The Politics You’ve Got

It took me a long time to realize that as much as I dislike identity and cultural politics, it is here to stay. I overestimated how much people vote based on “rational” criteria like economic self-interest, and in any event, people define that self-interest in many different ways. In fact, much of politics is tribalism, symbolism and low-information voting, not because people are stupid but because they are smart.

Many people see learning about and participating in politics as a waste of their limited time. They would rather spend their limited free time with friends and family or watching TV or doing something more enjoyable than following politics. Those of us who follow politics are likely more biased and ideological than we like to think. Others who follow and participate in politics do so in a way that is more reminiscent of sports fandom than anything else, which is why you have partisan “hacks” on both sides of the aisle.

If you are a left-wing person committed to reformism then I think there is a case for voting for the Democrats in 2020 even if somebody like Joe Biden is the candidate in the general election.
For example, you are more likely to get more of what you want with a Democratic
administration, even if it is very little. The judiciary alone is a legitimate reason for a leftist to hold their nose and vote Democratic. This does not mean that you have to be enthusiastic about the Democrats, or that you stop engaging in other forms of activism. Voting is only one form of political participation.

Things will likely have to get worse for more Americans to support a truly radical agenda. Too many on the left don’t see this. They forget that while things are worsening for millions of Americans, others are doing well or doing well enough that they don’t seem to see that we are heading for disaster.

The only reason that we are even talking about economic inequality now is because conditions have seriously worsened for more Americans and the misery is moving up the social ladder and is not just concentrated among minorities and poor whites. The upsurge in popularity of social democratic reformism is a result of the downward mobility of middle-class and upper middle-class elements. Without this change in material conditions there would be an even stronger systemic bias in favor of continued neoliberalism.

I can respect an argument in favor of “the worse, the better” logic but remember that first, there is no guarantee that left-wing radicalism will win out in a future crisis as opposed to right-wing radicalism, and second, that many of our weakest citizens will be hurt in a crisis scenario. I think that is where we are today.

We are stuck in a weird place where things are worsening but there is still enough “juice” left in the old system so that there is still a case to be made for reformism if only to help ameliorate conditions and prevent the right from taking full advantage of any future crisis.

“Tom: Mmhmm. Enslave women or burn the world. OK.”

Well Mandos, if people want a return to “cognitive normality”, this is what that looks like in these here parts. Only women born with lots of advantages get exempted, and they are too busy being awesome to concern themselves with what their shining leaders do to the smallfolk and their women.

Welfare reform. Snipers on the wall. Grannies in tent cities. Iran in flames. I mean darn if that isn’t some reassuring cognitive continuity I just don’t know what you people expect.

And oddly enough, I agree with you that Biden will win here and anybody other than Labor will win in the UK. And the majority of people in both countries will not get a break until something happens to persuade all of the lovely people who have profited from these arrangements to give a happy damn about the rest of us.

Or, to put it in terms Ian has used, it DOES have to be this way.

Joe “you’ll hold your nose and vote for the candidate we tell you to vote for” Biden?

I foresee another write-in None of the Above vote in my future.

The first time is always the hardest.

Sorry, “fundamentally behaved most Americans” should read “fundamentally betrayed most Americans.”

And the advantage of Biden, from this perspective, is precisely that Biden presents an opportunity to force the recalcitrant portions of the Democratic party and, yes, the American left insofar as it plays electoral politics, to choose explicitly once again whether it will acknowledge and ratify that feeling, or whether it will die on a hill of particular material policies to the neglect of vital institutional decorum.

I live about ten minutes away from our county seat, a fabulous little town that is one of the best small towns in the country. It is populated by a supermajority of folks whose precious feelings are aggrieved by the sordid spectacle of the Trump administration, and who cannot abide the trampling of their precious norms. Their feelings are not widely shared outside of the town in question, and certainly weren’t in 2016, when only in this town could one find a clearly dominant majority of Clinton yard signs. It is a town dominated by PMCs – doctors, lawyers, and financial asset managers. It’s quite lovely, and we would live there, if only we could afford the housing costs and property taxes.

But their feelings are no more valid than those of everyone else, and the turnabout, lo, in these past 15 years or so, is rich fuel for schadenfreude. During the Cheney Regency, we were told endlessly that the citizens of Flyover Country voted against their material interests, and for various culture war issues that could be summarized as matters of feelings and norms. And now, all of those PMCs are issuing a diktat to the rest of the country, both the Right and the Left: vote against your material interests, and in favour of our precious feels, because our precious feels are weightier, and altogether more precious, than your feels could ever be. Yes, there is the difference that their feelings rather neatly and conveniently align with their material interests, which were well served by the Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama (and hopefully for them, Biden, or whomever-but-Bernie) deconstruction of the American economy. However, since they are willing to so dogmatically and superciliously insist upon their feelings as a universal trump card (pun intended), they forfeit the right to insist upon the invalidity of the feelings of their political and cultural opponents, who regard their own feelings and norms similarly.

No need to recite the Te Deum of the indictment of this class. Suffice it to say that some of us predicted this as far back as the early 90s. We told you so, and bore your insults, more or less until sometime in late 2015 and the emergence of the Sanders campaign. No more. We’ve been told that neither our material interests, nor our feelings and norms, nor we ourselves matter, for at least two generations. So, no, PMCs and other neoliberals: f*ck your feelings and damn your norms. I, and I suspect others, will either stay home, or write in our dogs.

“Voting against the establishment” is a euphemistic phrase for “old racist white people who wanted immigrants out, women put in their place, and black people to stop protesting against police.” Why are people surprised that the generational cohort that cut their political teeth on Reagan and Thatcher also happen to be the current day “old people”, and old people have high rates of voter participation and therefore control the political debate — because they have power. To counter this you either let them win — that’s Tom’s answer, a “peace” where immigrants are murdered and women enslaved, but hopefully you have health care (someone should check in on Viktor Orban’s “slave law” to see if pivoting to “other issues” is working, or the Australian election that has these same miserable old racists embracing climate death and coal) — or you figure out how to best mobilize the opposition and hold the breaches back until all of these old boomers fucking die. It doesn’t help that climate crisis in the background is like a ticking time bomb and we don’t have much time left, but that’s the politics we have.

Biden will be a disaster of a president. But one would hope that people stop clinging to “heighten the contradictions” to get their achieved political results. Clinton would be much better than Joe Biden, but throwing the election resulted in a more conservative direction. Most people are not revolutionaries, and they just want the beatings to stop. Also notice that Trump is destroying material conditions in rural areas, and they’re voting for Republicans in even higher numbers. “The cruelty is the point”, and they love him for it.

