A new two party system?

– as the European reality -(without the UK) – is ”the five Party system” – this idea of a ”three party system” might be just a bit too ”Anglo-Saxon” –
because – why? –
again – do these AngloSaxonCountries always have this… this ”duo play”?
-(they never seem to be able to get over with – or if they try to ”get over with” they always – alway talk ”third party” – and hardly ever ”fourth” or ”fifth” – or even sixth or seventh)
– and btw – a member of the German Greens really isn’t a member of the ”SPD” or der Linke – or der AFD or der CDU!
-(and about the same goes for France and Italy and most of the Scandinavian Countries)

Or just look at the EU Parliament?

I’m with nastywoman on this one, 3 parties is too few. There is a definite splintering in all directions apparent. Macron’s party is a bit of an eye-opener in that regard in that a party created from nothing and representing nothing could win so decisively and then lose support so rapidly.

I think the issue is that we have been following a set of policies in the western world that have not worked and more importantly are now obviously leading to disaster (not least environmentally). This is combined with the disillusionment of a large post-communist generation in large parts of the world. Communism was not all bad, it removed existential angst and supported female independence at the cost of self-determination and self-actualization. This is now obvious to people and they are hunting for solutions without being offered any.

So in a sense there are two camps which could be called nostalgia and futurism, but both are splintered about how to achieve those goals with no clear policy prescription being offered on either side, nor even as far as I can see really by any of the splinters.

I get the feeling that we need academia to provide genuine blueprints, for somebody who recognizes what the problems are charts a path forward. At the moment I’m not seeing it. Tactics aren’t going cut it, we need strategy.

PPS. I forgot to mention that the two obvious serious issues that all the world can now see clearly are environmental deterioration and perniciously rising inequality (so great that large segments of the population suffer from the environment and social costs of growth but receive none of the benefits).

Communism … supported female independence

This is part right and part wrong. Communist countries certainly had high rates of participation by women in jobs formerly dominated by men (although some of those then became “feminized”) and had, in many ways, more equal education systems. This is important and good! But, on the other hand, women in communist countries tended to still do the vast majority of domestic work, and without most modern labor-saving devices, or at least much worse ones. Also, basic female hygiene products were often difficult, if not impossible, to get. It’s hard to be fully independent if you can’t a pad or a tampon. (Slavenka Drakulic is excellent on this, among other topics.) And, when normal birth control is super hard to get – and so an average woman has 4-5 abortions – which were not so fun! – independence is also greatly reduced. (In countries like Romania, this was even more of a horror show, of course.) It is, perhaps, unsurprising, that when “consumer products” are not given a focus, some people’s consumer products are more ignored than others. So, we should give the proper dues to the former communist countries, but give them their well-earned knocks on treatment of women, too. (At least in the Soviet Union – and in Russia still – domestic violence was and is a very serious problem, too – one take less seriously than in most western countries.)

Matt @7
Fair enough, I was specifically thinking a East Germany where women in the East specifically missed the child care offered by the DDR and had much higher labour force participation rates than the West.

As we all know, there are two kinds of people; those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

I’d argue that most democracies face a single defining issue, and the parties cluster on a particular side of this divide with the factions and groups vying to decide secondary issues within the primary grouping based round the big split. What is happening in the UK is that the previous issue, which was big state vs little state, is being replaced with a constitutional question; stand apart, or be a component of the EU. Scotland has had a similar switch from left/right to independent/union.

I’m interested in what the new dividing line in the USA is. What is the question that has Trump or the woke Democrats under Warren/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two possible answers?

The British Conservative party has been an unstable coalition of conflicting interests for decades: conservative prime ministers nearly always run into trouble over Europe.

Trumpism seems to me to be an obvious continuation of the US Republican’s Southern Strategy since the 1970’s, so maybe the Republicans were also doomed. (If you recruit the Confederate Flag waving element in order to get your party elected, the danger is they will vote for Trump in the primaries).

@bad Jim:
> The U.S., because of its legacy of slavery and segregation, has always been hostile to policies which treat its citizens equally, decrying them as socialist threats to our god-given liberties, which makes comparisons to European states, which generally speaking have taken care of straightforward problems like health care more economically, somewhat problematic.

I see this argument a lot and I don’t think it’s true. Yes slavery and segregation are important, but so also is the violence conquest of NW Mexico and the ways in which those native populations were forcably subjegated (a process that is still ongoing today), and the insanely violent history surrounding labour battles in the C19th and early C20th.

Like all things it really comes down to power. In the US the elites have been able to hang on a lot more of it due to the undemocratic nature of the US state. In places where elites have less power, things are generally better. In places that are essentially run like a S. American aristocratic post settler state (S. Carolina, Alabama, etc) – things are pretty terrible for most people no matter what the colour of their skin. One of the things that changed in the US over the past 40 years is that the Southern aristocratic states have become a lot more powerful, than the more democratic northern states. Similarly southern ideals about authority and subservience have come to dominate in the workplace.

The notion that Brexit is all about the culture wars strikes me as an us vs. them story that casts “us” as moral and “them” as deliberately immoral. Brexit seems to me to be very much about sticking with the US, this doesn’t seem to be useful. And the so-called “populists” in Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic republics are very much about joining the US in another crusade. The rise of yet more fascists in Spain and Italy are, I suspect, apt to try to turn against the EU (ostensibly on “culture”) as the German-French imperial consortium gets more and more SYRIZA on the their ass.

Jim Andrakakis@2 seems to think that SYRIZA was ever very much left, rather than “left moving right as fast as possible,” even though its core policy was anti-KKE, i.e., no Grexit, no matter what. “OXO” always meant no to the KKE, which is why the KKE tried to finesse the referendum without openly signing a suicide note.

The general trend is the slow working out of the implications of the defeat of socialism, not least the reversion to the bourgeoisie doing what it has always wanted to do, free from the burden of trying to look humane. It’s like there was a seesaw, with fascism on one end and communism on the other. One end goes down, the other goes up. Matt@7 has upheld the banner of reaction, on the unstated grounds that wife beating must, must, must be better under capitalism, because culture. I think being a wife being able to support herself (and maybe kids too) without relying on a man does far more than “culture” which means a bunch of fine words repeated at every opportunity. In my view, “culture” is the way of life, and abortion is not an atrocity.

It’s hard to say where centrists will end up. On the one hand, they mostly benefit from the regressive tax policies and weak regulation that Trumpists have carried over from hard neoliberalism.

This is easy. They will go full trump. Many already have.

JA@2:

I’m not overly fond of the “Trumpist” label because while there’s a certain appealing slur-like quality to it, it isn’t an informative label, and as you point out, the behaviors pointed to as being most characteristic of it are associated with other parts of the spectrum that are antithetical to the best examples of “Trumpism”. I’m tempted to suggest something like “elite populism”, “astroturf populism”, “crony populism”, or “opportunistic populism”. It feels wrong not to call “Trumpism” populism, because that’s the core feature even if its adherents might need huge amounts of cognitive dissonance to support it.

It might be simpler still to label Trump-like behaviors demagoguery, and then just call the broader movement JQ labels Trumpist as nationalist demagoguery or RW demagoguery.

Hate to be Johnny-One-Note, but it’s really hard to say something coherent while wielding a concept as incoherent, at least as applied to the US, as “soft neoliberalism.” It appears to have none of the characteristics of hard neoliberalism, except perhaps a belief in free trade. In fact, in 2016 it seemed to be exactly coextensive with the Democratic Party (of which Bernie Sanders is not a member, and it is literally axiomatic that he is not a soft neoliberal and Hillary Clinton is).

So why not just say so? See how much clearer your category (a) is if we say “the remaining elements of the Democratic and Republican Parties.” Unfortunately, what’s much clearer is that this is nonsense. There might be a few migrants from the the Republican to the Democratic Party, but they will not form a party with the “remnants” of the Democratic Party, nor will Greens and feminists and vegans form a new party.

– and I just don’t get? – as I always thought that ”Trumpism” –
(if there is something like that – outside of ”Trump” and the US – and being simply ”a…holery”) – IS –
”total and absolute confusion”?

And because ”there is just total and absolute confusion” – so many New ”Parties” show up – like in the EU Parliament there are sooo many different Parties that the parliament has a hell of a time to regroup them just into 8 -(in words ”eight” groups)

And then – how is it possible to believe and write:

”Recent elections (notably including those for the European Parliament) have shown the evolution of what I’ve called a three-party system, replacing the alternation between soft and hard versions of neoliberalism dominant since the 1980s”.

And I understand the wish -(or need?) to simplify such a chaotic party system BUT it’s totally absolutely impossible to reduce it to:
”The three parties in this analysis are the (a) remaining elements of the neoliberal consensus, (b) Trumpists[1], and© leftists, defined as broadly as possible to encompass greens, feminist, social democrats, old-style US liberals, as well as those who would consciously embrace the label “Left”.

