The three party system

Let’s not forget in the US the 40% of the population that sits on the sideline and watches, not even bothering to cast a ballot and easing any crisis of governability. Perhaps they have the lost the narrative of their lives, as Angus Deaton drawing from an anthropologist colleague says.

Tribalism is the only possible future ideology, given the massive immigration that has already occurred, I think you mean. Unless the country gets split up into relatively homogenous areas, of course

There are neoliberal true believers but also more pragmatic politicians who work within what is possible if you want to call them soft. Obama is in many ways neoliberal but also signed Obamacare, still an expansion of the welfare state even if along neoliberal lines. Let us not make neoliberal a synonym for rational.

The populist far right has always been pretty hostile to capitalism, the fascists of the 1930s advocated corporatist and autakic policies and were extreme nationalists deeply hostile to the internationalist tendencies of capitalism.

Yes — what RNB said.

A secular decline in political participation combined with a gradual shift of politics from substantive issues to symbolic ones has been concomitant with the gradual evolution of a politics that is responsive only to the very rich and powerful business corporations.

Neoliberalism serves as a rhetorical engine apologizing for plutocratic oligarchy and kleptocracy. If “none of the competing forces has an obviously compelling solution to the problems we face” I think we have to recognize that that is by neoliberal design. The greatest success of the neoliberal intellectual project has been in trapping our minds in the realm of “There is No Alternative” and depriving us of trustworthy authoritative voices.

The creation of a dialectic between Reagan and Clinton, Thatcher and Blair, which excluded or marginalized various left viewpoints was part of the neoliberal ideological design and it succeeded.

One reason it succeeded is that the plutocratic elite is nearly the only reliable source of funding for intellectual projects, across the whole range from punditry and opinion journalism to policy entrepreneurship in the “think tanks” of the Washington establishment. As social affiliation declined, there were no mass membership organizations to either fund political thinking on behalf of mass interests, nor to channel mass political education or indoctrination. People’s political thinking fragmented into twitter-size one-liners drawn from talk radio and cable news shoutfests. You can see this in the incoherence of Trump’s rhetoric: it tells us more about the “thinking” of Trump’s fans than about Trump.

Fascists and Nazis had capitalist economies. They may have talked a good game about being opposed to the capitalist system at first, to woo workers to their cause. But once they won power, capitalism remained the system and prospered. Private ownership of the means of production remained. Profits remained. The employer/employee dynamic remained. And they were a part of the competitive, unified markets created by global capitalism.

Talk is cheap. What did they actually do, once they held power? They kept capitalism in place and helped it thrive.

It is a little wonky, but I submit that the back-and-forth between Sanders and Clinton over the need for further financial reform well illustrates the problem neoliberalism poses as an ideology and a source of policy agendas.

Such neoliberal ideas as a “risk tax”, increasing capital requirements and macroprudential supervision (making lists of systemically dangerous institutions and asking for “living wills” for dissolution of companies too big to dissolve) — these are all insanely stupid proposals. Once you start discussing them, you are unlikely to be able to have a discussion that would identify effective approaches or genuine points of concern. You are trapped in a discussion that leads nowhere.

Prominent left or soft neoliberals helpfully offer to feel your pain and echo your concerns, but will lead the dialogue back down the rabbit hole, where there is no alternative. People like Krugman, Larry Summers or Brad DeLong are pretty conservative economists, but they play representatives of left viewpoints on the internets.

Capitalism only works in an environment of population and productivity growth, pretty much the last 500 years. Now that growth is coming to an end, starting in the developed countries, instead of adapting and changing the system, neoliberals started blowing bubbles and calling them growth. What the left has to do is start imagining what a system without growth looks like and go in that direction. Feminists are the left? Please. This is about capitalism.

Lupita,

To quibble a bit with the overall years. Capitalism began in Britain in the 17th century (primarily agrarian in nature) and remained fairly contained there for sometime. It was violently forced onto its colonies, especially Ireland and India, and little by little in the Americas, but it didn’t really take hold on the European continent until well into the 19th century. It wasn’t the dominant economic force in the United States until after the Civil War.

But I agree with the rest of what you’ve said. The left must present a radically downsized vision of living within the limits of Nature, while making sure that everyone has what they need. This is far easier than one might imagine, simply due to the massive concentration of wealth, income, access and power at the top . . . which obviously means that there is more than enough for everyone to live nicely if it is spread out across the population. We, by definition, have poverty and economic struggles because the top of the pyramid concentrates most everything.

Reverse engineer this, and all can be quite comfortable. And then some. When the top 0.1% hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, this is too obvious to remain hidden for long.

“Neoliberal” in the sense of “the market as an organizing principal, and the state’s role as supporting the wellbeing of the whole population”, has been tremendously successful, the GFC nonwithstanding. Everyone from the Danes to the Americans to the Chinese to the Indians in principal accepts this idea – it is easy to forget just how much objection there was to this concept in the very recent past, either because a) extraction for elites rather than wellbeing overall implied a plutocratic state (Latin America, classic monarchies), or b) capitalism was wasteful and could not be reined in except by state ownership of production (much of the developing world, major political parties even in Europe), or c) the state’s role as maximizing the prestige or power of the nation, or some other non-wellbeing measure (Fascist and theocratic movements). It’s also easy to ignore that the 1990s and the 2000s were the two decades in human history with the highest global growth rate in GDP.

Neoliberal policies are by definition technocratic. This means that they promise no utopias and have a fundamental conservative bias – in a good way, as far as I’m concerned – and that they are non-nativist because they, due to the second clause in the definition I gave, are unwilling to cede to policies which benefit a majority at the greater harm of a minority. Both the traditional left and the nativists can attract votes by promising simple ways in which particular voters will be better off, even if this is to the detriment of society. Because of this, political systems have been designed to limit tyrannies of the majority, such as split branches of government. In their absence, Greek or Latin American style swings between nativists and leftists, each of which promise benefits to 50%+1 voters with everyone else be damned, is inevitable.

The left was originally “international”. Neo-liberal dominance since Reagan and Thatcher has effectively created a continuous fiscal race-to-the bottom competition between states. This was called globalization and the left resisted it vehemently. Within states the left has since mostly focused on protecting the gradual breakdown of established well-fare states. It has consequently had to identify more and more with a certain conservatism as they’re competing directly with tribalists.

The only real way forward is for the left to be unashamedly international again.

@Plume

I dated the birth of capitalism to the emergence of banks in Renaissance Italy. I find particularly useful Varoufakis’ definition of capitalism as a hand that stretches out into the future to extract capital and loan it (at interest) in the present. In an environment of growth, the system works and can bring benefits; however, in a zero or very low growth environment, you would just be robbing from future generations since there would be no extra money in the system for interest payment. This is why usury was considered a sin during the low-growth Middle Ages, not because people were leftists.

For what it’s worth, I image a future post-capitalist world like the Middle Ages with plumbing and internet. I know, nobody is going to win an election on that platform

Thanks for the clarification, Lupita.

I like Varoufakis a lot, and wish Tsipras had bothered to listen to him.

Like your idea of a post-capitalist world. Good start for that. I’d just add that it needs to be fully democratic, inside and outside the workplace, with full public ownership of the means of production — not by the state, or political parties, or anything else. By right via a new constitution, etc.

Plume@11. You’re a good straight man!

@ Omega Centauri

I think we are past the stage where we can consider the risk of change. That is, there is no alternative to change because the birth rates in the 1st world have pretty much fallen below replacement level and shrinking populations do not sustain high GDP growth. We either start imagining how an economic system with no growth can function or the system will just implode on us and we would have to adapt under much worse circumstances.

As to Scandinavia or any developed region being a model, that is out of the question. Capital has been flowing from the 3rd to the 1st world during the whole neoliberal era, so the systems of the rich nations are premised on the continued exploitation of the poorest of the poor of the world, no matter how much they value internal equality.

So the new world order is starting to look like democracy, toilets, and internet… and no pensions.

Dan,

Not just black people, of course. Trump supporters hate Mexicans, Muslims, gay people and Abraham Lincoln, apparently. In a recent survey, 20% were against the freakin’ Emancipation Proclamation!

A large number support banning gay people and Muslims, too. And Trump basically got his start bashing Mexicans.

It’s as if the Civil Rights era never happened in America. We’re going backward, swiftly, to pre-Civil War tribal corners.

“20% were against the freakin’ Emancipation Proclamation!”

By bet is that 40% of the survey sample don’t know what the Emancipation Proclamation is — and so guessed.

Heard an unusually encouraging talk last week, by Gar Alperovitz. He described a surprising degree of activity by cooperative and community-based enterprises throughout the country. Convinced me, at least briefly, that progress toward self-government was possible within our lifetime. See:

http://democracycollaborative.org/
http://www.pluralistcommonwealth.org/
http://www.garalperovitz.com/

@30

I generally agree that we’re past the point of comfortably sitting on the current situation. It honestly looks to me as if it’s a societal race between the vast majority of the world population, and some subset of people from the developed world, to see if emergent economic and political systems can develop to better serve most of humanity before the subset precipitates the kind of modern middle ages previously mentioned.

Sebastian H
Her only real hope is that the identity politics of being a woman can overcome the repulsion of her neo-liberal side.

(You have to able to define it in such a way that it doesn’t just mean ‘women and minorities are so silly and emotional that they will vote against their own best interests because a candidate seems to be like them or to understand them in some way, unlike all us white left wing men who don’t have identities and don’t vote for people like ourselves and are all normal and rational’; as well as –
recognises that people have multiple identities and interests which are at times in conflict – which I think you already get, from the comment above.)

Geo @35,

Am a big fan of Gar Alperovitz and have been for a long time. He and Richard D. Wolff are well worth reading in tandem.

Thanks for the links.

Does ‘the Condorcet problem’ refer to the possibility of cyclic preferences in the population when ranking options pairwise?

That is a practical problem for anyone using the Condorcet voting method, but does any nation actually use that method?

And it’s only a problem if the cyclical situation obtains. It may well be that for a country using a Condorcet voting method for representative offices would simply never run into this problem: at every election the President would either end up being a tribalist, a neoliberal, or a leftist. And it may be that the preference in the population is stable over time. Just because there are three options doesn’t guarantee instability.

More relevant to first-past-the-post elections is Duverger’s Law, it seems to me.

In a country with proportional representation, the fact there are three ‘parties’ does not obviously entail political instability. The parties get the proportion of seats in the house according to the proportion of the population that votes for them, and then if no-one has a majority, they either cut a coalition deal or rule as a minority government, voting on every piece of legislation on a case-by-case basis.

Unless the three parties are approximately equal in size, one will be significantly smaller than the other two and have to accept being at best a junior coalition partner, the larger party setting the overall tone and the junior partner getting a bit of their preferred policy flavour in.

Of course, often there’s more than one party in any camp defined as broadly as Quiggan does.

I don’t see there’s an inherent problem with that, apart from the problems with representational democracy in general. And even in FPP situations this dynamic still happens, it’s just that it happens within the factions that make up a large political party (so the Leftists aren’t there as a particular party, but as the ‘left wing’ of a party which is ‘soft neoliberal’ in flavour) and isn’t as transparent to the electorate.

The main thing to say about these three general options, it seems to me, is not that there’s three of them, but that they represent fundamentally different and incompatible visions as to what kind of society we are going to have.

I don’t agree with this analysis at all. Sorry JQ! Some thoughts:

1. I don’t think “tribalism” is actually a thing. Even if it is a thing, it’s not the sort of thing that can explain political formations in the way that “left” or “right” or “liberal” can. And if—impossibly—it could explain political formations in the requisite way, I don’t think it would be possible anymore to intelligibly explain political formations in normal categories like “liberal”, “right-wing”, etc. So I think the triad in your post is very odd, it sounds to me like bad conceptual grammar.

Of course, everyone’s so in love with “tribalism” these days that this probably sounds like rank insanity to everyone. Moving right along to the next point then.

2. The (to me obviously) striking thing to me about how you’re explaining things is that you’ve done away with the category of the right, as in the right-wing. Yes, what we generally think of as right-wing attitudes or policy positions are accounted for, back-handedly as it were. But the right as explanatory category has completely disappeared. Which is bizarre.

3.

The hard neoliberal (in the US, the Republicans) relied on the votes of (white Christian) tribalists and made symbolic gestures in their direction, but largely ignored them

People say this all the time and while in some sense it’s not wrong, I think it seriously misconstrues the base-elite relationship on the right. I don’t see how one can look at what’s happened to reproductive rights in this country (obviously at the state level, but see also the federal ban on D&E), or the resegregation of educational institutions (etc.) and conclude that the base doesn’t get very significant aspects of what it votes for. Arguably, immigration shows that the base exercises a constraining influence even where the interests of capital are directly affected.

Basically, my point is: there’s a right and a left (much as there’s been for almost all of modern history). Despite the specificities and peculiarities of neoliberalism, nothing suggests to me that we’ve moved past that basic axis.

1. I’m
2. Voting
3. For Bernie Sanders
~

@40 The EU has sovereign states who sovereignly choose to yield to the money…

That’s really not the case, most the Left is sincerely ideologically globalist and Europeanist. The problems of Syriza and Podemos have in many ways come from the fact they’re intellectually committed to these projects, and aren’t willing to step back from them. You see the same forces in Corbynite Labour and various Green parties. They’re not cravenly following the cash, they just genuinely believe in the political projects and aren’t willing to let the economics change their stance.

a heavily regulated neo-liberal system

A contradiction in terms.

Also, net disinvestment seems to be a common aim of neoliberal policy in practice, if not rhetoric.

The American far right is as anti-corporate as the left. But they blame corporate ascendancy on government and Democrats. Their term of choice is crony-capitalism. Under pressure they include the Republican establishment among the likely suspects.

@57,

They said they were against freeing the slaves. They obviously know what that means. Throw in the roughly 78% who believe whites are the superior race, and the large percentage that believes the Confederate flag should be flown at state capitals . . . . and, well. I don’t think this should be excused on the grounds of poor civics education.

I think all too many people are trying waaay too hard to rationalize what is happening. Trump, if he is not himself a fascist, is obviously pushing fascism, and his followers are loving it. We need to wake up and smell the racism. It stinks to high heaven.

@ Omega Centauri

Capitalism means lending money at interest. If there is no growth, the business/industry/country cannot pay back its loan plus interest without cutting expenses, what is known as austerity. Neoliberalism with zero-interest would not be capitalism; it would be another system, one yet to be defined.

“Even in a quasi steady economy there is still need of investment capital to replace stuff that has worn out, so some mechanism for allocating capital is still needed.”

In the Middle Ages there were “survival loans”. I suppose people got money from friends and family, by marrying a daughter to a lord, or going to the Crusades and coming back with some loot. Whatever you want to call a similar system nowadays, it would certainly not be capitalism.

bob mcmanus @ 59

Well, yes, America has many subcultures, but affiliative attachments have grown weaker as the formality of membership organization has declined. Consider, say, the character of an Italian or Irish neighborhood in Boston circa 1950. Everyone went to Sunday Mass. Those who could afford it sent their children to parochial school; if the kids were in public school, there was PTA. The church fair or Lenten fish fry was organized by the Church. Most people voted for the Democrats and against the hated Republican Yankees because of clear conflicts of interest between ethnic groups that largely paralleled class interests. And, there was a deep investment of personal time in those associations. Dad went to the Knights of Columbus, Mom volunteered with the altar society. The whole family pledged not to see movies proscribed by the league of decency or whatever it was called. Everyone gave money to the Church as well as time.

All of that still exists, kinda sorta, but in much weaker form. 21st century political tribalism is something you see on teevee and imitate, associate with in your imagination. In the classic example, people still bowl, but they do not actually organize such elaborate teams and tournaments. Politically, that has profound implications.

The impulse to solidarity remains in human nature, but the social framework for affiliative investment is much weaker. If you like, teevee took up too much time, especially among the late boomers and gen X.

As an example, the NRA was once a genuine membership organization representing its membership’s interest in hunting, gun safety, etc. Now, it is basically an industry lobby group, representing the interests of makers of relatively cheap guns — people who want to sell and market guns on a large scale, and avoid liability. They engage skillfully in manipulating their membership thru propaganda. “Membership” is just a way of enrolling the rubes in direct mail campaigns.

Lupita @60,

That’s not really how to define capitalism. It’s much more than lending practices and debt.

The single best definition is detailed by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her seminal The Origin of Capitalism.

Read in conjunction with Michael Perelman’s essential The Invention of Capitalism, and it presents perhaps the fullest picture of what it means, why it’s unique, and how it got its start. Perelman is especially good on primitive accumulation and bringing in the voices of the early political economists to show what they had in mind.

21 minutes of gold (Sharpie):

http://drumpfinator.com/video/

courtesy John Oliver.

Another way to parse it would be that there are groups who want to maintain or enhance the current system (neo-liberals, elites generally), those who want to keep it with modifications (liberals, social democrats, many of those JQ calls tribalists – who want to modify the system so that it favours their group more and others less), and those groping for some way out (environmentalists, the remains of the old left, many small “tribal” groups, feminists). Bob has it right – you need at least three axes to map it, maybe more.

Stepping back, it’s worth asking why, if the present system has, as Brett Dunbar would have it, delivered so many goodies, that it took the turn away from social democracy in the late 70s? To have a stab at answering this, I think we need to be clearer about the paths we took to get here, discarding a number of myths along the way.

First, “feudalism” conjures up lords and serfs, local self-sufficiency, closed guilds and arbitrary governance. If these ever existed as a system, it was gone west of the Elbe by 1350. That’s a long time ago. There have been at least six politico-economic systems in Europe and the wider Eurosphere since then. The two latest are corporate managerialism under the aegis of a strong central state (starts about 1880, comes into full flower around 1950) and the finance-centred follow-on of the last few decades.

Together, the state and the corporation could tap resources (foreigners, labour, energy, mines, forests…) with a thoroughness and on a scale that were beyond the reach of any previous system. They reached everywhere and literally transformed landscapes. But diminishing returns set it..

Why the financial turn? To see this, stop thinking of money as a lubricator of market transactions, and start thinking of it as a flow that enables higher, wider and much more coordinated hierarchies. if you don’t have a large monetised base then, as Russia, the Ottomans and the Moghuls found out, your ability to command is limited. You can muster a lot of people in one place for a time, but to keep them fed and clothed, transport them and their materials, transfer the fruits of their efforts – nothing beats money. This was Britain’s great advantage in the French wars – it didn’t write orders so much as placed contracts, payable through London (contra Brett, mercantilism’s great aim was to maximise share of cash flow, as the essential resource for both national and commercial success).

What happened in the anglosphere after 1980 was that the cash flows from established lines of business started to falter, both in themselves and as newcomers diverted streams to themselves. The response was to look for new cash flows by monetising government and community (and as well squeeze the lower classes harder). But monetising may improve cash flows but not the underlying activity – hence bubbles – and may hollow out the cooperative base that allows the activity to be carried on at all.

Adam Smith is reputed to have observed that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation” in response to the doom-sayers of his time. I think there is a great deal of ruin left in the US and EU, so both Trumpism and neo-liberalism still have room to run. In much of the rest of the world, the margins are thinner. As the system degrades, my guess would be that the environmental tribalists will be the main practical beneficiaries, but expect major wobbles and various flavours of reconstruction first.

It occurs to me that some people are really just terminally sad that the politics of white solidarity that they remember from their youth is gone. And gone forever. It actually makes a terrible amount of sense, and I can’t believe I didn’t realize this earlier—or at least not this clearly. But it does make complete sense that so much of the “class not race” discourse in the US is really a very fancified cover for: it was much nicer being white when I was a kid.

[Clinton] is the arch-neo-liberal technocrat

That she is, which means if she becomes President she could govern to the left of Bernie Sanders or to the right of Ted Cruz; whatever is most expedient.

Trump, if he is not himself a fascist, is obviously pushing fascism, and his followers are loving it

Trump is not a real fascist. He is professional wrestling heel manager who, amazingly, is going be the Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America. It’s such a shame that William F Buckley is not around to see it.

Perhaps the dam has broken. From Reagan on, the right has successfully confused enough Americans into believing that “socialism” meant massive government, even totalitarian government, and no escape from this trap. For those Americans who open their minds and study the last two centuries of socialist thought and small scale practice, however, they know this is the opposite of the truth.

The truth of actual socialist theory and small scale practice is that it is the first, best, most effective and humane modern day attempt at true self-government under the umbrella of full democracy. And there can be no real democracy if it does not include the economy, and socialism does. Capitalism renders that impossible. Capitalism is anti-democratic and innately so.

That’s what young people especially are discovering. They’re discovering that capitalism is a sham, a scam, an illusion, with nothing but shiny objects to entice and distract, and they’re beginning to want more from life. They’re beginning to see that life should be and must be more than just a struggle to get ahead. Ahead of what? That always implies the many are left behind, and no sane, compassionate, intelligent human being could want that. Could be okay with so many guaranteed to be left behind. Could sleep okay thinking that was no big deal.

Underneath it all, capitalism is nothing but modified slavery, and when no democratic checks are around, it’s not even modified. More and more Americans are catching on to this. Pretty soon, there will be a fourth party to add to JQ’s list: An actual leftist, radically egalitarian, green party of the people, by the people, for the people.

@52: I’m not saying the entire left has abandoned the internationalist drive. Luckily that is not the case. Seen from Europe Sanders is also a real socialist from that point of view – and not one that merely picks votes out of discontent to further a localist agenda (I have to refer to the US here since people are rightly excited, maybe Sanders succeeds at least in socialists in Europe coming out of their closets again).

Still, what I don’t see is a drive to organize the left across European borders. Each of the parties remain first and foremost national. I think that’s where the opportunity lies for a new initiative from the left: to first make an international agenda e.g. on minimal wages and minimal taxation (and keeping a lot of things local; much more local than states now, not even regio’s but at the city level) and then focus on current state particularities. That is the only way out and I’m sure such an agenda (also including the environment) can be endorsed by many on the left (without forcing them to join on the national level).

“The ultimate outcome remains unclear. In part this reflects the Condorcet problem: with three alternatives, that can’t be neatly arrayed on a right-left spectrum, there is no stable outcome.”

I’m not sure it’s that unstable. It looks like none of the three are able to on their own obtain a majority in a legislature. So government will be based upon coalitions – either between parties in PR systems or within parties as historically in the US or Japan.

While it’s possible to imagine how it might occur, in practice the Left won’t form a coalition with Tribalists (at least in the form that they take in, say, France or the UK). Therefore governments will be formed by coalitions between the Neoliberals and either the Left or the Tribalists depending upon local advantage and personalities. The Neoliberals can form a coalition with either because they just care about an economic and fiscal policy that is benevolent to capital. Both the Left and Tribalists also care about other things (eg promoting Trans rights for the left or removing immigrants rights for the Tribalists). Neoliberals will be able to give either of the others as long as capital remains unimpeeded. The Left will also support the Neoliberals in order to keep the Tribalists out (wait for French leftists to vote for Neoliberals in order to keep out Le Pen), and I assume vice verse.

That situation could of course be overturned if either of the three could get a majority. The Neoliberals are still too weak. Based upon recent history I expect that in Europe the Left might be able to do so in Spain or Greece. Elsewhere the Tribalists seem to be more popular (especially in Central Europe where in some places the Tribalists are already in power).

Plume I like a lot of what you say, but structural or organised inequality preceded capitalism by a long long time, and it seems likely that patriarchal hierarchy (kingdom type structures) was the first form and that the oppression of women was the first form of exploitation, followed by slavery.

Engels and Marx knew this stuff, why are so many people here resistant to acknowledging it? Is it because – to paraphrase js – so many grew up in a time when being a white man was what mattered, and the only important conflict was between white male bosses and white male workers? I fear so.

Actually I think I’m extending what js said to encompass women as well as people of colour rather than paraphrasing it, but the point is similar – nostalgia for a past when being male, and white, was what counted.

I think it should be very easy for neoliberals to co-opt the tribalists.

The tribalist tendency towards “economic nationalism” could give enough of a short-term, localized growth spurt (via dislocations, relocations, and rate differentials of various sorts) to allow the tribalists to become distracted, back into medium-term quiescence.

