The implication that you’re in an awkward situation doesn’t render the underlying observation untrue.
They were both rapacious; Sally Hemings. The Founders were monstrous.
You know that liberty of speech/press/conscience isn’t all that there is to liberalism. Liberty of property is the key to the problem.
To me, anyway. I’m sure you also know that the radical left contains an almost fractal assortment of factions and theories.
OTOH, you’d also know that current institutions aren’t doing a great job of protecting liberty of press/speech/conscience, either. Not that they ever did; those protections were never fully extended to the working class.
as it happened, it was only one–joe manchin of west virginia who’s in a close race and he only voted for kavanaugh after it became clear he would be confirmed. polling showed manchin’s support in his state dropping at a rate of a point a day while he was officially undecided on the vote, a decline that stopped when he voted in favor and has improved since.
i personally would have voted against kavanaugh even if i thought it would cost the election even if i knew it would do no good to do so, but talk is cheap and i’ve never had the urge to run for office or felt the need to try to hold onto office. it’s hard for me to judge.
Just unrealistic in terms of proposed alternatives.
I would agree, in some cases taking into account that they were products of their times.
Liberty of property is not on the usual list of liberal democratic institutions that Gessen or myself would count on to save us from an autocrat, but some do foolishly hang their hats on that one as a way to save us from the autocrat (who inevitably turns out to be a kleptocrat). It isn’t a bad thing in and of itself as long as no-one’s going unsheltered or unfed or untreated for illness.
Take capitalism and racism out of the equation and all of those institutions of liberal democracy could survive unscathed.
None of which has yet provided a better practical alternative to any of the institutions I’ve listed so far (I’d also add “one citizen, one secret vote”).
Ok, you misread me. Liberty of press/speech/conscience and the other things I mentioned are themselves the liberal-democratic institutions under discussion by Gessen or myself. That they haven’t been adequately supported by the rotting zombie state and the rotting zombie market and the rotting zombie culture over the course of history is a separate matter, and it’s those systems that need to be turned human again or be killed.
At the risk of repeating my previous polemics, it is an evolutionary system. From government of by and for rich white males, we have made significant strides. We are not where we would like to be, but we are far better than we used to be and we shall be better than we are. Anyone ready to trash the system and start over needs to review history. Evolution means by definition we are a work in progress. In VA we have a transgender woman elected to the state legislature, a black woman stands a very real chance of being elected governor of Georgia, GEORGIA!! Is there blowback? Of course. How could you imagine there would not be? If you have had sole power for centuries, equality looks a lot like oppression. The founders were not perfect by any means, but i like to think they recognized that and created a system that would outgrow their vision of what was possible in terms of “all are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.” Easy to point to where we fall short, but that is just pointing to where the next footstep will go.
But it isn’t hard for liberals and progressives, even in a duopoly system, to say “no, I’m not going to support a Dem who voted to confirm someone who lied about being an attempted rapist as a SCOTUS Justice.*”
[* or who supports a xenophobic programme that separates parents from children, or who enables climate change denialism, or who authorises a GOP war of choice that was based on false pretexts, etc.]
In part, it is a matter of perspective. From the perspective of poor America, or from outside the USA, things are getting worse rather than better.
Bush dropped 70,000 bombs in eight years, Obama dropped 100,000 bombs in eight years. Trump, so far, dropped 44,000 in his first year. One every twelve minutes.
That is not an improvement.
War, climate, capitalism; all heading downhill fast.
BTW: one of the reasons why I tend to be vague on post-revolutionary prescriptions is that I’m not a bloody Bolshevik. I don’t have the arrogance to assume that I should be able to command how people organise their affairs.
(Observe and suggest, yes. Command, no.)
But the nature of what comes after the Trumpists are overthrown is a separate issue from the need for the Trumpists to be overthrown.
Climate and war; fascist America is not survivable for the planet. We cannot afford to let this continue for a generation.
unfortunately, for your average west virginia democrat it is easy to vote for him, or at least easier than it would have been if he had voted no, and even easier for your west virginia independent or ticket-splitter to do so. manchin really is an oddity, an old-fashioned blue dog democrat straight from the early aughts. if his seat goes republican it may not be until the final collapse of the republicans as a viable party that we see a democratic senator from west virginia again.
I don’t see a lot of suggestions for alternatives to those liberal democratic institutions from the “fringe left”, either. Observation is important (see Marx as diagnostician) but some attempt at addressing the illness without killing the patient needs to be made (see Marx as prescription, historically, for the failure mode).
I agree, but fascist America is not the only problem. Right-wing populism and ultra-nationalism is resurgent all over the industrialised West and is a fact of life in Russia. China has its own brand of crony capitalist authoritarianism, which it’s now exporting via Belt-and-Road and neo-colonialism in Africa, into places where there’s no tradition of liberal democracy to bother subverting. The U.S. could elect Bernie Sanders to the White House to-morrow for two guaranteed terms and the existential problem for humanity would remain.
Lacking a one-world government, this is a problem for the citizens of all nation-states to address where their states give them the leeway to do so (or to demand that leeway where it isn’t given). As I’m sure you’re aware, that includes Australia, which has its own problems regarding bigots and fascists trying to take power and where liberal democratic institutions aren’t supported as well as they should be.
I think it’s been mentioned before: a lot of us are smack in the middle of those institutions, with our families, and are pretty motivated to keep radical solutions bloodshed from affecting the people we love. We’re still a democracy and busting our asses to keep it that way.
