R U Sure Tho?

The Republican party is a broad church with plenty of room for people whose bigotry is primarily against gays, women, Jews, urban liberals and anybody else who isn’t, in their eyes, all-American. But Trump is a racist first and foremost, and he obviously represents the biggest single bloc in the Repub base.

Hey now, it could be xenophobia instead.

Chet Murthy

My reading of the piece is: he’s trying to appeal to a certain regretful-Trumpist readership …

Then he’s doing a rotten job of it. I doubt it’s effective to try to appeal to them by saying ‘I understand that you didn’t vote for Trump because you’re racists, I understand that you voted for him because you’re fools’, and I also doubt it’s effective to appeal to them by saying ‘I understand that you didn’t vote for Trump because you’re racists, I understand that you voted for him because you’re bloody-minded obstructionists’. Those are the alternative explanations he’s offering, aren’t they? I couldn’t find any others in the article.

… and if the Dems are gonna win it back in 2018/20, -some- Trumpists have to be convinced to vote Dem

That’s mathematically inaccurate.

I don’t see much daylight between Drum and Marcotte here.

As a point in Drum’s favor, Clinton Derangment Syndrome was a thing before Obama. Furthermore, as the OP suggests it might concede, tax-cutting class warriors are first and foremost just that, and not necessarily more racist than their White Democratic co-ethnics.

I assume Slavery and Western expansion provided a rich opportunity for 18th C US Elites to regard their own priveledged status as a birthright much as their European equivalents would have. (This belief is even lazier than the alternate strategy of a belief in “meritocracy” and was correspondingly more attractive before the birth of Modernity). History may have relegated this conceit to the ghettoes of White American apologetics, but the vestiges of a belief in privilege-by-birth can still be detected today among a large class of modern right wingers as a belief that liberals (Clinton, Obama) aren’t True Americans.

So as a point in Marcottes’ favor, Clinton Derangement Syndrome was itself an expression of a historically racist ideology of Elite privelege.

And yet racism itself was just politics before it took on a life of its own. The more fundamental forces at work are (illusory) self-interest and (illusory) self-regard among those with the power to project these as Culture. Buddhists say you can drive yourself crazy trying to comprehend Karma. That’s kind of how I’d guess most of us feel about trying to disentangle race and class in American politics.

As for Trump, I assume he’s no more subconsciously racist than Euro-American culture generally. At the level of conscious thought, his racism is opportunistic and not a genuinely-held ideology (the thing that took on a life of its own). Granted, as mental atrophy does its work, Trump may yet be devolving from a meritocratic ideology of self-justification to a more racial/birthright-inspired one. Didn’t that happen to Nixon, after all?

Bob Somerby made the point at the beginning of Obama’s administration that Republicans’ opposition to Democrats was so absolute that it hardly mattered that this president was black. Their reaction to Clinton was just as extreme.

This is not to say they aren’t racist. Of course they are, and our last president’s skin color certainly motivated them to buy even more guns. However, their fear and hatred is comprehensive.

They don’t want to deny healthcare only to indigent blacks and immigrants, they want to deny it to anyone too poor to pay for it. They want the harshest possible penalties for anyone suspected of a crime.

Abortion is an issue that especially excites the base, and it’s not an especially racist issue on its face, though that it is, obscurely, its motivation. It’s facially sexist, which may account for its continuing appeal (shame the fallen women!), but at its late 70’s inception the evangelical opposition to abortion was a cynical political ploy, making common cause with conservative Catholics.

Climate change is a sanity test that conservatives fail which involves neither race nor sex. One might suspect that trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel reserves might weight the balances on this judgment, but the absence of a libertarian solution is a problem as well.

In short, it’s difficult to tease out the different strands of hatefulness and obtuseness, sloth, anger and greed. These are things which go together well.

They hated Obama somewhat more than they hated Clinton but that was before Fox News. They really, really, really, really hated Bill Clinton. Things were very different then so who knows.

Of COURSE the Birtherism, and the Obama thing, and 90% of their current policies–including many economic policies–get their footing because of racism. They are flat out racist obsessions.

In fact, some of the dedicated racists even admit this about the economic policy. They want a more egalitarian economic system & institutions but claim these are only possible with a racially homogenous society (the kind that has never existed, and especially has never existed in the United States).

