Frothers on Parade

Wins by democratic socialists in last week's primary elections inspired quite a frenzy among centrist Democrats as well as MAGA. The influence of Second Wave feminism makes me reluctant to call it hysteria, because of the word's etymology, but I think relatively few people know that anymore, so what the hell, I'm going with Merriam-Webster's simple definition: "a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way."

I thought much of the panic over Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City had subsided, though it still rages in comments on Twitter and other social media. he's a communist he's a radical islamist terrorist he was behind the 9/11 attacks he's an antisemite he's going to round up all the Jews and impose sharia law etc. it wasn't just Twitter or Facebook randos who lost it, it was also politicians and party leaders -- the kind of people who we're told are the adults in the room were squalling like toddlers.

When some candidates Mamdani endorsed won in the primaries last week the frothing broke out anew.  Mamdani had forced these communist third-worldists on the voters, as though the voters had no choice but to do his bidding. Mamdani is certainly popular in some circles, but he doesn't have the kind of clout Donald Trump, say, has. And he only endorsed three candidates.  Other lefty candidates won elsewhere without Mamdani's support, though I suppose his sinister third-world tentacles reached out to force them on the voters there too.

And, of course, these were primaries.  As some of the frothers pointed out correctly, turnout in New York City was around 9 percent. The general elections are in November.  I've also seen a lot of people celebrating prematurely, but that's normal. No one thinks they're the adults in the room. It seems likely that some of these candidates will win the general, since they're in safely blue districts, but it remains to be seen. One Dem jeered, "If Socialists want to impress Democrats, go to North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and flip some seats."  I liked the person who replied, "centrists love to be like 'when are you socialists going to win regions and states that we centrists currently also don’t win'".

One reason I make myself keep this blog going is that it's useful to be able to look back in time a little.  When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2018, establishment Democratic reaction was like what I saw last week: how dare she go after an incumbent, she's helping Trump, and so on.  But she won the general and is still in office eight years later despite Democrat-backed attempts to primary her. And then the same establishment, including Nancy Pelsoi, primaried Ed Markey a year later, apparently because he'd become too friendly with Ocasio-Cortez and the other insurgent lefties known as the Squad.

Then, today, the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's assault on birthright citizenship.  The MAGA right predictably went bonkers.  This hysteria isn't a partisan thing, and it's good to remember that.

P.S. Just after I posted this and before I went to bed last night, I saw that two more entrenched Democratic incumbents were defeated in Tuesday's Colorado primary by candidates to their left, apparently without help from Zohran Mamdani.  But another Colorado Democratic incumbent defeated a progressive challenger.  That's no surprise, there will be losses as well as victories.  But there are some satisfying moments to savor, as in an item I saw this afternoon.  One of those incumbents posted a video of herself berating a voter last March  ""If ... the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me"-- the issue being Israel's atrocities in Gaza.  Ah yes, that move worked so well for Kamala Harris in 2024.  

I wouldn't assume that Gaza was the only issue that voter cares about.  Last week a self-identified "liberal progressive" and best selling author posted: "As a liberal progressive, I would be fine with the party moving left if these wins were about Medicare for all, reproductive rights, universal childcare, taxing billionaires, and creating affordable housing, But they weren’t." The winners in question are mostly Democratic Socialists, so they have the same wish list this person said she has. Mamdani, for a prominent example, campaigned on much more than Gaza, but his position on Israel obsessed centrist Democrats and the corporate media. The same seems to be true of these other challengers.  But it's also true that unbending support for Israel's crimes and the suppression of dissent about them in the US, not to mention their dependency on AIPAC money, are hurting the incumbents. 

One senior Democrat, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said he would argue that Mamdani "is the leader of the Democratic Party right now."  I think that's obviously absurd at this moment, but "rising star" feels about right, and Mamdani isn't the only one.  I've been wondering who will fill Bernie Sanders's shoes when he leaves office; suddenly there seem to be contenders.

Today's Facepalm

So all these Democratic anti-Trump memes that have been flooding my newsfeed, which are designed to promulgate fear, anger, and hatred of Trump and his fans, will turn those who view them into social conservatives?  That would seem to follow.  But I doubt it's what the meme-maker meant.  Our fear, righteous anger, and Two Minutes' Hate are different, because we're the good guys, intellectually and morally superior to the Rethuglitards.

I understand the desire to vent -- I do it often.  I don't object to venting in itself.  I object because, having vented, Democratic loyalists don't balance their rage with informed discussion of the political scene or anything else.  So I also see stuff like this link to TV pundit Ted Koppel saying that Donald Trump is "the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS."

That's really not fair to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other people already in (and out of) power who don't just advocate violence but actually practice it, killing and maiming and displacing innocent people and thereby causing the blowback we've been seeing for a few decades now. Trump is scum, and no doubt he's helping to recruit for Islamist organizations in his own small way, but he hasn't actually killed anybody or invaded and destabilized a country ... yet. All the others have.  Party loyalists can't admit, even to themselves, that in this respect Trump and the other Republican hawks are just continuing and extending normal bipartisan US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The author of the article on Koppel concludes, "Critical thinking and nuanced reasoning don’t go over too well in Trump Land."  That's true enough, but they're no more popular in Democrat Land, or whatever you want to call it.  I've often pointed out the confusion exhibited by educated people as to what critical thinking is, but here are a couple of positive models.  Deborah Meier, in The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon Press, 2002), sketched the Habits of Mind fostered in the alternative high school she helped found:

They are: the question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"; the question of viewpoint, in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"; the search for connections and patterns, or "What causes what?"; supposition, or "How might things have been different?"; and finally, why any of it matters, or "Who cares?" [50]

In Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973) the philosopher Walter Kaufmann proposed a canon, "the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and the meaning of intellectual integrity."

Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction -- one's own or another person's -- those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it?  (4) What alternatives are available?  (5) What speaks for and (6) against each?  And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult.  But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion?  On the contrary... [178]

Kaufmann also liked to quote Nietzsche's quip "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

Both Meier and Kaufmann acknowledge that objections may be raised to their canons; that possibility is included in their list of questions, and Kaufmann considered them at some length.  Meier says that the Habits of Thought have never been formulated finally, and have changed somewhat over time.  That's to be expected.  She also says:

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later" [81].

What a coincidence (or maybe not)!  What "some [liberal-minded citizens] argue" is the position of the Right as well.  Critical thinking tomorrow, indoctrination today.  But tomorrow never comes.

It's the spirit of critical openness these writers exhibit that is missing from the liberal and left partisans I'm discussing today, and have discussed before.