He’s arrived: the fully transactional, gig-economized, never been in a union, never read a book, learned intimacy from sado-porn, doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine, got his ethics from MMA/sports betting/gaming/Vince McMahon/Musk/Rogan, mostly white/mostly male all-American Asshole. It’s his moment. Democrat rhetoric doesn’t seem to know he exists, much less the role they played in creating him.
That was the "gig-economized" part. David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" tells the story pretty well. What we're witnessing is a much bigger story, of course, and I do think we've moved past that to a kind of nihilism and power worship (unlike many of my comrades I think stirring social democratic amelioration rhetoric might as well be Martian to Trump's demographic - they literally have no idea what a man like Sanders is talking about). But the story Graeber and others tell is part of what made this possible. My 2 cents.
If I am understanding you, I think I agree. The US government is now turned over to the capitalists completely, and all New Deal methods of keeping them in check will be stripped out. But the Democrats could not defend any of the structure that was in place because their eye wasn’t on that. They have no concept of what increased corporate control means for people’s lives. They couldn’t speak to these aspects in any way. So people’s dissatisfaction with how their lives are being affected by this could go anywhere—and enough of it went to Trump. He didn’t speak to it either but he spoke to its effects, and blamed these on the Democrats. That was enough.
I did a lot of hedging and self-censoring this year because I'm sensititve to being a tedious broken record, The Guy Who Yells That The Democrats Are Not Getting It. Today I, possibly we, can take comfort in the fact that nothing said differently would have made the slightest bit of difference.
John this was the first thing I read today and decided to become paying subscriber. Realized I have been ingesting alot of BS, yet your writing remains thoughtful and clear eyed. The TS Elliot quote is spot in
For the first time since 2022 I watched a chunk of CNN/MSNBC coverage in the wee hours before 4EDT. Right at the start of a segment Jake Tapper told the other 5 panelists this was not racism or sexism on the Trump voters part. To my surprise, Chris Wallace pushed back gently, pointing out Trump had been saying those kinds of things for the past few months. There was no engagement. They would not grant agency to the Trump voters. They just gestured a little at what they antiseptically labelled "the economy"/"immigration"/"crime". No mention of women's issues or abortion in particular. Then implied it was Ds with agency and they had to stop hurting the feelings of Trump voters. I was also getting lots of "this will be like Trump 1" vibes. Pretty sure that's seriously delusional. I caught 3/4 of Trump's comments. He's a shell of himself in 2016. I don't think he's going to make it to 2026. I'm curious about the history of succession and the internecine combat around a rapidly declining authoritarian. He wants to end investigations, probably pardon everyone convicted for 2020, do some retribution, and golf. I wonder how much the people around him want the Full MAGA, though? Besides Stephen Miller, that is.
The lack of willingness to ascribe agency to Donald or his voters is perhaps more core to what we are experiencing than has been realized. The benefit of the doubt will always go to them, whether or not there is any good reason to do so.
They confuse ‘capacity for responsibility’ with agency. Trump is incapable of moral responsibility in the standard sense. So people default to not holding him responsible. Many of his voters are the same. They are incapable of seeing the larger situation, and assessing it clearly. So they also get exempted from being held responsible. But, in a way, this actually makes sense. They aren’t fully autonomous reflective people —but they still have agency. They can still act and they choose immoral things (the ones who aren’t completely fooled, and think they are just voting for lower grocery prices). And this reflects who they are, fundamentally. So it’s also reasonable to be repulsed by them even if they aren’t reasonable, and can’t be reasoned with.
Some writers talk about them in ways that essentially equate them to rabid dogs or landmines. We aren't supposed to think of them badly in (while of course they can use whatever slurs come to mind), for they know not what they do (when many do know and choose this anyway).
They should be held accountable but they have limited capacity for morality. So we stop expecting it. But this was a choice—now the viciousness is locked in, like Plato’s tyrant.
If a lack of conscience effectively gets them off the hook, then no wonder they use that like a blank check. With that assumption, admitting guilt or responsibility in the first place is a sucker's game. If they never accept responsibility, then they can keep doing it forever.
As I've written before here, I live in a rural red state that has a Republican super-majority in its legislature. After little children were murdered in their Christian school, and despite thousands of grieving mothers and children pleading with them, TN legislators loosened gun laws rather than tightening them. So I am not surprised when there are assholes.
I guess I thought maybe it was mainly the rural South and parts of the Upper Midwest. But now I see that assholes are in the majority everywhere in the US. One way to think about them is as Emotionally Immature People. They are toddlers that look like huge, monstrous adults.
