Posts like the one this article cites illustrate why I think lots of Daily Kos users are racist. I don’t mean in the way that a place like 4chan has normalized racial slurs or how the Daily Caller will flat out say that victims of police brutality deserve it. Rather, there is a pervasive view that middle class college educated Western whites who identify with a centrist political party are the most enlightened demographic in the world, while the rest of us losers are uncivilized to varying degrees (for the record, I am middle class and college educated, but not white).
For example, the way posters on another diary were discussing the supposedly ingrained misogyny among Black and Hispanic men made my skin crawl. I’m not going to deny that such sentiments exist among some Black and Hispanic men (and women) but the way they were framing it as “the culture(s) that spawned ‘those people’ are clearly backward, deficient, and the opposite of mine” was gross.
Likewise, the way some posters are almost gleeful at the prospect of Muslim and/or Arab voters who “don’t fall in line” being deported or put in camps is vile. I’ve read that in Dearborn, people are attending funerals or memorials every day. There are individuals who have lost dozens of family members. If hypothetical Carole from Brookline, MA can’t understand why someone in Dearborn who has lost practically their entire family under a Democratic administration can’t see how things could get any worse under Trump, she’s either being dumb on purpose or she truly is permanently deranged by Trump. You would know better than I would, but it appears like just about every self-identified Arab and/or Muslim member at Daily Kos has gotten BoJoed for trying to discuss Middle Eastern issues as a person whose community/family has been negatively affected by US foreign policy. The Uncommitted movement tried to appeal to party leadership during the Democratic Convention and they were basically told to get lost and that nothing was going to change in regard to Palestine. If that’s truly the case, why do so many Daily Kos readers feel like Kamala Harris is entitled to their votes?
In a way, I think that Trump’s win in 2016 was a godsend for the DNC. It became evident to me in 2017 that the DNC was using Hillary’s loss to marginalize the social democratic wing (aka Bernie Bros) while also promoting her as this wronged beacon of democracy. Trump’s terrible optics also meant that even the most lackluster Democrats could be portrayed as paragons of responsible and progressive (but not really, wink-wink) governance. As long as Blue MAGA pushes mindless conformity to the elderly and out of touch leadership and frightens people with the specter of Trump, the rank and file will gladly keep marching to the right. To be a “reality based community” would require Daily Kos users to realize that the Democratic Party of 2024 is ideologically the same as the GOP of 2002, but I doubt that will happen.
Lastly, don’t know if you would know this, but I’ve been wondering about the exact relationship is between Daily Kos and the Democratic Party as an organization. Is that site just an unofficial meeting group for Boomer and Gen X Democratic super-fans or is it a front for disseminating official talking points to the rank and file? The way that anyone who doesn’t think that the fossilized centrist leadership are the reincarnation of the New Deal cabinet gets BoJoed makes me wonder. I know that any political site has its ideological limits, but the way that the DNC is purging its ranks of DSAers and the enthusiastic response to said purges (while still demanding that social democrats uncritically support centrist non-entities) indicates that the supposed Big Tent of the Democrats can contain the Cheneys
but not Cori Bush. Clearly, the Overton Window is moving far to the right, but users there don’t seem to perceive it.
I have seen at least two people at DKos express concern that the party will wake up "the morning after" and realize it's become Republican. I mean, the Harris campaign accepted the endorsement of Alberto "Torture Memo" Gonzalez. These are truly dark times for the party, but the grand poohbahs don't seem to sense this. Either that, or the prospect of grabbing the coveted ring of moderate votership has blotted out all sense of proper perspective.
I missed the discussion about misogyny in certain subcultures. I don't know if I should go trawling through backdated diaries to confront those apparent attitudes that you describe. As I was saying to Ohio Barbarian the other day, though, there is ingrained misogyny in the Black community, for many varied reasons that I couldn't possibly begin to encapsulate (but one of the ways that it expresses itself is in its extreme homophobia, especially in the black conservative [religious] community). I can't speak for the Latino community, though there's a reason why machismo is spoken of so often in relation to how it expresses itself in almost diametric opposition to females and anything feminine.
So there is a conversation to be had, but the content must match the tone, and the point needs to be constructive, not one of casting blame. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the historian, has underscored the macho mystique that scaffolds fascism. We need to be talking more about that, and about how Trump is attempting to "bro" his way back into power precisely because that's what fascism does. Those are the fantasies on which it plays. And there is a pecking order in male society that kind of evens out (though not entirely) when in mixed company, so the fascist idea of hierarchy speaks to men more strongly than it does to women. We're not having that conversation -- instead, people are ganging up on Obama for having the temerity (so far as I can tell) to speak to Black men as an exclusive audience.
I digress. I do think there's a deep strain of presumption of better knowledge in some corners of the Democratic Party. But it's hard to dissect that from the fact that education is a great divide, speaking in terms of demographics and class structures. Social scientists found not too terribly long ago, in 2012, that "general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect [is] largely mediated via conservative ideology." Turned around, this means that conservative politics tends to attract those who kind of have a lower aptitude. I say that not to put anyone down but to say that it's hard to say that the Democratic Party has an arrogance problem. I do think that formally educated people place extreme value on that education, and that leaks into other areas where such self-aggrandizement is not useful or warranted. But I certainly can see how, for those not in that particular demographic, that comes across as arrogance, and that would breed resentment. (The study is Hodson & Busseri, "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact"; https://sci-hub.usualwant.com/10.1177/0956797611421206)
I'm long-winded today. So, to your point about the somewhat xenophobic stance that some over at DKos are displaying, I think that speaks directly to the point that the place, and possibly the party at large, are being suddenly crowded by conservatives in their midst. [I've cut a bit back here that I said, but it's unvarnished and I want to consider it more before bringing it out as an open argument. Forgive the edit.]
I could say more, but I've gone on a bit. I will say that I recently saw someone at DKos post a chart that noted that membership there rather plummeted after the 2016 election. Lots of people there have remarked about the vicious atmosphere there during that era (I had an account there but was not active there at the time, so I missed this). I don't think the place ever truly recovered. I personally despise the appellation of "Bernie bros," despite the fact that there really was bad behavior on the part of some of Sanders's supporters, because it reduces all of his supporters to that bad behavior, and that's just poor form. It absolves Clinton of all of the mistakes she made. She was a flawed candidate, and no one really examined her missteps because they were immediately consumed with the daily dumpster fire of the Trump presidency. Lessons went unlearnt.
