Escapism isn’t the most debilitating thing. Far more dangerous are nihilism and what comes with it, which is a learned helplessness, resignation, and apathy.
It’s not easy to juggle some seemingly incompatible things, like the idea that we can’t change the right unless they want to change themselves, but that we’re also not without agency. Yet, if you’ve ever found yourself battling the addiction of a loved one, you know that these things can be reconciled. You can demand that the right gets the help they need rather than resigning yourself to go off the cliff with them. You can create all the conditions and incentives for them to get help. You can learn not to give up even though hard experience has taught you not to expect a better outcome the next time or the time after that. You’ll need to stand up for yourself and protect yourself against outrages, but you can also find times to turn the other cheek and look the other way, knowing that at root you are dealing with a diseased mind that can heal with time.
I’ve learned all these things and had both stunning successes and heartbreaking and cruel failures, and so I know that we might try everything we can think of and still wind up together as a nation at the bottom of the lake.
But giving up is the only sure way to wind up there.
I’d never leave this country while it still has a beating heart. I’ll fight to the bitter end.
Unless it’s a simile. In which case it’s still very apt.
. . . with “The Left Can’t Fix What’s Wrong With the Right”.
So, “The Left Can’t Fix What’s Wrong With the Right”, but we hafta keep trying anyway. That about it?
We can’t fix the right.
Guess we’ll just need to get our boot on their necks and never let them up.
The Reagan Administration embarked on an (effective) campaign to “defund the left” in the ’80s, attacking labor unions, public-interest non-profits, government agencies that administered social services, et c., on the ground that they just provided political and financial support for left wing causes.
Starting in 2018, we’re gonna have to turn that shit back around on them.
I promise that when we do, it’ll be fun as hell.
I am sorry, pillsy, but I want to clarify the possibilities and circumstances of this possible event.
#1-As the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian sidekick…”Tonto,” which roughly translated from the Spanish means “fool”…remarked to the Lone Ranger’s question “What’ll we do, Tonto!!!???” when they were hiding behind a rock under attack by vastly superior Native American forces:
Who exactly are “we” in that post, pillsy?
#2-And…provided that the “we” you identify actually wants to get a boot on their necks and never let them up (An open question regarding the controlling forces of the DNC, almost all of whom have been happily and profitably logrolling with the Republicans for the better part of 50 years or more no matter who has been president or controlled Congress.)…how and when do you think that they are going to go about that? By winning big in 2018? After the same forces totally whiffed in 2016? By beating Trump in 2020? If he lasts that long, do you really believe that open elections will even be possible?
I don’t.
I’m not even sure that they were possible in 2016, and that was before Trump took over.
AG
If there aren’t elections in ’20, it won’t matter, because the existing constitutional order will be completely dead.
If there are, I think you should look back to the extreme shift in the GOP approach to politics that took place between the fall of Richard Nixon and the rise of Ronald Reagan.
The “constitutional order” has been dead for a long time.
Trying to pinpoint exactly when is a mug’s game, as everyone has their own opinion and all of them are incommensurate. My own, if anyone cared, is the Nixon pardon.
A commonsense criterion for death is when institutions are seen to fail to defend their own prerogatives.
By that standard, the 1787 Constitution has been abrogated and is no longer in force. It has no friends left (except dishonest ones).
He’s their president. Only they have the power to deal with it. Our role is to the same as the role of anyone trying keep an addict alive long enough for them to want to change.
Do we also need to address our own codependence? Or do we bear absolutely no responsibility for this rolling catastrophe?
embedded this on the other thread, should have set here; I’m interested/ optimistic that he’s interested in the underlying problems as well as the presenting problems – what do you think?
Interesting. I don’t think I’ve heard an elected Republican speak as coherently, rationally, and dare I say, reasonably in ages. Is Sasse a real-life actual “moderate Republican” (at least in terms of a commitment to facts — I don’t know his policy preferences) or is this an illusion? It’d give me some hope if the former.
he isn’t a “moderate Republican” as I understand the term, he’s conservative, but he isn’t ideological, he’s a thinking person who wants to solve problems. He came to my attention b/c of his comments after the judiciary hearings. he has a PhD in history from Yale, did not support T in the election (said he’d vote 3rd party) on the grounds that T doesn’t respect the Constitution. he’s not up for reelection or under pressure in his state – I mention this because NYTimes has an article about Rs disaffected from T and it’s all horse race kind of stuff – Rs up for re-election facing dem opposition. nothing about Rs observing T and saying, T is undemocratic, problematic.
