Amy Goodman hosted a discussion between four progressives on the Hillary Clinton candidacy. It’s interesting reading, and I think is actually somewhat representative of the conversations I hear. Two of the four were lukewarm about Clinton — two detested her. I’d put myself in the cool to lukewarm camp myself, but the the other side rather discredited itself with all the enthusiastically goony praise for Rand Paul, highlighted by Charles Pierce. I’m sorry? Really? You want a more progressive candidate than Hillary Clinton, so you’re raving about a bizarrely theocratic racist Libertarian? That makes no sense.
I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for Clinton, but she’s the candidate we’ve got. I’d like to see more of a contest in the primary season — that’s the time to test candidates within a party, not when you’re in the voting booth in November 2016 — but I will without question vote for the lesser of two evils. We’re stuck with a winner-take-all system, and we have no choice. In the Goodman discussion, Joe Conason stated best how I feel about it all.
OK, the pressing issue for 2016 is: Do we have a radical-right Republican government that, in all three branches, which will end up with, I don’t know, seven, eight Supreme Court justices, like Alito, or do we have a moderate Democratic administration, where, yes, there’s going to be a lot of tugging and pulling within the party, within Congress, over which issues are to be brought to the fore, what the president’s position will be, what she should do if she’s president? That, to me, is a better situation for working families and all Americans—by the way, people around the world—than the idea of a President Rand Paul or a President Ted Cruz or somebody who is going to dismantle every protection that working families in this country have.
I’d love to have an Elizabeth Warren for president, but she’s not running. I’d love to have Bernie Sanders up there, but he’s not running, and the socialist label probably makes him unelectable (but it shouldn’t). We’ve got a conservative Democrat with far too many corporate ties running, and she’s the best we’ve got so far. Name a Republican who isn’t worse than she is, who wouldn’t be representing a party that has gone off the rails, and I might consider it…but you can’t. Such a creature does not exist.
Has Sanders said he’s not running? When he was on Larry Wilmore’s show recently, it sounded like he was almost definitely running .
But yeah, he’s unelectable.
Anyway, what so often seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the role of the electoral college. I like in New Jersey, a safe blue state. The Democratic nominee is going to carry New Jersey. Even if (somehow) that nominee was Sanders, he would still easily win New Jersey. So, assuming that the nominee is Clinton, she’s certainly going to win New Jersey.
The electoral college system is a terrible system, and I would much prefer a simple national popular vote. But as long as we have this crappy system, I’m going to take advantage of it. Those of us living in safe states (red or blue) don’t have to vote for the lesser of two evils. We can vote for a candidate we truly support instead.
I’m thinking about voting in the Democratic primary, since simply voting in the actual presidential election doesn’t get my intentions across. I’d at least like them to know I’m not enthusiastic about Hillary.
Naturally, the first step is to find someone else to vote for.
I find Clinton barely tolerable only because all the declared Republicans are clearly & thoroughly contemptible. With the bar set as low as it presently is, this town’s animal control officer would make an appealing candidate.
Calling Rand a “libertarian” is an insult to libertarians. And I say this as a non-libertarian.
A libertarian who actually understood anything about libertarianism wouldn’t hold Rand’s anti-marriage-equality and anti-choice positions.
The best description of Rand Paul I have heard to date is “he’s not a libertarian, he’s a John Bircher who likes to get high”.
re 1:
NJ, my home state (high school only) is BLUE?? With a gov like Christie?? How is that possible??
(like communistic state of Taxachusetts, bluer than blue, had a gov more Repub than Gingrich, ie that Romney guy)
gobsmacked!!
inconceivable o_O
oh, its best to have the executive branch and the legislative branch on opposite sides of the “tree”
:blance and fairness donchano. eerrrrrpppp, sorry, tongue out of cheek now. opposition and conflict sometimes works when the issues under discussion are actual issues and not blatant naysaying.
Seems to be a bizarrely common affliction.
@5:
is a shoe that fits an awfully lot of self-proclaimed libertarians, to the point that excluding Rand Paul for that reason verges on No True Scotsman territory.
ITT:
Dozens and dozens of liberals spouting “lesser of two evils”-isms and thinking it’s a definitive argument.
Yeah, on Election Day vote the Democrat ticket, sure, at least for the national offices. But it’s well past time that alert, observant people realized that these days there is only one party in America: the Business Party. It has two wings, Democrats and Republicans, and thus it wins almost every election from the local level to the Presidency. Candidates running for either wing might disagree about social policy (which is the main source of the illusion of choice), but the people who fund the Business Party do not easily allow people with ideas dangerous to the rich and powerful to reach a dominant position in either wing. Only in times of serious crisis do they relent (with great difficulty) and deign to allow someone like a FDR to come about, an authentic liberal who is set on taking reforming the system to save it from itself. FDR always said his greatest accomplishment was saving capitalism – and he was fought every step of the way by those who were happy to praise Hitler and fascism behind closed doors (of course, the feeling was mutual – Hitler reportedly kept a large portrait of Henry Ford in his office).
Fundamental change will not come from within the confines of the Business Party or by playing the game of politics with the rules it has set out for itself. This has been designed to be impossible, or nearly so. Change can only come from outside the system. Form community groups, start creating parallel institutions, change local governance, create political pressure that doesn’t follow the rules that the Business Party has set out. And they will challenge you – alphabet agencies like the FBI will spy on your meetings and your browser histories and your emails, undercover cops will attempt to entrap you, and if you get any amount of bodies into the streets than your local militarized PD will happily beat you with truncheons or attack you with tear gas. Just look at Occupy Wall Street for their blueprint. But the alternative is waiting until a massive environmental catastrophe unfolds, until we are in the late stages of a Gilded Age, or until the growing populist backlash is channeled into fascist parties who are all too happy with the attention.
Enough with the myth that Democrats will ever accomplish meaningful changes in the lives of the people. They will not. The spectre of “Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush 2016” should startle people into picking up this fundamental truth, but it is really high time that we gave up the collective delusion.
Calling Rand a “libertarian” is an insult to libertarians.
No, it’s not. I’ve been listening to libertarian bullshit since 1978, and they’re all every bit as stupid, irrational, dishonest, divisive, manipulative, and regressive as both Rand and Ron Paul. And libertarians’ interpretation of the Constitution is virtually indistinguishable from Michelle Bachmann’s.
The Democrats are inconsistently good. The Republicans are consistently evil, ignorant, indifferent, corrupt, and bigoted. It’s really not that hard a choice.
Enough with the myth that Democrats will ever accomplish meaningful changes in the lives of the people.
Barack Obama did a far better job as President than John McCain would have done, and better than Bush Jr. before him. That’s not a “myth.” Pay attention and stop pretending you’re too good to do your homework.
…there is only one party in America: the Business Party. It has two wings, Democrats and Republicans…
Ralph W. Nader used that tired old like to justify himself, and those who bought it ended up giving the election to Bush Jr. We won’t get fooled again.
Change can only come from outside the system. Form community groups, start creating parallel institutions, change local governance, create political pressure that doesn’t follow the rules that the Business Party has set out.
There are plenty of people who are already doing this, and have been since 2009 and earlier; and they’re not buying your bullshit about both parties being the same. What you’re effectively saying is: get out and get active, but only at the local level, because national change means working with one of the national parties, which you’ve ruled out as useless. You’re the one pushing a myth — one that’s consciously intended and crafted to disempower people and discourage us from doing what is necessary to change national policy.
slithey tove:
Yes, New Jersey is most definitely a solidly blue state *in presidential elections* (which is, after all, what we’re talking about). New Jersey has gone for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992, and it will do so again in 2016. Gubernatorial races are different, for one thing because they are held in off-off years. Christie was helped in 2009 by the fact that he was running against the Goldman Sachs candidate (Jon Corzine) in the worst possible year to be the Goldman Sachs candidate. He was helped in 2013 by the fact that the state Democratic party didn’t even bother to support their own candidate. Even so, he felt it necessary to go out of his way (and at considerable taxpayer expense) to make sure he didn’t have to share a ballot with popular Democrat Cory Booker. No Republican has a better shot at New Jersey in 2016 than Chris Christie, and Chris Christie has no shot at all. The Democratic nominee will carry New Jersey in 2016. No one in New Jersey should feel any pressure to vote for that nominee if they don’t want to.
@drewvogel,
Liberal, socialist, dark blue MA went to Reagan in 1980, even though he got less than 42% of the vote (and only about 4,000 votes more than Jimmy Carter). That year, John Anderson got 15% of the vote in MA. I wonder how many of the voters thought that MA would go for Carter anyway, and so decided to cast a protest vote. (I was too young to vote that year, but I confess to doing some work on the Anderson campaign during the primary. Chalk it up to youthful indiscretion.)
There’s no such thing as a safe state.
Oh yay, we already have a BOTH SIDES argument in. Great. Fantastic. Insightful and original. Very accurate and nuanced portrayal of our actual political landscape and the consequences faced when either political party gets power. Where oh where would we be without being reassured that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same thing.
This piece from 2012 is still spot on: The Choice Is Theirs – The American electoral system is broken beyond repair.
And then update this graphic with a silhouette of Hillary Clinton.
And then keep voting Democrat in national elections because the alternative would be worse!
But could someone please remind me how it could get worse than a president who claims the right to kill anyone, anywhere – American citizens included – without due process or oversight (and has done so)?
@11: Well, I suppose I didn’t state that well. Democrats are very good at accomplishing meaningful negative changes in the lives of people. And occasionally the odd slight improvement. But they will never go beyond the smallest reform necessary to save the status quo, and very often they’re terrified of doing even that.
Like when Obama solidified Bush’s legacy of executive overreach and security state impunity in the so-called War on Terror, or when Democrats torpedoed any hope of bring American health care up to the standards of the rest of the rich world with a single payer system. Obama has jailed and charged more whistleblowers then every other president combined, and his administration’s crackdown on press freedoms has driven veteran journalists like James Risen to say things like “I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting to undo damage done to press freedom in the United States by Barack Obama and Eric Holder.”
Well maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s examine action on climate change or species extinction? Does “talking” count as action? I guess he turned down a single pipeline, though, that makes him a lot better than Bush. How about reigning in Republican foreign policy? Can you say “Bombed 7 Muslim-majority countries since 2009”? Well, to be fair he stopped the bombing of Syria, until he decided to bomb Syria. Oops.
The point isn’t that Republicans are worse. They are, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. The point is that the Democrats are bad, increasingly so, and show absolutely zero signs of being able to tackle the very serious – existential, even – problems facing our species in the coming years and decades, on top of being constitutionally unwilling to help the working and middle classes. This means we have to tune out of the kayfabe wrestling match and start designing institutions that can work without the Business Party. Lots of attempts are being made but the radicals don’t have nearly enough popular support to really make inroads, thanks to the Liberals and their cries of “but Bush!”.
If you answer to all this is “lol but McCain and Romney would have sucked” then you aren’t paying attention. This is why Chris Hedges said the “Liberal Class” is dead. There are no more ideas, no more intellectual substance, no more spine. Just the pretense of being smarter and better than the rednecks (a blatant and unjustified elitism that causes them to lose plenty of elections to the “dumb folks”), and identity politics. But although we desperately need action on the social justice front, that’s not enough for a political ideology at a time of great strife, great inequality and great future danger.
@Raging Bee
Actually, it is very much an open question if Obama was even “equal” to Bush in terribleness as Obama basically continued, made worse and rubber stamped pretty every single reason Bush was a massive disaster. We are not going to get rid of the Bush era abuse for two generations because of Obama.
By my reckoning there is a real solid case for Obama being worse than Bush.
Obama is worse than Bush….because he supposedly did the same things as Bush. Okay. Great logic as usual michael.
“Ralph W. Nader used that tired old like to justify himself, and those who bought it ended up giving the election to Bush Jr. We won’t get fooled again.”
If you think Bush Jr OR Gore represented any fundamental diversion from the long term direction of American politics then you are in dire need of a history lesson.
I get it, you think boilerplate liberalism is all the country needs, a reform here, a reform there, and you think all radicals are hopelessly naive children that haven’t picked up the Tough Lessons of Life That You Get When You Are Older or whatever my father would tell me years ago. But you’re wrong. It is increasingly clear that politics as usual from the Business Party, no matter which wing, is leading everyone over a cliff. Frankly, who the fuck of the Ds or the Rs is proposing anything near the radical – and radical is the right word – changes needed to deal with climate change? You think Democrats have any answers? They don’t. They aren’t going to rock the boat, and nothing less than a total reorganization of politics and the economy is needed to deal with our carbon surpluses. Sorry, but that’s the cold hard truth, and no blaming of Bush or Nader or Ted Cruz is going to change that.
“What you’re effectively saying is: get out and get active, but only at the local level, because national change means working with one of the national parties, which you’ve ruled out as useless. ”
No. I am not sympathetic to the slymepitters and other assorted misogynists who attack the Horde here, but there really is a sort of hyperaggressive ignorance and ridiculous propensity to jump to conclusions exhibited pretty often. National change does not mean working with one of the national parties. OWS moved the dial on discussions of income inequality, and they steadfastly refused to help the Democrats, who were goddamn terrified of them. If you think that change can only be made by jumping on a Democrat or Republican bandwagon then you are being delusional. It in fact happens all the time. Liberals love to hate Nader but they forget his independent policy shop pressured DC for years in the 70s even before he partnered with Jimmy Carter.
People are already disenfranchised thanks to the Business Party. Why do you think barely any minorities or young people bother to fucking vote? They don’t care, and the whining of liberals that “scary Republicans will get you if you don’t sign up with us” – something literally true but ultimately missing the point – is being tuned out. That is why the demographic shift doesn’t help Democrats nearly as much as they think. That is why liberals are reduced to insulting the intelligence of Republican voters, are wondering why they are “voting against their own interests”.
That is why liberals have for some time now ceased to be a force to reckon with.
Evidenceless assertion by a idiotlog. One who can’t provide any viable alternatives. Just wacky-backy pipe dreams.
JR, what is your alternative? Quit complaining, and start the work necessary. We know what has to happen, but those like you who complain seem averse to the work actually required to make it happen. You want other people to do the work for you. I’m not going to follow somebody who is all talk and no action.
jackrousseau:
Fuck you.
No, seriously. Fuck you. My daily life is very heavily affected by several of those “social issues” you’re so keen to dismiss as window dressing to create the illusion of two parties. I know which of those parties would be all too happy to watch me die (and has actually voted, dozen of times, to try and make it happen), and it sure ain’t the Dems.
I know phrases like “check your privilege” are, at best, incredibly overused; but if there is any statement that it’s justified for, it’s “both major parties are the same”.
nichrome:
Killing even more people that way?
Starting wars, which is effectively the same thing but more massive?
Making the poor poorer, the rich richer, guns more plentiful, and watching significantly more people starve or kill each other in the streets?
Completely discredited themselves.
1. Rand Paul is wearing a human mask 0.1 mm thick. Under it is a tentacled horror from beyond space and time that even Cthulhu is wary of.
2. Rand Paul’s economic plan would result in the end of the USA.
3. Which I’m sure is the idea. The parental clone, Ron, has a hobby. He has been working with various secession movements to dismantle the USA.
If you tear away the mask and avoid the tentacles, both of these clones seriously hate the USA. I’d rather they go back to whatever dimension they came from but they have probably already destroyed it.
@anteprepro
1) it is not “supposedly.” Pretty much every single war of terror policy that Bush instituted, such as the PATRIOT act, and the absurdly expansive use of the state secret privileged doctrine Obama continued to the same degree. The few areas that there were positive changes were largely symbolic. i.e “we” are not torturing anymore, we are just hiring people to do it.
2) Most of the changes have been to increase the damage that Bush was doing, i.e. NDAA 2012 giving the Gov’t/military the “right” to jail American citizens because reasons, Obama claiming and using the “right” to assassinate citizens because reasons, and Obama’s war on whistle blowers.
3) Obama campaigned to remove, reverse and stop most of this shit, and Democrats are suppose to be the “civil liberty” party. Once Obama got into office and didn’t stop these things they became cemented into the system because both parties gave them their “blessing” and they became “legitimate.” Look, Bush is terrible, he’s a war criminal. But has damaging as that is, those abuses could have been removed back in 2008 far easier than if and when they finally get removed. Bush’s action were legitimized by Obama and for that Obama is probably the more damaging president. Obama is also a war criminal.
What a Maroon,
Yes, there is such a thing as a safe state, but it sounds like Massachusetts in 1980 wasn’t one. I’m pretty confident that it will be in 2016.
