rigorousintuition.ca

2 is far and away the most plausible. Past 2017, I suspect:

7. None of the above - or at least not as successfully all-encompassing events. Instead, the "Left" implodes due to old PR strategies gone wrong; Trump is framed too neatly as a xenophobic totalitarian and it fails to stick at all with his base and begrudgingly supportive partisans. Enough of the opposition is riding on a self-congratulatory wave of satirizing and hyperbolizing his dangers that his real policies look (incredulously) more reasonable in contrast. A convincing enough case can be made proclaiming that he has achieved his 100-day promises (see the presentation at https://www.aol.com/news/trump-campaign-promises/) and then some (see new employment figures) and enough of the body politic supports the idea that he "gets things done" to re-elect him. Chasm widens. Dems cling to old bad habits, failing to win back congress, putting forward another tepid establishment figure in 2020 (Booker/Newsom) with a poorly polished fake progressive rhetoric.

liminalOyster » Sat Mar 11, 2017 2:39 pm wrote:2 is far and away the most plausible. Past 2017, I suspect:

7. None of the above - or at least not as successfully all-encompassing events. Instead, the "Left" implodes due to old PR strategies gone wrong; Trump is framed too neatly as a xenophobic totalitarian and it fails to stick at all with his base and begrudgingly supportive partisans. Enough of the opposition is riding on a self-congratulatory wave of satirizing and hyperbolizing his dangers that his real policies look (incredulously) more reasonable in contrast. A convincing enough case can be made proclaiming that he has achieved his 100-day promises (see the presentation at https://www.aol.com/news/trump-campaign-promises/) and then some (see new employment figures) and enough of the body politic supports the idea that he "gets things done" to re-elect him. Chasm widens. Dems cling to old bad habits, failing to win back congress, putting forward another tepid establishment figure in 2020 (Booker/Newsom) with a poorly polished fake progressive rhetoric.

I'm glad you put the "Left" in quotes, since this basically describes the course struck by the national Democratic Party, although that is not the "Left" and rather than "xenophobic totalitarian" (which works too well) they have so far chosen "Russian agent" which they are reinforcing on themselves daily in a Maddow/WaPo/SNL/SLADthread echo chamber, oblivious to the fact that this ain't going to work outside their own narrowing circle. As for an actual LEFT, something not really seen around these parts in any kind of organized or successfully expressive form since 1920, or the 1930s (oh, okay, I'll grant the Sixties/early 70s too), I have reasons to believe it's several steps on the way to realizing itself as an entity in U.S. politics, and when it arrives it may not be nearly as lame as this D "resistance" so far has been.

.

Thanks. Yes #2 is a high probability scenario, of course.

Reposting with edits for thread top, just cos I'm like that.

Just playing basically but I'm thinking the race is on for what becomes the defining event of 2017 in this story.

Which happens first?

1. Factional machinations from within the deep realm ("deep state" is misleading here insofar as it suggests one entity) cause a rotation of Trump out and Pence in.

2. Trump finally succeeds with one of his self-implosions, or receives a crippling punch by the release of some new tape or easily digested business collusion proof.

3. An enabling event appears, or is fashioned out of some found domestic outrage or declared crisis abroad, and this either a) succeeds or b) fails in fashioning some form of emergency sovereignty pretext for the regime. (Obviously 3a is the Trump ideal and would be far the biggest immediate disaster and danger to all.)

4. The market crashes. (Just a matter of time, as always, but the current record-setting is usually a sound indicator. Trump buddy Carl Icahn apparently betting on a crash. Trump would be too, if he were not so firmly attached to the current labeling of a "Trump Rally.")

5. Some giant new outrage sparks a Tahrir Square. (A real one, not a Maidan, though some will want to spin it as the latter. Self-evidently the unlikeliest.)

6. International crisis not engineered by American-based interests engulfs the show.

Without going into an even more speculative discussion, I lean to 4 or 2. 3 is inherent in the agenda, but for all their gambling drive the regime is too poorly ensconced at this time.

.

