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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Because it's a conservative journal. Their entire world view basically doesn't consider that as something to be concerned about to begin with.

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Yeah I know. I wish more people noticed that the most powerful people keep being left out of diagnoses of our problems.

You should have read to the end...you also probably should have actually read more about what conservatives think, rather than what people who aren't conservatives say conservatives think.

As a matter of fact I did read to the end, since other than the eye-rollingly dumb rhetoric around wokeness it did raise interesting points.

They get the root cause completely wrong, but of course that's expected.

Conservatives are free to talk about their agenda whenever they like. The fact of the matter is elite conservative thought is wildly unpopular, and they know it. So all this culture war crap is all they have.

Yeah, it's funny, I read to the end; it's not a bad piece of writing though I suspect I wouldn't see eye to eye with the writer on some economic issues; I hold opinions that you might call classical Marxist, or Marxian, and to be honest, the analysis seemed almost "historical materialist" and he even uses Marx in his argumentation, and this quote "If politics is indeed downstream of culture, then it must be added that culture finds itself perched snugly downstream from the realm of production." could come straight out of an old issue of Monthly Review or Capital & Class.

Anyways, not easy to pigeon-hole. But maybe not super coherent either.

And yeah, his quip about "what passes for the left" -- indeed. The left -- and its bread and butter based economic critique -- is mostly unidentifiable in North American politics today. To the point that most educated Americans can't distinguish between neoliberalism and "socialism" anymore.

Malcom Kyeyune, at least, is a one-time socialist. Now he seems to be more of a (right) populist, albeit still heavily influenced by Marxism. According to this blog post[0], he believes that the populist right is the actual party of the working class, since leftist parties have invariably begun to advocate for the interests of the professional-managerial class, who are their primary clients these days.

[0] https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and...

>he believes that the populist right is the actual party of the working class

A pretty neat way of ingratiating himself with right wing elites and a promising route to political power.

And, if you are on the left, shouldn't you kind-of want the "bad guys" to start borrowing your ideas? That should make things less-bad when they win, right? As far as I can tell, the problem, apart from Trump winning, was that he didn't do enough of this Bannonesque stuff, and instead remained too-much a (typical, apart from the incompetence) Big Business Republican.

This is the two wings of the business party arguing over which one of them better represents actual people.

Yeah, Trump attempted some left wing populist rhetoric just before he won but it was just rhetoric.

I was expressing the hope that the populist right could be steered away from its worst impulses, and that, if that could be done, it might be a better partner for getting certain kinds of policy enacted than Reagan Republicans would be.

But instead, that wing has been taken over by white ethnic stuff and culture war (like right populist parties in other countries), which makes that sort of alliance very difficult.

Big business would seem to be the beneficiary of this situation.

Though obviously yes, in the voting booth, "Republicans bad" is a sufficient level of nuance.

Really not sure how that would be possible. The Republican party is fairly evenly split between corporate/Reaganesque Republicans and the populist right. There are no other power blocs that could enact the kind of steering you're hoping for. Even electoral defeat doesnt seem to phase them much (they're all voting against popular progressive bills in lockstep).

The best we could probably hope for is that those two wings of the party turn on each other but as Trump demonstrated they seem to be able to find enough common ground to work together.

It is easy to pigeon-hole because conservative writers were writing about this kind of thing before Marx (about five decades before in fact, this is a slightly complex point because politics then wasn't so linear but a lot of the critique of capitalism came from the wealthiest, it was the new rich Liberal factory owners that were the advocates for capitalism, the traditional land-owning elites, for example Disraeli, were making identical points to the OP).

I think the problem today is that people view Marxism within the context of a discussion that postdates Marx by one century. Historical materialism is also something quite distinct from Marxism. Marx wasn't a Marxist (or so Engels said), and there are lots of historical materialist historians (particularly economic historians) who aren't Marxist either.

On your final paragraph, I think much of the discussion today is totally reductive. You are right there is no difference between neoliberalism and socialism but that is because there is no difference between neoliberals and socialists. I am not actually opposed to "Third Way" politics but there is no real representation for working people. And yes, part of that is because the left has the moral authority and wealthy people have hijacked that moral authority in order to fight their culture wars about social causes that are largely irrelevant to most working people (the enemy doesn't exist, it is just a way for wealthy people to shed their guilt and obtain self-justification). It is telling that working class reaction in the US was led by an orange billionaire, it makes no sense (and btw, I don't think people like Sanders or Warren are particularly compelling or effective leaders, the reason orange man won was because, for all his grievous faults, he actually seemed like a normal human being...as weird as that sounds when talking about someone who is so obviously abnormal in many ways).

I think that you're missing that one of the co-authors of the original piece is in fact an ex-Marxist, and uses Marx and Marxian frameworks in this piece of writing.

Except the piece of writing focused on education/hierarchy/social standing rather than on class analysis.

I also never said that neoliberalism and socialism are the same thing or whatever; I said that among the average American, they don't know what socialism is, and often mislabel liberals/neoliberals with this label, nonsensically. And among the right in the US, this is a frequent talking point -- that somehow Biden is "socialist".. which is preposterous.

There is no effectively organized "left" in the traditional sense in American politics. Not even a social democratic party. Just a repressed minority within the Democrats (a right wing party) that is forced into a forever subservient position to neoliberal elites.

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