The night that Trump nominated Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, Senator Sasse claims to have gone out and talked to some of the people who were protesting his nomination in front of the SCOTUS building. He claimed that the protesters didn’t know why they opposed Gorsuch, and claimed that they didn’t know anything about Gorsuch’s record.
This sort of “the paid organizers of the professional Left are misinformed/stupid” is a nasty, corrosive propaganda method of the conservative movement, and it’s something Honest Ben engages in often enough. He’s cutting a decent figure with this earnest intact and his refusal to carry all of President Trump’s filthy water, but he’s an enemy of progressivism/liberalism who wants to give his movement some cover while making a brand for himself.
Sasse may even want to turn his Party and Senate Caucus away from Trump and Trumpism, but he’s been remarkably ineffective in doing so, and he’s bloodthirsty to eviscerate the ACA, pass budget-crippling tax cuts, and deregulate the holy fuck out of financial institutions and other businesses. So, yeah, I’m not down with Sasse’s fakery. If he isn’t organizing other Senate Republicans to block or oust Trump and negotiate more reasonably on policy, then Sasse isn’t worth a tub of lukewarm spit.
well, you’re right. don’t look at what he says about Trumprussia in connection with Trumprussia, look at what he said about SOMETHING ELSE ON WHICH YOU COMPLETELY DISAGREE WITH HIM and then WRITE HIM OFF COMPLETELY.
= recipe for successful coalition building after losing election should have won.
I concede you have a point in your response here. I didn’t engage the question you asked. That’s worth calling out.
I support Sasse’s desire to deal with the undermining of democratic institutions in our Nation and elsewhere. His understanding that stolen personal communications can easily be seeded with false information in the middle of real, though still stolen, information, is particularly important.
So: what was Senator Sasse doing and saying during the 2016 campaign?
Senator Sasse could have held some integrity and perspective when it counted. Instead, he engaged in vicious partisan politics on the Senate floor, narrowly and deceptively slicing and parsing statements in order to help elect Donald Trump President.
So, we can see what Ben means when he says on the video you shared that “there’s been a lot of politicization going on of the Justice Department over the last five, to eight, to nine years. We should want the Department of Justice to be very, very insulated from partisan politics.”
Sasse is now engaging in Both Siderism, which is an obscene thing to be doing right now. The differences between Presidents Obama and Trump and their Justice Departments are voluminous. But he’s not honest about that. Or he just disagrees.
Finally, I would hope that you, and everyone in this community, agrees that a Senator who snottily says that Liberals Are Paid, Uninformed Stooges and Every Single Senator In The Democrat Caucus Should Vote For Gorsuch And Those Who Don’t Are Engaging In The Worst Partisan Politics is not a leader who progressives/liberals can trust to build coalitions for reasonable discourse and policies.
– it doesn’t matter what he says now, because of what he said last year? fine, have that discussion.
What Senator Sasse is saying now, as defined by the video you shared from Sunday’s Face The Nation appearance, is that the Justice Department was politicized throughout the Obama Administration. We can see, from his obscene performance on the Senate floor in July, that a center of his concern is/was the Department’s refusal to indict Hillary Clinton. It isn’t as if he’s renounced any of that baloney.
Yes, he’s better than your average Republican at the moment. In the videos you have shared, he sounds reasonable and is diagnosing some real problems. But he’s selling a book, Brother. Earnest bipartisanship moves those units.
More to the point, he voted to make McConnell the Majority Leader, he’ll vote to murder Americans by taking health insurance from tens of millions of them if that’s what the Senate Republicans agree to do, and ditto on tax cuts for the rich and SS/Medi/Medi eviscerations for everyone else.