All the while the neolibs can slowly encroach, with their weirs and wares, back into the legislative process, and indeed cause more short spurts, to make it seem as if it can all work, again.

Here in the US, Trump would be the perfect tool for this.

Some data to add to your analysis:
twenty years ago, I worked on the Australian Everyday Cultures Project which, amongst other things, was interested in replicating Bourdieu’s work on culture in France in an Australian context, using a large-scale, properly randomised study.

Doing a factor analysis of expressed political attitudes it found three main ‘factors’ within Australian society (see ‘Accounting for Tastes’, Bennett, Emmison and Frow, p.255): Factor 1: conservative-welfarist; Factor 2: progressive-feminist; Factor 3: conservative pro-market.

This division maps neatly onto your tribal-progressive-neoliberal differentiation and has the added bonus of being supported by data. Although the research was done in Australia, I’ve thought ever since that this three-way differentiation quite efficiently explains the political systems in other native-English speaking countries.

I can cut-n-paste the detailed descriptions of each of the factors if there’s interest, although I trust people’s Google skills sufficiently to find them faster :) .

One thing that I have heard little about is the fact that much of the American religious right abandoned the idea of “social gospel” during the cold war. The logic behind that was that since Communists were atheists, socialism was the work of the devil. So the religious right, which was at one time sympathetic to the New Deal, allied themselves with all things Capitalist. The idea of “prosperity gospel” had been around a long time, but during this period went from marginal to mainstream.
There probably should be a more objective or less pejorative term than “tribalists”.
Though techically it is accurate. And Social Conservatives are united by their social conservatism whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or secular. At this point Muslims and Hispanic Catholics are definitely not included.

jake,

I’m close to the end of Stacy Schiff’s odd but very interesting history of the Salem Witch trials: The Witches: Salem, 1692. The level of mass hysteria involved in Puritan New England was provoked by endlessly bombarding the community with religious nonsense, 24/7, which no child could escape. They were taught to believe in devils, witchcraft, people signing pacts with the devil, flying on poles, turning into animals, shooting up and down chimneys, bewitching children and each other. The judges forced confessions, which snowballed into dozens of people turning in their neighbors, former friends and family to save themselves. Daughters turned in their mothers to save. Mothers their daughters, brothers their sisters, and so on. Late into the book, it appears twenty were hung total, and several died in jail.

We haven’t really come that far since then. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that famous religious leaders were blaming Katrina on gay pride parades, saying their god was angry with America and so on. (Apparently, however, their god is quite selective in his objects of anger. Reverend Wright’s god was very angry at slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and Jim Crow, but for that he was pilloried by the right.)

The origin myth tells us these good people fled religious persecution in Europe so they could live in peace and freedom here. Um, no. Actually, they fled because they wanted to establish a theocracy there and couldn’t. They did so for a time in America. And if we’re not careful, they will do so again.

Word is that Hillary Clinton may choose Labor Secty Thomas Perez as her Veep; would be to indicate that she’s not so much neoliberal as “progressive” which for her is not left because it draws its energy from making practical reforms to better achieve a truly equal opportunity society, not from a vision of just income and wealth distribution. Collective bargaining would be defended as an institution that gives the labor a fair opportunity to bargain for the wage; the hike in the minimum wage would be defended as necessary to make sure work is rewarded, and is a source of dignity and social inclusion. In other words, Clinton does not want to be considered a neoliberal but she wants to keep distance from leftism. So this position which she calls practical progressivism is justified, I think, basically in terms of the principles of an equal opportunity society–not labor or leftism.

@73 I am wondering whether the youth are just able to see more clearly what is happening–Bush’s bail out of the banks, Bush’s take over of Fannie and Freddie, trusteeship over the auto industry, exploding asset sheet of the Fed, government involvement in health care. Why pretend that this is not some form of socialism already? It’s not the youth that turned socialist. Perhaps they just recognized as the older people could not that the system was already socialist in a way that contradicted the ideology of free markets; so the question is simply about whose interests should be served by socialism. The youth see a socialism for the rich, a socialization of their losses; and want in on the game.

Plume — I’m not opposed to class-based politics. But “class not race” is an excellent way of ensuring that there will never be an effective class-based politics, at least in the US.

RNB @96,

I think young people know it’s not real socialism, and more and more of them want the real thing. Real socialism means no more capitalism. It’s not “Big Government,” etc. etc. In fact, many young people are discovering that true socialism is the best possible path to a much, much smaller and far less intrusive “state.” As in, those of us on the anticapitalist left, especially in the libertarian socialist camp (give or take) see no chance for a smaller, less intrusive state as long as capitalism exists. Unlike “anti-government” movements on the right, which tend to love capitalism but hate (certain parts of) the government, we see problems with any concentration of power — public or private. And unlike those right-wing movements, we recognize that under capitalism power comes from wealth, which creates immense centers of power in the private sector.

So to be against “Big Government” and for capitalism sets up an obvious major conflict, an impossibility, actually. As capitalism grows, so must the bureaucracy of the state and the web of states. And then it just becomes a matter of what that massive state does, who it does it for, and why.

js. 97,

I agree with you if the construction is “class not race.” That’s a terrible idea. But I think the left all but abandoned “class” altogether after the 1960s, so it’s become more of the reverse, as it is with parts of other group identity movements. Tons of exceptions all across the board. But I think issues of class have been grossly neglected for a good 40 years, at least.

Jacobin has a recent article about this with regard to feminism:

Feminism Against Capitalism

Another way to see the tripartite political divide is to imagine the investment options a person had during the housing bubble:

1. Neoliberals. They would put their money into funds heavily invested in housing believing that the trend would continue and give them safe, high returns. These are Clinton voters.

2. Tribalists. They would invest in shorting the housing market, sensing that the market was rigged and would eventually collapse. As long as they win, they don’t care about a financial crisis. They won! These are Trump voters.

3. Left. They know the system is rigged but don’t have money to invest. They vote for Sanders.

BW: “The Sanders voter is a recent college graduate with a mortgage but without a house”

That was the Occupy profile, certainly. What people should notice, though, is that this person is not a worker. Not culturally, not really structurally. They’re a potentially upwardly mobile aspiring professional. The core left in the U.S. are people like this plus minorities who are still oppressed under the American racial system. It really has nothing to do with socialism or workers except insofar as these are remembered words from an earlier time. I would guess that the new, young socialists who are being discovered as Sanders voters have only the vaguest idea of what socialism is and wouldn’t really agree with it if it was presented to them independent of the issues that they do care about.

Capitalism and industrialisation tended to undermine the status of existing elites. The relationship between the development of capitalism and a fall in the Gini coefficient is fairly well established. Tax records allow the reconstruction of income data a surprisingly long way back. The Gini coefficient fell sharply with industrialisation.

The conservatives are not gerrymandering. They do benefit from the abolition of some bias such as the overrepresentation of Wales and that the population of labour voting areas has declined since the last review.

Maybe Hillary Clinton will be relieved that Gerald Friedman is supporting her if he continues to acquit himself well in this debate?
http://dollarsandsense.org/Friedman-Response-to-the-Romers.pdf

Ze k @77. You might well be correct, then again you might not. I still think gender would be a meaningful divider in a world without a class system. Race as well , perhaps to a lesser degree. Probably even being Icelandic.
My own perspective is that even without this class based hierarchy, in a flattened world, you’d still have a genetic elite + a number of bad eggs, so you’d end up in the same place.

how exactly are authoritarian racists the missing ingredient of US leftist politics ?

You want to make ideology into a deep commitment to particular ideas or maybe a psychological pathology, and I suppose it is for some people, but mostly it is just attitudes.

I learned a lot from this book:
The Authoritarians
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

One thing I learned is that leaders and followers are different from one another.

Another is that life experience shapes attitudes. (Shocker that one!)

To answer your question more directly: the right represents the established order and vested interests against the commons; the left represents the commons against the boss. Whatever else a particular flavor of left politics may be, it is a critique of hierarchy and a plan to reform, replace, negotiate with it.

The commons that the left aspires to represent will necessarily be composed largely of people cast into the role of followers and the political attitudes of many of them are likely to follow the pattern documented by Altemeyer. A left that aspires to political power must contest with the right for leadership of these people.

“You want to make ideology into a deep commitment to particular ideas or maybe a psychological pathology, and I suppose it is for some people, but mostly it is just attitudes”

I don’t want to turn it into a psychological pathology, I have no problem trying to understand it. But I don’t think economic arguments are the best answer. I don’t think most racists have consistent racist ideologies (ie a deep knowledge of scientific and historical justifications for race hierarchies) but I believe they are meaningfully racist, and very difficult to budge on that.
Life experience shapes attitudes sure. But “life experiences” is very broad. Life experience can be growing up in a racist household. Or jumped by a non white gang. Or falling in with a bad crowd. I don’t know how any political movement (1)accounts for these multiple ways a person becomes a racist and (2) tailors their message towards (a) putting the target on a road to Damascus conversion to racial egalitarianism , or (b) gets them into the coalition without pissing off all the anti racists.

“The commons that the left aspires to represent will necessarily be composed largely of people cast into the role of followers and the political attitudes of many of them are likely to follow the pattern documented by Altemeyer. A left that aspires to political power must contest with the right for leadership of these people”

Theoretically, perhaps. But in practice i don’t see how or why. And I think the potential costs (driving out younger , liberal, and non white voters who are becoming more demographically important) outweigh the benefits of courting this group who seem to be declining in political importance.

Ronan,

But the Sanders campaign, and the Occupy movement that preceded it, point to a young and energized left in favor of the commons — all but discovering the concept for the first time. They’re growing in political importance, not declining. And I don’t see any reason why we have to chose between them anyway. We can make the economic argument and the anti-racist/anti-bigotry argument at the same time. Emphasizing class just strengthens it and makes it far more inclusive. As in, fairly close to Occupy’s 99%, though . . . probably more like the bottom 90%.

As mentioned, leaving class out of the picture leaves those neck-breaking hierarchies in place, and they fund structural racism, misogyny and all the other apartheids.

Above is response to 114

Ronan: “A genuine question, how exactly are authoritarian racists the missing ingredient of US leftist politics ?”

For most of the history of the left, it’s supposed to have been about representing workers. You see that in the sociological referents above (Peter Dornan: “three fundamental orientations for political parties in modern democracies — left/socialist/workers, liberal, and traditional/Christian Dem/old Tory”) or in things like BW’s “the left represents the commons against the boss.” I think that this is all just a historical mistake by the left. What a worker qua worker wants is good working conditions, a living wage, and a boss. That’s essentially conservative, not a revolutionary or even particularly left orientation at all.

So leftists through the second half of the 20th century have been increasingly wondering where all the workers that they are supposed to represent went. And that’s why authoritarian racists are the missing ingredient.

No. You’re right. In that hypothetical universe.

natural ?!

At the moment we’re on track to 4 degrees of global warming by the end of the century, maybe 6 degrees at the upper limit.

I think we are at 1.5 or so degrees C of warming in terms of ghg emissions accumulated in the atmosphere already based on ppm CO2 equivalent , depending on which probability turns out right. The temperature rise so far has been about 0.8 degrees or so C but there is a lag of about 30 years , I think specifically for carbon emissions due to the role of the oceans I think.

To maintain 1 – 1.5 degrees C of temperature rise in the long run the idea would be to rapidly decrease ghg emissions, put more focus on short lived ghg emissions like methane (if there was a 40% decrease in methane emissions that would decrease temperatures by around .5 degrees C, this would be partly from decreasing livestock but also addressing methane from natural gas mining and other sources like waste management landfill, methane digesters can be used to turn methane into energy) and also draw down ghg emissions by reforestation and afforestation , better land management to improve carbon levels in the soil, and also things like algae farming.

Race and class are not separable in the USA; it surprises me anyone can argue as though they were. “What else is white supremacism if not the ideology and practices of a class system? What else was US white supremacism founded on if not the desire to gain wealth by enslaving Africans?” — Me, Thoughts on race, class, and wealth

Bob – I meant to say in response to a comment by you in an earlier thread that in my local area, in October and December last year we had average maximum temperatures that were nearly 6C and 4.5C respectively above the long term average. Not only that, they were the highest ever recorded, by 1.9C in October and .9C in December.

Even those anomalies though pale in comparison with some in the arctic region in the Slate article you linked.

A further worrying thing is that January and February have been closer to the norm and I have seen some media articles talking about our ‘mild summer’. In fact both months have been about 1C above the long term average, but it seems like that has become the ‘new normal’ (or even the new ‘mild summer’). It is a worrying example of the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome.

You can’t expect people to be patient when it’s their own body under threat, so to get their vote you need to at the least listen to their concerns.

A point that is evidently difficult to grasp for people whose bodies have never been under threat.

Plume
This particular old guy has never been nostalgic for “white solidarity.” The idea itself is revolting. But I have been nostalgic for left-wing solidarity, which welcomed women and minorities as equal partners in the fight against social injustice and all apartheids.

The trouble is Plume that you are nostalgic for something that didn’t actually exist. I remember the new left of the 1960s, and I remember that women were still expected to make the tea, while the men made the decisions. That was part of the motivation for second wave feminism.

I call it the mostly-white Christian conservative party. Though you could swap reactionary for conservative. Social conservative culturism is mostly what unites them. Their prejudices are more class and cultural than racial. But of course, in the US those are not separate.

Val @136,

I don’t have any direct experience with leftist organizations in the 1960s. I was too young. College was in the 1970s for me, then back again in the 1980s, and for a last hurrah in the 1990s. My early activism was late 1970s, early 1980s, and I remember the unspoken assumption being that we were all equals in our little circle — mostly food co-op/enviro stuff. No words were needed to make sure this was the case. It just was. Women weren’t expected to make tea for anyone, and we were all pretty good at taking turns for that kind of thing. The quality of the tea, whether it was fair trade or not, was far, far more important than who made it or brought it to us. Women were also leaders, organizers, facilitators, just like the guys.

I suppose everyone has their own, quite different experiences, which is one of the best reasons for not drawing universals from particulars . . . . though I guess I just sorta did.

;>)

As for your online problems. I’m sorry you had to go through that, and I definitely hope it never moved beyond boorishness — which is rotten enough. I also hope it was the exception and not the rule. Life is too short for that garbage.

@ZM
LFC said you [mcmanus] lived in Texas

I want to make clear that I only said that because I recalled that mcmanus himself had said it here in the past. I know nothing about mcmanus beyond what he himself has chosen to reveal about himself in comments here.

Phoo, I mis-formatted 141. Both the first and second paras are quoted, the second is a response to the first and the third my response to the second.

Clew @143,

Are you claiming that all lefties treated you this way? That lefties as a group are all guilty of sexism and boorish behavior?

Or was it a few, which would tally up with the same rotten behavior in any other group in America?

Come on. One of the things we’re supposed to be fighting against is this kind of sweeping judgment, prejudging our fellow humans based on certain select criteria, and then treating them accordingly.

As I said to Val, I am sorry this happened to you. But it is not fair or accurate to condemn the entire left for the actions of a few. How is that better than assuming all women are X, or all blacks are X, etc. etc.?

reach 1 degrees of global warming and in just the last 5 months now we have gone 0.4 degrees warmer which is completely impossible in only 4 months to happen due to ghg emissions unless there was some sort of great disaster

Sorry that is just what they are saying. Global mean temperature has gone up 0.4 C degrees in 5 months. 0.1 is the maximum contribution of El Nino.

I have never believed they had a complete understanding of the systemic or cumulative effects or tipping points and that the vast majority of climate scientist were likely to be erring on the optimistic side by a large amount.

But hey if we are in a surge or tipping point they are not gonna be able to keep it secret and better minds than I will talking about it a lot, although again, I think the tendency will be to be overoptimistic. Because revolution and a command economy is gonna be hard.

We should done it 16 years ago.

Plume — Because it was (and is) a systemic problem. I mean, seriously, the New Left was practically famous for its sexist attitudes (I wasn’t around for it, but it’s well-attested and film and fiction, just for e.g. You could try The Golden Notebook or for a later, more obscure example, Die Dritte Generation.) Look, the fact that some poor people manage to do doesn’t solve the systemic problem of declining social mobility, right? Similarly, some nice dudes don’t undo the systemic problem of sexist attitudes and behavior on the left.

LFC: “I don’t think left parties (or in the U.S. context, left-liberal Dems and others) have been “wondering” about where the workers went. It’s pretty obvious. For structural and other reasons the economies changed.”

If “workers” are industrial workers in factories then yes, they are barely a class any more. Like agricultural workers in the U.S. (2% of the population, last time I’d looked) they may well make critically important products, but they aren’t numerically important in an electoral sense.

But what I’m trying to get at is that for a left that still thinks of itself as being for workers, this is a tremendously unsettling development. The natural response is to say — as left theory generally always held — that any prole working for a wage was a worker. Therefore most of the service economy was workers, governmental employees were workers, etc. I remember a whole cottage industry trying to convince e.g. academics that they too were workers and should share in worker class consciousness and solidarity.

The only problem with this approach is that it’s just not true. Not culturally, not in terms of conditions and relationships of production, not in terms of basic class interest. Most critically for the left, I see a sort of inversion — the left’s strength is basically in educated professionals, the marginally working poor, and racial minorities. But in a sort of permanent Halloween, these people have to metaphorically dress themselves up as and pretend to be workers. It leads to a left that’s unable to squarely face the actual interests of its core supporters.

Clew @ 141:

It wasn’t anything to do with the New Deal that makes it so hard for workers to unionize in the US. The culprit was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which Truman vetoed only for Congress to override it.

RP @151
On a theoretical level, the changes posed challenges for the left; but on the practical political level, service workers, govt workers, workers in the growing temp and contingent sectors of the economy, etc. do have some common interests. There’s no reason alliances can’t be formed w elements of the technical/managerial/professional ‘classes’ (or the so-called ‘new class’ as the debates of the ’70s and ’80s labeled it). Sanders, at least according to some analyses, has been getting some considerable support from across the class spectrum. All of which is not to deny that many of the problems you’re pointing to are real, but I think the Halloween metaphor is an exaggeration. (And having entered this thread late, I’m rather tempted to bow out of it early.)

@heckblazer 03.02.16 at 1:54 am
>I expect that this history in part explains skepticism by older blacks of Bernie Sanders – they remember being cut out of social and economic reforms and so need specific reassurance it wouldn’t happen again.

Whereas Clinton can credibly assure them that there will be simply no social and economic reforms to be cut out of; on the contrary, she is virtually certain to favour and tolerate social and economic policies that are guaranteed to hurt the majority of both blacks and whites (but, as always, especially blacks). Nothing to be sceptical about here.

>You can’t expect people to be patient when it’s their own body under threat, so to get their vote you need to at the least listen to their concerns.

How Sanders can be said to have listened to their concerns less than Clinton is a mystery to me. Unless talking about other things *in addition to* racism counts as ‘not listening’.

It’s a nice idea but I think there’s a lot wrong with this attempt at explanation…

1. Tribalism obviously is equivalent to right wing in this formulation
2. Neoliberalism is a weak kind of idea that is too often used to mean “capitalists I don’t like”, as in this case it is used to describe Thatcher, who was a big state interventionist not a neoliberal
3. If Obama and Clinton are neoliberals, then neoliberalism has been the best thing for America in a long time so why the reaction against it?
4. The tribes clearly are confined within the right wing and left wing, so the tribalism formalism doesn’t seem to work.
5. Trump is just doing what every Republican does: uniting the Republican voters. The reason he’s doing it so well is that he has decided to drop the bullshit about gutting social security and worrying about debt, and talk about what republicans actually care about. He doesn’t represent anything new about the Republican voter or America, he’s just the first person to actually bother to represent these people.
6. You can’t really compare American and non-American neoliberalisms

Trump seems like a basically pretty straightforward phenomenon to me: a dude who is talking to ordinary people about their economic fears and offering racist snake oil as the cure. Sure, he’s more fascist than most, but America is a military republic so what do you expect? This stuff is surely as old as Baden-Powell, I don’t think it needs to be explained in terms of tensions between a vaguely defined neoliberalism and a vulgar tribalism. If the Republicans had told their rich backers to get real 20 years ago, and offered a bog-standard diet of big state conservatism and reliable welfare for the racial in-group, Trump would never have happened – and neither would Obama.

It’s not tribalism, it’s an internal party reaction to the kleptocracy the Republicans have become. Once Clinton spanks his arse in the general, perhaps the Republican “thinkers” will finally get their mouths away from the wingnut welfare tit for long enough to have a debate about what their party actually stands for.

Or more likely they won’t and the whole party will finally whither to the point where it is small enough that Clinton can drag it into the bath and drown it.

So, in the spirit of the OP: When will Bloomberg step in to make it a 3-party race?

Clearly, the king over the water is being kept for a D Day raid. Health warning. Bloomberg is an establishment toady. He’s also cautious, and doesn’t like to lose. If he were worsted by Godzilla, he would never sleep again. What has the Trump constituency got to do with Trumpism? Zero. What could Bloomberg say except ‘I’m a safe pair of hands while the man in the wheelhouse right now is a maniac’. That hasn’t worked so far. The more Trump bawls and shouts at his shameless Mussolini-copy cat rallies, the more the punters lap it up. He also plays sex, just like Il Duce. Powerful drug.
In any event, the GOP wigwam gang would have to disconnect from all the campaigning and voting that has gone on so far. More like a coup d’etat I’d say. I am not saying they would not do it. Panicked men will do anything, and they are panicking.
Clinton is really the spectator in this: she hopes she’s the calm maiden of the seas, whereas she has yet to prove convincing. Viewed across the Atlantic waves, she is no Thatcher.
I am sure Bernie is pondering an indy run. He has the power to whip up a constituency which is both appalled by Godzilla, yet deeply and sincerely wants change, which Mrs. Macbeth does not have in her kitbag of handy family offers..

164 “I am sure Bernie is pondering an indy run.”

Predictions around here can be hilarious. We also had people claim that Kasich will come out on top. Come on folks.

‘You must either have parties or technocracy,’

To which my response is, we are all technocrats now: Another name for political parties is factions. So, to give the contemporary example of the British Labour party, you are a member of one of three factions under that umbrella who are barely on speaking terms with each other. Blair married his value-free system to the Tories, who in turn almost immediately split Japanese-style between their neocon and Macmillanite One Nation wings. Cricket anyone? The UK is slipping into an authoritarian state which does not require niceties of approval, as ministers have made perfectly clear.
W stands for Weimar.

I don’t understate Obama’s achievement on Obamacare, but I do recognize that the form it took (a mechanism for funneling taxpayer dollars to insurance companies while simultaneously ensuring their business model by taking single payer off the table, with the side benefit that some more people get affordable health insurance) is a consequence of the neoliberal consensus. And Bill Clinton surely ended welfare in the US, far more so than anything Thatcher accomplished in the UK. The OP seems right to me.

Val @157,

Your paraphrase isn’t in the same universe with what I said. It’s a gross misrepresentation of the quote in question, and everything else I’ve written on the subject.

I think complaints about sexism, racism and bigotry in general are absolutely necessary, and I wouldn’t even use the word “complaint.” When these things occur, naming them is just telling the truth. I support that. I support activism against these things. I support changing our legal codes to prevent discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity . . . . and class. The last in that list is something most good “liberals” wouldn’t think of adding, and until they do, they don’t get to claim they hold the moral high ground.

As mentioned, as an egalitarian I want all pyramids pulled down and I see all humans as holding equal value, regardless of the aforementioned categories — and, again, including class. The class structure needs to be obliterated because it’s immoral all by itself, but also because it funds, supports and sustains all the other apartheids — including the patriarchy.

My problem is with the blanket condemnations of all leftist males. And if I, too, was guilty of misreading, I apologize. There’s a lot of that going round on the Internet.

Bottom line: I’ve never had a problem with anyone calling black clouds black clouds.

RP 169, this seems shaky and also quite America-centric. Your last two items are not even an issue outside the US. And why are unions and full employment against the interests of the “actual left constituency”? And in what sense does “the left” support “threatened industries”? Who is the “the left”, anyway? The Dem party? The left of the dem party? Isn’t the most salient fact about the “contemporary left” that it is no defined and coherent entity?

