The Right understands this as a humiliation ritual, as a form of Effigy Politics in which they deploy Charlie Kirk as a synecdoche for the politics of subjugation he practiced, and the barista as synecdoche for the groups they want to dominate—young, queer, nonwhite, female, etc. We live in a time where popular democracy is so atrophied, and civic institutions so gutted, that even the ascendant Far Right doesn’t know how to vent their spleen except through expressive consumption, through symbolic Judas Burnings of non-compliant workers

The basic idea here, uniting vaccine hostility, ending PEPFAR, skepticism of GLP-1 drugs, pasteurization, etc, is that the Right believes The Strong do not need these protections or cheats, and they reward the undisciplined/deviant/weak when they ought to suffer or die

https://twitter.com/shreyabasu003/status/1959292167144280325

They believe that medical science has constructed a whole order which increasingly protects people from what we do not need to be protected from; sure, maybe some fat disabled homosexual needs pasteurization because their body can’t handle Natural Raw Milk—but not me, I’m Strong

You’re misunderstanding my point; “police are the actual enemies of people in the real world, so we must abolish them.”

Ok. How? And, importantly, how in such a way that doesn’t prompt immediate backlash and retrenchment? This is where “imagination” actually matters! I’m sorry but this is totally inadequate analysis: “X is bad, and therefore must be opposed. That’s all you need to know.”

Wrong! You need to know how you plan to successfully oppose police, or whatever other thing you’re opposing.

AI certainly looks a lot like a bubble, but I’d caution leftists from being too smug about it.

We used to ridicule Amazon for being a perennial money-loser. And Netflix. And Uber. Now they’re all profitable and have remade whole industries, and American life. For the worse! We used to shit on self-driving cars as “always five years away.” Well, Waymo seems to have actually gotten there, pretty much. Folks are still clinging to some copium about how you can mess with them, but it’s pretty clear self driving tech is viable.

Centrists can’t grasp that it’s impossible to remedy this by campaigning with Liz Cheney, or even by adopting conservative policy positions

Kamala could say she would be tough on the border, but she was abysmal at saying *why*. She couldn’t speak conservative *values*

https://twitter.com/trouble_man90/status/1952119111825174536

She also couldn’t speak very well to *liberal* values, either! She comes from a grand Democratic tradition of being fucking awful at speaking the language of morality, of moral metaphor and archetype. Of scaffolding policy with a moral and metaphorical context

I’m kind of tired of people talking about “revolution, not [material improvement short of revolution]!” unless they’re actually out there successfully building institutions/organizations which might plausibly be able to mobilize the working class for revolution In my experience, 99% of the time the people who say stuff like this mean “refuse to participate in the existing struggles of the working class, at the level of workers’ current political consciousness” with no serious effort to do anything else besides publish zines

Honestly the easiest thing to do immediately and by executive authority, as a left-populist president, would be to punish/imprison *different* symbolic targets. Instead of immigrants, bankers. Instead of homeless people, slumlords. Health insurance CEOs. Etc.

https://twitter.com/armanddoma/status/1919791447387074658

But Dems generally refuse to punish elites even when there’s legitimate grounds to punish actual crimes, with full due process. They couldn’t even punish their political opponents who attempted a coup!

While this is articulated in MAGA-coded grievance language, there’s a related truth.

I’ve talked before about how liberal experts are often blind to their own values, because they approach society as a math problem to solve. Goodness is something to be Efficiently Optimized

https://twitter.com/jbraunstein914/status/1914391100959465889

It’s not truly sneaky, in the sense that this blindness is totally sincere. They really think everyone wants the same things—that there just is an objective definition of The Good, and that the job of the state is to maximize Goodness Production. It all seems obvious to them

This is the lib version of Trumpism and it is present in some of the Abundance types—specifically, we’re seeing a nationwide exhaustion with self-regulation and compassion, and a desire to just throw up your hands, and do what’s easy even if it leaves others behind

https://twitter.com/vitruviusgrind/status/1904591689576042895

I have a family friend who was a really volatile and narcissistic 20-year old, who worked on herself over the years, went to therapy, grew up, and became infinitely more conscientious and regulated in her 30s. She fell down the Trump pipeline this election, and has regressed

I will keep begging leftists to have some humility about praxis. We act like politics has been solved, Correct Praxis is already known, and we just have to implement it. But we keep losing. So how can we possibly have the right praxis? If the American left already had the answers for how to Do The Work correctly, then why did we fail when 2 million people in Gaza needed us to win? We failed so comprehensively it’s totally broken all my faith and trust in our received wisdom about strategy and tactics

I’ve got some quibbles here but Trace is mostly right. On the left we’ve largely abandoned persuasion in favor of discipline, and instruction.

