Several weeks ago, at the height of the student protests, someone at Daily Kos wrote an essay entitled “When a Lie Obscures the Truth,” which began with this frame:
I think two things are going on with the DailyKos readership:
1. Age. It’s a site that skews towards older Gen X and Boomers, and social media in general tends towards voluntary age segregation. That they consider millennials to be “young voters” (a demographic now in their 30s and 40s) is telling. If you they middle aged people as basically children, which is not surprising if you are a boomer, then college students will seem practically like fetuses. Therefore, it becomes easy to dismiss the concerns of younger generations as just the whining of petulant children, especially when there are no millennials or Gen Zers present to provide an alternative view.
2. Politics as fandom. I’ve said before that electoral politics is basically like rooting for a team sport, where you always support “our side,” no matter what. Hence, no criticism of Biden is allowed. It’s especially bad, as they’ve convinced themselves that Biden is the one person capable of saving “our democracy.” Somehow it doesn’t register that Biden’s actions - demonizing protesters, cavalierly propagating debunked atrocity propaganda, and using American weapons for genocide - are also eroding “our democracy.”
3. Racial echo chamber. A lot of the comments I’ve seen at DailyKos about non-white people are pretty gross. Part of this is because they think they’re owed votes from minorities, and if they don’t get them, then the dissenters deserve to be put into camps or something. Any progressive Muslim and/or Arab poster gets run off the site, so they never hear that perspective.
3. To see Biden as he actually is - a lifelong conservative Democrat who doesn’t care for leftist protesters and had his hand in many of the policy disasters that enabled Trump’s rise - would be too psychologically devastating. Instead, we have what amounts to a bunch of old people writing real person fanfiction about an otherwise unremarkable career politician. As much as political narratives are cynically manufactured from on high, I think a lot of people want to be lied to, because the truth is too painful. It’s nice to think that Biden is protecting us from the far right, but that’s not what’s really happening. He has no problems with the far-right as long as they further what he perceives to be American interests.
I think much of the fear surrounding Trump has to do with aesthetics; he’s boorish, uncivil, crass, and pays no attention to norms. But if you look at what he actually did as president, it’s not really any different than what any other Republican politician would have done. His demeanor was just more unvarnished. I think a lot of people like the fake civility of the past, because they can avoid all of the political unpleasantness that’s actually happening. The antipathy of DailyKos users towards student protestors is part of that. With these protests, it becomes harder to pretend that everything is fine, that “Dark Brandon” is fighting against fascism, or that things are “normal” enough to not have to think about unpleasant things.
I really appreciate the time you took to flesh out this awesome in-depth comment.
On the whole, I can't say I disagree with you. I think there is -- or there used to be -- a contingent of Gen Xers there, and I would assume some older Millennials as well. Of course, I originally joined DKos before the advent of social media, and that may explain the schism of demographics that you've noticed. Younger voters simply have more places where they can register their opinions, and as they did or do not have an attachment to DKos or have memories of it being primarily a socializing place they don't have a sense of affiliation. I don't know -- that's a stab in the dark. I would think that 2010 represented a real change in online habits, though.
#2, through and through, I agree with you.
#3: This is a mixed bag, in my opinion. I think there is, broadly speaking, a multicultural ethos at DKos, and this mostly shines through. I have seen some questionable comments, some that have even stopped me in my tracks. For example, the vituperous contempt shown to Cornel West this campaign season rather makes me want to clear my throat. I won't go back into the archives to dig up any particular diaries there, but there were a few from last fall when West first announced his candidacy that really sketchy comments surfaced. They were _just_ borderline into crossing into racist territory, but submerged enough that if someone were to call them out that _they_ would be the ones being paranoid about them.
Anyway, Black Kos is still a major strength on the platform. There are enough users of color there that should serve as a corrective. And, again, multiculturalism is a true and honest thread running through the Democratic ethos. But I did witness at least one self-identified Arab American being run off the platform. He was from SE Michigan and could have let people know ahead of time about the dynamics shaping up w/r/t the Uncommitted movement. People didn't want to hear what he was saying, though. It's a real shame.
