The Liberals Thread

[semper occultus]

The closing of the liberal mind

John Grey

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/11/closing-liberal-mind

Today’s liberals differ widely about how the wealth and opportunities of a market economy should be shared. What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades. Writing in Tribune in 1943 after reviewing a batch of “progressive” books, George Orwell observed: “I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases that were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are ‘the abolition of distance’ and ‘the disappearance of frontiers’.” More than 70 years later, the same empty formulae are again being repeated. At present, the liberal mind can function only to the extent that it shuts out reality.

[Searcher08]

The closing of the liberal mind

John Grey

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/11/closing-liberal-mind

Today’s liberals differ widely about how the wealth and opportunities of a market economy should be shared. What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades. Writing in Tribune in 1943 after reviewing a batch of “progressive” books, George Orwell observed: “I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases that were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are ‘the abolition of distance’ and ‘the disappearance of frontiers’.” More than 70 years later, the same empty formulae are again being repeated. At present, the liberal mind can function only to the extent that it shuts out reality.

I have been enjoying Sargon's series on Liberal Ideas. Like most here, he is in the "Bottom Left" political quadrant and identifies as a left leaning, cultural libertarian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFnd6IS0DrY&index=1&list=PLM9L2W5aOI_1c9VBdAi6efQAZPoZ-UcdC



And for another view, here is Zizek (ignore the clickbait title)


From the comments

Alain Rochette4 days ago
Can someone summarize for me how exactly political correctness played a role in the rejection of Hillary and approval of Trump? Genuinely curious. Please and thanks!!
1
AwoudeX
AwoudeX3 days ago
the proponents of PC have shut down any discussion with dissenters by shaming them through falsely labelling them as sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe etc. etc. etc. People get really tired of being put in tiny boxes like that for no good reason at all. Enter Trump, who is not part of the establishment that is mostly PC-orientated, is not part of the establishment that disenfranchised a multitude of groups for decades. PC has killed the discussion of ideas to find out which ones are good and which ones are bad. You end up with a ton of bad ideas and a onesided narrative that gets further away from reality as it progresses.
PC on it's own hasn't made it possible for a Trump vs Clinton election, there is so much more at play, but the methods used by the status quo, the left side of the spectrum mostly of silencing and using anything up to violence sure didn't help Hillary, lol

[semper occultus]

.its gone way beyond just the whole "PC" discussion - what's been a total revelation since Brexit is the absolute vitrilioc outpourings against basically - the mechanism of democracy itself - people openly discussing the idea that certain people aren't "educated" enough to even be allowed a vote or if so that voting outcomes should just be ignored or over-turned if they don't vote the "right way"...a behaviour that's early & repeated manifestation in the EU was - of course - a key building block in anti-EU sentiment...

[dada]

It would be nice if we could keep the critique of liberalism on, 'What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades.'

Instead of 'political correctness.' This social critique thing is a non-starter. Isn't that what Zizek and the trolls getting stuck on political correctness are saying, anyway?

It comes off sounding more like a personal pet peeve, not a critique. It doesn't challenge power and inequality. Whether someone identifies as 'right or left' doesn't matter as much as the ideas they hold. That's as true for liberals who are center-right on the political spectrum, as it is for Zizek and trolls who say they're left but whose talk supports the right.

[NeonLX]

Thanks, dada. I've been agonizing about how to state what you just did so well. Writing is agony for me. The destruction of the world through rapacious consumption--and of course warfare--is issue number one. For all of us, everywhere.

[MacCruiskeen]

#liberals

Garrison Keillor:



Thread: https://twitter.com/2dAmMuslim/status/7 ... 3374190592

[tapitsbo]

It would be nice if we could keep the critique of liberalism on, 'What none of them question is the type of market globalisation that has developed over the past three decades.'

Instead of 'political correctness.' This social critique thing is a non-starter. Isn't that what Zizek and the trolls getting stuck on political correctness are saying, anyway?

It comes off sounding more like a personal pet peeve, not a critique. It doesn't challenge power and inequality. Whether someone identifies as 'right or left' doesn't matter as much as the ideas they hold. That's as true for liberals who are center-right on the political spectrum, as it is for Zizek and trolls who say they're left but whose talk supports the right.

the market globalisation and the political correctness are co-dependent, you can't have one without the other, as you implied yourself in the thread about NYTimes

as long as people have identities identity politics aren't going to go away, nor should they - of course there are particular identities that are extremely threatening/sacred/loaded and so on to the folks on this board

personally I don't see what's wrong with politics that span the entire world, what we've come to know as "globalisation" is just the project of a small and very particular clique, however

[MacCruiskeen]

Jonathan Cook:

American liberals unleashed the Trump monster
9 November 2016

http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2016- ... p-monster/

The earth has been shifting under our feet for a while, but all liberals want to do is desperately cling to the status quo like a life-raft. Middle-class Britons are still hyperventiliating about Brexit, and now middle-class America is trembling at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House.

