The Skinny: a Liberal Lexicon
A Liberal Lexicon
On Warren, Obama and Liberal Lust for Technocratic Incrementalism:
Just between you and me, I really don’t want to spend all my time chastising the Warren Weenies who populate much of the U.S. faux “left” media (The New Republic, Vox, Slate and often The Nation for example) but I think it’s a little absurd for bourgeoisie Beltway liberals to pretend that online left wing comparisons between Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign (and ensuing presidency) and Liz Warren’s 2020 campaign are “ridiculous.”
What nobody in the Warren wagon is prepared to point out about Liz Warren is that underneath all the sham populist rhetoric and plagiarized “Pow Wow Chow” recipes, the Senator for Massachusetts is a technocrat incrementalist and that’s why people think of Barack Obama, another (albeit slightly different flavor of) technocrat incrementalist, when she comes up. For just one obvious example Warren isn’t promising Medicare for All, she’s promising to try and create a “framework” for Medicare for All, eventually – if that kind of sh*t doesn’t remind you of Barack Obama’s constantly shifting and difficult to pin down position on this very same subject in 2008, I’m inclined to question your memory.
Frankly, none of the folks pretending to be shocked that lefties think of Obama when they’re asked to join the Warren wave have a leg to stand on because this is precisely why they themselves claim to prefer Liz over Bernie – her plans are supposedly more incremental and “attainable” while simultaneously being “less divisive” than Bernie’s proposed “radical and pie in the sky” reforms.
Look, ever since the birth of the myth of then-President Bill Clinton’s economic prowess, which was fueled literally by an insane policy of providing essentially free money to banks & Wall Street from the Fed as well as a tech stock bubble that was fake as hell, mainstream liberals have believed in a grand mathematical formula that when applied to the economy will “fix it” for some percentage of the poor and labor class, but also protect the rich donors they rely on heavily for funding. The goal here isn’t really to “help” the labor class so much as to give them enough crumbs from the table to secure their votes and continue the good times plutocratic celebration going on behind the curtain at the top levels of the Party.
Naturally, there is no such magic formula because the fundamental economic problem in America is not “how many crumbs we have to give the filthy poors to secure their complicity in the ongoing neoliberal project” but rather ultimately issue of mass inequity. You can’t be “for” protecting elite capital’s right to exploit poor people for profit, and also for protecting the labor class’s right not to be exploited; just like you can’t be for protecting the political influence of Wall Street and wealthy Dem Party donors while simultaneously be about restoring political power to the labor class – these are mutually exclusive goals for f*ck’s sake!
Furthermore, because ultimately liberal Democratic Party politicians don’t really believe in anything but maintaining power and furthering the corporate campaign finance grift anyway, they don’t really give enough of a sh* about the labor class to really fight for them during the process of enacting these magic technocratic formulae anyways; by the time the sausage comes out of the partisan political machine that actually controls the functions of the U.S. government, you just end up with more nightmare neofuedalism – like for example a health care act that functions more as a forced national subsidy to private medical insurance companies than it does as a method of providing quality healthcare to labor class Americans at an acceptable cost (either in tax dollars or out of pocket fees.)
Indeed, these two intertwined realities are ultimately why Bill Cinton’s Third Way capitalist economic plan helped to destroy the so-called American “middle class” and why Bush and Obama’s equally elitist economic recovery strategy helped Wall Street survive the 2008 financial crisis but absolutely devastated (primarily minority) labor class homeowners – in neither case could any sane f*cking person suggest these technocratic incrementalist policies have somehow been good for the American labor class, that’s for sure. Of course most Democratic Party affiliated minions aren’t even prepared to admit that Clinton and Obama weren’t actually good for the labor class but the proof is in the pudding – the wealth gap as widened, the “middle class” has all but disappeared and technocratic incrementalist Democrat politicians spent nine years getting run out of every level of American government until Trump’s sheer odiousness facilitated a mild rebound in the 2018 midterm elections.
So now, these same media people who invariably fell for the technocratic incrementalist pitch on behalf of candidate Barack Obama and if they’re old enough, candidate Bill Clinton too, want me to buy that Liz Warren is different, that for once the technocratic incrementalist really cares – so this time someone will fight for the labor class inside the sausage machine that turns these ideas into real policy; but the overarching problem is what bougie media liberals want me to believe will be the final result of a Warren presidency is simply impossible because the problem is inequity itself!
