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db Profile picture
@dbessner
Jan 25 • 5 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
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To my mind, Trump is the result of U.S. geopolitical and geoeconomic decline; the domestic militarism caused by the Global War on Terror; and the oligarchization caused by the neoliberal economy, especially a deregulatory project that enabled the conglomeration of business ...
... and the financialization of the economy. Now, while it is obvious that Trump is more dangerous than Kamala Harris, or any Democrat--I don't think a Democrat would have deployed ICE/CBP to U.S. cities--the Democrats ...
... bear significant blame for Trump's victory. For decades, they failed to respond to the obvious structural transformations of American society, and in so doing, paved the path for Trump's two terms.

This is strange, because one of liberalism's historical hallmarks ...
... was that it was very effective in incorporating criticism. The New Deal and neoliberalism were both, in effect, liberalism's response, first, to the failure of nonregulation, and, second, to the stagnation of Fordism.

To me, the biggest indicator of liberalism's ...
... decline is its seeming inability to incorporate criticism and reform itself. This was embodied by Obama and Hillary Clinton's various claims that, in effect, America was already great, and it is reflected in liberals' inability to admit the left was right about most things.

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More from @dbessner

db Profile picture
Feb 11
So my take on Kurt Cobain, as someone who has spent a lot of time researching him, reading everything he wrote, listening to his interviews, reading about him: he had severe mental illness that manifested very early in his life. He had depression that was exacerbated by ...
... severe addiction issues; both, in fact, ran on both sides of his family. All of this was of course compounded by a level of mass fame--and pressure--that is almost incomprehensible now. Moreover, the modalities of dealing with addiction and depression, to say nothing of ...
... their combination, in the 90s were, let's say, not ideal for Kurt. I'm no forensics expert, but contextually, suicide makes a lot of sense given Kurt's various historical and emotional realities. And until there is a literal smoking gun, I find it difficult to overturn ...
Read 4 tweets
db Profile picture
Mar 17, 2025
The United States has never been a democracy. There was a period in the 30s and into the 40s where it appeared that it would become one, but that was rapidly shut off by the anti-communist campaigns of the Cold War. In the modern era, the U.S. state has been designed ...
... to centralize power in the executive and to create a series of institutions that ensure the public (and in many instances Congress) can't affect policy. As this occurred, because governance still needed to happen, power accreted in the office of the presidency. ...
... This was always the potential outcome of this process of centralization and accretion. The system, designed in the 18th century and always expanded during war--moments that tend to push toward executive authority--has always lent itself to this ...
Read 4 tweets
db Profile picture
May 17, 2024
I rarely criticize the Blob because it's so obvious but it is extraordinarily frustrating to see people who came of professional age during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars--the 20 year period that demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that militarized counterinsurgency ...
... was effectively impossible (as was earlier shown in Vietnam)--advocate for Israel to "root out" or "defeat" Hamas. Even if one were to accept this position morally, which I assume they mostly do, as a matter of military strategy COIN is so obviously a failed approach that ...
... advocating it is in and of itself a moral failure.
Read 6 tweets
db Profile picture
May 1, 2024
The most bizarre thing about what Columbia is doing is that the encampment was so small, especially when compared to 1968. If Baroness Shafik had just let them sit on the lawn and basically ignored them, she would've won. But the neoliberal university can accept ...
... absolutely no, minor in the scheme of things, criticism. The students are ancillary to the project as a whole, to be disciplined when abrasive and otherwise generally ignored, except when they graduate and then the begging for money begins. I wish I could say I think ...
... this will be a turning point in the history of the university that augurs a more positive future, but I think that's unlikely: the mask is off, the (*perceived*) donors matter most, and the kids are there basically to get their credential to join the ruling class. ...
Read 5 tweets
db Profile picture
Dec 30, 2023
This is the common way it’s framed, but I actually don’t think bomb power is what changed the US state and the nature of power in the United States, especially bc the major structural transformations occurred before the bomb had really been incorporated as an …
… existential weapon in the American mind. (Hard to believe but for longer than one would think m—late 40s at the earliest, early 50s at the latest—the bomb was, within strategic thought, kind of just viewed as a mega-air raid wrapped up in one weapon as opposed to thousands.)..
… IMO, the thing that really needs to be the focus is the way modern liberalism defined itself according to the identification of existential enemies (first the Nazis—who didn’t have the bomb—and later the Soviets). The bomb is most important insofar as the …
Read 5 tweets

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