What’s The Score?

Heritage scoring: “Votes the Erick Erickson would?”

To be fair, you can see a sort of “Portillo moment” effect (UK reference) – Cantor was symbolic of the perceived failures of the Republican leadership – it’s less about his personal voting record and more about his participation in those failures…

There is a Democratic candidate now: Jack Trammell, another professor at the same college as Brat. In 2012 the Democrat got 41%, which was the most anyone had ever gotten against Cantor.

Oh jesus, not the “Democrats ruined the election” excuse again.

Do some Dems vote tactically in GOP primaries? Sure. I voted for the Tea Party loon in Mississippi. (And will vote for him again in the runoff.)

But how many of us are there sophisticated enough and bored, er “dedicated,” enough to get out & do that? Few. Decent GOP turnout wipes out our tricky shit.

And the fact that this race wasn’t thought to be close makes such Dem tactics even more unlikely. We knew McDaniel-Cochran was close (not HOW close). I’ve not seen that anyone predicted the Va. race to be close.

The Repubs would love to blame the Dems here so they don’t have to admit tactical & strategic faults: tactically a GOTV failure due to complacency; strategically, failure to realize the GOP base is now dominated by the Teahadi radicals whom the GOP thought they could use. How’s that ride on the tiger feel now, Cantor?

“His limited campaign, which had little funding, was entirely built around Cantor being a) an insider and b) not to the right enough.”

My perception is that his campaign was built around opposition to “comprehensive immigration reform”, which is not well correlated with rightwardness on the political spectrum.

So Mickey Kaus is now to the right of the Kochs?

“So Mickey Kaus is now to the right of the Kochs?”

One, Mickey Kaus is a contrarian idiot who should not be used as an example for anything but how to be a contrarian idiot. Two, just because SOME people on the right or the left take a different view does not mean that a policy does not mostly fall on either the left or the right side of the American political spectrum.

Also (and then I’ll shut up before I get banned), Cantor’s anti-Brat campaign spots (still available on YouTube) consistently portray Brat as a “liberal college professor”. If Brat really is to the right of Cantor across-the-board, maybe voters ousted Cantor for (in the words of Big Daddy) his “sheer mendacity”.

“Also (and then I’ll shut up before I get banned), Cantor’s anti-Brat campaign spots (still available on YouTube) consistently portray Brat as a “liberal college professor”. If Brat really is to the right of Cantor across-the-board, maybe voters ousted Cantor for (in the words of Big Daddy) his “sheer mendacity”.”

You mean a politician’s political advertisements might NOT be completely honest?
*Faints from shock.

Didn’t Brat also run as a “Christian” (“Judeo-Christian,” he calls himself), as opposed to Cantor who is a non-Christian? Being “Christian” is a big thing down there and it doesn’t simply mean someone who attends a major denominational church but rather is synonymous with being “born again.”

It seems that the Brat campaign exploited the crisis over the illegal migration of unaccompanied minors and argued hard against amnesty and the Dream Act? Jacqueline Bhabha’s new book may give some perspective as should Aviva Chomsky’s.
Brat has a piece in which he argues for the importance of Protestant-inspired institutions as the crucial explanatory variable to account for economic growth. But see
http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/7/5/puritans-and-development.html
Also see this review
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12049/abstract

6: thanks for the facts, Bloix!

There are lots of ways to parse voter reactions and voter motives, but I can say from first hand knowledge Brat’s campaign was not some deviously clever strategem that drove some major voter bloc of hatred against Cantor…it was very simply that Cantor ignored him and didn’t see him as any sort of threat until it was far too late.

Polls a week ago had Cantor up by more than 30 points. The average upper middle-class conservative who has been Cantor’s meal ticket from the beginning simply didn’t bother to vote – they were no shows since no one thought he would lose. The tea party mobilized their voters and won easily – it was really that simple.

I’d take it as bunk that Democrats had much sway in the numbers. Maybe some more politically active voters might have casted agains Cantor out of spite, but the turnout wasn’t high enough to suggest anything organized and frankly the average Democrat voter would have thought the same as the average Republican voter – why bother, Cantor will win anyway.

Erickson was on CNN saying that among the reasons Cantor lost is because conservative groups in Washington DC felt that he didn’t treat them with due respect. So this one might have to get filed under the It’s All About Hurt Feelings theory of conservative anger.

To understand the modern american conservative movement, you have to realize that the republican party is functionaly a Maoist party. In a Maoist party, legitmacy is judged through political tests of adherence to the proper revolutionary line. The actual policy effects of any position are not important in determining who has political power, as this cultural revolution slogan says,

“A socialist train coming with a delay is better than the capitalist one that comes on time”.

Replace socialist and capitalist with conservative and liberal and you have the modern GOP.

Of course Maoism is not a good way to run a political party. It is very unstable as can be seen from the cycles of political manias that charecterize the Maoist period in China. This seems to be starting in the GOP too, with waves of political ferver peeking at election time and crashing when the lack of governance leads to crisis, like in the debt ceiling debacle.

The GOP does a lack a charismatic leader. Ted Cruz seems like the type to take a shot at getting there. Should make for an interesting presidential election.

Here’s a Tea Partier who stands firm on Biblical morality (has no problem with the idea of stoning gays to death) http://slate.me/UtOAq8

@29

Holy shit.

The ‘left’ can certainly be as oppossed to immigration as the right, just (imo) for outwardly better reasons. (economic rather than cultural)
The real political battle ahead won’t be between left and right though, as always it will be between the internationalist democrats on the one side and the petty nationalist/nativist authoritarians on the other. (Whether that’s the hard authoritarianism of a jackboot stomping on your face by a neo-Stalinist/fascist, or the soft authoritarianism of the online leftist mobs or the nouveau religious libertarian Tea Party/UKIP nuts,or whether it’s just David Graeber reading poetry on channel ten ad infinitum as the anarchist Utopia descends into communal violence and tedious 10 hour speeches)
The internationalist democrats will lose, as always, because nonsense and nostalgia and all round stupidity and twitter fights and so forth always wins out.

If you’ve never been around Christian evangelicals, you might be surprised by how identified some of them are with Jews and Israel.

Mostly they’re identified with Israel purely in an eschatological “End Times” sense. Since the majority of American Jews are perceived as at least nominally liberal, and they hate liberals, they don’t actually identify very much with those Hollywood deviants who still control the parts of the financial sector which they perceive as doing them wrong. (Yup, all the old tropes bubble up under the right conditions, no matter how much they’ve grafted “Yay, Israel” on top after 1948 … or 2001.) So it’s perfectly possible in Brat’s case for “Judeo-Christian” to signal “Christian,” just as in so many other usages of the term. I mean, how many American Jews actually use “Judeo-Christian” to describe their values? The appropriation almost always flows the other way.

