Been telling everyone for a year now that they are couping the nation and that there will never be real elections again, but everyone just says to wait for the midterms like lemmings. Apparently the rules only apply if you are a Democrat, Republicans can shred the constitution to pieces and no one cares.
On another note I always go back to this letter to The New Statesman a few years ago:
In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.
What people say "killed Keynes" was a series of economic shocks: the 1967-1975 closure of the Suez Canal over the Israeli surprise attack on Egypt starting the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1971 Nixon shock, the 1973 OPEC oil embargo against the United States and its allies over their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah of Iran, the US- and UK-backed dictator of the country, and a cessation of cheap Iranian oil to the United States and its allies. These caused disruptive effects to the global economy and ultimately led to the rise of figures like Reagan and Thatcher who implemented the theories of economists like Milton Friedman (after a trial run in places like Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the installation of Augusto Pinochet as a US-backed dictator).
(Friedman reportedly remarked on his proposals to cut welfare-state spending that while he knew they were unpopular at the time he proposed them, he did so so that they could be implemented at a time when people would be looking for an alternative to the status quo, which came out after the aforementioned shocks.)
This forgets that Keynes helped manage the economy of the UK through three major crises in his lifetime, the Great War (as it was then called), the Great Depression, and the Second World War. A proper understanding of Keynesian economics would have seen similar management done through those shocks, instead of abandoning it in favour of Friedmanite neoliberalism.
It may also be worth remembering that when Nigel Farage was campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, part of his pitch was that money which he said the UK sent to the EU could instead be spent on the NHS.
So it has ever been with “communist”, “socialist”, and all the other similar epithets which have been deployed against any redistribution of wealth and political power that might benefit the people as a whole and restrict the privileges of the oligarchical minority. Michael Parenti (RIP) noted this rhetorical ploy in his talk at Fordham in the 1990s on his book, Inventing Reality.
You use the epithets to keep the discourse dressing off to the right and prevent any public proposal that might even signal a democratic benefit, even just a little bit, from being perceived as valid. This is also true of patriotism, which the right has arrogated to itself when they are the ones destroying the country.
The right, it must be acknowledged, was more skilled than the left (in the most general sense) in understanding and making use of narrative manipulation to steer people’s perceptions. It’s past time for that to corrected.
far right would need to be more skilled in manipulating ppl in order to go against their common sense and they did. Its also why the first thing they go after is education and critical thinking. I was amazed when during 2010's a bunch of democratic centrists senators advocated for the far rights project of charter schools very publicly-demonstrated how bought they were (by the same ppl to boot)
You’re absolutely right, Mike. The far right organized around the Powell memo and the federalist society a few years later. They had authoritarian tendencies and are now full blown fascist. The “left” is barely on the left, but everyone wants to argue about policy minutiae as to whether the “left” needs to move to the freaking right! It’s maddening.
Ever shifting the Overton Window rightward. I had a small dust-up on Twitter that was before I left that site with a true far leftist that wanted to seize and redistribute my small business, home, 8 acres of farmland and any means of production calling me a capitalist pig in the process. That is the far left. Our left polity is barely left of center. Mild socialism at the more left end.
What's tragically sad is when "centrist" Democrats refer to other Democrats as "far left," accepting the framing, thinking somehow this makes them more "serious." It's bad enough when the "neutral" press does it. But we who adhere to humane values have to stop it with the circular firing squad.
There's a pretty pedestrian explanation for why this is. I can explain it, because I used to think like this. I used to be in the frame of thinking that you are calling out. And I am now critiquing. It's the technocratic liberal posture. That tries to understand the world through experts and polling. And they try to calculate the center as a kind of scientific art. Seriously. This is still going on. You see it with Noah Smith, a little bit with Natalie Wynn / Contrapoints, and with Steven Bonnell / Destiny. It's really a pathology of liberalism with a Kantian metaphysics, I think. It's not a conspiracy per se. Although, predatory and extractive capital does target and manipulate them through lobbying and narrative-framing work they do in think tanks, the media, etc. Those things are true. But it's more of an organic corruption than anything. Many of these people's views are softening on AOC, Mamdani and Platner in real-time, so I'm not inclined to kick their teeth in while this is happening.