#4: Can't disagree with this, either. And "fanfic" made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that!
#5: This is where we disagree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Trump is a real departure from the staid politics of the Republican Party as a party and the conservatives as an ethos. He'd be placed in the pseudoconservatives that Richard Hofstadter and others of his time told us about way back in the '60s. That band of far-rightism spanned from Goldwater to the John Birch Society. Trump is particularly putrid insofar as he not just imported personal racism, that he toted in himself, but he advanced pure-D conspiracies into the mainstream, which had rather been blocked by gatekeepers in the Republican Party for many decades. So his ascendancy really was a shift, and his mark on American politics, as much as I loathe to say something like this, will be as indelible as the mark that Reagan left. It's a remarkable sea change.
I think that DKos members can't reconcile Biden as Democrat with Biden as encouraging crackdowns on students / enabling genocide / engaging in fascistic behaviors because they see Democrats as saviors. The fact that Biden is doing those things means that those things can't be what they are, because Democrats don't do fascistic things, apparently. The way to reconcile that is to recognize that this fact: that Biden is engaging in these means that they must reconsider the mutually exclusive categories that they have constructed in their heads.
There's at least one person at DKos (for whom I otherwise have extraordinary respect) who keeps putting up the false dichotomy that the choice this fall is either Biden or fascism. No, that's not the choice. Our fight is against fascism, full stop. That means from any corner. It's a bad dichotomy he's got going on there.
Thank you for your reply. When I speak of racist content of DailyKos, I don’t mean the type of stuff you see on 4chan, where it’s just racial slurs 24/7, or conservative boards, where they regurgitate 120 year old Daughters of the Confederacy talking points. First off, there’s the casual anti-Russian sentiment. It’s as if the only way they can cope with the 2016 election is by convincing themselves that every man, woman, child, pet, and farm animal in Russia pooled all their money to buy a dictator (ie Putin) from the dictator store. Never mind that Putin was handpicked by Bill Clinton to succeed Boris Yeltsin, since the Russian people couldn’t be trusted to do democracy right. Russiagate is useful because it not only lets this country’s institutional rot off the hook, but it also allows liberals to claim that they’re the party of national security and convince them that it’s perfectly fine to be playing nuclear chicken to avenge the Democrats’ wounded honor.
Russia aside, I feel like the general attitude is that posters think they are anti-racist, but will turn on minorities if they are perceived to be voting incorrectly, not voting hard enough, criticizing a Democratic presidential candidate for not doing enough (ie “wanting a pony”), or being too vocal and possibly turning off “moderates.” It’s not everyone, obviously, but the feeling that Democrats are entitled to votes means that it’s fine to ignore the discontent of the supposed base. The comments that use Black women as an example of “vote blue no matter who” are also grating. I can guarantee that there’s a lot of discontent from Black women about Democratic politicians who show up in a Black church for photo ops and then disappear for four years.
As for Trump, I agree that he has reset the tenor for the Republican Party to some extent, but I think that a lot of what happened during his presidency would have happened even with an establishment type like Jeb Bush. For example, Democrats never fought very hard for abortion, because they thought it was distasteful and divisive. They completely ceded to conservative framing on the issue and now here we are (it should be mentioned that abortion was never accessible for poor women or women in red states). I’m not sure why we’re supposed to think Democrats will do something about abortion now when they weren’t doing anything about it for fifty years. Jeb Bush would have nominated Supreme Court justices that were as conservative as those that Trump chose, though maybe not so obviously oafish. Trump’s main legacy is aesthetic, in that he made it acceptable for candidates to be more openly racist, although that arguably never went away either. See New England patrician GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ad for proof.
I don’t think the John Birchers were ever as fringe as a lot of people thought. William F. Buckley may have banished them from the National Review for being kooks, but his own views weren’t that different; he just looked and sounded superficially intellectual, which made his nonsense seem more reasonable than it was. Our government gives these types a wide berth to operate in, whereas progressive activists have gotten their lives ruined for expressing mild dissatisfaction with the status quo (see how billionaire donors are threatening to blackball student protestors). If Biden and the federal government actually thought Trump and the GOP were planning a fascist coup or at least, a legitimate threat, there would be Red Scare style purges like what happened during the McCarthy period. Instead, it’s the pro-Palestinian activists who are getting their lives ruined. This means that Biden either doesn’t really think that Trump and co are a real threat or he agrees with him to some extent. I mean, he clearly cribbed Trump’s immigration and border ideas.
