In honor of our Celtic colonizer cousins on their national day, a few new wave-y tributes to their homeland. New wave had a penchant for combining the modern and futuristic with the traditional and ancient. This comes out most clearly in songs that reflect on a people's character and history, like the Icehouse song below.
"Down Under" by Men at Work (1981)
"Great Southern Land" by Icehouse (1982)
"Already Yesterday" by The Church (1985)
January 26, 2019
January 24, 2019
The crisis phase of the culture war, when disasters lead to defections
After the latest battle in the culture war has blown up so horribly in the faces of the liberal media warmongers, it feels safe to declare a turning point. I don't mean that there couldn't be other similar battles in the short term -- with equal or greater catastrophes suffered by the liberals -- but that we are in a new phase of the culture war, in which many who were formerly in favor of the war begin to defect, publicly and vehemently.
The losses have piled up so much that the war is seen as illegitimate even by many former sympathizers. In the medium term, this means not only a fall-off in the intensity of this particular war, but an enduring sense among the defectors that we ought to never wage similar wars in the future.
As usual, the facts of the "MAGA teen vs. Native American" episode do not matter. With all of these hate hoaxes -- from Tawana Brawley to Matthew Shepard to the Duke lacrosse team to the UVA fraternity in Rolling Stone to the Access Hollywood tape to the Kavanaugh pile-on -- the central elements of the liberal narrative are unsubstantiated or proven false.
Yet again, the key facts of the narrative were proven false in the MAGA teen episode -- the Native American approached the white kids, he beat a drum with a stick right in the kid's face without provocation, all while Black Hebrew Israelites (left out of the original draft) chanted bigotries against the white kids. So much for the take-away message that the white teenagers were the instigators, that they acted out of proportion, etc.
Indeed, the facts of some incident during a war climate are only framed in such a way as to motivate a concrete set of actions that the warriors had already wanted to achieve. It's like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was involved in 9/11, etc. -- plainly lies from the very outset, but that didn't matter. That narrative was just a rationalization for the pre-existing plan to invade and occupy Iraq, dethrone Hussein, and put the nation under the US military's sphere of influence.
So the total collapse of the narrative is not what is noteworthy this time around -- that always happens with these hoaxes. What's new is the level of response demanded by the culture warriors -- ranging from ruining these teenagers' lives to exterminating conservative white males as a group. At earlier stages of the war, they would have demanded something less extreme, like merely staining their reputations, making them apologize for nothing, or suspending them from school. Now they're calling for them to be completely unpersonned or even killed off.
This marks an escalation in the risk-reward calculation that the culture warriors are making -- increasingly high-risk / high-reward for their cause. But most high-risk attempts fail, by definition. And when they blow up, the losses are far greater than with a loss under a low-risk / low-reward scenario.
Returning to the Iraq War analogy, this is like the stage beyond the Pentagon and CIA's support for both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, or the brief safe battle of the Gulf "War" in the early '90s, or the economic sanctions of the Clinton years. Those were all relatively low-risk and low-reward. Outright invasion and occupation on the order of hundreds of thousands of troops, plus eliminating the governing coalition and its leader, was a far higher risk -- and not surprisingly, it blew up in their faces. The geopolitical goal was to keep Iraq out of the Russian and Iranian spheres of influence, and under the US sphere, but they achieved precisely the opposite.
Whereas many Republicans and conservatives -- and a good deal of liberals and Democrats -- had supported US antagonism against Iraq during the earlier stages, they could no longer defend the war. Supporters turned into skeptics, and skeptics turned into opponents, not just on this war but any other like it in the future.
Indeed, we can see the beginning of this crisis phase in the culture war already with the media campaign against Trump's sexism during the 2016 election. The facts don't matter -- how many of the accusers retracted their stories, didn't pursue their allegations after the election season, or the clear intent of Trump's words on the Access Hollywood tape (i.e., that when you're a big star, women will let you do all sorts of things sexually because women are star-fuckers who fall under the spell of your celebrity). That was high-risk -- a continual campaign against one of the major-party candidates -- and it blew up in their faces. They lost the election, even more decisively than when they were more reserved against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
The same thing happened during the Kavanaugh confirmation in 2018. They escalated from "Kavanaugh drunkenly groped a girl in high school" to "Kavanaugh's entire social circle were perpetrating a serial gang rape epidemic in the affluent DC suburbs." And what reward did they get out of this high-risk campaign? Not only failure to block his confirmation, but leaving such a bitter taste in his mouth that he will only be more vindictive against their pet causes during his long tenure.
With the MAGA teen episode, the culture warriors were not just demanding the withdrawal of a presidential candidate or Supreme Court nominee -- they were calling for the banishment, impoverishment, assault, and murder of white adolescents who don't back down when antagonized by non-whites. If you respond like a pussy-ass little bitch, then fine, you don't have to be banished from society. But if you stand your ground -- like the average, normal, majority would do -- then you should be genocided.
And what did the warriors achieve? Not a single scalp! None of the kids are going to get disciplined, none are groveling or apologizing for nothing, presumably none will be shut out from gainful employment, and none are going to get assaulted or murdered as punishment for their supposed crime. If anything, they have only hardened their targets into greater vindictiveness after the warriors lost.
And unlike the earlier incidents, this time the media had to almost immediately retract their narrative and issue mealymouthed apologies. This makes all future battles even more risky on the warriors' part, since they've already admitted their own guilt. If they were not forced into admitting guilt, they could enlist their troops into another high-risk battle. But after having to admit guilt, and cut their losses so swiftly, there will be far fewer troops willing to enlist in the next battle, and they will not fight with the same zeal.
To reiterate, this is not necessarily because those would-be warriors have had a change of beliefs -- they may still believe the narrative to some degree, but given how catastrophically their leaders have fucked up, they would not expect glorious victory but humiliating defeat. Thanks, but no thanks. These are akin to former Iraq War supporters who may still believe that Hussein was a threat that needed to be contained, but on pragmatic grounds simply do not want to keep losing wars.
Of course, some would-be warriors have gone the extra step and now no longer believe the narrative that there are widespread roving gangs of white supremacist preppies who must be eliminated before they inflict further trauma on society. These are akin to the former Iraq War supporters who will never forget being lied to so blatantly about WMDs, 9/11, etc. They might hypothetically accept a military role for the US if such claims were proven to be true, but after such a stinging betrayal, they can no longer trust the claims from the US military. In the culture war, these types will dismiss future narratives as the same old fear-mongering that they lied about last time.
A tiny minority have been principled anti-culture-war pacifists the whole time, but then they do not represent a change during this new phase. Pacifists don't end wars -- defectors do. This has nothing to do with value judgments of who has been on the right side of history, but a descriptive statement of when we can evaluate the conditions to have qualitatively shifted out of one phase and into another.
Below is a sample of these defections. They are on the socialist Left, and although I don't know for sure, probably bought into the basic narrative of the Duke lacrosse case in the last decade. Maybe even saw white preppy dudes as a bad social force needing to be contained somehow. And at least some of them bought into the initial reporting on the MAGA teen episode, before the whole picture disproved it.
But their initial reaction was that even if we accept your framing of the events, what do you want us to do? You're calling for teenagers to be doxxed, banished, assaulted, and mass murdered -- that's psychotic and disgusting on its own, and will only make it more impossible for the class-oriented Left to build a coalition to achieve a better standard of living for everyone.
That's the key distinction -- it doesn't matter if some on the Left still believe parts of a specific narrative (e.g., the MAGA teen), or the greater ongoing narrative about "shitty white males". Beliefs don't matter, only actions. If they're unwilling to enlist in the culture war, and might outright sabotage it in the future, that's what matters, not their conception of events.
This will be lost on the identitarian Right, who as idealists will not consider the culture war over until one side changes its beliefs. But to the materialist / realist Right, this clearly portends the winding down of the culture war, as liberal media generals increasingly find it harder and harder to sign up new zealous troops.
The last one is the start of a thread too long to embed here. I'm leaving Michael Tracey aside since he's been reliably against this culture war crap for awhile, and not as notable of a defection.
Here is a recent episode of the Red Scare podcast that discusses the issue, and places them within the same defector camp as the Twitter people above. Two of those quoted, Adam Proctor and Aimee Terese, host the Dead Pundits Society podcast, and will be live-streaming on their YouTube channel at 8pm ET tonight -- I'd be surprised if they didn't touch on the issue. Here are two lengthy threads, first and second, at a Reddit group dedicated to destroying identity politics in favor of class-first Leftism.
A separate defection comes from the Black identitarian part of the Left, exemplified by Tariq Nasheed. He takes the media narrative at face value -- since, again, the facts are not relevant -- but asks what the liberal Establishment wants him to do about it? Blacks have been fighting other groups' fights for too long, with no reciprocation to help out blacks specifically, so it's time to let non-black groups like Native Americans fight their own fights. (HYON means "hold your own nuts".) He emphasizes the antagonism between non-white groups, such as Native American tribes trying to keep their membership purified of black people with some Native ancestry.
Presumably, Nasheed would enlist in a culture war hysteria that involved blacks as the victims, but those have become increasingly rare. As he goes on at length about in a livestream on this issue, the mainstream now considers the narratives about blacks as victims to belong to the past, during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. They are old news. The new culture war narratives are all about women of various races, including wealthy white women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, immigrants (including African immigrants, who slavery-descended Nasheed does not identify with), homosexuals, trannies, and so on and so forth.
So while he and his fellow travelers are potential culture warriors, they will not be so in practice since the generals are no longer waging war on the "black victims" battlefield. If the only battlefields that the generals choose are about defending wealthy Ivy-educated white women, gay Hollywood child molesters, and black-hating immigrant groups, they will not be volunteering for the culture war.
Political independents and realist conservatives should be doing whatever they can to amplify these fractures within the Left, so that identity politics and culture warring can be eliminated for good. Not because Leftists will convert their belief system to that of right-wingers, but because they won't want to keep investing so much into such increasingly risky ventures that only keep delivering greater and greater losses.
The losses have piled up so much that the war is seen as illegitimate even by many former sympathizers. In the medium term, this means not only a fall-off in the intensity of this particular war, but an enduring sense among the defectors that we ought to never wage similar wars in the future.
As usual, the facts of the "MAGA teen vs. Native American" episode do not matter. With all of these hate hoaxes -- from Tawana Brawley to Matthew Shepard to the Duke lacrosse team to the UVA fraternity in Rolling Stone to the Access Hollywood tape to the Kavanaugh pile-on -- the central elements of the liberal narrative are unsubstantiated or proven false.
