Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

Looking forward to the day the masses overthrow the Biden regime

We can recontextualize the quote for the times and take 'overthrow the government of the Hendersons' as 'vote for a more left wing option in the primaries in 2024 than would be possible if Trump were president 20-24, due to a less pronounced fearful "safety first" mindset'

I mean reframe

I guess it’s a good thing this guy doesn’t have to campaign out west right now, some nice backdrops for his “let me be clear I will NOT ban fracking” business

The LGBTQ Town Hall went great for Biden, uh pic.twitter.com/QUjQlJI1Xg

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) October 11, 2019

I hope someone mixed this into an absolute banger

I'm interested in your take on the Lenin quotes, and of applicability (or not) to todays situation, Milo!

"C'mon, man!"

It feels like someone behind the scenes presses a button that triggers a small shock to Biden and makes him say that, whenever the operative feels it is necessary

reports indicate that you do indeed come on man during round-the-clock sex at the gay gay gay gay gay bathhouses, Biden otm tbf

Oh, I thought you were joking because it's completely meaningless in regard to today's situation?
Lenin's talking about the need to make temporary political accommodation with the Labour Party of 1920, which had never been in power and had existed for... 25 years at that point? The closest analogy for today, politically, would be telling leftists to work with trade unions, Bernie and AOC. Which, uh, duh.

The question of voting for Biden or not is entirely irrelevant to any broader (left) political goals aside from 'electing Joe Biden.' He's Lloyd George in the quote (and Trump is Churchill but with less genocide)(so far).

I think I answered the basic question above - the idea that 'the left' can grow via conversion of liberal and centrist Democrats under a centrist Democratic President is a fantasy, as borne out by the three centrist Democratic Presidents of the last five (lol) decades. Tribalism is used as an epithet to beat Republican voters over the head but it's just as applicable to people who consider themselves Democrats (or are Democratic politicians) today. Any act committed by their team is to be celebrated (or actively ignored if it happens anywhere outside of the US itself).

The 'left of the party' might grow via young people, but it will be fought tooth and nail at every step by the Democrats, from the power brokers to the normies, because it criticizes the party. We've had repeated previews of this post-AOC/Squad, even down to a primary challenge of the one old liberal open to making an accommodation with the young progressive. (Upwardly mobile young people are also prone to shifting politics when they get good healthcare at a job or buy a house, of course.)

Whatever real growth or success there is on the left in the United States will come from otherwise uncommitted people - youth and immigrants who haven't formed 'Democrat' as part of their identity, or people who have lost it due to disillusion. This will come from building extra-partisan structures to advocate outside of politics (ie unions) or, perhaps, from actively organizing to hold votes hostage from the Democrats.

Thanks Milo, wasn't joking - I appreciate your viewpoint is all!

I was just thinking over the Lenin quote, I hadn't really decided my own thoughts on it (still haven't)

First sentence sounded combative, not intended, was sincere about thinking it was a gag.

Despite some others' assertions, I'm very much 'rooting for' (war criminal, probable sex criminal) Biden in November but it is purely as a tourniquet for a leg that's going to get cut off. Given that his people are already talking austerity, at best he gives us all a few months of not vomiting every day from anxiety and that would be pretty cool.

Working with reformists (Lenin's desire, I gather) and not closing yourself off into Red Guard cosplay is important - but the Democrats (in total) are not reformists. The progressive wing of the party might be, which is why they should be worked with and agitated for, but the Bidens and the Schumers and the Pelosis got us into this mess and have no interest in getting us out. (Cue clip of Pelosi's "Green New Dream" line set to footage of the entire Pacific Time Zone on fire.)

Now is not the time to make the big play to withhold votes and make them come left - but if that time never comes, if they can continuously make the lesser evil case, electoral politics will remain a largely pointless exercise.

A few months before 9/11, Punk Planet reprinted an interview with Howard Zinn that had a couple of paragraphs that I think are probably more instructive given the last few months and continuing uprisings -

It’s a bad move for progressive organizations to tie themselves to the electoral system because the electoral system is a great grave into which we are invited to get lost. For progressive movements, the future does not lie with electoral politics. It lies in street warfare – protest movements and demonstrations, civil disobedience, strikes and boycotts – using all of the power consumers and workers have in direct action against the government and corporations. To sink too much of our energy into electoral politics is a mistake. The result is to dishearten people because it gives us a false picture of how much strength the establishment has; because counted up, it looks as though all these people voted for Gore or Bush, but only a handful voted for Nader.