Hmm. We seem to have more divergent views here! But that's what makes the world go 'round, yes? It's good to have things to discuss.
I'm not sure how to characterize what you see as anti-Russian sentiment. Yes, there are those there who are rah-rah about defeating Russia w/r/t its conflict with Ukraine. I'll say that I remember precisely the sorrow and dread I felt when Russia went into Ukraine, and so it wasn't surprising to see people line up at DKos in support of Ukraine. When I and others expressed anti-war sentiments, we were told that 1) this was a just war and 2) anti-war folks needed to sit back and let the experts deal with this. So we were shushed pretty much immediately on that front. You'll still see Russia/Ukraine updates regularly hit the top trending spot for daily diaries. It's engrained there, which is very surprising considering that the site is supposed to be reflective of and/or cater to an audience of left-leaning folks. The left is traditionally against war.
As for admonishments for "wanting a pony" or what have you, I think that is the sentiment of the centrists of the party. Centrists in the Democratic Party like to style themselves as moderates; then, positioning themselves as "moderates", they see their stance as a corrective to the "excesses" of the left, seen as pie-in-the-sky or unworkable. It's a terrible dynamic in the broader scheme of things (i.e., outside of DKos), because you can't negotiate from the middle. These folks would have thrown cold water on FDR's first 100 days because they would have seen his agenda as too Pollyannish. But also, their stance is a way of condescending to and infantiliizing the progressive left. The centrists want to be seen as the adults in the room, which means someone has to be the kids.
I won't go into hypotheticals about Jeb! -- sorry. Jeb. I don't think he would have won against Hilary Clinton. *shrug* And I was not that big on Clinton, despite having voted for her in the general election. I think a lot of conservatives would have stayed home that year if that had been the matchup.
But, as far as your statement about Trump being worse only in aesthetics, I again must disagree with you. George Allen was poised to be the Republican favorite. Allen's is a name you may not even remember. He was done in by a surfaced video that showed him mocking an immigrant, if I'm not mistaken. He called him 'macaca' repeatedly. News anchors had to explain to the audience the severe level of disrespect this term indicated. I personally would not have known. His support evaporated. That's how much the Republican Party was distancing itself from abject shows of racism and discrimination. That was a mere ten years before Trump ascended to the White House. And can you imagine McCain or Romney showing the type of racism that Trump has? He really was a watershed. Since the ideological switch in the '50s & '60s, there's always been an undercurrent of racism in the Republican Party, because conservatives were betting the farm on stoking such tensions in order to sway working-class white voters to their side once and for all. But even Lee Atwater said that, by the '80s, you couldn't drop an N-bomb but were forced to use codewords like "forced busing".
I very much disagree that there was no real daylight between Buckley Jr. & John Birch types. There's a difference between conservative libertarianism, which still works within the existing system (though wants a fairly extensive reformation of it) and the type of extremism in the fringes of the far-right, especially at that time. That type of extremism is revolutionary -- they want to overhaul the entire system. The types of appeals are also something that should raise alarms, as they are exactly the type that bypass rational thought. In other words, they utilize the same methods and mechanisms of fascist appeals, and that's why they should be considered suspect. Such appeals are anathema to those of us who want to uphold Enlightenment thinking and ideals. I'm no fan of Buckley, Jr., but I never felt (looking at some of his clips) that he was a revolutionary. (But I say that relying mainly on his TV work. I've avoided his written work, fairly purposely! I may or may not rectify that in the future.)
I do think, getting to your final point about Biden, that Biden has revealed himself to be more center-right than even many Democrats supposed. I know he's surprised me. I don't know what that means for November. I got the distinct impression that he drew the ire of many in the party due to his stance on border policy -- but I think he's still angling to attract Nikki Haley voters. Now that she's endorsed Trump, I think Biden should stop that outreach. It was never a good strategy to begin with.
