Chait is maybe the ur-hack, available to produce relatively cleanly written prose of a liberal tint pretty much empty any meaningful insight. Just produces, like, the illusion of insight.
Then again, the path to fame and fortune is only for those interested in being propagandists. No money for anyone who dissents. Should be an old story...
Meanwhile, the love for conforming goes back to the 80s. Hasn't been any substantive non-conformity (like an avant-grade worth shit) since.
Not only do a significant portion of Americans today probably think Communism has more to do with living in a commune like old-timey hippies than it does with seizing the means of production, the idea anyone could seize the means of production from billionaires like Musk and Bezos and Zuck would rightly strike them as preposterous. You can take over a factory. You can't take over the internet.
And I'd guess the world Chait lives in is the same one Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias live in. Where you eat brunch and the health of your investments matter more than the health of democracy.
Pool scrapings, for which she was arrested and temporarily incarcerated til someone other than her said "Don't you know who she is????!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?"
If you know what's good for you, you'll choke it down with the rictus grin of the parents in a certain Twilight Zone episode and say "That's a GOOD thing you made there, Megan!"
He doesn't own the Means of Production but with Starlink he owns the Means of Transmission and that's enough. He controls the horizontal AND the vertical
Well, they have to write about something. It's their job! No words no money. And since he overwhelming news in the room is something they can't really write about ( The president is an incompetent pedophile monster) a certain class of reporter will be all over the Rising Red Tide. There's a couple of classes I guess - the dependable, old school assholes who have made a very good living for years doing the old poke and stroke for the Ruling Class ( Chait, Ygladiolus ( or whatever his name is) and David Fucking Brooks come to mind , with Young Ezra ready in the wings to pick up the mantle when the old fucks pass on. Then there's the hot young guns from all those made up word news sites full of wannabe Hunter Thompson's who make a living writing because their trustfunds can support them through unpaid internships in the high style to which they are accustomed. They' re all young old fogeys that write for shit. Politico, Vox, Axios and Semaphore are dogshit so they're right at home.
What makes "socialism" such a scare word is the fact the no conservatives and very few other voters have even the foggiest notion as to what socialism actually is. When conservatives I know start spewing about the evils of socialism, I always ask "what do you think socialism is?" And I always get one of two replies:
Socialism is the government telling me what to do, or socialism is the government owning everything and banning private property.
Such profound yet aggressive ignorance makes these people very easy to manipulate. So you can look forward to both conservatives AND our very own leading Democrats yelling the scare word "SOCIALIST!!!!" at the newest politicians who are not willing to be part of the gamed system. (Hell, just look at Hakeem Jeffries response to Mamdani and the new DSA candidates.)
I used to be a card-carrying paper-on-the-streetcorner-selling member of the ISO, the International SOCIALIST Organization. So I can tell of my experience with socialism: Meet up at Michelangelo's coffee shop at 9am on a Saturday to get your papers, afterwards let's all have a meeting to talk about how it went and see if anyone signed up any new comrades.
When I ran the local radio station, the first month I was doing that I was treated to my very first Board of Directors meeting set. Meeting set? Yep.
First, there was the series of pre-meetings with each board member individually (well, most of them--about a third just couldn't be bothered). Then there was the actual board meeting. This was followed by a post-meeting to discuss how the actual meeting went. The entire process ate a full week of my time.
So when the next BoD meeting hit my calendar, I announced that there would be no pre-meetings, nor would there be any post-meeting because didn't we all have better things to do? Nobody objected.
A few months after that change, I stopped providing the BoD with the financials at every meeting because nobody was interested and they were never discussed. I was giving everyone printouts that they'd just stuff in the notebooks without even looking at them. So I just stopped bringing the printouts. Two years passed before anyone asked about that, even after I'd managed to navigate the place through a dozen funding crises and drove three board members to resign over their non-performance (or even negative performance) as BoD members.
Occupy, you might recall, was "organized" along anarchist lines, which meant General Assembly Every Night. Stand in a circle passin' the Talking Stick around, outside, in the brutal cold (because Madison's Occupy went all the way through to the following Spring.) And if any hard-core anarchists wanted to take the thing over this would be the way they'd do it. Have a meeting every night til everyone who has a life stops showing up and there's nobody but hard-core anarchists left.