It may seem like trivializing to resort to psychological analysis of voters rather than seeing them as serious political actors, but this is what Adorno and Erich Fromm did after the Germans went collectively crazy, with the help of crazy anti-Semitic Poles and others in Eastern Europe. They discovered that whole nations can have hidden psychological pathologies that are liberated under the right conditions. Frequently these conditions include a demagogue who appears to get away with outrageously antisocial behavior himself. When he acquires many followers who outsource their morality to him and to the group, it is called a regressive group process.
This is what we have witnessed in the United States over the last eight years or more: Americans becoming increasingly antisocial, selfish, materialistic,misogynist, xenophobic, and accepting of horrific levels of violence. This is not to say that these people are happy. They are lonely and addicted. In part their addiction is to spectacles of suffering...of other people, preferably brown or female or both. It's not going too far to say that Americans have become sadistic. All personality disorders include a disconnection from reality and an inability to plan realistically for the future. We see that too.
The dark tetrad of personality disorders--Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism--has become normal in the United States. Trump is its supreme avatar, and people love him for it. He liberates their worst impulses and makes them proud to be like him. We can expect this to play out in various terrifying ways over the next four years, culminating in exhaustion and disillusion by 2028. They will wonder what hit them. We can say to ourselves that they had it coming. But we should not feel the need to "explain" it to them then, or now, or ever. We are not their therapists. We are not their clean-up crew. We should stop enabling them.
It's hard not to see this as endemic to American society, untreatable as long as America continues to exist. Almost every American spends the first eighteen years of their lives in indoctrination, during which the attempted genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans is played down and excused by any means necessary. Of course Americans are blasé about horrific violence; it's our only real national legacy.
There may be some school systems that made an attempt to rectify this, but the backlash to the "woke mind virus," as Elon Musk calls it, is part of what re-elected Trump. Nobody wants to look at the repressed. So then The Return of the Repressed is bound to happen. Nobody wants to believe Freud any more, but they need to read him.
This is the crux for me: if anyone seriously asking American to confront these historical-psychic forces are going to tagged hysterical and blamed for upsurges in reactionary power, what is the possible path forward––besides going along with the "indoctrination" and trying to beg for a little better acceptance?
It's honestly hard to read costal lefties or liberals who have no idea what things are actually like out there. They have no idea what it is like to try and live around these people.
This article made me a subscriber. In particular your explanation of anemic liberalism and the failure to Do Things. An obsession with consensus and equitable outcomes has hamstrung a lot of initiatives. Look how many pot legalization efforts have fallen flat from an attempt to ensure rectification for past injustice. California HSR was passed years ago yet has ballooned over budget and barely laid track. Even something simple like public housing or bike lanes drag on for years over "public input."
It reminds me of your piece on Mussolini and his action for action's sake. The call to action is an allure, even for liberals. No one wants to read a white paper or run a regressive analysis of every side effect. A small city mayor in California installed a bike lane and was asked about the people who opposed it and if he should take them into account. He simply responded they were welcome to organize and vote him out.
California HSR is a disgrace. The train goes from LA to Bakersfield. Bakersfield! Do you happen to know the name of the mayor and which city in California? Cuz that mofo is my hero.
I couldn't remember the name at the time but it is John Bauters of Emeryville. Not only Bakersfield but the failure to create HSR from LA to Vegas, one of the most flown routes with existing right of way on I-15 is indicative of just the complete collapse of Do Things Liberalism since the 70s. California is blessed with strong Democratic government, great sources of wealth, and massive population but it takes ages to do anything. They could be the image of what America Can Be with muscular liberal policy but instead a basketcase held hostage by interest groups.
Having been canvessing in PA... It would have been nice if mainstream media had gone with honest factual reporting of Trump and Repuglicans instead predigested even-hand/bothaidism. And been on the economic improvement every day for past 2 years. Abortion protections won majority votes (even florida), paid leave won. Same swing voters voted Trump on economy. The racists gonna racist; sexists gonna sexist. Swing vote was false narrative on economy.
Democracy was the driving issue for me. I shared your feeling in recent months that things were off, but leaned into the vibes these final weeks. In the end, I’m not really surprised and am now just hoping for the best.
I don’t think it’s possible. The Democratic Party social base is simply too broad and socially and economically incoherent especially to people who take little to no notice of politics. Most people aren’t engaged in politics and make use of ‘shorthand’ to work out what a Party stands for. I just don’t know how you convey anything useful with the Dem coalition made necessary by the structure of US political arrangements.
I have pondered this same question for decades. How does the left create a distinct political identity within a two party system? Is it even possible? I thought Bernie was on the right track, but he failed to sustain his movement. It became about him and not Our Revolution.
