Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

pretty sure that was randy meisner who threw that sucker-punch

as Perrin put it, "Oliver North: Feminist."

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/10/hillary-clinton-stalwart-friend-of-worlds-worst-despots-attacks-sanders-latin-american-activism/

At this rate, it shouldn't be more than a month or so until we get to hear Trump explain that his rebranded swastika isn't a swastika at all but a 'loyalty trademark' or something.

https://twitter.com/labuzamovies/status/707777046429065216

Kevin Williamson on Paglia:

She is also, unhappily, exactly right about Ted Cruz’s stage presence:

I mean that she is correct about the impression Cruz sometimes gives, not about the substance. The substance of Ted Cruz is his constitutional scholarship, his quick mind, and his deep patriotism. The substance of Donald Trump is some sort of howling psychosis playing itself out in public for ends that Sigmund Freud himself would hesitate to consider. The problem is that voters are not reliably all that good at distinguishing impressions from substance. Camille Paglia is a scholar of surfaces. Let us hope that the electorate is not entirely out of its depth.

I found it improbable if not impossible that Trump could survive his klutz-o-rama cascade of foot-in-mouth flubs, from carelessly categorizing Mexican immigrants as rapists to hallucinating about “thousands’ of Muslims cheering the fall of the twin towers from the mean streets of New Jersey.

whoops!

pretty sure paglia dresses up in a nazi uniform to get off

so what?

#notallnazifetishists

paglia is dumb, and she always has been.

Lol mordy

Paglia is so genuinely stupid it's just dazzling

In high school, I would say I was a moderate to liberal Democrat. It was an article of faith among my set that US intervention in Central America was not only strategically unwise but also morally unsound. Still reeling from Vietnam, nauseated over the barbarity of the Contras and the Salvadoran death squads, it didn’t take much in the way of liberal sympathy or imagination to think that anything the US did in Nicaragua, Guatemala, or El Salvador—short of getting the hell out of there—would be a disaster for the peoples of those nations.

Again, this was a position that was widely shared among mainstream liberals and Democrats. I just looked up the 1982 House vote on the Boland Amendment, which prohibited all military aid to the Contras, and it was 243 in favor, 171 against. Which means that some portion of moderates also adopted this anti-interventionist position.

The only reason Clinton and her supporters on Twitter can so reflexively attack Sanders over this issue—not his support for the Sandinistas or Castro, but his opposition to US intervention—is that, thanks to two decades of liberal support for regime change and humanitarian intervention, the whole discourse of liberal anti-interventionism has practically disappeared from the scene. Today, the only solid and reliable anti-interventionists you can find are either left-wing anti-imperialists, paleo- or other brands of conservative at outlets like The American Conservative, or an ever narrowing circle of IR realists like Steve Walt.

http://coreyrobin.com/2016/03/10/liberalism-and-the-millennials/

Paglia is great, always a riot.

so corey robin's pt is that this version of liberalism cannot be reasoned/negotiated with, but in the past it could. of course in the past i'm pretty sure the hard left was making similar arguments. honestly i've gotten to the pt where i think reformers and revolutionaries are not allies and the latter are trying to destroy anything good and should probably be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible. nb i don't think bernie is a revolutionary or on the hard left. he's a reformer lib.

When they think liberal, they think of the Clintons and their allies, who are not only terrible on the issue of US power around the world, but also terrible on the question of economic justice and equality at home. They have no memory of a generation of left liberals who fought firmly for labor unions, who pushed hard for universal health care, public housing, and the like. They have no memory of a young Arthur Schlesinger rejecting Communism but nevertheless affirming that “class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination.”

That Schlesinger sentence confused me. He was a liberal who supported anti-communist activity, covert or overt.

he's an idiot. i mean not just based on this, but also yes based on this.

his whole shtick is academic leftist. i guess he's a little more left-wing than freddie deboer but i find the 2 indistinguishable in smug tone + dogmatic self-righteousness

so corey robin's pt is that this version of liberalism cannot be reasoned/negotiated with, but in the past it could

That's not how I read the last paragraph.

The gulf today between liberalism and the left is not of the millennials’ or even of the left’s making; it’s the product of a liberalism that has been moving right for decades and that, whatever feints to the left it has been making more recently, still has some way to go before there can be a useful and productive dialogue of difference.