Fast forward to the mid ’80s, and Bruce Cockburn’s song about our Central/South American doings, If I Had a Rocket Launcher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9HFjErMMlA

Lyric sample:

I want to raise every voice, at least I’ve got to try
Every time I think about it, water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims’ cry
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die

And we’ve slid even further downhill since.

The fuss at Daily Kos over abortion is a good example of how the sellout wing of the Democratic party works.

With any luck, the furor over abortion will herd the Republican soccer moms back to the Democrats. The party will use that support to get Biden elected, who will then make a deal with those nice Republicans to keep the Hyde Amendment in place. Then rich women will still have birth control and the rest of the women in the country will not.

The media outlets for the Biden Democrats will make sure the truth gets buried. So all those stories about the horrors being inflicted on poor women will never appear on The View, or MSNBC or Daily Kos.

Since it looks like a lot of us will be writing in our dogs, let me say now that my dog is a really good boy and would make a great President.

People like Bill Hicks like to think they’re different than your average Trump supporter, but his clearly stated preferences align very much with what Trumpism is about: cruelty and sadism. Hicks wants people hurt, he loves it, he revels in it, because “they” deserve it. He likes the increased drone strikes under Trump, the higher civilian casualties, the higher numbers of children in detention and concentration camps (remember, Ian insisted for Trump to be fascist that there had to be camps, a ridiculous assertion that nonetheless is happening anyway). Just like Trump and the rest of his supporters love it. Comes from the same authoritarian impulse; the ones cheering Brexit “from the left”. And you wonder why the liberals hate you.

Tom and Someofparts

As someone who lives in Appalachia and in the Bible Belt, I don’t think that abortion rights are the big monster and obstacle you make it out to be. The anti-abortion vote is only 28 % nationally (67 % for abortion rights). Even when you break it down by state:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/abortion-views-in-all-50-states-map

There are only like seven of 50 states where you could say anti-abortion views are strong (say 10 % more than the pro-abortion rights total). There are lots of flyover country states where it is either about 50/50 or pro-abortion rights. As long as the Democratic party or whatever party you propose is pro-Civil rights and pro-gay rights, you’ll lose many of those same voters anyway plus you’ll lose massively in your current voters.

It is true, however, that following a truly progressive economic policy would win back many of the voters in those states who are motivated by job loss and outsourcing and not motivated by being against voting rights, gay rights, or abortion. In my experience, anyway many of the people against all these social issues are economically more upscale and comfortable; middle-class at least if not upper-middle class or above. The local chapter of our Eagle Forum years ago, was a rich asshole living in the ritzy part of town; I’m sure she was never worried about someone outsourcing her job.

@nihil obstet He can\’t because like his neoliberal brethren Mandos engages entirely in magical thinking.

@Tom,

If those “heartlanders” you reference who wish to burn the world rather than submit to legal abortion and illegal immigration succeed in burning the world, they won’t recover from the ashes. They will be part of the ashes just like the rest of us.

I will offer to split the difference with the “Tom’s heartlanders”. Yes to legal abortion, no to illegal immigration. Deal? Good. We can put out the fire together. No Deal? Okay then. We can just watch the world burn together. Too bad, so sad.

Biden? Nice try, guy. No sale.

Since Biden is not necessarily “worse” than Trump ( although Biden does support genuine real Bandera Nazis in Ukraine so that the company his son is involved with in Ukraine can frack for gas and oil all over the super-fertile black-earth bread-basket belt of Eastern Ukraine . . . which is one of the things the East Ukrainians are rebelling against) . . . I won’t vote for Trashy Trump if Catfood Joe gets the nomination. But I won’t vote for Catfood Joe either. I will vote for some futile gesture vanity third party wannabes.

Catfood Joe wants to take away my Social Security. And I won’t vote for that. If that means that Trashy Trump wins, then let Trashy Trump win. And if the Social Justice GenderRacial Warrior snowflakes want to cry, let them cry. The more they cry, the less I care.

“the Neera Tandens of the world do not merely represent a type of think tank class traitors in cahoots with the rich, but they are actually the genuine grassroots representatives of a large portion of American society”

Neera Tanden hasn’t been near a grassroot since her ass hit the ground when she was learning to walk.

From wikipedia, “Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, regional, national, or international level. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures. Grassroots movements, using self-organization, encourage community members to contribute by taking responsibility and action for their community.”

Mandos is bedrock Establishment, and in defense of that Establishment, we get these flip inversions. Neera Tanden is a poster child for top-down, elitist Establishment politics. That is she is as anti-grassroots roots as it gets, but wave a wand and the Establishment becomes the new grassroots. Taa-da. You get the same thing from Establishment politicians like Nancy Pelosi who have hated and shot down every progressive idea they have ever come across blithely self-describe themselves as “progressive” whenever it is politically expedient for them to do so. But just because they say it doesn’t make it so.

I think most of the commenters here overestimate how popular the Left is. There are plenty of people who prefer centrist Democrats over Bernie-style liberal populists. I personally know a good number of them. They consider themselves to be good liberals but they are not fans of Bernie, AOC and others like them. A big part of it has to do with their relative affluence but I know others who are less affluent but just don’t like anything associated with socialism. I know these are anecdotes but there are millions of people who are Democrats but who are not on the Left in any meaningful way.

The Left is not strong enough to just completely dismiss “lesser of the two evils” voting because our system basically guarantees two major parties. We are in a situation where you have to choose one or the other or waste your vote on an anemic third party or not vote at all. So why the aversion to damage control? Just to take one example, if Clinton was president you would almost certainly be getting less conservative judicial appointments. That has to mean something. If you don’t care about abortion or other social issues, you have to admit that Clinton judicial appointees would be at least somewhat more pro-labor than Trump appointees.

We need to get it through our heads that many, perhaps most Americans do not want radical change right now. Even if there is a socialist or social democratic “silent majority” they are outweighed by the politically more active and influential partisans who care more about culture war issues, race, symbolism and partisan affiliation. These are the activists who dominate politics and especially primary voting. This situation will not change until the underlying conditions of the country change to become more amenable to radical politics.