The people who ardently support Trump will never vote Democratic. Not everyone who voted him was ardently supporting him. Some people may have voted for him because they were construction workers, and hoped for an infrastructure plan, or had other jobs (especially in manufacturing) that he promised to directly benefit. He also promised to get everyone more comprehensive healthcare at a lower cost. I suspect there are some people who are naive about economics, and don’t get it is not a zero sum game, and are hoping to clear the field by shutting off the supply of immigrants. They sense that if there is a labor shortage, their wages will rise.

All those things require chilling indifference to the welfare of other Americans. You can’t get rid of racism & xenophobia as an explanation for such thinking. It makes one feel better about the cruelty of the things that you (mistakenly) believe are required for your wages to go up. But racism is more in the background in those cases.

You’d have to be a racist to support or vote for Trump. If you aren’t horrified and revolted by many of the things he says, then something is very wrong with how you see your fellow citizens. That’s not the same as doing everything for racism. Racism is required for all this to work, but it doesn’t have to be a prime motivator.

It’s important not to forget what a master con artist Donald Trump is. That was an important part of the explanation for his success, but we’ve kind of forgotten that at this point. Some people still think their ship will come in with this guy.

Hmm, it got through. Note, in a way , I am on Marcotte’s side here, and trying to explain how I see her position, including her quoted statement, which is all I can do. Never have found much to be excited by over at Drum’s, although rarely offended by him either. If you want more Bronner, with glossy glosses, let me know or let me slide. I will leave Chela Sandoval and “oppositional/differential consciousness” aside for the nonce. Probably.

“racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do.” Yes it is.
Also “class is the explanation for everything” and “misogyny is the explanation” and Imperialism etc. Intersectionality is brutally hard work.

bad Jim @ 9: > “… Republicans’ opposition to Democrats was so absolute that it hardly mattered that this president was black.”

D’ye think it might have mattered that many Democrats (i.e. many of those they were trying even then to suppress the votes of, to effectively disenfranchise as of old) were black?

Or, as much to the point, that with LBJ’s two great Acts in 1964 and 1965 and thereafter, Democratic policies had been sufficiently pro-black to help Nixon et al. recruit Southern racists into the GOP (the ‘Southern Strategy’)?

mcmanus @13

“racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do.” Yes it is.
Also “class is the explanation for everything” and “misogyny is the explanation” and Imperialism etc.

The phrase “the explanation,” with an implied emphasis on the definite article “the,” suggests or signals an exclusionary statement, i.e., a statement that racism is the only explanation. If you want to suggest/argue/state that racism, class, misogyny, etc. are all explanations, then it would be better to use the word “an” rather than the word “the” and say that racism is “an explanation” along with the others, not “the” explanation.

Your consumption of the works of every (trendy) theorist who has ever published a book w Verso seems to have dulled your responsiveness to the resonances — perhaps not the best word, but it’ll probably do — of English. But then it’s not altogether surprising that a steady diet of such theorists would or could produce that effect.

Read TNC’s article at the Atlantic: Trump is the first white president. Very much worth a look.

All those things require chilling indifference to the welfare of other Americans. You can’t get rid of racism & xenophobia as an explanation for such thinking.

modlux, they could be sociopaths

@9

“Bob Somerby made the point at the beginning of Obama’s administration that Republicans’ opposition to Democrats was so absolute that it hardly mattered that this president was black. Their reaction to Clinton was just as extreme.”

I’d go further than that. Obama was treated with kid gloves in comparison to Clinton. Clinton was relentlessly investigated, impeached, and had a sitting senator threaten his life. Of course, part of that was the fact that the Clintons are much greater pathological liars than the Obamas, but still, it makes the point.

Specifically regarding DACA, obviously this is a sop to the nativists who helped elect Trump. Regarding the statement in isolation, “racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do,” I don’t see how that’s an arguable point either. The problem with sloppy thinkers like Marcotte is that once they level the racism charge they just don’t know when to stop, and they end up alienating millions of potential allies.

“racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do”

No, racism is not the reason for everything the Republicans do; racism is pretty much their excuse for everything they do, though. There is a difference.

Maybe K-Drum has a point about racism not being the reason for everything Republicans do, but here in this specific case – it’s racism. He is dead wrong that this irrational and immoral position to fuck over immigrants is based in anything other than racism first. I mean the alternative is that a Republican administration is honestly concerned with executive overreach. The party of Dick Cheney.