If you want to take an honest look at the record Sasse has piled up since his Senate campaign in 2014, you’ll see an ideological extremist and a vicious partisan who sometimes falls back to an “aw shucks” patina and rhetorical reasonableness. Read, for example, his view of how the Justice Department should treat issues like reproductive choice and same-sex marriage:
“Ben Sasse believes that our right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life. This is not a negotiable issue. Government cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances. He will fight for the right of all Americans to act in accordance with their conscience.”
How moderate of him. There’s a man with whom progressives can build a coalition, eh?
Not really. Your argument is on it’s face an appeal to treat him as an honest person who just disagrees with us about what the solution is but agrees with us on what the problem is, therefore we can have a reasoned debate with him and anyone who doesn’t want to have a reasoned debate with him is wrong logically.
If one’s argument is based on the moral integrity of the messenger, it’s not ad homenim to point out the messenger is a lying shit.
Which of course brings us back to my main argument, Sen. Sasse is a typical old school Republican Conman. He has no intention of dealing in good faith with us if we engage with him on the issues you are talking about, or at the very least we have no reason to believe due to his past actions of bad faith with everyone not in his tribe that he will now or in the future engage in good faith negotiations with us to have a meaningful and real dialog.
The quest for the ‘Reasonable Republican’ is at this point shown to be a moral and logical waste of time. All known evidence shows that ‘Reasonable Republicans’ left the Republican Party and became Democratic Party members or stopped voting at least a decade ago.
You can’t have a rational conversation with someone who doesn’t believe in common reality. As Sen. Sasse has shown on this topic and others, he does not in fact believe in common reality.
Please stop trying to push this bullshit.
yes, I take him at face value,
Here’s what you can take from him on face value. He WILL vote to get rid of the ACA. He WILL vote to cut taxes on the wealthy. He will vote for any RWNJ the president nominates to the federal bench. He will vote to support efforts at vote suppression. He will vote to deny women access to reproductive health care. Other than that, he’s a great guy.
That is a logically, ethically, and morally unsound move.
You give credence and legitimacy to those proven to mean us harm.
And for the record, I’m not opposed on some fundamental level to having conversations even with people who have done me and/or the concept of shared reality wrong. But I damn well expect them to have at least said they are sorry for their past actions first as a bare minimum.
I feel like I have been watching a slow motion train wreck for decades now. I know many on the right, and, at least the ones I know, they do not show any real signs of changing. Actually, since Trump appeared on the scene they have gotten worse. So waiting for them to want to change as you suggest seems like never.
O over the years I thought for a time they could come along and at least have some empathy for progressive ideas, but it always falls back. I actually am surprised Trump still has so many supporters. It also seems that the left gives up ground in hopes the idiots will be satisfied.
I am not going to Norway or anywhere else. So I am here for the duration. but I can understand how people tend to just say fuck it.
The ones I know laugh about 20 million losing health insurance.
Hard to get that type to change.
.
It’s safe to say that the hardcore right-wingers are simply lost to any effort to reach out. The illiberal contingent calling themselves “left” are probably also a lost cause. Someone who is now very active with his state’s Green party essentially point blank told me recently that by defending the “neoliberal” ACA, my family “deserved” bankruptcy the next time we had a medical emergency. Clearly, we no longer knew each other, in spite of a decade and a half’s personal history. When you’re so locked into thinking in abstractions that you can’t even begin to see the struggles of concrete human beings in front of your very eyes, how can you be reached? I have serious doubts that it is even possible.
Heighten the contradictions and thereby bring on the socialist revolution!
That’s the theory. Revolutionary fantasies seem like fun and games until the proverbial sh*t gets real.
In the meantime, there are more pressing matters. Our county’s DP is in the process of rebuilding. That was starting last year during the election, but now is happening in earnest. Folks like me who passively donate but don’t actively participate at party events are showing up in numbers unseen. Our congressional district appears to have a viable Democratic opponent (for the first time in years) – and one who will hang that AHCA yes vote around his neck like an albatross from now until next November. This is an ancestrally GOP district, so I’d be surprised if the district flips, but there are just enough pissed off constituents that I wouldn’t write it off as madness either. We’ll do what we can.
Amen.
