… and created a bunch of jobs. Was it worth it? There is a tendency among some on the left to reflexively adopt the enemy of my enemy is my friend concept when it comes to certain critiques of “neoliberalism” and the Democratic establishment. In my view it’s a lazy kind of thinking and I don’t pay much attention to it. That impulse was on display yesterday when The American Prospect published a lauditory piece on Tucker Carlson and the internet blew up. It was a very bad piece. Today the magazine offered a response and it’s quite good: On Tuesday afternoon, the Prospect posted an article about Tucker Carlson on its home page. Focusing almost solely on Carlson’s opposition to corporate globalism, it missed a very large forest for some very cherry-picked trees. It failed to note the roots of Carlson’s positions, in a broader sense failing to note that opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy is an element of both progressive and fascist politics, and hence, depending on whence it comes, not automatically worthy of celebration.
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Jonathan Martin, Politico’s answer to Maureen Dowd (when she was a snotty reporter) says that the GOP is starting to come to terms with the fact that they are stuck with Trump for another round. I have always thought so (barring some intervening event like Trump dropping dead on the golf course.) He addresses the biggest problem they face — the fact that Trump will never concede gracefully if he loses: Just as progressives privately worried that Hillary Clinton and her party’s moderates would never truly embrace Bernie Sanders if he prevailed, many pessimistic Republicans wonder the same about Trump next year. That ridiculous. The test was in 2008 when the delegate count in the primary was super, super close and yet Clinton endorsed Obama at the convention (saying “were you in it for me or were you in it for the country” to her disappointed followers) worked to get him elected and was then brought into the cabinet as Secretary of State. Both of the primaries in 2008 and 2016 were very tough (I hope to never relive them) but to assume that Clinton would never have “truly embraced” Sanders is typical.
This piece by Tim Miller made me laugh. He’s so right: Brokeback Party The Republican party has barely tried anything in their effort to move on and they are already out of ideas. After a few bad weeks in the polls for Tiny D, the party poohbahs are throwing in the towel and getting back aboard the Trump Train. Whether it’s a pheremonal attraction to his rakish, devil-may-care persona, an addiction to the small donors and the retweets, an unquenchable desire to be invited to a disgusting dinner in a gaudy dining room, a cowardly fear of being shouted down at the airport by obese hillbillies, a boner for making the libs squirm—or a little from columns A, B, C, D, and E—the GOP grownups are signing up to Do It all over again. Like the besotted Jack Twist staring at their mountain man, these Republicans just don’t know how to quit Trump. In just the past week, the former guy has received endorsements from both the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Steve Daines, and Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York in 2022.
I find it deeply disturbing that the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech (not the Trump Administration…). Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of […]
Begins with securing freedoms now under attack President Joe Biden released his opening reelection ad early this morning. First word: Freedom. That’s an excellent start. Personal freedom is a sacred value Democrats must hammer and reclaim from a movement bent on unmaking America. MAGA extremists’ twisted idea of freedom is standing athwart history, yelling “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Without the “stop.” “We are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said four years ago. “And we still are.” Our freedoms are under attack from the right (if you haven’t noticed). Elections are about choices, not poll numbers. So amid Politico’s recent pronouncement that President Biden’s poll numbers are “grim” and NBC’s reminder that Biden is still more popular than Donald Trump, remember that election outcomes hinge on turnout. Voters need a reason to. Michael Tomasky believes Biden has to go for broke. “What can he and the Democrats do to energize people about the 2024 election?” (The New Republic): Biden should do something bigger and bolder.
Anxiety does not inspire Millennials are not as bad off as advertised, Jean M. Twenge writes in The Atlantic. Reports that they were the first generation not to be better off than their parents was a premature take, post-Great Recession. “By 2019,” Twenge writes, “households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.” But shaped by their rough start, they are not feeling it. John Della Volpe, who heads up the latest Harvard Youth Poll, studies Gen Z (born since ~1997). The latest data shows that three quarters of 18-29 year-olds worry about being homeless, he told The 11th Hour Monday night. A third think it could happen to them, and that’s almost 50 percent among people of color. Check out a quick Twitter thread here. A sampling: Fewer than half (42%) of young Americans who grew up in conservative households call themselves Republicans today. Among those who grew up in liberal households, 60% are Democrats. But left-leaning is not the same as voting. People need motivation to get off their couches.
Take a few minutes and listen to this if you missed it last night. Puts it all in perspective:
I get emails and letters from right wingers fairly frequently and they’re mostly insulting rants against me personally. (I get some of those from the left too. This one I thought was interesting because he doesn’t call me any names and seems to be so earnest. You can see the extent of the brainwashing: I don’t think I need to tell you that virtually everything he says is not true. Nobody is supportive of abortion”up to the minute of birth and after birth.” That’s just not on the agenda and nobody is doing that. Children are not deciding to “attempt to change their sex.” That’s not legal. Their parents are making these decisions on their behalf in consultation with experts and doctors. The seriousness of crimes in our cities is vastly overstated and the three cities he mentions aren’t even in the top ten. There is much more gun violence in red states than blue states. And I suppose it’s irritating that people get shouted down on college campuses but I wouldn’t call it fascist. (At least not in comparison to storming the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power…) He seems like a decent person.
Speaking of fascism, TNR made a handy list of “the 10 most fascist things Fox’s top host said on air”: 1. He has promoted the “great replacement theory.” Carlson has repeatedly pushed the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” He has argued that Democrats want to replace white people so they can control the country. 2. He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad. 3. He said the desire to procreate has been “subverted” by birth control and abortion. 4. He complained about “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.” Carlson has insisted that masculinity is supposedly on the decline in the United States. While both the theory and his suggested solution—tan your testicles—are ridiculous, they stem from a right-wing belief that attacks on masculinity upset the social order. 5. He said white supremacy is not a real problem. 6.