And, of course, middle-class Americans are blaming everyone but themselves. Typifying this blinkered self-righteousness was a column yesterday, written before news of Trump’s success, from Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, Britain’s unofficial stenographer to power and Washington fanboy. He blamed everyone but Hillary Clinton for her difficult path to what he then assumed was the White House.

Well, here is some news for Freedland and American liberals. The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.

But no, liberals won’t be listening because they are too busy blaming Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing the truth about the Democratic leadership set out in the Clinton campaign emails – and Russia for supposedly stealing them.

Blame lies squarely too with Barack Obama, the great black hope who spent eight years proving how wedded he was to neoliberal orthodoxy at home and a neoconservative agenda abroad.

While liberals praised him to the heavens, he poured the last US treasure into propping up a failed banking system, bankrupting the country to fill the pockets of a tiny, already fabulously wealthy elite. The plutocrats then recycled vast sums to lobbyists and representatives in Congress to buy control there and make sure the voice of ordinary Americans counted for even less than it did before.

Obama also continued the futile “war on terror”, turning the world into one giant battlefield that made every day a payday for the arms industry. The US has been dropping bombs on jihadists and civilians alike, while supplying the very same jihadists with arms to kill yet more civilians.

And all the while, have liberals been campaigning against the military-industrial complex that stole their political system? No, of course not. They have been worrying about the mass migrations of refugees – those fleeing the very resource wars their leaders stoked.

Then there is the liberal media that served as a loyal chorus to Clinton, trying to persuade us that she would make a model president, and to ignore what was in plain sight: that Clinton is even more in the pocket of the bankers and arms dealers than Obama (if that were possible) and would wage more, not less war.

Do I sound a little like Trump as I rant against liberals? Yes, I do. And while you are busy dismissing me as a closet Trump supporter, you can continue your furious refusal to examine the reasons why a truly progressive position appears so similar to a far-right one like Trump’s.

Because real progressives are as frustrated and angry about the status quo as are the poor, vulnerable and disillusioned who turned to Trump. And they had no choice but to vote for Trump because there was no one aside from him in the presidential race articulating anything that approximated the truth.

Sanders was ousted by Clinton and her corrupt coterie. Jill Stein of the Greens was made invisible by a corrupt electoral system. It was either vote for Clinton and the putrid status quo, or vote for Trump and a possibility for change.

Yes, Trump is very bad. He is as much a product of the plutocracy that is now America as Clinton. He, like Clinton, will do nothing to fix the most important issue facing humankind: runaway climate change. He is a climate denier, she is a climate evader.

But unlike Clinton, Trump understood the rising popular anger at the “system”, and he was articulate enough to express it – all it took was a howl of pain.

Trump isn’t the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.

Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.

- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2016- ... drlOc.dpuf

[Searcher08]

Cheers, Mac - so spot on.

Trump isn’t the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.

Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.

[brekin]

Zizek. You know this guy is just fucked. So, even though Trump has brought the country to the point of direct fascism, we should really be talking about how Political Correctness is a pain in the ass, and put us in this fix. Trump is the guy Zizek endorsed and even though he normalized vulgarity, racism, misogynous and assaultive language and behavior, its the elites who tell us that we shouldn't use the N word that is the crux of it all.

Zizek is trying to say PC talk has made us so wooly in the head that it could be used to normalize and minimize dangerous and repulsive behavior. But isn't Trump the complete refutation of that? People were tired of being challenged to justify and police their offensive language and thoughts. It was hard not being a racist, misogynist, xenophobe, bully off line everyday. So they rebel and vent anonymously online, and then one day their id shows up to say the same thing on CNN day after day and the hate messiah has come. But those PC elites, they just don't get it is wrong to say such things aren't appropriate in the first place. That is elite.
Zizek is just a Trump fanboy, who can't just come out and say it plainly. Which is kind of his shtick.

"No, in politics we have authentic enemies. Everyone should not be respected in politics and so on. Politics is a real struggle of life and death."

And now I think the United States are at a very important moment, at the moment when this machine to build consensus has broken down. Now these are moments which can be catastrophic. In such moments direct fascism can take over, but this can be also moments when the left, or whatever would be the new left, provides a new answer.