So what kind of wilderness is better and/or more futile? Trying to change the Democratic party? Or creating some kind of new party or rallying around one of the existing fringe-y ones? My view is that the best path forward is neither of those options and to do the boring long-term work of making electoral system changes (RCV, Non-partisan primaries, etc.) but I'm open to having that perspective challenged.
I’m disappointed - devastated, even. And you might be right that it’s not possible. But I think our work is to try - and to have an earnest belief in the value of trying - because the alternative of throwing up our hands is no alternative at all. And I realize that in the day after, it’s hard to see that and embrace it. But I really don’t see us with any other options.
The democracy argument left me cold because I have enough middle school contraband left in me to think unchecked democracy is a tyranny of the masses. I want a diverse liberal society, and I only support democracy so far as it helps us achieve that goal. And right now, whatever arguments people make about outside interference, the fact is democracy isn't going to get us there.
The point of democratic government isn’t to creat a diverse society, however good that outcome may be in itself. The point of democracy is to ensure that the greatest number of people possible have some democratic control over the conditions of their lives. The US manifestly fails on the latter while delivering on the former.
You are right about the nostalgia. The left nostalgia for a new ‘New Deal’ when its social and economic structural conditions have long been superseded by its successor regimes. The insistence on US exceptionalism by US liberalism despite the US record of wars abroad and repression at home. I’m not sure that the Democratic Party as it exists is able to forge an alternative. The peculiar politics of a strictly two Party polity at a national level creates too unwieldy a coalition to be able to successfully challenge existing national politics in the US. There’s no real threat from below and none from abroad. And appeals to abstractions like ‘democracy’ simply don’t cut it anywhere really.
Do you mean no real threat to the country from abroad? Because, if so, that’s an illusion—I think too few Americans are paying attention to the machinations of Putin and the Ayatollah, and only scant attention to Xi and Kim. It will bite back on us *hard.*
Putin regards anyone who be a serious counterparty as really gullible. He treated Tucker like shit and that fucker took it just to prove he's not a cringey American liberal.
Many other Americans will act similarly to prove the same thing. Honestly, Russia might not even need to pay them anymore. Trying to betray cringelibs to Putin is its own reward.
More to the point, if American citizens are willing to betray their liberal or left neighbors to Russians for literal shits and giggles, then the FSB aren't going to be the only ones with wide lanes for domestic operations.
Also: now that I think about it, too many people underestimate petty spite as a motive for betrayal under totalitarianism. You can see this in the story of how Arthur Koestler (never trustworthy around women in any context anyway) denounced his Russian mistress to the NKVD just because they had an acrimonious breakup, or any one of the many interviews on the topic of denunciations and poison-pen letters in “The Sorrow and the Pity.”
This is human nature at its meanest and if it happened in those times and places, it will happen here.
No it won’t. Both regimes are too canny to launch any attack against the US. Why would they? US institutions are doing a good job of failing to,protect the US polity and state from bad actors all by themselves.
The state of US institutions is exactly why they have so many gaps to exploit nowadays. Some foreign agents are not content to merely let the US devour itself. They would like to speed that along, if they can.
They’re not doing it all by themselves, first of all. US intelligence agencies already discovered significant evidence of Russian interference this election cycle—so far, mainly through propaganda, but we’ll see what else comes to light. Second, some regimes would probably consider America’s capacity for institutional self-destruction irrelevant and would be more interested in overt martial conquest—I’m thinking specifically of North Korea’s constant envelope-pushing ICBM tests.
If you think the Chinese are going to launch a military attack on the US you know nothing about the Chinese government. And how would Putin even try? The US can never stop with the fear of someone else attacking it, despite the world watching the US attack in innumerable sovereignties in my lifetime. Get a grip. Are they trying to influence with stealth propaganda? Sure they are. Like the US does in my country.
That’s a very telling reply if I may so. Your contempt for anyone that is either from a tiny country on the Eurasian steppe or from a modern advanced democracy shines through. Think on it for a minute. You are exactly why people in many advanced democracies hate Putin and fear the US.
No. It’s another democracy, and if you believe the US doesn’t interfere in the politics of their friends you are either lying or too stupid to tie your shoelaces.
Are you kidding me? Putin knows, and more importantly his apparatus knows that the first nuke he lets fly guarantees the end of Russia. Permanently. He’s a terrible man. But he’s not suicidal.
Don’t make me laugh. There’s a reason justifiably bitter Russian anti-war activists call Vlad “Grandpa in his bunker.” He doesn’t care if the rest of his country gets obliterated, so long as he has a place to hide. And he’s an old man without long left to live anyway; maybe he figures he’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper.