I don’t know as much about Europe, but OK, for Europe strike the last two issues and add instead the unresolved issues about the role of the state. The European Union has been pretty much a disaster for the left’s core constituencies.

Have you ever talked to black people in the U.S. about unions? They are not the One Big Union of Wobbly fame: they pretty much are designed to ensure that some workers are elevated and the rest are not. The workers so elevated have no real common interest with marginal labor: in fact, their interests are pretty much opposed.

The rest of your questions I think that you could answer yourself if you actually wanted to. Here’s an example: the AFL-CIO supported Keystone XL because it would create a few jobs. I don’t understand any sense in which the AFL-CIO is not “the left” and in which that support was not directly against the actual interests of the left.

Lynne @178,

Ferrante’s books are definitely on my list. Have read nothing but great things about them in recent months.

As for the rest of your comment, especially this:

“leftists don’t have to be more sexist than the rest of society for the sexism among them to count.”

My experience with this kind of discussion is that words are twisted, projections are made on top of those words, and any kind of response seems to just make it worse. Defending one’s views, trying to clarify them, just gives further ammo for the twisting, the misrepresentation and the projection. It never ends well, once some folks think they see blood in the water. Sharks gather.

So I’ll end it with this: I have repeatedly said sexism, misogyny, racism and bigotry in general are rampant in society, obviously wrong, obviously highly destructive, and should not exist. At all. We should not have a patriarchy. We should not have hierarchies, period. I am a committed egalitarian (small d) democrat and a staunch supporter of women’s rights, equal rights, human rights, civil rights, etc. etc. Of course it counts and it matters when leftists are sexist — or bigoted in any other way. I never said otherwise, nor did I remotely imply that it didn’t count. My entire point was that all male leftists shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. That’s it. That’s the entire argument in a nutshell.

And, again, if I’m guilty of misreading, or projecting this view onto the words of others, I apologize.

Enjoy your day, all.

FWIW, I identify “identity politics” for use on CT with something Scott McLemee said a few years back (I think it was McLemee–now I’m thinking it might have been Michael Bérubé): that, somewhere between, say, 1980 and 1990, the left fragmented, because women, LGBT, the disabled, people of color, indigenous people, and so on, became politicized around their own interests and had less interest in joining what someone like him would probably characterize like a broader movement like socialism. My memory of that era is that a lot of effort was expounded on explaining why such “identity politics” was misguided, for one reason or another. Now it appears to be accepted, as long as it knows its place, which I suppose is progress.

With the possible exception of something like feminist philosophy, which seems to be increasingly important.

Further to 180. The big contradiction at the core of any reformist left politics is due to the fact that in capitalism, most people’s well-being depends on their having a job, and therefore is tied to the interests of their employer. consequently, the left must support policies that reduce people’s dependence on their job. I guess this is what you were getting at? Basic income is one such policy but full employment also makes workers less vulnerable. I don’t see why you object to that.

So just wondering what you meant by [identity politics] in this statement?

Val, I wouldn’t want to answer for Sebastian H, but my understanding of the term is as follows.
-It can either mean that people will make political choices based on the perceived choice of the majority of a given group whose members seem to ressemble them in some trait (possible exemple of this use, not necessarily describing the reality: Southern Whites voted against Obama because he is black, Black Democrats voted for Clinton because they are her firewall).
That use is often explicitly derogative or perceived as such (in your words “‘women and minorities are so silly and emotional”), though it also perfectly aligns with Weber’s description of social phenomena (not necessarily amenable to rational explanations, but subject to statistical regularities).
-Or, in a slightly more technical sense, it can mean the body of political ideas and actions inspired by the theory that variables pertaining to one’s identity are clear determinants of the relative distribution of power, wealth, prestige and influence and important domains of action if one wishes to influence said distribution (possible exemple of this use, with the same caveat as above: gender diversity in academic panels is important, christians are persecuted in the US).
In sense 2, if you think that the single most important thing to know about the political project of a candidate to the presidential election in 2016 is the likely impact of her program on the various brackets of the wealth distribution, your politic is materialist; if you think it is more important to know how it will impact Appalachian whites, black women, LGBT people and evangelical christians, your politic is identity politics.

Both 1 and 2 can apply to Sebastian H’s sentence about Clinton (without the sentence being derogatory in any way).

TM: “Basic income is one such policy but full employment also makes workers less vulnerable. I don’t see why you object to that.”

There are a few reasons. First of all, as you wrote yourself, even full employment still ties the worker’s interest to the interest of their employer. Even in a situation in which workers could pretty easily find another job, it’s still often a major disruption of one’s life to change jobs.

Second, full employment naturally pits workers against nonworkers. This is one of the major social divides in the U.S., and a cause of a lot of supposedly working class people voting GOP. The scorn of white workers for white “parasites” who don’t work is a major source of social advantage and psychological well-being for workers.

Third, you can’t really at once have both a full employment system and a basic income system. It’s like the people who ask why can’t Social Security be means-tested so that only poor people get it. Well, without everyone being in this system, there’s no broad support for it. If the left is working towards full employment it can’t really be also working towards basic income.

Fourth, it’s not necessary and in fact is positively harmful. Not everyone needs to work, and if everyone did work, we’d have far too much production for the planet to sustain.

Fifth, pursuing full employment within the current system implicitly means coming to terms with our current system of social control. In practice people mean either that the Fed should lower interest rates — which keeps the reserve army of the unemployed still there — or that a shorter work week should be mandated. But a shorter work week didn’t do anything to change the essentials of our system. As I wrote above, a worker qua worker wants good working conditions, and a shorter work week is part of that. But it’s a lump of labor fallacy to assume that if you cut the work week in half, employers would have to give everyone jobs in order to get the same work done.

I should maybe say that I’m not myself capital-l Left or a Sanders supporter, and agree with what Rich says above about the us sustainability of current liberal emphases on college, and don’t know what to think about the strength of Sanders’s emphasis on access to good, free college educations leading to good jobs for everyone.

192 “Third, you can’t really at once have both a full employment system and a basic income system.”

What do you mean by a “full employment system”?

@Rich Puchalsky 03.02.16 at 11:45 am

>If the ruling class really is diverse then they have to make it so that society does not automatically come down hard on disfavored minorities, and instead oppresses everyone equally. That’s a decided advance for people who are in one of those disfavored minorities.

The question is what the absolute level of oppression is, or the one relative to the ruling class. It might be the case that you go from a situation where working-class blacks get worse education/healthcare/security than working-class whites to a situation where both regular blacks and regular whites get worse education/healthcare/security that *either* group had before, and both are far worse off compared to the ruling class than they were before. I wouldn’t call that an advance. Another question is, of course, whether even complete racial and gender equality will ever be achieved under neoliberalism in the first place – I don’t consider it so implausible or unprecedented that minorities do get some representatives in the ruling class, whereas all sorts of old inequalities persist among the oppressed.

>And the American racial system is one of the primary devices that has kept the poor from uniting in their own interest.

Certainly, but I’m afraid that by the time one gets to the point where this device is finally completely gone – assuming that one does ever get there – all the achievements of economic equality will have been lost and very difficult to restore.

On identity politics, Clinton has to manage it in her party. Trump provokes an angry, FU politics of the people self-identified as white. He wants to defend white citizen privilege. And that means giving a thumbs up to the abuses from policing the black community and deporting 11 million Latinos and casting suspicion on each and every Muslim (or people who look as if they may be Muslim). Clinton is talking love and kindness because Trump’s opponents are angry (I have had nightmares since he has commanded the public stage) and could well alienate many of the white people who are likely to vote Democratic. Trump’s most hopeful sign is the 100K + white Democrats who voted for him yesterday in MA as a cross-over vote like that could give him NJ, OH, IL, PA. Clinton is desperately trying to create the image of the Democratic Party as a place where all Americans come to enjoy neighborly relations and community and take pride in meeting their responsibilities to each other as citizens. But there is no doubt that the best way to attack Trump is not for his nativism and racism but for his failures as a businessman and Chancellor of Trump University, his narcissism, his belief in his own abilities in the absence of any real plans for action, his vacillation. Basically Axelrod got it right: make Trump appear as the used car salesman who will say anything to get you into that car.

At some point, the good white people who have supported Sanders need think about how they are going to go get their boy.
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/15/whites_against_trump_kamau_bell_tells_white_people_yes_even_you_good_liberals_to_come_get_your_boy/

“free trade doesn’t impoverish the poor”

So it’s just a coincidence that millions of Mexican peasants suddenly decided to leave their families and trek to the US just after NAFTA was implemented?

“Removing tariffs on exports increases demand for labour in poor countries”

NAFTA also removed tariffs on imports, specifically corn. What then happened was that Mexico was flooded with cheap, inferior American corn unfit for making tortillas since they disintegrate at the touch of a drop of salsa. American corn was imported by the president’s brother-in-law who became a billionaire by destroying the livelihood of Mexican peasants plus killing Mexican cuisine.

“This has meant the global inequality has shrunk while inequality within countries has increased.”

If you treat countries like persons and then calculate the Gini coefficient, yes, world inequality has shrunk. But if you take each person in the world and calculate the Gini coefficient as if the world were one big country, inequality has risen to the point where the world is much more unequal that any individual country.

Lupita,
Now that many, perhaps more than a million ejidatarios have been displaced through neo-liberal restructuring, what is the way forward?

faustusnotes @ 182

“Layman you’re wrong. Millions of people are getting access to health insurance for the first time. Obamacare is a huge improvement in the American health system. By any definition I’ve ever read of neoliberal, that surely disqualifies Obama from the title.”

Wrong about what, exactly? We agree that Obamacare makes health insurance available and affordable to some people who didn’t have health insurance before. It’s a great achievement, unfortunately architected squarely within the neoconservative consensus. It’s a Heritage Foundation plan, don’t you know. Use ‘market solutions’ subsidized by public funding to deliver what ought to be non-profit social services.

As for Obama, you mean the guy who quite desperately pleaded for the chance to cut Social Security and Medicare as part of some grand bargain with Republicans? He’s disqualified as a neoliberal? I’d say he’s a left neoliberal, as described in the OP. We can only thank our good fortune that the Republicans are morons who can’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.

In Angels in America, Tony Kushner has his affectionate portrait of “the world’s oldest living Bolshevik” say that the people he’s addressing lack a theory as grand as the one that had failed him, and therefore “Then we dare not, we _cannot_, we MUST NOT move ahead!”. The divide between “Greens” and “Left”, on the one hand, and a coalition of people who are trying to put political form to their interests–between those with a theory and those without–seems like the big one to me. YMMV.

Rich Puchalsky’s post at #169 was excellent so I wanted to highlight it.

Of course I have minor amendments and caveats. Universal health care is in fact part of the program of the left, even in the US. The Democratic Party in the US opposes it, but the Democratic Party is not a left wing party, and the strategy of some American leftists in allying with it is actually very questionable. But American leftists within and outside the Democratic Party do in fact support universal healthcare.

The military as employer of a last resort only really exists in the US and I can’t think of any other country in the world where this is even relevant. But high military spending so the military can be a supporter of the last resort, and as a sort of subsidy as jobs for middle class people, is more something that the American right pushes for. In the case of middle class jobs I’ve seen this reasoning used explicitly on right-leaning blogs.

The overall point is valid, and the left wing agenda really should center around a basic income, universal healthcare, and ending the drug war. Arguably a few other issues should be added, such as ending privileges for certain subgroups (people will probably think this means affirmative action and it could, but I’m thinking more of immunity from prosecution for the wealthy), and ending debt peonage, particularly connected with housing.

TPP would be one obvious thing to point to if you wanted to make the Obama as neoliberal case. There wasn’t congressional or public or any other kind of pressure. If anything, the pressure was all the other way. (Obviously excepting pressure from vested interests.)

Trump may be able to sell himself as a protectionist and Clinton as having dissimulated about her neo-liberal support of any and all free trade deals. But Trump has a major weakness. He says that he wants to stand for America against the illegal movement of people over the US border, against the importation of cheap goods and even against the export of factories abroad. But he has not said a word about regulating the movement of money capital abroad. Clinton has spoken against inversions and for cracking down on tax havens. Trump’s only solution to this export of money capital is to eliminate taxation as a way of encouraging the super-wealthy to keep their money in America. He would thus have the state abdicate its responsibility to have people pay taxes according to their ability to pay. The Republicans can’t hit him on this, but the Democrats surely can. And Clinton should be able to turn around any advantage his nationalist rhetoric gives him. Trump won’t counter the wealthy who have made fortunes in America from using their threat of exit to free themselves of any responsibility towards the country that has given them so much.

I don’t really understand why anyone would think Obama isn’t neoliberal in the U.S. sense. He has all the typical preoccupations of TNR neoliberalism, and as for Harvey- and Mirowski-definition neoliberalism, his deference to mainstream economics (itself more or less a mark of US neoliberalism) seems to make it difficult for him to put any distance between himself and it.

Piketty’s critique of consumption taxes vindicated. From the WSJ:
‘Deductible expenses can include labor, supplies and equipment or items where it is hard to separate Trump the business from Trump the man, such as his jet or perhaps even the maintenance of his famous coiffure, said Joseph Perry, a partner-in-charge at accounting firm Marcum LLP.

“His haircuts might be deductible because that’s an image that he keeps and he needs to keep in order to generate more fees, because he’s an entertainer,” Mr. Perry said.’

Yes, nationalism is a form of tribalism — or rather, nationalism is a emotional appeal that resonates with tribalists — and no, I wouldn’t say that neoliberalism is particularly nationalist. If people spread neoliberalism throughout the world, it wasn’t to particularly strengthen U.S. power: U.S. power was greater before neoliberalism emerged. Putting the world under a neoliberal system hurt the U.S. as well as other countries (for instance, via U.S. based major companies locating themselves and their facilities elsewhere), although the U.S. wasn’t as much hurt because it was so wealthy to start with.

I’ve pretty much stopped arguing with people who think that Obama isn’t a neoliberal. TPP? No one in Obama’s base pushed for TPP. It was all on him. I know that the church of savvy sets up a howl about supposed green lanternism whenever you mention Obamacare, but come on: he sabotaged universal healthcare. He continued all of Bush’s security, surveillance, and warmaking policies. All on environmental issues, he’s a classic neoliberal. That is not to say that he hasn’t done anything, but neoliberals are not as bas on environmental issues as the right is.

On the topic of Obama supporters who just can’t see why we can’t see how great he is — here, I’ll just quote a Duncan Black blog post in full:

“I still get enraged about Libya. Probably not as enraged as actual Libyans who have a bit more reason to be enraged than I do, but I still get really pissed off about it. All of the humanitarian interventionist liberals informed me that we had to bomb the shit out of the country in order to save the poor people of Libya from the tyranny of the guy we supported 10 days ago, and that not wanting to bomb the shit out of them made me a bad person. Predictably, everything went to hell in Libya, and humanitarian concerns magically disappeared as well. Where are the impassioned pleas for aid? They seem to be missing from the blogs and newspaper columns. It’s not about me, of course, but honestly there are people I will never talk to again because of the bullshit condescension I got about the need to bomb the shit out of Libya. Assholes.”

I remember that on this blog, and yeah, there are people who really can’t distinguish neoliberalism from anything else.

I remember that on this blog

So do I. I also remember the calls for NATO intervention after Srebrenica.

Sanders seems to have no interest in having this argument with Clinton but if he does he has to show that Clinton jumped at shoddy intelligence about Qaddafi creating an imminent bloodbath to justify what you are calling her “stupid, destructive warmongering”. Clinton shared this belief, if I remember correctly, with Juan Cole who is not known for his warmongering.

Let’s agree that Qaddafi was both planning and carrying out an imminent bloodbath, and say for the sake of argument that there was nothing shoddy about the intelligence. How was bombing supposed to make the situation better?

I’m not a reader of Juan Cole so I don’t have an appreciation of why he believed whatever he believed or have this belief in the magical power of his name to sanitize killing as rightly meant. There were plenty of liberals who apparently deeply felt the need to kill. Two seconds Google brings up this: “The Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration, not only for Libyans but for a youth generation in the Arab world that has pursued a political opening across the region.” Maybe you shouldn’t be holding up Cole as an avatar of good judgement?

RNB@226 – “And it seems that France and the UK would have carried out bombings regardless of US involvement.”

So what ? That’s on the unhappy citizens of France and the UK. Meanwhile , here in the USA, Hillary Clinton chuckles, “We came we saw he died”.

Holy shit, it’s going to be like this all the way to November. So much fun!

@234 If you have good evidence that Clinton exercised poor judgment in concluding that there was a high risk of Qaddafi carrying out massacres, I am more than happy to read it. If the argument is that there is nothing productive the US can do in the form of humanitarian intervention, I am willing to consider it.

For example, Bhikhu Parekh has argued that humanitarian interventions tend to fail because the intervening nation puts such a high relative value on its troops’ lives compared to the people on whose behalf the intervention is made that the intervening power will take only those actions that do not put its own troops at risk though that kind of action, such as aerial bombing, tends not to be effective and create a lot of innocent deaths.

So the argument can be made that Clinton simply does not understand the limits of humanitarian intervention and that she should have simply the countenanced Qaddafi carrying blood bath after blood bath.

The argument could be that Clinton should have seen whatever atrocity she prevented in the short-term would result in greater atrocities in the long term. Or the argument could be that Clinton did not use the right kind of military pressure against Qaddafi. Or she was wrong that she increased the chances of success by trying to lead from behind the French and British air forces that were set to strike, regardless of US actions.

I have tried to suggest that I think we need to have a serious discussion of whether we are going to rule out a priori any kind of humanitarian intervention. As I have suggested, there are arguments for such a position.

I will say again is that even if Clinton’s judgment proved poor in hindsight, it does not mean that it was a terrible judgment at the moment of crisis and it does not mean that this decision proves that she is a war monger.

Plume
I dropped out of the discussion with you for a while when you started comparing people who disagreed with you to sharks – bit much! I still think in the passage I quoted earlier, you seemed to be blaming the fragmentation of the left on those who raised concerns about sexism and racism, rather than those who were sexist and racist. That passage did sound to me like ‘people on the left should stop going on about sexism and racism because it’s fragmenting the left’.

Now that may not be what you think or what you meant, but if so I think you should go back and re-read what you wrote and then express it to say what you actually mean.

On the topic of class and patriarchy again, I have been reading Richard Wolff, I don’t know if you have mentioned him previously or what you think about him. You probably know that he advocates democratic work structures as an alternative to capitalism, which sounds like your ideas. I am looking at these ideas for my thesis currently, exploring alternatives to the existing hierarchical structures.

Also I read Resnick and Wolff on the class structure of households, which they describe as (in their classic form) a “feudal” class system, in which husbands are “lords” and wives (and potentially children if they do household work) are “serfs”. They say that in theory “nothing precludes” wives from being lords and husbands from being serfs, but it is unlikely in practice because of “still dominant cultural norms”.

What they are talking about certainly can be characterised as feudal, but it is also clearly patriarchy, but they never name it that way. It is an interesting omission. In general it seems to me that that the patriarchal kingdom or lord type structure was most likely the original form of hierarchy, and Engels certainly saw the origins of private property (and subsequently class) in patriarchal relationships, but later socialist theorists seem very reluctant to acknowledge patriarchy.

My theory is that many male socialists (and indeed some women/feminists, as shown in previous discussions on CT) are reluctant to acknowledge the historical existence and legacy of patriarchy and its relationship with hierarchy and class, because it raises questions about male privilege that make them uncomfortable.

Ha so now I see that there was a whole discussion and debate about patriarchy and class in the 90s which Richard Wolff and his wife Harriet Fraad were involved in. I guess some people here, being American, are already familiar with this, but because I became involved with feminist theory more through my studies of Australian history, I hadn’t come across it so much.

It seems to clarify to me some of the processes by which feminist theory moved from using patriarchy as a key analytical tool to using gender as a key analytical tool, a shift which to me (particularly as a historian) weakened feminist analysis. That seems to be apparent in a discussion by Fraad, Resnick and Wolff where they appear are claiming to be Marxist Feminists but also appear to rather subtly trying to make that shift.

“I will say again is that even if Clinton’s judgment proved poor in hindsight, it does not mean that it was a terrible judgment at the moment of crisis and it does not mean that this decision proves that she is a war monger.”

This is sort of like trying to prove someone is a racist. I don’t know what is in her heart, but her actions suggest that she seeks war more often than is a good idea.

I was really hoping that R2P had gone into the trash bin along with Libya. Or maybe with Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” We can’t let Qaddafi kill his own people! We have to do it.

Any kind of evidence-based evaluation really quickly, and obviously, finds that you can’t bomb people into humanitarian compliance, so I interpret “I want there to be a better way” as “I really want to bomb people by proxy and I don’t want to give up on that idea.” That’s pretty harmless in an ordinary person, although I’d recommend video games rather than analysis of foreign policy, but it’s not harmless in a political leader.

How does rudeness correlate with evil?

@bruce wilder 03.03.16 at 4:13 am
>How does rudeness correlate with evil?

Sorry, that’s too subtle for me.

You are ditching any Responsibility to Protect.

I’m pretty sure everybody in the thread is cool with protecting people. There may be methods other than bombing to achieve that.

“critics of R2P do leave us in the uncomfortable position of accepting bloodbaths and human rights catastrophes as realities to which we must adjust.”

Actually critics of R2P leave us in the uncomfortable position of accepting most current bloodbaths and human rights catastrophes as situations for which we are largely responsible.

Luckily there is a situation to this problem!

Hidari: “Luckily there is a situation to this problem!”

I think that’s way too advanced for this forum. First you have to get through difficult concepts like “Bombs kill people — and not always the ‘right’ people” and “Killing people indiscriminately is wrong”. Only after a lot of painstaking remedial work on basic physics and morality could you then get to even more difficult topics like “I wonder where these dictators and terrorists that we have to stop keep coming from?”

This is why I think that all the research on “the authoritarians” is sort of beside the point. (Getting back to Hidari’s link at #232 and the continuing discussion of e.g. Altimeyer). It’s not just some kind of rube Trump-loving authoritarians who can’t understand basic concepts like “bombs kill people”. It’s most of the left too, at least in America. Basically we have a violent society and most people can’t question their society’s values.

@256, Brett Dunbar
You could also argue that in 1982 old man Assad put a stop to the unrest with exemplary brutality, re-establishing order and peace, and this was an even better result. If he had been a US ally, lots of people would make that argument.

RNB@237

“I will say again is that even if Clinton’s judgment proved poor in hindsight, it does not mean that it was a terrible judgment at the moment of crisis and it does not mean that this decision proves that she is a war monger.”

I’m struggling to recall an opportunity for war not embraced by Clinton. Can you think of one? Which war did she vote against, or argue against, or decide against, since coming to a position of power? She seems to have been on board with invading Afghanistan, invading Iraq, bombing Libya, bombing Syria, arming militants of all kinds, and the relentless death-by-drone regime of the past decade.

Even if your proposed lesser-evilism about Clinton is right, you shouldn’t be blind to what she is. I’ve said before, if HRC were a Republican, she’d be their dream candidate.

Sinclair Lewis was right: it is already happening in America.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
This is no ordinary book end election, it is a decisive and defining election that will decide America’s future inclination, permanently.
Sanders will run: on the Democrat ticket or under his own flag. He has come too far to give up now.

@ faustusnotes

Yes, I am largely serious, though by ‘Republican’ I meant the party, not the rump constituency. HRC is a corporatist, pro-Wall Street, hawkish Establishment woman. Pro-choice is certainly a problem, but the rest is just posturing by one side or another. As I said before, Obamacare is a policy designed by conservatives, and is only reviled by them now because the other side did it. GWB blunders killed far more Americans than did Benghazi, which makes it clear that the Benghazi rage is just partisan posturing. Of course HRC embraces BLM, it’s a Democratic constituency.

If a Republican woman with HRC’s record existed, she’d already have wrapped up the nomination.

Trump is “pro-choice,” too. But that isn’t stopping him from running away with the Republican nomination. And lest some folks say he’s drawing in a lot of Democrats, no. His poking at the xenophobic, racist, homophobic and overall bigoted id of the American right syncs up perfectly well with the GOP at the moment. They love him enough on all of the authoritarian nasty bits to overlook his stance on abortion.

