succeeds in getting elected, the Council will still be 8 liberals with one leftist.
If one of these new leftists get elected it will do nothing to allow a left agenda to progress. Probably it'll set it back, since they have no experience and seem unable to even envision the tactics and strategy required to move the Council left.
Hard to come up with a coherent response to all of this because I find myself in almost complete agreement.
I will say the pathologies of the "modern left" boil down to basic human nature I think - they are what happens in the absence of enough social organization. We evolved our social skills to be part of small bands where we knew everyone. We seem to be incapable of managing social relationships with more than 150 or so people. Our persuasion skills were meant to convince a small group of people that maybe we should go east instead of west to look for food, and our "political" skills to attempt to ingratiate ourselves with enough of the band that if push came to shove, they would have our back.
To move past this as societies evolved and became more complicated and interconnected, we needed something more. We needed bureaucracy. We couldn't manage social relationships with thousands of other people on an ad-hoc basis (sorry anarchists) but we could have people siloed away in areas of specialty, dealing with their comrades on a daily basis, and then interfacing with the broader world through a more established system of law and custom. Unfortunately, hierarchy came hand in hand with this, because it was one of the easiest ways to structure a large society. After all, you can't manage a project with 10,000 people directly, but you can have 100 supervisors all responsible for 100 people under them. And once hierarchy was established, it was easy for those at the top (or even in the middle) to extract surplus value and to create ideologies which promulgated the rightness of said action.
Due to how hierarchy has been used by capitalism (and other authoritarian nasties) it tends to be dismissed by many on the left, along with bureaucracy. But in the absence of an actual structure/order, humans just fall back into what comes naturally to us regarding politics - which means we cannot enact effective political change. Effective politics is hard work - and very unpleasant - because it bucks human nature to put yourself out there repeatedly for rejection, and to repeatedly reach out to people who disagree with you. This is why things like socialist reading groups have been historically very effective - you take someone who is new to the politics and place them into an entirely new social circle where people are discussing the ideas of socialism all the time. So not only are they getting personally educated in socialism, they on a subconscious level internalize the idea that socialist politics are right-thinking given they are now surrounded by people who take these things as axiomatic. But this is also part of why the left often falls to factionalism, because it's really, really easy to lapse back into human nature and care more about what your peers think of you (and your internal standing within the social group) and lose sight of the actual politics supposedly animating your cause.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I've learned from experience that your comment threads tend to go fast and be over within 24 hours, so perhaps brevity is better if there is going to be any kind of discussion.
There's a new book out called The Dawn of Everything that calls into question many of these assumptions, in particular the whole progression of hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to modern bureaucratic capitalist states. Organizing is both difficult and necessary, but I don't think the problem is lack of hierarchy and order - and, as FdB characterizes it, the problem is one of pervasive uniformity that would in fact be impossible to enforce in any kind of top-down way, but rather emerges organically from the (perhaps perverse) incentives of the structure. Which is actually a cause for hope, since it means that we can organize differently by using different structures.
Please expand on how a realatively free market under the rule of law is authoritarian. Having read a lot of Milton Friedman, Like "Free to Choose," and Capitalism and Freedom," I find that assertion needs some argument behind it to support it.
I take it as historically proven that the transition to a relatively free market, the rule of law, and government by the consent of the governed, starting about 1700, produced an historically unprecidented enrichment of the entire world. Please explain why that isn't true.
Also, please explain why Socialism, government control of everything, isn't the Road to Sefdom that Hayek said it is.
You comment on a marxist's substack and wonder why people support socialism? Okay.
Regardless, the difference between capitalism and communism isn't about private versus state ownership. It's about whether the means of production are owned by a largely idle ruling class or by the working class. I'm not a market socialist per se, but I do think if we're talking about "after the revolution" I'd prefer if most firms were self-governed by the workers rather than directly state controlled (outside of critical areas like utilities, rail, provision of healthcare, etc - many of which are state owned internationally or within the U.S. and seem to work just fine).
Also, you're not going to get any doctrinaire Marxist to disagree that the movement from feudalism to capitalism was not a great step forward. It's right there in Kapital. Marx believed that the transition was inevitable in fact - a stage of history which had to come to pass given the tremendous efficiencies gained through capitalism.
Regardless, the term "free market" is a bit of an oxymoron. Throughout history markets have always been regulated, explicitly through law and implicitly through custom. Indeed, markets - just like governments - can be seen as a sort of technology - something that needs to be engineered properly in order to deliver the desired return for a society. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian will admit, for example, you need to set up intellectual property laws to have a market work properly, which means that total market neutrality is impossible - the government has to pick winners and losers. Lack of enforcement of antitrust laws leads to monopoly or monopsony (a big issue now with Amazon) - or even more commonly, broad collusion across theoretically independent actors in the economy. Because when it comes down to it, most wealthy people would rather eliminate financial risk for themselves and be able to pass on power to their (often less talented) progeny over playing the game fairly.
I also find the idea of liberty to be only half-realized if we must spend half of our waking adult hours in a workplace which amounts to an authoritarian state. What use is freedom of speech, for example, if you do not have the right to speak your mind within the workplace without fear of repercussion? We must extend the principle of democratic control out of our system of governance and into the workplace in order to truly be liberated from oppression.
Or at least I think so. We all have our own ideological priors after all.
Like the American Founders, I believe the concentration of power is dangerous. The more concentrated the power gets, the more corrupting and dangerous it becomes. Socialism concetrates the control of everything in the central government's hands. The government becomes, in effect, a single corporation with a monopoly on everything. I don't see how labeling any organization a "government" suddenly makes them altruistic.
The first rule of bureaucracy is self preservation. The second is growth. Any bureaucracy with absolute power over everything in an entire nation, with no checks and balances, becomes absolutely self-serving. That's why the end point of Socialism is almost always dictatorships. Everybody is equally impoverished, except Party members, of course.
Relatively free markets, under the rule of law, with government by the consent of the governed, are successful as long as concentrations of power are broken up. When power gets concentrated, like it is now with Big Tech and bigger government, it begins to fail.
Democratic control is frustrated by concentrated power. It's an inherent contradiction of Socialism.
If you want to invoke the Founders, they were clearly supporters of private enterprise, but the embrace by American capitalism of the limited liability entities known as corporations would have raised considerable ire. Most of the Founders were dead-set opposed to corporations due to their experience with the East India Company - and even those who thought they had a role wanted them under strict controls (only used for one line of business, like canal building, cannot make more than a certain profit per year, etc.)
I don't know why you keep making all of these authoritative statements about what socialism is. Socialism does not need to be a completely centralized system. Marx himself was somewhat agnostic on the subject - central planning came from Lenin, which for obvious reasons cast a long shadow over history. But there's no inherent reason why you couldn't see a socialist economy within (as an example) a loose confederational system with a weak central government.
As an aside, I think the reason why communist states generally speaking ended in dictatorships is primarily because they gained power through the barrel of a gun (or were imposed externally in the case of the Warsaw Pact. If you look at the history of "liberal revolutions" most violent ones which began in coups ended in either failure or military dictatorships as well.
Concentrated political power within a democratic system can be distributed. But concentrated power within an authoritarian system cannot easily. The workplace is an authoritarian system within a purportedly democratic nation, which is why I support democratizing it.
I feel that in the future, there will be more of a "left" to speak of, but that it will largely comprise of people who haven't participated in the last 7 years of debating what the left "is" and who should be excluded. This is a positive thought, but it's also a negative thought, because I think it will really put into relief how much time was wasted.
