re: #5 Renaissance_Man

I will CL your post because it’s very true. With the current information environment, Republican narratives do not have to be based in reality. Americans will believe what they’re told to.

I’m not a Bernie fan. Americans will find an excuse to not vote for him, and they’ll find it by repeating random words that they hear and read. But that’s not why I’m not a fan - the same will be true of someone completely qualified like Elizabeth Warren, just like it was for another similarly qualified woman.

The thing I didn’t think to say was that people should consider that whatever is leveled at Bernie will be leveled at Elizabeth Warren, the minute they feel Bernie is neutralized.

Because that’s how this whole disavowal thing works, for it is just another bad faith game rooted in the idea there’s a “center” that stays still and is somehow the ideal. Media goobers are invested in this because they’re pseudointellectuals that have to sell the idea there’s a perfect balance of blame and unreason between both parties, and that means constantly finding fault with the left and excusing the right…because since Nixon the right has fucked up over and over and will not brook being called out, while the left is deeply attentive to criticism and will try, milquetoastian, to explain itself and find comity. The far right is even more heavily invested, because they’re trying to escalate the already-present concept that all leftism is inherently dangerous and axiomatically wrong, which justifies their transformation into compulsively masturbating gibbons waving switchblades.

The left wing of US politics actually believes in reasonableness, but the culture underpinning “what is reasonable” is going bugshit crazy because the culture has been deliberately altered over decades by evil shitheels: the cynical ones that want more power and cash, and the zealot ones who want compliance and thus want to destroy the spectrum of opinion. The belief in reasonableness has stayed constant while “what is reasonable” has becomes unreasonable: we watched this play out with Obama. Take a step towards them, they take a step back and demand you step towards them as a sign of good faith.

So here’s the fucked up thing that I think about this that comes from personal experience: there is a strong incentive to take that step as well, to be “reasonable.” It’s not the people are being tricked, over and over, it’s that it feels like the right thing to do, or at least the expedient alternate to standing still indefinitely. That’s how abusive relationships continue: by leveraging the love, good faith, and fair dealing of the abused party, over and over, until they’re used up…because love, good faith, and fair play held genuinely valuable can’t countenance that degree of bad faith, that never reciprocating is form of “winning.”

This argument of “hey liberals, if you do X, the reasonable people will sign on” should be treated with tremendous suspicion. Especially since a bunch of the people pushing the “Bernie is bad optics, ooohhh pinko” thing are people who have been wrong about shit for three decades and pride themselves on being the intellectual core of a movement of wanking, knife-waving arboreal apes while not noticing that they were surrounded by wanking, knife-waving arboreal apes.

Okay, Bernie grates. His proxies are jerky, his followers are over the top. But he is not in any way equivalent to the consistent, organized perfidy of the right. I have more intense leftist friends in real life than on the board, and I find the to be largely grounded in their assessment of the world as it is, though they have strong opinions about what ought to be, and I can’t disagree with them entirely. I’m forty, pretty damn wealthy, and I’ve never seen the “American Dream” status quo that people are promising a return to. For all that I have, I’m could be destroyed by one bad accident, and I’m doing better than most Americans. Most people I know are making it but overworked and unhappy, or desperate because the very idea of a job has been transformed even as the cultural understanding of what a job means hasn’t. So my experience with their characterization here as…caricature based off a sampling of performers on Twitter…is a disconnect.

That is set in contrast to the consistent unrealities of the Trump supporters I know on and offline (whether or not I generally like them, that their concerns and fears are rooted in unreality is consistent).

These are not the same thing. People angry with specific, describable systems are not comparable to people with vague, drifting anger that simply finds targets. And—I’m sorry, but I’m so sick of doing it I’m never going to preface something with “but I don’t like Bernie” again—the same applies to Bernie Sanders. Okay he’s flawed but he actually says something coherent, so he does not compare to any rightist politician currently in power, all whom are willing to discard meaning and “values” to maintain their social capital (earned from appeasing the aforementioned gibbons).

And it’s really important is that there’s an ongoing push to make hard leftist ideas so unreasonable that simply aren’t circulating in the culture, and this is just another round of it. The label slip from socialist to communist, the “hypocrisy” charge that he’s rich—which, consider, you could take the same data and as a centrist read it as a good sign, that he’s not too hard core—but the point is to establish a taboo. At the same time, even though “centrism” is basically meaningless because of the constant rightward shift and the failure to identity a synthesis of the left thesis and right antithesis, it’s treated as “reasonable” even when it makes no damn sense. And the “right” has rejected the idea that any reactionary idea is taboo, even the agreed-upon ones we tried to kill off last century: they simply won’t be call to account, and they have multiple strategies to dissemble about what they really think that have become normalized, part of “reasonable” culture. It the microcosm equivalent of the death tally of communism being a single bloc that makes the ideology illegitimate forever, but the death tally of capitalism (or “the West”) can be treated as separate incidences that can’t be summed to make condemn the concept. Cheating at the rhetoric game should be identified as such.

Furthermore, the promise of support from people who are so scared they can’t accurately evaluate something genuinely dangerous…a party who’s been hurting them for years versus a hypothetical scenario in which, if all the divinations are correct, Bernie Sanders Will Become Just As Bad As The Actually Bad People Halfway Through Bad Shit Right Now…in exchange for leftists who are bit grating but have accurately described a bunch of shit that’s been going on for decades, who are consistent and stable—this does not strike me as a good trade even if it was made in good faith. Not because the scared people are bad people, but because their primary trait is utter unreliability. If they’re that fear-driven, and that fear is influenced by the theater of politics (optics) rather than calculation, then they’re a fair-weather gain.

I mean, for whom is the theater of fear an easier act to pull off? The party that’s going to lie and swagger about like a ten-in-one hawker selling constant existential threat in exciting exotic varieties that blow up good, or the party that tries to accurately describe the complicated systemic problems the world has?

They don’t know what they’re scared of, and don’t even know how to know what they’re scared of. If you’re the bad faith team intent on fucking all of them over while distracting them with exciting stories and the promise of miracle cures they’re perfectly useful because they’re just voting widgets. But if you’re the good faith team, precisely because you’re a realist in tweed and not a lucha libre match you’re going to disappoint and anger them.

And as much as I rely on dark humor to cope, I’m not saying that to condemn them. Life is painful and confusing and people want structure and comfort, and it’s deeply cruel to offer the illusion of those things in return for compliance…then deliberately make things painful and confusing again. I’m so self-aware of my inchoate fears it’s a mental illness and I’m still disappointed that the Democratic Party can’t make me feel better by hitting someone with a folding chair. I have the privilege of having the time and money to be an autodidact and do therapy; most people don’t. It’s sad.

_{Except for the rich dudes that think Rush is smart. They need a dose of folding chair.}

But the point stands: this process of cutting away bits of leftism on demand, to appease people who don’t seem to be political, just aesthetic, is a losing proposition, because the loop of “X is scary, cut it off” is eternal, and the last couple of decades demonstrate that the ones making demands, creating the fear, are utterly shameless and entirely cynical.