The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 7 of 29

Square circles

*** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST ***

I just want to draw some attention to this post on Naked Capitalism that I thought was an excellent analysis of the dilemma of left-wing electoral politics.

They have done so mainly by convincing a layer of affluent, middle-aged professionals that the Left ultimately represents a threat to their most cherished social values: meritocratic, individualistic, cosmopolitan liberalism. In the US, this perceived threat has mainly taken the form of a repeated insistence (against absolutely all psephological evidence) that a Sanders candidacy would inevitably lose to Trump, thereby extending the life of his cartoonishly villainous regime. This same threat was used to convince older Black Democratic voters in the South that the defence of centrist liberalism was the only alternative to a perpetuation of Trumpian white supremacism. In the UK, the same effect was achieved by convincing a small but strategically crucial section of middle-class voters that Jeremy Corbyn was an advocate for Brexit and an antisemite, and that voters should instead lend support to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens (or abstain).

Secondly, again in each case, a nationalist, and increasingly irrationalist, populism on the Right has attracted enough support from some of the social constituencies who we might have hoped would unite around a radical social democratic agenda to make it impossible for that programme to win a majority. In the UK this was the constituency which voted for Johnson to ‘get Brexit done’. In the US, Trump’s economic nationalism and nativist populism mobilised lots of his base.

His failure to deliver on any of his promises (either to build a wall on the Mexican border or to bring jobs back to the rust belt) has undermined much of his credibility with that section, which is partly why increasingly deranged conspiracy theories are circulating among his die-hard supporters. There isn’t much reason left to vote for Trump, if you didn’t benefit from his tax cuts, or don’t believe he’s engaged in a secret war with the ‘deep state’.

This is exactly right, but I would cast it in another way.  There is still a large segment of opinion on the left that wants to engage in electoral politics but without taking into account voter subjectivity.  Well, of the votes meaningfully available to the left (construed as generously as possible) in Western countries, they do not conceive of the universe in the way that many people, particularly on the economic and environmental left, want them to.  If you are interested in exerting power via electoral politics, you must seriously engage with the subjective reality that these voters live in.  In the USA, one large group views Trump and all his supporters to be a critical values threat (what I’ve been calling the “dire aesthetic emergency” — keep in mind that I do not use “aesthetic” in a derogatory and trivializing way), another group (black voters) exist in a state of justified mistrust towards the rest of the electorate, and another group wants economic improvement but only if it is obtained through an aggressive posture towards those they view as an outgroup.  How these groups formed is a matter of a complex social history that is not fully amenable to class politics via “vulgar Marxism”.

Perhaps because it is, ultimately, the expression of inchoate and malleable emotional forces, nationalism can become attached to various political projects and tendencies. Its most extreme manifestation may have been in the murderous modernity of mid-twentieth century fascism, but the New Right of Thatcher and Reagan also managed to convince xenophobes and nationalists that they were on their side, willing to endorse racist and militarist projects as long as they also got to sell off public utilities and slash taxes for the rich. So the discourse of nationalist authoritarianism has proven remarkably flexible over the years, being used to justify everything from imperialist war to the destruction of the British coal industry. But the purpose that conservative nationalism always serves is to provide alternative explanations for historical events to those that would inform a progressive response: blaming unemployment on immigration; blaming union unrest on unpatriotic militant workers; blaming crime on the supposed moral degeneracy of ethnic minorities.

In the UK, the most recent and powerful iteration of this narrative was the Right-wing argument for Brexit. The Brexit story offers a compelling and plausible account of almost all of the cultural, social, political and economic changes of recent decades that many UK citizens have cause to regret, while promising an easy remedy to them. The weakening of our democratic institutions, the collapse of manufacturing industry and the consequent loss of secure employment in many places, the changing cultural composition of our cities and other communities: all could be laid at the door of EU membership. Of course a few of the people who voted Leave did so out of a hard-headed Left-wing understanding of the EU as an institution committed to the implementation of neoliberalism. Of course almost everyone who took such a view was a committed supporter of lifelong anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn. But absolutely every relevant survey suggests that the proportion of leavers who were motivated by this view, free from any nationalist fantasies of ‘recovering sovereignty’ or restoring cultural purity, was statistically negligible. A certain section of the American Left loves the idea that Brexit was in fact a vote against neoliberal policy rather than the reactionary form taken by dismay at some of its effect. The truth is, for most of its supporters and opponents, a vote for or against Brexit was the precise symbolic equivalent of a vote for or against Trump’s border wall.