From personal experience, I think that the way I began savvily tweeting about the left was identical to the way I began savvily tweeting about liberal stuff when I was a liberal. Savvily tweeting is a major part of being a liberal, in a way that is subconscious. Not just because of the smugness that liberalism tends to encourage but because, when you're on social media, it is incredibly easy to feel like the smartest person on the forum. Not just because you maybe are but because everyone is so silo'd off that it's easy to feel like the one page you've read on a topic is more than anyone else you're talking to has ever read (again, this isn't helped by the fact that maybe 80% of people have read even less than you; it's just that you can't help but assume 100% of people have read even less than you).
So, I was experienced with being a liberal online, and when it comes to liberalism, it mostly is just a cultural expression these days, so it doesn't occur to you that there is more to it. Easy to internalize that mindset. I think it's inevitable that many people start from that and you only grow out of that from education or a way longer-term process of years of reflection... needless to say, education is better if the goal is to build a movement.
I agree with Freddie about most things but I think he misses one point sometimes, which is that there isn't really a substantial "old left" in the way that he thinks there is. I agree with him about the old left values that are contiguous with leftists of the past, but I think he overestimates the extent to which anybody can reliably find a "real" leftist to learn from. I think that is a far bigger problem than not listening.
If you're a leftist trying to plug into the real stuff that's going on, it's just always a roll of the dice. You can just as easily get educated about the real left as you can get told "it's not my job to educate you" by people insecurely convincing themselves that they know stuff, and that teaches you to mimic their defensiveness, and then they start treating you like one of the crowd, and then you feel as if you've been educated on how to be a leftist.
Basically I agree with Freddie, but I think it's a case of needing to build something new that happens to resemble something old... I think it gets confusing to talk about continuity with the old left because I don't think there really is much continuity to plug into. The plethora of people saying "leftism means saying you're better than liberals while trying to call out every leftist for not being enough of a liberal" are, in a way, a symptom of the harsh absence of a real left to plug into right now.
What about the Iron Law of Institutions? You couldn't design a better set of ideas to thrive within that environment. Of course if will eventually collapse, but that will take a few decades to run it's course.
Look at history. The last time this woke stuff reared its ugly head who was responsible for slaying it? Bill Clinton. Why? The electoral losses were unsustainable.
That's a great example. Let's assume this woke stuff was responsible for the end of 40 years of Democrat congress. A quarter century later it not only still exists, but is an order of magnitude more prevalent.
I guess we got a momentary break from it at least. But if it ever went out of fashion, it was a pretty quick fashion cycle.
Your timeline is all messed up. I wrote that Bill Clinton killed off the first PC movement in order to be elected. The Democrats didn't lose Congress until Clinton's first midterm. And after that Clinton was more than happy to cooperate with Newt Gingrich on welfare reform (meaning time limits and work requirements) and a massive crime bill that a lot of people think is responsible for kick off the modern carceral state. Does that sound like progressive policy to you?
And keep in mind that Clinton was elected in 1992 while the PC stuff only got its start in the mid to late 1980's You're talking about a period of time substantially shorter than a decade after which the woke stuff went underground for 20-30 years.
Put another way the electoral losses I speak of weren't Clinton's midterm losses. He was after all the great triangulator. I was referring to Dukakis losing to Bush, plus the Reagan terms before that.
As to your other point, look at the google ngrams for "political correctness". It definitely didn't go underground in usage. It's stayed pretty constant since a peak in 97. I'm not sure how else to measure it. Subjectively, I didn't see it go underground either.
Now try an older term like "social justice". It's a pretty steady rise since 1900. This didn't start in the 1980s.
Yes, I'm the guy who always says "vote for Democrats", but the Democrats need to move away from wokeism to have sustained success in the future, and badly need a wake-up call. Losing the Virginia governorship and legislature will do the least long-term damage, while hopefully providing that wake-up call.
Of course, that the Democrats will correctly interpret the weke-up call (paging David Shor!) is unlikely. So the US will most likely become a right-wing dictatorship when Trump and his VP, Trump Jr, win in 2024, thanks in part to rigged elections.
I agree with you on a lot of this, from 'always vote straight ticket Dem is obviously correct and barely an interesting discussion' to 'I hope between now and 2024 the Dems get scared away from embracing deeply unpopular ideas, whatever that takes is worth it.'
That said, Trump is old and fat, will die one day and none of his progeny have an ounce of charisma. He may win a close reelection but if he does I'm more concerned about the new round of social upheaval than the downfall of democracy. I think when he got elected many people overestimated the mess he would make politically and underestimated the amount of chaos he would inject into American society. It's easier to patch your election system than your social fabric.
"Losing the Virginia governorship and legislature will do the least long-term damage, while hopefully providing that wake-up call."
It might be my own blinkered perspective, as a mom receiving forwarded emails from well-meaning relatives warning me that the social-emotional component of my child's curriculum (the very part of the curriculum causing my child to finally bloom, it seems) is creeping CRT, but I have a hard time seeing a Youngkin victory as "the least long-term damage" right now.
It'll mean the strategy of ratcheting up the culture wars by reacting to what is sometimes a genuine problem, the excesses of the "equity industry", with ever-more ridiculous reactions like "Norman Rockwell = CRT" and "teen assignation devolves into date rape = transgender attack on innocent girls", is a winning strategy. Perhaps that is the path of least long-term damage, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Of course I cannot answer that with any certainty. I mean who could? But considering it was a cause he was willing to give his life for, yes I think he would have stepped back or at least changed his level of exposure when it came to less pressing politics issues. I mean. He was murdered for it. Do I think he would want to live his entire life under the threat of murder for his beliefs? No I do not. I think once his political hopes were realized, he would have been relieved.
Yeah, I'm not saying he wouldn't be happy to achieve his goals, or that he wouldn't change how he engaged. I'm just saying that I think he'd definitely continue to engage publicly with the issues of the day, because it's interesting, and it's fun.
Sure. I think the “sociopath” aspect comes in when someone makes politicking the game their career “for the fun of it.” When it becomes divorced from material reality of the people.
The NY Times wrote that the real political divide in this country is between the minority who actually cares about politics and the overwhelming majority (about 2/3 of the country) that do not. Why do so many turn their backs on political engagement? At a guess the widespread corruption, venom and fanaticism found in the political realm.
Well...per the Megan Markle investigation that discovered that what appeared to be a mass campaign of hate actually amounted to a few dozen folks on Twitter - how sure are we that any of this is actually a thing vs. something the Twitter, Facebook etc. algorithm is creating?
Re: antifa, and debates as to who belongs in a movement. It seems to me that adopting a "you are what you do" attitude avoids a lot of the inevitable semantic bickering here. Many people in antifa will claim that they're out there fighting for the "marginalized" or what have you. But if you're on week 15 of smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire and nothing more, does it matter what you *say* you want? Same goes for the identitarians on the left. They *say* that they want to fight racism, but many of their actions involve making race the sole relevant factor in judging a person's moral character.
People can say all sorts of things, but who cares? What do they actually *do*?
I agree with this as just a general approach to life. I think people would be a lot more successful focusing on their actions rather than their identity.
Maybe less for you, given your background, but for me what I've noticed most in the past decade is what I'd like to call radicalism/extremism inflation. It's important to note that this took place on both sides of the political spectrum, which makes me want to put on my Marshall McLuhan cap and say "the medium is the message." That for reason I can't concretely state this is all a product of the shift from traditional to social media.