Yet again, the key facts of the narrative were proven false in the MAGA teen episode -- the Native American approached the white kids, he beat a drum with a stick right in the kid's face without provocation, all while Black Hebrew Israelites (left out of the original draft) chanted bigotries against the white kids. So much for the take-away message that the white teenagers were the instigators, that they acted out of proportion, etc.
Indeed, the facts of some incident during a war climate are only framed in such a way as to motivate a concrete set of actions that the warriors had already wanted to achieve. It's like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was involved in 9/11, etc. -- plainly lies from the very outset, but that didn't matter. That narrative was just a rationalization for the pre-existing plan to invade and occupy Iraq, dethrone Hussein, and put the nation under the US military's sphere of influence.
So the total collapse of the narrative is not what is noteworthy this time around -- that always happens with these hoaxes. What's new is the level of response demanded by the culture warriors -- ranging from ruining these teenagers' lives to exterminating conservative white males as a group. At earlier stages of the war, they would have demanded something less extreme, like merely staining their reputations, making them apologize for nothing, or suspending them from school. Now they're calling for them to be completely unpersonned or even killed off.
This marks an escalation in the risk-reward calculation that the culture warriors are making -- increasingly high-risk / high-reward for their cause. But most high-risk attempts fail, by definition. And when they blow up, the losses are far greater than with a loss under a low-risk / low-reward scenario.
Returning to the Iraq War analogy, this is like the stage beyond the Pentagon and CIA's support for both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, or the brief safe battle of the Gulf "War" in the early '90s, or the economic sanctions of the Clinton years. Those were all relatively low-risk and low-reward. Outright invasion and occupation on the order of hundreds of thousands of troops, plus eliminating the governing coalition and its leader, was a far higher risk -- and not surprisingly, it blew up in their faces. The geopolitical goal was to keep Iraq out of the Russian and Iranian spheres of influence, and under the US sphere, but they achieved precisely the opposite.
Whereas many Republicans and conservatives -- and a good deal of liberals and Democrats -- had supported US antagonism against Iraq during the earlier stages, they could no longer defend the war. Supporters turned into skeptics, and skeptics turned into opponents, not just on this war but any other like it in the future.
Indeed, we can see the beginning of this crisis phase in the culture war already with the media campaign against Trump's sexism during the 2016 election. The facts don't matter -- how many of the accusers retracted their stories, didn't pursue their allegations after the election season, or the clear intent of Trump's words on the Access Hollywood tape (i.e., that when you're a big star, women will let you do all sorts of things sexually because women are star-fuckers who fall under the spell of your celebrity). That was high-risk -- a continual campaign against one of the major-party candidates -- and it blew up in their faces. They lost the election, even more decisively than when they were more reserved against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
The same thing happened during the Kavanaugh confirmation in 2018. They escalated from "Kavanaugh drunkenly groped a girl in high school" to "Kavanaugh's entire social circle were perpetrating a serial gang rape epidemic in the affluent DC suburbs." And what reward did they get out of this high-risk campaign? Not only failure to block his confirmation, but leaving such a bitter taste in his mouth that he will only be more vindictive against their pet causes during his long tenure.
With the MAGA teen episode, the culture warriors were not just demanding the withdrawal of a presidential candidate or Supreme Court nominee -- they were calling for the banishment, impoverishment, assault, and murder of white adolescents who don't back down when antagonized by non-whites. If you respond like a pussy-ass little bitch, then fine, you don't have to be banished from society. But if you stand your ground -- like the average, normal, majority would do -- then you should be genocided.
And what did the warriors achieve? Not a single scalp! None of the kids are going to get disciplined, none are groveling or apologizing for nothing, presumably none will be shut out from gainful employment, and none are going to get assaulted or murdered as punishment for their supposed crime. If anything, they have only hardened their targets into greater vindictiveness after the warriors lost.
And unlike the earlier incidents, this time the media had to almost immediately retract their narrative and issue mealymouthed apologies. This makes all future battles even more risky on the warriors' part, since they've already admitted their own guilt. If they were not forced into admitting guilt, they could enlist their troops into another high-risk battle. But after having to admit guilt, and cut their losses so swiftly, there will be far fewer troops willing to enlist in the next battle, and they will not fight with the same zeal.
To reiterate, this is not necessarily because those would-be warriors have had a change of beliefs -- they may still believe the narrative to some degree, but given how catastrophically their leaders have fucked up, they would not expect glorious victory but humiliating defeat. Thanks, but no thanks. These are akin to former Iraq War supporters who may still believe that Hussein was a threat that needed to be contained, but on pragmatic grounds simply do not want to keep losing wars.
Of course, some would-be warriors have gone the extra step and now no longer believe the narrative that there are widespread roving gangs of white supremacist preppies who must be eliminated before they inflict further trauma on society. These are akin to the former Iraq War supporters who will never forget being lied to so blatantly about WMDs, 9/11, etc. They might hypothetically accept a military role for the US if such claims were proven to be true, but after such a stinging betrayal, they can no longer trust the claims from the US military. In the culture war, these types will dismiss future narratives as the same old fear-mongering that they lied about last time.
A tiny minority have been principled anti-culture-war pacifists the whole time, but then they do not represent a change during this new phase. Pacifists don't end wars -- defectors do. This has nothing to do with value judgments of who has been on the right side of history, but a descriptive statement of when we can evaluate the conditions to have qualitatively shifted out of one phase and into another.
Below is a sample of these defections. They are on the socialist Left, and although I don't know for sure, probably bought into the basic narrative of the Duke lacrosse case in the last decade. Maybe even saw white preppy dudes as a bad social force needing to be contained somehow. And at least some of them bought into the initial reporting on the MAGA teen episode, before the whole picture disproved it.
But their initial reaction was that even if we accept your framing of the events, what do you want us to do? You're calling for teenagers to be doxxed, banished, assaulted, and mass murdered -- that's psychotic and disgusting on its own, and will only make it more impossible for the class-oriented Left to build a coalition to achieve a better standard of living for everyone.
That's the key distinction -- it doesn't matter if some on the Left still believe parts of a specific narrative (e.g., the MAGA teen), or the greater ongoing narrative about "shitty white males". Beliefs don't matter, only actions. If they're unwilling to enlist in the culture war, and might outright sabotage it in the future, that's what matters, not their conception of events.
This will be lost on the identitarian Right, who as idealists will not consider the culture war over until one side changes its beliefs. But to the materialist / realist Right, this clearly portends the winding down of the culture war, as liberal media generals increasingly find it harder and harder to sign up new zealous troops.
You're definitely not going to see the radlib left say "sorry we fucked up." So, it's sort of enjoyable to watch the totally predictable moving of the goalposts back to the 2016 message of MAGA is a racist statement. pic.twitter.com/SmnvVBZHCD— Jesse Singalese Liberation Army (@Shialabeefsteak) January 21, 2019
Condemning people for how they look now. Their cheekbones and nose indicate someone of low moral character, and we just cannot wait to see them purged from society.— everyone deserves a decent life (@martymacmarty) January 21, 2019
Last comment on this grotesquerie but the people piling in on this spectacle of hate disgust me utterly. https://t.co/sDy2cRQ7Qg
Do you want to know why this MAGA chud is both famous and increasingly viewed as a sympathetic figure? Because you created this. Your continued insistence on your own inviolability is ruining the credibility of progressive and leftwing journalism among the broader public.— Adam Proctor (@AdamPr0ct0r) January 22, 2019
It's sick.— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) January 22, 2019
There it is, the ressentiment. Revenge of the nerds. "Dismantling their power structures" has nothing to do with seizing and redistrubuting wealth - material socialism - because nerds are well off too; this sort of shit is 100% pathetic spite pic.twitter.com/jgxSbiHhJp— Elagaballer 🗿🏀 (@htmlmencken) January 21, 2019
i think the reaction to the maga-hat kids highlights some of the problems with the 'left', at laest online. very emotional, volatile, quick to leap to conclusions and lash out. yeah it makes sense that everyone is scared and angry, but we cant let it make us stupid.— post hog ergo tony hawk (@Discourse_Stu) January 21, 2019
The last one is the start of a thread too long to embed here. I'm leaving Michael Tracey aside since he's been reliably against this culture war crap for awhile, and not as notable of a defection.
Here is a recent episode of the Red Scare podcast that discusses the issue, and places them within the same defector camp as the Twitter people above. Two of those quoted, Adam Proctor and Aimee Terese, host the Dead Pundits Society podcast, and will be live-streaming on their YouTube channel at 8pm ET tonight -- I'd be surprised if they didn't touch on the issue. Here are two lengthy threads, first and second, at a Reddit group dedicated to destroying identity politics in favor of class-first Leftism.
A separate defection comes from the Black identitarian part of the Left, exemplified by Tariq Nasheed. He takes the media narrative at face value -- since, again, the facts are not relevant -- but asks what the liberal Establishment wants him to do about it? Blacks have been fighting other groups' fights for too long, with no reciprocation to help out blacks specifically, so it's time to let non-black groups like Native Americans fight their own fights. (HYON means "hold your own nuts".) He emphasizes the antagonism between non-white groups, such as Native American tribes trying to keep their membership purified of black people with some Native ancestry.
I saw the video of the suspected white supremacist teens in the MAGA hats while taunting a Native American elder.....And that is very unfortunate...— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) January 19, 2019
BUT, many Indian tribes kicked out the Black ppl connected to them so that Blacks wouldn't get money, so this aint my fight #HYON https://t.co/MDKbOAVIto
Presumably, Nasheed would enlist in a culture war hysteria that involved blacks as the victims, but those have become increasingly rare. As he goes on at length about in a livestream on this issue, the mainstream now considers the narratives about blacks as victims to belong to the past, during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. They are old news. The new culture war narratives are all about women of various races, including wealthy white women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, immigrants (including African immigrants, who slavery-descended Nasheed does not identify with), homosexuals, trannies, and so on and so forth.
So while he and his fellow travelers are potential culture warriors, they will not be so in practice since the generals are no longer waging war on the "black victims" battlefield. If the only battlefields that the generals choose are about defending wealthy Ivy-educated white women, gay Hollywood child molesters, and black-hating immigrant groups, they will not be volunteering for the culture war.
Political independents and realist conservatives should be doing whatever they can to amplify these fractures within the Left, so that identity politics and culture warring can be eliminated for good. Not because Leftists will convert their belief system to that of right-wingers, but because they won't want to keep investing so much into such increasingly risky ventures that only keep delivering greater and greater losses.
