It's a real chickenshit article. Yeah the NBA players protested police brutality and guess what? The fans booed them for it. Even if players like Lebron don't secretly hate a lot of these people I have no idea why you'd think he would give up revenue from China for them.
I think a huge part of it is that the politicians who did this before relied on the electorate going to sleep between cycles or just the fact that people didn't pay much attention to the left in general. Now that the brand of the modern progressives is being always online and constantly in the spotlight they can't bullshit hard enough to maintain it. You can see them try to mitigate by dodging outlets that would give even mild push back, but even the softballs are starting to fuck them up the longer this goes on.
Like it's not just AOC, Ro Khanna with his weird ass startup culture israel thing, Jayapal getting heated over Mariam Williamson asking for any kind of concrete plan, Cori Bush stumbling for a response when CNN ask why they don't vote as a block, etc. It's all going to break down.
They also act like we don't know they're the exact same fucking people who always break out the Senna quote on overtaking whenever Verstappen, Shchumacher, Leclerc, Vettel or whoever else did the exact same shit. I swear if Senna was a modern driver they'd fucking hate him.
It would've been a repeat of how Bernie took a huge amount of flack for merely pointing out planned parenthood was part of the democratic establishment. Too many of the people who need to go are high up in other liberal orgs that leftist respect and support. So when you get rid of them the headline won't be about Corbyn purging anti leftist, it'll be about how he hates puppies and ice cream and is a secret bigot fascist. Which to be fair already happened from the center and right, but this time it would be progressive NGOs saying it and a bunch of lefties will eat it up.
I hope they keep going mask off with this. The sooner people realize they are being steered away from popular and meaningful policy like M4all into the harmless charity circuit the better.
You can see how the bouge really fucked up in cutting off most people from any hope of small business ownership. They tried to form groups to go pressure Biden to pass another bailout for small businesses and his stance was that he's not going to do shit about it and they should just pay more. Now they are running constant pieces about failing restaurants, but there is no longer any mass of potential entrepreneurs to influence. There's not going to be any 1980s style "save the beloved small town diner" crap, it's just over for these people.
That wasn't the squad. The pressure on Manchin to ease up on the cuts and restore the checks was from Kamala and Biden. Kamala who I'm sure people remember, went to west virginia to force his hand. The pressure on refugees also didn't come from the squad. It was from refugee orgs who threatened to break with Biden because he lied to them.
Same with the relief bills. Those are Janet Yellen's baby and unless you think she is a progressive then it's also not the squad at work there. What we have is not a leftist insurgency into the democratic party, what we have is the same old where party leadership deals out scraps for individual politicians to market themselves with in their home districts.
I never brought into narrative of the left being racist and sexist until we had several months of AOC's camp trying to pretend everyone calling her out was a white guy all to distract from the fact that they've sunset any major progressive policy for at least a generation. I never brought into it until her people intentionally dodged talking to her black critics in person where the absurdity of this shit doesn't play.
At this point I don't even think it matters. She actively dodges left wing media and gaslit people the last time they noticed progressives weren't actually doing anything. Remember those super important paygo exemptions? Remember how she needed to save political capital for the minimum wage battle?
She can either explain herself and go win support back or just eat shit. People shouldn't accept political leaders on faith. The whole thing where people play lib whisperer obviously isn't working.
Can you really even call her a social democrat anymore? They are no longer trying to pass M4All or raise the minimum wage. This is basically young pelosi.
The rent strikers at least proposed making a program and instead of either leading themselves or offering a more coherent strategy our big brained super marxist threw cold water on the idea and went on to recap david lynch movies for the billionth time. This is really the core of the problem to me. We have people who have a ton of money, who have a ton of reach, and they are perfectly content being commentators forever. This gets framed as the serious marxist thinker that for some reason needs ever more money and attention.
Then we have the naive people with no resources fucking up because they are effectively alone, having to start from scratch perpetually because most of the funding the left generates burns away on ephemeral campaigns or minting the new bourgeois of the prior group. This is effectively the group who all movement and progress within the left depends upon, but they're unserious.
Well, most of the unions are anti worker and not going to help them. Not that the existing ones cover any large amount of the workforce. The bizarre organizer bureaucracy the US has built up is also rudderless, now largely acting as a money pit.
So that leaves them in the position of trying to spark something spontaneously which does have a low success rate, but it isn't the zero that's being brought to the table elsewhere. I feel the same about this as I did when the chapos were crapping on the rent strike idea as being unserious, well, what was the serious thing? More editorials in indie mags? Writing a memoir? There was no other plan even proposed.
The silver lining of having so many experts who've won all of jack shit ought to be that it gives normal people a bit of confidence to go take those shots in the dark. At least nobody can say they see the target more clearly than you.
The only part I disagree with is that the primary cause of this is christianity. Because the western left doesn't have mass labor or really mass politics at all as its support base and is instead more a market leftism there is a huge incentive towards smearing anyone threatening the revenue streams society's misery generates. It is the problem Bernie and Corbyn ran into where the possibility that long standing issues may change immediately sent orgs and "allies" into collaboration with the ruling class. The structure itself demands failure.
Foreign models like China's are a threat for the same reason. Not only because they aren't based on NGOs, but because of the contrast they provide to a left structure where people are taught that raising the minimum wage is a political project with a longer timeline than the entire October revolution.
Probably the last good observation Terese had on what's left was when she did a deep dive into the origins of the online left and talked about when she was a normal DSA type person reaching out to the circles that had the Bruenigs, Matt, Amber, etc before things solidified into what we see now. The most interesting part of it was her talking about how it was all based around Gawker/Buzzfeed type media work and there was just no real coherent political project to it at the start. Instead of being a socialist effort that went online, it was more a type of left politics that evolved specifically for being able to control online spaces and defend online media. Dirtbag left media could flourish in a way normal jerkass media couldn't. It could wield a type of moral authority at a time in the Internet's history when otherwise clout just went to whoever was charismatic and well connected.
It really clarified to a large extent why twitter and the whole podcast sphere is the way it is. It was also a sort of bittersweet thing because I think if she hadn't alienated so many people the information could have been more widely understood, but the alienation is the only reason she is able to share the things the rest of the circle doesn't want to acknowledge. You can put it together with Matt's observations on the demographics of left twitter along with its inability to engage the working class and Terese's observation is the unspoken key to why that is.
Don't worry guys we're going to work super hard to push Biden left. That's why it's very important you get him to like and subscribe to this video so he can watch my 8 part video essay on how Airbud's nepotism ruined the first canine sports dynasty.