Treating undocumented immigrants with basic human dignity is cause to worry about executive overreach, but ignoring haneas corpus is not. There’s a very simple reason explanation as to why this is the case and that explanation is racism.

Opps

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-white-republicans-more-racist-than-white-democrats/

I wish there was an edit.

@29 Given that the data set shows very low self-reported racism among Republican voters, I think there must be an awful lot of social acceptability bias going on. I wonder what proportion would have admitted approving of Donald Trump in 2012.

Steve @ 30, you are so right.

Dragon-King Wangchuck :
The party of Dick Cheney

Now that’s speaking of unitarity, Unitary Executive Theory, John Yoo and all that.

To conclude playing around (for now).

So if Breivik Øbama, exchange student from Norway and future Social Democrat politician, replaced Barack Obama senior, how would his son have been treated running for President? No racism, obviously, but it wouldn’t be all puppy cuddles either.

For me, one the surprises of the Obama administration was that our democracy could have legitimacy conflicts, just like a monarchy. Pretty clearly a sign of a deficient understanding of history, though; there were also legitimacy conflicts over FDR and Lincoln.

anymouse @ 29

Thanks. Makes me wonder whether saying “Republicans are racist” effectively focuses our attention (complacently) on partisan zero-sum politics rather than comprehend how broken our communities are and act from that wider view.

The thing about conspiracy theorising is that, if you’re a woman or queer or the wrong ethnicity, and your life is shit, and you say that there’s a vast nation-wide conspiracy keeping you down… you’re right!

But if you’re a socioeconomic dominant group person and you say – mutatis mutandis – the exact same thing, you’re wrong.

Raven, you are of course correct that Republican opposition to Democrats is in no small part related to the latter’s support for and inclusion of blacks, and has been so at least since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

I’m not sure about the Dunning-Kruger diagnosis. The usual formulation is “I’m not a racist, but …” which reveals a guilty self-consciousness. Everyone knows that racism is wrong, and people will go to absurd extremes to avoid looking bad.

People who are not traditional racists, and I’m thinking of conservative Southern Californians, are outraged by phone prompts like “Press 1 for English” (although it’s actually always more like “Para español, oprima nueve”). The discomfort they have with the babble of different languages and the apparition of unusual faces is perhaps distinguishable from the urge to maintain social norms originally rooted in slavery.

Conservatives are unsurprisingly unhappy with change, and they’d rather have things the way they used to be, when women and blacks knew their place and immigrants were back where they came from.

Are there significant differences between the following?

Racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do
Racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do
Racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do
Racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do
Racism is not the explanation for everything Republicans do

@36

>It ain’t about facts, truth, logic, evidence, fairness, or universality. It is about choosing and expressing a subjectivity for solidarity with a specific community at a particular time.

I don’t see what that choice of solidarity can be justified by if not by facts, truth, logic, evidence, fairness, or universality.

>The relevant questions are about whether it works, and how it works.

Works for what? I don’t see how the purpose can be determined without recourse to facts, truth, logic, evidence, fairness, or universality. Nor can you determine *whether* (or *how*) it works without recourse to facts, truth, logic and evidence.

‘I lie, and I proudly admit it’ strikes me as vaguely fascist – reason’s betrayal of reason, intellectuals’ betrayal of intellect, humanity’s betrayal of humanity. Also, it doesn’t even work, or make sense, if you admit it.

No, definitely not a fan of Nietzsche. 18th century indeed.

I don’t want to feel bound by a commitment to engage in a longer discussion, so this will be a single comment.

H@23
Re Clinton:
I remember Richard Reeves on the Tonight Show being asked to give a one sentence appraisal of the 7 Dwarves, as the (D) prospective candidates were called.
“Clinton?”
“Oh! He’s a liar.”

I, too, have a unitary theory of American politics. I think it is about the money. I think it has always been about the money: that is, politics is always at its core a struggle over power, which is to say, a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status, and American politics is, too.

I think U.S. politics would be improved by the emergence of a left party, invested in representing the economic interests of the great mass of people, including what used to be called “the working classes” and “the middle classes”, over and against the interests of giant business corporations and the extremely wealthy. In the absence of such a party, it is natural to expect most people to either not-vote or to vote at random and it is natural to expect the two plutocratic parties to differentiate themselves on psychology, symbolism and nonsense (cf birtherism, Russiagate).

