If you're wondering why a certain, obviously ridiculous narrative about the 2016 election keeps flaring up, consider the following explanation:
A small group of people bet years and years of their professional lives on a particular politician and the promise of well-paid, high-profile gigs in a presidential administration.
That politician was assured a coronation in '08 but was bested by a junior senator. Eight years later, two more unlikely figures annoyingly got in the way and one of them improbably ruined the whole bet.
Anyways, if there's a point to any of this I guess it's just that no one should take the absurd narratives of a particularly strange cast of people too seriously. They're an expression of thwarted professional entitlement, not serious analysis.
The whole thing makes even more sense when you consider the absurd scale of the mythos these people built around their chosen leader: that of an epoch-defining figure of destiny who practically transcended politics.
2016 wasn't a defeat to these people. It was a reality-destroying cataclysm and, more importantly, one that could almost certainly have been avoided. So I think the prevalence of certain narratives and attempts to create weird folk demons makes sense, absurd and pitiable as it is
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Much of the essence of conservatism can be found distilled in these tweets: the overriding belief that there are structures somehow both innate and natural but also so fragile and persistently on the verge of collapse the state must constantly work to impose and reify them.
You see this formulation all the time: "X or Y is rooted immutably in nature" + "Unless we stigmatize and outlaw practice X or Y civilization itself will collapse". It's more than just a rejection of pluralism. It's a politics motivated by deep insecurity and fear.
I’d add to this by noting that there definitely are forces at work that corrode communal bonds. But those are things most of the right applauds, because they virtually all have to do with the market.
Throughout the past 18 months or so, I've had the pleasure of working in collaboration with my friend Ed Broadbent and colleagues @FrancesAbele and @jonnysas_ on a very special project concerned with Ed's life and career (incoming in next tweet).
Today is cover reveal day and, on behalf of the quartet, I'm happy to announce Seeking Social Democracy: the first ever chronicle of my friend Ed Broadbent's seventy years in public life, out October 10 and available for preorder from @ecwpress now.
Part memoir, part history, part manifesto, the book sees Ed take readers from his early life and first years as an MP, through his leadership of the New Democratic Party right up to the present day. A little more on that here: seekingsocialdemocracy.com/products/seeki…
I was pleased to partner with @justicedems on this short documentary about how the corporate lust for profit drives misinformation — at Fox and beyond.
Something made abundantly clear by Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News is the extent to which editorial calculations at the network were being driven by market considerations.
Many of the network's hosts and senior editorial team knew full well that Trump had lost the election, and that they were lying to their audience. But share value and competition with networks like Newsmax took precedence over the truth. jacobin.com/2023/02/fox-ne…
It's the exact inverse in my experience. Right wing books on the left tend to be the most shallow and intellectually lazy caricatures imaginable, but there are countless books from the left that engage the right seriously even if they're critiquing it.
I feel like a broken record on this, but it genuinely is my sense that the Democratic leadership has successfully spun last week's events such that many think Republicans are primarily to blame. That simply isn't true.
The fact is that the self-described "most pro-labor president in history" spearheaded the effort that ultimately robbed railworkers operating under completely indefensible conditions of their ability to strike. A brazen attack on workers rights led by Joe Biden.
What happened has been quite effectively obfuscated so it's worth walking through what actually happened:
Sorry, the dominant narrative on this administration just doesn't scan. This isn't what you do if you're intent on passing a sweeping program of reform or inaugurating a whole new political consensus.