The American socialist worldview is just broken | Hacker News Reader

The American socialist worldview is just broken

noahpinion.substack.com

30 pointspaulpauper26 comments

>The arrogance of this kind of armchair quarterbacking is breathtaking — an American public intellectual dictating territorial and diplomatic concessions to Ukraine. Chomsky uses the word “we” to describe the parties that he imagines will make these concessions to Russia, but the first person pronoun is totally unwarranted — it is 100% Ukraine’s decision how much of their territory and their people to surrender to an invader who is engaging in mass murder, mass rape, and mass removal to concentration camps in the areas it has conquered. It is 0% Noam Chomsky’s decision.

What a strange paragraph. Chomsky is using "we" in the context of America because he is American. If "we" cut off support to Ukraine, the environment there will be much different. The idea that the rest of the world has no say in and/or effect on what's happening there is a weird claim.

No. That is not how Chomsky uses the word "we." Chomsky is clearly saying "we" in the sense of what Ukraine ought to do.

This sort of headline inevitably results in unproductive debate because when you say "socialist," it's not referring to anyone in particular. Everyone who hears the word is going to think of different people and different policy positions, depending on what they've read and their experiences.

Better to stick to criticizing specific arguments by specific people and avoid the abstract opponents. Noah Smith does get specific, but he has a variety of targets, so it's somewhat scattershot.

As others have pointed out, this has a number of very fundamental misinterpretations and omissions that really jump out at the reader. It's hard to see it as completely accidental, but it's possible.

>The arrogance of this kind of armchair quarterbacking is breathtaking

How dare someone have an opinion on a topic that is not mine!

We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine.

I need to stop reading here, not just because what Chomsky's saying here -- when you sit down and think about it -- is actually a pretty sensible (if highly Realpolitik-driven) analysis of the situation.

But because this has nothing to do with "socialism" per se. Which strongly correlates with the rest of the piece being just another rant, with not much of point to make.

It's funny that in Europe those posirions, generally summed up as appeasement towards Putin, are mostly spread by the extreme right (Le Pen in France currently being a prime example).

And appeasement is what those proposals, territorial concessions etc, are. And as appeassement in the thirties the effected countries are not asked their opinion (the future allies gave away parts of Chekoslovakia in Munich without asking).

Appart from that, the general observation holds true: The US definition of socilicsm is only applicable to the US, in every other country it is just laughable.

EDIT: Regarding embargoes of oil and gas. Those are the last things the West can take away from Putin. There is nothing left after that, Putin will entirely depend on China for revenue, making a defacto puppet of Bejing. Not sure anybody wants Putin in a position where he has nothing to loose. Sure, put those embargoes in place as an answer to something Putin did. And not pro-actively, becaise that would be escalation. As a coubter example, the Greens in Germany, by no means at risk as being seen war hawks, a strongly in favor of sending heavy arms like tanks to Ukraine.

First half is some ranting about Chompsky. Then we get into the meat of it:

> This theory started showing its limits when Bernie was defeated by Biden despite having a much bigger war chest.

This is some guy who claims that there is no oligarchy because he doesn't see evidence of it in the outcomes of elections vs recorded spending. Specifically, focusing on Bernie's failure to get the nomination over Biden (notably ignoring the previous election cycle).

I don't know how to characterize this other than a willful blindness.

Socialists tend to oppose US world policing and military intervention. It's not a matter of good vs. bad guys, but that America is overstepping its lines again. So Chomsky's position may seem reprehensible or appeasement but it's not inconsistent with the democratic socialist view of foreign policy.

Is this about socialists, democrats, or the American left? I don't believe that restricting home construction is a tenant of socialism, the democrats nor the left. This entire article is just a rambling, semi-coherent attack against a "socialist" straw man it creates.

Additionally, the bad faith interpretation of what Noam Chomsky said regarding Cambodia is just lazy. This is not worthy of HN, especially not the front page.

