Democrats’ Georgia Hopes Rest on Jon Ossoff, 33. How Did He Get Here? He’s rich. That’s it. No need to read the piece, that’s all it is. Yes, he has other attributes, but his main qualification is that he is from the leisure class. You knew that before you read the piece. This is not a huge ideological point. George W. Bush was from a wealthy and well-connected family. He had other attributes, but without the financial and social capital, he would have gone nowhere in life probably judging by his dissolute middle period.
It doesn’t really matter if you are a partisan. Ossoff will vote with the Democrats. That’s the reason to vote for him if you are a Democrat, and against him, if you are a Republican. For many years Nancy Pelosi has been one of the wealthiest members of Congress (#3 in 2018), and she’s led the Democrats without any problem.
The Democratic party is the party of the economic left. The base and the members of Congress are to the left of the average Democrat. But, as David Shor pointed out, the Democratic leadership and base are much further left in relation to the average Democrat on cultural issues. The Democrats have gotten some serious policies predicated on their economic liberalism (e.g., ACA). But, on the whole, that is small-ball in comparison to other left parties the world over.
But on cultural topics things are different. Right now some stupid person is denigrating the classics as white male and worthless, etc. The usual. I still see academics use the term “Latinx” in places like The New York Times even though it’s ridiculous and opposed by the people who it purports to describe. Through the capture of media, academia, and in alliance with the corporate and governmental bureaucracy, the left is rearranging and modifying our language and categories. To be frank, I feel they are engaging in an inverted rectification of the names; attempting to make reality conform to names.
A left materialist critique of this pattern is that this is neoliberal co-option of the class struggle and transmutation of it into something that capital can control and leverage. It’s idealism. The people stay poor, but they are given the opium of the ideals of antiracism. I have right-libertarian friends who agree in some ways with this critique, but they look positively on it. They are more fearful of distortion of the market process that materialist leftists would engage in, rather than ransacking our cultural categories.
So what would you pick: Canadian single-payer healthcare with Shakespeare or no Shakespeare without single-payer? It’s a stupid contrast but it cuts to the heart of the issue. I think there are people on the right who are so well-off due to their position within capital that the rise of cultural barbarism does not concern them. They are in their gated community. What would you prefer, that they come for your tax bracket or your soul? Perhaps it depends on what bracket you’re in and if you can buy a soul.
So what would you pick: Canadian single-payer healthcare with Shakespeare or no Shakespeare without single-player? It’s a stupid contrast but it cuts to the heart of the issue. I think there are people on the right who are so well-off due to their position within capital that the rise of cultural barbarism does not concern them. They are in their gated community. What would you prefer, that they come for your tax bracket or your soul? Perhaps it depends on what bracket you’re in and if you can buy a soul.
Questions for your next reader survey!
I’ll start the ball rolling.
a) Shakespeare and Canadian single payer
b) soul vs. tax bracket — my tax bracket. My wife and I are fairly high up in the tax rates (not 1% but I am pretty sure we can see it from here) … My ideal would be something along the lines suggested by Picketty, Saez and Zucman, who have argued that negative incentives don’t really start to kick in at top marginal tax rates below 80%, or perhaps back to the tax schedule that was in place until JFK’s administration (MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!). If effectively enforced, it would at least discourage the rich from hoovering up all productivity gains into their own pockets.
Inverted? I just watched “Tenet” (twice) and it’s about inverted objects and people who can travel backward in time. What a nice escape it was to be away from this mess we’re in.
What would it be like if people from the future could invert themselves to the time right before COVID struck and warn us? Or just go back to the 90s and enjoy those years over and over again?
Marxism? No it is Idiocracy:
“In Virginia teenager N-word story, where are the adults?” by Becket Adams on December 28, 2020
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/in-virginia-teenager-n-word-story-where-are-the-adults
The New York Times published a grotesque report this weekend cheering an 18-year-old named Jimmy Galligan, a biracial Virginia resident who targeted a white girl for destruction after he obtained a years-old video of her using the N-word.
The white girl, Mimi Groves, used the racial slur jokingly in 2016 in reference to having just acquired her learner’s permit. Groves, who was a freshman in high school at the time, said specifically in a private Snapchat video to a friend, “I can drive, @#$%&*!.”
Three years later, Galligan obtained a copy of the video and bided his time. “He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right,” reports the New York Times.
And by “when the time was right,” the paper of record means the aggrieved 18-year-old waited until Groves, who spent her years in high school competing successfully as a cheerleader, had been accepted into the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as a member of its prestigious cheer team.
The New York Times adds, “Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer.”
The University of Tennessee bowed to the mob, first by removing Groves from its cheer squad and then later by pressuring her into rescinding her application for enrollment.
1 Single payer with Shakespear
2 Tax bracket
Unfortunately we all know that we will end up having neither single payer nor Shakespeare.
I dislike both cultural Marxism and economic Marxism. Are you saying it’s impossible to banish both? If so, what’s the key societal characteristic that requires some form of Marxism to prevail? Democracy?
I feel sorry for Nikole Hannah-Jones. Condemned to a lifetime of despising her father because of his patriotism.
I moved from a country where they took half my pay check and used that half for killing Shakespeare and destroying my soul to one where they take a quarter of it and mostly leave my soul alone. My viewpoint is that yielding financial power to the government is likely to lead to yielding cultural power to the government – financially strong individuals at least have a fighting chance against a financially weak ruler.
financially strong individuals at least have a fighting chance against a financially weak ruler.
individuals have no defense against collectives. so we need to figure out some way to organize social units that can fight back.
you are presenting a libertarian argument i used to find persuasive but the results of the experiment are in, and it’s not good.
