The Strange Death of Liberal Wonktopia, day 6, part 2: I Drink Your Kool-Aid, I Drank It Up

I remember in 2005, when the GOP was publishing whole books on how it was going to dominate politics for the two generations, and then, lost congress and many governors in an upset in 2006.  Then in 2009, there are books calling for the neoconservative light, closer to the triangulation of the Clinton Era Democrats forsaking most of the Moral Majority rhetoric. Then a few months after that the more or less libertarian Tea Party was emerged unto the scene nationally and was quickly astroturfed by a variety movements resembling the old Theo-conservatism, but even more monetarily radical.  Far away from any of this, for more than a decade, paleo-conservatives and paleo-libertarians were radicalizing themselves: some becoming “radical traditionalists” and others outright racialists around a movement started by a few ex-paleoconservatives and white nationalists calling themselves the Alternative Right.  Around the same time, Nick Land and Menius Moldbug started popular neo-reactionary blogs, repackaging a skeptical attitude towards Democracy itself with strains of ethno-nationalism and spiritual fascism. This was seen as too insane to even deal with, and even the other Paleo-conservatives ignored them.

Then the Alt-Light happened, repackaging some of the ideas of the Alt-Right, some ideas of traditional Republicanism, a less interventionist foreign policy, and bits and pieces of libertarians in cool memes that mocked the frustration at campus Social Justice excesses. The racialism was toned way done to a more inclusive nationalism. Even the paleo-conservatives over at American Conservative missed this, even though Richard Spencer, at founder, had at one time been an editor at the magazine but his views became too radical for even them. Very few people saw it coming because they didn’t know about the institutions that had been building from the decades prior, and since those movements were largely seen as too radical for even cooption, they were left alone and un-astroturfed. They had little money, but they used meme warfare, podcasts, reddit, and obscure publishing houses to much effect.

Currently, but also stealthily, the liberal center consensus wing of the Democrats was telling itself that raw statistics where in their favor.  Minorities were loyal patrons of the Democratic machines, and they would turn out and keep them in power.  Sure, they had some problems at the state level in the “red States” but those populations were declining anyway. This, by the way, was hubris. The same kind of hubris I saw from GOP in 2005. How bad was this hubris?  Philip Bump over at the Washington Post, goes into the numbers, it was dire hubris. 

Since 2010, the Democrats have been losing house level seats, state legislatures, and governors seats. Bump puts it very clearly:

When I use the term “decimate” in reference to what’s happened to the Democratic Party in the era of Barack Obama, I admit that I am using the word in a way that would annoy those same pedants. After all, the number of Democrats in Congress and in state leadership positions has dropped far more than 10 percent since 2008.

So not only has the Obama coalition lost between 6-9 million voters to thin air and abstaining, but they lost tons of the state level apparatus. But they forgot they were in a Federated Republic as well with the increasing concentration of their population in very tiny, population dense, geographic regions.  What was the cost?

Two patterns to note. The first is that the Democrats surged into power in 2006 and 2008, winning seats in elections that would normally have leaned to the Republicans. So some of the losses since 2008 are a function of reversion to norm, light-red areas going red once again. The second is that federal and state races largely correlate. A good year for the GOP nationally tends to make a good year at all levels.

First the lost the purple states at a state level, and then… they called it wrong.  They mispredicted wins in 2014 and in this election, as many Democrats I knew were using internal polling data to say they would take back the Senate.  I had heard this before in 2014 as well. Yes, gerrymandering played a part as do felon voting laws, but have no state game at all since the sending Howard Dean packing as DNC chair. Well, that has a cost.

I am not fond of the Democratic establishment–or their apologists, pundits, and true believers–anyway, and there continued partisan success is, frankly, not my concern, but you have to wonder how they misplayed the game so badly and at such at cost the structure of democracy in the US itself.  This does complicate the thesis that Bernie Sanders would have won handily.  He may have won, but it could have been just as close, and he probably would have had a Republican House and Senate to deal wit.  It would have only taken one state in the purple spectrum of the rust belt to go the other way.  However, that wouldn’t have fixed your problem.  A stalled Sanders would have had a hard time keeping the reigns of power, and forces of the Alt-Right that Trump, and yes, Clinton, played with in this election are out now.  That pandora’s box is blown open.

The Alt-Right is tiny, and punches, for the first time ever, above its weight. The main reason it had is that both the Alternative Right and the Neo-reactionaries were not known outside of obscure and dark corners of the internet.  However, a series of campus regulations oversteps and the perhaps overly ambitious use of no platforming became a means for less radical rightists and libertarians to use some of their tropes. The biggest coup though is all the attention Clinton and left-liberal magazines have given the movement to try to use Trump’s rhetoric against him.  They successful broadcast this small sub-set of meme warriors into the popular dialogue and exposing them to far, far more people than they were exposed to at any time prior.

Wonktopians were drinking their own koolaid by the gallon, and yet also trying to give it out for free.  That really rarely ends well.

The Strange Death of Liberal Wonktopia, Day 6: Intersectionality is always a key term until someone asks you to actually do it.

Let’s getting something out of the way that is spreading like a virus: You can’t understand what it means to be “white working class,” or any working class, from polling results.    This isn’t going to become a John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen video with a folksy version of the Internationale in the melody.  Finally, no, you don’t have to empathize with the “white working class.”  You don’t have to empathize with anyone for a lot of what I am going to say to make sense.  That, however, isn’t the same thing as not shaming them, ignoring them, pretending what is happening to them isn’t happening.