JackRiddler » Sat Mar 11, 2017 8:54 pm wrote:

liminalOyster » Sat Mar 11, 2017 2:39 pm wrote:2 is far and away the most plausible. Past 2017, I suspect:

7. None of the above - or at least not as successfully all-encompassing events. Instead, the "Left" implodes due to old PR strategies gone wrong; Trump is framed too neatly as a xenophobic totalitarian and it fails to stick at all with his base and begrudgingly supportive partisans. Enough of the opposition is riding on a self-congratulatory wave of satirizing and hyperbolizing his dangers that his real policies look (incredulously) more reasonable in contrast. A convincing enough case can be made proclaiming that he has achieved his 100-day promises (see the presentation at https://www.aol.com/news/trump-campaign-promises/) and then some (see new employment figures) and enough of the body politic supports the idea that he "gets things done" to re-elect him. Chasm widens. Dems cling to old bad habits, failing to win back congress, putting forward another tepid establishment figure in 2020 (Booker/Newsom) with a poorly polished fake progressive rhetoric.

I'm glad you put the "Left" in quotes, since this basically describes the course struck by the national Democratic Party, although that is not the "Left" and rather than "xenophobic totalitarian" (which works too well) they have so far chosen "Russian agent" which they are reinforcing on themselves daily in a Maddow/WaPo/SNL/SLADthread echo chamber, oblivious to the fact that this ain't going to work outside their own narrowing circle. As for an actual LEFT, something not really seen around these parts in any kind of organized or successfully expressive form since 1920, or the 1930s (oh, okay, I'll grant the Sixties/early 70s too), I have reasons to believe it's several steps on the way to realizing itself as an entity in U.S. politics, and when it arrives it may not be nearly as lame as this D "resistance" so far has been.

.

Wait, haven't the progressive Left have more often made use of the xenophobic totalitarian Trump effigy rather than the Russian agent one? The former seems like the plaintive moral appeal, while the latter is mostly played for vulgar laughs as best I can tell. Of course the more rarefied think pieces and NE liberal beach books canonizing the latter into historical record will follow later this year, I assume.

Personally, I hope "the Resistance" will more return to the course that some Bernie and later Stein supporters and surrogates took last year, being more vocally conciliatory to the populist sentiment which Trump vampiricized, offering a parallel version that is equally fierce but grounded in straight class antagonism rather than nativism. Which particular omens do you take as meaningful towards the emergence of an organized new LEFT?

Yeah, well, never mind totalitarian (vague term applicable to a lot of developments in a mass technocratic society, like the surveillance state or wraparound media), but about authoritarian and racist there is no question, and the fascism is built right into the performance so gimme break if like Jason Hirthler you're pretending not to see it. The core fans sure fucking do! So staged that it is both a post-modern post-real professional wrestling version (why I keep saying Kayfabe Hitler, which you may be bored of seeing) and, actually, not that unlike the originals, who were also extremely focused on performative politics and theaters of bullying. Is Trump performing the man on horseback or not? Remember Hitler was also not "Hitler" until he really got in to the role. The only reason not to think he is identical to the strongman salvation trope is that he's so obviously also a classic late night television scam artist of the type who says, "But wait, there's more! Order now and you will receive...!" Hence the title of this thread: I'm just not into making excuses for people, especially on R.I., who are not seeing or pretending not to see that, and taking seriously the populist or peace promises. And there is plenty of reason to think there will be a successful accommodation with the deep realm factions, whom he alarms mainly by being such a moron loose-cannon and brand destroyer. Except he is so liable to keep attempting a #2 on the list.

.

JackRiddler » Sun Mar 12, 2017 12:37 am wrote:Yeah, well, never mind totalitarian (vague term applicable to a lot of developments in a mass technocratic society, like the surveillance state or wraparound media), but about authoritarian and racist there is no question, and the fascism is built right into the performance so gimme break if like Jason Hirthler you're pretending not to see it. The core fans sure fucking do! So staged that it is both a post-modern post-real professional wrestling version (why I keep saying Kayfabe Hitler, which you may be bored of seeing) and, actually, not that unlike the originals, who were also extremely focused on performative politics and theaters of bullying. Is Trump performing the man on horseback or not? Remember Hitler was also not "Hitler" until he really got in to the role. The only reason not to think he is identical to the strongman salvation trope is that he's so obviously also a classic late night television scam artist of the type who says, "But wait, there's more! Order now and you will receive...!" Hence the title of this thread: I'm just not into making excuses for people, especially on R.I., who are not seeing or pretending not to see that, and taking seriously the populist or peace promises. And there is plenty of reason to think there will be a successful accommodation with the deep realm factions, whom he alarms mainly by being such a moron loose-cannon and brand destroyer. Except he is so liable to keep attempting a #2 on the list.

