Looking for a succinct primer for those politically disengaged folks who are tuning out because "both sides have gotten so mean". Obviously the contradictions are heightening but how do you ease in a materialist perspective when someone is already so exhausted by "bias"
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-112-how-polarization-discourse-flattens-power-dynamics-and-says-nothing
Transcript: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-112-how-polarization-discourse-flattens-power-dynamics-and-says-nothing-e5e8f9cba023
thanks, I should have linked that instead since it has a link to the episode
I still prefer Libsyn for listening/downloading. For whatever reason, unless you're logged in or listening from an embed, SoundCloud doesn't let you go back/forwards or jump to a timestamp, it only lets you play/pause.
yea they made that change in the last year or two to try to force users to register
For whatever reason, unless you’re logged in or listening from an embed, SoundCloud doesn’t let you go back/forwards or jump to a timestamp, it only lets you play/pause.
I fucking hate that shit. Completely turned me off that platform.
:this:
Honestly antipolitics is such a powerful term. Once you’re thinking through that lens you see it everywhere
Nailed it, it's important to remind people that it is almost completely one-sided. Republicans hate democrats way more than democrats hate republicans. Part of the reason why is that Republicans love to prey on easy targets, and democrats have embraced their ineffectual meekness as somehow a good thing.
Showing the world how strong you are by simply acting weak: this is the 69th form of liberalism. :mao-shining:
Republicans hate democrats way more than democrats hate republicans
Our democracy needs a strong and healthy Republican party :good-morning:
Republicans hate democrats way more than democrats hate republicans.
If you're at the stage where you can see that the right hates humanity, but can't bring yourself to utterly reject everything they stand for, what does that say about your own love for humanity? This step is scary because it means confronting the fact that your own party stands for a lot of the same hateful things, and the only real option is to also reject them and their platform of compromise and appeasement.
Part of my break with liberalism was realizing I wasn't polarized enough lol
There is little difference between D and R in Washington. They both know they're on the same side: against us. Thus the RINOs on one and corporate Democrats on the other. Both despise their voters and yet keep getting elected because they have basically merged with the mainstream media.
I would advise them to re-read What's the Matter with Kansas? IDK too much about Thomas Frank but I knew he went on Chapo once and he seems to be a good gateway into genuine leftism.
Other than that, remind them that conservatives have always been this way, it's all part of being ontologically evil :bateman-ontological:.
Capitalism polarizes people into classes, capitalism ain’t what it used to be because of the tendency for profit to decline (to make more money you need better machines, but these also cost money, which ultimately decreases your profits), plus the world is uniting against amerikkka and proving that like feudalism and slavery and primitive communism, capitalism is a temporary thing, but as capitalism declines labor aristocrats (mostly democrats) and the bourgeoisie (mostly republicans) need to blame something other than the system (since the system used to benefit them more and in fact created them), so they scapegoat each other as well as minorities. Thus, polarization!
labor aristocrats (mostly democrats) and the bourgeoisie (mostly republicans)
don't know about this one
Yeah that's not a useful divide at all and the reverse is often true depending on where you live. Where I live the wealthiest types are more likely to be democrats. The only real class distinction that denotes if one is a democrat or republican is among the bourgeoisie. Industries like oil, construction, energy, weapons, have a lot of republican business owners. Industries like international finance, advertising, media, etc have more democrats.
Working class people associate with either party in idiosyncratic ways, but largely geographically, sometimes by age, and sometimes by education level. Most people don't seem to give a shit and form affiliations based on stuff they've heard from their parents.