The first part of the narrative:  The interests of the working class are divided by both race–and something even Marxists don’t talk much about anymore–region.  The reason for this difference is historical, but not just because of the long history of racial violence in the United States.  That most definitely plays a part, and the real gap in wealth between the black community and the white community largely comes from that very history: slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, chain gangs, and the second wave of Klan. The gap in wealth between the white community and the black community has to the ownership of real property and investment, and not just current income.  It also has to do with inheritance and access to fair investment markets.  That, however, most left-liberals and Marxists vaguely understand.

What historical factors are ignored?  The shape of economic development in the country. While it is tempting to think the interests of the working class are unified, even within the “white” working class, this is somewhat laughable if you look at the shape of the country.  The Union movement in the USA has largely failed. As I wrote about in another place, the South and West’s “Right to Work” laws and history of race baiting actually killed the Unions there.  But there was another problem–the South were NEVER industrialized on the same model as the upper mid-West of the United States and share-cropping and prison labor was used to keep agricultural wages down as well. Similar to the way exploiting undocumented immigrants who do not have wage protections are done now . This means the industrial union model never took off, and the few unions that did exist were largely for contractors, functioning more like professional guilds.  After all, who can a Union of independent contractors strike against as they are technically their own employer.

The West Coast’s working class and now most of the South have a working class in the service sector or in the military or education.  That said, the service sector in the West Coast, largely because of a historical accident, is in higher skilled work like computing in urban areas or in crops that are resistant to mechanization like vegetables, nuts, and fruits in rural and suburban ones.  In the mountain West, outside of the cities, the main employer is mineral extraction but of more profitable and rarer minerals than in the mountains around the rust belt. The South is even more complicated,  being largely urbanized and de-urbanized very quickly, centers of population are even more concreted than North East.  This changes the nature of land ownership, and the kinds of employment there.   While in area manufacturing and contracting specifically for turning former farm land into rich subdivisions provided a lot of jobs, that manufacturing work was limited. Furthermore, many employers from Japan and even the US moved factories to the South but they were newer, much more highly automated, and cost of living and wages low enough that even a non-unionized job was more attractive than what else was on offer.

This is a very rough sketch of the last two decades of development, and I am sure there is much to contend with in the fine print.  It definitely related to the voting patterns. Here’s what we know about Trump’s voting electorate.  It was overwhelming white, but upper middle class. The “white working class” only seemed to turn the election to his favor actively in the devastated areas of the rust belt.

To delve into some further vulgar Marxism, the bourgeoisie in the US are mixed too and not just by size of their businesses. Small business owners have been in decline as have small farmers. This is nothing new.  However, the GOP has largely based itself out of Sun Belt where these declines were more pronounced.  Furthermore, ironically, the GOP and black Democrats colluded to make sure that representation was more concentrated, allowing for a bigger electoral hold on Sun Belt states than would otherwise happen in exchange for some clearly black representation of mostly black districts.  The Democrats, whose origins back to Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson, depending on our interpretation, are a populist party without an ideological or even consistent class base core. The GOP has always, even in Lincoln’s day when it was radically progressive, been a party of business.  The nature of business to society itself has changed. As the Brahmin Republicans declined in the North East and West because of urbanization, the Nixon strategy and the Goldwater vote on the civil rights act, and the taint of the Dixiecrats drifting away the Democrats, Democrats were able to take over the political machines and the interests of the Wall Street in the North East fairly easily.  Meaning that there are some substantive differences between the GOP and Democrats even though they both favor managerial and bourgeois interests–those interests are different. For example, Trump and Koch make things or build things, but Goldman Sachs finances things and Silicon valley disrupts things–ironically, though, because even the sharing economies business model of ending monopolies is based on intellectual property monopoly.

You will note that NONE of that requires empathy. It does require understanding. It requires also a buzzword that everyone throws around in Social justice circles but few people actually try to do: Intersectional understanding.  Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined that term from his work in law at the turn of the 1980s to 1990s. It did really take off with meme and think-piece culture in the late aughts. Like lectures about privilege, it hide in legal and pedagogical studies in the academy before being integrated by undergraduates into to think pieces 20 years later. I have written in other places extensively on the strange relationship of intersectionality to ideas like standpoint epistemology, and it has theoretically absorbed some of those assumptions in its common use. But at least, Crenshaw wanted disability, race, class, gender, sex, caste, and class into our understanding of human interactions.   Crenshaw did not think they could weighted or put down in simple categories and thus all analysis had to be multi-casual. This is easily done in cases like understanding American labor, but it removes the easy of sloganeering and simple reductive rhetoric.

Yet think pieces and blogs have increased simple reductive rhetoric to the point that “intersectionality” is generally used a way to shut people up,  or as a substitute for the idea of Solidarity, or as way of erasing the very things it was suppose to overlay. When combined with the psychologization of a lot of left-liberal politics–with analogies to trauma, unintended aggression, and constant pleas to empathy–you can see where this valuable way of analyzing the world drops out and becomes useless because the substantive methodological content goes into the air.

This brings me to a series of counter articles written in the last few days to all these naive pleas about the empathizing with the white working class. Some of this is a weirdly liberal appropriation of Maoist-Third Worldist ideas, but only applied to race within the US. I will ignore that because J. Sakai being used to support Hillary Clinton is absurd on its face. Other responses are been more nuanced in part, addressing “white allies.” I will talk about Kali Holloway’s piece for Alternet,  “Stop Asking Me to Empathize With the White Working Class: And a few other tips for white people in this moment,” as I think it is representative of what is likely to become a genre in the few weeks of doubling down on ideas and paradigms that largely only speak to themselves.

