From Robinson’s piece:

It’s a bad idea to listen to right-wingers who claim to be on the side of “the people.” Usually it turns out they want to crush the people by force. Nathan J. Robinson

All of which is to say: Right-wing populism seems like a terrible ideology that needs to be rejected. I disagree with nearly everything these people believe in. The kind of world they believe in is not one I wish to inhabit. They are in favor of reactionary cultural traditions, militarized borders, bigotry, and rabid nationalism. I am a leftist, meaning that I favor free movement of people and multiculturalism. I am anti-nationalist and anti-militarist. Donald Trump’s ideology seems to me to be monstrous.

I find it peculiar, then, to hear “right populism” and “left populism” discussed as part of the same tendency. Usually when this is done, it is by centrists, who subscribe to the “horseshoe theory” that fascism and socialism have a lot in common. (The idea is that the political spectrum, instead of a line, is horseshoe-shaped, meaning that the ends come together.) This is what led the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute (a “progressive” and “free market” think tank, respectively) to collaborate on a project about combating “authoritarian populism” from both the “right and left.” Their idea is that Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, Bernie Sanders, Jair Bolsonaro, etc. can all be understood as part of the same tendency, because they all seek to overthrow “elites” and “the establishment” in the name of “the people” and use the power of the state to create justice.

But this idea is fundamentally wrong, because it fails to acknowledge the massive difference between the Left and the Right, namely that the Right’s brand of populism is a complete and utter swindle that involves scapegoating foreigners for social problems, while left “populism” is generally anti-racist and egalitarian. Right-wing populists do not actually care about “the people”; Trump and Bolsonaro may have pitched themselves as crusaders against “elites,” but neither actually cares about helping anyone but their wealthy cronies. Both want to privatize public assets, which in practice means simply giving away the people’s collective wealth to oligarchs. Both of them have been utterly indifferent to the socially unequal consequences of coronavirus, and both are accelerating their country’s contributions to the climate crisis, which will cause “the people” incredible suffering. Neither has any interest in deepening democracy; their ideal societies are characterized by massive wealth inequality. They are about as “populist” as the Nazis were “socialist,” meaning that it is a convenient label that makes them sound like something they aren’t.

WV,

Is this Round Two, or have I missed any?

;>)

After watching/reading this one, I give it again to Robinson. On points, if not a TKO.

To me, Ball went cheap-shot with the “comparing everyone on the right to Hitler,” which Robinson didn’t do . . . and the “ideological purity” dig, which is what I hear from Dems when I argue for leftist solutions/ideas. Either that or “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” or some such obnoxious variation. She should know better, cuz she’s probably been on the other side of that canard.

I completely agree with Robinson that there is no such thing as “right-populism.” Have always seen that as a classic oxymoron. It just goes against everything they say they stand for. They don’t want proactive, collective action for the greater good, at least not via the public sector, and since they love capitalism, which means they want “competition,” they don’t want it in the private sector, either. Every man for themselves, etc.

For centuries, they’ve supported elites and neck-breaking hierarchies as righteous, God-given or based entirely on “merit.” It’s the “natural order of things” for them. If someone is for taking direct action for the greater good, they’re not a righty. Righties honestly believe this is done via the capitalist system itself — again, “naturally.”

I’m also puzzled by the insistence that we leftists supposedly need to form coalitions with anyone on the right. Why? They’re what we oppose, and always have opposed.

Plus, we’re small. The populist right is small, too, but powerful. It has the backing of billionaires, and the often secret backing of all kinds of corporations. So if we were ever stupid enough to help them gain power, they’d betray us in a nanosecond, with backing, and we’d be worse off than ever before. We’d be helping a Wilders, a Bolsonaro, a Trump gain control, and they’d laugh at us and call us “antifa” and we’d never see the light of day again.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.

In case I wasn’t clear: I don’t agree with Dems who think Sanders would have lost to Trump. I think he would have won in 2016 and again now. I agree with them for thinking that defeating Trump does mean real change.

Obviously, not as much change as we all desperately want. But it’s significant, given Trump’s record, his behavior, the way he’s successfully managed to create his own “deep state.” Recent articles tell us that it’s not just his cabinet/political appointees enacting dangerous change throughout the Executive. It’s filtered down to career management as well.

