That’s another draft post gone

Ha! I’ve been trying for monthsto write something about what it feels like to be an immigrant in Brexit Britain, but it keeps on getting worse (Labour threw us under the bus as “cheap labour” to be gotten rid of just a few weeks ago). At this point I’d rather emigrate again than come up with something thoughtful/heartfelt/blah blah blah to say about it all.

Jeez, can we not with the “alt-center” / “alt-left” stuff? Spencer and his Nazi followers popularized the alt-right label, so it’s fair to use the label they’ve chosen for themselves. Conversely, I’m unaware of any significant use of “alt-left” or “alt-center” as a term of self-identification. I mean, fuck Ryan Lilla and his awful arguments, but if you’re a liberal using “alt-left” to attack leftists or a leftist using “alt-center” to attack liberals, you’re just contributing to the circular firing squad and adding nothing of value to the conversation.

Maria, “At this point I’d rather emigrate again than come up with something thoughtful/heartfelt/blah blah blah to say about it all.”
that’s kinda the way I’m feeling about being an immigrant in the USA.. I have friends at church who voted for Trump, which is to say, voted to have me deported. It doesn’t seem to bother them either. My wife, talking to an old lady Trump enthusiast, “Em, I’m an immigrant, I won’t support Trump” response “but I like you !”
Unfortunately there isn’t anywhere to go..

Just read Lilla, and the first thing that comes to mind is what he thinks of Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, knowing that the Dixiecrats would flee in droves to the Republicans.

Was that a mistake? Should Johnson have adopted the position of the liberals addressed by MLK Jr. in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”?

Jeebus.

“Alt” now has precise meaning in political conversation and eliminates any space for “center” because at this moment in history there is no middle there is only “alt” and anti-fascist.

alt-whatnot makes me think of alt.sex.bondage, back in the day when the net was flat.

PatinIowa 08.16.17 at 4:55 pm @ 10 —
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not Identity politics in the contemporary sense.

Yeah, Maria, it’s of course all Johnny Foreigner’s fault:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-wholesale-eu-immigration-has-destroyed-conditions-british

F@ck you, JC! Also, ypu’re an idiot or lazy or both:

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/jeremy-corbyn-is-wrong-you-dont-have-to-be-a-member-of-the-eu-to-be-part-of-the-single-market

I’m going back to playing Animal Crossing on my 3DS.

Did Trump just coin the phrase alt-left? Seems appropriate: something that doesn’t actually exist, but fits perfectly into his narrative.

Please someone tell me his ludicrous (and completely predicable from before the election) behaviour is damaging him in the polls. Please.

Belle Waring,

The Stone Sky is available today. It is one click away.

Re Comment 15.. There’s a hilarious post on Fivethirtyeight where various pundits try to make sense of Trump in terms of conventional electoral strategy. Eventually it just ends up as ‘he’s crazy’. It (almost) makes me feel sorry for all the journos who have spent years figuring out how triangulation might work only to be faced by someone who seems to make no political calculations – there really aren’t that many neo-Nszi voters- but seems highly successful (in the narrow sense of winning an election).

@17

Here’s an article that might interest you.

‘The health crisis afflicting working-class Americans recalls similar symptoms in Russia following the collapse of communism…On Thursday March 23, Case and Deaton released an update to their 2015 study[i] that showed a significant increase in mortality among middle aged white men and women — an increase concentrated amongst lower income, working class Americans.[ii] Case and Deaton trace the proximate causes of death driving this increase to suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Measures of self-assessed health status they examined in surveys over 2011-2013 compared to 1997-1999 also show increased reports of pain and psychological distress.

While some questions have been raised about the differential impacts of gender[iii] and urbanization in these statistics,[iv] the overall numbers remain dramatic. Case and Deaton estimate that the upturn in mortality rates in the US is starkly divergent from other developed countries, and accounts for 96,000 deaths that could have been avoided between 1996 and 2013. Their latest work delves deeper into the underlying causes of this decline. “Deaths of Despair” — by suicide, drug overdose or alcohol abuse — cannot be completely explained simply by stagnant or declining incomes. Income profiles for middle aged blacks and Hispanics look similar, without a corresponding rise in mortality. Rather, the authors posit, it can be traced to a “cumulative disadvantage over life”, where declining labor market opportunities have led to declining outcomes not just in the labor market but also in health, marriage, and child rearing. In other words, the stress accompanying the shock of downward mobility is likely driving this health crisis….

