A problem I’ve noticed on the left for the past couple of years is that their unrelenting and infinite cynicism towards the Democratic Party center does not extend to the far right. Indeed, they seem to take their lies at face value. With that in mind, you’d be an all-mighty idiot for believing the stances of safety net expansion, hostility towards Big Tech dominance, and infrastructure projects from fascist pieces of shit like Hawley and Carlson. Their primary agendas are, respectively, a post-liberal evangelical Christian theocracy and a white nationalist ethnostate. The first thing that they’ll do is throw away all the nice-sounding things to their platform, as fascists have done since the birth of the ideology (the Nazis were anti-capitalist until they realized they could get the funding and support of wealthy industrialists).
Let’s not forget, 2016 campaign Trump talked about being the only Republican who wouldn’t cut Medicare and wanted the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for drug prices. But he’s presided over budgets that do the former, and as for the latter, he had a White House meeting with pharma bosses within a couple of months of getting into office.
However, let’s suppose Hawley or Carlson do keep their word about all the progressive things they say they want to do. If that’s the case, you can count out the Democratic Party for at least a generation, much like the GOP after the New Deal. And it’ll be the bed they made that they’ll have to lie in. They set themselves up for this via aggressive means testing for valuable benefits, disguising such arguments in a thin veil of class warfare (“the rich shouldn’t have the benefits of everyone else,” they say). If someone else is gonna do what they should have been doing all along, then you deserve to become irrelevant.
I tend to agree in that we shouldn't take anything at face value with these guys. What I'll say for Hawley is he's been putting these proposals out there and it's actually become politically acceptable, for conservatives, to target Big Tech. If anything, because Donald Trump hates Bezos, the Right has developed more animosity for Amazon, in some ways, than the Left.
the joke is what a emasculated lying sack of..shit you are .....it was pre planned false flag ass wipe but you commie nazies keep threatening Trump supporters see what happens you cuckold
I love you man but I have to push back against some of this. You're giving Democrats and Biden short-shrift while being *far* too credulous about the likes of Hawley, Cotton, and Carlson's occasional social-democratic or peacenik noises. It's not new. See: 'compassionate conservatism'. They lie, people die, and not just abroad. Speaking of though, I also don't think we should simply embrace uncritically the isolationist line of some American Conservative types whole cloth as some unalloyed good, much less the standard for a leftist foreign policy for this country, which seems to be what you're doing when simply putting out snide remarks re NATO with zero elaboration. This should not be posited as one of only two options for a responsible and positive global engagement (which often seems to boil down to 'lolz none'), with the other being 'bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran' or maybe 'dumb r2pers can't help but tear shit apart' or some shit like that. I get that this was kind of ancillary to the overall point here but I find this kind of thing sort of endemic among left writers I admire. It would be nice if more ppl could articulate a positive vision for left FP beyond 'don't shoot'. You're at least not positing the US as the only or most malignant actor on the world stage, as some would have it, but I suspect that'll be the takeaway for many people reading this anyway.
As for the ACA, at the time m4a was not on anybody's radar or agenda. Can you seriously recall strident criticism from prominent progressive voices of the House Democrats for a lack of vision re healthcare back in 2007-10? Everybody back then was burned by the HillaryCare experience of the previous decade, and it was understood that even with a market-oriented plan, they'd have a heavy lift because of the likes of Stupak, Blue-Dogs like McMahon, etc, to say nothing of the GOP. (And, while you didn't quite say this, outside of the individual mandate, the bill doesn't actually share anything with the Heritage plan it is constantly accused of ripping off. That plan had no subsidies, no community rating, no coverage mandates, no employer mandates (though, imo, this was, if anything, worse), and ofc no expansion of Medicaid.) In any case, the caucus is more progressive than it was ten years ago, even accounting for freshmen from swing districts--though, I want to stress, even the House of 2009-2010 never truly 'abandoned' the public option. You know full well that Joe Lieberman personally struck that one from the bill in exchange for his support, out of sheer spite. Not for the first time should we lament: would that Lamont had won in '06.
Finally re Biden, I don't think we should dismiss out of hand the collaborative doc that just came out, and the 'basement' stuff again gives short shrift to his engagement, particularly within the context of the rona. He's hardly my preference as a nominee, but is neither idle nor mentally incapacitated, contra Twitterverse memes to this effect.
These are fair points. I don't have time to respond in depth but I appreciate you reading and offering feedback. Jury is out on these guys. I sense some daylight between Hawley and Cotton, for example, because Hawley has actually put proposals out there for the federal govt to subsidize private business during the pandemic. Would he be another fiscal conservative as president? Possibly, if history is a guide. We will see what happens.
In the first paragraph what I meant was 'the only option for', not 'one of two'. Remnant of an earlier version of the sentence, no edit button here apparently.