There is a strong temptation, again especially among economic leftists, to see favorite leftist bugbears (e.g., the construction of European institutions while neoliberalism still seemed to bear the Mandate of Heaven) as the “real” thing that underlies the false consciousness of nationalist resentment.  Arguing this requires the kind of psychologizing that typically heralds weak armchair sociological reasoning.  Perhaps if one were already in power, one could use economic policy or withdrawal from neoliberal globalization to abate the underlying impulses that motivate proto-fascist ideation in the population.  This is putting the cart before the horse.  There is no evidence that catering to those impulses before attaining power enables you to create a cadre of voters that is more motivated by economic policy than by latent cultural resentments.

There are therefore two overall options:

  1. Accept the electorate as it is (yes, fully understanding the power of capitalist media to shape public opinion without overestimating it or imputing omnipotence to it). Then make a decision as to what are the palatable compromises in order to exert power.
  2. Set aside electoral politics as the center of available political progress and do the hard work, outside the question of elections, of raising public consciousness and reshaping the attitudes of the electorate.

This is, of course, not a complete dichotomy, since a combination of the two is possible.  The option that has not been available at this present time, however, is running on a platform that centers economic and environmental improvement, given the constraints of the electoral system and its social history to date.  This is not a circle you can square.  The prospects for this have improved (the fact that Corbyn and Sanders got as far as they did is a relevant indicator), but the world is not “there” yet.

Biden Has What It Takes to Lose

So,  Covid-19 has led to over 180K deaths so far. The economy is trash, something like a third of renters can’t make their rent, unemployment levels are at Great Depression levels, and so on.

Not all of this is entirely Trump’s fault, but he has been vastly incompetent at handling all of it, and he’s the man in charge.

Back in June, Biden had a commanding lead. Even in battleground states, his worst showing was six points ahead. On average, he was over eight points ahead.

Now?

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading President Trump in five of six battleground states…

…Biden leads Trump by six points in Florida, 50 to 44 percent, and the former vice president leads by five points in Michigan, 48 to 43 percent…

Biden is also up by four points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 48 to 44 percent and 47 to 43 percent, respectively.

The former vice president’s lead is slimmer in Arizona, where he is ahead of Trump, 45 to 44 percent.

Trump, meanwhile, holds a narrow lead over Biden in North Carolina, 48 to 47 percent.

The same survey showed Biden holding a six-point advantage over Trump at the national level, 50 to 44 percent.

Biden’s average lead in battleground states is down to about 3.2 percent from over eight percent. Back in 2016, Hillary had similar or larger leads.

Biden’s play is basically the same as Hillary’s was: left-wingers have nowhere else to go, they’ll vote for us no matter what, let’s get the suburban white centrists and Republicans who are repulsed by Trump.

Didn’t work for Clinton. I had assumed it would work for Biden, simply because Trump has reigned over absolute catastrophe, but Biden seems to have what it takes to lose.

I’m bad at predicting elections: I don’t know who’s going to win this. But so far, it’s looking a lot like a replay of 2016. Trump is definitely not out of the running.


Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Real Republican Platform

I don’t much like Frum, but he’s 100 percent right on this and it’s worth reading. Nor is it all “Republican,” some of this is shared by a lot of Democrats. I’m going to summarize, since the Atlantic has a very limited amount of free views.

1) Lower taxation is the most important economic policy.

2) Covid is no big deal. Reopen, let people die, the numbers aren’t that big.

3) Climate change is either no big deal or can be dealt with with technology, it’s not worth spending money on.

4) China is the US’s enemy, and when China loses, the US wins, and vice-versa.

5) The post-war order is dead — NATO and the WTO. The EU is a rival, Britain and Japan are subordinates; Canada, Australia and Mexico are satraps (he says dependencies).

6) You deserve as much health care as you can afford.

7) Voting is a privilege, not a right, and can be restricted.

