The Liberals Thread

[Luther Blissett]

When I hear "liberal" I still hear the joke leftist phrase, "not to sound like a liberal, but I literally had never heard of that before" meaning liberals, being the most moderate of leftists, haven't read as much theory and don't pay as much attention to global events going on around them.

Liberals can still join the revolution if they're not cowardly capitulating to neo-nazis. We just had a big counter-demonstration against some neo-nazis and the comments section was rife with liberals who wanted the anti-fascists to just leave the poor neo-nazis alone and "let them spread their genocidal ideology in peace."

[MacCruiskeen]

Yeah, Luther, but it's not just this:

liberals, being the most moderate of leftists, haven't read as much theory and don't pay as much attention to global events going on around them

Sure, they get their history off the TV, or out of the latest must-read recommended to them by the NYT. But it's also -- and above all -- that too many of them have little or no actual experience of poverty, either at first- or at second hand. They might read the odd article about it on HuffPo or Vox and tut-tut about it, but that's it. Their attitude is spectatorial and opportunistic. They are a) consumers, and b) sellers. So they seek opportunities to raise their social or financial profile by getting one over on some awful person who said some awful thing on TV or on the Web. They are Grundys, whose idea of a really touching struggle is Lady Gaga's stony path to fame, or Hillary's courageous battle against "that orange troglodyte Trump".

Or, especially if male, they are snark-merchants of the Daily Show/Chapo Trap House variety. They have no skin in the game. They're just selling themselves, building their own brand. What is the net worth of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher or David Letterman? When do any of them ever speak out about US prisons, or US proxy wars, or 9/11, or about any issue that is not safe?. (and no, a coupla team-scriped "edgy" wisecracks does not count.) Compare, say, Bill Hicks, who was not a liberal and not rich, and who was never given his own TV show.

In the 21st century, the greatest taboo topic is Money.

(Re, "theory": much if not most of that is worse than a waste of time. Three hours of listening to Michael Parenti provides a better political education than three years of reading Lacan or Badieu or Judith Butler or Slavoj bloody Zizek. And like Hicks, Parenti is also a great comedian, precisely because he is angry and notices things and tells the truth, again and again and again, to comparatively tiny audiences.)

[Rory]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals?CMP=fb_cif

Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.

[...]

The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.

This is very sharp. Needs to be hammered home - Trump was caused by Clinton and the DNC.

Also, this tweet from Virgil Texas. Truth coded as satire

I know most of us didn't vote for him, but now he's our President we need to ensure he keeps his promises to put Hillary in prison.

[Wombaticus Rex]

On a thread started by a snide cunt for the sole purpose of exulting in his snide cuntiness.

Boy this will be a fun thread to sift through. (Maybe we should just have drew shut this place down until Thanksgiving?)

[norton ash]

On a thread started by a snide cunt for the sole purpose of exulting in his snide cuntiness.

Boy this will be a fun thread to sift through. (Maybe we should just have drew shut this place down until Thanksgiving?)

A more liberal response is that cooler heads will prevail. Because we're all good folks at heart.

[tapitsbo]

"Liberal" is a broad, vague term.

But watching hacks who called for sadistic wars and marginalization and mass murder of populations they didn't like domestically and overseas beg for mercy and cry "pls no bully" is delicious.

We're not done with these guys yet, though. They still have their cushy jobs at platforms demanding WAR against people like me, and frankly against most of you too

[MacCruiskeen]

On a thread started by a snide cunt for the sole purpose of exulting in his snide cuntiness.

Boy this will be a fun thread to sift through. (Maybe we should just have drew shut this place down until Thanksgiving?)

Why? Because Jerky wants it that way? You saw that quote on page 2 of this 3-page thread. It might be an idea, then, to "sift through" the remaining 1 page before threatening to shut anything down. No one responded in kind to Jerky's series of foulmouthed meltdowns. No one.

[norton ash]

Good articles that echo the Thomas Frank piece on how the Dems blew it ... posted on Jeff's FB page.

The wages of liberalism is Trump

http://theleftchapter.blogspot.ca/2016/ ... trump.html

The Cataclysm: Notes on Election Day and the Politics of Hubris

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/09/ ... xhaustion/

[Luther Blissett]

Yeah, Luther, but it's not just this:

liberals, being the most moderate of leftists, haven't read as much theory and don't pay as much attention to global events going on around them

Sure, they get their history off the TV, or out of the latest must-read recommended to them by the NYT. But it's also -- and above all -- that too many of them have little or no actual experience of poverty, either at first- or at second hand. They might read the odd article about it on HuffPo or Vox and tut-tut about it, but that's it. Their attitude is spectatorial and opportunistic. They are a) consumers, and b) sellers. So they seek opportunities to raise their social or financial profile by getting one over on some awful person who said some awful thing on TV or on the Web. They are Grundys, whose idea of a really touching struggle is Lady Gaga's stony path to fame, or Hillary's courageous battle against "that orange troglodyte Trump".

