Taibbi on Obama

Mackeyser wrote:

I mean, ideologically, she’s more aligned with the Republicans of the late 80s than Democrats of 2016, but she’s now trying to pass herself off as a PROGRESSIVE…

How is that not a laughable notion???

She stood up in front of God and everybody and all, but endorsed John McCain for his “experience” over Obama because all he had was…a “speech”.
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But her rise as well as Trumps is more a function of our reduction into a retarded tribalism.

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When did she support McCain??

I think she may very well think of herself as a ‘progressive’ Mack.

Coz nowadays, people think so much in terms of “identity politix” that if you support the right for people to go into a whatever
bathroom they want, you are considered ‘progressive.’

“Class” discussions are off the table. Race, sex, and gender stuff now make you a ‘progressive’.

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What do u boyz think of this here? Yes? No?

“….An equal longer-term danger, however, is the likelihood that we will find ourselves with no critical politics other than a desiccated leftism capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity. This is neoliberalism’s version of a left. Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to antidiscrimination, a point from which Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it’s the path Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.

Confusion and critical paralysis prompted by the racial imagery of Obama’s election prevented even sophisticated intellectuals like Žižek from concluding that Obama was only another Clintonite Democrat — no more, no less. It is how Obama could be sold, even within the left, as a hybrid of Martin Luther King Jr. and Neo from The Matrix. The triumph of identity politics, condensed around the banal image of the civil rights insurgency and its legacy as a unitary “black liberation movement,” is what has enabled Obama successfully to present himself as the literal embodiment of an otherwise vaporous progressive politics. In this sense his election is most fundamentally an expression of the limits of the left in the United States — its decline, demoralization, and collapse….”
Adolph Reed

Zooey wrote:

I agree with you and Reed on this. Being in favor of civil rights is what defines being liberal these days, and that’s about the extent of it. One is progressive if one is in favor of allowing 0.3% of the population to urinate in their bathroom of choice.

You can’t find any discussion of class anywhere in the mainstream media, and that is certainly the fault of the Democrat party which hasn’t mentioned class in the past three decades.

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Thats how i see it.

The ability/critical thinking skills to even conceive of, let alone make, A systemic examination of why there are poor-people in America doesn’t exist in the mainstream-media.

All you ever hear from the media is ‘socialism failed’ riffs, and ‘blame the poor’ riffs, and “gee aint it awful that poor people have bad water,” etc.

No critical examination of corporate-capitalism is even conceived of.
I think its not just ‘not permitted’, i think mostly its ‘they cant even conceive of’ a critique of Amerikan-capitalism.

Which makes the Bernie phenomenon all the more…surreal.

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“… I have to engage feminism because that becomes the vehicle by which I project myself as a female into the heart of the struggle, but the heart of the struggle does not begin with feminism. It begins with an understanding of domination and with a critique of domination in all its forms. I think it is in fact, a danger to think of the starting point as being feminism. …I think we need a much more sophisticated vision of what it means to have a radical political consciousness. That is why I stress so much the need for African Americans to take on a political language of colonialism…. to frame our issues in a larger political context that looks at imperialism and colonialism and our place as Africans in the Diaspora so that class becomes a central factor….” bell hooks
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“There is a lovely feature of the American psyche which rejects the notion that there are victims. In America, attitude is a magical elixir that cures everything. People are supposed to believe that they create their realities, and are solely responsible for every aspect of their lives. Everything is because of a choice you made somewhere. Somehow, you were supposed to not only be equipped to make the right choice at all times, despite your circumstances, but to know exactly what the outcome of every choice you made would be. This is all very convenient for the people at the top of our economic system with all the money and the power. Keeps the rest of us trying.”
― Carl-John X. Veraja
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“…I see a hunger, especially among Black youth, for more sophisticated answers. Unfortunately, right now, it’s narrow nationalism, narrow forms of Afrocentrism, that are mostly addressing that hunger. Our leading people buy into utopian fantasies of liberation, when in fact our liberation should come from a concrete struggle in the workforce, no fantasies about ancient Africa, and kings and queens. Not that we don’t need to know about ancient Africa to address the biases of Western education.
People forget that the militant struggles of the 1960s were profoundly anti-capitalist. Even Martin Luther King reached a point, before his death, in A Testament of Hope, when he was saying we must be anti-militarist; we must critique capitalism. That has somehow gotten lost in the mix, and I think that this embracing of capitalist ethic of liberal individualism has done more to diffuse Black people’s capacity to struggle for freedom, than any other factor.” bell hooks