A study by Shannon Monnat at Penn State found that Trump did particularly well in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates. She finds that “Even when using statistical models that include 14 demographic, economic, social, and health care factors, the drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rate remains a significant and positive predictor of Trump overperformance nationally.”’

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/mortality-crisis-redux-the-economics-of-despair#.WNkkV5zv4ww.twitter

I am just thinking tactically. Against the racism? Take to the streets, get the statues into a museum. Against the possible criminality? Not much to do until we see what Mueller finds. On the economic issues? The course ahead is complicated.

The economic issues are more complicated politically, because the US is in a long post-crisis expansion that looks a tiny bit better every day. Trump’s political strategy (for surely he had one) is to amorally get power and then to get jobs for the workforce, or else to lie about the results if necessary. (For one of many examples, Trump is touting the million new jobs in the last 6 months even though this is part of the economic expansion, and in fact it’s a slowdown from the number of jobs created in the last 6 months under Obama. Also a large portion of the new jobs are in healthcare due to the expansion of coverage under Obamacare; another large portion of the jobs are very low wage, etc.) But almost all politicians make these claims, and this sort of seeming success is a hard thing to fight politically.

Bannon wants the Democrats to use up their time in fighting racism while Trump starts a trade war with China, which will re-energize the blue-collars in Trump’s favor, even though 1) new domestic factories will be mostly automated; 2) the standard-of-living may decline long-term, relative to other countries; and 3) much sooner than that, financial capital will start to flee the US for sunnier shores that are getting a higher ROI from the China Belt and Road initiative. That means US interest rates will skyrocket. And that, in turn, will work into the GOP’s plans to shrink Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare — the Welfare State — as they are falsely claimed to become more costly.

Thus the Democrats are still in their pre-existing pickle, until they make a full-throated pitch for a Single Payer State that guarantees everybody’s access to all lifeline goods and services, regardless of job status. More immediately, the infrastructure debate will be upon us, and the choices to pay for that are 1) more public debt, 2) raising taxes on the richest, or 3) privatizing new roads and bridges (Trump’s choice). Here the Democrats could regain the support of the Obama-to-Trump voters by arguing simply and loudly against choices 1 and 3.

Hidari, have you seen Andrew Gelman’s blog posts on the case and deaton study? It appears that their findings can be explained by demographics, and when properly standardized there is no increase in mortality rates in non white hispanics, and a slight increase in blacks. I don’t remember the details now but I suggest you check gelman ‘s blog. Also describing deaths due to drug and alcohol use as deaths of despair is a terrible misunderstanding of how drug addiction works. There’s much more to the epidemic than tht and it needs a more nuanced discussion than the economists are giving it.

My suspicion is that the increased rates of opiate addiction reflect real underlying health care needs that were not being handled by americas health care system, and that in the absence of care for the underlying cause poorer Americans and ex labourers used opioids to manage pain, but because they didn’t have proper medical care they were at risk of dying. I suspect Obamacare helped to fix that but the real reason for the easy access to drugs was changed to prescription pricesade in the bush era, and maybe also bush era deregulation of drug markets (the opioid epidemic has been trending up since 2010). When you view the epidemic as a 10 year epidemic the idea that it is connected with trump voting becomes a little unsustainable. Why didn’t these people vote trump in 2012? I think it just reflects aging in rural areas that is not properly handled in the models because economists don’t understand epidemiology. I will further go out on a limb and guess that the new study linked above used linear regression on logged crude rates, which means a) it can’t properly handle aging and b) all counties with zero deaths were excluded. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet though but I would advise against trusting anything economists do on health.

Lee Arnold @30: violent agreement. The core issues remain in our hands: what must we on the left do (not what will Trump do). Are we finally ready to speak truth: single payer, high taxes on great wealth, jobs via public expenditure for infrastructure, end the wars.

Here’s opinion poll data about Trump’s comments. 67% of Republicans approve of Trump’s response.

http://flavorwire.com/609389/one-third-of-americans-support-trumps-reaction-to-charlottesville-and-seriously-fuck-them

and this:
“I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”The problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy.

Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit. And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,” Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Most important perhaps, violence is just not as effective as nonviolence. In their 2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Dr. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examined how struggles are won. They found that in over 320 conflicts between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving change. And nonviolent struggles were resolved much sooner than violent ones.”

There’s quite a good article in, all of places, the BBC, about Trump/Bannon’s thinking about this.

