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?

    • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      What I am saying is that there has been an objective instinctual tribal polarization between the two political tribal groups in our society in the past 20 years

      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.

            • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              No, you are just arguing way beyond the point i am making.

              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.

              I am talking about just the “politically” active class of “upper middle class”, mostly white but not exclusively, people. This group is the critical class for capital because they are the petite bourgeois foot soldiers for them. In that group there has been a decided polarization, largely driven by the right. A lot if this is really stupid cultural shit but its there.

              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.