8) Anti-black racism is BS, it’s whites and Christians and so on who are discriminated against now.

9) Abortion rights need to go. (Interestingly, he dances around this one a bit, while stating the other mostly clearly.)

10) Secret money and conflicts of interest are no big deal.

11) The border wall is good, and a long delay in granting illegal immigrants rights is good.

12) The protests should be crushed by granting police more powers. (Dances around this a bit too.)

13) Trump and his surrogates acting up on Twitter and so is just a reaction to worse excesses of his critics.

If you have free articles left at the Atlantic, this is worth reading in full. My take is that it’s accurate; this is the real Republican platform. Frum says it is kept secret because while Republicans agree, most non-Republicans don’t. Remember that there are a lot of independents and non-voters.

All of these points are more or less known, and each point has been discussed by various people in detail, but what Frum has done is put them clearly and in one place. He’s a little obscure on abortion rights, BLM, and that the US has subjects, not dependencies.

The attitude to China is shared by Democratic elites. The attitude to the EU isn’t, though the UK is understood to be a lackey and Japan is the most important US ally after the UK. Until they get serious and get their own nukes and figure out a way to deal with their oil dependency issues, they can be considered subordinates.

Canada is scared of the US, the relationship isn’t of a child to a parent (well, not a non-abusive one), it is of a servant to a master. My fellow Canadians won’t like that, but it’s true. Mexico has an even worse relationship with its “master.” As for Australia, they’ve decided the master they have is better than the other possible master, which would be China, and they’re probably right.

It is also true that Democrats generally believe in low taxes as well. They don’t believe in them quite as much, but they do believe. They aren’t taking Covid that seriously, and while they mouth off about Climate Change, they have never done anything but accelerate it. Remember that Obama/Biden vastly increased fracking and bragged about it, and that Biden’s policy platform removed the pledge to end subsidies to oil companies.

As for health care, Democrats and Republicans aren’t that far apart. Democrats want to subsidize some for the poor and middle class, but they don’t want to end the fact that the quality and amount of care one receives is primarily based on the ability to pay, and that it is a market purchase.

With respect to BLM, Biden has promised to give police more money, saying it will be spent on anti-racism training, and so on. (That’s been done before, and you see the results.) Both parties want the police to have more money, not less.

Finally, while Democrats are nowhere near as bad as Trump on corruption and secret conflicts of interest, they are bad, very bad.

Frum’s done a real service here by spelling out Republican beliefs carefully.

What’s interesting, however, is the extent to which Democrats (the ones who run the party), agree. Democratic voters sometimes don’t (they want Medicare for all — at about 80 percent now), but what they say they want really isn’t relevant when they won’t vote for it in the primaries.


Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

Sanders Anoints AOC His Heir

There was a lot of furor over AOC speaking at the DNC. First, that she had only a minute, then that she didn’t “endorse” Biden.

Both of these things come down to a simple fact: She was invited by Bernie to nominate him. As such, it wasn’t appropriate for her to talk about Biden. That she had only a minute is because that’s how long the nominations are.

AOC wouldn’t have been invited to speak at the DNC, really, if it was up to the people running the convention, Biden’s people, she wouldn’t have spoken at all.

She was there because Bernie chose her.

AOC is Bernie’s successor: She is going to be the leader of his movement when he no longer is, and this was his last Presidential campaign. She’s the progressive leader now.

It could have been Elizabeth Warren, but she called Bernie a liar and a sexist and waffled on key progressive priorities. AOC, on the other hand, when Sanders needed help most, right after his heart attack, came out, endorsed, and campaigned for him and made a huge difference.

Warren, in her short-sightedness, torpedoed herself in an attempt to win it all now, and then later to maintain viability with centrists. In exchange, she got a DNC speech, and in exchange she gave up her post as heir-presumptive to the progressive bloc. She will never be President.

I don’t know if AOC is a better choice, but she is genuinely charismatic in a way Warren and Sanders aren’t. It will be interesting to see if she can can do more with the movement than Sanders did.

Let us hope so.


Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Left-wing “Shit Sandwich” Dilemma

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden each have terrible records. There is no reason to believe they will do much that is good, and every reason to believe they will do much that is bad.

