June 2, 2020

Collapse of Dem coalition, as riots target fellow libs rather than conservatives

There's been a major shift from the riots of the mid-2010s to the latest explosion. The black riots of the BLM type used to focus on cops and whitey, while the antifa type focused on Trump, GOP offices, "punching Nazis," conservative media, the Republican inauguration, and so on and so forth. In other words, none of their targets were fellow members of the Democrat coalition, either at the elite or popular level.

When antifa was going nuts back in 2016 and '17, I pointed out how closely they resembled the informational wing of the Deep State -- that is, the CIA rather than the Pentagon -- in their choice of targets. What happened to smashing up Starbucks from the early 2000s anti-globalization days? Or the corporate media? Or the banks, on Wall Street or elsewhere? Or mainstream / sell-out / corporate Democrats like Crooked Hillary or Joe Biden? Or the DNC writ large?

Antifa were utterly MIA when it came to protesting the DNC in 2016, for example, whereas the Bernie bros and babes were out in full force, along with Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Lots of Bernie's delegates were protesting from the convention floor, drowning out the neolib speakers. And yet, not an anti-fascist activist in sight -- then, or throughout that entire primary season.

That's because antifa is not a substantively radical group. Nope: like other brands of liberal, including the DSA and the fanbase of the Chapo Trap House podcast, they were mostly whipped up into a frenzy by Crooked Hillary's loss in November 2016, and the prospect of the Orange Bad Man occupying the White House. They are aesthetically radical, emotionally / socially / psychologically radicalized, etc. But politically they're slaves to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. They are angry, polarized liberals -- not Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, or whatever else they and their right-wing foils want to believe them to be.

However, over the past week the nationwide riots show these two groups -- angry blacks and angry white liberals -- going in a new direction. No longer are they confining their targets to the safe ones for their political coalition -- e.g., Trump supporters, "Nazis," GOP politicians, oil pipelines, police, military, and brands associated with conservative / GOP voters like Walmart, Chick-fil-A, and the like.

Why not? If you wanted to loot a big box retailer, why loot the Walmart for liberals -- AKA Target? Friendly fire! Why burn down a McDonalds, famous for liberal culture warring in their ads, rather than the Christian conservative Chick-fil-A? Why descend upon and vandalize the corporate headquarters of CNN, progressive local newspapers, and indie bookstores, rather than Fox News, conservative local papers, and Christian bookstores? Why destroy an Apple Store rather than a boat dealership? An Amazon truck rather than a supermarket?

It's not as though the rioters are ignoring the safe targets -- they're still punching Trump supporters, running over cops, and looting gas stations. But for the most part, they're turning on their own within the Democrat coalition, whose elites control the sectors of finance, tech, and media / entertainment. They've even set fire to the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, striking at the organized working class in the sub-elite level. So much for this being a Marxist, communist, or economically focused insurrection.

As for unorganized groups, who are not part of the 1%, most of those being terrorized by these riots are fellow liberals, Democrats, and urbanites. That includes professional-class city dwellers, as well as poor urban blacks. None of them feel great seeing their own backyard literally going up in flames. Of course the urban blacks and professional urbanites who are out rioting, or egging them on over the internet, feel great -- I'm talking about the typical slum dweller or yuppie. They may not want to say anything out loud, but they do not want to see wanton destruction of the city they like.

Suburban, exurban, and rural residents may be incensed by what they're seeing going on in the cities, but they don't feel terrorized. They know it's not going to reach their neighborhood, let alone their doorstep. And they're more comfortable than the urbanites in writing off the anarchy and destruction going on in the urban core -- if they gave that much of a damn about such places, they wouldn't choose to live far away from them.

They washed their hands of the ghettos decades ago, but by now they don't even give a shit about the yuppie gentrifiers who moved in to "clean the place up". I don't think professional-class transplants understand just how little respect everyone else has for their crusade of gentrification. We don't care that crime is low in some downtown area that we never went to in the bad old days. And we don't find your new neighborhoods cool and enviable -- a vegan Buddhist cafe instead of a guitar store on St. Mark's? A trannie ball-waxing salon instead of a used bookstore? Borrrinnng.

While we don't like what we're seeing, it doesn't strike fear into our hearts like it does for the urban liberal Democrats whose neighborhoods are being pummeled into oblivion.

