Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
Yeah, well, I am not the voice of the coalition or anyone by myself, but speaking for myself: I don't trust you. Not you personally. The royal you -- all the centrist and NeverTrumpers and New Left Democrats. I found a lot about the old order lacking but it was a good bit better than our current situation. The policy outcomes were often bad but not your principle failing as coalition partners.
The primary failing was that the current situation was very predictable; my tiny voice on 2p2 counts for nothing but I have like 10 years of posts that speak to the growing alarm about how the right AND centrists were flattering if not wholly welcoming of Trumpian style. Obviously I am just cribbing from the rest of the left, so take my voice as representative of many people who warned of the same. So I feel confident to speak to this point: The right has been descending into paranoid, angry madness for a generation and longer and still right-wing radio hosts were allowed to be part of our respectable polity. Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly ostensibly ran a sexual harassment shop in their spare time, but their full-time gigs were giving voice to racist idiots and conspiracies and anger and treachery of the liberal order you cherish. And respectable centrists and Republicans gave them access and interviews and the veneer of approval. Ever unhinged lunatics like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and the rest showed up and no one bothered to check their influence. When the left did, they were taunted.
You -- the royal you -- did nothing but embrace it. Told whiny liberals to pipe down, shut-up, this isn't a problem, it's all under control. These people are fine, it's your noisy alarmism that really is the big problem here. NOW at the moment of their increasing political inconvenience and risk to the things you cherish -- because black people, immigrants, women, the poor, and the old welfare schemes now dismantled were ephemeral and part of the collateral damage costs of doing business with the angry white hordes who signed up for Yacht Club Republicanism free trade and deregulation -- NOW you agree, come to think of it, this is all really heinous. A big problem. Let's join together and impeach the orange menace.
As you constitute probable bad-faith actors just looking for a critical mass of people to leach off of, I see no reason to enter into any sort of long-term coalition again. One of the things Trump really laid bare is that the emperor has no clothes. The Bernie-style left has the actual people and votes and energy; what do the centrists have to offer again? It ain't votes. It ain't political capital. It's mostly just actual capital. That's important but you get the sense the owners of capital are as cowardly and feckless as Trump proved them to be, and can be cowed. And the political utility of capital can be overcome with dynamic personalities and new mediums. Capital will eventually genuflect to wherever the power is and will take deals to protect some of their hordes at the risk of losing more of it. Roman elites bargained with barbarians for like 300 years after the Crisis of the 2nd Century. The early Anglo Saxon and French elites paid the Danegeld for generations. The Business Plot against FDR never really rose to much beyond a wild scheme. Capital interests are powerful but they aren't stupid. They'll play ball with the left for concessions.
So I don't see why the left should really entertain this long-term. Maybe as a last-gasp temporary kludge to impeach Trump and avoid nuclear holocaust but that's it. The center is dead and dying. Impeachment would be a godsend but I think the left has to think strategically for the days beyond if that scheme doesn't work, and there's really no much more for the centrist to offer anyone, and I think the left has been fooled for far too long by ultimately powerless centrists offering a lifeboat against encroaching and creeping strident reactionary right-winger idiots. The worst fears have been realized, the inmates took over the asylum, the whole leftist Faustian bargain with the centrists is that you got your trade and deregulation and tax cuts in exchange for keeping the inmates in straight jackets so we could keep some statutory protections for blacks and immigrants and women. Instead you loosened the locks and gave them ever-more freedom and told us to quiet down when even our minimalist goals were threatened. "Hey, uhh, it's nice that public schools are desegregated, but come to think of it your school-choice schemes are re-segregating them, cops are still throwing tons of black guys in prison for drug offenses, also we noticed you seem to be passing ever more de facto burdens against their right to vote?" we would meekly ask. We would get some measure of polite head-nods, maybe a hand-waving gesture of sympathy, then the measured centrist opinion elites would head back to Fox News to gab with Sean Hannity about the Muslim Brotherhood and BLM alliance that threatens white child blood vitality while the capital would mostly be used to fund Republicans.
Not sure why we'd fall for that again.
The main problem with this is that the Bernie-style left does not actually have the people and the votes and the energy like you claim. Bernie lost, decisively, to one of the least popular presidential candidates on record. Bernie-would-have-won fanfic is a self-indulgent delusion. If you'll permit a historical analogy, he's basically Celestine V. Celestine V was an extremely holy hermit in the 13th century who lived in a cave and prayed all the time. He was so holy that he inspired a whole order of holy hermits to live in desolate monasteries and pray all the time. Very nice. Meanwhile, there was a bitterly contested papal election, where two deeply corrupt Roman factions kept throwing up competing candidates, but they couldn't come to a consensus. Meanwhile, Rome was spiraling into chaos, riots in the streets, Christendom without a leader. Eventually, someone came up with the brilliant idea of nominating the holy hermit, Celestine V, and everyone thought it was great. Forget all these corrupt money-grubbing big-city folks and go with the man of principle, and he was duly elected pope. Needless to say, he was an awful pope, resigned or was forced to resign before the end of the year, and turned things over to Boniface VIII, who was terrible and led directly into the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism and all that.
You can tell yourself all you like that centrists somehow betrayed the left by failing to stop voter suppression bills, but the actual fact is that voter suppression laws were enabled by left voters who couldn't be bothered to turn out for down-ballot elections for the state legislatures that enacted them. The Tea Party lunatics won because Democrats couldn't get elected to congressional seats no matter how crazy their opponents were because the voters let them down. I agree with you that the right should have been punished for the Tea Party movement and it's unfathomable that they weren't punished for Trump. It would be nice if we lived in a country where they were punished for tacitly courting the support of racists too. But where we part ways is that you think that they should have been punished by centrist voices scolding them. I don't ascribe as much influence to the disapproval of George Will or some hypothetical #NeverTeaParty movement. Rather, I think they should have been punished by losing elections, but it didn't happen. The moderates have been taking the band of psychopaths that the electorate gave them and trying to keep them from doing something insane like defaulting on the national debt.
I'm in favor of anything that will get a more moderate, less RWNJ legislative and executive branch. If talking about socialized medicine and 60% tax rates on labor income is what it takes, I'll deal with that. I don't even have much of an opinion on whether it's true or not. That's just electioneering, and I'm not a political consultant. However, I do think it's a dangerous fantasy and a reversal of causation to believe that our current political crisis is a product of centrists betraying a powerful leftist movement to serve the interests of capital. The compromises that you resent were necessitated by the failure of the electorate to deliver wins for the left, especially downballot.