Thank you for your reply. Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Jeb Bush or Rick Perry would have won against Hillary or vice versa. What I am saying is that their policies, at least in the domestic sphere, would have been the same. A more “traditional Republican” still would have put conservative justices on the Supreme Court, most likely with the aid of some Democrats (Biden helped lead the charge against Anita Hill). Until Trump, I don’t think the party leaders in the Republican Party would want someone as vulgar as him to be their spokesman, even if they agreed with what he was saying. This is why the Dixiecrat faction, as influential as they were, could never get one of their men as a presidential nominee. A Storm Thurmond type, loudly proclaiming the virtues of Jim Crow, wasn’t the image the political establishment wanted broadcast across the world, even if most of them believed in segregation. Now that they see that they can do that and possibly win, it’s a whole new world. You might be interested in reading about the rise of the Sunbelt and the influence of the Orange County Republicans to see how these mini- Trumps were able to gain power at the regional level, which has now lead to influence at the national and international level.
You present a lot of great points and I need to view and read deeper on this. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology are useful disciplines for understanding the root causes of these things of course.
I had major problems with that DKos piece and I usually find a lot of pieces that author has written to be excellent. But in my opinion he left out too many critical components of the protests. In the very short bits where he wrote about those rather than his own protest experiences he managed to repeat "death to America" three times. It comes off as his key takeaway of the protests. And given some of the groups that tried to worm their way into the student protest groups, that chant may have come from one of them and not any actual student protests. But among the 150 campus protests in the US there was great variety and the biggest error is the generalization to lump it all as one group. The media was fine with the generalization (as was Biden), and media had a major role in promoting it, and for making Columbia the "poster child" to represent all the protests. Most DKos readers seemed to soak that up.
He ignored the roles of university admins, police, agents provocateurs, other side show protests and the unique motivations of these student protesters. We often continue to grasp at simple answers to complex events and problems and we continue to project our understanding of the past onto new events involving people we don't understand.
Well, I should perhaps make it more clear that I was merely suggesting that Netanyahu et al. engaged in narrative warfare. I don't have any hard evidence, such as a paper trail or any comment directly bearing on the subject. However, the nature of his comments themselves on the student protests were sufficient for me to hazard a speculation. It really was the height of gaslighting -- and that's not even delving into the actual intrusion into the domestic affairs of the United States. It really was an overstepping on his part, and yet the White House did everything they could to minimize the perception of intrusion and built upon Netanyahu's characterizations.
So, I was following how people at DKos were covering the student protests at this time, and I was dismayed to see that in general there wasn't much conversation there at all. When the author took up the subject, I visited the essay with interest. I very much appreciate the author's general take on topics. So I was doubly disappointed to see the direction in which the student protest essay went. I could only shake my head.
It's very strange to me that a community and general audience who could see that the Black Lives Matter protests in all probability had been "infiltrated" or had some agent provocateurs (as you say) compromise some of its protests in the wake of George Floyd's death. Specifically, the marches in the daytime were fine, but those after dark saw property damage that seemed to be explained by people not actually part of BLM but there to cause trouble and to bring a black eye to the movement. So DKos folks could see that -- but they couldn't see that a similar dynamic could have taken place at some of the protests? It's just very odd. And the fact that some of the comments that were attributed to students happened to be caught on tape as originating from pro-Israeli counterprotesters never really got much traction at DKos. Some people just wanted to believe the worst of the student protesters.
The lumping and extrapolating is EXACTLY what racists do when it comes to taking the bad behavior of one person of a minority or marginalized group and then unfairly extending that bad behavior to the whole of that person's designated group. It's such shoddy thinking that I'm embarrassed for the people who just took that characterization at face value and who didn't think twice. Of course, that's compounded when a president that someone admires tells them that that's exactly what they should think. That's a level of influence that is difficult to counter, outside of completely catching that influential person in a cut-and-dried lie.
Your last sentence is one that I consider a lot, and it's something to which I do my best to hold myself accountable as well. That's an old problem, one built into the human system where we look for familiar patterns and attempt to explain the world in previously encountered models. It takes effort and practice to look beyond what we already feel we know.
