Yep.
It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies.
Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance.
Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.
The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future.
But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle.
So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
A certain German clergyman write a poem about this.
The Constitution applies to everyone on US soil, ceding any ground undermines the next norm to be broken. It's a deliberate scope creep from Criminal illegal immigrants -> illegal immigrants -> immigrant-looking and criminals in general -> enemies of the state and criminal/enemy sympathizers. Having to "defend" American-born citizens means you've ceded a lot of ground, and are nearing your last stand.
The direction doesn't matter, the barometer is in hell and so are we.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
As a citizen of the world, this option absolutely remains available to you. As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Eh, it depends. To put it succinctly, a leading investor from the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic Gulf state once told me that while the Republican govt., especially under Trump, is super friendly to letting them get away with shit, a Democrat government is better for returns. From an investment standpoint, everyone craves stability and is happy to double down and reinvest, but given cases like Trump, we're happy to move out our American extractions.
That high rent Americans pay to their landlords? Yeah, we're LPs of Blackstone, who brag about bleeding renters dry annually. That new war Mr President wants to start? Carlyle is very happy about its strong showing. All those farm running out of water in California, Arizona, etc.? They're happily eating local mutton and dairy derived from cows, goats and sheep fed on American alfalfa. Oh, and my mom absolutely loves those water-hungry almonds you grow there, especially when they come for a nice hefty discount.
My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people.
Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people.
And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Abstract, abstract, abstract,
my hat is red,
your hat is blue
that is why -
I hate you.
I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.