Good observation. It's so normalised now, those with even slightly left leanings, will label anyone slightly lefter 'radical'. Democrats have got to stop listening to these fascists and play their own game.
Political donations have always been an utterly foreign concept and an abhorrent idea to me. Happily a good chunk of the world tends to agree. We'd call it corruption, bribery, political tributes and favouritism. The sort of thing you'd expect from some 3rd world, war-torn African military dictatorship. But to America, it seems, just as foreign to consider banning it. Normally, I'd just say it's a quirk of the US system and it's up to them how they run/wreck their country. But when it spills into the world and starts messing everyone else up? Well, it just makes me cross.
This is what really pissed me off about the award-winning movie "One Battle After Another". It creates a fictional far left enemy to justify the far right doing whatever it wants. Sure, it's just a movie. But it's just one more example of the idea being normalised. It's not far left vs far right, it's slightly left leaning centrists vs far right fascists. It's nurses, teachers, and regular working class people, vs rich fascists with mega rich donors, well-armed militant white suprematists, unregulated corporates with massive power, and rampant big tech controlling the comms. It's incredibly one-sided. And MAGA nuts justify this with their wild visions of a "radical far left", blue-haired transgender kids taking over the world. Whenever I've tried to speak to Trumpists, faced with inconvenient facts and figures they can't argue with, they switch to "Well, I suppose you WANT men competing with women in the Olympics!" At that point, I just can't. Seriously.
Sorry- I hit send button accidentally before I finished… To continue:
The affluent young people from the 60s (of which I am one) could brandish their radical beliefs with no real consequence. They went to college, were often deferred from the draft, and after the war walked into good jobs. They became affluent in their own right, buying homes cheaply, and accumulating wealth. We forget that despite their pose as leftists, they often showed contempt for the working class”hard hats”, for soldiers, for Southerners, for their parents- for lots of people who did not share their privileged level of educated enlightenment. What they valued was people like themselves.
Without anyone realizing it, the Democratic Party became the party of these well educated liberals. No longer a party organized around working people, but around ideas of personal freedom and diverse lifestyles. It costs nothing to be “open-minded” to racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities if your job, economic opportunity, or social status is not threatened in any way by these social changes. Of course, anyone who objected to these tremendous sociological upheavals was obviously bigoted, and an object of scorn. Same contempt, but with more money and status. Proud liberals!
Don’t get me wrong. The Democratic Party has done much good, and is the only party that gives a damn about democracy. But there is a soft corruption- many decades old- that has weakened it as a moral and political force. Democrats have consistently favored policies that supported the poor, the disenfranchised, and those looking for a real opportunity to succeed. That is real, and commendable. But they have also strongly supported policies such as the home mortgage deduction, local property taxes to fund education, and lower taxes on capital gains that only reinforce their own economic advantage. And by the way, all egalitarian impulses seem to be forgotten when it is time for their children or grandchildren to go to college or to get a coveted internship.
So we don’t need to focus only on the corrupting force of corporate money on politics. It’s true enough. But we have corrupted ourselves.
I don't think many understand these dynamics of media manipulation as well as you do. I worked in media for years and got exposed to it first hand but the false equivalencies the billionaire owned media cooks up that are required to justify the insane behavior of the right are so infuriating to me.
The conservatives have been inching the overton window farther and farther right baseless character assassination by assassination. They spent 50 years shifting the ground right out from under us and now the trap has sprung. All we can do now is slam the door shut and work on bringing sanity back to the country.
Yeah. I'll be upfront, I don't believe anyone's Far Left until they start quoting Das Kapital verbatim and start disappearing Republican Judges and shutting down Fox News studios and start nationalizing businesses left and right.
On the left edge of the far-right that thinks of itself as the righteous right, you immediately stumble into the far left. Nothing in the middle. And that's where "woke" starts, too.
Been telling everyone for a year now that they are couping the nation and that there will never be real elections again, but everyone just says to wait for the midterms like lemmings. Apparently the rules only apply if you are a Democrat, Republicans can shred the constitution to pieces and no one cares.
On another note I always go back to this letter to The New Statesman a few years ago:
In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.