A War Against Climate Science, Waged by Washington’s Rank and File Efforts to block research on climate change don’t just come from the Trump political appointees on top. Lower managers in government are taking their cues, and running with them.

A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control Over a Large Swath of Utah By Bill McKibben June 13, 2020

wv wrote:

====================
Well, I dont agree or disagree with Taibbi, and i dont agree or disagree with Robinson. My brain just refuses to engage in ‘it’ and I ‘think’ the reason is this — I’ve been reading a lot of commie-memoirs this summer. I dunno why, but thats what I did in April and May. And over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, I read stories about leftists attacking other leftists. Groups forming and then factions and cracks and fissures tear the leftists apart. Heck even the FBI used to laugh about it. It got to where they stopped playing dirty tricks on the Black Panthers and some Commie groups, because the groups themselves were tearing themselves apart.

Thats been on my mind a lot. And i see Taibbi as one of us. And i see Robinson as one of us. Two fine leftists.

And i just do not have the will to pick one of them apart. It just seems like something the RIGHT would LOVE to see.

Now you could say “well Taibbi started it” — but i dont care. I just see Taibbi as venting a little bit about some shit that bothers him. Next week he’ll be back to writing great stuff.

w
v

WV,

I deleted various responses a host of times, trying to make this more Old Hacker size, while still effectively expressing my thoughts, and I just couldn’t do it. Things kept spinning away from me and growing and growing, etc. So I’ll just write this and then try again tomorrow or the next day to clarify. Or not.

;>)

I think Taibbi is doing just what you say we shouldn’t do. Attack our own. That’s kinda my whole point throughout this thread. I know you don’t want to get into “it,” but, for me, there’s no escaping that. I want “leftists” to deal with imminent threats, real threats, real crises, and nothing Taibbi wrote about rates as that, IMO, and most of it seems to be petty in-fighting. And it helps the right. It helps the right’s propaganda tropes that “the left” is intolerant and “Stalinist,” etc. etc. . . . and that it isn’t diverse, and can all be lumped in together, from the corporate Dems to we socialist/left-anarchists who read Kropotkin, Morris, Reclus, Nearing, Luxemberg, etc. etc.

It’s an echo of a quandary of an enigma of a dilemma, but Taibbi, Dore, Ball, Mate and company need to realize that their apparent reluctance to go after Trump seriously, dangerously helps the “far right.” Their belief that they can’t do it, that they have to concentrate on the DNC and the MSM, instead of the people actually in power, just makes it that much more difficult to mount an effective opposition. Hell, if leftists don’t fight against the “far right,” who will? And they aint doing that when they spend all their time going after “corporate Dems,” etc. etc.

I’ll leave it there.

Going back to the George Will example, which is my own, not Robinson’s or Taibbi’s. To make a case, one would have to show a pattern of “silencing” or “censorship” or “violation of free speech rights.” Without that, it really comes down to less than a tempest in a tea pot.

Given the fact that roughly 422 out of 423 outlets kept publishing George Will, the “pattern” was that, not the one outlet that cancelled him.

Taibbi failed utterly to show any kind of pattern of this sort of thing, via his examples, and could not remotely even suggest that there was some kind of movement afoot on “the left” to do so. Scattered, isolated, and rather dubious and easily contested examples do not make a pattern. But they do make a good day’s work on Fox News.

IMO, we have far, far bigger fish to fry.

Personally, I don’t see it as “censorship” at all to not say one word out of hundreds — much less ask for a bit of an explanation before making the decision to say it or not. My own take, for instance, on reading a literary excerpt to a class, if I were teaching it . . .

Say we’re reading Huck Finn or Beloved. Students are tasked with reading the entire book, as written. But if I’m going to read a part out loud, I find a passage that doesn’t contain the N word, if at all possible. And if it’s not, I choose not to say it in the midst of the rest of the passage. That’s not “censoring” the work, IMO. Students still see the word. They know it’s there. They have it in front of them. They just don’t hear me repeating it. Nothing/ no one is being “silenced.” The authors are not being “silenced.” Their words — all of them — live on in my classroom. I just choose not to repeat that word to them in my own voice.

It would, OTOH, be “censorship” if the books were banned. It would be a form of “silencing” if Cotton, for instance, couldn’t find any place to voice his views. But he’s a powerful senator, and he’s never had that problem. There is no lack of venues readily available for him to publish his various idiocies.