I don’t really buy that this is actually a dilemma we face, or will face in the near future. Most of the supposed tension between the woke left and the economic left seems manufactured or overhyped. Wokeness in fact correlates strongly with anti-capitalism. The wokest members of congress are the socialist ones, and the wokest activists (e.g., Ibram Kendi) are anti-capitalist. The same rich people, corporations, and ‘Davos elites’ pushing ‘woke capital’ are also begging governments to regulate and tax them more. Anti-woke leftists like Matt Taibbi meanwhile get most of their audience from people on the right who like reading a self-identified leftist criticize other leftists. And the moderate Democrats most skeptical of wokeness, I would bet, are also the least supportive of single payer healthcare etc. and thus least amenable to being bought.
In short, politics right now isn’t really structured to make such a bargain possible for the right, much less so than many people think anyhow. But then being an anti-woke classical liberal, I guess that’s also exactly what I’d want people on the right to believe anyway.
> In short, politics right now isn’t really structured to make such a bargain possible for the right, much less so than many people think anyhow.
I don’t think bargaining would have any payoff; the kinds of people that are coming to dominate the left/Democrats can’t be reasoned or bargained with. They’re zealots.
But *outflanking* them with redistributionist policies might well have an electoral payoff. Personally I think they could even be valuable on their own merits if done the right way; I haven’t done that much research as I think it matters less in the long run than containing and crushing wokeism, but industrial policy, public works, and social programs with good free-rider controls and paternalism (for example, Singapore’s mandated saving for healthcare) are intuitively appealing to me.
Regardless libertarianism is insane. There’s nothing good about leaving an overdose epidemic raging in your country.
I agree with @ragak regarding libertarianism. It is very unfortunate how much influence it has on the current American conservative movement. Businesses are the biggest drivers of social liberalism yet the Republicans keep on giving them tax cuts. It as if the sheep is giving the wolf a gun to kill it.
Republicans also need to face the reality that blacks constitute 13% of the US population and completely ignoring them in a country where white conservatives are in terminal decline is a completely retarded position. The biggest enemy of Republicans are white liberals who fortunately also tend to be the wealthiest. Tax the hell out of white liberals and distribute it to blacks and buy their support.
Black men in particular tend to be socially conservative on all issues other than race. Concede to some of their demands on racial issues. White racists are declining and regardless, they are not going to start voting for Democrats.
“Canadian single-payer healthcare with Shakespeare or no Shakespeare without single-payer”
If that was a real choice (which I don’t think it is for the reasons stated by Mark S. above), I would pick no Shakespeare without single-payer without a moment’s hesitation. Genuine economic freedom inevitably leads to social freedom as the free market erodes social controls. Genuine social freedom, without economic freedom, is an impossibility. As the saying goes, try exercising your freedom of the press or your freedom of speech when you aren’t allowed to own a pencil or a soap box.
I find some of the reasoning upthread a bit questionable where high taxing government is equated with governments that is fiscally strong against the people.
It seems a bit like saying “I don’t want to buy products from business, because it will make them fiscally strong and then they will be able to resist giving me what I want, rather than what they think I will need”.
That is, you will get to the state of them not offering what you want more surely if they are entirely dependent on revenue sources from other people with different interests who have definite ideas about what you deserve and need.
In the same way, if governments become dependent on revenue from plutocrats and borrowing on the markets, they will be emancipated from the taxpayer and they will not be terribly interested in what the taxpayer wants… They will very definitely offer you what Davos Man thinks you need (and you’ll be liable for the interest payments on it).
Governments that are dependent on high tax revenue are more dependent on people – this is the whole historical experience of how higher tax revenues across Europe co-evolved with higher representation in government…
It might make sense to try and keep governments fiscally weak, if you are prepared to take the downsides of a fiscally weak government (which is that they’re weak against outside states and against actors within the state; if you have a Qing sized level of tax, it’s a problem if your Qing scale government is facing a foreign government with 19th century British levels of fiscal capacity). But keeping them weak through low taxation revenues specifically, without much of a check on other sources of revenue, seems like not the good way to do it.
Many libertarians naively believe that markets are natural, logical and that they will easily triumph in every society as long as you get rid of the repressive government. But markets and economic success obviously depend on formal institutions and culture, as noted by smarter libertarian/neoliberal theorists such as Hayek. If you destroy institutions and culture, capitalism and the economy will also gradually collapse (well explained by Schumpeter).
Liberal capitalism is rooted in a specific Western tradition; leftist animosity, mass inflow of immigrants that are hard to assimilate and libertarian/neoliberal indifference to culture are a recipe for destruction. Market economy might be the optimal economic solution but it is not eternal and doesn’t appear overnight. Numerous times it collapsed and was replaced with decades of socialism, fascism or kleptocracy. It seems we are slowly going in that direction again.
@Harry Jecs, what’s your opinion on the George Nkencho incident?
Reminds me of the argument that a state reliant on specialist infantry like the English,Swiss, Greeks and Romans needed a solid middle class to provide soldiers and so created conditions to keep the middle class viable. When the government needs you they treat you well, when they can get by with just minority support and/or have an independent source of wealth like oil or gold mines, they won’t care if you live or die. Taxes buy you a seat at the table.
What is wrong with latinx? Unnecessary yes, but seemingly harmless. It is especially fun if you pronounce it latinks.