I don't really see these people. Usually, I can't avoid hearing what Greenwald says, but the rest of them don't come to my attention or if they do, I don't know enough about them to know they are leftists.
There seem to be large numbers of people who want to get one up on people like me either because I'm a liberal or because I'm a neiliberal. They're both probably partial right, but fuck them.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who are too leftist to think of themselves as Democrats. I have pretty much no sympathy for anyone too leftist to think of themselves as a Democrat who's heavily involved with or interested in US electoral politics (as opposed to grass-roots organizing or some kind of direct action) who isn't firmly aligned with the Democratic party as against the Republican alternative, even if they despise a whole lot of specific Democrats.
Anyone on the left who's rooting for or trying to bring about damage to the Democratic party without a clear immediate plan of how that gets to a further-left alternative is either irrational or lying about being a leftist (hi, Glenn Greenwald!).
It is really weird! ("Russiagate is made up and the only reason people pretend to care is because they don't want to admit that Hillary Clinton fucked up the election" is the official line in my internet circle, because I am this type of leftist.)
But it's obvious that everyone only believes the government when the government is saying something they want to be true! Like, the left is deeply skeptical of the FBI when there's a possibility that something negative about Russia/Trump will emerge, but totally credulous about Barr and by extension Mueller when it's convenient, and that's just the reverse of the regular Dems.
I feel that this is due to willfully missing ideology on the part of the center and corrupt ideology on the part of the left.
The obvious, obvious thing is that Trump isn't a "Russian asset" in some kind of Manchurian candidate way; he's a corrupt rich person who has some kind of deeply crooked ties to crooked people in Russia and who is forwarding both his own rich-person agenda and the agenda of the global right. This is not because he's a puppet of Putin; it's because he's a rich fascist and is acting in his own interests. Centrists don't want to admit this or don't want to recognize it because it puts the spotlight on capitalism and fascism rather than "America's enemies".
And of course, for various pathological reasons (weird Russia nostalgia, unwillingness even to appear to agree with centrists, firm conviction that any enemy of America is a friend of the left, immature belief that politics is about picking sides) large chunks of the left want to believe that this is all made up.
Similarly, it's incredibly obvious that the loss of the election was overdetermined and there's plenty of blame to go around. The Clinton campaign failed in important ways that the Democrats don't want to reckon with, but the electoral college, voter suppression, racism, middle class fascist impulses and larger "exhaustion of current social models" effects plus the whole "difficult for any party to hold the White House for three terms" bit, Stein voters in key states, etc were equally important. Everyone just waltzes around blaming the people they hate the most, though, instead of figuring that everyone is responsible for the factors they control and "other people were also bad" does not let you off the hook.
This is an age of fantasy, basically. What's real is so terrifying that we're all trying to tell ourselves stories about how it's someone else's fault, or how this one weird trick will fix everything. It is very demoralizing.
Totes agree, Von Frowner, and I'd just amend this: The Clinton campaign failed in important ways that the Democrats don't want to reckon with to replace "The Clinton Campaign" with "The Obama administration". Even in his second term, when he was not giving a fuck about Republicans, he had no spirit of AOC in him, when that's what the country actually needs.
6: I'd agree with most of that, except that I think there are plenty of people who are being pretty realistic about the Mueller investigation/report, not limited by ideology. It's just that making fun of people you disagree with is satisfying, so there are a lot of people attributing intense beliefs about Russia-gate (or whatever to call the whole mess) to anyone they want to call naive.
Specifically, I think the belief that Trump was a Manchurian-candidate Russian agent is pretty rare -- the most intense common hope for the Mueller report was that Trump's usual corrupt rich-guy business maneuvering would have included some stuff that was provably criminal in terms of his interactions with the Russian government. It looks as if that that didn't pan out at the level where Mueller was willing to bring indictments, but it wasn't ever unrealistic.
A problem with "the left" (I mean, it's a problem with everyone, but I don't care about everyone) is that we tend not to see ourselves as shaped by the forces that shape our age. We tend to assume - just as people assume that advertising works on others but not on them - that we're sitting out here coolly observing the naive idiocy of the normies.
Which is why:
1. The left that's effective right now is either new, only loosely part of "the left" or allied with new forces - AOC, the DSA, orgs that have grown or grown more active recently like RAICES, coalitions that have existed largely outside "the left". The "Old Left" is still fighting a series of last wars except where it's actively joined the new.