A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible. This constant one upmanship leads to an unending pissing contest to see who can be the wokest, the most extreme tankie, the most based neorractionary, etc.
This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception. Debates, if you could even call them that, are all about who has the most based, hottest take. The actual problems and how to resolve them never enter into it. The liberals (it's weird even calling them this) saying we should censor the shit out everything are basically just the hall monitors, the teacher's pets, the snitches tell the teachers that someone said a dirty word. This is probably how most of them have always solved their problems, and FB and Twitter are just another principal to sick on one's enemies.
“A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible.” The term I’ve heard for this is “acid-coating” ie, the opposite of sugar coating. As you point out, it’s a strategy to build social media clout, but is counter-productive to building political change.
"This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception." I think you can look to McLuhan (as you mention) and more or less get a full understanding of what's happening. The form of discourse on social media is shitposting; it creates an environment where good faith engagement is all but impossible.
The people with the sharpest pens are the ones with the laziest tongues. They type a lot but organize little. They post a lot but meet little. They might march, and they might even do so with a mask and a scowl, but they don't win converts. I've noticed this time and again in local politics.
I think part of it is that the American left has been so weak for so long that now that there's been a mini-renaissance over the last decade, the newcomers can't help but overwhelm the old guard. As a result a lot of newly minted leftists are bringing liberal or Democratic party sensibilities to their new home. So it's less the left changing its mind on these values and more that the left is mostly made up of different people now, with different beliefs.
You can sort of see this play out as well in the Democratic party too. I believe one of the reasons Bernie struggled in 2020 was that the primary base consisted of many more ex-Republicans compared to 2016, and those voters brought their attitudes towards redistributive politics with them.
I've read a few times about some major shift in Sanders between 2016 and 2020. What changed exactly? I don't really remember 2016 well, and I tried not to pay attention to campaign minutia in 202.
There is a line of argument that the 2020 Sanders campaign leaned more into social justice rhetoric at the expense of his original message. I don't know if I believe that. If anything, his 2020 platform was more radical on economic issues than his first. Aside from what I mentioned above, in my opinion the biggest problem is that a large part of his voters in 2016 were anti-Hillary rather than pro-Bernie, so in 2020 they found the other candidates just as attractive.
that definitely does not gel with my experience of both campaigns and i think anyone pushing that argument is too high on the anti-woke supply. imo the difference was more just that the media decided to ignore his campaign in 2020 rather than try and smear him for running against the potential first woman president.
I think many people have given up on the idea of something actually changing, so they use politics as a badge of identity. Yelling "abolish the police" makes you look cool. The fact that it doesn't accomplish anything isn't relevant to these people, because they don't think anything can be accomplished.
Spot on. Nothing is more dispiriting than the notion that nothing can change, and it's far from a badge of honor to wear it. Too many are giving in to the intoxicating feeling of righteous indignation, without it being even slightly tempered by a clear-eyed plan to real policy reform. If no one is actually willing to get their hands dirty in politics, seeking actual achievable progress, they are engaging in nihilist play-acting.
Change is hard. Taking the issue of criminal justice inequities, there just isn’t some magical solution. It means navigating difficult trade offs and engaging with sometimes uncomfortable research findings (like more police = less crime). Snappy slogans aren’t going to do it - it’s going to take a long term multi-tactical approach and positive results may not appear right away. I think that reality just isn’t very appealing to a lot of activists.
"It means navigating difficult trade offs and engaging with sometimes uncomfortable research findings (like more police = less crime)"
Right, and you need descriptively accurate view of the world to change it. If it were "problematic" to believe that smoking caused lung cancer (to pick an extreme example), then it would be a lot harder to reduce lung cancer.
people ask "what happened to Matt Taibbi" because he used to write about the material things that you say are what should be foremost in any left wing conversation. He does not do that now. Just go to his substack and look for the materialism! It's not there. He's gone from writing about Goldman Sachs' political influence to writing about fucking Ivermectin being a free speech issue. It's pathetic and it has very little to do with the left (is Taibbi even on the left?). It has to do with a guy getting old and rich and slightly canceled himself for some dumb things he wrote twenty years ago. It's not about ideology, it's just about Matt.
All your criticisms are fair, I just don't see the point in lumping this all under the umbrella of "left". It's true that a DSA Twitter account will never tweet "we should support poor white people", but that's because it's needlessly provocative. It doesn't mean it's not something lots of people believe, including almost everyone that was working to get Bernie elected last year. The people that don't believe that just aren't leftists, and putting a hammer and sickle in their bio on twitter doesn't make them one. Anyone can be anything on social media, it doesn't make it true.
Major institutions were working very hard to censor discussion of ivermectin. Taibbi is opposed to censorship, as am I. That ivermectin doesn't work is no more reason to censor it than the fact that the day acceptance movement said scientifically false things is a reason to censor them.
Major institutions were also working hard to promote the use of ivermectin, which is why we are even having this discussion in the first place.
*fat acceptance movement
Which "major institutions were working very hard to censor discussion of ivermectin", exactly? Private companies that decided they didn't want to host false and potentially dangerous information on their sites? Is that not a moral position for the public good? I think it is, and I applaud them for doing so. There were still plenty of platforms (I think you've heard of substack?) that were willing to host that false and dangerous info. Not to mention Fox News, the world's largest and most popular news gathering and disseminating organization, which everyone on the left somehow thinks doesn't exist.
I have written before that I don't think that anybody really knows if masks work, much less drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What's the harm in pointing out that these questions typically take decades and multiple studies to sort out?
You have been consistently wrong about masks. Basic physics shows that they work, as have large numbers of detailed studies, which you consistently reject.
As for drugs, there are all sorts of bad consequences of a large fraction of the public believing something works when there is no evidence that it does, including inducing shortages of those drugs for the ailments for which they do work, as well as unnecessary counter-productive busy work for the medical community that has to battle that misinformation.
The promotion of ivermectic was the precise equivalent of shouting fire in a public theater.
Your very first statement shows that you misunderstand my argument. I have always argued that it is perfectly reasonable for masks to work at one scale due to basic physics and at the same time be completely useless in the real world due to the inability of human beings to adhere to protocol for any large period of time.
And what real world studies demonstrate that masks are efficacious? The only ones I am aware of (by which I mean RCT's carried out in the wild) have shown limited benefits at best and more often shown masking to be completely useless.
When Trump first advocated for the use of HCQ there was endless hand wringing about potential shortages--shortages that failed to materialize because pharmaceutical companies donated large stocks of the drug to aid the fight. In terms of hypotheticals this is one scenario that has consistently failed to materialize.
I think you go a bridge too far when you use the word "censorship" here. Major institutions make decisions about what to cover all the time. Nobody is entitled to have their ideas broadcast to the public at large, the fact that the media and various social media platforms decided not to broadcast that stuff doesn't amount to censorship.
Incorrectly characterizing ivermectin as a veterinary medicine isn't censorship. There are a bunch of drugs that see dual use in both humans and veterinary contexts--including most antibiotics. Are you seriously going to turn down antibiotics after a surgery just because your dog would get the same exact drug if he needed to go under the knife?
"Incorrectly characterizing ivermectin as a veterinary medicine isn't censorship. " I'm glad we agree that there was no censorship happening!
