January 1, 2019

Bernie is the most populist / socialist, not the "most left" -- therefore, the only shot to win the general

Socialists who are trying to clear the 2020 Democrat primary field for Bernie are going with the argument that Bernie is the farthest left, there's no one to his left, he's the true left, etc., against the identity politics crowd who would place all sorts of other Democrats to Bernie's left, including Harris, Booker, and other liberals in good standing with the ID-pol camp.

They are quibbling over the definition of "left," attempting to wrest it away from meaning identity-oriented SJW and back toward meaning class-oriented populist. But words mean whatever the language community's consensus is at the time and place that they're being used. You can't re-define words and expect everyone else to go along with it.

And right now, in probably every country where there's a word for "left," it refers to identity politics rather than class politics. It means supporting a coalition of certain marginalized identity groups -- people of color, women, gays, foreigners, etc. (Other marginalized identities fall under "right" ID-pol -- founding stock natives, heterosexual men, etc.)

"Left" does not mean wanting to break up the cartels that run our society, wanting labor unions to play a stronger role in the economy, seeking government protection for certain industries, and so on.

Like it, or don't like it, but that's what it means.

It's no different for "right" or "conservative". Everyone understands that to refer to culture-war topics, not so much to deregulation, tax cuts, military expansion, and the rest of their material agenda.

The populists supporting Bernie should learn from Trump's successful populist insurgent campaign in 2016. He did not run as the "most conservative" or the "farthest right" -- indeed, his opponents continually decried him as "not a true conservative," not a real Republican. And that charge was true -- he was a moderate on culture-war topics.

More importantly, though, he did not emphasize these identitarian distractions one way or the other. Some Republicans going for the yuppie vote try to play the culture war game, only from the liberal side. But Trump avoided those topics altogether, sticking with trade and industrial policy, militarism / foreign policy, and immigration. Whenever the culture war came up, he waved his hands and then moved on to his familiar material issues.

As he put it (paraphrasing), "Folks, I do happen to be conservative, but who cares? Our country's a mess, and we don't have time to worry about who's conservative, liberal, or moderate."

Some of his supporters may have made earnest arguments about how he was actually the truest conservative of the field, and the true candidate of the right, based on some rejected usage of "conservative" and "right". They didn't feel wholesome voting for a moderate, and felt better if they could cast their choice as ideologically pure. But nobody else bought that argument.

The same must happen on the Bernie side for 2020. He should not bring up identity politics or intersectionality at all, except to briefly wave his hands while mispronouncing a shibboleth to prove to the normies that he isn't really "one of them" (psychotic SJWs).

Voters worried that Trump might be another Bible-thumping Republican were quickly relieved to hear him mispronounce "Two Corinthians". Only someone who's never been to church, and doesn't take religion seriously, would fuck that up so bad. Phew! Evangelicals like Ted Cruz would never have made such a mistake.

If Bernie were to botch a pronunciation, fumbling over "outer-sectionality", it would relieve the non-leftist voters that he has nothing to do with identity politics. After the neoliberal shills jumped on his mispronunciation in the broadcast media, social media, etc., that would only convince normies all the more that Bernie does not belong to their in-group. Phew! No way would we ever vote for someone who revered a concept like "intersectionality".

All this crazy hand-wringing over identity politics would give Bernie the perfect opportunity to, like Trump, say "Look, I do happen to side with you guys on social and cultural issues, but there are quite frankly far more dire fundamental problems facing this nation, so who cares about who's liberal, conservative, or moderate?"

Like Trump, he would not be taking the opposite side of his party in the culture war, but ignoring it altogether, and casting aspersions on those who fixate on it -- as Trump did to Cruz et al, who were more worried about trannies in bathrooms than whether the working class would continue to be able to support their families if the management relocated their factories to Mexico, or whether we should go into debt by another $7 trillion just so the generals can play Risk in the Middle East.

The fact that Bernie is not the "most left" of the 2020 Democrats -- e.g. on "Abolish the 2nd amendment" -- is a selling point for the general public, not something to obfuscate or apologize for. If you need to tell yourself he's the "most" something, to make yourself feel pure, tell yourself that he's the most populist or the most socialist. No one believes those terms refer to social-cultural issues, and nobody disagrees that Bernie is the most class / economics populist of the field, by far.

Abandon the pointless struggle to re-claim the definition of "left" from the long-victorious SJWs, and prioritize terms like populism or socialism, choosing appropriately for your audience. Symbolic battles are not supposed to matter to materialists -- so just let the SJWs have their stupid "left" word, and use that to marginalize them with a general audience in order to advance materialist populism.

"See, the SJWs themselves hate Bernie -- what more of an endorsement could you want, Independent / Moderate / disaffected voters?"

5 comments:

  1. Happy New Year!

    Bernie is nearly eighty and while healthy, should not and will not be president on account of old age, not that the Democratic machine will allow an outsider like him anyway

    That party needs a new populist hell it needed Paul Wellstone ten eyars ago but he's long gone .

    I can promise you that they Neo Liberals that run the Democratic party won't allow a populist not that they have one to send.

    Ironically its less Democratic as such goes than the Republicans.

    As for a fix, I'd like to think that the system can be reformed but I'm short on ideas to make it happen.