Though I imagine you at the end in Scottish war paint on horseback.
“Nothing’s over until we say it is.”
“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
We can, however, fix what’s wrong with the left. We have got to be more patriotic. And seek a deeper and more beautiful meaning to the term. Not a patriotism of military hegemony, but actually loving where you live.
We need to gently coax the political left back into the patriotic herd of “everyday” Americans. Russian occupation of the Green Party, Greenwald/Snowden/Wikileaks, and other parties have to be exposed and understood.
We also need to rehab FBI, military, IC, gov’t in general.
…and for f*cks sake we need excise the foreign owned war propaganda operations of RT and FoxNews that turn those that would be on our side, against us. Foreign war ops should not have the benefit of the 1st amendment protections.
you appear to have bought the standard right-wing talking point that the left is somehow less patriotic because we don’t like war and gratuitous flag-waving.
That’s not at all the way I read it, but of course I bring my own biases.
Certainly you see that some of the ‘left’ on this site are in no way patriotic. As long as a meme, no matter how absurd, is damaging to American interests, they believe it. Just the insistence that Putin is some benevolent character, even as he tries to erode western values all across the west shows a lack of patriotism. Or America should ‘stand down’ because the CIA overthrew the Iranian government in the fifties.
These attitudes do massive damage to progressive interests. It allows the right to dismiss democrats, as a whole, as unpatriotic when compared to the alt right. It’s a belief in nothing, a rejection of American cultural advancement. It’s the belief that America can do no good, ever, anywhere.
It’s unpatriotic. And unless democrats reject it, they will themselves be rejected by middle America.
It’s one of the fantastical beliefs…..’we must appeal to the white working class in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Kentucky…now let me explain all the war crimes America is guilty of, and that America can never make amends for.’
.
There’s a difference between the Stalinism that’s been rampant among some commenters here, and standard left wing anti-war and anti-empire. No one is saying to run Noam Chomsky for house districts in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I nearly threw up during the DNC convention with that lunatic general or whatever he was on stage — didn’t seem to work, but it’s going to be what a lot of the party uses to appeal to certain segments of the electorate. But I’m not going to be arguing from the other side. Big tent, right?
I’m going to be arguing from the other side*.
Hey, Macron called the French colonization of Algeria a war crime. Should he not have done that because of fascists exploiting it?
I’m not going to argue for Noam Chomsky as a candidate grin. But even Chomsky said, quite steadfastly, that the only rational choice was to vote Dem. It’s true that he’s on the left end of the spectrum. But he’s not Jill Stein. He understands lesser-evil voting, and its necessity.
Noam Chomsky is an idiot.
The Democratic Party has been too eager to signup for idiotic Wars.
The majority of the country actually opposes involvement.
All of these things are true.
I’ll give you 2 & 3, but 1 is pretty all-encompassing. Why do you think he’s an idiot? About everything?
I do not share your willingness to label viewpoints I disagree with “unpatriotic”.
You inability to read Mt’s comment for what it was directly led to your inability to read my comment for what it was.
I’m not surprised.
.
The very existence of the word unpatriotic implies that there are in fact conditions that exist in the real world to satisfy the definition of the word.
Party over country is by definition unpatriotic.
The word exists. And people can actually meet that definition. Therefore it is logically and physically impossible for all uses of the word unpatriotic to be false or propaganda.
So please explain why you think calling people who are putting party over country, which by definition is unpatriotic, is simply labeling positions one disagree’s with unpatriotic.
Please show us how merely disagreeing with Nalbar is unpatriotic according to Nalbar and not actual unpatriotic behavior labeled as such.
I get the feeling you and I could really get a conversation going on this subject.
.
One of the heartening things from last year’s Democratic Convention (and really the two before it) was just how much the Democratic Party had done to take back ownership of patriotism. It wasn’t quite a “morning in America” sort of convention, but it really did go to great lengths to show that liberal = patriot in a way that had not been on display in a long time. That was very refreshing. I hope to see more of that going forward. I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for the Greens, or the Wikileaks apologists, or some of the other strands of what counts as left of center.
Nationalism is not okay.
Unaccountability is also not okay.