So, what this wave of riots shows is that polarization has intensified so much that it's moved past the basic level of left vs. right. They did that back in 2015-'18. Now it's entirely groups within the left half of the spectrum turning on each other -- and the occasional police target, since cops still get in the way of rioting sometimes, but not extending to broader right-wing targets.

This is the IRL version of the collapse of the leftist bubble that had inflated during the previous vulnerable phase of the excitement cycle (2015-'19). Indeed, none of them care about what Bernie is saying or doing -- he's just being ignored in the corner. And none of them are holding up Biden as a leader or savior. Sure, if they turn out to vote, they'll vote Biden over Trump. But when a political coalition is this fragmented and waging open-ended and escalating internecine violence and destruction -- don't count on a large-scale unified assault on Election Day.

If you thought the divisive Dem primary of 2016 portended electoral fragmentation when it counted in November, it'll be even worse this time, as the clients of the various Democrat patronage networks are biting the hand that feeds, and as the representatives of the Democrat machine are forced into punishing their clients, however lightly it may seem to conservatives outside of those networks.

Just imagine having the most recent memory of your party being either fear caused by their inaction -- for non-psychotic blacks / white libs -- or burning resentment over their cracking down on your public outrage -- for psycho blacks / white libs. That is not going to inspire and motivate turn-out for that party in the general election.

As usual, all signs point to this disjunctive phase in the regime cycle lasting more than just the usual one term, and thus like the 1856 election preceding the Civil War. The opposition party -- Whigs then, Dems now -- are too psychotically polarized at the moment to accept a mass wave of defectors from the dominant party (Democrats then, Republicans now). They are so polarized they've devolved lower than intransigence against the other major party, and are hell-bent on splintering their own coalition to maintain the purity of their own narrow little sub-group.

The realignment phase will have to wait until, like the GOP grew out of the ashes of the Whigs, something new grows out of the self-immolation of today's Democrats.

19 comments:

  1. What Steve Sailer calls the KKKrazy Glue of the Coalition of the Fringes is losing its stickiness as the black-SWPL conflict intensifies:

    https://www.takimag.com/article/the_kkkrazy_glue_that_holds_the_obama_coalition_together_steve_sailer/#axzz5Uya7zWSH

    https://www.amazon.com/Race-Class-Politics-Cappuccino-City/dp/022644953X

    ReplyDelete
  2. Also unlike earlier riots, the blacks and white libs have confronted each other, IRL and online.

    Once it was clear that these were not pure angry-black race riots, the black side tried blaming the angry white libs -- "your mayhem is going to provoke a police crackdown that will hit blacks worse than you whites".

    They managed to triangulate and reach the compromise position that the white rioters were ackshually Nazi provocateurs. But several days later, even that risible lie has fallen away, since it would have required the white libs to STFU and GTFO. It could only be a face-saving measure while they stopped rioting.

    But whites have kept on rioting, so the black side stopped condemning the white rioters altogether. There's still an uneasy tension between them -- we will riot over here, you will riot over there, and try not to get in each other's way or cause a crackdown on the other one.

    It's not a unified or cohesive supergroup, but a fragmenting coalition of angry polarized Democrats.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do you see a long-term resurgence of woke ideology or will it be negated by the warm-up phase?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sailer's analysis is culturalist, like all of the contempo Right. (I am literally the only one who is conservative in any way, who has presented a materialist view of politics.)

    Ideology is just a rationalization that coalition members tell each other to feel more emotionally bound to each other. But what actually unites them are shared material interests, which cannot be so overtly described as what unites them -- that would sound too crass and transactional, liable to make coalition members suspicious of one another as mere thieves in a loose band who could defect at any moment.

    If a coalition is fraying, it's not because their feelings are weakening per se -- that's just a symptom of a rift in the underlying material shared interests. Like the Democrat patrons largely cutting loose their former clients -- during Obama's two terms, only the upper-middle class libs received any of the central bank's multi-trillion-dollar money-printing.

    And since their party got kicked out of the White House, their elites have been even less able to deliver the goods. Lots of lib professionals are now downwardly mobile indefinitely, and blacks are still getting "paid" primarily in feel-good slogans and mass-media representation, rather than cold hard cash money, from their patrons.

    That's what's going on, not a weakening of the "hate whitey" ideology.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That also shows the wrongheadedness of saying "corporations" are woke and supporting the rioters. That's only true, or mostly true, of the elite sectors in the Democrat coalition -- finance, tech, media / entertainment. And other informational sectors elsewhere, like the CIA within the Deep State.