There is a difference, the intervention in Libya weakened Gadaffi enough that his regime collapsed and the rebels won. Then fell out over what to do next. The supply of arms to the Syrian rebels was insufficient to destroy the Assad regime, it was enough to stop Assad winning but not enough to make him lose.

We didn’t want a prolonged war. We would have preferred a short decisive and successful revolution like in Tunisia, or a few years earlier Indonesia.

Speaking of tribalism, several times over.

I can’t stand watching CNN, but caught this via online newspapers:

Trump and KKK inspire meltdown on CNN starring Van Jones and Jeffrey Lord

The entire exchange was pretty stupid. But the worst of it for me was the re-diculus right-wing meme that the KKK is a “leftist terrorist group.” This is the same garbage the right tries to peddle about Hitler, etc. etc. but with a slight twist.

Apparently, since the right views the Democratic party as “far left” today, and the Democrats once dominated the KKK — back in the 19th and early 20th centuries — this must mean the KKK is “leftist.” Never mind the fact that the Democrats, even today, have “conservatives” in their midst, and that the Democratic establishment is center-right. When it controlled the American South, prior to the Civil Rights act, those reps and that political structure, were decidedly hard right. And the KKK has always considered itself right wing, and hates socialism, communism and liberalism with a red hot passion. The left has always returned the favor.

But the right is often very smart about these narratives. Get them out there. Overwhelm the left with opposite-day lies. And little by little, the left stops every trying to debunk those lies. They just become a part of the furniture and enough people accept the Night is Day garbage to weaken the left a bit more each time this happens. And with more and more universities selling out to right-wing billionaires . . . . I wonder how much longer before we’re in some version of Fahrenheit 451. Or the truth as Soylent Green.

.

@265 The only thing childish here is the way in which you are responding to what Juan Cole has written. At least you linked to it.

Hippy seems to think Libya was a desert paradise before the NATO bombing. It was in the midst of a bloody civil war; Qaddafi had lost 30% by some estimate of the territory and was poised to carry out ever bloodier massacres to shore up control. The situation would have become more and more horrific without NATO bombing. And you haven’t tried to make a counterfactual argument that things would have been better without NATO bombing. After all, the peaceful citizens who may yet make Libya a better place could have been annihilated by Qaddafi, leaving only externally-funded and violent jihadis. And who is advocating the killing of children? The strikes were targeted on Qaddafi’s forces poised to carry out massacres. What are you talking about? And as for Clinton being a war monger as “layman” claims she did not advocate sending in US ground troops even after the attack on the US Embassy.

At any rate, I am not convinced by those of you trying to make Hillary Clinton out to be the same kind of war monger as George W. Bush because of her actions against Qaddafi and Assad who received support from Russia and Iran, not wanting to lose their ally, to absolutely crush the civilians caught up in the Arab Spring.

Again the dubious idea here is that the all-powerful US itself created problems in these otherwise peaceful societies just because allies who recycle their petrodollars through the US wanted good guys Qaddafi and Assad ousted. So Sanders and his supporters think these situations are historically reminiscent of the US overthrowing Cold War enemies Arbenz, Trujillo, Lumumba, and Allende. But Qaddafi and Assad do not belong in this group.

At any rate, the most absolutely hilarious claims is layman’s–HRC had she run as a Republican would have sewn up the nomination by now!

Ze K @ 271

Do you mean the U.S., or the West generally, should stay out of Middle East conflicts? Or do you mean us little people should let the people in charge make the hard decisions based on the principles of utilitarianism, or whatever principles or lack of principle (I.e. realism) they use? I don’t remember what your basic theory of this stuff is supposed to be, so could you clarify? Thx.

@RNB, while you’re chuckling, maybe you could name that war of which HRC didn’t approve?

Rich,

It’s not “the left” in America. It’s a very small part of it, and mostly very close to the center. There is a ton of real estate to the left of center-left hawks.

Beyond that, politicians like HRC are center-right on most issues — the economy, taxes, the surveillance state, Wall Street, the two party system itself, campaign financing, the war on drugs, wars in general, etc. She doesn’t really venture across the aisle to the left until we start dealing with things that some would say make her “socially liberal.” Essential and important issues, but things that are much easier for pols to talk about without getting beaten up by the powers that be. And it may be that they’re easier stances to take because we’ve seen next to no progress along those lines — except on gay rights — since the early 1970s. Lotsa talk. Very little action in the face of the right-wing onslaught.

p.s. should add that there was of course an ‘indigenous’ Bangladeshi ‘army of liberation’ but it couldn’t have defeated Pakistan, certainly not quickly, w/o the Indian help.

Plume,

We do not have a “left ideology” (for want of a better term) in the U.S. Only a very few topics are considered to be inherently politicized. The rest are the common patrimony, hegemony, whatever you want to call it, which we generally think of as being basically center-right. (The wingnut right calls it center-left, liberal, or even Far Left, but they are wrong. They are misled because they are tribalists, in the formulation of the OP, who are still thinking in terms of a two-party system.) Much of the left considers everything to be political, true, or at least subject to politicized modes of critique, but this attitude is, as you put it, limited to a few.

Bianca @283,

Agreed. I think of “the left” as pretty diverse. Much more so than the right. Though that may just be my own bias.

Beyond that, I wish there were better terms and better ways to differentiate the things I want to say about the American political system. I fear it comes across as too dismissive to talk about “culture wars” or “socially liberal” issues, when compared with the economy, wars, empire, etc. But I do see a certain “type” of American politician, primarily in the Democratic party, who seems center-left on some issues, but center-right on the rest. Sometimes it’s limited to economics, so one could use “neoliberal” for that . . . . but other times it also includes wars and empire, so we could add “neoconservative.”

Either way, I think reality is bursting open the seams of those terms, and now perhaps more than ever before. It all seems to fall so short of even slightly adequate descriptors.

@282. Thanks for this; but don’t miss the responses. Gareth Evans who had been Roberts’ collaborator argues persuasively, I think, that Roberts is wrong to assume that a ceasefire and negotiated settlement was still possible.

what bianca steele said.

what is it the man said about not being able to oppose something with nothing? well, you can oppose nothing with nothing, if you stage manage it properly.

That, not incidentally is the significance of “neoliberalism” the non-ideological ideology that emerged to encapsulate the made-for-teevee political competition of Reagan v Clinton, Bush v Obama. Commenters say it does not mean anything, but they are missing that that is the point of its content – there is no alternative.

Political alignments, viewed naively and heuristically, are always going to call forth the chalkboard theorist’s 2 x 2 matrix: a dichotomy, an excluded middle, and non-participating unknown unknowns. What is happening in American politics is that almost everyone, whether they know it, choose it or not, is consigned to the non-participating by political establishments, who are busy serving a kleptocracy. The empty form of participation is maintained by noisemaking, which also serves to divert and, paradoxically, to suppress the emergence of genuine alternatives.

In a healthy politics, the ambition of rivals for rotation in office would fuel some faction to just say, “no” to whatever foolishness the party in power had propagated, but neoliberalism absorbs its own contradictions. A policy of realist intervention to prevent counterfactual mushroom clouds alternates with humanitarian bombing campaigns to prevent counterfactual atrocities. A surge in Afghanistan follows a surge in Iraq. A rube goldberg framework for private profit and public plunder can be rebranded from Romneycare to Obamacare. Scandals are manufactured to order — as much to inoculate their supposed targets as to generate the necessary noise: the Clinton email server and Benghazi “scandals” being cases in point, where the accusations miss any genuine malfeasance but excite ye olde tribes.

Up until the present moment, the neoliberal whirlwind has absorbed all the genuine skepticism about foreign policy, financial reform, trade policy, health care or climate change response and neutralized it. And, tribalism does the rest with regard to racism and other social issues.

There is no left.

@RNB

Yeah I agree the part about the possibility of the negotiated ceasefire is the weakest part of the argument (though I think Roberts has the more persuasive case on that point too).

Regardless, the info pertaining to the “imminent potential for massacres” argument is why I linked it. Consider it carefully; look for that kind of info in the present when the war-drums start beating.

bw@291: There is no left.

Could you spell this out a bit? It’s true that there’s not a major, or even significant minor, left-wing political party in existence or in prospect. But there are at least a few left-wing intellectuals and magazines — I certainly spend enough money buying their books and subscribing to the magazines. There are the organizations I linked to way back @35 of this thread, which deserve better than to be declared nonexistent. There is Nader and the panoply of citizen organizations he founded. Not to mention Crooked Timber’s own very impressive left-wing brain-trust-in-waiting: McManus, Puchalsky, Wilder, & Plume. And beyond that, a good deal of inchoate hunger and dissatisfaction, perhaps slouching toward articulateness.

Not much, perhaps, but not nothing.

No you should agree with me on economics because my Ph.D is not in economics. Please provide link to your blog review of Raghavan’s 1971. Thanks for the other cites.

Geo,

Thanks.

I’d add

(I tried too many the first time and it put me in mod mode):

https://www.jacobinmag.com/
(young and up and coming)

http://climateandcapitalism.com/
(a leading ecosocialist journal)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/
(And oldie but still goodie)

@Rich Puchalsky 03.03.16 at 4:28 am, 03.03.16 at 12:16 pm, 03.03.16 at 3:01 pm

I’m sorry, but most people, in and outside of America, will agree that there really are situations in which it is conscionable or, some would say, imperative to risk killing some innocents in order to save more innocents. Every resort to violence and military force is a case of that at some level. Yes, this principle is awfully abused all the time by everybody, and the NATO actions in Libya were a particularly drastic example of such abuse. But if you expect most people to come over to the view that this kind of ‘mathematics’ is unacceptable in principle, I think that’s a lost cause.

@RNB 03.03.16 at 4:09 pm
>Qaddafi had lost 30% by some estimate of the territory and was poised to carry out ever bloodier massacres to shore up control. … The situation would have become more and more horrific without NATO bombing.

Qaddafi seemed to be about to win the civil war, and yes, of course, as dictators like him typically do, he very likely would have committed some atrocities against his opponents, as have the mostly Islamist rebel militias fighting against him (BTW, you may – or may not – be interested to google their relationship with black people). Then it seems relatively plausible that Libya would have reverted to some degree of stability, preserving the remarkably high living standards and secular lifestyle it had had before the civil war, instead of descending into the present anarchy with dismal living conditions and a reign of uncontrollable fundamentalist militias, including, most recently, an ISIS branch. But these are all counterfactuals. The crucial, absolutely crucial point is that nobody has appointed you, RNB, or Clinton, or the US in general to make decisions based on such counterfactuals and to decide who should win a civil war in a foreign country and which foreign regime should be toppled. Nobody has given you the right to perform open heart surgery – skilfully or unskilfully – on other countries, and debating just how well every given forced surgery of yours was conducted and just how predictably bad the outcome was is completely pointless. Just stay the hell out. I hope this wording is finally clear enough for you.

Again, I should point out that I am still not opposed on principle to international military action authorised by the proper representative international institution, namely the UN (even though it, too, can easily be manipulated by the US). The way the UN resolution was blatantly misused in the Libya case has already been mentioned above. And this will have to be my last post about this in the thread, even though – or precisely because – I have no doubt in the opposing side’s truly inexhaustible potential for writing further posts that ignore or obscure the nature of the issue at hand.

The New Latin America Century, a short play in two acts
Inspired by Rich Puchalsky (but it’s not his fault)

(Several serious Latin Americans sit around a sidewalk table in Buenos Aires sipping mate. They enjoy the cool breeze, the magnificent sunset, and the sound of birds chirping.)

ACT I

MEXICAN: The US is such a mess! Have you heard about Trump? He’s a fascist! What should we do? Should we oppose the very idea of humanitarian intervention? Is a negotiated settlement still possible?
ECUADORIAN: Critics of R2P do leave us in the uncomfortable position of accepting bloodbaths and human rights catastrophes as realities to which we must adjust. I think we should send Rubio a box of grenades. He can give them to his supporters to throw at a Trump rally. I am sure that would avoid a massacre in the future.
ARGENTINEAN: Yes, it is a good idea to arm, finance, train, and support by other means various anti-Trump actors.
BOLIVIAN: We could send coke to Carson. Maybe he’ll wake up and win the election.
BRAZILIAN: The peaceful citizens who may yet make the US a better place may be annihilated by Trump, the despot, leaving only externally-funded and violent Republicans. And who is advocating the killing of children? The strikes will target Trump rallies poised to carry out massacres.

ACT II

BRAZILIAN: Our actions resulted in chaos but maybe it wasn’t as bad as the chaos might have been otherwise.
MEXICAN: The box of grenades to Rubio rebels was insufficient to destroy the Trump candidacy; it was enough to stop Trump winning but not enough to make him lose.
ECUADORIAN: We didn’t want a prolonged war. We would have preferred a short decisive and successful revolution like in Tunisia.
ARGENTINEAN: It does not mean that it was a terrible judgment at the moment of crisis and it does not mean that this decision proves that we are war mongers.

THE END

Bruce,

You make me sound so radical! I suspect we still disagree at a basic level. Also, skepticism isn’t an ideology, its, well, skepticism of ideology. Don’t want anyone to think I’m nodding along here. But sure, “stuff sucks” isn’t a positive program, and doesn’t have much of a response to offer to “you suck too” after the worm has turned. But letting people say what sucks, exactly, might have some positive results (or might result in cooperation, who knows?).

Bruce @303: The desirable but still feasible alternative, imho, isn’t an ideal politics …

Check. So what is it? (Sorry if you’ve explained already — one would like to devote all one’s attention to Crooked Timber, but alas … )

Lupita @302: Priceless, thanks.

@Lupita 03.03.16 at 9:55 pm

Best post ever.

Bruce @303,

It always confuses me when people try to use our political theater, our two-party kabuki dance to “prove” that this or that doesn’t exist beyond that dance. As if in the absence of any official political diversity, political diversity does not exist. As if there is no “unofficial” version happening all over the place, while that silly, phony theater takes place. As if a good many Americans don’t realize it’s nonsense and kabuki.

So, yes, you describe the insanely limited A to B spectrum we get to sit through year after year, and it does make it much, much harder for unofficial leftist flowers to bloom. But, amazingly enough, despite all the forces arrayed against that true political diversity and leftist dissent, it still happens. There is a real “left.” It’s not officially recognized, or allowed into official channels. It’s not allowed to be seen through any of the mediums corporate America controls — which is most of them. But it’s still there. And, ironically, it probably can’t exist within officially recognized channels anyway. If it were, it would likely soon be corrupted and absorbed by the Borg.

That’s what happened, of course, to the Ezra Kleins and company. They were once the young Turk dissidents, a part of the rising tide of Internet opposition against both the Bush regime and corporate Dems. But as is often the case, one of the best ways to cripple upstarts and dissidents is to give them jobs in various House Organs and embed them with the rest of the Borg. Shuts them up pretty quickly, in general. They start to think in terms of “What will I lose if I say X,” rather than “What will we all gain?”

(Greenwald is one of the few from the old liberal blogosphere that hasn’t been absorbed yet. Perhaps because he moved to Brazil!)

So, who knows what the answer is, but it’s likely gotta start with the realization that it doesn’t exist with either party, corporate media, or our government structure at all . . . . or the extended web of IMFs and WTOs and the like. Perhaps the only thing to do is gather enough people together to opt out, stop buying corporate shit, and start making our own products, our own life, our own world. I think Occupy had that in mind and they also wanted their medium to be their message. Non-hierarchical, democratic, from the ground up.

Most folks missed that entirely. It was perhaps too subtle. But the very shape of their non-organized organization was their message and encompassed all of their demands. The message of egalitarian, left-anarchist, anticapitalist, participatory democracy, creating social justice organically — form as content, content as form.

That’s the left, in my view.

@Ze K 03.03.16 at 10:27 pm
>There is no left, but, as I said at the beginning here, the right is the new left. Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin. With any luck, they might just kill liberalism (okay, ‘neoliberalism’, if you insist); people are sick of it.

Kind Sir, my *only* problem with neoliberalism is that it’s basically taking us in the same direction as the reactionaries and wannabe/quasi/crypto-fascists soft you mentioned, only along a slightly different road. Putinism is Putinism, and CT-ism is CT-ism, and (apart from the occasional criticism of US imperial policy) never the twain shall meet.

Bob,

thanks for the reminder.

Brenner is a must read for me and I have his Economics of Global Turbulence on my to-buy list. Combination of Benjamin Kunkel writing about him in his Utopia or Bust, and Ellen Meiksins Wood in her The Origin of Capitalism. He sounds like an important and astute scholar.

Argentinian: Two groups of otherwise indistinguishable gringos are about to massacre each other.
Ecuadorian: It would only cost us $650,000 American dollars worth of pesos for each life we could save, and we may lose only one life for every 50,000 we could save if we would intervene.
Mexicano: They’re not worth it. Let them kill each other. It’s an election year. But let’s sell our inaction as anti-imperialism borne of solidarity with the gringos.

Sorry for the tone Layman, I just find this denial of the scope of Obamacare frustrating. There’s no such thing as a perfect UHC system and every UHC system lets down its people in some way. They’re measured on three dimensions, of which risk protection is one, and they usually start weak and grow. Their flaws aren’t due to whether they’re single payer or not and single payer is not the only way to do UHC, contrary to the vision of some people on the left. Medicare is single payer for example and offers very poor financial risk protection. The fact that some of the 29 million people you cite are receiving sub-standard risk protection doesn’t mean Obamacare is not a UHC system.

But the main reason a large portion of Americans are getting sub-standard care is that the states refused to sign up for the Medicaid expansion. If they had, then the prevalence of uninsured people in the USA would be very low by now. The states didn’t sign up because the Supreme Court rewrote the law, not because Obama designed it to be weak.

Obamacare is a huge achievement for poor people in the USA and a huge expansion of the welfare system. Complaining that it isn’t perfect or that Obama didn’t go straight to single payer is misleading (because no UHC system is perfect) and unfair (because Obama had to deal with a hostile senate).

So no, HRC would never ever be acceptable to the Republicans.

fautusnotes — you’re exactly right, obviously. The argument—sorry, but the argument is actually insane. If Clinton is in fact an ideal Republican candidate for the party wing or whatever, there ought to be someone with at least some national profile with roughly the same positions and concerns in the Republican party. Otherwise I don’t even understand what the statement means.

And actually, if someone Clinton’s record had been a Republican, she would have become a Democrat. Ask Arlen Specter.

geo @ 307: So what is it?

I am an institutionalist and liberal, so I think, I don’t know “the answer” and neither does anyone else. The “best” we can hope for is to keep the game going, that is, to legitimate conflict and use strategic competition and the frustration of same, in order to make possible deliberative politics with no final solutions. When the arguments no longer matter to anything except which team jersey you display, then we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble.

Bruce Wilder, have you read the assessments of Obamacare in the actual medical literature (e.g. the New England Journal of Medicine and the Commonwealth Fund reports)? Access to insurance and thus to health care has massively expanded in the past two years, and one of the main mechanisms for this – the Medicaid expansion – is also the most effective and is being blocked by Republicans, not by Clinton. I just don’t understand how you can claim Obama dismantled the welfare state when he planned to expand it to cover something like an additional 12 million people.

If your argument is that UHC is not UHC until it’s perfect well then your much-vaunted single-payer NHS is also not UHC, since even though it’s free it doesn’t cover a bunch of services. Similarly Japan’s generally much-lauded system, which somehow manages to produce the world’s longest life expectancy but isn’t single-payer and has user fees. This kind of posturing is not going to get you to a functioning health policy, which is what Obama promised and delivered.

There is a mirror-image of this kind of lunacy going on in right wing blogs right now. On those blogs Trump is actually a liberal-Democrat, his policies are Democrat, and it’s just some kind of aberration of the GOP establishment that he ended up in the Republican party, because actually the Republican leadership love Democrat ideas and are really working against their good christian base. In this formulation Trump is just the inevitable result of GOP leadership caving in and giving America Democrat policies all the time.

If that sort of idea sounds crazy to you, while you’re simultaneously making the exact claim about Clinton (and Obama!), perhaps you should have a think about your analytical framework.

If that sort of idea sounds crazy to you

If you read all the comments, the answer’s quite clear. See here and here for Bruce Wilder talking about how Trump is preferable to Clinton in the general. This is what passes for “liberalism” on CT these days.

Two excellent articles, with links to others, regarding the ACA and the snow job from the media.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/gaffney-single-payer-sanders-healthcare-obamacare-aca-clinton/

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/vox-bernie-sanders-single-payer-ezra-klein-matt-yglesias/

BW
Rich P appears discouraged that his efforts to explain the morally obvious about the “good intentions” behind “humanitarian bombing” [are] just being absorbed into the neoliberal whirlwind of partisan advocacy and dizzying counterfactual “evidence”.

I did not present any ‘counterfactual evidence’ — this is a misunderstanding of what I wrote re the ’71 episode. Rich P’s position doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny, as F Foundling I think pointed out. Rich P’s position is a refusal to recognize that politics sometimes involves choices that are all bad to one degree or another. This is an old, quite obvious point. Rich wd rather just pretend the choices do not exist. Ignore them and they’ll go away. No, they won’t. Just as the Syrian and Afghan refugees stranded in Greece and at the Greece-Macedonia border won’t vanish simply b.c things for various countries wd be easier if they did.

In NYT today, linked at another blog, there were letters of response to a (bad, or so I gather) Michael Hayden op-ed. One of them was from a Yemeni now living in Canada who was in a wedding procession in Yemen attacked by a U.S. drone in 2012. Two relatives of his died. The Obama admin has not apologized or explained to him, apparently, though someone from the admin did meet with him.

The drone program is hard to defend and that Yemeni has every right to be completely furious. Does that mean every single use of force by the U.S. (or any other country) in every conceivable situation for any conceivable reason is equally indefensible? The question answers itself. True, some uses of force are patently immoral and illegal. (Btw Russian and Syrian regime forces, or so I hear, have been charged w repeatedly attacking hospitals etc. (before the recent ‘cessation of hostilities’). There is no discussion or denunciation of that here.)

The moral ‘logic’ of the RP and BW position basically boils down to: one is either a pacifist, in the strict sense of the word, or a “neoliberal” who believes in “humanitarian bombing”. No middle grounds are acknowledged, no complexities recognized, no real ‘agency’ attributed to anyone except the (invariably evil) Western intervenors. In RP’s framing, you either think it’s fine to put a gun to a three-year-old’s head and pull the trigger, or you think it’s not fine. That’s it. Period.

So, BW, I expect a retraction of @331 any minute now.

Here is an article from the NEJM on Obamacare’s successes, which concludes in July 2014:

Taking all existing coverage expansions together, we estimate that 20 million Americans have gained coverage as of May 1 under the ACA. We do not know yet exactly how many of these people were previously uninsured, but it seems certain that many were. Recent national surveys seem to confirm this presumption. The CBO projects that the law will decrease the number of uninsured people by 12 million this year and by 26 million by 2017. Early polling data from Gallup, RAND, and the Urban Institute indicate that the number of uninsured people may have already declined by 5 million to 9 million and that the proportion of U.S. adults lacking insurance has fallen from 18% in the third quarter of 2013 to 13.4% in May 2014.

Here’s an article on the remaining uninsured, also from the NEJM, which observes that of the remaining 30 million children and adults, 3-4 million are being blocked access by GOP-run states, and 2/3 have chosen not to sign up, despite the penalties that apply to this group and the availability of subsidies. The remaining 15-20% are undocumented immigrants, a problem shared by most UHC systems.

20 million people gained coverage under Obamacare who previously could not, and insurance companies were forced to offer actual insurance products rather than scams. I’m well aware, Plume, that there are better options than Obamacare, but they just can’t be implemented in the modern USA, at least until the Democrats manage to get control of the presidency and both houses. To claim that these political realities are somehow Obama or Clinton’s fault is unrealistic, and to suggest that people who accept this political reality have “stopped thinking” is unfair.

Hopefully Sanders will win and fix the current mess but if he doesn’t win, maybe – just maybe – that represents the will of the American people not to live in a social democracy. If so, then they will have chosen a UHC system that suits their preferences. Sucks to be them, but that’s what democracy is about.

faustusnotes: . . . they just can’t be implemented in the modern USA, at least until the Democrats manage to get control of the presidency and both houses.