You can’t always predict which states are going to safe 18 months in advance. It’s possible that New Jersey will somehow be in contention in 2016. But if that’s the case, we’ll know about it before Election Day, and in that case, I’ll hold my nose and vote for Clinton. But if New Jersey is a safe state in 2016, we’ll also know that before Election Day. The way you can tell is by looking at polling. What did the polling look like in Massachusetts in 1980? In New Jersey in 2012, there wasn’t much polling at all, because it was a safe state. What polling there was showed Obama with a commanding lead throughout the whole of the election season. That’s what a safe state looks like.
The day before Election Day, we’ll be able to identify 35 or 40 safe states. Polling aggregator sites make this really easy to do. We’ll be able to see at a glance which states are too close to call, which lean one way or the other, which are strong leaners, and which are simply out of play. “Out of Play” is the largest category, and will probably account for around 35 or 40 states. Those are safe states. Most of them we can probably identify in advance (like Massachusetts and New Jersey), but we’ll know for sure by Election Day.
Hell, Obama civil liberty positions in 2008 are one of the main reasons why he won the primary against Clinton.
Shit like Nichrome’s comment up there @7 and others in this thread are the reason I can’t follow election speculation / news closely. It’s too depressing that so many motherfuckers that ought to know better goddamn don’t.
Unequivocally FUCKING YES A REPUBLICAN WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING WORSE YOU FUCKING ASS.
We can acknowledge that the democrats are corporatist tools who serve the nefarious interests of the CIA (Creepy International Assassins), military industrial complex, all that. But it doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are all that PLUS abhorrently antihuman domestic policies on LGBT and women’s rights, race, class, and a bunch of other stuff that dems are at least sorta passable at.
As a poor person, I can NOT afford what rethuglicans and libertarians and tea partiers have in mind for me. I’ve already been fucked over by their policies in so many ways. If we don’t get a candidate who can move asses like Obama was able to, we’re gonna get jacked by the same white people who came out in droves to vote for Romney and against the future of the human species.
Whoever said this is an idiot.
1. Bush destroyed the US economy. Obama fixed it.
2. Bush started two wars, one counterproductive i.e. Iraq. Obama wound them down.
3. Bush won one war, the War on Science. Obama is at least, smart enough to realize a war on the basis of our civilization is equivalent to a war on your own liver.
4. Bush was our first and hopefully last fundie president. Obama, while a xian, doesn’t have a problem with reality and less than true believers.
They are pretty much opposites.
So PZ.. do you have stairs in your house?
“JR, what is your alternative?”
I gave it.
“Change can only come from outside the system. Form community groups, start creating parallel institutions, change local governance, create political pressure that doesn’t follow the rules that the Business Party has set out.”
Note this doesn’t mean completely ignoring Democrats and Republicans, but channeling the will of the people through vehicles that are not tied to the two-party system and pressuring the political system from the outside. Good ideas off the top of my head that anyone can do even without a movement: starting worker-owned business, developing banking and other forms of co-operatives, etc. Doesn’t have to be starting up Paris Communes all over the place, but we really need experimentation.
“We know what has to happen”
Do you? How do you propose to fight the legion of environmental issues inexorably heading our way? Voting Democrat? Don’t accuse me of “wanting others to do the work” if you aren’t willing to even consider radical alternatives.
@24: “No, seriously. Fuck you.”
How kind.
“My daily life is very heavily affected by several of those “social issues” you’re so keen to dismiss as window dressing to create the illusion of two parties.”
I don’t doubt it. They’re actually really important, as I said: “But although we desperately need action on the social justice front, that’s not enough for a political ideology at a time of great strife, great inequality and great future danger.” I also didn’t say “both parties are the same” – ultimately they’re part of the same “entity”, or serve the same backers, but they do differ on policies. My problem is really that “both parties are grossly incapable of meeting the challenges we face” – you gonna disagree with that?
If you think Bush Jr OR Gore represented any fundamental diversion from the long term direction of American politics then you are in dire need of a history lesson.
Really? What “history lesson” proves that Gore would have invaded Iraq, and done it as carelessly and incompetently as Bush Jr. did? The history consistently shows that third-party movements only serve to divide the progressive left and keep the right in power.
I get it, you think boilerplate liberalism is all the country needs, a reform here, a reform there…
Well, it’s a shitload better than what the Republicans have to offer. (And, in fact, that’s what you’re advocating with your local-action-only approach — so what are you complaining about?) What do you suggest we do — keep on enduring Republican misrule until the Perfect Candidate rides in on a white horse? Maybe you can afford that, if you’re Mitt Romney’s next-door neighbor; but most ordinary Americans can’t afford to be that picky.
National change does not mean working with one of the national parties.
Yes, it fucking well does. Progressives need to form coalitions with people not like ourselves to get anything done, and that means working with Democrats. Unless of course there’s another viable national party doing the same thing? didn’t think so.
OWS moved the dial on discussions of income inequality, and they steadfastly refused to help the Democrats, who were goddamn terrified of them.
I’m all in favor of OWS — but what have they really accomplished? Their protests petered out, and the Republicans are still able to block anything remotely resembling constructive change. Why is this? Because OWS lacked consistent organizational advantage, and they either failed, or self-righteously refused, to form working coalitions with other people who could have benefitted from the policies they advocate. (I knew OWS would ultimately fail when I heard some of them BRAGGING about their lack of leaders — how the fuck can you get anything decent done if you don’t even WANT leaders or organizational advantage?)
I agree that the Democrats have failed, miserably, to reach out to the progressive left and make a common cause with them. But part of the reason for that failure is that too many people in the progressive left have failed to reach out to Democrats and to “mainstream Americans,” or to respond to others’ efforts to reach out to them.
jackrousseau:
If you think if Gore had been president, things would be the same today as they are now, you are profoundly ignorant or unhinged from reality. Iraq War? Massive tax cuts leading to record deficits? “Partial Birth Abortion Ban”? 2 right wing additions to Supreme Court, leading to the Citizens United ruling? Vetoes against stem cell research? Really?
Again, you are fucking not dealing with reality if you think that whining about Democrats is anywhere near the right approach to this issue. The Republicans are outright denying the reality of the issue, and others are saying that they want to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING because otherwise it hurts the economy. And you fault the Democrats for not having a clever or drastic enough of a solution? Fuck off.
michael kellymiecielica:
You’re right on the details you give re: Bush vs Obama, although you’re being selective as to which details you give. The ACA + drive for gay rights + even the pathetically small acts of the Holder DOJ in fighting against racism and police abuse is important to note as well. Of course, that doesn’t make either President “good” in any meaningful sense.
I could note that Clinton undermined economic regulation like Glass-Steagal (although it was basically dead by then anyway), Bush rode the speculation bubble and Obama refused to prosecute anyone for the orgy of corruption that resulted to make the idea clearer. American politics has become a game where the only real descriptors of most actors involved are “awful” and “worse”.
I suspect the progressives who get sucked in by Rand Paul are motivated by his anti-war stance (which seems to be legit), and choosing to ignore his pretty much everything else stance. Single-issue myopia is usually a bad idea.
By my reckoning there is a real solid case for Obama being worse than Bush.
If he quacks like a Tea Party Republican…
I suspect the progressives who get sucked in by Rand Paul are motivated by his anti-war stance (which seems to be legit)…
His “anti-war stance” is pure bullshit — he signed onto that letter to the Iranian ayatollahs, right along with John McCain and Tom Cotton.
I would have been financially destroyed years ago if not for an Obama administration program for income based student loan repayment. The rethuglican solution would no doubt be debtors prisons. I will be destroyed the second a slash and burn GOP scumbag gets in there and cuts the program. I’m one of those people at the bottom whose life is hanging on the dental-floss-thin string of social services that remain, the programs every right wing fuck wants to cut. To jackrousseau@36, I say “awful” is massively better than “worse” when you’re poor.
It is still possible that Martin O’Malley [1] might run. I learned of him first from Mano Singham’s blog[2]. Let’s all encourage him, shall we?
[1] http://martinomalley.com/
[2] http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2015/03/13/martin-omalley-as-a-potential-democratic-nominee-for-president/
The ACA + drive for gay rights + even the pathetically small acts of the Holder DOJ in fighting against racism and police abuse is important to note as well.
Thank you, you just admitted that the Democrats are indeed worth supporting, and can indeed get some good things done. Argument over, eh?
I know that I, for one, am looking forward to the next 18 months of the center-right declaring that they own me — and that, if their preferred candidate should lose for any combination of reasons, the only reason that will matter is that not everyone on the left followed the center-right candidate’s orders. Because that’s been the “Nader in Florida” approach since 2000: “Deliberately confusing ballots? Mobs stopping the recount? An ineffective campaign? Sure, changing any of those could have changed the result of the election — but the fault for Bush lies entirely with people in California who voted for Nader! Get back in line and start voting for the friendlier conservatives, or it’ll be entirely your fault (never ours!) when we concede the next election to the horrible right-wingers!”
@ raging bee
I f’ying hate the Tea Party.
The problem with complaining about Democrats not being liberal enough and making that your focus is that it is ignoring the political reality: The Republicans are obstinate, powerful, and horrible. And the major faults of Democrats are the issues where they attempt to be “moderate”, mostly by acquiescing to the Republican side. But the fact is that is a tactical decision to try to get “moderates”, which largely sway toward Republicans anyway.
By all means, take the Democrats to task. They have supported some terrible things in the name of bipartisanship. Or in the name of the Almighty Dollar. But do not forget that Republicans need to be opposed for more fucking loudly. Don’t fucking for one minute pretend that they are Just As Bad as Republicans because they happen to have given into them on some issues. Don’t fucking ignore the fact that they are different by degrees even on the issues where they are both bad. And don’t fucking pretend that you are going to change politics just by not voting for Democrats. That is why we need to criticize them, but to just outright abandon them and delude ourselves into thinking we can just vote Socialist or Green and get the perfect candidates into office is just fucking myopic idiocy. The Democratic Party is not just the lesser of two evils. It is actively good in many respects, and THEN the lesser of two evils in others. It is also the only major political party with a fucking chance of being a force for good in America. To dismiss that is just missing the forest for the trees.
“What “history lesson” proves that Gore would have invaded Iraq, and done it as carelessly and incompetently as Bush Jr. did?”
The history lesson that starts with the beginning of the American Empire in the late 1800s, where imperialist military action continues through twenty-odd presidents. The lesson that is only selectively remembered by liberals. I could start with the Latin American interventions known as the Banana Wars, work my way through African rebellions and Vietnam, take a detour in Haiti, talk a bit about the first Gulf War and then move on to the present day, but to keep it simple I’ll just remark that Clinton with Gore as VP were happy to use NATO to bomb the Balkans in a very questionable use of force. Clinton with Gore as VP were happy to destroy the Sudanese factory producing pharmaceuticals for millions. Hell, if we’re talking about disasters in Iraq, Clinton and Gore’s Secretary of State Albright was happy to remark that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions was “worth it”. You think Gore represented a fundamental departure from the use, or rather abuse, of US military force? You should go back and read the history that made liberal lions like JFK just as complicit in the disaster of Vietnam as Nixon. Anathema to you, I’m sure.
“What do you suggest we do — keep on enduring Republican misrule until the Perfect Candidate rides in on a white horse?”
No. I apparently need to repeat myself again. See my comment @ 33.
“Progressives need to form coalitions with people not like ourselves to get anything done, and that means working with Democrats.”
It doesn’t mean working with Democrats in the confines of the system. It CAN mean forcing Democrats to do the right thing, keeping in mind Jon Schwarz’ Iron Law of Institutions. Of course, “progressives” are hardly interested on doing much more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic anyhow.
“I’m all in favor of OWS — but what have they really accomplished?”
They brought an idea into the mainstream consciousness. Frankly, they were destroyed not so much by organizational issues (which absolutely did exist but were not fatal) but by a concerted effort from just about everyone with any power, from the feds spying on them, cops dropping off homeless drunks to fuck with them, to the media nearly totally blocking out favorable coverage in favor of hippie-punching, to the inevitable military-style crackdown and clearance of protesters. But despite all this they really made a difference, and the next populist backlash might carry with it the lessons learned and be even more dangerous to those in power. All while giving the finger to Democrats, Republicans and liberals who tell us to vote Democratic or else.
“If you think if Gore had been president, things would be the same today as they are now, you are profoundly ignorant or unhinged from reality”
Counterfactuals are impossible, but I can confidently state that things would not be the “same” today as they are now. The point isn’t that nothing would be different, it’s that the direction of the country would STILL have been insufficiently budged, that the challenges facing us as a society (and as a species) would have been too much ignored, and the ideas dominating society would have been mostly identical.
“And you fault the Democrats for not having a clever or drastic enough of a solution? Fuck off.”
I’ll take that as a “No, the Democrats have nothing, and I don’t like it but I’ll insult you for bringing it up”.
Guess what – the climate doesn’t give a shit who hasn’t come up with ideas, or if the Republicans are worse. It is going to keep heating up unless we do something about it. The two wings of the Business Party are not going to do something about it. So where does that put you?
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/04/atlantis-wont-sink-experts-agree.html
Sanders sounded like he was seriously considering a primary run against Clinton on the Rachel Maddow show last night. (April 15th). He might be unelectable in the general elections, but he could certainly push Clinton from the left to be more progressive in the primary.
@Jackr
I’m being selective because the issues I highlight are the most important. Different ideologies will cut this differently but from mine you can’t even consider, say, economic policies (ACA) until the civil liberties are satisfied. And while there as been some nice actions by Obama on civil liberties (anti-racism stuff) they simply pale in comparison to not so nice ones.
RE: Gay rights.
Obama deserves zero credit for the positive moment in terms of gay rights over the last 8 years. Obama has done nothing but drag his feet and led from behind. the most important change at the federal level, repealing DADT, would have happened any way because the Log Cabin Republican case about it.
jackrousseau:
And suddenly the cost of economic decisions matters again. Go figure.
Evasion of the obvious fact that the Iraq War would not have happened under Gore is noted.
Also what apparently doesn’t matter: The fact the reason why we can’t do anything is because of Republicans consistent and unrelenting opposition to anything we attempt to do.
Congratulations on ignoring our political realities in the name of self righteousness. And you wonder why your voice isn’t getting heard.
@40:
“The rethuglican solution would no doubt be debtors prisons”
Soon to be an area of bipartisan agreement, no doubt. How many Democrats even now are lining up to “reform” Medicare and Social Security by slashing and privatizing it? How many of the massively successful for-profit colleges have scammed students while taking advantage of a too-lenient Obama administration that waited years to do anything about it? The government is charging ridiculous rates on student loans and won’t even let you declare bankruptcy on them, are the Republicans to blame for that too?
“I say “awful” is massively better than “worse” when you’re poor.”
Sure thing, and I understand the sorts of desperate situations that people are in, but you shouldn’t be willing to roll over and accept “awful” as the best possible political ideology of the day.
@42: “Thank you, you just admitted that the Democrats are indeed worth supporting, and can indeed get some good things done. Argument over, eh?”
If you think that’s what my statement implied, you’d better read it again. My entire point, repeated ad infinitum, is that while the parties might offer some differences, in much the same way that getting stabbed and handed bandages is probably better than getting shot and left for dead, neither party offers meaningful change or the ability to meet increasingly urgent challenges that we all face. I don’t even have to branch out much, I’ll do it as a syllogism. Let’s see.
1) Climate change almost certainly will be an existential challenge for the human species.
2) Neither Democrats or Republicans have come up with anything close to a workable plan to combat climate change, and have no serious indications of doing so or being able to do so.
=> 3) If we are relying on Democrats or Republicans to save us from an existential challenge, we are all fucked.
=> 4) The lesser of two evils doesn’t matter shit if it still can’t fix the existential problem.
I f’ying hate the Tea Party.
When you echo their opinion of Obama, the above statement is meaningless.
The history lesson that starts with the beginning of the American Empire in the late 1800s…
Al Gore’s policies were predetermined in the 1880s? Fuck off to bed, boy, you have no clue what you’re talking about.
The point isn’t that nothing would be different, it’s that the direction of the country would STILL have been insufficiently budged…
Just because the direction of the country would still not have met YOUR exacting standards (or mine) does not mean things would not have been significantly better; nor does it mean such incremental improvements would not have been worth fighting for. I wasn’t thrilled with Gore either — but even back then I KNEW that he would have been better than Bush Jr., and that was a good enough reason to have voted Democratic. And history has been proving me right on that point ever since.
michael sez:
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Citation desperately needed.