@Mandos,

On the subject of workarounds, I think some people are so fed up with the neoliberal consensus and the way politics works in the USA (and perhaps the UK too, I am not as familiar with British politics) that they are becoming less willing to accept playing the game of politics and want something more radical hence the rise of figures like Bernie, AOC and Trump. They represent a kind of “outsider” politics that promises to shake up the rotten Establishment. That is where a lot of the impatience with “lesser evil” voting comes from.

Dissatisfaction is also related to the decay of American political institutions. The result is that people increasingly hate politics and look to populist figures to change the system.

Here are two articles that influenced my thinking on this issue:

“How American Politics Went Insane” by Jonathan Rauch
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

“Insider Nation vs. Outsider Nation” by Michael Lind
https://thesmartset.com/insider-nation-v-outsider-nation/

The only wasted vote is a vote for someone or something you don’t believe in. I am not responsible for making up for or overlooking the crap awful deficiencies of Democratic candidates.

I suppose you could rationalize voting for the lesser evil as a one off. But over the last 20-30 years this has turned into the permanent rationale for why progressives should vote for anti-progressive Establishment Democrats. It has gotten beyond decrepit for many progressives, and most millennials never bought into it.

Mandos always espouses the Establishment line and approach. I don’t get what he thinks he gains or is hiding by pretending otherwise. As for the “issue under discussion,” this too is a con. Who gets to say what that issue is? It’s usually Establishment politicians and media. So shut up, progressives, and only talk about what the Establishment wants you talk about and how they want you to talk about it. A great example of this was back in 2009 and early 2010 during the great healthcare debate. The only allowed discussion was Obamacare, the Establishment issue. Universal single payer/Medicare for All was taken off the table, and progressives who insisted on raising it were stifled or banned.

As for Mandos’ false association of Neera Tanden with the grassroots, I note that he did not retract it but simply equivocated on it.

Finally, I would add that we all should know by now that Trump has not only failed to discharge his office of President but is supremely incapable of doing so. It is a damning realization. But we should also recognize that in the face of this, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House has equally failed to discharge her office by not just not opening an impeachment inquiry into this most unfit of Presidents and indeed torpedoing all efforts to do so. The argument in defense of Pelosi is something along the lines of Trump would never be convicted in the Republican controlled Senate. But this misses the point. I have duties as a citizen. You have duties as a citizen. Nancy Pelosi has duties as a citizen. Even the Donald has duties as a citizen. Outcomes are not guaranteed, but that is no excuse for any of us not to do our damn duties.

“Take a look at Joe Biden—he appears to have, for now at least, considerable staying power in the Democratic primary opinion polls … .”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36QXSnSRgM

Meh.

Oh, and Mandos.
If you give a politician enough rope, they don’t use it to hang themselves. They use it to hang you.

This democratic socialist will abstain from voting in the general if a neoliberal democrat wins the primary.

I’ll suffer the noose rather than compromise my values.

MojaveWolf, Although I have never read The Silmarillion, you speak for me with the other points of your post…again. Thank you!

I’m startled to see repeated here that “the left is not popular” in the US.

Aside from the unprecedented turnout in 2016 primaries for Sanders, in a country that has long marginalized any political persuasion other than the duopoly, the truth is american of every persuasion agree on leftist POLICY–healthcare, minimum wage, education, against foreign wars, debt peonage and spiraling housing costs.

Americans voted for fake populist Trump because he promised much of what Sandernistas want to enact. And to give a big FU to both shite parties.

No, no, no the job is to find a way their vote will actually count towards the policies they already know are needed. A half dozen DSA’s in Congress and six more in the Chicago City Council is a start.

Biden ain’t it.

Mandos

The first step in making the USA or UK or anywhere else “more amenable to radical politics” is to recognize where these countries “are”, politically, and grappling with that head-on. Instead, I see attempts at side-stepping and workaround. But there are issues under discussion that are going to take primacy.

No, I think you misunderstand mechanisms.

The road you are seemingly advocating (or accommodating) is the continuation of 40 years of Democratic “realism”, of moving to the right. Its result is:

1) The Republican party moved further to the right and became the party of ideologues, fruitcakes, and bigots;

2) Saner heads that found the increasingly hateful and nutty politics of the Republicans distasteful became Democrats. However, this had the effect of continuing to pull the Democratic party further to the right, economically, at least.

3) As the Democrats moved right, they lost the “real”, FDR- and leftward, Democrats, who became independents This is why Sanders does better among independents instead of Democrats; the independents are not the mythical ‘centrists’ occupying the space between the Democratic and Republican poles but the economically leftward (and often socially too) people who the Democrats betrayed and abandoned.

This is the real reason why Clinton and Biden do better among “Democrats” than Sanders, because “Democrats” today are the moderate Republicans of yesteryear. As the US electoral system severely punishes attempts to form alternative parties, this means the left was disenfranchised.

The solution can be found in movement conservatism. You see, movement conservatives *did not* meekly take shit sandwiches “as the best that could be had” and smile and vote for the lesser of two evils by their reckoning. Many of them were perfectly willing to see the Republican candidate go down in flames in the general if they felt he was a RINO. The Reagan Republicans had money and institutional advantages that the left lacks, true, but their not-play-nice strategy won.

The Left should follow likewise. There can be no triumph of what the Left wants as long as left-leaning voters accept people who will sell them out as “realists”, like the Clintons, like Biden, like Obama. Changing the increasingly banana-republic politics of the US (where you have a ‘left’ party but it’s as bought out as the right) means you have to transform the Democrats (or replace them) with a true left party. Succeeding in that so will lose the Clintonistas, the Obamacrats, and the followers of Senator Credit Card, and drive these to the Republicans–but that’s a good thing too, as it will improve the Republicans as well; if people like Bernie become more the center of the Democratic party instead of its left fringe, then the Republicans will become more like Eisenhower Republicans.

Mandos’ go along to get along argument works equally well with people and policies. Better to pass a bad bill than no bill? | Ian Welsh- Mandos says yes, at his place.
“A bad bill has a chance of defeating at least one pernicious meme: that no Congress or administration can alter US health care delivery systems, which are wholly broken.”
https://www.ianwelsh.net/better-to-pass-a-bad-bill-than-no-bill/

Yesterday morning, riding the bus, I used my phone to write a “meta” comment on the Mandos post that I thought was quite good with the intention of using the bus’s wifi (yes, transit buses in LA have free wifi on the bus) to post it — analytical and dispassionate as well as insightful — and of course all my brilliance was lost when I changed buses. Sigh. In the meantime, the comment thread was burning like a forest fire with far greater eloquence than I could ever manage. Sitting now at my ‘puter, I am going to write a different “meta” comment, recalling some of what I was thinking yesterday, but it will be a poor, dull light at best, in comparison with what has been posted since.