Yes. I’ve been strenuously wishing for years that a Democrat would describe an exciting vision of what we could be. There is nothing wrong with opposing what is abhorrent; of course that is correct. But opposition describes a negative possibility space. Why can’t we say, “let’s have a great civilization,” and then describe what that looks like? (Echos of LBJ.) Instead of gloomily talking of preventing climate change and the destruction of the world, can’t we describe a future of cheap, clean energy, a vision of abundance? And so on. We on the left seem to feel that it isn’t honest or credible to speak in positive terms, even when the net goal is equivalent.
This is an excellent comment. It reminds me of a boat trip my wife and I took down the Yangtze River several years ago. There is a stop at the Three Gorges Dam and a small museum that highlights the history of the project (at that time, at least, most of the exhibits had descriptions in English).
Somewhere in excess of 1 million people were displaced to build the dam and thousands of villages submerged. Along one wall of the museum there were testimonials (no doubt sanitized) from some of the farmers who lost their homes. Most were relentlessly upbeat with pictures of smiling farmers in front of their new bungalows showing off their latest harvest. The subtext of these exhibits is, 'Yes, I might have lost everything when the land was flooded but look at how much better my life is now."
I tried to imagine how long it woud take for a comparable project to be planned, approved, and constructed here in the States. The correct answer I think is "forever." And China is filled with these engineering marvels -- with new bridges, bullet trains, monorails, and subways everywhere. Even if it might be true that there is only minimal "consultation" in China's self-described "socialist consultaltive democracy," a bit of that broad-shoulders dynamism would not hurt in this country.
With you in every way, John, except that I think the next two years will be more terrifying than you seem to allow. I’ve posted a quatrain on X in hopes of provoking its Goebbels.
It really doesn't matter at all that you dared to hope a little, even if it was at the behest of a few silly Democrats. I had the hopium going big time myself.
As far as Trump getting a (bare) national majority, I don't think it changes much at all, except to what it says about the American public and in particular its white subset.
In any case the main analogy for a contemporary authoritarian with a meaningful national majority isn't the European dictators on the 20th century, because as you rightly point out, none of them ever won a majority in a free elections. A more apt analogy might be Vladimir Putin, who commended majority support almost from the start of his first presidency. I question whether Trump's (apparent) 51 percent majority truly counts as meaningful.
I unfortunately was one of those plebs.. though I'm often online critiquing the far right appeasement of Silicon Valley kleptocrats like Pelosi and her lackeys.. but you were right. I have in laws in Ukraine and also in Russia.. I don't think Americans get what's coming .. This is not 2016.. It's much worse. There's no such thing as dissent, protest, or collective solidarity under violent totalitarianism which I have no doubt Trump with the help of his fash tech friends will become
I think the antifascist frame is still going to be the crucial one, but to be more than nostalgia it has to open itself to more than US-European history and it Cold War lens. Global oligarchs in alliance will be likely to reinvent the shape and meaning of fascism.
In the mean time, though, there will be endless, tone-deaf pieces written by "centrist" liberals castigating the Democratic party for foolishly succumbing to something they will insist on calling "identity politics." (I started reading one this morning and had to stop in order not to be consumed by disgust.) Maybe even by liberals in these comments.
Whatever its policy mistakes and messaging ineptitude, the Democratic party was the party that *faced* a ferocious onslaught of identity politics. The winning party ran on a campaign that culminated in public orgies of contempt and hatred for women, people of color, queers, and intellectuals who think and talk about them to advocate for their dignity. Well, we get to speak up, too, and tell people what reality looks like to us. So to now be *blamed* for supposedly handing power to this group of out-and-proud reactionaries, as they prepare to further grind us under the boot, is beyond exasperating.
He’s arrived: the fully transactional, gig-economized, never been in a union, never read a book, learned intimacy from sado-porn, doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine, got his ethics from MMA/sports betting/gaming/Vince McMahon/Musk/Rogan, mostly white/mostly male all-American Asshole. It’s his moment. Democrat rhetoric doesn’t seem to know he exists, much less the role they played in creating him.
This comment is so good I'm copying and pasting it to the various dooming threads I'm on.
In a nutshell, what role did the Democrats play in creating him?
That was the "gig-economized" part. David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" tells the story pretty well. What we're witnessing is a much bigger story, of course, and I do think we've moved past that to a kind of nihilism and power worship (unlike many of my comrades I think stirring social democratic amelioration rhetoric might as well be Martian to Trump's demographic - they literally have no idea what a man like Sanders is talking about). But the story Graeber and others tell is part of what made this possible. My 2 cents.