Holloway begins with,

The only people who were surprised by white people voting for white supremacy is other white people. Muslims, black folks and other people of color have been petrified of this outcome for a long time now, because we know how white power will do anything to preserve itself. We have seen it, worked beside it, watched it on the news, lived next door to it, witnessed it call itself our friend and then question our experiences with racism when we recount them.

Right out of the park, we begin with a bunch of assumptions that have to be unpacked. One of my problems with standpoint epistemology is the way it conflates derailing someone’s experience with questioning the scope of someone’s experience. Is a vote for Clinton NOT a vote for white supremacy?  After all, she was an active supporter of her husband’s tough on crime act.  Furthermore, in most of the country, “lived next door to it” is a false claim.  This implies an integrated America that only exists in the upper middle class suburbs of large cities. It also implies equal class footing. That’s not even false.

However, the conflation of both interests of whites being unified and the interests of people of color being unified but opposed is common.  It’s a white hat/black hat myth, with the moral significance of the colors inverted, but it’s common.  Yes, all white identified people benefit from the social structures around race, but they do not all equally nor is white power necessarily in everyone’s interests equally. Furthermore, as we pointed out, the diversification of the elite actually hasn’t been that much of a threat to white power. That is not what is going on.

Holloway says,

The only surprise to come out of this election is how many, and how quickly, white people want us to empathize with the people who voted against our humanity, our right to exist in this place. Even before the election, the Washington Post actually had the audacity to berate us for not crying for the white working class. In the days since Trump won, the number of articlesurging everybody to be cool to Trump’s America, to understand what they are facing, to hear their grievances, has added insult to injury. Bernie Sanders issued a statement saying Trump “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media.” I read it at least three times and couldn’t find the words “white supremacy” anywhere in it.

Which is true, but also it wasn’t just white supremacy being maintained. 47% of the population didn’t vote. 70% of the voting electorate was white, about 9% more than representation of the country, and while the majority of those votes did go to the Republicans, the white working class that needs someone to listen to them didn’t vote for anyone. Neither did larger portions of working class blacks and hispanics. These are facts. I have documented them elsewhere.  The reasons why people are calling for this to be looked at is based on a simple question:  how are you going to win state level races to get back those purple states if you can’t address white people?  2060 is the year projected that the white population becomes majority minority–if and only if other current groups don’t start identifying as white.  But even then, you have to assume simplified interests among groups.  This doesn’t start up to much pressure.

Without that reforms of electoral college and other things that liberals are putting their hopes on are not just unlikely but impossible. Furthermore, as has been a theme, shaming people on this front doesn’t work.  Holloway makes it worse though in key ways:

Let me pass along some advice black folks have been given for a long time: stop being so angry and seeing yourself as a victim, and try pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. That’s really all I have for you right now, this re-gifting of wisdom.

This is not just spite, it’s stupid spite. Everyone knows in her circles that this is not possible. Indeed, the very image is a logical impossibility but dismissing that is the normalization of a downward trend that also continues to affect large portions of the black and hispanic community. Hard work doesn’t change aggregate outcomes for anyone.

Holloway makes another lazy argument:

Here’s another reason I’m not interested: This whole idea that I have to understand the people America seems to believe are its “real” citizens is less and less relevant. Yes, they won an election. This country is getting browner and gayer by the day, and for all they are fighting to get back to the 1950s, lazing in toxic nostalgia isn’t going to change that. The demographics of this country are not on their side. They might want to try understanding the future—in which they are outnumbered and outvoted—because it comes for us all.

Yes, but Republicans are getting more and more of the brown vote, the idea that identity has set ideological content because of abstractions is, frankly. absurd. White power is a material thing, as it wanes, the interests of those who replace it in the same economic system will resemble that of who they replaced. Don’t believe me? Study the history of the coloreds in Haiti versus the black former slaves and who made up the elite classes there after the whites were gone.  The demographics of the U.S. are centralized in urban areas in a way that make it less and less democratic, and fixing that without also erasing many state borders and localities, would quickly cause several constitutional issues to become manifest like they did in large nation-states with diverse population that didn’t have a system to balance those interests:  see the history of Mexico and Brazil and the increased history of party centralization, corruption, and military coups for the long gains from that.  You don’t only change one part of a broken system, and yet that is all that is being talked about and predicting that raw number demographics will change things for the Democrats and People of Color. In Brazil, the “whites” (although Americans who think of them as Latinos) dominated and still dominate politics despite demographic trends being against for almost two decades. Why?  Accumulation, centralization of power, and conflicting interests among other groups.

Holloway doubles down again before she’s finished,”To paraphrase Samantha Bee, if Muslims and black folks have to take responsibility for every member of our communities, so do you.”  This again is confusing identity revenge with some vague notion of justice. The reason why everyone from bell hooks to Samantha Bee says making people representative of their race is it bad thinking. Inverting it is still bad thinking and is basically just sticking ones finger in the air and screaming: you did it too.

Holloway does make some sound points: poverty is always portrayed more romantically for whites and is perceived differently by the public, the diversification of elites isn’t what is causing white working class problems, and that it is basically each community’s responsibility to speak to itself.  However, if one was intersectional AT ALL in the analysis, it would be clear that communities overlap.  Indeed, Holloway’s whole premise in the beginning based on exposure to white communities is predicated on it overlapping.

I will quote a friend’s conversation with me about this as it makes the point clear:

Here’s what I mean (I feel like I’m talking to 5th graders, so I’m even worse than mansplaining): SOME white people are racist ignoramuses, and SOME white people are economically oppressed, and the intersection of these groups is not
the NULL SET. See? That’s not hard, is it?