What people say "killed Keynes" was a series of economic shocks: the 1967-1975 closure of the Suez Canal over the Israeli surprise attack on Egypt starting the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1971 Nixon shock, the 1973 OPEC oil embargo against the United States and its allies over their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah of Iran, the US- and UK-backed dictator of the country, and a cessation of cheap Iranian oil to the United States and its allies. These caused disruptive effects to the global economy and ultimately led to the rise of figures like Reagan and Thatcher who implemented the theories of economists like Milton Friedman (after a trial run in places like Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the installation of Augusto Pinochet as a US-backed dictator).
(Friedman reportedly remarked on his proposals to cut welfare-state spending that while he knew they were unpopular at the time he proposed them, he did so so that they could be implemented at a time when people would be looking for an alternative to the status quo, which came out after the aforementioned shocks.)
This forgets that Keynes helped manage the economy of the UK through three major crises in his lifetime, the Great War (as it was then called), the Great Depression, and the Second World War. A proper understanding of Keynesian economics would have seen similar management done through those shocks, instead of abandoning it in favour of Friedmanite neoliberalism.
It may also be worth remembering that when Nigel Farage was campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, part of his pitch was that money which he said the UK sent to the EU could instead be spent on the NHS.
So it has ever been with “communist”, “socialist”, and all the other similar epithets which have been deployed against any redistribution of wealth and political power that might benefit the people as a whole and restrict the privileges of the oligarchical minority. Michael Parenti (RIP) noted this rhetorical ploy in his talk at Fordham in the 1990s on his book, Inventing Reality.
You use the epithets to keep the discourse dressing off to the right and prevent any public proposal that might even signal a democratic benefit, even just a little bit, from being perceived as valid. This is also true of patriotism, which the right has arrogated to itself when they are the ones destroying the country.
The right, it must be acknowledged, was more skilled than the left (in the most general sense) in understanding and making use of narrative manipulation to steer people’s perceptions. It’s past time for that to corrected.
far right would need to be more skilled in manipulating ppl in order to go against their common sense and they did. Its also why the first thing they go after is education and critical thinking. I was amazed when during 2010's a bunch of democratic centrists senators advocated for the far rights project of charter schools very publicly-demonstrated how bought they were (by the same ppl to boot)
You’re absolutely right, Mike. The far right organized around the Powell memo and the federalist society a few years later. They had authoritarian tendencies and are now full blown fascist. The “left” is barely on the left, but everyone wants to argue about policy minutiae as to whether the “left” needs to move to the freaking right! It’s maddening.
Ever shifting the Overton Window rightward. I had a small dust-up on Twitter that was before I left that site with a true far leftist that wanted to seize and redistribute my small business, home, 8 acres of farmland and any means of production calling me a capitalist pig in the process. That is the far left. Our left polity is barely left of center. Mild socialism at the more left end.
What's tragically sad is when "centrist" Democrats refer to other Democrats as "far left," accepting the framing, thinking somehow this makes them more "serious." It's bad enough when the "neutral" press does it. But we who adhere to humane values have to stop it with the circular firing squad.
There's a pretty pedestrian explanation for why this is. I can explain it, because I used to think like this. I used to be in the frame of thinking that you are calling out. And I am now critiquing. It's the technocratic liberal posture. That tries to understand the world through experts and polling. And they try to calculate the center as a kind of scientific art. Seriously. This is still going on. You see it with Noah Smith, a little bit with Natalie Wynn / Contrapoints, and with Steven Bonnell / Destiny. It's really a pathology of liberalism with a Kantian metaphysics, I think. It's not a conspiracy per se. Although, predatory and extractive capital does target and manipulate them through lobbying and narrative-framing work they do in think tanks, the media, etc. Those things are true. But it's more of an organic corruption than anything. Many of these people's views are softening on AOC, Mamdani and Platner in real-time, so I'm not inclined to kick their teeth in while this is happening.
Good observation. It's so normalised now, those with even slightly left leanings, will label anyone slightly lefter 'radical'. Democrats have got to stop listening to these fascists and play their own game.
In too many words but exactly that.