Really some outstanding comments (including Mandos, who kept his cool and reiterated his points clearly). Hugh and MohaveWolf were among the commenters whose efforts I most appreciated.

@ bruce wilder,

Several years ago, I read an entry somewhere about a “peasants movement” based in Balkan Europe ( and most of all in Bulgaria) lead by fully literate thinker-leaders of genuine peasant background. This was for a couple of years after the end of World War One. In the color-coded shorthand world of European Politics, they even called it the Green Party, to distinguish it from the various Reds and Browns and Blacks of that time and place. I have never even been able to find another reference to that Peasant Movement/ Peasant Party . . . ANYwhere. It seems to have been very effectively memory-holed. Perhaps someone schooled in the deepest arcana of Bulgarian political-intellectual history between the wars might know about this.

The Reds, Browns, and Blacks all agreed that the Greens had to be destroyed and their supporters banished back into invisible obscurity deep behind the Haystack Curtain.

About Neera Tanden and whose grass is rootier . . . she and her thinker-tanky Spin Mill remind me of a lawn service that used to be called ChemLawn. Now it is called TruGreen because TruGreen sounds better than ChemLawn. But it is still the good old ChemLawn that some people knew and loved. They would use all the high-powered chemicals needed to get your suburban lawn green green green and impress the neighborhood. They put the “manicured” in Manicured Lawn. Here is their website.
https://landing.trugreen.com/ppc/b?aitrk=us-lawn-brand&MarketingPartner=Bing&AdType=CPC&mkwid=SEzhgHLC_dc|pkw|chemlawn|matchtype|be|slid||ptaid|kwd-80058346393528:loc-71170|pgrid|1280931275480851|pcrid|80058265709173&keyword=chemlawn&pmt=be&group=Chemlawn&campaign=b2_North_New_NonGeo_Brand_Chemlawn_Core_Exact&detailedtheme=&currentnew=new&adcopy=&utm_campaign=b2_North_New_NonGeo_Brand_Chemlawn_Core_Exact&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing&utm_term=chemlawn&ptaid=kwd-80058346393528:loc-71170&pgrid=1280931275480851&msclkid=959695d00694167e16c3c939b639d484

Neera Tanden speaks for the millions of well-off suburbanites who support Clinton and still long for some way to take the throne away from the Usurper Trump and restore it unto the Rightful Queen Hillary.
These millions of Jonestown Clinties are a real force and presence in the Democratic Party. They help put the “Catfood” in Catfood Democrat. In honor of the real demographic force of their rootiness, I think we should call them the Manicured ChemLawn roots of the Catfood Democrat Party.

Bruce Wilder your reply is a great read. It serves as a cautionary tale for leftists. And a wonderful antidote to the musings of Mandos.

I enjoy that Ian has Mandos post here. I have many friends/ family who repeat the liberal Democratic line that they hear on NPR , read in NYTimes, watch on CNN, etc. So it is nice to have someone bravely spell out that position on a lefty blog and let me mull over what Mandos has to say. It helps me hone my disagreement.
Secondly I often feel a little lonely in my political leanings and so feel a sense of community when I read all the intelligent rebuttals to the liberal dem line.
I know that the polling data reflects that being against eternal war/regime change, mistrusting the intelligence services, wanting national healthcare, rolling back ridiculous interest rates, holding corporate criminals to account for their crimes, stopping student loan debtors indentureship, keeping government out of decisions about what you do with your body(recreational drugs, sex preferences, reproductive health decisions) all poll well as majority positions, not out-liers. These are all left positions. but you do not hear these positions taken seriously in the political class.
I always look forward to a Mandos post. Of course I always vehemently disagree.
Where else would you get brilliant bulletpoints like StewertM’s ?

“1) The Republican party moved further to the right and became the party of ideologues, fruitcakes, and bigots;

2) Saner heads that found the increasingly hateful and nutty politics of the Republicans distasteful became Democrats. However, this had the effect of continuing to pull the Democratic party further to the right, economically, at least.

3) As the Democrats moved right, they lost the “real”, FDR- and leftward, Democrats, who became independents This is why Sanders does better among independents instead of Democrats; the independents are not the mythical ‘centrists’ occupying the space between the Democratic and Republican poles but the economically leftward (and often socially too) people who the Democrats betrayed and abandoned.

This is the real reason why Clinton and Biden do better among “Democrats” than Sanders, because “Democrats” today are the moderate Republicans of yesteryear. As the US electoral system severely punishes attempts to form alternative parties, this means the left was disenfranchised.”

Perfect!

The fundamental problem with the people who disagree with Mandos — the ones who have something positive to contribute and aren’t just people with warped views and conspiracies (the ones who are Putin, Assad, Gaddafi apologists, for example, have fundamentally warped views) — is the refusal to learn from the right wing, that “laying out policy proposals and anyone who disagrees with those proposals is a shit-lib” doesn’t win anyone to your cause. The real issue is refusing to understand what motivates people, to ascribe bad faith motives to people who have fundamental disagreements and mistrust. And why shouldn’t they mistrust you? You just told them you’d rather throw them to Trump and his mob if you don’t get your way.

For example, why not run people like AOC in safe districts? Ayanna Pressley? Ilhan Omar? In order to do that, you need to talk to communities who have power! The vast majority of “the professional left” has no connection with the places and people they want to win over. You can’t do it by telling them what they must do. “Just run on my platform and you win” isn’t very convincing when you can’t even show proof of concept. And 75% of the comments come from the same place of “my way or the highway”. Politics doesn’t work that way, especially in a place as diverse as the US.

@Mallam,

I agree with running left-wing candidates in safe districts but there are people on the left who don’t even understand why sometimes you need to support somebody like Joe Manchin, just to take one example. There is simply no way a “democratic socialist” can win in West Virginia right now. Manchin did in fact have a progressive challenger, Paula Jean Swearengin, and he beat her fair and square in the primary.

As bad as Manchin is from a left-wing perspective, he is still better than any of his Republican alternatives especially on many economic/labor issues. Manchin is a good fit for West Virginia. You aren’t winning West Virginia and many other places with an AOC or Ilhan Omar type of candidate so you should take the best you can get. Getting 50 percent or even 25 percent of what you want is better than nothing.