The fact is that millions and millions of people voted for Gore who would have voted for Nader if they thought he had a chance to win. That is, millions and millions of people would whose basic views are closer to Nader than they are to Gore. But because people are trapped in this electoral system in which two parties and wealth control the media and control the electoral process, people are trapped in that therefore they vote their conscience, they dont vote their beliefs. They become pragmatic the moment that they go to the polls. They sort of shrug their shoulders and go “We’ve only been given two choices – we’ve been given a multiple choice test with only A and B. We can’t do C or D.” So the result is to give a misleading picture about the strength of the progressive movement. That was the mistake of the Nader campaign, to fall into that trap.

In 2001 he points to some positive signs in the wake of the WTO protests, but we get to look at how they all got turned inside out by 9/11, the failure of Iraq War protests and the retreat of the left into disillusionment or Democratic Party politics.

They would do better by taking a look at the actions people have been taking these past few years – the new vitality in the labor movement, the unionization of white collar workers, the victory of the United Parcel Workers strike, which is one of the largest labor victories of the past decade.

I know we've had our disagreements here, but I appreciate these posts, Milo, and am in agreement for the most part. Thanks.

TS: “growing the left” vs. getting Trump the fuck out of office

we clearly have to do both

This quadrennial discussion about the shortcomings of the presidential candidates isn't very useful, imo. If you're going to have a larger and more effective left, it shouldn't concern itself too much at this point with a binary national election where you're almost always going to be frustrated and end up arguing about whether or how much to support whatever compromise candidate emerges.

Concrete and theoretically achievable goals are important, otherwise it's just a lot of yelling about "capitalism." The things you can actually get people organized around are things like labor conditions and protections, access to healthcare and education, criminal justice/police reform. There are movements on all of those fronts, and the Green New Deal too, and I think working on the ground issue by issue and taking each small win as a step forward makes a lot more sense than trying to construct a viable left out of thin air at the presidential level. A "real left" presidential candidate is the end point of that movement, a decade or more in the future, not the starting point.

yep, though having a non-crank candidate kicking around for a while who was the closest to "genuine left" or whatever any of us have seen in our lifetimes certainly muddied the waters for a bit there

(I am of course referring to marianne williamson)

You mean you didn't refer to Nader?

woefully lacking in orb power

https://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/blog_header/RQ08WV0Q4U241314297472185.jpg

stay a while and listen

I think working on the ground issue by issue and taking each small win as a step forward makes a lot more sense than trying to construct a viable left out of thin air at the presidential level. A "real left" presidential candidate is the end point of that movement, a decade or more in the future, not the starting point.

i think all of this is right, but we should also keep in mind that so much work has already been done, and that there will never be a clearly defined time when the movement is at its end point and it's time to consolidate all the gains with a leftist president. it's always going to feel like there's so much more to be done, first. i think that's why a lot of leftists get exhausted with the "wait until the movement is stronger" thing - it may prove to be true, but it's what people always say

9/09 Mike Luckovich: Decisions, decisions https://t.co/JVIH8ZbtH2

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) September 9, 2020

Whatever real growth or success there is on the left in the United States will come from otherwise uncommitted people - youth and immigrants who haven't formed 'Democrat' as part of their identity, or people who have lost it due to disillusion. This will come from building extra-partisan structures to advocate outside of politics (ie unions) or, perhaps, from actively organizing to hold votes hostage from the Democrats.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z), Thursday, September 10, 2020 1:07 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I genuinely appreciate this paragraph, Milo. I feel like I've tried to push you in the past on what you saw as a "path for success," and maybe I've gone about it in a clumsy or ill-tempered way, but I had the impression that you thought that there wasn't a viable path, or at least that you didn't seem to have any interest in answering that question. This is what I was looking for. I'm not sure I agree, but I understand it.

dunno if this has been touched on but i thought it was an interesting, if frought, way to frame an explicitly progressive and radical path forward

