Undoubtedly we've been reading different people, but little of this matches my experience, or last half century of resistance to reactionaries.rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Apr 23, 2025 3:32 pm Er, don't the liberals remember advising people to pay no attention to what the right was saying? They threatened to ban me for discussing Mencius Moldbug. They laughed at me for being alarmed about Jordan Peterson before he got famous. I got it right (if you can call it that) because I didn't listen to any of that advice. These weren't centrists. There were Jewish lesbian feminists involved. Repeatedly being wrong about such things is part of what turned me off mainstream liberalism.
Rawls' "overlapping consensus" view of politics was helpful, but I think Cockshott's "Markov model" framing was more systematic in predicting why certain people would want certain things. It's in How the World Works by Cockshott. Unfortunately, the dude's really old and a Second Generation Feminist TERF. Liberals might have similar worked out models, but I'm not familiar with them. I have to look into Michael Freeden's work. But if it argues against revolutionary leftism, I don't know how predictive it will be. It seems to me Trumpism succeeded by following revolutionary tactics, while liberalism failed by giving undue respect to smart-mouthed centrists. Also, arguing against revolution might put people off attending protests, the surest way to strike fear into Trump's black heart.
I do agree about the problem of "giving undue respect to smart-mouthed centrists", though attributing this to "liberals" is kind of silly, since the word now has no meaning except as a slur. It wouldn't be terribly wrong to describe Clinton as taking the position "what if we moved a little to the right" and Obama as saying "What if we appealed to people's better natures?" But progressives, for half a century, have strongly criticized such positions; the problem is that they were not in power even within the Democratic Party. The people who like centrist or even center-right policies are centrists.
I've said it over and over, but it never seems to register: the progressives (as well as anyone farther left) make up half of the Democratic party, and that's an advance from 30 years ago when it was a quarter. There's a fashionable idea among pundits that the Republicans won because of progressives. I don't think we do know why Trump got his winning 1.5% of the vote, but I haven't seen any good evidence that it's because of progressives. A much better guess is economic insecurity, which matters a lot more to centrist voters. They didn't understand that they were voting for high taxes and a massive recession.
I don't think out-and-out leftists can be left out of the blame game. Comparing notes with Orwell, it's remarkable how much more sensible today's leftists are— they are generally not totalitarians, not specifically tools of Russian foreign policy, not advocating inhuman or absurd programs. But there's a minority who spout fascist talking points and seem to have not realized that Russia is no longer even pretending to be communist, and a larger number who want to spend all their time fighting near-allies. (At the same time I always want to recognize that a lot of leftists, no matter what they say, actually do a lot of good practical work for progressive causes.)
AOC and Bernie Sanders have been out organizing bigger rallies than they've ever had, people are responding to their message, and other orgs are forming nationwide protests. They have the right idea: politics is something that we have to do, not something we sit back and watch. The Republicans learned this forty years ago— they started taking over school boards and creating their own media.
Unless you're just talking about the election, the Republicans haven't "succeeded". They aren't playing four-dimensional chess; they are desperate people trying out contradictory notions based on conspiracy theories. As these theories aren't based on reality, reality does not cooperate in giving them the outcomes they want. It's possible to create an authoritarian regime that persists for decades— but that takes a certain humility that these dudes totally lack, an ability to not go too far and not to outrage their own allies. Eric Hoffer had their number decades ago: revolutionaries are good at tearing things down, but that's it. If anything lasts of their regimes, it's because they're taken over by people who don't want to burn the world down, but to control it.
And as of this posting, the website is *still* naming and shaming Trump-supporting businesses who pay it for the privilege 