Attacking Chomsky as Old or bringing up Khmer. Some random non-checkmarks on twitter. Ilhan Omar joining Trumpists? If Ilhan Omar and Trumpists agree on something. You probably need to investigate this further. There's almost certainly something there.

>This is not to say, of course, that the socialist Left has been as bad as the Trumpist Right in this episode. It has not. But I would expect better of the socialists than of the rightists — or perhaps I should say that I would hope for better.

The author doesn't seem to understand. This isn't about socialism vs capitalism. Socialism died in 1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989 This is really about wealth redistribution.

The key take away is that the USSR only functioned because of slave labour via gulags and not taking the cost of development and innovation, stealing the ideas. 100% employment. Then also not dealing with decadence in society. The thing about capitalism is that it inherently is designed to fix these things. Much more efficient system as far fewer people need to work in society. We can afford to have far more people not participating in labour force.

That's the intellectual break and why the USSR would inevitably collapse. China did something slightly differently. Massacre everyone at Tiananmen Square but do economic free trade zones with ultra low taxes and property rights. There's no going back for China and it's obvious their adoption of capitalism has been tremendously successful.

That's the thing about the american socialist. They aren't calling for this. They reject free trade zones and ultra low taxes. Bernie bros definitely got stabbed in the back. I find it so funny you have Tulsi Gabbard who is? was? a democrat who called that out. She was a colonel in army and had enough honor to see it for what it was.

Obama spoke well on why he designed the obamacare system the way it is. If you went all the way to single payer system, what do you do with millions of people working for insurance and such? Insurance doesn't go away but there's definitely some serious layoffs. Those people don't deserve that.

Effectively what he designed is a single payer system via states that will inevitably grow and displace people in the private system at a slower rate than would happen.

No, I think the better description of the american socialists is more 'system is corrupt, im not working anymore' UBI and MMT together will be great because... oh wait we trialed this and it didn't work. "You're a nazi. Go away."

How many people got a chance to vote for Bernie Sanders in 2020? As I recall the Democratic primaries were ... "abbreviated" to put it politely. I've seen the phrase "Obama's Night of Long Knives" used to describe that show.

> How many people got a chance to vote for Bernie Sanders in 2020?

It doesn't matter. A large percentage of Democrats describe themselves as conservative. Many of those people are minorities.

Sanders' popularity was an illusion due to the bizarre ordering of Democratic primary states. The voters in the early states are much whiter, more educated, and politically active than most of the later states. That means a candidate like Sanders (who is disproportionately popular with white, educated people) looked a lot more viable than he was.

I'm not saying I think Sanders would have lost to Trump. I think Sanders was actually more viable as a general election candidate than as a Democratic primary candidate for various reasons (one of them being that a small-but-significant group of anti-establishment voters were willing to vote for Trump or Sanders, but no one else).

Yep, the AP called the election for Hillary the night before the primary in California. We'll never know what the vote would have been without that major election interferance. Update: I was indeed talking about 2016 - thanks for pointing that out.

That was '16. That was also a complete mess and was my introduction to how politics is really played. Democrat party is not your friend, they are bought and paid for by the people making money hand over fist on everything that people are upset about today.

Actually, we do indeed what the vote would have been, which is why AP felt comfortable calling it. You know why they called it, right? It's because Hillary had enough pledged and unpledged delegates at that point to become the nominee.

NBC called it before California, too. Because it was over. That's even assuming Hillary won ZERO delegates in California, which of course was not the case, and could not possibly have ended up being the case. It was a very conservative and well-justified call.

Please check your facts before posting misinformation.

There were months left in the primaries, and public opinion is far from static. Your logic, even at a first pass, fails completely.

There was so much, and so little has still been addressed.

The ACRONYM fiasco alone is enough to discredit the entire institution, but apparently news moves too fast for real public discourse about that.

You think Bernie losing the primary in 2020 is comparable to Hitler literally murdering his opposition? And Obama is somehow involved?