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/one-billion-americans-by-matthew-yglesias-book-excerpt.html

And while reproductive freedom is crucially important, in practice Americans end up having fewer children than they say they would like to. As Lyman Stone from the Institute of Family Studies writes, “The gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years.” It’s no great mystery why. Having and raising children is an increasingly costly and difficult undertaking, as anyone who has, or is hoping to have, children could tell you. A 2018 poll for the New York Times asked people who have or expected to have fewer children than they considered ideal why they hadn’t had more. The No. 1 answer was that child care is too expensive. No. 3 was worries about the economy. No. 4 was “can’t afford more children,” and No. 5 was that the parents had waited to start having kids until they achieved financial security and then ran out of time. Climate concerns, frequently discussed in the press, do not show up as prominently in surveys and perhaps for good reason — greenhouse-gas emissions are probably too big a problem (a global rather than a national one, for starters) to tackle through population restriction. Instead, what is needed is a wholesale re-creation of our energy infrastructure to make sustainable power sufficiently abundant that population would become less relevant. (In the meantime, opening up borders is among the best ways to allow the world as a whole to adapt to warming.)

The idea of taking deliberate action to increase national fertility gives some progressives the willies, just as conservatives are these days in a perennial state of alarm about immigrants. But Americans, as a whole, simply do want to have more kids...

oof.

sorry to be the person with the willies here, but please, no, let's not have a billion people in united states. i think this is the only thing in the excerpt that deals with resource scarcity:

if the extra 650 million came from immigration/open borders, great. if it comes from purposely trying to convince people to raise the birth rate from 1.7 to 2.7 million, no thanks. what are his reasons for wanting a population that is 3x larger? to compete with China in a war? and because people want to have more kids? are there any others?

and of course we want to get to a place where population is irrelevant because clean energy is so abundant. maybe it will be by 2100! but we are nowhere close to that point right now, and are loooooong past the carrying capacity of the planet, by a multiple of 4.

1.7 to 2.7 million kids/family, i meant

i'm sure there are other reasons to increase the population that he has in mind, but this is the big one that leads off the article, and which he spends time on addressing, before getting to other things:

When America faced down Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we were the big dog. We had more people, more wealth, and more industrial capacity. (Back in 1938, the gross domestic product of the U.S. alone was larger than that of Germany, Japan, and Italy combined.) But against China, we are the little dog: There are more than 1 billion of them to about 330 million of us. Chinese people don’t need to become as rich as Americans for China’s overall economy to outweigh ours. If they managed to become about half as rich as we are on a per person basis, like the Bahamas or Spain, then their economy would be far larger than ours in the aggregate. To become one-third as rich as we are, like Portugal or Greece, would be enough to pull even. To stay on top, we probably need to grow the country threefold — to one billion Americans.

i am...unconvinced? we all need to fuck like rabbits so we can stay on top and crush china? no

The entire premise of the article is based on nationalism and the primacy of the child. It's also complete lunacy.

intelligencer, more like......stupider

Why is it taken as a foregone conclusion that everyone wants the US "to stay on top"? He mentions the possibility of my sort of hand-wringing in the article, then just dismisses it by saying, "America should aspire to be the greatest nation on earth." Which, ignoring the fact that America is not a nation (fucking nitwit), perhaps focusing less on competition and instead on cleaning house and solving the intractable problems of the US might be a better solution? Lunacy.

I'm really hoping this will mark the end of Yglesias being treated as A Smart Person but sadly he's probably much too well-connected for that to ever happen

Yglesias still writes a good article monthly. In the '80s he'd be one of those Sunday paper columnists who's occasionally otm

i like ygelesias on a lot of stuff! and if this was just a one-off, it would be whatever. but i'm kinda...extremely disappointed?...that he's make this the thesis for an entire book?

This review (warning: The New Republic) gives that book — and its author — the savage beating they apparently deserve.