Of course Trump is almost but not quite proto fascist phenomenon, but it's because they, the liberal centrist mainstream because they failed. And that's why, not that I like in anyway Trump, Trump is scum, trash and so on, but my but is this one, first Trump nonetheless if you are a leftists you should admire him sincerely. He did something wonderfully. He almost single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party. What I mean you have two main vaguely orientations, the Christian fundamentalists in the party hardliners and this Republican liberal enlightened big business elite. Both of them are more or less horrified of Trump. And Trump is vulgar, but in his very vulgarity you can see a common human baseness, opportunism, now I will say something horrible, but for me people like Ted Crews or you remember eight years ago Rick Santorum, there's something much worse. Trump is a dirty disgusting human being, do you really think that Rick Santorum is a human being? I think that they are aliens. There's something so monstrous about them. That's my first one.

So again, in no way I am for Trump. He personifies what I was talking about this disintegration of public values, of public manners, this obscene situation where you can talk about whatever you want. Again, things which years ago were unthinkable as part of a public debate are now normalized, open racism and so on. And here I think political correctness doesn't work. Because political correctness is a desperate attempt when public mores all these unwritten rules which tell you what is this and what is not, break down, political correctness tries directly to legislate. This expression is to be used, that expression is to be used and so on and so on.

So again, I don't to like this narcissistic idea of the ultimate horizon do feel hurt, are you wounded or not and so on and so on. I mean this is a very ambiguous topic. Of course you can in this way defending gay rights, the exclusion of LGBT people and so on, but then what would prevent white Arians or whatever, white power people to say sorry guys but we are hurt if you attack us like that and so on. No, in politics we have authentic enemies. Everyone should not be respected in politics and so on. Politics is a real struggle of life and death.

http://bigthink.com/videos/slavoj-zizek ... presidency

[MacCruiskeen]

Zizek is just a Trump fanboy, who can't just come out and say it plainly. Which is kind of his shtick.

This is true. Searcher, please don't post him as any kind of support for this thread. Zizek is at best a tiresome "contrarian" "provocateur" and self-publicist, at worse a barely-closeted fascist. And while I'm at it, the John Gray piece is also a typically annoying mixture of a few plausible observations hurtling to a lazily reactionary conclusion.

[MacCruiskeen]

'#liberals

Having shut down the centre of Austerity Athens for 42 hours, the #liberal US president Obama is now shutting down the centre of Berlin for the same length of time. Airspace is locked down, armed cops are everywhere (at least 5,000 of them on duty), masked police snipers are posted on roofs, public transport is heavily disrupted and partially shut down, a large area of the city centre is barred off to the public, passport controls are in operation for residents within a wide radius of his hotel - and of course Mr Hopey Changey will make no public appearances at all. Anyone might think Europeans are getting a bit tired of robotic admen mouthing dead platitudes & #liberal-sounding bromides and expecting adulation for their amazing "eloquence".

It will not be the least of Trump's services to Empire if, by January at the latest, airheads everywhere are mourning Obama's presidency as a lost #liberal Golden Age and "Hillary" as a #liberal martyr.

But the benefits of American #Liberalism are not wholly self-evident to all Europeans. Let's wait and see whether nuclear war with Russia has in fact been averted by January and whether TTIP will actually be abandoned. Those would be real changes worth hoping for.

[Rory]

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... stops.html

JMG has some interesting takes on the failure of Clinton's election bid (and corresponding success of Trump's). I've condensed these to bullet points and left the body of text at the link.

1. The Risk of War.
2. The Obamacare Disaster.
3. Bringing Back Jobs.
4. Punishing the Democratic Party.

This one is a bit of an outlier, because the people I know who cast votes for Trump for this reason mostly represented a different demographic from the norm out here: young, politically liberal, and incensed by the way that the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process to favor Clinton and shut out Bernie Sanders. They believed that if the campaign for the Democratic nomination had been conducted fairly, Sanders would have been the nominee, and they also believe that Sanders would have stomped Trump in the general election. For what it’s worth, I think they’re right on both counts.

These voters pointed out to me, often with some heat, that the policies Hillary Clinton supported in her time as senator and secretary of state were all but indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the policies Democrats denounced so forcefully a little more than eight years ago. They argued that voting for Clinton in the general election when she’d been rammed down the throats of the Democratic rank and file by the party’s oligarchy would have signaled the final collapse of the party’s progressive wing into irrelevance. They were willing to accept four years of a Republican in the White House to make it brutally clear to the party hierarchy that the shenanigans that handed the nomination to Clinton were more than they were willing to tolerate.