‘Donald Trump, in a series of tweets, bashed his Republican opponents and the media and defended Confederate Civil War monuments – the cause for which white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched last weekend.
The president appears to be forcing exactly the kind of fight with progressive groups that Mr Bannon, in his interview, said he welcomed.
“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Mr Bannon said. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”…

A recent Marist poll shows that a majority of Americans support (62%) allowing “statues honouring the leaders of the Confederacy” to “remain as historical symbols”….

While Americans overwhelming reject racism and white supremacists, a debate over weather-worn statues cuts much more in Mr Trump’s favour….

(in other words) ‘ if th(e) debate …means Democrats abandon bread-and-butter economic issues, Mr Bannon’s side will welcome the exchange…

Mr Trump railed against change – a return to when America was “great”. And the statue debate, as he’s constructing it, snugly fits that theme.’.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40965827

Accompanying measures against wage and social dumping (de fr it en) [Sorry bad link]

Katsue @ 43: As far as I’m concerned, the only appropriate referent for “alt-left” are the (actually) “alt-right” supporters e.g. trolls pretending to be leftists:
● Meet the GOPers Trolling Hillary From the Left
● Paid Commenters Hired By Fox News To Spread Right Wing Talking Points Across The Net
● BUSTED: Trump-loving comment trolls pose as Sanders and Clinton supporters to divide Democrats
● Russian internet trolls were being hired to pose as pro-Trump Americans – Business Insider
● The Russian troll army that helped swing the election for Trump
● Donald Trump Supporters Boost Bernie Sanders in West Virginia (“In fact, 39 percent of Sanders voters said they would vote for Trump over Sanders in the fall.”)
….

Lee A. Arnold @30, John R. Garrett @34

But something fundamentally more…

Single payer, public infrastructure, and some semblance of public discipling of the oligarchy is a necessary first step, but to what?

Freedom has merely become mass distraction and entertainment. I say the new word for the 21st is “community” as in…the individual freedoms that we aspire to wither on the vine unless they can prosper in the soil of loved ones, familiars, and enemies. Everywhere in the U.S., citizens have struggled to create and maintain community and connection against the desiccating heat of market relations. We now pledge to support 3 principles to strengthen and broaden our vision of freedom:

1. A cradle to grave safety net for all citizens regardless of market outcome.

2. Community development: yes to Walkable mixed-income urbanism and shared common spaces. yes to diverse markets, no to large private oligopolies in all but priveleged industries (infrastructure, high tech).

3. Broad support for experimention with and research about diverse communities in the U.S.

Ahhhh space to dream….thx CT

@45
”A de facto pro-war rag like the Guardian doesn’t of course discuss it,”

Which reminded me how much I hate any linguistic maneuvers constructing kind of a pro-Bannon narrative by telling stories of ‘cheers erupting on the floor of the New York stock exchange.’ -(because GOD-thankfully the idiot is gone)- and silly Breitbart Internet Lingo about ‘real puppet masters’…. especially if by chance -(or accident?) such ‘a puppet master’ came out on the side of the ‘good guys’ – by condemning Neo Nazi and thusly horrible – absolutely HORRIBLE Alt-Righters like Bannon.

‘Stephen Bannon may have been a political adviser to President Donald Trump, but his firing Friday could have an impact on U.S. foreign policy from Europe to the Middle East and Asia.

Bannon’s exit clears an obstacle for backers of an active U.S. foreign policy in line with recent presidencies — and is a resounding win for Bannon’s internal rival, national security adviser H.R. McMaster….

In the immediate term, foreign policy insiders agreed, Bannon’s departure also could increase the chances of a U.S. troop increase in Afghanistan—a plan championed by McMaster but strongly opposed by Bannon, who managed to draw out debate on the issue with direct appeals to Trump.

More generally, it will remove an internal brake on U.S. military action abroad. Bannon has argued against greater U.S. intervention in Iraq and Syria and was among the few White House officials to oppose President Donald Trump’s early-April missile strike in Syria….

“Bannon’s departure probably means a return to normalcy, where the State and Defense Departments will have greater influence on foreign policy,” Abrams said.’

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/18/foreign-policy-hawks-rise-after-bannon-departure-241812

@50
but the most tragic figures under US – are probably Americans who vote for horrible and disgusting F…faces because they think they are this kind of (peaceful) ‘non interventionists – and (still) desperately trying to keep up the illusion – in order NOT having to join the chorus in Dogpatch in honor of all the Jubilation T. Cornpones…

nastywoman@38:

“Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit.”

