incidentally, the solutions that aren't "crazy" are ones that acknowledge the origins, scale, and urgency of the problem, which is to say exactly the solutions that Shapiro et al want to squelch by calling them "extreme."
Shapiro pretending that he's acknowledging the problem while refusing to consider any changes that could mitigate it is, in fact, "posturing," while the activists he yells at for "screaming" are the only ones offering *realistic* solutions.
if your only engagement with the issue of climate is to chide the people who actually are engaged with it for being too "crazy," you're willfully accelerating the catastrophe.
(and this applies to "centrist" pundits and "moderate" politicians as much as it does smug reactionaries who run lucrative racist-facebook-propaganda mills)
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to ask whether the grift is a betrayal of the ideology is to misunderstand the ideology, which underneath the "populist" drag is really just "rich people can do whatever they want to extract money from regular people and nobody should be able to prevent it"
the truth about the reactionary fake-populists of our current era is that they are, to a person, the exact parasitic elites they pretend to complain about
these people exist, they drive me crazy, and they're wildly, catastrophically wrong. but i'd caution against assuming this is a creation purely of politicians or donors; a lot of Dem *voters* feel this way, too.
and when i say "wildly, catastrophically wrong" i don't just mean "this isn't how you get to single payer/GND/job guarantee." i mean it doesn't even succeed by its own metrics of obtaining political cooperation or securing modest victories.
this is often put forth, ironically enough, as the "realistic" alternative to a more combative stance and a harder starting position, promoted by people who think of themselves as more devoted to Getting Things Done than purity...
"i don't know. i do know he broke into and drove off in a car that wasn't his. but i'm not in his head enough to know if he thought the car was his, or maybe he disliked the owner."
the decision to actively promote racism because you derive some personal political benefit from it is, itself, racist; it is a demonstration of the low value you place on the safety and comfort of your targets.
using racism instrumentally or tactically is not morally or practically different from "being racist in your heart," and to insist it only matters if it's a personally-held belief is to profoundly misunderstand why it's bad.
"None of this precludes the existence of non-racist conservatives, to be sure. It just makes them some of the least influential people in their movement." - @zakcheneyricenymag.com/intelligencer/…
@zakcheneyrice "they made clear that their support for the president was not in spite of his inflammatory rhetoric, but because his chosen targets often match their own....Republican infrastructure has been remade to reflect that marriage." - @AsteadWesleynytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/…
@zakcheneyrice@AsteadWesley the reason Trump was able to take the long golden escalator ride through the institutions of the Right is because he was eager to say outright what a generation of operatives and politicians talked around.
really good piece: slate.com/news-and-polit… McConnell and Trump's judicial handiwork could, quite intentionally, result in a country with the segregation and economic feudalism of the pre-New Deal era.
the open door to a markedly more racist, undemocratic and oligarchic society is not, strictly speaking, Trump's doing. it's a longstanding priority of establishment conservative politicians and organizations, their *reward* for looking past Trump's cartoonish corruption.
many of the worst, most consequential things about Trump's administration are the things that Mitch McConnell is getting *in exchange for his support.*