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May 8 - July 16, 2019
Maybe after John Kerry reported for duty at the 2004 Democratic Convention, you felt a brief twinge of patriotic embarrassment followed by a bone-deep sense that things will never get better.
Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath.
Despite their practical cultural hegemony in movies, TV, and academia, liberals have an uncanny knack for losing elections and being generally loathed.
So straight out of the gate, the Cold War was emphatically not about democracy versus totalitarianism. In Korea and in every subsequent proxy war, it was about capitalism versus threat to capitalism.
How many times did we act not against Communism but against anything remotely subverting capitalism? United Fruit in Latin America? Iran? Democratically elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende? In none of those cases were the Soviets to be seen.
America was so interested in fighting the evils of Communism that it propped up fucking Pol Pot—AFTER the Killing Fields! Yes, the genocide in Cambodia was stopped by the Communists running North Vietnam, who drove Pol Pot out of power.
The thing we call the War on Terror is, like pretty much every other war, a crude land grab for control of resources, oil pipelines, and good old-fashioned access to markets.
It should be sufficient to say that the justifications for it, from WMD to any supposed concern for the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi people, were obvious confabulations that fooled only those who wanted to be conned and those who just didn’t care because the thought of war excited them so much.
Obama pulled off a much trickier job: Febreze-ing our national conscience without ever truly reckoning with what happened or winding down our blood-soaked “strategic interests in the region.”
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 PPM. As of this writing, we’re over 410 PPM and rising.
The apocalypse is already here; you just don’t live there yet.
Despite its claim to the mantle of American Progress, the liberal algorithm produces positive social change or legislation only when pressured—sometimes terrorized—by militant and/or popular left-wing movements.
Without an organized and popular Left, liberals end up negotiating themselves into oblivion, moving the country, inevitably, to the right.
So, liberalism from FDR to Johnson was about accommodating white racism in its most quotidian form while eventually trying to tamp down its more old-fashioned form—i.e., de jure segregation and Jim Crow.
Reagan selling arms to Iran in order to fund rape squads in Central America really did make Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.” So if libs want to keep holding up Watergate as a historic triumph for the forces of good, they’ll have to admit that letting Reagan off the hook represents a far greater historic triumph for the forces of evil.
Bill and Hillary enjoyed the services of unpaid black prisoners, a situation detailed in a passage of a book by Hilldawg that Bernie Sanders’s oppo team should be liquidated for not having circulated: When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a long-standing tradition, which kept down costs, and I was assured the inmates were carefully screened. . . . I saw and learned a lot as I got to
When one of his advisors received a package containing Bush’s debate prep materials, the advisor recused himself in the interest of fairness and reported the event to the FBI. (Superfun fact: In 1980, Reagan was leaked papers from Carter’s debate prep. He, of course, did the right thing and used them, because he wasn’t nearly as much of a fucking sucker as institutional liberals.)
liberalism is just a system for managing capitalism. It’s a collection of political and social norms that safely discharge the chaos generated by capital through gradual reform.
Democrats’ lack of vision suggests a historical descent into an also-ran party, one whose best shot at the White House is to stumble through the door after whatever grotesque catastrophe befalls the country thanks to Republican governance. But this party will never—and can never—fundamentally change American politics.
Yikes, did we shaft unions and sign health care over to insurance companies? Sorry, we were busy “getting things done,” like deregulating the financial sector and ballooning the war on drugs.
Perhaps the single greatest feature of neoliberalism is that it’s entirely compatible with contemporary values of racial and sexual equality, provided they don’t stray too far into income equality.
The right wing in America is like Dracula: a grotesque avatar of inherited wealth who is unkillable, casts no reflection in mirrors, and lives off the blood of peasants.
Even though the standard American lib might desire many of the same “good” things as you and I, their politics have a congenital defect that makes them easy marks for capital and empire. Their problem is not only their beliefs but also their lack of conviction.
America’s liberals are the good cops. They appear in viral videos in which they play basketball with diverse teens, participate in charity bike races, and look the other way only on evidence-planting and extrajudicial murder.
To the conservative, America’s vast wealth and power are signs of its goodness, because if there’s one thing the Bible is clear about in both the Old and New Testaments, it’s that rich and powerful empires are good and blessed by God.
In the right-wing vernacular, freedom means the freedom to exercise one’s God-given right to dominate anyone deemed lower than you.
Despite being caricatured as less of an ideology than a series of “irritable mental gestures,” “the incessant whining of collicky adult babies,” or “thinly veiled justifications for base prejudice and ignorance,” the conservative movement does have a proud intellectual heritage of hating anything intellectual.
The conservative movement is filled with boys who look like old men and old men who look like condoms packed with oatmeal,
capital has no problem assimilating pop-cultural rebellion and antiauthoritarian imagery. In fact, that stuff creates all kinds of new markets, new consumers, new suckers.
being in control of what is “cool” in our culture is a kind of power, but it’s one that liberals increasingly rely on in lieu of actual politics, to the detriment of politics—and
By realizing that a white author could get away with using racial slurs provided he didn’t use his real name and used the slurs only to point out that racism is bad, Twain created a distinctly American art form that endures to this day.
The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe.
So when old people tell you that work builds character, what they really mean is that it trains you to slog through hopelessness and alcoholism and to redirect your unexpressed rage toward your family and your loved ones.
The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (after brutally suppressing a grassroots “Occupy” movement) immediately pretended it never happened.
the liberal opposition to Trump (and whatever nightmare comes after Trump) reveals itself to be feckless and incompetent, more and more people are going to realize that there is no reforming a system built on exploitation and nonstop, infinite economic growth.