Thank you for your reply. I didn’t know that Alberto Gonzales had endorsed Kamala Harris. I can’t say I’m surprised, though. I guess I should have seen all of these questionable neoconservative endorsements coming when Bill Kristol announced he was becoming a Democrat. I remember reading the Weekly Standard website (purely for novelty purposes, of course) during the Iraq War and Kristol had some of the most delusional takes imaginable. Like, Bill Kristol switching parties isn’t a flex, it just means that he thinks that the neoconservative agenda of nonstop forever wars is best advanced through the Democratic Party.
No one is denying that there are misogynist men in Black and Hispanic communities. The problem I have is that it seems like these men - along with Arabs, Muslims, antiwar protesters, and trans people - are being preemptively blamed for a hypothetical Harris loss. People in general vote for different candidates for a variety of reasons, some of which are shallower than others. Since there’s no essay portion to a ballot, we can’t say for sure why voters make the choices that they do. In the case of Trump, maybe some like that he “tells it like it is.” Others think he might be better on the economy. Some are ride or die MAGA. Another group remember his wrestling cameo. And still others might just feel sorry for his uphill battle with finding a decent hair implant.
It’s also worth noting that voting for a woman or a minority doesn’t mean that one is not misogynistic or racist in other aspects of one’s life. After all, there are plenty of MAGA women who run for office and win, and it’s not ridiculous to assume that misogynistic men are among their supporters. There were also many people in the Rust Belt who voted for Obama who then switched to Trump. Detangling voter motivations can be a tricky thing, especially if a voter doesn’t want their true feelings to be exposed to a pollster or interviewer.
I don’t think that formal education as such makes a person less likely to be racist or to voter accordingly. Lots of people have university degrees, but a shocking percentage of them completely lack intellectual curiosity. Think of it as a difference between being educated and having a degree. I have noticed among tech bros in particular, but also among a good chunk of the Ivy League as well, a fascination in bringing back eugenics and race science (to the extent they ever truly went away). To me, this is far more dangerous than the average rural reactionary, since people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are putting their considerable efforts behind promulgating race science 2.0. I think being highly educated will merely change the ways in which one expresses prejudice without getting rid of it altogether.
It’s also worth remembering that all David Duke had to do to get people to take him more seriously was to drop the Klan robes, buy nice suits, get a haircut, and have some plastic surgery. To be clear, I’m not putting these Daily Kos posters in the same category as Musk, Thiel, or Duke, but I think they have the misguided idea that racism only afflicts conservatives, the poorly educated, or “lifestyle racists.” Lots of well-educated men were members of the first and second iterations of the Klan. When the Klan started having more of a “white trash” reputation, they still had plenty of upscale supporters in the White Citizens Councils.
Given that the most famous faces of the European far right are women now (Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen), I’m not sure if the hyper-masculine focus is quite right. They’re clearly doing something very different than Hitler or Mussolini. Original fascism was very much a product of the mass mobilization of men during WWI and those conditions just don’t exist now. Their ascendancy seems to be a reaction to the migrant crises caused by our Middle Eastern wars, combined with the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe calling our current far-right moment fascism isn’t the best term (it’s a subject worth investigating).
I plan to come back to your comment and give a fuller reply, but I wanted to offer this regarding your suggestion that fascism might need an updated term to describe what we see today. I think I would disagree, for this reason: fascism has always been described, at least among several scholars such as Robert Paxton and Federico Finchelstein, as a protean system. It will adapt itself to conditions on the ground, such that the fascism that we saw in Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany would not resemble necessarily any fascistic system we see today. (I am guessing others might add Franco’s Spain in there, but I still have yet to delve into the history of that time and place, so I can’t personally speak to that; but I would assume that fascism today would differ from whatever Franco had in place as well.)
If this is true, then we should expect that our type of fascism — that of an America in a hyper-technocratic 21st-century society grafted onto neo-laissez faire economic policies — would have its own mannerisms and appeal. The ultra-masculinism that affects American society has to account for Elliot Rodger and Andrew Tate as well as those time-worn icons of John Wayne and Rambo (I’ve deliberately chosen fantasy figures here). The masculinity scripts that would appeal in today’s culture necessarily has to fit the right-wing culture war, which has been raging for decades, so it has to justify the denial of the right of women to control their own bodies. It has to be couched in this hyper-heteronormativity, a return to the “traditional” family (stock-and-trade for fascist ideals), a need for purity, all the language of the religious right.
I could go on. But I think that the concepts — the nouns, the tangible items — might differ from what fascists of the original era may have latched onto as symbols, but I think that the symbology itself is used to communicate certain ideals of power, hierarchy, technology, and the superiority of the in-group (in this particular slice, the in-group of males).
So I think that ‘fascism’ is still useful, descriptive, and on-point, though I will grant that Ben-Ghiat’s addition of masculinity scripts to the broader concept of fascism is somewhat new. (I did come across an essay in Feminist Review from 1979 called “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology” that explores this theme rather in-depth, and that clearly predates Ben-Ghiat.) And clearly there are other aspects of the movement afoot in American culture that qualifies it to be called ‘fascism’ that I haven’t touched upon here. I just wanted to address the masculinity facet.
Thank you for your reply. As I’ve said before, my preferred definition of fascism is Aime Cesar’s who called it something like when the logic and methods of imperialism/colonialism boomerang back to the core. I think this definition is useful because it boils the problem down to its core, without being bogged down in the specific aesthetic of the early twentieth century.
For example, one of the main appeals of fascism 1.0 was that it claimed it would solve the class struggle by organizing society into an organic entity where labor and capital would be reconciled. This involved remaking society along military lines, with each part of society mobilized to do their part for the whole. The class struggle for the most part isn’t a concern today, as the average person tends to have very little class consciousness. The highly individualistic nature of the US makes the kind of regimentation of Nazi Germany impossible to achieve.
However, one commonality between the early twentieth century political climate and today is anxiety over mass migration. After the collapse of so many empires during World War I, people throughout Europe were in the move. Many people wanted to carve out nation-states from the husk of these empires, but the details of how to do that lead to problems that we are still dealing with over a hundred years later. If some ethnic groups can’t obtain nation-states, and the pre-existing nation-states don’t want outsiders, what is the solution? I think we know what the “solutions” always end up being.
