2021 Will Be Welcomed as a Liberator, and Will Pay for Itself

I'm going to cheat and fiddle with the timestamp on this post, because I really truly did intend to post it yesterday.

On Wednesday the libertarian writer and Cato Institute wonk Julian Sanchez posted this in response to a deranged tweet from a Trump Republican:

It seems that by "the party that always wants larger, costlier government" Sanchez meant to refer to the Democrats.  It's hardly obscure that although Republicans like to campaign against big-spending and big government, when they are elected they increase spending, raise the deficit, and increase government surveillance into ordinary citizens' lives.  It's arguable that what matters is not the amount of government spending, but what and whom it's spent on.  Or other considerations, as when Barack Obama perpetrated a hiring freeze for government employees in the middle of an economic crisis.

That Sanchez got an obvious point so wrong discredits him, which reminds me of something else.  It's difficult to know whether every Republican who wants to overturn the 2020 presidential election has any evidence or other basis for their belief that the election was stolen.  But it appears that most if not all such Republicans also believe that Joe Biden is a radical-left socialist, which is delusional in a classically Republican way.  The only mitigating factor could be that many Democrats believe that Biden is a "progressive," which is just as delusional but in a classically Democratic way.

But Already It Was Impossible To Say Which Was Which

It's frustrating to be called a faggot.  But liberal Democrats tell me it's important that I empathize with their pain over Hillary's loss last year, which can only be expressed adequately by fag jokes.

Oh, of course, they aren't talking about me, or so they will claim.  Well, maybe they are talking about me, because I voted for Clinton without adoring her, which indicates that below my left-wing surface I'm really a Putin-loving cock holster.

What they don't get is that when they call Trump a cock holster, or post cartoons depicting Mike Pence on his knees gobbling down the Donald's manhood, they are revealing how much they despise me and every other faggot.  (And by corollary, every woman.)  We're the polluted bogeymen who unsettle their dreams, and no matter how much they support gay marriage they keep waking up in a cold sweat, clutching their scrotums to make sure they haven't undergone sex-reassignment surgery in the night.

A liberal Democratic Clinton supporter I know posted a video clip on Facebook the other night which he said expressed his hope that Jared Kushner will soon be in prison being violated by brutal hairy felons.  I called him on it, and he accused me of trying to blind everybody with my intellect, but he wasn't cowed and would stand by his principles.  He claimed that he couldn't see what I stand for; which I understand to mean that one only 'stands for' a political party, specifically its anointed and corporate-funded leadership, with fervent and unshakeable loyalty.  So, opposing rape requires an advanced intellect, and fantasizing online about prison rape -- for someone else -- shows one's courageous devotion to principle?  But maybe his fantasies about Kushner's ravaged rosebud are driven by economic anxiety.  Whatever: it's good to know what I'm dealing with.

What I'm dealing with is an all-American, bipartisan anti-intellectualism.  I'm quite used to being accused of a smarty-pants know-it-all by far right-wingers, less so by near right-wingers of the Democratic center.  But the Dems are howling for the heads of pointy-headed intellectuals more and more these days.  What worries me is that this guy, who seems to have trouble keeping a job (economic anxiety?), sometimes works as a substitute teacher.  Sometimes he posts his contempt for his charges on Facebook.  His students, good or bad, shouldn't have to defend themselves against such attacks.
  
Jon Schwarz had linked to "this incredibly prescient" 2012 Onion video a few days earlier on Twitter, but he presumably saw it as a harbinger of the right-wing rage that made Donald Trump the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.



And it is that, though any reasonably attentive observer would know that demented right-wing rage has always been with us.  It wasn't new when Father Coughlin, a Rush Limbaugh in a clerical collar, had millions of radio listeners from the 1930s onward.  Jon knows it himself, since in October he recommended a documentary about a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.  Hell, the Pilgrim Fathers brought this kind of rage with them from the Old World in 1620, though it already existed here among Native Americans from time immemorial.