Those were the reasons I heard people mention when they talked in my hearing about why they were voting for Donald Trump. They didn’t talk about the issues that the media considered important—the email server business, the on-again-off-again FBI investigation, and so on. Again, this isn’t a scientific survey, but I found it interesting that not one Trump voter I knew mentioned those.

What’s more, hatred toward women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the like weren’t among the reasons that people cited for voting for Trump, either. Do a fair number of the people I’m discussing hold attitudes that the Left considers racist, sexist, homophobic, or what have you? No doubt—but the mere fact that such attitudes exist does not prove that those attitudes, rather than the issues just listed, guided their votes.

He mentions this guy http://theferrett.livejournal.com/2085448.html as an example of a democrat that is facing the enormity of the task ahead (even if he doesn't yet have a plan for executing the reversal. Is going to be tough. Maybe it's best to rip the liberal facade away and start from scratch. The Democrat Party is tainted - they aren't going to fix shit, just shill and graft, if ever given the platform. Excise, cleanse, and start fresh.

Cold Math Lesson #1:

Minority voters are not going to save America.

They came out. Blacks and Latinos tried to stop Trump.

Despite their best efforts, white voters came out in droves and annihilated them.

Which leaves us with this chart, and Cold Math Lesson #2:

uneducated_voters

We’re going to have to find ways to reach uneducated white voters.

Which largely means “rural white voters.” Look at the map county by county, and it looks like dots of citified blue drowning in a sea of red. We as Democrats have lost that sea of red, and it’s costing us more each year.

Which leads us to Cold Math Lesson #3:

We’re going to have to find ways to understand the concerns of people who hate us, or get used to losing more.

I’m not saying that’s pleasant, man. But the coldest math is this:

As long as we’re willing to write off the people in dying towns with no economic future and doubled suicide rates because they’re anti-gay or sexist or racist or whatever repellent thing they are, we are going to be at their mercy.

[dada]

the market globalisation and the political correctness are co-dependent, you can't have one without the other, as you implied yourself in the thread about NYTimes

as long as people have identities identity politics aren't going to go away, nor should they - of course there are particular identities that are extremely threatening/sacred/loaded and so on to the folks on this board

personally I don't see what's wrong with politics that span the entire world, what we've come to know as "globalisation" is just the project of a small and very particular clique, however

In the context of critiquing liberals from the left, identity politics is a non-starter, is what I'm saying. Sticking up for women and minorities is a good thing, from the perspective of the left. If the right wants to argue that white and male are important, too, they're welcome to do that. White and male are always important, I think it's safe to say. Women and minorities, not so much. So to challenge power and inequality includes sticking up for them.

I didn't read the John Gray piece, maybe he's full of shit. I was using the quote for the "What none of them question is the type of market globalisation" part, not only the "market globalisation" part. The type of market globalisation is exploitative. Liberalism doesn't question it. If we're going to have a global politics that isn't exploitative, we're going to have to question it. Something like that.

---

I have to disagree with the Cold Math. There are many non-voters left out of the equation. Most of them I'm guessing are politically left, or they would've voted for The Donald. It would make more sense to appeal to them, than to appeal to voters on the right.

I mean, appeal to the voters on the right, too, sure. But the left base is just there, waiting. Their abstention is what decided this election. Give them a reason to vote.

[tapitsbo]

Sounds to me like you're interested in sticking with the rhetorical configuration that we saw during the election cycle dada.

White men more and more realize that that all big politicians are owned by hostile oligarchs who are going to suppress our group rights too like freedom of association. White people might be a global minority but their politicization doesn't require your permission, if you actually want common ground instead of a war of attrition you need to find new rhetoric.

Let me guess, all the big institutions dedicated to women and minorities in the US are "liberal"?

What would non-liberal ones look like?

We acknowledge the Donald never explicitly appealed to "white" people right?

How was Clinton to the "left" of the Donald anyways? Yah, yah, all of you hate her too now. Clinton's time as Secretary of State was wildly hostile to minorities in the Middle East, for instance.

Identity politics is not a non-starter because it always gets smuggled in covertly. In your post you equated "left" with "not white men". That's been a winning strategy in many places but not in the most recent US election...

I get that the heroic struggle against the white man and western civilization has a long, illustrious history. The culture of the west is dormant and basically dead now. Other societies and cultures have bounced back from this, however (Islamic ones most dramatically.) If you really want to stamp out any chance of the west being reborn, you'd better start kicking a little harder while it's down.

Or depending on our objectives, we could all find new axes to orient ourselves around, maybe. To one degree or another...