The main point being not that “I am right” in the particulars, but that a certain amount of complexity is irreducible. As an analogy: if you want to cure a disease, you have to get the etiology right. Bleeding someone with malaria might make you feel better about yourself, as a caretaker, but it will do fuck all, therapeutically, for the patient.

The right isn’t totally wrong about how therapy has taken over a model for politics, they are just wrong about how and why. There are confluence of interests and actors in all of this, but the liberal and conservative–indeed most of the American– imagination has become so withered by simplistic typologies and the focus on emotional states that simple descriptive facts seem beyond most people’s capacity.  The personal being political, and the politics being symbolic has massively eroded liberals’ ability to parse complicated reality.  It has make intersectionalism the buzzword for most activism while also making it nearly impossible to say anything that actually has a multi-factor analysis as its core,  which is what intersectionality itself demands.

The Strange Death of Liberal Wonktopia, Day 2: I am Sancho Panza, We should be Sancho Panza

I am running a fever as I write this, watching without any particular strong emotion, President Obama, having to eat crow and welcome President-elect Donald Trump to the White House.   As my friend Arya said, “What a fitting way to end a presidency, by a man who forfeited all his principles in order to maintain a face of political modesty, and shall now open the White House doors to welcome President-elect Donald J. Trump.”  In this moment, as being on a podcast too late may have weakened my fight against a desert fall cold, I am probably going to alien more “left liberals” who feel disgraced and embarrassed for their country, but refuse to see their role in any of it.

So I got angry at the left and liberals on a podcast last night.   For months, I have been calling this a race to bottom, and it was:

Between 2008 and 2016, we saw the demoiblization of about 10,000,000 voters.  More facts to astonish, Trump won the electoral college with less votes than Clinton, but both got less votes than either McCain or Romney lost with.  Furthermore, while this narrative that it was only bigotry and not the Democrats playing with fire that does this, Trump got a HIGHER percentage of the Black and Latino vote than Romney. He got a majority of white women who voted. 

So Romney’s vote was larger and whiter than Trumps.  Clinton could not get youth or he demographic to come out in force. Obama’s oversaw the the demobilization of 10,000 voters. And Clinton made almost no policy prescriptions, Michael Moore’s only real defense of her was she would be the first woman president.  The whole thing was made to look like she was inevitable when there wasn’t much there. While I often don’t like Sam Kriss’s opinions even if his caustic writing is always a joy, we have agreed more and more in this election about the impotence, silly rage, and lack of substance of the post-Obama progressives in the DNC.  He hits the worm I the apple:

Throughout the entire election, one slow-motion clip of a clown car ramming into a crowd of pedestrians, I’d assumed that the danger of Trump and the danger of Clinton were of two different orders. Trump was dangerous because of what he said and what he represented, the waves of fascism and violence that rippled out from the dead plopping weight of his speeches. Clinton was dangerous because of what she would actually do, because Clinton was going to win the election. I was a sucker, the kind who gets duped precisely by believing himself to be too smart for any kind of con. I thought I saw through it all, the whole stupid charade, a coronation disguised as a battlefield. I was wrong. This was exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted people like me to think; she wanted to be an inevitability. And this is why Trump won: the presidency was Clinton’s to lose, from the moment she announced her candidacy, and she lost it. She was the only person who could. People don’t like taking part in someone else’s inevitability.

My guess is even a lot the people throwing useless tantrums that they will call protests now couldn’t bring themselves to care either.  One of the lowest percentile of voters in a country that already has anemic voter participation gave a non-mandate to a celebrity who is a populist cheeto and effectively threatening to grab the infrastructure by the pussy.  I can’t make this up.  And the people who liberals say they are speaking for voted for him in higher numbers than they voted for Romney.  White women voted for him in the main despite two weeks of predictions.  They didn’t seem to really want to vote for him. However, he was a sledge hammer and the few that did vote used it.

Why did they want a sledge hammer?  Juan Cole, who wrote an excellent article whose only mistake is confusing neoliberalism with non-Kenyesian capitalism, hits at part of it:

Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: “have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married.” This study found other causes for the increased death rates than just the ones mentioned above, but didn’t deny the Princeton findings. Here is their chart:

The only comparison I can think of to this situation is what happened to Russians in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation had a population of nearly 150 million in 1990 and thereafter fell to about 144 million. The end of the Soviet Union caused their confidence in the future to collapse and the end of the old economic system created very high unemployment. They stopped having children and drank themselves to death.

In America, the rural/urban divide is becoming one of life and death like the black/white divide was and the way Democrats–and progressives in general handled that was–calling them racist and sexist for wanting something. I have said for the years that the natural result of privilege talk wouldn’t be lifting everyone up, it would be subjecting everyone to the same hellhole that minorities undergo and then pretending it already wasn’t happening to the rural and exurban poor.  The National Review and Vox basically came to a tactic agreement on this.

So let’s take a second here and look at what Glen Greenwald says,

Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.

But it is worse than that: Nate Silver ended up yelling at HuffPo for predicting with more hubris than Fox News did a Romney victory that there was 98% that Clinton would win. See I never fully accepted the inevitable because I knew that the Democrats were relying on demographics who have not voted in high numbers except in the first Obama campaign to save them based off of nothing but fear of Trump Planet. Vox, the supposed bastion of liberal fair-mindedness, objectivity, not siding  with Huffpo or Silver but pretending they were on more or less equal ground. .   But we are talking to the same Vox that forget to mention the biggest electoral college, but not popular vote, winner in American history, Lincoln, in an article on the topic. 