Hey you know what else fuels their narrative of victimhood? Literally everything! Video games have women who aren’t just titninjas and fap objects? Suppressing male sexuality! Anime removes gratuitous panty shots from underage girls? Censorship! Affirmative action and immigration? White genocide! Interracial marriages? Race traitors! Welfare? Helping the lesser races commit white genocide! Seriously, the entire Nazi identity is one of whinging victimhood. The suggestion that violence against Nazis is a significant part of that narrative, when literally any social and cultural action that doesn’t serve white men’s needs is interpreted as victimizing them, is silly.

“And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,” ”

No. What we are trying to deal with is Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. Being tolerant of the intolerant is an existential threat to the tolerant. Attempting to debate those who are not interested in debate, or to attempt to reach a consensus with those whose motive is extermination is a dead end.

“They found that in over 320 conflicts between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving change.”

Not all conflicts are the same. Most conflicts are about power sharing or political representation, where non-violent resistance really does work. It would be interesting to see how many instances of genocide and extermination were stopped by non-violent resistance. My guess is very few.

Fianlly, here is a touching story of a clergy person in C’ville changing their mind about Antifa: https://twitter.com/make_ready/status/897899970501541888/photo/1

@53 Yes I am not in the slightest bit implying that Bannon is a nice or good guy.

There’s a good interview with Max Blumenthal here:

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19809:Max-Blumenthal-and-Paul-Jay-on-firing-of-Steve-Bannon

about the possible implications of Bannon’s sacking (mainly bad).

I don’t even know if people are still following this thread, but there’s a good piece at Jacobin about where we are now, vis a vis the CEO revolt.

‘Trump also took office lacking a key ingredient of a powerful presidency: he didn’t have the backing of the big corporations and banks that hold decisive economic and political power in the US.

After his inauguration, he set out to build that base. He named several representatives of big capital to high cabinet positions (although only two of them came from major institutions of big business: ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn). In a bid to reach further into the ranks of big capital, he set up two business advisory councils: the Strategy and Policy Forum, whose remit was economic policy as a whole, and the American Manufacturing Council, which advised on policies specifically affecting manufacturing.

These two bodies represented a key means for Trump to anchor his presidency in the capitalist class. The Strategy and Policy Forum boasted officials from big finance (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan) and from major nonfinancial corporations (Boeing, GE, General Motors, IBM, PepsiCo, Walmart). The twenty-eight-member Manufacturing Council contained a cross-section of American manufacturing including consumer products, capital goods, aircraft producers, military contractors, high tech, and pharmaceuticals, as well as two token trade union representatives and someone from the joint business-labor Alliance for American Manufacturing. The two councils held highly publicized meetings with Trump when they were founded (although they hadn’t met since).

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Trump had his work cut out for him in trying to build bridges to big business. Since the presidential campaign, the heads of giant corporations and banks hung back from their usual enthusiastic support for GOP candidates, wary of Trump’s agenda Trump. And with good reason. For one, Trump’s call for high tariffs and other protectionist measures threatens almost all of big business, from retailers dependent on imported consumer goods to manufacturing companies whose inputs come from abroad. Export-heavy sectors would face retaliatory tariffs if the US erects trade barriers. And most of big business is tied into the globalized economy.

Second, Trump’s anti-immigrant measures rankle broad sections of American big business. Agribusiness and hospitality sectors need low-wage immigrant labor, while high-tech sectors rely on highly skilled workers from abroad. Third, Trump’s penchant for going after individual companies — in an attempt to dictate their investment decisions — runs counter to big capital’s desire for maximum freedom to choose where to invest….

Trump’s behavior on foreign policy is also a probable source of concern. Big capital needs the US to maintain its dominant presence on the world stage, and Trump’s actions threaten to undermine that hegemony by repelling long-time US allies…

His post-election shift on domestic economic policy, toward neoliberal policies of deregulation and calls for business tax cuts, aimed at buying that acquiescence, as well as mollifying the hardcore neoliberals in Congress….

Trump rendered the service of winning the White House for the Republicans. But now he’s an albatross around their necks. A President Pence — a normal extreme neoliberal politician — must be a far more appealing prospect to congressional Republicans. It’s likely that the main thing holding them back is their fear of Trump’s still-strong support among GOP voters. Yet if a significant part of big business moves beyond disassociation from Trump to a quiet endorsement of his removal, we might see a President Pence before 2020 rolls around.’