But Robin, whom I hasten to say I like, wrote a confusing post. He doesn't immediately establish that he's going to distinguish between liberalism and leftism; it's as if last night's debate point about Cuba served as inspiration without working as an orgazational pivot point.

the problem is that the 2 ideas, at least in the way he's defining them, are incompatible so this idea that there was ever a time when they could have worked together but didn't (unlike today where they can't) is just a fantasy. this is how i understand his argument, but i could be wrong. the fact is that from the POV of the left, who want a complete revolution, anything short of that is always going to look like "moving right." there's a context to american liberalism as well - it's not that it's full of bad actors who disingenuously moved liberalism to the right. it's that if you're a reformer you have to be pragmatic esp if you're trying to win back a country after reagan. (important to keep in mind that the russian right-wing never got their shit together in the first place.) ignoring that is just more radical piety imo.

there's been more ferment on the right about what constitutes conservatism than on the left/liberal side, which spent almost 20 years reeling from Reagan.

and REAGAN is a synecdoche for fifteen years worth of inevitable Democratic collapse, in part because the war and inflation and civil rights destroyed whatever semblance of a coalition existed

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/10/why-the-republican-establishment-is-actually-winning/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_wb-gopestablishment-945a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

If this is a revolution, though, it's a funny kind of one. That's because the new boss sure does look a lot like the old boss, at least when it comes to what the Republican establishment cares about the most. And that's cutting taxes for the rich. Indeed, the two "anti-establishment" candidates are even more orthodox on this than the establishment ones. You can see that in the chart below. Trump and Cruz would both, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, cut taxes for the top 1 percent by twice as much as Rubio would. And though they all would give the top 0.1 percent a $1 million-plus tax cut, it's the putative outsiders who would give the plutocrats the most.

Populism ain't what it used to be.

the POV of the left, who want a complete revolution

the Dems really rolled over for the last revolution in 1981-85; shouldn't be that tough

by revolution i really mean a complete restructuring of the system. the nationalism of all industry might be a good example of a revolution. a coup in the WH and the institution of a new party (fascist, military, communist, etc), would constitute one. reagan worked within the system. it's only a revolution by rhetorical standards.

his whole shtick is academic leftist. i guess he's a little more left-wing than freddie deboer but i find the 2 indistinguishable in smug tone + dogmatic self-righteousness

― Mordy, Thursday, March 10, 2016 6:52 PM (14 minutes ago)

i find corey useful and smart most of the time, tho arthur schlesinger (who ironically enough was good pals with kissinger) was probably not a wise name to drop in this context. can't imagine classing him w/ FDB who is a complete worthless idiot and full-time troll.

and that's really the issue i think - if you aren't willing to accept change within the system, even change that might go in the wrong direction, you don't have much in common who believes system reform is the only answer bc the alternative is worse. you have to be willing to accept that things might not turn out the way you want them for democracy to work. and the alternative, where you can guarantee that it turns out the way you want, doesn't look pretty. xp

99% of the time i encounter corey, and i have to admit it's mostly on crooked timber, i find him intolerably smug as he lays out his radical 101 ideas. i don't even know what his field of study is.

After following Shakey's link I wanted to apologize for goofing around. Jesus, scary.

Then on actually reading the Paglia thing I saw this:

Although the rampant Hitler and Mussolini analogies to Trump are wildly exaggerated - he has no organized fascist brigades at his beck and call...

Key word "organized."

I read his 2012 book on conservatism; it was like a smart but attenuated college thesis.

what pct of the American populace, even the Left whatever that is, want nationalization of industry or deem it remotely possible in this society? You're talking about well less than a million, most of whom don't ever leave the amen chorus.

i agree. they are marginalized and on the fringe. america was horrified watching the communist experiment and only a pocket of ppl in the academy really believe this is a going concern.

Schlesinger is for me the ne plus ultra of post-war establishment lib: definitive FDR and Jackson biographer, White House sycophant, Center for American Progress, loses his meal ticket, amazed by Nixon election, spends seventies in an alcoholic funk, horrified by Reagan despite voting for him, becomes Nixon's neighbor in Manhattan long enough to note in his diary that the old man would desultorily bounce a rubber ball against the wall with his grandson, parties with Mick Jagger.

I read his 2012 book on conservatism; it was like a smart but attenuated college thesis.

i haven't read it ("the reactionary mind" right?) mostly bc every time i've seen it it seems like what i expect from him - partisan politicking under the guise of scholarship

i did quit reading him for a while after his incredibly dense attack on spielberg's lincoln (which got reposted a million places w/ the annoying implication that it was the "correct" left stance to take on the movie)

Trumpling in clip posted above arrested and charged: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-mcgraw-arrest-north-carolina-trump-protester-punched

idk who corey robin is but why are we having the "revolution is ruinous" conversation about whether or not america should have a mainstream political party willing to object to things like cia gun-running for right-wing dictators?