Chait, to nobody's surprise, gets it exactly backwards, the Hard Left takes over not by denying us democracy, but by giving us so much democracy we're all sick of it.
My neiphew was an ardent anarchist until their boygirlfriend got beaten up by some rednecks. Then they suddenly became very interested in the help the police were offering, and decided that maybe have an organized state wasn't such a bad thing afterall.
As an employee of another company, I once attended a meeting with the CEO of a very big corporation with about five or six other people. At the end of the meeting, he pointed to each one of us in turn and asked "On a scale of one to 10, how successful do you think this meeting has been?" This being corporate America you could hear everybody's brains in a frenzy to guess what would be a safe number to pick. If you said 9 or 10 he was sure to put you on the spot and ask why, and anything below 5 or 6 would result in the same thing. So almost everyone picked 7 or 8 which had nothing to with what actually took place, and I imagine whenever this guy pulled such management bullshit he got the same answers. It was a typical lesson in how power in a corporate or political hierarchy can turn everybody into craven peons.
Probably someone has thought of this before me, but I think the idea, the pure concept of communism, the fucking essence of it, is heaven on Earth FOR EVERYONE. Fascism, on the other hand, is heaven for some undefined (but mostly white) "us." We all live or suffer together vs. someone else lives or suffers by my whims. The two sides could possibly meet, but nowhere near "the middle." Not a billion miles near the middle.
I don't know. I personally don't want to see that utopia we're all told we want, just a world where things are better. And THAT isn't utopian or extreme.
Amen, Brother Roy. And may I add that James Carville and all the other "Democratic Party strategists" who are rending their robes over the rise of AOC, Mandami, yadda-yadda, offering instead the likes of Rahm Fucking Emmanuel, need to get the hell out of the way. I've been a card-carrrying Dem for (checks watch) 60 years and I'm here to say Bernie and the Kidz are right: The Democratic Party needs to stand and deliver.
Goddamn BRAIN GENIUSES, every last one of 'em. One of the main issues driving this insurgent movement within the Dem party is that party's slavish devotion to Israel. I know, let's send out Rahm Emmanuel, that'll calm 'em down.
I am just so tired of Dems stepping on their own dicks. It's especially galling that the so-called "moderates" don't seem to understand that any legislation they would like to pass would certainly get at least some support from "the Socialists." But from the MAGAts? Honkey, please.
Right now, Speaker Johnson-puller can't get ANY legislation through, including a defense bill, because 10 Republican extremists are mad that John Thune (a SENATOR) won't kill the filibuster to get Tubby's national voter-suppression law passed. Explain that one, if you can.
And moderate Dems in Congress think WE are like THAT.
And they think that even though lefty Dems are in their very presence every session. AOC votes for moderate-Democrat stuff all the time, til the day she can get something better. Doesn't matter, we're still the people who want to Burn It All Down.
Somehow I’m seeing any misplaced sympathy for Joe Biden quickly evaporating as people start struggling with student loan debt again.
Thanks Joe, you fucking asshole. This one’s on you, both for causing the problem and for failing to do anything about it while you had the opportunity.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Biden try to cancel $400 billion of student debt, which was stuck down by our right-wing Supreme Court because it was a "major question," unlike Trump's destroying the country?
I don’t get why they don’t work to pass a law retracting the part about bankruptcy. There is a major fairness argument for that. Repeat after me, The nepotism baby billionaire Trump went bankrupt six times, why can’t a normal kid?
To be more clear, I don't get why the DSA friendly Dems don't work to help young people be free of ridiculous debt through bankruptcy instead of indentured servants for the banks. I clearly understand why corporate Dems don't do that.
DSA's moved past "allow student debt to be discharged through bankruptcy" to "cancel all student debt." You may not agree with that, but it answers your question.
But I'm pretty confident that if Dems win the majority and some member of Congress puts forward a bill on the lines you're describing, they'd support it.
Yea, but why should we cancel the debt of rich kids whose parents got them into Ivy League schools and went to work for Investment firms or AI startups?