So there are plenty of voices, some less loud but more established than me saying this. Thomas Frank is speaking the same talk as Greenwald, myself, Kriss too:

Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

In light of the Podesta e-mails, not only did DNC do exactly what was Frank says and were clueless to the people warning them, they actually brought their kryptonite in, they did because they thought it would enable them to win.  Not only did it not happen, nor could milquetoast Obama and saying that the recovery was great despite the fact that rural America is dying not do it, Trump blow up the traditional conservation coalition, more or less ended the religious conservatives as a force in secular politics, and divided his party.  Yet they still routed the Democrats. A celebrity land developer with no political experience who set his party on fire, not only won, but enabled that flaming, divided party to win.

Now for all the decries of shame on America, and all the talk of defeating the patriarchy by supporting a candidate on Wall Street and that anyone who told you differently was mansplaining to you.  What did that you?  So if you continue to do it, what will it get you now?  Particularly when many of the professional white women claiming this have to ask themselves: why did the women in their race and some even in their class but outside of coastal elites not fight the great misogynist. Was it just brocialists trying to shut you up? Was it just the alt-right?  No, no it wasn’t.  Working class women in the main sat on their hands this election. Why?

To go further, and return to Kriss.  I don’t think Trump is a fascist for the very reason Kriss thinks he is. I actually have strict definitions, Trump is something new:

Donald Trump is a fascist. We shouldn’t be afraid of the word: it’s simple and accurate, and his fascism is hardly unique; it’s just a suppurating outgrowth of the fascism that was already there. Still, this time it’s different. The fascisms of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, or east Asia in the 50s and 60s, or Latin America in the 70s and 80s were all the response of a capitalist order to the terrifying potency of an organised working class. Fascism is what capitalism does when it’s under threat, something always latent but extending in claws when it’s time to fight; it imitates mass movements while never really having the support of the masses. (In Germany, for instance, support for the Nazis was highest among the industrial haute bourgeoisie, and declined through every social stratum; look at Trump’s share of the voter per income band and see the same pattern. The workers didn’t vote for Trump, they just didn’t vote for Clinton either.) But today the organised working class is nowhere to be found. There’s no coherent left-wing movement actively endangering capitalism; the crisis facing the liberal-capitalist order is entirely internal. It’s grinding against its own contradictions, circling the globe to turn back against itself, smashing through its biological and ecological limits and finding nothing on the other side. This is the death spasm, a truly nihilist fascism, the fascism of a global system prickling for enemies to destroy but charging only against itself. There’s no silence in the final and total victory, just an endless war with only one side. It’s not entirely the case, as the slogan puts it, that the only thing capable of defeating the radical right is a radical left. The radical right will defeat itself, sooner or later, even if it’s at the cost of a few tens of millions of lives. We need a radical left so there can be any kind of fight at all.

I actually don’t think Kriss is entirely right here. He is right that this emerging from contradictions within capitalism and global economy. The organized left exists more now than any time since 1980s though, but its still tiny, irrelevant.  Losing battles like SYRIZA. Misplaying its hand by backing Corbyn or Sanders. Believing in a mixture of magical thinking like MMT that currency and value as the same thing because exchange creates products, creates value, and that this can go on in a closed system for more than two voting cycles despite the fact that all command economies that I have studied have stagnated and massively declined within a decade if they thought the you can operate an economy like a war.  There hasn’t been an organized left because the left has been wrong or opportunistic or both.  It continues, more conservatively than liberals or conservatives, to use models from the distant past and ignore events in decades that don’t suit them.  To hope this is a death pasm, is like the nice, polite but petty optimism of phrases like “late capitalism.”  You don’t have evidence that this isn’t a crisis that will, like a brush fire, will allow it growth again.

Nor do I think Tom O’Brien, who was in the podcast I appeared  on last night is right, that this infrastructure will produce jobs and bring work back. Tariffs and deficit spending will save the US and its internal economy because economics never has been limited to a single polity. And manufacturing is coming back to America, it just isn’t providing jobs.  Automation is as big a problem of austerity.  Service jobs don’t generate as much value and thus can’t pay as well in  a capitalist economy.  This is a hard truth.   This cuts against populists and the left deeply if it doesn’t internalize many hard truths about economics and culture and the interplay between the two.

Furthermore, despite this, how has some of the stars of the “progressive” wing of the Democrats reacted.  Bernie Sanders and Elisabeth Warren reached out to Trump, particularly on things like Trump’s infrastructure plan, which people like Mitch McConnell  want to stall and destroy.  People like Arthur Chu go two steps further, seeming confirming what a  lot of conservatives and alt-rights believe about all leftists, liberals, and progressives:

That the elites should be like them. Like they are better. That white people are scum in the rural areas for not wanting more death. He knows better than those racial inferiors. Invert that language. How does it sound to you? That is what the alt-rightists think ALL Progressives believe. That institutional wonktopia will save them and that people are depraved, moral monsters who need to be told what to do.

If Arthur Chu is the face of young progressivism, it deserves a worse fate than the Whigs in 1850. Smug, angry, and frankly just as racialist as those it claims are racialists themselves. Call that what is it: deluded, disgusting, hubristic.   You think you can shame people because of merely who you are?  I  will quote Wes Alwan of Partially Examined Life:

The left needs to look in the mirror stop it with the sanctimonious, deluded partisan-bubble narrative about bigotry and how America suddenly found millions more racists in its basement after electing Obama twice. Where’d they come from? Did someone grow them in a box? The existing electorate suddenly realized that they couldn’t stand having a black man as president, after voting for him twice?