2. The "Old Left" failed just as much as the Dems. Like, I have been around the left for-fucking-ever at this point, and as neoliberalism/the old social order/whatever has fallen apart, did we step into the breach? We did not! Sometimes we made feeble gestures in this direction but nothing came of it. I argue that this is more for structural reasons than People Are Terrible reasons; the Old Left is a product of its times and conditions.
3. This is a time of rupture and new social formations are coming into being. But recognizing this from the outside and being able to act in some useful way is pretty difficult. There's a lot of foolishness going around and a lot of new strategies and it's difficult to separate one from the other.
So my takeaway here is basically "don't overestimate your own ability to see what's going on and don't underestimate other people".
9: To be fair to the old left -- I'm not sure exactly where all the new left energy came from, but I think a lot of it goes back to Occupy Wall Street radicalizing people who then went and did stuff. And I think the old left gets a lot of credit for supporting OWS and helping make it happen.
Specifically, I think the belief that Trump was a Manchurian-candidate Russian agent is pretty rare -- the most intense common hope for the Mueller report was that Trump's usual corrupt rich-guy business maneuvering would have included some stuff that was provably criminal in terms of his interactions with the Russian government.
Corrupt rich-guy business maneuvering when done as president or candidate make him a Russian agent.
It looks as if that that didn't pan out at the level where Mueller was willing to bring indictments...
Trust the process?
11. I think OWS and Black Lives Matter are going to be way, way more important when the history of this moment is written than people are currently willing to admit. (Consider how widely hated both have been on the center and parts of the left.) Both of them advanced a systemic critique, both involved a lot more working class people than many movements do and neither was led by old guard upper middle class leftists; both were sort of sustained and gave birth to a lot of stuff, more so than Battle of Seattle/anti-WTO things IMO. I mean, both are products of systemic collapse rather than common or garden inequality.
And I'm not really disparaging individual "old left" people or groups so much as saying that the habits that grew up through the eighties and nineties don't serve the left well now, and that it's difficult for those of us who are de facto Old Left because we are so very, very old now alas to recognize that the habits and ways of thinking that sustained or formed us are not what is needed now.
12.1: I think the distinction here is between
Trump being nice to Putin for his own ends (ie in order to keep getting funding from oligarchs, and get permission for Trump Tower Moscow),
and
Trump doing what he's told by Putin because of MICE (Money Ideology Compromise Ego, the four classic reasons for someone to become a traitor).
The order flow from Putin to Trump, or lack of one, is what makes him an agent, or just a (corrupt and probably criminal) supporter and sympathiser.
No War But (Respecting my 401k) Class War.
To be clear, I would say that 14.1 is 90% likely to be true and 14.2 more like 30%.
I'd put 14.2 even a little lower -- I'd think that Trump would be bad enough at taking orders competently that I can't see a sensible person trying to put him in that position. But there's plenty of criminal behavior available in the 14.1 category.
I'd say so, the open question is provably criminal 14.1 versus not.
18: pretty much, hence 90%. But it is not impossible that Trump is nice to Putin simply because he likes Putin, because Putin is living what Trump conceives to be the good life - crush your enemies, see them driven towards you, and live in a big gold palace with a hot young Slavic chick. And that oligarchs will continue to fund Trump regardless of whether Trump is nice to Putin, because it's a good way to launder money.
I'd put 14.2 at near zero if what it implies is puppet-master level control. Instead we have 14.2, which Trump uses for personal dealing and political/international dealing.
I think Trump is nice (sometimes) to Putin for the same reason he's nice (sometimes) to Kim, which is because it's the method of "making a deal" he has used all his life. You flatter people and nod your head a lot, clap them on the back, propose your maximum "want," and then you start yelling at them or walking out or whatever. Then you repeat.
You can see him doing this on the "wall." He's not really all that invested in it as a thing, he's invested in making a deal, damn the details. Those pesky Democrats won't budge, and those pesky Trumpistas won't shut up if he budges.
Frowner, your analysis is super useful, thank you.
A bunch of old enviros in my field are gathering to ask why they've lost so much power and influence and how to get it back. But like you said, they are super fixed in the thinking of their generation and the old fights. They want to do better, but can't envision what that is.