Cantor’s loss is not really about ideology – it’s about paying the price for staying at home instead of voting in a primary election. As much as I hate vox dot com and the glib arrogance of its writers, I think Ezra Klein nails it this time- Cantor lost because no one showed up to vote : http://bit.ly/1n6vYV0

The ones who did show up at the polls are the ones who are passionately enraged (not passionately engaged.) That’s why Cantor lost. So please everyone – vote in your primary elections!

One policy difference between Cantor and Brat seems to have been that Brat was an outspoken opponent of Common Core. Education policy has become quite visible recently.

http://dianeravitch.net/2014/06/11/eric-cantor-republican-champion-of-charters-defeated-in-virginia/

Just a thought, not an argument, but we might take a small step away from parochialism, schadenfreude, and cause-I-got-a-job-and-Obama-everything-is-fine and provisionally correlate this election to the recent EU elections and other data (Ukraine) as a general global wave of “throw the bums out” with a shift to the right. Cause the left and left-center aren’t offering anything.

Varoufakis was on this last week, and sentiment is trending toward the right in the US.

I mean, people and pundits with always give reasons but we don’t have to buy them.

Brat is apparently a Roman Catholic. How he can combine that with purportedly being a follower of Ayn Rand, I cannot imagine. He has written a moral analyses of Rand, it is being reported. I don’t know if anyone has actually read this analysis, or how he can reconcile her writings with the teachings of the Roman Catholic teachings, but some members of Opus Dei of my acquaintance (when my daughter was in music school) have been able to do so.

To B9n10nt – Kind of like the anti-vaxxers – someone else will take care of it. They stayed home because the idea that an unknown guy with no money could win was inconceivable to them. Everyone else will vote so I can stay home.

As to those who voted for the Randian prof, they appear to be (from news reports) fans of right-wing talk radio and TV. Sigh.

And also, don’t underestimate the rage and paralysis people are feeling about the American political system. Some may have stayed home because the choice between Cantor and a Randian prof was simply too awful to consider voting for either one. Really, the quality of American political candidates is dismal these days.

To Harold, Paul Ryan is also Catholic, and he used to hand out Atlas Shrugged to all new employees of his governmental (moocher) office. Quite a disconnect going on there…

Harold @ 43: You can’t analyze consumerist identity politics through the lens of sectarian or ideological coherence. Novelty and spectacle wins, and what is won is entirely insubstantial.

To be middle class is to effectively enjoy a post-scarcity world. What to do then with the atavistic urges for power and release from stress? Electoral, mass-media politics is one distraction, and because these vestigial internal sufferings do not refer to any immediate necessity, the practice of politics will merely take any form that satisfies the urges. And that form is consumerist capitalism.

You are a consumer. Now, to give you a sense of agency, i’ll let you choose what kind of consumer you are. Here’s a choice: there’s a whole TV channel for it!

wow, no connection even attempted here between the obvious context of this defeat, and your recent dozen-egghead symposium on the morality of “open borders” (interesting enough on its own terms but i like to get my open borders ontology from bryan caplan and rand paul — don’t you?).

luckily, there are others around who notice what non- (or is it post- ?) theorists are thinking these days

http://www.unz.com/isteve/brookings-hispanics-dont-care-much-about-immigration-reform/

MSM: “someone else will take care of it. They stayed home because the idea that an unknown guy with no money could win was inconceivable to them. Everyone else will vote so I can stay home.”

…and it doesn’t matter anyway.

@b9n10nt
Your premises are or seem to be that the U.S. is run (i.e., all decisions of consequence made) by “a non-democratic elite,” that elections therefore don’t matter in any substantive way, and that they are consequently just a way for voters to indicate whether they like this or that brand of soft drink, or whatever. While there are certain similarities of course betw the marketing of candidates and the marketing of consumer goods, and while the US pol system does increasingly display some oligarchic characteristics, the suggestion that elections are entirely meaningless spectacles b.c electoral democracy is a just a shell surrounding a non-democratic elite core is not one that a whole lot of people here prob will agree with, and as a result you and they/us will be talking past each other.

Yes, I tried to clean up any absolutes (electoral democracy is “tenuously linked” versus entirely separate from actual governing).

The reason (especially Republican) politics matters is that elections are having consequences, and the trend towards an entirely (though understandably) narcissistic politics is having negative consequences, from the elite being ever more enabled by a distracted voting public to a right wing authoritarian “populist” surge that seeks only politics-as-entertainment as its actual mode of governing.

I don’t know how Brat was using or intending to use “Judeo-Christian,” but in ordinary usage I doubt it’s a phrase that many Jews wd find esp. objectionable.

There is no such thing as the “ordinary” usage of this phrase, as it only exists as a shibboleth intended to signify the speaker’s righteousness. The “Judeo” part is anyway not even remotely sincere, as those who utter this phrase only care about the rich, conservative sort of Jew. I don’t know if I find it offensive, but the second that phrase leaves a person’s lips my inclination to distrust them skyrockets.

Elections disconnected from policy are way worse than useless. Cantor sowed the wind (to make a judeo-christian point) and reaped the whirlwind … “the standing grain has no heads; it shall yield no flour; if it were to yield, strangers would devour it. [Our nation] is swallowed up; already [we] are among the nations as a useless vessel.”

People calling for a spoiler vote ie #2 should be ashamed of themselves.

Ok, b9n did say that “the performance of electoral democracy is tenuously linked to consequential policy-making” (emphasis added). That’s a somewhat more nuanced or qualified claim than I suggested he made, so I was in error on that. Personally I think elections matter for some issues, not so much for others.

@Tony Lynch — My impression, w/o having read his work except for a summary post or two, is that Martin Gilens’ basic argument is that the rich have much more influence on policy outcomes in the current system than anyone else. It’s possible Gilens wd agree w b9n’s formulation, at least w/r/t certain issues.

Nice Lizza piece. My vague impression is that Brat is the kind of free market conservative that conservatives don’t like – a purist. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/david-brat-the-elizabeth-warren-of-the-right.html
Not Elizabeth Warren, but he could certainly work with the left wing of the Dem party on certain issues.

“Judeo-Christian” is another “careful” use of words — a euphemism for Christian — sort of the way people use “Western”.

It’s a little odd that Brat’s now Catholic, since he has a degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, which is Presbyterian. “Dark money” is questionable, but he apparently got quite a bit of attention from prominent right-wing personalities like Laura Ingraham and Glen Beck. There was extensive advertising which raised his name recognition, but Eric Canton paid for that.

FWIW, I think this comes down to a show of power. The leadership, including Cantor, bowed to reality and raised the debt ceiling twice, in alliance with Democrats and over the dead bodies of most Republicans. The Tea Party demanded that they not do this. Not doing it, of course, would have been utterly insane, but at this point the crux isn’t the action, it is showing who is boss.

Thanks, Adam Smith.

On Brat as a Christian:

He is Catholic but says he is also a Calvinist, he has written an approving paper on the Prot work ethic and associates Protestantism with economic dynamism, he thinks Ayn Rand is interesting.

You could easily say he is very confused, but there are way to many of like mind to dismiss it so.