That might be understandable from the perspective of somebody who has been grown up with the Anglo-Duoplay BUT from a European perspective it is just like an American saying he is ”a social democrat” and then we find out that he -(or she) believes in ”policies” -(or stuff) which is totally, absolutely contradictionary to the program of a ”social-democratic Party”.

And so – would there be a way… to somehow… discuss all of this – NOT being so… confused?

Thank you for this, John. I think efforts to understand what is actually happening are very useful. Until this occurs, prescriptive strategies and “solutions” are premature, at best.

The current norm is read any utterance from those we cast as the “enemy” in the worst possible light. That’s fine for rhetorical and/or tactical purposes.

However, internalizing our own propaganda and then mistaking this dross for actual observed data or behavior can only lead to (continued) catastrophic results. Case in point, not everyone agrees climate change is regarded is a priority problem. That fact might distress “us.” But operating as though the opposite is “true” produces the results of the recent Australian election. Ditto Brexit. Ditto Trump.

Culture matters, as many are just now discovering. Let’s be quite clear, CT was the only “liberal” site I’m aware of in 2016 that permitted open disagreement outside the set of culturally normative discourse modes. The percentage of people willing to listen to others while being called “racist” etc. is likely to be extremely small in most western societies.

What is happening in Europe is that left-leaning parties are listening to middle-class voters concerned with culture and social economies. Canada, Australia, and Japan have extremely restrictive immigration policies already. Arguing that “racism” is a switch that gets turned on and off is ludicrous. America elected Obama twice, and the same voters who made him president twice in the north-east stayed home or voted for a clearly damaged candidate. Why? Understanding that question would be good place to start.

The key difference for me between 2016 and 2020 is that at least a few sensible academics, such as JQ, are keen to avoid the errors of the past and present, and are trying to do a better job of asking questions and analyzing data, which I suppose is what academics should actually be doing like, all the time? Too few, however, and the echo chambers of the left and right even in many parts of academia are drum-tight shut.

Trump can and will say anything. Voters will look at the job numbers and the economy, shrug, and pull the lever. Tub-thumping doesn’t cut it.

I think Rod Dreher is your best guide to the “Fear of an SJW gulag” mindset right now. As ever, he is useful for illustrating the broad topic of what I suppose we should call “problems of liberalism”, but not much use as a commentator in himself. “Cultural conservatism” was the original “identity politics”, so far as that term has any use.

To be honest, whenever I see Americans sounding off about British politics, I just think “Christ, is this how bad we are, when we talk about them?”

– and about this one:
“Yet the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.” — Karl Polanyi

He wrote that in 1944. – Right?

And there is NOTHING more tragic – than the believe of so many Americans that some ”Liberals” -(or Hillary) made Von Clownstick unavoidable!

NO! NO! and thousand times NO!! –
As you REALLY can’t excuse the existence of Hitler with the Weimar Republic or some Versailler Verträge – YOU can’t excuse the ”erection” of an moronic Idiot like Trump – by suggesting it was the fault of somebody who didn’t manage to control – regulate or beat him.

Hidari@34 is correct about the intimate connection between fascism and war. The comment even notes the essential continuity of colonial ideology and fascism. Hitler’s war aims being so similar to imperial Germany’s for example is inevitable.

But I think there are a couple of implications overlooked. Fascism is the program for mass mobilization for war, which disciplines the masses especially the labor movement, dividing them by hysteria about enemies threatening the nation, targeting a minority both legally and illegally, quelling disagreements among the ruling class by elevating a strong man who uses force of some kind (the interwar use of assassination in imperial Japan was extreme in this regard, I think) to suppress elite dissent as well as left wing opposition. Historically, in the interwar period it was the losers of the Great War who needed to resort to the fascist program to prepare for war to reverse the defeats.

But…if the mobilization is of powers that are losing their grip economically, but still are very strong in military terms, why would the fascism look the same? In WWI, the largest fraction of casualties were from soldiers fighting each other. In WWII, the generals did learn something and began targeting the civilian populations, much easier targets. WWII exposed the costs of colonies so neo-colonialism became the preferred method of empire. (Again, who says no one learns anything from the last war?)

Today’s fascism doesn’t want to recreate the inefficient colonial system. I think today’s fascism is far more apt to be weakening imperial powers terrorizing humanity by assaults on weaker nations using quasi-genocidal tactics. The fascist leaders of course start these wars as their choice, regardless of legal verbiage in deference to parliamentary piety. It begins now with economic warfare on the enemy people, and results in the re-division of the world. Domestically, being already powerful, the winners of WWII, would the mobilization for war require an expensive and ungainly concentration camp system when a simple Red Scare can purge the labor movement?

The complex diplomacy like that of the days of colonial empires is meant to prevent general conflagration, but like all complex systems, in time it will fail. It will be perceived as a ludicrous accident, an unheard of concatenation of wickedness on the part of selected enemies and the mysteriously frustrated good will of selected allies. Nonetheless it’s failure is inevitable. I suspect when the rattletrap device breaks down the world will become the playground of genocides. Democracy is us (the nation) vs. them, and if victory means killing all of them, the democrats will do what the nation needs.

The first implication of fascism as a program for war is that much of what is happening now is fascism-lite, fascism adjacent, cryptofasicsm, and simply fascism with an unexpected outward appearance. The second implication is that the historical continuity of fascism puts in into the same spectrum as democracy. Historically there is no sharp dividing line between fascism and democracy. I’ve imagined one could write a useful pamphlet about democracy and genocide. [“Genocide” in many ways is an unfortunate term, raising irrelevant issues about the intentions of individuals and the degree to which murder is industrialized. Most real world “genocide” is conquest and ethnic cleansing.]

There are no clear lines between what is flatteringly called democracy and what is usually insulted as fascism. It’s like the imaginary distinction between good capitalism and crony capitalism. The difficulty with tactical alliance between the left and the center is finding the supposedly anti-fascist center.

Consider the current example of Venezuela. Quite aside from longtime unofficial support for resistance by the oligarchs of Venezuela, even to the point of openly endorsing a coup, the US has engaged in organizing economic warfare on the people of Venezuela. The fall in oil prices plus the neither fish nor fowl economic policies of Chavismo no doubt have contributed to a deteriorating situation. But the simple truth is everyone knows that the economic war on the people of Venezuela has to some degree achieved its purpose, hurting the people of Venezuela. Despite that, it is entirely unacceptable to oppose this war—even though nobody really knows why this war instead of say, one against Colombia which has slaughtered a couple hundred thousand of its citizens! Instead, it is the war itself that is held to be the democratic imperative.

In a way, I agree. It’s just that democracy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

I live in northern Italy, and here the Lega party is dominant since I was old enough to think about politics.
Later we had various Berlusconi governments (that included the Lega), with intermittence of center-left “soft-neoliberal” governments.

Now we have a M5s-Lega government, where the Lega is largely dominant (even though Lega had half the votes of the M5s and therefore has much less parlamentarians).

As Trump, Farage etc. remind me closely of Berlusconi and the Lega, from my poinbt of view it’s like if the rest of the world is becoming more and more similar to Italy, which is a bit funny.

I propose to call the Trump-Berlusconi-Lega etc. politicians “rightwing populists”, that has the advantage of being a clearly understandable label.

I propose to consider Mussolini, Hitler etc. also as part of the “rightwing populist” team, although quite extreme ones; this has the advantage of highlighting the similarities without necessariously implying that Trump is the same as Hitler, which luckily he is not at least as far as we are now[*].

In Italy, what happened is that thwe highly polarizing figures of Berlusconi and currently Salvini pushed everyone who wasn’t for them to become part of a unified opposition, which however when it comes into power is a bit of a mixed bag of different political philosophies. This spelled the death of more “extreme” (in relative terms” parties of the left, that could only support center-left (soft-neoliberal) parties or, when they didn’t, be blamed for the ascent of the right[**]. If the world continues to follow Italy’s path, I expect this to happen elsewhere too.

@steven t johnson 17
I see that there are many lefties that, as the EU is clearly a neoliberal institution, think that true lefties are against the EU (implying that those who are pro aren’t really lefties).
But, for some reason they expect post-EU coutries to turn fully non-export oriented, self enclosed state-controlled economies. I have no idea why they think this would happen.
I rather think we would have a USSR breakup style situation whith a lot of asset stripping, ramped up privatisations etc. (though probably not as bad as with the USSR).
I’m very pro EU, for this and for other reasons, even though the EU has a strong neoliberal bias.
Currently an italian politician, Rizzo, resurrected the old communist party (he got the right to use the logo etc.), and in the late european elections he had a strongly anti-EU, anti-NATO campaign, with wich he got less than 1% of the votes (while the party I voted, supported by Varoufakis, got 1.4%, ha ha, so much better!).
I’m not sure why one would see Rizzo as the true left. If he is the choice, though, I would be forced to vote for the soft-neoliberals because I think he is a smoke seller. I don’t think I’m less leftish for this.
____________________
[*] While we look in bewilderment to the past generations who supported Hitler or Mussolini (some of them I met), or maybe the confederates, from their point of view they were actually defending their countries (because their point of view was quite detached from reality), so they were quite normal people.
This is because I suspect many people assume thyat only madmen would support such “evil regimes”, but in reality it is not so.
So it is possible that current rightwing populists morph into full-blown fascists.
However, it just didn’t happen yet.