I, for one, don’t appreciate advice from 7000 miles away that could get my kids killed, thanks.
If they’re voting for a Blue Dog in 2018 they might as well vote for the GOP candidate. That way they can lean into the traditional values and ignorance that have them voting for a Manchin without holding the rest of the national party back. There’s a small chance a few terms under a full-on Republican might convince them to try an actual liberal or progressive Dem for once.
to my mind, what we’re really arguing about here is at the operational level between strategy and tactics and whether it’s better to tolerate having someone in office who is with us about half the time and keeps the party from falling even farther into the minority or replacing them with someone who is definitely against us pretty much all the time. you make some good points but i keep thinking it takes a majority to have a majority and having fewer democrats in office is not moving closer to the goal.
Yeah, I get you. More and more though it’s becoming less a question of quantity (seats) than it is one of quality, especially with the Overton Window being pulledd even further rightward into conservative Bizarro World. Dragging that window back leftward on the Dems may mean losing a Manchin or Mccaskill, but it also means gaining an Ocasio-Cortez or O’Rourke.
Domestically, it was worse in the 60s, in the 30s, in the 1890s and Lord knows much worse in the 1860s. We came put of those periods and continued on a more or less progressive path. Now, the scale of damage inflicted possible in this era is on a scale unimaginable during those periods, which leaves precious little margin for error. I do not know how this plays out, honestly. I think thete is a nonzero chance that Trump suffers a devastating loss on Tuesday and triggers a true constitutional crisis in a fit of anger. I think there is a much more likely chance that we regain some level of sanity and begin rebuilding a global effort to save our planet. I do not know much about the future other than it will come regardless of my wishes. I do know what I need to do now and even more so next week. For me that is enough.
Everybody has their personal favourites, but Bookchin is fairly popular these days. He has written at great length on ways to structure a better society, and his theories are in practice in Rojava.
The Turkish/ISIS invasion is messing with the experiment a bit, however.
Chomsky also has much to say, so does Žižek, so does Naomi Klein, so do plenty of others. None of them are perfect, but there are useful things in all of them.
A change of figurehead won’t do much, sure. What’s required is a broad-based movement. Leaders are only useful in their ability to inspire and guide; the real power is in the people.
Bernie is definitely imperfect, especially regarding US imperialism. But he is able to be moved, and he has been improving:
Yup.
The constant stream of North American fascists on speaking tours aren’t helping, however.
On the bright side, the Oz Liberals just lost their parliamentary majority, and are probably headed for the opposition benches fairly soon. The main task is likely to be preventing the right wing of the ALP from selling out all principles in their effort to grab as much electoral territory as possible.
The DCCC launched the effort this year in response to the party’s inability to respond to millions of accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms that spread negative and false information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other party candidates in 2016, three people familiar with the operation told Reuters.
While the prevalence of misinformation campaigns have so far been modest in the run-up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 6, Democrats are hoping the flagging operation will help them react quickly if there is a flurry of such messages in the coming days.
The Tweets included ones that discouraged Democratic men from voting, saying that would drown out the voice of women, according to two of the sources familiar with the flagging operation.
Drown out the voice of women? That’s some weird logic there.
Not quite; those are the principles that the institutions theoretically protect.
By “institutions”, Masha was talking about courts and parliaments and the established news channels. The embodied mechanisms of the thing, the machinery of state.
The failure of Congressional oversight to restrain Trump is one example of Masha’s warning in action. Same goes for the stacking of the judiciary, the USSC approval of the Muslim ban, the failure of the courts to protect voter rights, the police siding with fascists, etc.
Masha’s warning is that the embodied mechanisms that are supposed to safeguard democracy will not function, because they are under the influence of the autocrat.
They are fascinating and insightful, but like Marx they’re more diagnosticians. Bookchin at least seems to offer a practical prescription.
Somehow the real world of power-hungry authoritarians always intervenes.
The movements and manifestos are there but as long as nation-states exist (and not just the U.S.) there need to be sovereign laws that back up the precepts. This is everyone’s failure.
She’s not talking about principles (really values) or organisations, she’s talking about institutions that express the former by means of the latter: Not just the press but a free press (and not the value/principle of open discourse); not just the judiciary but an independent judiciary (and not the value of separation of powers); not just elected representatives but freely elected ones (and not the value of democratic legitimacy); not just churches but ones that exist free of state control or preference (and not the value of religious tolerance).
Gessen’s point is not that the organisations or that the values will fail, but that the institutions can be co-opted or undermine when the organisations are controlled by the autocrat or when the values underlying them are twisted. This is why the institutions of liberal democracy won’t save us from the autocrat: not because they’re invalid in and of themselves and need to be replaced with … something … but because they can be turned into institutions of illiberal democracy as the nascent Russian one was.
It’s a more profound and disturbing philosophical statement about the inherent fragility of liberal democratic institutions, a variation on Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. For example, the institution of a free press remains intact, but now the autocrat is now insisting that the underlying value (open discourse) requires news outlets (the organisations) to tolerate the intolerant and the organisations go along. This is all done without the need to replace the outlets with a new version of Pravda or to use heavy-handed censorship which made no credible pretense of paying lip service to the institution – the insitution is just subtly perverted until it serves the ends of the autocrat’s regime.
