Dear Identity Politics: please die.

???

 

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If neither you you can comprehend what I said, I don't know how to help you. Perhaps you should rephrase your question and we try again?

 

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Well, you're really close: It's about fighting for rights and against privileges.

 

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How about the right for us to have control of the government, what about that right? You want to fight for that?

 

I put it in quotes because I was utilizing (quoting) your exact words...

 

You just got to love a thread where everybody disagrees with everybody else. Especially poignant when it is a thread about everyone focusing on what we should all agree on. It's quite made my day. Thank you all.

 

I think the liberals should continue doing exactly what they are doing. It is working out very well for the Republicans.

I read a study about youth suicide. Did you know that over the past 60 years the rate of suicide has quadrupled for males and doubled for females. About 47% of the total is connected to homosexuality. This rise is attributed to an increasing lack of coping skills.

If we trace back 60 years to say the mid 1950's, this is civil rights, the rise of modern feminism, sexual liberation, loss of moral and religion; liberalism. You can see the affect on contemporary college aged students who now need safe zones to avoid mean sounding words. Who runs the colleges? Feminism and liberalism has made men feel guilty about being men; evil male, leading to loss of male instinct which is the basis for a males best coping skills.

Make America great again is a movement to reverse this damage.

 

It's called the Republican Party now, or sometimes "alt-right", "both sides", "American People", etc. - changed from "T-Party" etc - and it's moving into the White House.

Jeffery Beauregard Sessions III, lifelong and nth generation member named for two of its most famous luminaries of the past by his doting parents, is the official nominee for Attorney General of the United States. Did you catch up on any of the man's confirmation hearing?

Oh man. The idea that Barack Obama (or lord save us Hillary Clinton, of all people,) is "ideologically driven", would be comedy gold if the tragedy of it were not still in front of us, hiring Steve Bannon to manage our media world.

And the answer was, as always with her, "I want to be President".
And she won a majority of the "popular vote", despite that. Because the Republican Party has become a horrible thing, and no one can completely conceal that even from a talk radio listener - if they have any decency as a human being.

A majority of the American people voted for "nothing in particular" instead of the Republican Party nominee. So there's hope.

Identity politics was forced on the country by the success of Nixon's Southern Strategy in the hands of Reagan. Racially bigoted white Christian fundies are the largest single "identity" in the country, and the two wings (fundie, bigot) expand to around 27% of the electorate and nearly 40% of the ordinary vote.

The Dems best chance of beating it was - in my opinion - courage: ignoring the identity division claimed by Wallace/Nixon/Reagan, courage and forthright adherence to principle in the face of temporary setback, straight and overt appeal to principle and straight talk about economics win or lose; because the Fundies + Klan even together is still a minority in the United States - decent outnumbers confused and angry reactionary even in the white suburbs and trailer parks. And reality will out.

They chose triangulation, "both sides", obfuscation of conflict, reactionary compromise after compromise on basic and bedrock principle , and so forth. Their leadership voted to hand Iraq War powers over to the likes of W&Cheney, and tossed all vestige of "socialism" out of their management plan for medical care delivery to the non-rich public, and helped discard key features of the New Deal financial regulations because they interfered with maximum profit accumulation by Wall Street financiers.

Now they stand for nothing except "not fundie/bigot", and are currently discussing discarding even that - because it draws accusations of elitism and name-calling and being an extreme leftist - in spite of winning a majority of the vote, and losing the election on fraudulent manipulation only.

 

Yeah sure, tell me when they start lynching "negros"vagain. Here is your problem: you can't comprehend the idea of NEW enemies, no no they are all the old kind of enemy (like those dastardly Jews, always behind everything!) No the "alt-right" is in a new kind of enemy, yes made of out of some parts of the older but with new features and agendas and most of all tactics, we must adapt to those tactics, develop EFFECTIVE COUNTERMEASURES and we muse WIN or else this alt-right will rule us until inevitable destroying the nation ala 2008 or worse.

Yeah, because everyone has been talking about it, I do listen to NPR and BBC you know. Do you think I enjoy his cabinet picks? The man seems to have enough sense to know he has no fucking clue what he is doing so he has differed to the first politicians to back him, simple political back scratching, only those where the WORSE politicians the republican party had to offer. Long story short there is nothing, NOTHING we can do about it, thanks to the likes you and your ilk helping us to lose ALL POWER to them.

 

Or shooting them?

The current Republican Party is a new thing, to you. You never saw anything like this before. You were born yesterday, and fell off the turnip truck in Washington DC, and it's all so new and strange.