    Ideology and culture do not unite that coalition. It's their material interests as sectors whose status, power, wealth, etc., are derived from non-labor-intensive activities. Whereas the GOP sectors are united behind the material interests of labor-intensive activities -- military / police / armed force, manufacturing, agriculture, energy.

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2017/05/dems-wall-st-party-gop-pentagon-party.html

    I've been trying to make this catch on for three years now, but it is largely ignored by both the Left and the Right. First, it's materialist rather than culturalist, so there goes most of the online consumer audience.

    But even for those who are sympathetic to material analysis, it's not strictly class-based but prioritizes conflict within the elite stratum (informational elites vs. labor-intensive elites), and says that the elites and the workers will mainly try to get along within their own sector, so there go the Marxists.

    And it deprives the Right of being able to blame "corporations" for supporting the riots, when it's mainly the Democrat corporations doing so. Corporate agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and defense contractors are not out there defending BLM and white rioters like the corporate finance, tech, and media / entertainment brands are.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The rub for Dem elites is providing jobs when their sectors are non-labor-intensive. Finance, tech, media / entertainment will never be able to provide that many jobs at the professional or working-class levels because those kinds of activity can be scaled up easily -- being informational, unbound by material constraints -- and so, eliminating the need for lots of employees.

    They try to make up for this by providing government service jobs, through their control over state and local governments. The DMV, postal service, schools, garbage collectors, etc., are all labor-intensive activities provided by the government. They require lots of workers, so that's plenty of paychecks to be distributed to their voters.

    But there's only so many make-work jobs for state & local govs to create. So you can expand your client base a decent amount -- to include urban blacks and white schoolteachers -- but not enough to contend for national control.

    Contrast with the GOP elites, who oversee labor-intensive patronage networks. The military, police, prisons, border patrol, ICE, mall cops -- all labor-intensive activities, all requiring lots of people to work for them, all able to spread the GOP's pork around the bottom 99% of society.

    Ditto in principle for manufacturing, agriculture, and energy.

    However, the GOP faces a different tension -- the compulsion to hire cheap foreign labor (importing immigrants or off-shoring to 3rd world), to drive down unit labor costs, since Americans will only work for so cheap. That then cuts off the GOP clients from their patrons, who are now employing clients from around the world -- who, as non-citizens, cannot vote for the GOP and keep them solidly in political power.

    If immigrant strawberry-pickers could vote, California would still be a red state (contra the racialist / culturalist analysis on both the Left and Right). Farm hands don't care whether their paymasters are white or Latino, they just want job security and a steady income, and they'll vote for whichever party sends the most pork to their own sector, hoping for some trickle-down.

    But Salvadorean strawberry-pickers and Afghani military informants can't vote in American elections, so a huge chunk of the GOP elites' client base has no ability to return the favor politically.

    This is the impasse we're at now, before a realignment shakes things up. The Democrats must deliver protectionism for the jobs of American citizen workers (and professionals) in labor-intensive sectors, at least one of them like manufacturing, against cheap foreign competition.

    That would bring a labor-intensive client base into the Dem coalition, and give them shitloads of new voters, sorely needed because info-sector white collars will never be numerous enough to dominate national elections. And the defecting GOP workers / professionals would be eager to receive protection, after getting sold out by their GOP elites who have off-shored and outsourced for decades.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I have seen some RW-ers appropriate the patronage term, but only to own the libs in online discourse. What higher goal is there for the contempo Right, after all?

    I.e., casting the Democrats, liberals, and urbanites as part of patronage network (or a coalition of networks), as though they're a backwards remnant of the Tammany Hall era, and as though blacks are the only racial group to behave politically according to the patronage model.

    But the military, agriculture, manufacturing, and energy? Nah, those aren't patronage networks. They're job creators, staffed by tax-payers. And GOP voters are not voting for the narrow material interests of their patronage network, to ultimately benefit their individual selves -- they're the last of a dying breed of patriotic, materially disinterested citizens seeking the best for the nation.

    And they refuse to blame the GOP patrons for cutting off so much of their former domestic client base, in the pursuit of lowering their labor costs. If you cut off all your clients, who the fuck is there left to vote for you, or support you in any other political way?