Categories:
Dudes and dudettes,
Economics,
Human Biodiversity,
Media,
Morality,
Politics,
Psychology,
Violence
January 13, 2019
Tulsi campaign to flush out woke imperialists from Democrat party, attract culturally conservative populist crossover voters
As long as Tulsi Gabbard does not cannibalize votes from the one plausible re-aligner candidate to unite around, Bernie Sanders, there's no problem in her running a campaign before the actual primary voting begins. She could help build enthusiasm for realignment during the debating stage, and get most of her supporters to go to the polls for Bernie during the voting stage. She endorsed him last time, and they mostly overlap on the issues, so that should not be too hard for her to do.
The real threat to uniting around Bernie is Pocahontas, who will not campaign on the same issues as he will -- she is a Reaganite, not a realigner -- but who will still position herself as an enemy of the banks. She will not drop out before voting begins, nor eagerly plead with her supporters to vote for Bernie, whom she refused to endorse last time.
With Tulsi in the race during the debate stage, she and Bernie can tag-team the neoliberals -- Bernie focusing more on domestic issues, and Tulsi on foreign policy. They will force the dozen other neolibs to promise crushing austerity programs domestically, and endless wasteful destruction abroad.
That will be the main split among the candidates -- survival or extinction. Most voters will not care what particular flavor their austerity/warmonger candidate comes in. They are sick of the failed Reaganite system, and want major change. That leaves only Bernie/Tulsi. The voters who materially benefit from austerity and war will split their vote a dozen different ways, just like the anti-realigners did during the GOP primary in 2016, clearing the way for a consolidated realignment vote in favor of Trump.
Tulsi's function in the prelude to voting will be to force voters to choose between identity politics and material issues like healthcare, wages, and war. She will be pilloried by liberals for not being pro-gay, pro-choice, or pro-Islamist. These are empty dead-end identity issues for materially comfortable liberals to jerk themselves off to -- no different than being vocally against gay marriage, pro-life, or anti-Islamist are empty identity issues for materially comfortable conservatives.
Someone who wants to improve material conditions first and foremost will form an alliance with anyone else who does, regardless of their differences on less important social-cultural issues. So Tulsi is perfectly happy to endorse and work with Bernie, who holds more liberal positions on the social issues. And Bernie is happy to work with Tulsi. Each one of them does not care about these marginal identity issues, or else their alliance would never have formed.
Those who put empty identity issues first could stand behind Bernie but would reject Tulsi. This includes most of the so-called "socialists" who have re-branded themselves after Bernie's 2016 campaign. They're not the inheritors of historical socialism, which is class-first and anti-imperialist. They just got tired of being called SJWs, but still could not leave behind their favorite label of "social justice". In practice, in the US in 2019, "socialism" mainly means "social justice-ism" AKA "intersectionality".
That's how the DSA shot up in membership by several orders of magnitude overnight -- tens of thousands of former liberals or progressives did not suddenly adopt a whole new worldview, vision, strategy, tone, or set of goals. They're the same ol' libs and progs from before Bernie showed up, but since the hot new phenomenon labeled himself a "democratic socialist," well, they had to adopt that label as well. They've always styled themselves as radicals, and "socialism" has a radical connotation, so they're happy to adopt the term. But fundamentally, they are stylistically-radical liberals ("radlibs" in the words of the class-first, anti-imperialist Left).
These libs and progs will not condemn Tulsi for her economic policies, which they mostly share, so these opponents are not pro-austerity. They are pro-welfare state. But they will scold her for discussing radical Islamic terrorism, on the basis of any criticism of any Muslim individual or group being Islamophobic. She will make these crazy woketards say that we must let ourselves get blown up by jihadists just to prove that we aren't Islamophobic. And that anyone who isn't a Sunni Muslim in the Middle East must let themselves get blown up, their shrines desecrated, and their villages bulldozed, to prove they have not bought into the Western white supremacist myth of radical Islam.
These identitarian attacks against Tulsi's foreign policy agenda benefit the Pentagon's alliance with the Salafi jihadists of the Gulf like Saudi Arabia, who along with Israel are our partners in imperialism throughout the Middle East. This puts the woke crowd in league with the imperialists. And if there's anything the American people hate, it's political correctness and endless wars -- combine them both, and it's an electoral death wish. Tulsi's campaign will serve to flush the woke imperialists out of any realignment coalition.
There are far more politically incorrect anti-imperialists than there are woke imperialists, and being more Independent in partisan affiliation, they would have no problem invading the Democrat primary to vote for Bernie, if Tulsi withdraws and endorses him. The woketards are far more moralistically partisan, and would rather drop out of Bernie's electoral coalition if it meant sharing space with those who are ritually unclean ("deplorable"). All the more space for us, then, who don't mind mingling with different groups, as long as they share our goals.
Realignment of the Democrats into the dominant party, after Reaganism, requires purging themselves of their anti-coalitional members, i.e. those who want a smaller purer party. All politics is coalitional, and a dominant party must be even more of a cohesive coalition than the opposition party. And in order to realign, they must secure permanent massive defections from the current dominant party. In 2019, that means stealing away legions of Trump voters for the indefinite future. The only way to do that is to say "We're going to bury the hatchet on all this pointless culture war BS, and focus on improving material living standards at home, and cutting loose our dead weight empire abroad."
Woketards will never bury the hatchet on the culture wars, so they will purge themselves out of this new realignment coalition, especially once they get a taste of large numbers of former Trump voters sharing the room with them. Tulsi's campaign can be a call to the Trumpian cavalry to come to the aid of Bernie during the primary, when he's most desperate.
The strategy for Trumpian populists should be supporting Tulsi during the debating stage, then voting for Bernie when the polls open. Bernie is the only viable candidate to crush the identity politics crowd for good, by winning on material issues after getting vilified as a racist sexist old white man. Just as Trump was the only viable candidate to crush right-wing identity politics (pandering to evangelicals), by winning on material issues after getting vilified as an atheist adulterer with "New York values".
The real threat to uniting around Bernie is Pocahontas, who will not campaign on the same issues as he will -- she is a Reaganite, not a realigner -- but who will still position herself as an enemy of the banks. She will not drop out before voting begins, nor eagerly plead with her supporters to vote for Bernie, whom she refused to endorse last time.
With Tulsi in the race during the debate stage, she and Bernie can tag-team the neoliberals -- Bernie focusing more on domestic issues, and Tulsi on foreign policy. They will force the dozen other neolibs to promise crushing austerity programs domestically, and endless wasteful destruction abroad.
That will be the main split among the candidates -- survival or extinction. Most voters will not care what particular flavor their austerity/warmonger candidate comes in. They are sick of the failed Reaganite system, and want major change. That leaves only Bernie/Tulsi. The voters who materially benefit from austerity and war will split their vote a dozen different ways, just like the anti-realigners did during the GOP primary in 2016, clearing the way for a consolidated realignment vote in favor of Trump.
Tulsi's function in the prelude to voting will be to force voters to choose between identity politics and material issues like healthcare, wages, and war. She will be pilloried by liberals for not being pro-gay, pro-choice, or pro-Islamist. These are empty dead-end identity issues for materially comfortable liberals to jerk themselves off to -- no different than being vocally against gay marriage, pro-life, or anti-Islamist are empty identity issues for materially comfortable conservatives.
Someone who wants to improve material conditions first and foremost will form an alliance with anyone else who does, regardless of their differences on less important social-cultural issues. So Tulsi is perfectly happy to endorse and work with Bernie, who holds more liberal positions on the social issues. And Bernie is happy to work with Tulsi. Each one of them does not care about these marginal identity issues, or else their alliance would never have formed.
Those who put empty identity issues first could stand behind Bernie but would reject Tulsi. This includes most of the so-called "socialists" who have re-branded themselves after Bernie's 2016 campaign. They're not the inheritors of historical socialism, which is class-first and anti-imperialist. They just got tired of being called SJWs, but still could not leave behind their favorite label of "social justice". In practice, in the US in 2019, "socialism" mainly means "social justice-ism" AKA "intersectionality".
That's how the DSA shot up in membership by several orders of magnitude overnight -- tens of thousands of former liberals or progressives did not suddenly adopt a whole new worldview, vision, strategy, tone, or set of goals. They're the same ol' libs and progs from before Bernie showed up, but since the hot new phenomenon labeled himself a "democratic socialist," well, they had to adopt that label as well. They've always styled themselves as radicals, and "socialism" has a radical connotation, so they're happy to adopt the term. But fundamentally, they are stylistically-radical liberals ("radlibs" in the words of the class-first, anti-imperialist Left).
These libs and progs will not condemn Tulsi for her economic policies, which they mostly share, so these opponents are not pro-austerity. They are pro-welfare state. But they will scold her for discussing radical Islamic terrorism, on the basis of any criticism of any Muslim individual or group being Islamophobic. She will make these crazy woketards say that we must let ourselves get blown up by jihadists just to prove that we aren't Islamophobic. And that anyone who isn't a Sunni Muslim in the Middle East must let themselves get blown up, their shrines desecrated, and their villages bulldozed, to prove they have not bought into the Western white supremacist myth of radical Islam.
These identitarian attacks against Tulsi's foreign policy agenda benefit the Pentagon's alliance with the Salafi jihadists of the Gulf like Saudi Arabia, who along with Israel are our partners in imperialism throughout the Middle East. This puts the woke crowd in league with the imperialists. And if there's anything the American people hate, it's political correctness and endless wars -- combine them both, and it's an electoral death wish. Tulsi's campaign will serve to flush the woke imperialists out of any realignment coalition.
There are far more politically incorrect anti-imperialists than there are woke imperialists, and being more Independent in partisan affiliation, they would have no problem invading the Democrat primary to vote for Bernie, if Tulsi withdraws and endorses him. The woketards are far more moralistically partisan, and would rather drop out of Bernie's electoral coalition if it meant sharing space with those who are ritually unclean ("deplorable"). All the more space for us, then, who don't mind mingling with different groups, as long as they share our goals.
Realignment of the Democrats into the dominant party, after Reaganism, requires purging themselves of their anti-coalitional members, i.e. those who want a smaller purer party. All politics is coalitional, and a dominant party must be even more of a cohesive coalition than the opposition party. And in order to realign, they must secure permanent massive defections from the current dominant party. In 2019, that means stealing away legions of Trump voters for the indefinite future. The only way to do that is to say "We're going to bury the hatchet on all this pointless culture war BS, and focus on improving material living standards at home, and cutting loose our dead weight empire abroad."