Or, especially if male, they are snark-merchants of the Daily Show/Chapo Trap House variety. They have no skin in the game. They're just selling themselves, building their own brand. What is the net worth of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher or David Letterman? When do any of them ever speak out about US prisons, or US proxy wars, or 9/11, or about any issue that is not safe?. (and no, a coupla team-scriped "edgy" wisecracks does not count.) Compare, say, Bill Hicks, who was not a liberal and not rich, and who was never given his own TV show.

In the 21st century, the greatest taboo topic is Money.

(Re, "theory": much if not most of that is worse than a waste of time. Three hours of listening to Michael Parenti provides a better political education than three years of reading Lacan or Badieu or Judith Butler or Slavoj bloody Zizek. And like Hicks, Parenti is also a great comedian, precisely because he is angry and notices things and tells the truth, again and again and again, to comparatively tiny audiences.)

Sure, any kind of education in class consciousness works for me. I'm notoriously undereducated in classical Marxist theory.

I do know a couple liberals / neoliberals who grew up in poverty.

[bks]

Favorite topic of mine, Mac. The largely untold story of this election is the way Trump cast the elite media as the central foil in his morality play - largely untold, because the one thing media will never ever discuss in a serious and thorough way is their own role in shaping political discourse and the conditions for political possibility. All the media do is mirror reality, you see, so any effort to analyze the ways they operate would just be a waste of time.

Trumpists loathe the press because they (rightly!) view press organizations as accomplices in their political dispossession at the hands of elites. We can certainly argue over the degree to which the political inheritance those Trump supporters feel dispossesed of is a rightful inheritance, but the feeling is very, very real. There’s nothing the press can do in the short run to change this, since it’s been several decades in the making.

The atavism of Trump’s followers is nauseating and their analysis of the what ails them is flat wrong in obvious ways, but they are absolutely and incontrovertibly correct in feeling they’ve been abandoned by both the political class and the press that has chosen to serve it instead of serving their interests. That has happened.

What the elite press knows and will not admit, except to themselves, is that they've become absolutely fucking worthless to the majority of the population because they and their bosses have encouraged their slow absorption into the political class over a few decades. They chose their business interests and careers over their duties. The days of holding power to any kind of account are gone, because media now are beholden to and identify with that power. This largely parallels the trajectory of US liberalism more broadly, which has devolved from its early/mid-20th century heights when its core tenets derived from union-hall discussions and media organs that reflected workers' interest, to its present denuded, elite variant epitomized by people like Matt Yglesias and the identity politicians interested in "breaking barriers" and simply diversifying the class of governing elites.

The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished
What a joke.

By Jim Newell

The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.

I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullshit.

The midterm losses? That was just a bad cycle, structurally speaking; presidential demographics would make up for it. The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.

We should blame all those people around the Clintons more than the Clintons themselves, and the Clintons themselves deserve a ridiculous amount of blame. Hillary Clinton was just an ambitious person who wanted to be president. There are a lot of people like that. But she was enabled. The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club. The Clintons will be gone now. For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.

What was the line? Hillary Clinton would do well in a general election, because she’d been “vetted” for 20-some years and there was nothing new Republicans could try? Just writing that, I recognize that it’s the funniest line I’ve ever seen, and yet it was the exact argument Clinton used in two separate campaigns for the Democratic nomination.

The ace ground game, the brilliant ad-makers, the top Hollywood talent, and the best analytics operation ever assembled? This was all a joke. The best analytics team in the world, apparently, couldn’t find in their numbers that it was worth making a single stop to Wisconsin following the convention in a campaign against a Republican whose base appeal was in the Rust Belt. Not that an extra visit would have changed the result.

Think of how wrong the entire national media conversation was—and yes, I contributed my fair share—about how the Republicans were being torn apart as a party. I prewrote a piece Tuesday afternoon, to be published in the event of the expected Clinton win, pushing back against both myself and other members of the media, arguing that Democrats and Republicans were both in existential trouble and that, in the short-term context of a decaying political system, Republicans might even have the edge: Democrats could win the presidency most of the time but never a majority of state governments or the House; while Republicans could always win the majority of state governments and the House, and occasionally—probably in 2020, I thought—the White House. This was wrong. Republicans don’t have a slight edge over Democrats in a decaying political system. Republicans are ascendant. Trump has given them a mission. The country is now theirs.