Despite all of the talk about the progressive wave in the midterms, at least as many moderate Democrats were elected.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-house-will-have-just-as-many-moderate-democrats-as-progressives-next-year/

Right now we have to work with the country that we have and if you are on the left and support a broadly left-wing worldview, it is better to hold your nose and sometimes vote “lesser of the two evils” while working to move the country in different direction.

” Neera Tanden is actually one major voice of a real (small-d) democratically significant popular constituency”

In Mandos land, if a carnie like Neera Tanden razzle-dazzles a bunch of rubes and lines up enough marks for the fleecing, she becomes a “major voice of a real (small-d) democratically significant popular constituency.” No. Tanden is running one kind of a con. Mandos is running another. Tanden is using Democratic tribalism to corral a bunch of voters into voting against their own interests. Mandos’ con is to legitimize this operation. To this end, instead of a cynical, hackneyed political operative, Mandos transforms Tanden into a “major voice” as if she is expressing the true interests of this group she has managed to manufacture, and not what she is actually doing which is overwrite the interests of her financial backers on to this group. Of course, Mandos has to wrap this crass manipulation into higher, more noble sounding verbiage. According to him, the goal of these marks is to find candidates “’who will restore order to the republic’ and views progress on other issues as impossible until a certain kind of procedural order has been restored.” In other words, they need to vote for the return to full power of the Establishment which has betrayed them and accept that they can’t have nice things because that “certain kind of procedural order” will make damn sure they never get them.

Like today’s pop music, the politics we’ve got was carefully designed and manufactured to satisfy our baser, and worser, instincts and desires, so that a few can max-profit. A lot of things are now that way. Less risk for them, less quality of life for us. Welcome to the idiocracy machine.

Under this system progressives will need a pop star who’s secretly, a competent progressive. Yeah that’s it. Lets trojan horse the system. Lets give Mandos a new do, slap on some makeup, and have him sing on one of the TV talent shows. From these humble beginnings…

To steal an idea from Bruce Wilder and comment w/out vitriol on the substance, and simultaneously explain WHY the substance induces vitriol:

In The Gospel according to Mandos, leftwingers should be willing to follow the lead and throw our support behind the Biden/Tanden/Corporatist wing of the Democratic Party, because this the key to long term improvement and achieving left-wing goals and avoiding worse global warming and more/worse wars, even though, over the past 30 years to the present, said wing has consistently

(1) worked to destroy the working class while displaying utter contempt for said workers whenever the workers fail to appreciate and show proper gratitude for their ever increasing misery;
(2) worked to increase the surveillance state;
(3) increasingly devoted themselves to a war-profiteering and a culture of permanent war with an ever higher body count and ever worse destabilization of different parts of the world;
(4) worked to undermine/undercut actual efforts to help the environment and fight global warming while pretending that they are the champions of fighting these things;
(5) worked as hard as possible to demonize and smear any actual leftwingers who wish any actual non-corporatist, pro-worker, truly pro-environment policies enacted;
(6) chose to attack Trump on an obviously made up bullshit conspiracy theory rather push policy alternatives;
(7) cheer Trump when he makes warmongery sounds;
(8) occasionally condemn Trump for not being warmongery enough;
(9) consistently demonized and seek to discredit anyone who failed to fully back any of these things
(10) gotten vastly worse about all of these things over the last 30 years, including the bulk of that time, pre-2015, when there was no meaningful leftist voter block saying “screw you assholes”,

Because, if we decide to support the people who are doing all these things, they are suddenly going to do something worthwhile, when they’ve been in power at least half the last three decades and failed to do any such things, and increasingly devote themselves to attacking the very idea of doing anything worthwhile, and smearing those who try to do something worthwhile?

This is why people are furious.

Also, according to Mandos, if a top-down diet of propaganda is fed to people non-stop with a media saturation not even possible in previous times, with techniques honed to a degree they haven’t been in previous times, those people who buy that propaganda are grassroots, and one of the main people pushing the propaganda is the voice of the grassroots.

This is why I think you are trolling.

Yes, it’s a constituency, but most of it is nothing resembling grassroots, and those who actually do hate everyone but the technocrats and their woker-than-thou mouthpieces are not anyone to be worked with; they are deadly enemies to be defeated, and who, very importantly, view US as THEIR primary enemies to be defeated. These are not people who, at the present moment in time, can be worked with or given any quarter, from a political point of view; it’s like saying “work with Mitch McConnell”.

These fine people Mandos wishes us to submit ourselves to and work with and turn our backs on and view as allies are the same people saying “Bush was really a pretty good president and it would be so much better to be back to the days of sending our economy into a near depression-level tailspin and screwing up the entire world for possibly forever by invading Iraq under false pretenses and ignoring a host of warnings to let people hijack planes and fly them into our cities and ignorning a host of warnings to do nothing to stop New Orleans from drowning, and it would be so much better to have him back instead of Trump.”

They are the same people who lied non-stop about Bernie in 2016 and now, and do things like ask him to apologize for opposing Nicaraguan death squads and the Iraq war, they think the Iraq war and the destruction of Libya were good things; they tell one lie about Tulsi after another while smearing her for things said as a home-schooled 17 year old raised in an ultra-conservative family, rather than giving her credit for getting beyond that,

And now they (and Mandos!) think we should support a guy who kept saying GOP administrations weren’t drug-warriory enough, who supported and I believe co-sponsored the Hyde amendment (and we’re supposed to do this to help protect women’s bodily integrity and reproductive freedom!) and who chaired the Anita Hill hearings and ….

Seriously, this has to be trolling.

Feanor was one of the Tolkien characters I was thinking of when I said Mandos was unlikable in a dreary way, not an interesting or anti-hero way; Feanor definitely fell into the latter camp, iirc.

I\’ll grant you it\’s been over 30 years since I\’ve read The Silmarillion, but background for those who haven\’t read it (and should this entire line of conversation get moved to the open thread?)(this shall be lacking in subtlety, cause shorthand version):

The Valar, including Mandos, were in Tolkien\’s world sort of a combination of Greek and Norse and possibly other pantheons re-invsioned as sort of bunch of Archangels / Gods rolled into one (all under Illuvatar, mostly absent, who pretty much resembled the new testament creator god of love talked about by Jesus).

The most powerful of the Valar was Melkor, who more or less corresponded to Lucifer/Satan. The whole continent on which all of these and the Elves resided was lit up by beautiful trees, which basically gave a prettier and nicer version of sunlight. Feanor, creative genius of the elves, captured some of this light (without harming the trees) in beautiful jewels called the Silmarils.