I'd completely forgotten his record as a senator pushing bankruptcy bills for his Delaware finance constituents. Maybe he tried to cancel some student debt out of a teeny bit of guilt.
You are not wrong. They got him on "Shoulda passed a law", but I don't remember why they didn't, I'm guessing Manchema had something to do with that.
Also "Major Questions Doctrine" joins "Unitary Executive" and "Independent States Theory" in the list of longstanding constitutional principles that nobody heard of til we just made 'em up a few years ago.
Same old asshole. Chait alludes to a few young Dem politicians, who entered and won primaries, as tankies, and goes after them like Big Joe, and with the urgency of Kevin, staggering thru the LA freeway traffic, screaming that the pod people are here.
So this must be my second childhood. Huh, i'd have preferred the Saturday afternoon triple feature matinees for a quarter.
Ah, the sassy young 'uns are gonna turn the Dem Socs (such as moi) into totalitarian zombies as they take over the entire Democratic Party 'from the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters."
<"We are dozens!> meme
I'm not feelin' Chait's "crucify them! crucify them!" calls to action will work, even tho war criminal David Frum is all in.
Chait has a long history of supporting Israel no matter what they do and launching straw man attacks on its critics. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more along these lines, as factions of the DSA provide plenty of material, truly viewing historical Communist regimes as role models, which is just stupid, both intellectually and, most definitely, electorally. But those same factions have censored AOC and are openly critical of Mamdami, both of whom fail to toe the party line. Chait follows the propagandist playbook of portraying the DSA as a unified authoritarian organization, which it's clearly not. I think if the momentum continues, it will be the AOC's and Mamdamis and other newly elected leftists that define the party, not the other way around. If that fails, they'll just become Democrats, if they haven't already, and try to reform the Party rather than destroy it. It'll be a challenge though, as the corporate and Israeli stooges aligned with Republicans with a big money and media backed campaign to deter democracy will be formidable.
I've mentioned before that nearly all my professors in college were Marxists, and the few who weren't still taught Marxism in order to argue against it. Yet the generation that was taught that way turned out to be the furthest thing from Communist. I think we absorbed the general Marxist historical and social analysis and most of that is pretty much accepted now as common knowledge. The system is rigged for the wealthy, workers are exploited, things like healthcare that shouldn't be commodities have become commodities, the media serves power, etc. But the political aspect of Marxism was rejected and anyone who thought the Soviet Union or the Communist China of the time was a role model was considered a moron and not taken seriously.
I think the new wave of candidates are winning by making Marxist arguments about history and culture that track with what regular people are actually experiencing. Regular people have not read Gramsci or the Frankfort School, but their own experiences validate what those thinkers taught. But they would do well to do everything they can to distance themselves from political Marxism and the catastrophic authoritarian regimes it spawned. Pin that on the Republicans who reject the ideology but embrace the anti-democratic police state.
"they would do well to do everything they can to distance themselves from political Marxism and the catastrophic authoritarian regimes it spawned"
Take your point but what I think is happening, and better suits my sense of justice, is the chuds going YA WANNA BE LIKE NORTH KOREA? and the kids answering "these Democrats seem to want us to be LESS like North Korea."
Cuba works even worse because all they know is, it's yet another poor country that Tubby and his grifters are trying to rip off -- much like the country THEY live in.
Goddamn, am I tired of candidates who spend all their time saying "No, I'm not THAT! And I'm not THAT either!" and then somehow in all the denying, what they ARE seems to get lost.
From what Dad said the other day, FAUX must be going heavy on the "the commies want to make us Cuba" because that's instantly where he went when I asked him what communism was.
I wasn't gonna read the fuckin' thing, but I know how to ctrl-F and Chait mentions Israel ONCE. Would it be fair to say he's downplaying it as a reason young people in particular are furious with traditional Democrats? Wonder why? Does he sense the public is no longer with him in "Send all the bombs they ask for"? If he's going with this Red Scare shit, it can only mean he's got nothin' else.
Akshually... Though I don't follow her, whenever I've happened to see something by her in the last couple-few years, the pieces have been good. Her writing's seemed to show sincerity about striving to make amends for her past affiliations. Unlike Frum, Kristol, et. al., I think Rubin's come to join the correct side of things.