When did that happen last? Hmmm. I forget. It all seems so long ago and far away. I’ll just stop thinking now. Sleep, sleep.

You seriously want to do this? Let’s fucking do this. This is all from Holbo’s A Few US Election Thoughts thread. I’ll provide the comment numbers; people can check at their leisure. (I’ll have to quote at medium length to make clear I’m not leaving out context; people can check the full comments themselves.)

mdc @114: “I guess the thought implies that there are some voters whose ordered preferences are 1) Sanders, 2) Trump, 3) Clinton. Do we know how many people like this exist? I’ve never met one, but that’s not saying much.”

OK. It should be obvious here mdc is talking about candidates standing in elections. I mean, it’s explicit, so I won’t press the point. BW’s response:

Bruce Wilder @116: “I think those are my ordered preferences, though I would not actually vote for Trump or Clinton. [¶¶] Trump seems a horror show to me. Clinton — I do not see the point in voting for a blood-thirsty neoliberal, who wants to just keep doing the same wrong things.”

Obviously, BW would not vote for Trump. Equally obviously, BW thinks that Trump is preferable to Clinton as a candidate standing in an election. That is the obvious and only context.

At this point, multiple people rush to BW’s defense and try to bail him out. Donald Johnson @321:

“I was bothered by Bruce Wilder’s Trump over Clinton comment, but assumed he was venting against Clinton or engaging in one of those slightly too clever paradoxes that very smart people sometimes use.”

Bruce Wilder responds @339: “Donald Johnson @ 321 ‘too clever paradoxes’ [¶¶] I don’t think I was doing that. [¶¶] I am not going to support either one for the Presidency, but as a personality on television or a representative of a certain (differing) brand(s) of smarmy politics, I do prefer Trump over Clinton.”

Trump and Clinton are in all likelihood going to be the nominees of their respective parties. If you support Trump over Clinton as a candidate, you support Trump over Clinton in the general.

Once again, I expect a retraction any minute now.

If you support Trump over Clinton as a candidate, you support Trump over Clinton in the general.

Replace “support” with “prefer”, if you prefer. That was my original claim on which you called me a liar.

And by the way, this was my first response to Bruce Wilder on that thread.

Bruce Wilder: While we disagree on a lot of things, you are a commenter I have immense respect for. The fact you think he is preferable to Clinton is deeply, extraordinarily disturbing. This is someone who has proposed that me and my entire family be placed on a national registry, and that my father and mother, who are currently out of the country, not be allowed back into it. In what possible world is he preferable to Clinton?

You can read BW’s response to me @228.

I stressed that I did not intend to support either in an election. You are not entitled to just disregard clear statements of intentional context for my statement of preference and make it mean whatever you want in a context of your choosing alone.

You chose to omit the qualifying phrase, “in the general”, when you responded @ 333. That omission tipped the lie.

I did have a serious point to make about ill-judged efforts to redeem one candidate by “lesser evil” comparisons to another. Trump has never bombed Libya. That’s a reason to prefer him to her, as a celebrity. But, it isn’t a reason to vote for either one, given the totality of their promises, presentations and histories.

You prefer Trump over Clinton as a candidate in an election, as I believe @340 shows. Trump and Clinton are in all likelihood going to be the candidates in the general. This entirely justifies me saying @328: “Bruce Wilder talking about how Trump is preferable to Clinton in the general”. Tell me again where I lied.

Or look, even easier: just explicitly say you don’t prefer Trump over Clinton qua candidates. Easy as that.

Anyone else who wants to call me a liar (or not), should feel free to weigh in to this nonsense.

FWIW – I read BW to say that he rejects the species of reasoning that lines lining up the candidates from worst to best and then supporting the least worst out of the choices available in any given election and instead argue that candidates should judged on their own merits (and that under this test both Clinton and Trump don’t deserve support). So I think BW actually rejected the kind of relative/preferential weighing of Trump v. Clinton that you have accused him off.

I then went on understand him to say that from a perspective of pure spectacle he gets more entertainment from Trump Clown than Clinton Clown because the former at least has some skill as an entertainer and is somewhat aware about how absurd this whole thing is while the latter has already helped enact and carry out policies which BW finds abhorrent.

confused why BW says js not getting him right. BW tells over and over that capitalists are neo-liberals and feel that the system is safer in the hands of a Democrat who will give them everything they want (paper Wall Street regulations) while legitimizing the system by eliciting some enthusiasm for it by tying it to a facile multiculturalism and humanitarianism and offering social programs that prove, upon closer examination, to be give-aways to business (Obamacare). Clinton is thus a more insidious candidate than Trump who driven by personal ambition would just create confusion and dysfunction for neo-liberal capital and thus is to be preferred to Clinton, the toxic racist environment he would create notwithstanding.

Everything BW writes is an attempt to bring us to this conclusion without stating so explicitly that the American left needs to bring down the Democratic or social Democratic or multicultural face of neo-liberal capital by any means necessary, including a racist and misogynist demagogue if that is what history has made available to us.

Wow…

How broken are some of you? I don’t believe for a moment that you’d accept as valid an argument asserting that the support of a left-wing politician by left-wing crazies must mean that the left-wing politician is also a crazy. That’s just wrongheaded; at best uncharitable, at worst dangerously flirtatious with undemocratic thinking.

There are only two valid candidates in America. Everyone interested in politics — which crazies, no matter what else you may think of them, certainly are — has to choose between one of those. The right wing crazies unsurprisingly support the right wing candidate, and after eight years out of power, do so fervently. I guarantee you that plenty of bad people who just happen to be Democrats are going to support HRC, and that you would not accept for one moment the idea that she or you should be blamed for that.

But here you are, unable to accept that when the shoe is on the other foot. A bunch of reactionaries terrified of shrieking at the prospect that the other side might win, and trying to whip yourselves into a righteous furor to justify the undemocratic feelings that stir within. Grow up.

LFC: “Rich P’s position is a refusal to recognize that politics sometimes involves choices that are all bad to one degree or another. This is an old, quite obvious point. Rich wd rather just pretend the choices do not exist. Ignore them and they’ll go away.”

Of course there’s a choice — supporters of “humanitarian intervention” just don’t want to acknowledge what it involves. They would rather choose setting out on a course of action that they know involves killing children and that has almost always turned out to not save any lives.

People always have the choice to go to war and start bombing people for no good reason. And they can justify this choice by pointing to the bad things that are undoubtedly really happening due to some dictator, and claim that not bombing people is worse than bombing people. But reality has not made their sacrifice of other’s lives actually worthwhile.

The problem with refusing to choose the lesser evil is you end up with more evil.

On Libya I think Hilary was quite affected by Rwanda where we stood by and did nothing while genocide occurred, Bill was heavily criticized for inaction. And the success of air strikes in Bosnia when we did finally act.

I regard UN authorisation system as sufficient but not necessary. Due to the permanent members at times giving some parties impunity.

VaL: “If they are the future of the left, this is the left’s message:”

Val lists me by name as supporting the above “message”. That’s par for the course for her.

Here’s one of the many things I wrote upthread: “the left’s strength is basically in educated professionals, the marginally working poor, and racial minorities. But in a sort of permanent Halloween, these people have to metaphorically dress themselves up as and pretend to be workers.”

Val can pretend that that’s a critique of identity politics if she likes. She’s long ago proven that she holds to a form of essentialist feminism as a justification for attacking people, not because she actually believes in the values that she supposedly advocates.

Charges of essentialism are the biggest load of bs by the way – because actually our concerns about rape and abortion and maternity leave and so forth are just stuff we made up because we’re essentialist. I call bullshit Rich.

Actually Rich it was geo who nominated you four as the future of the left on CT. But if you can’t see any problem with that, I think you prove my point.

I assumed that geo was joking — he likes to do that — and gently poking fun at us for writing so much. Not that he was seriously nominating us as the future of the left.

You are the one who chose to go with that and list me as presenting a message that bears no relation to what I wrote. Because as far as I can see from you write, you’re not actually interested in feminism. You’re interested in attacking other people for not supporting your version of feminism, and saying that they aren’t real feminists if they don’t agree with you.

Val: “And obviously a woman who is studying stuff should not be taken seriously because a man who is not studying that stuff knows a lot more about it.”

And here’s a case in point. Obviously I argue with people and posters here all the time. For instance, I just argued with LFC even though LFC claims an IR doctorate. All of the posters and most of the comments here have sterling academic credentials. But if I disagree with you, I must be not respecting women.

Wrenching back to the post – first, JQ’s notion of tribalism is useful, but fails to appreciate how quickly new tribes can form. People have multiple identities, and less salient ones can come to the fore as they fit circumstances when old ones fail. Nationalism – the great tribes that formed mostly in the C19 – still has a fierce hold, but migrations don’t weaken tribalism; they force the creation of new ones. What those might be is still up in the air, but new ones there will be. Scottish and Welsh identity is much more salient in Britain than 50 years ago – and Catalan in Spain, and Lombard in Italy. Not to mention the great Soviet break-up. Maybe the Holy Republic of United Kansas and Iowa?

Second, as I rather inchoately tried to lay out in a much earlier comment, it matters both for neo-liberalism and for “the left” what sort of transition we are entering. If its another of the changes in political-economic forms that have come along every century or so for the last few hundred years, then both political forces will survive, albeit in mutated form. The textbooks will trace the genealogy of ideas, and the names will stay the same, and we will all pretend that liberalism tomorrow is the same as liberalism yesterday. This is in fact the hope and expectation of both neo-liberals and much of the left. A bit of technology, a few policy tweaks, some better regulation, and life will go one much the same but with electric cars, solar panels and a better tax system. And eventually a global citizenry united by its common appreciation of our responsibility for managing our lonely terrestrial home…

We may be facing something quite different in scale, in which case the zealotry of the hard neo-liberals and the incoherence of the left are symptoms. That difference lies in adjustment to diminished ability to command resources (not because the resources are not there, but because using them degrades critical ecosystems), and the necessity to looking after our own patches in a sustainable way (CO2 is a global problem, but the other environment issues are local) . Both challenge existing systems quite fundamentally. The first sparks an ever more committed adherence to current arrangements – a doubling down. The second looks to a quite different basis for judging human affairs – no longer human-centred but essentially pantheistic. The first links to existing tribes, the second is likely to call up submerged identities, and call forth a new left very unlike any current version.

No, I claim that you shouldn’t be taken seriously or listened to because you personally argue in bad faith. Your historical, totalizing theories about patriarchy are no nuttier than mcmanus’ Marxism, and I’d argue with them on the same basis, but you have this habit of simultaneously saying that you want people to argue with you as they would anyone and of saying that if they do that they don’t care about abortion rights or something.

Rich @ 373
Sorry but that doesn’t make sense (as well as still being fucking patronising). Perhaps you could rephrase it?

Faustus,

Wilder beat me to it. But, seriously, this?

“I’m well aware, Plume, that there are better options than Obamacare, but they just can’t be implemented in the modern USA, at least until the Democrats manage to get control of the presidency and both houses. To claim that these political realities are somehow Obama or Clinton’s fault is unrealistic, and to suggest that people who accept this political reality have “stopped thinking” is unfair.”

They had the presidency. They had both houses. They road a wave of popularity in January of 2009 this country hasn’t seen in generations. And before the ink was dry, they started negotiating with themselves before negotiating with the GOP, the insurance industry and big pharma. They began all of their negotiations with the GOP on GOP turf, even though they, the Dems, won the election overwhelmingly. They governed as if they lost two out of the three branches.

Obama surrounded himself with neoliberal economic advisers, kept Bush’s defense secretary, rehired his Fed chairman and basically continued Bush’s programs on Wall Street, bailouts, the economy, taxes, war and surveillance. I can’t remember a bigger shift (since Nixon) from campaign to governing — except perhaps for Clinton. Both men ran as mildly oppositional, “progressive” candidates but almost immediately got to work propping up, protecting and expanding the status quo. Both are guilty of among the worst “bait and switch” campaigns — again, since Nixon in 1968.

Think about it. The Dems begged and begged the GOP to support its watered down Heritage Foundation insurance plan. It was the GOP’s idea in the first place and they still couldn’t get them on board. That should have told them something. That should have told them to say, fuck it. “You’re not voting with us anyway, so why should we craft this thing to your liking? We’ll do it our way and if you don’t like it, tough shit.” They should have done that, but they didn’t. Because they didn’t want to upset their donors by doing the right thing for Americans and, ironically, the economy.

They passed the ACA with nothing but Democratic party votes. Which tells us, by definition, they could have passed Single Payer if they had wanted to as a party. It wasn’t GOP obstruction. The GOP didn’t cast one single vote for the ACA. It was Democratic Party cowardice.

Peter T: “The second looks to a quite different basis for judging human affairs – no longer human-centred but essentially pantheistic.”

Yes. When I wrote here before about how flowers “work”, and how the human economy is just a subset of the ecosystemic economy, I don’t think that most people actually got it beyond thinking that I was writing something strange and incoherent again.

But this is what I meant about the left needing a new theory. “Theory” may be the wrong way to put it, because being theory-centric may itself be part of the problem. But I don’t think that we’ve really considered what this new left is going to have to look like.

(1) I’m not sure why working class (in this thread) has at times become synonymous with “bigoted”. I get that there are bigots among the working class, and that class based manifestations of bigotry can take different forms, and that in the US there are regional differences in radicalized politics, but we seem to be starting from the assumption that all nativist/racist political calls will resonate with the white working class. (Whoever they are)
(2) I’m surprised by the continued naivety of so many on the left. I can understand this with the likes of Freddie de Boer (that great champion of the working man) but I guess I thought some of the brain trust here were more astute. Sometimes, as rich might say, people just value hating on each other. Not acknowledging this, or imagining you or your hypothetical policies/coalition building have the potential to bridge this human urge needs supporting (see 4) Reminds me of all the Marxist analyses of northern ireland, if only the locals in the falls and the shankill could recognise their convergent class interests and discard these meaningless collective identities all would be resolved! Lol. That worked out well. Or the stereotypical idealistic liberal going to live among the natives and help them advance in their social and economic development, only to find the natives neither cared about their bullshit or held the same values they did. This goes for the African American vote as well, imo, which is artificially inflated in the left’s favour because of the US’s strange political geography. In a perfect world the reactionary element of the black vote would be safely enconsed at a trump rally.
(3) I used to be liberal until Obama compromised on single payer and now I sympathise with the fascist candidate isn’t particularly convincing. In fact it’s juvenile nonsense, at best.
(4) Id still like to see how the specifics of this coalition of the unwilling would function. I’ve personally given up on “neoliberalism” having any specific meaning, but can we not try and get “populism” a little more specific? Any ideas on what sort of populist coalition the Dems could build ? In the real world rather than fantasy america.

Peter T,

And this:

“The textbooks will trace the genealogy of ideas, and the names will stay the same, and we will all pretend that liberalism tomorrow is the same as liberalism yesterday. This is in fact the hope and expectation of both neo-liberals and much of the left. A bit of technology, a few policy tweaks, some better regulation, and life will go one much the same but with electric cars, solar panels and a better tax system. And eventually a global citizenry united by its common appreciation of our responsibility for managing our lonely terrestrial home…”

Perhaps this is the problem in a nutshell. Because the part of the left I identify with — waaay to the left of liberal — already sees “liberalism” as outmoded, ineffective, wrong-headed and less than weak tea — even its past forms. Even its heyday. We actually see it as a major part of the problem. With the usual caveats of “not being as bad as conservatism.”

So I don’t think it’s really a fact that “most of the left” wants “liberalism” to make a comeback, or get its deathly slow incrementalist game back up to snuff. We’ve already moved on from that — long ago, in fact. The problems that afflict the globe are too severe for liberalism to handle, even at its best. Liberalism wants too much time to enact its programs, and that’s even if it had a clear path to do so, which it doesn’t, obviously.

It’s connected as well to the unicorn and rainbows idea that we can solve our ecological problems through technology while keeping capitalism in place. It wouldn’t even do the trick if we had that clear path, no resistance from the right, no resistance from capitalists themselves, etc. And they’re never, ever going to gather as one in solidarity to “save the planet.” That’s not how they roll. They’re going to keep doing what is in their individual best interests as profit-making entities, not ours, not the planet’s, and drive us over the cliff. To assume that we will have this kumbaya moment of peak capitalist cooperation . . . . . is, well, dangerously naive.

It makes sense then to take a look at the various political forms that have been in charge while Rome burns, and replace them with baked-in social justice, from the ground up. To save time and space, we can move on from the following:

Conservatism
Capitalism
State Capitalism
Liberalism
Western Liberal Democracies
The Welfare State

Time for the above to go, to be replaced by actual democracy, including the economy, where the economy is publicly held, becomes a part of the Commons and does the job upfront, so we don’t need a welfare state on the back-end. Logically, this is the only way we can find a path to save the planet. Because for the first time in history, “the people,” the folks who suffer the most from the greed, irrationality, selfishness and short-sightedness of the ruling elites, will now be the sole “interest group” in place. Since the economy impacts all of us, all of us should own and control the economy, etc. etc.

Re: what Peter T is saying about the possibility of departing from a human centric ethos – There’s a good essay by Nancy Tuana called Viscous Porosity, about Huricane Katrina. It follows on from her earlier work which I’m not really familiar with, but she calls for an “interactionist” ontology and epistemology, as opposed to either objectivism or social constructivism which have humans as independent from the material embodied world around them.

She uses the idea of porosity to look at how dualisms like nature/culture and sex/gender shouldn’t be seen as fixed and stable, but fluid and emergent and interacting. So Hurricane Katrina – or the effects thereof – are the result neither solely of nature or solely of social structures or processes, but both, especially due to the interaction of humans and nature causing climate change, which is a factor in hurricane Katrina existing.

It’s a good essay http://www.academia.edu/12103511/Viscous_Porosity_Witnessing_Katrina

Ronan @381,

Your #1.

As Bianca says, I don’t think that’s the assumption here. Though I do think that’s Trump’s assumption. I think his campaign is banking on that being the case. His form of “populism,” as is basically the case with all right-wing populism, is that the working class can be mobilized on the basis of hatred toward the Other. That’s an assumption by the powers that be as American as apple pie.

From where I sit, left-populism is radically opposed to that assumption and that idea. We find it abhorrent, in fact. Both as a strategy and a belief.

For those of you who scoff at the notion the Republican establishment would have loved HRC were she only a Republican.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/trump-clinton-neoconservatives-220151

ZM: “So Hurricane Katrina – or the effects thereof – are the result neither solely of nature or solely of social structures or processes, but both, especially due to the interaction of humans and nature causing climate change, which is a factor in hurricane Katrina existing.”

Here’s a poem that I wrote a while back about Katrina, ZM. It goes over what we’re talking about as well as anything does.

js @ 322

“If Clinton is in fact an ideal Republican candidate for the party wing or whatever, there ought to be someone with at least some national profile with roughly the same positions and concerns in the Republican party.”

There are lots of such persons. Of the current crop, Jeb! and Kasich come closest. Mittens is also one. Many of the so-called moderate Republicans would be indistinguishable from HRC on virtually every aspect of the presidency save, possibly, Supreme Court nominations. If you can think of another practical difference, name it.

Trump, Rubio, Cruz, and their ilk would of course be worse.

Speaking of Mittens. What do you folks think will come of the current food fight between Romney and Trump? How do you think this will play out? It seems the Republicans truly are imploding as a party, and no one is remembering Reagan’s 11th commandment.

Brokered convention? Third-Party run by Trump? Who wins the general then? etc.

Aid to states and local school districts. Not abolishing existing taxes. Slowing or reversing the militarization of local police departments. Working to defuse and build on, not worsen, the problems raised by the African-American community. Not reversing Obama’s accomplishments on health care and immigration. Not going back to Bush policies in the Middle East. Is that enough for you? I’m not asking you to say whether you didn’t know about this or whether you did and were being disingenuous, and I’m not asking you to defend yourself either way. If you’re 18, okay. If you’re a Republican and those aren’t issues you care about, okay.

Notably, Bill Clinton’s elite education never made him “one of us” among that set.

HRC on the Middle East is indistinguishable from the establishment Republican position. Congress will not send a bill to the White House which expands aid to state and local school districts, so the question is irrelevant. ‘Working to defuse and build on’ is marvelously vague. What evidence suggests HRC won’t sign on to a Grand Bargain on taxes and entitlements, cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting SS / Medicare benefits in order to ‘save them’? It’s precisely the sort of thing she did as Senator, or that WJC did as President. I agree she’s unlikely to sign a blanket repeal of Obamacare, as I think would be a moderate Republican President; but do you really think she’d refuse to go along with a repeal-and-replace bill, assuming one actually made it through the Senate?

“Jeb! and Kasich come closest. Mittens is also one. Many of the so-called moderate Republicans would be indistinguishable from HRC ”

This is just tiring.

@bianca steele, I don’t think you know what the word ‘attacking’ means.

RP @392
noted (I misinterpreted your use of the word “claims”; sorry about that)

Heh. I came to CT as a person with some interest in reading about economic views but essentially no economic training at all; thus, a layman rather than an initiate. And, unfortunately, for reasons of employment had to choose to be anonymous. It never occurred to me that someone would read that word the way I think you’re taking it.

Also, too, I’m not 18, not a Republican, not especially a liar or an idiot. And I don’t think I’ve attacked anyone here. So, again, maybe you could dial back the invective a bit?

Layman, I apologize. I intended to make a political statement in the third person, not to say something bad about you, and I’m sorry you felt attacked. You are right that I should have been more careful in using words like “idiot” and “liar.”

Ze K:

Sure, if the Donald justified his right to rule by his being an expert in the philosophy of Kant!

Just an Observer @350 — Why not use whatever your usual CT nym is? Why the special handle? In any case:

I think BW actually rejected the kind of relative/preferential weighing of Trump v. Clinton that you have accused him off.

Look, at least in the English that I understand, “Those are my ordered preferences” is an odd way of expressing: we ought to reject preferential weighting.

Also, what RNB said @352. Exactly.

Ze K @ 353

“this is where we can see clearly how western imperialism and global financialization are basically the same thing, or two elements of the same thing; call it ‘neoliberalism’, if you like. If the sovereigntist right can stop it, so much the better, more power to them.”

In Latin America, anti-neoliberalism is the purview of the left. I find your European examples of the emergence of an anti-neoliberal right very interesting and meaningful. Ah, what a takeover by the IMF does to traditional politics, no?

Perhaps the difference is that the Latin American left can talk about “our people”, “our culture”, and “our society” without raising any racial red flags, starting infinite arguments about identity, and being accused of being right wing, racist, and fascist. Then there is the issue of trade agreements and participation in Western controlled bodies such as the UNSC, the IMF, the NPT, and the WTO. The Latin American left quite easily dismisses them as imperialist while Westerners get bogged down in discussions about humanitarian interventions, terrorism, exceptionalism, freedom & democracy, and the white man’s burden.

js.@414 —

Because I don’t have one. I’m a lurker.

His “ordered preferences” in (as I read him to say) “entertainment from Trump Clown than Clinton Clown because the former at least has some skill as an entertainer and is somewhat aware about how absurd this whole thing is while the latter has already helped enact and carry out policies which (he) finds abhorrent” not preferences about who he wants elected to run the country. A darkly cynical statement, but not one that says “I’d vote for Donald first and I hope he wins if they match up.”

But as I said, that’s just how I read him. Maybe he really did make an argument against preferential weighting and then did a similar kind of preferential weighting. Anyway, this is all off topic and probably why I’m best as a lurker. Back to the Lurk I go.

More anti-neoliberal right: Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, Varoufakis

@ bianca steele, thanks and no hard feelings.

@ The Temporary Name, I’m not much impressed with your argument at 408. I get that you disagree with me, but the rest is empty of useful content.

@TM, if you’re bored, go elsewhere.