But the same mindset can be found among nominally liberal Democrats, and never more than in the Age of Trump.  This shrieking white-hot sphere of pure rage, we're informed, howled "'Guns ... Not my America', and then it just repeated "faggots' at a deafening pitch for hours and hours."  When it became clear that Trump had won the Presidency in the electoral college, the shrieking white-hot sphere began winning adherents among mainstream Democrats: they began to say that Trump was not their president and his America was not their America.  They fantasized about Resistance, even armed Resistance.  The first human sacrifices were offered up.  And liberals began repeating "faggot" at a deafening pitch for hours and days and months.

I know, I should be compassionate.  I'm finding it very hard to be so, because Democratic loyalists would like me to believe that only they can stop Trump and block his dastardly designs.  It doesn't look to me like they have any idea how to do so, let alone repair the damage he's already done and will continue to do.  So this isn't really about them, it's about me and the other people who are Trump's and Paul Ryan's real targets as they dismantle the systems of social and economic justice that were built at such human cost in the past century.

It's the Stupidity, Stupid!

Mehdi Hasan points to some important information and makes a good argument in this article at The Intercept.  The title sums up his claim: Trump voters were motivated more by racism than by the economy.  He's critical of Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders who've claimed the contrary.

His colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang are somewhat skeptical, and Greenwald says that "there's a lot of debate - generally & at the Intercept - about this argument."  That's as it should be, but I think that even if Hasan is right about everything he says, he's accepting and fostering a confusion of issues that is all too common in American politics.

Here's an example from the article:

Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isn’t surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. It’s difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as “racial resentment.” The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Sanders and Warren might disagree with me, but I don't see a problem here.  I think Sanders was constructing a false dichotomy, but then so is Hasan.  I have no difficulty accepting (if that's the word -- "acknowledging" is more like it) that millions of my fellow citizens are racist, but I don't think it's limited to Trump voters; many Democrats are also racist, and Democratic presidential candidates routinely pander to their racism.  I'm not surprised by Sanders's trying to downplay American racism, since like many Socialists he's always been weak on issues other than the US economy anyway.

It's important to point out, as Hasan does, that much of Trump's base wasn't suffering economically anyway:

Look, if you still believe that Trump’s appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as “the most important issue facing the country” opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didn’t black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?

This reminds me that when Rush Limbaugh first became nationally famous at the end of the 1980s, he and his critics tried to cast him as the voice of disaffected blue-collar American whites, though his audience had an average income of $53,000 (which was worth considerably more then than it is now).  That was no surprise any more than Trump's fans should be now.  Much of the really toxic American Right is at least middle-class and college-educated, like Limbaugh himself, which is another reason to harbor skepticism about the efficacy of a college education.

According to Philip Klinkner, a political scientist whose research is Hasan's main source,

the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?

No, claiming that Obama is a Muslim does not equal "economic anxiety," and I'm not sure anyone has actually said it does.  But it's not necessary to confuse these things.  (Especially if, as Hasan claims, voters who expressed concern about the economy, whether or not they were racist, voted Democratic anyway.)  Denying that racists are racists is a popular tactic, of course, and it's alarming when liberals and leftists try to use it.  I have friends on Facebook who are Trump supporters and racists; I challenge and criticize them on both matters as I see fit.  It doesn't seem that any of them are suffering much economically, and most of them are dependent on the Big Government Teat, but it's typical of the Right to poor-mouth themselves.

Ironically, though, many Trump-haters are just fine with thinking of his fans as low-rent white trash, often shading into overt racist stereotyping and imagery, and I find myself challenging them as often as I do the Trump fans.  It's not necessary to confuse racism and economic anxiety, but it sure is fun. This comment, for example, was posted on Facebook today under a post by a source one of my liberal friends relies on:

No one ever believed Trump...we know why the ones who voted for him did...Now they are at home looking at the news...chewing tobacco..drinking moonshine...rubbing their cousins ass....safe and sound...the wealthy ones waiting on the check to clear safe and sound...but people lives were taken...no human no matter what status you are life is more valuable than the next...He started with lies he will end because of lies...America is alot more fun...when we aren't divided by race so in the words of a great man......Fuck Trump

Democratic elites are also "waiting on the check to clear safe and sound," but it wouldn't do to remember that.

