Democratic (Party) Direction

the idea she has had no agency in her career is absurd

it most certainly is absurd. good thing I didn't say that!

I said she was endorsing the idea as part of a larger package deal that included major concessions from conservatives in order to be enacted, but this important context was omitted and continues to be ignored by every response to my post. The Grand Bargain was envisioned as a means to break a wide variety of logjams over budget priorities, taxation and allocation of revenue. It wasn't just about cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. There were notable goodies in it for liberal/progressive policy goals, too. But the framework of deficit reduction and benefit cuts was too deferential to the Tea Party agenda that drove the 2010 election.

I also said the initiative for this proposal came not from her, but directly from Obama, and she was acting as a follower not a leader, which is true enough, but not my main point. Treating it as the main point is a deflection. Her falling in line behind Obama was a careerist move, and her pending nomination is partly a reward for that loyalty. This is part of how DC operates. It is ugly, but it's worked this way literally for centuries now.

Working up a good lather of outrage over her falling in behind the president's major policy initiative of 2011 seems overdone. As I said, we knew Biden's administration would tilt this way and will continue to do so. I don't need to be freshly outraged every other day in order to retain my sense of what the goals are. They've stayed constant all my adult life and I'd rather save my attention and energy for work that might improve society, including non-political work.

Has it occurred to you we’re not outraged, but standing by our convictions? It was bad for the Obama administration to put Social Security on the table, it was bad for Tanden to go to the negotiations with that, and it was ridiculous when Biden was on the campaign trail and he denied ever anticipating or participating in a talk where Social Security benefits were on the table. I’d respect them admitting it and perhaps explaining what those “notable goodies” were instead of deflecting!

For what it’s worth, you’re spending your attention and energy on this very issue, much more verbosely than I am!

Has it occurred to you we’re not outraged

When I hear quacking, I think I'm listening to a duck. When I hear tones of outrage, I think I'm listening to outraged people.

And I wasn’t implying you said she had no agency, only that there’s a dichotomy between “she was just doing what her boss said” and “she absolutely could decide not to work toward a goal if she personally found the terms abominable” that you seemed to rhetorically jump on because you know the truth is in the middle. You can’t play it both ways by saying she _wasn’t_ just following orders and then go on about a greater context that’s missed. Of course there’s a context, but the context for some people is that _you do not ever put that on the table_. The context is irrelevant in that case!

I’m more of an incrementalism melt than I sometimes let on and if it was, hey, let’s push the age at which you can collect benefits up, maybe I’d be willing to roll with it in the, as you say, right context. But acting like you have a greater understanding because the _context was misleading_ is wrong because others aren’t seeing Social Security as negotiable regardless of the terms.

Well, I often read your words as self-satisfied bluster but I know you’re a kinder person than that so I take a pinch of salt

Is he?

there *was* the go-drink-bleach episode

Aimless, funneling bleach into the gullets of ilxors since 2001.

luckily you always miss

Even I recognize that despite my near constant disagreements with Aimless, he is a kind person.

There was the time he cosigned calling my African-American brother a Nazi because he was a graduate of the Air Force Academy and then said because my brother is dead, he wasn't around to be offended by the characterization anyway. Very kind.

Hands up everyone who has only ever posted wonderful posts they are proud of to ilx, because this is some bullshit lads

(hand raises

middle finger extends)

Lol in context of this being your actual last post, tbf

Is her boyfriend asking her to poop on his face? Or is her boyfriend asking for mouth?

― You will notice a small sink where your sofa once was. (Old Lunch), Tuesday, 1 December 2020 20:27 (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thank you for underscoring my argument.

I doubt your argument could score any lower tbh

(hand raises

middle finger extends)

― You will notice a small sink where your sofa once was. (Old Lunch), Tuesday, December 1, 2020 8:39 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

agree

So on one side you have Yellen who will have a significant command over the economy and who has had a clear anti-austerity/anti-neoliberal stance for a while now and on the other side you have Tandem who will have an obviously much lesser role and who will face higher odds than most to get confirmed, some of you chose to focus on Tandem’s dumb twitter career. No matter how many Keynesian new deal types he is going to bring in, no matter how much he is going to go against the neo-liberal rulebook, you guys are going to move the goalposts because you have deemed he is evil no matter what. Hate him as much as you want, that’s okay, but people like Krugman, Warren, Faiz Shakir who are ~much more attuned to these things than us armchair analysts have praised some of those nominations for opening the door to true deficit spending.

I’ve been encountering skepticism from everyone from my mom, when I was a teen, to skepticism on ilx about the fact I’m more vocal about the bad choices than the reasonable ones. But really, no one sends congratulation notes to power when a Yellen is nominated because that serves no one — the people
voting against her nomination don’t care if I call their offices. The complaints register louder, although only marginally so.

I’m more than willing to give high-fives, back-pats, and re-election votes when I agree with choices in government! But keeping the people you vote into office on task isn’t an exercise in congratulation, it’s about voicing your preference when they stray off the path

I mean, what do I do, share a facebook post about Yellen being nominated and comment “Yes!”

if you want that here: Yes!