I think that the effects of fascism tend to vary based on one’s relation to society. We tend to speak about “authoritarian” societies as being uniformly gray, dull, and stifling, but that’s not necessarily true. A lot of working class people in Nazi Germany genuinely benefited from the regime, in that they got jobs, had new educational opportunities opened up to their sons, and got access to low cost consumer goods and vacations. If the war hadn’t interrupted the supply chain, there was going to be a plan to provide highly subsidized Volkswagens to the public. You can’t tell me that there wouldn’t have been unbridled joy among the populace if Hitler had announced over the Volksempfanger (ie the subsided radios every family had) that everyone was getting a car. We tend to think that the Germans were just brainwashed to go along with this, but you don’t need much brainwashing if you perceive that you’re benefiting from Nazi policies. And if some people start disappearing to these “camps,” it was probably their own fault anyway. They should have minded their own business and followed the law. If the law in question happens to be a racial law, then there’s no room for that in our beautiful “racial community.”
Similarly, the authoritarian nature of the US depends on your status. The US often seems very fascistic to people living in impoverished heavily surveilled communities. However, someone in a middle class or wealthy community where the formal police presence is minimal might not perceive this. I’ve never understood why so many people don’t see how a system of laws that prescribe what door you can enter based on your skin color (ie Jim Crow) isn’t authoritarianism at its finest. Many Americans also don’t perceive how our civil liberties are being further chipped away by the repression against the Palestinian solidarity movement, particularly in terms of freedom of speech and assembly.
To bring this back around to the original topic of Blue MAGA, many posters at Daily Kos are fine with the idea of repressing pro-Palestine protests because they think that such actions are undermining the Democratic Party in an election year, and probably being funded by Russia/China/Iran/Hamas/whoever. They’re also not concerned with increased government surveillance, dismissing such concerns as a sign of “privilege” or a case of misplaced priorities. The fact that so many writers and intellectuals are being blackballed for pro-Palestinian sentiment or the fact that our media is censoring Palestinian voices about this slaughter doesn’t register any alarm either. I think Blue MAGA just need to be honest with themselves that what they really want is a one party state with the decaying corpse of Joe Biden presiding over the country in perpetuity.
I always appreciate your long and thoughtful replies, LM. :)
So I was trying to limit my earlier response to you only to your point about fascism. I'm glad I got the thought down before it flitted away. You don't seem particularly convinced about the masculinity aspect of the phenomenon, which I'll file away, certainly, and probably revisit when I write more on the topic. It's good to know where one's arguments need strengthening. If you're interested in learning more about what Ruth Ben-Ghiat had to say, she spoke about it in a one-on-one interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSaYgxqbl_k&t=976s
Paxton at first resisted using the label 'fascist' at all, saying it brought more heat than light, but changed his mind very publicly after January 6. An excerpt from the article reads, "This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. 'It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,' Paxton said. 'It’s the real thing. It really is.'”
So that's an argument from authority, so you can ding me on that if you'd like. But I reference Paxton because I think that his definition of fascism, which really cannot be condensed into a single sentence (indeed, his entire Anatomy of Fascism is one long definition), is quite instructive. Of course, I lean not only on Paxton and Ben-Ghiat, but also Theodor Adorno, Joost Meerloo, Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell and others. (Not all of them wrote on fascism per se but on adjacent topics such as totalitarianism and psychopathological leadership.)
I tend to agree with Paxton that fascism is not a regular political ideology. It stands apart from our normal understanding of what's left and what's right, liberalism vs. conservatism. It eats regular ideologies. It's akin to an invasive species, and it has no natural predator. I see it as a combination of politics and economics, but it's more than either of those singly or both in combination. It's its own thing.
I believe it was Meerloo (though it may have been Paxton) who remarked on fascism's "emotional lava." It taps into a primordial center in disaffected citizens, whereby they're persuaded by something other than logic, though they may later turn to logical arguments to justify their actions. Fascism as a system is designed to overwhelm and surmount the Enlightenment. That's why it's so dangerous: it circumvents logic and rationality.
I will save my thoughts on the authoritarian nature of the US and how the majority fails to see it, though I will say that I, in the main, very much agree with you.
Hmm. I'd begun writing a response and inadvertently hit the cancel button. Perhaps I should take that as a sign.
I find it interesting that much of what you've written here touches upon the subject of race and racism. I think that says a lot about our current moment.
I am both intrigued and dismayed by the resurfacing of race science. Intrigued because I am curious to find out how exactly this rhetorical trick is being pulled off. It's all rhetoric, as far as I can see. This is particularly true because "race science" had its death knell after DNA was discovered and it was shown that melanin was not determinative of intellectual ability or physical prowess. It pretty much put all of those ideas to bed. That added with the horrors of the plain endpoint of racial superiority ideology as embodied in Nazism and fascism in general should have nailed the coffin shut, but people have been intent on raising the dead. Anyway, as I say, it's all being done with language, and so I'm interested to dissect these attempts to see how words are being twisted and flipped to cast alluring shadows.
I find it funny the way you list all the things Duke had to do to gain a "respectable" following. He had to change his entire image! In that vein, I think that specifically speaks to your examples of European female far-right figures: it's still all about image. Meloni has a very conventionally attractive face. She's not the matronly figure we saw in Angela Merkel (or even Hillary Clinton, for that matter). That classic European female appeal is part of her marketing / packaging. It makes the extremism she's peddling seem tame, or at least approachable.
Trump is not stereotypically attractive (though I'm sure he would claim otherwise). He's in the mold of the buffoonish fascist leader, such as Berlusconi or even Hitler himself, who was described in such terms. Trump is more about spectacle, about never letting the camera move away from him. Spectacle is a core component of fascism insofar as people enthralled to fascism always need to be titillated. (We see this now in Israel, except the delight is one of watching the lions eat their prey in the Coliseum: blood-soaked bread and circuses.) Note how Trump is promising, in not so many words, that a general atmosphere of violence would accompany his re-entrance into the WH. He knows that his followers want that adrenaline.
Thank you for your reply. I don’t think race science ever truly went away. In the United States, at least, the concern about all of the various sub-types of Europeans disappeared in the 1960s and instead created a more generic white category. The “ethnic whites” were always considered legally white (which is what matters most), but they were considered to be the wrong kind on a religious, cultural, and biological level. These concerns largely disappeared once mass immigration from Europe ended and the “ethnic whites” assimilated. I think the current popularity of race science among tech bros and certain academics is a way to justify systemic injustice using the trappings of science, as well as to justify their own superior position in society. I’m not optimistic that the Democrats will do anything to counter this, since they’re becoming increasingly reliant on Silicon Valley money. Maybe in a few years, we’ll be hearing about how the supposedly progressive nature of Jim Crow 2.0 from our social betters.
I don’t think David Duke changed his image, so much as he just changed his outward appearance so he wouldn’t look like the sort of guy who walks barefoot on a highway with no shirt pushing a baby carriage. His essential message remained the same, he just made a few cosmetic adjustments to person. This was apparently enough to convince the national media that Duke was definitely someone whose ideas needed to be taken seriously. If that’s all it took for David Duke gain a foothold into mainstream discourse, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump was able to do so with much more success.
