And speaking of laments, I can think of no better way to characterize Michel Lind’s article at Tablet Magazine which I don’t believe I’ve ever cited before. In the article Mr. Lind argues that today’s progressives have blundered down the same arid path that conservatives did years ago and there’s precious little creativity or dissension from the accepted orthodox view:
If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention†is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.
Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.
It is not surprising that the written output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus tends to read like an NGO word salad with crunchy croutons in the form of acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.
Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.
In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.†Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center left as “colorblind racism,†and progressives in the name of “equity†are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent†Asian-Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.
The same mindless orthodoxy is seen in issue after issue from immigration to energy to LGBT+ rights and a host of others. The orthodoxy is enforced through a combination of blacklisting and censorship.
Read the whole thing.
That’s odd. The stuff I read by people on the left does all of the things he says you cant do. For sure there are a lot of people who make sure they hold all of the views he suggests but some of these are actually minority views. As I demonstrated yesterday very few cities actually defunded the police and those that did have refunded. A dozen or so congress people, does not as Dave suggested, constitute a majority who support it. Indeed Biden, the guy who won the nomination, campaigned against it. Still does.
Steve
steve, you are moving the goal posts. You said “nobody”. Not “majority”. It doesn’t take a majority of its members to screw up a political party.
Dave you just posted a guy and suggested it be read that claims there is no dissent from Defund the police. None. I searched the cities listed in your Forbes article and none of them I could find had not increased funding if they did initially cut it. Could I have missed some city? Sure. If you have to look that hard to find someone is it a problem? No. Is it easy to find Dem leaders who oppose defund the police. Yes, start with Biden. Are there a few congress people who still talk about defunding the police probably. I am guessing those are the ones covered non stop by the right wing media but just like I dont really think MTG is the official spokesperson of the GOP those people dont represent the Dems either.
So I will freely admit I was wrong and correct myself. Nobody is wrong. A small percentage of Dems actively support defund the police. Nobody that I can find is acting on it. There is lots written about it. Your writer isn’t even remotely correct.
Steve
And that small percentage is really screwing the party for November.
Way I figure, Steve is right.
A screwed up party with the wrong people still turning the policy screws should lose.
They’re so shrill they can’t hear the people laughing.
That’s amazing spin, steve. Staking out a 100% standard, citing only congressmen instead of all sorts of public officials – especially Soros funded DA’s – (yes, the George Soros you said a while back was nothing more than a Republican boogieman), and citing the current posture after two years of defund mentality.
And actual cuts or redirections to useless social programs occurred or are occurring in the following little, no-name burgs: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Portland , OR, Seattle, WA, Austin, TX………..
Nothing is monolithic. Save that dumb debating tactic for your sewing circle. As Dave notes, a vocal and very visible minority in major cities makes the case and tars the majority.
I agree a minority of fringe Dems, like the squad and big-mouth Maxine Waters, are the ones publicly spewing the defund-the-police mantra. However, the majority of Dems, who silently sit on the sidelines not refuting the idiocy of their democrat comrades, are the ones quietly anchoring such foolish policies in place. IOW, what you permit you are also seen as supporting.
What tars the majority are the lies claiming that the fringe represents the majority. As noted, Biden, among others, has explicitly refuted defund the police. So Dem leaders have in fact not been silently sitting on the sideline. Then you have the actual actions (I know you guys think words are more important) of the Democrats in either not defunding, very largely the case, or increasing funding in the few places that actually carried it out. Actions speak louder than words, except when you are a conservative I guess.
Look at the two articles Dave has cited. Both full of outright easily proven lies.
Steve
The “fringe†is the squeaky wheel making most of the noise and getting almost all of the attention – especially from social media and the legacy press. I actually think the “majority†in this country is comprised of people with center right principles and opinions. Whether it’s voter ID, pro life issues, free speech, law and order policies, immigration, religion, school choice etc., most people seem to support the more conservative stances vs the ones espoused by and put into practice by the current democrat administration. However, despite their numbers, traditionally conservative people continue to be degraded by the fringe, ignored or put down by the sanctimonious elite, while the middle class is continuously shrinking under the pressures of heavy taxation, inflation, and onerous job and business-killing regulations. Who flourishes under a democrat regime, like we have today, are illegals, the subsidized poor, and the rich elites, lending itself to larger income inequality chasms between the grouping on either end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
As for Biden refuting defund the police measures, he has done nothing to support policies that would discourage criminal behavior. He is effectively nothing but a limp, lying mouthpiece, standing for absolutely nothing but weaving, bobbing and skirting his own long history of corruption.
https://www.newsweek.com/us-jobs-income-gdp-growth-startlingly-higher-under-democratic-presidents-analysis-1566313
“As Newsweek previously reported, U.S. counties won by Biden in the 2020 election make up a 70 percent majority of all U.S. economic output. Trump counties composed just 29 percent of output and included only six of the country’s top 100 most powerful local economy centers.”
Steve
It’s common knowledge that a statistical economic analysis of presidencies favors democrat regimes. However, there are those who interpret the numbers produced to be derived more through “luck†and superficial deductions than well-thought-out policies instigated under either a dem or GOP presidency.
For instance, Obama incessantly referred, for 8 years, to the recession he “inherited†from Bush. However, that recession spanned 18 months, from 12/07 to 6/09, with Biden touting a Recovery Summer (that never happened) following a massive TARP bailout – much of shared with the Obama Administration to wisely apply to shovel-ready jobs. Of course wisdom was not a strong point of Obama’s, and instead he gave lots of that stimulus to pet projects and loyal donors. While the economy didn’t technically fail under Obama – nor was he responsible for another recession under his watch – the economy merely limped along for 8 years and small business optimism was driven into the lowest numbers ever experienced. Manufacturing was also going overseas because of Obama’s support of globalism and over-regulation. Much of that turned around under the policies of Trump, even though he had only half the time to establish pathways for his policies to take hold, and was under excruciating stressful harassment before, during and now after his presidency.
Another example of a democrat presidency, glowingly reflected upon, was Clinton whose GDP numbers rose to over 7% because of the explosion of the dot com industry. However, at the end of his 8- year term he left Bush with a manufacturing sector in free fall and a crashing dot com financial bubble. All of these negative circumstances, though, were attached to Bush’s economic record, along with the 9/11 crisis, that many said was seeded in Clinton’s reluctance to preventively address the threat that OBL posed for this country.
I attributed what you’re describing, Jan, to “folk Keynesianism”, the notion that federal spending ALWAYS stimulates the economy regardless of productive capacity. Keynes certainly didn’t think that. He knew that aggregate product constituted a ceiling of sorts. The purpose of Keynesian fiscal stimulus was to fill up the gap between aggregate demand and aggregate product.
But what if there is no gap? Then additional fiscal “stimulus” stimulates nothing other than consumption and produces inflation which is at least part of what we are seeing right now.
That’s the reason I harp on production. The question we need to answer is why aren’t we producing more of what we consume here? It’s not as simple as “because it’s cheaper” because in some cases it isn’t cheaper and in others there’s no meaningful difference in costs between domestic and overseas production. I think that one of the factors is risk.
So Republicans are better and just becasue the numbers are actually better with Democrats in control its all due to luck. Gotcha.
Steve
I’m not sure to whom you’re addressing that, steve. I never made such a claim. The notion that the ARRA ended the Great Recession is a hard case to make for the simple reason that not a penny of what it appropriated was disbursed until AFTER the recession had ended. It could reasonably be claimed that the ARRA prevented a double dip recession, however.
I hope I have made clear that I think that fiscal stimulus bills can be justified if timed and structured properly. Sadly, that isn’t what’s happening.