Drum’s argument is: “I think it’s unwise to tiptoe around racism, but I also think it’s unwise to make it the go-to explanation for everything. . . . Race is a powerful political weapon. It should be used judiciously.”

Unfortunately, if you are going to advocate for the other Plutocratic Party, the one disparaging the first for its undoubted racism, you really do not have a lot of alternatives. There’s sexism and sexual assault, of course, but Trump will not have the good grace to be embarrassed (and neither will Marcotte). Trump as Russian Stooge may not have a lot of mileage left, though there’s some hope that Mueller will turn up the equivalent of a blue dress).

Fighting racism and sexism will not do much to break up the banks or raise wages or end perpetual wars — at least fighting racism and sexism in the way Marcotte practices won’t. And, that I suspect, is a big part of its attraction for both Drum and Marcotte. If we are disparaging birtherism, we are not expressing our disappointment that Obama proved to be such a reliable friend of the plutocracy.

Drum makes the point that partisans will be partisans, and take up any cudgel against their opponents, sound any dog-whistle to rally their base — sincere conviction or commitment to principle need not apply, nor does there need to be any particular policy program in the offing. I am not sure where he’s going with that observation, regarding the charge of racism as motivation. The argument seems to turn on itself and then ends with an anodyne endorsement of judicious use. But, are partisans judicious? Ever? Cynical opportunists, yes, but judicious? Do we want to ask about how the sausage is made?

Drum’s argument overlooks a core problem for any mass electoral politics: from the top, how to manipulate the base; from the bottom, how to trust the politicians. In particular, how does any Party seeking an electoral majority, and nominally committed to the interests of the working and merely middle classes in order to get that majority, prove its bona fides to the rubes? In that context, racism and the charge of racism are both partisan arguments to the effect, “trust me”. In a contest between two pro-plutocratic Parties (or Party factions, if you think either Party is internally divided), neither argument is really trustworthy because the candidates are not trustworthy because the candidates do not really care much, certainly not enough to bind themselves to the interests of the lower classes when those interests conflict with those of the predatory and parasitic classes paying for the political Media and the electoral campaigns and the think tanks and all the rest.

The partisan use of racist appeals and charges of racism have a push-me, pull-me quality. Indeed, any partisan rallying cry has this quality, as the task at hand is a contest for hearts and minds, but not everyone’s hearts and minds: 50.1% (or possibly less in fptp) given whatever appeals the other Party is making. In our present-day context, it seems to me that that both racist appeals and charges of racism are meant to divide, rather than persuade. Arguments against racism could be aimed at persuading the erstwhile racist. Racism is a potent charge today because past campaigns against racism as a moral wrong have largely succeeded in dominating the culture. But, for partisans contesting an election, getting out our vote and suppressing their vote competes for resources against any plan to persuade on policy grounds. Judicious choices, indeed.

Politics may be paid for by the 0.1% but it is staffed by the 10% and if the 10% are happy enough with their lot, not much is going to happen, not many thoughts truly subversive of the <1% are going to rattle around in the political discourse. At least, they will not be mouthed by anyone credibly threatening to enact effective policy or build institutions to sustain such policy. And, charges of racism or sexism can be deployed in a rear-guard action against such as do appear from stage left, even as the main guns are deployed against those stage right. The partisan right can pick up the powerful cudgels the bought-and-paid-for "left" leave idle and make comical use of them, as when Trump pummeled Clinton for her ties to Goldman Sachs before appointing Goldman Sachs alumni to his Administration (as Obama had done before him with Goldman and other big bank alumni). All that does is remind us that both Parties are pro-plutocratic; people might as well not-vote or vote at random, as vote in response to anything politicians promise or advocate. For the majority of the electorate, any vote for a viable candidate is arguably a vote against their own economic interest. That's not necessarily true for the 10% and they will rationalize their own random allegiances with whatever brand of righteousness they have at home.

J-D @ 46: “look at people who didn’t vote at the last election”
A lot of them tried to vote (Democratic) and weren’t allowed to, due to the Republican Party’s very successful voter-suppression efforts. You need not so much “look at” nor “appeal to” those people as act in their interest (and your own) by re-enfranchising them. But then the Democratic Party has been trying to do just that — e.g. helping voters get IDs in red states that instituted voter-ID laws; it’s just been a rear-guard battle.