[**] Shades of late Weimar. Ouch!

Z@10:

Even in the US, the country in which the “Trump against everyone else” narrative is most believable, it is at the moment still unclear how the neoliberal group will react if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination

It’s instructive to remember September and October 2016. Clinton’s victory was immanent, and US centrists were crowing about the approaching deathblow to the Republican party, which would leave a racist, anti-elitist, no-nothing rump and a bunch of basically decent disillusioned moderate Republicans with no party to call home. This is the part of Clinton’s “deplorable” gaff that gets forgotten: for all that #resistance adherents now talk about how anyone who voted for Trump was an irredeemable racist, an awful lot of them were salivating in early fall ’16 at the prospect of welcoming the well-heeled portion of the Republican party into the coming Democratic one-party state – which was going to finally let them stop relying on DFHs to get votes. Moderate essentialist identity politics and all the donors would grant them a permanent majority, and they could be rid of the millstone of leftists.

If you go to centrist echo chambers now, there is a strong tendency to equate support for Sanders as support for Trump, and generally to dismiss leftists as reactionaries wearing very thin masks. If Sanders were nominated, elected, and managed to institute any appreciable amount of socio-economic reform, it seems pretty clear that the neoliberal centrists would tearfully tear up their Democratic party memberships and bitterly complain they hadn’t left the party, the party left them. It’s unlikely they’d embrace the hard neoliberals in the GOP because those neoliberals are for the moment managing to ride their populist tiger successfully; I think it would be more likely to see the wealthier portions attempting to pull a Macron. Alternately, they might try push through new anti-democratic “reforms” to “save the party from itself”.

I don’t think Sanders is going to win, though. We’ll probably see Warren or Harris nominated, and little change because of a Republican Senate even if elected. In that case, with much handwringing, they’ll seek to have more power concentrated into the imperial presidency, but take modest ACA-like measures instead of dramatic ones, and the centrists will continue trying to separate the progressives from the leftists so the former can be used as a firewall to insulate liberal power in the party. And if the party dies because of it, it dies. The liberal centrists obey the Iron Law of Institutions above all others, and they can always follow Macron’s good example if this ship starts sinking.

—

JQ@25:

Half that formulation is redundant; crony demagoguery retains pretty much all the unique information between connotation and denotation. Nazism is distinct within faschism, and while we still throw around Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist as labels, we also throw around communism as the overarching movement those fall under. If you really want to work Trump into the name, I’d go with Trumpist populism or Trumpist demagoguery, but the Trumpist part identifies the grifter, not the type of grift.

Orange Watch

Immanent, imminent? Imminent, immanent?

So while you are earnestly deciding which lever to pull, the wild fire is rushing up the hill, and the mud slide is rolling down the hill toward your polling booth.

@JQ
“How about charter schools, financial sector boosterism and welfare reform?”

John, this just illustrates the problem of incoherence I was talking about.

1. I have never seen these things you mention described as characteristics of hard neoliberalism. What happened to a belief in laissez-faire? (Hayek didn’t have this belief, but almost everyone thinks he did.) Or I’ve often seen austerity described as characteristic of neoliberalism. But while Paul Krugman has written recently about how fixing the deficit became unassailable consensus, Democrats were never warmly enthusiastic about it.

2. No less a leftie than you yourself has been, tepidly, in favor of nonprofit charter schools. Please name a single “soft neoliberal” (i.e., Democrat) who has been in favor of for-profit charter schools.

3. Ah, now the cat’s out of the bag. Are there other soft-neoliberals associated with financial-sector boosterism besides HRC? But HRC was a senator from New York state, which has something like 400,000 jobs in financial services. This is about as informative as finding a senator from Vermont who’s a booster of the dairy industry. Note that no one seems bothered whether the garment of neoliberalism is capacious enough to hold the entire Democratic Party or narrow enough to hold just one, as long as that one starts with an H.

4. Again, what soft neoliberals are associated with welfare reform besides, um, HRC’s husband? BTW, I know two people who resigned from the Bill Clinton administration over welfare reform, and I don’t think either would decribe themselves as “left.”

No, the whole point of the misguided effort to apply the term “neoliberal” to the US was to serve as a useful piece of invective in the 2016 election campaign, which purpose it has now served, and to simplify argument by just lumping together the Democratic and Republican parties. If people were using it for serious analysis, you would see the word “neoliberal” applied ten times as often to Paul Ryan as to Hillary Clinton. My impression is that the actual ratio is the reverse. It’s not an aid to analysis, it’s a substitute for analysis.

@44
”Call “Trumpism” whatever you like”.

Thank you! –

And why of all commenters on CT – Ph has to tell US?!
And when he writes:
”Intellectuals are not respected because too frequently intellectuals say profoundly stupid things. Suggesting America is like Weimar Germany is really stupid”.

WE couldn’t agree more –
even if Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven already in 1920 (Weimar Republic) ”channeled” Trumps famous ”Covfefe” Poem. And WE -(a whole group of ”Non-Intellectuals” – residing currently in Germany) – have undeniable proof – that Baron von Clownstick was ”deeply influenced” by another artist from ”Weimar Times” – the Great Kurt Schwitters and his ”Ursonate”:

”Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwii Ee”.

– and at @
”Before the financial crisis, it was taken for granted that (after Silicon Valley) Wall Street was the sector of business closest to the Dems”

That’s where my Californian ”Granddad” –
(a lifelong Republican and member of ”the Boehemians”)
always got his YUUGEST ”kick” from.
He absolutely loved it – ”that after Obama so many Democrats couldn’t differentiate between Republicans and D’s anymore” – and thought ”it was all the same” – by ”lumping together the Democratic and Republican parties”.

And – how true – the very ”un-differentiated” word ”Neo-liberalism” played a YUUGE role in the ongoing confusion of US – so called ”Progressives”!

WHICH! –
could bring US (all?) to the final conclusion how important it is to have more than just one – two – or even ”three” parties.

As when YOU have five – or even more parties – you HAVE to learn how to differentiate between different policies and politics – and you HAVE to learn that – for example – ”the Greens are NOT just another Party of the Left –
AND – you have to learn especially about the meaning of the world ”Liberal” and that you can’t use this world just willy nilly and in combination with all kind of confusion add – or pre-ons.

BE-cause – there is pretty big ”group” of (growing) ”Liberal” Parties -(which – again – are NOT ”all the same”) – and you need to know them – very intimately! –
In order to fight them successfully!

Capisce!

The linked Washington Post article, the OP and many of the comments are wrong because they completely misunderstand what “centrism” is. “Centrism” isn’t the ideological position of compromised weak-left or soft-neoliberal leftists, it’s a cover for fascism. “Centrism” was never the ideology of the democrats, and their policies were a reaction to a “centrist” movement that was made up out of whole cloth to fool leftists into compromising on their goals while the fascists looted the joint. This is why “centrism” has become more and more right wing as the Republicans became more unhinged. “Centrism” is just plausible deniability for fascism, which plays on the existence of the swing voter to con leftists into thinking that they need to compromise to win elections. These “centrists” – the Bobos and Bari Weiss’s and Bret Stephens and Megan Mcardles and all the other lying scumbags of the mainstream press – aren’t representatives of an ideological position, they’re simply a smokescreen for fascism, the mask it wears until it has control of the institutions of power. They all absolutely hated Clinton and did everything they could to undermine her, as well as Obama, and now that Trump is in they have one single story they’re all singing from: that the leftist radicalism of Clinton and Obama is the reason we have Trump and oh I’m so sorry but if you keep pushing me with your leftist radicalism I’ll have no choice but to vote for Trump again! It’s a scam, and a lot of people on here have fallen for it hook line and sinker. Democrat weakness is a response to this, and Democrats are weak and compromised to the exact extent that they’re fooled by it. This is why AOC and Ilhan Omar are “radical” – because they see the “centrists” for what they are and refuse to water down their politics to give into a scam they know they can’t beat. Obama fell for this and so did Bill in his time, but the new generation have seen through it.

Also while I’m here can we ditch this junk about “when Bernie wins the dems will panic.” He is far from the most radical person in the running, and he isn’t going to win – it will be someone like Warren or Harris who is much more radical than him, and if you think Bernie is radical you’re falling for another scam. He’s a show pony, and his policies are poor compared to Warren or Harris.

