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We lack doubt in a moment of extensive political crisis in the United States of America. And I understand who to blame. No, not that man, or the 62 million dissatisfied, deluded and semi-downtrodden peoplewho elected him. Not the opposition celebration that seems to have lost all sense of mission and vision,and that now comprehends democracy as a completely transactional affair, buoyed up sporadically with empty inspirational rhetoric. Not the capital-owning oligarchy whose wealth and power have actually grown immeasurably over the last 30 or 40 years. Not the international elite ideology often called the “Washington consensus,”which held that there was only one method forward after completion of the Cold War, which involved lower taxes, less expensive durable goods, fewer social services and the totally free circulation of tasks and money.Nope, it was
n’t any of that things that got us where we are now. Because I am a mature and level-headed grownup who earns money to sit at a desk and compose things, I comprehend these things. Does James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, who– in the longest and most erudite hot take of recent journalistic history– blames the current disordered state of the anti-Trump opposition on the “dude-bros and ‘purity progressives'” of the “alt-left,” which he refers to as a “mirror image distortion” of the neofascist alt-right. (I think that “mirror image distortion” equates, in English, to something that is not like that other thing at all.) These individuals, whoever and any place they are, “apply an effective reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left. “
Oh no– factionalism on the! What a brand-new and troubling phenomenon. Anyhow, who am I to quarrel with one of the greatest cultural critics of the dead-tree era: The fantastic historic bad guys of this era are none of the previously mentioned possibilities, but rather the DudeBros. I have never ever totally grasped the term, but I take it Wolcott means the young white males with liberal-arts degrees and confusing haircuts, whose closets seem to integrate all the worst propensities of the last 4 decades?If so, I see those men on the street in Brooklyn all the time, and I am acutely knowledgeable about their criminal offenses. Their trousers are numerous sizes too small, which makes me uncomfortable. As someone who lived during the 1970s, I can’t assist feeling that their facial hair muddles olden semiotic differences in between gay and straight. This is not supportable.As those people who
understand how the world actually works realize, traditional liberalism as embodied in the Democratic Party can not perhaps be to blame for its huge political failures. It has demographics on its side! Which makes certain to lead, in some golden period that lies simply beyond the horizon, to the long-term hegemony of reasonable technocratic decency.Furthermore, liberalism is bound to dominate ultimately since it seeks practical compromise and avoids ideological confrontation, which– according to the tenets of liberalism– is how you win over the middle-most piece of the middle ground and ensure endless electoral victory and social progress. How do we understand that will work, in the face of repeated electoral defeat, quickly reversing social development and the total disappearance of the so-called happy medium? Well, it’s complicated: Consultants and pie charts were included. You wouldn’t really understand.Since liberals are by definition sensible individuals who make the right choices about whatever, each brand-new and awful obstacle should be blamed on some minimal but problematic phenomenon: talk radio, Ralph Nader, crackpots in Revolutionary War outfits, the Koch brothers and, in the illuminating case of the dreadful 2014 midterms, the disconcerting truth that voters who supposedly supported the liberal agenda simply couldn’t be troubled to show up.Now, a cynic may state that “We’re the party that many people in fact support; they’re simply too foolish and lazy to choose us “is the example a doomed political entity might say.
Or, more to the point, that even if such an argument is partially true, it recommends a prevalent loss of faith in the electoral procedure and the workings of democracy that mainstream liberalism is ill-suited to attend to. However such a cynic lacks the blithe confidence of the liberal establishment, which believes itself driven by factor while steadfastly resisting all empirical evidence it doesn’t like.I’m sorry; I’m losing the thread here a little bit. To the liberal hive-mind, the inordinately agonizing defeat of 2016, in which Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than that other person however lost anyway, provides a hard problem. It appeared to be a difficult outcome beforehand, and remains so in retrospect. It couldn’t have actually occurred, and therefore in some sense did not take place. It can just be explained in regards to strange extrinsic aspects, and when it comes to this fluke election a lot of those factors are at least rather possible: It was the Electoral College, it was the Russians, it was the FBI. It was white people, stubbornly putting the chimera of racial uniformity ahead of their own financial interests, which is a long-running style in American politics.But another running style in Democratic Celebration apologetics informs all that, which is the ingrained desire to blame the left-wing resistance for anything that goes incorrect– and to firmly insist that it isn’t actually the left at all however sort of, kind of, the. Thus Wolcott’s argument that the DudeBros and”pureness progressives”of the”alt-left” remain in some undisclosed manner carefully associated to the rebranded white supremacists of the alt-right. Or perhaps it’s simply that he doesn’t like either of them.To go back to our central premise: The DudeBros messed up everything. Their operations are destructive, and marvelous. They are at the same time unaware, puritanical and all-powerful. In in between Ultimate Frisbee tournaments and Vampire Weekend marathons, they elected Donald Trump, eliminated the Democratic Celebration between the coasts