.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - of course I see it and of course I agree enthusiastically that Trump is a pig in so many different senses - a tribute to the richness of the word. Authoritarian, facist, misogynist etc. But there's also a huge swath of voters who I don't expect to fully dig why obliterating the EPA isn't pro-business common sense but a scary assault on vulnerable people of many stripes.

Their own lungs included.

This was great, NYT and all, and I remember those days:

Remembering a City Where the Smog Could Kill https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyre ... -smog.html

What are you going to do? It can't be about catering to the sensibilities or convincing some notional average Trump voter or confused fence-sitter. Alliances of the common interests first, build a fighting coalition, and eventually enough of the slowpokes may follow. Also, don't call them slowpokes to their face and stick to the policy and politics, don't bother with the trivial approaches of "Russia" or Trumpocentrism or Shia LeBoeuf rituals.

JackRiddler » Sun Mar 12, 2017 1:05 am wrote:Their own lungs included.

This was great, NYT and all, and I remember those days:

Remembering a City Where the Smog Could Kill https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyre ... -smog.html

What are you going to do? It can't be about catering to the sensibilities or convincing some notional average Trump voter or confused fence-sitter. Alliances of the common interests first, build a fighting coalition, and eventually enough of the slowpokes may follow. Also, don't call them slowpokes to their face and stick to the policy and politics, don't bother with the trivial approaches of "Russia" or Trumpocentrism or Shia LeBoeuf rituals.

I hear you. I'm not interested in catering to the imagined average Trump voter's sensibilities so much as wondering if/how those sensibilities can be grown. IE is their opposition to NAFTA a pedagogical entree into how the US fostered the drug war fostered destabilization fostered illegal immigration, etc.

liminalOyster » Sat Mar 11, 2017 3:35 pm wrote:Personally, I hope "the Resistance" will more return to the course that some Bernie and later Stein supporters and surrogates took last year, being more vocally conciliatory to the populist sentiment which Trump vampiricized, offering a parallel version that is equally fierce but grounded in straight class antagonism rather than nativism. Which particular omens do you take as meaningful towards the emergence of an organized new LEFT?

We don't have to be conciliatory, the working class is just organizing between urban centers and pockets of the far (mostly millennial) rural and Deep South left. I've just been in conversation this week with a Marxist group in Tennessee looking to organize and coordinate with those of us in northeastern cities.

That the majority of young people have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism includes both large rural swaths of the country as well as the south.

Membership numbers in these groups have exploded since the election. Our group in particular went from 3 members in summer 2011 before Occupy to 77 on the eve of the election to over 130 today. That's skyrocketing, on a small scale, in my view. And while I have my own personal differences with them, I understand that memberships in the DSA have exploded so much that they cannot even manage the growth.

Thanks to Bernie Sanders, it seems that "socialist" is no longer a dirty word. Progress!

Give Trump a chance!

JackRiddler » Thu Apr 27, 2017 6:23 pm wrote:

82_28 » Thu Apr 27, 2017 4:56 pm wrote:

JackRiddler » Thu Apr 27, 2017 1:50 pm wrote:

Karmamatterz » Wed Apr 26, 2017 6:48 am wrote:What is worse: Trump or the Patriot Act?

Which has had a more long lasting impact on our constitutional rights?

You know I'm sick of you people not giving President Trump a chance.

Did you forget to put that in green?

Why? Besides that I don't believe in putting anything in green? I'm serious.

The Trump administration has barely had a chance to destroy rights in America, constitutional or otherwise, or even to commit mayhem elsewhere. It's a very unfair comparison on karmamatterz's part. I think in terms of policy direction, rhetorical flourish and actual achievements, they are doing very well within the mere 100 day window.