As for Meloni, part of her success is due to the fact that the fascist brand was never really discredited in Italy (I don’t think it was in Germany either, but that’s another story). Despite Mussolini’s brutal yet satisfying end, his family is still involved in far right politics and a number of parties have claimed him as a spiritual ancestor. So Meloni is not considered to be an outlier on the Italian political spectrum. I’ve read some self-identified Italians claim that she’s not really a neo-fascist, but rather, just a standard neoliberal trying to be edgy. Perhaps this skepticism is because she’s not advocating for the same type of system as Mussolini (which wouldn’t be feasible anyway in 2024), but she clearly sees herself as carrying his torch into the 21st century.
Part of Meloni’s appeal is that she’s conventionally attractive, but she’s also a fandom girlie and can use that and her appearance to make herself seem more approachable. I feel like the English speaking press tends not to know how to interpret her very open love of LoTR, but it’s key to understanding her strategy. There’s a sub-culture of conservative Catholics who interpret LoTR as an allegory of the corruption of traditional rural European society by urbanism, the Industrial Revolution, and questionable outside influences. So when Meloni is doing her hobbit cosplay and extolling the virtues of the Shire, this is what she means. When she and the other hip young neo-fascists were organizing far-right summer camps in the 1990s, they would use books like LoTR and The Last Unicorn as narratives for participants to imagine themselves in. It’s because Meloni understands the power of narrative and the dynamics of fandom that she can post fan art of her anime alter ego in Xitter and get away with it, while Hillary’s Pokémon Go to the polls fell flat.
Trump doesn’t strike me as particularly manly when compared to other famous 1980s men, but he could project the image of wealth, which is probably more important in terms of his brand. I feel like people perceive a rich man to project power, while a rich woman conjures up the image of a lazy socialite. Mussolini only comes off like a buffoon because he’s juxtaposed against Hitler. Google Mussolini and castor oil and it becomes apparent that he was no stranger to gratuitous violence and cruelty. As much as I feel like Trump just regurgitates whatever the last person tells him about any issue, he knows how to craft a narrative and spectacle to go with it. The inability for Democrats and the legacy mainstream parties in Europe to craft counter-narratives to the far-right other than, “We’re not like that guy/girl” is a main part of the problem in which we find ourselves. Lots of people are not satisfied with “actually existing democracy,” but the far-right parties are often the only sources providing any kind of alternatives to the status quo.
“The Democratic Party of 2024 is ideologically the same as the GOP of 2002”.
The shift to the right is real. Not so much on social issues but economically it seems accurate. I would argue that the shift right goes back farther. Obama seemed to the right of Nixon and Eisenhower on economic policies. Clinton too. I am wondering how all the former Republicans, never Trumpers, who are supporting Harris will influence things.
DK has changed quite a bit. Or maybe it’s the same ol same ol and I have changed. I think there is a close knit and rather large group of well knowns who have decided they are the adults in the room and that their work is necessary in order to shape a certain narrative.
It really irked me with all the support for Garland and his decision to drag out the pursuit of criminal charges against Trump for Jan6. It seemed this effort to protect Garland was coordinated. I sort of soured on the place around that time. Then Gaza and ANY support for Palestinians and any support for student protests was attacked at the least and in many cases, a comment in support of the Palestinians got flagged or the commenter was accused of antisemitism. I try to be reasonable and I got a warning from admin for recommending a comment. I lost the ability to comment until I removed the rec. Since then, I have avoided most diaries that pertain to Israel and I am sure my views are unpopular over there with regard to Gaza and Israel.
I do think tho that Harris has been a great candidate. I will be voting for her. I disagree with American foreign policy concerning Israel. I hope we change course. A Trump win will make everything much much worse. Exponentially worse. So as I said, I will be voting for Harris. Without hesitation. There is no other candidate that has even a tiny chance of beating Trump.
But yeah, DK has its own little corner of the universe and I think it likely that the regulars over there (big names with huge followings) have an outsized view of their importance. All true tho… a Trump win will be absolutely catastrophic. I am sure of this.
As for who wins Michigan, I can’t make a prediction. But I think our support for Israel hurts with young voters. It hurts in Michigan. And most importantly, it is devastating for the Palestinian people who are suffering and dying and facing extermination. Like your essay mentioned few days back, this damages all of humanity. When we provide support and weapons used in a genocide, we are not direct victims. But it does cut into our humanity. As we cast about for excuses, we are liars. We will be writing a history of this time in a way that excuses our policy. But there is no excuse. I hope we change course.
I totally understand where you are coming from, and I appreciate you being so forthright.
This post, mind you, is not about whether Harris herself is an excellent candidate or even a decent person. It's about the choices her campaign has made and the ways that the grassroots has justified these, even when others on the ground point out that unforced errors have been committed. It's almost a sense of, "She's right, and we're right, so she can't have done anything wrong," which is a terrible string of logic.
I think it's clear, when you go through the timeline and chart when she began to make her commitment to continue Biden's ME policy clearer (coinciding around the time of the DNC) and when support for her began to drop from the meteoric rise she'd experienced since getting into the race, that those things are correlated. She messaged something, and people picked up the cue. All of the goodwill and hope that she'd generated by picking Walz as her running mate over Shapiro has all but ... I won't say "dissipated," but perhaps 'stagnated' is the better word. It's a push.
To the extent that we see people at DK and other places (they're surely not the only platform featuring arguments such as this) saying that those who fail to vote for Harris are shooting themselves in the foot or are dumb are ignoring the actual critique of what it was that caused her momentum to stop. Now she's coasting, while Trump is starting to make up ground, and people are already set to blame those who fail to cast a vote for Harris, calling them traitors to the Republic, hoping they get deported or put on trains or what-have-you. It's a terrible look; but, more than that, it's a way to studiously ignore what Harris could have done to avoid the pitfall she's in now.
(I'm very shocked, by the way, that you were treated the way you were by the mods there. Their use of restricting privileges is a form of operant conditioning. I don't blame you for avoiding similar situations, because who wants to be so directly trained and manipulated?)
You're very thoughtful, and I appreciate your empathy. I daresay that's what I fear most about the Democratic Party: that we're losing our empathy.