I think two things are going on with the DailyKos readership:
1. Age. It’s a site that skews towards older Gen X and Boomers, and social media in general tends towards voluntary age segregation. That they consider millennials to be “young voters” (a demographic now in their 30s and 40s) is telling. If you they middle aged people as basically children, which is not surprising if you are a boomer, then college students will seem practically like fetuses. Therefore, it becomes easy to dismiss the concerns of younger generations as just the whining of petulant children, especially when there are no millennials or Gen Zers present to provide an alternative view.
2. Politics as fandom. I’ve said before that electoral politics is basically like rooting for a team sport, where you always support “our side,” no matter what. Hence, no criticism of Biden is allowed. It’s especially bad, as they’ve convinced themselves that Biden is the one person capable of saving “our democracy.” Somehow it doesn’t register that Biden’s actions - demonizing protesters, cavalierly propagating debunked atrocity propaganda, and using American weapons for genocide - are also eroding “our democracy.”
3. Racial echo chamber. A lot of the comments I’ve seen at DailyKos about non-white people are pretty gross. Part of this is because they think they’re owed votes from minorities, and if they don’t get them, then the dissenters deserve to be put into camps or something. Any progressive Muslim and/or Arab poster gets run off the site, so they never hear that perspective.
3. To see Biden as he actually is - a lifelong conservative Democrat who doesn’t care for leftist protesters and had his hand in many of the policy disasters that enabled Trump’s rise - would be too psychologically devastating. Instead, we have what amounts to a bunch of old people writing real person fanfiction about an otherwise unremarkable career politician. As much as political narratives are cynically manufactured from on high, I think a lot of people want to be lied to, because the truth is too painful. It’s nice to think that Biden is protecting us from the far right, but that’s not what’s really happening. He has no problems with the far-right as long as they further what he perceives to be American interests.
I think much of the fear surrounding Trump has to do with aesthetics; he’s boorish, uncivil, crass, and pays no attention to norms. But if you look at what he actually did as president, it’s not really any different than what any other Republican politician would have done. His demeanor was just more unvarnished. I think a lot of people like the fake civility of the past, because they can avoid all of the political unpleasantness that’s actually happening. The antipathy of DailyKos users towards student protestors is part of that. With these protests, it becomes harder to pretend that everything is fine, that “Dark Brandon” is fighting against fascism, or that things are “normal” enough to not have to think about unpleasant things.
I really appreciate the time you took to flesh out this awesome in-depth comment.
On the whole, I can't say I disagree with you. I think there is -- or there used to be -- a contingent of Gen Xers there, and I would assume some older Millennials as well. Of course, I originally joined DKos before the advent of social media, and that may explain the schism of demographics that you've noticed. Younger voters simply have more places where they can register their opinions, and as they did or do not have an attachment to DKos or have memories of it being primarily a socializing place they don't have a sense of affiliation. I don't know -- that's a stab in the dark. I would think that 2010 represented a real change in online habits, though.
#2, through and through, I agree with you.
#3: This is a mixed bag, in my opinion. I think there is, broadly speaking, a multicultural ethos at DKos, and this mostly shines through. I have seen some questionable comments, some that have even stopped me in my tracks. For example, the vituperous contempt shown to Cornel West this campaign season rather makes me want to clear my throat. I won't go back into the archives to dig up any particular diaries there, but there were a few from last fall when West first announced his candidacy that really sketchy comments surfaced. They were _just_ borderline into crossing into racist territory, but submerged enough that if someone were to call them out that _they_ would be the ones being paranoid about them.
Anyway, Black Kos is still a major strength on the platform. There are enough users of color there that should serve as a corrective. And, again, multiculturalism is a true and honest thread running through the Democratic ethos. But I did witness at least one self-identified Arab American being run off the platform. He was from SE Michigan and could have let people know ahead of time about the dynamics shaping up w/r/t the Uncommitted movement. People didn't want to hear what he was saying, though. It's a real shame.
#4: Can't disagree with this, either. And "fanfic" made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that!