Your analysis is really helping me understand this group and how to work with them. I appreciate it; thanks again.
20 doesn't explain Trump's bizarre emasculated behavior whenever he's in Putin's presence. Remember Helsinki?
Frowner has been really on point in this thread.
agreeing v much with frowner and ogged with the caveat that "the left is deeply skeptical of the FBI when there's a possibility that something negative about Russia/Trump will emerge, but totally credulous about Barr and by extension Mueller when it's convenient, and that's just the reverse of the regular Dems" may be true for non-lawyer white person left, but lawyer and poc left not so much. the degree to which people have been in the tank for valorizing mueller, the fbi, doj in general has been fucking nauseating. the vast power of the prosecutorial and police state in this society is horrific and the sanctimony and self regard of your average ausa truly epic. it's gross gross gross all the way down.
I was going to say Mrs Putin is a perfectly respectable lady but I see now they're divorced.
I get that you're talking about your circles rather than certain usual suspects who are overprominent thanks to Twitter, Frowner, but I still think/hope (in some combination) that that unproductively contrarian spirit does not characterize the left's efforts overall. A lot are focusing on the local and national organizing and positive visions (Medicare for All, GND).
Some of the Russian kompromer tricks just seem too obvious to work, but then maybe other old men have lots of times where young women they've never met before are really eager to have sex with them or maybe I'm overestimating how quickly I could rationalize things if given the opportunity.
I think you're conflating old men generally with "rich old men who spend a lot of time either explicitly with sex workers or in plausibly-deniable sex work situations." That is, for example, I doubt Trump really thought Stormy Daniels had the hots for him.
I was reading a piece about kompromat in the Atlantic and they were talking about the tactic being used on journalists and lower level political leaders.
That is, for example, I doubt Trump really thought Stormy Daniels had the hots for him.
My guess is that he did. But Trump is a special case.
I probably don't want to remember how widespread the plausible-deniability sex worker client base was in Russia.
Is a little hard to distinguish between the Russian mafia and the Russian government, so it's hard to distinguish between the "Machurian candidate" situation and the situation where Trump is essentially an adjunct of the Russian mafia. I still think the latter is largely true, even if it turns out that Mueller has concluded that the former is false (which I'm not really sure he did, not having seen the report, and not trusting Barr at all).
Manchuria is also really close to North Korea.
What's the case that OWS gave birth to anything productive or useful? It seemed like the worst kind of lefty process-centric nonsense that generated no policy ideas and no political pressure, and I've been bitter ever since that energy was wasted on it at a time when the iron was hot.
I'd have to do some looking around to remember what I was reacting to, but I think I've seen a lot of young democratic socialist politicians say that they got into politics and activism through OWS -- enough that I got the impression it was a common pattern. If it started a lot of careers that will turn out to be effective, it will have been useful.
And I think the concept of "the 1%" as salient in the public mind was new with OWS and is very politically powerful.
crush your enemies, see them driven towards you, and live in a big gold palace with a hot young Slavic chick
That does sound pretty good I mean I am appalled at the depravity of the ruling class.
I know it's old territory here, but I'm baffled by the attitude that OWS didn't accomplish anything. That is the first time in my entire life that I ever heard anyone (outside of my family or lefty blogs) make the case that inequality was a problem. The mainstream media didn't even have regular language for talking about inequality. And now it's become a mainstream idea.
That is the first time in my entire life that I ever heard anyone (outside of my family or lefty blogs) make the case that inequality was a problem.
I think that some of that language disappeared during the 90s (amid the dot com boom). I don't have much sense of the mainstream political culture of the 80s, but at some point I found the Jesse Jackson campaign video which played before his speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, and was struck by just how strange it feels, both in the choice of imagery it uses, and the tone it takes, compared to contemporary campaign videos.
I don't know how mainstream Jackson was in 1988, but note the network anchor saying at the end, "Jesse Jackson has arrived to deliver the most widely anticipated speech of this convention. Even though he is not the presidential nominee he is clearly the most gifted orator in the Democratic party today."
That was a time when the Democrats were deeply committed to sucking.
Seeing the dumb leftists online actually keeps reminding me of a story Frowner told here years ago about student protestors in the 60strashing Adorno's office, and feeling sorry for Adorno. I didn't have much sympathy for Adorno in that story, but I now feel like I know how he must have felt.