We get strident and offended when it’s suggested we might have to *entice* and *encourage* people to agree with us

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1897914435014213772

I maintain my belief that one of the great virtues and unique strengths of socialism/socialists is that we’re *right* more than anyone else. We’re materialists, we’re critical, and that counts for a lot. But we’ve also gotten kind of high off that rightness.

It’s actually imperative liberals and leftists learn how this works: only a tiny minority of Americans actually care about literal deficits. No one really cares about “fiscal responsibility.” These are symbols; they signify “taking resources away from the Undeserving and Cheats.”

https://twitter.com/hutchinson/status/1894543149047189884

The GOP is the party of “fiscal responsibility” because “fiscal responsibility” means “taking money away from poor people, single mothers, the homeless, immigrants, and minorities.” They can take out infinite debt and give it to billionaires and be totally consistent

Sorry but he’s right. This metric doesn’t explain any of the political behavior leftists want to explain as being due to economic suffering.

Things got better; people voted for Trump. Culture war issues are luxury issues that Americans vote for in good times, not bad.

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1889552031360098359

All the data on economic discontent is most parsimoniously explained by partisanship. People unhappy with “the economy” mostly report positive personal financial situations—it’s literally just Republicans mad that the Wrong People are getting assistance.

Something I’ve come to realize about most of the American left, is that we believe that it’s liberals’ job to win and hold power, our job to shame them, and their moral duty to listen to us—a tiny powerless minority—and do our bidding. It’s a toddler’s theory of change Of course, it’s a theory largely sold to us by liberals, especially in academia (many who fancy themselves radicals). It’s a narrative of the eternal Outsider radical, who marches and sits-in and publishes exposés and whatever else.

Jesus Christ Jacobin is fucking embarrassing.

This attitude of “so what if I was lying? It’s a lie that slanders the Bad Guys” is a fucking blight on the Left right now.

It matters because we can’t solve fake problems, dumbass! @devintoshea This type of shit matters—if people think the problem is private equity owning existing housing stock, then they’ll push for legislation to ban that, which would be fine, but WOULDN’T BRING DOWN RENTS. Which then leaves people mad at us, the Left, for failing to deliver!

For a long time many of us on the left have tolerated some very counterproductive discourse norms because it seemed like everyone crying about them was actually opposed to the *substance* of anti-racism, disability justice, decolonization, and so on But it feels like we’ve gotten to a point where these norms are truly untenable, even (especially?) for those of who care to really do the work and win on these fronts, as well as on the front of class struggle.

Just an incredible, undeniable failure by liberals. A human catastrophe.

And you’d think socialists, of all people, would be eager to scourge the libs about this clear, empiric failure of their unscientific policies! Yet so many of us defend these liberal policy regimes!

https://twitter.com/statisticurban/status/1862231223760044452

Housing is this bizarro space where 90% of socialists become raving liberals who suddenly believe in the power of regulated markets to deliver socially-necessary goods. It’s insane that we give up criticizing one of the biggest, most obvious weak points of liberal policies!

The main problem I have with leftist arguments against YIMBY housing reforms (upzoning, legalizing single stairwell buildings, etc) is that they all seem to assert some version of “the market can never provide cheaper rents than it currently does”, which is flatly not credible Housing should not be a market-provided commodity, but for now that’s what it is. And it is cheaper in some places than in others. And it has been cheaper at different times. None of the leftist arguments I’ve seen about the power of landlords to dictate price can explain this

Tbh @Tyler_A_Harper, the “pipeline” is very real—it describes so many young men I know.

The problem is Democrats see Bernie as *causative* here; he drove them away from Dems and to MAGA. Of course, the opposite is true: they would’ve stayed Dems with a Bernie-style platform We should absolutely talk about the reality that tons of low-info, low-propensity, and politically disengaged voters loved Bernie and flocked to him. But he put off the highly-engaged base of the Democratic Party.

Problem is, Dems needed those low-info voters after all

I really think if Harris loses, it won't just be about a bad campaign and a bad candidate. Looking at the polling on immigration, homelessness, and crime (among other issues), the country has lurched right pretty hard in just the last few years. I think because of COVID People experienced a collective crisis, which demanded concerted action and sacrifice in order to protect the whole public--but especially the most vulnerable. And they hated it! They got exhausted with it very quickly. They wanted to go "back to normal" ASAP

It seems bad that once our society started to take child sexual abuse more seriously, people became increasingly fixated on the “sexual” part and not the “abuse” part. Like, we now have a society where a shockingly large number of people think children will be suffer harm analogous to CSA by *reading* about sex and sexuality, but are totally uninterested in dismantling the systems of authority and hierarchy that abusers exploit to find victims