I remember the furor by some on the right when one newspaper decided to stop publishing George Will. He was, at the time, syndicated in more than 400 outlets, and just one decided no mas. I think it was over an article of his that dismissed the prevalence of sexual assault on campuses.

So he’s still got more than 400 outlets publishing after that one says No. But umpteen conservatives raved and ranted about how “liberals” were supposedly denying him his “free speech rights” and trying to “silence” him. If having a weekly column in more than 400 newspapers is being “silenced,” I’d gladly sign up for that.

To me, Taibbi, in his rebuttal to the rebuttal, tries to make it sound like Robinson skipped over any and all rationales for his (Robinson’s) critique of Taibbi. My take is that it was Taibbi who did exactly that. Robinson was detailed and, again, surgical in providing the whys and wherefores regarding that critique.

WV,

Have you read Robinson’s piece? Didn’t know he had responded to Taibbi until I saw your video. Thanks for posting.

The Current Affairs piece is excellent. He calmly, effectively, surgically destroys Taibbi’s (IMO) ludicrously broad-brushed complaints, and Taibbi should have quit while he was behind. MT’s rebuttal to the rebuttal was a big ol’ bust. He wasn’t able to adequately address a single point made by Robinson — well, at least not without twisting it like a pretzel.

Will quote a bit from the article tomorrow or later this week. Sad to see Taibbi choosing this hill — and The Hill — to plant his flag.

Has The American Left Lost Its Mind? No. Once again critics of the left are misstating the facts and distracting us from consequential issues.

Trump’s sadism and his bull-horn messages to white supremacists and other right-wing bigots seem to be escalating. Planning his MAGA rally, originally on Juneteenth, in Tulsa, where blacks were massacred nearly 100 years ago. Then announcing the end of health care coverage for trans people on the anniversary of the Pulse killings.

No way these things were “coincidences.”

Also, likely preaching to the choir here: But “neoliberalism” is such a tricky, ill-defined term. I think it often just confuses people.

My own take on the word is that it’s never been the exclusive domain of Dems, corporatist or otherwise. But it has always been right of center. I also think it helps to talk in terms of a hard version and a soft, which is how David Harvey deals with it. He sees the Republican version as hard, and the Dems’ as soft. I’m generalizing a rather complex thing here, of course. But that’s the gist of it.

Also, and I know you guys know this . . . it has nothing to do with “liberalism” as most people think of the word. It’s about “liberalizing” the markets, after the Keynesian era reined them in somewhat. Its main tenets, which are really far more compatible with Republican beliefs through the decades, are aggressive tax cuts for the rich and businesses, deregulation, especially Finance, and privatization of public goods, services and assets.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Hey, WV,

I posted two articles about Seattle and Trump’s response earlier, in your thread What do we think, etc. etc.

Trump is committing political suicide, luckily for the world, with his insane, fascistic support for police brutality, for using the military to attack Americans in the streets, and he just recently showed his support for the Confederacy by saying he won’t allow the renaming of military bases, etc.

In my lifetime, we’ve never had such a despicable human being in the White House, and we’ve had some doozies.

=====================

Part of me agrees with all that. And part of me thinks we are all living out some kind of Twilight Zone episode.

If its a twilight zone episode, hard to tell how it all ends up.

w
v

Well, part of me agrees with all of that. And, um, then the other part wishes I could score some magic mushrooms.

Hope all is well, WV.

Hey, WV,

I posted two articles about Seattle and Trump’s response earlier, in your thread What do we think, etc. etc.

Trump is committing political suicide, luckily for the world, with his insane, fascistic support for police brutality, for using the military to attack Americans in the streets, and he just recently showed his support for the Confederacy by saying he won’t allow the renaming of military bases, etc.

In my lifetime, we’ve never had such a despicable human being in the White House, and we’ve had some doozies.

ZN,

Thanks for reposting those links. Will try to remember the chat option.

I know you mentioned there were obvious reasons for the inability to form effective coalitions on the basis of “class.” But I think the topic is still worth hashing out, despite the potential for stating the obvious.

It’s always struck me as baffling that when America and most of the West was far less unequal, economically — during the 1960s — it seemed easier to form those coalitions. Just three people today — Bezos, Gates and Zuckerburg — control more wealth than the bottom half of the nation combined . . . and CEOs routinely make hundreds to thousands of times their rank and file. That would have been unthinkable when MLK and RFK talked about economic justice for Americans, and the young, especially, demanded economic equality.