, rioted versus Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley and/or defected to the alt-right en masse. They develop apps whose functions stay mysterious, which many of us don’t know how to use. Unforgivably, they made the Phish reunion possible, and now it will never stop.Intemperate young males who supported Bernie Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primaries and acted like jerks about it on the web had a much wider reach, obviously, than their modest numbers and childhood would recommend. They damaged the popular front of unanimity and solidarity that would have been essential to defeat Donald Trump. Perhaps they did so through their bad good manners and worse footwear, because otherwise I am unclear on the mechanisms included. They were not signs of the truth that the Democratic frontrunner was commonly viewed as a scandal-plagued Wall Street tool whose political sell-by date had ended, but causes of that perception.Without ever letting the Hacky Sack touch the ground, the DudeBro army traveled back in time in their Tardis and horrified the Democratic Party into neutering itself ideologically, spending years running as the Slightly Less Mean Republican politicians and losing more than 1,000 state legislative seats throughout the 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Perhaps their upsetting appearance in the past, wearing T-shirts for Radiohead albums that didn’t yet exist, caused Obama to demoralize the progressive base by staffing up his Cabinet with monetary market experts and performing drone assassinations in many foreign countries with which the United States was not at war.Back in the present of 2016, the”Bernie or Bust “tribe in some way scared the Clinton campaign into deserting the Rust Belt states and making what lots of experts perceived as a bold play for”moderate Republican ladies”in the suburban areas of Charlotte and Phoenix and Philadelphia and Atlanta. All we are is dust in the wind.I will drop the satirical mode here– if it hasn’t dropped me currently– and make a few simple observations. I am not protecting the obnoxious habits of the DudeBros, to whatever extent they exist. I am not challenging that sexism and misogyny played a function in the terrible defeat of Hillary Clinton
in the fall election, or that it played a role in the suddenly close main contest in between Clinton and Sanders. That strikes me as obvious. Numerous feminists were not surprisingly amazed that more youthful women overwhelmingly favored Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic race– and you didn’t need to be
a female or a feminist to be shocked that a majority of white female citizens supported Donald Trump over Clinton in the general election. Those things speak to an extensive crisis of identity and ideology on the” lib-left “that James Wolcott, et al., are eager to avoid.I don’t pretend to understand whether Sanders or some other “progressive”candidate would have beat Trump. Those who claim the answer is obvious are doing their cause no favors. We don’t get to roll back history and rerun the experiment, and it’s essential to understand the Trump election as the crest of an around the world wave of conservative response. Trump’s success was overdetermined, to utilize social-science lingo; once his unusual project had actually gathered momentum, conventional politics seemed powerless to stop him. This might be wonderful thinking of a different kind, however I’m inclined to think that President Trump had to happen, in order to galvanize the next stage of American history.(I’m not promising
that stage will be awesome.)I have actually invested much of my adult life around the left-wing opposition– that is, around folks on the leftward fringe of the Democratic Party, or outside it– and I know how sanctimonious and contentious they can be. The combination of narcissism, delusion and entitlement that produces something like Wolcott’s über-troll manifesto– or the tiresome circular discussions about whether class-based economics should trump”intersectionality, “or the other method around– shows the terminal disintegration of the liberal consensus.When “liberals “become a political grouping morbidly consumed with their left-wing critics, continuously accusing them of being too optimistic and too intransigent and of being covert agents for the opponent, they have actually stopped being liberals and become conservatives. Which certainly occurred some time ago, when the old”conservatives “became radical enthusiasts. When” the left”constantly arguments which core concerns or constituencies must be compromised for political gain, as if financial justice for the poor and the working class could be separated from social justice for ladies and individuals of color and the LGBT community and immigrants and people with specials needs, it is no longer working as the left.The tsunami of discord and disruption that overturned political truth and brought Donald Trump into the White Home has been a long period of time coming, and most likely represents the only course forward. Those who tell themselves that the old order will soon be restored are joking themselves, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum. In the long run, the liberal establishment’s attempt to purge or ignore the upsurge of left-wing populism is most likely to work simply about as well as the conservative facility’s effort to put down right-wing populism did.In hindsight this may look like one of those periods Karl Marx described more than 160 years ago, when “all that is strong merges air, all that is holy is profaned, and guy is at last forced to confront with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
“Or it might look like the duration when James Wolcott entered into his garage for a can of whup-ass, due to the fact that the DudeBros will not leave his yard.
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