Democratic (Party) Direction

Xpost Nah just obviously funny/revealing of the bubble one is in that the reflex is to process the Democratic Party sending out an email talking up a candidate you like in unnecessarily nefarious terms.

VENEZUELA!!!

I am just going shout this every time I get a little annoyed.

Love to be mad and have a weird conspiracy theory even when the DNC does something I like.

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Friday, June 29, 2018 3:43 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh JFC do you really not think they target emails? That's a "conspiracy theory"? I'm not even mad about it, but it's ridiculous to cite AOC in a fundraising pitch when her race is not actually going to be the target of DNC/DCCC spending, as there is no reason for it to be. Pappas has like zero dollars raised.

I am so jealous of the initials AOC. She's her own own terroir, her own island.

AOC is AOK

eh

https://d3j2s6hdd6a7rg.cloudfront.net/v2/uploads/media/default/0001/64/thumb_63427_default_news_size_5.jpeg

everyone's moved on already but i was at work. recent lbj talk itt underrates his ideological commitment to civil rights. the model for the enlightened, pragmatic, thoughtful liberal president willing to be pushed left if his reading of his own political fortunes permits is jfk. the quickest way to understand how useful the civil rights movement found jfk in the end is to know that when jackie knelt by his televised coffin, mlk muttered to corretta (and to hoover): "look at her-- sucking him off one last time." think of how much smarter and more reasonable we'd all be than him, how much better than him we'd all understand how politics "actually" "work", if he'd tweeted that.

lbj was a new deal politician and cut his national teeth running agencies for fdr in texas. his feelings on race are hard to untangle; they're no doubt not far off from the average white texan of his generation (or ours)-- but what is not hard to untangle is that he viciously hated poverty, as a dyed new dealer was all-in on belief in government, and believed that southern blacks could not live without the vote. i think his feelings on this were much, much stronger than jfk's warmhearted noblesse-oblige.

it's true that the 1959 senate bill raised his star (at the time already, to be clear, higher than literally anyone's save eisenhower's) and it's also true that it did very little-- in fact it did almost nothing-- but it's wrong to paint it as sheer pragmatism imo. you can argue that breaking through (not waiting for "values to shift" or "mores to change"-- breaking through) the hundred-year wall southern democrats in the senate had built around jim crow is so spectacular a display of legislative muscle that it must have been performatively intended as such. but idk. there are easier ways to look like a big deal in the senate. there are not easier ways to set yourself up for signing a later civil rights bill, as president. i think that's what he was thinking of. in 1959 he was certainly planning for the oval office. after 1960 that went into recession a while because he knew he'd failed and that deliverance could only come from something unspeakable. then it came. as president in 64, precariously unelected, he's no doubt looking for something to endear him to millions, so okay that's what the 64 civil rights bill is. but then he dispells the cloud under which he entered the office by winning the largest presidential electoral victory ever. whatever a guy does after that is probably fairly revealing of what matters to him, if anything's ever gonna be. certainly lbj's foreign policy of the time reveals his incuriosity, provincialism, and fear. i think the voting rights act-- a terrible betrayal of many southern (even northern) colleagues, and friends, and mentors, and donors-- reveals something else.

tl;dr there's a reason movements care what politicians' actual bedrock is. and how did a politician with bedrock like this get into american government, let alone get into the white house? the new deal.

my point was that LBJ would not have passed (and in fact, did NOT pass) anyone's ideological litmus test on civil rights - until he actually became President.

dunno what to make of yr MLK anecdote, which seems impossible to verify and highly unlikely to have occurred but idk

it's in taylor branch. source is the bugs.

yr def right tho that lbj's public actions pre-presidency didn't endear him to the movement.