Trump will, at least for Americans, probably be even worse. (It is less clear he will be better for foreigners.)

The issue is simple, both choices are bad choices.

The left-wing dilemma is simple: If you always vote Democratic, then why should they give you anything? If, however, you don’t vote Democratic, Republicans are likely to win and they are generally even worse (though not in every way).

If you vote, you’re stuck with the choice of endorsing a shit sandwiches. One has slightly less shit and a single leaf of lettuce, but they’re both shit sandwiches.

The “Don’t Eat a Shit Sandwich” vote happens, usually, in the Democratic primaries. This time and last, the “Don’t Eat a Shit Sandwich” candidate was Bernie Sanders. His offering was a spam sandwich. He lost because Obama convinced every remaining candidate except Sanders and Biden to drop out — all nearly simultaneously.

Thanks, Obama! You sure deliver!

So now the choice is simply which shit sandwich to vote for or whether to not vote. Not voting doesn’t mean you don’t get to eat a shit sandwich, it just means you aren’t saying, “Yes, please feed me a shit sandwich!”

Shit sandwich eating is, alas, compulsory, unless you are rich. Rich people are a bit stupid, not understanding that having to live with people, 96 percent of whom eats shit sandwiches, is gross.

What tires me out, beyond the obvious (mmmm, shit sandwich!) are the people who pretend, every election, that the Democratic Presidential candidate is not a shit sandwich candidate.

Don’t try and tell me that Biden is offering brie and thinly sliced apples on a croissant when I can see that what’s in his hand is a shit sandwich.

Anyway, it’s almost time to decide which sandwich to eat. The only forbidden option is not eating.


Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Biden Picks Kamala Harris as VP

The two most important consequences of this decision derive from the fact that Biden is old and almost certainly senile.

This means that Harris stands a good chance of becoming President if Biden dies or his incapacity cannot be concealed, even with the best drug cocktails.

If that doesn’t happen, Kamala is odds on to be the next Presidential candidate of the Democratic party.

Kamala is ruthless and ambitious, a hard person willing to do whatever it takes to win. That might be acceptable, but her ruthlessness has been used mostly in favor of doing evil. (Here’s a rather long list.)

Particularly comic-book-villain-evil was fighting to keep someone she knew to be innocent in prison. You have to be particularly twisted to do that.

Of course, Wall Street is thrilled, they know they can’t lose. Trump/Pence win, great! Biden/Harris win, great! If either President dies, the person who replaces them will take great care of rich people whose money comes from parasitical rentierism and direct financial subsidies from the Federal Reserve.

Biden/Harris will be worse in foreign affairs than Trump has been (despite the screams). Domestically, they’ll be somewhat better, but will keep the shovels feeding trillions to the rich going. American decline will continue. In four to twelve years, odds are Donald Trump’s true successor, the competent authoritarian “populist” will win, and that’ll be all she wrote.

The US has been offered many off-ramps (the most recent being Sanders, twice) and refused them all. Decline will continue until it is irreversible (it may already be), or until Americans accept that right-wingers aren’t going to produce good results, whatever their party, gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.


Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

 

It’s Biden’s World

Biden was one of the key architects of the bankrupty bill, which made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.

The result of the bankruptcy bill is that millenials and zoomers who went to university and don’t have rich parents can’t own a house and many have decided they can’t afford families. They expect to live in poverty for decades as a result. (Not going to university means you can’t even apply for good jobs.)

Biden pushed hard for three-strikes laws, the drug wars, and so on. He is responsible for completely destroying entire generations of poor black men and gutting inner cities.

Biden has repeatedly tried to cut social security. He didn’t just vote for war with Iraq, he pushed the lie that Iraq had WMD, and worked hard to promote approval for the war.

He actively helped repeal Glass-Steagall, setting up the 2007/8 financial crisis that caused a ten-year long “recession” for ordinary people.

We live in Joe Biden’s world. Joe Biden was there every step of the way, creating a world in which young people live in poverty, poor black (and white) men are in prison, and in which the rich get richer and everyone else scrambles to even keep up.

By any rational consideration, Biden is a bad man. Evil, even.

Let us move briefly to Sanders. Bernie’s key planks were Medicare-for-all and student debt forgiveness, with a large climate change plan.