    Nope, these right-wing numbnuts still believe California turned blue because a bunch of Democrat-voting DNA was allowed to invade the border by liberal Democrats. Rather than the obvious causes -- the military off-shoring their operations from the American West Coast to the Persian Gulf, the Hindu Kush, and the former Eastern Bloc.

    Sure, they still employ some Americans in those foreign bases, but are they registered to vote in California? No. And all the secondary links are local -- that is, foreign to Americans. Nobody in California, outside of San Diego, benefits by even six degrees away from military spending. So there go millions of potential GOP swing voters in the largest state in the nation.

    The CA ag cartel stopped hiring more-expensive Americans ages ago, and again the foreign replacements can't vote. So there go millions more potential GOP sympathizers.

    CA used to have manufacturing all over the place, including Silicon Valley. Check any vintage Apple products, and they're all made in USA, excepting some monitors which were made in Japan, not China or Malaysia. But then the National Assoc of Manufacturers, through the Reaganite GOP, de-industrialized the economy in order to get cheaper costs. So there go millions more former recipients of GOP elite largesse.

    Who does that leave in California to vote Republican? A handful of small biz owners who don't want to fund the nation, and hoard more wealth to themselves? Ideological voters -- i.e., hardly anybody?

    The only elite patrons left there are finance, info-tech, and media / entertainment, plus state & local govt make-work jobs. Sounds like only Democrats can put food on your table, and a roof over your head, if you live in the largest state in the nation.

    Who the hell else are you going to vote for? The party that nuked its entire patronage network throughout the state, in the pursuit of cost-cutting? Gimme a break, of course California's turned from medium-red to deep-blue.

    And any right-winger who peddles an alternative framework is just trying to sheepdog you back into "voting straight R," lest the nation perish. Gee, it's been going so wonderfully with the GOP as the dominant party since 1980!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One more sector of the economy to add to your materialist analysis of party patronage networks: healthcare, whose partisan alignment has become more clear than ever thanks to the coronavirus outbreak. Democrats trust the experts and hail the hospital workers as heroes; Republicans believe the opposite of whatever the experts say and froth at the mouth over dancing nurses in TikTok videos.

      This also brings a fresh perspective to Democrats’ plans for healthcare reform, and the GOP’s obstinate refusal to do anything about it. Healthcare is a far more labor-intensive sector of the economy than the information-based ones that are the other pillars of the Democratic network. There are entire cities where the hospitals are now the single largest employers.

      This presents a solution to the Democrats’ dilemma of not enough jobs to dole out to their supporters, which is why the Democrats are eager to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding the healthcare industry (and improving access to it among their own economically struggling voters).

      It’s a little less clear where pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare insurance (the parts of the medical industry nobody likes) stand; both parties seem eager to court them for their money while trying to hang the blame for the public’s grievances with them on the other party. The Medicare for All faction of the Democrats is ready to toss the insurers off the bus, but they do not have control of the party yet.

      One more note to this: the one sector of the healthcare industry in full alignment with the Republicans are the VA hospitals, in keeping with the fact that the Pentagon is the GOP’s main patron. Republicans always campaign on the Democrats neglecting veterans’ healthcare.

      And the fact that much of the GOP voter base is now aging and suffering from ill health is yet another case of the Republicans nuking their own base of support in their obsession with driving down costs and spending.

      Delete
    2. The healthcare sector being relatively labor-intensive does throw a sizable kink into your model of the information-intensive vs labor-intensive sectors of the economy, but another of your ideas (from your boobs vs butts posts, of all places) can actually account for it.

      What we really have is patronage alignment that is based on the corporeal vs the cerebral sectors of the economy. Agriculture, manufacturing, energy, the military - all corporeal labor. Finance, media, entertainment, healthcare - all cerebral.

      This accounts for many other things. Why is Trump loved by the military’s rank and file but despised by the flag officers in the Pentagon? The generals have been promoted beyond corporeal labor into jobs that are all cerebral. The same is true in general of the party’s voting base and the party’s elites and elected representatives. The party’s elites are businessmen and lawyers, which accounts for the gaping disconnect between them and their predominantly corporeal voting base on both cultural and economic issues.

      Trump’s physical presence and persona played a key part in winning the hearts of Republican voters. Sure, he is a lifelong businessman - but he swaggers around and talks like a construction site foreman, a man who does corporeal labor. He doesn’t just agree with us, he is just like us (if you gave one of us a billion dollars).