I know most people have a positive view of Occupy Wall Street, but I think it was a total disaster. There was a rare opportunity to push the country left, and OWS sucked up all the energy of the opportunity and then completely wasted it. People are more radicalized because the biggest economic calamity since the Great Depression is an intrinsically radicalizing event. All we got out of that radical energy was one snappy slogan of the 99% versus the 1%. The complete inability of the left to take advantage helped lay the groundwork for the return of fascism. The mainstream was discredited, and the left couldn't get organized, which left space for the right.
And I think the rightwing insanity we're seeing is backlash to seeing some real successful motion to the left in Democratic politics. I don't think the right moved into a vacuum, I think they're fighting a positive trend.
A lot of leftists have been really turned off by Greenwald and Tracey and the gang, so the cool position on Twitter has shifter to backlash to the backlash.
OWS started in september 2011. Not sure how an immediate focus on elections or policy demands or whatever would have made a difference at that point in time. A movement like OWS would never have gone on in the same form for much longer than it did anyway, and a lot of immediate policy wins weren't on the cards. They did change the conversation, radically, they did create energy and momentum.
And there were only 3,5 years between OWS and the Bernie campaign. The energy never really dissipated.
It's maybe the opposite, I don't know if leftists would have become so electoralist and pragmatic if OWS hadn't been so extreme in being so anti-hierarchical and horizontal. Lessons were learned.
42,43 ???? Much of America apparently resents change of any kind-- explicit nostalgia with white dominance of everything as part of the fond "memory" is super-popular. An escape from being informed about anything is not a reasoned decision. Seeing democrat's policies or statements as especially influential in that seems surprising to me, beyond the visceral reality of a president who wasn't a white guy.
Understanding that the crash of 09 had causes is niche activity, any such conversation may as well be in koine. People are not interested in hearing explanations-- "global warming is a hoax" gets shared, that is voluntarily broadcast, while "Miami's skyscrapers need 24/7 water pumps now" is confusing. "Obamacare is the ACA" is too much detail.
45.2, others above. The other candidate that Russian trolls supported was Bernie Sanders. Russia doesn't care which incompetent gains prominence, their goal is the suppression of competence and reason. Apparently they don't need to do much for that suppression to happen.
It's not just that nobody wants explanations. If the explanations involve race, even very correct, well-supported explanations will make many white people vote their racial anxieties instead of their interests.
For those who don't know, the Greenwald clique have been crowing and taking a victory lap for several days, which has struck most people as weird and unseemly.
The Greenwald clique shouldn't be read as the Intercept. I've seen several Intercept contributors retweet things that implicitly rebukes Greenwald in pretty harsh terms.
Is that different from Fox News? Every now and then, somebody on Fox points out that somebody else on Fox is more than the usual amount of horrible, but nothing really changes.
(This is a question I'm asking from a low knowledge base, not a rhetorical point. I never paid attention to where Greenwald was publishing, so I hadn't heard of the Intercept.)
It's extremely funny to me that Ogged is now the voice of the left on the blog
45: OWS didn't change anything. The conversation changed because the establishment drove the economy into a ditch. People didn't have their minds changed because of anything activists said, but because they woke up one morning and found out everything they'd been told about the economy was wrong. OWS simply took the energy that was there, and wasted it on a bunch of hippie bullshit. It was the death rattle of the Old Left.
Sanders deserves more credit because his campaign at least articulated a policy vision.
43: The right wing backlash is a backlash against the mainstream, not the left. It's a backlash against the people in power who let foreigners pollute our bodiliy fluids.
Wait? Is that why Kraft only had to pay $80 for a handjob?
Contextual note for people reading the archives in the future: "Kraft" refers to the owner of the New England Patriots. We did not have cheese, but in a way you couldn't understand.
39: That is the first time in my entire life that I ever heard anyone (outside of my family or lefty blogs) make the case that inequality was a problem.
This again? We talked about this 6 years ago.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_13053.html
See Clinton's 1992 speech at Wharton, John Edwards 2004 speech at the Dem convention, and it was Edward's entire schtick in his 2008 presidential campaign. Here's the Clinton speech.
http://www.ibiblio.org/nii/econ-posit.html
Yeah, still alive and scan the comments from time to time.