Well, you didn’t compare Chait to Christopher Rufo, for which Chait should be eternally grateful, since you otherwise exposed him for the oligarch mouthpiece he is paid to be. News flash, Chait: we’re all more than a little disappointed in the Chuck Schumer version of the Democratic Party, which is throwing away the opportunity to rally normal people behind policies and politics that most Americans say they want.
Thank you. A well deserved evisceration and boy do I agree with all of it. I read that awful Chait piece and it's gotta be one of his worst. From what I've read, Chevalier is a loon by any standard which is why he singled her out as an easy target throughout the column. But the DSA? A loose party "organization" of about 100,000 members (by comparison, there are a 45 million registered Democrats in the country) which doesn't even merit a line on the ballot in the socialist hellhole of NYC? The DSA whose national leadership refused to endorse AOC last time around? That DSA?
And you know who is also not a member of the DSA and never has been? Bernie Sanders. He's identified his politics as democratic socialist from way back when he first ran for mayor in Burlington, Vermont, and they kept re-electing him mayor because, like Mamdani, he got things done for ordinary people and prevented the city from being taken over by rich developers, among other things. But he's always called himself "independent."
Um.. about that "Fuck Kamala Harris" thing, I'm an old fart and I'm still capable of being shocked by the things young folks say, and the casual way they throw the word "fuck" around like we're all in the British army still shocks me. I remember when it started popping out in the classroom, the first time I thought "Do we need An Intervention here?" but it was just being used as a random intensifier. I suspect that "Fuck Kamala Harris" to most young people reads as "I am somewhat displeased with her leadership."
Chait is maybe the ur-hack, available to produce relatively cleanly written prose of a liberal tint pretty much empty any meaningful insight. Just produces, like, the illusion of insight.
Then again, the path to fame and fortune is only for those interested in being propagandists. No money for anyone who dissents. Should be an old story...
Meanwhile, the love for conforming goes back to the 80s. Hasn't been any substantive non-conformity (like an avant-grade worth shit) since.
</grumblegrumble>
And the conformity of the 80s seemed largely to be based on a false image of the 50s channeled through sitcoms.
Was thinking more just about the desire to confirm, not what to conform to.
We dropped the ball big time…
"produce relatively cleanly written prose of a liberal tint pretty much empty any meaningful insight"
HackGPT
Are now getting on a loop repeating yesterday?
Ha ha, it was interesting to see how the merest mention of AI brings all the boys to the yard.
I can do the same with a milkshake but I’m forbidden from mentioning it
Not only do a significant portion of Americans today probably think Communism has more to do with living in a commune like old-timey hippies than it does with seizing the means of production, the idea anyone could seize the means of production from billionaires like Musk and Bezos and Zuck would rightly strike them as preposterous. You can take over a factory. You can't take over the internet.
And I'd guess the world Chait lives in is the same one Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias live in. Where you eat brunch and the health of your investments matter more than the health of democracy.
They’ve all transformed into male Megan McArdles.
I.e., they throw cocktail parties for each other where bad ideas and worse food are passed around.
[looks at green paste on a cracker] "I bet she broke out the Thermomix for this one."
Pool scrapings, for which she was arrested and temporarily incarcerated til someone other than her said "Don't you know who she is????!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?"
If you know what's good for you, you'll choke it down with the rictus grin of the parents in a certain Twilight Zone episode and say "That's a GOOD thing you made there, Megan!"
"the world Chait lives in is the same one Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias live in"
Somebody made more of these guys than anybody asked for. Shut down the Means of Production!
"You can't take over the internet."
Not us, but Elon might be able to.
He doesn't own the Means of Production but with Starlink he owns the Means of Transmission and that's enough. He controls the horizontal AND the vertical
https://i.gifer.com/E9yd.gif
Well, they have to write about something. It's their job! No words no money. And since he overwhelming news in the room is something they can't really write about ( The president is an incompetent pedophile monster) a certain class of reporter will be all over the Rising Red Tide. There's a couple of classes I guess - the dependable, old school assholes who have made a very good living for years doing the old poke and stroke for the Ruling Class ( Chait, Ygladiolus ( or whatever his name is) and David Fucking Brooks come to mind , with Young Ezra ready in the wings to pick up the mantle when the old fucks pass on. Then there's the hot young guns from all those made up word news sites full of wannabe Hunter Thompson's who make a living writing because their trustfunds can support them through unpaid internships in the high style to which they are accustomed. They' re all young old fogeys that write for shit. Politico, Vox, Axios and Semaphore are dogshit so they're right at home.
.
"Ygladiolus"
Because we can't get the chrysanthemums, you know.
YGLADIOLVS CRASSVS
I want Aesop's kid to chisel that into a marble wall with a jackhammer.
Why not the Kennedy Center?
What makes "socialism" such a scare word is the fact the no conservatives and very few other voters have even the foggiest notion as to what socialism actually is. When conservatives I know start spewing about the evils of socialism, I always ask "what do you think socialism is?" And I always get one of two replies:
Socialism is the government telling me what to do, or socialism is the government owning everything and banning private property.
Such profound yet aggressive ignorance makes these people very easy to manipulate. So you can look forward to both conservatives AND our very own leading Democrats yelling the scare word "SOCIALIST!!!!" at the newest politicians who are not willing to be part of the gamed system. (Hell, just look at Hakeem Jeffries response to Mamdani and the new DSA candidates.)
I used to be a card-carrying paper-on-the-streetcorner-selling member of the ISO, the International SOCIALIST Organization. So I can tell of my experience with socialism: Meet up at Michelangelo's coffee shop at 9am on a Saturday to get your papers, afterwards let's all have a meeting to talk about how it went and see if anyone signed up any new comrades.
That help?
And if I had a nickel for every Gotcha Guy who asked why the paper wasn't free I'd be Jeff Bezos today.
Bald and married to a walking collection of plastic that rivals the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
My Gotcha Guys came in all types.
When I ran the local radio station, the first month I was doing that I was treated to my very first Board of Directors meeting set. Meeting set? Yep.
First, there was the series of pre-meetings with each board member individually (well, most of them--about a third just couldn't be bothered). Then there was the actual board meeting. This was followed by a post-meeting to discuss how the actual meeting went. The entire process ate a full week of my time.
So when the next BoD meeting hit my calendar, I announced that there would be no pre-meetings, nor would there be any post-meeting because didn't we all have better things to do? Nobody objected.
Oh, we'll meet you to death if you let us.
A few months after that change, I stopped providing the BoD with the financials at every meeting because nobody was interested and they were never discussed. I was giving everyone printouts that they'd just stuff in the notebooks without even looking at them. So I just stopped bringing the printouts. Two years passed before anyone asked about that, even after I'd managed to navigate the place through a dozen funding crises and drove three board members to resign over their non-performance (or even negative performance) as BoD members.
Occupy, you might recall, was "organized" along anarchist lines, which meant General Assembly Every Night. Stand in a circle passin' the Talking Stick around, outside, in the brutal cold (because Madison's Occupy went all the way through to the following Spring.) And if any hard-core anarchists wanted to take the thing over this would be the way they'd do it. Have a meeting every night til everyone who has a life stops showing up and there's nobody but hard-core anarchists left.
Chait, to nobody's surprise, gets it exactly backwards, the Hard Left takes over not by denying us democracy, but by giving us so much democracy we're all sick of it.
My neiphew was an ardent anarchist until their boygirlfriend got beaten up by some rednecks. Then they suddenly became very interested in the help the police were offering, and decided that maybe have an organized state wasn't such a bad thing afterall.
As an employee of another company, I once attended a meeting with the CEO of a very big corporation with about five or six other people. At the end of the meeting, he pointed to each one of us in turn and asked "On a scale of one to 10, how successful do you think this meeting has been?" This being corporate America you could hear everybody's brains in a frenzy to guess what would be a safe number to pick. If you said 9 or 10 he was sure to put you on the spot and ask why, and anything below 5 or 6 would result in the same thing. So almost everyone picked 7 or 8 which had nothing to with what actually took place, and I imagine whenever this guy pulled such management bullshit he got the same answers. It was a typical lesson in how power in a corporate or political hierarchy can turn everybody into craven peons.
That CEO probably wonders why he's never getting any substantive ideas or feedback from his crew.
Fast forward to Trump Cabinet Meeting, where anything less than "You turned it up to eleven, sir!" gets you fired.
Really good one, Roy.
Probably someone has thought of this before me, but I think the idea, the pure concept of communism, the fucking essence of it, is heaven on Earth FOR EVERYONE. Fascism, on the other hand, is heaven for some undefined (but mostly white) "us." We all live or suffer together vs. someone else lives or suffers by my whims. The two sides could possibly meet, but nowhere near "the middle." Not a billion miles near the middle.
I don't know. I personally don't want to see that utopia we're all told we want, just a world where things are better. And THAT isn't utopian or extreme.
Splitter!
Ain't it quaint?
Whenever someone commie-baits you on Felchbook, just answer "Workers of all nations, arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains."
Maybe not in those words, but yeah.
Exactly in those words
I know; but... you know, right?
One two three four
Went to my local pub yas yas yas
Yas yas yas
Ran into the boss, he bought me a pint
My Christmas bonus in a glass
Told me about his travels to Cuba
Not as nice as snuba in Aruba
His takeaway was that socialism don't work
My boss told me that socialism don't work (X2)
How would you like to move to Venezuela
They knock down your door and cuff ya and jail ya
And haul you to a gulag
with parrots and surf
ANd you get
RAT for breakfast, rat for dinner too
Rat empenadas, and rat stew
Have a ratburger, rat is the patty
Follow it up with some apple brown ratty
My boss told me that socialism don't work
But I've got a clue, yes, I've got an inkling
THere might be some self interest behind his thinking
My boss told me that socialism don't work
So sorry about your healthcare and debts
But this is as good as it gets
My boss told me that socialism don't work.
Is there a tune to that? I'd listen.
Aw thanks. Sort of a political song for Wynonie Harris to sing, jump blues
I was thinking Billy Bragg, and that's as high a compliment as I can give.
2 marks, plus one more for Wynonie
Amen, Brother Roy. And may I add that James Carville and all the other "Democratic Party strategists" who are rending their robes over the rise of AOC, Mandami, yadda-yadda, offering instead the likes of Rahm Fucking Emmanuel, need to get the hell out of the way. I've been a card-carrrying Dem for (checks watch) 60 years and I'm here to say Bernie and the Kidz are right: The Democratic Party needs to stand and deliver.
Thank got for Fox giving them all a platform to warn us of this dreadful turn of events.
Goddamn BRAIN GENIUSES, every last one of 'em. One of the main issues driving this insurgent movement within the Dem party is that party's slavish devotion to Israel. I know, let's send out Rahm Emmanuel, that'll calm 'em down.
I am just so tired of Dems stepping on their own dicks. It's especially galling that the so-called "moderates" don't seem to understand that any legislation they would like to pass would certainly get at least some support from "the Socialists." But from the MAGAts? Honkey, please.
Right now, Speaker Johnson-puller can't get ANY legislation through, including a defense bill, because 10 Republican extremists are mad that John Thune (a SENATOR) won't kill the filibuster to get Tubby's national voter-suppression law passed. Explain that one, if you can.
And moderate Dems in Congress think WE are like THAT.
And they think that even though lefty Dems are in their very presence every session. AOC votes for moderate-Democrat stuff all the time, til the day she can get something better. Doesn't matter, we're still the people who want to Burn It All Down.
Yep, and such epic cluelessness seems to be the norm for too many professional Democrats.
Well, you know, we're the mirror image of the Tea Party.
I think it's a twin situation, can't figure which is the evil one. Probably both.
Current Dem leadership would demand that the Repubs stand and deliver, then demand all of their lupins.
Somehow I’m seeing any misplaced sympathy for Joe Biden quickly evaporating as people start struggling with student loan debt again.
Thanks Joe, you fucking asshole. This one’s on you, both for causing the problem and for failing to do anything about it while you had the opportunity.
Failing to do anything about it when they had the opportunity is the epitaph of the Democratic Party as we've known it post Johnson.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Biden try to cancel $400 billion of student debt, which was stuck down by our right-wing Supreme Court because it was a "major question," unlike Trump's destroying the country?
He did. After spearheading the legislation that made student loan debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy. He wrote the bill, Clinton signed it.
So he failed at cleaning up his mess too. Guy was fucking useless, not that Trump would have been any better.
I don’t get why they don’t work to pass a law retracting the part about bankruptcy. There is a major fairness argument for that. Repeat after me, The nepotism baby billionaire Trump went bankrupt six times, why can’t a normal kid?
To be more clear, I don't get why the DSA friendly Dems don't work to help young people be free of ridiculous debt through bankruptcy instead of indentured servants for the banks. I clearly understand why corporate Dems don't do that.
DSA's moved past "allow student debt to be discharged through bankruptcy" to "cancel all student debt." You may not agree with that, but it answers your question.
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/cancel-all-student-debt/
But I'm pretty confident that if Dems win the majority and some member of Congress puts forward a bill on the lines you're describing, they'd support it.
Yea, but why should we cancel the debt of rich kids whose parents got them into Ivy League schools and went to work for Investment firms or AI startups?
I'd completely forgotten his record as a senator pushing bankruptcy bills for his Delaware finance constituents. Maybe he tried to cancel some student debt out of a teeny bit of guilt.
Wasn't he once called "Senator from MBNA" or was that someone else?
You are not wrong. They got him on "Shoulda passed a law", but I don't remember why they didn't, I'm guessing Manchema had something to do with that.
Also "Major Questions Doctrine" joins "Unitary Executive" and "Independent States Theory" in the list of longstanding constitutional principles that nobody heard of til we just made 'em up a few years ago.
Same old asshole. Chait alludes to a few young Dem politicians, who entered and won primaries, as tankies, and goes after them like Big Joe, and with the urgency of Kevin, staggering thru the LA freeway traffic, screaming that the pod people are here.
So this must be my second childhood. Huh, i'd have preferred the Saturday afternoon triple feature matinees for a quarter.
Ah, the sassy young 'uns are gonna turn the Dem Socs (such as moi) into totalitarian zombies as they take over the entire Democratic Party 'from the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters."
<"We are dozens!> meme
I'm not feelin' Chait's "crucify them! crucify them!" calls to action will work, even tho war criminal David Frum is all in.
"Marxist-Leninist organizers"
My God, I bet you'd need TWO hands to count 'em.
"Mister, we could use a man like Mary McCarthy again."
Oh for the days when Ward worried about The Beaver and Trumbo was too busy polishing the screenplay for Bride Of The Gorilla to frighten the cattle.
Stephanie Coontz said it years ago; despite the common wisdom, "''Leave It to Beaver' was not a documentary." https://archive.org/details/wayweneverweream00coon
Came roarin' back with Spartacus, though!
Chait has a long history of supporting Israel no matter what they do and launching straw man attacks on its critics. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more along these lines, as factions of the DSA provide plenty of material, truly viewing historical Communist regimes as role models, which is just stupid, both intellectually and, most definitely, electorally. But those same factions have censored AOC and are openly critical of Mamdami, both of whom fail to toe the party line. Chait follows the propagandist playbook of portraying the DSA as a unified authoritarian organization, which it's clearly not. I think if the momentum continues, it will be the AOC's and Mamdamis and other newly elected leftists that define the party, not the other way around. If that fails, they'll just become Democrats, if they haven't already, and try to reform the Party rather than destroy it. It'll be a challenge though, as the corporate and Israeli stooges aligned with Republicans with a big money and media backed campaign to deter democracy will be formidable.
I've mentioned before that nearly all my professors in college were Marxists, and the few who weren't still taught Marxism in order to argue against it. Yet the generation that was taught that way turned out to be the furthest thing from Communist. I think we absorbed the general Marxist historical and social analysis and most of that is pretty much accepted now as common knowledge. The system is rigged for the wealthy, workers are exploited, things like healthcare that shouldn't be commodities have become commodities, the media serves power, etc. But the political aspect of Marxism was rejected and anyone who thought the Soviet Union or the Communist China of the time was a role model was considered a moron and not taken seriously.