So, to repeat myself, toothless, cousin-marrying losers need to be able to find jobs and support their families.  They need a roof over their heads. They need health care to fix their bad teeth and good public schools to educate their children.  To say so is not to minimize their racism or other unseemly traits, any more than good economic policy justifies poor blacks' frequent criminality and bad beliefs.  Nor is it to recommend, as the New York Times did recently, that the Democratic Party should reach out to working class whites by pandering to their racism instead of ameliorating their economic plight.  Middle class and wealthy whites also have bad beliefs and are frequently criminal, but they aren't held accountable as poor whites and blacks are.  We have to distinguish between poor whites' racism and their economic and political rights, just as we do between poor blacks' misbehavior and their economic and political rights.  Empathy doesn't entail uncritical approval, just as you can vote for a corrupt neoliberal as the lesser evil while criticizing her relentlessly.  Martin Luther King Jr. knew this, as did black radicals of the late 1960s; if today's white liberals don't know it, and it seems they don't, then they are not part of the solution but part of the problem.

It's possible in principle, and I hope in practice, to push for good economic policy without pandering to white racism or other forms of bigotry.  As I indicated, we shouldn't justify good economic policy by claiming that it will eradicate bigotry.  It won't, but I'm not sure what will.  Without reliable employment, health care, education, and infrastructure, though, the country (and the world) will continue our agonizing slow downhill slide into immiseration; in which case people's energy to fight for a better world will be diffused into so many areas that they'll become hopeless.  Which, of course, is just what the rulers want.

How Far Down Do You Want to Go?

I just saw the second meme today that said "If Bill Clinton's past is 'fair game' so is this", referring to Donald Trump's gamy sexual past.  I'm not going to link to it or post it here; you can probably find it with an online search if you want to see it.

Now, first: way to go, Democrats, sinking to Trump's and the GOP's level! If you object to their atttempts to lower the discourse, the right response is not to mimic them.

Second: Democrats prefer it that way, because the last thing they (or the Republicans) want is a serious, rational discussion of Clinton's policies and actions as President (or Hillary Clinton's policies and actions as Senator and Secretary of State). That would be going too far.

Third: this version of the meme consisted largely of several naked or nearly naked pictures of Trump's wives/girlfriends. So it's not really Trump's past they're interested in -- they want to slut-shame the women in his life. (And probably to look at naked pictures of women -- it's a win/win!) Which establishes these Dems as the lowest kind of scum, right down there with Trump himself. (Some of the comments on the previous sharing ranted about "skanks" and such. Stay classy, Democrats.)

Most fun of all, the person whose share put this meme where I'd see it is a vocal feminist, highly vigilant about such issues on her own account.  But she didn't notice the slut-shaming or didn't care as long as it was aimed at women associated with an official enemy, but who are not running for office themselves and have no impact on policy. Sort of like the slut-shaming we saw, some years ago, of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky -- not only by the Republicans but by Bill Clinton himself, trying to save his worthless ass.

See why I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place? There is a dime's worth of difference between the parties, but a dime doesn't buy much these days, and the Democrats are hellbent on being as sickening as the Republicans.

This Man Must Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophet

Why does this meme-maker write as though most of "2010's America" didn't support government-run healthcare, expanding Social Security, raising taxes on the rich, and all those other "socialist" programs and policies? Why do people who think that they're smarter than Republitards accept and spread the corporate media / Republicrat propaganda line that the US today is right-wing? Yes, there are people who want to eliminate social programs, but they are a minority. Often they are even a minority of Republicans.  To talk as though they represented America in this decade is not only dishonest, it's siding with them by taking their claims as fact.
 