The Intercept has its issues, but with the exception of Greenwald, they admirably focus on ideologically driven reporting, not take writing and opinion, so nothing like Fox News.
I'm inclined to agree with WS at 52. OWS sprang up in the context of widespread realization that, not only had the establishment driven the economy into a ditch, but they were apparently going to suffer no consequences, were remaining in charge, and in fact were doubling down on "We're the responsible grown ups here who understand how things work and the rest of you children should just shut up already".
I recall a lot of disbelief and frustration that no one knew what to do with. OWS did something with it, but arguably in a way that wasted the opportunity.
Gswift!
Gswift! Good to see you, you comment-cherry-picking-dick. You left out "I know it's old territory here, but..." at the beginning of the comment.
comment-cherry-picking-dick
They were a one-hit wonder in the 90s.
comment-cherry-picking-dick
The truth is for suckers! Speaking of which, what in the hell is the SA in Chicago playing at?
https://mobile.twitter.com/craigrwall/status/1110997231551873024
Maybe Smollett had a card from an NYPD officer.
Let me be the first to say: gswift!
Gswift! But only because his comment strengthens my case. My approval is always conditional.
I don't mean to just pick, I'm really interested -- what were people like Walt who think that OWS wasted an opportunity thinking that an unwasted opportunity would have looked like? How might an effective movement under the same circumstances have turned out?
Forced breaking up of the larger banks?
A bunch of bankers sentenced to hang but the sentence is replaced with life in prison as so many wealthy people were exposed to the possibility of execution that they got together and saw the death penalty abolished?
But how would a popular movement have gotten there from here?
LB asks my question. What works? We're still trying to figure that out, and I am averse to criticism of anybody who is out there trying to do something. What useful work did OWS undercut?
That used to be my attitude about the leftist critique of Obama, too. Hey, the guy is out there winning! Leave him alone!
But I am increasingly persuaded by the ogged/LB argument that his presidency was, in important respects, a missed opportunity. Watching Bernie and AOC has been, for different reasons, illuminating.
Obama was always hyper-conscious of backlash -- sensibly, in my view. But could the backlash have been worse than it actually is?
And it's not that I mind criticism of people who are trying, I just badly want specifics of what could have been done better.
Obama literally said to Wall Street "I am the only thing between you and the pitchforks".
Me and my torches. I'm forgetting the pitchforks, which are vital.
I randomly ran into a Bernie Sanders rally in SF on Sunday and he was heavily using OWS terminology (99% vs. 1% framing + demonizing big business). Pretty sure it at least Changed the Discourse.
I know nothing about OWS*, but I think the underachievement** of the Obama administration is hardly disputable.
*Except that my brain wants to parse it as Octopoid Web Services.
**And catastrophic failure, in foreign policy.
I don't hold the underachievement of the Obama administration against him; I understand the institutional problems and Republican opposition.
But I deeply resent that he covered for it. He personally acted like it wasn't house on fire, and we trusted him and he was wrong.
I also think that he should have seated Merrick Garland as soon as Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings. Senate refusal to hold hearings should have been interpreted as an implied Yes, not a No. Basically, Obama needed to flip the defaults to make bad behavior a problem that hurt Republicans rather than a method that rewarded Republicans. That's the sort of thing where Obama was inadequate to the urgency and his duty to the country.
I don't think it's very likely we'll do much better than Obama in my lifetime. The U.S. system is set up to take large majorities over successive elections to produce any big improvement. The changes of the past two years are going to make it harder.
The kind of open call the arms Megan talks about is necessary, but it's going to tend to freeze things politically.
Re 4.1 vs 4.2, isn't it fair to say that if there's one thing we can be sure of it's that Putin is the one with the power in the relationship, also the brains? So the relationship will have been whatever he (not Trump) habitually prefers -- arm's-length sycophant/self-starting satellite-runner or full-on mafia soldier (with deniability) as the case may be. I can't bring myself to read any of the Putin biographies myself, so don't know which it is, but it does seem like there should be a knowable pattern here. And fwiw he strikes me as more a 4.2 kinda guy....
At one point, 2/3 of democrats believed that it was "definitely true" or "probably true" that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected."