If we are disparaging birtherism, we are not expressing our disappointment that Obama proved to be such a reliable friend of the plutocracy.

…As Dr House was heard to say once, when we assume, we make an ass of you and me….

bruce wilder

I think it has always been about the money: that is, politics is always at its core a struggle over power, which is to say, a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status, and American politics is, too.

That’s clear; but reading on, another question comes into my mind on which your position is not quite as clear. That question is this: Is the struggle between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status (in America)? When you write that both parties are pro-plutocratic, it seems as if you take the view that they both have the same position on the distribution of income, wealth and status in America and therefore that this, the distributional issue, is not what they are struggling over. But I may have misunderstood you there, so I’ll consider both possibilities.

On the one hand, if I’ve understood correctly, your position is that American politics is a struggle over how income, wealth and status are to be distributed (in America); but the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is not a struggle over how income, wealth and status are to be distributed in America. If that’s your view, then it follows necessarily that the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is not where American politics is going on, that American politics is going on somewhere (or perhaps I should write somehow) else and the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is separate from it. If that’s your view, then it’s clear enough, although it needs to be stated with great explicitness for clarity because otherwise confusion will result, because mostly when people talk about ‘American politics’, the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is precisely what they mean. Also, if that’s your view, it leaves open the question of what the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is about, if it’s separate from the struggle of American politics; and the question of where (or how) the struggle of American politics is taking place, if it’s not the struggle between Democrats and Republicans.

On the other hand is the possibility that American politics is a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status in America and that the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is also a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status in America, which fits with the common usage in which ‘American politics’ means (or mostly means) ‘the struggle between Democrats and Republicans’. But if that’s so, then, even if Democrats and Republicans are both generally pro-plutocratic, it necessarily follows that they don’t have the same position on the distributional issue, that they must have different positions, even if those different positions can both be covered by the broad description ‘pro-plutocratic’; which leaves open the question of what their differences are, on the distributional issue.

icastico

47: yes.

A fair answer.

A follow-up question: which is closest to Kevin Drum’s intended meaning?

Alternative follow-up question: which is closest to the truth, and which furthest from it?

J-D: that the struggle between Democrats and Republicans is also a struggle over the distribution of income, wealth and status in America

Well, Wilder tends to be more institutional than I (tho he does mention the top 10%), and I am a little more sociological, but I sometimes think we have, or have recreated, something of a patronage system akin to the other Gilded Age. For example, HRC gets a 1.5 billion dollars in campaign dollars in campaign money that does not all go to Penn or Mook’s bank account, some goes to local tv stations, some goes to an organizer of GOTV operations in Raleigh, and somebody gets $5-10k to draw the fonts for posters in Cleveland. Some goes to Wasserman-Schulz IT guy. I would be interested in a solid breakdown on the Democratic superdelegates, who they are and what they do, because they are likely small-scale power brokers in their localities, and this is one of the factors in the current competition between Clinton/Obama and Sanders supporters. Older vs younger poster designers. There is a lot of overlap between direct political money and various NGO distributions, I remember Deray McKesson showing up in Ferguson and after getting some NGO job*. When they said Sanders didn’t reach out to black people, what they are saying in part is that Sanders didn’t contact and reassure the right black people, older power brokers.

Of course, Republicans and Kochs have their own distributional networks.

Money means power, and power trickles down into jobs, resources, and loyalty.

*Wiki:”Mckesson was an organizer in Baltimore City as a teenager, notably as the Chairman of Youth As Resources, Baltimore’s youth-led grant-making organization. After graduation Mckesson began his education career by working for Teach for America for two years in a New York City elementary school.[8] Mckesson later worked as special assistant in the office of human capital with the Baltimore City Public Schools, for the Harlem’s Children’s Zone, and as a human resources official at Minneapolis Public Schools.[9][10] In June, 2016, he was appointed Baltimore City Schools’ interim chief human capital officer, i.e., chief personnel officer, by district CEO Sonja Santelises”

Not to single out McKesson or to criticize, but I have just followed him a little. 32, he supported Sanders in the primary. And of course, the jobs and loyalty are connected to idealism and good works.

Umm, and if I get enraged when Marcotte or Lemieux talk about “Bernie-bros” or Sanders hanging on too long in the primaries, keep 63 in mind. I can’t say why Mckesson supported Sanders in the primaries, but I suspect he had reasons beyond personal interests and ambitions.