#5: This is where we disagree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Trump is a real departure from the staid politics of the Republican Party as a party and the conservatives as an ethos. He'd be placed in the pseudoconservatives that Richard Hofstadter and others of his time told us about way back in the '60s. That band of far-rightism spanned from Goldwater to the John Birch Society. Trump is particularly putrid insofar as he not just imported personal racism, that he toted in himself, but he advanced pure-D conspiracies into the mainstream, which had rather been blocked by gatekeepers in the Republican Party for many decades. So his ascendancy really was a shift, and his mark on American politics, as much as I loathe to say something like this, will be as indelible as the mark that Reagan left. It's a remarkable sea change.
I think that DKos members can't reconcile Biden as Democrat with Biden as encouraging crackdowns on students / enabling genocide / engaging in fascistic behaviors because they see Democrats as saviors. The fact that Biden is doing those things means that those things can't be what they are, because Democrats don't do fascistic things, apparently. The way to reconcile that is to recognize that this fact: that Biden is engaging in these means that they must reconsider the mutually exclusive categories that they have constructed in their heads.
There's at least one person at DKos (for whom I otherwise have extraordinary respect) who keeps putting up the false dichotomy that the choice this fall is either Biden or fascism. No, that's not the choice. Our fight is against fascism, full stop. That means from any corner. It's a bad dichotomy he's got going on there.
Thank you for your reply. When I speak of racist content of DailyKos, I don’t mean the type of stuff you see on 4chan, where it’s just racial slurs 24/7, or conservative boards, where they regurgitate 120 year old Daughters of the Confederacy talking points. First off, there’s the casual anti-Russian sentiment. It’s as if the only way they can cope with the 2016 election is by convincing themselves that every man, woman, child, pet, and farm animal in Russia pooled all their money to buy a dictator (ie Putin) from the dictator store. Never mind that Putin was handpicked by Bill Clinton to succeed Boris Yeltsin, since the Russian people couldn’t be trusted to do democracy right. Russiagate is useful because it not only lets this country’s institutional rot off the hook, but it also allows liberals to claim that they’re the party of national security and convince them that it’s perfectly fine to be playing nuclear chicken to avenge the Democrats’ wounded honor.
Russia aside, I feel like the general attitude is that posters think they are anti-racist, but will turn on minorities if they are perceived to be voting incorrectly, not voting hard enough, criticizing a Democratic presidential candidate for not doing enough (ie “wanting a pony”), or being too vocal and possibly turning off “moderates.” It’s not everyone, obviously, but the feeling that Democrats are entitled to votes means that it’s fine to ignore the discontent of the supposed base. The comments that use Black women as an example of “vote blue no matter who” are also grating. I can guarantee that there’s a lot of discontent from Black women about Democratic politicians who show up in a Black church for photo ops and then disappear for four years.
As for Trump, I agree that he has reset the tenor for the Republican Party to some extent, but I think that a lot of what happened during his presidency would have happened even with an establishment type like Jeb Bush. For example, Democrats never fought very hard for abortion, because they thought it was distasteful and divisive. They completely ceded to conservative framing on the issue and now here we are (it should be mentioned that abortion was never accessible for poor women or women in red states). I’m not sure why we’re supposed to think Democrats will do something about abortion now when they weren’t doing anything about it for fifty years. Jeb Bush would have nominated Supreme Court justices that were as conservative as those that Trump chose, though maybe not so obviously oafish. Trump’s main legacy is aesthetic, in that he made it acceptable for candidates to be more openly racist, although that arguably never went away either. See New England patrician GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ad for proof.
I don’t think the John Birchers were ever as fringe as a lot of people thought. William F. Buckley may have banished them from the National Review for being kooks, but his own views weren’t that different; he just looked and sounded superficially intellectual, which made his nonsense seem more reasonable than it was. Our government gives these types a wide berth to operate in, whereas progressive activists have gotten their lives ruined for expressing mild dissatisfaction with the status quo (see how billionaire donors are threatening to blackball student protestors). If Biden and the federal government actually thought Trump and the GOP were planning a fascist coup or at least, a legitimate threat, there would be Red Scare style purges like what happened during the McCarthy period. Instead, it’s the pro-Palestinian activists who are getting their lives ruined. This means that Biden either doesn’t really think that Trump and co are a real threat or he agrees with him to some extent. I mean, he clearly cribbed Trump’s immigration and border ideas.