Woketards will never bury the hatchet on the culture wars, so they will purge themselves out of this new realignment coalition, especially once they get a taste of large numbers of former Trump voters sharing the room with them. Tulsi's campaign can be a call to the Trumpian cavalry to come to the aid of Bernie during the primary, when he's most desperate.
The strategy for Trumpian populists should be supporting Tulsi during the debating stage, then voting for Bernie when the polls open. Bernie is the only viable candidate to crush the identity politics crowd for good, by winning on material issues after getting vilified as a racist sexist old white man. Just as Trump was the only viable candidate to crush right-wing identity politics (pandering to evangelicals), by winning on material issues after getting vilified as an atheist adulterer with "New York values".
January 9, 2019
Trump's border speech was typical GOP, about crime / drugs; Realignment requires focus on economics and populism, which only Bernie crowd can deliver
Trump's border speech could have been worse -- it could have said no barrier whatsoever, and btw we're amnestying everybody. But it failed to realign the GOP, adhering to the Reaganite orthodoxy about waging a war on crime and drugs in order to distract from the elite sources of our deteriorating standard of living and fragmentation of our communities.
In particular, he failed to name and blame the enemy -- the elites on the GOP side, who have been steering our society since the 1980s, and who have a collective material interest in cheap labor. Their sectors of economic activity are physical and labor-intensive, unlike the informational and non-labor-intensive sectors who control the Democrat party. The cost of labor is a major component of the cost structure for GOP elite sectors like armed force (military, police, prisons), manufacturing, agriculture, and energy.
Their cartels will always push for cheaper labor in order to maximize profits, and when they organize together in a political coalition like the GOP, they will pursue this goal through replacing American workers with cheap foreigners. Either by re-locating the worksite to the cheap labor colony (manufacturers who off-shore their factories), or by bringing the cheap labor here if the worksite cannot be re-located (agribusiness whose worksites are its immovable land).
Democrats have been the powerless shut-out opposition party during the Reagan era, so they deserve less or no blame in general. On immigration, they have not passed the amnesties or open-borders laws that Reagan and Bush Sr did, and that Bush Jr spent his entire time attempting. Workers -- not the elites -- in labor-intensive sectors are a major chunk of their electoral base, especially those who are collectively organized, like union members.
Even their elites do not depend on slashing labor costs because that is just a rounding error in their cost structure. For example, the senior cartel of their coalition -- finance -- employs nobody, and is still at the top of their industry on a global scale. Their "costs" are when they take financial risks that blow up, like lending someone money who doesn't pay it back. Those are balanced by the rewards when their risks pan out, like when the debtor does something highly profitable with their loan, and manages to pay back the loan plus interest. Finance may seek bailouts if their bets don't work out, but they do not seek cheaper labor.
So far, Bernie Sanders has been the only major politician to call out these cheap-labor material motives as the basis for our immigration policies, casting blame correctly on the GOP elites. During the most recent presidential election cycle, he dismissed "open borders" as "a Koch Brothers proposal". He represents the electoral base of the Democrats -- actual or potential union members -- but his view could be harmonized with the elites of his party like the Wall Street investment banks, whose bottom lines would not be affected one way or the other if we closed the borders.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump railed against the GOP elites, though not so much on immigration as for trade / industrial policy and foreign policy. Still, he was not blindly partisan in his blame, and delighted in antagonizing the party's elites, who he said were manipulating the other candidates like puppets on a string. Now in office, Trump only blames the powerless opposition party, rather than returning to his campaign trail slogan of being even more disappointed in the Republicans than in the Democrats.
Aside from having the wrong analysis, and therefore the wrong proposed solution (hector Congressional Democrats), this speech took the wrong move in building a broad coalition to support the supposed goal of reducing immigration. By being partisan, he turned off all Democrats and most Independents -- who want to hear both parties blamed -- and by focusing on the themes of crime and drugs, he appealed only to conservative morality, giving liberals and moderates an easy excuse not to join him.
Focusing on matters of class and economics, and populism against elitism, would have had greater success in building a coalition at the popular level, but also at the elite level. Now, he has no elite support, including from Republicans, whose material interests militate in favor of cheap labor, and therefore open borders. If he had opened the door for Democrat elites, such as finance, they could have amassed political capital for appearing to be the good elites, as opposed to the bad elites, on the economic concerns of the working and middle classes -- while not having to sacrifice their own material interests. That's how the borders stayed closed during the prosperous New Deal era, when finance still controlled the Democrats but they were the dominant rather than opposition party.
In order for the Democrats to re-gain dominant-party status, they require massive defections at the electoral level, as well as one or more elite sectors.
As for the latter, that is a separate post, but it is industrial commodities like steel, whose elites have generally supported the GOP but who have been wiped out by the de-industrial trend pursued by the more powerful manufacturers of finished goods, who want cheap materials as well as cheap labor, and who have been only too happy to substitute foreign for American steel. Robust protection of steel would secure Pennsylvania back for the Dems, while mealymouthed marketeering would give them little reason to return.
As for popular support, they need anyone who feels like the GOP has sold them out. These are people opposed to wasting resources on maintaining our crumbling and pathetic empire abroad. They are people who want to re-industrialize the economy, in order to raise the average person's prosperity back to industrial-society standards rather than continuing to revert to pre-industrial peasant levels. And they are people who want to dramatically reduce the share of the population who are foreigners.
The GOP during the Reagan era has sold out all of those groups, and they feel like they "want their country back". A minority do not really mean this, and are dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites who are simply upset that their gains also come with some costs. But most disaffected non-Democrats really do want to go back to the New Deal era, which did include closed borders, a more homogeneous population, and civil rights focused on one group, the descendants of African slaves, who were deeply rooted in this country and had been mistreated, rather than diluting civil rights into "every fresh-off-the-boat minority group gets to be represented in Disney movies".
Realigners on the Democrat side do not have to make explicit nationalist appeals to the very large group who "wants their country back," but rationalizations are not important, the outcomes are. As long as that group can see that immigration will come down, and the population will be more native-born, they don't care what the reasoning is, what the public rhetoric is, or what party or politician gives it to them. If it's a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, and if he's making purely class-based rather than nationality-based appeals, who cares? That's just PR.
There would be a wave of people who have "never voted Democrat in my life," or who have done so only occasionally and grudgingly, who will now do so eagerly and devotedly. That will mark a departure from the Obama coalition, most of whose GOP defectors were temporary and grudging -- and who went right back to the Tea Party and neutered Obama from getting anything done.
The right must move in that direction also, giving relatively less importance to nationalist appeals in the context of immigration, and more to economic appeals. Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson are leading the way on this shift in appeal. They are positioning to be the opposition party under a Bernie-dominant era -- agreeing on the big-picture fundamentals, in the same way today's Democrats share the GOP's neoliberal orthodoxy, but are more culturally liberal. The new GOP will be culturally conservative sympathizers of the Bernie / Ali O-C agenda.
And the left must accept these new populist Republicans, as a preferable opposition compared to one dominated by Reagan, the Bushes, McCain, Romney, Ryan, et al. At the outset of the realignment, they will even have to tolerate them in the Bernie coalition, in order to give it the oopmh necessary to overcome all the obstacles in its way and secure status as the new way of doing things. After that initial hurdle has been cleared, then the conservative populists can separate off on their own, into a new populist GOP.
That will be no different from everybody voting for Reagan, to terminate the New Deal, before segregating into red and blue Reaganite states. Or everyone voting for FDR, to secure the New Deal, before segregating into red and blue Midcentury states.
The alternative is to favor "woke neoliberals" over "racist populists," i.e. prioritize identity over class, and deliver an even more crippling level of inequality and immiseration than the Reaganites. There are only a handful of woke populists, not enough to sustain a dominant-party coalition. They will have to choose which slate of issues is more important in the trade-off, and that will determine whether we head toward another New Deal or another Robber Baron era.
In particular, he failed to name and blame the enemy -- the elites on the GOP side, who have been steering our society since the 1980s, and who have a collective material interest in cheap labor. Their sectors of economic activity are physical and labor-intensive, unlike the informational and non-labor-intensive sectors who control the Democrat party. The cost of labor is a major component of the cost structure for GOP elite sectors like armed force (military, police, prisons), manufacturing, agriculture, and energy.
Their cartels will always push for cheaper labor in order to maximize profits, and when they organize together in a political coalition like the GOP, they will pursue this goal through replacing American workers with cheap foreigners. Either by re-locating the worksite to the cheap labor colony (manufacturers who off-shore their factories), or by bringing the cheap labor here if the worksite cannot be re-located (agribusiness whose worksites are its immovable land).
Democrats have been the powerless shut-out opposition party during the Reagan era, so they deserve less or no blame in general. On immigration, they have not passed the amnesties or open-borders laws that Reagan and Bush Sr did, and that Bush Jr spent his entire time attempting. Workers -- not the elites -- in labor-intensive sectors are a major chunk of their electoral base, especially those who are collectively organized, like union members.
Even their elites do not depend on slashing labor costs because that is just a rounding error in their cost structure. For example, the senior cartel of their coalition -- finance -- employs nobody, and is still at the top of their industry on a global scale. Their "costs" are when they take financial risks that blow up, like lending someone money who doesn't pay it back. Those are balanced by the rewards when their risks pan out, like when the debtor does something highly profitable with their loan, and manages to pay back the loan plus interest. Finance may seek bailouts if their bets don't work out, but they do not seek cheaper labor.
So far, Bernie Sanders has been the only major politician to call out these cheap-labor material motives as the basis for our immigration policies, casting blame correctly on the GOP elites. During the most recent presidential election cycle, he dismissed "open borders" as "a Koch Brothers proposal". He represents the electoral base of the Democrats -- actual or potential union members -- but his view could be harmonized with the elites of his party like the Wall Street investment banks, whose bottom lines would not be affected one way or the other if we closed the borders.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump railed against the GOP elites, though not so much on immigration as for trade / industrial policy and foreign policy. Still, he was not blindly partisan in his blame, and delighted in antagonizing the party's elites, who he said were manipulating the other candidates like puppets on a string. Now in office, Trump only blames the powerless opposition party, rather than returning to his campaign trail slogan of being even more disappointed in the Republicans than in the Democrats.
Aside from having the wrong analysis, and therefore the wrong proposed solution (hector Congressional Democrats), this speech took the wrong move in building a broad coalition to support the supposed goal of reducing immigration. By being partisan, he turned off all Democrats and most Independents -- who want to hear both parties blamed -- and by focusing on the themes of crime and drugs, he appealed only to conservative morality, giving liberals and moderates an easy excuse not to join him.