I am a conservative, liturgically and theologically, Catholic and I see a lot of these converts, especially from Prebyterianism, who are basically still Calvinists. While I am happy they have come over, I am not so happy with their influence. They are basically neo-Jansenists, and they are everywhere. Brat seems to be an extreme one of these.

These are the crowd who don’t grasp the social gospel is an integral part of Catholic teaching the same as pro life issues, devotion to Mary, and transubstantion. These are the prople who are worried about Francis being a Socialist when he repeats what every Pope since Leo XIII. Opposition to Immigration is shibboleth of this sort of new Catholic. If their conversion didn’t teach them that the Universal Church teaches a Universal man that transcends borders, they won’t get the hard stuff that actually requires hardship.

Often these types move on to Orthodoxy, which they also clearly don’t understand, but we all have to live with them. They are driven across the Tiber by the superficial reactionary appearance of the Church, hopefully they will learn some humility over time.

I would add that my best friend from 7th grade through 12th in NJ went to RMC (mostly to be near her boyfriend at UVA — they married, divorced — long story; she’s since become a Canadian). Anyway, a good liberal arts college, at least once (it seems to have succumbed to the allure of an outside-funded institute or some such). Just saying, you don’t have to be from Virginia to have heard of Randolph Macon.

Politicians must come from powerful and ardent districts? That’s a new one on me. We have the seniority and patronage systems in Congress – no doubt Cantor’s fortunes relied on being favored by some who thought he would make a good whip, and then he was unanimously elected House Majority Leader. In some sense, this is just a reflection of the Connecticut Compromise – entire states get a chance to exercise outsize influence. In another sense, it’s a reflection of the need of political parties – not just the Republican – to continually reinvent themselves. They thought the “young gun” Cantor would be a good face for the party.

I am not really surprised that his strong identification with the government shutdown last year was apparently not remembered by the voters in his district.

See Martin Gilen and Bemjamin I Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics”, Perspectives on Politics, Fall 2014.

Doesn’t the figures in that book rather support the case that elections are fundamental in US politics? The claim made is that the 20% richest have vastly more influence than the bottom 20%. But then they vote twice as much as the average, and infiitely more than the bottom segment who aren’t allowed to. Consequently, you don’t have to got below perhaps the top 30% by wealth before you find the median voter; a 50-something white guy with enough money to never work again, providing the stock market just slightly beats the historical average.

And for lower-turnout elections like this, that effect is only strengthened, until you get the situation where a politician who can be shown to at one point have compromised with the interests of 70% of the populace is generally going to lose a fair election.

Sorry, screwed up the link:

http://www.republicreport.org/2014/dave-brat-cantor/

Phil: “The fiscal conservative Right, which originally raised the Tea Party banner,…”

Bullsh*t. They weren’t holding rallies when Bush and Cheney were using the open model ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. The real crowds came out *after* the GOP lost the House, Senate and White House.

Seems to me that there are several splits here: socially conservative, small gov’t socially, small gov’t fiscally, pro-business main street, and pro-business international high finance.

Cantor was only really one of these, from my perspective – and it wasn’t the most popular with conservatives overall.

“I think the main point is that we need to synthesize Christianity and capitalism”

Hasn’t Max Weber already done this ?

The billionaire money is critical to keeping the brand together nationally, of course, but like any “populist” movement, it combines leaders with followers, and I suspect the leaders are different in kind from the followers. The followers may be the politically addled, modelled before the cameras by the persona of, say, Michelle Bachmann, but the leaders are aspirant local notables, who long to be the John Galt of the neighborhood, and know in their hearts the critical importance of extracting all they can from low-wage workers, and protecting the grift.

Guys, you’re way behind the times. Libertarianism is passé. Being authentically right-wing these days means being as close to outright fascist as possible:

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”

Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color.

Tunney was at one time a prominent and divisive fixture of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lately, though, her views have . . . evolved. How does an anticapitalist “tranarchist” (transgender anarchist) become a hard-right seditionist?

“Read Mencius Moldbug,” Tunney told her Twitter followers last month, referring to an aggressively dogmatic blogger with a reverent following in certain tech circles.

Tunney’s advice is easier said than done, for Moldbug is as prolific as he is incomprehensible. His devotees, many of whom are also bloggers, describe themselves as the “neoreactionary” vanguard of a “Dark Enlightenment.” They oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others affect obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.” As best I can tell, their ideal society best resembles Blade Runner, but without all those Asian people cluttering up the streets. Neoreactionaries like to see themselves as the heroes of another sci-fi movie, in fact, sometimes boasting that they have been “redpilled,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix—a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

In 2007, he reemerged under an angry pseudonym, Moldbug, on a humble Blogspot blog called “Unqualified Reservations.” As might be expected of a “DIY ideology . . . designed by geeks for other geeks,” his political treatises are heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas. What set Yarvin apart from the typical keyboard kook was his archaic, grandiose tone, which echoed the snippets Yarvin cherry-picked from obscure old reactionary tracts. Yarvin told one friendly interviewer that he spent $500 a month on books.

In short, Moldbug reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master.

Yarvin’s most toxic arguments come snugly wrapped in purple prose and coded language. (For instance, “The Cathedral” is Moldbuggian for the oppressive nexus of liberal newspapers, universities and the State Department, where his father worked after getting a PhD in philosophy from Brown.) By so doing, Moldbug has been able to an attract an audience that welcomes the usual teeth-gnashing white supremacists who haunt the web while also leaving room for a more socially acceptable assortment of “men’s rights” advocates, gun nuts, transhumanist libertarians, disillusioned Occupiers and well-credentialed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

When Justine Tunney posted her petition online, the press treated it like comic relief that came from nowhere. In fact, it is straight Moldbug. Item one, “retire all government employees,” comes verbatim from a 2012 talk that Yarvin gave to an approving crowd of California techies (see video below). In his typical smarmy, meandering style, Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

This plea for autocracy is the essence of Yarvin’s work. He has concluded that America’s problems come not from a deficit of democracy but from an excess of it—or, as Yarvin puts it, “chronic kinglessness.” Incredible as it sounds, absolute dictatorship may be the least objectionable tenet espoused by the Dark Enlightenment neoreactionaries.

Moldbug is the widely acknowledged lodestar of the movement, but he’s not the only leading figure. Another is Nick Land, a British former academic now living in Shanghai, where he writes admiringly of Chinese eugenics and the impending global reign of “autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy.”

These imaginary übermensch have inspired a sprawling network of blogs, sub-Reddits and meetups aimed at spreading their views. Apart from their reverence for old-timey tyrants, they espouse a belief in “human biodiversity,” which is basically racism in a lab coat. This scientific-sounding euphemism invariably refers to supposed differences in intelligence across races. It is so spurious that the Wikipedia article on human biodiversity was deleted because, in the words of one editor, it is “purely an Internet theory.” Censored once again by The Cathedral, alas.

“I am not a white nationalist, but I do read white-nationalist blogs, and I’m not afraid to link to them . . . I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin writes. He also praises a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor, Yarvin rhapsodizes on colonial rule in Southern Africa, and suggests that black people had it better under apartheid. “If you ask me to condemn [mass murderer] Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck,” Yarvin writes.