And also while I’m here can I take on (again) the crusty old leftist idea that if fascism comes around again it will have to do so in the same form it took in the 1930s. It won’t, and for obvious reasons. Modern fascism isn’t going to be openly enthusiastic about war the way that 1930s futurists were because now we have nukes, and everyone knows you can’t win a modern land war with the US army because it’s so crappy. Modern fascism therefore won’t be about expanding living space since it can’t, and instead will be about racial purity at home and punishing deviance – as it has always been – without the expansionist overlay. So what? It’s still fascism. It’s hilarious to see Hidari writing about how America isn’t fascist because it doesn’t glorify war or have concentration camps for political opponents in the same week that we see Trump doing his 4th July parade and locking migrant children in concentration camps. The fact that he can’t organize a root in a brothel and hasn’t got to his political opponents yet doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist, and if he can get his job done by taking control of the courts and the legislature by stealth rather than by violence that doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist. Also what’s this stuff about Republicans haven’t talked about suspending elections? Trump has openly floated the idea, and the Republicans don’t need to suspend elections if they can stop anyone they don’t like from voting. Just because people aren’t goose-stepping into your living room wearing swastikas, doesn’t mean you haven’t gone fascist.

The American left is facing a huge crisis at the moment but it’s not a crisis of “centrism.” The real crisis is that the far left – which should be holding these people to account, and which has as its central most fundamental tenet the opposition to fascism – has no grounding in theory, no idea about the issues, and no ability to adapt to the changing context. If you don’t have a robust class analysis, a good intersectional politics, a sense of history and a bit of adaptability of course you won’t see the jackbooted thugs when they come for you, because you won’t recognize the uniforms or the targets. But that’s because you lack a basic understanding of politics, not because it’s not fascism. An additional problem the US left faces is the dirtbag left, who are just the millenial US reincarnation of Spiked! but who get their ideas amplified by the “centrists” because they’re useful idiots. And then we have all the Russia-apologists and Trump-curious Putin-fluffers, whose real animus is against earnest moderate leftists rather than the nazis who’re coming for them. When the Day of the Rope comes, Tulsi Gabbard isn’t going to be spared because she got a bit of Russian money.

Don’t be fooled by this “centrist” smoke screen, don’t let these liars divide the far left from the electoral left, and don’t think fascism isn’t coming for you just because it’s wearing a polo shirt rather than Calvin Klein.

@J-D 42

My understanding is this:

– The M5s are a transversal party that managed to catch the disaffected vote from both left and right; although for some reason people outside of Italy assume that the M5s are lefties, they themselves deny it explicitly. They do have both an internal right wing and left wing.

– They got votes mostly by throwing mud on the PD (italian main center-left, soft neoliberal party), and to a lesser extent throwing mud on Berlusconi (though they often used sentence like “the PD is as corrupt as Berlusconi”, which implies that B. is at least as corrupt as the PD, in practical terms they campaigned more against the PD because it was in power in the last electoral cycles).

– They won a lot of votes in the last elections, but not enough to govern alone. The PD somewhat logically[*] gave them the cold shoulder, and the M5s refused Berlusconi on principle (to their merit), so the only choice was an alliance with the Lega, which is quite explicitly a rightwing populist party, but it can’t completely pretend that it’s a new party since was part of all Berlusconi’s governments (I think Lega is the currently existing party with more total time in government in italy) and has some disadvantages in southern Italy because up to yesterday they spent their time being racist against southern italians.

– But the Lega outclassed the M5s in the department of being an evil, antagonising axehole against immigrants and evil globalist organisations like the EU. Consider that many italians believe that the EU is forcing Italy to accept all migrants (as opposed to Italy having an obligation to accept refugees and other EU countries not wanting to take a considerable number of said refugees on their territory).

– By being an aggressive axehole against migrants and offensive to the EU every time he can, Salvini shows that he is honest and trustable (to people who dislike migrants and the EU), so this is a big vote winner; the M5s act much less aggressively (because they have different wings, so as a party they don’t take such excessive positions).
Thus those people from the right who went from Berlusconi to the M5s probably are going back to the Lega, which appears more aggressive and believable (in the political dynamic of right wing populism).

– By being strongly anti-immigrant, the Lega can appropriate a nationalist “Italians first” retoric (yes, he stole the motto from Trump). Southern italians, who wherewary of the Lega because until recently it was racist against them, apparently accept the idea that the Lega turned the racist beam against someone else, and can happily get behind it, so the Lega is getting a lot of new votes from southern italy.

– Also I suspect that some of the leftish disaffected voters who voted M5s might be reconsidering, because of the alliance with the Lega.

So the M5s appear to be royally scr-ed, in particular because I doubt they can seriously attempt an alliance with the PD at the next elections, and salvini can, at the nex elections, go back to the alliance with Berluscony and Fratelli d’Italia (another nationalist party), so Salvini can ditch the M5s, but the M5s can’t ditch Salvini, even though on paper the M5s looks like the bigger party.

So, to your last observation:

“The M5S did not go into that election as supporters of Berlusconi and/or Salvini (and/or their parties), but they came out of it into a government partnership with Salvini and his party, not as part of a unified opposition.”

In my view, the M5s “won” because in reality, for all their boosterism, they are an even more centrist party than the PD.
There are certainly reasons to say the opposite (for example, the M5s are more keynesian than the PD), but anyway:
Since they cut the bridges with the rest of the opposition they are going to lose big, hence I doubt that there is another choice that isn’t the sort of ragtag opposition that once it is in power squabbles a lot with itself.

Ideally, if one party, say the M5s, could win the elections alone, this might be different, but I think they could do this only by pandering to so different voters that they would become a ragtag by themselves (that in part they already are).

________
[*] I don’t mean that I approve of this choice, in pratice the PD acting this way put the Lega in power, but the M5s asked as a condition for creating a government with the PD that the PD changed leadership, and a large part of the M5s campaign was about dismantling stuff that the PD did in the last legislature, and furthermore the M5s ate a lot of former PD votes, so obviously in terms of self preservation the PD wants the M5s to fail, so in the end it’s quite natural that the PD and the M5s didn’t ally. In the previous election, in a similar but specular situation, the PD offered an alliance to the M5s (with less strings attached) and the M5s refused.

‘ It’s hilarious to see Hidari writing about how America isn’t fascist because it doesn’t glorify war or have concentration camps for political opponents in the same week that we see Trump doing his 4th July parade and locking migrant children in concentration camps. ‘

Not that anyone cares, least of all me, but obviously I would not, nor have I ever denied that America glorifies wars and puts immigrant kids in concentration camps.

The difference between Trump and Hitler is that Hitler put senior leaders of the legal opposition in concentration camps as well (and then banned all other parties except his own, and put all the leaders of all the other political parties in concentration camps).

Again, to repeat, I have no problems with calling America ‘fascist’ in a loose metaphorical sense, although it must be pointed out that American has always been fascist in that sense. Indeed, it was one of the key points of the American New Left analysis that the US Empire represented a sort of fascism-lite.

My problem comes when people literally and with a straight face state that there is no difference between the Berlin of 1937, and the Washington of 2019. (and before people say that’s a straw man…I can assure you it’s not. People really do say that, unironically. Or try and weasel out of it by saying ‘Of course there are differences there’s (blah blah blah blah blah, incomprehensible self-refuting nonsense leading to the conclusion that, in the eyes of the speaker, actually, no there’s no difference)’

or to be more precise – eat this:

– Schwitters even goes so far as to state that the Merz stage would be connected through wires and have its surfaces smoothed over, an idea that came to be reality as the Merzbau progressed. Perhaps the most interesting connection to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is the title itself. The two great reoccurring symbols of the Gesamtkunstwerk were the cathedral and the theater. The first of these is already alluded to Schwitters’ alternate title for the Merzbau, The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. However, it is the second symbol, the theater, with which Schwitters identifies as his aim in the essay “Merz” in his quest for the Merz stage. This is significant. While the cathedral is typically associated with the fusion of plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), the theater is linked to the synthesis of the temporal arts (poetry, music). Yet the very nature of the Gesamtkunstwerk resists such a division, and we are led to contemplate whether or not the plastic environments created to host temporal expressions can ever be fully complete without each other. For example, a church is created to host religious activity, and a music hall is constructed to provide a space for music. The plastic and the temporal can be appreciated separately, but reach a greater unity through their intended purpose. It is possible to view the Merzbau as an iteration of this greater synthesis. The plastic environment, the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, was the realization of the Merz stage, which Schwitters indicated in his essay “Merz,” “serves for the performance of the Merz drama.”

““Trumpism” pre-dated Trump’s rise, and it will march on after Trump’s fall (whenever and however that is).”

——

It certainly will march on, because Trump’s not really an aberation. He’s currently the most popular Republican President among Republican voters in many, many years. He is the most popular Republican in America among Republican voters. They love him, he says the things they love to hear, and he says it loud and ugly. Which is the way they like it.

It’s amazing just how well Trump has pushed all of the GOP voter’s buttons and how much they love it. It is essentially his only observable skill.

@JQ

I obviously didn’t get across my point about finance. Here’s the point: Around 10% of NYC’s employment, and 20% of its payroll, comes from the financial services industry. So any New York senator, and a good chunk of its Representatives, will be big boosters of the industry. There is nothing “neo-” about this, and it’s not an “-ism”. Did Gillibrand suddenly get more interested in financial services, at the same as she was moving to the left in general, when she went from being an upstate Representative to a statewide senator? It’s not because she suddenly acquirede a new idelogy.