64: Well, you know, Mckesson is a loyal Party member, working with kids in Baltimore and Harlem, so he wouldn’t even think about Obama “having to make a living” (LGM) at a half a million a speech, and I suppose he could hit the kids for pennies in order to pay Clinton for the $3000 good seats on her book tour.

I guess a 50 million dollar book deal doesn’t go as far as it used. Let me check my SS account, wouldn’t want Obama to starve.

But my larger point was a supplement to Wilder, that are probably thousands of Democrats, gender and ethnicity unspecified, that make 5, 6 or 7 figures from the Clinton/Obama corruption machine. It is not only about the plutocrats.

And there should be absolutely no doubt that we have Senators scrambling over each other, like rats to a lifeboat, to jump onto the Sanders single-payer bandwagon, solely and entirely because Sanders ran hard and Clinton lost the general. Harris is looking better, but has a ways to go before I trust her.

The Sanders kids are losing the intra-party battles, so it may take a couple more humiliations and tragedies to turn the Democratic Party into something better than a grifter and graft machine.

Drum and Marcotte are doing what Democrats do best – wasting time while Trump runs rings around both the establishment of both parties. I can’t frankly think of a more pointless discussion than – how racist are Republicans? What happens when they arrive at an answer? What changes? Zip.

A better questions is what are Dems actually doing to demonstrate they’re going to improve conditions for the majority of Americans? Because the answer over the last 8 years at the local, state, and national level is clearly nowhere near enough. They’re losing, and continuing to lose, and because they’re losing at the local and state level, there is no bumper crop of bright young politicians capable of seizing power from a corrupt geritocracy who might, maybe, someday toss Amanda a crumb, or two. I recall her gushing over her photo-op with Bill Clinton – utterly revolting.

Dems better do something other than huddle in their enclave cocoons talking to themselves about how evil and racist Republicans are because Trump is carving his way into the middle even as he’s being denounced as a racist by pundits most Americans ignore. And if he can keep America out of any new wars, cut a few compromise deals with Dems, and keep the stock market up, he’ll help Republicans do well in 2018 and cackle all the way to 2020 watching Kevin and Amanda. The gullible believe that cause Bannon is out of the WH, Trump now suddenly forgot how to get the media to chase bright shiny objects.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/september_2017/most_voters_welcome_trump_s_outreach_to_congressional_democrats

alfredlordbleep @ 68
J-D @ 59

The Republicans and Democrats can both be pro-plutocracy Parties, in different ways and with different political strategies, ideologies and policy programs.

My point in labeling both Parties, pro-plutocracy — besides descriptive accuracy — was to highlight that a great majority of the actual and potential electorate finds the resulting unresponsiveness of the political system, frustrating and de-moralizing.

When one reads a narrative of the naked greed, corruption and viciousness of Republicans like that presented in the Eric Levitz September 12, 2017 N Y magazine article quoted above, one might well think the Democrats would gleefully take up the good fight in opposition and win elections to general acclaim. But, we would not have arrived at such a pass as this, if the Democrats were capable of effective opposition on clear, untarnished principles as champions of the general good. (hah!)

Less and less do I understand this fixation on there being some difference between the Parties, which small difference is suppose to be enough to redeem one Party or Candidate over the other and that’s all we need to know. Of course, there are differences between the Parties. That’s not what matters. What matters is the dynamic set in motion by the restricted range of those differences.

Sometimes like others I have used the label “neoliberal” for this tick-tock pattern of politics, where Reagan is followed by Clinton, Thatcher by Blair. I often point out that neoliberalism’s great strength is that it isn’t one fixed thing, but an adaptive dialectic between a right neoliberalism and a left neoliberalism sharing many of the same assumptions and not incidentally paid for by the same corporate Media and similar sets of donors to academia and think tanks and the like. The critical genesis of that dialectic was the decision of the nominal left to surrender in the perpetual economic war between the classes, to abandon the role of champion of the working classes, in the 1970s or 1980s. Looking back, there’s an inevitability to that political development, driven by the evolution of the economy; it is very stark in Britain as coal and steel fade away and is tied to the rise of global finance thruout the developed world. (The self-destruction of the Democratic Party as a party of the people, did not happen all at once, but it has happened (and not incidentally, electoral support for the traditional centrist social democratic parties have collapsed in many countries at nearly the same time).