Focusing on matters of class and economics, and populism against elitism, would have had greater success in building a coalition at the popular level, but also at the elite level. Now, he has no elite support, including from Republicans, whose material interests militate in favor of cheap labor, and therefore open borders. If he had opened the door for Democrat elites, such as finance, they could have amassed political capital for appearing to be the good elites, as opposed to the bad elites, on the economic concerns of the working and middle classes -- while not having to sacrifice their own material interests. That's how the borders stayed closed during the prosperous New Deal era, when finance still controlled the Democrats but they were the dominant rather than opposition party.
In order for the Democrats to re-gain dominant-party status, they require massive defections at the electoral level, as well as one or more elite sectors.
As for the latter, that is a separate post, but it is industrial commodities like steel, whose elites have generally supported the GOP but who have been wiped out by the de-industrial trend pursued by the more powerful manufacturers of finished goods, who want cheap materials as well as cheap labor, and who have been only too happy to substitute foreign for American steel. Robust protection of steel would secure Pennsylvania back for the Dems, while mealymouthed marketeering would give them little reason to return.
As for popular support, they need anyone who feels like the GOP has sold them out. These are people opposed to wasting resources on maintaining our crumbling and pathetic empire abroad. They are people who want to re-industrialize the economy, in order to raise the average person's prosperity back to industrial-society standards rather than continuing to revert to pre-industrial peasant levels. And they are people who want to dramatically reduce the share of the population who are foreigners.
The GOP during the Reagan era has sold out all of those groups, and they feel like they "want their country back". A minority do not really mean this, and are dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites who are simply upset that their gains also come with some costs. But most disaffected non-Democrats really do want to go back to the New Deal era, which did include closed borders, a more homogeneous population, and civil rights focused on one group, the descendants of African slaves, who were deeply rooted in this country and had been mistreated, rather than diluting civil rights into "every fresh-off-the-boat minority group gets to be represented in Disney movies".
Realigners on the Democrat side do not have to make explicit nationalist appeals to the very large group who "wants their country back," but rationalizations are not important, the outcomes are. As long as that group can see that immigration will come down, and the population will be more native-born, they don't care what the reasoning is, what the public rhetoric is, or what party or politician gives it to them. If it's a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, and if he's making purely class-based rather than nationality-based appeals, who cares? That's just PR.
There would be a wave of people who have "never voted Democrat in my life," or who have done so only occasionally and grudgingly, who will now do so eagerly and devotedly. That will mark a departure from the Obama coalition, most of whose GOP defectors were temporary and grudging -- and who went right back to the Tea Party and neutered Obama from getting anything done.
The right must move in that direction also, giving relatively less importance to nationalist appeals in the context of immigration, and more to economic appeals. Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson are leading the way on this shift in appeal. They are positioning to be the opposition party under a Bernie-dominant era -- agreeing on the big-picture fundamentals, in the same way today's Democrats share the GOP's neoliberal orthodoxy, but are more culturally liberal. The new GOP will be culturally conservative sympathizers of the Bernie / Ali O-C agenda.
And the left must accept these new populist Republicans, as a preferable opposition compared to one dominated by Reagan, the Bushes, McCain, Romney, Ryan, et al. At the outset of the realignment, they will even have to tolerate them in the Bernie coalition, in order to give it the oopmh necessary to overcome all the obstacles in its way and secure status as the new way of doing things. After that initial hurdle has been cleared, then the conservative populists can separate off on their own, into a new populist GOP.
That will be no different from everybody voting for Reagan, to terminate the New Deal, before segregating into red and blue Reaganite states. Or everyone voting for FDR, to secure the New Deal, before segregating into red and blue Midcentury states.
The alternative is to favor "woke neoliberals" over "racist populists," i.e. prioritize identity over class, and deliver an even more crippling level of inequality and immiseration than the Reaganites. There are only a handful of woke populists, not enough to sustain a dominant-party coalition. They will have to choose which slate of issues is more important in the trade-off, and that will determine whether we head toward another New Deal or another Robber Baron era.
Categories:
Crime,
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Morality,
Politics
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?"
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?"
Categories:
Economics,
Human Biodiversity,
Language,
Media,
Morality,
Politics,
Psychology,
Religion
December 31, 2018
Manic songs of early 2010s find new interest as audiences tire of vulnerable phase
Over the past couple weeks, I've noticed a burst of songs from the early 2010s on the adult top 40 station I listen to, as well as in the retail places I frequent.
It's rare to hear these at all nowadays -- typically I've heard a few per month, and now it's more like several per day. In fact, it's been rare to even hear songs from 2016 or '15, let alone from 2010-'14.
They're from the manic phase, and stand out in stark contrast to the sentimental emo music of the current vulnerable phase. The radio programmers are clearly trying to offer something quite different tonally to the listeners, though without having to go back so far that it sounds retro / oldies.
You're all moped out from the five-millionth play of "Girls Like You" or "In My Blood"? OK, we're taking the hint -- how about we liven things up every hour with a surprise like "I Knew You Were Trouble" or "Roar"?
I'm even hearing a few songs from the late 2000s, the restless warm-up phase that hinted at the manic phase to come ("Wake Up Call" and "Bad Romance").
But nothing from the previous vulnerable phase of the early 2000s -- that would just be another variety of soft mellow music like today's.
At first I thought maybe it was a seasonal change to coincide with New Year's Eve -- a nostalgic look back at the hit songs of years past. But they didn't do that in previous years for the holiday. And again, they're avoiding going back into the early 2000s.
I think people are simply feeling exhausted of feeling exhausted, and that the vulnerable phase of the excitement cycle is coming to a close. We're in the part of the refractory period where it's just about to return to baseline, and that 2019 will be the last of the 5-year phase, right on schedule. Radio marketers are desperate to keep their finger on the pulse of fickle listeners, and they're responding to this subtle change in attitude by dialing down the emo-tude of their playlists.
This does not mean we're about to enter another manic phase, or a full-blown revival of earlier manic phases. They're only playing a handful of these songs per listening session, but it's still a major change from the past year or so. It's more like we're winding down the vulnerable phase, and will enter the next restless warm-up phase around 2020. The next manic phase won't hit until around 2025.
Reflecting on the previous revival of manic-phase music, there was an explosion of '80s music -- meaning, primarily early '80s new wave / synth-pop music -- in the late 2000s. Hardly at all during the early 2000s. By the restless warm-up phase, people were trying to get back into the swing of things, and returned to something familiar that they knew would get them excited and pumped up. They didn't know what the next manic phase would sound like, but returning to the '80s would at least prepare them for it. And the soaring popularity of '80s night made sure that their bodies would be in the habit of dancing for whenever the next manic phase erupted.
They did not return to the most recent manic phase -- the late '90s -- probably because it was not so intense of a manic phase, compared to the others. During the upcoming warm-up phase, I expect they'll get warmed up with the familiar manic phases of the early 2010s, or all the way back to the early '80s again -- linking that music with its revival period more recently, not the original context (when they weren't even born).
Although Millennials will be poised to get nostalgic for the late '90s, it was just way too weak to serve as a stimulant, when the early '80s and early 2010s are readily available. And Gen Z-ers will form a big chunk of the audience, not just Millennials as they've been used to so far. And I don't see Gen Z giving much of a shit about the late '90s, which they barely remember if at all. They'll go back to the early 2010s when they're mining the past for manic stimulants to get them back on their feet during the warm-up phase.
It's rare to hear these at all nowadays -- typically I've heard a few per month, and now it's more like several per day. In fact, it's been rare to even hear songs from 2016 or '15, let alone from 2010-'14.
They're from the manic phase, and stand out in stark contrast to the sentimental emo music of the current vulnerable phase. The radio programmers are clearly trying to offer something quite different tonally to the listeners, though without having to go back so far that it sounds retro / oldies.
You're all moped out from the five-millionth play of "Girls Like You" or "In My Blood"? OK, we're taking the hint -- how about we liven things up every hour with a surprise like "I Knew You Were Trouble" or "Roar"?
I'm even hearing a few songs from the late 2000s, the restless warm-up phase that hinted at the manic phase to come ("Wake Up Call" and "Bad Romance").
But nothing from the previous vulnerable phase of the early 2000s -- that would just be another variety of soft mellow music like today's.
At first I thought maybe it was a seasonal change to coincide with New Year's Eve -- a nostalgic look back at the hit songs of years past. But they didn't do that in previous years for the holiday. And again, they're avoiding going back into the early 2000s.
I think people are simply feeling exhausted of feeling exhausted, and that the vulnerable phase of the excitement cycle is coming to a close. We're in the part of the refractory period where it's just about to return to baseline, and that 2019 will be the last of the 5-year phase, right on schedule. Radio marketers are desperate to keep their finger on the pulse of fickle listeners, and they're responding to this subtle change in attitude by dialing down the emo-tude of their playlists.
This does not mean we're about to enter another manic phase, or a full-blown revival of earlier manic phases. They're only playing a handful of these songs per listening session, but it's still a major change from the past year or so. It's more like we're winding down the vulnerable phase, and will enter the next restless warm-up phase around 2020. The next manic phase won't hit until around 2025.
Reflecting on the previous revival of manic-phase music, there was an explosion of '80s music -- meaning, primarily early '80s new wave / synth-pop music -- in the late 2000s. Hardly at all during the early 2000s. By the restless warm-up phase, people were trying to get back into the swing of things, and returned to something familiar that they knew would get them excited and pumped up. They didn't know what the next manic phase would sound like, but returning to the '80s would at least prepare them for it. And the soaring popularity of '80s night made sure that their bodies would be in the habit of dancing for whenever the next manic phase erupted.
They did not return to the most recent manic phase -- the late '90s -- probably because it was not so intense of a manic phase, compared to the others. During the upcoming warm-up phase, I expect they'll get warmed up with the familiar manic phases of the early 2010s, or all the way back to the early '80s again -- linking that music with its revival period more recently, not the original context (when they weren't even born).
Although Millennials will be poised to get nostalgic for the late '90s, it was just way too weak to serve as a stimulant, when the early '80s and early 2010s are readily available. And Gen Z-ers will form a big chunk of the audience, not just Millennials as they've been used to so far. And I don't see Gen Z giving much of a shit about the late '90s, which they barely remember if at all. They'll go back to the early 2010s when they're mining the past for manic stimulants to get them back on their feet during the warm-up phase.