Melkor turned evil and started whispering in Feanor\’s ear, gradually turning him paranoid and convincing him that everyone else was out to get him (given the extent to which Melkor/Morgoth was able to warp people\’s perceptions and deceive even his deity brethren and sisters, one can argue how much there\’s freewill and how much Feanor should be given a pass/opportunity for rehab, but that never came up). Then Melkor killed the trees, essentially putting out the sun. Feanor had gone full dickmode by this point and refused to turn over his jewels to the other Valar to restore life to said trees (also, if you\’ve read Tolkien, treekiller=very bad person; killing special trees especially bad, failing to help restore the trees, and for that matter light to the world, also obviously bad, so Feanor has gone full dark at this point). Whilst Feanor and the other Valar were arguing, Melkor killed Feanor\’s father, stole the Silmarils, and ran off.

Feanor renamed Melkor \”Morgoth\”, which stuck and sounds suficiently nasty, and he and his kin wanted to go after Morgoth, kill him, and retake the Silmarils.

The remaining Valar had two people, Tulkas (sort of a vastly nicer and vastly more powerful version of Thor/Hercules with a bit of Herne the Hunter thrown in) and Ulmo (sort of a vastly nicer and somewhat more powerful Poseidon) who also wanted to go after Morgoth. The rest, with Mandos (the character) cheering on this viewpoint, chose to do absolutely nothing and let Morgoth go into our world where he did lots of bad things and would have done more but for what comes next.

Feanor gets to where all the ships are and the elves there refuse to let him have them. He kills a bunch of them and takes their ships and goes sailing.

IIRC, there was zero effort on the part of the very upset Mandos (or other Valar) to prevent this situation or outcome or aid the elves whose side he was presumably on.

I seem to recall Mandos was almost as upset that Feanor and the elves would challenge one of the Valar as that Feanor killed other elves for their ships (forgive the lack of discussion around the exact whys and wherefors of motives/discussions/negotiations/conversations prior to the bloodshed here, I don\’t remember it), and made comments about how \”none of you have any chance against any of us including Melkor who you named Morgoth (which name stuck)\” with an implication that \”even though he is much worse than you in every way and responsible to some degree for your bad acts, we are going to enjoy watching you get killed by him, and not just you, but all your descendants/followers/allies too! Here\’s my curse, to help make sure Morgoth wins in your struggle that all your descendants and followers and allies get punished for what you did! Even for thousands of years, even when they are trying to do good with nothing but hte best of intentions! Because I\’m all about the justice and fairness!\”

Morgoth then went to our world, where caused all manner of evil and corruption and warped entire civilizations. Like Feanor and his followers or not, they were the only ones opposing him, and when left alone tended to live in peace and harmony, and without them (and the non-Mandos type supernatural beings who occasionally helped them) things in our world would have gone much worse, to all appearances.

(I can\’t think of how to say more without being excessively spoilery to major story points)

@DifferentClue — I agree with all your points here and in your comments upthread and you are probably right about Mandos not trolling; I’m just being an incurable optimist about human nature here and trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

@ S Brennan and some others upthread who liked one of my prior comments! I apologize for almost never having the time to do this anymore.

@DC Hugh & all the others who’ve made comments– thank you!

@Mandos– the first time I tried to post my 2d Silmarillion comment; it said I was a spambot and I couldn’t figure out why, then realized your name had somehow gotten in the field where it should have said “MojaveWolf”; if this ever shows up I promise I wasn’t pretending to be you and I don’t know how that happened (and if I was going to try & pretend such, I’d at least try to sound like you, as opposed to myself–we have very different writing styles and I don’t think anyone would have believed you wrote that anyway)

fwiw I agree w/Ian about exposing people to different points of view, and even if I didn’t it’s his blog and he can do what he wants; he can let Neera Tanden post here if he wants to; my problem is more, as said above, that I perceive Mandos’ posts to be propaganda efforts, not actual statements of his real beliefs, in part due to things like “Neera Tanden=grassroots”. Maybe I’m wrong. Or, hopefully, he’s just trolling. 🙂

@Mike Barry,

As long as voting-boycotters remember to come out and vote about things of particular interest at their own mini-regional and micro-local level, a voter boycott against the Catfood Democrat DemPrez candidate could be an okay approach. It would at least be a passive-default withholding of numbers from the Catfood Candidate.

Now, if those vote-boycott comtemplators were to instead vote for the vanity third or fourth or fifth party of their dreamland unicorn pony heart’s desire, would their actual vote for an actual non-approved candidate or party be more “counted” and “noticed” than if they had left the Presidential line blank? What if all the ” Can the Catfood!” voters actually voted for some on-the-ballot alterna-miniparty? Those votes actually would be counted and added up. What if their numbers were bigger than the number that Candidate Catfood ends up losing the election by? If that actually happened, and were undeniably seen to have happened, then the NO CATFOOD! voters could take actual reality-based heart in the undeniable-in-the-event fact that the Catfood Democrats will NEVER elect a President without the NO CATFOOD! vote in addition to the ChemLawn roots vote.

At which point the NO CATFOOD! weed roots could resolve to vote NO CATFOOD! over and over again, until the Catfood Democrat Party could be exterminated from political existence and wiped off the face of the political map. Then the NO CATFOOD! New Dealocrats could focus on trying to win elections with the Cat Foodists rigidly excluded from any contaminative presence whatsoever on the New Dealocrat Party.

Let the ChemLawn rootists and the Cat Foodists all move to whichever two or three states they can take over totally. Let them have their own kitty litter politics where they can’t keep preventing the rest of us from getting nice things.

yeah, Neera Tanden as Voice of (at least some large number of) the People was practically designed to provoke a strong reaction, a reaction that was right-on as far as I am concerned and made important points about the top-down, manipulative nature of partisan and ideological politics. That the reactionary “feeling” concerning “vital institutional decorum” that Mandos wants to ratify expresses stupidity, ignorance and irresponsibility and is promoted with arch-cynicism by the tools of the worst of the billionaire class to block urgent and necessary economic reform is something that really ought to be acknowledged.

Pretending that Russia,Russia,Russia or other memes of Trump Derangement Syndrome is a narrative bubbling up spontaneously from popular concern and the well-functioning organs of a free press is to deliberately overlook the structural nature of political dysfunction and its origins in the very plutocratic domination that the Left, practically by definition, struggles against.