Your comment at 33 is not nearly as clear as you suppose it is. By radical action do you mean total anarchy? Let republicans win the executive, then smash the state with bricks and tire fires, something like that? I’m cool with radical action, but I’m not cool with rhetoric that encourages non-voting, because that always favors the republicans.
Neither Democrats or Republicans have come up with anything close to a workable plan to combat climate change, and have no serious indications of doing so or being able to do so.
The Democrats admit that climate change is happening, and that it’s man-made. The Republicans don’t. If you can’t even understand that difference, then you’re either a moron, or a Republican propagandist. I’m leaning toward the latter guess, since everything you’ve said serves only to demoralize and discourage progressives from doing what’s necessary for real progress.
Nope idjit, one of Obama’s first acts was to ask the Joint Chief of Staff to look into the issue, and look at the facts, not the hyperbole. Gee, to the surprise of nobody but the hyperbolists, the JCoS found support for gays and lesbians high in the ranks, and that there would be no problem repealing the law. Which wouldn’t change until congress repealed it. Since the JCoS helped to lead the repeal, it took the sails out of the more absolutist rethugs who found their hyperbole suddenly ineffective due to the data the JCoS obtained. Yes, Obama helped, and did it according to the rules. What more do you want?
jackroussea:
What is your fucking solution then? If neither of those political parties can be trusted to pass something to fix climate change, then we are fucked no matter what. You are going to need to change the political landscape enough to get Green Party control of both houses of Congress (and possibly a Green President too to ensure there is no veto) if what you are saying is true. AND THERE ISN’T ENOUGH TIME TO DO THAT. That is not something that could be done over the course of even 50 years, let alone say 10 or 15. If what you are saying is true, then THERE IS NO SOLUTION. Don’t you think you have better odds trying to goad the Democrats and fight to ensure Republicans lose power, than abide your completely useless position?
“Evasion of the obvious fact that the Iraq War would not have happened under Gore is noted.”
It might not have happened, maybe even was unlikely to happen, but I don’t know what would have happened in its place. The liberal hero Obama has bombed SEVEN majority-Muslim countries since his inauguration, and has been the 4th President in a row to bomb Iraq. Oh yeah, Clinton and Gore did limited bombing of Iraq too, did you forget about that?
Seriously, if the hill you’re making your last stand on is “Whatever, Bush invaded Iraq and Gore might not have, despite having supported the bombing of Iraq as VP” then it is a sad testament to how far liberalism has fallen in stature.
“The fact the reason why we can’t do anything is because of Republicans consistent and unrelenting opposition to anything we attempt to do.”
And we go full circle. Did you read anything I’ve said thus far? My entire point is that the two-party system, the Business Party system, is bullshit and working within it will not accomplish anything relative to the challenges we face. Putting aside the fact that if Republicans block everything Democrats do, there’s not really any point in voting Democrat anyway, consider my words again:
“Change can only come from outside the system. Form community groups, start creating parallel institutions, change local governance, create political pressure that doesn’t follow the rules that the Business Party has set out. ”
Demand climate action, force climate action not by buddying up with the corrupt and feckless Democrats, but by telling them to go fuck themselves and applying power externally. There are millions and millions of people willing to take action on climate change. Their power simply needs to be channeled through a movement that won’t piss it away.
Raging Bee @54 is damn right. One time my dad was being his usual paranoid self about a supposed progressive shit-talking democrats all over a progressive forum – he remembers COINTELPRO – and tracked the IP back to the office of a military contractor. All the republicans need to do to win is discourage the right people enough, they know that, and they act on it.
The lesser of two evils doesn’t matter shit if it still can’t fix the existential problem.
Again, history and common sense prove you are dead wrong. As Lao Tsu said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And it only continues when you keep on taking single steps, one after the other. Radical actions are sometimes necessary, but they never work unless there are a lot of incremental steps on which they can be based.
jackrousseau:
How many people died in those bombings? How many people died in the Iraq War?
It’s a sad testament to the state of liberalism when supposedly radical liberals can’t understand the severity, seriousness, and toll of outright war.
jackrousseau:
Fucking. How.
Are we fucking overthrowing the government here? Is that we are supposed to be doing this?
It’s just pipe dreams all the way down with you, isn’t it?
I don’t pretend to know that much about US politics, even though I try to follow it somewhat, but as a Canadian looking south I would certainly vote for Clinton over anyone the Republicans have on offer (or had as wannabe candidates in the previous election). She may be all of the negative things stated in the thread above, but the Republicans are so much worse. It always seems to be that we vote for the lesser of two undesirables, and the contest for the lesser spot is not in dispute here, IMHO. Having a Teabagger as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the US and the world. Just try to imagine what it would be like if Cruz or Santorum were in the Oval office. Seriously, no contest.
From my perspective Obama has been a huge disappointment. I expected him to start, however modestly, to clean up the mess that Bush Jr. created. But for the most part he hasn’t done that. I figured it would take a couple of decades to undo the damage Bush caused, and that Obama would face intense resistance from the Republican controlled house and/or senate, but I expected him to do more. So on the whole, a disappointment. But on the plus side, he’s not palpably evil, like say, Dick Cheney.
Depressing all the way round.
It might not have happened, maybe even was unlikely to happen, but I don’t know what would have happened in its place.
Your argument from ignorance does not prove that Gore would not have been better than Bush Jr.
Great American Satan: good on you and your father for remembering COINTELPRO. I’ve heard so much pure stupid bullshit from people pretending to be liberal, leftist, progressive or whatever, that I can’t help but at least suspect that a lot of it is coming from Republican plants trying to alienate and discredit the left (which they’ve done very thoroughly) and discourage us from doing anything meaningful and effective.
There are millions and millions of people willing to take action on climate change. Their power simply needs to be channeled through a movement that won’t piss it away.
Like Ralph “Lenin Lite” Nader did?
The two workable solutions I can think of are:
1. Change the Democratic Party, by changing the public opinion by whatever means necessary and pressuring them to change, while simultaneously pushing against the Republican Party and discrediting it.
2. Push for a change in the way we do elections so that third parties are viable and aren’t seen as throwing votes away.
Even those are fucking long shots. Not doing the above and just voting for third parties or pushing for a revolution or some shit with no attempt to work with the Democratic Party as it is, is just fucking masturbation.
51: “Al Gore’s policies were predetermined in the 1880s?”
How exactly do you think one earns the nomination of a major party? Do you think someone who is fundamentally at odds with the American project since the late 1800s would have the backing to make it that far? Do you think that Gore, who as I mentioned previously happily signed up to a bombing of Iraq himself, not to mention to unilaterally throwing down in the Balkan conflict, would decide that American imperialism was out of style and needs to be ended? Do you think that Al Gore, President would have cut off funding to the dozens of American-backed dictators, rebel groups, proxy forces and assorted thugs that operate around the globe? Do you think that Al Gore seriously disagrees with the idea that American foreign policy should revolve around securing access to resources and investment opportunities for American business, via the destruction of nationalist or leftist governments in every continent save Antarctica?
Do you think that ignorance of history is a reason to dismiss those who are not?
“Just because the direction of the country would still not have met YOUR exacting standards (or mine) does not mean things would not have been significantly better”
How many times do I have to say this? Sure he might have been better in some areas, in particular social justice, maybe even the Iraq War as it is currently known would have been avoided. But things would be Not. Better. Enough. Al Gore might have made An Inconvenient Truth but he hasn’t come out for much beyond investing in solar panels and a modest carbon tax. That’s not going to fucking save our asses, and anyone who’s read a little about climate change knows it. Worse, who have the Democrats pushed forward since Gore that have even had ideas like his? Obama? Don’t make me laugh. The man talks a good game but it’s been 6 years and we’re still waiting for him to throw anyone from Goldman Sachs in jail, let alone fix the climate.
@53: “By radical action do you mean total anarchy? ”
Putting aside the fact that anarchists believe something different then “smash all the windows” as a political ideology, no. I even said at the very beginning of my first post: Sure, vote Democratic on Election Day. Which is likely all you were going to do anyway. By radical action I mean the construction of viable new institutions that don’t rely on the goodwill (or more accurately self-interest) of the psychopaths inhabiting DC. Build up worker-owned businesses and banks. Start experimenting with the efficient local production of food. Move toward producing energy sufficiency with renewables on a small-scale, community basis. Above all, refuse to allow your dignity and freedom as a human being to be monopolized by plutocrats, polluters and the talking suits that they pay off to enact their favored laws.
@54: “The Democrats admit that climate change is happening, and that it’s man-made. The Republicans don’t. ”
So fucking what? The climate doesn’t care if someone admits it’s changing or if someone doesn’t. We have to stop climate change, not just agree that it’s a thing. Democrats aren’t doing that and it is obviously infuriating the liberals here to admit it. Well? I don’t want to doom my children or grandchildren to a fucked up world with “Well at least the people I voted for agreed it was a problem” as the only salve I have to give them. The hell with that. Swallow your pride and admit they don’t have a plan, an inclination to form a plan or the institutional structure to come up with one.
@56: “What is your fucking solution then? If neither of those political parties can be trusted to pass something to fix climate change, then we are fucked no matter what.”
No. People can change their habits regardless of whether or not a government is assisting (or impeding, as is the case) them. Humanity is endlessly creative. I gave some ideas above – and if you were to use a simple Google search you’d find quite a lot more – but the general principle is finding ways to unplug from the system, to form sustainable communities and to evangelize for their creation.
anteprepro: option 1 is the most workable: progressive activists need to take the initiative and paint a clear and easily-understood picture of the overall pattern of Republican corruption, incompetence and bigotry; and the more people respond to that message, the more incentive the Democrats will have to embrace it, without fear of losing more votes than they’d get. It can be done.
As for option #2, forget it. Why the fuck would I want to change our system to make irresponsible, incompetent, divisive third parties MORE influential? None of the third parties we have are any good — even the Greens are simply unwilling, or unable, to talk sensibly to ordinary Americans, and they’re the only third party that isn’t either insane or plain fucking evil.
@anteprepro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_Cabin_Republicans_v._United_States
Obama only really pushed for the repeal of DADT after it became painfully obvious it was going to happen anyway because of court proceedings. This case started in 2004, the DoJ defended DADT the entire time, until it became apparent the votes were there in the senate.
@Nerd
What report are you talking about? the Nov. 30th one (CRWG on DADT repeal) started up in response to Log Cabin case as the Log Cabin case forced an injunction against the policy in October. I don’t know of any other DADT report that Obama was involved in at all.
Or DADT, like the various marriage amendments, was render unconstitutional by the courts.
For Obama to not my life as a shield against charges of being awful.
For Obama to not play games with my rights.
For democrats to recognize that the party’s leadership is my as a tool and stop playing the gay card me.
A libertarian who actually understood anything about libertarianism…
wouldn’t be a libertarian.
Wait, are people seriously accusing me of being a Republican shill now? What the fuck is this? Talk about a poor response to an argument. Is that the liberal response to criticism from radicals?
@59: Useless cliche, not much to argue with there. Sometimes step by step reforms are necessary, sometimes a revolution is necessary. Human history has examples of both working and of both failing.
@60: “How many people died in those bombings? How many people died in the Iraq War?”
Clinton and Gore were happy to kill off 500k Iraqi children via sanctions, as I mentioned. The bombing of the Al-Shifa Sudanese pharmaceutical maker was considered to have killed tens of thousands of innocent people through depriving them of medicine. Operation Desert Fox killed a couple thousand (depending on the sources). Clinton and Gore have many skeletons in their own closets, that’s for sure.
@61: “Are we fucking overthrowing the government here? Is that we are supposed to be doing this?”
I think your anger at being criticized from the left is making it hard for you to think logically. On what planet does, say, rallies like the hundreds of thousands of people strong climate marches recently mean “overthrowing the government”? I’m not Lenin. No Vanguard party. Just people demanding action and building up institutions that can put things into motion.
“Your argument from ignorance does not prove that Gore would not have been better than Bush Jr.”
As a serious point here, I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this statement before you will accept it as my position instead of straw-manning me: “My entire point, repeated ad infinitum, is that while the parties might offer some differences, in much the same way that getting stabbed and handed bandages is probably better than getting shot and left for dead, neither party offers meaningful change or the ability to meet increasingly urgent challenges that we all face.” I guess I have to say it ad infinitum plus one.
“Like Ralph “Lenin Lite” Nader did?”
Oh yeah, Ralph Nader is just like Lenin. Jesus Christ, liberals gonna liberal but that one’s just dumb.
But things would be Not. Better. Enough.
Tough shit. Reality doesn’t always live up to our ideals. People who sit on the sidelines and do nothing but carp at everyone else for not making everything perfect, are NOT the people who get to tell us what’s the best thing we can do to make things at least a little better in a given day.
In fact, you sound a lot like the Republicans who fucked our country over, and who are now saying how horrible Obama is for not unilaterally fixing all their mistakes in his first 100 days.
I’ll also note that I’m not in favor of pushing a Third Party. Even if by some stroke of ridiculous luck it became powerful, it would quickly become corrupted because it would be in the same institutional milieu as the Rs and Ds. One thing the Business Party is happy to do is open a new franchise.
Well dandy then. But the burial of “go ahead and vote dem on election day” under a mountain of “they’re the same/just as bad” seems calculated to encourage non-voting while allowing a tiny blip of plausible deniability that it isn’t your actual goal. I agree with a ton of what you’ve said, but the way you’re framing shit is effectively translating “let the GOP win” regardless of your actual meaning.
jackrousseau:
Wow. That’s your solution. Great work.
Except a lot of emissions come from industry and commercial businesses. Including the electricity needed for those businesses, and the transportation needed for those businesses. Also agriculture factors in, and it is a large contributor to methane production, which has an impact on climate change around 25 times that of carbon dioxide (pound for pound).
But I’m sure millions of people voluntarily changing their habits and going off to little communes will work just fine. You fucking visionary world saver, you.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html
“Tough shit. Reality doesn’t always live up to our ideals.”
Climate change is going to fuck us up big time and you’re there saying tough shit, because reality doesn’t live up to our ideals? I don’t know how better to phrase this but we don’t have a god damn choice in the matter, we need to fix this problem or homo sapiens is on its way out. If Democrats can’t do it (and they can’t) then fuck Democrats and the two-party system, we’ll work around it. Unlike liberals I at least have an appreciation for human ingenuity and ability to solve problems despite long odds.
I side-eye people with masculine handles dogging the logic of people with kinda feminine handles. <_< And people going Vulcan in any discussion, frankly.
…sometimes a revolution is necessary.
Revolutions tend to be extremely bloody and divisive, and more often than not cause a slide BACKWARD, both because everyone suddenly needs a restoration of order more than anything else, and because the institutions of peaceful progressive change have been undermined by the state of WAR you so childishly call “revolution.”
@73:
“But the burial of “go ahead and vote dem on election day” under a mountain of “they’re the same/just as bad””
I don’t know how many times I have to repeat “That’s not what I’m saying, god damnit, stop putting words in my mouth!” before the people here listen up. I did not ONCE say Rs and Ds are identical or are just as bad. My point, over and over and over and fucking over, is that they are both insufficient, regardless of the differences between them. Go ahead and spend the 20 minutes on Election Day to vote the D ticket – with my blessing! You really should! But don’t expect them – don’t hope for them – to fix the major, existential problems facing us. Because they won’t, they can’t. We need to work outside the system for that to happen.
Seriously. Can we all just not make up my position in order to punch up a straw man? Please?
@ raging bee,
but I don’t Obama because he’s black.
@raging bee,
I mean… “but I don’t hate Obama because he’s black.”
jackrousseau
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
jackrousseau:
So you got nothing? As I’ve already said, economics have consequences. The fact that you can acknowledge that to bash Clinton and Gore (rightfully) while still blatantly ignoring the fact that the drastically different economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans ALSO IS A DIFFERENCE OF LIVES is rather intriguing.
So what I’m getting here is
1. People demand action via protest.
2. People build up an organization and continue to protest.
3. ?????
4. PROFIT!!!
You haven’t answered how the fuck any of your shit is actually going to get anything accomplished.
@74:
I hate to break it to you, but if we continue on our current path we’re not going to have too much viable farmland to continue producing agricultural emissions from. There’s long odds on the people coming together without DC, forming movements and parallel institutions that can act powerfully, and meaningfully changing things, but they’re the only odds we have. What is your big fucking ideas besides bashing the radicals and hoping Hilary will be the Climate Savior?
@76: My moniker comes from a well known philosopher who happens to be male. I myself do not give my gender publicly. Furthermore, accusing someone of ignoring reason really is legitimate when someone is going on tilt. I do not think it… unreasonable, to use that attack when people are calling me a shill.