Hmm. We seem to have more divergent views here! But that's what makes the world go 'round, yes? It's good to have things to discuss.
I'm not sure how to characterize what you see as anti-Russian sentiment. Yes, there are those there who are rah-rah about defeating Russia w/r/t its conflict with Ukraine. I'll say that I remember precisely the sorrow and dread I felt when Russia went into Ukraine, and so it wasn't surprising to see people line up at DKos in support of Ukraine. When I and others expressed anti-war sentiments, we were told that 1) this was a just war and 2) anti-war folks needed to sit back and let the experts deal with this. So we were shushed pretty much immediately on that front. You'll still see Russia/Ukraine updates regularly hit the top trending spot for daily diaries. It's engrained there, which is very surprising considering that the site is supposed to be reflective of and/or cater to an audience of left-leaning folks. The left is traditionally against war.
As for admonishments for "wanting a pony" or what have you, I think that is the sentiment of the centrists of the party. Centrists in the Democratic Party like to style themselves as moderates; then, positioning themselves as "moderates", they see their stance as a corrective to the "excesses" of the left, seen as pie-in-the-sky or unworkable. It's a terrible dynamic in the broader scheme of things (i.e., outside of DKos), because you can't negotiate from the middle. These folks would have thrown cold water on FDR's first 100 days because they would have seen his agenda as too Pollyannish. But also, their stance is a way of condescending to and infantiliizing the progressive left. The centrists want to be seen as the adults in the room, which means someone has to be the kids.
I won't go into hypotheticals about Jeb! -- sorry. Jeb. I don't think he would have won against Hilary Clinton. *shrug* And I was not that big on Clinton, despite having voted for her in the general election. I think a lot of conservatives would have stayed home that year if that had been the matchup.
But, as far as your statement about Trump being worse only in aesthetics, I again must disagree with you. George Allen was poised to be the Republican favorite. Allen's is a name you may not even remember. He was done in by a surfaced video that showed him mocking an immigrant, if I'm not mistaken. He called him 'macaca' repeatedly. News anchors had to explain to the audience the severe level of disrespect this term indicated. I personally would not have known. His support evaporated. That's how much the Republican Party was distancing itself from abject shows of racism and discrimination. That was a mere ten years before Trump ascended to the White House. And can you imagine McCain or Romney showing the type of racism that Trump has? He really was a watershed. Since the ideological switch in the '50s & '60s, there's always been an undercurrent of racism in the Republican Party, because conservatives were betting the farm on stoking such tensions in order to sway working-class white voters to their side once and for all. But even Lee Atwater said that, by the '80s, you couldn't drop an N-bomb but were forced to use codewords like "forced busing".
I very much disagree that there was no real daylight between Buckley Jr. & John Birch types. There's a difference between conservative libertarianism, which still works within the existing system (though wants a fairly extensive reformation of it) and the type of extremism in the fringes of the far-right, especially at that time. That type of extremism is revolutionary -- they want to overhaul the entire system. The types of appeals are also something that should raise alarms, as they are exactly the type that bypass rational thought. In other words, they utilize the same methods and mechanisms of fascist appeals, and that's why they should be considered suspect. Such appeals are anathema to those of us who want to uphold Enlightenment thinking and ideals. I'm no fan of Buckley, Jr., but I never felt (looking at some of his clips) that he was a revolutionary. (But I say that relying mainly on his TV work. I've avoided his written work, fairly purposely! I may or may not rectify that in the future.)
I do think, getting to your final point about Biden, that Biden has revealed himself to be more center-right than even many Democrats supposed. I know he's surprised me. I don't know what that means for November. I got the distinct impression that he drew the ire of many in the party due to his stance on border policy -- but I think he's still angling to attract Nikki Haley voters. Now that she's endorsed Trump, I think Biden should stop that outreach. It was never a good strategy to begin with.