That said, Neera Tanden’s tactics have worked. The effectiveness of her tactics in the present environment and state of politics have made her reprehensible strategy effective. It may be the degenerate state of politics and political media — the structural problems of living under a plutocratic oligarchy — that enable a Neera Tanden to thrive and so Neera is just an example, not an individually important person. I tend to think about it that way.

The question remains, what can be done?

I am not worried about Joe Biden. Mandos wants to surrender 500+ days out to a 76 year old politician who has proven his rank incapacity as a presidential candidate in previous outings and who presents as being on the wrong side of all the “particular material policies” that form the focus of the Left, from bankruptcy to trade policy to mass incarceration. Biden is the ripe target the Left should be grateful for, not an occasion for despair or joining nonsensical talk about what is “normal”.

Still, considerable damage has been done to Left political discourse by Trump Derangement Syndrome, Russia,Russia,Russia and similar memes. I can think of a lot of examples of opinion leaders and even opinion platforms that have lost their bearings. Many went south trying to justify Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to themselves and others and have never come back.

The ability of journalists and pundits to reason effectively in distinguishing facts from narrative — never high — seems to be reaching new lows as whole media platforms like CNN specialize in provoking emotion with speculation with very little reference to facts or considered judgment. Rachel Maddow rules someone’s world.

I think politics really does need radical, structural reform driven by material concerns from and about those below as well as from and about the catastrophe enveloping the natural world. And, those agendas are being stymied by the induced stupidity and complacency of the liberal, professional classes.

Telling people who are being amazingly stupid that they are being stupid lacks persuasive power. But, what else can be done? Seriously.

I hope we can return to these issues, maybe without the trollish provocations. There is plenty to get upset about without those.

@BruceWilder — great post.

My major concern about Biden is that the Dems seem as invested in cheating as the GOP — notice not only their failure to back any of the bills insisting on paper ballots, and indeed their general resistance to the idea, and whatever you may think about 2016, but look at the 2018 election in Cali —

I didn’t vote for Antonio Villaragosa (sp?) or particularly want him to win, but somehow over 100,000 people got thrown off the rolls by accident in LA, where Antonio used to be the mayor? (the establishment Dems wanted and got Gavin Newsom from SF).

You could say “these votes would not have been enough”, and that’s true, but how do we know this is the only cheating going on? Especially since Gayle McLaughlin, running for Lt Gov as independent (and who was one of the only candidates I actually cared about in this mid terms), somehow got FEWER votes in Richmond, where she had been elected and RELECTED MAYOR, than in a previous long ago run for statewide office before she had ever been elected anything.

(& especially since, I say as someone who lived here, there is no chance on Earth, Heaven or Hell that those primary results were right; anti-social as I am, I do interact in a friendly fashion w/the general public and that last time I saw as much support for one candidate over another as Bernie over Hillary was when I grew up in small town Alabama, for Reagan over Mondale. Sure, HRC had her primary support in the Coastal cities, but she supposedly won in the Inland Empire where I live also, by a significant margin. Yeah, I know, it’s cause all her supporters were either unable to walk and so not getting out much, or living in terror and not expressing there views while the Bernie people shouting in the streets so as to make them appear more numerous than they were, and all the exit polls all across the country were wrong even tho they were right for the R side of the same races, etc etc)

These kinds of things are why I think paper ballots are a MUST before anyone should ever again trust any American election, even aside from propaganda, which keeps getting weirder (aside from the general war is peace crap going on these days, has any candidate polling as low as Tulsi supposedly is EVER been hit with such a non-stop onslaught of propaganda? it’s worse than what they’re doing to Bernie and he’s one of the front-runners, however you look at it)(possibly in part because she is pushing for paper ballots, as much as the anti-stupid-wars stance)

@nihil — point out to whoever these people are that the military is not a monolith, nor the ex-military, and there are LOTS of left-wing, and lots of anti-war-profiteering sentiment regardless-of-wing. Tons of “Veterans for Bernie” groups out there; I think probably half of Tulsi’s support comes from veterans, and except for Gravel who wants either Bernie or Tulsi to win, these are the two most left-wing, anti-war candidates running.

I never enlisted (I’m not much a joiner, I don’t take well to getting yelled at, and the idea of living in a barracks unable to get away from other people for an extended period of time actually distresses me far more than the idea of getting shot at, or even shot and killed, so even in my youthful conservatism I always passed on the idea), but I spent many years (not doing anything interesting, alas) working primarily w/military and ex-military, so I know enough to know that most people’s idea of what military types are like is some combination of simplistic and wrong (I mean, yes, there are plenty of people who fit every stereotype you want to think of, but there are plenty of people like that in every walk of life; and most military are very good people even if you don’t like the causes they fought for; some of them don’t approve of those causes either)

Disclaimer–my observation tends to indicate that the higher you go up the ranks, the more the trend toward conservatism, it is true. But the counterpoint to that is that most of the people getting shot at, who I confess get a little extra deference from me as well, are not the higher ups.

@DifferentClue — I can see bouncing off this one, and I think there are CliffNotes for it. I think the beginning of the Silmarillion was sort of like a more poetic Genesis about the creation of the world or somesuch? It was written more as a history, from creation to end-of-first-age on Middle Earth, so if you weren’t already a Lord of the Rings fan, I totally see not having the patience to get into it. Also, some people just don’t like Tolkien’s writing style that much (I’m obviously not one of them). I used to read Greek & Norse mythology for fun as a little kid, so I was just the right kind of person to appreciate this particular book. To be fair, Tolkien was fairly pro-rightful-authority, so he probably had more sympathy for the bulk of the Valar than I did, even while still clearly having a lot of sympathy for the elves.

On a totally different note, pushing this just because I like it even tho it has very little to do with this discussion–try watching Killing Eve. It is awesome and compulsively watchable and not at all boring, and the two leads are amazing. The title character is interesting, but the stone cold psycho Villanelle that she is chasing is one of my favorite characters ever, stone-cold psycho status notwithstanding. Bad guy in a totally fun way. Also, one ep has a great piece of dialog that is totally relevant to this blog: “I think if you go high enough you’ll probably find we work for the same people.”

Killing Eve is pure fun. (Tolkien would not approve of Villanelle, I’m pretty certain, nor *should* anyone approve of Villanelle, nonetheless I’m usually pulling for her & wish her to live happily ever after once the series is all over)

@ mojave wolf,

There is much Tolkien writing that I did like. I enjoyed reading The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings.