That’s a rather tasteless metaphor.

The establishment candidates aside from Biden did drop out to clear the lane, but that only created the same head-to-head matchup that Sanders had with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Which was probably motivated by seeing what happened to establishment Republicans in the 2016 primaries.

Uh, this is completely absurd. Please refrain from commenting in public if you think this is remotely true. Also, "I've seen" is a pretty classic way to disown the words you're saying and to evade accountability. Do YOU think it's comparable to the Night of Long Knives? If not, don't say it.

If you have real, cogent criticisms of the Democratic primary, post them.

Here's what I saw: the primary played out fair and square, just as it's designed to do, and Bernie lost. Fair and square.

You're thinking of 2016 perhaps. Nothing of the sort happened in 2020.

What happened with Bernie Sanders in the primaries? I thought he saw it through to the end and just plain lost to Biden. Not that that fact alone didn't concern me.

But I think it's a far more damning image to the party that Tulsi Gabbard qualified for the debates under the rules at the time, and then was excluded because they changed the rules. You can't play the race or gender card every time your person isn't winning, and then go out of your way to very specifically exclude the only candidate left who isn't white and isn't male. You can't really make a principled argument against the way the electoral college currently works by ignoring non-mainland delegates. You can't claim every vote should count. You can't claim the two party system is the reason you can't incorporate new, non-adversarial ideas.

I tried to reply to this earlier but was put on time-out by the mods for replying to other comments. Literally has never happened to me before, until today, when I started challenging Dem establishment lines.

There's way too much to say in one comment, but just to summarize:

The "establishment" organized a quite effective takedown just prior to Super Tuesday. It was in retrospect a classic rug-pull: flood the field with candidates who provide each segment of identitarians a race-horse they can get behind; dilute the rhetoric and box out the candidates labelled "extreme" while simultaneously ripping off and diluting their core policies; pull all candidates except one, have all the other candidates endorse them, and bet (correctly) on the assumption that people don't have the time or inclination to look at all beyond the news headlines to inform their vote.

I am happy to dive much deeper into this if you are interested. There are many angles to investigate, but I would say the mainstream news media outlets were the most crucial factor, being used as effective tools of consent-manufacturing in many of the ways Chomsky describes.

Look, anything that purports to comment on the American socialist worldview just tells me the author has zero real knowledge of American socialism.

Unsurprisingly, every single example he picks to illustrate his point is something that has been deeply divisive among American socialists, rather than characterizing a consensus among them. (And this isn't just a anarchist vs. authoritarian (“libertarian socialists vs. democratic socialists vs. Marxists vs. Leninists/Maoists” spectrum) thing, or revolutionary socialist vs. electoralists (everyone else vs. demsocs) thing, either, as division on the issues Smith purports are emblematic of “American socialism” are deep and cross all of the traditional subgroups.

Is there any topic that is not divisive to American socialists? The socialists I know love nothing more than to argue how the other socialists around them are idiots because of minute differences in how they want to implement socialism.

In the coworking space I work at, the Democratic socialist cohort, a group of Maoists, and a group of Marxist Leninists (yeah I get it, not Socialists but close enough that they all feel comfortable debating each other) sit around and get into knock down drag out battles about the correct ways to socialize the means of productions. I think it's gotten to the point where they dislike eachother more than any outside group. They agree on literally nothing because all three of their world views are razor focused on ultra nuanced minutiae of how they will run Socialism/communism once their team wins and they make all the rules.

They have zero interface with reality or our current system so all of the stuff about how you build a stable system where any of this stuff is even relevant in the first place is totally uninteresting to them. Unless it involves them getting to dress in black and protest in a way they can post on social media. Then maybe it's worth a discussion.

It's basically Dungeons and Dragons for people with complexes about ruling the world.

But to bring it back around, nothing seems to be more socialist than telling other Socialists they don't know how to do socialism correctly besides maybe complaining about how non socialists have zero knowledge of Socialism.

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