True, predecessors have set some pretty daunting records of mass atrocity to exceed, and the opposition has shown unusual energy so far (if enough of them can just stop humping the carcass of their Russian fantasy). But beyond the simple trampling of Americans' rights, or the rights of sub-Americans globally if we are to care about them, let us consider the set-up for wealth plunder ops on behalf of the 0.01% now being rolled out. Or the awesome moves to just flat-out demolish the basis for human life on earth. No one's ever had as strong a start on either, I dare say. They have also been very impressive in the area of cultural defoliation uprooting the very hope of informed knowledge -- very innovative! Tremendous. A player to watch. He's just getting bigger and bigger. Good friend of mine.

.

The Trump ascendancy is also the latest turn in the neoliberal era of class war.* He was among the players at the beginning of it, in the 1970s.

“FEAR CITY” EXPLORES HOW DONALD TRUMP EXPLOITED THE NEW YORK DEBT CRISIS TO BOOST HIS OWN FORTUNE

Naomi Klein
April 23 2017, 8:25 a.m.

WHEN I PUBLISHED “The Shock Doctrine” a decade ago, a few people told me that it was missing a key chapter in the evolution of the tactic I was reporting on. That tactic involved using periods of crisis to impose a radical pro-corporate agenda. They said that in the United States that story doesn’t start with Reagan in the 1980s, as I had told it, but rather in New York City in the mid-1970s. That’s when the city’s very near brush with all-out bankruptcy was used to dramatically remake the metropolis. Massive and brutal austerity, sweetheart deals for the rich, privatizations. In classic Shock Doctrine style, under cover of crisis, New York changed from being a place with some of the most generous public services in the country, engaged in some cutting-edge attempts at racial and economic integration, to the temple of nonstop commerce and gentrification that we all know and still love today...

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/23/fea ... n-fortune/

* Note on my idea of periods of neoliberalism:

I would say there have been two major phases in the neoliberal era of class war, in which the ruling class consensus moved against the New Deal and the Keynesian golden age and launched a restoration, a drive to restore Manchester era conditions, but now in the new technological conditions and with an individualist ostensibly democratic ideology that defines one's market value and competency as the measure of one's virtue.

The first or socio-politically conservative phase of neoliberalism came with the early 1970s crisis of capitalism and drive to restore profitability for investors and especially to get those fucking workers to stop striking and expecting good wages (as well as to get those fucking students and minorities and for fuck's sake women to stop expecting rights and peace and justice and shit).

The first phase saw the alliance of the long running Hayek/Friedman/liberatarian "conservative" and "intellectual" opposition to the New Deal (since the 1930s) with the far larger right-wing reaction against everything represented by "the Sixties" (America hating, baby killing, pissing on Jesus and spitting on veterans, the idea that black people were human beings, etc. etc.). This led to the policy turns under Ford and Carter and the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher. Neoliberalism went hand-in-hand with social conservatism.

The second or liberal and "identitarian" phase came with the restyling of the Democrats and Labour as "New Democrats" and "New Labour," giving rise to Clinton and Blair and a much more thorough integration of perceived "left" positions with neoliberalism. Eventually, rights for minorities was fashioned into a representational identity politics conflating justice with the appearance of diversity among elites. In a sense, this was the golden age of neoliberalism, which despite Bush (when the innovation was mostly on the fronts of war and state repression) ran through Obama.

The third comes with the renewed crisis and increasing incoherence of the establishment thus put into place, and again turns to an even more extreme right-wing social reaction (more extreme precisely due to the relative decline of the right and the general discrediting and mocking of their dearly held cultural ideas in particular). Again the Christian Evangelicals and the traditional racists as well as the very self-important secular prepper and AJ types like we have on this board provide the voter-foot-soldiers for a scam in which they are told they will get symbolic ego-points and economic relief by the most obvious NEW YORK CITY scam artist in the world, and they believe all of it. (Thus the truth in the title of this thread, tough shit suckers if you ever decide to figure it out.)

Essential to all this has been that the right remained highly organized throughout and the corporate media always catered to the delusion that it represented the opposition and the outsiders to the center-right establishment, while the latter was labeled "liberal" or "left" for the lulz. The idea being not just to silence the still-extant left but to make an actual left impossible to conceive. Setting the bounds of discourse, Chomsky style, manufacturing consent, etc.