I'd say that Janet Yellen ought to do more thinking and less yelling

I believe you mean Janet should do less Yellen

that's right

Biden, Blinken, Yellen — what is this, a gerundocracy?

— A.J. Bauer (@ajbauer) November 23, 2020

heyooooo

Did anyone here actually criticize Yellen? As I said in the other thread (one thread etc) she's the least objectionable name thus far and even she has her hand in devastating Democratic policy (NAFTA and the Glass-Steagall repeal).

Being better than Obama's cretins shouldn't merit hosannas from the left.

working on the inevitable now

And the base keep rahmin' rahmin', and rahmin' rahmin', and rahmin' rahmin', and

some of you chose to focus on Tandem’s dumb twitter career

are you complaining that nobody yelled at you for being positive about Yellen's nomination or

we didn’t start yellin about Yellen being a decent pick so we’re bad

on the bright side, the Lincoln Project ghouls didn’t jockey for a position and decided they’re the new repubs so they won’t get in

fwiw Neera’a inability to log off is good and not bad

(I focused on Tanden's dumb career advocating war crimes and Social Security cuts, AFAICT. Others focused on her career outing sexual harassment victims and union busting.)

Holding up a Faiz Shakir tweet like a crucifix made of garlic against the vampires of the left is a power move though.

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/01/biden-administration-transition-obama/

(I focused on Tanden's dumb career advocating war crimes and Social Security cuts, AFAICT. Others focused on her career outing sexual harassment victims and union busting.)

tbf I pointed and laughed at her spending the day going back through her tweets to delete one from four years ago where she very very badly fabricated an email from someone else fraudulently exonerating herself of shitty policy-designing professional experience

but only because I had learnt ITT the same day of her inability to log off

It’s really a testament to the fact she was still in the grinding phase of her career that few tagged her as a Podesta or Abedin level person when she really was! I have to give her credit for doing the work and only being on that second tier of criticism, but trying to make up for a lack of public controversy by being very online

the 2016 weirdos hollering about spirit cooking and she’s all “I got a moma day pass”

What are you talking about? Neera Tanden is embarrassing and bad.

She's a funny and human kind of embarrassing and bad, though. Beats most Democratic "operatives."

I certainly find self-destructive and clownish posting to be relatable.

<3

The point was made in different ways, by different commentators of at least outwardly different political persuasions, with different code words and different bogeys—feminists, socialists, police abolitionists, transgender people, social-justice warriors, wokeness, identity politics in general. However they might have varied in their particulars, these arguments all circled the same thesis: The members of the working class—by which is always meant the white working class and very often, incoherently but significantly, the white middle class, too—have fled the Democratic Party because of its abandonment of the firm materiality of class politics for the soft superfluities of culture and identity.

By my calculations, we are now in the fifth decade of people making some version of this claim.

If white working class so deeply cherishes "the firm materiality of class politics" that they fled the Democratic Party for supposedly abandoning it, why the fuck did they senselessly flee into the party that actively and continuously prosecutes class warfare against them? It's a stupid claim on its face.

that's a great article, articulated what's wrong with a lot of lazy tropes that have been out in force since the election (and also for our entire lives)

The Democratic party was never purely a party of class politics in the sense of a European-style labor party. We never had a labor party. We had a party that once relied on unions as part of its coalition. Unions waned in influence and the Democratic party increasingly looked to tech and wall street for funding, which was a sort of self-reinforcing cycle. But I think that the kinds of people who might have actually swung Democrat to Republican are the kinds of people who don't feel that much of a perceptible material difference in their conditions under democratic versus republican administrations. Because while it's true that Republicans would love to gut social security and medicare, they're powerless to do so, and meanwhile the Democrats openly say stupid shit like "those jobs aren't coming back" and "learn to code" and stroke their own chins at their high-IQ cold realism. I don't quite accept the premise that people are fleeing "into the party that actively and continuously prosecutes class warfare against them," because at least since Clinton, Democrats have given the impression that they are also prosecuting class warfare against them.

Also, jobs and economic populism was a huge part of Trump's messaging (even if anyone who trusted him on that was a sucker) and I don't know why commentators are so hell bent on ignoring this part of his appeal

Their paycheck depends etc

I'm suspicious whenever someone waves a hand around the words working class and lumps everyone who's used the words in together.

Claire McCaskill is obviously not talking about the working class in the same way as Bernie Sanders or Ilhan Omar (Craggs uses Thomas Frank as the avatar of 'the left' though I wonder who more people have heard talk about politics between those three), she's using it purely as a dog whistle - her economic record was garbage. What I see from the 'progressive wing' is that the Democrats aren't delivering economically or culturally.

The "fifth decade of people making some version of this claim" - yeah, that coincides with the Watergate Babies, the vanguard of the neoliberal turn and rejection of New Deal liberalism/transactional politics for anyone but the donor class.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/dianne-feinsteins-missteps-raise-a-painful-age-question-among-senate-democrats

a not great situation!

Oh I see, but when a man shows obvious signs of cognitive decline, we elect him president (twice). #feminism

Oof that article