Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. Do not congratulate. This is not business as usual.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

This fight is for everything.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

The revolution will be supervised.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2020 / Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Meanwhile, at the Other Pole of the Horseshoe…

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Meanwhile, at the Other Pole of the Horseshoe…

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The Trump administration is doing what it does, but on steroids. Meanwhile, the Too-Woke-To-Settle-For-A-Mere-Imperfect-Democrat “Left” is… acting out that Nietzsche quote. “… When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”


Some of the weird wobbles in ‘ordinary’ political twitter commentary make much more sense when you realize they’re being affected by distant, dense objects outside the limits of normal observation — on the centrist-right, too.

Reader Interactions

38Comments

  1. 1.

    Mary G

    Looks like a good person to block. I’m being prejudiced to write him off without reading the whole piece, but life is short.

  2. 2.

    opiejeanne

    @Mary G: Not sure which of the chumps you’re referring to, but I think MangyJay is commenting on this ridiculous dystopian fantasy thing, pointing out that it’s ridiculous. I could be wrong, though.

  3. 3.

    JGabriel

    Mangy Jay via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    This whole article is very strange, and I’m not sure how much to say, but, for the record, I would like to state that it’s very odd to cast Malia Obama as the central figure in your neoliberal technocratic hellscape.

    Y’know, I find Trump’s adult offspring to be pretty damn irritating, crooked, and contemptible, but I don’t fantasize about still resenting them 20 years down the line.

    What the fuck is wrong with these people?

  7. 7.

    BlueDWarrior

    @JGabriel: It wasn’t just rural conservative Whites who had their minds broken by the meteoric rise of Barack Obama. The Professional, Super-Totally-Socialist Left also has gone out to lunch and I’m not sure if some of them, like the author referenced in the first Tweet, are ever coming back.

    Then again you can question if they were in our ‘reality’ to begin with, what with the constant insistence that the mere use of socialist rhetoric will finally break the grip that culturally conservative revanchism has on rural America.

    I dunno do these people actually remember how the Democratic Party functioned before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s?

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    Open thread?

    Ugh. Learned this week that step-niece (whom I “think’ I’ve met maybe once) is going to give her old iPhone to 91-year-old Mom.

    Already anticipating a string of phone calls, each of which will be summarized by yours truly saying, “I don’t know nuthin ’bout birthin’ no iPhones.”

  13. 13.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mary G:

    Looks like a good person to block.

    Just to spell it out, the person responsible is Matt Karp, of the extremely proletarian Princeton University:

    … and the article seems to be titled “Is This the Future Liberals Want?”, which is *totally* not a parody meme already.

  14. 14.

    M. Bouffant

    I remember right-wing nut jobs having dystopian nightmares of a permanent Democratic majority & a potential/eventual Chelsea Clinton presidency.

    Are we completely out of material?

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    @BillinGlendaleCA

    45 minutes with Mom on the phone this week to alleviate a display anomaly on her computer (which would have taken 5 minutes had she been clearer in explaining what the problem was), followed by another 20 minutes diagnosing and fixing a dilemma with her FIOS cable service. Blindfolded tech support from 6000 miles away has become one of my fortes.

  19. 19.

    opiejeanne

    @Anne Laurie: But the article itself isn’t a parody, is it? I haven’t slept yet and I think I strained my brain earlier trying to keep all of the current players straight, connecting the dots, and then I read Adam’s post. Now it’s full of cottage cheese, which I don’t even like very much.

  20. 20.

    Anne Laurie

    @opiejeanne:

    But the article itself isn’t a parody, is it?

    Well, it doesn’t seem to have been intended as a parody. Not consciously, anyways…

  23. 23.

    JR

    @sanjeevs: it is telling that Jacobin and Intercept get parroted on social media but never a word is heard from Adbusters (I’m guessing their editors are okay with that).

  24. 24.

    rp

    I had a dust up with Corey robin on Facebook a few months ago. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that he’s an incredible asshole.

  27. 27.