We lost the election because we thought we had our boot on the neck of the white working class and that we could not only ignore their concerns, but ridicule them for having any concerns. We thought that we could could make them America’s new bad object, to fill the void left by the fact that persecuting black people has fallen out of fashion. We told them they were Nazis for worrying about blue collar job competition from illegal immigrants and wanting to see immigration law enforced. We told them they were thinking about voting for Hitler. That’s not what Obama did. He won precisely by reaching out to these voters.

That’s not what Bernie Sanders did either. We were positively allergic to Bernie Sanders’ winning message, because we just couldn’t deal with the fact that it laid off the identity politics for two seconds. In fact, Sanders supporters similarly became a target of the relentless you’re-a-bigot loop that a certain segment of the American left have going on in their heads on constant replay. “Bernie Bros.” Every time you think about why this election was lost, I want you to think about the wisdom of the phrase “Bernie Bros.” Poll after poll showed Sanders dramatically outperforming Clinton against Trump, precisely because he made the same appeal as Trump to actual swing voters.

Here’s a novel way to win friends and influence people: stop calling people names. Stop trying to shame them into compliance. Stop telling your political opponents that they are evil. It’s remarkably effective.

Finally: consider the enormous asymmetry in cultural power in the United States, the one the media conveniently never talks about. Ask yourself how you would feel if Republicans had a mortal lock on the University and the media and Hollywood.

As long as the left’s hegemony over American cultural power remains unenlightened and devoid of benevolence, we’re going to see political power balance it out.

I watched the same thing happen under Clinton. The PC bullshit peaked right before the 2000 election. The Republicans are terrible losers, but the Democrats are terrible winners.

The first black president. Gay marriage. The more cultural gains we made, the more the left ratcheted up the rhetoric about how sexism and racism and homophobia are worse than ever and that the rednecks are to blame. If you think you have your boot on the neck of America’s cultural peasants, and your conscience can tolerate it, then that’s a winning strategy. Grind them into the dirt. But if you’ve decided on total war, you better be sure you actually have the armaments for total war. Did you forget that the majority of the population is white, and that the majority of them do not have a college degree? Did you really think that they wanted to hear about their “privilege” from liberal white elites? You thought you could tell the peasants to shut the fuck up and eat their cake, and that they wouldn’t come at you with your pitchforks?

The effete delusions of a corrupt aristocracy, of hash-tag courtiers who have abandoned actual policies that help the underprivileged to indulge in conspicuous ethical consumption that displays their moral superiority to the cultural peasants. Screw the diverse mass of peasants: Does the aristocracy have the right race and gender balance? Screw socioeconomic policies that help African Americans; I’m going to a “protest”!

If Chu is an example, Wes Alwan is right:  Chu sees himself as an aristocrat. Better than the people.  Democracy should have been used to suppress Democracy.  I am not a fan of liberal democracy anyway, but this  Chu is an example of this lack.  If Chu is representative of progressives, is the alt-right wrong that they just want to take the seat and grind most regular people to dust?   DeMaistre ancien regime is manifested in tantrums like Chu’s. Wes is right  the effete delusions of a corrupt aristocracy, of hash-tag courtiers who have abandoned actual policies that help the underprivileged to indulge in conspicuous ethical consumption that displays their moral superiority to the cultural peasants.

The question: How did it become an ancien regime in just eight years if there was substance in the ideology in the first place?

Progressives are scared–after all, they enabled this and people ARE mad. A lot of innocent people will be hurt by policy shifts, but then again, it’s not like ACA was working. ACA will probably be gone.  With the premiums were skyrocketing and so was the penalty tax next year, there is no incentive to save it. What did Democrats expect? They compromised and put the bomb in the program to be kicked the road. Progressives should be afraid–more for what the Senate and Congress will do than what Trump will do.  Honestly. There will be all kinds of things dependent on whether or not a conservative Supreme Court decides to uphold stare decisis.  There is even talk that there will be horse-trading over LGBT+ rights.  I obviously don’t think this is good.  However, this would have happened with any GOP routing of the Democrats, not just Trumps.  Furthermore, it is unclear how much Trump will play with both consensus GOP and Tea Parties, since his populism is different from the conservatism of both. It is also unclear how they will play with him. This isn’t just happening in the states. Every year Le Penn’s National Front grows in the French electorate. Brexit has happened. Theresa May is PM of Great Britain.  Trade is down worldwide. Modi won India. Putin maintains power in Russia. Rody Durante. The pink wave has crushed and Latin America is in a rightwing mood.  PRI has retaken Mexican politics.  The Arab Spring is over and most of the places are in civil war.  Even politicians in Canada are talking about taking lesson from Trump.   You heard of Kellie Leitch? You probably will.

So let’s get one thing straight though: IF the DNC was serious about responding, heads would be rolling and they would be preparing to not just assume support. What did they do? Keep Pelosi as a leader. No significant change in the guard. The left–in so much that there is one–should regroup and give the Democratic leadership no quarter. Don’t be suckered into supporting them on pragmatic grounds.  This election was proof this leadership aren’t pragmatic.  They aren’t real as force.   Their wonktopia was substance.  An empty phantasm of a city on a hill. These were tilling a windmills and pretending we were a distant past.

You and I need to be Sancho Panza, but angrier and more consistent.  Give no quarter to these delusions and don’t forget anyone who holds them.  Wonktopia was a delusion. A shiny polity on a hill that never existed.  We need to be careful of being fooled into thinking that politics as normal in liberal democracies is going to save us.