In other words, no matter how much you tinker, fiddle and change up the technocratic magic economic formulas, as long as you start with the idea that “we have to protect rich donors, corporations and free market capitalism” you’re not going to end up with the right answer for the labor class. This bougie liberal fascination with technocratic incrementalist answers has frankly been a quixotic quest for the land of unicorn farts from the get go because the real political issue is about labor power versus capital; you can’t be everything to everyone here and rich liberals f*cking know it.
So, maybe you media folks are right; maybe unlike Obama, Elizabeth Warren isn’t lying about who she intends to fight for if she ends up in the Oval Office – personally I don’t see why I have to concede that point frankly; Warren actually lies a lot, she has lied or at least misrepresented the truth throughout her entire political career, so I don’t see why faux left influencers insist I have to trust her… but even if I assume she isn’t lying this time? She’s still f*cking wrong mate and so are her backers in the faux “left” media; Liz Warren’s plans aren’t the best choice for the labor class at all. We don’t need some student debt relief; we need the candidate who will wipe out student debt. We don’t need a framework that might eventually lead to Medicare for All; we need the guy who is going to deliver Medicare for All as soon as he’s elected. We don’t need a candidate who promises to think about addressing racialized mass incarceration at a later date and offers up empty platitudes about education reform; we need a nominee who’ll end the war on drugs, expunge the convictions of anyone in jail for marijuana offenses and deliver comprehensive education reform to the most underfunded and neglected public education system in the western world. In every single case, that candidate is Bernie Sanders and not Elizabeth Warren.
As I’ve mentioned in more than a couple of recent articles, what’s truly “ridiculous” here is the elite liberal arts college set in “left wing” media who continue to pretend is “ridiculous” to point out that the differences between Warren and Sanders are not only extremely significant for the labor class but also fundamentally an issue of altering the power dynamics of class relationships in American politics; Warren’s “plans” won’t help the labor class gain political power at the expense of the upper classes and their minions in the professional class (including the faux-left media, of course), while Bernie’s program will – the difference could not be more apparent and as such, neither could the selfish reasons why the elitist toadies in corporate media have no interest in examining that difference.
It’s not an accident that rich party donors, greedbag Wall Street moguls and longtime neoliberal power brokers in the Democratic Party are all finding a way to get over their “fears” of Elizabeth Warren and “come around” to supporting her candidacy. It’s not a coincidence that party apparatchiks, think tank minions and the leadership of “grassroots” liberal organizations prefer Warren, while rank and file labor class voters, workers and volunteers in those same organizations overwhelmingly prefer Sanders either.
The bottom line here is that giving a f*ck about the labor class isn’t a mathematical formula, and increasing unnecessary complexity (as is inherent to all technocratic incrementalist solutions or “plans” – including Warren’s) is a tool of the machine; that’s why Liz “I’m a capitalist to my bones” Warren isn’t getting my support and I’m not going to pretend she’s even in the same league as Bernie Sanders.
On Misconceptions About the Eternal Nature of Liberalism
Dear folks in my mentions talking about how the “original meaning” of “liberal” has been corrupted “in their opinion” – this is not actually how words work, it’s not a democracy. The original meaning of liberal is not “all these good left wing things” you’ve heard mainstream liberals take credit for – I’m sorry to be the bearer of such horrible news, but you’re just wrong from both a historical and modern perspective.
Liberalism is and has always been fundamentally a civil rights movement for the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie; it was quite literally about obtaining the right to own property, conduct business and be represented in government for the MERCHANT, PROFESSIONAL and LAND OWNING classes. Having ACHIEVED those rights, sometime in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America, liberalism became a FUNDAMENTALLY conservative ideology that revolved around protecting those rights and the position of the middle classes – the REAL middle classes, not the worthless term “middle class” from modern American politics.
There is after all a reason that the terms “liberal” and “left wing” existed throughout the entire post-Enlightenment era of British and (later) American politics and it is NOT because they mean the SAME f*cking thing.
They do not. You are unfortunately just wrong about the history of liberalism.
It was never thus.
On Casual Online Foreign Policy Punditry
What’s amazing to me is that suddenly hordes of people who know absolutely nothing about foreign policy, have never given two sh*ts about the subject in their entire life in fact, are now pretty sure they “grok how the world really works” through the lens of… what amounts to a bad spy novel about Vladdy Putin.