@77: How do you feel about the series of French Revolutions that as a by-product gave us much of your own political philosophy, as vulgar a version as you might exhibit? Do you really think all revolutions have been failures? Perhaps you should ask Cubans what Cuba was like when Batista tortured citizens for sport and the American mafia and American corporations ran Havana.
I’ll also note that I’m not in favor of pushing a Third Party. Even if by some stroke of ridiculous luck it became powerful, it would quickly become corrupted because it would be in the same institutional milieu as the Rs and Ds. One thing the Business Party is happy to do is open a new franchise.
So in other words, the minute ANY party became powerful enough to do any of the things you think are necessary, you would oppose it because it’s too powerful.
So now jackrousseau is sounding like a libertarian. Why am I not surprised? Libertarians are about the most anti-progressive movement America has ever had (second only to Republicans, who they’ve been inseparably in bed with from day one), and they’ve been demonizing liberals, progressives and Democrats for as long as I can remember. So it’s not at all surprising that a libertarian would be using tired old manipulative rhetoric to disparage the very idea of government solutions and discourage progressives from working within an broader coalition to win elections and get laws passed.
Rousseau @78 – I’m sorta satisfied that you aren’t a complete piece of shit now. See what brevity and clarity will get you? Have a nice day.
jackrousseau:
Much like conservatives, you dismiss the significance of government and its ability to help with things that individuals could not, and ignore the negative impact of businesses, which cannot be reigned in by a bunch of people going off and doing their own thing.
Well there is one solution of trying to get Democrats to pass various fixes improving fuel efficiency, creating infrastructure using green energy, and regulating businesses and preventing them from having massive amounts of emissions because it is cheaper that way. And then there is year plan of getting enough people to voluntarily go off the grid and live in an electricity and fossil fuel free Utopia that you end climate change. I will leave it to the audience to decide which is more plausible.
That is YOUR mindless idiotlogal view, not necessary one based on evidence. So, why should I pay any attention to it? Just like the radicals in college long ago, you need to be laughed at for you excessive hyperbole, and the arrogance to think you are the only one seeing things clearly. You have some blinders one, so you aren’t as clear as you could be. Maybe you need to quit preaching, and shut the fuck up and listen.
jackrousseau:
Way to address the argument, dumbfuck.
Jackrousseau, if you look at the links at the EPA, they actually have proposed solutions regarding each source of emissions right on the pages. I’m fairly sure Democrats have at least tried to propose some of them in the past. But I doubt that that matters to you. Anything not already in your pipe dreams is of no relevance to you.
@82: I’m going to give you one more answer and that’s it. Frankly, your argumentation is on the level of an angry Tea Partier defending their tribe and I hope others can see that regardless of where they stand on the issues.
Well, since you dishonestly chopped out the death toll from Clinton’s bombing of Iraq from your quote (getting pretty desperate are we?), I’m not sure I should deign to answer this. However, the death toll from NATO’s intervention in the Balkans was estimated to be 2000-4000 civilians and 5000-10000 soldiers. Add that to the mountain of Clinton and Gore’s skeletons. I don’t know how many more deaths you want me to tabulate before you accept the point that Gore was through and through a servant of American Empire and would not have represented a decisive break in US foreign policy. Would he have to have had ridden a bomb like at the end of Dr. Strangelove for you to agree?
How do you feel about the series of French Revolutions that as a by-product gave us much of your own political philosophy, as vulgar a version as you might exhibit?
First, most of our political philosophy (specifically, Locke) came BEFORE the French Revolution(s). So did our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And second, yes, the French Revolution was indeed a failure in many ways, since it didn’t achieve much of the liberty it promised, and led to a lot of bloodshed and civil strife, followed by a dictator named Napoleon. And your reference to a “series of French Revolutions” pretty much admits how hard a time they had getting it right.
I suppose I missed a tag somewhere there. Oops.
He might be unelectable in the general elections, but he could certainly push Clinton from the left to be more progressive in the primary.
Like that would help. It would mean her rhetoric would move temporarily to the left, but her actions if/when she got elected wouldn’t.
I haven’t proposed anything? Yeah, whatever. You aren’t worth engaging with.
@82: I’m going to give you one more answer and that’s it. Frankly, your argumentation is on the level of an angry Tea Partier defending their tribe and I hope others can see that regardless of where they stand on the issues.
I don’t see that at all. Quite frankly, you’re just plain lying about the content of comment #82. Which means another pathological liar is bashing the Democratic Party. Again, why am I not surprised?
jackrousseau@#90
Also: Libya. And it appears that the US was more than an innocent bystander in causing the current horrible situation in Ukraine. The democrats are just as much imperial machinators as the republicans; their body-counts are lower and they don’t gloat about it as obviously as Bush/Cheney but they’re all rolled and stamped from the same batch of shit.
jackrousseau:
Because Jack thinks I am a Teabagger because I think he is talking nonsense, can anyone else manage to make sense of what this is actually talking about? Is this is a thing that has actually happened? Is it a thing that is likely to happen? What kinds of organizations are we talking about? Am I just not seeing something or is he full of shit?
First I’m a Republican shill, now I’m a libertarian… the Gamergaters call me a SJW.. I suppose I am many things to many people. It’s hard to respect anyone who uses this line of argumentation, though.
I am a libertarian socialist, which is generally synonymous with the term “anarchist”. I am primarily interested in maximizing the freedom of humans from oppressive hierarchies like the State or Capital and even more abstract forces like gender roles. My ideal society consists of networked autonomous communities where the people own the means of production and live sustainably, where there is no strong central authority, where meaningful democracy exists in the decision making process, and where communities have their own rules and people are free to follow them, find a different community, or start their own as to their desire.
But this ideal society is a long way away, no doubt. In the short and medium term, I want to attack the power of the State to harm people, the power of Capital to enslave people, and to ensure humans live on as a species and do not destroy themselves via their environment. Our current political systems are sclerotic and malfunctioning, not that they were ever designed to really give much power to the people (c.f James Madison talking about giving power to the “minority of the opulent”), and that means the only other viable option open to us to combat existential environmental challenges is to start creating proto-sustainable communities and institutions that can help us transition from our current, carbon-intensive and species-destroying society to one without these problems.
So to address this:
I’m not really opposed to having a central government in the short to medium term as long as its credibly addressing our problems. I like Social Security and the New Deal programs! Taxation is fine as long as its going to the poor and lessening the impact that Capital has on society! My problem with the Green Party isn’t so much their policies as the fact that they’ll never gain power in a rigged system, and the fact that the “democracy” in America is resistant to the type of policies needed to combat climate change ever being carried out, by ANYONE. Which is pretty obvious to see.
@89:
A handful of EPA policies is not going to combat global warming. Get on your thinking cap and consider the scale of the issue and the scale of these proposed “solutions”. The problem is bigger than the solutions, it turns out. And it’s not like CO2 emissions are all that’s at issue. We’re killing massive numbers of species annually, for one. What’s the EPA going to do about that?
@91:
I hate to break it to you but while the French Revolution was influenced by previous thinkers, it is generally considered by historians to have kicked off the modern age. It was the culmination and refinement of a lot of Enlightenment thought, though it’s obviously not the only important event in that period. Oh, but, Napoleon was there for a while so it’s garbage and fuck the French Revolution, I guess.
Like that would help. It would mean her rhetoric would move temporarily to the left, but her actions if/when she got elected wouldn’t.
Not necessarily. Her actions would stay to the left if she saw that a) left activists were actually able to help get a clear message out and get large numbers of people to the polls with said message; and b) her administration had a left flank that could keep public attention focused on their issues as her budgets and other legislative proposals made their way through Congress.
Jack, you are a fucking idiot. YOUR SOLUTION ISN’T BIG ENOUGH EITHER THEN.
Fucking pompous windbag.
Also: No one called you a Republican shill. I didn’t even imply that. Get off the fucking cross.
Ha!
I say someone is arguing on the level of an angry Tea Partier, they say I’m accusing them of being part of the Tea Party.
Yet I’ve been accused multiple times of being a Republican shill, a Libertarian, and have had my repeatedly-stated arguments strawmanned to a quite frankly ridiculous extent, and all’s fair when you’re bashing the radical eh?
Nobody has mentioned what the Democratic plan to actually combat climate change is yet. Because no such plan exists nor is it remotely likely to exist. This is painful to liberals, so they lash out at the only people proposing things, I guess.
@96: Of course. The list is… very long. American Empire has always been a bipartisan project, tribalism keeps people from seeing the acts of empire done by “the other side”. JFK’s involvement in Vietnam was horrible, for example.
Anteprepro, straight up, you’re not half the debater you think you are and you really should consider how much of your opinions are driven by pure tribalism. That’s all I’m going to say.
Jack Fucking Guy On Internet apparently has better ideas (specifically one fucking idea) about how to combat climate change than the 15 or so suggested by the fucking EPA.
Jesus fucking Christ, the fucking ego.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/electricity.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/transportation.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/industry.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/commercialresidential.html
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/agriculture.html
I am a libertarian socialist, which is generally synonymous with the term “anarchist”.
You admit I guessed correctly, but you can’t respect me for it?
Fuck off to bed. “Libertarian socialist” is just another working arm of the ongoing scam that is libertarianism. The pressing problems we’re facing today can never be solved by anarchism — we need organizational advantage (and, yes, coercive regulations) at all levels to protect the environment, stop global climate disaster, regulate the financial sector, transition to clean energy sources, fight corruption and police misconduct, and reposition our military to get out of the Middle East and go back to defending democracy in Europe.
“Libertarian socialist” is an oxymoron, and people with that label have never had anything useful to offer.
Right back at ya, jack.
Also, apparently Jack can’t fucking Google.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/climate-change
http://books.simonandschuster.com/This-Changes-Everything/Naomi-Klein/9781451697384
The book isn’t perfect, but it does a good job of describing the scale of the problem. You might learn something from it – and maybe learn why the EPA isn’t going to fix global warming and doesn’t a credible plan to either (lol at that suggestion).
And: http://www.democrats.org/issues/environment
This is embarrassingly wrong. Libertarian socialism predates the libertarians (who stole the name) by a good 150 years. Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin among others were not part of a “scam”, I don’t think. Neither was Leo Tolstoy. It’s worth noting that the anarchists and libsocs drove most of the labor movement, which is why we have things like.. the 8 hour work day, or bans on child labor.
I read PZ’s posts but I don’t read the comments too often here. Is this really the calibre of rhetoric that goes on at a regular basis? Because this is shockingly ignorant. I get that the common meaning of “anarchy” means “no rules” and people aren’t aware of the political philosophy that means “no rulers” (big difference), but seriously, for fuck’s sake, there’s nothing worse than aggressive ignorance.
Since the piece began by highlighting the talk on Democracy Now, I thought I’d quote Kshama Sawant: “if we are going to stay with lesser-evilism, that argument works until perpetuity. It’s never going to be a good time to break from the two-party, or, you know, the two-big-business-party machinery, and build an independent alternative, because you can always make the claim that, well, you know, if we ran a left candidate this year, in 2016, it’s not going to work, so let’s just hunker down and vote for Hillary because she’s better than the Republicans.”
Oh man, fuel emissions standards! Shit, why didn’t I think of that? That will surely solve the world’s environmental problems. Sorry everyone, I was wrong, you should vote for Hilary Clinton because fuel emissions standards will fix everything.
Getting millions of people to go Amish is truly the One True Way.
It’s worth noting that the anarchists and libsocs drove most of the labor movement, which is why we have things like.. the 8 hour work day, or bans on child labor.
All of which today’s libertarians oppose and despise with an unholy passion — and none of which can be called “anarchism” by any stretch. Those are laws passed by governments — you know, the kind of thing Democrats advocate, and get bashed for advocating.
I get that the common meaning of “anarchy” means “no rules” and people aren’t aware of the political philosophy that means “no rulers” (big difference), but seriously, for fuck’s sake, there’s nothing worse than aggressive ignorance.
Okay, so what DOES “anarchy” mean then? If you don’t have actual information to correct our “ignorance,” then calling us ignorant doesn’t mean much.
And seriously, for fuck’s sake, WE NEED RULERS (that’s why next year’s election is so important), so if “anarchism” means “no rulers,” than it’s nothing but shit.
Yeah, I definitely said everyone should go Amish. Does it trouble you that you seem constitutionally incapable of truthfully characterizing an opponent’s position?
Oh man, fuel emissions standards! Shit, why didn’t I think of that?
More to the point, why didn’t you think of anything better?
Jack: Really? You are the one who characterized those two links as just “fuel emission standards” and you really want to say I am dishonest for mocking your millions of people in off-the-grid communities by calling it “going Amish”? By god.
Okay, jack, have the last word. I have had my laughs.
…I thought I’d quote Kshama Sawant: “if we are going to stay with lesser-evilism, that argument works until perpetuity…”
ALL policy making is about building working coalitions of people who don’t totally agree with each other. And building coalitions means compromise. And compromise means no one will think any policy is perfect. And when they get in imperfect policy, they’ll have to support it because it’s the lesser of two (or more) evils. That’s how politics always works: people trying to work together to make things at least a little better than they were before. Mindlessly labeling that “lesser-evilism” and pretending it’s bad, is just plain babyish. Why is it bad to try to make things less evil then they are, or could be?
“Lesser of two evils” is just a snobbish and disdainful way of saying “the best option available at this time.” That is, in fact, an example of the kind of clueless snobbery that gets progressives tarred as out-of-touch elitists. Thanks for being part of the problem, jack.
@ 113, Raging Bee — Well, re: Anarchy, here’s Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy and here’s David Graeber who’s been mentioned a lot in anarchy discussions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
jackrousseau @9:
I will vote Democrat in the election bc it is a case of the lesser of two evils. Any GOP candidate is going to be worse than a Dem and I don’t want a GOP clown in the Oval Office. What other option is there when voting in the Presidential elections?
@121: I know, which is why I said vote the D ticket on Election Day. But if you want to change things, don’t look toward that system to do it.
Maybe the problem is with democracy itself. People like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rand Paul get elected because people vote for them. That means that either they really do represent the policy preferences of people who live in those states, or the people who live in those states were too stupid to know what’s good for them . Neither of those is a great commentary on democracy.
We live in a country in which lots and lots of people disbelieve evolution, think it’s a fantastic idea to regularly conduct bombing raids in the third world, and think that if only the poor were better at pulling themselves up by their bootstraps life would be just grand. As repulsive as everyone here (including me) finds those positions, they are basically mainstream positions. Until that changes, neither will anything else.
Maybe there is no solution; if there is, I’m not smart enough to know what it is. But the Tea Party is the symptom, not the root problem. The root problem is the American public, which has far too many idiots in it for my taste. Fix that problem, and politics will follow. If that problem remains unfixed, then at one level it really doesn’t matter who lives in the White House.
@ 117, Raging Bee – I would recommend the whole talk on Democracy Now, can’t quote everything of course. Sawant makes the point that this is why there has to be pressure form the left (one of the reasons FDR was able to do what he did – pressure from the left). It’s basically in response to Progressives like Conason and Bob Cesca who are already scolding lefties for not falling in line behind Clinton … 16 Months before the election! They’re already saying Sanders is unelectable so why bother? So, that’s the context. Also, I don’t think Sawant “mindlessly” labeled anything ‘lesser of two evils’. I think she quite mindfully labeled Clinton that, and I agree with her.
How many people are you willing to hurt on the way to punishing the Democratic Party for their flaws?
I don’t think running Hillary is a case of the lesser of two evils. I will not vote for her because she is the same song, same verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse. In other words, she has been in public office for far too long and hasn’t managed to get one damn thing accomplished, so why would I want her as President? I didn’t like her pig eyed husband either, he was also the lesser of two evils. I think we need to abolish the electoral college altogether. Both of the current parties are worthless, and have completely failed the people they supposedly represent.
@jackrousseau
Can’t help but note that the anarchist society described therein devolved into a centralized bureaucracy that stifled innovation, change, and individual power. You know what the message of hope was? The protagonist (and his fellows) engaging with the system to change it. Going off the political grid really isn’t the answer.
For me, voting Democratic is damage control. Nothing more, nothing less. Disengaging from the political process will empower Republicans. Even disregarding the “collateral damage” to so many people (which I don’t), I’m fairly sure your nascent movement would fare poorly under the (larger) police state that would follow.
By the way, the blockquote monster hates us all — but do try to remember to close with a /blockquote tag.
Maybe the problem is with democracy itself. People like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rand Paul get elected because people vote for them. That means that either they really do represent the policy preferences of people who live in those states, or the people who live in those states were too stupid to know what’s good for them . Neither of those is a great commentary on democracy.