His jargon may be novel, but whenever Mencius Moldbug descends to the realm of the concrete, he offers familiar tropes of white victimhood. Yarvin’s favorite author, the nineteenth-century writer Scot Thomas Carlyle, is perhaps best known for his infamous slavery apologia, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” “If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle,” Yarvin writes. Later in the same essay Yarvin calls slavery “a natural human relationship” akin to “that of patron and client.”

As I soldiered through the Moldbug canon, my reactions numbed. Here he is expressing sympathy for poor, persecuted Senator Joe McCarthy. Big surprise. Here he claims “America is a communist country.” Sure, whatever. Here he doubts that Barack Obama ever attended Columbia University. You don’t say? After a while, Yarvin’s blog feels like the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a Gwar concert, one sick stunt after another, calculated to shock. To express revulsion and disapproval is to grant the attention he so transparently craves.

Moldbuggism, for now, remains mostly an Internet phenomenon. Which is not to say it is “merely” an Internet phenomenon. This is, after all, a technological age. Last November, Yarvin claimed that his blog had received 500,000 views. It is not quantity of his audience that matters so much as the nature of it, however. And the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today. This is why I have concluded, sadly, that Yarvin needs answering.

If the Koch brothers have proved anything, it’s that no matter how crazy your ideas are, if you put serious money behind those ideas, you can seize key positions of authority and power and eventually bring large numbers of people around to your way of thinking. Moreover, the radicalism may intensify with each generation. Yesterday’s Republicans and Independents are today’s Libertarians. Today’s Libertarians may be tomorrow’s neoreactionaries, whose views flatter the prejudices of the new Silicon Valley elite.

In a widely covered secessionist speech at a Silicon Valley “startup school” last year, there was more than a hint of Moldbug (see video below). The speech, by former Stanford professor and Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, never mentioned Moldbug or the Dark Enlightenment, but it was suffused with neoreactionary rhetoric and ideas. Srinivasan used the phrase “the paper belt” to describe his enemies, namely the government, the publishing industries, and universities. The formulation mirrored Moldbug’s “Cathedral.” Srinivasan’s central theme was the notion of “exit”—as in, exit from democratic society, and entry into any number of corporate mini-states whose arrival will leave the world looking like a patchwork map of feudal Europe.

Srinivasan ticked through the signposts of the neoreactionary fantasyland: Bitcoin as the future of finance, corporate city-states as the future of government, Detroit as a loaded symbol of government failure and 3D-printed firearms as an example of emerging technology that defies regulation.

The speech succeeded in promoting the anti-democratic authoritarianism at the core of neoreactionary thought, while glossing over the attendant bigotry. This has long been a goal of some in the movement. One such moderate—if the word can be used in this context—is Patri Friedman, grandson of the late libertarian demigod Milton Friedman. The younger Friedman expressed the need for “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” after a public falling out with Yarvin in 2009.

Friedman has lately been devoting his time (and leveraging his family name) to raise money for the SeaSteading Institute, which, as the name suggests, is a blue-sea libertarian dream to build floating fiefdoms free of outside regulation and law. Sound familiar?

The principal backer of the SeaSteading project, Peter Thiel, is also an investor in companies run by Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, an original investor in Facebook and hedge fund manager, as well as being the inspiration for a villainous investor on the satirical HBO series Silicon Valley. Thiel’s extreme libertarian advocacy is long and storied, beginning with his days founding the Collegiate Network-backed Stanford Review. Lately he’s been noticed writing big checks for Ted Cruz.

He’s invested in Yarvin’s current startup, Tlon. Thiel invested personally in Tlon co-founder John Burnham. In 2011, at age 18, Burnham accepted $100,000 from Thiel to skip college and go directly into business. Instead of mining asteroids as he originally intended, Burnham wound up working on obscure networking software with Yarvin, whose title at Tlon is, appropriately enough, “benevolent dictator for life.”

California libertarian software developers inhabit a small and shallow world. It should be no surprise then, that, although Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neoreactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing. For instance, Thiel echoed Moldbug in an infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute in which he explained that he had moved beyond libertarianism. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote.

“Brat is apparently a Roman Catholic. How he can combine that with purportedly being a follower of Ayn Rand, I cannot imagine.”

Nothing new about Christian hypocrisy. Take for example the Protestant theologian Gerhard Kittel, who managed to write all kinds of pro-Nazi nonsense. Kittel was unusual in his vitriol, but not in supporting the Nazis agaisnt the left.

Having grown up around certain conservative Christian milieux, it seems to me that the New Testamant does not exist for these people, outside of miracles, salvation and lakes of fire. Even biblical literalists (especially these, in fact) seem to be completely oblivious to things like the Beatitudes. My guess is Brat simply associates Rand’s critique with ‘collectivism’, of which his personal Christianity is now purged. ‘God helps those who help themselves’ alongside ‘you can’t legislate altruism’, etc. ad naus. Conservative Christians have had thousands of years to learn such contortions, and they’ve got quite good at them.

@bob and others discussing ‘populism’. Richard Seymour has a pretty good line on this; he’s been writing about the subject for years. His most recent: http://www.leninology.co.uk/2014/06/populists-against-elites.html

“Those who disparage the abilities of the Tea Party to attain positions of power need to check out NC, Kansas, Wisconsin, etc.”

Well too be fair they were speaking about the federal context not state.

“To MPA Victoria, all politics is local… and the destruction of Tea Party politics on locals is extreme. (Speaking as one in NC, where Tea Party ideology is destroying the state.)”

I am not saying you are wrong. In fact I bet S.L. would agree with your statement that the tea party is wrecking many states. However he has a point when speaking federally. The Republicans would probably be in control of the Senate right now if it wasn’t for the Tea Party.

Yes, MPAVictoria, Obama and the bought-and-FIRE-paid-for Dems are destroying the country federally, and their excuse is the Tea Party (they have to have someone to be less-evil-than, and given how evil the centrist faux-liberal Dems are determined to be, the “alternative” has to be made-for-teevee scary), but, hey, the Tea Party are delivering the country into the hands of the Democratic Party, so score one for the good guys “our” team.

I pretty much know your schtick on partisan politics — you might as well be a robot, so predictable are your responses — so let’s just skip the usual, usual. What I want to know is if any lukewarm Dem / liberal or progressive ever looks on Tea Party political effectiveness with some envy, some awareness of what electoral power looks like, of some inkling of how useless and superfluous they themselves have been made by their own unwillingness to hold “their” representatives and leaders accountable.

Or, Bruce Wilding, do the modliberals look at the Tea Party and say, “Wish some of us cared as much as these undereducated morons do.”