Categories:
Excitement cycle,
Generations,
Music,
Psychology
December 21, 2018
Putting purportedly anti-neocon news in perspective (Reminder: psycho Gaffney will replace Mattis)
On its face, the news about Trump planning to withdraw US forces from Syria, and thousands from Afghanistan, appears to be a welcome change. But given the track record of disappointment on foreign policy from the Trump admin, let's put these announcements in perspective.
First, they have not happened yet -- the last time Trump said he wanted to pull the US out of Syria, the Pentagon's jihadist allies staged a fake chemical attack, and the military bombed Syria again. And the last time Trump threatened to withdraw Americans from Afghanistan, the Pentagon made him read a neocon speech in primetime, followed by sending thousands of Americans more back into Afghanistan.
Second, assuming these changes do happen, they do not represent fulfilling a campaign promise -- i.e., fixing a problem that existed before he came into office, and that he was elected in order to fix. Although the CIA was happy to use the jihadist militias as their proxy against the secular Syrian government, we did not have thousands of American boots on the ground, occupying a third of the Syrian land mass, until the Trump admin.
If all that happens is that these forces are withdrawn, it would represent a return to the status quo ante Trump. That's better than continuing to keep them there, but not a bold reversal of an existing policy -- that would require no interference in Syria at all, boots-on-the-ground or otherwise, or switching sides to help out Assad against the jihadists.
The same goes for Afghanistan. After Trump's threat to withdraw troops in August 2017, the Pentagon punished him by sending "about 4,000" Americans back into the country, in addition to the "roughly 8,500" who were already there. Now the reports refer to "more than 14,000" Americans in Afghanistan, meaning the Pentagon last year sent at least 5,500, not 4,000, and likely more.
So, if Trump forces a withdrawal of 7,000 now, for all we know that's just the same number that were sent last year -- again, more of a return to the status quo ante Trump. A true reversal would be to announce that we're withdrawing all Americans from Afghanistan, with only the pace left to be sorted out.
Contrast these two changes with the one real foreign policy change that Trump has achieved so far -- holding the summit with "Chairman Kim," reversing not just every Reagan-era president, but those of the previous New Deal era as well. Nothing further has developed from that summit, but the meeting itself was a big ice-breaking deal, and not to be minimized. When the non-militarist Bernie realignment takes over in 2025, the path toward full withdrawal from Korea will have already been paved by the Trump-Kim summit.
In related news, General Mattis has resigned, confirming a major part of the blind item discussed in this post a couple months ago. Blind Gossip's inside WH source says that throughout October, John Bolton had been scheming to replace Mattis with neocon fellow traveler and Iran hardliner psycho Frank Gaffney, with the president's blessing.
I noted how dark that news was, portending some major action against Iran after the new Congress is sworn in. I reminded people that it's way too premature to declare "At least Trump isn't as bad as George W. Bush because there's no Iraq War". That war did not begin until that president's third year, after the mid-terms, just as his father's Gulf War did not begin until the admin's third year, after the mid-terms. At this point in the admin, we are simply not in a position to judge how war-mongering it will wind up -- even the Bushes waited until year 3.
The spin that Mattis has given, and most are accepting, is that his resignation has to do with Trump's sudden decision to pull troops out of Syria. But this resignation has been in the making for months, and has nothing to do with that. It is just a convenient excuse instead of resigning for apparently no reason. Therefore, Mattis' resignation cannot be interpreted as a loss for the neocons, i.e. "The guy who wanted to stay in Syria just got booted from the WH". It's really, "the guy who couldn't get along with Trump any longer" has left, with an apparently much more neocon war-monger ready to take his place.
For all we know, the ascendant neocons like Bolton and Gaffney will cut their losses in Syria in order to focus all the more single-mindedly on Iran.
And notice: Trump did not say Assad was not an enemy, that Syria is neutral or friendly toward the American people, etc. He framed Syria, Iran, and Russia as our enemies, and claimed that by fighting ISIS, who in turn are fighting Syria-Iran-Russia, we were only helping our enemies. On the campaign trail, Trump said all the secular strongmen were perhaps "bad guys" but were far preferable to the only alternative, the radical Islamic terrorists. Hussein, Assad, Qaddafi -- it was either them, or Medieval psychos who drown people in steel cages. So he has not even returned to his campaign-trail rhetoric and framing of those leaders and their governments, and remains committed to the neocon view of them.
Nor has he criticized Saudi Arabia for its support and participation in radical Islamic terrorism, like he did on the campaign trail and for years in the conservative media before that. Now he's as buddy-buddy as you can get with the jihadists of that nation, with Jared serving as MBS' butt boy.
He has not criticized our support for Israel, but then that is consistent with his longstanding agreement on that policy. The point is, his stance on Israel is also fully status quo.
Unwavering, ever-expanding support for the jihadists and the Zionists, and unquestioning antagonism toward Iran, is not a reversal of longstanding US policy in the Middle East. If Trump is truly throwing off the shackles of the neocons, is he about to re-commit to the Iran nuclear deal? That would be one of the easiest things to do, since it would not require a whole new plan, but simply signing back onto an existing agreement of the previous admin. Is he going to fire Bolton and replace him with Rand Paul?
I know people want a reason to celebrate, but we've been down this road too many times during the Trump admin. Even if he withdraws the numbers stated from Syria and Afghanistan, that is only correcting his own admin's mistakes, not delivering on a campaign promise to fix the state of affairs of the Obama-or-earlier period. And nothing suggests a re-orientation of policy away from the jihadists and Zionists, or away from their main target, Iran.
When Gaffney replaces Mattis, our foreign policy in the Middle East will get far more disastrous, and we should be prepared for that now, so we don't get blind-sided by it after assuming that removing troops from Syria, and removing the new troops from Afghanistan, means the neocons are on the way out. It may just mean they're consolidating their efforts for one last Hail-Mary plan against Iran, before the Bernie realignment forecloses on that possibility for the next half-century.
First, they have not happened yet -- the last time Trump said he wanted to pull the US out of Syria, the Pentagon's jihadist allies staged a fake chemical attack, and the military bombed Syria again. And the last time Trump threatened to withdraw Americans from Afghanistan, the Pentagon made him read a neocon speech in primetime, followed by sending thousands of Americans more back into Afghanistan.
Second, assuming these changes do happen, they do not represent fulfilling a campaign promise -- i.e., fixing a problem that existed before he came into office, and that he was elected in order to fix. Although the CIA was happy to use the jihadist militias as their proxy against the secular Syrian government, we did not have thousands of American boots on the ground, occupying a third of the Syrian land mass, until the Trump admin.
If all that happens is that these forces are withdrawn, it would represent a return to the status quo ante Trump. That's better than continuing to keep them there, but not a bold reversal of an existing policy -- that would require no interference in Syria at all, boots-on-the-ground or otherwise, or switching sides to help out Assad against the jihadists.
The same goes for Afghanistan. After Trump's threat to withdraw troops in August 2017, the Pentagon punished him by sending "about 4,000" Americans back into the country, in addition to the "roughly 8,500" who were already there. Now the reports refer to "more than 14,000" Americans in Afghanistan, meaning the Pentagon last year sent at least 5,500, not 4,000, and likely more.
So, if Trump forces a withdrawal of 7,000 now, for all we know that's just the same number that were sent last year -- again, more of a return to the status quo ante Trump. A true reversal would be to announce that we're withdrawing all Americans from Afghanistan, with only the pace left to be sorted out.
Contrast these two changes with the one real foreign policy change that Trump has achieved so far -- holding the summit with "Chairman Kim," reversing not just every Reagan-era president, but those of the previous New Deal era as well. Nothing further has developed from that summit, but the meeting itself was a big ice-breaking deal, and not to be minimized. When the non-militarist Bernie realignment takes over in 2025, the path toward full withdrawal from Korea will have already been paved by the Trump-Kim summit.
In related news, General Mattis has resigned, confirming a major part of the blind item discussed in this post a couple months ago. Blind Gossip's inside WH source says that throughout October, John Bolton had been scheming to replace Mattis with neocon fellow traveler and Iran hardliner psycho Frank Gaffney, with the president's blessing.
I noted how dark that news was, portending some major action against Iran after the new Congress is sworn in. I reminded people that it's way too premature to declare "At least Trump isn't as bad as George W. Bush because there's no Iraq War". That war did not begin until that president's third year, after the mid-terms, just as his father's Gulf War did not begin until the admin's third year, after the mid-terms. At this point in the admin, we are simply not in a position to judge how war-mongering it will wind up -- even the Bushes waited until year 3.
The spin that Mattis has given, and most are accepting, is that his resignation has to do with Trump's sudden decision to pull troops out of Syria. But this resignation has been in the making for months, and has nothing to do with that. It is just a convenient excuse instead of resigning for apparently no reason. Therefore, Mattis' resignation cannot be interpreted as a loss for the neocons, i.e. "The guy who wanted to stay in Syria just got booted from the WH". It's really, "the guy who couldn't get along with Trump any longer" has left, with an apparently much more neocon war-monger ready to take his place.
For all we know, the ascendant neocons like Bolton and Gaffney will cut their losses in Syria in order to focus all the more single-mindedly on Iran.
And notice: Trump did not say Assad was not an enemy, that Syria is neutral or friendly toward the American people, etc. He framed Syria, Iran, and Russia as our enemies, and claimed that by fighting ISIS, who in turn are fighting Syria-Iran-Russia, we were only helping our enemies. On the campaign trail, Trump said all the secular strongmen were perhaps "bad guys" but were far preferable to the only alternative, the radical Islamic terrorists. Hussein, Assad, Qaddafi -- it was either them, or Medieval psychos who drown people in steel cages. So he has not even returned to his campaign-trail rhetoric and framing of those leaders and their governments, and remains committed to the neocon view of them.
Nor has he criticized Saudi Arabia for its support and participation in radical Islamic terrorism, like he did on the campaign trail and for years in the conservative media before that. Now he's as buddy-buddy as you can get with the jihadists of that nation, with Jared serving as MBS' butt boy.
He has not criticized our support for Israel, but then that is consistent with his longstanding agreement on that policy. The point is, his stance on Israel is also fully status quo.
Unwavering, ever-expanding support for the jihadists and the Zionists, and unquestioning antagonism toward Iran, is not a reversal of longstanding US policy in the Middle East. If Trump is truly throwing off the shackles of the neocons, is he about to re-commit to the Iran nuclear deal? That would be one of the easiest things to do, since it would not require a whole new plan, but simply signing back onto an existing agreement of the previous admin. Is he going to fire Bolton and replace him with Rand Paul?