Posts like the one this article cites illustrate why I think lots of Daily Kos users are racist. I don’t mean in the way that a place like 4chan has normalized racial slurs or how the Daily Caller will flat out say that victims of police brutality deserve it. Rather, there is a pervasive view that middle class college educated Western whites who identify with a centrist political party are the most enlightened demographic in the world, while the rest of us losers are uncivilized to varying degrees (for the record, I am middle class and college educated, but not white).
For example, the way posters on another diary were discussing the supposedly ingrained misogyny among Black and Hispanic men made my skin crawl. I’m not going to deny that such sentiments exist among some Black and Hispanic men (and women) but the way they were framing it as “the culture(s) that spawned ‘those people’ are clearly backward, deficient, and the opposite of mine” was gross.
Likewise, the way some posters are almost gleeful at the prospect of Muslim and/or Arab voters who “don’t fall in line” being deported or put in camps is vile. I’ve read that in Dearborn, people are attending funerals or memorials every day. There are individuals who have lost dozens of family members. If hypothetical Carole from Brookline, MA can’t understand why someone in Dearborn who has lost practically their entire family under a Democratic administration can’t see how things could get any worse under Trump, she’s either being dumb on purpose or she truly is permanently deranged by Trump. You would know better than I would, but it appears like just about every self-identified Arab and/or Muslim member at Daily Kos has gotten BoJoed for trying to discuss Middle Eastern issues as a person whose community/family has been negatively affected by US foreign policy. The Uncommitted movement tried to appeal to party leadership during the Democratic Convention and they were basically told to get lost and that nothing was going to change in regard to Palestine. If that’s truly the case, why do so many Daily Kos readers feel like Kamala Harris is entitled to their votes?
In a way, I think that Trump’s win in 2016 was a godsend for the DNC. It became evident to me in 2017 that the DNC was using Hillary’s loss to marginalize the social democratic wing (aka Bernie Bros) while also promoting her as this wronged beacon of democracy. Trump’s terrible optics also meant that even the most lackluster Democrats could be portrayed as paragons of responsible and progressive (but not really, wink-wink) governance. As long as Blue MAGA pushes mindless conformity to the elderly and out of touch leadership and frightens people with the specter of Trump, the rank and file will gladly keep marching to the right. To be a “reality based community” would require Daily Kos users to realize that the Democratic Party of 2024 is ideologically the same as the GOP of 2002, but I doubt that will happen.
Lastly, don’t know if you would know this, but I’ve been wondering about the exact relationship is between Daily Kos and the Democratic Party as an organization. Is that site just an unofficial meeting group for Boomer and Gen X Democratic super-fans or is it a front for disseminating official talking points to the rank and file? The way that anyone who doesn’t think that the fossilized centrist leadership are the reincarnation of the New Deal cabinet gets BoJoed makes me wonder. I know that any political site has its ideological limits, but the way that the DNC is purging its ranks of DSAers and the enthusiastic response to said purges (while still demanding that social democrats uncritically support centrist non-entities) indicates that the supposed Big Tent of the Democrats can contain the Cheneys
but not Cori Bush. Clearly, the Overton Window is moving far to the right, but users there don’t seem to perceive it.
I have seen at least two people at DKos express concern that the party will wake up "the morning after" and realize it's become Republican. I mean, the Harris campaign accepted the endorsement of Alberto "Torture Memo" Gonzalez. These are truly dark times for the party, but the grand poohbahs don't seem to sense this. Either that, or the prospect of grabbing the coveted ring of moderate votership has blotted out all sense of proper perspective.
I missed the discussion about misogyny in certain subcultures. I don't know if I should go trawling through backdated diaries to confront those apparent attitudes that you describe. As I was saying to Ohio Barbarian the other day, though, there is ingrained misogyny in the Black community, for many varied reasons that I couldn't possibly begin to encapsulate (but one of the ways that it expresses itself is in its extreme homophobia, especially in the black conservative [religious] community). I can't speak for the Latino community, though there's a reason why machismo is spoken of so often in relation to how it expresses itself in almost diametric opposition to females and anything feminine.
So there is a conversation to be had, but the content must match the tone, and the point needs to be constructive, not one of casting blame. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the historian, has underscored the macho mystique that scaffolds fascism. We need to be talking more about that, and about how Trump is attempting to "bro" his way back into power precisely because that's what fascism does. Those are the fantasies on which it plays. And there is a pecking order in male society that kind of evens out (though not entirely) when in mixed company, so the fascist idea of hierarchy speaks to men more strongly than it does to women. We're not having that conversation -- instead, people are ganging up on Obama for having the temerity (so far as I can tell) to speak to Black men as an exclusive audience.
I digress. I do think there's a deep strain of presumption of better knowledge in some corners of the Democratic Party. But it's hard to dissect that from the fact that education is a great divide, speaking in terms of demographics and class structures. Social scientists found not too terribly long ago, in 2012, that "general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect [is] largely mediated via conservative ideology." Turned around, this means that conservative politics tends to attract those who kind of have a lower aptitude. I say that not to put anyone down but to say that it's hard to say that the Democratic Party has an arrogance problem. I do think that formally educated people place extreme value on that education, and that leaks into other areas where such self-aggrandizement is not useful or warranted. But I certainly can see how, for those not in that particular demographic, that comes across as arrogance, and that would breed resentment. (The study is Hodson & Busseri, "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact"; https://sci-hub.usualwant.com/10.1177/0956797611421206)
I'm long-winded today. So, to your point about the somewhat xenophobic stance that some over at DKos are displaying, I think that speaks directly to the point that the place, and possibly the party at large, are being suddenly crowded by conservatives in their midst. [I've cut a bit back here that I said, but it's unvarnished and I want to consider it more before bringing it out as an open argument. Forgive the edit.]
I could say more, but I've gone on a bit. I will say that I recently saw someone at DKos post a chart that noted that membership there rather plummeted after the 2016 election. Lots of people there have remarked about the vicious atmosphere there during that era (I had an account there but was not active there at the time, so I missed this). I don't think the place ever truly recovered. I personally despise the appellation of "Bernie bros," despite the fact that there really was bad behavior on the part of some of Sanders's supporters, because it reduces all of his supporters to that bad behavior, and that's just poor form. It absolves Clinton of all of the mistakes she made. She was a flawed candidate, and no one really examined her missteps because they were immediately consumed with the daily dumpster fire of the Trump presidency. Lessons went unlearnt.
Thank you for your reply. I didn’t know that Alberto Gonzales had endorsed Kamala Harris. I can’t say I’m surprised, though. I guess I should have seen all of these questionable neoconservative endorsements coming when Bill Kristol announced he was becoming a Democrat. I remember reading the Weekly Standard website (purely for novelty purposes, of course) during the Iraq War and Kristol had some of the most delusional takes imaginable. Like, Bill Kristol switching parties isn’t a flex, it just means that he thinks that the neoconservative agenda of nonstop forever wars is best advanced through the Democratic Party.