Again, I think the OP is largely right, and that the two party establishments in the US represent two different flavors of neoliberalism. HRC is quite solidly in the neoliberal tradition, as has been Obama for the most part. I’m voting for Sanders in the primary here, and will certainly vote for the Democratic nominee, which is almost as certain to be Clinton. But I don’t have any illusions about HRC – she’s a third way neoliberal, hawkish, compromising, and thoroughly wedded to the finance industry. She’s simply better than the alternatives being offered by the other side.

@420 Where is Obama? And if Clinton is neo-liberal right, why did she agree to be Secty of State under Obama? She was charged to withdraw troops from Iraq and to try diplomacy with Iran. She did both. Cruz, Jeb Bush, Rubio, Romney would not have agreed to work under Obama, given those assignments (we’ll leave aside whether any of them would be consulting with Sidney Blumenthal as well). And you do realize that perhaps the loudest critic within the Cabinet of her decision to strike Qaddafi’s forces was Secty of Defense Robert Gates, not actually a peacenik. If you want to understand this concern about humanitarian intervention, you may want to consult what the Clintons did to stop it in Rwanda on the grounds that saving tens of thousands of African lives was not worth the very few American lives it might cost.

@RNB, I think you’ve just proved that HRC and Robert Gates are of the same political persuasion, since both agreed to work for Obama. Or perhaps it’s more complicated than that?

Would Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Romney work for a Democratic President to implement policies with which they disagreed? Of course not. Would they work for a Republican President to implement policies with which they disagreed? In a New York minute they would.

Also, too, the Secretary of State doesn’t run the DoD. It was not HRC charged with scaling down force levels in Iraq.

Good point on Gates. But he intended to take the job for a but a year and to help in the continued withdrawal from Iraq that the US people had forced upon Bush against his will. So in this way Gates was only carrying out what he had been charged to begin. Clinton on the other hand agreed to accept Obama’s direction in changing the direction of US relations with Iran, and she did do this. If she wanted to maintain her bona fides as a war hawk, she would not have joined the Obama Administration. She also has also said that she would continue Obama’s policy of meeting with Iran and Russia to deepen the cease-fire in Syria. No Republican is saying that. I do think Clinton’s State Dept played some important functions in the withdrawal from Iraq, but I need to check.

Lupine: “I understand it is a concern only the policeman of the world has.”

Yeah, there’s kind of a reason the police were mentioned in that short play up at #265. If the “police” decide that the deaths of some Libyan civilians from bombing is an acceptable price to pay in order to prevent deaths of other Libyan civilians, who are you going to turn to to stop them? Different police? But there are no other police.

I understand it is a concern only the policeman of the world has.

This isn’t actually true though. Obviously there are people all over the world wishing that someone would do something about their particular awful situation, and why shouldn’t people want to help? It seems help only comes via explosion though.

I don’t think there’s a reluctance on the left to speak about ‘our’ culture or people or society. The problem with the left and right, worldwide, is that to varying degrees that’s all we speak about. We’ve replaced a possible culture of curiosity and benevolent individualism with a culture of victimisation tied into a politics of identity. This is what Trump represents, it’s what identity politics represents, it’s what ISIS represents, and it’s what the emergence of an ‘isolationist’ right (strange term for imperialists like Putin and nationalists like Le Pen) represent. It’s more or less all politics is nowadays.
Say what you want about liberalism but at least it encouraged some level of desire to break away from the group and develop a critical perspective on your tribe. We’re now expected to lobotomise ourselves in the name of left/right politically correctness, worship some factional sacred goats, and march lockstep behind whatever moron renegade has whipped up a posse this evening.
Thank you but no thanks. By all means band together in a white man whinge culture but please God I’ll be long dead or living in a cottage somewhere before the brain trust are running the show.

I finally read the New York Times series on Clinton and Libya. Wow.

@ The Temporary Name, I’m not much impressed with your argument at 408. I get that you disagree with me, but the rest is empty of useful content.

Cranky morning. Forget it.

@Rich Puchalsky

It’s OK as long as there’s a wolf involved.

lupita@429:
“I understand [humanitarian intervention] is a concern only the policeman of the world has”

and Rich Puchalsky @432: “there are no other police”

Well, if you can bear to look at cases not involving the US (yes, US =/= everything) you might want to consider, apart from LFC’s well-argued example above of the Indian invasion of then-East Pakistan to stop the massacres by the West Pakistani army:

The Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to remove the murderous and allegedly cannibal tyrant Idi Amin, “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas “.

The French intervention in Mali to drive out the murderous and demented Boko Haram.

Arguably, the Turkish intervention in north Cyprus to protect Turkish Cypriots.

The British intervention in Sierra Leone to end the civil war.

Don’t know if you would include the Falklands (intervention to defeat a fascist militarist invasion) or Northern Ireland (intervention by people not particularly concerned with Republican/Loyalist differences, to defeat or convert sort-of-fascist movements).

It’s hard to argue that the vietnamese invasion of cambodia didn’t have some impressive human-rights improvements associated with it, although I don’t know enough of the history and context to know if that was a motivation for the vietnamese.

@Stephen

I would add to your list Brazil’s intervention in Haiti.

There are two systems in place: the imperialist one I described and the emerging regional, neighborly one you did. The left would want to see the first one disappear (Western supremacy) and the second one be institutionalized and codified. I guess I was describing the past whereas you described the future.

The US very much wanted to intervene in Venezuela during Chávez but was kept in check by the rest of the Latin American countries, that is, the US no longer got to call the shots as to which Latin American governments were legitimate or not, which presidents were to be deposed or not. The same happened when Cuba was re-incorporated into the OAS against the wishes of the US. Then there is the emergence of CELAC that was formed without inviting the US and Canada. Lastly, it was the Latin American countries that decided what to do after coups in Paraguay and Honduras and the rest of the world just kind of went along with its determination.
In short, Latin America has become more stable and integrated by dealing within a regional system of equals than with the US barking orders, arming the contras, harassing the anti-imperialists, and blockading the Marxists in the region. Hopefully, something like that will replace Western hegemony around the world.

Quarantine doesn’t involve deliberately killing people. You’d save all the people in quarantine if you could, and you don’t generally make it more likely for them to die by putting them in quarantine.

None @337

The Pakistani army had [a] written policy (really, they were dumb enough to put it on paper!) of targeting Bangladeshi [H]indus for ethnic cleansing. In short, there will have been a gigantic lobby in India for intervention to prevent the slaughter of [B]angladeshis. The humanitarian motive was more than a “distant third” to any other. Do you have any actual evidence to the contrary?

First, as I said upthread, I think more one motive was in play here. Second, you make a good point re the targeting of Hindus (though Muslims were certainly not exempted). Third, as with any historical event of this complexity I’m sure that more than one (non-crazy) interpretation is possible. Fourth, the impression I got from the Raghavan book is that it was the sheer number of refugees from E. Pakistan that was one of the most pressing considerations for Indian govt policymakers. That most of the refugees were Hindus was a factor of some importance, but it was the numbers (and the associated costs) that were key, according to Raghavan at pp.206-8. He also argues that the failure of other govts, including the US, to pressure Pakistan made New Delhi despair of a political solution and turn to the military option:

The central concern for Indian decision makers was the continuing influx of refugees. Up to the end of July 1971, 7.23 million had taken shelter in India. By 15 December, an additional 2.67 million had poured in, taking the total to almost 10 million…. In this context, the religious composition of the refugees took an alarming color. As of 31 October 1971, the Indian government recorded that 82.3 percent of the refugees were Hindus. New Delhi was worried not just about the difficulty of persuading the Hindus to return to East Pakistan, but also about the prospect of their melting into the population of eastern India and providing cannon fodder for the Maoists in the region.

Then there was the growing economic burden of maintaining the refugees…. By the third week of September it was assessed that maintaining 8 million refugees in camps for six months at the rate of just 3 rupees per person per day would amount to… about US $576 million….

A prolonged crisis would push the problem to unmanageable proportions. Although a war would entail significant costs, they would be more bearable than the burden posed by the refugees….

It was now [i.e., by late August 1971] evident that most countries did not agree with India’s view that the crisis needed a political resolution in Pakistan; rather, they preferred to regard the refugee problem in India and the situation in East Pakistan as separate issues…. These developments…convinced New Delhi that the possibility of a political solution to the crisis was receding.

“I also think that anti abortion fervour was about other things besides abortion. I think there are a lot of people in this country who feel excluded and unheard and held in contempt. Often, at meetings, I would see that a certain type of well educated middle aged man, in particular, was enraged at being forced to listen to a plurality of voices, when no one was listening to him.
I’m not saying that their anti abortion feelings weren’t absolutely sincere. But the rage was even larger than the issue. They would still have been angry, even if travel and information and the whole lot had gone as they had wanted.
It is ireland they are disappointed in, and their own place in it. It is the erosion of certainty that is threatening them. A lot of people in this country want to go back to the certainties of an authoritarian era” Nuala O’Faolain 93

@Val
Right, Rich and I have already cleared this up: he used the word “claims,” which can be ambiguous, but he’s said he did not mean it in a doubting way, and I accept that.

I don’t esp. want to get pulled into the middle of an argument between you and Rich, so I won’t say anything about that point.

Val :”he should therefore be able to patronise me about my current feminist studies without any blowback from me.”

Can you for once represent a conversation that’s just upthread accurately? I wrote nothing about getting no blowback from you. On the contrary, I expect that you will be your usual self.

But this should be interesting. What makes your nutty theories immune from criticism? Have academics everywhere put intersectionality in the trash bin and said that patriarchy is really, historically, what it’s all about?

Val: “As I say, I don’t think ‘bombing as a humanitarian intervention’ is justifiable. But suggesting that those who do think so are deliberately choosing to murder children for no reason should be beyond the bounds of debate I would think.”

And this is BS too. Advocates of humanitarian intervention bombing give plenty of reasons why they have to kill, and I never characterized them as saying otherwise. You went through a lot of them above: children are “already being bombed, or starving, or dying of preventable diseases for want of medication, or drowning at sea”, and somehow that means that we have to unavoidably kill more of them with bombs because this is supposed to be effective at stopping the above atrocities. The same set of reasons were heard in the U.S. about why we had to invade Iraq and, later, why we had to stay in Iraq to fix the damage we’d done from our invasion of Iraq. There is no shortage of reasons.

LFC
Yes I saw that. I was pointing out that Rich mentioned you because he was making a false analogy. As his mention of you was an attempt to justify his increasingly denigratory and patronising attacks on me, I did think that you might not wish to be used in that way.

His latest attack on me is this:
“But this should be interesting. What makes your nutty theories immune from criticism?”

You may think those kinds of attacks on a feminist theorist are in keeping with the general level of debate at CT, though I would hope not. I don’t.

Rich @ 462

As I said, I agree with you that bombing cannot be justified, even as an (intended) humanitarian intervention.

What I object to is your ridiculous and over the top attacks on people, such as comparing those who think bombing might be justified in some circumstances to child murderers.

I don’t disagree with all your views, and I even once defended you against rebuke by John Holbo. However as one of the people who has been singled out for your grossly offensive personal attacks, I’ve had enough and I’m calling your bullshit.

js. @461
No one here, afaict (though I certainly can’t claim to have read every word in the thread), is arguing for the intentional killing of innocents.

Rich’s position, as I understand it, is that any use of force that might entail any civilian casualties, as an unintended but reasonably foreseeable consequence, cannot be justified under any circumstances. Perhaps he would want to phrase it in slightly less absolute terms, but his position seems to approach that. Phrased in this way, the position basically rules out all uses of force in all circumstances whatever (b/c it is usually impossible to guarantee that there will be no unintended civilian casualties from any use of force), i.e, it is pacifism. That’s a position with a long history and roots in some religious traditions, but it’s not widely held.

I think it’s hard to have these arguments in general terms without reference to concrete examples. But I would point out that the standard law-of-armed-conflict principles of necessity and proportionality are designed to minimize civilian casualties. Sometimes violations of those principles are fairly obvious, and at other times they’re debatable. I believe there’s also a duty on those using force to consciously try to avoid (unintended) civilian casualties whenever possible. I don’t want to get into specific examples, although they’re useful, b/c it will just stir up things and raise hackles. But suffice to say that it is sometimes, and even from a distance, not that difficult to tell when these rules have been violated.

Rich
During the course of our argument, you have made seven posts attacking me, in which you claim that I am putting forward “nutty”, “tired”, “outdated”, “stupid” and “essentialist” theories that I don’t even believe in myself, but am only putting forward in order to attack other people.

I won’t continue this argument because it is no doubt boring for other people, but surely you must be capable of seeing that that is not a reasoned critique or civil argument. If you want to argue with my position, argue with it – don’t just name call.

Right, my intervention there, so to speak, might have been exceptionally off-topic. I’m pretty much with RP in being resolutely anti-interventionist—the exceptions being cases where the intervening country is already directly affected, as in India in ’71 or Vietnam re Cambodia (by comparison, if Mexico and Canada were waging war against each other—which is kind of a hilarious possibility—the US might well have good cause to intervene). But I think we’re all agreeing that those aren’t really “humanitarian interventions”. In any case, @461 was neither here nor there.

Val,

I mentioned an essay by Nancy Tuana in a comment above @385 which I think you would be interested in reading with your research in climate change, public health, and women/gender. The essay is called Viscous Porosity and about Hurricane Katrina.

You were commenting above about the displacement of women’s studies by gender studies, Nancy Tuana mentions how she thinks the sex/gender conceptual opposition served an important historical purpose but for analytical purposes it is flawed by not being conceptually adequate to deal with the interaction between sex and gender — or the body and the social.

I think this also has something to do with Rich Puchalsky’s charge that you hold an “essentialist” position, a charge I think is unfair based on your comments I have read, but maybe has something to do with Rich (and Bruce Wilder and Plume) having some discomfort with the idea that difference between men and women isn’t only wholly socially constructed, meaning that a single ungendered (uncoloured) subjectivity based in an Enlightenment masculine (white) subjectivity is not the only subjectivity that can or should be acknowledged or experienced.

bob mcmanus said something expressing similar discomfort on the A Disquieting Suggestion OP thread “And I stop short of signifiers and pre-linguistic perception/cognition because of the dangerous temptation to the metaphysical, for example much feminism with its direct knowledge of the different body.”

“We can make divisions between the biological and the social, as we feminists did with sex and gender, but what we soon discovered is that the divisions are both permeable and shifting, while at the same time deeply entrenched in bodies and practices. In “Re-Fusing Nature/Nurture” (1983) and “Fleshing Gender, Sexing the Body” (1996), I urged feminists to abandon the sex/gender dichotomy, arguing both that the nature/culture dualism that it rested on was flawed and that its use —while perhaps liberatory at a particular historical moment — was perpetuating the conceptual framework out of which sexist as well as racist practices have emerged. I argued that bodies, and sexes, are neither fixed nor inert, but fluid and emergent.

…

We often view nature as subdued through technology, the story of human agency affecting the natural order. But we forget to reverse the interaction for the Mississippi and Katrina — and those shell middens have agency too, an agency that influences the so-called natural and social order. And as we make pragmatic divisions between what is natural and what is social , as I have here, it behooves us to remember the viscous porosity between these phenomena , a porosity that undermines any effort to make an ontological division into kinds —natural and cultural — where the edges are clean and the interactions at best additive.

Go back to the levees. The levees had been shaped by numerous forces —technology, economics, weather, sedimentation patterns, the Mississippi River , to name a few. A 1947 hurricane that caused 100 million dollars in damage gave rise to hurricane protection levees alone Lake Pontchartrain’s south shore. Another deadly hurricane in 1965 caused the Orleans Levy Board to raise existing levees to a height of 12 feet. We knew these levees and flood walls were not designed to provide protection from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane storm damage.

…

The boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world we are of and in is porous. While that porosity is what allows us to flourish — as we breathe in the oxygen we need to flourish and metabolise the nutrients out of which our flesh emerges — this porosity often does not discriminate against that which can kill us. We cannot survive without water and food, but their viscous porosity often binds itself to strange and toxic bedfellows.

Katrina’s wake left New Orleans flooded with what headlines called a toxic “soup” . There are five superfund toxic waste sites in and around New Orleans, all of which were compromised by Katrina’s flooding. There are even more superfund sites in Louisiana and Mississippi that were in the path of Katrina’s wake…

…

There is a viscous porosity of flesh — my flesh and the flesh of the world. This porosity is a hinge through which we are of and in the world. I refer to it as viscous, for there are membranes that effect the interactions. These membranes are of various types — skin and flesh, prejudgements and symbolic imaginaries, habits and embodiments. They serve as the mediators of interaction.”

— Nancy Tuana, Viscous Porosity, https://www.academia.edu/12103511/Viscous_Porosity_Witnessing_Katrina

ZM
Thanks for your comments, Tuana’s work sounds very interesting. I have been interested in these ideas around permeability and leaky borders for a long time as I think we have discussed before. I remember mentioning to you (I think) an interesting article on The Conversation about how can think as part of the ecology.

In a way it is similar to the earlier discussion on this thread about “pantheism” though I get frustrated that people talk about these ideas without mentioning the contribution of feminist scholarship.

I am not opposed to the idea to the idea that we are capable of thinking as ‘individuals’ in a way that transcends boundaries of sex, gender, ethnicity and so on; however at the same time we are also both embodied and part of the ecology. I get frustrated at these poorly thought out claims about essentialism – at the risk of falling into the Rich Puchalsky style that I’ve been criticising, I do find them a bit “tired” and “outdated” :)

If I understand what you are saying about RP and BW above, I agree and also commend you on your ability – unlike myself – to say these things in a less confrontational way. I guess I just get tired of being dismissed and patronised, and trying to be polite in response (I do mainly – though not always – try to be polite, even though some may not see it!) I don’t wish to include Plume in the discussion though and I’m sorry I did before (even though geo lumped him in with the other three) as I think Plume’s position is more complex.

In regard to your other worries, I hope that you have someone that you can discuss these with in person. Take care of yourself. I always value your contributions here.

Thanks RNB. I’m an outsider to American politics of course but I guess like most of the world, I’m really trying to understand what is going on at present. I thought yours and js’ perspectives were really interesting and informative, especially as People of colour and Muslims don’t seem to be heard much on CT. I don’t necessarily agree with your views here (because I am a pacifist in fact) but I thought and think they are well expressed.

That of course is part of the reason I blew up at RP, as well as his ‘I’m not sexist, you’re stupid’ attitude to me (Rich probably doesn’t realise how common that attitude is amongst common or garden sexists). I’m always vowing not to get so steamed up on the internet but it hasn’t worked for me yet :)

Anyway thanks again for your views.

Of the nonsensical and incoherent claim that the ‘West’s’ intervention in Syria was ‘not enough’ and that if only ‘we’ had ‘intervened’ earlier everything would have been ok:

http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/has-western-intervention-prolonged-the-syrian-civil-war-has-our-press-covered-it-up.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

It’s true that Syria isn’t an example of “non intervention” but it is an example of a different type of intervention than Libya, and regardless of how bad Libya is Syria is worse. (I don’t personally think an explicit strong military response to Syria would have had much better outcomes than we have today, but the claim has some plausibility. I guess)
On lurkers “support the dictators” (stability is better than instability) argument way above, leaving aside the politics; (1) siding with the dictators over the opposition doesn’t resolve the underlying causes leading to opposition, in fact it probably makes them worse. So it’s can kicking (2) its uses last as long as people remenber what “not supporting the dictators” was like. After a while people start arguing the dictators, and western support for them, are the causes of instability in a region. So we go in circles (3) leaving aside moral qualms there are plausibly practical ones, concerning turning populations against the country supporting the dictator (bear in mind al Qaeda initially drew primarily from countries the US supported, not invaded) (4) I don’t know how true it is that this has better human rights outcomes, particularly in the long term.

RNB: “We are confusing humanitarian intervention with one of the forms that it may take–bombing. ”

Let’s see: we started talking about the Libya intervention. You claimed that HRC’s support of the Libya intervention wasn’t so bad. And what did that intervention involve?

Hmm, I wonder. Could it have been bombing?

RNB: ” see no reasonable argument here against strikes against Qaddafi’s military forces on Clinton’s assumptions that the strikes would be targeted on besieged military forces poised to carry out multiple massacres and thus possibly save tens of thousands of people. From just a quick internet search, it seems that Human Rights Watch estimates that fewer than 50 women and children were killed by accident in the NATO strikes. I understand that many of you find her decision abhorrent, but I think this is more complicated than people are making out as long as you share her assumptions. ”

Her assumptions? What about your assumptions? She supported actions that killed 50 innocent people, and you’re excusing that because you say her intentions were good. I have news for you: everyone (except, possibly, for you) knows that when bombs are dropped, some innocents will be killed. So her assumption was exactly as I’ve described: that it’s OK to kill some innocent people to try to save a larger number of people.

I don’t think that there was anything unfair or cheap at all about what I’ve written here. 50 innocent people were killed, and this did not save lives. And rather than drawing the lesson that we should not do this, the lesson is that this is more complicated than we think, and that it’s “childish” to be revolted at this useless sacrifice of other people’s lives.

Meh. “Western countries” don’t appear to behave much differently than non western countries, once you account for power differences and opportunities for domination. Certainly the history of Russia seems to support the idea of a proud people stomping on whoever they can , whenever they have the means, and whenever the opportunity arises.

No. Though I considered a facepalm or headdesk.

I think Ronan’s comment @484 (though I read it quickly and don’t agree w every single word) makes some good points. In particular it’s clear that, in some circumstances, the use of military force can stop atrocities (how that use of force is labeled and/or what motivated it is a separate question).

One form of ‘intervention’ not mentioned specifically yet is the various forms of UN peacekeeping and peace ‘enforcement’. A lot of empirical research has been done on this. While their record is mixed and problems remain, UN operations have had some successes and overall their record has improved over the past couple of decades. The record of regional-force interventions, e.g. through the African Union, is probably (even) more mixed. The recent civil war (or civil conflict) in South Sudan, not yet really resolved afaik, and the long-running problems in Darfur (better for a while, but recently worse again, I believe) are two examples where a robust UN presence, had it been feasible and implemented, might have made a difference — though I’m speculating, as I lack the expertise to say this with certainty. But basically, the more UN personnel there are relative to pop. in a particular setting, and the more robust their rules of engagement (i.e. not just ‘observing’) and their overall mandate, the better things are likely to go.

Ze K @491
In any case, we have the evidence, undeniable empirical evidence: the West has conquered the world. Not Russia. Not Persia. Not China, not Aztecs, not Egypt.

Well, there was a Persian empire, a Chinese one, a Russian one. Boundaries of contemp. China are certainly the result, in part, of ‘imperialist’ incorporation (Tibet, arguably Xianjiang [sp? sorry]).

Ze K has a cartoon version of world history: West bad, everyone else not-so-bad or actively ‘nice’. End of story.

In his novel Guerrillas, V.S. Naipaul has one character say to another (I’m paraphrasing): You have the whole world in front of you, and your mind prints out comic strips all day long.

I meant ZM not Val, sorry.

RNB @ 478, you still haven’t named a war HRC opposed. Yes, I know you posted about some tactic she didn’t go for, but bombing people from afar is still war, right?

Arguments about careful targeting, surgical strikes, avoiding collateral damage, etc, exist to obscure the fact that everyone knows the decision to make war is a decision to kill the innocent. It’s pushing the fat man onto the trolley while proclaiming, loudly that you’ll be careful about it, and maybe anyway there is no fat man, and if it turns out there is a dead fat man lying there afterward, well, we’ll conduct a thorough investigation, which will show that this was just an unfortunate case of collateral damage, entirely consistent with the rules of engagement, and anyway those other people were BAD, were we supposed to let them just be BAD, they would have killed the fat man themselves if we’d done nothing. He should thank us!

@503 http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10452.html

The NYT reporter Scott Shane reflects on his co-written piece on Clinton’s role in the intervention in Libya.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside_hillary_clinton

RNB @ 505, why do you think Clinton voted for the Iraq war? She says she was convinced by the intelligence, which turned out to be wrong; but 23 of her Senate colleagues were not convinced. I wouldn’t have said she was especially gullible. On the contrary, I think she’s quite smart, not easily fooled or misled. So, I have a view. I think she made the political calculation (in this she was certainly not alone!) that it would be better for her future poltical ambitions to be for it than to be against it – that she didn’t want to be Sam Nunn, as an example. What do you think?