Describing ivermectin as a "horse dewormer" isn't foregoing coverage at all though, is it? My point pertains to HOW the issue is covered. Technically suggesting that ivermectin is poisonous or not meant for human consumption is not censorship. It is still very, very problematic though.
Why is "we should support poor white people" needlessly provocative? Isn't the fact that it is so exactly the problem?
why on earth would someone need to put the qualifier "white" in that sentence, instead of just saying "we should support poor people"? you're begging people to address a problem that doesn't exist and goading people into saying things that intentionally exclude non white people. It's moronic grievance politics, that's why. It's not a real problem if you are care about anything except culture war, which I admit I am starting to question on this particular blog.
It’s a response to the current theme on the left of NOT giving thought or importance to “white” people. And by doing so, the left is pushing those poor white people away. Because the left is almost literally saying that contingent does not matter *to them.*
if you see the sentence "we should support poor people" and see white people as being discriminated against then I think our politics are just different, sorry.
I don't see that. But I also don't see "we should support poor people" without qualifiers. Therefore it has become necessary to explicitly state who ought to be supported. That's not my doing, and as a humanist, that's not my politics. But it's where we are.
I think you're being willfully obtuse about the current political economy of the left. There are plenty of people who very explicitly believe that we should NOT help poor white people, as some twisted version of equity. Search around on Tumblr or Twitter. Go for it. I understand that you're not one of them, but that's not really the question, is it?
I'll take your word for it, but I don't think think some posts on Tumblr qualify as a problem with the left. If you're talking about the non profit/commentator complex that is essentially an arm of the Democratic Party, sure I don't disagree. They're not the left, they never have been, why are we saying the left doesn't care about all these things that they do care about? Are we seeing labor unions tweet that they don't care about poor white people? of course not. Is Bernie saying that? of course not.
But Bernie, and his followers, moved significantly towards the politics of the nonprofit industrial complex between 2016 and 2020. That is always the drift; whatever socialist movement exists in this country keeps getting more and more woke, because its followers are sick of being called racist. And those fringe Tumblr and Twitter communities keep winning the mainstream. If I had talked about defunding the police in 2016, people would have called that a powerless fringe too. And then....
I'll take your word on it again, just because I don't remember the rhetoric of 2016 Bernie that well. But the movement behind Bernie only grew from 2016-2020 it seems to me? Like far from being cast aside for his regressive views or whatever, he nearly won in 2020.
Maybe the socialists have gotten more woke, I don't know. I do know that there is an active defund movement in DSA, which seems based not wokeness but in the material reality of cities' spending incredible amounts of money on militarized, unaccountable police forces. That seems like a pretty left wing project to me, even if David Shor thinks it's not popular or whatever.
also worth mentioning Bernie pretty explicitly said he's not a defund the police guy lots of times. I suspect it was based more on political expediency than material politics though, but we have come to another point in our discussions where I point out that the right wing has power in this country and "political expediency" does not always mean being more woke.
FWIW, I've never seen the "I don't care about poor white people" stuff either, but I try to stay off political social media.
smart move, doing more of that myself lately.
Yeah that’s the thing: in everyday life, I don’t have those kind of bullshit political interactions, but I’m an at home parent in a diverse middle class neighborhood. But the moment I started “doing the work” that stuff came up FAST. If I were involved in other political or politically adjacent circles, I’d have more real life examples. But here is one: https://jozua.substack.com/p/pride-isnt-for-the-working-class
I've heard these sentiments from every woke person I know in real life. Some variation of "These people have all the privilege of being white and still fail." It's because they have no working theory of how economics or exploitation work.
Exactly. It's this very thing that is driving me away from the modern left. It's disgusting how far this is from the civil rights left, of which I was an ardent advocate (liberal not marxist). I hate the slicing and dicing intersectionality "only these people matter because of "x" oppression." WTF? If you (not you, DanT) are not about fighting for all human beings to have rights and opportunities, you've lost me.
And as you implied, they are arguing from a position of ignorance on economics and exploitation but apparently, actually knowing something no longer matters as long as you can pose as if you know something and steer the conversation away from any rational inquiry into the basis of your argument. They are masters of deflection.
The word I haven't heard anyone use in this conversation is "revenge." The radical left is about the politics of revenge right now and they are having a moment. And nothing will sway them from having this moment. Social media has given them a powerful megaphone - and instead of using it to effect actual change - they are using it to feed egos. How typically human. And, how f'n useless.
Taibbi's longform work on GS was also subsidized by a major magazine for months (years?). That support dried up when Rolling Stone figured out, only slightly ahead of most other major outlets, that op-eds about Lana Del Ray earned just as many clicks at a fraction of the cost. The Ivermectin beat is sometimes the best you can do as an indie journalist--major investigstive reporting is a boring money pit, no matter how important.
a fair point.
I agree with the part about Taibbi. It seems like there's a strong "anti-woke" beat now that's just kinda pointless.
yeah i don't understand how people continue to enjoy litigating these endless culture war battles and i hate how any serious consideration of the pros and cons of identitarianism or materialism have been flattened into these "woke" or "anti-woke" consumer identities. like once you understand that racism and sexism are everywhere, you shouldn't need to have it pointed out that they're also in the latest political news story or marvel movie and conversely once you understand the negative aspects of identity politics you shouldn't feel the need to weigh in on every single invocation of it.
This is false. I subscribed to his Substack up until a few weeks ago and you're misrepresenting what's on there. A large percentage of his writing over the past year is free speech related (which is of course the context in which Ivermectin is being covered). His Substack also includes stories about financial fraud and misdoings I've seen nowhere else.
Literally the second most recent article is an interview with David Sirota regarding the failed response to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Which is about.... Goldman Sachs' political influence.
That would seem like you're misrepresenting your facts, which deserves to be corrected for other people reading these comments.
yes, I saw that Sirota was on there, but that post was an exception. Just because you call something "free speech" doesn't make it so, it's just culture war.
Again, you seem to have made up your mind, and I don't care what your opinion of Matt Taibbi is, but I do wish to counter the misrepresentations you're making for others. So let's do that.
Since June 18th, the word "Ivermectin" has appeared in 9 articles on Matt Taibbi's Substack. In chronological order:
The first is an article entitled "Why Has Ivermectin Become a Dirty Word?" and is free for anyone who wishes to read it and make their own judgment. The article talks a LOT about Ivermectin, mainly in the form of quotes from a doctor who was banned by YouTube. This quote at the end is relevant:
"Ivermectin may never be proven effective as a Covid-19 treatment, but its story has already appeared as a powerful metaphor of the Internet’s transformation. Once envisioned as a vast democratizing tool, which would massively raise global knowledge levels by allowing instant cross-global communication between all people, it’s morphed instead into a giant unaccountable bureaucracy for suppressing dialogue, run by people with an authoritarian vision for information flow."
So, yes, this is pretty clearly an article about speech issues.
The next article comes the next day and is an interview with Bret Weinstein. It's from a series called "Meet the Censored" and is pretty obviously about people who have been censored from the Internet. So, yeah, that's two.
The next article, June 25th, is entitled "Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be Right Wing?" And it's paywalled so I'll just say you're right about this one.
It shows up again on July 2nd in an article with the following title and subheading: If Private Platforms Use Government Guidelines to Police Content, is that State Censorship?
YouTube's decision to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein raises serious questions, both about the First Amendment and regulatory capture.
So there's another one clearly about speech issues.
It shows up in a July 10th article which is rounding up articles from the past few weeks.