No one is denying that there are misogynist men in Black and Hispanic communities. The problem I have is that it seems like these men - along with Arabs, Muslims, antiwar protesters, and trans people - are being preemptively blamed for a hypothetical Harris loss. People in general vote for different candidates for a variety of reasons, some of which are shallower than others. Since there’s no essay portion to a ballot, we can’t say for sure why voters make the choices that they do. In the case of Trump, maybe some like that he “tells it like it is.” Others think he might be better on the economy. Some are ride or die MAGA. Another group remember his wrestling cameo. And still others might just feel sorry for his uphill battle with finding a decent hair implant.
It’s also worth noting that voting for a woman or a minority doesn’t mean that one is not misogynistic or racist in other aspects of one’s life. After all, there are plenty of MAGA women who run for office and win, and it’s not ridiculous to assume that misogynistic men are among their supporters. There were also many people in the Rust Belt who voted for Obama who then switched to Trump. Detangling voter motivations can be a tricky thing, especially if a voter doesn’t want their true feelings to be exposed to a pollster or interviewer.
I don’t think that formal education as such makes a person less likely to be racist or to voter accordingly. Lots of people have university degrees, but a shocking percentage of them completely lack intellectual curiosity. Think of it as a difference between being educated and having a degree. I have noticed among tech bros in particular, but also among a good chunk of the Ivy League as well, a fascination in bringing back eugenics and race science (to the extent they ever truly went away). To me, this is far more dangerous than the average rural reactionary, since people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are putting their considerable efforts behind promulgating race science 2.0. I think being highly educated will merely change the ways in which one expresses prejudice without getting rid of it altogether.
It’s also worth remembering that all David Duke had to do to get people to take him more seriously was to drop the Klan robes, buy nice suits, get a haircut, and have some plastic surgery. To be clear, I’m not putting these Daily Kos posters in the same category as Musk, Thiel, or Duke, but I think they have the misguided idea that racism only afflicts conservatives, the poorly educated, or “lifestyle racists.” Lots of well-educated men were members of the first and second iterations of the Klan. When the Klan started having more of a “white trash” reputation, they still had plenty of upscale supporters in the White Citizens Councils.
Given that the most famous faces of the European far right are women now (Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen), I’m not sure if the hyper-masculine focus is quite right. They’re clearly doing something very different than Hitler or Mussolini. Original fascism was very much a product of the mass mobilization of men during WWI and those conditions just don’t exist now. Their ascendancy seems to be a reaction to the migrant crises caused by our Middle Eastern wars, combined with the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe calling our current far-right moment fascism isn’t the best term (it’s a subject worth investigating).
I plan to come back to your comment and give a fuller reply, but I wanted to offer this regarding your suggestion that fascism might need an updated term to describe what we see today. I think I would disagree, for this reason: fascism has always been described, at least among several scholars such as Robert Paxton and Federico Finchelstein, as a protean system. It will adapt itself to conditions on the ground, such that the fascism that we saw in Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany would not resemble necessarily any fascistic system we see today. (I am guessing others might add Franco’s Spain in there, but I still have yet to delve into the history of that time and place, so I can’t personally speak to that; but I would assume that fascism today would differ from whatever Franco had in place as well.)
If this is true, then we should expect that our type of fascism — that of an America in a hyper-technocratic 21st-century society grafted onto neo-laissez faire economic policies — would have its own mannerisms and appeal. The ultra-masculinism that affects American society has to account for Elliot Rodger and Andrew Tate as well as those time-worn icons of John Wayne and Rambo (I’ve deliberately chosen fantasy figures here). The masculinity scripts that would appeal in today’s culture necessarily has to fit the right-wing culture war, which has been raging for decades, so it has to justify the denial of the right of women to control their own bodies. It has to be couched in this hyper-heteronormativity, a return to the “traditional” family (stock-and-trade for fascist ideals), a need for purity, all the language of the religious right.
I could go on. But I think that the concepts — the nouns, the tangible items — might differ from what fascists of the original era may have latched onto as symbols, but I think that the symbology itself is used to communicate certain ideals of power, hierarchy, technology, and the superiority of the in-group (in this particular slice, the in-group of males).
So I think that ‘fascism’ is still useful, descriptive, and on-point, though I will grant that Ben-Ghiat’s addition of masculinity scripts to the broader concept of fascism is somewhat new. (I did come across an essay in Feminist Review from 1979 called “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology” that explores this theme rather in-depth, and that clearly predates Ben-Ghiat.) And clearly there are other aspects of the movement afoot in American culture that qualifies it to be called ‘fascism’ that I haven’t touched upon here. I just wanted to address the masculinity facet.
Thank you for your reply. As I’ve said before, my preferred definition of fascism is Aime Cesar’s who called it something like when the logic and methods of imperialism/colonialism boomerang back to the core. I think this definition is useful because it boils the problem down to its core, without being bogged down in the specific aesthetic of the early twentieth century.
For example, one of the main appeals of fascism 1.0 was that it claimed it would solve the class struggle by organizing society into an organic entity where labor and capital would be reconciled. This involved remaking society along military lines, with each part of society mobilized to do their part for the whole. The class struggle for the most part isn’t a concern today, as the average person tends to have very little class consciousness. The highly individualistic nature of the US makes the kind of regimentation of Nazi Germany impossible to achieve.
However, one commonality between the early twentieth century political climate and today is anxiety over mass migration. After the collapse of so many empires during World War I, people throughout Europe were in the move. Many people wanted to carve out nation-states from the husk of these empires, but the details of how to do that lead to problems that we are still dealing with over a hundred years later. If some ethnic groups can’t obtain nation-states, and the pre-existing nation-states don’t want outsiders, what is the solution? I think we know what the “solutions” always end up being.
I think that the effects of fascism tend to vary based on one’s relation to society. We tend to speak about “authoritarian” societies as being uniformly gray, dull, and stifling, but that’s not necessarily true. A lot of working class people in Nazi Germany genuinely benefited from the regime, in that they got jobs, had new educational opportunities opened up to their sons, and got access to low cost consumer goods and vacations. If the war hadn’t interrupted the supply chain, there was going to be a plan to provide highly subsidized Volkswagens to the public. You can’t tell me that there wouldn’t have been unbridled joy among the populace if Hitler had announced over the Volksempfanger (ie the subsided radios every family had) that everyone was getting a car. We tend to think that the Germans were just brainwashed to go along with this, but you don’t need much brainwashing if you perceive that you’re benefiting from Nazi policies. And if some people start disappearing to these “camps,” it was probably their own fault anyway. They should have minded their own business and followed the law. If the law in question happens to be a racial law, then there’s no room for that in our beautiful “racial community.”