It’s complicated, complex, etc. etc. . . . but I still think it’s important to discuss. Why then, but not now? Today’s 99% has never been further away from the 1%. Economic hierarchies have never been this steep. The system hasn’t been this plutocrat-friendly since the first Gilded Age, etc.

Strange days, these.

No luck on posting the links, ZN.

One from the WaPo and one from Salon.

Forgot to mention this atrocity:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/detained-migrants-say-they-were-forced-clean-covid-infected-ice-n1228831

Migrant detainees forced to clean up Covid-infected ICE buildings in Arizona. Why isn’t this the subject of Congressional hearings/Inspector General reports, etc.?

The perfect, obscene storm of racism, the culture of cruelty and privatization.

If we’re just talking about the US and our relatively brief history, police violence has always been with us, of course. But I don’t think we’ve seen such a widespread attempt, from the top down, to promote a culture of cruelty, prior to Trump. At least not since Andrew Jackson. And, to make this worse, a culture of avoiding responsibility for that cruelty.

Impunity. A culture of cruelty with impunity.

He ran on that. He ran on cruelty to immigrants, black and brown people in general, dissenters, critics, reporters, especially female reporters . . . to anyone who dared say something critical about him. He ran as someone the supposedly “forgotten (white) man” could cheer on for that cruelty . . . so they could live vicariously through Trump. So they could cheer on someone who gets away with doing stuff they typically can’t do, or at least do so easily.

And once he got into power, he continued to avoid responsibility for his horrific actions. He got away with putting kids in cages, destroying environmental regs, destroying the civil rights division of the DoJ, gutting workplace regs, and stacking the courts with far-right judges. He got away with colluding with Russia and strong-arming Ukraine. He got away with endlessly attacking, bashing, insulting all of his critics, threatening them with goddess knows what — doing goddess knows what. It may just be now, after he sent out unidentified, heavily militarized jack-boots to clear peaceful protests — for a photo op at a church!! that he may finally pay for his crimes. But who knows?

To make a long story short . . . yeah, this police violence, the violence of the capitalist system it protects . . . . these things have been with us for centuries. But we’ve never had a president/admin (until now) that seemed to relish its cruelty, expand and amplify it so proudly, or scream out the message of who counts as “American” and who doesn’t. Trump has made it abundantly clear to the powerful and their lackeys that they have carte blanche to go after those who don’t count in Trumpland.

To oversimplify on the defund issue:

It’s kinda like the difference between Old Testament “justice” and NT.

To me, our society would be radically better if we got rid of as much on the “punishment” side of the ledger as possible, and shifted it to the compassion/uplift/generosity/problem-solving/non-violence side. To the extent humanly possible. Not just nibbling at the edges of this. But actually go for it, full on. Radically shift where we focus our time, energy and funding. Not incrementally. But radically.

For starters, we need to decriminalize all non-violent, victimless crimes, and stop incarcerating people for that. Let everyone out of prison who was put in there for those “crimes.” Drugs, sex-work, small-scale property theft, etc. Put this in perspective. Make the punishment fit the “crime,” and factor in the cost to society at all points along the way. Let the police deal with seriously dangerous issues of deadly harm, not the kinds of things that social workers, drug counselors, psychologists, etc. etc. would be better equipped to handle . . . or . . . the kinds of things that don’t require any kind of “remedy” at all. All too often, no “remedy” is needed to begin with, because it’s really not an issue we should be concerned with.

Also: I’ve always found this striking about the way the political right views Big Gubmint. They seem all in on “law and order” shite, to the max, border patrol atrocities, endless wars, expansion of empire to the nth, but when it comes to trying to rein in the abuses of corporations and the super-rich, or religious institutions . . . . suddenly, that’s supposedly “Big Gubmint.” Freedom and Liberty for whom? is what we always need to ask.

“Small government” is ideal, if this includes the police, the military, the border patrol, capitalism, the way brown, black, indigenous and leftist bodies are disciplined and punished — ending that garbage. It’s horrifying if it just means corporations and the super rich can do what they want, while everyone else has a boot on their necks.

Private tyrannies are tyrannies too, etc.

In short. Hell, yeah. Defund the police, ICE, our military, our empire. Replace this with an actual “caring society.” Not just words or greeting cards. Facts, deeds, on the ground.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.