If I am understanding you, I think I agree. The US government is now turned over to the capitalists completely, and all New Deal methods of keeping them in check will be stripped out. But the Democrats could not defend any of the structure that was in place because their eye wasn’t on that. They have no concept of what increased corporate control means for people’s lives. They couldn’t speak to these aspects in any way. So people’s dissatisfaction with how their lives are being affected by this could go anywhere—and enough of it went to Trump. He didn’t speak to it either but he spoke to its effects, and blamed these on the Democrats. That was enough.
I did a lot of hedging and self-censoring this year because I'm sensititve to being a tedious broken record, The Guy Who Yells That The Democrats Are Not Getting It. Today I, possibly we, can take comfort in the fact that nothing said differently would have made the slightest bit of difference.
yea i am here too. the horror i processed morning after election day in 2016 was so thorough that I'd priced something like this in.
John this was the first thing I read today and decided to become paying subscriber. Realized I have been ingesting alot of BS, yet your writing remains thoughtful and clear eyed. The TS Elliot quote is spot in
Same.
I am having the identical experience.
For the first time since 2022 I watched a chunk of CNN/MSNBC coverage in the wee hours before 4EDT. Right at the start of a segment Jake Tapper told the other 5 panelists this was not racism or sexism on the Trump voters part. To my surprise, Chris Wallace pushed back gently, pointing out Trump had been saying those kinds of things for the past few months. There was no engagement. They would not grant agency to the Trump voters. They just gestured a little at what they antiseptically labelled "the economy"/"immigration"/"crime". No mention of women's issues or abortion in particular. Then implied it was Ds with agency and they had to stop hurting the feelings of Trump voters. I was also getting lots of "this will be like Trump 1" vibes. Pretty sure that's seriously delusional. I caught 3/4 of Trump's comments. He's a shell of himself in 2016. I don't think he's going to make it to 2026. I'm curious about the history of succession and the internecine combat around a rapidly declining authoritarian. He wants to end investigations, probably pardon everyone convicted for 2020, do some retribution, and golf. I wonder how much the people around him want the Full MAGA, though? Besides Stephen Miller, that is.
The lack of willingness to ascribe agency to Donald or his voters is perhaps more core to what we are experiencing than has been realized. The benefit of the doubt will always go to them, whether or not there is any good reason to do so.
They confuse ‘capacity for responsibility’ with agency. Trump is incapable of moral responsibility in the standard sense. So people default to not holding him responsible. Many of his voters are the same. They are incapable of seeing the larger situation, and assessing it clearly. So they also get exempted from being held responsible. But, in a way, this actually makes sense. They aren’t fully autonomous reflective people —but they still have agency. They can still act and they choose immoral things (the ones who aren’t completely fooled, and think they are just voting for lower grocery prices). And this reflects who they are, fundamentally. So it’s also reasonable to be repulsed by them even if they aren’t reasonable, and can’t be reasoned with.
Some writers talk about them in ways that essentially equate them to rabid dogs or landmines. We aren't supposed to think of them badly in (while of course they can use whatever slurs come to mind), for they know not what they do (when many do know and choose this anyway).
They should be held accountable but they have limited capacity for morality. So we stop expecting it. But this was a choice—now the viciousness is locked in, like Plato’s tyrant.
If a lack of conscience effectively gets them off the hook, then no wonder they use that like a blank check. With that assumption, admitting guilt or responsibility in the first place is a sucker's game. If they never accept responsibility, then they can keep doing it forever.
As I've written before here, I live in a rural red state that has a Republican super-majority in its legislature. After little children were murdered in their Christian school, and despite thousands of grieving mothers and children pleading with them, TN legislators loosened gun laws rather than tightening them. So I am not surprised when there are assholes.
I guess I thought maybe it was mainly the rural South and parts of the Upper Midwest. But now I see that assholes are in the majority everywhere in the US. One way to think about them is as Emotionally Immature People. They are toddlers that look like huge, monstrous adults.
It may seem like trivializing to resort to psychological analysis of voters rather than seeing them as serious political actors, but this is what Adorno and Erich Fromm did after the Germans went collectively crazy, with the help of crazy anti-Semitic Poles and others in Eastern Europe. They discovered that whole nations can have hidden psychological pathologies that are liberated under the right conditions. Frequently these conditions include a demagogue who appears to get away with outrageously antisocial behavior himself. When he acquires many followers who outsource their morality to him and to the group, it is called a regressive group process.