Given recent publicized incidents of voter-purges and partisan gerrymandering, I’d say the problem is NOT ENOUGH democracy.
The root problem is the American public, which has far too many idiots in it for my taste.
Oh yeah, call the voters the problem — that’s a sure-fire way to get votes and build a working coalition. Not.
And the fact that better politicians have, at least sometimes, got the same public to support better policies, kinda disproves that snobbish excuse to avoid real political work. People weren’t any smarter in 1932, but that didn’t stop FDR from getting elected and getting some damn good, and damn necessary, things done in his lifetime.
“Anarchy” as a political philosophy I already described: it’s the belief that human freedom should be maximized by dismantling unjustified hierarchies, generally including (but not limited to) the State…
Excuse me, but the State is NOT an “unjustified hierarchy” — it’s an absolute necessity, not only to respond to hurricanes and invasions, but also to enhance individual liberty by enforcing reasonable laws. All of our individual liberties are described in the Constitution, and enforced by government enforcing laws.
“Anarchy” fails as a political philosophy because its fundamental premises are FALSE.
A fun example is the society of Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”, but historical examples include the Ukraine Free State, Revolutionary Catalonia, kibutzim, certain First Nations societies, today’s Rojava (with the Kurds), the territory held today by the EZLN, etc.
Your first example is pure fiction; your second didn’t last and was crushed by the USSR; your third got crushed by Franco; your fourth is of small-scale organizations and not at all comparable to a national government; and I’ve not heard how the others were “anarchic” in your sense of the word. (Do you really think the Kurds have no state apparatus? Or do they depend on the Iraqi state for some state functions?)
To abolish the Electoral College would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Instead, by state laws, without changing anything in the Constitution, The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country.
Every vote, everywhere, for every candidate, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of pre-determined outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of ‘battleground’ states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just ‘spectators’ and ignored after the conventions.
The bill would take effect when enacted by states with a majority of Electoral College votes—that is, enough to elect a President (270 of 538). The candidate receiving the most popular votes from all 50 states (and DC) would get all the 270+ electoral votes of the enacting states.
The bill has passed 33 state legislative chambers in 22 rural, small, medium, large, red, blue, and purple states with 250 electoral votes. The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
NationalPopularVote
Here’s a good companion piece by Gosztola at Firedoglake, talking about the context of this debate among progressives … http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2015/04/13/hillary-clintons-announcement-paves-way-for-progressives-to-abandon-their-principles-very-early-in-2016-election/
Sometimes reading through the comments here makes me feel like an optimist, which I’m generally not. I honestly don’t think that Obama’s presidency has been a disaster. It certainly could have been better, but overall I think it’s going well. And I think a Hillary Clinton presidency would be substantially similar. Things Obama has accomplished:
*Turning the economy around, helping millions of people
*The Affordable Care Act. Sure it’s not as good as single payer, but it’s undoubtedly helped lots of people who previously didn’t/couldn’t have health insurance. Plus there’s the intangible effects, that as people come to like the various positive effects of the ACA (no denial for pre-existing conditions, kids stay on until 26, etc.), they’ll start to wonder how they could have done without it.
*The administration took a strong position on civil rights. For instance, opposing DADT (which only Congress could repeal), and submitting briefs and arguing at the Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage. The administration wasn’t strictly needed for either, since they were taking place in Congress/SCOTUS, but the solicitor general is sometimes called the 10th Justice and hearing the President state his support for something can have a powerful effect. Also, the DOJ taking a stronger position on racism/sexism/anti-transgender discrimination, including launching lawsuits against discriminating institutions. I’m personally grateful to Obama, if it wasn’t for his administration’s strong stance, I wouldn’t have been able to sponsor my British husband for a green card, and we’d be living in separate countries visiting each other every few months.
*Acknowledging that climate change is taking place. Yes, it’d be very nice if there was more action, but I think of it as a longer game. Get people talking about it more, start to change minds, and then people will be more open to substantial changes.
*Winding down the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq. Yes there are still bombings, and there are still troops there, but compared to 8 years ago it’s massively decreased.
Yes, I know there are things Obama hasn’t accomplished. Like closing Guantanamo, or fixing the Patriot Act. But overall I think he’s accomplished a lot. I predict that just getting the ACA passed will be viewed by posterity as a monumental accomplishment.
So while I would rather have Warren or Sanders running, I would vote for Clinton over any of the Republicans in a heartbeat, and I won’t feel like I’m voting for the “lesser of 2 evils”
Raging Bee, whatever public relations problems may arise from telling the voters they’re idiots, the fact is the voters are idiots. Sugar coat it if you think it will help, but that’s the underlying truth. FDR got elected because of a catastrophic Great Depression, and if our economy were to suffer another comparable collapse we might get another one.
How else to explain all the poor people who vote Republican? That makes absolutely no sense, yet significant numbers of poor people do vote Republican. My sister is an example. She’s disabled and depends on government programs; if the GOP ever succeeds in abolishing the safety net altogether she’d be completely screwed. Yet she votes Republican because she’s anti-abortion and anti-gay and thinks the Democrats are anti-God, and those issues are more important to her than her own well being. Plus lots of poor people have bought the bill of goods that if they just work a little harder and vote for low taxes, their lives will improve.
My take on what a lefty should do in this election: If you’re in a competitive state, vote for the Democrat, whoever it is, because they’re certainly better than the Republican and will prevent a further cementing of a conservative court and will likely turn the court back liberal. Remember, it was the conservative majority that gave us Citizens United – the liberal wing dissented. If, however, you’re in a state that will be safely won by one candidate or the other, vote for a third party or independent candidate who more closely fits your views. Perhaps enough dissenters in this manner could provide some momentum for change.
Geh, Frankly, I’m still pissed that I essentially ‘need’ to vote for clinton if she makes the primary ticket. I’d take Sanders or Warren over her, because, well, I’m a flat out socialist. I would really love to see instant run-off voting, but that’s one thing I can bet that will be unilaterally opposed by BOTH parties.
Raging Bee, whatever public relations problems may arise from telling the voters they’re idiots, the fact is the voters are idiots. Sugar coat it if you think it will help, but that’s the underlying truth.
No, that’s not an “underlying truth,” it’s a gross oversimplification that offers absolutely nothing in the way of a possible solution.
If, however, you’re in a state that will be safely won by one candidate or the other, vote for a third party or independent candidate who more closely fits your views. Perhaps enough dissenters in this manner could provide some momentum for change.
Thanks, you just admitted that voting for a fringe candidate only makes sense when your vote doesn’t count.
Oh, there are other factors too, but don’t discount that the voters are stupid. And my whole point is that there may not be a possible solution; if you’ve got one, please share.
eeyore: The biggest problem when it comes to stupidity isn’t voters. It’s the politicians. Their positions are far more stupid and detached from reality than the general population. The problem is the unscrupulous and incompetent people that wind up being our only choices for positions of power.
They’re not ‘stupid,” so much as too busy, and too engrossed in their own respective circumstances, to take the time to see the bigger political picture. Politics and policymaking are information-intensive tasks, and you don’t have to be “stupid” to not have the chops for it; just like you don’t have to be “stupid” to need a lawyer to represent you when you get sued or arrested.
And my whole point is that there may not be a possible solution; if you’ve got one, please share.
That’s relatively easy: find candidates who are effective communicators. That’s the “super-power” that made pre-New-Deal conservatism look so credible under Reagan; it’s how Roosevelt managed to build support for the New Deal and a global two-front war that nobody had previously wanted; it’s a skill that most Democratic candidates to date (including Hillary Clinton) don’t seem to have; and it’s a skill that Obama DID have, but didn’t use enough.
Progressive change requires leadership; and a large and indispensable part of leadership is the ability (and willingness) to explain things to people in a way they can understand and rally for.
It doesn’t matter how well a message is communicated if the public isn’t buying it. President Obama is arguably the best communicator we’ve had in the White House in 50 years, and last year virtually every Democrat running for office asked him to stay out of their districts because they knew his message was unpopular. The problem wasn’t his inability to communicate; it was that the voters weren’t interested.
Maybe I’m wrong; maybe if progressivism were better communicated more people would support it. But there are an awful lot of people whose vision of America is a place where you make it on your own, where government is to be viewed with suspicion, and where people who aren’t like them are second class at best. You’re not going to change their minds by getting a better communicator.
They’re not stupid. They have different motivations, goals, and priorities from you.
I almost wonder if the libertarian “progressives” on the panel were paid Paulite shills. They always but into every progressive dialogue large and small. I do know that Libertarian major media like Reason magazine is financed by the Kochs.
I see it as a lack of critical thinking on the organizers. How can someone with a political ideology that favors the haves over the have nots be considered progressive? The 1920s called an wants their ideology back.
No enemies to my left.
Why don’t you run?
Blaming Nader-voting Democrats in Florida makes no sense, when there were far more Bush-voting Democrats in Florida.
One word: Obamacare.
I know it’s Romneycare. I know it’s still pathetic compared to European, Canadian etc. arrangements. But.
You don’t seriously believe the Republican Party is limited by your imagination.
Frankly, you’re making yourself sound horrible.
Look beyond the rim of your dinnerplate, then. What would obviously happen would be that the Big Tents would fragment. I can’t think of another country where any party contains as many contradictions as a holy book.
The way some people react to the word libertarian here is not that different from the way the right reacts to the word socialism. Left-libertarianism and anarchism are fairly obscure political terms so not knowing what they mean right off the bat is understandable, but to be so fucking dismissive and insulting when you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and are not interested in learning is repulsive.
Drawler @145:
It’s so precious that you think people around here don’t understand libertarianism.
People might not understand your particular flavor (whatever that may be), but the criticisms of libertarianism many people have made to apply to forms of libertarianism that other people believe in.
Do you hold to some version of libertarianism that doesn’t oppose government, taxation, and regulations? Is your version of libertarianism one that doesn’t promote apathy, selfishness, and a dogmatic adherence to property rights over all other rights?
Except liberturdism here in the US is a non-workable idiotology. For example, show me where a first world country had used liberturd political philosophy for thirty years in the last century. I’m not holding my breathe. There are reasons for that, called history, politics, and economics.
Yes, but where’s jackasseau’s PONY?
127:
The protagonist literally left the anarchist planet in search of answers and ended up in the middle of a revolution on the capitalist part of the other planet, I’m not sure if that can be seen as “engaging with the system to change it”. The reason I brought up that story is because it’s a good illustration that the human project will never be finished, and all societies have potential flaws, but it depicts how one anarchist society might function in the day to day and better fulfill the needs of the people than the alternatives.
If you’ve been following what I’ve been saying, my point was that neither Democrats nor Republicans show any signs of having the institutional capability to tackle the real existential crises the human species is currently facing. The fact that Republicans are even less capable than Democrats doesn’t change the fact that neither meet the bar. The only alternative is to work outside of the system and build up movements and institutions that can meet the bar – despite the admitted long odds. And, like I said, go ahead and vote the D ticket on Election Day, which is basically what was going to happen anyway.
128:
Yeah, see, I’m not going to try and convince you, but there’s a couple centuries of philosophy that says otherwise, and you can’t just dismiss it all by saying “well hurricanes and invasions, duh, checkmate anarchists”. Pro tip: if an ideology with millions of adherents can be dismissed and disproved with a smug one-liner then it probably wouldn’t have got off the ground in the first place. How do you like it when Tea Partiers make ridiculous image macros like that slamming liberals? It’s just as dumb when you do it against radicals. Anarchists don’t even believe in “no government”, just “no centralized, undemocratic government”. It’s the difference between a community council where everyone gets a direct vote on what’s going on and the feds starting a War on Drugs to mass incarcerate the black population because fuck you, that’s why.
I gave a big list of examples and you dismissed them all with more one-liners. Worse, you ignored the best examples. If you haven’t heard of the EZLN or what’s going on Rojava, it’s time for you to educate yourself. The Zapatistas are a indigenous movement that has been making great strides in pushing back the neoliberal takeover of Mexico for 20 years, increasing living standards and providing dignity to a people that for most of the past few hundreds of years have been denied it. The Rojavan Kurds follow the ideas of a guy named Murray Bookchin, who had a particular focus on sustainable libsoc communities. By the way, the Kurds are split into different groups, and don’t always get along with each other. Rojava is in Syria, not Iraq. Seriously, before you start the smugness you should know what you’re talking about.
Beyond that there are plenty more examples, from the small scale to the large scale. Why not just Google it?
@145: Fucking tell me about it. The Horde apparently thinks that Noam Chomsky = Ron Paul with less of a fascination with gold.
@146: In the nicest way possible, Wikipedia offers a pretty straightforward introduction to anarchism/libertarian socialism (basically synonymous) that you should read before attacking its adherents. You would quickly learn that we oppose property rights, for example. We oppose the State in the long term, too, but the goal is to maximize human freedom, not destroy a list of X things, so the State can be temporarily useful in countering the power of Capital. Like, tax the fuck out of Wall Street, I’ll be overjoyed. Net human freedom from that action is pretty strongly positive. And the reverse is true too – the USSR could have used stronger property rights, so that people could have defended themselves against the predation of the State. Every situation needs to be analyzed on its own terms.
147: Libertarianism in the Ron and Rand Paul sense is god damn different then libertarian socialism (the original meaning of the word, stolen since the 1950s by those assholes) which is Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Proudhon, Tolstoy and others.
jackrousseau @149:
1- Pharyngula has seen its share of libertarian commenters over the years. I’ve read many comments from these folks where they expound on their views and I find most of them abhorrent. I don’t need to visit wikipedia to criticize the libertarian ideas put forth by the apathetic libertarian assholes who have commented at this blog.
2. My inquiry @146 was directed specifically at Drawler. I was asking them what strain of libertarianism they adhere to and I don’t think visiting wikipedia is going to help in that regard.
Honestly, it seems like a lot of liberals treat “anarchism” like dudebros treat “feminism”. Instant anger upon hearing the term, refusal to learn anything about it, straw-manning the fuck out of it, and just angry one-liner dismissals of even the basics.
It’s pretty funny that you folks pride yourselves on having Totally Open Minds, but it turns out that tribalism goes deeper than you ever imagined, I guess.
150: I read that comment as saying the “libertarian” part of “libertarian socialism” was making people freak out, just like the Tea Party reacts to buzzwords in a sentence. The conversation seems to be like this: “Hey guise I’m a libertarian socialist” “OH SHIT YOU SAID LIBERTARIAN, BURN THE WITCH” “But there’s more words in that sentence…” “DOESN’T MATTER FUCK OFF”
jackrousseau @152:
Why would you think that?
Drawler said:
There’s nothing in that comment about “libertarian socialism”.
BTW, my name is Tony. Not 150.
@eeyore 138
50 years takes us back to 1965. Obama is, at best, the 3rd best in that time frame behind Clinton and Reagan. Push it back another five years and he is arguably in 5th place.
@JackRousseau various
I don’t think you know the meaning of existential and I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the philosophy of your namesake.
Climate change is a massive problem and one that needs addressing sooner rather than later, but it is NOT an existential problem. The human race will survive any of the forecasted effects of climate change I have seen.
Rousseau advocated rather the opposite approach to yours for governing societies the size of any modern nation state.
I am genuinely curious if you are in college at the moment. You come off like a college radical that is still bank rolled by their parents.
Ursula Le Guin Pedant Alert
Actually, Shevek left the anarchist planet because the anarchists were forming statist institutions increasingly reliant on enforced community feeling, with penalties for noncompliance, which, while nonviolent, were nonetheless of great import in a scarcity economy. This was not only interfering with his work/play, but causing hardship to his compatriots, through increasingly authoritarian sanctions.
By the way, please note that if the Hainish hadn’t been there to take Shevek in (please note the Hainish weren’t anarchist either, though they’d tried it — and everything else — once!), Shevek’s sojourn to Urastes would have left him dead, dead, dead. Or at least permanently imprisoned. Note further that the rebellion was sparked in part by Shevek’s presence and actions, and it is not at all clear that such a mass movement did anything other than get a lot of people killed.
If you’re going to bring one of my favorite books into this thread, you’re damn well going to do it right. In short, have you actually read the book, or are you relying on Wikipedia?
This conversation has reminded me of this
You know, it occurs to me that at this point, describing yourself as a “libertarian” and protesting when people comment disparagingly on libertarians that it only means favoring personal freedom and the Narcisso-Capitalists “stole” it is kind of like wearing a Swastika and protesting that it only means “good luck.”