Similarly, the authoritarian nature of the US depends on your status. The US often seems very fascistic to people living in impoverished heavily surveilled communities. However, someone in a middle class or wealthy community where the formal police presence is minimal might not perceive this. I’ve never understood why so many people don’t see how a system of laws that prescribe what door you can enter based on your skin color (ie Jim Crow) isn’t authoritarianism at its finest. Many Americans also don’t perceive how our civil liberties are being further chipped away by the repression against the Palestinian solidarity movement, particularly in terms of freedom of speech and assembly.
To bring this back around to the original topic of Blue MAGA, many posters at Daily Kos are fine with the idea of repressing pro-Palestine protests because they think that such actions are undermining the Democratic Party in an election year, and probably being funded by Russia/China/Iran/Hamas/whoever. They’re also not concerned with increased government surveillance, dismissing such concerns as a sign of “privilege” or a case of misplaced priorities. The fact that so many writers and intellectuals are being blackballed for pro-Palestinian sentiment or the fact that our media is censoring Palestinian voices about this slaughter doesn’t register any alarm either. I think Blue MAGA just need to be honest with themselves that what they really want is a one party state with the decaying corpse of Joe Biden presiding over the country in perpetuity.
I always appreciate your long and thoughtful replies, LM. :)
So I was trying to limit my earlier response to you only to your point about fascism. I'm glad I got the thought down before it flitted away. You don't seem particularly convinced about the masculinity aspect of the phenomenon, which I'll file away, certainly, and probably revisit when I write more on the topic. It's good to know where one's arguments need strengthening. If you're interested in learning more about what Ruth Ben-Ghiat had to say, she spoke about it in a one-on-one interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSaYgxqbl_k&t=976s
The timing is interesting insofar as Ben-Ghiat wrote in her Substack, Lucid, within the last week about this topic: "Is Trump a Fascist?" https://lucid.substack.com/p/is-trump-a-fascist
And, amazingly, Robert Paxton features in a New York Times piece today about Trump & Trumpism: "Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Uk4.fPQL.hPndRBu0mBGV&smid=url-share (gift link to get beyond the paywall)
Paxton at first resisted using the label 'fascist' at all, saying it brought more heat than light, but changed his mind very publicly after January 6. An excerpt from the article reads, "This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. 'It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,' Paxton said. 'It’s the real thing. It really is.'”
So that's an argument from authority, so you can ding me on that if you'd like. But I reference Paxton because I think that his definition of fascism, which really cannot be condensed into a single sentence (indeed, his entire Anatomy of Fascism is one long definition), is quite instructive. Of course, I lean not only on Paxton and Ben-Ghiat, but also Theodor Adorno, Joost Meerloo, Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell and others. (Not all of them wrote on fascism per se but on adjacent topics such as totalitarianism and psychopathological leadership.)
I tend to agree with Paxton that fascism is not a regular political ideology. It stands apart from our normal understanding of what's left and what's right, liberalism vs. conservatism. It eats regular ideologies. It's akin to an invasive species, and it has no natural predator. I see it as a combination of politics and economics, but it's more than either of those singly or both in combination. It's its own thing.
I believe it was Meerloo (though it may have been Paxton) who remarked on fascism's "emotional lava." It taps into a primordial center in disaffected citizens, whereby they're persuaded by something other than logic, though they may later turn to logical arguments to justify their actions. Fascism as a system is designed to overwhelm and surmount the Enlightenment. That's why it's so dangerous: it circumvents logic and rationality.
I will save my thoughts on the authoritarian nature of the US and how the majority fails to see it, though I will say that I, in the main, very much agree with you.
Hmm. I'd begun writing a response and inadvertently hit the cancel button. Perhaps I should take that as a sign.
I find it interesting that much of what you've written here touches upon the subject of race and racism. I think that says a lot about our current moment.
I am both intrigued and dismayed by the resurfacing of race science. Intrigued because I am curious to find out how exactly this rhetorical trick is being pulled off. It's all rhetoric, as far as I can see. This is particularly true because "race science" had its death knell after DNA was discovered and it was shown that melanin was not determinative of intellectual ability or physical prowess. It pretty much put all of those ideas to bed. That added with the horrors of the plain endpoint of racial superiority ideology as embodied in Nazism and fascism in general should have nailed the coffin shut, but people have been intent on raising the dead. Anyway, as I say, it's all being done with language, and so I'm interested to dissect these attempts to see how words are being twisted and flipped to cast alluring shadows.
I find it funny the way you list all the things Duke had to do to gain a "respectable" following. He had to change his entire image! In that vein, I think that specifically speaks to your examples of European female far-right figures: it's still all about image. Meloni has a very conventionally attractive face. She's not the matronly figure we saw in Angela Merkel (or even Hillary Clinton, for that matter). That classic European female appeal is part of her marketing / packaging. It makes the extremism she's peddling seem tame, or at least approachable.
Trump is not stereotypically attractive (though I'm sure he would claim otherwise). He's in the mold of the buffoonish fascist leader, such as Berlusconi or even Hitler himself, who was described in such terms. Trump is more about spectacle, about never letting the camera move away from him. Spectacle is a core component of fascism insofar as people enthralled to fascism always need to be titillated. (We see this now in Israel, except the delight is one of watching the lions eat their prey in the Coliseum: blood-soaked bread and circuses.) Note how Trump is promising, in not so many words, that a general atmosphere of violence would accompany his re-entrance into the WH. He knows that his followers want that adrenaline.
Thank you for your reply. I don’t think race science ever truly went away. In the United States, at least, the concern about all of the various sub-types of Europeans disappeared in the 1960s and instead created a more generic white category. The “ethnic whites” were always considered legally white (which is what matters most), but they were considered to be the wrong kind on a religious, cultural, and biological level. These concerns largely disappeared once mass immigration from Europe ended and the “ethnic whites” assimilated. I think the current popularity of race science among tech bros and certain academics is a way to justify systemic injustice using the trappings of science, as well as to justify their own superior position in society. I’m not optimistic that the Democrats will do anything to counter this, since they’re becoming increasingly reliant on Silicon Valley money. Maybe in a few years, we’ll be hearing about how the supposedly progressive nature of Jim Crow 2.0 from our social betters.