If this is not widely accepted and political donors not banned from the political stage, there is little hope for democracy.
Political donations have always been an utterly foreign concept and an abhorrent idea to me. Happily a good chunk of the world tends to agree. We'd call it corruption, bribery, political tributes and favouritism. The sort of thing you'd expect from some 3rd world, war-torn African military dictatorship. But to America, it seems, just as foreign to consider banning it. Normally, I'd just say it's a quirk of the US system and it's up to them how they run/wreck their country. But when it spills into the world and starts messing everyone else up? Well, it just makes me cross.
This is what really pissed me off about the award-winning movie "One Battle After Another". It creates a fictional far left enemy to justify the far right doing whatever it wants. Sure, it's just a movie. But it's just one more example of the idea being normalised. It's not far left vs far right, it's slightly left leaning centrists vs far right fascists. It's nurses, teachers, and regular working class people, vs rich fascists with mega rich donors, well-armed militant white suprematists, unregulated corporates with massive power, and rampant big tech controlling the comms. It's incredibly one-sided. And MAGA nuts justify this with their wild visions of a "radical far left", blue-haired transgender kids taking over the world. Whenever I've tried to speak to Trumpists, faced with inconvenient facts and figures they can't argue with, they switch to "Well, I suppose you WANT men competing with women in the Olympics!" At that point, I just can't. Seriously.
Have you seen the movie?
I have. I'll admit I drifted off in bits and really wanted to fast-forward it, but I watched it start to finish. Did I miss something?
Oh, flippin' great article by the way.
Sorry- I hit send button accidentally before I finished… To continue:
The affluent young people from the 60s (of which I am one) could brandish their radical beliefs with no real consequence. They went to college, were often deferred from the draft, and after the war walked into good jobs. They became affluent in their own right, buying homes cheaply, and accumulating wealth. We forget that despite their pose as leftists, they often showed contempt for the working class”hard hats”, for soldiers, for Southerners, for their parents- for lots of people who did not share their privileged level of educated enlightenment. What they valued was people like themselves.
Without anyone realizing it, the Democratic Party became the party of these well educated liberals. No longer a party organized around working people, but around ideas of personal freedom and diverse lifestyles. It costs nothing to be “open-minded” to racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities if your job, economic opportunity, or social status is not threatened in any way by these social changes. Of course, anyone who objected to these tremendous sociological upheavals was obviously bigoted, and an object of scorn. Same contempt, but with more money and status. Proud liberals!
Don’t get me wrong. The Democratic Party has done much good, and is the only party that gives a damn about democracy. But there is a soft corruption- many decades old- that has weakened it as a moral and political force. Democrats have consistently favored policies that supported the poor, the disenfranchised, and those looking for a real opportunity to succeed. That is real, and commendable. But they have also strongly supported policies such as the home mortgage deduction, local property taxes to fund education, and lower taxes on capital gains that only reinforce their own economic advantage. And by the way, all egalitarian impulses seem to be forgotten when it is time for their children or grandchildren to go to college or to get a coveted internship.
So we don’t need to focus only on the corrupting force of corporate money on politics. It’s true enough. But we have corrupted ourselves.
Thank you for saying these things out loud. I keep hearing far left, and not seeing far left, and sometimes I wonder if it's me who's crazy.
I don't think many understand these dynamics of media manipulation as well as you do. I worked in media for years and got exposed to it first hand but the false equivalencies the billionaire owned media cooks up that are required to justify the insane behavior of the right are so infuriating to me.
The conservatives have been inching the overton window farther and farther right baseless character assassination by assassination. They spent 50 years shifting the ground right out from under us and now the trap has sprung. All we can do now is slam the door shut and work on bringing sanity back to the country.
False equivalence is one of the main tactics of the far right establishment..
Yeah. I'll be upfront, I don't believe anyone's Far Left until they start quoting Das Kapital verbatim and start disappearing Republican Judges and shutting down Fox News studios and start nationalizing businesses left and right.
On the left edge of the far-right that thinks of itself as the righteous right, you immediately stumble into the far left. Nothing in the middle. And that's where "woke" starts, too.
Amen Mike, and what great points you've used to make your conclusions. Sharing everywhere.