Well, maybe rookie enthusiasm will provide some benefit, overpower the ignorance. But if the first thing out of your gate is blaming some mythical left for pushing the Democratic Party to extremes of lefty ideological rigidity and losing the Silent Majority or whatever the term is these days, you might want to read up a bit on this idea of "new tactics". Because the first time I heard a guy like you talking like you're talking was in 1968. And it didn't work then, either - just like it didn't work for Hillary. Pretty much exactly - same voter groups, same tactics, only they were actually novel at the time. Nixon's Southern Strategy has been the Republican Party's basic approach ever since, and it's how they won this one as well. That and electoral fraud.

And you see a new kind of enemy - something you've never seen before.

Check out Reagan's cabinet, in 1980. W's, in 2000.

 

Sure or putting them in deathcamps what ever.... Oh OOOOH I get it, you think the ~300 blacks shot by police is part of a racial program of oppression? Well if it is it is so grossly ineffective as to be ignorable. The degradation of loans, education and infrastructure for the poor in general is a problem that completely encompasses and surpassed any lingering racial oppression of blacks. To the rich is it merely happenstance that minorities make up more of the poor, the poor in general they would have ground into fertilizer if they could, regardless of race, but no regressives like you want to make it a race thing, want to divide us from fighting the common enemy. And don't tell me again to consider racism and sexism as the true obstetrical, no, thanks to that kind of thinking we lost everything... you have no honor, none. Not even seppuku would help you. And that is the real problem: very few of you regressives will accept that you helped put trump in charge, you will take no corrective action and at best enough of you will merely quite down to become background noise next time.

So this is what your reduced to, claiming I'm a baby? Pathetic.

Blah blah blah, it worked for the Clinton in the 90's. Bill Clinton's "Southern Strategy" won him the presidency. Despite appeasing the southern whites the Clinton's did so much for the black community then they were even calling him the first black president. Of course even 10 years later cleaning up the streets by imprisoning so many aah "super predators" had made Hillary un-voteable to the younger generations.

Had we simply gone with Bernie and focused on infrastructure reformed, education debt pay of, loan pay offs for the poor and middle class, single payer medical care, etc, we would have won and likely even taken back the senate with all the enthusiasm Bernie generated (the down ticket effect of Hillay's lack of appeal was horrifying). We were that fucking close! But no instead Hillary won the primary, regressives claimed he did not support blacks enough took hold, DNC wanted to use Bernie's jewish heritage against him, Bernie supporters were called sexist (How do you say, Bernie Bro?), everything turned to how great it would be to have a women president and then BOOM we got President Trump.

Session was US Attorney General then... oh no, no he was not. Where is Turd Blossom, where is Dan Quayle? Oh that right they are nobodies now. The Bush administration is mucked openly by the new adminstration and alt-right. Steven Bannon, Donald Trump, Rex "I gave Putin a blowjob" Tillerson
are a whole new kind of political nightmare, if they were not then they would have lost. They are new and we were not ready for them, certainly not a political dinosaurs like Hillary, who had so many fucking harpoons in her already!

Trump is president, the republican control everything and you claim what? Stay the course with identity politics?

 

Of course it is, and it's been reasonable effective for your entire life, despite some hard won and discouragingly slow progress over the past century or so. Did you somehow overlook that? It's kind of important, politically anyway - it's why Sanders got beat in the primaries, it's how Clinton got beat in the electoral college (the various electoral frauds and suppressions and manipulations (that cost her at least 60,000 votes in Detroit alone, headed for a 15,000 vote loss in Michigan, for example) were all - every single one of them - designed to suppress and undercount the black vote).

Uh, no, they're not. They're the same old political nightmare, winning the same way Reagan and W won, as old as Babylon and as evil as Babylon was supposed to have been (which I don't believe for two minutes - that's fundie revisionist history if I ever saw it - but let's go with the myth).

The fact that you think the current batch of alt-right or whatever they decide to call themselves this week (because renaming yourself at will, and having every patsy and sucker go along with your new name every time, is an important job skill when your business is a swindle ) is something new, something you've never seen, is absolute proof that you are getting your entire view of the world from inside the wingnut bubble.

They're marketing themselves as new, brand new, the latest thing, just as they did with Reagan ("Morning in America") and Bush ("New World Order", borrowed from Goebbels himself) and W (Project For a New American Century) - you don't have to go along with that. It's just marketing, bait - have a little dignity, try not to just swallow the worm first time you see it.

Which brings up a central question: how is it that these guys get to rename themselves as well as everything else every few years, and pretend nothing they did before ever happened? Why do people cooperate with them?
Look at this shit, for example:

This was directed against - no kidding - "the left". And it's about stuff that happened within the past sixteen months.

Why, after the left has once again been beaten by the rightwing DNC establishment and its "triangulations" (a defeat the left has experienced every four years since WWII), would someone assign the bad stuff from that same DNC and the Republican media operations to "the left"? Why do these people buy into wingnut vocabulary, wingnut lies and slanders, and DNC ass covering deflections, while acting all victimized by the left - as if "the left" had done something to them?