Thus neoliberalism (and its corresponding war policy claiming humanitarian intervention) is still idenfitied with the Clinton/Blair version and the liberal leaders continue to champion it as though it was the "opposition" answer to the declared nationalism of the new and wilder billionaire pirate crew conducting the biggest strip-and-plunder operation on the nation yet. Just as Clinton/Blair could go further in various regards than Reagan/Thatcher by appearning to be new, so too can Trump (or rather, the extreme right-wing Republican regime that includes Trump's gangster crew as its president and spear-point) now go beyond any prior neoliberal dreams, and pretend it's nationalist.

Not that it won't be on the social and political front. The first phase was a kind of pre-fascist, the second was state-authoritarian, and the third takes the state-authoritarian achievements and doesn't disguise its fascist ideology or intent.

Trump declared that May 1st will be Loyalty Day, by the way.

Thanks, Jack. I enjoyed your take on the periods of neoliberalism.

JackRiddler wrote:I would say there have been two major phases in the neoliberal era of class war, in which the ruling class consensus moved against the New Deal and the Keynesian golden age and launched a restoration, a drive to restore Manchester era conditions, but now in the new technological conditions and with an individualist ostensibly democratic ideology that defines one's market value and competency as the measure of one's virtue.

Yes, but what if we go bigger. From my perspective, the uncomfortable yet unavoidable conclusion is that Capitalism itself is the problem. The New Deal and the Keynesian golden age isn't a success, but a stopgap measure. An attempt to apply Fordism on a societal scale, or something. I don't know, I'm not a political economist, I'm not well versed in the lingo. But it's a way to keep poverty and homelessness pressure capped just enough, from bubbling over into revolutionary transformation. A failure to make significant structural changes. The system is there to be gamed, it's going to be gamed.

Perhaps that's all Marixistly inevitable. eh, I shrug. But the commodity form is what defines one's market value as the measure of one's virtue. Long before neoliberalism, Capitalism set the bounds of discourse.

Personally, I would say the problem is even more fundamental than that. Market value as the measure of one's virtue is archaic law. Capitalism is just a modern manifestation, a more -or less- perfect form, depending on your perspective. I take care of sick and old people, that's market value, virtuous. I write and do creative things for free, that's not virtuous, I'm a trouble-maker, a dirty, dirty ninja. I take grandma to her doctor's appointment, I'm virtuous. Confucious is proud. I criticize the family structure, say it's part of the problem, I'm not virtuous. Confucious says I'm a bad guy.

Defining market value as the measure of one's virtue is what authoritarian society is all about. The rewards are alluring, it appeals to the baser nature in man. To refuse to bow out and be anti-social, yet still resist it, is to be a heretic, the enemy of society. You aren't building your brand, you're instantly suspect. Because you threaten the social order.

The good thing about this is, if you're evolved and enlightened, you can use it to your advantage. Post insightful shit on the "Rigorous Intuition Congratulations, Stupid" thread. You're not self-importantly puffing yourself up with mystical aura? The dopes don't understand what the hell is going on.

Here's what I was reading tonight, trying to find the words to fit these concepts. Bob Jessop:

The Strategic-Relational Approach
https://bobjessop.org/2014/12/02/the-st ... ob-jessop/


Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Pespective

"To facilitate a comparative analysis of “actually existing” neoliberalization, it is useful to contrast neoliberalism with three other ideal-typical strategies [...]: neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. Before elaborating on these particular concepts in more detail, however, I will explain the general theoretical purposes of ideal types and their possible role(s) in empirical analysis.

Ideal types are so called because they involve thought experiments, not because they represent some normative ideal or other. They are theoretical constructs formed by the one-sided accentuation of empirically observable features of social reality to produce logically coherent and objectively feasible configurations of social relations. These configurations are never found in pure form, but their conceptual construction may still be useful for heuristic, descriptive, and explanatory purposes."

https://bobjessop.org/2014/12/02/libera ... espective/

Neocommunitarianism needs a new name. That would never fly in America.

---

Narratives of Crisis and Crisis Response: Perspectives from North and South

"This chapter explores attempts by different social forces to interpret the complex global financial and economic crisis as it unfolded from 2006 to the end of 2009. Much mainstream commentary has read the crisis from the viewpoints of capital accumulation rather than social reproduction, the global North rather than the global South, and the best way for states to restore rather than constrain the dominance of market forces..."

https://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/narrat ... and-south/

JackRiddler wrote:The idea being not just to silence the still-extant left but to make an actual left impossible to conceive. Setting the bounds of discourse, Chomsky style, manufacturing consent, etc.