A lot say, “racist” and stop thinking. Some are very happy, as on this comment thread, to extend that to an accusation of anti-Semitism

Too few are willing to look at issues, which might call into question what their own support is used to enact.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/06/cantors-loss-triumph-anti-corporate-right-wing-populism.html

Jerry Vinokurov @ #57: Gotta be careful when using the word “conservative” in conjunction with the word “Jew”. Capital-C-Conservative Jews tend to be liberals; lower-case-conservative Jews tend to be Orthodox. On the average, the former are richer and less fanatically pro-Israel than the latter, although there are well-known exceptions.

Indeed; if there’s any confusion, I wrote small-c-conservative to point to political, rather than religious conservatism.

What I want to know is if any lukewarm Dem / liberal or progressive ever looks on Tea Party political effectiveness with some envy, some awareness of what electoral power looks like, of some inkling of how useless and superfluous they themselves have been made by their own unwillingness to hold “their” representatives and leaders accountable.

I’m not sure why the Tea Party should be our standard here, especially since there’s basically no such thing as “the Tea Party,” there’s only the Republican party. To whatever extent that the even-more-rightwing-than-normal Republicans have managed to gain any ground against their internal party opponents, they have yet to translate it into electoral dominance.

“I’ll believe there’s such a thing as “anti-corporate right-wing populism” about the same time I’ll believe in unicorns.”

+1

“real people.”

Who would you consider not a “real person” Ed?

Me: >>And what precisely has the Tea Party even tried to do, to punish those people?

Daniel “It would certainly help matters if they received some assistance from the current attorney general, Holder, and his boss.”

Too bad there’s no such thing as state laws against fraud and suchlike.

@MPAV: People who actually exist, and not just in your imagination, perhaps. This kind of conservative is out there and you just sound smug and uneducated when you say they don’t exist.

A point like mds’ @ #110 is fine but it really doesn’t address the question of what these people are running on, and whether it wins elections. We all are old enough to know that politicians don’t care about what actually works in government; they just care about getting elected and staying incumbent.

Just an historical note: the Glass in Glass-Steagall — the cornerstone of New Deal banking reform and financial repression — was Carter Glass, a senior member of the Harry Byrd organization that dominated Virginia politics for decades and as conservative a conservative as you’d ever want to meet.

I don’t believe that “right-wing anti-corporate populism” is a real actual force in today’s political climate mostly for the reasons that mds already covered. At the top level, there simply are no anti-corporate elements at all; anything that Brat says can be dismissed as posturing and not an actual serious anti-corporate agenda, which of course would look nothing like his Randian ideal. At the bottom, there certainly exist plenty of people who have been fucked over by corporations and are angry about it, but there’s no “anti-corporate” philosophy unifying them in any real sense, since these are also people who hate unions, environmental and safety standards, and any actual anti-corporate interventions. So anti-corporate right-wing populism just doesn’t exist as a motivating force, and Dayen article gets it wrong by cherry-picking a few pieces of red meat that Brat threw before the primary voters. You can draw any kind of curve you like through a single data point.

We all are old enough to know that politicians don’t care about what actually works in government; they just care about getting elected and staying incumbent.

This is standard right-wing rhetoric, but there’s good evidence against it in the form of my ice-cream-free freezer. That stuff is actually believed in should be obvious, money=justice for instance.

What I want to know is if any lukewarm Dem / liberal or progressive ever looks on Tea Party political effectiveness with some envy,

I’m not really a political liberal, but I’m generally firmly in the “art-of-the possible” camp on policy, so I’m sure I’m included in Bruce’s lukewarm group—and yes, envy (or something along those lines) was exactly my first reaction to this.

I think primary-targeting corporate liberal members in relatively safe districts is a lot more interesting as a strategy than targeting moderates in swing states or districts, so especially if people want to primary, say, Charles Schumer or Dianne Feinstein, I’d be very happy. It would almost certainly be possible to elect people further two the left in their respective states.

This, though, I believe is nonsense:

are angry and available. If there were only liberals and Democrats available to push an ideology and an agenda of anti-corporate, anti-plutocrat reform.

From what I’ve seen in terms of research, Tea-party supporters are firmly Republican. They’re not potential swing-voters. They also don’t appear to be particularly similar to, say, European protest voters, which really do seem to be up for grabs between right-wing and left-wing (and whatever Beppe Grillo is) populism.
I’m not sure if there is such a group of potential voters in the US. I’m skeptical, but even if they do exists, I’m pretty sure they’re not a factor in Tea-party primary victories.

@Bruce Wilder

I cannot help notice how this juxtaposition lets Democrats off the hook for supporting a pro-plutocracy President, who enhanced the power of Wall Street and left millions to suffer foreclosure, who has built up the power of the surveillance state and claimed the authority to murder anyone he wills.

Except that Democrats and the left have, for years, been directing a torrent of protest against Obama for those very reasons. While the right is bubbling with conspiracy theories that just make Republicans more unelectable each day, the criticism that really harms the administration comes from the progressive side.

Compare that to the tea partiers Taibbi’s talking about, who supported Bush without a hint of dissent right up to the day he lost the presidency, at which point he became their Voldemort and they all started calling themselves non-partisan libertarians.

@ The Temporary Name:

A minor oversimplification on my part, but I find it a bit hard to believe that you wouldn’t have guessed the context of my comments, which makes your own response seem patronizing at best. The context is simply this – let’s find out what the guy believes (or, perhaps more accurately, what the guy is going to do once in office) for the sake of better understanding the political landscape. That’s a matter of truth, not politics or morality. Politics as “the art of the possible” implies maneuvering around various obstacles with some goal in mind, but don’t put the cart before the horse. It also means not driving blind; looking at actual behavior and distrusting our own tendencies to believe in a set story about what outcomes we get from what intentions.

For example, take your “money=justice” example. We certainly have heard noises in that tone from (certain) conservatives (who may or may not be relevant to the politicians at hand), but in actual practice, anybody in office who wants to stay in office is going to be giving some special consideration to powerful (i.e., moneyed) interests. So far that’s fine, but we should go a bit further. What happens when we find (as we do) that even Democrats in Congress have a tendency to vote with elites over mainstream voter interests? It’s jumping the gun to say that we’re immediately spouting a Tea Party talking point, because we haven’t said anything about policies or intentions yet. From the standpoint of somebody who thinks this is one of the signal issues of our times, hearing the appropriate dog whistles isn’t very interesting. Getting results is what matters.

Yes, it’s a generalization, but sometimes generalizations help wash away the muck so we can actually see what’s settled in the bottom of the tank.

“so much so that he now defines his foreign policy as “don’t do stupid shit.””

You know that is actually a huge improvement compared to the average US president.

@ MPAV: Perhaps. But it reflects a collapse in this Administration’s ambitions over the really not very out-there promises he made years ago. I don’t fault the Administration for not delivering on some of those promises, but “don’t do stupid shit” is less than they are capable of, in reality or rhetoric at least.

@B Wilder
If there were only liberals and Democrats available to push an ideology and an agenda of anti-corporate, anti-plutocrat reform.