 

And We Make 'Em Just Like This

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It's a fun narrative, isn't it? It's not that I outright disagree with you on these points, but you're overstating some and, quite frankly, continuing to be stubborn about the other. For instance, as cartoonist Jen Sorensen↱ put it:

Let me start by saying I consider myself to be somewhat to the left of Bernie. I favor a Scandinavian-style social safety net — heck, I am Scandinavian. So this comic is not coming from the perspective of a milquetoast centrist Democrat, or even a strong Hillary partisan, as I'm guessing some will assume in our world of fun political binaries. What concerns me is that I'm seeing fundamentally right-wing concepts being adopted by those who self-identify as lefties or progressives. You might say I'm criticizing the left from the left ....

.... Hillary has certainly frustrated me at times over the years, but I came to admire her intelligence and poise over the course of this election cycle. Her performance at the debates with Trump was nothing short of heroic. She also ran on the most progressive Democratic platform ever, but since policy has become almost completely divorced from politics, she gets little credit for that. I could go on, but as my husband says, this was not so much an election as an exorcism, the culmination of a decades-long smear campaign by the right.

The term “political correctness” has been the cornerstone of conservative efforts to transform the ideas of civil rights and equality into something frivolous and stupid. The right loves plucking silly examples from obscure, powerless people and blowing them up into huge “culture war” issues that supposedly threaten the nation. “PC” is an insult that plays into their hands.

Along these same lines, “liberal elites” — long a Fox News favorite — is designed to shift attention away from the actual economic elites hoovering up the world's wealth and resources, such as the Koch Brothers or Trump, and instead make one think of poodle-owning urbanites supposedly looking down their noses at everyone (while in reality voting to raise the minimum wage). It's a frame, not a fact, and hides a deep anti-intellectual agenda.

Don't fall for these con-job concepts! The world doesn't need any Fox News Lefties.​

It's going to be important in coming years. Long have Democrats botched themselves to bits trying to imitate marketplace successes of Republican neighbors; indeed, this is how Democrats alienate their liberal base in favor of a triangulated centrist pitch.

The prospect that what liberals should adopt this time is right-wing rhetoric should go over about as well as negative advertising, which really helped the hell out of Democrats over the years, didn't it?

Democrats have yet to learn that the bully society isn't going to reward them for giving over; they already have ready-made bullies to rely on. Democrats have yet to learn that adopting the bully society only further alienates the human resources of liberalism and leftism in our society; not only do people falter at the ballot box, they simply don't put as much into the campaign process. The dedicated volunteers will do the hard work they always do, but they're not going to be buttressed or bulwarked by the same numbers and enthusiasm in cyclical-sometimes volunteerism.

But the right-wing rhetoric bubbling up in the range between Bernie supporters, who could often be heard reminding that compared to actual socialism the platform wasn't situated especially leftward, and the far left that loathes the Democratic Party, anyway, will not make a useful addition to the Democratic repertoire; it will harm the Party over the long run, just as it did this cycle.

And, really, lamenting self-inflicted wounds is one thing, but it's up to us to make the new ones↱.
____________________

Notes:

Sorensen, Jen. "Cartoon: Oddly Familiar Talking Points". Daily Kos. 3 January 2017. DailyKos.com. 12 January 2017. http://bit.ly/2j1g97e

 

I'll give any Clinton handy as much credit as anyone thinks they've earned, for conjoining policy and politics - with automatic updates every fifteen minutes, apparently.
That is, after all, how we got the Republican health care kludge from 1993 imposed on the entire country and blamed on the Democrats.

But "heroic"? No. There was no heroism in this campaign. This was ugly, and like most ugly rooted in cowardice and cynicism.

 

Yeah sure more conspiracy theories. Please cite who determined 60,000 votes were suppressed in Detroit alone. And I don't see how voter suppression has anything to do with pisg killing blacks. Pigs killing blacks was for a time, in the 90's, something much of even the black community approved of, when they cheered the Clintons get tough of crime bill.

Insane, Illuminati, Elders of Zion level drivel from you, there is no hope for you. I stopped reading here, lets see what Tiassa has to say.

First of all Tiassa this is not a "triangulated centrist pitch" to say our primary issues should be single payer healthcare, paying off student loans, debts, basic income guarantee, etc, pretty sure that is pretty fucking far on the left in the same vain as your Scandinavian comic artist. Now the fact conservatives utilize politics correctness as a weapon against us should be sign enough that we need to keep it on the down low and focus on the above issues that we can get broader support for, that does not mean we won't be improving civil rights, for example Obama and Hillary both shunned gay marriage in 2008, as supporting it then would have ruined their chances, none the less under their administration gay marriage became legal, do you think a republican administration would have allowed that? There are issues the marching morons are simply not ready for, like pumping out an executive order for transgender bathrooms months before an election.