    Trump and not my words here is our Gorbachev and as such is quite possible the USA is headed down the same route as the USSR . Hell California our most populace state is according to the census bureau our least educated

    That's right out 3rd world sh*t right there and its not something a few policy tweaks can bring us back from





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  2. I think the neolibs will spoil the election for Bernie and elect the non-Trump GOP candidate.

    Either they rig the primary, and Bernie or a substitute runs 3rd party, and the deeply hated neolib Dem loses yet again.

    Or, they allow Bernie to have the nom, but then run a 3rd-party neolib Establishment campaign, say Biden-Romney on an American Party ticket ("country over party" and "avoiding the extremes of both sides").

    That 3rd party doesn't have to directly steal votes from Bernie, although it will do that. It will mainly serve to tarnish Bernie, and send those voters over to the Reaganite GOP candidate.

    That would be akin to the 1856 election, which is where we are structurally -- hyper-polarization leading up to civil breakdown, and after the first term of disjunctive rule for the dominant party.

    So the Establishment wing of the old opposition party (neolib Dems) will cause a 2nd disjunctive term for the old dominant party (neolib GOP). That rarely happens, since do-nothing end-of-era administrations are so hated and dysfunctional that they get swept away after only one term.

    But when the opposition collapses, like the fragmenting of the Whigs into Republicans and American Party in 1856, or like the fragmenting of the Democrats into Sandernistas and neolibs in 2020, that allows the sclerotic dominant party to eke out a rare, 2nd disjunctive term.

    Of course, who's to say it'll only last one more disjunctive term? That's the parallel from before the first Civil War. But if the neolibs fuck it up bad enough, maybe they'll elect another Reaganite GOP-er in 2024 as well.

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  3. But I think the disasters of the GOP admin from 2021-24 will be so great that it will break the will of the elite sectors with true power, who control the Democrat party as their vehicle, and they will effectively fire the neolibs from the Democrat party apparatus.

    The big Wall Street banks are not going to just sit around while yet another end-of-era Reaganite Republican adds $10 trillion more to the national debt, threatening to vaporize the value of the financial assets owned by the finance sector. The Pentagon, controlling the GOP, owns no such assets -- they're all tangible, like military bases, weapons, vehicles, equipment, social capital like troop loyalty to attack whoever the leaders say to attack, etc.

    So the military will never care about Wall Street banks getting wiped out, or the central bank going bust from having to monetize the debt incurred primarily by the military, but also by agriculture (who we just gave nearly half a trillion dollars to for one year).

    Wall Street investment banks and the Fed were perfectly well-off during the New Deal, when they were in the driver's seat of the New Deal Dem coalition. But after getting demoted to opposition status, they've lost control under Reaganism / neoliberalism.

    If they want it back, they're going to have to fire the neolibs and do something at least quasi-populist, just to finally dethrone the Reaganites.

    But it won't be like the New Deal. Following the historical cycle forward, it will be like the post-Civil War coalition -- robber barons, updated for today (tech titans). But the Lincoln era did abolish slavery, build public infrastructure, and stabilize the finance sector somewhat from the Jacksonian anarchy.

    I don't expect much more of them this time around either -- it will be mainly a Reconstruction after the Jacksonians / Reaganites destroyed the country. After that, a pivot toward McKinley-style progressivism. And only after that, a new New Deal.

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    Replies
    1. Not an unreasonable notion.

      I suspect instead the US will just slide deeper into the 2nd tier power and will end up governed more in line with its neighbors to the South.

      Our institutions are simply too broken to repair at this point and too many people here want nothing to do with them other the an what they are forced too for a wide range of cultural reasons

      Note here are three most populated states (Texas , New York and California) are our least educated in percentage terms and while highs school graduation is still above 80% a prosperous modern economy is very education and skill intensive.

      We don't have the demography or culture for that and its going to wreck us. Also unlike the robber barons who you quite rightly note they resemble. the tech sector is brittle . Its lacks any real substance and fast change can take out today's big players. Railroads and factories decay slower

      This suggest to me no matter who is in charge the US will become increasingly ungovernable and might collapse or go to a hot civil war as well and there is basically nothing that can be done that will matter over a longer term



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  4. The mainstream media is finally starting to run the article about the Trump supporter college student who got kicked out of medical school at the University of Virginia for publicly debating with a far-left SJW communist professor. Here are two new ones:

    https://bigleaguepolitics.com/college-student-suspended-for-antagonizing-sjw-microaggression-lecture/?utm_source=srp002

    https://www.halseynews.com/2019/01/02/kieran-bhattacharya-kicked-out-of-school-for-questioning-sjw-lecture/

    Someone also took the time to type up a transcript of the events which happened: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/927181909976616960

    Reddit is freaking out about the story too, of course. 1000s of comments on these threads:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/absqb1/4chan_red_piller_gets_kicked_out_of_med_school/

    https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/abigoo/ms1_suspended_after_challenging_microaggressions/

    https://www.reddit.com/r/UVA/comments/ab1dy7/university_of_virginia_med_student_receives_1year/

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/abloyy/medical_student_burns_every_bridge_past_present/


    This story, known as MedGate, has the potential to create a mass public outcry against our far left college system, and thus cause real damage to the student debt loan bubble.

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