Skip to main content

On Steps Taken Back pt. 2

I had a conversation with a woman earlier this week who feels that the democrats and republicans are basically the same party. I felt that way too until bush. In retrospect Clinton was actually a pretty good president, the most effective in my lifetime, unless you consider Reagan's success at making workers less secure and corporations stronger a good thing. I personally don't. She also said that the democrats won't speak the truth because, like the republicans, they are afraid of losing money and power. I disagreed with her at the time on several points, but find myself agreeing with her on this point, at least in part. I hear individual democrats making smart, precise, and thoughtful critiques fairly often. At the same time I feel they lack the seemingly unified voice of the political right. I also think that for too long the dems have rolled over for bush, instead of making principled stands because they were afraid of the political backlash. Bush has been politically vulnerable for a while now, but they still seem incapable of all making the same stand at the same time.

there have been suggestions that the democrats need their own version of the contract with America promoted by it's own group of young upstarts. I'm ok with that, but what I think they need even more is to start speaking the truth like they don't care if they are re-elected. They need to start speaking as if telling the truth means more than keeping their jobs, every last one of them. Some actually might lose their jobs in the short term, but the party would grow in the long term. They also need to speak the same truth from a common platform, a shared paradigm. At the heart of any platform should be the promise to restore the transparency of the government and to keep us safe without false wars and while maintaining our rights and principles.

------
To save on all of the effort I'll just say that part 3 was to be about the why of my blogging and decisions around that but I'll cut to the chase and just say that instead of writing just about politics and the news that makes me cry myself to sleep I'm going to start writing on the topics I usually write in other places, like comics, music, art, dance, djing, biting, mammals, queens, sexual frustration, how much I can fit in my mouth at once, the library card numbers that I remember from six years ago, the elasticity of smoke, queens, ny, honeyforms, music, and cartoons. Maybe. And I'm also going to try to remember to use the shift key.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making the White Supremacist Argument in Blackface

What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same pathology? Ultimately, it's a race reductionist argument. What the Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an insistence that we can't ever talk about anything except race. And that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to sell. Adolph Reed Jr.
If it's not clear already, it's worth thinking about the ways in which the history revision of the 1619 Project is less about understanding history than it is using history to justify a specific approach to defining and dealing with racism in the present. It serves the same purpose as all of the moral idealism pretending to represent justice-- identity politics, intersectionality, reparations-- that exist in the discourse to deter economic redistribution generally, and specifically, in th…
Post a Comment
Read more

Anti-racism - Class = Status Quo: The Neoliberal Argument Against Coalition

I was approached a few months ago around the idea of collaborating to make the progressive case for reparations. I've said before that while the idea of reparations is morally appealing I don't believe in them as an immediate political project. It's not clear to me that it's possible to build a coalition around a reparative justice focused on just 13% of the population. Encouraged by a recent Twitter conversation that included economists Sandy Darrity and Darrick Hamilton where they suggested that saying reparations will never happen is cynical I've begun trying to think of them as an eventuality and lay out the steps to reaching them. Doing this has made clear that our understanding of reparations as a form of compensation to the descendants of the enslaved is not the reparative justice that we think it to be. If we were living with the kind of understanding of justice that made reparations possible we would not be a nation where war, healthcare, education, and cr…
Post a Comment
Read more

The Intersectional Swiftboat Waltz

This past week the Working Families Parties endorsed Elizabeth Warren in the democratic primary. It's a somewhat obscure thing, in terms of national politics. WFP is a nominally left party started in New York state. In New York rather than run their own candidates they endorse Democrats. The choice of the centrist Warren over Sanders isn't without precedent. They endorsed Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Andrew Cuomo over Zephyr Teachout. The entire affair is only relevant for what it suggests that we can expect from the rest of the primary.

When the endorsement was announced, members asked leadership to release the breakdown of votes, as they did in 2015 when the party endorsed Sanders. Leadership refused, saying something about preserving the integrity of the vote. What was obvious, where the 56 person leadership/advisory board had a vote equal to that of the 10,000+ membership, is that the leaders had heavily favored Warren while the members went to Sanders. I…
Post a Comment
Read more