A problem I’ve noticed on the left for the past couple of years is that their unrelenting and infinite cynicism towards the Democratic Party center does not extend to the far right. Indeed, they seem to take their lies at face value. With that in mind, you’d be an all-mighty idiot for believing the stances of safety net expansion, hostility towards Big Tech dominance, and infrastructure projects from fascist pieces of shit like Hawley and Carlson. Their primary agendas are, respectively, a post-liberal evangelical Christian theocracy and a white nationalist ethnostate. The first thing that they’ll do is throw away all the nice-sounding things to their platform, as fascists have done since the birth of the ideology (the Nazis were anti-capitalist until they realized they could get the funding and support of wealthy industrialists).
Let’s not forget, 2016 campaign Trump talked about being the only Republican who wouldn’t cut Medicare and wanted the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for drug prices. But he’s presided over budgets that do the former, and as for the latter, he had a White House meeting with pharma bosses within a couple of months of getting into office.
However, let’s suppose Hawley or Carlson do keep their word about all the progressive things they say they want to do. If that’s the case, you can count out the Democratic Party for at least a generation, much like the GOP after the New Deal. And it’ll be the bed they made that they’ll have to lie in. They set themselves up for this via aggressive means testing for valuable benefits, disguising such arguments in a thin veil of class warfare (“the rich shouldn’t have the benefits of everyone else,” they say). If someone else is gonna do what they should have been doing all along, then you deserve to become irrelevant.
I tend to agree in that we shouldn't take anything at face value with these guys. What I'll say for Hawley is he's been putting these proposals out there and it's actually become politically acceptable, for conservatives, to target Big Tech. If anything, because Donald Trump hates Bezos, the Right has developed more animosity for Amazon, in some ways, than the Left.
the joke is what a emasculated lying sack of..shit you are .....it was pre planned false flag ass wipe but you commie nazies keep threatening Trump supporters see what happens you cuckold
I love you man but I have to push back against some of this. You're giving Democrats and Biden short-shrift while being *far* too credulous about the likes of Hawley, Cotton, and Carlson's occasional social-democratic or peacenik noises. It's not new. See: 'compassionate conservatism'. They lie, people die, and not just abroad. Speaking of though, I also don't think we should simply embrace uncritically the isolationist line of some American Conservative types whole cloth as some unalloyed good, much less the standard for a leftist foreign policy for this country, which seems to be what you're doing when simply putting out snide remarks re NATO with zero elaboration. This should not be posited as one of only two options for a responsible and positive global engagement (which often seems to boil down to 'lolz none'), with the other being 'bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran' or maybe 'dumb r2pers can't help but tear shit apart' or some shit like that. I get that this was kind of ancillary to the overall point here but I find this kind of thing sort of endemic among left writers I admire. It would be nice if more ppl could articulate a positive vision for left FP beyond 'don't shoot'. You're at least not positing the US as the only or most malignant actor on the world stage, as some would have it, but I suspect that'll be the takeaway for many people reading this anyway.
As for the ACA, at the time m4a was not on anybody's radar or agenda. Can you seriously recall strident criticism from prominent progressive voices of the House Democrats for a lack of vision re healthcare back in 2007-10? Everybody back then was burned by the HillaryCare experience of the previous decade, and it was understood that even with a market-oriented plan, they'd have a heavy lift because of the likes of Stupak, Blue-Dogs like McMahon, etc, to say nothing of the GOP. (And, while you didn't quite say this, outside of the individual mandate, the bill doesn't actually share anything with the Heritage plan it is constantly accused of ripping off. That plan had no subsidies, no community rating, no coverage mandates, no employer mandates (though, imo, this was, if anything, worse), and ofc no expansion of Medicaid.) In any case, the caucus is more progressive than it was ten years ago, even accounting for freshmen from swing districts--though, I want to stress, even the House of 2009-2010 never truly 'abandoned' the public option. You know full well that Joe Lieberman personally struck that one from the bill in exchange for his support, out of sheer spite. Not for the first time should we lament: would that Lamont had won in '06.
Finally re Biden, I don't think we should dismiss out of hand the collaborative doc that just came out, and the 'basement' stuff again gives short shrift to his engagement, particularly within the context of the rona. He's hardly my preference as a nominee, but is neither idle nor mentally incapacitated, contra Twitterverse memes to this effect.
These are fair points. I don't have time to respond in depth but I appreciate you reading and offering feedback. Jury is out on these guys. I sense some daylight between Hawley and Cotton, for example, because Hawley has actually put proposals out there for the federal govt to subsidize private business during the pandemic. Would he be another fiscal conservative as president? Possibly, if history is a guide. We will see what happens.
In the first paragraph what I meant was 'the only option for', not 'one of two'. Remnant of an earlier version of the sentence, no edit button here apparently.