I know people want a reason to celebrate, but we've been down this road too many times during the Trump admin. Even if he withdraws the numbers stated from Syria and Afghanistan, that is only correcting his own admin's mistakes, not delivering on a campaign promise to fix the state of affairs of the Obama-or-earlier period. And nothing suggests a re-orientation of policy away from the jihadists and Zionists, or away from their main target, Iran.
When Gaffney replaces Mattis, our foreign policy in the Middle East will get far more disastrous, and we should be prepared for that now, so we don't get blind-sided by it after assuming that removing troops from Syria, and removing the new troops from Afghanistan, means the neocons are on the way out. It may just mean they're consolidating their efforts for one last Hail-Mary plan against Iran, before the Bernie realignment forecloses on that possibility for the next half-century.
December 9, 2018
Intimate soulful ballads during vulnerable phase of 15-year cultural excitement cycle
As a sign of how much the pop music cycle has mellowed out since the manic phase of the early 2010s, the hit songs of 2018 have brought back the ballad as a popular genre. They haven't been this slow and sentimental since the emo early 2000s, or the power ballad era of the late '80s, the soul ballads of the early '70s, or the weepy strings-section sound of the late '50s.
These 5-year periods are all instances of the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, crashing into a refractory state after the excitement and climax of the manic phase, and before they feel comfortable enough to come out of their shell during the restless warm-up phase.
It's not just the depleted energy levels that lead audiences and performers alike toward the ballad during their refractory state. It's also the shrinking social space -- the manic phase also has soulful songs, but they are more exhibitionistic, which assumes performing before a crowd of (friendly) strangers. Once that social energy has been spent, the socially exhausted population feels more like retreating into a private space and interacting with at most the kind of people you'd meet within the home setting.
For romantic songs, that means a single person who you're devoted to and want to spend the rest of all time with -- preferably within that same isolated home setting, since widespread social stimulation is painful during this refractory state. The atmosphere is more intimate and cozy, rather than thrillingly novel as it is during the manic phase when everyone feels invincible.
Rather than list every one of the ballads over the rise-and-fall of their popularity (you can flip through the Billboard Year-End charts at the second link in this post for that), I'll just pick what stands out as the most representative of the trend during each of the vulnerable periods.
"Perfect" by Ed Sheeran (2017)
His earlier hit ballad "Thinking Out Loud" straddled the line between the manic and vulnerable phases, recorded in 2014 and soaring in popularity during '15. A few years further into the refractory state, he was better able to channel the cozy-intimate zeitgeist.
"Your Body Is a Wonderland" by John Mayer (2002)
The early 2000s is the least soulful of these vulnerable periods, but still slow, mellow, and intimate. Outside of romantic songs, there was another more soulful-sounding ballad hit -- "Drift Away" by Uncle Kracker in 2003, itself a cover whose original recording came from an earlier vulnerable phase, by Dobie Gray in 1973.
"Lady in Red" by Chris De Burgh (1987)
Most ballads from this phase were "power" -- guitar solo affairs -- which does testify to how popular the ballad is during a vulnerable phase, that even the rock gods du jour have to perform them. But it also makes them sound less ballad-y. The dream-like, ethereal, slow funk of this song fits in better with the others across pop music history.
"Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye (1973)
The proper contrast here is not with his hits from the previous manic phase, such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" from 1967, but with his big hit from the following manic phase, "Sexual Healing" from 1982. The soulful ballad from '73 is more familiar with the woman he's addressing, whereas the one from '82 sounds more like he's addressing any ol' woman who he's currently got the hots for, drawn from a broader social space, rather than the one he's devoted to. "Let's Get It On" is about intimacy, whereas "Sexual Healing" makes declarative statements of sex-positive "ideology". (Recall that sex-positive feminism peaks during the manic phase.)
And typical of manic-phase music, "Sexual Healing" has more musical phrase development, teasing with a slow intro and building gradually toward a dramatic climax, while "Let's Get It On" gets right to the mood and stays there for the whole song. Climaxing is not possible during a refractory state.
"Unchained Melody" by Les Baxter (1955)
This song was recorded and charted highly by multiple performers in 1955-'56, the version above is simply the highest-ranking one on the year-end charts. It's a good reminder for people unfamiliar with pre-'60s music of how closely the late '50s tone veered toward mawkish, weepy, pining, and dejected. For a version that has the full lyrics, and sounds closest to the version you're most familiar with, try this one by Roy Hamilton.
The most well remembered recording was from a decade later, in 1965 by the Righteous Brothers. Springing from the manic phase of the late '60s, that version is much higher in energy and comes off as more exhibitionistic than the originals. An emotional delivery that is so over-the-top does not suggest a cozy-intimate setting and an audience of one who you're already familiar with. It suggests a performance before a crowd of (friendly) strangers, where the focus is more on baring one's own soul. It's not for narcissistic aims, but to cheerlead the audience into feeling the same way, and getting a massive crowd pumped up and resonating on the same emotional wavelength. Still, it is decidedly not an intimate atmosphere, but a crowd-pleasing one.
With so many ballads filling out the 2018 chart, it feels like the genre's revival is done. We're nearly in 2019, which is similar in the cycle to 2004, 1989, 1974, and 1959, by which time the unrelenting mellow-ness was beginning to get old. You can't stay vulnerable forever. Just one more year of (decelerating) vulnerability, and then it's back into the restless warm-up phase again.
It would be interesting to see if any of these ballads from the late 2010s get covered during the next manic phase of the late 2020s, a la "Unchained Melody". I'd guess "Girls Like You," which is weepier and lower-energy than the other big ballads of 2017-'18, and offers the most room for changing it to fit a different zeitgeist in the future. Perhaps even by the same band -- just think of how different it would've sounded if recorded by the manic-phase Maroon 5 of 2013.
These 5-year periods are all instances of the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, crashing into a refractory state after the excitement and climax of the manic phase, and before they feel comfortable enough to come out of their shell during the restless warm-up phase.
It's not just the depleted energy levels that lead audiences and performers alike toward the ballad during their refractory state. It's also the shrinking social space -- the manic phase also has soulful songs, but they are more exhibitionistic, which assumes performing before a crowd of (friendly) strangers. Once that social energy has been spent, the socially exhausted population feels more like retreating into a private space and interacting with at most the kind of people you'd meet within the home setting.
For romantic songs, that means a single person who you're devoted to and want to spend the rest of all time with -- preferably within that same isolated home setting, since widespread social stimulation is painful during this refractory state. The atmosphere is more intimate and cozy, rather than thrillingly novel as it is during the manic phase when everyone feels invincible.
Rather than list every one of the ballads over the rise-and-fall of their popularity (you can flip through the Billboard Year-End charts at the second link in this post for that), I'll just pick what stands out as the most representative of the trend during each of the vulnerable periods.
"Perfect" by Ed Sheeran (2017)
His earlier hit ballad "Thinking Out Loud" straddled the line between the manic and vulnerable phases, recorded in 2014 and soaring in popularity during '15. A few years further into the refractory state, he was better able to channel the cozy-intimate zeitgeist.
"Your Body Is a Wonderland" by John Mayer (2002)
The early 2000s is the least soulful of these vulnerable periods, but still slow, mellow, and intimate. Outside of romantic songs, there was another more soulful-sounding ballad hit -- "Drift Away" by Uncle Kracker in 2003, itself a cover whose original recording came from an earlier vulnerable phase, by Dobie Gray in 1973.
"Lady in Red" by Chris De Burgh (1987)
Most ballads from this phase were "power" -- guitar solo affairs -- which does testify to how popular the ballad is during a vulnerable phase, that even the rock gods du jour have to perform them. But it also makes them sound less ballad-y. The dream-like, ethereal, slow funk of this song fits in better with the others across pop music history.
"Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye (1973)
The proper contrast here is not with his hits from the previous manic phase, such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" from 1967, but with his big hit from the following manic phase, "Sexual Healing" from 1982. The soulful ballad from '73 is more familiar with the woman he's addressing, whereas the one from '82 sounds more like he's addressing any ol' woman who he's currently got the hots for, drawn from a broader social space, rather than the one he's devoted to. "Let's Get It On" is about intimacy, whereas "Sexual Healing" makes declarative statements of sex-positive "ideology". (Recall that sex-positive feminism peaks during the manic phase.)
And typical of manic-phase music, "Sexual Healing" has more musical phrase development, teasing with a slow intro and building gradually toward a dramatic climax, while "Let's Get It On" gets right to the mood and stays there for the whole song. Climaxing is not possible during a refractory state.
"Unchained Melody" by Les Baxter (1955)
This song was recorded and charted highly by multiple performers in 1955-'56, the version above is simply the highest-ranking one on the year-end charts. It's a good reminder for people unfamiliar with pre-'60s music of how closely the late '50s tone veered toward mawkish, weepy, pining, and dejected. For a version that has the full lyrics, and sounds closest to the version you're most familiar with, try this one by Roy Hamilton.
The most well remembered recording was from a decade later, in 1965 by the Righteous Brothers. Springing from the manic phase of the late '60s, that version is much higher in energy and comes off as more exhibitionistic than the originals. An emotional delivery that is so over-the-top does not suggest a cozy-intimate setting and an audience of one who you're already familiar with. It suggests a performance before a crowd of (friendly) strangers, where the focus is more on baring one's own soul. It's not for narcissistic aims, but to cheerlead the audience into feeling the same way, and getting a massive crowd pumped up and resonating on the same emotional wavelength. Still, it is decidedly not an intimate atmosphere, but a crowd-pleasing one.
With so many ballads filling out the 2018 chart, it feels like the genre's revival is done. We're nearly in 2019, which is similar in the cycle to 2004, 1989, 1974, and 1959, by which time the unrelenting mellow-ness was beginning to get old. You can't stay vulnerable forever. Just one more year of (decelerating) vulnerability, and then it's back into the restless warm-up phase again.
It would be interesting to see if any of these ballads from the late 2010s get covered during the next manic phase of the late 2020s, a la "Unchained Melody". I'd guess "Girls Like You," which is weepier and lower-energy than the other big ballads of 2017-'18, and offers the most room for changing it to fit a different zeitgeist in the future. Perhaps even by the same band -- just think of how different it would've sounded if recorded by the manic-phase Maroon 5 of 2013.
Categories:
Dudes and dudettes,
Excitement cycle,
Music,
Psychology
December 3, 2018
Soak-the-rich Right revolts in France at end of neoliberal era, as 50-year cycle of political violence also returns
First, some necessary background and context on the French riots from Peter Turchin, whose historical data analysis has shown 50-year cycles in collective political violence -- more organized than individual violence, or crime, but less organized than states warring against each other. The last peak was around 1970, and 1920 before that, and 1870 before that. That means we're due for another peak around 2020, and the view from France certainly looks like we're on schedule.