Much of the corporate media is of course covertly angling for a Pence Presidency (under the guise of of ‘impeaching’ Trump or demonstrating he is ‘unfit for office’ or whatever), and of course the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia will go along with that. What is currently saving Trump, I would imagine, is the current news on the job front and the currently booming stock market. Republicans, I would imagine, will withhold their fire until closer to the next elections, to see whether Trump might cost congress men (sic) their cushy mostly gerrymandered ‘jobs’.

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/trump-charlottesville-business-advisory-councils-republican-party

Hidari:

there’s a good piece at Jacobin

No there isn’t. There never is, and that article is a case in point.

Krugman: His [Trump’s] agenda, such as it is, amounts to reverse Robin Hood with extra racism — the conventional Republican strategy of taking from struggling families to give to the rich, while distracting lower-income whites by attacking Those People, with the only difference being just how blatantly he plays the race card.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/opinion/trump-american-workers-jobs-policy.html

Anybody who failed to notice this until now can’t be taken seriously.
But of course, Krugman is a neoliberal.

Given that the most recent of those was over a year ago now, Hidari, and most were 2-4 years ago, I’m not sure how strong a rebuttal that is. My impression is that the real rot at that place has come out more and more recently.

Bullshit. The true representatives of neoliberalism (neoliberalism the thing, not neoliberalism the slur deployed by angry berniebros) are the GOP and they are sticking by trump. Business won’t abandon trump until he fails to deliver the tax cut they want, or if he crashes the economy by refusing to raise he debt ceiling over the wall. Watch thenpathetic GOP reps refuse to say they don’t support him after they decried his racism. They’re cheap racist scum who will sell us all down the river for a tax cut. This advisory council stuff is easy PR. We will know business has abandoned trump when their cock sockets in the GOP abandon him and not before.

Which they won’t, because of a phenomenon the jacobin piece gets completely wrong in the last paragraph. Trump remains more popular than the GOP because of his racism and at this point they all know their primary – and in many cases general election – hopes depend on trumps fascist base mobilizing for them. If that changes watch them throw him under the bus faster than you can exclaim “what a pack of slimy fuckknuckles “. Until then they’re locked in, and the only people opposing him are people who don’t depend on him for votes (Murkowski) or who are too old and vengeful to give a fuck (McCain). When Jacobin can’t even get that right they don’t have much to say.

Oh, and how’s that dove trump working out for you berniebros? After years of saying the Afghan war was a waste of blood and treasure, as soon as he gets hold of the levers of power he expands it. What a real non interventionist you found to carry your economic nationalist hopes in the White House!

TM @ 67: “Not only is the administration full of plutocrats like them….”

Trump: ‘I just don’t want a poor person’ running the economy —

So, somebody said, ‘Why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy?’ … I said, ‘because that’s the kind of thinking we want.’ I mean, you know, really. Because they’re representing the country. They don’t want the money. They’re representing the country and they had to give up a lot to take these jobs. They gave up a lot. And you get the president — this is the president of Goldman Sachs. Smart. Having him represent us. He went from massive paydays to peanuts, to little tiny — I’m waiting for them to accuse him of wanting that little amount of money. They wanted that. But these are people that are great, brilliant business minds. And that’s what we need, that’s what we have so the world doesn’t take. … We can’t have the world taking advantage of us anymore. And I love all people, rich or poor. But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? If you insist, I’ll do it. But I like it better this way, right?

PPS: As I pointed out on the other thread, Bannon’s declared goal is the destruction of the regulatory state. It’s amazing how underapprecited this fact is because that is precisely the area where the Trump administration has been most successful.

John Quiggin

I’m not going to defend everything in Jacobin. But I don’t see why everyone is so upset about the article in question.

The conclusion is a huge unjustified leap, a work of fantasy (although I wouldn’t say that upsets me).

Hidari
That’s interesting as an example of somebody sneering at people for sneering at people.

But seriously, the biggest supporters of fascism are the small business owners who run small businesses because they haven’t been able to make their businesses grow. This is a precarious posution but it’s not actually all that low-status… in general, I guess, precariosity requires that you’ve got enough height to fall.

Btw: a generous social welfare system means being a talentless arsehole with no social skills is no huge impairnent to your ability to survive as a valued member of society -> less economic anxiety. But (people of the type I’ve described) rather notoriously have difficulty with allowing for counterveiling second-order effects, so the path “if everyone has welfare available to them society will change to make my life outcomes more accepted” isn’t really a conclusion people on the hard right will find easy to come to.