    Richard Guhl

    There’s more than a whiff of Gnosticism in the screeds of the far left wing politics.
    I mean, just from the practical matter that you cannot build a movement of change by trashing erstwhile allies instead of doing the hard work of persuasion. You have to wonder if they really want to accomplish their professed goals. Or is it that they are just aiming for aggrieved satisfaction, safe in the knowledge that they alone possess the truth?
    Beyond that you have to wonder if they have ever had conversations with the white working class. Having served a church made up of such folk for 13 years, I can attest to the fact that they aren’t hankering for socialism. When the first words out of the mouths of white, working-class women is ,”I’m not a feminist,” you know something else is going on in their value system.
    After all, the nakedly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s was not pushed by predatory capitalists like Leland Stanford but by the white working class of California.
    There’s a huge disconnect between what the Jacobin says they want and how they think they’ll get there.

  28. 28.

    Ben Cisco

    Rose Twitter is NEVER worth the look.

    For this bunch, EXPECT stupidity, then you’ll never be disappointed.

  29. 29.

    StringOnAStick

    I was friends with one of these “enhancing the contradictions hard enough” idiots awhile ago; middle aged white guy of course. Not at all privileged but had an advanced degree and was counting on an inheritance I suspect. When he emailed that he “couldn’t wait to vote for Sarah Palin” because he was sure that would really enhance those contradictions, I got my first proof that he was an unrealistic moron. I replied I don’t vote for fascists; I didn’t get any emails for quite a after that but we he became a lefty men’s rights advocate I told two permanently fuck off. I don’t know if he read Jacobin but I bet he did/does.

  30. 30.

    Brachiator

    So, let’s see:

    Since the 1970s, parties of the left center have bled working-class support all over the industrialized world, with millions of “blue-collar” Democrats, Social Democrats, and Labor voters giving way to a new class of highly educated professionals. Schumer’s own political career, which began at age twenty-three, when he graduated from Harvard Law School and won election to the New York State Assembly in the same year (eat your heart out, Pete Buttigieg!) is just one illustration of this shift….

    Thomas Piketty has dubbed this new configuration a clash between “the Brahmin Left” — educated professionals, defined by their cosmopolitan virtues…

    Hmmm. Piketty attended The École normale supérieure. According to the Wiki, ENS is is one of the most selective and prestigious graduate schools in Paris, France. But Schumer is part of the Brahmin Left, but Piketty is not.

    Ultimately, the Bernie-bros expect to see Sanders shit on Obama and the Democratic Party because they expect him to transform it into a working class grass roots movement. I wish that a couple of the candidates who have no real shot at winning would force Sanders to come out into the open on this and make it clear to primary voters that Sanders is not a Democrat and does not represent their interests.

  31. 31.

    Miss Bianca

    @JR: the original Jacobins had some truly progressive positions vis a vis family law and social programming that these douches appear to lack.

  32. 32.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Brachiator:You want to know something funny? The Communist party in India is dominated by actual fucking Brahmins in both Bengal and Kerala. And the second generation progeny of many Indian-Americans associated with Jacobins are Brahmins as well. Including AOC’s ousted chief of staff.

  33. 33.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:

    You want to know something funny? The Communist party in India is dominated by actual fucking Brahmins in both Bengal and Kerala.

    Interesting. I did not know this about the CP in India. I knew a little bit about AOC’s controversial former chief of staff, but not this biographical detail.

  34. 34.

    brantl

    Obama REALLY got under their skins, didn’t he? I bet he laughs, and laughs. He has a great sense of humor, as I recall.

  36. 36.

    Groucho48

    Much of the article is based on the premise that the Democratic Party, for no good reason except that elitists making one to two hundred thousand a year wanted to, abandoned the (white) working class. Rather than the actuality that the (white) working class left the Democratic Party in droves during the civil rights era.

    It is also upset that Medicare for All wasn’t passed under Obama. Apparently, things would have been different if Bernie had been President back then.

  38. 38.

    stinger

    Sorry about the Flood of ’39 and the brownfields and the exhaustion and all, but I gotta say I like Governor Obama’s policy proposals, at least as laid out in the paragraphs quoted in the OP. (Certainly not clicking through to the entire article.) Hope she wins!

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