@Tony #153
“Left-libertarianism”, anarchism, and “libertarian socialism” are all of a similar stripe, so what Drawler and JR said are addressing the same thing. It is nonsense usually grown out of by the time one graduates from college or their mid twenties. In that way it is like standard US libertarianism.
Tony:
I guess it is debatable. I can see it either way now that I read again; I don’t think the commenter has anything else in this thread so I don’t know where they’re coming from. The second sentence is pretty unambiguous though, and also 100% correct.
155: I’m well aware Rousseau was no anarchist. I am imagining him as a modern figure. Would his Enlightenment talk about the proper divisions of power within a state stand strong when faced with the 21st century reality of such states, and would he refuse to follow through to the logical conclusions of the Enlightenment tradition? I don’t think so. That’s my opinion… and it’s my moniker, after all.
When you say “The human race will survive any of the forecasted effects of climate change I have seen.” I don’t think you understand the severity of the problems facing us. The collective impact of species destruction, extreme global warming and resource mismanagement (e.g California) might not kill every human outright but it will certainly trigger massive conflicts in a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. I wouldn’t be so smug in dismissing these issues as “existential”.
Ah, yes, the standard line used by liberals to attack radicals, in particular when they can’t answer on the merits. Closely related to the election-losing “yeah but you’re a dumb redneck and I’m a smart liberal, so there” retort. I shouldn’t answer that, but no. I have an advanced degree in the physical sciences and a related job.
156: Yes, the Odonians after a couple hundred years were watching their anarchism (a mixture of individualism and collectivism) crystallize into mostly collectivism, and Shevek was felt pressure keeping him from studying his physics. So he left, partially to complete his work and partially to open up new lines of idea exchange with the ancestor planet. I just don’t see how that’s “working within the system”, even though the Hainish embassy saves him in the end. It seems like an end-run around the society as it existed in an attempt to jump-start it.
A wider point here that is probably being missed is that I never said “working within systems is always impossible” – indeed, I am promoting the creation of new systems, which presumably would be channels to work within – I said “working within the American two-party duopoly is not going to solve our problems”. Which it won’t.
jackrousseau, #98:
This doesn’t make much sense.
-You said before that it’s a good idea to vote for Democrats in 2016. That’s short term by any measure.
-Climate change seems to be your major worry, overshadowing many others. I’m going to suppose that’s the example you want to use. That’s a short and medium and long term problem.
-You say you’re not opposed to having a central government, as long as it’s credibly addressing our problems. Not solving them outright and single-handedly to your total satisfaction, but addressing them.
-It isn’t credibly addressing our problems, according to you, especially or particularly with respect to climate change.
-You apparently want us to do something other than having a strong central government. Not now, when such things need to be done to credibly address our problems in the short or medium term, but sometime later I guess.
Even if it isn’t actually doing many of the necessary things now, a strong centralized government has the potential to credibly address those problems through laws/regulations which are enforced everywhere, even if many people don’t directly and democratically support such measures. There’s nothing inherent to it that prevents such things; indeed, that is a feature and not a bug of a political system like that.
Whatever that may be, that can be counted in addition to the voluntary and non-governmental social actions you propose (or more localized forms of government, if that’s your preference in some cases). To the extent it’s doing anything at all in the right direction about climate change, no matter which party it’s coming from (or if you think they’re wings of the same party), you should welcome that because you think it’s such a devastatingly big fucking problem. Not oppose it on the grounds that it’s not sufficient or not ideal or not anarchistic.
@ Azkyroth:
Now, now, be fair. #NoTrueLibertarian, #NotAllLibertarian, #ButISaidSocialLibertarian, and all the rest.
P.S. Can’t believe I didn’t notice the addendum to your ‘nym before. I salute you.
@JackRousseau:
As Tony! has said, please observe the courtesies of this forum and use ‘nyms as well as comment numbers when responding to people.
I’ll withdraw the Ursula Le Guin digs, and leave that there. Clearly you’ve read the book, even if I feel you’re understating her critique of social opprobrium as a tool of coercion in anarchic societies.
I had a longer comment, but really, consciousness razor summed it up nicely. I’d like to see your response to their comment.
158:
Are you fucking kidding me right now? Ron Paulites are dumb and their ideal society would probably be a nightmare, but they haven’t led an actual genocide or anything like that and they aren’t actual Nazis. I’m calling Godwin’s Law on that one. The Pauls, Murray Rothbard, etc basically haven’t had power anywhere in the world. Not to mention that nobody says “libertarian” in America without referring to the right-libertarians. Left-libertarians/libsocs/anarchists have been around for 200 years and counting, and for some reason haven’t bothered to try and suck up to whiny, ignorant liberals, who are typically happy to meet up with the nearest Freikorps and kill all the radicals when they get in a bad mood.
159:
You think you’d stop using that line when conservatives LOVE saying it about liberals. “Hey libtards, how about you grow up and get a brain! Maybe when you stop spending your parents money and get a real job, you’ll be conservative like me!”
How about: people hold political philosophies for different reasons, different eras have featured different dominant ideologies, and to dismiss any of them as “People are supposed to grow out of it after college” is the mark of a fucking moron themselves.
PatrickG:
OK. I wasn’t aware it was a broad convention. Some of the handles are… long, and not clearly name-like. I will do so in future.
consciousness razor:
The biggest problem is explaining a complicated line of thinking in a short comment.
First, since voting Democratic takes basically no time and effort relative to the expected gains (or rather, lower expected losses, at least most of the time), then I support doing that except on a local level, where there are typically other realistic options (YMMV). I do not support putting any sort of faith into the higher echelons of the American political system producing any results on the most important issues, taking the issue of climate change as the main example (and I’d add species extinction as a twin problem), and I do not support donating money, volunteering or otherwise spending time and energy helping the Democrats, because these actions likely fail the energy/reward ratio test (are there other places you can put your resources and energy into that have a higher expected payoff in terms of your goals?).
My suggested alternative is putting your time and energy and resources into forming and maintaining community groups for various issues, alternative institutions that may one day be capable of managing communities without the current State, worker owned businesses, the formation of sustainable communities, etc etc. Lots to choose from. Hell, even helping the homeless and feeding the hungry from day to day has a pretty high expected payoff compared to helping the Democrats, and this work really needs to be done, but I suggest that if you have any ability to help with the first set of groups then climate change is more pressing.
Second, when I say that I have no inherent short-medium term objection to a State that is addressing issues, I mean that primarily to counter charges that anarchists are simply a bunch of idiots who yell that they want to destroy a list of X things and smash Starbucks windows while dressing up in black. The State did a reasonable job of countering old-age poverty and finally getting rid of workhouses with pension/Social Security policies, and I would not remove such policies (or the State) until there were adequate alternatives ready to take over. You’re also right that a centralized State is in theory well-placed to combat climate change; of course I would argue that it’s also not the only institution that could do so, and given a choice I would prefer the institutions of my ideal society. However, the current centralized State by all evidence appears completely incapable of managing climate change on any time scale, and so I am arguing that we don’t have any alternative but to work outside of the current system at long odds to “save the environment”, so to speak. We don’t have a State able to do it and we don’t have an anarchist utopia either, so we really need to get experimenting ASAP.
When you say “There’s nothing inherent to it that prevents such things; indeed, that is a feature and not a bug of a political system like that.”, I disagree: perhaps this is the main point of contention. I do not believe this because I am an anarchist (even as an anarchist I would, as you say, welcome the additional firepower that the State could provide, if I thought the proposition to be true). I believe this because I have spent a long time learning about how the system functions.
While it is forseeable that the system would produce a liberal reformer in the guise of FDR to combat climate change, I think it is improbable, and worse, would happen much too late in the game.
Why? Well, the worst aspects of climate change, the ones that demand radical action immediately to solve, are long term and somewhat unpredictable issues. Our political system, which is based on our economic system (I’m no Marxist, and it is not always true that an economic system produces a political system, but American “democracy” rests on capitalism and always has), is chronically short-sighted. Elites simply don’t respond well to long term problems, even serious ones. There are gigantic numbers of institutional problems that produce this, some of them written into the Constitution (like the way the separation of powers is done, or the idea that the “minority of the opulent” should control the country) and many that have accumulated over the years (like the collapse of the idea of bribery, as chronicled by Zephyr Teachout).
If we take a small detour to examine the way we measure risk in the financial world, you get the same problem. Hell, if you use a 5% discount rate, even if the world was predicted to explode in 50 years with a 100% probability, the effect on the stock market today (based on constant revenues to make it simple) would be a 0.15% drop (1/50th of 0.95^50). So the money (and thus the politicians) are just not going to be behind any big or expensive moves to fight climate change until the problems are actually causing serious economic losses, at which point it will be too late as the damage will already have been done. We literally have like 10-20 years to make radical changes, and barring a literal revolution I don’t see Washington DC or the NASDAQ coming up with the resources or plans to make those changes.
There’s also the problem of the propaganda-soaked American population, where a good chunk of the people live in little more than an ideological fantasy world (conservatives far worse than liberals), and don’t accept the urgency of action, which feeds into the way the American government is designed and produces inevitable roadblocks to action.
I should also note that the State is actively clamping down on people who want to pursue other means of action and freely allowing polluters, sponsoring oil supermajors as they destroy parts of Africa to get at more oil, etc, so it’s not even a neutral bystander in the fight against climate change. Honestly, the ethical imperatives get kind of complicated. I want to destroy the State in the long term as it is inferior to alternatives, I want to support the “good” parts of the state that right now keep the old, sick and poor alive, and I want to fucking tear down the State brick by brick this afternoon when it comes to the War on Drugs, the War on Terror and the War on Doing Anything About Climate Change That Offends Our Donors.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you mean a political party like the Democrats is not supporting certain planks in your platform, you should be clear that a party is not a state. And I find it hard to believe there’s anything illegal about doing whatever you have in mind to combat climate change, so what “actively clamping down” means is pretty mysterious. I mean, unless you’re suggesting eco-terrorism, which ought to be out of the question, I have no clue what I’m supposed to be imagining here.
But people are going to be doing other things this afternoon. I think this is a much more improbable course of action, compared to the pluralistic one of trying to move the state in the right direction while also doing your anarchy stuff. (But what exactly that is, in terms of concrete solutions to specific problems, I still have no idea.)
jackrousseau and those arguing with/yelling at them@various,
Although jackrousseau does come off as somewhat naive, I think they have justifiable complaints about the way they’ve been treated here. First, the identification of anarchism/libertarian socialism/left libertarianism with the kind of libertarianism we generally encounter here is unjustified and ignorant. An excuseable ignorance in the first place perhaps – although surely most people here are aware that Chomsky describes himself using those terms, and that he has very little in common with the Ron Pauls, Ayn Rands and Murray Rothbards of the world; but jackrousseau’s invited people several times to check out the difference, and just been yelled at more. Specifically, while libertarian socialists are anti-state and anti-government – regarding state and government as instruments of elite (and currently, specifically capitalist) rule – they are also – unless you’re talking about so-called anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard – anti-private property in capital (land, industrial plant, infrastructure, etc.). Jackrousseau is also right in saying that libertarians “stole” the word: it was used by left anarchists long before the market-worshippers.
Now to the substance of the dispute. Jackrousseau is almost certainly right in saying that a solution to anthropogenic climate change* is not possible within the confines of current political systems, particularly in the USA, where both main parties are indeed bought and paid for by big business, and the system’s structure makes the emergence of viable third parties extremely difficult. I endorse jackrousseau’s recommendation of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: it’s long-winded and sometimes irritating in its focus on Naomi Klein, but does make a very strong case for the hopelessness of expecting the current system to produce a solution: the science is quite clear that much of the currently accessible fossil fuel reserve – let alone those fuels being made accessible by fracking, coal-bed methane extraction, underground coal gasification** etc. – must be left unburned; but the logic of capitalism is that as long as burning them is profitable, it will continue. I also think their suggestion of working on bottom-up sustainable institutions and economic structures is worthwhile – although I don’t believe it can be more than a part of any solution: we’ve seen a lot of such attempts in the last couple of centuries, and capitalism is very good at either destroying or co-opting them. But he’s quite wrong to minimise the importance of the 2016 US election – and just putting your cross against the name of H. Clinton – or any other Democratic candidate – is not enough. Anyone able to do so should campaign, donate, work on their friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances to vote that way – at least if they are in a state that could conceivably go either way (I can see arguments both for and against voting Green or whatever in “safe” states.) If the Republicans win the Presidency in 2016, and particularly if they retain control of Congress, then quite apart from the disastrous outcomes for women and racial and gender-sexual minorities, and the high likelihood of an attack on Iran, far-right rule could be locked in for decades, by Supreme Court and other appointments, gerrymandering, voter exclusion measures, union-busting, suppression of rights to protest, further extension of the surveillance state (yes, I know Obama has done this)… Today’s Republican Party is proto-fascist, as shown by its extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, misology and militarism; in unrestricted political power, it might complete its trajectory.
What about the longer term? First, for full disclosure, I’m an ex-anarchist – I was an anarchist between the ages of 14 and 33 (1968-1987). I’d now describe myself as a democratic ecosocialist feminist***. I credit Margaret Thatcher with my conversion: as a Brit, I saw how the anti-statist rhetoric of my 1960s-70s youth could be harnessed to the project of increasing inequality and corporate power – and realised that my own childhood and youth (free education, free health care, functioning infrastructure, low housing costs) had been provided by (partially) wresting control of the state from the ruling class and making it (partially) democratically accountable. I later came to realise that, attractive as the idea of an anarchist society might be, even as a long-term goal it has serious flaws. Jackrousseau extols the freedom to go and form your own community if you don’t like what’s on offer. Great – but what about those who would use that freedom to form communities where women are the property of men, or where child sex abuse is permitted, or where – perhaps for perfectly benevolent motives, perhaps not – the genetic modification of dangerous pathogens is undertaken without adequate controls? Dont’ think these things would happen? You need to provide sound arguments why not. Jackrousseau@149 says:
Well, that goes against what anarchists have traditionally said, and is difficult to reconcile with the idea that any group that wants to can opt out of existing structures, but in any case, some things need to be (democratically) centralised – indeed, decided on a global level. Ameliorating climate change requires a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Potentially dangerous technologies such as biotechnology, weather modification, and perhaps artificial intelligence need to be regulated in ways agreed globally. Weapons of mass destruction (including the actual weapons of mass destruction over the last 70 years, small arms) need to be controlled globally.
So what’s my propsed solution? Let me admit first that I don’t have one I think guaranteed, or even likely, to work: we’re in deep shit as far as climate change and other environmental dangers are concerned. But:
1) Keep the far right out of government. Even if the Republicans win everything in 2016, and the Tories form a coalition with UKIP in the UK, and the fascists win the French Presidency in 2017, I won’t be giving up – that would just be self-indulgence. But any one of these things would make our situation considerably worse.
2) Where possible, build ecosocialist parties. (I’ve recently joined the Scottish Green Party, and will be working for them in the current UK general election – there’s effectively zero chance the Tories or UKIP will win the seats I’ll be working in.)
3) Support anyone, anywhere, fighting the fossil fuel industry, particularly its attempts to extend extreme extraction methods. Klein’s book is very good on this, particularly the struggles of Indigenous groups in the Americas. I’ve already been involved in direct action against fracking in the UK, and intend to continue this.
4) Build bottom-up sustainable alternatives, as jackrousseau suggests. This need not mean living off-grid in an anarchist commune: community renewable energy/insulation projects, small-scale credit free of the big banks, etc. are well worth it. Something I’m looking into currently.
5) Be prepared to ally in the medium term with segments of the ruling elite who realise that it’s in their interests to take radical action to mitigate climate change. Jackrousseau suggests that political systems can be collapsed from below, but in fact, they seldom if ever collapse without a serious split in the ruling elite. This occured in the American, French and Russian revolutions, and in the collapse of the USSR. Rationally, it is indeed in the interests even of a billionaire who either expects to live past mid-century or has children they care about, to take such radical action. In ten years, this may be clear to far more of them than it is now. In the 1930s, many on the left – anarchists included – thought the ruling classes in the UK, the USA etc., would never fight fascism; they were wrong. Since we don’t have time to bring about the anarchist/ecosocialist millennium. we’d better hope at least some of them decide to get off the fossil fuel train before it goes thundering over the cliff. If they do, the very logic of the situation will give us a fighting chance of coming out on top in the inevitable internal struggles against them in the climate change mitigation movement.
*They’re probably wrong in thinking it threatens human extinction, but the collapse of civilization, with billions of miserable premature deaths and an indefinite future of hardship and oppression for most people is well within its scope.