The dash through Mirkwood reminded me of the local neighborhood woods I used to run around in back in East Tennessee.

thank you, Mandos, for your response

she is also offering something that a good chunk of the Democratic base values is completely neglected. And that neglect makes it in turn impossible to discuss rationally what that offer is, without a kind of moral sneer. That is fatal.

First of all, I do not think the nature of the offering is “completely neglected” at all. It was, for example, the subject of extended and clear-eyed observation in Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? which is a work that I see echoed often enough in comments here. Adolph Reed has been sometimes brilliant delineating the way antiracist intent filters thru identity politics in ways that subvert concern with class and economics. I could name other salient voices on the Left — many of which are severely marginalized from the mainstream media, but that is another issue of resources and institutions — who have been looking at this for a long while past.

What the base itself “values” — its appetite to do good and be seen doing good, or to be part of something larger — is not itself the issue for me in any case.

I could have said a lot more about what Neera is offering and why it appeals and why I am mostly OK with the political appetites involved among the Democratic base, but for my purpose the important point — the sharp end of the stick — is that Neera Tanden is offering bait, not a meal — bait sweetened with the saccharine of symbolic gestures and a narrative drama of false Manicheism that is offered in a scheme of psychological entrapment.

Your prescription is to join the patient in his delusion, as a psychologist might in treating a neurotic lost in elaborate fantasies or paranoia. Reducing politics to the clinical psychology of the self (cf Adam Curtis The Century of the Self) is itself the political disease afflicting us. And you seem to be saying we should stop worrying and join the zombie apocalypse, because feeding them our brains will turn the situation around?

Mallam “you either let them win — a ‘peace’ where immigrants are murdered and women enslaved or you figure out how to best mobilize the opposition and hold the breaches back until all of these old boomers fucking die” did not seem to me all that interested in “serious involvement with the communities in question” at least if the question is about the sensibilities of the sort of suburban (formerly?) Republican women that the Democratic Establishment hopes will win the day.

Whatever Neera Tanden is feeding some large part of the Democratic base, it is not political power for that base. The political system is not responding to the concerns of that part of the Democratic base watching Seth Meyers make jokes about Trump or Rachel Maddow breathlessly anticipate the next “development” in the Mueller / Impeachment saga.

Getting a large number of people thinking that Russia nefariously tipped the election in Trump’s favor with hacking and Facebook ads — Neera Tanden’s Center for American Progress played a significant part in creating and promoting the Russia,Russia,Russia narrative thru the political news Media — was an achievement in political propaganda. It was an exercise of political power for political power. I do not think political power ever touched ground with the audience; the audience — aka the Democratic base — was simply the mark. Whatever political power they might have, potentially, evaporated or was hijacked by players and purposes off-stage.

Their credulity has contaminated their values and their reason. You can read that view as condescension, pity, despair or a simple assessment of clinical fact. I see it as a failure to organize politically. Politics is a team sport and a participation sport. Organizing from the top-down is easier than organizing from the bottom-up and there is a lot of pre-existing top-down organization all ready. I am not even sure that true or pure bottom-up organizing is even possible — sooner or later, leaders emerge and manage. Still, political organizations can be membership societies, driven by the needs of their members; or the members can be a mailing list, manipulated by professionals for someone else’s purposes.

Some political organization may be dedicated to a public purpose, more or less. When a political media seeks to arbitrate debate and regulate the political discourse, by verifying facts and assessing the quality of judgment, that might serve. Or, something else might be happening. Access journalism and PR for the powerful, while bringing in ratings points.

The process of organizing politically changes people’s views, refines and improves them in the best case. (or, not) I do think we ought to question in any significant act of political organizing or institution building whether the values of the base are being served or merely manipulated for someone else’s purpose.

Neera Tanden is engaged in top-down on behalf of interests I find reprehensible. Ignoring the interests in the driver seat for a moment, I also think Tanden in cooperation with corporate Media is engaged in a kind of political organizing that’s actively destructive of people’s political values and judgment. Once you think a $100,000 of amateur Facebook ads, half of them appearing after the election, swung the result or that the “pee tape” is a remotely plausible scenario, you are pretty much ruined as a citizen participating in the political discourse. The sheer volume of speculation and innuendo can wear out the intellect of anyone paying any attention at all.

It is not just that it involves top-down organizing. (Like I said, to some large extent it is all at least partially top-down; at best, when I say, “bottom-up”, I am nodding in the direction of any political organization where the leadership serves the membership, and not as dinner to some lord.) I think the participation in the prevailing mode of top-down organizing by manipulative narrative transmitted thru mass and social media is a kind of ersatz political participation. It is not real. You are not asked to show up. Or, to think critically. Or discuss in an exchange with others, even as some few may be doing here. Quite the contrary: you are asked to suspend disbelief to enter into a speculative fantasyland by MSNBC or some social media threading. What you get is a personal, emotional experience — emotionally stimulated perhaps but less informed after than before. Perhaps you get a vague sense of being aligned with a nebulous band of righteous misfits fighting for the forces of light against the Night King. What you don’t get is a concrete, material benefit (go Lambert!). Nor do you develop a realistic view of political issues in controversy (which mostly do involve material benefits)

I do not think it is some idle “changing the channel” to suggest to people who are caught up in a web of professionally crafted political narratives not of their own making that, perhaps, they ought to also want material benefits from their political soldiering.

When I am confronting someone deep into Trump Derangement Syndrome, longing for the “normal” of Obama, I sometimes offer that Obama made a great mistake when he gave the banksters immunity from prosecution. I have never, ever had someone come back at me saying, no, they really wanted the old “normal” of rampant, unpunished corruption and predation continued, that they are grateful to Obama and Kamala Harris for giving Steve Mnuchin a pass so he could serve the country under Trump. It has never happened. Go figure. I guess values are elastic that way.

@Bruce Wilder — Thank you! Your patience is amazing! This entire comment is spot on!

To illustrate which comment I’ll just quote this bit: for my purpose the important point — the sharp end of the stick — is that Neera Tanden is offering bait, not a meal — bait sweetened with the saccharine of symbolic gestures and a narrative drama of false Manicheism that is offered in a scheme of psychological entrapment.

Your prescription is to join the patient in his delusion, as a psychologist might in treating a neurotic lost in elaborate fantasies or paranoia… And you seem to be saying we should stop worrying and join the zombie apocalypse, because feeding them our brains will turn the situation around?