And it's not as if there weren't many in 1930s America who opposed the New Deal. FDR had to work against a lot of opposition. Probably about the same proportion of the population. Much of the opposition that didn't come from the wealthy came from working-class whites who didn't want the New Deal programs to help blacks -- in other words, to prevent the enactment of any program that would benefit anyone beside themselves. This meme perpetrates historical ignorance, and worse, misinformation.  It also encourages liberals and progressives to believe that the obstacles to improving life for most Americans come from the vast majority of Americans, thus giving themselves an excuse for failure in advance.  As Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote of their hero and role model, "It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does."

Soy Huevon...

... So I'm just going to recycle some online discussion for today's post.  My work week is over until Monday, so I promise to write something more substantial tomorrow.

Anyway, a number of people have linked to this clip from the Jimmy Fallon show, which finds that a surprising number of Americans object to "Obamacare", but not to the "Affordable Care Act," even though those are merely different names the same legislative package.  One of my Facebook friends did, remarking "Do you think an informed citizenry is essential to a democracy? Er....."; and one of his other friends linked to this clip, which apparently (I haven't watched it yet) shows that some "Obama supporters actually hate Obama's policies."  That wouldn't surprise me; I've often pointed out that many vocal Obama supporters have no idea what his policies are.  ("He stopped the wars!"  Not.)

I commented: I don't deny that many Americans are horrifyingly ignorant about our history, our government, and our elected officials. I get my nose rubbed in that ignorance every day. (Though even more, as someone once said, the trouble isn't that people aren't ignorant -- it's that they know so much that isn't so.) But I've been thinking again: I see Democrats calling the Republicans idiots a lot. But suppose that's so: what does it say about the Democrats, including Obama, that those "idiots" keep beating them, over and over again? It's a popular line in many action/horror movies, that the villain says that Good is weak and ineffective, while Evil is powerful and effective, and so will triumph in the end. The Democrats are oddly ready to agree with and confirm that claim, it seems to me (though only if I agree that Democrats are good, which I don't).

Also, as far as I'm concerned, the only real impediment to an informed citizenry is the laziness of the citizenry themselves. People love to complain about how the Media are sapping their precious bodily fluids and all, but I call bullshit. What we need to know is out there, but no one is going to hand it to you -- in fact, wanting to have it handed to you is why we're in trouble now.

Not long after I wrote that, another friend posted a quotation from the liberal comedian and soft-edge satirist Andy Borowitz: "I wasn't happy about the country being controlled by the richest one percent, but I really hate it being controlled by the dumbest one percent."  Which provided a good example of the complaint that the "idiots" are winning.  My friend objected when I said so, saying that "I really don't think the idiots are 'beating' Obama and the Democrats in the present instance." This, in the middle of a US government shutdown engineered by the "idiots!" I linked to Derek Thompson's recent article which pointed out that although Republicans lose various battles, over the long term they've been winning the spending war -- the Democrats keep caving in to their demands.  That's leaving aside the fact that Obama is in close agreement with the "idiots" on many important issues, disagreeing only on a few social issues.

Someone just commented on my comments that the Republicans win because "they're generally the favorites of people with lots and lots of money."  Which doesn't affect my point, since it indicates that "idiocy" is no obstacle to accumulating lots and lots of money; and ignores the fact that the Democrats also take in lots of money from the rich.  Obama raised more money than his opponents in both 2008 and 2012, much or most of it from the wealthy.  That could be one reason Democrats love to accuse the Republicans of idiocy: to divert attention from their own devotion to the wishes of the rich.  I think I'm onto something here.  But I need to blog more, and comment less on Facebook.

Why Johnny Can't Blink

But for the time being, the administration has blinked.

Oh, noes!  They've never done that before!  Well, hardly ever.  Well, usually.  Only politically naive professional leftists would have expected the President to do anything else.

Also from The Atlantic today, Republicans are indignant that Democrats are concern-trolling them, which the Republicans would never do, especially now that the party is "down-and-out" and the Democrats are "triumphant." A lot of conspiracy-theory mongering in there too, which is amusing when you consider how respectable politicians and pundits despise conspiracy theories floated by their opponents.  I guess there just isn't enough going on right now for people really to worry about.