I just rolled my eyes so hard I’m dizzy…
“Squad politics”
I mean, politics aside, this is quite bizarre. There is absolutely no evidence presented here. None. A purely ideological statement, masquerading as “journalism.”
“Squad politics”
I mean, politics aside, this is quite bizarre. There is absolutely no evidence presented here. None. A purely ideological statement, masquerading as “journalism.”
I don’t disagree with this - it captures the pathologies of access journalism precisely. I do think, however, that we shouldn’t focus solely on the opportunistic nature, as ideology always defines the limits of opportunism. The person who wrote this piece can’t be fully agnostic.
https://twitter.com/gilbertjasono/status/1494686106692038663
This, exactly - and these centrists receive active support from journalists who are fully on board with the project of fighting back against the “radical,” “woke” forces that have supposedly advanced too far in the Democratic Party in particular and American life in general.
https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1494668006269636620
If you write a piece like that, you’re not simply a messenger, not just a passive medium being used/abused for political purposes. You’re an active participant in this struggle, and you’re intervening on the side of the reactionary centrists.
Yes, it’s clickbait, but we’re letting the people writing these pieces off the hook too easily if we’re considering them as *just* clickbait. That guy is not just trolling - he is deliberately fighting back against what he perceives is the dangerous spread of “woke” forces.
The thing is, a serious journalist could actually do some interesting things with the “squad politics” idea: by not treating it as a reality, but as the ideological and media construct which it is and as which it is clearly having a disastrous effect.
If you start from there, the questions are: What are the ideological assumptions behind the “squad politics” construct? Who is interested in pushing it? How is it being propagated? What does it tell us about American politics and society that so many people find it so attractive?
Exploring those questions, grappling with them in earnest, would yield some interesting results. But it would be rather uncomfortable for the people actively engaged in the reactionary centrist backlash to “wokeism,” which is precisely why that kind of reflection isn’t coming.
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