@509 I read a wonderful book many years ago by Cordelia Fine which showed the limits of MRI and other evidence of putatively hormonally-induced sex differences in brain development in utero. I thought it was a rather important critique of biological essentialism.

It seems I am the only person on this thread who has ever been elected to public office. It shows. The kitchen sink is a very brutalising experience. The postings that I see are mostly passionate exuberance, and even I would say nursery in their grasp of understanding the public mood. Trump has let the long sleeping authoritarian itch of Frontierist Americanism out of the bag. Mrs. Clinton could easily stand as the republican she really is. The only genuine article is Sanders, who will be obliged in the final analysis to run as an independent if he fails to gain traction post March 15. ‘Woman worship’ is all that My Lady of Whitewater has. She slept through her term in the Senate. Ditto, State, although she briefly awoke during the murder of a head of state recognised by the United Nations – and the United States government.
Sanders will rub, and if he does, he may well win.

Val: “The main problem with geo’s formulation is he selected (ironically or otherwise, but I thought he was serious) four white malees that had recently been or were embroiled in arguments with feminists, people of colour/Muslims. Not an inclusive vision for the future of the left, can you see that?”

“four white males that had recently been or were embroiled in arguments with feminists, people of color / Muslims.” So I suppose that these four white males are not themselves feminists [well, bob holds to a version of intersectionality that he says excludes feminism as such, but no one here seems to read him carefully] , and that js, for instance, isn’t speaking as someone with a Muslim perspective, but is defined as a Muslim, and not also a feminist or a white male or whatever else he is. He is supposed to stand for all Muslims, and his perspective is the Muslim perspective. Therefore, if someone is embroiled in an argument with him, they aren’t arguing with js, they are arguing with “a Muslim”. Diss js and you diss all Muslims. Is that it?

And when I diss your theories, I’m dissing “a feminist theorist”. The debate over essentialism has gone rather beyond the article you linked to. The idea of patriarchy as a sort of universal, historically grounded, privileged source of all oppressions is not a majority one within academic feminism, to put it mildly. So can I allude to this? Or is “feminist theorist” an authoritative identity — a source of power, discipline, and respect — similar to typical patriarchal identities, that means that you stand for feminism?

RNB: “I am happy to leave that criticism unanswered.”

Because you can’t answer it. You just said that killing those 50 people was OK, just like the person in my satirical short play. Regrettable, but necessary, and you’re preparing arguments for why we should kill more.

RNB: “I would be surprised if RP has convinced anyone by the reasoning he has supplied of anything but the fact that he has a strong sense of his own moral superiority.”

When the Libya intervention was being prepared, we had a “humanitarian” posting here who worked to make R2P justifications for the UN. He said the same kind of thing. I wonder what’s he doing now? Bringing civilization to the natives somewhere else, probably.

“Why can’t geo’s comment also be seen as a cheerful, playful dig at 4 white males? A semi ironic jab that does more to deflate “white maleism” because of its subtly ?”

That’s certainly how I took it.

“embroiled in arguments with feminists, people of colour/Muslims.”

Hey, and what about Ze K? She’s been holding the anti-imperialist fort all alone since yesterday! Does she not count as a 3rd world woman of color bravely battling the supremacist prejudice of privileged Westeners and therefore deserving of your respect and attention? She has been making very strong points that have been either ridiculed or ignored while all the rest of the posters seem like a cozy family from Kansas sitting around the kitchen table circa 2003 discussing whether “we” should invade Iraq and concluding that, yes, “we” should.

Sorry Rich I’m bailing out at least for the moment. Unfortunately it does seem that you can’t get this idea that I’m actually intelligent through your head and you have to keep telling me about things about feminism that I ALREADY KNOW.

I will have some sleep and get my patience back and try to convince myself that no matter how offensively you appear to be convinced of your own superiority, you actually don’t mean to be like that (I think or at least hope).

And just for the record, do you actually believe that I think I represent all feminists or js represents all Muslims? Because if not, why did you suggest it? Think about that.

Nup, it’s no good. I’ve given up trying to be polite or get back to sleep.

Rich, I’m a feminist scholar, ya hopeless twit. Stop trying to explain feminism to me!

I am aware that some people, including some feminists, see the notion of patriarchy in the way you describe. I am also aware that there are some who don’t, and that there is a reconsideration going on, of which I am – or hope to be – part.

Val: “I am aware that some people, including some feminists, see the notion of patriarchy in the way you describe. I am also aware that there are some who don’t, and that there is a reconsideration going on, of which I am – or hope to be – part.”

OK, so you admit that your feminism is a hopeful reconsideration of what’s currently a widely held feminist view. So I return to my original. What makes your feminism beyond critique? If I call your historical, universalizing theories nutty, which I think they are, am I dissing feminism? Or am I supposed to just shut up because of your authority?

And I knew that you couldn’t remain polite. You aren’t that kind of person, and your apologies are always insincere.

For what it’s worth, “McManus, Puchalsky, Wilder & Plume” was a joke. My comment as a whole was a response to Bruce’s understandably (though, I think, excessively) downbeat declaration that “there is no left.” After offering some serious examples of modest but genuinely promising left-wing writers and activities, I thought I’d toss out the (semi-) facetious suggestion that the mere existence of all the left-wing brainpower on constant display here at CT also counted against Bruce’s pessimism. I chose McM/P/W/P partly because they’re so prolific, and among my favorite commenters; also because the idea of associating them harmoniously together in a political-strategy consulting firm — or in anything except a food fight at the CT cafeteria — tickled my fancy. But mostly I chose them because I thought “McManus, Puchalsky, Wilder & Plume” had a nice rhythm and sound. I do, I confess, occasionally say things simply because I like the way they sound. Sorry for any confusion.

@RNB, I confess I don’t understand your response at 513. Could you be more clear about why you think Clinton voted that way?

js, I ‘m curious. What were Ze K’s other handles?

RNB: “critics here should consider Weber’s warning that the total unwillingness to use force speaks only of the irresponsibility and non-seriousness of the statesman. ”

Huh, that’s funny. I distinctly remember that when Weber wrote about the ethic of responsibility,he wrote:

“We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility.’ This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends–that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves theresults with the Lord’–and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an accountof the foreseeable results of one’s action.”

An account of the foreseeable results of one’s action! But how could HRC have known that things would go so wrong? Her intentions were good.

Yes, Weber really supports this case. The ethic of responsibility means that when you screw up, it wasn’t your fault because you meant well.

Thanks, Geo @531.

That helps a lot. Sound and sense. Makes sense.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with Bruce about that “there is no left” thingy. I think you’re own writing proves there is, and the people you write about.

As for my own. I’ve finished the first of a proposed trilogy of novels about a future corporate state — no public sector at all — and a band of leftist dissidents fighting against it. I hope to publish it someday, under my real non-plume name.

Lynne — I’m about as sure as one can be in these cases. I guess Ze K can always can always deny it if I’m wrong.

Back to neoliberalism, from Laura Miller, Beauty Up

Unlike the Kano sisters, the majority of Japanese women have
reservations about seeking either surgical measures or aesthetic salon-assisted breast augmentation. Yet their anxiety and fears concerning breast adequacy, fueled by late capitalist logic, leave them susceptible to unscrupulous marketing of strategies that can be attempted in privacy.

Like I said, Modern Leftism must connect an analysis of the macro/meta, global capital flows and the IMF and Neo-Imperialism, to the most intimate and personal aspects of individual narratives and attitudes.

WT @542: Centrifugal governors with brass balls. Hmm … intriguing concept.

Bianca @546,

We don’t own it, of course. But we’re likely the only people who want to use it. Because it does imply a beginning, middle and end to the capitalist horror show. OTOH, its fans — like the the two Bretts — want it to be a neverending story, in full defiance of Aristotle.

@537 One also has to take into account the foreseeable consequences of inaction.

@549 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/02/hillary_clinton_told_the_truth_about_her_iraq_war_vote.2.html
Really George W. Bush, not Hillary Clinton, is responsible for the destruction of Iraq and tragedy that continues to unfold.

Is this the all-time champion comment thread count? The world wonders.

No ethic of responsibility that I’ve ever envisioned allows you to justify any failure by saying that the foreseeable consequences of inaction might have been an even worse failure. As I wrote all the way at the beginning of this, before everyone decided that I have to be a pacifist because pacifists are ritually honored and then ignored: if you want to be a practitioner of realpolitik, you’d better succeed. Otherwise there is no use for you.

If you read that Weber speech carefully — yeah, I know — he links the vocation of politics to the state. As in, a particular state. I wonder what he would think of a leader who decides that they have to preserve peace everywhere in the world and who therefore embroils their state in conflicts which have foreseeably bad consequences whether the intervention is “won” or “lost”. Perhaps he’d say that a responsible politician would choose to avoid failure by not taking on a problem that their state does not need to take on.

Not that I think that Weber is worth listening to in any practical political sense. He was an imperialist (in the classical sense of that word) and the practical effect of his influence on the Weimar constitution was disastrous. But I dislike the kind of barely understood use of him you’re making.

Rich Puchalsky @537
You have to read and quote more than just *one* paragraph from ‘Politics as A Vocation’. Anyway, you’re misreading the paragraph you do quote. The ‘ethic of responsibility’ means that good intentions are not enough and don’t absolve someone of the consequences of his/her acts: in other words, it means exactly the opposite of what you say.

An enormous amt of scholarly ink has been spilled on Weber in general and that essay in particular, and it’s actually somewhat painful, even in this context, to see someone glibly quoting one paragraph and then declaring that it says something it does not say.

That said, I would prefer to keep Weber out of this discussion. Under the circumstances I don’t think it will help. Actually, probably nothing will help b/c the positions have hardened and everyone has dug in. As is often the case on 500+ comment threads.

(p.s. The ‘Data’ handle was Data Tutashkia, or something like that.)

LFC: “The ‘ethic of responsibility’ means that good intentions are not enough and don’t absolve someone of the consequences of his/her acts: in other words, it means exactly the opposite of what you say.”

That is what I said. I wrote that HRC can hardly claim that the failure of the Libya intervention was all right because her intentions are good.

Seriously, I wonder whether most people here actually read. Perhaps the sarcasm at the end of the comment was the problem?

LFC — I think @537 is supposed to be sarcastic. Unless I’m misreading or misunderstanding the argument. In any case, this is all rather bizarre. It’s quite obvious, I’d have thought, that the Iraq war vote was a political calculation, one that qua political calculation made a sort of sense in 2003 but (obviously) blew up in Clinton’s face in 2008.

(ps. Yeah, I wasn’t even going to try to spell the second name on the Data handle, but thanks.)

OK, here’s another copy of that comment marked up with sarcasm tags:

Huh, that’s funny. I distinctly remember that when Weber wrote about the ethic of responsibility,he wrote:

[Weber quote]

An account of the foreseeable results of one’s action! But how could HRC have known that things would go so wrong? Her intentions were good.

Yes, Weber really supports this case. The ethic of responsibility means that when you screw up, it wasn’t your fault because you meant well.

I considered the possibility that 537 was sarcasm. But not always easy to tell. Anyway, noted.

@556 When you tell us something you can’t envision, you are just telling us about the limits of your vision. Turbo-charged by your own sense of moral superiority, you have made no case at all that the consequences of action proved to be worse than what would have been the consequences of inaction. The NYT reporter Scott Shane reminds us that Hillary Clinton may well have had to explain today how she allowed the slaughter of tens of thousands of unarmed protestors had she pressured the French and British not to act against Qaddafi or advocated for a ceasefire during which Qaddafi could have regrouped to carry out a mass slaughter of regime opponents.
It’s interesting that you are now arguing from a consequentialist perspective. You probably haven’t noticed the shift in your moral framework.

@553. If Clinton voted for war authorization because she thought being a hawk would best serve her politically, then why did she urge Bush not to rush to war and urge restraint? OK she was credulous about what George W. Bush was telling her was his strategy. She imagined that he would carry out a foreign policy similar to his father’s–use sanctions to get inspections and go to war only with international support. George W. Bush surprised her. This in itself does not make her the war criminal that George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are. She has in fact apologized, but that triumvirate is not in jail.

@571. I was just trying to tease out what I thought was LFC’s allusion to Weber. He does not want to bring him into it. But do note what RP has done; he had previously argued against a consequentialist framework by saying that the savings of many more lives does not justify taking fewer lives. Now he urges us to judge HRC by the consequences of her actions. He has shifted moral perspectives, and does not care. He’s just having so much fun on his jaunt on his high horse.

They’re incompatible. You can’t reason.

They aren’t incompatible at all: it’s a two-step test. If you’re reasoning morally, it’s immoral. If you’re reasoning in a practical political sense that rejects that kind of morality, it doesn’t work. It can’t be defended under either one of Weber’s ethics. You end up being just like Bush in Iraq: both an incompetent leader and a war criminal.

But that’s no reason for you not to try it again, right?

I was waiting for someone to bring up the big one. WW II, the ur-humanitarian-intervention, or so claimed by people who don’t know much about it. I haven’t particularly studied it, but as a Jew I know something. Should we start with the Bermuda Conference? Or maybe this:

“The destruction of the death installations can not be done by bombing from the air, as the first victims would be the Jews who are gathered in these camps, and such a bombing would be a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by the Allied bombers.”

Every suggested mission to bomb the camps or the railway junction bringing prisoners to them was refused. Why do you think that was?

You’d rather let the Nazis kill all the inmates than soil your own pure white hands with even a single drop of blood.

My hands are brown, thanks very much. In any case, the utilitarian case is a non-starter even here. After all, it’s not as if if you kill 8 bystanders to save 10 camp victims, you’re A-OK, but if you kill 12 to save 10, you’re fucked.

@573

That was one memorable thread.

@Lupita 03.05.16 at 7:26 pm

>Is that so? I really like Ze K. She seems genuinely anti-Western hegemony. Very Global South.

You can have more than one reason to be anti-Western hegemony.

@Ze K 03.04.16 at 8:33 am

>1. they weaken globalization and global financialization.

My only problem with globalization and global financialization is that they increase inequality and unfreedom. Political and cultural authoritarianism and traditionalism increase them likewise. Ultimately, maximised economic domination will destroy any political and cultural autonomy, and maximised political and cultural domination will destroy any economic autonomy. Having employers as feudals, international companies as feudals, bureaucrats appointed by the local dictator as feudals or priests as feudals is the same to me.

>they resist western imperialism

And, whenever they get the chance, practice their own. Having Putin as overlord and having Clinton as overlord is the same to me.

>they are populist, which is another word for ‘participatory democracy’.

Well no, it’s not another word for that at all; that’s the point. ‘Populist’ basically means you appeal to something popular among the masses in one respect or another. You can be an autocrat and yet use populist techniques when it suits you. In fact, almost all autocrats and authoritarians do that to some extent, including the ones you’ve mentioned.

That was one memorable thread.

It made me chain smoke.

@js. 03.05.16 at 11:28 pm

>After all, it’s not as if if you kill 8 bystanders to save 10 camp victims, you’re A-OK, but if you kill 12 to save 10, you’re fucked.

Again, I’m not sure if I understand you correctly, but if the ‘bystanders’ you’re talking about are camp victims, then you are choosing between the death of 8 and of 18 and the case is clear (to me at least). If, somehow, there are some innocent bystanders who were *not* going to be executed and your chosen course of action entails killing more of them than there were camp victims to save, then I’d say you are, indeed, f***ed.

>My hands are brown, thanks very much.

Excuse me, I hail from a small, parochial, largely monoracial society and my cultural background shows – I definitely didn’t mean it to be interpreted racially (although I realised it inevitably would be almost immediately after posting). Let me correct this to ‘your own pure, untarnished, gentle, beautiful and angelic hands of whatever colour’.

@Rich Puchalsky 03.05.16 at 11:19 pm 578

In case this is a reply to my 577 (03.05.16 at 11:02 pm), I would just like to say that I wouldn’t dream of claiming that the real-life WW2 was a humanitarian intervention. Certain aspects of the Allied Powers’ actions at some phases of the war happened to have some (enormous) humanitarian (side-)effects, that’s all. That doesn’t mean that we can’t consider, as an intellectual experiment, whether these effects were worth the immediate cost, assuming the actors had been guided by moral considerations.

I think that that answer is weak. If you’re going to use the moral force of an actual example for your intellectual exercise, surely you should what actually happened in that example.

But I assume that you agree that in actuality, WW II was the same kind of case that I described upthread — a state that commits atrocities internally also acts aggressively to neighboring states until they respond because of either national interest or self defense, and the humanitarian effects of the war are a byproduct of a war pursued for other reasons.

Foundling, I was kind of joking about the color of my hands (tho they are brown). No worries about that. As for the rest…, maybe later. It would take a long-ish post.

So Ronan, how do you pronounce it?

I tried googline around and this is the most poignant result:

Seoraí 0 words found
Wow, you actually found a word not on Forvo!

Val: “Anyway I guess what matters is not whether we can have a coherent discussion about feminism, racism and left wing politics”

Geez, Val, what I’ve tried to tell you more than once is that if you want a coherent discussion, you have to start with one. You can’t attack people for not supporting identity politics on a thread where they just supported identity politics and then ask why they’re saying mean things about you.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being insulting. I should know! But if you choose to be, you have to expect other people to respond the same way, and not be shocked when they do. You can’t expect a civil discussion when you yourself are one of the least civil people around.

Btw – I know, I know, content isn’t important according to my theory, but I can’t help giving you the benefit of the doubt – you think I am “attacking people for not supporting identity politics”, you’ve completely misunderstood everything I’ve been saying.

Brett Dunbar,

“[ZM] you don’t have a right not to be the inspiration for a song. Common People by Pulp for refers to a Greek student from a wealthy family studying sculpture at St Martins College University of London. The details given fit Danae Stratou the wife of Yanis Varoufakis the former Greek finance minister. She was there 1983-88 while Jarvis Cocker was a mature student there from 1988. This doesn’t give her any specific rights over the song.”

Brett Dunbar — I had the right as a woman to go to concerts in 1998 dressed as I pleased and making polite uncritical faces as if I was in Salaam Cinema just as I pleased — and not be stalked and sexually harassed by musicians on THREE RECORDS Moon Pix, Knock Knock, and I See A Darkness.

Common People is ONE SONG. The number of songs about me over 18 years now is in the DOZENS, and lots of film clips as well :-/

Victorian Crimes Act 1958
(1) A person must not stalk another person.
Penalty: Level 5 imprisonment (10 years maximum).
Stalking is a course of action by a person or persons involving more than one incident.
(2) A person (the offender) stalks another person (the victim) if the offender engages in a course of conduct which includes any of the following—
(b) contacting the victim or any other person by post, telephone, fax, text message, e-mail or other electronic communication or by any other means whatsoever;
(ba) publishing on the Internet or by an e-mail or other electronic communication to any person a statement or other material—
(i) relating to the victim or any other person; or
(ii) purporting to relate to, or to originate from, the victim or any other person;
(bc) tracing the victim’s or any other person’s use of the Internet or of e-mail or other electronic communications;
(db) using abusive or offensive words to or in the presence of the victim;
(dd) directing abusive or offensive acts towards the victim;
(e) giving offensive material to the victim or any other person or leaving it where it will be found by, given to or brought to the attention of, the victim or the other person;
(f) keeping the victim or any other person under surveillance;
(g) acting in any other way that could reasonably be expected—
(i) to cause physical or mental harm to the victim, including self-harm; or
(6) It is immaterial that some or all of the course of conduct constituting an offence against subsection (1) occurred outside Victoria, so long as the victim was in Victoria at the time at which that conduct occurred.

And somehow for Bill Callahan my act of dressing not provocatively in a long half hand sewn and half stapled gingham skirt was so provocative, he wrote a song telling me to dress sexy — Dress Sexy At My Funeral [My Good Wife — another reference to me dressing up as Will Oldham’s wife which I did not do, and referring to Will Oldham possibly dying due to going to bondage dungeons which I never understood in the lyrics until John Holbo kindly mentioned bondage dungeons repeatedly in comment threads here, now he is a historical character too for being so helpful due to his scholarly knowledge of decadent literature]

JanieM, I’ve looked in an Irish English dictionary I found but no luck. I’ve texted a friend who should know and tweeted the original tweeter. So I’ll see when they get back to me. I’m going to guess “show-ra” (seo generally sounds like show. My reference here is the surname seoige ie show-i-ga. google tells me seo also means “this”, which rings a bell) I can’t find any reference to this word though , so I’m curious to see what fabulations are concocted.

@606

I believe the pronunciation is more like show-roy because of the accent on the diphthong.

Ah, thanks MilitantlyAardvark.

Brett Dunbar, interesting about “Common People.” Such a great song!

On humanitarian interventions (and aspects of R2P), as I mentioned above two (imo) problems that were baked in at the start were (1) reliance on military action(2) assuming states (and interests, institutional failures they bring to the table) were best methods and actors to resolve humanitarian crises. I will quote the below at length, which perhaps isn’t overly specific, but lays out an alternative approach to civilian protection in war:

“R2P though, as one might expect, is not without its troubles. (The imperialism charge for me is not one of them, because R2P does not encourage the domination of small countries by large ones; it merely provides transparent rhetorical dressing for actions states would’ve undertaken anyways.) R2P’s language frames civilian protection as occurring entirely between states and international institutions. States themselves, of course, have the primary responsibility, but then the international community has the responsibility to aid states in protecting their civilians.

Therefore, R2P rests on two foundational assumptions. The first is that states, with the occasional helping hand of the international community, have the capacity to adequately protect civilians. This simply isn’t the case. The UN suffers from severe bureaucratic, financial, and political difficulties in even predicting mass violence, let alone intervening to stop it. While regional organizations are generally improving their ability to predict, mitigate, and respond to mass violence, their capability to push the same bureaucratic, financial, and political constraints is still hampered. Most civilians will remain beyond the reach of international organizations and even well-meaning states when violence breaks out..

Unfortunately, R2P’s framing leaves no room for sub-state methods of civilian protection, and more specifically, the possibility of civilian self-protection. Frédéric Mégret writes, “…formulations of R2P all stopped short of reorganizing that ‘victims’ (or intended victims) of atrocities might have a role in averting atrocities at the point when they are being committed.” Mégret labels R2P as a component of a “salvation paradigm”, in which outsiders view themselves as the only ones capable of saving those at risk of mass violence. The problem here is that most civilians who survive R2P crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing) do so without the help of outside actors. The survival of this silent majority is mostly a result of small-scale social networks that take on protective roles in conflict. Hillhorst estimates that less than 10% of civilians survive natural disasters because of outside aid, and due to the more advanced nature of disaster early warning systems and the relative lack of political complications caused by disaster aid, it’s a safe bet that this number is even lower for violent conflict. R2P is the cornerstone of how to protect civilians, but yet it fails to engage with the avenue through which an enormous majority survive.

The distance between R2P’s vision of civilian protection and its reality is a problem that goes beyond the theoretical. R2P’s wording ensures international strategies for civilian self-protection will continue to work through state and international institutional channels, where frankly there isn’t much improvement that can be made. Even if there is a shift toward collaborating with sub-state actors, R2P’s lack of recognition of these efforts means they will remain rare and continuously makeshift. R2P is a potent mechanism for generating a global consensus that atrocities must not be ignored, but this does not translate into effective civilian protection.

Trying to understand why R2P does not recognize the most common forms of civilian self-protection during mass atrocities throws up two divergent currents that pulled the doctrine in opposing directions, and what can be generally described as the “top-down model” won out. The first set of influences will likely be more familiar to the reader. R2P emerged out of the “humanitarian intervention” debate of the 1990’s, itself spawned by the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Rwanda. Especially in the latter two, humanitarians were frustrated by the international community’s inability to act effectively to stop violence. This frustration translated into a constructed chain of causality that drew a direct and almost monocausal link between international inaction and the occurrence of atrocities. This ignored both the complex drivers and inhibitors of mass violence and the international community’s frequent inability to sufficiently protect civilians through military interventions.

