Quote:
Originally Posted by AllTheCheese
PSA is effective propaganda for the Democratic party, which is good. Even the left of median of the Democratic party. They've raised millions of dollars for candidates like Beto and others. What is happening itt is that people found a cudgel to clobber them with - zomg they had a Republican guest on a few times, and it turns out he was ****ty like every Republican - when in reality their dislike of the show comes from the bro-ness of the hosts and their relatively slight establishment bent.
I like your summary. The poker equivalent is that this is like, second level thinking. Which of course is that for critics, this a bit of a cudgel AND that some of the distaste is for the PSA fratbro establishment brand.
But OK, that's the point! That's the third level of this criticism. Why de-couple the notion that the bro-ness of the hosts and their establishment bent is WHY they are completely comfortable with ****ty Republicans, and that's baked into the criticism and the emotion here? I think you're halfway saying that the critics really want to hammer the PSA guys for being uppity white guys born out of the establishment of the Democratic Party, and their critics are cynically using their friendship with a ****ty Republican as a bait-and-switch for the real criticism they want to make, but I'd argue that's missing the point and you shouldn't decouple the two.
I think the ultimate criticism is that progressives who channel a lot of their political agency through Pod Save America style brand (e.g., former Obama dudebros, on a podcast no less, the modern white liberal high art) are effectively lionizing the status quo political ethos -- centrist, performative wokeness but ultimately corrupted and anemic (again, a podcast of former Obama's former white dude staffers where their political effect has, multiple times ITT, referred to their advocacy for Beto, new white liberal scion).
And the longstanding, low-level criticism is that this is white guy co-option, channeling what progressive energies might be out there into the establishment white guy political order.
And so: Tim Miller is proof these people haven't changed, won't change, aren't different, and this is subterfuge, that the worst aspects of the Obama Admin and his politics (genuflecting to the dominant mores and norms of white guy centrism), that a political movement led by Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor where the frontline communication is a podcast is ultimately co-opting the left back into the status quo, centrist, establishment mold. That their woke dudebro act is the pretense, that they're perfectly comfortable with huge corporations and money and Tim Millers of the world, and they're effectively the Pied Pipers of the nascent and growing left movement in the US.
tl;dr summary: your correct to note that underlying a bit of the Tim Miller backlash is a proxy criticism of white guy political hegemony, which ...yeah. That's why people are leery of PSA, that our politics is rife and corrupted by faux leftist white dudes who fraternize and travel in elite circles with Tim Miller types, channel political energies into white guy establishment centrism but sell performative progressivism as a branding exercise.