This was fucking insane. There never was any evidence of this.
the professional dems kept things under control and prevented it from being an issue in the 2018 elections, but the Russia obsession was no joke a real problem.
And, now that shit is over and I am happy I won't be called a Russian bot on twitter anymore.
I don't hold the underachievement of the Obama administration against him
I can't work up any genuinely visceral dislike for anybody who is broadly on my side -- such as Obama or OWS or Bernie or Hillary or whoever. I have so many better targets for my rage.
However, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi et al are not on my side.
Taibbi is consistently progressive and clearly cares about the homeowners he wrote about in the Obama years. He's probably an asshole but if he's a blowhard about Russia now it probably connected to crazy people calling him a traitor for two years.
Greenwald isn't a reliable ideological ally of anyone since he's a narcissist weirdo, but "not on my side" still feels like pretty unhelpful when there's toxic levels of distrust and resentment in online discussions. Any side will be full of unlikable people, or people with bad character. He's broadly left of center.
70: AOC over the last three months is what an unwasted opportunity looks like.
I agree that Obama was a disappointment. I was thinking about Brad deLong's recent mea culpa, and how it embodied how stupid the Democrats were. Even if you are a policy moderate who only wanted to thinker around the edges, it was still obvious that the Republicans had turned to a program of extremist class war against the poor and middle class all the way back in 1980.
But I also agree with 88. There's a certain fraction of "leftists" whose real enemy is the center, and they are happy to align with the right against that enemy.
85: My sympathies.
I don't think some leftists's fears about russiagate panned out, but maybe that's because it got a bit of pushback!
"At one point, 2/3 of democrats believed that it was "definitely true" or "probably true" that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected."
Link.
"There's a certain fraction of "leftists" whose real enemy is the center, and they are happy to align with the right against that enemy."
No. Red-brown people barely exist. Poo pooing one specific controversy is not aligning with the right.
Greenwald and Tracey are just career minded and narcissistic. Greenwald pals around with Carlson, but there's hundreds of liberal/centrist journalists who'll happily go on Fox. No one in that crowd is all that leftist anyway, other than foreign policy/natsec issues I guess.
Most people will agree in theory that global warming is the major issue of our time, or at least one of them, but they still just post about mayor Pete or Brexit or whatever. You can come across leftists who spend all their time shitting on the centre-left - that's not the sum of their political priorities. People write about their pet issues, they rail about the things they *enjoy* railing against. They may react to what's in their timeline, they may be carrying out some feud.
Shitposting isn't activism. There's no leftwing activism that can be characterized as aligning with the right.
What about aligning with scotsmen though, does that count?
Red-brown people barely exist.
This really took me a second.
"There's no leftwing activism that can be characterized as aligning with the right."
Except that time we're hoping everyone has forgotten about.
And funny you should mention Brexit because that is a great example of an issue where the far left, or bits of it, really are aligning with the right. "We must leave the EU so we can stop immigrants coming into Britain and taking jobs away from natives" is a policy vocally espoused by both the British far right and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. (Latter in March 2018.)
At one point, 2/3 of democrats believed that it was "definitely true" or "probably true" that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected.
I'm trying to figure out where this problem ranks on the list of misconceptions held by Americans. I am at a loss. Surely there are at least a thousand or two false beliefs that are more important.
If Erik Garland shit had become mainstream, if ordinary dems would have become as paranoid and authoritarian as fox news grandpas, things would have turned pretty dark.
A dreadful prospect to behold, from these broad sunny uplands on which we currently stroll.
101: That's it exactly. There are people who think the important, interesting problem in the US today is that Trump might, in some scenario, be treated unfairly.
I am not worried about this. Not even a little.
I don't know, I just don't think you can say that because AOC is having a moment now, OWS or Obama or whoever could have done something different a decade ago. Things are fluid. What was unthinkable in 1962 becomes inevitable in 1968. I think the Obama/DeLong moderation string had to actually be played out. Just as the ACA and Republican advertising that they could use some sort of market approach to provide an even better system has had to be played out, to make room for actually better solutions.
Megan, it's easy to say Obama should have "seated" Garland, but what does that actually mean? Swear him in? Send the 101st Airborne to escort him into the Supreme Court building? Somehow force John Roberts to recognize him as a justice? Obama would have been impeached, and there would have been at least 67 votes for removal. Why not call for Obama to appoint his dog as the senior senator from Kentucky? (A marked improvement!) Or just call for him to eliminate the Senate altogether? ISTM that he has the same power to do that that he has to "seat" Garland.