This entire unhealthy obsession with Russia is absolutely mind-blowing and it simply doesn’t make any bloody sense if you look at the facts. Donald Trump started trying to rig up a war with Iran about ten days into his nightmare-fuel presidency; Iran is a Russian ally – so, if your theory that Downmarket Mussolini is working for Putin is correct, how do you explain our foreign policy behavior towards Iran, or for that matter the proxy war against Russia we’ve been fighting in Ukraine this entire time? Are the increasing sanctions on Russia all part of some bizarre rope-a-dope strategy Putin cooked up in the Kremlin? If you had any idea how many billions of dollars that’s costing Russia and its capitalist oligarchy, the very suggestion is pretty preposterous.
Sadly the simple answer is you newly minted foreign policy experts don’t even bother to consider these contradictions; because you have no f*cking idea what’s been going on with US foreign policy since the lead up to the War on Terror at all. You literally have zero clue about this subject, so the contradictions just don’t occur to you and you confidently blunder towards a New Cold War even more farcical than the last one – it’s almost like a mass Dunning-Kruger effect but exclusively for neocons and liberals with cable television.
Do you want to know why the Klepto Kaiser does “bad” things for America in terms of his foreign policy decisions? Because Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about America, its position in the world or the impact of its foreign policy decisions; the entire presidency is just there to make him and the people who put him in power more money and more powerful.
But that isn’t as exciting as “PuTiN cOnTrOlS tRuMp WiTh A pEe TaPe!!1!” and to grasp the issue properly, you’d actually have to understand something about the history of the Pig Empire and the reporting in the Foreign Policy section of the newspapers you don’t read – they don’t teach this kind of stuff on John Oliver after all.
What the Liberal Media Misses about the Threat Behind the Gaetz Gaggle Stunt
House Republicans Ratf–k Impeachment Hearing in Reckless Bid to Please Trump
My how quickly the worm turns; it was only a couple of days ago that I was praising Rolling Stone for publishing an intense critique of mainstream liberal neo-McCarthyism in Matt Taibbi’s excellent “Everyone is a Russian Asset” – in today’s article analysis we’re going to take a look at a decidedly less impressive piece from Tim Dickenson. I chose this article not to pick on Dickenson (whose work I find hit and miss) but rather to highlight Rolling Stone’s perplexing habit of slapping an edgy headline on what amounts to bog standard liberalism and calling it counterculture; the truth is that I could have picked any one of about twenty-five articles in corporate media – they’re all terrible for the exact same reasons.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past forty-eight hours, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about the Matt Gaetz-led political theater stunt in which roughly forty GOP Congress members “stormed” into a soon-to-begin impeachment deposition hearing in what has been largely described in the mainstream “liberal” media as an attempt to curry favor with the Klepto Kaiser.
To his credit, Dickenson’s piece takes a half-assed stab at poking holes in Gaetz’s ridiculous claims that his mayo mob where there to “protest a lack of transparency and due process for the president” in the ongoing Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry and the author is one of the few people to hint at the notable far–right (read: fascist) element among the GOP House brigade of belligerence. Unfortunately like virtually every other piece covering this story in the “liberal” corporate media, the article then bogs down into simultaneously declaring the Republican “stunt” pathetically ineffective and also over-hyping the fact that some of Gaetz’s gang entered the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)” – an issue which only resonates with unhinged national security liberals who think the CIA is dreamy; in other words the exact same Bircher nutbags who already want to impeach Trump because of the mythical “pee tape” and think Putin has decided the last twenty-five elections in the so-called West.
Now before we go any further here I just want to be clear about where I’m coming from; I’ve vocally supported impeaching Trump from almost the precise moment he took office for a growing list of reasons that include (but are not limited to) repeatedly profiting from open corruption, admitting he obstructed justice on television and that whole “being an actual goddamn fascist” thing. While I (correctly) never bought into the Russia part of Russiagate, I’ve known that Trump is a crook for a very long time and that was even before Downmarket Mussolini admitted he fired his own FBI director for investigating him on live TV.