Er not arrested? Idk how u get charged w out being arrested

Xp

ticket to appear

i'm not sure we should conflate promoting the Sandinistas w/ objecting to cia gun-running for the contras. neither are ideal. nb i'm not a debayle fan or anything like that.

i don't think there's really anything wrong w/ bernie liking castro + ortega and i don't think hillary's attack on that pt is a great one (obv considering her own record). but inevitably if we're going to talk about socialist revolutions we're going to be talking about revolutions, right? it might be that in the case of nicaragua and/or cuba a revolution was necessary. idk i have complicated feelings on this pt i should probably work out elsewhere b4 discussing it here.

but like dlh, this is obv germane. hillary's comment in full was:

"I think in that same interview he praised what he called the revolution of values in Cuba and talked about how people were working for the common good, not for themselves. I just couldn't disagree more," Clinton said. "You know, if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere."

the breitbart organization has acted like a house organ of the trump campaign

but after trump's campaign manager threw a breitbart reporter to the ground...

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/03/10/3758686/trump-campaign-accuses-assaulted-reporter-of-lying/

If thats in the context of castro, seems legit to me.

Of course hillary has historically been fine w other regimes that do that shit so there's an element of hypocrisy there.

Xp

neither are ideal.

That seems unnecessarily non-committal, as if to say it was a coin toss.

The Sandinistas may have been somewhat corrupt and not above jailing opponents or pocketing bribes, but they were a big improvement over the deeply corrupt Somoza regime (which we backed) and were not murderous mercenary thugs like the contras (who Reagan illegally backed by, among other things, selling arms to Iran).

if bernie has the dem left sewn up then at least tactically she has to get the moderates excited, and nobody likes castro! and i don't doubt that her anticommunism is sincere. i hate to speak in horserace language but it's def something sanders should have been preparted for.

arguing about whether it's ok to have been against reagan's central american fuckery in the 80s seems nuts to me in 2016, truly ugly.

The Sandinista government implemented a policy of forced conscription for all men aged 17 to 35. The Sandinistas used this army to help guerrilla groups throughout Central America. Ortega pursued a policy of centrally planned economy and nationalization. Ortega took a very hard line against opposition to his policies: On 21 February 1981, the Sandinista army killed 7 Miskito Indians and wounded 17.[20] Forced displacement has also been documented to have occurred with the native population: 10,000 individuals had been moved by 1982.[20] Thousands of Indians took refuge in Honduras and 14,000 were imprisoned in Nicaragua. Anthropologist Gilles Bataillon termed this "politics of ethnocide" in Nicaragua.[21]

again, no one's hands are clean but i think we should be clear-sighted about what they did or didn't do

The tactics used by the Sandinista government to fight the Contras have been criticized by some historians for their suppression of civil rights. On 15 March 1982, the Junta declared a state of siege, which allowed it to close independent radio stations, suspend the right of association and limit the freedom of trade unions. Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights condemned Sandinista human rights violations, accusing them of killing and disappearing thousands in the first few years of the war.

maybe necessarily. i'm sticking tho w/ "neither are ideal."

i read The Reactionary Mind, it's just a collection of book reviews from like LRB and NYRB and the Atlantic, not really even a proper book or a systematic investigation of ideas. my grad student polisci friend says his academic work is good. CR is obviously kind of a blowhard self-styled public intellectual but it was well-written, but heavy on biographical detail and character driven kinda pot-shots. my problem with it was Corey Robin doesn't seem get what's appealing about conservatism to conservatives and kinda just says the rich and powerful are motivated by fear of having their power sucked up from under them by the masses. which doesn't really explain why so many of the poor and powerless masses are conservatives. also there was a blog post of his recently where he talked about reading Ricardo with his graduate class, and it was so obvious he had never properly thought about classical economics before because he totally bungled it (even admitted so much) and it's like, dude, you're supposed to be the leftist who actually reads conservatives? classical/free-market economics is the most powerful conservative intellectual tradition, and like he didn't even seem to understand simplest intro shit so now i don't trust him at all

is there a good intro to ricardo text out there? not that i need to add to my reading list but i'll ask