Putting aside for the moment the question of the content of such an agenda, I suspect that a look at the members of the Progressive Caucus in the House wd disclose at least a few willing to support “anti-plutocrat reform.” (Also, Sanders in the Senate, though an independent, caucuses w the Dems, I believe.)

Sancho @ 130 . . . who . . . don’t accept the errors – or even the existence, it seems – of the Bush years

Do you accept that Obama continued many of the errors of the Bush years?

Lefties are big talkers, I’ll give you that. But, you seem to be missing my point entirely. It isn’t about competitive critiques. It’s about power, and power is about organization and acting in concert, strategically. The vast majority, including liberals and progressives — maybe especially liberals and progressives — are scarcely respected in American politics, because they vote at random, or might as well for all the organization and discipline involved. Even when the Left get all upset and angry, they cannot get it together to actually win a critical election or discipline a politician, who betrays them, as Obama and the Senate Democratic majority has. The Left has a lot of excuses for its own impotence, its inability to reverse 30+ years of conservative and neoliberal economic policy despite the manifest consequences, and for the betrayals and failures of the politicians served to them from the political menu bought and paid for by billionaires and corporate business. The Left also has a lot to say about its own scruples as far as representing and leading the ordinary people, whose interest they sometimes purport to champion, but whom they despise as racists, religious fools, undereducated or self-destructively stupid.

I will repeat my summary @ 100:

People with a genuinely populist or social-welfare agenda are not willing to pay for the politics necessary to deliver it. I think many Dem pols would want to be the heroes of such a politics, but know better than to think they could deliver it and survive, in the absence of mass-membership political organization able to back them and reward good governance.

” I don’t fault the Administration for not delivering on some of those promises, but “don’t do stupid shit” is less than they are capable of, in reality or rhetoric at least.”

If the US government avoids touching off another major war I will be happy.

MPAVictoria: If the US government avoids touching off another major war I will be happy.

From your keyboard to the Deity’s ear!

William Timberman @ 136: [Mass-membership political organizations] depend on a consensus about what’s important.

I would say that they create a consensus about what’s important, and such a consensus, more durable than the mob’s fickle instinct for fashion, is a pre-requisite to obtaining and exercising power: educated public opinion, the ol’ raising of consciousness, is the root of political will. It’s not just prioritizing an agenda. It is about extending horizons and idealizing an enlightened standard for self-interest, about valuing a genuine public interest above and beyond the narrow confines of the self. Even for we hermits, there’s no way to an ideal of the general good or the public interest, but the social way. Just as the Christian is admonished to love the sinner, the liberal must love the authoritarian follower, which is to say, the bigot, and, yes, the casual racist. (The Meatheads of the blogs must learn to love the Archie Bunkers, to use a terribly out-dated reference.) We cannot continue to abandon them to the hypnotic power of Fox News, hoping for spontaneous improvement in a younger generation, raised on tales of vampires and zombies and happy gay marriage. And, we liberals need them, need those good soldiers. We think we are highly principled and steadfast, but our surfeit of good ideas blows in the wind and never leaves committee, without them. There’s no bob mcmanus option without them. They get mad and go out in the rain and vote. And, other things, if it comes to that. We occupy, and scatter at the first sign of trouble. We need each other, ’cause they tend to find the wrong leaders and our leaders have a lot of trouble without followers.

Bruce Wilder @ 137

As has been obvious to me for some time now, we’re more or less on the same page, even if you’re il miglior fabbro when it comes to writing it out. It winds up being more talk after all, though, doesn’t it? Justified, if it can be justified, by not preaching just to the choir, and if as a consequence interests and our stars align, then we call on bob, or he calls on us, which amounts to the same thing, more or less.

Here’s yet another paltry attempt. Not exactly Democracy Now! but as poor a thing as it is, it does exist, and it is on every Monday, right after Fox News:

Democratic Perspective

Too much in the way of Blue Dog influence on display for me, but I have partners who aren’t the flaming leftists that I am, and as you say, it’s the social way. Once in a while some genuinely good stuff leaks out, for which I suppose I should be grateful — especially since the station is a notoriously right-wing a.m. broadcaster in Northern AZ, which means that we’re definitely not preaching to the choir here. The station owner makes a few bucks in a tough market, so what does he care? Having his traditional listeners foaming at the mouth probably doesn’t hurt the bottom line so much as it increases the buzz. Another compromise….

“the liberal must love the authoritarian follower, which is to say, the bigot, and, yes, the casual racist.”

Any movement that appeases racist, bigots, sexists, and homophobes is not one that I want any part of. They are the fucking enemy Bruce not potential allies. And including them in any mass movement will lose you the most important parts of the democratic coalition.

In short you are 100% wrong and 0% right on this one. You are letting your hatred of Obama blind you to the true nature of these people.

And in 141, we get a straightforward statement of the obvious: the modern “Left” is only concerned with the top 10% (people with incomes over about $75k) and their problems.

This is, of course, obvious by looking at where the Left’s efforts are focused–on getting the courts and senior bureaucracies (strongholds of the elite) to overturn/ignore democratic legislation, especially popular referenda (influenced at least some by the non-elite).

And in 141, we get a straightforward statement of the obvious: the modern “Left” is only concerned with the top 10% (people with incomes over about $75k) and their problems.

Yes, because racism and homophobia are strictly problems of the top 10%. Leave it to a conservative to project his own agenda onto his opponents.

I have a great idea for all of you political geniuses who just can’t hold in their love for the bigots and homophobes: go out there and go ahead and try and build a coalition premised on attracting those people. Go ahead and tell Hispanics and African Americans and sexual minorities that you don’t give a fuck about their problems and they’ll have to take a back seat so you can attract gay-bashers and racists to your side. And then please come back with a trip report about how well that works for you and how successful you’ve been. Can’t wait to read it!

go ahead and try and build a coalition premised on attracting those people.

I think the coalition is called “FDR’s Democratic Party”

William Timberman @ 139 il miglior fabbro

Flattery, which also serves to remind me (since I didn’t immediately get the reference) I should probably read more and write less — bob mcmanus becomes more my hero every day ;-) [I’m still only a liberal, though.]

“I think the coalition is called “FDR’s Democratic Party””

Oh? Are you posting from 1933?

Are there no blacks, LGTBQ folk or women who make under 75K a year?

I’m not sure if you are missing the point on purpose or not, so I’ll make it clearer.

There are lots of blacks, women, LGBTQ folks, and so on who make less than $75k a year. I think if offered the choice between “you can make enough to support a family comfortably” and “you can keep trying to get a job, and when you get one it will just barely pay for rent, food and a broken-down car, but you won’t be treated any worse than an equally-poor white man,” a fair number of them would take option one. And a lot of white men would too.

I think if offered the choice between “you can make enough to support a family comfortably” and “you can keep trying to get a job, and when you get one it will just barely pay for rent, food and a broken-down car, but you won’t be treated any worse than an equally-poor white man,” a fair number of them would take option one.

It’s amazing that you think this is even a real choice that real people are actually offered.