The smart cool kids call it, "the New Word Order."

Thank you dada. Of course we're talking about capitalism - what do you think I meant by "Manchester era conditions." Neoliberalism is a return to overt class war following the 25-30 year and incomplete "golden age," which was the result of stopgaps from an upper-class perspectiv, in the sense that it was in response to the big crisis and a means of keeping Western class peace in the face of the perceived Soviet challenge and fear of falling dominoes. But I think it was more than that, that a consensus of power-elite and technocratic belief was formed that saw this kind of quasi-managed capitalism as a great idea, that the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and all the other planners of the postwar believed in the New Deal for the world and managed permanent growth with better distribution to the workers in the West. That it had a powerful mythic force is evidenced in the degree to which people think we are still in the golden age, things are getting better, every generation has it better, growth and prosperity are always the norm, contrary to 40 years of evidence otherwise. The golden age just did not work long enough, for various reasons, and the resort on its "failure" (definition: decline in ROI for investors, loss of belief in the system, perception of too much democracy) was predictably to a new overt class war. That is the "neoliberal" phase. What defines it is not any given strategic move but that the class war to raise ROI and concentrate the wealth and sideline dissidence to "economics" is permanently on. (Rights demands of individuals belonging to given groups are allowed long as they are heading to embourgeoisement in thought; the gay community is a lot like immigrant communities that were finally allowed in as white ethnics.) Anyway, I'm not using the term as a counterpoint to a good golden age capitalism. But it is a useful distinction. The broadest aspect is that the welfare state was turned again from something good and stabilizing into something too costly and blocking progress. A lot of it has stuck around in distorted form, remarkably, since it's still popular (not under that name, of course).

Anyway, is market value (and ability to appear to function well on the market, competence and "seriousness") always the measure of virtue? It always was in capitalism, just with this one period of counter-trend without radical change in the fundament. Seems to me in your pre-capitalist examples you're not always talking about value on formalized markets in which commodities (including labor, land and types of money itself) are exchanged using money as the medium. The definition seems to become circular: virtue is what the society defines as virtuous in each context.

.

I don't entirely disagree. Technocrats certainly believed in the New Deal. It's failure, in the way you've defined it, leads to the overt class war phase. I appreciate the discussion. Here's my next round of half-formed thoughts:

"Good and stabilizing" was marketing. Like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The threat was (and still is) the final phase, International revolution. They saw (and see) it coming: So you've got to divide the workers. The West gets carrots, the rest get sticks.

Fracturing the class is the goal. Sweetheart deals are tactics. Like weakening the Union by promoting the leadership, getting them off of the shop floor. When the tactic has proven successful, and the class is weakened, you move to open warfare. That's another tactic. The strategy is a dull but effective one, "permanent war by any means necessary."

I don't think I'm the first person to see the New Deal in this light. I seem to recall Zinn planting the seed of this idea in my mind. Chomsky has gone there, too. How do we distract the unwashed rabble? They see the inequality, they know it isn't just about the "working class." People see potential for a different world. Look, here's a nice big carrot. The failure that I'm talking about is in the people who fall for it, and don't knock the carrot out of the invisible hand wearing the velvet glove. For whatever virtuous reasons. Gotta feed my family, you understand. And I do, I actually do.

So we come back to virtue. So where does the value of commodities on formalized markets come from. Does value come from the shared perception of value? Society agrees something is valuable, or pretends they do, or some believe it and some pretend, or voodoo Jim Cramer shakes his rainstock rattlestick, and viola. The measure of Capitalist virtue.

And yes, I do think that beyond formalized markets, virtue is always market value. As I was saying, Capitalism is the more or less perfected form. Virtue is not defined by just any society, but by authoritarian societies. I take grandma to her doctor's appointment naturally, it's what a normal human being does. There's nothing virtuous about it.

I guess this moves into rarefied territory, you know, "when the way is lost, laws and morals appear." Shit like that. Out of time for the moment.