It then shows up again on September 2nd in another Meet the Censored this time with an Ivermectin critic who was erroneously censored by YouTube because the algorithm thought he was pro-Ivermectin. Really odd article for someone pushing Ivermectin to write.
It shows up again on September 9th in an article about the Rolling Stone Oklahoma/Ivermectin story. Which is NOT a free speech article. It's media criticism.
Then it appears twice more. One is a reference in an article about how news has become religion (which I can't quote because it's paywalled) and one in his article on media coverage of vaccines. That article contains two references to Ivermectin. One is notice that a Bloomberg report on another drug brought it up even though the drug is unrelated. The other is when he states this drug is "being suspected of Ivermectinism" which is a wonderful reference for those of us familiar with the Soviet Union.
That's it. That is the entirety of every reference on his Substack to Ivermectin. A grand total of one article that could be considered about the drug rather than media criticism, censorship, or passing references.
A search of "Goldman Sachs" turns up 8 articles this year, including ones titled "Let the Apes Have Wall Street" and "Will Goldman Sachs penis envy crash the economy again?"
If you hate Ivermectin so much that even the mere mention of it makes you repulsed at a writer, that's completely fair. If you think its very mention should be banned from the internet I find your politics distasteful but defend your right to express that. But to claim that a writer who writes about people being censored from the Internet is "culture warring" because he covered Ivermectin is just wrong and needed to be called out.
Thanks for this. I would hazard that Trump's support for Ivermectin at one point is why people lose their gourds over it. Just another form of TDS.
I don't think MT cares one way or another over Ivermectin. He cares deeply about those who have decided they are the new arbiters of reality shutting down needed debate and conversation about this topic (or any topic for that matter). It is the shutting down of debate that MT cares about. He is an old school liberal and is horrified (as am I) about the creeping totalitarianism of elements of the far left.
I don't always agree with him. But I LOVE that he is willing to writing about things that MSM journalists tiptoe around. He is willing to confront hard truths head on. I will always support him as long as he does this. Plus, he is an incredible writer - some of his phrasings are better than sex. YMMV. ;-)
I hope we all recognize and appreciate how much effort, thought, and honesty went into producing DanT's post. If all our public discourse when like this, there would be no culture war.
The issue isn't free speech. Yglesias, who is hardly a conservative, when writing about the lab leak kerfuffle pointed out that the argument that it was a leaked bioweapon was apparently invented whole cloth by liberal journalists who either didn't understand what "gain of function" is or didn't care. It's the same deal with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, where what matters is not the actual merits of the drug but who is advocating for it.
I’ll just say re: Taibbi: (a) it’s boring picking on Trump; he’s a narcissist with no character or intellect and the people who think he’s a great leader are dumb or liars. Insofar as there are smart Trumpists, and there are, they’re not fans of Trump. They pine for Orban. And they have little cultural power. (B) many of the smartest people in the world are part of the wine left; I’m plenty smart but there are countless wokies who leave me in the dust. I find it fascinating, endlessly fascinating, that so many smart people find what seems to me to be a crude ideology to not only be true, but obviously true, and not extreme enough. (C) Taibbi has lots of former friends and acquaintances in this movement, as do I. That compounds the fascination and frustration. (D) Taibbi believes that the woke movement is a cover for capital, no? So this is part of a materialist analysis — the economic base is propping up a superstructure, as usual.
That was supposed to be: "many of the smartest people in the world are part of the woke left", not the "wine left", but I admit, there's a lot of overlap between those two groups.
I thought wine left was apt.
I'm going to start using it. Make "fetch" happen and all that.
It's exceedingly rare these days to read a longish opinion piece and agree with every word. But yes, every word. Thank you, and good morning!
I want to note the more controversial element of moral absolutism that the Left no longer embraces (but should): cross-cultural absolutism. There ARE cultural practices (like whaling) that should not exist. Something being apart of somebody's culture in zero ways makes it worth perserving or defending.
Yup. Would today’s world be better if the Aztecs had won? A culture that aggressively practiced human sacrifice, horrific war crimes and human sacrifice, but now armed with modern technology? Kind of terrifying, right?
i don't disagree with the larger point about cultural relativism but i can't say i agree that the europeans who were burning witches, torturing jews, and indiscriminately murdering and enslaving their way across the new world were any better. who's to say what hypothetical civilization would have turned out better over 500 years?
I will defer to the expertise of a comparative historian if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that the Aztec practices I mentioned were more consistently and frequently engaged in than the European ones. Also, there appeared to be more internal pushback- even Columbus was criticized by his contemporaries for his over the top brutality. It’s hard to say - maybe there was internal dissent brewing within the Aztecs that outsiders weren’t able to see? But from what I’ve read it seems that if you are talking about reforming brutal practices, the Aztecs had further to go than the Europeans.
The book 1491 estimated that Aztec human sacrifices killed about half as people, on a per capita basis, as executions in England.
Regardless, both are bad , and the culture would have changed as the economic conditions changed.
amazing book, one of the few history books you can read and come away realizing your entire conception of a time and place was wrong.
I also recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me. Despite the edgy title, it's a fairly mild critique of US history textbooks.
*half as many
sure. i think one of the hardest things to quantify in history are the impact of institutionalized bad practices (like human sacrifices) vs non institutionalized but culturally pervasive bad ones (like considering any non-european as less than human). the former appears more immediately repulsive to us, but also institutions can be abolished and gone within a generation or two, while attitudes are much more tricky to change and their effects show up in diffuse ways.
there's a book i just finished that's a counterfactual history where an inca emperor unifies and conquers europe, so this sort of thing has been on my mind i guess.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/29/civilisations-by-laurent-binet-review-counterfactual-hi-jinks
Whaling is your go to example!? I definitely agree but that's a funny one to point out when there are so many other egregious examples.
I'm reminded of Sam Harris talking about about a discussion he had with a woman: In her opinion a culture that removed the eyes of every third child for religious reasons would not be morally wrong. And she was one of Obama's bioethics advisors.
Bioethics seems to be a field that attracts those who think way too much.
A better example would be something like the (relative) silence in the West about practices such as female genital mutilation compared to say 30 years ago.
This ^^^. The way the modern left demonizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes me ashamed. She is a perfect example of their intolerance for any dissent from the prevailing narrative.
I disagree completely. Whaling? Seriously?
Absent a religious foundation I think it's tough enough to make an argument for moral absolutes in the first place. But to advance an argument about whaling, which is completely dependent on cultural differences in what's viewed as a proper food stuff (dogs for example), seems especially problematic.
Whaling has literally zero to do with what is and isn't proper food and everything to do with the fact that it's pretty obviously immoral to hunt critically endangered animals.
The Makah just won the legal right to start hunting whales again, after a period of years, precisely because they had to endure a lengthy environmental review to ensure that the specific species of whale that they are targeting is not threatened.
Plus some critically endangered animals needs to go. Smallpox, for example.
But...that's manifestly untrue. What whaling exists today almost exclusively targets minke whales, narwhals, beluga, and pilot whales...none of which are endangered.
You'd have a much stronger point if you brought up the bush meat trade in Africa, or the demand for animal parts in China, both of which are rapidly bringing many charismatic megafauna to the verge of extinction.
Generally agree. Moral absolutism absent an external source for "right" and "wrong" seems a tough nut to crack. Not that's it's stopped us from trying.
"But I have been organizing and protesting in radical left spaces since I was a teenager, I have diligently done the reading that was considered an essential part of socialist practice for most of our history, and I have written and thought through the left’s issues my entire adult life."
