Thursday, January 26, 2017
Lord Keynes — The Secret of Why the Modern Left in the West is Impotent and Clueless
Bingo. Although it is no secret. It's why HRC lost the election to DJT.
Can the Democrats turn this around. No. It's everything they stand against. There are the "deplorables."
The only left in the US is the pseudo-left.
Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Secret of Why the Modern Left in the West is Impotent and Clueless
Lord Keynes
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16 comments:
"the working class – and even a significant part of the non-cosmopolitan middle class that might vote for the Left"
Consider this former qualified working class base has been made unqualified via cronyism, nepotism, Title 7 and Title 9.
These activities have degraded their qualification for acceptable technocratic rule because under those 4 policies the most qualified are not promoted by design....
There remain more qualified people in the right in comparison to the left due to the lefts embrace of those 4 methods of selection so the voting public sees this and after 8 years of under performance just sees more qualified people in the right and is voting in that direction to see how they do...
For the want of cheap labour, legal immigration was disposed of. Democrats are partly responsible for this, over the decades.
Lord Keynes has this a little upside down. The putative nationalism and anti-multiculturalism of the working class have arisen as a reaction against neo-liberal policies, which include full labour mobility. The working class is not against multiculturalism, but rather against policies which make a race to the bottom an inevitability. Being in favour of national government and reasonable border controls is not about anti-multiculturalism, as one can have the latter even with controlled borders. The working class "base" has abandoned the "left" merely because, in its so-called internationalism (and here I agree with Lord Keynes) it offers no hope for change. Support for right wing loonies is a strategy of DESPAIR, not genuine opposition to multiculturalism, because, as LK correctly notes, neo-liberals don't give a damn for the earning classes.
These designations of who is on the left is a problem. Killary is not on the left. She's on the right. The Dems are all rightwingers. See how easy that was to free your mind! In the US, the left are the likes of Chris Hedges and Cornel West. Pro-abortion imperialists aren't leftists, they're righwingers who have come to the pragmatic conclusion that it's pointless trying to police women's vaginas. The right believe the very same thing, but use it as a stick to bash the pragmatic liberal imperialists. The right use abortion as a cultural tactic to win over millions of religious but politically credulous simpletons who think that abortion is going to be made illegal.
There is no power center on the left other than the Democratic Party. The Green Party is so feeble as to be irrelevant and the rest of the left is just voices in the wilderness. Bernie Sanders is probably the most leftward of the power center, but I would call Bernie "leftish" rather than actual left.
There is no political Left in the US in comparison with most other countries, so the what is considered the political "left" is comprised of those less right than the Right.
"...so the what is considered the political "left" is comprised of those less right than the Right."
Spot on, and that's what should be stated time and time again when these rightists claim to be on the left. Today on C-Span we are joined by the slightly less headbanging headbangers who call themselves Democrats and we are also joined by the more headbanging headbangers who call themselves Republicans. It'd be a mouthful of an introduction, but at least it would be accurate.
@Matt, I'm not familiar so, I read in the Wikipedia, about Title IX:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Are you arguing that people (probably women) should be discriminated because their sex on the issue of receiving Federal financial assistance or education? How does this even make them less "unqualified"?
Ignacio,
it results in quotas. This is a big part of why the alt-right is ascendant... white males become under represented in a stochastic analysis...
Ignacio,
15:30 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27RXiA0qkrM
Might be a big part of why alt-right is getting rolling among millennials...
"...The truth is that severe and devastating political defeat in elections..."
Another crap political analysis underpinning another sophmoric attempt to foist some dreamy ideology onto not only a majority of Progressives, but of the total electorate, who supported what the Dems were offering in 2016. As with so many political 'experts' these days, the author confuses the YUGE and dire consequences of the election with the tiny-hands way it came about. It's not that Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million, it's more that she lost the election by just 78K combined votes in PA, WI, and MI - less than 0.2% of the votes cast - and most of those voters had voted for Obama, twice. Sure, some of it was due to those 0.2% voters succumbing to the 3-decades-old 1/2 billion dollar per year Clinton Hate Derangement Syndrome industry but most was simply due to a sense of being left behind (and forgetting or taking for granted that we were lifted out of worse economic contraction and finacial meltdown since the 1930s) and thinking maybe CHANGE is needed. The problem is that while burning down one's home is CHANGE, some people don't get how much they screwed themselves until they try to find a place to sleep the evening after the fire. The one silver lining in the conflagration to come is watching the "so-the-what-is-considered-the-political-"left"-is-comprised-of-those-less-right-than-the-Right" false equivalency crowd finally being enlighted by the fire.