This is what we have witnessed in the United States over the last eight years or more: Americans becoming increasingly antisocial, selfish, materialistic,misogynist, xenophobic, and accepting of horrific levels of violence. This is not to say that these people are happy. They are lonely and addicted. In part their addiction is to spectacles of suffering...of other people, preferably brown or female or both. It's not going too far to say that Americans have become sadistic. All personality disorders include a disconnection from reality and an inability to plan realistically for the future. We see that too.
The dark tetrad of personality disorders--Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism--has become normal in the United States. Trump is its supreme avatar, and people love him for it. He liberates their worst impulses and makes them proud to be like him. We can expect this to play out in various terrifying ways over the next four years, culminating in exhaustion and disillusion by 2028. They will wonder what hit them. We can say to ourselves that they had it coming. But we should not feel the need to "explain" it to them then, or now, or ever. We are not their therapists. We are not their clean-up crew. We should stop enabling them.
It's hard not to see this as endemic to American society, untreatable as long as America continues to exist. Almost every American spends the first eighteen years of their lives in indoctrination, during which the attempted genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans is played down and excused by any means necessary. Of course Americans are blasé about horrific violence; it's our only real national legacy.
There may be some school systems that made an attempt to rectify this, but the backlash to the "woke mind virus," as Elon Musk calls it, is part of what re-elected Trump. Nobody wants to look at the repressed. So then The Return of the Repressed is bound to happen. Nobody wants to believe Freud any more, but they need to read him.
This is the crux for me: if anyone seriously asking American to confront these historical-psychic forces are going to tagged hysterical and blamed for upsurges in reactionary power, what is the possible path forward––besides going along with the "indoctrination" and trying to beg for a little better acceptance?
Going along with indoctrination and begging for a little better acceptance does not sound feasible to me. Whether I am blamed or not... so what?
It's honestly hard to read costal lefties or liberals who have no idea what things are actually like out there. They have no idea what it is like to try and live around these people.
This article made me a subscriber. In particular your explanation of anemic liberalism and the failure to Do Things. An obsession with consensus and equitable outcomes has hamstrung a lot of initiatives. Look how many pot legalization efforts have fallen flat from an attempt to ensure rectification for past injustice. California HSR was passed years ago yet has ballooned over budget and barely laid track. Even something simple like public housing or bike lanes drag on for years over "public input."
It reminds me of your piece on Mussolini and his action for action's sake. The call to action is an allure, even for liberals. No one wants to read a white paper or run a regressive analysis of every side effect. A small city mayor in California installed a bike lane and was asked about the people who opposed it and if he should take them into account. He simply responded they were welcome to organize and vote him out.
California HSR is a disgrace. The train goes from LA to Bakersfield. Bakersfield! Do you happen to know the name of the mayor and which city in California? Cuz that mofo is my hero.
I couldn't remember the name at the time but it is John Bauters of Emeryville. Not only Bakersfield but the failure to create HSR from LA to Vegas, one of the most flown routes with existing right of way on I-15 is indicative of just the complete collapse of Do Things Liberalism since the 70s. California is blessed with strong Democratic government, great sources of wealth, and massive population but it takes ages to do anything. They could be the image of what America Can Be with muscular liberal policy but instead a basketcase held hostage by interest groups.
Thank you! I used to live not too far away from Emeryville before I left the US.
'California is blessed with strong Democratic government' Blessing or curse?
Having been canvessing in PA... It would have been nice if mainstream media had gone with honest factual reporting of Trump and Repuglicans instead predigested even-hand/bothaidism. And been on the economic improvement every day for past 2 years. Abortion protections won majority votes (even florida), paid leave won. Same swing voters voted Trump on economy. The racists gonna racist; sexists gonna sexist. Swing vote was false narrative on economy.
Food insecurity and child poverty are at decades-long high but yeah I guess people with 401ks are doing good
Democracy was the driving issue for me. I shared your feeling in recent months that things were off, but leaned into the vibes these final weeks. In the end, I’m not really surprised and am now just hoping for the best.
Same here. Disappointed, but not surprised. I also don't see how we can achieve any of our goals in a two party system.
I don’t think it’s possible. The Democratic Party social base is simply too broad and socially and economically incoherent especially to people who take little to no notice of politics. Most people aren’t engaged in politics and make use of ‘shorthand’ to work out what a Party stands for. I just don’t know how you convey anything useful with the Dem coalition made necessary by the structure of US political arrangements.
I have pondered this same question for decades. How does the left create a distinct political identity within a two party system? Is it even possible? I thought Bernie was on the right track, but he failed to sustain his movement. It became about him and not Our Revolution.
So what kind of wilderness is better and/or more futile? Trying to change the Democratic party? Or creating some kind of new party or rallying around one of the existing fringe-y ones? My view is that the best path forward is neither of those options and to do the boring long-term work of making electoral system changes (RCV, Non-partisan primaries, etc.) but I'm open to having that perspective challenged.