Whoever takes over what’s left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can’t win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this.

The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn’t show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton’s emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue “wall.” They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we’ll be fine.

Don’t listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'm notoriously undereducated in classical Marxist theory

Join the club. Capital is not easy reading and I've only read bits of it myself, and struggled even with that. I'd say it's good to grasp the basic ideas, which are simple and useful, and bad to get lost in the jungle of "Marxist theory", which is of very doubtful benefit imo, and which only academics & hobbyists can really afford to do anyway. Angels on the head of a pin... I wouldn't call myself a Marxist any more (or any less) than I'd call myself a Reichian or even a Christian. Nets are there to be avoided, I think. And anything can become a net.

Sure, any kind of education in class consciousness works for me.

For me too. I got my education in class consciousness through growing up working class in the UK in the 60s and 70s, hearing the stories told by my parents and grandparents, and experiencing first-hand in what ways money matters and doesn't matter. There are some things you never forget. And books did help, although novels always helped me much more than any works of theory or philosophy. (Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism is a great thing, and more relevant than ever right now, I think. Short, too, which is always merciful.)

[MacCruiskeen]

People often feel undereducated when their real problem is just escaping the education they had.

[dada]

I'm not college educated.

Yeah, Luther, but it's not just this:

liberals, being the most moderate of leftists, haven't read as much theory and don't pay as much attention to global events going on around them

Sure, they get their history off the TV, or out of the latest must-read recommended to them by the NYT. But it's also -- and above all -- that too many of them have little or no actual experience of poverty, either at first- or at second hand. They might read the odd article about it on HuffPo or Vox and tut-tut about it, but that's it. Their attitude is spectatorial and opportunistic. They are a) consumers, and b) sellers.

There's an authoritarian bent to liberalism, too. I find it gets in the way when I converse with them. Or maybe it's my anti-authoritarian bent that gets in the way. Depends on how you look at it.

Damn, this guy Nathan Robinson is really good - and really quick. From his post-election analysis, today:

The weakness was obvious even in the differing campaign slogans. “I’m With Her” is about the interests of the candidate. “Make America Great Again” is about the voters. Let’s learn an important lesson here: do not run a widely-despised ruling-class candidate who has open contempt for the white working class. That is a recipe for electoral catastrophe.

http://editor.currentaffairs.org/2016/1 ... to-do-now/

I don't know if I could sum up Clinton's failure as a result of her 'open contempt for the white working class.' That's too easy. Maybe this is a small part of a wider critique, I just got home and haven't read the article yet.

I think this thread is a pretty good idea. Yes, 'liberal' is a label. It's worth breaking it down. It would be best if we could do it without it being snarky about it. Not that I'm saying anyone is, it's just something we should keep in mind. Be like surgeons. We're dissecting with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.

I like bks' post above. The media, the press, needs fresh critique like that. Just because Donald's crowd complains about the media, doesn't mean we're on the same side. Our critique can differ in substance. Obviously.

[MacCruiskeen]

There's an authoritarian bent to liberalism, too. I find it gets in the way when I converse with them. Or maybe it's my anti-authoritarian bent that gets in the way.

Exactly. In other words, they don't like it when you get uppity. You are expected to know your place.

It would be best if we could do it without it being snarky about it.

It would also be best if we could do it without being shy about it. Because liberals, being tendentially authoritarian, frequently interpret civility as weakness and respond with snark and condescension, or worse.

- I'm fading, and (for the record) feeling anything but jubilant. But also anything but submissive. Guardian columnists*, Daily Show smugsters and Dem Party operatives can all stick it where the sun don't shine. (Call me a Nasty Woman for that and I'll just get a Haitian sweatshop worker to make me the T-shirt, which I'll wear once and then give to my Filipino maid, for I am nothing if not charitable to the deserving poor.)

Goodnight, all.

*I don't mean Thomas Frank! (Or Gary Younge.)

[tapitsbo]

What I'm noticing from this thread is that the tone of vicious, merciless hatred towards the "stupid majority" is suddenly absent in a few of you.

Of course this majority may be misguided. It's really striking how the tone has changed from the murderous hatred some of you used to espouse.

This change of tone is going to encourage the populations who have been targeted by the vicious scorn of vocal, powerful minorities and cliques to keep standing up for themselves, especially as they find the likes of Trump won't solve all their problems.