Similarly, it is an unfortunate peculiarity of US electoral politics that politicians constantly need money, and those who can supply it have influence. The finance industry has a lot of money. Occam weeps if you look at that and say: “Aha! Mont Pelerin!”

Sorry, I wasn’t able to carry out the experiment of moving NYC’s financial industry to Vermont to see what the political consequences are, but here’s an article entitled, “Bernie Sanders, Animal Agribusiness Stooge?” Who knew that neocarnivorism had spread so far?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-animal-agr_b_9402158

bt @ 61

As I have argued here before, Trump is a truly unwitting but functional metaethical emotivist. (Emotivism: the use of language to manipulate emotional attitudes to produce alignment in such attitudes. Facts, truth, etc. are irrelevant with respect to that goal.) He doesn’t realize any of that of course, but his success does show that in a pragmatic metaethical way, emotivism can “Trump” moral realism in terms of the regard for truth. In an interesting way, 2020 will be a electoral (college) referendum on the pragmatics of metaethical emotivism versus realism, or at least something other than emotivism. Of course that pronouncement completely disregards other factors like Russian meddling, the self-interested overlords of political contributions, etc.

– and as Von Clownstick yesterday lost to the Women’s American Soccer Team – we will have to recognise the importance of ”the Great American Soccer Party” for the last 48 hours.

Emotionally they for sure beat also the ”We own the Libs Party” -(some here call ”Trumpism”) – for at least the last 24 hours – so a lot will depend how they keep enplaning against the Von Clownstick team -(and if ”the Great American Soccer Party” can be a ”sustainable fourth US Party” – for more than 48 hours?)

All the reasonable people – Biden, HRC, Bushco, etc. authored Iraq, Bill Clinton paved the way for the banking housing crisis which Bushco ensured would happen. 44, the so-much better candidate gave Americans banker bonuses and the hollowing out of the middle-class, Libya, and big pharma run-a-mock.

Boy, those were the days.

by@61:

There are plenty of Republicans who are “pwn teh libtards uber alles” – politics as football but better because you get to judge the opposing team’s fans as literally evil – but it’s a dangerous and self-satisfying mistake to assume that this is how all of them think. Not least because it means a GOP without Trump would appear less dangerous. It’s not. Trump is ostentatious and confrontational, but the the aloof imperiousness of the Old Boys Club GOP (which includes plenty of young men and women) is if anything more dangerous because it brings out some of the worst attributes of the Democrats’ own old guard – complacency, comity, and compromise for their own sakes.

faustusnotes,
“These “centrists” – the Bobos and Bari Weiss’s and Bret Stephens and Megan Mcardles and all the other lying scumbags of the mainstream press – aren’t representatives of an ideological position, they’re simply a smokescreen for fascism, the mask it wears until it has control of the institutions of power. ”

Thank you for the post, it clarifies my thinking..

Will Self had a memorable phrase describing ‘sustainability’ as “that nauseating fig-leaf for priapic capitalism”.
‘Centrism’ is another such.

As Jan-Werner Muller observes in the LRB, “no right-wing populist has yet come to power anywhere in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites.”
The centrists were Trump/Brexit/your rightwing populist of choice, collaborators all along. It seems likely they will stay the course.

a footnote, somewhat topical

. . . Not long after his release, Mr. Epstein returned to New York and reminded a local reporter that, legally, he was a sexual “offender,” not a “predator.” He joked, “It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.” NYT

(in the spirit of the bon vivant in the Oval Office)

Doug K@75:

Please don’t buy into fn’s exculpatory narrative. The people they label as the REAL centrists aren’t centrists; they’re right-wing centrist baiters who clutch pearls and hold Van Peltian footballs for the actual centrists (Pelosi, Obama, HRC, WJC, Biden, etc.) to perenially try to kick. They’re enablers leading sometimes-complicit Democratic centrists ever further down the garden path, but they themselves are not centrists, even if they’re who Democratic centrists might name as such to justify pandering to their criticisms in search of those crucial, elusive swing voters the left must eternally compromise with and attract.

It takes breathtaking chutzpah to claim politicians who literally advocated “Third Way” politics are left-wing radicals rather than centrists.

I don’t like this “the GOP will be the same without Trump” line. They didn’t suspend the Senate before Trump, or set up concentration camps for migrants. They needed Trump – or someone special like him – to come forward and break the final barriers to their arseholery going fully florid.

I bet there were lots of Democratic Socialists and leftists in 1923 in Germany who were saying Hitler was just representative of German conservatism, or that Germany has always been anti-semitic so we shouldn’t say Hitler is special. That didn’t end well for those people.

Just because the party is a sewer of racism and authoritarianism doesn’t mean that it will become an openly fascist regime. Something is needed to make it get there, and Trump is that something. It’s not some kind of stochastic process that finally randomly flipped – Trump did it.

Until you recognize the specialness of this moment, you won’t realize how dangerous it is. You can accept that the party has always been a horrible cess-pit without downplaying the present crisis.

Orange Watch, your narrative is as always completely skewed. You may recall that Obama was opposed to the Iraq war and introduced a Medicaid expansion that had it not been gutted by the Supreme Court would have been the most radically left-wing policy introduced in America since the war (and was still radical by American standards even after being gutted). The key thing is that he fell for the centrist pablum and weakened his own politics because of it (this was also the strategy with Merrick Garland).

Every single person who wants to claim Obama is a centrist needs to explain the Medicaid expansion before they go one step further. If you can find a way to finnagle away the most left wing policy since WW2 as centrism then you’re good to make the claim; otherwise you need to accept that the people you say are centrists are not, by any reasonable American standard, anything except left wing.

They are also not the centrists that the Washington Post article JQ cites are talking about. There’s a reason Schultz is not a Democrat. Please deal with the political facts before you start making claims about people’s political positions.

Chetan Murthy, everything ph says is trolling, just don’t even bother.

@
”What results can be expected from these elections, or what might be learned from them”?

We might learn from them what we learned again form the election in Greece on the weekend.

”The people” elected somebody who promised them to help them – as ”the dude” and the Party who promised them before have NOT helped them -(good enough) – so they are willing to give somebody else a try.
And as this ”somebody else” told them:
”I know what I’m doing” –
they hope – he will know what he is doing – and he doesn’t – next time they will elect another ”Party”? – and perhaps it will be a ”new” one – or even better ”a Party” which says ”it’s no ”Party” at all – just a bunch of ”people” who try ”to help people” –
but please:
”no Amateurs” anymore –
as ”Amateurs” also aren’t able to help ”the people”?

Labour in Britain is riven by open anti-Semitism. Jewish author Richard Zimmler was disinvited from two cultural events in the UK. Mike Pence is now fund-raising off the obscenity of describing detention facilities as “concentration camps.”

The old coalition Democrats relied upon is fracturing. 45 picked up 30 percent of the hispanic vote, his son-in-law and key advisor is Jewish. After a succession of US presidents promised to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, 45 did. Given the opportunity to visit Kim (axis-of-evil leader), he has; and decided to drop in on his pal and be the first US president to enter the gates of “hell.” Smiling and handshakes ensued. Record unemployment for African-Americans and Hispanics, most new jobs go to women, and small businesses are booming.

Leaked cables from Her Majesty’s Ambassador and top “diplomatic” representative of the May government describe the 45th president’s administration as “dysfunctional” and “inept.” A white Democratic governor in Virginia “can’t recall” if he was wearing black-face in “that” year-book picture, but boasts he gives a heck of Michael Jackson impression.

Claiming America in 2019 is really nazi Germany, three years after “Hitler” came to power, or always really has been, sounds like: a/ an astute analysis of the American political landscape; or b/ complete insanity.

In 2016, democrats took white-working class voters in the rust-belt for granted; as they did African-Americans in Michigan, particularly. Support for 45 among hispanics and African-Americans is steady or up from 2016. Democrats ask, who else can we piss-off? employ “final solution” rhetoric to ignore, alienate, and outrage Jewish voters in advance of 2020. And let’s not even go near late-term, you know what. Meanwhile, 45’s numbers are steady or inching up. 45 has his message honed already; he’s already on the stump. Dems can’t figure out what they stand for; or what to tell voters except orange man bad.

So, yes, the moment is special in that way.

Chetan Murthy@82 blames the people for not…actually it’s not quite clear. The requirement that the Democratic electorate (insofar as they can even be identified, registered Democrats? Party officials? Donors?) be “sufficiently virulently anti-war” is quite a strange one on reflection. Everybody knew that the majority of the people didn’t want an aggressive war and everybody who cared to admit it knew the administration was lying. ph is right for once in saying the Democratic Party in the person of its elected officials chose to ignore majority opinion and chose to roll over in the face of fraud.

The habit of the Democratic and Republican parties in making war regardless of whether the people really wanted it, is one of long standing. It used to be “Remember the Maine” or “Remember Pearl Harbor.” But then it was the Democratic Party and Truman who removed war from the tiresome need for a congressional declaration. And it was Eisenhower and his red-baiting friends who excised the left from US politics, so that it was unthinkable to disagree over foreign policy, because the domestic war against the left required foreign war against the left.