      The corporeal voters are heavily invested in cultural issues, the cerebral elites are not; it’s all about the money for them. The man on the street Republican voter be far more open-minded to the notions of ending the wars in the Middle East, bringing back factories from China, or expanding Medicare than he will be about giving up guns or letting drag queens read stories to children. Conversely, the affluent businessman Republican will eagerly trade guns, LGBT rights, and favors to minorities away if it means keeping taxes low and business unregulated.

      The right wing gym bros may be blockheads on plenty of things, but they do fundamentally understand this divide. The cult of lifting offers a pathway for suburbanites who aren’t necessarily working corporeal jobs to develop a corporeal focus, and thus closer alignment to the right wing on cultural issues.

      Dancing is another activity that can help people expand the corporeal side of life, but it’s something the right has tended to frown on throughout history and across most cultures, unless it is highly polite, structured, and restrained, as without these limitations it’s just a warmup for mating.

      Which is why we see dancing embraced on the left. It’s Bernie girls and hospital nurses posting TikTok videos, and BLM demonstrators spontaneously twerking on the streets. Dance-oriented pop music artists are all aligned with the left; the few right wing holdouts in the music industry are found in country music, heavy metal, or dad rock, genres that will never be played at clubs.

      Delete
    3. I believe the corporeal vs cerebral focus on cultural vs economic issues extends to the left as well, with one caveat that’s more important to emphasize here: there’s a floor on material comfort, where if you’re below it, you’re not going to care about cultural issues, keeping food on the table and a roof over your head is going to take priority over everything.

      Thus corporeal-oriented urban black voters who despise faggots and think women are bitches will vote Democrat without a second thought, that’s the party providing their meal ticket and place to live.

      And the likewise corporeal-oriented antifas, who do come from materially comfortable middle class backgrounds, are extreme radicals on cultural issues but indifferent to fighting neoliberalism. They are a completely different crowd from the Bernie bros and the dirtbag left chicks, who come from the same class background but are cerebral instead; they are willing to be flexible and moderate on cultural grounds but hardliners on restructuring the economy.

      And at the elite level, you have the neoliberals themselves, extremely affluent and extremely cerebral, completely cynical on cultural issues and willing to advance or discard them as convenient, all about keeping the economic status quo in order and servicing their big patrons.

      Cerebral vs corporeal further explains why academics and scientists are so overwhelmingly aligned with the Democrats and the left, and why the right instinctively supports police officers and looks toward action movie stars (Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood) or sports heroes (Tim Tebow, Tom Brady, Tyson Fury) for lone resistors to the left’s cultural dominance.

      Cerebral/corporeal is the missing third level of analysis to the fault lines in American politics, along with class and race. It would help if there was a convenient one-word shorthand to label it with, but I’m drawing a blank on it. Any ideas?

      Delete
    4. But one thing actually: the corporeal/cerebral split almost perfectly mirrors the S/N split in Jung and MBTI.

      Delete
  8. Turchin seems to have been accurate about mass violence peaking in the early 2020s as this Angela Nagle article has pointed out:

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/angela-nagle-on-peter-turchin-the-russian-historian-predicting-chaos%3f_amp=true

    ReplyDelete
  9. The situation in Chicago has become an intra-group conflict, black vs hispanic. What happened was that on Saturday there was a ton of looting in downtown. Sunday with all the police downtown blacks started looting the stores in their neighborhoods, it was surreal you had middle age black laddies getting out of their cars, forming orderly lines, going into stores and taking as much as they could. I'm sure some of them rationalized it by saying that the stores were going to get wiped out anyways they might as well get something out of it.

    Monday with all the stores in black areas wiped out they decided to try and go into hispanic areas. The hispanics were prepared to defend their turf and it got the point where any car with a black person in it got a brick thrown at it.

    Now supposedly blacks want to take out revenge on hispanics and have something planed for tonight.

    The local PBS station had the most amazing interview the white gentrifier alderwomen was yaking on about racism while the black alderman was demanding the national national guard be called up to defend the only Wal-Mart that wasn't looted.