Apologies if you've listed this elsewhere but, could you tell me some of the essential reading? Where should one start? Thank you.
can't edit but should've said please
I have a thing I keep meaning to publish but my advice is always to read history first, not theory. I'll write about it.
Sounds great, thanks a lot!
"read history first, not theory" is hardly what I would expect from a marxist.
Well, you know, I'm my own kind of cat.
Marx was too - he wrote a lot of history.
And completely failed to understand it.
I second the request for this!
As a historian I approve this message. 😅😄
Maybe one day, if there's enough interest, we can discuss classic socialist texts here. I mainly read them in grad school, which was really a mixed blessing. It forced me to slog through long texts and understand them well enough to write papers – but the group discussion was critical and dismissive because it was a conservative discipline.
I was about 23 when we were assigned the Marx-Engels reader (that red book) and I remember thinking “Wow, this makes so much sense.” Then I got to class and the neoliberal prof was sneering at it while all my classmates tried to impress him by sneering at it too, and I felt embarrassed for liking it. But I still have it along with my margin notes. I'd be ready.
I've had that exact book sitting on every bookshelf I've had since the age of 17. Until this moment I wasn't aware it was a common printing.
Of course, sitting next to that dog eared Marx Engels reader is the more reddish brown Lenin Reader absolutely falling apart from overuse. Which I believe reveals everything anyone would ever need to know about my outlook on the world.
I think it’s common to assign it in college, since I encountered it at 2 different universities. I just looked back at my margin notes and I kept writing stuff like “exploitation of grad students.” Oh 23yo Carina… 🙃
I think the abandonment of mass politics is the most depressing aspect. It ties in with the previous points, of course, but people don't even attempt to build coalitions.
I seem to use Minneapolis as examples often on here, but I'm very annoyed with my City Council election happening here. The Council Member representing my Ward is the far left of the Council and the only leftist on the Council. He's facing other leftist challengers and at least one moderate. Why this bothers me is that these other leftist candidates are going after his seat rather than a more moderate Council Member. Even if one of these new leftists succeeds in getting elected, the Council will still be 8 liberals with one leftist.
If one of these new leftists get elected it will do nothing to allow a left agenda to progress. Probably it'll set it back, since they have no experience and seem unable to even envision the tactics and strategy required to move the Council left.
Hard to come up with a coherent response to all of this because I find myself in almost complete agreement.
I will say the pathologies of the "modern left" boil down to basic human nature I think - they are what happens in the absence of enough social organization. We evolved our social skills to be part of small bands where we knew everyone. We seem to be incapable of managing social relationships with more than 150 or so people. Our persuasion skills were meant to convince a small group of people that maybe we should go east instead of west to look for food, and our "political" skills to attempt to ingratiate ourselves with enough of the band that if push came to shove, they would have our back.
To move past this as societies evolved and became more complicated and interconnected, we needed something more. We needed bureaucracy. We couldn't manage social relationships with thousands of other people on an ad-hoc basis (sorry anarchists) but we could have people siloed away in areas of specialty, dealing with their comrades on a daily basis, and then interfacing with the broader world through a more established system of law and custom. Unfortunately, hierarchy came hand in hand with this, because it was one of the easiest ways to structure a large society. After all, you can't manage a project with 10,000 people directly, but you can have 100 supervisors all responsible for 100 people under them. And once hierarchy was established, it was easy for those at the top (or even in the middle) to extract surplus value and to create ideologies which promulgated the rightness of said action.
Due to how hierarchy has been used by capitalism (and other authoritarian nasties) it tends to be dismissed by many on the left, along with bureaucracy. But in the absence of an actual structure/order, humans just fall back into what comes naturally to us regarding politics - which means we cannot enact effective political change. Effective politics is hard work - and very unpleasant - because it bucks human nature to put yourself out there repeatedly for rejection, and to repeatedly reach out to people who disagree with you. This is why things like socialist reading groups have been historically very effective - you take someone who is new to the politics and place them into an entirely new social circle where people are discussing the ideas of socialism all the time. So not only are they getting personally educated in socialism, they on a subconscious level internalize the idea that socialist politics are right-thinking given they are now surrounded by people who take these things as axiomatic. But this is also part of why the left often falls to factionalism, because it's really, really easy to lapse back into human nature and care more about what your peers think of you (and your internal standing within the social group) and lose sight of the actual politics supposedly animating your cause.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I've learned from experience that your comment threads tend to go fast and be over within 24 hours, so perhaps brevity is better if there is going to be any kind of discussion.
There's a new book out called The Dawn of Everything that calls into question many of these assumptions, in particular the whole progression of hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to modern bureaucratic capitalist states. Organizing is both difficult and necessary, but I don't think the problem is lack of hierarchy and order - and, as FdB characterizes it, the problem is one of pervasive uniformity that would in fact be impossible to enforce in any kind of top-down way, but rather emerges organically from the (perhaps perverse) incentives of the structure. Which is actually a cause for hope, since it means that we can organize differently by using different structures.
Please expand on how a realatively free market under the rule of law is authoritarian. Having read a lot of Milton Friedman, Like "Free to Choose," and Capitalism and Freedom," I find that assertion needs some argument behind it to support it.
I take it as historically proven that the transition to a relatively free market, the rule of law, and government by the consent of the governed, starting about 1700, produced an historically unprecidented enrichment of the entire world. Please explain why that isn't true.
Also, please explain why Socialism, government control of everything, isn't the Road to Sefdom that Hayek said it is.
You comment on a marxist's substack and wonder why people support socialism? Okay.
Regardless, the difference between capitalism and communism isn't about private versus state ownership. It's about whether the means of production are owned by a largely idle ruling class or by the working class. I'm not a market socialist per se, but I do think if we're talking about "after the revolution" I'd prefer if most firms were self-governed by the workers rather than directly state controlled (outside of critical areas like utilities, rail, provision of healthcare, etc - many of which are state owned internationally or within the U.S. and seem to work just fine).
Also, you're not going to get any doctrinaire Marxist to disagree that the movement from feudalism to capitalism was not a great step forward. It's right there in Kapital. Marx believed that the transition was inevitable in fact - a stage of history which had to come to pass given the tremendous efficiencies gained through capitalism.
Regardless, the term "free market" is a bit of an oxymoron. Throughout history markets have always been regulated, explicitly through law and implicitly through custom. Indeed, markets - just like governments - can be seen as a sort of technology - something that needs to be engineered properly in order to deliver the desired return for a society. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian will admit, for example, you need to set up intellectual property laws to have a market work properly, which means that total market neutrality is impossible - the government has to pick winners and losers. Lack of enforcement of antitrust laws leads to monopoly or monopsony (a big issue now with Amazon) - or even more commonly, broad collusion across theoretically independent actors in the economy. Because when it comes down to it, most wealthy people would rather eliminate financial risk for themselves and be able to pass on power to their (often less talented) progeny over playing the game fairly.
I also find the idea of liberty to be only half-realized if we must spend half of our waking adult hours in a workplace which amounts to an authoritarian state. What use is freedom of speech, for example, if you do not have the right to speak your mind within the workplace without fear of repercussion? We must extend the principle of democratic control out of our system of governance and into the workplace in order to truly be liberated from oppression.
Or at least I think so. We all have our own ideological priors after all.