So, now we are here, having travelled this path, and the much abused interests of what used to be the working and merely middle classes are struggling to find advocates and political means, and those interests, with somewhat inchoate understanding, are up against an elite political establishment of corporate Media and Political Parties dependent on their well-established donor classes (and we know who those people are), journalists and political operatives pursuing their careers on well-trodden paths. Those are the chattering classes and they are going to tell us stories.

For a popular Party or movement, driven by the interests of its mass membership, the challenge is to control its own leadership. For a plutocratic Party, the problem is to manipulate its electoral base and prevent the base from getting any ideas. Plutocratic Parties, without effective opposition, can also face the problem that their greed undermines the ability of the society and economy as a whole to function; left to their own devices, without effective pushback, their predatory impulses destroy all below them. Those are different kinds of struggles. In the U.S., there’s a struggle going on, over whether the Democratic Party is going to continue to be a plutocratic party and its establishment is being challenged and is fighting back with gaslighting and intra-party shenanigans. And, in the halls of power there’s another struggle, over whether a dominant Republican Party can function as a technically competent governing party at all.

bruce wilder
You have fallen victim to one of the classic blunders. Two that have attracted some attention are ‘getting involved in a land war in Asia’ and ‘going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’, but perhaps more generally relevant is ‘thinking people know what you mean’. You think I know what you mean. You are mistaken. I don’t know what you mean. What do you suggest we do about that?

72 “TM” : “I was puzzled by the latest mcmanus posts until I realized that he’s talking to himself.”

Dude, you’re too funny. +1000

(Not) Shorter: Thank you.

77@ I question what the utility of the answer might be. What do you plan to do with the answer, precisely?

Here’s a little reminder from NPR: http://www.npr.org/2016/03/04/469052020/the-democratic-party-got-crushed-during-the-obama-presidency-heres-why

I realize that characterizing the Obamas as American royalty, just like the Bush and the Clinton clans, is something of a no-no these parts. But that’s my view all the same. As noted, 75 percent of California’s African-American males of high-school age can’t meet basic literacy standards. That seems to me a much, much more pressing issue.

I agree, btw, that we can keep more than one idea in our heads. What I don’t get is why one of these might be trying to gauge how racist Republican actually are? The problem, btw, if we must address that topic, isn’t the percentage of Republicans who might be racist, but of Dems. Left-leaning folks like to keep things simple, I know, “we good, moral, clever,” they “bad”.

My favorite “analytical” statement on Amanda and Kevin’s “discussion” of moral purity comes from Shepard’s Sincere Convert: “if thou hast any good thing in thee, it is but a drop of poison in a bowl of rosewater.”

Shepard’s theology has rightly been described, imho, as one entirely devoid of both charity and common sense, but for my money the Puritans can’t be beat when it comes to the poetry of evil and eternal damnation. Nothing like a little perspective when we’re busy uncovering the evil residing in the hearts of others.

Presbyterian Magazine 1821
https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=y90cAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=a+drop+of+rosewater+in+a+bowl+of+poison&source=bl&ots=lP9sX5X_qy&sig=o4A1zXWdSzmvt0-IxjdJEhQwC3o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFrbPnjaTWAhUCVLwKHbOgCgIQ6AEIPzAJ#v=onepage&q=a%20drop%20of%20rosewater%20in%20a%20bowl%20of%20poison&f=false

Racism it is:

https://piie.com/system/files/documents/wp17-7.pdf

But why be surprised? The US is, much more than most western countries, patronal – an intricate web of connections and favours directing resources at local and state level. Since it is an entrenched two-party state, there is a strong winner takes all element (unlike, say, post-war Italy, where spoils were divided by party in accord with their relative strengths). Patronalism plus strong party affiliation hands power to the plutocracy, as rents are gathered at the top to be distributed downward. This was always there, although it has became much more open and less balanced by other forces over the last thirty years.

bruce wilder

I took your comment @ 59 to expose your effort to understand my remarks …

Correct (except, possibly, for the use of the word ‘expose’; I don’t know whether that’s correct because I don’t understand it). The reason I was making an effort to understand your remarks is that I did not understand your remarks. I still don’t. I don’t understand the remainder of your latest comment, either. What do you suggest we do about that?

@19 in re: TNC’s Atlantic piece:

Counterpoint: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/09/ta-nehisi-coates-george-packer-white-president/539976/

When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham.