Matt Taibbi

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."

Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-response-to-trump-another-dangerous-movement-appears-20160630

Yeah I feel like with that one Taibbi is back in good form.

one of the candidates would nominate supreme court judges that would overturn citizen's united. the other candidate would nominate supreme court judges that would not. but i'm supposed to believe that the supporters of the latter candidate are angry bc there's too much money in politics? it strains credulity.

People are angry because they feel helpless and disenfranchised. Are you trying not to understand this?

maybe if they didn't vote for republicans over and over and over they wouldn't be so helpless and disenfranchised. you don't get to set your house on fire and then complain that it's burning. esp if you won't let the firefighters put it out.

Sorry for the snark. It just seems like there is this impulse to paint everyone who doesn't support Hillary in this race as a racist idiot. I'm no USA-apologist (and I'm going to vote for stupid Hillary), but I don't think that 45% of the country are racist idiots. People feel fed up with feeling fucked-over, and they are trying to find anyone who they think will bust shit up.

I'd like to think that if dems were in charge of the presidency and congress, things would get better, but I can also envision a world where they just keep the politics of fear thing going, and continue spending half their time dialing up their rich donors and begging for money.

except that we know that while dems are in power things do get better bc they have a track record we can look at. and when the republicans are in charge regulations are loosened, unions are cracked down on, welfare is cut, etc. clinton's supreme court nominees voted against citizens united, as did obama's. reagan's, gwb's, and ghwb's voted for it. this isn't a big secret.

what taibbi is saying is that you can argue against the positions held by voters, saying they are in error, irrational or based in ignorance, but it is another thing altogether to argue that because you think other voters are irrational, we should take away their vote or render their votes meaningless. This is bad because a society which chooses that direction must simultaneously deal with enforcing its will upon an unwilling and disenfranchised population, which quickly devolves in taking political prisoners and creating a violent despotism.

right, that part i agree w/ - democracy is a v important ideology that i support. i'm just saying that his view of the electorate - when he gets to the question of 'why' - is not based in reality.

it's cut from the same cloth as bernie claiming that the republicans have a natural constituency of 15% of the electorate. the false consciousness arguments are not compelling from the get-go but especially when they've had decades and decades to know what the republicans are about. the republicans not only don't make a secret of it - they campaign on these things. they campaign on cutting government programs and drowning the government in a bath tub and campaign on starting new wars and removing regulations on industries. their voters aren't confused. they're republicans themselves and this is what they want.

Dems were happy to loosen banking regulations, and Clinton presided over the destruction of welfare.

If the dems weren't basically offering a lite version of the same policies, maybe they would be more successful.

they weren't "happy." after having no power in washington for decades the democrats finally won the WH w/ a compromising centrist who was forced to deal w/ a gingrich congress whose republican revolution was predicated primarily on the argument that clinton was not a New Democrat (aka the moderate he campaigned as) but a "tax and spend" liberal. and even still it was clinton's supreme court choices who voted against citizens united. dem policies are different enough that republicans have painted obama and clinton as secret muslims + marxists.

i don't know why you think they'd be more successful offering an even more explicitly left-wing vision of government when it is precisely their left-wingness that makes them unpalatable to a large percentage of the electorate. i get that this is a version of the tea party argument that the dems just haven't run a sufficiently left-wing pol yet but i don't think this is true to reality.

"secret muslims + marxists" hasn't really got shit to do with policies

that's bullshit. they have to do w/ a) that democrats are not as hawkish + warmongering as the republicans who want to bomb muslims everywhere and b) that they support increasing taxes to grow social programming. they are totally linked to real policy differences in the parties.

dems need to launch their own cable+streaming channel that targets millennials

"No power in Washington for decades" is some hellacious rewriting of history. They controlled one or both Congressional bodies throughout the Reagan-Bush era.

starting in the 80s they controlled the senate and house simultaneously for 12 years total - 4 of which took place under the obstructionist anti-obama republicans where a veto-proof majority was needed (and where despite that the dems pushed through the biggest new addition to the social safety net in decades). almost all the presidents in that time period were republicans

do u guys honestly believe that if the democratic party started introducing far left policy in the house that the american right-wing would defect to them?

Why do you think Bernie polled better than Hillary against the GOP, then? Just blind sexism and Hillary-hate?

That paragraph doesn't even make sense. The decades of powerlessness are... the one 12-year run of GOP Presidencies with Reagan and Bush I, when Democrats still held part or all of Congress?

Post FDR until Clinton, Presidentially you have:
Dem - 2
Rep - 2
Dem - 2
Rep - 2
Dem - 1
GOP- 3

Which means that they were on a routine 8-year cycle except for once. You're trying to rewrite history to defend Clinton's craven neoliberalism and it's simply untrue.

People who feel like they're powerless and getting fucked can't look at Clinton and Obama (or New Labour) and say they're objectively better for the working class.

Why do you think Bernie polled better than Hillary against the GOP, then? Just blind sexism and Hillary-hate?

― schwantz, Friday, July 1, 2016 5:58 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES

sexism, hillary-hate, and no major campaign to defame his character and expose his weaknesses

I think Americans prefer people who have deeply-held principles to those who are compromisers, even though compromise is where the real work gets done. When your biggest principle is compromise and "bringing people together" you look like a sucker.

cool story

even craven neoliberal bill clinton did more for democracy + the non-wealthy than a single republican. it's like you forget we live in the ideological capital of capitalism. ppl to the right who refuse to vote for democrats don't do so bc they're too capitalist, it's bc they aren't capitalist enough. you know how you know that? bc that's how the republicans campaign.

Compromise is not a principle, but a method.

Someone needs to tell the dems that.

i love that obama has become bolder + issued more executive orders since he discovered that the republicans could not be negotiated with, but considering taibbi's article is about how undermining democracy is bad i think complaining that obama compromises too much w/ democratically elected representatives is inconsistent.

even craven neoliberal bill clinton did more for democracy + the non-wealthy than a single republican.

The latter is... arguable. Nevertheless, this is the fundamental "lesser evil" argument for Dems that has turned out badly so many times before and quite possibly would again if the Republicans hadn't nominated the worst candidate of any of our lifetimes.

it's like you forget we live in the ideological capital of capitalism. ppl to the right who refuse to vote for democrats don't do so bc they're too capitalist, it's bc they aren't capitalist enough. you know how you know that? bc that's how the republicans campaign.

Lesser Evillism moves the whole political structure to the right EVERY TIME.

as anyone who's wasted part of life reading these threads knows, M and map are either liars or ignorami.

"the era of big government is over" - W J Clinton, 1996

and so am i

"party of lesser evil" is just propaganda. every choice you ever make is between the better of two options. rarely in life do you get two options where either is perfect.

i guess if you're picking between chocolate and vanilla ice cream you might feel like both are great choices and you're thrilled to pick either. but anything more complicated -- like if you've ever had to decide whether to take a treatment w/ X side effect, or risk a disease progressing further - or paying to replace a part now or waiting and possibly ruining the machine later - your entire life is weighing choices that have ups and downs. only w/ politics is "lesser evilism" seen as a legitimate critique of those choices - presumably bc ppl think it has more to do w/ their personal morality than health or appliance repair.

^^^

and btw i know this has been pointed out a million times and somehow still hasn't landed but the far right make the exact same arguments. their representatives compromise too much, the culture keeps moving to the left, the republicans are the party of lesser evilism, etc.

There are more non-voters than voters

this isn't true btw, at least not during presidential years. in 1996 it was just under 50% and then was above 50% since 1924

The far right isn't wrong on some parts of that - culturally, they're losing and all the Republican holding actions can't stem the tide. Yay!

Unfortunately, economically, the left is right about Democrats. Wealth and income inequality grew rapidly under both Clinton and Obama and even Obama, who was an inspirational candidate and figure in many ways, has provided almost nothing in terms of making life better for all the people who have lost out to contemporary capitalism. (Clinton, of course, was actively hostile to those losers.)

i think more ppl should vote btw and i think even a system w/ mandatory voting would be preferable to what we have, not to mention easier ways to increase voting % like a voting holiday, or more access to absentee and mail-in ballots. i suspect these, as well as apathy/political ignorance, are greater impediments to voting than ppl are who too pure for the parties.

ACA? Dodd-Frank? and i have no doubt he would have done more if he had control of the legislation for more of his administration. not to mention that he had an impossible task taking over the country right after the second worst depression in its history. fdr had the advantage of being able to bully the senate into signing whatever he put in front of him - and even that only lasted so long before they grow a backbone and started shooting down every piece of progressive legislation he proposed.

Obama didn't have FDR's majorities

The difference between left-wingers and right-wingers is that right-wing policies aren't actually popular (whereas left-wing policies ARE more popular). Despite that, the right-wing strategy has moved the American political goalposts to the right as the rest of the developed world has gone the other way.

Tbf, the Great Panic of 1893 was pretty damn bad, too.

the right as the rest of the developed world has gone the other way.

wait waht this is not accurate

EU austerity policies, Chinese command economy, Japan in an economic slump for over a decade, s. america leftists failing all over the place

if anything the economic policies of Obama administration have been to the LEFT of everybody else

do u guys honestly believe that if the democratic party started introducing far left policy in the house that the american right-wing would defect to them?

― Mordy, Friday, July 1, 2016 1:54 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

even by your standards you've been on a roll of willful obtuseness and misunderstanding lately.

the argument isn't that people don't support republican policies. the argument is that, from the standpoint of their own self-interest, they're not benefiting from those policies (and actually harmed by them), and that there are reasons they are convinced otherwise (including anti-immigrant nativism, etc).

there was no equivalent to the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in the UK for ex.

(xp)

the argument isn't that people don't support republican policies. the argument is that, from the standpoint of their own self-interest, they're not benefiting from those policies (and actually harmed by them), and that there are reasons they are convinced otherwise (including anti-immigrant nativism, etc).

okay but how will the democrats being more left-wing convince them otherwise which is what we're actually discussing here

so happy you were elected chair of what we are actually discussing