I don’t think David Duke changed his image, so much as he just changed his outward appearance so he wouldn’t look like the sort of guy who walks barefoot on a highway with no shirt pushing a baby carriage. His essential message remained the same, he just made a few cosmetic adjustments to person. This was apparently enough to convince the national media that Duke was definitely someone whose ideas needed to be taken seriously. If that’s all it took for David Duke gain a foothold into mainstream discourse, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump was able to do so with much more success.
As for Meloni, part of her success is due to the fact that the fascist brand was never really discredited in Italy (I don’t think it was in Germany either, but that’s another story). Despite Mussolini’s brutal yet satisfying end, his family is still involved in far right politics and a number of parties have claimed him as a spiritual ancestor. So Meloni is not considered to be an outlier on the Italian political spectrum. I’ve read some self-identified Italians claim that she’s not really a neo-fascist, but rather, just a standard neoliberal trying to be edgy. Perhaps this skepticism is because she’s not advocating for the same type of system as Mussolini (which wouldn’t be feasible anyway in 2024), but she clearly sees herself as carrying his torch into the 21st century.
Part of Meloni’s appeal is that she’s conventionally attractive, but she’s also a fandom girlie and can use that and her appearance to make herself seem more approachable. I feel like the English speaking press tends not to know how to interpret her very open love of LoTR, but it’s key to understanding her strategy. There’s a sub-culture of conservative Catholics who interpret LoTR as an allegory of the corruption of traditional rural European society by urbanism, the Industrial Revolution, and questionable outside influences. So when Meloni is doing her hobbit cosplay and extolling the virtues of the Shire, this is what she means. When she and the other hip young neo-fascists were organizing far-right summer camps in the 1990s, they would use books like LoTR and The Last Unicorn as narratives for participants to imagine themselves in. It’s because Meloni understands the power of narrative and the dynamics of fandom that she can post fan art of her anime alter ego in Xitter and get away with it, while Hillary’s Pokémon Go to the polls fell flat.
Trump doesn’t strike me as particularly manly when compared to other famous 1980s men, but he could project the image of wealth, which is probably more important in terms of his brand. I feel like people perceive a rich man to project power, while a rich woman conjures up the image of a lazy socialite. Mussolini only comes off like a buffoon because he’s juxtaposed against Hitler. Google Mussolini and castor oil and it becomes apparent that he was no stranger to gratuitous violence and cruelty. As much as I feel like Trump just regurgitates whatever the last person tells him about any issue, he knows how to craft a narrative and spectacle to go with it. The inability for Democrats and the legacy mainstream parties in Europe to craft counter-narratives to the far-right other than, “We’re not like that guy/girl” is a main part of the problem in which we find ourselves. Lots of people are not satisfied with “actually existing democracy,” but the far-right parties are often the only sources providing any kind of alternatives to the status quo.
“The Democratic Party of 2024 is ideologically the same as the GOP of 2002”.
The shift to the right is real. Not so much on social issues but economically it seems accurate. I would argue that the shift right goes back farther. Obama seemed to the right of Nixon and Eisenhower on economic policies. Clinton too. I am wondering how all the former Republicans, never Trumpers, who are supporting Harris will influence things.
DK has changed quite a bit. Or maybe it’s the same ol same ol and I have changed. I think there is a close knit and rather large group of well knowns who have decided they are the adults in the room and that their work is necessary in order to shape a certain narrative.
It really irked me with all the support for Garland and his decision to drag out the pursuit of criminal charges against Trump for Jan6. It seemed this effort to protect Garland was coordinated. I sort of soured on the place around that time. Then Gaza and ANY support for Palestinians and any support for student protests was attacked at the least and in many cases, a comment in support of the Palestinians got flagged or the commenter was accused of antisemitism. I try to be reasonable and I got a warning from admin for recommending a comment. I lost the ability to comment until I removed the rec. Since then, I have avoided most diaries that pertain to Israel and I am sure my views are unpopular over there with regard to Gaza and Israel.
I do think tho that Harris has been a great candidate. I will be voting for her. I disagree with American foreign policy concerning Israel. I hope we change course. A Trump win will make everything much much worse. Exponentially worse. So as I said, I will be voting for Harris. Without hesitation. There is no other candidate that has even a tiny chance of beating Trump.
But yeah, DK has its own little corner of the universe and I think it likely that the regulars over there (big names with huge followings) have an outsized view of their importance. All true tho… a Trump win will be absolutely catastrophic. I am sure of this.
As for who wins Michigan, I can’t make a prediction. But I think our support for Israel hurts with young voters. It hurts in Michigan. And most importantly, it is devastating for the Palestinian people who are suffering and dying and facing extermination. Like your essay mentioned few days back, this damages all of humanity. When we provide support and weapons used in a genocide, we are not direct victims. But it does cut into our humanity. As we cast about for excuses, we are liars. We will be writing a history of this time in a way that excuses our policy. But there is no excuse. I hope we change course.
I totally understand where you are coming from, and I appreciate you being so forthright.
This post, mind you, is not about whether Harris herself is an excellent candidate or even a decent person. It's about the choices her campaign has made and the ways that the grassroots has justified these, even when others on the ground point out that unforced errors have been committed. It's almost a sense of, "She's right, and we're right, so she can't have done anything wrong," which is a terrible string of logic.
I think it's clear, when you go through the timeline and chart when she began to make her commitment to continue Biden's ME policy clearer (coinciding around the time of the DNC) and when support for her began to drop from the meteoric rise she'd experienced since getting into the race, that those things are correlated. She messaged something, and people picked up the cue. All of the goodwill and hope that she'd generated by picking Walz as her running mate over Shapiro has all but ... I won't say "dissipated," but perhaps 'stagnated' is the better word. It's a push.
To the extent that we see people at DK and other places (they're surely not the only platform featuring arguments such as this) saying that those who fail to vote for Harris are shooting themselves in the foot or are dumb are ignoring the actual critique of what it was that caused her momentum to stop. Now she's coasting, while Trump is starting to make up ground, and people are already set to blame those who fail to cast a vote for Harris, calling them traitors to the Republic, hoping they get deported or put on trains or what-have-you. It's a terrible look; but, more than that, it's a way to studiously ignore what Harris could have done to avoid the pitfall she's in now.
(I'm very shocked, by the way, that you were treated the way you were by the mods there. Their use of restricting privileges is a form of operant conditioning. I don't blame you for avoiding similar situations, because who wants to be so directly trained and manipulated?)
You're very thoughtful, and I appreciate your empathy. I daresay that's what I fear most about the Democratic Party: that we're losing our empathy.