I’m disappointed - devastated, even. And you might be right that it’s not possible. But I think our work is to try - and to have an earnest belief in the value of trying - because the alternative of throwing up our hands is no alternative at all. And I realize that in the day after, it’s hard to see that and embrace it. But I really don’t see us with any other options.
The democracy argument left me cold because I have enough middle school contraband left in me to think unchecked democracy is a tyranny of the masses. I want a diverse liberal society, and I only support democracy so far as it helps us achieve that goal. And right now, whatever arguments people make about outside interference, the fact is democracy isn't going to get us there.
The point of democratic government isn’t to creat a diverse society, however good that outcome may be in itself. The point of democracy is to ensure that the greatest number of people possible have some democratic control over the conditions of their lives. The US manifestly fails on the latter while delivering on the former.
You are right about the nostalgia. The left nostalgia for a new ‘New Deal’ when its social and economic structural conditions have long been superseded by its successor regimes. The insistence on US exceptionalism by US liberalism despite the US record of wars abroad and repression at home. I’m not sure that the Democratic Party as it exists is able to forge an alternative. The peculiar politics of a strictly two Party polity at a national level creates too unwieldy a coalition to be able to successfully challenge existing national politics in the US. There’s no real threat from below and none from abroad. And appeals to abstractions like ‘democracy’ simply don’t cut it anywhere really.
Do you mean no real threat to the country from abroad? Because, if so, that’s an illusion—I think too few Americans are paying attention to the machinations of Putin and the Ayatollah, and only scant attention to Xi and Kim. It will bite back on us *hard.*
Putin regards anyone who be a serious counterparty as really gullible. He treated Tucker like shit and that fucker took it just to prove he's not a cringey American liberal.
Many other Americans will act similarly to prove the same thing. Honestly, Russia might not even need to pay them anymore. Trying to betray cringelibs to Putin is its own reward.
Carlson, like Vance, is another mercenary bootlicker with a keen ability to discern which side his bread is buttered on.
More to the point, if American citizens are willing to betray their liberal or left neighbors to Russians for literal shits and giggles, then the FSB aren't going to be the only ones with wide lanes for domestic operations.
Also: now that I think about it, too many people underestimate petty spite as a motive for betrayal under totalitarianism. You can see this in the story of how Arthur Koestler (never trustworthy around women in any context anyway) denounced his Russian mistress to the NKVD just because they had an acrimonious breakup, or any one of the many interviews on the topic of denunciations and poison-pen letters in “The Sorrow and the Pity.”
This is human nature at its meanest and if it happened in those times and places, it will happen here.
"Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsev is one preview of where we are all going.
Good thinking.
It would be fortuitous if we all expand our imaginations and our collective will to action.
No it won’t. Both regimes are too canny to launch any attack against the US. Why would they? US institutions are doing a good job of failing to,protect the US polity and state from bad actors all by themselves.
The state of US institutions is exactly why they have so many gaps to exploit nowadays. Some foreign agents are not content to merely let the US devour itself. They would like to speed that along, if they can.
They’re not doing it all by themselves, first of all. US intelligence agencies already discovered significant evidence of Russian interference this election cycle—so far, mainly through propaganda, but we’ll see what else comes to light. Second, some regimes would probably consider America’s capacity for institutional self-destruction irrelevant and would be more interested in overt martial conquest—I’m thinking specifically of North Korea’s constant envelope-pushing ICBM tests.
One of many sources: https://apple.news/A_Oi2VomYSF2c-baolb2goQ
If you think the Chinese are going to launch a military attack on the US you know nothing about the Chinese government. And how would Putin even try? The US can never stop with the fear of someone else attacking it, despite the world watching the US attack in innumerable sovereignties in my lifetime. Get a grip. Are they trying to influence with stealth propaganda? Sure they are. Like the US does in my country.
Also, you ignored what I said about North Korea. Kim is a loose cannon.
He was a loose cannon yesterday, last year and the year before that. For crissake. Get a grip!
“And how would Putin even try?”
Umm…with nukes, like he’s always threatening to do?
And pray tell, what *is* your country? Transnistria?
That’s a very telling reply if I may so. Your contempt for anyone that is either from a tiny country on the Eurasian steppe or from a modern advanced democracy shines through. Think on it for a minute. You are exactly why people in many advanced democracies hate Putin and fear the US.
No, it’s a democracy. And it hasn’t elected an adjudicated rapist and criminal as a leader ever, to the best of my knowledge.