Furthermore, I absolutely support impeaching Herr Donald for his attempts to use US foreign policy to leverage American allies into persecuting his political rivals – even if those rivals are almost certainly guilty of their own corruption, as Palooka Joe Biden likely is in this case. In my opinion debating Trump’s guilt or the legitimacy of this impeachment inquiry pretty much went out the window when the president (again) went on TV and asked Ukraine and China to investigate Palooka Joe; a sentiment at least one Trump ally says was clarified by the administration to mean “investigating corruption is an easy way to earn goodwill with Trump” when asked by Chinese government officials “if Trump was serious when he suggested China open an investigation into Biden.”
In other words, this guy is guilty and while I may sincerely doubt the Democratic Party’s ability to get this impeachment across the goal line, I’m very much in favor of trying. So what’s the problem with Dickenson’s piece and the nearly infinite number of articles just like it in the “liberal” corporate media?
Simple, they’re wasting time selling fairy tales about national security and our brave spies while still missing the clear and present danger that Gaetz’s little “stunt” exemplifies; despite the clever talking point disseminated throughout the usual suspects in the media, the GOP’s slow-speed assault on the impeachment inquiry deposition hearing did not have an audience of merely one person.
Look, I don’t know if you’ve taking a look at the overarching themes and tenor of GOP rhetoric surrounding the possible impeachment of Herr Donald, but it seems pretty clear to me that these folks are purposely trying to stir up armed protest and far right violence in response to any attempt to impeach Trump. Sure you can say that the right has been gibbering about a coming “Civil War” for a very long time, but I’ll remind you that we aren’t talking about shock jock radio hosts here – these are extremely prominent administration surrogates, big time Republican donors and actual elected Republican officials trying to turn up the hate seed to eleven and marshal the armed reactionaries whose votes and support lie behind this entire far right movement, into the street. It’s not an accident that the Gaetz mob included an open nazi like King and a couple of casual nazi sympathizers like Scalise or Hunter, just like it’s not an accident that Sleaze Bannon (the street fighting right wing populist who had a plan to fight Trump’s impeachment from day one) is back to defend against this threat to the Klepto Kaiser’s rule.
The Bannon-Trump plan (as frequently hinted at in self-aggrandizing interviews by Bannon himself) always revolved around using the threat of armed right wing crazies to keep the system from stopping Trump’s attempts to mold America into a budding white ethno-state – do you sincerely think a guy like Roger Stone wasn’t choosing his words carefully when he said “try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence –an insurrection– in this country like you have never seen before… Both sides are heavily armed, my friend… this is not 1974… people will not stand for [the impeachment of President Trump]. Any politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life?” It’s not desperation or a coincidence that Republicans, including high-level officials in the GOP, are now speaking in terms of a religious war, soviet-style totalitarianism, violent armed insurrection and yes, a civil war – this is a strategy, and an extremely dangerous one.
Will it work? Will the fascists behind Trump be able to pull Fox News Nation into the streets to shut down any attempt to hold Trump accountable for violating the Constitution and abusing his (considerable) power? Well to some degree it’s already working; everyone from prosperity gospel Pastors, to Major League Baseball Umpires are now low-key (but actively) threatening armed resistance to Trump’s impeachment; thankfully however a few random crackers with large gun collections, an army of blackshirts does not make – for now.
Frankly the problem here is that I’m not really sure it matters precisely how *many* right wing nutjobs the pro-Trump forces convince to threaten or perhaps even carry out violence in the long run. From armed standoffs in Nevada, through the militant occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and on to GOP minority state senators killing a climate change bill in Oregon by fleeing the capitol and hiding behind a phalanx of armed right wing militia nuts, history has demonstrated that it doesn’t take a very large number of gun-toting fascists to make cowardly liberals shut up about their “rules and norms” before quietly submitting to whatever the fascists demand.
Truthfully half the time the reactionaries don’t even need to get violent; anyone who saw the Gaetz Gaggle’s march on television and wasn’t immediately reminded of the infamous “Brooks Brothers riot” that helped end the recount and secure George W. Bush’s stolen presidency in 2000, clearly hasn’t been paying much attention to American history – and yet, there’s no mention of the Brooks Brothers riot in this article, or the vast majority of the articles on the subject in the mainstream “liberal” media. I guess something like that just doesn’t rate when compared to the salacious possibility GOP congressmen were secretly there to bug a SCIF chamber on behalf of Snowball, the greatest enemy of the people – I mean, Vladdy Putin.
*eye roll*
- Nina Illingworth