That said, the roots of the war with Iraq lay in the support to Saddam Hussein in his monstrous attack on Iran. Hostility to the Iranian revolution because it was a revolution (but not because the ayatollahs crushed Tudeh, which I suspect was regarded as their only good feature, and why Khomeini was regarded as suitable for haven in the West in the first place) required trashing the Middle East. Hussein’s defeat in Iran left a crippling debt, which had everything to do with the attempt to annex Kuwait.

‘Labour in Britain is riven by open anti-Semitism’

roflmao

@
”it’s probably going to be harder than any of us currently think to keep the machinery running, dependent as it is on global synchronizations which may very well turn out to be unmanageable under the kind of pressures now being applied to them”.

Supposedly – or as ”the Elders” say – it was much, much more difficult to keep ”the machinery running” in the old times -(at least in Europe) –
as I never get tired to remark:
Over seventy years without any Germans marching into France -(or vice versa) is an amazing accomplishment of ”synchronisation” – and sometimes I think – IF my homeland (US) – right now – would -(like ”them Germans”) – focus just a little bit more on ”technical problems” -(than on political ones) – that could be a YUUUGE improvement?

Which doesn’t mean that I don’t know how sausage is made -(even with more then three Parties) – and there hardly is anything in sausage-making – which hasn’t been tried out in the last seventy years – and nearly all the results are IN – so why – still such crazy experiments?

Just try a lot harder to copy Dänemark – and that’s IT!
and there are these countries –

JQ

Well, all righty, then.

The remaining question is whether”soft neoliberalism” is a useful concept (other than rhetorically or as a piece of invective) or obscures more than it reveals. If we observe that when Rep. Gillirand become Sen. Gillibrand she moves to the left, but also becomes more neoliberal in her attitudes toward banks, then I’d say the latter: there’s a more useful description available. If we saw people who were bank boosters also favoring privatzation of services, that would be an argument for the former, but I don’t think you really do. Privatization was a fad among Democrats for a while, out of a desire to try something new, but it’s mainly Reublicans pushing it nowadays, often in the face of considerable resistance from Dems.

There’s a question over whether history is influenced by chance factors of the personality of individual politians, or whether the electorate would have voted for someone similar if Trump did not exist.

There’s a whole literature of counter-historical science fiction on this topic, satirized in “Lenin is shot dead at Finland Station”.

As evidence for the hypothesis that a Trump-less alternate universe would have elected someone similar, I offer Boris Johnson. (Across the Atlantic rather than an alternate history).

“Three Labour peers have resigned over the party’s handling of antisemitism complaints, with the former general secretary David Triesman arguing the party was “plainly institutionally antisemitic”. (20 hours ago)

@91 ‘Labour in Britain is riven by open anti-Semitism’ roflmao
Who, really is going to listen to the complaints of Labour party Jews? Not @91, we see!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/09/labour-peers-resign-over-handling-of-antisemitism-complaints-triesman-darzi-turnberg:

– but as nobody – so obviously – wants to give up the ”Where-Is-My-Party-Game” – let’s try this… problem for once and for all – at least for Teh Homeland.

America has 5 Parties

1. The currently ”Ruling Party” called ”Republicans” – who are just a bunch of old white rich dudes who hate nothing more than any kind of change.

2. The ”Idiots and Racist Party” – called ”Trumpists” -(by confused Americans) – who supposedly are a part of the Republican Party – but actually hate the Republican Party because they are so confused that they think they are kind of ”anti-mainstream”.

3. The Democratic Party – who are just a bunch of old white -(and so called coloured) less richer than the Republicans dudes who are able to tolerate change.

4. The ”I hate every Party and every government Party” – which actually isn’t a actual Party – just a bunch of ”amateur anarchists” who only have a voice on the Internet as they don’t tend to vote .- and so they are pretty much ”irrelevant”.

5. ”The Greatest American Party of All” – with members like AOC and Bernie and Warren and even some Female Soccer Players and any women who are able to deconstruct idiots – in other words: a bunch of ”cool operators” who want to change the Country for the better and who will rule the homeland soon – after all ”the old dudes” are dead and gone…

Orange Watch, those two articles don’t say what you think they say. The first one shows that the Republican “plan” was just a grift and then goes on to say all the ways in which it is different to Obamacare; the second one states that the idea that Obamacare was based on the Heritage Foundation plan is (and I quote) “baloney”.

This Obamcare=Heritage Plan idea has been debunked multiple times and you really need to stop saying it. But if you are going to keep trotting out this tired right wing propaganda, you could at least avoid citing an article that says it’s “baloney”.

But riddle me this, Orange Watch: why do you think Sanders is not a “centrist”? He voted repeatedly for sanctions on Iraq. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you aren’t aware of the recent finding that the research on the effects of the Iraq sanctions was fraudulent, and so you still think the sanctions killed 100,000 children. Yet you believe Sanders – who voted for the sanctions – is not a racist imperialist blood-soaked maniac like the rest of the Dems, and is not a “centrist”. After he voted to kill 100,000 kids. What is the price of centrism in your book? Is there a threshold?

Or riddle me this: Pelosi voted against the Iraq war (the vote you claim makes Clinton a “centrist”). So is she not a “centrist”? Is she a leftist?

Your definition of “centrist” appears to be: not Sanders. But Sanders has an abhorrent record on foreign interventions, and like the rest of your bloodthirsty country has a shameful history of supporting murder overseas. He voted for regime change in Libya (and supported it as far back as 2011). He voted for sanctions. He supported Marco Rubio’s ridiculous criticism of the UN and BDS. He voted for the AUMF in 2001 that has been used by the USA to attack many countries in Africa and Asia. That legislation is used to support Guantanamo. He voted against legislation to close Guantanamo Bay – legislation proposed by Obama, who you consider a “centrist”. He voted for the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. He voted for the Clinton Crime Bill.

So what is a “centrist” if not that?

Chetan Murthy@94 is misled by 20/200 hindsight. My belief that the supporters of the Iraq war knew it was all a pack of lies was formed then, not now. This was confirmed by the bland agreement that Bush should be impeached if he was lying. That shamelessness was a sly confession in itself. In addition, there were very large demonstrations. A moment’s googling shows a Huffington Post item from as recently as last year claiming the Feb. 3 2003 demo to be the largest anti-war protest ever. So, no, Democrats weren’t just weaklings afraid to face down the bloodthirsty mobs.

I’m not sure how Al Gore’s lack of a career can be attributed to anything but the way he rolled over to Bush over the election.

As to the back and forth about ACA being left wing, it’s not even clear to me that Bismarck was a left winger. George W. Bush also massively extended the welfare state by adding drug benefits to Medicare. Given the massive inequality of access to public discourse, where very extreme views (aka BS) held by vested interests can dominate because free speech is treasured by isegoria is hated, references to public opinion are often citations of the views of the elite stakeholders or the government or both.

The problem Orange Watch et al don’t want to deal with is that the US public is extremely conservative and nationalist, with a solid underpinning of very upfront racism, … Orange Watch et al want to pretend that the Dems are operating in a political environment like Europe’s, and they’re not. … Thus they get to claim that Obama is a “centrist” for introducing the best law he could given the electorate and the opposition. It’s much easier than accepting you can’t always have what you want, and doing the hard work of convincing the American public to go left.

Some people think (or at least this is the way it appears to me) that if only the Democratic Party (or possibly some hypothetical other party) presented to the American people a different kind of program, and campaigned for that program, then they could win the electoral support of the American people and implement it. (The kind of different program I am referring to here is the kind of program that might be described as more progressive, or more radical, or more leftist, at least to the degree of programs that are or have been successfully campaigned for and implemented by political parties in some other Western countries.) The people I’m referring to here take the view (or at least this is how it appears to me) that Democratic politicians are deliberately obstructing the adoption of this kind of program because they themselves do not prefer it to the more centrist/moderate Democratic programs of the past.

On the other hand, some people think (or at least this is the way it appears to me) that the Democratic party is constrained by the views of the American people to the kind of programs and policies they have advocated and implemented in the past, or to programs and policies which are not significantly more radical, or progressive, or leftist, and that if the Democratic party tried to move significantly further to the left the result would be decisive or even disastrous electoral defeat.

Maybe I have misunderstood, and nobody actually thinks these things, but nevertheless having defined both positions I contemplate them and I am not sure which has the greater element of truth in it.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that if the question is ‘Whose attitudes and opinions constrain the political positioning of the Democratic party: voters, or Democratic politicians?’ the answer is probably that both do.

More particularly, my best guess is that there is a majority of voters who are both further left than the current positioning of the Democratic party and also further left than most Democratic politicians suppose them to be, but probably only a little further left, by which I suppose I mean not as far left as I personally would like them to be.