Like the American Founders, I believe the concentration of power is dangerous. The more concentrated the power gets, the more corrupting and dangerous it becomes. Socialism concetrates the control of everything in the central government's hands. The government becomes, in effect, a single corporation with a monopoly on everything. I don't see how labeling any organization a "government" suddenly makes them altruistic.
The first rule of bureaucracy is self preservation. The second is growth. Any bureaucracy with absolute power over everything in an entire nation, with no checks and balances, becomes absolutely self-serving. That's why the end point of Socialism is almost always dictatorships. Everybody is equally impoverished, except Party members, of course.
Relatively free markets, under the rule of law, with government by the consent of the governed, are successful as long as concentrations of power are broken up. When power gets concentrated, like it is now with Big Tech and bigger government, it begins to fail.
Democratic control is frustrated by concentrated power. It's an inherent contradiction of Socialism.
If you want to invoke the Founders, they were clearly supporters of private enterprise, but the embrace by American capitalism of the limited liability entities known as corporations would have raised considerable ire. Most of the Founders were dead-set opposed to corporations due to their experience with the East India Company - and even those who thought they had a role wanted them under strict controls (only used for one line of business, like canal building, cannot make more than a certain profit per year, etc.)
I don't know why you keep making all of these authoritative statements about what socialism is. Socialism does not need to be a completely centralized system. Marx himself was somewhat agnostic on the subject - central planning came from Lenin, which for obvious reasons cast a long shadow over history. But there's no inherent reason why you couldn't see a socialist economy within (as an example) a loose confederational system with a weak central government.
As an aside, I think the reason why communist states generally speaking ended in dictatorships is primarily because they gained power through the barrel of a gun (or were imposed externally in the case of the Warsaw Pact. If you look at the history of "liberal revolutions" most violent ones which began in coups ended in either failure or military dictatorships as well.
Concentrated political power within a democratic system can be distributed. But concentrated power within an authoritarian system cannot easily. The workplace is an authoritarian system within a purportedly democratic nation, which is why I support democratizing it.
I feel that in the future, there will be more of a "left" to speak of, but that it will largely comprise of people who haven't participated in the last 7 years of debating what the left "is" and who should be excluded. This is a positive thought, but it's also a negative thought, because I think it will really put into relief how much time was wasted.
From personal experience, I think that the way I began savvily tweeting about the left was identical to the way I began savvily tweeting about liberal stuff when I was a liberal. Savvily tweeting is a major part of being a liberal, in a way that is subconscious. Not just because of the smugness that liberalism tends to encourage but because, when you're on social media, it is incredibly easy to feel like the smartest person on the forum. Not just because you maybe are but because everyone is so silo'd off that it's easy to feel like the one page you've read on a topic is more than anyone else you're talking to has ever read (again, this isn't helped by the fact that maybe 80% of people have read even less than you; it's just that you can't help but assume 100% of people have read even less than you).
So, I was experienced with being a liberal online, and when it comes to liberalism, it mostly is just a cultural expression these days, so it doesn't occur to you that there is more to it. Easy to internalize that mindset. I think it's inevitable that many people start from that and you only grow out of that from education or a way longer-term process of years of reflection... needless to say, education is better if the goal is to build a movement.
I agree with Freddie about most things but I think he misses one point sometimes, which is that there isn't really a substantial "old left" in the way that he thinks there is. I agree with him about the old left values that are contiguous with leftists of the past, but I think he overestimates the extent to which anybody can reliably find a "real" leftist to learn from. I think that is a far bigger problem than not listening.
If you're a leftist trying to plug into the real stuff that's going on, it's just always a roll of the dice. You can just as easily get educated about the real left as you can get told "it's not my job to educate you" by people insecurely convincing themselves that they know stuff, and that teaches you to mimic their defensiveness, and then they start treating you like one of the crowd, and then you feel as if you've been educated on how to be a leftist.
Basically I agree with Freddie, but I think it's a case of needing to build something new that happens to resemble something old... I think it gets confusing to talk about continuity with the old left because I don't think there really is much continuity to plug into. The plethora of people saying "leftism means saying you're better than liberals while trying to call out every leftist for not being enough of a liberal" are, in a way, a symptom of the harsh absence of a real left to plug into right now.
I wish I was also confident that this will go out of fashion. What does that path look like?
These new ideas give power to those that hold them. Both at an individual level and to institutions. What will counteract that?
Failure. Sustained, deep, punishing failure.
What about the Iron Law of Institutions? You couldn't design a better set of ideas to thrive within that environment. Of course if will eventually collapse, but that will take a few decades to run it's course.
Look at history. The last time this woke stuff reared its ugly head who was responsible for slaying it? Bill Clinton. Why? The electoral losses were unsustainable.
That's a great example. Let's assume this woke stuff was responsible for the end of 40 years of Democrat congress. A quarter century later it not only still exists, but is an order of magnitude more prevalent.
I guess we got a momentary break from it at least. But if it ever went out of fashion, it was a pretty quick fashion cycle.
Your timeline is all messed up. I wrote that Bill Clinton killed off the first PC movement in order to be elected. The Democrats didn't lose Congress until Clinton's first midterm. And after that Clinton was more than happy to cooperate with Newt Gingrich on welfare reform (meaning time limits and work requirements) and a massive crime bill that a lot of people think is responsible for kick off the modern carceral state. Does that sound like progressive policy to you?
And keep in mind that Clinton was elected in 1992 while the PC stuff only got its start in the mid to late 1980's You're talking about a period of time substantially shorter than a decade after which the woke stuff went underground for 20-30 years.
Put another way the electoral losses I speak of weren't Clinton's midterm losses. He was after all the great triangulator. I was referring to Dukakis losing to Bush, plus the Reagan terms before that.
Ah ok, I see what you meant now. Fair enough.
As to your other point, look at the google ngrams for "political correctness". It definitely didn't go underground in usage. It's stayed pretty constant since a peak in 97. I'm not sure how else to measure it. Subjectively, I didn't see it go underground either.
Now try an older term like "social justice". It's a pretty steady rise since 1900. This didn't start in the 1980s.
Hopefully beginning on Tuesday in Virginia.
Yes, I'm the guy who always says "vote for Democrats", but the Democrats need to move away from wokeism to have sustained success in the future, and badly need a wake-up call. Losing the Virginia governorship and legislature will do the least long-term damage, while hopefully providing that wake-up call.
Of course, that the Democrats will correctly interpret the weke-up call (paging David Shor!) is unlikely. So the US will most likely become a right-wing dictatorship when Trump and his VP, Trump Jr, win in 2024, thanks in part to rigged elections.
No plan, that would be game over. Like Russia or Turkey.
I agree with you on a lot of this, from 'always vote straight ticket Dem is obviously correct and barely an interesting discussion' to 'I hope between now and 2024 the Dems get scared away from embracing deeply unpopular ideas, whatever that takes is worth it.'
That said, Trump is old and fat, will die one day and none of his progeny have an ounce of charisma. He may win a close reelection but if he does I'm more concerned about the new round of social upheaval than the downfall of democracy. I think when he got elected many people overestimated the mess he would make politically and underestimated the amount of chaos he would inject into American society. It's easier to patch your election system than your social fabric.
"Losing the Virginia governorship and legislature will do the least long-term damage, while hopefully providing that wake-up call."
It might be my own blinkered perspective, as a mom receiving forwarded emails from well-meaning relatives warning me that the social-emotional component of my child's curriculum (the very part of the curriculum causing my child to finally bloom, it seems) is creeping CRT, but I have a hard time seeing a Youngkin victory as "the least long-term damage" right now.
