Thread by @Noahpinion

I'm this post from 1 year ago, I predicted that leftists, frustrated that they were having trouble bashing Biden's bold economic agenda, would switch to focusing on foreign policy so they could bash Biden for being a "hawk".

noahpinion.substack.com/p/biden-is-tri…

I think that happened, and you could see that in the eagerness of leftists to blame the Russian military buildup on NATO expansion.

Then Russia rolled into Ukraine and started blasting cities, and the "blame America" line was proven to be ridiculous.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-moment-of-…

So now leftists are left with very few avenues to bash the Biden administration and the American establishment in general.

They can still bash the Right and the GOP, of course, but every normie lib does that too, so that doesn't let leftists bash the Dem establishment.

Remember, leftists (in America) see themselves as factionalists, fighting a neoliberal Establishment for control of the Democratic party. Thus they can't let themselves blend in to the normie lib crowd.

So now what will they do? Some will persist with the foreign policy thing, falling back to the claim that OK yes Russia is bad, but anything Biden does against Russia risks global thermonuclear war, so Biden is being a warmonger.

This will also fail -- everyone realizes that total capitulation to any mad dictator with nukes is not a realistic option. So the leftists will be left without much of a leg to stand on in terms of foreign policy. And on econ, all they can do is bash Manchin like the rest of us.

In fact, the collapse of "Blame America first" will be just one piece of a general realization that the American Left's worldview is just totally broken.

* Degrowth
* Housing NIMBYism
* Solar/wind NIMBYism
* Theory of change
* Oligarchy (Gilens/Page)
* Price controls etc.

Which sucks because America didn't really have much of a real Left before 2016, and we could really use a movement to push for economic equality and labor power.

It's just not possible to win with a movement whose worldview again and again veers into abject fantasy.

And it's doubly frustrating because the Right never gets punished for veering into abject fantasy. Instead they get rewarded with Fox News shows and 10,000 retweets and power within the Republican party.

The political incentives in this country are highly asymmetrical.

In any case, this is my pre-post-mortem on the collapse (yet again) of the American Left. It's depressing as hell. Hopefully in their brief resurgence since 2016, the Left will have managed to make mainstream progressives enduringly bolder in terms of unions, taxes, etc.

But if you see people on Twitter shouting that literally anything other than total capitulation to Putin represents warmongering for global thermonuclear war, just realize that this is the dynamic playing out in the background.

(end)

Oh btw this was what I told @TonyFrangieM in a discussion yesterday, and I will write these ideas up in a blog post sooner or later (once I can think about anything non-Ukraine-related).