I think the new wave of candidates are winning by making Marxist arguments about history and culture that track with what regular people are actually experiencing. Regular people have not read Gramsci or the Frankfort School, but their own experiences validate what those thinkers taught. But they would do well to do everything they can to distance themselves from political Marxism and the catastrophic authoritarian regimes it spawned. Pin that on the Republicans who reject the ideology but embrace the anti-democratic police state.
"they would do well to do everything they can to distance themselves from political Marxism and the catastrophic authoritarian regimes it spawned"
Take your point but what I think is happening, and better suits my sense of justice, is the chuds going YA WANNA BE LIKE NORTH KOREA? and the kids answering "these Democrats seem to want us to be LESS like North Korea."
Cuba works even worse because all they know is, it's yet another poor country that Tubby and his grifters are trying to rip off -- much like the country THEY live in.
Goddamn, am I tired of candidates who spend all their time saying "No, I'm not THAT! And I'm not THAT either!" and then somehow in all the denying, what they ARE seems to get lost.
From what Dad said the other day, FAUX must be going heavy on the "the commies want to make us Cuba" because that's instantly where he went when I asked him what communism was.
I wasn't gonna read the fuckin' thing, but I know how to ctrl-F and Chait mentions Israel ONCE. Would it be fair to say he's downplaying it as a reason young people in particular are furious with traditional Democrats? Wonder why? Does he sense the public is no longer with him in "Send all the bombs they ask for"? If he's going with this Red Scare shit, it can only mean he's got nothin' else.
Having nothing, as usual. But he's also hopping on the new bandwagon (see Alexander Jokay's link below, where Jen Rubin calls this out).
Jen Rubin OF ALL PEOPLE
Akshually... Though I don't follow her, whenever I've happened to see something by her in the last couple-few years, the pieces have been good. Her writing's seemed to show sincerity about striving to make amends for her past affiliations. Unlike Frum, Kristol, et. al., I think Rubin's come to join the correct side of things.
Well, you didn’t compare Chait to Christopher Rufo, for which Chait should be eternally grateful, since you otherwise exposed him for the oligarch mouthpiece he is paid to be. News flash, Chait: we’re all more than a little disappointed in the Chuck Schumer version of the Democratic Party, which is throwing away the opportunity to rally normal people behind policies and politics that most Americans say they want.
And once again, as always, the legacy media and the Dem Establishment bring on the Streisand Effect by reacting to scurrilous GOP agitprop and treating it as if it were a good-faith argument. I wish they'd fucking break the cycle for once and start calling bullshit what it is, especially with democracy on the line. I have to give mad props to Jen Rubin, a former establishment Republican, who wrote an outstanding piece today about the current Red Scare and why we should ignore it: https://www.contrariannews.org/p/non-stories-you-can-ignore?utm_source=substack&publication_id=3719374&post_id=204531200&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=43a8hi&triedRedirect=true
She's done this so much that I almost trust her!
Thank you. A well deserved evisceration and boy do I agree with all of it. I read that awful Chait piece and it's gotta be one of his worst. From what I've read, Chevalier is a loon by any standard which is why he singled her out as an easy target throughout the column. But the DSA? A loose party "organization" of about 100,000 members (by comparison, there are a 45 million registered Democrats in the country) which doesn't even merit a line on the ballot in the socialist hellhole of NYC? The DSA whose national leadership refused to endorse AOC last time around? That DSA?
And you know who is also not a member of the DSA and never has been? Bernie Sanders. He's identified his politics as democratic socialist from way back when he first ran for mayor in Burlington, Vermont, and they kept re-electing him mayor because, like Mamdani, he got things done for ordinary people and prevented the city from being taken over by rich developers, among other things. But he's always called himself "independent."
Um.. about that "Fuck Kamala Harris" thing, I'm an old fart and I'm still capable of being shocked by the things young folks say, and the casual way they throw the word "fuck" around like we're all in the British army still shocks me. I remember when it started popping out in the classroom, the first time I thought "Do we need An Intervention here?" but it was just being used as a random intensifier. I suspect that "Fuck Kamala Harris" to most young people reads as "I am somewhat displeased with her leadership."
Ahhh fuckit. Let's go bowling.
Fuck YEAH!