As far as where the “left”() needs to be, do the math.
(
) Stop using that word, it no longer has any meaning except as a insult.
Asterisks do funny things. Shoutiness not intended.
. . . is your friend.
Objection is to the lumping of these very different cases together as though there were no distinctions between them.
Despite having done some good things in the past, the Greens, Greenwald, and Assange/Wikileaks seemed to lose the thread, especially wrt lesser-of-evils (which isn’t just a slogan, it’s a real thing! Repudiating it = enabling the greater-of-evils!).
Snowden does not belong in that basket imo. (I was reminded of this a short while ago by an NPR piece on Chelsea Manning’s eminent release thanks to Obama’s commutation, which drew comparisons, not all valid, between the two cases.) What Snowden exposed was a real, criminal, unconstitutional abuse (see resulting policy changes for clear acknowledgment of that).
Also, he did not indiscriminately dump all the information he had. Rather, he provided it to journalists (one may quibble over their quality) to exercise editorial judgment and due diligence, including for risks to individuals and national security re: what to publish and what to withhold. This is starkly different from what was Assange’s approach — just dump it all out there — until this election when he evidently became selective against Hillary (and thereby in service to Trump and Putin).
In short, Snowden performed a national service and did it in a responsible manner. He deserved, and should have been granted, whistleblower protections. He’s at least arguably a national hero imo.
Been seeing way too much of this sort of indiscriminate lumping. Felt compelled to speak up in objection to it.
I mean to lump them all together. They are part of an ongoing Russian operation. Forget the New World Order. Putin brought us back into the ’80s while we all slept.
(I.e., that “[you] mean to lump them all together.”)
Therein (i.e., your lumping contra the facts that comprise Reality) lies the problem!
Hence my objection!
As someone I know might say …
If you study history, most democracies had rocky paths. There are good political reason for democracies and it’s a strong fundamental system. Even extreme autocracies find it necessary to at least pretend to be democracies. It’s possible that people need to be reminded now and again why democracy is preferable but I expect it will recover.
I don’t think addiction is the right analogy.
These people are mentally ill or evil, collectively. Trump may have NPD, but so does the Republican Party base. ‘We’re entitled to everything. Tax cuts, white supremacy, the best jobs, control of women’s bodies in every way, all the Supreme Court appointments, you name it. And they believe they are not subject to any constraints – not human decency (torture, bombing brown people everywhere), not math (Laugher Curve), not the national debt (tax cuts), not science (global climate change) not even routine societal norms like respecting a black president.
It’s not addiction, it’s mental illness or evil that requires no drugs to be triggered because it’s intrinsic to the way they were brought up and how they think.
Additionally, the country did not end Jim Crow by sitting down and discussing things reasonably with white Southerners. Sure MLK and all the protests triggered a national conversation among non-Dou but basically black civil rights were guaranteed by federal agencies and federal troops intervening.
The rest of the country ended the evil in the South.
If you want to end Republican Party evil, you need to think confrontation not persuasion.
Where do you live, LosGatosCA? In CA, probably, but…where?
You say:
Did it? Ask people in the south about that. And in the mid-south. People who are not doing so well no matter what their race.
And…ask ghetto-dwellers in the so-called “north” while you’re at it.
How about Oakland?
Where was this “end,” exactly?
When and where?
I seem to have missed it.
AG
Evil still exists everywhere, which proves that nobody has ever ended any evil. Any improvement that does not manifest perfection is futile.
I doubt we’d be able to rationally discuss much with the angry mob of neo-Nazis with torches protesting the removal of their cherished Confederate monuments. Added bonus: one of the chants was “Russia is our friend.” We’re not too far removed from the days when a chant like that would get one labelled as a traitor. And yet here we are. Back in the USSA.
Sorry, could have been more clear.
‘the evil’ did not mean ‘all evil’ and ending ‘the evil’ was specifically Jim Crow as it was institutionalized in the South.
My point stands. The South did not end Jim Crow after 100 years because they recognized the value of human rights for everyone. It ended because MLK and patriots like John Lewsis confronted their tormentors to the point that the federal government had to make a stand.