The Strange Death of Liberal Wonktopia: Some thoughts on Trump as he appears to win from an expatriate “leftist”

I am sitting at my work desk at school on the edge of the desert, near the outskirts of Cairo, where the wealthy developments have moved away from the slums around the Nile.  Here the government is talking about building a new city Akhenaten-style away from the bustle of Cairo, which has been the seat of some of the Egyptian government for most of 4000 years. Cairo itself is an Islamic city, but the Hellenistic Roman settlements that made up coptic Cairo were right near by and so was the ancient capital of Memphis and the tomb complex at Giza.  The reason for this is that Egypt has had to make hard choices:  float the currency to get more imports in and hurt the poor, or continue subsidies but get have no cash to buy imports and hurt the poor that way.  Given the number of impoverished here, either choice was politically destabilizing potentially and, which the five year anniversary of the “revolution” that spring from the Arab Spring coming up, the atmosphere is tense.   This and Occupy Democrats are the ashes of the hopes of Occupy and the rebellion against politics as usual.

Politic as usual, however, deserved what it got.  These politics will have costs and the costs are painful.  In it not just in “revolution” that breaks a few eggs but the march of change breaks this period.

It is with this in mind that write about Donald Trump and the US election. Sleeping through the early stages of polls being called because I was in seven hours in the future thanks to magic of the curve of the earth, I awoke at 5 am Cairo time to my social media feeds in a frenzy of panic: “I hate America,” “Jill Stein cost us a woman President,” “All those who voted for a third party showed that they didn’t value my life, or the people I loves life.”  Rachel Maddow apparently almost crying on national television.   I have never seen so much panic, and there would have been panic either way.

This, however, is what I predicted would happen, and, in a way, the Democrats played with fire and got badly burned.  However, to be completely honest, it does not seem that any of them will let go of their identity as a kind of person to look at why this happened deeply.  The confluence of events that has led to the likely defeat.  Instead, they will blame third parties, and not why third parties had an appeal. They will blame racism and sexism, and not why the voters in swings states ignored those things.  They go into histrionics as the polity that they have so throughly identified themselves with gave two fucks about them.  It doesn’t. It hasn’t. It wouldn’t have.

The last two elections the liberal wonks were certain that I was wrong about the anger at them and certain that me calling midterms for the GOP was wrong. I was right.  I was right because I listened to trends and patterns because I know that their is a tendency for those who rule to isolate themselves and those who identity with rulers to self-select.  Friends who have grown up during the Bush years, but didn’t remember how that happened because they were in their teens forget the tenor of American politics or why the end of the Bush years were unique.  They ignored business cycles, and then cynically prompted up abstract economic growth that had not trickled down into the working class, particularly the rural working class for years. These Democrats and left-liberal “independents” embraced most of the very things they had criticized during the GOPs ascension in the late 1990s and 2000s.   Then thes good liberal people feel shame for the decisions of their country’s people when they showed a center-right or even populist mood but not shame at what would have let to that anger. This is part of what DeMaistre saw in ancien regimes. DeMaistre, even though he saw the French Revolution as essentially Satanic, did not blame the revolution primarily on the people but on a cycle of decadence in the Ancien Regime itself.

DeMaistre also said, “every country gets the government it deserves.”  

I have often said, “nothing is about what anyone deserves.”  Perhaps, in a sense, both DeMaistre and I are right depending on the level one is taking about.  Almost assuredly most of the existential threats made by Presidents are to non-citizens, and in that sense, both Clinton and Trump made plenty.  Ironically, though, it does not lead the conclusion that people voting against Clinton do not care about Democratic lives. Indeed, if anything, they don’t care about non-American lives, but this election proves that this is a bipartisan affair. So that contradiction of sentiment remains regardless of outcome.

This, however, is deeper than that. The Clinton campaign deliberately played with fire and got burnt.  I wrote about this a few weeks before Jacobin did, but Jacobin goes into more detail.  If there was a vast right-wing conspiracy here, it was from operatives within the DNC and the Clinton campaign themselves.  This began in the primaries:

For many, the earlier DNC emails release proved their suspicions that the DNC had placed its thumb on the scales in favor of Clinton’s campaign, such as one email that showed DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz nixing a final debate between Clinton and Sanders. The latest release all but confirms it, with a briefing memo laying out discussions between the Clinton campaign and the DNC about the debate schedule, including the need to “limit the number of debates,” “start the debates as late as possible,” and “keep debates out of the busy window” between the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. At least the DNC failed to “eliminate the possibility of one on one debates,” as the memo had advocated.

Furthermore, Clinton’s explicit strategy in 2015 was the build up marginal candidates to undermine the establishment GOP and allow an easier win.  Again, I will quote Jacobin:

Upon pivoting to the general election, the Clinton campaign has largely eschewed a positive, affirmative vision in favor of stressing how much worse Donald Trump would be in office. “We cannot allow this man to become president,” her campaign recently tweeted. But back in the campaign’s early days, Trump was one of three “Pied Piper Candidates” — along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson — the campaign planned on “elevating” so “they are leaders of the pack.”

“We don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates,” the memo strategy read, but “tell the press to [take] them seriously.” The Clinton camp hoped their rise to prominence would “move the more established candidates further to the right,” making the eventual nominee unelectable come November. Depending on the Trump campaign’s afterlife, the Clinton team may come to regret helping create this monster.