What is your point Sam “I oppose decisions allowing gay marriage” Chevre? That we try and convince are blacks, women, LGBTQ folks to accept being discriminated against because treating them like people makes some white redneck uncomfortable?

There is no point. These alleged political “allies” are fantasy elements that don’t exist in real life except in token amounts. In reality, the moment these people get a whiff of the fact that they won’t be allowed to exclude minorities from the gains that this putative political coalition is sure to win, they will bolt. You know, just like they did when it turned out that they wouldn’t be allowed to monopolize the gains of the New Deal.

And there’s the racist to make common cause with I guess.

The idea of attracting disaffected white right-wingers as the “solution” to the lack of progressive action in this country? Seriously? The “Blue Labor” solution? I mean, really, seriously? When the demographics are shifting so decisively?

“These white anti-racists and feminists etc OTOH do not want to either convert their enemies or completely destroy or assimilate them. Like France and Germany, they want their enemies to continue to exist so as to provide an identifying boundary. They just want their enemies to submit, show deference, accept defeat.”

And your evidence for this ridiculous claim?

It is like some pop psych Faux-Nietzscheanism.

““These white anti-racists and feminists etc OTOH do not want to either convert their enemies or completely destroy or assimilate them. Like France and Germany, they want their enemies to continue to exist so as to provide an identifying boundary. They just want their enemies to submit, show deference, accept defeat.”

I’d agree there’s a faction, for sure, and they are quite obnoxious. (As was the case in the old labour/Marxist movements etc ) But I really dont think you can generalise too ‘white anti-racists and feminists ‘ as a totality (or even majority)

“LGBTs and Afro-Americans do dream of a world without prejudice”
McManus
–
Far be it from me to get in people’s heads and poke around, especially when they’re dreaming, but experience says oppressed minorities are not uniquely configured aside from their identifying minority characteristics and some insight from the perspective of being outside the majority comfort zone, when it comes to irrational negative prejudicial judgments everbody’s got ’em.

I doubt seriously that all prejudice vanishing is anyone’s goal or dream, though claimed so vocally by so many.
Just the prejudices that “we” don’t approve of, mostly because they’re directed at “us”, the ones we see because they bother and harm “us”.

In the day, Bob, as I’m sure you must remember, there was almost no crossover whatsoever between the movement toward black liberation and the movement toward gay liberation, as those movements were termed at that time.
There was a weighty amount of homophobic prejudice in the black community generally, and quite a bit toward the front of the struggle.

Which is to say it is likely that hidden prejudices, which the afflicted tend to think of not as prejudices but as perfectly sensible negative judgments, will continue to exist as long as humans make judgments about each others’ behavior.

So that a dream of a world without prejudice really should be seen merely as a world where the accepted prejudices match those of the dreamers. They’re still going to be there, just not recognized by the prejudicial.

As they are not recognized, even in this enlightened moment, by some many poor benighted souls, in themselves.

Ed@170: there’s probably the possibility of micro-coalitions or even larger coalitions

As usual, Uncle Ralph is on the case. See his new book: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Even shorter and far wittier shorter Roy:

Prejudice can’t see itself.

True Roy. You really can’t see.

roy belmont @ 169: there was almost no crossover whatsoever between the movement toward black liberation and the movement toward gay liberation

There was James Baldwin and there was disco. Seriously. I think there was actually loads of cross-over, deep cultural cross-over as well as tactical political imitation. I mention disco, because long before the horror of John Travolta, or even Stonewall, gay culture and socialization got started in sharing and then imitation of the underground black club scene, even adopting Motown as its theme music. Gay liberation took many cues from the civil rights struggles of blacks, particularly the creation and celebration of a subculture and community. Gay Pride was an obvious mimicry of concept, based on a adapted analysis of the role of shame and humiliations in creating oppression, including self-oppression. Gay liberation was a by-product and a component of the Sexual Revolution, and formed a cultural bridge to feminism, and issues as diverse as abortion and miscegenation, which deeply affected black communities.

I’m not sure how the facts of that history should affect the valuable points roy was making, but I offer it anyway.

“Gay Pride was an obvious mimicry of concept.” So was White Pride.

I have no serious point to make by that, but, well, it is true.

Bruce Wilder, #133

Do you accept that Obama continued many of the errors of the Bush years?

Of course! That’s largely why Obama attracts criticism from the left. Progressives are guilty of evangelising about him initially, but when the character of his centre-right administration became obvious, lefties criticised him from where they stood, instead of blithely pretending they’d always been at war with Eastasia and at peace with massive deficits, as conservatives did with Bush, then suddenly re-discovering their principles when the same policies were continued by the Tweedledee Party.

The left’s ongoing impotence is from the same source: lack of hierarchies and obedience. While the left is sorting through ideas and arguing over which ones deserve support, the right takes orders from HQ and gets marching.

tl;dr: Left! Right! Argle! Bargle!

#122
“My point was precisely that Art Pope felt it necessary to engineer a change in political control, even though politicians of both parties are supposedly equally for sale.”

We can’t assume that everybody is equally for sale, can we?

As an outsider I’m not sure what’s going on with the Tea Party. If it’s true that nobody is in charge and the inmates are running the asylum, then they will do things with a certain I can’t say what — yes I can, the word is randomness.

But if somebody is in control, this could be his way to tell Tea Party politicians that they don’t get a free pass by being Tea Party, he will replace them whenever he feels like it so they better do exactly what he wants.

When my list of possibilities includes both of those, IU really don’t know much. Maybe I should just shut up. Except, who else knows what’s going on? Who told you? Why do you believe them?

“Similarly with the notion that any apparent unpleasantness due to Tea Party rule is largely imaginary in order to provide corporatist Democrats with a convenient enemy. In places like North Carolina and Wisconsin, things really did become worse.”

I don’t really know what’s going on, but if there are impersonal economic forces or evil manipulators who want to make things worse, it’s possible that the particular politicians only affect some of the details about how things get worse. Like, maybe one set cuts funding and passes repressive laws, while the other set sells bonds and spends the money which puts them more at the mercy of the people who can withhold the money…. I don’t say that’s true, but if you’re fighting a hydra it would be good to find some vital point and not just whack away at disposable heads.

“Yet apparently we need to leave both states that way until sufficiently worthy progressive politicians come along, lest we be acting as mere partisan robots.”

For myself, I’ll vote for a center-right democrat over a far-right Republican. I’ll vote for a far-right Democrat over a crazy-right Republican. But if you want me to get excited, show me somebody who actually has an idea beyond just trying to hold the barbarians at the gates.

#135

If the US government avoids touching off another major war I will be happy.

Ah, the gentle tyranny of low expectations.

Still, I have to admit that one of Obama’s major accomplishments has been putting off war with Iran.

I an sure women, minorities and LGTBQ folk are comforted by your eagerness to throw them over board to pick up the bubba vote.

J Thomas @ 186: the local water district has promoted the use of rain barrels, and if we actually were getting appreciable amounts of rain my roof is big enough that I could collect quite a bit of water. Integrating it with the sprinklers wouldn’t be easy. It might be easier to use it to flush the toilets, but I’ve decided just to piss on the pomegranate tree instead.