It'll mean the strategy of ratcheting up the culture wars by reacting to what is sometimes a genuine problem, the excesses of the "equity industry", with ever-more ridiculous reactions like "Norman Rockwell = CRT" and "teen assignation devolves into date rape = transgender attack on innocent girls", is a winning strategy. Perhaps that is the path of least long-term damage, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Anyone who enjoys politics is a sociopath? Do you really think so? You don't think MLK Jr. & Rosa Luxembourg enjoyed what they did?
Would you make a distinction between enjoyment and satisfaction, and say that you can find satisfaction in politics, but not enjoyment?
In fact a core theme of MLK's work was envisioning a time when he didn't have to deal with this shit.
Andrew Sullivan frequently says the point of the gay rights movement was to get to a time when gays did not have to live political lives.
Coming to something out of necessity is different from coming to it out of your own inclination, freely.
You think that if MLK achieved all his goals he'd just give up public life?
Of course I cannot answer that with any certainty. I mean who could? But considering it was a cause he was willing to give his life for, yes I think he would have stepped back or at least changed his level of exposure when it came to less pressing politics issues. I mean. He was murdered for it. Do I think he would want to live his entire life under the threat of murder for his beliefs? No I do not. I think once his political hopes were realized, he would have been relieved.
Yeah, I'm not saying he wouldn't be happy to achieve his goals, or that he wouldn't change how he engaged. I'm just saying that I think he'd definitely continue to engage publicly with the issues of the day, because it's interesting, and it's fun.
Sure. I think the “sociopath” aspect comes in when someone makes politicking the game their career “for the fun of it.” When it becomes divorced from material reality of the people.
The NY Times wrote that the real political divide in this country is between the minority who actually cares about politics and the overwhelming majority (about 2/3 of the country) that do not. Why do so many turn their backs on political engagement? At a guess the widespread corruption, venom and fanaticism found in the political realm.
I've been hearing this since I was 12 years old, and I'm now 66.
Maybe because they don't care about power and/or have other, more interesting things to do with their time?
Well...per the Megan Markle investigation that discovered that what appeared to be a mass campaign of hate actually amounted to a few dozen folks on Twitter - how sure are we that any of this is actually a thing vs. something the Twitter, Facebook etc. algorithm is creating?
I'm guessing deBoer is basing this on people he's met in person as well.
A righteous essay. Thank you for it.
Re: antifa, and debates as to who belongs in a movement. It seems to me that adopting a "you are what you do" attitude avoids a lot of the inevitable semantic bickering here. Many people in antifa will claim that they're out there fighting for the "marginalized" or what have you. But if you're on week 15 of smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire and nothing more, does it matter what you *say* you want? Same goes for the identitarians on the left. They *say* that they want to fight racism, but many of their actions involve making race the sole relevant factor in judging a person's moral character.
People can say all sorts of things, but who cares? What do they actually *do*?
I agree with this as just a general approach to life. I think people would be a lot more successful focusing on their actions rather than their identity.
“Behavior is truth.” —Andrew Vachss
Love the post.
I love the custom URL. Now I'm wondering if there were other fun URLs that I missed.
Maybe less for you, given your background, but for me what I've noticed most in the past decade is what I'd like to call radicalism/extremism inflation. It's important to note that this took place on both sides of the political spectrum, which makes me want to put on my Marshall McLuhan cap and say "the medium is the message." That for reason I can't concretely state this is all a product of the shift from traditional to social media.
A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible. This constant one upmanship leads to an unending pissing contest to see who can be the wokest, the most extreme tankie, the most based neorractionary, etc.
This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception. Debates, if you could even call them that, are all about who has the most based, hottest take. The actual problems and how to resolve them never enter into it. The liberals (it's weird even calling them this) saying we should censor the shit out everything are basically just the hall monitors, the teacher's pets, the snitches tell the teachers that someone said a dirty word. This is probably how most of them have always solved their problems, and FB and Twitter are just another principal to sick on one's enemies.
“A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible.” The term I’ve heard for this is “acid-coating” ie, the opposite of sugar coating. As you point out, it’s a strategy to build social media clout, but is counter-productive to building political change.
Bullying mixed with hyperbole mixed with narcissism. A nice little cocktail for dominating others and accomplishing zero.
"This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception." I think you can look to McLuhan (as you mention) and more or less get a full understanding of what's happening. The form of discourse on social media is shitposting; it creates an environment where good faith engagement is all but impossible.
The people with the sharpest pens are the ones with the laziest tongues. They type a lot but organize little. They post a lot but meet little. They might march, and they might even do so with a mask and a scowl, but they don't win converts. I've noticed this time and again in local politics.
I think part of it is that the American left has been so weak for so long that now that there's been a mini-renaissance over the last decade, the newcomers can't help but overwhelm the old guard. As a result a lot of newly minted leftists are bringing liberal or Democratic party sensibilities to their new home. So it's less the left changing its mind on these values and more that the left is mostly made up of different people now, with different beliefs.
You can sort of see this play out as well in the Democratic party too. I believe one of the reasons Bernie struggled in 2020 was that the primary base consisted of many more ex-Republicans compared to 2016, and those voters brought their attitudes towards redistributive politics with them.
I've read a few times about some major shift in Sanders between 2016 and 2020. What changed exactly? I don't really remember 2016 well, and I tried not to pay attention to campaign minutia in 202.
There is a line of argument that the 2020 Sanders campaign leaned more into social justice rhetoric at the expense of his original message. I don't know if I believe that. If anything, his 2020 platform was more radical on economic issues than his first. Aside from what I mentioned above, in my opinion the biggest problem is that a large part of his voters in 2016 were anti-Hillary rather than pro-Bernie, so in 2020 they found the other candidates just as attractive.
that definitely does not gel with my experience of both campaigns and i think anyone pushing that argument is too high on the anti-woke supply. imo the difference was more just that the media decided to ignore his campaign in 2020 rather than try and smear him for running against the potential first woman president.
So your theory is that Bernie got 3.8 million fewer primary votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 because the media didn't cover him enough?
whoops almost caught myself relitigating the 2020 primary on the internet. not today, satan!!
Yeah, never argue with Satan! I always win.
I think many people have given up on the idea of something actually changing, so they use politics as a badge of identity. Yelling "abolish the police" makes you look cool. The fact that it doesn't accomplish anything isn't relevant to these people, because they don't think anything can be accomplished.
Spot on. Nothing is more dispiriting than the notion that nothing can change, and it's far from a badge of honor to wear it. Too many are giving in to the intoxicating feeling of righteous indignation, without it being even slightly tempered by a clear-eyed plan to real policy reform. If no one is actually willing to get their hands dirty in politics, seeking actual achievable progress, they are engaging in nihilist play-acting.
Change is hard. Taking the issue of criminal justice inequities, there just isn’t some magical solution. It means navigating difficult trade offs and engaging with sometimes uncomfortable research findings (like more police = less crime). Snappy slogans aren’t going to do it - it’s going to take a long term multi-tactical approach and positive results may not appear right away. I think that reality just isn’t very appealing to a lot of activists.
"It means navigating difficult trade offs and engaging with sometimes uncomfortable research findings (like more police = less crime)"
Right, and you need descriptively accurate view of the world to change it. If it were "problematic" to believe that smoking caused lung cancer (to pick an extreme example), then it would be a lot harder to reduce lung cancer.