There are now great cries that Sanders supporters should support and vote for Biden.

People supported Sanders so ferociously because his policies meant they could actually have health care they could use (Medicare-for-all) and might be able to not spend decades in debt, and thus start families and maybe even own a home.

In other words, Sanders policies would make them more likely to NOT DIE and to be able to live a decent life.

Biden’s policies do not do that. Period. So when you see upset Sanders supporters, understand that they’re angry that people who voted Biden don’t seem to care if they die or live in poverty.

Biden, even if Sanders likes him personally (a fact which should have had no effect on his strategy, and is one of Sanders ethical failings), is one of the top fifty or so people in the country responsible for how shitty the US is to so many people. That is Biden’s legacy. He’s a warmonger, and someone who has favored rich people over the middle class and poor all his life, and made sure that the poor and young were hurt–and hurt badly.

Trump may be worse, but this a case of Beelzebub vs. Satan.

The Left is not Democratic. It does not have the same beliefs as Democrats. It does not believe in war. It does not believe young people should be poor. It does not believe in increasing fracking and destroying the climate (which Biden/Obama did–and do). It does not believe that whether you can have health care should depend on how much money you have.

The two are not friends–they’re not even allies, because allies don’t make separate peace.

The entire argument for voting for Biden rather than Trump, if you’re left-wing, is, “We’ll throw you some scraps, and kick you slightly less often.”

I mean, OK, I guess?

But don’t act like it’s some great moral argument, or that the Left and Democrats are friends, or allies, or even exist in the same moral universe.

Democrats like Biden are people who have done literal incalculable harm to both Americans and foreigners throughout their careers. Those who prefer Biden to Sanders are people who want more evil done than good, claiming that it is less evil than Trump would do (which it may well be, especially if you’re American). But they don’t actually want good. They aren’t, on the whole, in favor of doing good. They are, on the whole, in favor of doing evil. (No, no, don’t tell me about Biden’s platform. His record is what matters.)

So, yeah, Bernie losing matters, and Americans will pay the price. Biden is evil, there is no question about that. He is so far from being good that he’s somewhere around the sixth circle of hell. The argument is, yet again, simply about voting for the lesser evil.

But a majority of Democrats did want the evil guy rather than the good guy, and that’s what they have.

So be it.


The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Sanders Drops Out

Bernie Sanders

Yeah, not much to say right this moment. I think this is a mistake; there’s a lot of flux right now. This isn’t an ordinary season, and he might have made it in, though, obviously, the odds were against him. I suspect part of Sanders’ reasoning is that, unlike Biden, he wasn’t willing to urge his followers to go vote during a pandemic and many states were making mail-in voting impossible.

Biden was always most likely to win, alas. There are a lot of people who want a return to the old normal, and Biden, for all his flaws, symbolizes that. Plus, for most people, he’s best known threw memes showing him as Obama’s best buddy (thanks, Onion).

Biden won’t be President for long, if he wins. He’s clearly in decline, even if he’s a figurehead, someone else will be running the show. Or they’ll just hand it to the vice president. His vice president pick is incredibly important, since that person may well be who is actually being elected as President.

As for Bernie, this was his last hurrah. Warren is seen as having betrayed the left; she won’t be able to win if she runs again. I would guess AOC is the heir apparent, but we will see.

Bernie lost because Democrats are actually conservatives (Republicans are reactionaries). Independents tend left, but don’t vote as much as registered Democrats. Likewise, the old vote more than the young, and there was heavy-handed engineering to shut down the votes of poorer or younger people. (For example, shutting down polling places in poorer neighbourhoods, leading to massive lineups in the few that remained. Same with campuses.)

Bernie was the only chance of having a good government in charge in the United States for the next four to eight years.

If Trump wins, we have another four years before a chance at someone decent. If Biden wins, it will be eight, as even if Biden’s VP loses in 24, he still takes up the running slot.

Either way, we’re out of time on things like climate change. We were already past the point of no return, we’ve now lost the serious possibility of mitigation.

So be it. Be well, all and take into account that, no matter who wins, the 20s are not going to be a good time unless you’re already quite well-off.


The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Page 7 of 29

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén