Matt Taibbi

reminder from that great recent lemeiux post:

It is also worth noting that this is not an ideological dispute; it is not about FAILING TO RECOGNIZE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE TO YOUR LEFT. Noam Chomsky believes that swing-state voters should support the leftmost viable candidate in general elections; Tom Friedman, conversely, shares Freddie’s view that there really needs to be a third-party candidate that agrees with him in every detail because coalition-building should be obsolete for today’s consumer.

has nothing to do w/ evil, or dissent, or the left. it has to do w/ childish atomistic consumerism replacing pragmatism. "lesser evilism" is the telling phrase. the so-called democratic liberals don't use the idiom when making their argument bc they aren't making an argument based in morality. it's the priority of a stunted morality that sees voting as an expression of their personal purity and views compromise as somehow contaminating said purity. don't vote for the lesser evil. vote for the option that best fits your issues. if one candidate fits 20% and the other fits 10%, vote for the 20% one. if both fit 0% (like let's say you're a one issue capitalism voter and the options this year are fascism and communism, or more practically if you're a one issue hardcore anti-imperialism voter and your options are interventionism and belligerence, and neither seem superior to the other) then don't vote. no one is asking anyone to vote for a candidate who they don't agree with on any issue. they're just saying that if you agree with one politician more than another, the only intelligent decision is to vote for the one you agree with more. the whole purity in politics thing is bizarre.

re treason, Taibbi is talking about the snotty, punchable attitude of DLC types, funny i can't think of an example just now.

taibbi feels bad about himself and he's projecting all kinds of /attitudes/ to DLC types that aren't being made. no one said anyone /owes/ Hillary their votes. what they said was that only stupid people don't vote for the best of the two candidates. it's the left-wing political fluoride hysterics (and their related versions throughout the political spectrum including tom friedman self-obsessed voters) who believe anyone is making a case about treason or evil or whatever. he admits himself that voting for the better candidate is a good way to make a decision at the ballot box. he can't quite bring himself to admit that it's the only logical way to make a decision but even he realizes that he's complaining about the demons in his head and not actually people.

MaxSpeak had a pretty great run on LGM front page the other day. One of about eight posts of his - http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/confessions-of-a-bernie-bro

Some on the left seem to make it their mission to invite the contempt of others. I’m always reminded of an appearance by the late Harvey Pekar on David Letterman’s show, decades ago. Pekar’s message could be boiled down to, I’m the left, and you all suck. Ah, politics. Winning friends and influencing people! His hatred was pure! Some on the left fall prey to this, if only occasionally.

lots of good responses in the comments imo - he does come off as smug and repetitive (like someone points out - it's as if he thinks no one has heard the case for bernie yet, maybe bc he still can't believe that someone heard the case and didn't sign on), but i thought this was a gracious way to end the run:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/kumbaya

Absolutely. Also I can't imagine how he wrote all of those in one day but for all I know he did, which is pretty amazing.

he said somewhere in the comments that he started prepping them a week ago

someone else who doesn't understand Harvey Pekar

anyway, Debs was right, I do not want what i do not want (Or was that Morrissey?)

the weird thing about you isn't that you don't have a strong grasp of how our political system works (most americans don't) but that you think anyone cares to hear yr personal preference stated over and over again. you'd make a good fit on the nyt op-ed pages next to maureen dowd.

btw every winning presidential candidate has been elected mostly by stupid people, it's just how the math works

i don't give a flying fucking shit what anyone cares to hear

it's a messageboard, your time can be wasted any which way

incrementalism is good imo

'things are bad, only swift and wide-sweeping changes can make them better' seems like some kind of logical fallacy

but perhaps less so when humanity is going to drown/starve very soon

morbs mordy unity ticket

maybe i should have said 'underrated' instead of good, it depends on context

if Hillary wins and gets public option into ACA that would be 'incremental' but better than trying and failing to get single-payer during obama's first term would have been

So, there's this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-reaction-to-brexit-is-the-reason-brexit-happened-20160627

can't wait for the Neoliberal Hot Takes

Neoliberal Hot Take:

Democracy in the US hit a roadblock when one of the two main political parties decided it was no longer a good idea to pass legislation

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."

Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-response-to-trump-another-dangerous-movement-appears-20160630

Yeah I feel like with that one Taibbi is back in good form.

one of the candidates would nominate supreme court judges that would overturn citizen's united. the other candidate would nominate supreme court judges that would not. but i'm supposed to believe that the supporters of the latter candidate are angry bc there's too much money in politics? it strains credulity.

People are angry because they feel helpless and disenfranchised. Are you trying not to understand this?

maybe if they didn't vote for republicans over and over and over they wouldn't be so helpless and disenfranchised. you don't get to set your house on fire and then complain that it's burning. esp if you won't let the firefighters put it out.

Sorry for the snark. It just seems like there is this impulse to paint everyone who doesn't support Hillary in this race as a racist idiot. I'm no USA-apologist (and I'm going to vote for stupid Hillary), but I don't think that 45% of the country are racist idiots. People feel fed up with feeling fucked-over, and they are trying to find anyone who they think will bust shit up.

I'd like to think that if dems were in charge of the presidency and congress, things would get better, but I can also envision a world where they just keep the politics of fear thing going, and continue spending half their time dialing up their rich donors and begging for money.

except that we know that while dems are in power things do get better bc they have a track record we can look at. and when the republicans are in charge regulations are loosened, unions are cracked down on, welfare is cut, etc. clinton's supreme court nominees voted against citizens united, as did obama's. reagan's, gwb's, and ghwb's voted for it. this isn't a big secret.

what taibbi is saying is that you can argue against the positions held by voters, saying they are in error, irrational or based in ignorance, but it is another thing altogether to argue that because you think other voters are irrational, we should take away their vote or render their votes meaningless. This is bad because a society which chooses that direction must simultaneously deal with enforcing its will upon an unwilling and disenfranchised population, which quickly devolves in taking political prisoners and creating a violent despotism.

right, that part i agree w/ - democracy is a v important ideology that i support. i'm just saying that his view of the electorate - when he gets to the question of 'why' - is not based in reality.

it's cut from the same cloth as bernie claiming that the republicans have a natural constituency of 15% of the electorate. the false consciousness arguments are not compelling from the get-go but especially when they've had decades and decades to know what the republicans are about. the republicans not only don't make a secret of it - they campaign on these things. they campaign on cutting government programs and drowning the government in a bath tub and campaign on starting new wars and removing regulations on industries. their voters aren't confused. they're republicans themselves and this is what they want.

Dems were happy to loosen banking regulations, and Clinton presided over the destruction of welfare.

If the dems weren't basically offering a lite version of the same policies, maybe they would be more successful.

they weren't "happy." after having no power in washington for decades the democrats finally won the WH w/ a compromising centrist who was forced to deal w/ a gingrich congress whose republican revolution was predicated primarily on the argument that clinton was not a New Democrat (aka the moderate he campaigned as) but a "tax and spend" liberal. and even still it was clinton's supreme court choices who voted against citizens united. dem policies are different enough that republicans have painted obama and clinton as secret muslims + marxists.

i don't know why you think they'd be more successful offering an even more explicitly left-wing vision of government when it is precisely their left-wingness that makes them unpalatable to a large percentage of the electorate. i get that this is a version of the tea party argument that the dems just haven't run a sufficiently left-wing pol yet but i don't think this is true to reality.

"secret muslims + marxists" hasn't really got shit to do with policies

that's bullshit. they have to do w/ a) that democrats are not as hawkish + warmongering as the republicans who want to bomb muslims everywhere and b) that they support increasing taxes to grow social programming. they are totally linked to real policy differences in the parties.

dems need to launch their own cable+streaming channel that targets millennials

"No power in Washington for decades" is some hellacious rewriting of history. They controlled one or both Congressional bodies throughout the Reagan-Bush era.

starting in the 80s they controlled the senate and house simultaneously for 12 years total - 4 of which took place under the obstructionist anti-obama republicans where a veto-proof majority was needed (and where despite that the dems pushed through the biggest new addition to the social safety net in decades). almost all the presidents in that time period were republicans

do u guys honestly believe that if the democratic party started introducing far left policy in the house that the american right-wing would defect to them?

Why do you think Bernie polled better than Hillary against the GOP, then? Just blind sexism and Hillary-hate?

That paragraph doesn't even make sense. The decades of powerlessness are... the one 12-year run of GOP Presidencies with Reagan and Bush I, when Democrats still held part or all of Congress?

Post FDR until Clinton, Presidentially you have:
Dem - 2
Rep - 2
Dem - 2
Rep - 2
Dem - 1
GOP- 3

Which means that they were on a routine 8-year cycle except for once. You're trying to rewrite history to defend Clinton's craven neoliberalism and it's simply untrue.

People who feel like they're powerless and getting fucked can't look at Clinton and Obama (or New Labour) and say they're objectively better for the working class.

Why do you think Bernie polled better than Hillary against the GOP, then? Just blind sexism and Hillary-hate?

― schwantz, Friday, July 1, 2016 5:58 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES

sexism, hillary-hate, and no major campaign to defame his character and expose his weaknesses

I think Americans prefer people who have deeply-held principles to those who are compromisers, even though compromise is where the real work gets done. When your biggest principle is compromise and "bringing people together" you look like a sucker.

cool story

even craven neoliberal bill clinton did more for democracy + the non-wealthy than a single republican. it's like you forget we live in the ideological capital of capitalism. ppl to the right who refuse to vote for democrats don't do so bc they're too capitalist, it's bc they aren't capitalist enough. you know how you know that? bc that's how the republicans campaign.

Compromise is not a principle, but a method.

Someone needs to tell the dems that.

i love that obama has become bolder + issued more executive orders since he discovered that the republicans could not be negotiated with, but considering taibbi's article is about how undermining democracy is bad i think complaining that obama compromises too much w/ democratically elected representatives is inconsistent.

even craven neoliberal bill clinton did more for democracy + the non-wealthy than a single republican.

The latter is... arguable. Nevertheless, this is the fundamental "lesser evil" argument for Dems that has turned out badly so many times before and quite possibly would again if the Republicans hadn't nominated the worst candidate of any of our lifetimes.

it's like you forget we live in the ideological capital of capitalism. ppl to the right who refuse to vote for democrats don't do so bc they're too capitalist, it's bc they aren't capitalist enough. you know how you know that? bc that's how the republicans campaign.