Finally, a couple of notes to jackrousseau. First, don’t give up on this place – there’s a lot of good people and ideas here. Second, how much do you actually know about Rousseau? The man was a grade A shit, who handed over all 5 of his children to orphanages, where they died. Third, do you have a good reference for what you say about Rojava?
**That means setting fire to coal seams and collecting the gases produced by low-oxygen combustion.
***I could add pro-science, anti-racist, anti-homophobe, anti-transphobe, anti-Islamophobe, and even, if the word hadn’t been so irretrievably dirtied, “libertarian”. But I include “feminist” while leaving these other terms implicit because of the central importance of improving the status and education of women and girls in promoting both equality and sustainability.
#146 Tony
Yes. jackrousseau has talked about it some already, but the easiest way for me to explain it is that left-libertarians vigorously support the social safety net, workers rights, affordable healthcare and education, and other socio-economic rights. It is defined by opposition to private and corporate power, in addition to state power.
The unholy marriage of the got-mine-fuck-yours free market fanaticism and the racist, reactionary opposition to feminism, LGBT rights, and immigrants that the Paul-types represent is abhorrent to us.
consciousness razor:
Not specifically speaking of climate change, but do you know what happened to OWS? What is happening to the Black Lives Matter protesters? Going back a little bit, do you know about the political assassination of a man named Fred Hampton (here, the Wiki page has a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton)? Do you know of the program named COINTELPRO? Why is MLK primarily remembered not by his socialist activism but by the softest platitudes about race relations one can dig out of his speeches – and why did the North cease its support of him the minute he decided that the working class of every color deserved a break? What about the decades of Labor Wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? It goes on and on. This is real American history.
The American government under both R and D administrations has had a policy of striking out violently against anyone who seeks to diminish its power or the power of the rich capitalists that stand behind it. It doesn’t matter if the protesters or organizers follow the very letter of the law. They will be stamped out. Why do you think there is not really any socialist movement in America? They crushed it over decades, violently if they needed to, but as Corey Robin has pointed out, often ingeniously through the actions of private bureaucracies. It doesn’t matter. They killed dissent. There Is No Alternative.
The police in America came out of the slave patrols and matured in the labor wars, where they were used to brutally crush anyone who stood for the dignity of the working class (occasionally, CEOs just hired the Pinkerton thugs to murder whoever they wanted while the State stood by and watched). During the 60s the police were used to destroy the Black Power movements and attack the New Left, as weak as it was anyway. Now the police attack Occupiers and anarchists while smug liberals join in the hippie-punching. And you ask me what’s the big deal, if any protests or community-building I want to do isn’t illegal? The answer is that in America, to a very good approximation, what’s legal is what benefits the rich and powerful, what’s illegal is what doesn’t benefit those groups, and you’d better be on notice that the law can change at any time as it is primarily dispensed at the unaccountable end of a billy-club or a Taser.
When you say “I think this is a much more improbable course of action” I of course agree. I did not mean to literally suggest that the State should be torn apart brick by brick this very afternoon. Read it in the context of what I was saying, to wit, the morality of engaging with a State has many shades of grey in it.
Nick Gotts:
Per Rojava, check it out: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis
Per Rousseau: I am aware of his…dodgy biography. The point is that I am imagining him as a philosopher in modern times, which doesn’t require his old baggage to come along, and I needed a name some months ago during my periodic Internet disappearance and re-emergence. I hope people don’t read too much into it.
Per this place: I’ve been reading PZ regularly since… oh, 2010? Earlier on occasion, since 2007 I think. I tend to not read much of the comments, and I’m aware that most are standard liberals, but this was pretty embarrassing. It really is like the mirror image of an angry insular Tea Partier in some ways. People justifiably get upset when MRA jackasses strawman or mansplain about feminism, well you can’t get too upset if you’re also happily accusing anarchists like Noam Chomsky as being in cahoots with Ron Paul or saying that anyone who diverges from progressive orthodoxy in any way is either pure evil (Republican) or a shill/useful idiot for pure evil.
Regarding your electoral strategy: just as the Tea Party told the Republicans they could cater to their wishes or fuck off, a strategy of checking the D box, tuning them out and walking away from anyone but the most progressive candidates the other days of the election cycle might very well be a viable strategy to convince them to cater to progressive wishes. Of course, this has not really been tried, so we wouldn’t know. There is also a wider zeitgeist of neoliberal ideology which may complicate this, but I just wanted to point out that even when working within the system there are likely multiple options to get more or less of what you want. My problem is simply that a Democrat getting 40% on an exam is a fail even if the Republican got 20%. Neither pass the class and the Democrat’s parents aren’t going to be happy with the excuse that the other student did even worse.
Regarding your criticisms of anarchism: I am basically defining “government” as “a bureaucracy that moves and distributes goods and services”, which can be rather small or quite large in scale, democratic or authoritarian, responsive to people or utterly broken, and so on. You’re right that many issues need to be dealt with globally, but that doesn’t imply centralization in the classic sense. If the network of communities covers the world, you can implement such “global rules” as “no nukes plz” through the network, on pain of bad things happening to the community that tried it. Same with regulating pollution, etc.
And your related question, if an anarchist community in the network wanted to resurrect the old rules of capitalism or test some nukes or something like that, it’s difficult to imagine anyone without material need voluntarily agreeing to the reconstruction of dangerous weapons or oppressive hierarchies, but I suppose it would happen every now and then. The response would likely be the response a human body has when faced with illness (roughly): isolation of the infectious agent, deprivation of resources, and finally destruction if need be. Flooding a rogue community with new inhabitants that would vote against the shitty thing being done is an option too, if we’re talking about something threatening the whole. I doubt it would have to come to violence very often, but I think it’s a last resort. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen, but I don’t think it’s been an issue in anarchist societies thus far, maybe because today’s technology can more quickly endanger everyone than it used to.
Back to the radical days forty-five years ago. Prove your idea works with historic evidence. Then sit back and laugh at the lack of historic examples that really work.
jackrousseau@170
No, it’s not at all clear that you can; asserting it doesn’t make it so. Take one of the specific examples I used: the regulation of biotechnology. You need clear, imediately enforceable rules to do that effectively, and it’s not something you can afford to leave to “on pain of bad things happening to the community that tried it”. That won’t do you any good if the geneticaly modified virus has already escaped the lab. Moreover, your precondition, “if the network of communities covers the world” is itself a utopian dream: it requires effectively everyone to be anarchists, and moreover, to agree on all issues serious enough to generate real political conflict even between anarchists: vegans and omnivores, transhumanists and primitivists, those who want to set an area aside as wilderness and those who want to live in and cultivate it.
It may be hard for you to imagine. That doesn’t mean it’s actually unlikely.
You are aware, I take it, that people die of infections and cancers? And for that matter, of out-of-control immune systems.
Well that could be because none have persisted long under anything like modern conditions. And if you think pre-industrial or non-industrial “anarchist” societies (those without states or similar centralised hierarchical structures) were necessarily benign, you’re wrong: they were and are often characterised by high levels of violence, and the subordination of women.
Second blockquote@172 is wrong, should be:
UPGRADING OUR DEMOCRACY
In America we do democracy by dividing the territory into districts, and electing one representative from each district. We elect them by plurality, that is, by whichever candidate gets the most votes, whether or not they get an absolute majority. If there are three candidates, a candidate can win with 40% support, for example.
This is not the only way democracy can be done. Other countries, fully democratic, do it in other ways. The way we do it, single-winner districts won by plurality, has some big systemic flaws. Every American knows these flaws, we live with them every election: Gerrymandering and the Spoiler Effect.
The Spoiler Effect makes it almost impossible to challenge the two largest parties. Under single-winner Plurality, voting for small parties is both useless and harmful. This means many voters with different points of view, and different issues, are unrepresented. Adding to this, Gerrymandering makes most districts into effective one-party states. When the dominant party in a legislature draws district lines to suit themselves, they deliberately “waste” as many opposition votes as possible, drawing the lines to make such votes either impotent or superfluous. Gerrymandering is used to make as many “safe” districts as possible, to make incumbents immune to challenge. There is less turnover in the U.S. House than there was in the Soviet Politburo. Gerrymandering also creates exaggerated majorities, and even false majorities, where parties with minority support get a majority of seats.
Gerrymandering and the Spoiler Effect are not necessary parts of democracy. There are other ways of doing democracy that don’t have these problems. Every district can be competitive, and every voter can be a “swing” voter.
Gerrymandering is abolished by abolishing single-winner districts. If a district elects only one representative to the legislature, it makes a BIG difference where the district lines are drawn. If we use larger districts, where every district elects five representatives or more, distributed among the parties in proportion to voter support, where the lines are drawn makes no practical difference to the outcome. Proportional Representation greatly reduces “wasted votes”. Instead of having a maximum of 50% of voters having effective votes (necessary to elect a winner), with proportional representation 80%, 90%, 95% of voters can elect a winner. The more representatives per district, the higher the percentage can be. Alternative parties can challenge the top two much more easily; if they get 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats in the legislature. With Proportional Representation, there is no spoiler effect; there is no penalty for voting for small parties.
For those elections that MUST have a single winner, such as for Mayor, Governor, or President, the Spoiler Effect is abolished by switching from plurality to another voting system that does not suffer from it. The simplest one is Approval voting: allow voters to vote “yes” or “no” for EACH candidate, saying “yes” to as many (or few) candidates as they wish. The candidate with the most “yes” votes wins.
To learn more about Proportional Representation, see http://www.fairvote.org and the book REAL CHOICES, NEW VOICES, by Douglas J. Amy. For more on the advantages of Approval voting, see
http://www.approvalvoting.org
—
(What about Instant Runoff Voting, IRV? It is an improvement over Plurality, and I would support it and vote for it. But it is not the best alternative. It solves the spoiler effect, but it has a systemic flaw of its own, the Center Squeeze Effect; it sometimes malfunctions by picking a larger “wing” party over a smaller centrist party, even though a clear majority of all the voters would have preferred the centrist.)
Left-libertarianism and anarchism are fairly obscure political terms so not knowing what they mean right off the bat is understandable, but to be so fucking dismissive and insulting when you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and are not interested in learning is repulsive.
Some of us have been listening to libertarian bullshit since 1978. It’s not a new or obscure philosophy that only a select few understand.
And like every other libertarian who calls us ignorant of what libertarianism “really” is, you have failed to offer any information to correct our alleged ignorance. Bluff: called.
…although surely most people here are aware that Chomsky describes himself using those terms…
So what? When was the last time Chomsky came forward with any actual alternative policies, as opposed to just criticism?
Raging Bee@175,
That is complete crap. You are simply ignoring the differences that not only jackrousseau, but Drawler and I have pointed out to you. You’re either incapable of reading for comprehension, or being dishonest.
Raging Bee@176,
So what? So you’re being completely dishonest.
Specifically, while libertarian socialists are anti-state and anti-government – regarding state and government as instruments of elite (and currently, specifically capitalist) rule – they are also – unless you’re talking about so-called anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard – anti-private property in capital (land, industrial plant, infrastructure, etc.).
In other words, they pretend to be against private capital and its abuses, but then they also oppose the one means known to counter those abuses: a strong government with the power to enact laws to regulate private capital. Which means that “libertarian socialism” is nothing more than a laundry-list of gripes and no real solutions.
And before you respond by calling me ignorant, just remember I’m basing my critique on YOUR description of “libertarian socialism.” So if my critique is wrong, it’s because it’s based on a wrong description.
Jackrousseau is also right in saying that libertarians “stole” the word: it was used by left anarchists long before the market-worshippers.
They stole it for a reason: to use it as yet another con-game to attract progressives into a place where they can be neutralized and disempowered while thinking they’re part of a real movement for change. Did “libertarian socialists” ever accomplish anything remotely comparable to what more “statist” progressives have done since 1933? No? That’s why the libertarians stole the phrase, and that’s why it’s not worth reclaiming.
For fuck’s sake. There is plenty to criticize jack over. Being libertarian isn’t one of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
I suppose you could have similar arguments against their form of anarchy as there might be with anarcho capitalists, but he is not “libertarian” in a traditional sense, he is not an anarcho capitalist, he is not a capitalist. Criticize him where he is, don’t fight for your right to mislabel him.
Nick: you called me dishonest TWICE, without actually stating what I got wrong.
…the easiest way for me to explain it is that left-libertarians vigorously support the social safety net, workers rights, affordable healthcare and education, and other socio-economic rights. It is defined by opposition to private and corporate power, in addition to state power.
All of the things you claim to support, are made possible ONLY by some form of state power: the power to collect taxes, redistribute wealth, prosecute and punish violations of worker rights, and organize resources to meet the needs of those who can’t afford to pay for them within the private sector.
Every single meaningful advancement in individual rights, has been accomplished ONLY with the active intervention of government at some level: state governments drafted and ratified the Constitution; slavery was abolished by state laws in the North, and by the US Army in the South; the Nazis were crushed, and half of Europe liberated, by interventionist governments, not by private enterprise; the right to unionize was enforced by laws; the right to vote was expanded to minority groups by Federal laws and court decisions; and more examples than I have time to list in haste here.
Anarchists don’t even believe in “no government”, just “no centralized, undemocratic government”.
That also describes just about everyone who opposes dictatorship. In which case, you’ve stretched the word “anarchist” so thin that it no longer has any meaning or descriptive value.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #171
This argument has serious limits. I know you like it but it evertheless has serious limits.
In 1789 the French king was certain he would not possibly be killed, precisely because, you know, there’s no way a society could be ruled without a king. (And that was indeed a common argument and perception at the time).
For sure, there already was about a decade or two of enlightment discussions about Greek democracy, but obviously ancient greek democracy was a fail because it lasted so short compared to the demonstrably long term efficiency of monarchy…
PS: Gee, who else insists on calling everyone who opposes right-wing authoritarianism “anarchists?” Oh yeah, the right-wing authoritarians. When you use a word like “anarchist” in almost exactly the same way as a right-wing authoritarian uses it, it’s time for you to step back and think a lot more seriously about what you’re saying.
Now to the substance of the dispute. Jackrousseau is almost certainly right in saying that a solution to anthropogenic climate change* is not possible within the confines of current political systems, particularly in the USA, where both main parties are indeed bought and paid for by big business…
All of the major advancements we Americans have accomplished — including meaningful environmental protection — have been accomplished by working within the “confines” of our political system. Rhetoric like yours only serves to discourage the participation necessary to make real progress; and I have no doubt that that is the purpose of such rhetoric: promise the people ome undefined pie-in-the-sky solution, while manipulating us to mistrust and disdain the real tools we have here on the ground.
…and the system’s structure makes the emergence of viable third parties extremely difficult.
I’d take that complaint seriously if most of our third parties weren’t either flaming bigots or obvious loonies. Seriously, do you really think we’d make any progress by enabling the emergence of the Constitution Party, Christian Identity, or the LaRouchies? This talk of America being rescued by unspecified third parties is pure escapist fantasy.
Yeah, see, I’m not going to try and convince you…
Yeah, you’re going to ignore me, because you know you can’t address anything I’ve said.
…but there’s a couple centuries of philosophy that says otherwise…
Since when did philosophy trump (MORE than a couple centuries) experience?
Nick Gott #168
Interesting, transitions are unfortunately more often libertarian (ss, i.e., Old World def) –> libertarian (sl, i.e., New World def).
I’d be interested you discuss your (evolutive?) take on “participative democracy” (which you may have liked depending on your ex-anarchistic flexion –there are many currents, but the main intrinseque dichotomy is still self collective, even in anarchist currents). I’ve long longed for experiencing this, and unfortunately did the other extremes in diverse cultural settings. I’m currently living at a place where the current culture (it’s more appropriately defined as a strongly hybrid status but let me simplify) has a strong emphasis on “participative democracy”. And it’s quite nice but indeed, one cannot take part in every decision process, so that the base weakness is what happens when an in-group takes control of decision power. (I think this is an important weakness of many possible “libertarian” or “democratic socialist” organisation modes that are just tolerated as innerly constitutive in current societies and would not be eradicated with any organisational shift whatever direction).
What would obviously happen would be that the Big Tents would fragment.
First, it’s not at all “obvious” that any such thing would happen; and second, why should I treat “big tent fragmentation” as a good thing? We on the progressive side, at least, need less fragmentation, not more.
I can’t think of another country where any party contains as many contradictions as a holy book.
The “contradictions” you speak of arise when people of different interests and opinions come together to try to get things done on a large scale. That’s what political parties are FOR. That’s how democracy works. You do want democracy to work, right?
Your example didn’t show the serious limits.