Thank you for your reply. Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Jeb Bush or Rick Perry would have won against Hillary or vice versa. What I am saying is that their policies, at least in the domestic sphere, would have been the same. A more “traditional Republican” still would have put conservative justices on the Supreme Court, most likely with the aid of some Democrats (Biden helped lead the charge against Anita Hill). Until Trump, I don’t think the party leaders in the Republican Party would want someone as vulgar as him to be their spokesman, even if they agreed with what he was saying. This is why the Dixiecrat faction, as influential as they were, could never get one of their men as a presidential nominee. A Storm Thurmond type, loudly proclaiming the virtues of Jim Crow, wasn’t the image the political establishment wanted broadcast across the world, even if most of them believed in segregation. Now that they see that they can do that and possibly win, it’s a whole new world. You might be interested in reading about the rise of the Sunbelt and the influence of the Orange County Republicans to see how these mini- Trumps were able to gain power at the regional level, which has now lead to influence at the national and international level.
Hi,
You present a lot of great points and I need to view and read deeper on this. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology are useful disciplines for understanding the root causes of these things of course.
I had major problems with that DKos piece and I usually find a lot of pieces that author has written to be excellent. But in my opinion he left out too many critical components of the protests. In the very short bits where he wrote about those rather than his own protest experiences he managed to repeat "death to America" three times. It comes off as his key takeaway of the protests. And given some of the groups that tried to worm their way into the student protest groups, that chant may have come from one of them and not any actual student protests. But among the 150 campus protests in the US there was great variety and the biggest error is the generalization to lump it all as one group. The media was fine with the generalization (as was Biden), and media had a major role in promoting it, and for making Columbia the "poster child" to represent all the protests. Most DKos readers seemed to soak that up.
He ignored the roles of university admins, police, agents provocateurs, other side show protests and the unique motivations of these student protesters. We often continue to grasp at simple answers to complex events and problems and we continue to project our understanding of the past onto new events involving people we don't understand.
Well, I should perhaps make it more clear that I was merely suggesting that Netanyahu et al. engaged in narrative warfare. I don't have any hard evidence, such as a paper trail or any comment directly bearing on the subject. However, the nature of his comments themselves on the student protests were sufficient for me to hazard a speculation. It really was the height of gaslighting -- and that's not even delving into the actual intrusion into the domestic affairs of the United States. It really was an overstepping on his part, and yet the White House did everything they could to minimize the perception of intrusion and built upon Netanyahu's characterizations.
So, I was following how people at DKos were covering the student protests at this time, and I was dismayed to see that in general there wasn't much conversation there at all. When the author took up the subject, I visited the essay with interest. I very much appreciate the author's general take on topics. So I was doubly disappointed to see the direction in which the student protest essay went. I could only shake my head.
It's very strange to me that a community and general audience who could see that the Black Lives Matter protests in all probability had been "infiltrated" or had some agent provocateurs (as you say) compromise some of its protests in the wake of George Floyd's death. Specifically, the marches in the daytime were fine, but those after dark saw property damage that seemed to be explained by people not actually part of BLM but there to cause trouble and to bring a black eye to the movement. So DKos folks could see that -- but they couldn't see that a similar dynamic could have taken place at some of the protests? It's just very odd. And the fact that some of the comments that were attributed to students happened to be caught on tape as originating from pro-Israeli counterprotesters never really got much traction at DKos. Some people just wanted to believe the worst of the student protesters.
The lumping and extrapolating is EXACTLY what racists do when it comes to taking the bad behavior of one person of a minority or marginalized group and then unfairly extending that bad behavior to the whole of that person's designated group. It's such shoddy thinking that I'm embarrassed for the people who just took that characterization at face value and who didn't think twice. Of course, that's compounded when a president that someone admires tells them that that's exactly what they should think. That's a level of influence that is difficult to counter, outside of completely catching that influential person in a cut-and-dried lie.
Your last sentence is one that I consider a lot, and it's something to which I do my best to hold myself accountable as well. That's an old problem, one built into the human system where we look for familiar patterns and attempt to explain the world in previously encountered models. It takes effort and practice to look beyond what we already feel we know.