Despite all this, many groups on the radical Left, including groups that had advised against tactical and strategic alliances with Democrats in the past, other groups tactically sided with Jill Stein, and other groups and individuals outright endorsed Trump as a means accelerating the contradictions, including the recently much maligned Platypus Affiliated Society and even Zizek.  The smug answers to liberals on this was “why don’t these leftists ever learn?” while also demanding that the Marxists vote for them because Trump was going to send everyone to FEMA camps run by Putin, or something. Nevertheless, in a frenzy of speculation, opportunism, and borderline civil war, most of the gains made by the left were lost.  While not to blame exactly, the elephant in the room was the naiveté around both Bernie Sander’s and the ability to march back into the Democratic party and endorse an outsider after trying and failing to hold even Obama’s feet to the fire.

Ultimately, though, the radical left is tiny–it was growing, but it could still be metaphorically drowned in the bathtub.  Furthermore, as Cutrone points out, may who voted for Obama-some who even voted for him twice-would vote for Trump. My friend, Arya, said to me in light of all this: “If a Trump victory has done one positive thing, it has dispelled the illusory bourgeois myth of a “post-racial America”, by having a melted G.I. Joe action figure who kickstart his campaign by referring to roughly 15 million undocumented migrants from Latin America as “rapists” and consistently appealed to the racist anxieties of white middle-class voters, achieves a definitive victory.”  While not entirely wrong, the there is more a play here. The rural white working class seems to have gone with the middle-class because, not just lie of post-racial America, but also the lie of post-class America and the naive (and racist itself) demand that minorities support the lesser evil of rich, largely white parties of US capitalism. Cubanos, for example, have so far gone for Trump, and while many of my friends would call them gusanos, it does not change this fact.

Furthermore, consistently calling anyone who had any skepticism revolving around the erasure from class from most racial dialogues themselves suspect was a self-fulfilling prophecy in regards to many on the left.

Yet what I did I see today?  Everyone blaming everyone else. I will bring up something I said years ago:

There is a strange tendency Americans have to say shit like “Americans are so stupid.” This seems like a habit particular to US politics: to claim you represent the majority but also to insult the majority as stupid. That’s trying to have your cake and eat it too: Yes, there is a lot of idiocy coming out of the US, but honestly, the populist opinion out of most countries I have been exposed to has a tendency to be “regressive,” at least in parts, and definitely ignorant of history.  There is something interesting about US culture that so many feel the need to both be representative of and be smug against the majority of the culture. And, honestly, a majority of the people I encounter from the US do this at some point.

 This attitude of wanting to be the majority while also insulting it has arisen lately in a way that shows cracks in US self-identity.  The inversion of exceptionalism that doesn’t fix economic problems but shames people for their problems just like conservatives are said to do. It’s as if the the Puritans are ashamed that since they are not the shining city on the Hill, they must be not just utterly depraved and deplorable, but uniquely damned.   This is not an attitude in just the left or liberals either.

Furthermore, when you believe that your existence is at stake over the executive because for the past 30 years the believe in executive power has even outstripped its usurping other checks and balances, then is it surprisingly that the majority of the country feels like you would do the same to them?  Isn’t it easy to see how this hyperbole and histrionic behavior could, actually, bring about something akin to the very thing that wouldn’t have happened without it?

I have been asked for the prospects of the left again?  I don’t know. The world’s political memory is both ancient and very brief:  we remember our myths of the past, and the past eight years.  There is a global recession brewing, nationalism is in the air across the planet, and trade is down globally.

Furthermore, there are many trends missed in this black swan year. The youth vote was not mobilized, but probably out of the contempt. The Democrats could not dependent on the automatic support of several minority communities.  New York dominates our politics at the executive level because regional politics has been declining year by year.  The Democrats have had, and not even really attempted to have, any electoral game outside of Urban areas, and their hope that the inversion of the Southern strategy was somehow not racist in and of itself is beyond me.  The Religious Right is coopted and dead. The neoconservatives have split into three camps depending on their social inclinations and how much they valued trade.  Clinton had no incentive structurally or electorally to move to left to capture the Warren or Sanders vote.  Both sides engaged in heavy conspiracy mongering, but the press largely gave the Democrats conspiracy mongering a pass, and ignored aspirational “whiteness” among many voting demographics as well. These trends were, indeed, marginal, but with polls as close as they were as last two weeks of mega-scandals, the margins mattered.

What is apparent: People don’t trust the wonks anymore at a time when US wonk culture has become the global culture of the world.  The educated students I have worked with in Mexico, Egypt, and South Korea all knew more about US popular culture and US politics than about any other country aside from maybe Britain, often including their own.  Trust in democracy is down world wide, and yet the advent of American liberalism dominating the educational system of the states has affected the young elites of the world. They are somewhat disconnected from the events on the streets of their own country, even if those myths and conspiracies are wrong. They don’t know them.

Brexit has happened, and yet few in the Labour circles around the UK foresaw it. Indeed, many had adopted much of the language and lifestyle politics of the US left while also opposing Americanism.  Indeed, not entirely realizing the fracturing of their own thought in relationship to the US domination of Anglosphere media. Indeed, that so much the UK’s editorials in the Guardian were devoted to the US election is telling.

The problems that have led the liberals to the this point are world wide. Larger than just the states. Yet the disgust will be aimed at traitors who wouldn’t vote for a candidate that began with 55% disapproval rating and lose a primary just eight years ago. They would not revitalize a Democratic party that was increasingly represented by pale, white faces of people in the sixties and seventies who claimed to represent progressive ideas and the pulse of the opinions of people of color.

Of course, though, when all seems lost and you are bleeding from fresh wounds, it is best to blame everyone else for things and not see that very act as part of why you lost in the first place. That’s a totally winning strategy.

So, perhaps, DeMiastre was right here after all.