Academics also contributed heavily to R2P’s top-down approach to civilian protection. Scholars of violent conflict have tended to imbue armed actors with near-total agency in determining the course of conflict. Norms might matter, but only rarely do scholars demonstrate how civilians can participate in the shaping of these norms. Only recently have scholars like Stathis Kalyvas and Oliver Kaplan examined civilian agency during violent conflict. Therefore, without a theoretical base to examine how unarmed non-elites may play a role in shaping conflict and aiding their own survival, it becomes difficult to imagine an international doctrine for responding to atrocities that has a role for these marginalized actors.

However, the more intriguing current that helped to shape R2P is the one that ultimately lost out. Mégret notes the R2P was in fact out of step with thinking in related fields at the time, “Whereas neighboring branches of the international discourse (e.g. conflict mediation, development) are increasingly explicit about the need to forge direct relations with civil society actors even at the height of conflict, R2P seems marked by a reversal to the ‘high politics’ of international intervention in times of unfolding crisis.” This positive influence was almost borne out, as the original draft of R2P created by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty included a section highlighting the agency of victims and domestic civil societies in protecting themselves from conflict. For reasons unbeknownst to me, this vein of thought pushing for a more grassroots approach to conflict prevention and mitigation lost the ideological struggle. ”

See the problem with r2p “the widening lens” blog

Too boil it down a bit more, two articles by Margaret paxsons “what is peace” at aeon magazine (which can’t be linked to here for some reason) and a similar though expanded version here

http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/fall-2012-will-india-win/precipices/

Brett @618,

Well, that was spoken like a true blind lover of capitalism, smoking your pipe at the club with the other “gentlemen.” With all the empathy of a shark at midnight.

Ze K,

But, again, you’re never, ever “firmly in control” as a single human being. We are, ourselves, alone, very, very weak and rather powerless creatures. We require massive amounts of human and technological help to achieve and maintain “power.” We’re not X-Men, etc.

I think if you go through history, you’ll find that any autocrat who thought he or she was “firmly in control” and no longer needed to convince anyone they were doing what was “right for the people” soon ended up dead — or at least jailed or exiled.

I mixed up which was the expanded version (the aeon one was) but it’s not really important, if you didn’t get much out of one you wouldn’t the other.
I don’t mean this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity, but isn’t that an odd position for an anarchist? That’s not to expect an anarchist perspective (if I could speak about such a thing )to be completely ideologically coherent, but would it not at least skew away from the state and towards things like community or individual self reliance?
I agree it only goes so far, but (1) as per the first link, the majority of civilian protection on the ground occurs away from the state or large international organisations, among individuals and within communities (2) the larger point was that spending resources enabling that to function (or seeing how it does) could be theoretically more useful than either (a) using military force or (b) things like building refugee camps, creating safe zones etc. The emphasise would be on local knowledge and self reliance rather than outside intervention.
It’s not a solution, per se, so much as a shift in emphasis.
I think we’re talking about slightly different things though. You seem to be asking more how do you prevent the US from using this enormous war machine. That I don’t know.

” would it not at least skew away from the state and towards things like community or individual self reliance?”

The state is a tool for genocidaires, basically. Individual or communal self reliance may or may not work, but without a state your neighbors at least have to risk their lives killing others in person. They can’t just democratically vote to send the bombers cruising halfway around the world to do it.

There are obvious problems with this approach: 1) how do you keep some demagogue from reforming a state, 2) how do you keep the stateless area safe from incursions by neighboring states, 3) how do you keep interpersonal violence in a stateless area from being worse than violence in state-ruled areas. I don’t really want to get into anarchist theory in depth here for a variety of reasons.

I keep seeing the claim that tens of thousands would have been murdered in Libya if we hadn’t intervened. I think someone used it up thread.

I think this replaced the claim that massive atrocities had already occurred before we intervened, when the actual civilian death toll was a lot smaller than what Egypt, Israel, and the Saudis have done recently. And what evidenced is there that the tens of thousands of deaths would have happened? Was Qaddafi that much worse than the Islamist militias?

Finally, if we are going to use counterfactuals, what would the interventionist argument have been if we had bombed Libyan rebels instead? Everyone knows this– the interventionists would have argued we had to do this to prevent tens of thousands of deaths or an outright genocide if the Islamists won. The reality has been bad enough, but you know that in the counterfactual world of a Qaddaffi victory with our help, the counterfactual alternative would have been imagined to be ten times worse.

I’d like to read that, Plume. Thanks. Even more, I would like to read The Un-Making of Global Capitalism. When will that be written?

The US got criticised for supporting dictatorships such as in El Salvador in The 1980s. It gets criticised for doing nothing as in Rwanda or during the massacres in Bosnia, it gets criticised for aiding rebels in overthrowing a tyrant in Libya. Whatever you do is going to be criticised by some people.

Yes, Brett, if an empire supports murderers or intervenes and the result is chaos people are apt to be a little snippy about it.

FWIW I was new here when abb1 was banned and don’t know all the history–I was a little surprised by it. As far as I’ve seen, s/he’s kept away from the topics that led to the original banning, and the others have been for, well, overenthusiasm, as far as I could see. If the moderators don’t think reincarnation is a reason for immediate rebanning, that’s good enough for me. S/he comes across, to me, as someone who used to live in the Soviet bloc.

Geo@639,

Rich is a strange sort of “anarchist,” as he’s in favor of capitalism continuing. I find that to be an immediate non-starter for the existence of any viable, democratic, humane sort of left-anarchist community, or federation of left-anarchist communities, or a left-anarchist society in general. I see capitalism as in major conflict with social justice, period.

Capitalism is fundamentally antithetical to democracy and anarchism — at least left-anarchism. It’s obviously hierarchical, structurally, so I don’t get how anyone, honestly, can be a left-anarchist and support capitalism at the same time. I see them as diametrically opposed and incommensurate. And I wish Rich would at least attempt to square that circle here.

@bianca steele
I await LFC’s post to tell me I’m all wrong

Bianca, I would never dream of telling you you’re all wrong. I mean, that’s just not like me. ;)

(More seriously, I agree that the U.S. role in Europe and Latin America is different — and has been historically. Probably wdn’t phrase it *exactly* the same way as you, but …whatever.)

geo: “there do seem to be other “obvious problems” with the stateless society you envision, apart from security, namely, coordination and arbitration”

Arbitration is part of security, if the purpose of arbitration is keeping people from turning to violence to settle disputes. Coordination is one of the things that’s really kind of dangerous in itself. What are people coordinating to do? Anything that people coordinate in a large group to do has a large capacity for going bad quickly.

Plume continues to criticize some past stuff that he didn’t take the trouble to read in the first place. Like almost all left anarchists, I’m an anti-capitalist. 1) I don’t envision a future anarchist society in which goon squads descend on individual traders to stop them from practicing “capitalism”, 2) I don’t see some anarchist revolution sweeping the nation or the world any time within my lifetime, and I don’t plan to do nothing while waiting for it. That means that I have to use the system to some extent.

Coordination is one of the things that’s really kind of dangerous in itself. What are people coordinating to do? Anything that people coordinate in a large group to do has a large capacity for going bad quickly.

But you need to solve fairly complex coordination problems to make medium-scale transport possible, e.g. Or really, any of the basic enabling conditions of life in a modern society that we take for granted and don’t even notice. I’m not saying these kinds of coordination problems can’t be solved in a stateless society—I don’t see any in principle reason they couldn’t be. But it seems to me much stranger to turn against the idea of coordination itself.

(This is amazingly off-topic obviously. I like coordination problems.)

js: “But you need to solve fairly complex coordination problems to make medium-scale transport possible, e.g. Or really, any of the basic enabling conditions of life in a modern society that we take for granted and don’t even notice.”

Do you really? As the thread goes past 500 comments each one of them becomes a magnet for people to say “ha ha you’re posting so much the thread is past 500 comments” so I’m reluctant to start a whole new discussion, but:

1) It’s becoming more and more possible to produce things anywhere
2) Sustainability implies that we’re going to have to produce less in any case
3) I’m not opposed to trading, or to market set prices within a limited sphere of long-distance goods. I think that this may be part of what Plume means by “supporting capitalism.” But of course trading is not capitalism and markets per se are not capitalism.
4) How much coordination do you need to build a road? Mostly the coordination comes in exercising eminent domain to kick people out of the path of the road. Maybe we shouldn’t have that kind of coordination and just have fewer roads.

= = = 4) How much coordination do you need to build a road? Mostly the coordination comes in exercising eminent domain to kick people out of the path of the road. = = =

Even in a moderately built-up area there are webs of utilities down to 30 meters below the ground that have to be managed (in NYC or Chicago down to 200 meters). Opening up a road for repairs is a good time o look at signalization which are often large systems themselves. Closing a road may affect region ambulance routes, large load routes, hazmat evacuation plans. Etc.

“But Chomsky’s opposition was not full-throated probably because he was quite aware of the monstrous things Qaddafi had been doing.”

Humanitarian intervention supporters always assume that opposition must come down to one of three things: a) the opponents don’t believe that the dictator is really doing horrible things, b) the opponents believe that the intervenors must have bad motives, c) the opponents must be pacifists who just oppose everything.

I asked upthread why people think the Allies didn’t bomb the extermination camps in WW II. Hint: it’s not because they didn’t know what monstrous things the Nazis were doing.

Cranky Observer: “Even in a moderately built-up area there are webs of utilities down to 30 meters ”

I’m sympathetic, Cranky, but if I keep on going much longer, then I get into the comedy of micromanaging an imaginary future society. In short, I think that it’s likely that an anarchist society will have groups of infrastructure geeks who manage this stuff locally. I don’t see why this is a long-distance coordination problem, except possibly for standards setting.

Geo may be able to confirm, but Chomsky was quite critical of the US blocking Qaddafi from being held responsible at the proceedings at the Hague for the crimes of Charles Taylor.
‘It was not long after he received a secret warning from the Italian government in April 1986 and narrowly escaped being blown to bits by American bombers that Muammar Gaddafi declared his intention to become Emperor of Africa. What followed as the increasingly erratic Gaddafi pursued his megalomaniacal dream was one of the most obscene and violent episodes in recent African history.

Drawing recruits from his terrorism camps, Gaddafi trained, armed and dispatched thugs like Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh to take power in West African countries, initiating the brutal slaughter of innocents in Liberia and Sierra Leone, says David M. Crane, the founding prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. “This was a long-term criminal conspiracy,” says Crane, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, and “[Gaddafi] was the center point.”

For those who don’t remember, here’s a quick summary of the atrocities that took place in the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. In pursuit of diamonds, timber and gold, Sankoh, backed by Taylor, backed by Gaddafi, invaded Sierra Leone and instituted a campaign of terror, cutting off the arms and other body parts of civilians to frighten the country into compliance. Rape was a widespread weapon of war, and according to reporting by one human rights organization, Sankoh’s troops played a game where they would bet on the sex of a baby being carried by a pregnant captive, then cut the fetus out of the woman to determine its gender.

Sankoh died in custody after the war ended; Taylor is currently being tried by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Gaddafi is named in Taylor’s indictment, and Taylor has testified to Gaddafi’s involvement. Crane says he found evidence that when Sankoh invaded Sierra Leone, “Libyan special forces were there helping train and assist them tactically and there were Libyan arms in that invasion: he had been involved from the get go.”

Tuesday afternoon, the U.N. Security Council issued a statement suggesting Gaddafi might be called to task for the current bloodshed in Libya, which has reportedly included unprovoked and lethal assaults by foreign African mercenaries against innocent protesters. “The members of the Security Council stressed the importance of accountability,” the statement said, “They underscored the need to hold to account those responsible for attacks, including by forces under their control, on civilians.”’

geo,

Depends what you want the book for, I guess.

js: “Anyway, I was thinking of signal systems, air traffic control, that kind of thing.”

How many jet airplanes flying around do you think is a sustainable number? Like I wrote above, a whole lot of our coordination is coordination to do things that are kind of problematic.

But, OK. Let’s say you want lots of jet airplanes. How much of the current coordination is powered by the force of the state? Or even voted on democratically? Isn’t a whole lot of it based on respect for certain world-class experts who other experts listen to plus “I”m not going to let you land at this airport if you don’t follow the agreed rules”?

p.s. additions to my 641
— geo’s list
— the Rajan Menon book mentioned by RNB upthread

The recent death of Boutros-Ghali might provide an occasion to revisit Bosnia, Rwanda, and other crises that occurred during his tenure as UN Sec. Gen.

Rich @645,

Since no one in those conversations suggested that “goon squads would descend on individual traders,” it was your lack of reading skills that caused the misunderstanding, not mine. I took you as a supporter of capitalism because — in those discussions, at least — you opposed removing its legal status and support structure.

But, no matter. Glad to hear you actually say you’re an anticapitalist.

Well, I’m not going back to those old threads, so let’s just say mutual misreading occurred.

In general, though, when someone baits you with “I bet you wouldn’t let me do X in your anarchist utopia” I think it’s best to say “Sure, do whatever you want” assuming that it doesn’t involve violence. If someone wants to set up a business and hire workers and pay them a wage or whatever, tell them that’d be fine. There’d be no contract system and no need for the workers to work for the wage or starve, so if they didn’t like it, they’d walk off. You have a tendency to talk about anarchisms universally banning things as if that were really possible and / or necessary. What’s more important is to empower people not to have to depend on that structure.

“My experience is that the wherewithal will accrue to someone, and they’ll use it, regardless of whether it’s sensible. What will stop them, if not the state?”

Inability for the society to support a system of property rights that lets them accumulate stuff. I mean, they can accumulate it, but as what? Gold bars? Once they reach the number of gold bars they can carry around, they’ll have to leave them at home, and somebody will take their gold bars.

The “I” controlling the airport will be some person in temporary charge of the shift of people who like airplanes watching it — probably somebody who really likes bossing people around and who the others are fine with letting them boss them around because it means they do an outsized share of the boring clerical work. That person will really get a thrill out of turning away planes that don’t meet his or her checklist of rules, if human nature then is anything like it is now.

How many jet planes is sustainable is something that will emerge organically from whatever technology and ability to use it they have available. And how many people there are who like to watch airplanes.

Why does the person need to make a contract? They don’t need to work to live, or the whole thing falls apart.

If the sector can’t run without being able to find enough people who want to do it, then oh well the society can’t have that sector. But there likely would be some kind of large social status reward for people who work a lot, and people do a whole lot for social status.

I have a conflicted relationship with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin. (Yes, I know that one can’t actually have a relationship with a set of texts.) Please let’s not start on The Dispossessed.

And I know that this next question is coming, so “How do people live if they don’t have to work?” It takes something like 5% of the population to actually make the stuff we need to live now. Let’s say 10%. I’m guessing that any group of people is going to have 10% of inveterate hard workers who basically would be more bored not working.

Now I’m imagining Trump giving a speech about “Omelas”. (I hope that’s not how he’s planning to build his yuuuuge classy wall.)

I sort of knew that you meant to ask about The Dispossessed. I’ll just quote Ken McLeod, who had a book event here recently:

Academic discussions of Anarchism and SF tend to begin and end with Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a book which has probably put more people off Anarchism than any other. It presents a dour vision of Anarchist Communism: something like a particularly fanatical kibbutz or Spanish Civil War collective.

Probably every living anarchist has written about The Dispossessed. That’s a joke, but not much of one. If you want to read more about this kind of thing, a book to start with might be Instead of Work, by Bob Black. This recommendation doesn’t mean that I agree with everything in it. It’s got a little bit about William Morris in it, I think.

Brett Dunbar,

“ZM the police had little interest in your complaint as you are clearly deluded. The songs just aren’t about you. No one else would think that they were about you. You do come across as needing psychiatric help.”

This happens to women who allege prominent figures have harassed them all the time. Their mental state is questioned, their character is brought into disrepute etc.

Usually people who harass others do not make it obvious to the world at large as well. It is enough that I know about it to make it stalking and sexual harassment.

The only unusual things in my case is the involvement of people of both sexes, with women stalking and sexually harassing me as well, and the use of commercial products which use literary devices etc instead of saying something to me directly to my face.

Rich Puchalsky,

“4) How much coordination do you need to build a road? Mostly the coordination comes in exercising eminent domain to kick people out of the path of the road. Maybe we shouldn’t have that kind of coordination and just have fewer roads.”

It depends on the road. Some roads are under the control of local government, and some roads are under the control of a State roads body (here we have VicRoads), depending on the importance of the road. Some roads are decided on by the Premier and Transport Minister and other parliamentary figures, with information provided to them.

Road planning is quite important as it is about connectivity and permeability. There is also movements away from roads only for cars, to multi-purpose roads of the past that can be used by people walking and talking and so on, for this see Jan Gehl’s work.

Transport planning is really quit complicated and takes a lot of knowledge and involves different state and private actors.

geo: “The poem (and blog) you link to is intriguing”

That poem continues to be the best one I’ve written, probably and unfortunately. It was a reply to Michael Berube. If anyone really wants to know what I think about current politics, just read that.

The poem repays a second reading, and I’ll give it a third soon. Some very dark — almost willfully dark — passages, though. The marginal commentary is a clever, even inspired, touch. What of Michael Berube’s were you replying to?

I’m surprised you think the anarchist society in The Dispossessed is so unattractive. It doesn’t purport to be the end of history, but I wouldn’t mind living in it.

Rich did you miss the bit about thousands of people dying?

Left anarchism makes even less sense than right anarchism. At least the right anarchists have some idea of how to get some unpopular but necessary tasks done. Those that can be treated as club goods or private goods. The market is reasonably good at providing those in desired quantities.

Until the sewers were built London had repeated outbreaks of cholera and typhoid which killed many thousands and the Thames was so polluted that there were no fish. The sewers eliminated cholera and typhoid and so reduced contamination that the river became able to support life. The sewers were built in response to the 1858 Great Stink by government action. Building and maintaining sewers is a public good as the benefit is non-excludable so you need to be able to require the beneficiaries to contribute to the cost of keeping them safe from disease. Having large urban centres that don’t have a much shorter life expectancy requires a state, as certain public goods must be provided.

Having as large a population as the earth has requires a complex society and therefore will have a complex economy as some things are scarce. Assuming that public goods will somehow be provided in desired quantities flies in the face of the long standing experimental evidence that they are chronically under supplied.

Common goods on the other hand tend to be destroyed, for example the hunting to the point of extinction of beaver in Canada due to unregulated hunting for fur. Without a property right allowing the exclusion of other hunters there was no reason to leave any beavers as some one else would get the benefit.

geo: “What of Michael Berube’s were you replying to?”

There’s a link just under the poem title. It was a discussion about what to do about torture being normalized by the Bush administration openly doing it and the Obama administration declining to prosecute those who’d authorized it.

TM: “Surely there have been more advanced theories of anarchism than that.”

This is one of the reasons why I sort of didn’t want to answer that first question. I’m not going to provide an especially advanced version of anarchism in the last few comments of this thread. “Advanced” approaches to the coordination problem tend to look a whole lot like a state going under another name, and distinguishing them from one requires a whole lot of picky and to my mind not entirely convincing detailing. I don’t see any real chance of going through that here.

If you look at what I’ve already written and think “That’ll never work”, then fine. As I mentioned upthread, I don’t think I’ll live to see it, so it’s not really my responsibility to come up with a workably detailed plan. The hubris of planning out the lives of future generations is one of the things that I think that anarchism should generally avoid. On the other hand, if you think that this kind of thing is close enough to be interesting, you can work on it yourself.

Brett: “Rich did you miss the bit about thousands of people dying?”

Oh no — no anarchist has ever thought about the question of who would work in the sewers! I guess that I just missed that.

From another short source (that I also don’t really agree with a lot of, but)

Tony Gibson, Who will do the Dirty Work: “Everyone who speaks on the subject of anarchism meets the ever-recurring question: ‘But in a social condition of anarchy, who will clean out the sewers?'”

I can’ t speak for anyone else, but I haven’t defined away the existence of right anarchism. If I had, then there would be no point in calling myself a left anarchist: I’d just say I’m an anarchist. Ken McLeod again has written some books about left-anarchist and right-anarchist societies coexisting. There are plenty of other anarchists who think of themselves as post-left anarchists who hold to attitudes that people generally associate with the left but who reject the accumulated traditions and history of the left.

Or really, you may have noticed that no two anarchists seem to believe in exactly the same things.

“But has any anarchist ever successfully ANSWERED the question of who will work in the sewers?”

Had anyone even ANSWERED the question of why people work in the sewers now? If it’s so ultimately horrible, then how are people coerced into doing it?

Here, from the first Google hit on the pay of sewer workers in London: as of 2012 sewer flushers got 45,000 pounds / year. “Fruit machine engineers” earn the same. Oil rig workers got 61,000 , private security contractors got 90, 0000. I’m very familiar with the liberal maxim that job pay reflects danger, unpleasantness, and skill / education / talent required, but of course the whole thing rests on the coercion of people having to work or else. Do people really have to work or else?

Brett @695,

“I’d take a close look at Plume, if you think leftist anarchists don’t want authority, His views reek of coercion.”

Only if by “coercion” you mean full on democracy which ends the coercion, extreme violence and innate predatory nature of capitalism, your beloved.

It’s funny how people who love the most destructive, autocratic, hierarchical and imperialistic economic system in world history think those who oppose it are guilty of “coercion.” It’s like the serial arsonist who screams “that’s violent suppression of my rights!!” when the community takes away his matches.

Rich Pulchalsky #702: “Anarchists have successfully answered all questions”

Okay, so what is the answer to the question: Who will work in the sewers, in the non-state of anarchy?

Lee @700,

Yes. We’ve answered this many times. You just refused to accept those answers.

Rotation via lottery, for starters. A peace corp-like span of time, where you give back to your community, your region, your society, rotate through needed jobs and then go home. Imagine that. Citizens giving back! What a concept!! It’s sooo radical!!

The left-anarchists at the Paris Commune of 1871 solved this problem, building on the theories forged over the course of several previous decades. Read Kristin Ross’s Communal Luxury, or just jump to the main focus of her very short book, Elisee Reclus, William Morris and Petyr Kropotkin. The latter’s Mutual Aid is a good place to start.

Cradle to grave education, free to all, emphasizing artisanship, arts and crafts, trades, engineering, cross-training, the Big Picture, etc. Along with all the cultural arts and humanities one could want. As in, all phases of community production and enjoyment. No more focus on micro-specialization. People will learn how to do everything — or as close to that as is humanly possible. Everyone will have access to extremely well-rounded education. No one left out. No one left behind. Money is no longer an obstacle to this, so we can, for the first time in history, invest in truly universal education. From cradle to grave, everyone will be taught how to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, self-provision, and be able to give back to the community as well.

Rich Puchalsky: “…better than trying to shut everyone else down if they don’t meet certain essentialist criteria.”

Asking who will work in the sewers in an anarchist non-state is “shutting everybody down” because it isn’t fair to ask about essential categories of jobs (e.g., dirty, dangerous)?

“Asking who will work in the sewers in an anarchist non-state is “shutting everybody down” because it isn’t fair to ask about essential categories of jobs (e.g., dirty, dangerous)?”

Only if you can’t follow a conversation, together with such niceties as who is being addressed in a comment that follows a quote by someone.

Who will work in the sewers, in the non-state of anarchy?

Who will work in the sewers, if not those who have to do so “for money” in “conditions of job scarcity”? Who will pick up cotton, if not slaves? Who will take care of households and children, if not women with the legal rights of children? Who will work 15 hours a day in a mine that blows up every month, if not workers escorted there by armed militias or the regular army? Who will feed us, if not serfs?

Isn’t it obvious that abolishing an unjust system of coercion will always seem to bring new problems which heretofore had obvious solutions, and that this is true whether the abolition comes forth gradually or abruptly, partially or completely? And isn’t it intuitively at least as plausible as the converse that a society in which more people flourish is more apt to solve its practical problems than one in which some people are coerced? Is it really so hard to imagine that 90% of what makes working in the sewers the most nightmarish social fate is the product of social mechanisms (low pay, deliberate dismissal of health issues, reliance on unprotected immigrant work force, deliberate dismissal of social policies leading to the reduction of waste…) the elimination or reduction of which would make this work no worse than dozens of others people willingly embrace all the time?

And Geo, why am I never invited whenever you conjure an imaginary CT’s left think-tank, dammit?