I have to say I am cautiously excited about the prospect of a 5+ member left caucus in congress

ah I was confused cuz the way you wrote it made it sound like he was being chummy w both Coretta AND Hoover while *at* the funeral which was just... waht?!

but FBI bugs make sense

xp

yeah sorry lol, overpoetic

brutal MLK quote, thanks for that

excellent post dlh, you repeatedly earn your rep

hey DLH my memory is that the MLK quote is not from an actual recording of king's voice but from interviews taylor branch did with FBI ppl decades after hoover told them that. i don't have the book handy or i'd check the notes.

if the source is Hoover and not actual tapes um yeah that's highly suspect to say the least

tbh it does sound more like something hoover would've made up to infuriate RFK than a plausible statement MLK would have made to his wife

i think i first encountered this quote years ago in a column by (wait for it) christopher hitchens, who predictably thought it was hilarious and right-on

vols 1 and 3 are where they're supposed to be (history/american/postwar) but vol 2 is not for some reason; think i may have given it away in some kind of fit. i believe you tho. still branch is not elsewhere very credulous of hoover or the fbi, and my memory of the quote is that it's sourced only in endnotes (and not in the text the way you might with something you wanted to be careful with). ultimately tho i just find it believable. he was pretty frustrated and he thought he had privacy.

yeah the Hitchens review is what just came up when I looked for it. Um, among a bunch of other openly racist and right-wing crank sites.

and coretta wasn't just his wife but another pretty frustrated person. xp

otoh maybe namethejew.com is a credible news source lol

xp

Didn't LBJ get elected to congress mostly through dirty oil money, and then flat out stole a senate election ten years later? Not much New Deal about that.

get out

Love to be mad and have a weird conspiracy theory even when the DNC does something I like.

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Friday, June 29, 2018 4:43 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when you are definitely, definitely not mad

Sort of suprised that the DNC spam email I received today used AOC as part of their fundraising pitch (among ten candidates). Obviously her general race doesn't need my money. They probably have some data on me as a bernie voter and focused on leftish candidates.

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Friday, June 29, 2018 4:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw I got this email as well and I didn't vote in the primary (because I'm not a registered democrat)

Frederik is actually correct about his election wins. Wrong about his commitment to the New Deal, which was deep and enduring.

xp

I hope no one thinks that precedents LBJ set are necessarily applicable today

I don't understand that anecdote about the sucking off. That MLK was whatever about JFK?

that he thought he was a phony

re lbj i was talking about ideology and personal concept of the function of government, not about taking some special pure path to power. (but i think more of it was dirty contractor money?) lbj's a borderline-psychopathic schemer and liar, beholden to corporations (brown+root) and an obsessive master of transactional politics, and yes he does buy votes in south texas by the fiefdom. but why does such a person, given all the capital he'll ever have, finally spend it on the VRA?what's he a product of? not my time.

People are complex.

I've noticed that, too.

Banality but true. And despite the corruption and false compromises I believe his anecdotes about how the Mexican schoolkids affected him

Well, I consider it a feature rather than a bug of our current climate that if someone like OAC made too many compromises to centrists (either out of being "complex" or simply run-of-the-mill careerism) she could very well find herself out of a job within a cycle or two.

re: Venezuela as boogeyman

Tfw you don't have the Soviet Union as a bogeyman anymore and you gotta really reach pic.twitter.com/QreBkiS2Ia

— Connor Wroe Southard (@ConnorSouthard) June 29, 2018

AOC will start with an edge over most freshmen reps, in that she has become a symbol and an icon. A sizable bloc of voters listen to what she says. That's her power. We'll see how well she can parlay that into having a seat at the table where the real decisions get made.

hoping she gets on some good-ass committees

America's growing socialist left have another word: Scandinavia

in that twitter video posted 40 posts ago or so, is that...atul gawande toward the beginning?

America's growing socialist left have another word: Scandinavia

I don't think this is a winning strategy, for a whole bunch of reasons.

who's talking strategy?

I thought you were?

The right's continuing efforts to find an unflattering picture of OAC are a source of dim amusement in these dark times.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/06/29/fact-check-girl-from-the-bronx-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-grew-up-in-one-of-richest-u-s-counties/

Obama won almost the entire Midwest because people thought he was MORE progressive than he was https://t.co/JbNwcSqKV9

— Gore Vidal Sassoon (@JimmyJazz1968) June 30, 2018

strategy is maybe overrated in countering tweet zings

I had no idea Ellison was talking up a maximum wage. Fucking dope idea imho

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/30/minimum-wage-maximum-wage-income-inequality?CMP=edit_2221

yeah, at the very least companies with such stark pay disparities should be punished. interesting article

a maximum wage is easily circumvented by capital gains. there would have to be a maximum annual income and a cap on maximum wealth.

a constitutional amendment like that was introduced during the great depression