His win was far from a lock, and I feel like it would have been so easy to bomb a building and then have someone claim there was residue of whatever. By late 2004 the war was not popular, for a lot of libs "finding" WMDs would have probably justified the most evil thing the US had done in decades, I'm sure.
I was so sure they would serve up an October surprise. When they didn't it really shook me, like I didn't understand politics at all. Maybe I still don't.
Thoughts?
Hyper-partisanship makes people more susceptible to fascist propaganda, though. It's one thing to fetishize civility, but recognizing that fascism exploits material conditions by fueling partisan divides is valid and important. It's true that material conditions will always dictate whether or not a society maintains the status quo or engages in radical change. Liberalism to fascism is the radical change most likely to result in a hyper-partisan society.
You're correct in what you say but I wouldn't call hyper-partisanship "polarization" because it implies that the two parties are moving away from each other in policies when in fact they are simply more hostile to each other even as they both move to the right. Perhaps by "polarization" you simply mean partisanship, which I can get behind, but it's a buzzword the US media uses to imply that centrism is the solution and the democrats have moved too far left. Partisanship is a better word, because it implies blind loyalty to these institutions regardless of their policies.
"polarization" discourse bad
"asymmetric polarization" discourse good
there we go
the republicans run to the right and the democrats are dragged behind on a leash, and the leash is labeled capitalism
I'm using "polarization" literally, as in movement to opposite poles. I consume virtually zero mainstream American media so I'm probably lacking the context that you have for its use as a buzzword. It's funny to me that anyone would think that the Democrats are "left". I've said it before, but it bears repeating, in 10 years on this current trajectory everyone will think Marx is best known for organizing the first Pride Parade.
Opposite poles with respect to what? Policies? If you mean policies, The two American parties aren't doing this. They're increasingly beholden to capital. Especially since "Citizens United" deregulated dark money campaign donations. They aren't moving in opposite directions. The idea that they're moving too far from each other is an idea mostly pushed in American media by people who are disappointed they aren't cooperating even more when it comes to screwing over the working class. Even though they're already doing that. It's mostly liberal civility fetishism. But even on a "civility" level they've been more polarized in the past. The civil war, for example. Also the prescribed solution by these pundits is always "the democrats should move to the right, because they're becoming too far left and unreasonable"
not sure what you mean by this.
It means that "left" to the average person in the US now only means pro-LGBTQ and pro-choice, and maybe nominally environmentalist and pro-union.
And of course the two parties don't have anything to offer in terms of substantive difference, because they both serve capital. The poles I see arise from to whom to assign assign blame for the declining material conditions; one pole blames the queers/jews/illegals and the other blames those they see as "anti-progressive".
I am in agreement with this and have no objections or nuance to add. Got ya.
Yeah, I think sometimes the Pride Parade comment initially strikes people as anti-queer or dismissive of queer marginalization. I am militantly lesbian (the trans-inclusive flavor, though). I'm just really angry that my identity, and I'm old enough to have existed in a time long before being gay was ok, has been appropriated by capitalists to sell more things.
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"culturally" only implies in terms of rhetoric. Dems might tepidly stand up for certain groups (like LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities) during election time, but they barely do anything once in power. Also this acceptance is driven by capital's desire for profits, rather than by a genuine concern for the well being of marginalized groups. You see corporations flying pride/BLM flags not because they're allies of these downtrodden groups, but because they view these groups as targeted sales demographics whose conspicuous consumption of certain products is profitable. If you don't have enough money to conspicuously consume their products, they don't care about you, regardless of what marginalized identities you might have. In reality, you have the radical leadership of the early Ferguson BLM being shot and lit on fire on their cars and no investigation afterwards. You have fascist war criminals like Eddie Gallagher being pardoned with zero material pushback from the democrats. You have AOC voting to give ICE more money, and voting with tears in her eyes to give Israel more weapons. You have financial precarity plunging millions into poverty where they become easy targets for all sorts of systemic violence and discrimination. You have fully cooperative bipartisan agendas (regardless of campaign trail rhetoric) when it comes to waging wars, oppressing migrants, deregulating key industrial sectors, oppressing unions, and disciplining labor with austerity. When you're at the bottom, like most marginalized people are, pride flag burger wrappers means nothing. It's just a gesture. The only people who really feel the "cultural" difference between the parties are petit bourgeois. A black female supreme court justice is meaningful if you're a black millionaire, but it's not meaningful if you're a black man currently in prison for possessing drugs in 2010.
it absolutely still is, especially among people in power.
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socialists don't get along with their republican uncles at thanksgiving, but rank-and-file democrats absolutely will go to the ball game with their rank-and-file republican cousins, and just roll their eyes at whatever they say. In fact. I'd say most of the mooks will actually parrot the pundit bullshit of "can't we all just get along? Aren't we all too polarized these days? I wish there was more bipartisanship!" that kind of rhetoric polls well because the middle class white moderates prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice :mlk-yes:
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Right. 20 years. Because one has to narrow the window of US political history to only the past 20 years for this to make sense. Because I look back at things like the LA riots, the civil rights movement, the civil war, etc, and I see much more violent levels of so-called tribal polarization in our past than in our present. Black people used to be lynched over mere accusations. What we have today might be worse than the mid 90s, because of the brief "lull" between the collapse of the USSR and the beginning of the war on terror, but that lull was the exception rather than the rule.
look at this photo from the civil rights era. We've always been polarized and tribal. The real trick here is pretending everything began 1995-2005, which is easy because a lot of people who are late teens/young adults now were born then. I think also that there is a tendency to look at the elected party members and the middle class(es) too much.
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i hope i didn't come off as hostile :(
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I sincerely apologize if that's the case. Perhaps I lost track of who I was speaking to. I've worked two long weeks and I am very tired but nevertheless very passionate when discussing these things.
Nevertheless I still disagreed with this point because, as I said, these classes are the classes that are constantly in lockstep when it comes to financial matters, and constantly updoot op eds about how there's "too much polarization" and there "needs to be more bipartisanship". That's why I posted the citations needed episode in the first place. I am very suspicious of any time the term "polarization" is employed with respect to US politics and, to the person I was originally discussing this with, i said "partisanship" is a better word because what's really going on is they're blindly loyal to the parties as institutions, rather than to the policy goals or ideological agendas being pursued by those parties. This always happens with US politics. The parties are merely vessels for capital. There was a time when democrats were the party of klansmen and republicans were the party of abolitionists and freesoilers. But obviously they "switched places" (scare quotes) because the US parties are vessels of capital rather than vessels of ideology. That's what makes them so dangerous, and the loyalty to them so empty.
Perhaps my real objection here is to the fact that, when a lot of people hear the word "polarization" they will assume that the parties should be even more in lockstep than they already are, and perhaps a more nuanced analysis of their class character is in order, as we already elaborated by discussing this at length.
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