In Southern California, the issue isn’t avoiding dependence on the system, which actually works pretty well for us, it’s lessening our impact on the distant places our water comes from.

@12:

The Tea Party is a real thing, and it is making the running at the moment as far as the meaning of ‘conservative’ goes over there – but it’s a real organisational thing.

As near as I can tell, Brat received no organizational support whatsoever, which is why he had almost no money to spend. He did receive moral support from radio hosts and from Eric the Redstate, but these guys aren’t grassroots and everything they do should be understood in terms of self-aggrandizement.

Brat got labeled as “Tea Party” purely because he ran against a powerful incumbent and because he tried to position himself to Cantor’s right. Of course, all Republicans try to position themselves to each other’s right these days, so the Tea Party label in this case, like in all cases, merely means “extra-dickish Republican”.

I have found some kind of temporary sanity in this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klOnDr9Xrvc

lyrics here:
https://tinyurl.com/3t4ol

The incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world
https://tinyurl.com/c6uzt4e:

@160
“These white anti-racists and feminists etc OTOH do not want to either convert their enemies or completely destroy or assimilate them. Like France and Germany, they want their enemies to continue to exist so as to provide an identifying boundary. They just want their enemies to submit, show deference, accept defeat.

I am mostly interested in the rise of these new constructed identities not in themselves, but because they show a cultural pathology analogous to the last Gilded Age, and are a possible indicator of the collapse of the older identifiers, a new social disorder, and possible social revolution.”

I won’t comment on the “white anti-racists” because that’s another whole very long discussion, but are you seriously suggesting that being a feminist is a ‘constructed identity’ and “cultural pathology”, presumably in contrast to being someone like you who is totally real and authentic and culturally healthy? Because lol.

The ‘conflict’ mentioned, in a somewhat exaggerated way, by SamChevre @166 is one that can be bridged; it’s not something one has to assume is a permanent feature of politics in ‘advanced’ capitalist countries. J.M. Schwartz’s The Future of Democratic Equality is relevant on this point (and to some other aspects of this discussion).
http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Democratic-Equality-Rebuilding/dp/0415944651/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1403014167&sr=1-1

I need (for certain values of “need”) a McManus-made-intelligible cheat sheet, to the extent such a thing wd even make sense.

Much of the time I can’t make heads or tails of his perspective or argument, if indeed he has one. His comment @198 is somewhat typical — a link to a long piece by one Davidson, criticizing Nairn, whom McManus then proceeds to quote (he’s quoting Nairn, as quoted by B. Anderson), followed by some cryptic utterance in the last graph.

B. Anderson’s Imagined Communities (2nd ed 1991) is worth reading, though one probably wdn’t know it from McManus’s comments here. Anderson, btw, is critical of Nairn’s statement that “nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history,” though, again, one wdn’t know that from McManus’ comment.

Okay I am just going to say it. Roy is a pretty obvious bigot.

W Timberman:
Started to write a long reply and lost it. Shorter version: I think this is less about liberalism (either in the political-philosophy sense of the word or the contemp.-US-politics sense) and more about *where* Bob M. is “looking for enlightenment.” (The bk I linked at 199, btw, is by a democratic socialist.)

…and more about *where* Bob M. is “looking for enlightenment.”

You know one place I look? National Cinemas, the original movies and academic work about same. Isn’t it interesting that we have had a surge in idiosyncratic wonderful art cinema in eastern Europe, New German Cinema, Taiwan, South Korea, Iran among others, and I look at the relationship to the waves of national art cinemas in the 50s and 60s.

You know, people mark neo-liberalism from Latin America, The USA of Reagan, the Britain of Thatcher, maybe the failure of the 1st Mitterand term, but a lot of other stuff happened in the 80s and 90s. Was what happened in Taiwan and South Korea and Poland “liberalism” or “neo-liberalism?” Naomi Klein says Poland for instance, pretty much skipped right to neo-liberalism.

Iran? Well goodness, so repressive. Still, some terrific art. Thing is, I do not necessarily believe the full panoply of institutional freedoms are a necessary part of the neo-liberal individualistic empowerment political economy. Neo-liberalism is partly about making some kinds of resistance ineffective and harmless therefore tolerable.

I also try to place this art in a context of local and global political economies.

Oh, I always have 4-5 books going, one of which looks like this, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, Guo-Juin Hong, italics hers, spacing mine:

New Taiwan Cinema contributed to, if also complicated and
troubled, the notion of Taiwan’s national cinema. The quest for a Taiwan
nation inevitably implies and, as we shall see in the remainder of the
book, requires a double movement:

temporal retrospection and spatial displacement,

both of which are already evident In Our Time.

But, I ask again, What exactly is new about New Cinema? For
Chiao Hsiung- Ping, New Taiwan Cinema was “new” in four important ways.

First, New Cinema, like new literature or theater, played
an important role in helping to develop and reexamine Taiwan’s
culture. Second, with its continuous success in various international film
festivals, New Cinema broke diplomatic barriers and became one of
the most powerful vehicles to promote Taiwan’s image. Third, New
Cinema reestablished confidence in its local audiences, making them
aware of the artistic, historical, and cultural significance that cinema
is capable of conveying. And, finally, a new film critic system was
instituted that rejected being a mere agent for the dominant Western
culture, but stood firm in creating and advancing a distinct cultural
identity

Uhh, identity? Why should I privilege or give a pass to some forms of constructed or imagined identities and not others? Are they all emanations of neo-liberalism? Or just Tea Parties and Salafism? I don’t hate or oppose identity-formation, I just want to understand how it works, and how it works with and against neo-liberalism.

“I’m totally great too!”

Me too!

And now for the up:
http://t.co/qDFVuavLov

Of course we already know who’s side you are on and it isn’t mine or anyone else whose demands for equality make you feel uncomfortable or icky.

Looks like lgm is missing a few of its scolds.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/

The idea is that MPAV and I frequent LGM (seen by Real Leftistsâ„¢ as a non-stop Obama-justification site and therefore unworthy of Real Leftistâ„¢ attention). Deeply wounding. Being a scold is not so bad.

Back to the OP: a Goldwater moment?

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/eric-cantor-davebratgopteaparty.html

I’m a little late to this party, but…
MPAVictoria:

Any movement that appeases racist, bigots, sexists, and homophobes is not one that I want any part of. They are the fucking enemy Bruce not potential allies.

J Vinokurov:

These people are not potential liberal allies; the name for them is “fascists” (oh, I’m sorry, “right-wing anti-corporatists”) and they are never going to be on board with any significant part of the progressive agenda.

I am now becoming quite curious about this shunning therapy, which apparently allows exposure the reactionary reich-wing echo chambers to continue. I hope this turns out to be a revolutionary therapy for curing fear of “the other”, but it just seems so counterintuitive.

http://youtu.be/iTB1h18bHlY

“At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won’t be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.”
― George Clooney