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Originally Posted by DVaut1
Today in asymmetrical partisanship, liberals lament the loss of The Weekly Standard for presumably Discourse related reasons:
Gonna be lit when these guys start a Patreon to give Bill Kristol a publication again.
Again, just try to imagine a single right-winger ever sitting around fretting about the loss of The Nation or Mother Jones or some ****. That's neither here nor there but it just goes to show how elite discourse works, the right wingers are uniformly hardcore ideologues and the supposedly liberal left people with platforms sit around pining for vibrant political debates (with people you might even revile!?) for completely obscure reasons.
In other words, in the debate between the libs and the fascists on the value of the Discourse, you tend to agree with the fascists?
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Remember if you swapped out The Weekly Standard with Stormfront pamphlets they'd get it, that actually no, no one should root for platforms for people with politics you revile, which should prove this isn't so much the mental disease it appears on first blush but is almost certainly entirely ideological, that these guys don't revile The Weekly Standard in the least and want them as counter-parties for Discourse. Josh Marshall types will ultimately pivot to saying this is bad because without The Weekly Standard, more extreme voices are going to fill the right wing mindspace (lol a little late there buddy, this is the result of that, not the precursor) but then also ignores how The Weekly Standard was simply an intermediary stopping point, a contributing factor to the rise of the fascist right. 10 years from now these people are going to getting the fainting couch when Breitbart goes under because Richard Spencer's YouTube page is getting all the traffic and ad revenue. Even if you revile Breitbart's Black Crime section this is not at all good news, not remotely says 2030 Josh Marshall. Even if you revile Tucker Carlson it is not at all good news his show has been cancelled because it cannot compete with the Gavin McInnes 8pm NewsHour on ProudBoys.tv.
It's kind of hard to see how your predictions about the future actually differ from Marshall's, or even how your feelings about those predictions differ. I mean, I think Marshall is deeply concerned that in 10 years, the right is going to consist solely of cryptofascists and open facists. I imagine he views this as a deadly serious problem because the government of the country is going to be in the hands of the right at least half the time, and having a government run by fascists who are smarter than Trump is a mortal problem. If you're on board with all of those things... why wouldn't you think it's scary that the more centrist parts of the right are disappearing. Even if you despise Bill Kristol, I have no doubt you would prefer to be governed by him than Gavin McInnes, right?
The fundamental logic of democracy is a competitive-cooperative model. The literal whole point is that you want your side to win as much as possible, but you acknowledge that the other side's victory is an acceptable outcome. If you're living in a society where one of the two governing alternatives is no longer acceptable, then you are an opponent of democracy. What Marshall is alluding to is that the survival of an acceptable right is a necessary condition for the survival of democracy. Perhaps what you are saying is that there is no acceptable right and the libs need to get on board with the revolution?