Imaging your trying to sell something, sell it to as many people as possible, a white man comes up, what are you going to say:

A) "here buy this because as a white male you're the oppressor of everyone else and need to check your privilege, if you don't buy this you are racist sexist bigot"
B) "here buy this, it will give you a stable job, improve your income, reduce your debt, added to your retirement account and make all your worries go away."

You and your ilk specifically, and Hillary Clinton generally did (A), while Trump, a natural born hukster, did (B). Resulting in Hillary Clinton making virtually no gains in any demographic and losing white males, even white female vote. She garnered less votes then the second term vote for Obama, while Trump got more votes than any Republican EVER. Now yes Hillary got 3 million more votes then trump but thanks to our horrible election system that gives white states more voting power, those very same whites Hillary shunned, she lost the electoral college.

Now I want you to take a good look at that comic again. Had we had Bernie the first panel would one not count, as Bernie was outside the "establishment" and his platform was working class issues, even republicans I met door to door while campaign admitted that. The second panel would not have counted either as republicans would just have had months to demonize him verse the DECADES they had been demonizing Hillary, lastly Bernie would have won, despite the regressive left's constant yammering, and I would not be grilling you now for being the regressive bully that you are that help trump win, so you can count that panel defunct as well.

 

One reason Donald Trump is about to be nominated is that Americans believe in myths about America.

One of these is that an individual, a John Wayne character, can achieve things by not doing things by the book, by upending norms and making authorities nervous about their . . . authority. Another is that people like this exist, not just in the movies, but for real. The kind of people who sacrifice things for the good of the many, etc.

But the choice they made is none of these things because the things are mythical. America is about to see some of its cultural myths traduced by an individual who is a complete idiot; they voted for the Joker and the Joker always ends up in Arkham asylum.


My thanks to Mark Hamill for this insight (and of course, DC comics, the best goddam comic books in the free world. Absolutely the best).

 

Attend your own complaint and stop wasting your life↗.

 

Why can't I waste my life now? trump president, what fucking life do we have left? I have a lot of people to blame for everything trump does before we die, and you are no done getting your share.

 

The people who counted more than 70,000 ballots from black people in Detroit who stood in line for hours to vote and then supposedly - the machines said - cast no vote for President.

The recount attempt was forbidden to examine most of those ballots, because the machine count of the ballots in those precincts did not match the count of registered voters who voted.

Really. Do you suppose the Republican Party campaign strategists are similarly clueless?

Hillary lost some important less-white States, and won several more-white States. She won Minnesota and lost Wisconsin, for example (more blacks in Wisconsin); won Oregon and lost Mississippi; won Vermont and Rhode Island and lost Alabama.

And the curtain rises on what's really going on with this poster. There was Hillary, "shunning" white people and pandering to black people. No wonder she lost.

So pointing to thirty five years of continuity in voter support, ideology, personnel, media relations, espoused agenda, rhetoric, vocabulary, campaign tactics, and actual behavior, in the Republican Party and its endorsed politicians, is "insane drivel".

And that is your excuse for posting lies and slanders and idiotic accusations against people you don't know, crap you got from DNC apologists and wingnut websites.

That was all lies and bs, you moron. They weren't all just idiots about it, either, like you telling me I need to stop calling people racists and fascists: many instigators of that were intentionally lying and slandering, deliberately misleading their victims - apparently including you - into feeling dissed and abused.

Nothing you "keep on the down low" is going to shut down the Republican media operations. Look at how difficult it is to stop even you from claiming people like me went around namecalling our neighbors, even screaming at them, calling them racists and sexists and so forth instead of presenting them with a good case for rejecting Trump - and you're honestly mixed up and ignorant, in theory persuadable if someone wanted to take the time: the Republican media guys know exactly what they are doing. They aren't persuadable at all. You can't make deals with them, say whereby you agree to never say the word "fascist" under any circumstances and they agree to quit telling their target voters you've been calling people names.

 

(if i had a title ....)

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Well, see, that's the thing. To the one you lament wasting your life. To the other, you apparently need an audience while you do.

Seriously―

―the advice of a conservative is the advice of a conservative.

The thing is that your critique does not show itself capable of dealing with narrative (A). It's not that people aren't aware of it. If you were an actual liberal instead of whatever manner of poseur, you would already know that. The general frustration is what to do about it, because the actual elements of narrative (A) are not prerequisite to narrative (A) being in play.

In the end, you have no answer for this problem. Nor are you trying. Neither are those points what we might call surprising. In the end, the advice of a conservative is the advice of a conservative, and, you know, there's only so much to be done with it.

So, you know, sure, I kind of agree with your lament↗ insofar as if you're going to put that much effort into convincing me American liberals ought to adopt a conservative narrative it really does seem like you're wasting your time↗.