BTW, at least part of the (historical) stateless anarchy argument is really based on the archaism of state concept and history. The aim of a stateless society is to end war and immigration control: the very first anarchist experience, the Communes (I put an s because it wasn’t just Paris) were really into that: suppress the State level, in order to organise society at the Commune level, the whole world turning into a giant confederation of free communes where decisions are under democratic control and wealth redistribution can be decided at local scale and averaged at greater scales depending on inhabitant basic needs.
This is basically the origin of the split between communists and anarchists, a debate and schism that occured between the Communes events and early XXth century, based on the great divergence between communists who based the realisation of a classless society on a first phase of a state controlled “dictature du prolétariat” and anarchists who were thinking that the classless society could organize autonomously with the abolition of historic oppressive tools of the bourgeoisie (basically, capitalism, state and religion).
In the aftermath, anarchists were at least lucid with regard to the future failure of communism to get to the classless dreamland heaven. They probably overlooked difficulties in constructing a viable alternative, sure. But what’s amazingly overlooked in the debate here, it’s also that any historic political anarchist experience ended in sabottage, whether actively organised by a bourgeois reaction or by communists themselves or both (hand in hand). I would not be that comfident in claiming that these experience are failures on intrinsic grounds when these are best explained by crushing the eggs straight before it starts inspirating other experiences at other places.
Which of course doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have failed neither.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #190
Indeed. Either these are not serious limits, or you don’t see them as serious limits.
The king was beheaded precisely so that no going back was made possible, because people were listening to the argument that “without a king, nothing can work: you’ll fail because obviously the republic cannot work”.
The serious limits are that things can work even if there’s no proof that they will. You take quite a step in assuming things never work without first evidence. That’s somethimes wrong. In the case of the French revolution, while for sure it was a sad end for the king, it’s probably best that it happened, and worked.
It is best to have evidence of course, but that’s no reason not to experience when we don’t have any.
The king was beheaded precisely so that no going back was made possible, because people were listening to the argument that “without a king, nothing can work: you’ll fail because obviously the republic cannot work”.
That has nothing at all to do with Nerd’s original point that there are no historical examples of libertarianism working in any form, socialist of not. (Certainly the “republic” that was created to replace the French monarchy didn’t work all that well.) In fact, that bit about beheading the king seems a bit of a non-sequitur here.
But what’s amazingly overlooked in the debate here, it’s also that any historic political anarchist experience ended in sabotage…
Well, if a political system is consistently vulnerable to sabotage, and fails to withstand sabotage every single time, then it’s really not viable, and therefore not bloody much good to anyone when push comes to shove.
Every single meaningful advancement in individual rights, has been accomplished ONLY with the active intervention of government at some level: state governments drafted and ratified the Constitution; slavery was abolished by state laws in the North, and by the US Army in the South; the Nazis were crushed, and half of Europe liberated, by interventionist governments, not by private enterprise; the right to unionize was enforced by laws; the right to vote was expanded to minority groups by Federal laws and court decisions; and more examples than I have time to list in haste here.
Oh yea that’s a great argument. “All these horrible injustices inflicted upon people by the powerful state governments have been eventually and partially ameliorated by state governments.”
And like every other libertarian who calls us ignorant of what libertarianism “really” is, you have failed to offer any information to correct our alleged ignorance. Bluff: called.
Yea see, the analogy I made was perfectly appropriate. Try explaining to a hardcore Republican that Bernie Sanders isn’t trying to usher in Soviet style totalitarianism because he calls himself a socialist. You’ll get completely stonewalled while he insists that he isn’t going to fall the ruse; Sanders and the other socialists are just waiting for people to let their guard down before opening up the gulags.
@ JackRousseau:
Thanks. It really helps in longer threads like this.
For reference, it’s perfectly acceptable to shorten names that have, what, titles on them. For instance, I know “Tony! The Queer Shoop” is perfectly fine with being called Tony! Just so long as it’s recognizable who you’re responding to.
“All these horrible injustices inflicted upon people by the powerful state governments have been eventually and partially ameliorated by state governments.”
Well, yeah, the injustices committed by governments ARE remedied by people influencing their governments to change their act; or getting other governments to forcibly intervene to stop the injustices. Police misconduct, for example, is currently being remedied in some jurisdictions by political intervention, new laws, re-application of old laws, new procedures and training mandated by the state, and sometimes, investigation and prosecution by the Feds.
Yea see, the analogy I made was perfectly appropriate.
It’s an analogy. I asked for corrective information, which you again fail to provide.
Libertarian socialism and anarchism are immature philosophies because not only will they not work in the real world, they cannot work in the real world. The micro-states small enough to allow direct democracy cannot survive with modern nation states and multinational corporations as neighbors. All of this sabotage that some here say validates the notion that the philosophy didn’t fail, rather it was broken from the outside doesn’t matter if it will always be broken from the outside. The only way for them to work is if it is global, which will never happen. Even if it did magically come to be that the entire world was made up of these democratic micro states that doesn’t mean that those states would look anything like the egalitarian anti capitalist utopias described. The idea that every, or even most of those micro states would democratically choose to be completely egalitarian is ridiculous on its face. In order for all of those states to be so egalitarian there would have to be an enforcement mechansim. There is no mechanism of enforcement that doesn’t have the same drawbacks as a nation state. This is why people grow out of it, like they grow out of communism, standard US libertarianism, and other utopian fantasies.
Add to that, these microstates simply cannot compete with actual states. They cannot provide the basic infrastructure of modern society (interstates, coordinated continental air, sea and rail travel, high speed internet, GPS, high end scientific research, etc, etc). Without the ability to do those things they will not attract many people and certainly not the people that drive innovation.
As for the idea that the Left in the US didn’t try to force purity like the present Right in the US, that takes a startling ignorance of rather recent history.
Raging Bee #194
So is democracy then. Democracies always falls short for tyranny.
Moreover, don’t forget each of these experiences occurred at war time with mostly unarmed and poor disorganised labour class masses.
If we follow your argument, there’s no point in attempting to struggle against prejudices within society. The historian view as related in this post clearly makes the case for intrisic sabotage of actual emancipation. We’re still here how many years later?
“Well, yeah, the injustices committed by governments ARE remedied by people influencing their governments to change their act; or getting other governments to forcibly intervene to stop the injustices. Police misconduct, for example, is currently being remedied in some jurisdictions by political intervention, new laws, re-application of old laws, new procedures and training mandated by the state, and sometimes, investigation and prosecution by the Feds.”
So we agree that it was foolish on your part to list a bunch of problems that states perpetuated as evidence that a powerful state is necessary so that it can clean up the trail of wreckage and human suffering it leaves behind after its forced to acquiesce to popular pressure.
“It’s an analogy. I asked for corrective information, which you again fail to provide.”
Its been provided by me and several others, repeatedly and at length. You’re so primed to foam at the mouth at the mere mention of the word libertarian that you cannot interpret it as anything more than some kind of elaborate hoax designed to trick people into destroying medicare or something.
Raging Bee #193
There are many.
And all are of the socialist kind.
Why aren’t you citing some? So we can see your examples you think will translate even to a small state in the US of A.
So is democracy then. Democracies always falls short for tyranny.
Some democracies last a LOT longer, despite far more duress, than those communes you mentioned could ever withstand.
So we agree that it was foolish on your part to list a bunch of problems that states perpetuated as evidence that a powerful state is necessary so that it can clean up the trail of wreckage and human suffering it leaves behind after its forced to acquiesce to popular pressure.
We agree on no such thing. What I stated is a fact of political life, and always has been. Government is necessary and indispensable, therefore it is necessary for people to work within the system to keep it honest and make it better, on a pretty much continual basis. Anarchism does not offer anything remotely like a realistic alternative.
Its been provided by me and several others, repeatedly and at length. You’re so primed to foam at the mouth at the mere mention of the word libertarian that you cannot interpret it as anything more than some kind of elaborate hoax designed to trick people into destroying medicare or something.
Wow, you’re so desperate to pretend I’m irrational, that you forget that, yes, libertarian ideology REALLY IS being used as a hoax to get people to destroy Medicare…and Obamacare and EPA and banking regulation and the Voting Rights Act and women’s bodily autonomy and…
This argument has serious limits. I know you like it but it [n]evertheless has serious limits.
That’s okay — the argument works quite effectively within its limits.
The unholy marriage of the got-mine-fuck-yours free market fanaticism and the racist, reactionary opposition to feminism, LGBT rights, and immigrants that the Paul-types represent is abhorrent to us.
And Stalinism was abhorrent to the Eurocommunists. But that doesn’t mean the Eurocommunists were right about anything else.
Raging Bee #206
I’ve met many eurocommies who didn’t despise stalinism until it was itself dead since a long time.
The others just pretended to be trotskist when they really were good closet stalinists.
1/ They were still right that wealth is still stolen from the labour masses directly into the wealthy 1% (or whatever the number or threshold is).
2/ That doesn’t mean you were wrong on everything. :)
Grewgills # 198
Hi! Been some time now… :)
Sure, there’s no reason why they should be.
I’m not sure it does really matter neither, equality is not possible whatever you do. They may only be slightly more egalitarian than any current social construct, or even not at all.
My feeling is not that this organisation would allow complete equality, however desirable it could be, rather that is was thought of, in its original formulation, as a way to put an end to wars between nation that had historical evidence of nationalistic predatory competes (Think of France, England and Germany, and how these countries behaved in the following decades…). Part of the working class of the XIXth century (shortly after capitalism emergence) begun to realise that these wars were mostly killing neighbours without actual interest in killing each other.
What I find interesting is the development of these ideas take quite different pathes between cultures that differ vastly in the way they constructed each other: see what is libertarianism in Old world with old autoritarian and state controlled regimes often at war with each other vs. libertarianism in the USA were republic foundation is based on federal collaboration and generally more liberal and individual-based independence mainly with historical experience of civil war. It’s amazing how they differ fundamentally from each other.
That, I find interesting. Feasibility of an entirely different social organization is not even a pastime to me. History sometimes hooks up my interest.
I don’t have to pretend your irrational when you keep speaking of libertarians as a monolith, even after it has been patiently and repeatedly explained to you the deep and significant rifts between left-right libertarians, and that left libertarians are fundamentally opposed to destruction of all the things you just lifted. But whatever, you’re determined to assume bad faith because we share the word libertarian with the Others.
Judging us by the basis of what we believe is literally the only thing we’ve been asking you to do, instead of guilt-by-word-association.
Nick Gotts:
I appreciate the conversation but it is clear that I am not welcome here, and primarily for reasons of stubborn ignorance hardly different than that found on foxnews.com. Pathetic really. So this will be my last post for some time. If people can’t read the “socialism” part of “libertarian socialism” and instead think it is all a Koch Brothers hoax, even after repeated clarifications from multiple people, that’s not my problem. And this forum is known as a major exponent of feminism (rightfully) in certain circles, constantly complaining about the treatment they get that they have given to me in spades! One wonders when self-awareness will kick in.
Regarding the problems of anarchist societies, I don’t think any anarchists claim such a society would be a cure-all. I mentioned the Le Guin book The Dispossessed above for good reason, both to illustrate how one might work but also to show that even an anarchist society is vulnerable. That is because all human societies are vulnerable, and to tell you a little secret, all human societies existing before the present set have collapsed in one way or another, no matter what their structure. All an anarchist society could do is reduce the chances of disaster by leveling social hierarchies and changing incentive systems for the better. To that end, secret bioweapons labs would still be a problem; but they are a problem in dictatorships and democracies too. The Soviet Union released anthrax by accident once, and the US decided it would be useful to give people syphilis and radiation poisoning without their knowledge (see Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files for more on the latter, the Tuskegee experiments are well known). It is hard to see anarchist communities having a higher interest in such things since they wouldn’t be fighting for hegemony in Cold Wars either.
So yes, sometimes immune systems fail – which is true of every society. I’m not sure it’s an unanswerable critique of anarchism. As for your other major critique, I think an anarchist network of communities does not have to be global to push global pacts; it could easily interface with the remaining nations (provided they were not at war, say, but again little difference between all human societies in that regard). Some delegates could be chosen among the whole, and so on. I think this one is less of a problem.
Ultimately, if you look at the larger thrust of your argument, I’m not sure it’s an argument against anarchism so much as it’s an argument against human society. And it’s valid, which is why “The Rise and Fall of X” has been a popular title for books, essays, and so on over the years. But those are the limitations, we must work within them to maximize human potential.
Raging Bee:
I have put up enough with your aggressive ignorance. The last time I witnessed such garbage and dishonesty I was debating a fucking Gamergater. So straightforwardly: fuck you for being so closed minded, intolerant and unwelcoming.
I don’t have to pretend your irrational when you keep speaking of libertarians as a monolith…
I never said they were a monolith — I said they were useless and bogus in different but congruent ways.
…you’re determined to assume bad faith because we share the word libertarian with the Others.
That’s not an assumption, that’s a conclusion based on the nonsensical and inconsistent things I’ve heard all sorts of libertarians say. I explained that, in response to the nonsensical and inconsistent things said here, and you know it.
All an anarchist society could do is reduce the chances of disaster by leveling social hierarchies and changing incentive systems for the better.
Got any real-world examples of that happening? How, exactly, does “leveling social hierarchies” “reduce the chances of disaster?”
“The Dispossessed” was well-written and persuasive, but it was still fiction.
We got you, but like all political theorists, you had no concrete examples to show your ideas work in real life for any period of time. Vague allusions and handwaving is exactly the same as my college radicals had, a previous anarchist poster or two here, the USA version of liberturd, etc. Your lack of historical citations was your death knell.
How to deal with this mess that a society of beings programmed for 200 personalities creates? I tend to see things as a slider between individual or group instincts depending on the issue and place in history.
A government is a gang leader or a team leader, not just a political class and a nation’s traditions and structures managing millions to billions. We create hierarchies, anarchy is not happening as a form of government, but the instincts and emotions that it appeals to are quite useful for tearing apart hierarchies that are toxic. Sorry but at the moment people using libertarian philosophy are doing a lot of damage and the best people for dealing with them are, other libertarians (you have an in-group psychological advantage, get a spine and use it if the Kochs don’t represent you). Like it or not people harmed by libertarians in a society of shitty apes running our particular psychological hardware and software are attacking a symbol in ways that has worked for our species in the past. Whine all you want about #notalllibertarians you are going to get criticized.
Groups can also be toxic as the cultural beliefs and patterns of behavior can become toxic to the whole or minorities*. One way is irrational illogical prejudice and discrimination that become institutional problems when practiced by groups. Another is neglect, abuse, and negligence from actions taken by authorities such as those plaguing our economic system. The first way is from irrational means of creating categories and shows that care should be taken in how we do that. The second is from authority used badly and shows that we need to hold our authorities to high standards with serious consequences.
At this point in history I say fuck conservatives, republicans, libertarians, and democrats in the order of most to least intensely. I’m still tending towards voting for no one as no one is supporting my most important issues, and I do not want to reward a political party with support. I will not vote because someone else is scarier, I would rather make the lesser evil paranoid and more willing to deal. Yes that makes me an asshole, but that is where I stand.
*Minority groups are complicated because they rationally strategize together in opposition to abusive majorities. Otherwise there is nothing that binds them together in ways that could make a bigot happy. Race, sex, and gender based discrimination is still irrational bullshit, yet we can talk of race communities and LGBT because they have to deal with an abusive majority.
I always feel dubious about socio-political theories which rely on everybody acting altruistically and benevolently towards everyone else. Aristocrats were nobility because their great-granddad was a bigger bully than anyone else. It only takes a few bullies to bring down egalitarian regimes unless the regime is willing to bully the bullies back.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #203
You know why I like you so much? You’re an irony master. I really wonder because, as far as I know, there’s no skill this level that wouldn’t imply at least some bad faith, and I always fail to detect it in your quote-level discoursing style. Which means you could actually argue fully in good faith. This impressed me since the beginning.
That said apart, you’re acting as if you were completely ignorant of the biggest scale modern experiment of the kind, which is also the longest lived at this point. And if you’re inclusive enough, it’s been happening in North America since 1994. Are you that a youngie that “you know nothing, Nerd snow”? Look at the wildlings beyond the wall.
Now I’m far too generous, but that’s because I love you Nerd.
But honestly, and while it may hurt your ethno-centrism, there is no reason why anybody would try any experience like this in a country doomed to that level (that’s sad, for all the good it still caries out, yet true). Please forget about the Us of A, it’s a thing of the past.
If you look closer, you’ll notice small scale porpoises next your garage. Go mock it if you like, they still occur next to you.