That’s only a guess, though, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have it proved wrong. However, I do think it’s worth mentioning, even if only as a possibility, that if politicians position themselves differently from voters, it can be because they themselves have different preferences, but it can also be because of inaccuracy of their estimates of where the voters are. I can’t be sure it’s so, but it is at least possible that Democratic politicians fail to move to the left because they are genuinely and sincerely mistaken about how far left voters want them to move. If this is so, at least in part, there must be systemic/structural reasons for it.

It’s not Trumpism all over the world, it’s more Caesarism: “Let’s put somebody in charge who’s a big loud macho man who’ll shake things up– break some rules and some eggs/pointy heads, and punish our enemies, foreign and/or domestic. And then: glory!”

@J-D Some people think (or at least this is the way it appears to me) that if only the Democratic Party (or possibly some hypothetical other party) presented to the American people a different kind of program, and campaigned for that program, then they could win the electoral support of the American people and implement it.

You speak hypothetically, but in 2016 a generally unknown jewish elderly guy ran on a socialist platform and made a surprisingly strong showing against the preferred candidate of the Democratic Party establishment in the primary. In 2018 a completely unknown young woman ran on a socialist platform and defeated the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus just as talk was building in Washington that he was a potential future speaker of the House. Two years later, 40% of Americans declare they would rather live in a socialist than in a capitalist country in some opinion polls. These are developments that I would have thought inimaginable 15 or even 10 years ago that seem to indicate that when (not if) the Democratic Party presents to the American people a different kind of program, and campaigns for that program, then they win significantly more electoral support than conventional wisdom predicted only a decade ago (if anybody thought Sanders could win states in the primary against Clinton on the day he announced his candidacy, I would like to see the evidence).

On the other hand, I think it is wrong to simply oppose ordinary democratic voters and the establishment of the party. The current constituency of the Democratic Party contains young latina bartenders and elderly socialist jew, but also financial analysts and computer programmers in Manhattan and Cupertino. All these people have some common interests and common political views, but also steep divergence. It is true that the Democratic Party establishment is so much more responsive to the needs and preferences of the second group that equating the establishment views and their views is tempting, but it would be wrong to conclude that the second group doesn’t not exist at all.

> I can’t be sure it’s so, but it is at least possible that Democratic politicians fail to move to the left because they are genuinely and sincerely mistaken about how far left voters want them to move. If this is so, at least in part, there must be systemic/structural reasons for it.

Democratic representatives spend most of their time phoning donors and talking to lobbyists. They spend very little time with ordinary constituents.

And every study has found that congressmen and senators think their constituents are way more right wing than they actually are. Or as someone else put it – US politicians are very good at representing the beliefs of their donors.

Johnson is a liberal centrist with an egotistical self-publicising clownish streak. He is pretty weak on many things. Conservative members are going to make him PM because they think he is the most likely candidate to get there UK out of the EU. That’s all, nothing more.

I mean he’s a racist and very right wing on economic issues – but sure, believe that if it helps you sleep at night.

@ Cian – “I mean he’s a racist “ yes because obviously Nimco Ali is just deluded and needs racism mansplained to her. I mean, why listen to a brown-skinned woman who has worked with Boris Johnson on this issue when we can just listen to you. But if it helps you sleep at night…

Orange Watch @99 notes only 55% of the US electorate votes

As an outside observer of US political behaviour this squares with the apparent disconnect between how Americans claim that they would prefer income to be distributed and the actual distribution as outlined in this article (and the studies it references)

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/09/americans_have_no_idea_how_bad_inequality_is_new_harvard_business_school.html

To the extent that attitudes towards income distribution might serve as a proxy for one’s political inclinations, is it plausible to assume that the majority of the 45% of US citizen non-voters are to the left of the 55% who do? And if so, do the actions of the “centrist triangulators” to pull Democratic policy rightward actually harm the Dem “electability” about which they claim to be so concerned?

The only escape from the “Team Pepsi vs Team Coke” Hobson’s choice of eternal neoliberalism for the US public would appear to be a leftward shift within the Democratic Party, from where I’m sitting. As other posters have noted, however, it appears that the “captivity of the donors” where their leadership is concerned is preventing progress where this is concerned.

So it goes …

Orange Watch @39:
If you go to centrist echo chambers now, there is a strong tendency to equate support for Sanders as support for Trump, and generally to dismiss leftists as reactionaries wearing very thin masks. If Sanders were nominated, elected, and managed to institute any appreciable amount of socio-economic reform, it seems pretty clear that the neoliberal centrists would tearfully tear up their Democratic party memberships and bitterly complain they hadn’t left the party, the party left them. It’s unlikely they’d embrace the hard neoliberals in the GOP because those neoliberals are for the moment managing to ride their populist tiger successfully; I think it would be more likely to see the wealthier portions attempting to pull a Macron. Alternately, they might try push through new anti-democratic “reforms” to “save the party from itself”.

I think this is broadly correct, as can be seen by what’s happened in the UK since Corbyn won. You’d also see lots of articles in the more respectable press, MSNBC, etc about how the Democratic party was turning Stalinist, was anti-semitic, being controlled by Russia, etc. The degree to which that mattered would depend upon how successfully Sanders was able to democratize the party.

I agree that Sanders winning the nomination does seem unlikely – though I think if he does succeed it will be a surprise to most because of the type of campaign he’s running. They seem to be trying to pull off the same kind of strategy that AoC pulled off in New York – ignoring the wealthy minority that vote, and instead increasing turnout among those who don’t vote (most Democrat voters). If that strategy works it may not be picked up by polling.

Seeing Faustusnotes claim that Sanders is a centerist, but Kamala Harris is a radical, has been the most galaxy brained take on this whole thread.

The comparison of the ‘dirtbag left’ (*) to the RCP/LM/Spiked (+) crew is pretty funny though. I can’t wait for such future hot takes such as – crust punk anarchists are the same as ‘tankies’. Or libertarians are identical to Social Democrats.

(*) Not actually a real thing. See jokes, self-deprecation and people who do podcasts.
(+) Actually a real thing with leaders, membership lists, organization and a successful strategy of entryism including almost taking over the Economist Intelligence Unit. If I didn’t hate them so much I’d admire the bonkers ambition.

Sigh. I didn’t say that Bernie is a centrist and Harris a radical, I simply pointed out that Bernie is a war-mongering millionaire who votes with the Dems 98% of the time, and is not a socialist. I know it’s very uncool to criticize your Cool Uncle, but this guy is not a socialist. Why are you putting your faith for socialism in a millionaire johnny-come-lately who has never done serious policy work and has voted for almost every military adventure the US has ever done? And why do you think he is different from the rest of the dems when he votes with them almost all the time, and has never been in a position to act on his pronouncements?

Why won’t you engage with either a) the substance of the Obama-era policies you criticize or b) any criticism of Bernie’s voting record? I’ve raised it here in detail, describing specific votes he took that further US imperialist goals and/or domestic oppression of minority groups, and you simply won’t speak of them. Either Bernie is something special and different, in which case you can engage with his voting record as evidence for or against this; or he is broadly the same as the other dems, in which case your whole “centrist” critique of the rest of them falls apart. You avoid this by simply refusing to engage on the substance of Bernie’s past actions. Why?

Get back to me in two years about the dirtbag left. But before you get too hot under the collar about it, I’ll just point out that the term “dirtbag left” comes from them, not their critics – a simple fact that is stated in the introduction to the Spiked article. Let’s see where they are in two years, eh?

Orange Watch

French republicanism is broadly monocultural, while the UK falls into the multiculturalism more dominant in Anglophonic nations. That significantly impacts exactly how welcome ostentatious signs of diversity and deviations from imputed cultural norms are across the political spectrum.

My best guess is that the levels of hostility and negative reactions to burka-wearing are similar in the UK and in France. It is just a guess, but unless you can produce some evidence to the contrary you are also guessing and there’s no reason to prefer your guess to mine.

More generally, multiculturalism is the law in exactly one country, Canada (which is Anglophone, but also anyway at least partly Francophone), and it is declared government policy but not actually law in exactly one other country, Australia (also Anglophone). It is neither law not declared government policy in any other country, Anglophone or not, and specifically not in the UK, no matter how Anglophone.

(Why ‘Anglophonic’? Isn’t ‘Anglophone’ an adequate word?)

Orange Watch

I am also under the impression that Z is French, and if Faustusnotes thinks Z is American I can’t guess why.

I wish I had only been referring to candidates in elections. The Democratic party had a soft coup following the 1972 election you reference; from then until 2016 the party leadership was under the control of explicit triangulators who openly advocated moving right to avoid another such result.

The point I was making can be applied just as readily to a broader context than one restricted to candidates in elections, as follows.

Not every political party aspires to control of or participation in government, but some do (and the Democrats in the US are certainly one such). A political party in a system where its access to control of or participation in government depends on election results has to make strategic choices about what priority to give to appealing to different groups of voters–the same choices I mentioned in my earlier comment. For the Democratic Party in the US, one of the choices that probably needs to be considered is the one I mentioned in my earlier comment, the choice of whether to give higher priority to attracting support from people who seldom vote but who generally vote Democratic when they do, or to attracting support from people who usually vote but who vote Democratic sometimes and Republican sometimes. It’s not immediately obvious which of those is more strategically advantageous, so it’s not immediately obvious that if the party decides to focus more on swing voters it is making a poor choice, still less a pathological one, even though it’s obvious why it’s likely to be a disappointing choice from the point of view of many of the people who nearly always vote and nearly always vote Democrat.