DTUC, what definition of activism doesn't include shitposting? I'll agree that it's not "leftwing" to disparage and demoralize for one's own entertainment, but selfish assholes are distributed (hopefully not evenly) across the political spectrum.
IIRC Obama was legally able to appoint Garland in the recess?
For like, a few months. A year, maybe? It would have to have preceded the non-consideration of Garland.
Lol
Funny for you; not for those of us whose friends and colleagues and relatives are immigrants.
People like Garland and Mensch are utterly crazy conspiracy theorists, they're also nationalist and authoritarian, especially Garland. Their diehard fans have become like fox news grandpas, they've become the thing they hate. And you saw a larger group of people flirting with that mentality for a moment in 2017. It wasn't gonna take over the democratic party, but it could have become more of a thing than it did, something lasting. But most liberal pundits and influencer derided them instead of ignoring or embracing them. That needed to be done, you needed to draw a line in the sand. Tolerating them would not have been savvy and pragmatic, it would have been foolish and irresponsible.
This confused me until I figured out there are two Garlands here. It these people are like Fox in terms of crazy, they sure aren't as central to the Democratic party as Fox is to the Republican.
98. Corbyn is old enough to have been caught up in the "Alternative Economic Strategy" agitation that the left wing Union leaders were pushing in the '70s. And he doesn't seem to have shifted on that, like on everything else. He should really be put in a glass case somewhere for school outings to go and gawp at.
(It's notable that the Trots, who were locally influential in the '70s and opposed joining the EEC because it was a capitalist club, have come round to being ardent remainers. Unfortunately or otherwise, they're no longer remotely influential anywhere.)
109: The followers of the fringiest grifters are very marginal, and people who thought things like that would become massive had a distorted and overly uncharitable view of mainstream liberalism.
But there was a brief period in 2017 when they had a moment, including the fringiest people - Mensch had a NYT op-ed, Garland was intially praised by a bunch of centrist journalists (not actually by any left-liberal journalists, I don't think). It was disconcerting to people to see a non-trivial number of middle of the road regular people acting and talking in a way you thought only republicans and conspiracy buffs do.
There's still people accusing anyone disagreeable of being a russian bot, and presumably that was an intended effect of the russian bots, to sow distrust and a toxic, fractured political climate.
I don't recall that moment, but that's after I stopped reading the NYT.
Let's put it this way. I think you could find a dozen people deeply committed to the idea that both parties are at risk of being dominated by crazy extremists for every one person who was a crazy extremist in the Democratic party.
Or really the hacking itself, I doubt the Russians expected Trump to win.
Which is what stopped me reading the NYT, though I still read Bouie's twitter.
Also, a majority of the cookiest of these people are what's referred to as alt-center, not liberals, even though the media referred to them as such. Their heroes the CIA and the FBI, after all.
81. 104. Is there any evidence other than wishful thinking that if the Republicans had brought Merrick Garland's nomination to the floor, he would have been confirmed? Obama would have had to nominate someone else, then they'd have turned that nominee down, too. Repeat until the election. What am I missing here?
That they spared themselves having to vote on those nominees and then defend those votes in an election.
94.2: Is this some new dramatic frontier in gaslighting? We're talking about a red-brown alliance to let Trump off the hook in this very thread.
Though one irritating thing about political discussion online is that the dumbest leftists will declare themselves the True Left, and the rest of us a bunch of sell-outs. Fuck Glenn Greenwald and his pretensions to be a leftist. I was here first.
104: Clinton-style centrism was already played out. Obama had an opportunity to move away from it, and he didn't. His unwillingness to recognize it allowed the Republicans to outmanuever him again and again. The sequester was a good example, and maybe Garland was another.
AOC (and Sanders for that matter) are very different from OWS. They attempt to actually lead.
AOC won an election. OWS wasn't elected officials. The scope for action is different.
OWS pissed off Mellon Bank by sleeping in their park for so long that they now live in fear of young people who even sit down.
It's moderately interesting that the earlier part of this thread went in the diametrically opposite direction to the previous Mueller thread.