What is a book? A novel, a biography, a popular science story—I think I know what these are, even at the far edges of formal experimentation, where categories are tricky. But what does it mean when a columnist or a pundit writes “a book”? Swift reads, even when they number in the many hundreds of pages, volumes like David Brooks’s The Second Mountain or Paul Krugman’s Arguing With Zombies or Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” diptych tend to collect a set of superficially counterintuitive arguments and insights that upon closer inspection almost always resolve themselves into the preexisting, commonsense notions that their intended readership already assumes to be true. Designed for an educated, business-class airport set who have heard of the Aspen Ideas Festival, they gather groups of loosely connected, lecture-circuit insights like guests at a party where everyone seems to be the friend of someone else’s spouse, awkwardly unable to explain why they’re all there together, sweating and drinking under the same tent.

Matthew Yglesias’s latest, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, is a near-perfect example of the genre—a book-length collection of thoughts and proposals loosely arrayed around the endearingly crackpot idea that there should be one billion Americans by some undefined point in the future. Why one billion? The author is surprisingly hazy on this point, except to note that the aggregate economic output of China’s and India’s billion-plus people will inevitably exceed our own (and China’s may already have). Yglesias does recognize that by any per capita measure, both of these mega-countries remain much, much poorer than the United States. But “India and China are trying to become less poor and seem to be succeeding.” They may, of course, “stumble and fail, in which case we will stay number one,” although we should not deliberately pursue this “hideously immoral” policy aim. “By contrast,” however, “tripling the nation’s population to match the rising Asian powers is something that is in our power to achieve.”

it seriously sounds like a thomas friedman idea

xp

In my view 'the left' as a coherent ideologically-driven movement does not really exist as a political entity in the USA, in that the numbers of leftists who are invested in and committed to any one flavor of ideology are too few to merit the label of 'movement'.

If you disregard the need for a coherent ideology and identify 'the left' as a much looser amalgamation of people dissatisfied with the present economic and political structure and looking for pragmatic government-centered actions to bring those structures into better alignment with their needs, then 'the left' in the USA is already somewhat larger than 'the right' and can draw upon a potentially enormous reservoir of politically disengaged and dispirited people who see no hope in politics as a source of solutions to their pressing problems. What is most critically missing is a means of organizing and directing the masses, analogous to the right's control of mass media and fundamentalist churches.

here's my wild, ted talk style idea:

what if we spend our time thinking about ways in which the united states can support people in india and china who are becoming less poor, rather than being asked to replicate my dna via fucking to overwhelm them like starcraft zergs? i don't want to compete against people! jfc

Good post, Aimless, and one that resonates more with me.

what if we spend our time thinking about ways in which the united states can support people in india and china who are becoming less poor, rather than being asked to replicate my dna via fucking to overwhelm them like starcraft zergs? i don't want to compete against people! jfc

Our declining standard of living has been propped up by exploitation of the 'developing' world - Yglesias can't countenance cooperation over subjugation because you have to start answering questions about how you maintain that consumer choice economy.

Karl otm, why is the language always about winning in a zero-sum way that entails others losing?

On the other hand, fucking is pretty enjoyable, let's not knock it

Fucking: arguably even more enjoyable when you don't think about all the diapers you might be changing down the road.

or whether your grandchildren will enjoy economic dominance over some other country's grandchildren while the skies are on fire

if the extra 650 million came from immigration/open borders, great.

tbf yglesias is very into this, he doesn't think we can fuck our way to 10^9

damn he really is dumb as a rock.

Bacharach's review is good; also, congrats on having the chutzpah to open a book review with the question "what is a book?" (though he might have taken the gag slightly further with a "Webster's defines a 'book' as..." followup)

i'm sticking with "interesting, if frought" in that it suggests an america with universal childcare, open borders, broad infrastructure and housing expansion... all wrapped in heavily patriotic, pro-fucking, populist, MAGA friendly (and as noted, generally absurd) rhetoric. Why a billion? because a billion is a big number that sticks in people's heads! As jiu-jitsu op-eds go, i think the piece has got some worth.

that said, on review, i thought the entirety of his argument was encompassed in that article and didn't catch that it was a book excerpt... I can't imagine what this would look like or even what more he could add over 250 pages.

Look, he just wants to make messy creampies in as many women as possible, and the book will serve as entree to the sort of fucking he desires.

xp i think you mean fraught!

(i say this only because in years of your posts you rarely misspell anything, so i figure you'd appreciate it)

frawt