No. It’s another democracy, and if you believe the US doesn’t interfere in the politics of their friends you are either lying or too stupid to tie your shoelaces.
Are you kidding me? Putin knows, and more importantly his apparatus knows that the first nuke he lets fly guarantees the end of Russia. Permanently. He’s a terrible man. But he’s not suicidal.
Don’t make me laugh. There’s a reason justifiably bitter Russian anti-war activists call Vlad “Grandpa in his bunker.” He doesn’t care if the rest of his country gets obliterated, so long as he has a place to hide. And he’s an old man without long left to live anyway; maybe he figures he’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper.
The bad news: The US government is going to be under the control of oligarchs supported by a hostile foreign power.
The good news: The Thirty only held Athens for a year.
Yes. I’ve been strenuously wishing for years that a Democrat would describe an exciting vision of what we could be. There is nothing wrong with opposing what is abhorrent; of course that is correct. But opposition describes a negative possibility space. Why can’t we say, “let’s have a great civilization,” and then describe what that looks like? (Echos of LBJ.) Instead of gloomily talking of preventing climate change and the destruction of the world, can’t we describe a future of cheap, clean energy, a vision of abundance? And so on. We on the left seem to feel that it isn’t honest or credible to speak in positive terms, even when the net goal is equivalent.
This is an excellent comment. It reminds me of a boat trip my wife and I took down the Yangtze River several years ago. There is a stop at the Three Gorges Dam and a small museum that highlights the history of the project (at that time, at least, most of the exhibits had descriptions in English).
Somewhere in excess of 1 million people were displaced to build the dam and thousands of villages submerged. Along one wall of the museum there were testimonials (no doubt sanitized) from some of the farmers who lost their homes. Most were relentlessly upbeat with pictures of smiling farmers in front of their new bungalows showing off their latest harvest. The subtext of these exhibits is, 'Yes, I might have lost everything when the land was flooded but look at how much better my life is now."
I tried to imagine how long it woud take for a comparable project to be planned, approved, and constructed here in the States. The correct answer I think is "forever." And China is filled with these engineering marvels -- with new bridges, bullet trains, monorails, and subways everywhere. Even if it might be true that there is only minimal "consultation" in China's self-described "socialist consultaltive democracy," a bit of that broad-shoulders dynamism would not hurt in this country.
I didn't want to believe the Oct. 1 post but it proved very prescient. I became a annual subscriber today. Gotta give the $$ to those who deserve it.
With you in every way, John, except that I think the next two years will be more terrifying than you seem to allow. I’ve posted a quatrain on X in hopes of provoking its Goebbels.
I owe you a special debt for initiating me into the tradition of American democracy and anti-authoritarianism
It really doesn't matter at all that you dared to hope a little, even if it was at the behest of a few silly Democrats. I had the hopium going big time myself.
As far as Trump getting a (bare) national majority, I don't think it changes much at all, except to what it says about the American public and in particular its white subset.
In any case the main analogy for a contemporary authoritarian with a meaningful national majority isn't the European dictators on the 20th century, because as you rightly point out, none of them ever won a majority in a free elections. A more apt analogy might be Vladimir Putin, who commended majority support almost from the start of his first presidency. I question whether Trump's (apparent) 51 percent majority truly counts as meaningful.
I unfortunately was one of those plebs.. though I'm often online critiquing the far right appeasement of Silicon Valley kleptocrats like Pelosi and her lackeys.. but you were right. I have in laws in Ukraine and also in Russia.. I don't think Americans get what's coming .. This is not 2016.. It's much worse. There's no such thing as dissent, protest, or collective solidarity under violent totalitarianism which I have no doubt Trump with the help of his fash tech friends will become
I think the antifascist frame is still going to be the crucial one, but to be more than nostalgia it has to open itself to more than US-European history and it Cold War lens. Global oligarchs in alliance will be likely to reinvent the shape and meaning of fascism.
In the mean time, though, there will be endless, tone-deaf pieces written by "centrist" liberals castigating the Democratic party for foolishly succumbing to something they will insist on calling "identity politics." (I started reading one this morning and had to stop in order not to be consumed by disgust.) Maybe even by liberals in these comments.
Whatever its policy mistakes and messaging ineptitude, the Democratic party was the party that *faced* a ferocious onslaught of identity politics. The winning party ran on a campaign that culminated in public orgies of contempt and hatred for women, people of color, queers, and intellectuals who think and talk about them to advocate for their dignity. Well, we get to speak up, too, and tell people what reality looks like to us. So to now be *blamed* for supposedly handing power to this group of out-and-proud reactionaries, as they prepare to further grind us under the boot, is beyond exasperating.