Salsabob, now that IS political analysis! Very well argued. The one thing I would add is that Killary was a bad candidate: wooden, aloof, rightwing warmonger. All the polling shows that Bernie would have thumped Trump, so that's another commendation to the antidemocratic superdelegate system. If she was such a bad candidate, why did she win more votes than any other candidate in history. Leaving aside the fact that with population growth there will always be more voters every election cycle, we can safely say that other than the tiny proportion of people who think Killary's a goddess who has descended from Mount Olympus, I think the vast majority of those who voted for her were simply voting against Trump. There was little real passion or conviction for Killary.
It is refreshing to remember, as you point out, that the election came down to 0.2% of votes cast, and of those they had previously voted for Obummer, and these typically working class Democratic voters only went full retard because they had had enough of being spat at, while a good deal of Rep voters are simply deluged by the most ludicrous propaganda every day of their lives. Years ago, a friend of mine told me how he sat through Fox News, believing it to be political satire! He howled like a dog for an age. It slowly dawned on him that it wasn't satire, but rightwing propaganda. It is funny the first time you encounter it, easily mistaken for satire, whether it's Fox, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage or any of the rest of these headbangers, but it isn't funny after about an hour or two.
" that the election came down to 0.2% of votes cast,"
Youre making Trump's argument for voter fraud investigation for him...
the election came down to 0.2% of votes cast
Actually, Trump and others pointed out that the prize is not won in popular votes but electoral votes. He maintains that he could have won the popular vote if he had targeted it but it did not since its electoral votes that count. His claim about the having abel to win the popular is immaterial now since he targeted the electoral vote and won. According to DJT, HRC was poorly advised not to campaign in swing states MI, WI, and OH.
He is right on that. The Dem strategy failed and Trump's proved to be the correct one.
But it was more than just strategy. The Democratic party establishment lost the plot and then shot itself in the head by undercutting Bernie. Really clueless and they still don't get it apparently.
Tom: "He maintains that he could have won the popular vote if he had targeted it but it did not since its electoral votes that count."
Of course he's going to say that! What else can he say? That he doesn't mind even if he lost by fifty million votes because he could have won them if he had wished to but he knows it's all about the electoral college? There is no evidence that Trump could have won the popular vote. And I don't think that it's plausible that he could have won but simply chose not to because he knew it was unnecessary. Every president wants to win the popular vote. They may say otherwise, and drone on about how the US is a electoral college democracy and what not, but it does not sit well. Especially for someone like Trump.
The Dems ran a poor candidate and a very poor campaign. The only reason Killary got as many votes as she did was because half the population was scared shitless at the prospect of a Trump presidency. I saw that time and time again on UK television news. When asked why they were voting Killary, the vast majority said they were anti-Trump. Pressed on the matter by liberal journalists that that did not sound like a ringing endorsement of Killary, American voters agreed.
But, Tom you're missing the point that Salsabob was making. In the end, the presidency was decided by a tiny proportion of working class Democrats who decided enough was enough. They'd pretty much always voted for the Dems, and were, whether they knew it or not, the difference. They were the difference, even if Killary won by ten or twenty or fifty million votes. Killary could easily have won by more than three million votes and still lost the election. The issue was rust belt working class voters turning against their political party. If the Dems had run a half way intelligent campaign, they'd have won, but being the closeted liberal snobs that they are they take the plebs votes for granted.
John, I I have explained previously now US politics works. It looks quirky from the outside but it is designed to protect different groups from the tyranny of the majority.
All political strategists realize that the battle is for electoral votes and HRC lost key states that she expected to win. As a result she did not campaign hard there and the strategists did not allocate a lot of funds there. In hindsight, it was a stupendous blunder and it cost her the election.
Could she have won those states if her strategy was better? Almost certainly.
But HRC decided to write a lot people off, and the Dem establishment strategy was to go after independents and disaffected Republicans, figuring the base had no where else to go and would vote for her anyway. Big mistake.
The Dem politicians and a lot of Dem activists have been so busy blaming everyone but themselves that they have further lost the plot and are wandering around in the weeds not even looking for the ball.
Losers. No one likes or respects losers. They have a real problem and they are not facing up to it yet.
This is a big deal because the Dems have many more senate seats at risk in 2018 than the GOP. Even Elizabeth Warren who progressives are touting for president in 2020 is lagging in the polls and could lose her senate seat in 2018.
This is turning a loss into a debacle.
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