    Incidentally the Rodney King riots(as well as a bunch of riots in 1980s Miami) were actually black anti-immigrant riots with blacks attacking both the market dominant Koreans and labor replacement Central Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Nice seeing someone on the Left finally promote Turchin. Till now, only conservatives read his work and promoted it (including here, going back to the early 2010s -- mainly applying his overall framework to new case studies). And of course that article had to be published by a conservative newspaper, not a liberal/left one.

    He's on the left side politically, supported Bernie in 2016.

    So why is the Left allergic to his work?

    - Not derived from philosophy, lit, "theory", or other lib-arts, but science and history. Having to learn specific things, rather than deduce from general principles, deprives cerebral people of their craving for pure abstraction and context-free bullshitting.

    - Materialist rather than culturalist. Both Left and Right are 99% culturalist these days, though.

    - Focuses on group vs. group conflict. Uh-oh, describing that is the same thing as validating that, which is the same thing as causing that to occur. Especially when the conflict is across a "meta-ethnic frontier" -- leftoid morons think merely talking about this universal process is what causes it to happen. So just shut up, and it won't happen -- magic words!

    - Prioritizes conflict within the elite, rather than Marxist-style class conflict.

    - Focuses on dynamics and cyclical behavior, frustrating progs who view things as only getting better and better -- or, to be fair, conservatives who view things as only getting worse and worse.

    - Describes how immigration lowers bargaining power -- and therefore, material welfare -- of domestic working class. This is a third rail for liberals.

    From my overall impression of what makes the leftoid mind tick, I'd say the main factors are the anti-open-borders implication, and the requirement to know stuff rather than be able to bullshit in utter ignorance. Liberals, whether aesthetically normie or radical, just want to riff and toss around empty takes about why morally conservative people are evil.

    It's really shocking how little anyone on the Left knows about any topic, other than contemporary pop culture and media.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Even Matthew Yglesias of the SWPL-outlet Vox has heard of Turchin!:

    https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1268136980178767872

    ReplyDelete
  12. Other shift: thotties at the marches, whereas antifa are ugly crust punks. Among standard leftoids, you're lucky if there's one passably hate-fuckable girl there. And forget about the Russiagate, pussy hat crap that was dried up disgusting hags.

    I don't mean the new girls are red-hot, just a decently toned bod, clean long hair, cute face, under 30 y.o. And not overwhelming in numbers, but a handful here and there during any video that's longer than 10 seconds.

    Their presence does not mean that normies are becoming radicalized substantively -- rather, that the whole march / vigil / protest / riot is a politically status-quo affair, but now some of the former aesthetic normies are dipping their toe in the aesthetically radical pool.

    Only their toe, though -- they haven't uglified their personal appearance, but they are mixing into a social crowd of aesthetically radical liberals.

    BTW, they were the ones who defected from Bernie to Warren. Didn't want to mention that during the early stage of voting, but those Iowa caucuses did not show the same picture as 2016, where there were tons of Bernie babes.

    After the leftoids hijacked his campaign and alienated a lot of his former supporters, the girls who remained were a lot worse-looking, whereas there were plenty of normie cuties now standing in the Liz Warren group. Heartbreaking.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Just went on walk through the CBD where the riots were the only store that looks like it was spared looting was Urban Outfitters.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Healthcare falls under govt services supervised by the Dem machine, like schools, post office, DMV, etc.

    Like schools, the most politically powerful group of healthcare "workers" are the professionals -- doctors and increasingly nurses (post-grad, credentialed), not the ones who file records or staff the reception area. Teachers are also post-grad credentialed professionals, not workers.

    And like schooling, healthcare per se is not very profitable, which is why only 25% of US hospitals are for-profit. Big pharma is different. Insurance is different -- part of finance. But it is crucial for operating society -- their elites could withhold their services, and cause others enough pain to give in to their demands.

    However, since most people are fairly healthy, the main group that needs it are old people -- and they get 100% free govt healthcare, not from their employer and/or a private insurance company. So those clients are already under the patronage of the govt, in this case overseen by Dem elites of machine origin rather than GOP elites.

    Ditto for those too poor to afford insurance, and under 65 -- Medicaid. Clients of Dem machine-origin elites.

    ReplyDelete
  15. How much of the "defund the police" movement is about shifting funds liberal sectors? Defunding the police is very popular with talented tenth blacks but much less popular with regular blacks who think racist cops are a problem but at the same time often want more police. Hispanics tend to be even more pro cop. So defunding the police mainly means letting go of cops and providing more jobs for the PMC.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."