While the immediate trigger was a rise in the regressive diesel tax on ordinary consumers, the revolt stems from a much deeper anger against the entire neoliberal framework of the past 35 years. From a Bloomberg report on the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes), their demands are populist rather than libertarian or elitist:
One of Macron's first actions in office was to dramatically slash the wealth tax on high-net-worth owners, in response to the exodus of financial elites from Paris to London in search of a lower tax burden, and to implement a flat tax on capital gains, also to placate the parasitic financial elites. As usual, the business press had the real news right away (e.g., this report from FT).
Macron gave the usual trickle-down logic to justify these tax cuts on the wealthy, and as always they failed to benefit the middle or lower classes, and only padded the ill-gotten gains of the elite class. No wonder his approval rating sits in the 20s now.
In the model of regime dynamics by Stephen Skowronek, Macron is clearly a disjunctive leader presiding over the end of an era for his dominant coalition. In his case, it is the finance-backed Socialist party that ushered in the neoliberal era in 1981. Like other Mediterranean nations, the neoliberal era in France has been dominated by the relatively more Left of the two major coalitions -- Mitterrand in France, Craxi in Italy, Gonzalez Marquez in Spain, Soares in Portugal, and Papandreou in Greece.
That pattern contrasts with the Anglo nations, whose nearly identical era of neoliberalism has been dominated by the relatively more Right of the two major coalitions -- Reagan in America, Thatcher in Britain, and Mulroney in Canada. (Australia is an exception, perhaps being too far outside the Atlantic sphere of influence: their neolib era has been dominated by the Left party beginning with Hawke.)
Historical regimes usually turn over by the sclerotic old dominant coalition becoming dethroned into opposition status, while the old opposition realigns itself to attain dominant status. And indeed, the egalitarian Midcentury was presided over by the opposite pattern of the neoliberal era -- the Med nations were governed by the relatively more Right party, and the Anglo-Atlantic nations by the more Left party.
That suggests that the nascent realignment out of the neoliberal era will come from the Right in the Med (and Straya), but from the Left in the Anglo-Atlantic. It's clear that left-wingers Bernie and Corbyn will realign the US and the UK during the 2020s, and the first Med nation has already begun realignment under right-winger Salvini in Italy.
With the current breakdown of order in France against the hated disjunctive Socialist Macron, it seems clear that the post-neoliberal era will be led by France's version of Salvini. As in Italy, the Right in France will have to realign itself in a nationalist populist direction, just as Salvini's party had to realign itself away from regional cultural separatism that would have favored the wealthy north. For most of the neoliberal era, it was Lega Nord ("League of the North"), then to attain real national power it recently dropped the regional separatism to become simply "La Lega" ("The League"), agreeing to a wealth transfer from Northerners to poorer Southerners via the "citizen's income" -- not the "Northerner's income".
Whether it's one of the Le Pen's under a rebranded Front National, or a fellow traveler, the populist Right in France will also have to shed its escapist and separatist fantasies of its earlier years, and promise prosperity for all of France, if it wants to seize national power and hold onto it as a dominant coalition instead of the occasional minority pressure group.
The right-wing character of the French realignment will be revealed once the revolts turn to the migrant question, and join Italy in curbing immigration.
I don't think either side of the Mediterranean-Atlantic divide will close the borders, though, during the post-neoliberal era. They resemble each other at the big-picture level -- including the Anglo-Atlantic nations whose egalitarian Midcentury featured the same closed borders as the Med, even though it was the relatively more Left party in control of the US and UK.
Likewise, the Bernie realignment shows little chance of restricting migration, suggesting that we are not going back to the closed-borders New Deal era, but rather to a new Lincolnian Gilded Age with Ellis Island-era open borders. An earlier post here from August detailed how the Bernie realignment will resemble the Lincoln era of robber barons, open borders, and soaring inequality, rather than the New Deal, on the analogy that the Reagan era has been a revival of the Jacksonian era, and that their successor regimes will be similar as well, taking place during the same phase of a long-term cycle.
Even the far-Left socialists are starting to become aware of how non-socialist the Bernie realignment will turn out to be. From a recent article in Jacobin:
If Bernie and Corbyn don't restrict immigration, then their counterparts in the Med probably will not either, despite being from the relatively more conservative side.
Even if immigration does not meaningfully decrease, and even if inequality continues to widen, at the very least we should expect a massive decline in militarism. That was the one silver lining of the robber baron-led fin-de-siecle. Both the Bernie-Corbyn Left and the Salvini-Le Pen Right want to wind down the West's over-extension in so many pointless wasteful military occupations all over the world. Hopefully they can start with putting an end to NATO.
Much further down the cycle, we will see this absence of militarism explode suddenly a la World War I, probably coinciding with another peak in the 50-year cycle of riot-level violence. That will usher in the next phase of egalitarianism, which most of us will probably not live to enjoy, but may at least see the beginnings of.
While the immediate trigger was a rise in the regressive diesel tax on ordinary consumers, the revolt stems from a much deeper anger against the entire neoliberal framework of the past 35 years. From a Bloomberg report on the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes), their demands are populist rather than libertarian or elitist:
The movement’s demands have expanded from rolling back the gasoline taxes to higher pensions, an increase in the minimum wage, a repeal of certain other taxes, the restoration of a wealth tax, a law fixing a maximum salary, cutting politicians’ salaries, and replacing Macron and the National Assembly with a “People’s Assembly.” While political parties have tried to show their support for the movement, the Yellow Vests have rejected any political link.
One of Macron's first actions in office was to dramatically slash the wealth tax on high-net-worth owners, in response to the exodus of financial elites from Paris to London in search of a lower tax burden, and to implement a flat tax on capital gains, also to placate the parasitic financial elites. As usual, the business press had the real news right away (e.g., this report from FT).
Macron gave the usual trickle-down logic to justify these tax cuts on the wealthy, and as always they failed to benefit the middle or lower classes, and only padded the ill-gotten gains of the elite class. No wonder his approval rating sits in the 20s now.
In the model of regime dynamics by Stephen Skowronek, Macron is clearly a disjunctive leader presiding over the end of an era for his dominant coalition. In his case, it is the finance-backed Socialist party that ushered in the neoliberal era in 1981. Like other Mediterranean nations, the neoliberal era in France has been dominated by the relatively more Left of the two major coalitions -- Mitterrand in France, Craxi in Italy, Gonzalez Marquez in Spain, Soares in Portugal, and Papandreou in Greece.
That pattern contrasts with the Anglo nations, whose nearly identical era of neoliberalism has been dominated by the relatively more Right of the two major coalitions -- Reagan in America, Thatcher in Britain, and Mulroney in Canada. (Australia is an exception, perhaps being too far outside the Atlantic sphere of influence: their neolib era has been dominated by the Left party beginning with Hawke.)
Historical regimes usually turn over by the sclerotic old dominant coalition becoming dethroned into opposition status, while the old opposition realigns itself to attain dominant status. And indeed, the egalitarian Midcentury was presided over by the opposite pattern of the neoliberal era -- the Med nations were governed by the relatively more Right party, and the Anglo-Atlantic nations by the more Left party.
That suggests that the nascent realignment out of the neoliberal era will come from the Right in the Med (and Straya), but from the Left in the Anglo-Atlantic. It's clear that left-wingers Bernie and Corbyn will realign the US and the UK during the 2020s, and the first Med nation has already begun realignment under right-winger Salvini in Italy.
With the current breakdown of order in France against the hated disjunctive Socialist Macron, it seems clear that the post-neoliberal era will be led by France's version of Salvini. As in Italy, the Right in France will have to realign itself in a nationalist populist direction, just as Salvini's party had to realign itself away from regional cultural separatism that would have favored the wealthy north. For most of the neoliberal era, it was Lega Nord ("League of the North"), then to attain real national power it recently dropped the regional separatism to become simply "La Lega" ("The League"), agreeing to a wealth transfer from Northerners to poorer Southerners via the "citizen's income" -- not the "Northerner's income".
Whether it's one of the Le Pen's under a rebranded Front National, or a fellow traveler, the populist Right in France will also have to shed its escapist and separatist fantasies of its earlier years, and promise prosperity for all of France, if it wants to seize national power and hold onto it as a dominant coalition instead of the occasional minority pressure group.
The right-wing character of the French realignment will be revealed once the revolts turn to the migrant question, and join Italy in curbing immigration.
I don't think either side of the Mediterranean-Atlantic divide will close the borders, though, during the post-neoliberal era. They resemble each other at the big-picture level -- including the Anglo-Atlantic nations whose egalitarian Midcentury featured the same closed borders as the Med, even though it was the relatively more Left party in control of the US and UK.
Likewise, the Bernie realignment shows little chance of restricting migration, suggesting that we are not going back to the closed-borders New Deal era, but rather to a new Lincolnian Gilded Age with Ellis Island-era open borders. An earlier post here from August detailed how the Bernie realignment will resemble the Lincoln era of robber barons, open borders, and soaring inequality, rather than the New Deal, on the analogy that the Reagan era has been a revival of the Jacksonian era, and that their successor regimes will be similar as well, taking place during the same phase of a long-term cycle.
Even the far-Left socialists are starting to become aware of how non-socialist the Bernie realignment will turn out to be. From a recent article in Jacobin:
Today’s Democratic Party, to their credit, appears far more committed to preserving civil rights than the late-nineteenth-century Republicans. But as the party consolidates its strength around the wealthy suburbs, the dangers of a Gilded Age–style class division persist. A political coalition led by affluent metropolitans, armed with pietistic certainty about their moral cause, but almost physically allergic to huge chunks of the working-class population: this was the Republican Party of 1884. It does not offer us a roadmap to the future.
If Bernie and Corbyn don't restrict immigration, then their counterparts in the Med probably will not either, despite being from the relatively more conservative side.
Even if immigration does not meaningfully decrease, and even if inequality continues to widen, at the very least we should expect a massive decline in militarism. That was the one silver lining of the robber baron-led fin-de-siecle. Both the Bernie-Corbyn Left and the Salvini-Le Pen Right want to wind down the West's over-extension in so many pointless wasteful military occupations all over the world. Hopefully they can start with putting an end to NATO.
Much further down the cycle, we will see this absence of militarism explode suddenly a la World War I, probably coinciding with another peak in the 50-year cycle of riot-level violence. That will usher in the next phase of egalitarianism, which most of us will probably not live to enjoy, but may at least see the beginnings of.
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