The use of federal law and military assets to enforce it was what made that change possible and lasting, as much as it has.
As we can see today throughout the confederate states the majority of white folks still do not accept equal rights as the natural order. But they can’t enforce Jim Crow de jure even as they try to do it de facto.
I’m so old I remember when the workers had no country.
C’est la lutte finale.
Groupons-nous, et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.
Speak English, you unpatriotic bastard!
.
This is the final struggle.
Join us, and tomorrow
The International
Will be the human race.
Google Translate is easy peasy to find …
https:/translate.google.com
Nalbar was being sarcastic.
Ah, The International, a song with its own storied history – including being the USSR’s first national anthem. Probably a Tankie theme song on Tumblr blogs these days. Ah, times do change.
I really appreciate this post by Mr. Longman. Far too much of the post-election commentary seems to assign responsibility for the outcome to the Democrats (or to Hillary Clinton personally). As Mr. Longman’s piece implies, that is incorrect. While Democrats have every obligation to present a humane, rational, responsible political program as attractively as they can, in the end the responsibility for the right rests with the right. They alone have the power to change themselves and their “movement,” just as they and they alone have responsibility for the appalling things they have done and are doing with political power.
There is no way anyone can “make” people who have chosen to be part of the right-wing destruction machine choose something else, just like outsiders often have limited tools to heal a diseased brain. It comes down to taking responsibility and determining that things have to be different.
I wept when Barack Obama won his first term as President, not just a few tears, but big gulping sobs of joy. I can still remember the feeling of relief and happiness that our country had finally turned a corner and made strides toward progress and redemption.
Then came the cruel backswing of the pendulum: a Republican resistance that would be relentless and brutal in their pushback. No cause was too small for them to bring down, no challenge too great for them to blow up. It was frustrating, but I was still hopeful. After all, the Recession was coming to an end, and health insurance was going to be available again. It seemed like a renewal of the country’s spirit. We had a smart young President and a dedicated First Lady.
But the pendulum swept back yet again. And then it fell on the poor, the immigrants, minorities, women, the helpless. It will slash the middle class and the elderly. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. I don’t know how we rebound from this one.
I will remain loyal to this country. I value my family’s roots and their struggle to be here and thrive here. My mother’s family came here and mined coal to make a living. They would be proud of me and the life I’ve built here. And I want my sons to be proud, but they know it’s going to be an uphill battle.
Giving up isn’t in my DNA. I will keep doing what I can to be heard. I hope we all can do that.
It’s not complicated.
You do what you can. You show up to Party Meetings, go to demonstrations, give money if you can.
I never hear Hillary Clinton’s name at the events I go to. I don’t really hear all that much about Bernie either. People have the sense not to deliberately stir up trouble.
What I do hear from politicians is a broad consensus that we need to have a better economic message, and that it needs to be communicated with sense of urgency. O’Malley said as much here in NH. Amy Klobuchar was in Iowa this week – and she talked rural issues and economic development. She barely mentioned Clinton and Sanders.
There is no great puzzle: we need to win back some of the rural and working class votes we lost.
It is interesting. The politicians are way ahead of the bloggers for the most part. This idiotic identity versus economic debate some seem determined to create makes no sense to them.
In my conversations everyone is quite aware of the mistakes the Clinton campaign made.
The hope – and it is only a hope – that Trump becomes so unpopular that he hands us an opportunity to become the majority party.
As you know, i was anticipating a Clinton win, and planning an extended stay in Guatemala. I didn’t leave in the aftermath for several reasons: worried about access to Sam/borders, the feeling that our country needed help, conflicted about working for a left-wing news org and leaving the country the minute peril hits.
I feel like I did the right thing. But I also feel like this is the last time. Because “I’d never leave this country while it still has a beating heart. I’ll fight to the bitter end”, sounds much to close to “I’d never leave physically abusive alcoholic spouse while he or she still has a beating heart. I’ll fight to the bitter end.”
And you know… sometimes shit gets so broken, it’s not the same thing anymore. Or worth fighting over.
As soon as Trumples is gone, well, like the song says.
“NY Attorney General“
All checks go through New York. NY Attorney General is way powerful re matters financial.