It’s more like:
Dems: Labor aristocrats, international/financial bourgeoisie, proles stuck within Liberal ideology, managerial class, “creatives”, academics
Republics: Industrial/National bourgeoise, Petty bourgeoisie, alienated proles with confused reactionary ideologies, lumpens, self-employed “entrepreneurs” and the heavily religious
The system always has to artificially divide up proles against each other to survive, but the increasing polarization is happening due to a widening rift between the interests of the international/finance bourgies and the national/industrial bourgies, this rift is filtered down through proxy issues that the lower groups care about: LGBT rights, abortion, police brutality. The upper haute bourgies don’t actually care about any of these issues, but they cynically know their underlings do and use them to try and gain political and economic dominance against their bourgie rivals (they actually care more about imperialism, protectionism/free trade, taxes)
Democrats are more international bourgeoisie and intelligensia(although the latter is in both groups) Republicans are more national bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie
In my experience, it's labor aristocrats (Democrats) vs small business owners (Republicans).
Because our media is entirely for-profit and a divided, terrified, angry, paranoid, violent populace is significantly more profitable than not.
NPR quietly pleading for civility will never overpower the fascist war drums of the Murdoch family.
Division is profitable. Violence is profitable. Bringing the country to the brink of civil war is profitable. WWIII will be VERY profitable.
And no you can't regulate the media's profit-seeking nature away when both political parties are capitalist to their bones. They are not going to nationalize the news media, they are not going to regulate their freedom speech, and if they tried, said media would annihilate whichever party tried and hand all power to the other.
Polarization is profitable, and profit is the only thing that matters under Capitalism.
You wanted lib-friendly so there ya go.
I mean things aren't that polarized. There's the sphere of nonmaterial symbolic shit which is hotter than ever, drag queen story hour etc, but tax policy for example is just a boring bell curve. Foreign policy. Most things people are just on a bell curve about them.
I'd say that nonono we're actually an incredibly homogenous conformist country. Even the stores all look the same. As things become homogenized we exaggerate the remaining difference a la narcissism of small differences.
Yep American politicians all pretty much agree on our underlying fascist/neoliberal ideology (they are functionally the same thing to different degrees). What we are seeing is simply the recriminations of losers. When an elite class sees its power slipping away they start to turn on each other and eat each other for the shrinking scraps. The exact division lines among that elite class aren’t particularly relevant, it’s just how the recriminations happened to play out when there’s not enough abundant wealth to paper over all disagreements
The contradictions of capitalism are heightening, and the high standards of living generated by centuries of imperialism have been shaved away by the bourgeoisie in the name of profit. As people feel their quality of life slip, they become disillusioned with the status quo, and seek extreme change.
Ask them to watch "come and see" and ask them at the end if they think polarization is the central conflict of the movie
The cold war open collaborationism was an odd, not the rule.
The simple thing to focus on is that political strategy changed around the fall of the USSR. It changed these things:
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The alignment of capitalist interests against socialist countries via the state. Instead, it was free reign to privatize and force concessions from states that no longer had their trade network, which created an even bigger split between national and international bourgeoisie, both based in the US.
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The State Department and intelligence no longer needed to keep media narratives going for cold war things and were in a transitional period.
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Neoliberalism was increasingly impacting white cishet dudes and this created the need for political explanations other than, "well in communist Russia they have to eat bland mush every day, we must be unified against the nuclear threat".
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Bill Clinton and his faction won by taking over the entire previous "center" space, which is itself a result of the above. The left had been destroyed by the cold war and the "far right" hadn't been stoked to resolve contradictions. Jesse Jackson was the last chance to have a center-left do anything for people and both parties, and therefore capitalists, plus the deep state and so on, made sure he ate shit. This allowed triangulators to take over and have the consent of all of the above.
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Gingrich et al are a reaction to Clinton that had limited tools and no resistance from capitalists or the state because of the end of the cold war.
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Heightening contradictions reinforce the "anti-Democrat" politics of Gingrich and the culture wars. Neoliberalization's impacts have continued. It's taking a fashy turn.
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The Filter Bubble does a good job of laying out the profit motive in setting up echo chambers and farming clicks and attention. The author is a bit of a lib but he points in the right direction instead of just treating it as an aggregate of personal decisions.