It’s not certain that the reason the Democrats did so badly in 1972 was that their platform was too progressive/radical/left-wing, but that proposition is also not obviously implausible. Since the 1972 election, the Democrats have won five out of eleven Presidential elections. It’s possible that if they’d steered further to the left over that period they would have done better, but it’s also possible that they would have done worse.

J-D The 1972 Democratic platform has been described, more than once, as the most progressive/left-wing on which the party has ever run, and the results of that year’s Presidential election are not encouraging from that point of view

I would definitely say I think that things have changed a lot in two generations. Things appear to me to have changed a lot in much less time than that. (Who would have thought in 2002 or even 2012 that socialism would be a thing in the US ? Who would have thought in 1999 that Trump would be president 20 years later, when he was getting 7% in opinion polls and starring in Sex and the City? Certainly not me and I don’t remember anybody else predicting it at the time. )

It’s possible that the Democrats would have done better in 2016 if the platform had been more like Bernie Sanders’s, or more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, but it’s also possible that the party would have done worse.

Certainly you are right. I would mention two things though.

1) I’m not claiming that the Democrats would have done better in 2016 if the platform had been more like Bernie Sanders’s, or more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (I do believe it, but I don’t trust my judgment, because I’m sympathetic to their ideas). I’m claiming that people using these platforms have done better (much better!) than what was expected of them at the time (including by me, who is sympathetic to their ideas). So I’m applying some sort of Bayesian reasoning I guess: in recent years, I have several times underestimated the potential of platforms well to the left of what appeared to be the political center of gravity of the country in question (not only in the US, but also the UK and France). It seems to me that the mainstream press as well as sympathetic observers and analysts (for instance our hosts here at CT) by and large also underestimated that potential . Based on that experience, I think at least some caution is warranted in my (and perhaps others) future appreciations of the potential success of these platforms.

2) On a very different note, the Democratic party in the US is a very big tent party, and as I mentioned several times here and elsewhere, it seeks to represent constituencies which do stands together on several issues, but also stand apart or even in bitter oppositions on others. This means that analyzing the electoral success of that party is not a simple matter, because the same absolute electoral score can be achieved with very different combinations of electoral successes among the various constituencies. In that context, some people (including myself) will think that who voted for Democratic candidate X and why can be at least as important as if X won, and to be clear, this is not because I think neoliberalism is worse than trumpism, but because I think that trumpism is a reaction to neoliberalism, so that if we want to get rid of the latter (and not just of Trump), the power of the former must significantly decreased.

@117 Dipper – Right, there’s nothing racist about writing “regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”, or referring to “the tribal warriors… [who] all break out in watermelon smiles”.

In assessing the political appeal of the 1972 Democratic Party platform, it is useful to remember that it came after the political turmoil of the Sixties, up to and including major riots, open calls for revolution on campuses and campaigns by would-be guerrillas. It is not clear that the platform was very left in regards to the times. Nor is it clear that the turn to the right suggested by the re-election of Nixon isn’t more demoralization after defeat, compounded by divisions in popular leadership. Easy generalizations that this was the maximum left of the people are strikingly certain.

Faustusnotes:
I wasn’t lecturing people on the internet for having opinions on America, I was observing that your beliefs about what Americans believe are wrong. I’d be more polite about if you weren’t so patronizing with it.

I’m a British ex-pat who happens to live in the US. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to defer to your expertise about the US healthcare system. I wouldn’t describe myself as an expert, but I do know people who work in healthcare and insurance admin (at a reasonably senior level), have clients in various parts of the system (software) and also know a couple of healthcare policy academics. So I’m not entirely ignorant either. I also have passing familiarity with a few of the European systems, FWIW.

I know why Obama promised that nobody would lose their plan – because he lost control of the debate and people were scared they were going to get something worse. They weren’t wrong about that incidentally – the ACA plans are typically worse.

And as for not being conservative and nationalist

What has this got to do with people’s support for social welfare style policies?

Bernie Sanders would fit very comfortably in the soft left of the Labour party. He’s to the right of Corbyn, sure, but so is most of the party. Claiming that he would be a member of a conservative party in Europe just makes you look like an idiot frankly.

There has been a fairly rigorous debate about reparations on the left in the US for a while now. A lot of people on the left think it’s impractical, or bad strategy. Generally the people most opposed to it are the ones with the most experience in organizing, which I think is interesting. I’ve certainly not seen a very convincing plan for how it could be implemented.

If you think he’s a socialist, how do you think normal Americans view single payer?

In the socialist hell hole of South Carolina they mostly seem to think it’s a good idea.

How is it that the American left are so banboozled by this bloodstained hack

Given that the American left has quite robustly criticised Bernie on a bunch of things, has pushed him to the left on certain issues and has mostly stated that they think he is the best option out of all the alternatives.

Bloodstained is funny though. What do you call Hillary Clinton, or Obama then? What about all the Senators and representatives in the Democratic party who are constantly pushing for war, bombing and destruction. There is a lot to criticize Bernie for on foreign policy, but compared to most of his party, or Elizabeth Warren, he’s pretty good. Which is a sad reflection on US politics, but nonetheless only a hack would single out Bernie for this.

who has spent his career hiding from any legislative responsibility while voting for every centrist policy the dem leadership has put forward

Neither of these things are true. They sure are purty words though.

Does this imperialist running dog even oppose the death penalty?

Yes… you know it’s not hard to find this stuff out…

Is it a surprise that this millionaire Chicago u alumni took until he was under pressure from the left in a primary to remember a basic tenet of socialism?

LOL He’s a millionare because he wrote a best selling book. But thank you for repeating this common right wing talking point. Remember kids – you can only be commited to social change if you wear sack cloths and live under a bridge.

Think about that when you wonder why you can’t change anything in your country.

Right, nothing whatsoever to do with a corrupt and undemocratic political system. It’s all Bernie’s fault.

And instead of being taken to the cleaners by this show pony, vote for someone competent and left, and use her presidency to drag the country left

Hmm. You do know that Berie’s failed presidential run helped drag the country left, right? That all around the country alumni of his campaign are fighting at a local level to get left wing candidates elected. That in the house we have several left wing reps whose campaigns were built on the remains of the Sanders run. That there is an organized left, that didn’t exist before that run, which is trying to change things. That the campaign this time round has been sending resources to union campaigns and strikes all over the country. That there is a fight in the Democratic party between the new left (people like the very wonderful AoC), and the old guard (the not so wonderful Pelosi) – and that Bernie Sanders is a major player in that.

Sigh. I didn’t say that Bernie is a centrist and Harris a radical, I simply pointed out that Bernie is a war-mongering millionaire who votes with the Dems 98% of the time, and is not a socialist. I know it’s very uncool to criticize your Cool Uncle, but this guy is not a socialist.

Never said he was a socialist – if you’re trying to score cool points by pointing out he’s a social democrat, um okay, that’s not exactly a secret. But to then argue that Kamala Harris is more radical than, well, anyone running is hillarious. Of all the people to pick.

Fairly sure that you can be rich and a socialist, unless we’re kicking Engels out of the socialist club, so thanks for that. Not my cool uncle – simply the candidate that I think is the best out of the options available. You know – the pragmatic choice.

Legit question. What war has Bernie pushed for? Not voted for, pushed for. Because war-mongering suggests he’s actively trying to start wars, which I don’t think is true.

Why are you putting your faith for socialism in a millionaire johnny-come-lately

I’m putting my faith for socialism in people like jane mcalevey thanks for asking.

And why do you think he is different from the rest of the dems when he votes with them almost all the time, and has never been in a position to act on his pronouncements?

Dude disagree with him all you want, but it’s stupid to say he’s not different. If nothing else he’s not beholden to lobbyists and donors. Your criticisms might have more bite if you actually engaged with the person, rather than the strawman.

Why won’t you engage with… the substance of the Obama-era policies you criticize

What are you talking about? I’ve done it many times. To return to healthcare, Obamacare failed to control costs – and that has nothing to do with the Republicans. He sacrified homeowners to save banks. His foreign policy was awful.

@131
”On a very different note, the Democratic party in the US is a very big tent party, and as I mentioned several times here and elsewhere, it seeks to represent constituencies which do stands together on several issues, but also stand apart or even in bitter oppositions on others”.

and if I may ”translate” the above?

”On the least different note (related to the headline of this OP) – the Democratic party in the US is a few different parties, and as I mentioned several times here and elsewhere, the only way to represent constituencies which do stands together on several issues, but also stand apart or even in bitter oppositions on others” –
IS –
to put all the constituencies which do stand together on several issues – together in one Party –
and constituencies which do stand together on several other issues into another Party in order to avoid that in just one Party constituencies stand apart ”in bitter oppositions on others”.

Right?