On OWS specifically; ISTM that in general the actual direct correlation between protest action of that kind and actual change is generally fairly small, and usually the value of such moments is in raising the political consciousness of those involved in them - who then go on to do valuable things elsewhere. Which doesn't seem so bad - there's value in learning remedial civics and basic organising principles.
120.3: I don't know how many real openings Obama had given how intransigent the republicans were determined to be. But it's true that both Obama and his administration seemed to genuinely believe that the only grown ups were to be found among those politically to their right, and that everyone to their left were dirty f*cking hippies. And post-Bush II the time when that was a remotely reasonable thing for anyone to believe was long long past.
I remember watching Obama's speech at the 2016 Democratic Convention and feeling like he was living in a very different United States than me. He was so positive and optimistic! I guess it was his job at that point to talk up how successful his eight years in office were, but still he just struck me as deeply out of step with the spirit of the times.
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Lourdes, it turns out, is even more impressively learned in person than online; indeed, save for an unfortunate vegetarianism, a perfect dinner companion.
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Fortunate vegetarians have cheese.
126: Right about the time he decided a Russian influence campaign, and Congressional Republican complicity with it, wasn't something he needed to do anything in particular about.
129: Yes. It's hard to know what he could have done that wouldn't have made things worse, but he seemed so complacent.
He could have announced it noisily. He could have shamed the Congressional Republicans. He could have shouted it in the UNGA. He could have sanctioned Russia into economic implosion. He could have invoked Article 5. Republicans would have denied it all anyway, Trump might have won anyway, but I don't see those courses would have been worse than what happened.
IMO, 129 and 131 are so colored by hindsight as to be bad faith. At the time Obama made the decisions, the race really did look like Clinton's to lose, and one can have reasonably thought that Obama accusing Trump of being a pawn of Russia might be what would tip it over the wrong way. Establishment making shit up to keep the populist champion of the people from taking over.
I don't think it's likely that Russians (or people working with them) successfully altered votes but (a) apparently there were a number of attempts to hack into state voter databases in the run-up to the election; (b) you don't have to look far to find stories -- over the course of like two decades! -- about some hacker genius who can get into an election system and change votes, undetected; and (c) some results seemed pretty anomalous. I don't think the people who are denying and scoffing at hacking, on no evidence whatsoever, are any more credible than the people who think it was likely, on no evidence whatsoever.
Will I be shocked if it turns out, long hence, that there actually was cheating in the form of vote machine hacking? No, but that's mostly because I'll be dead before the truth of this thing is actually known.
132: I said the same thing at the time, actually.
strongly endorse ccarp in 132 and 133, also will apparently never stop banging on about the imperative to constantly watch out for falling into the good-and-true-patriots-of-the-doj-will-save-us bullshit, bc comey's up his own ass-ness screwed us all for decades to come (and maybe for good, in light of our pissing away opportunities to ameliorate climate change impacts).
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And in other news (not), Nicholas Cage is a twat.
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129: I more or less agree with you, but I don't think it's as simple a decision as you describe it. As soon as Obama opens his mouth, it becomes an article of faith on the right for a decade that "Russian interference" is a Democratic conspiracy, to be repeated on Fox News hourly for as long as it takes. There was a conflict between short term domestic political needs and an effective medium term response. There's not even any particular guarantee that Obama acting unilaterally would provide any benefit.
Eric Garland is that black swan, a left-wing extremist conspiracy theorist. Famous on Twitter, apparently, which is meaningless to me but I guess someone puts stock in it. Merrick Garland is the guy Obama nominated to Supreme Court who never got considered by the Senate. Not the first but one of the more notable breakdowns in our government that preceded Trump.
You're welcome.
Garland Flowers was a night club singer who claimed to have had sex with Bill Clinton.
James Garland did commercials for the Meat Board.
Eric Garner is the guy who was murdered by the police for selling cigarettes. Eric Holder is the Obama-era attorney general. Eric Foner is the Civil War historian who I can never remember if people still think he's good or not. I can keep going, because this storage region of my brain is soup.
Eric Rohmer is not Agnes Varda. RIP Varda.
I was stumped the other day trying to name the lead actors on Friends for my stepdaughter -- at first the only ones I could remember were Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer. Eventually I remembered Courtney Cox. I could look this up, but maybe instead I should try to forget all of them.
