DOOM, or The Official 2016 US Election Thread

vimothy

yurp
The other thing I find notable about this video, which doesn't relate to Spencer as such, is how inane and vapid the interviewer's responses are. She can't challenge him on the level of his politics, and instead resorts to snarky comments that he can easily swat away. It's painful to watch. Okay, this is Vice magazine, but she's done stints as politics editor at the Atlantic, senior editor at TNR -- it's not like she's some totally green reporter, fresh out of uni. And it might be that she's unusually inept, but I suspect she's more representative of people of our generation, who struggle to enunciate their political beliefs, offer any kind of justification for them, or even discuss politics seriously.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
The other thing I find notable about this video, which doesn't relate to Spencer as such, is how inane and vapid the interviewer's responses are.

Not that I'm comparing Farage to these lot, but it does remind me of how people interview him. They challenge him only with stale politically correct platitudes, rather than on the content of his politics. Of course I don't think he should get away scot free with his racial stuff, but his message would be much less potent if the other flaws in his politics were exposed.
 

vimothy

yurp
I don't think it's moronic, but it is a conception of politics that is completely wrong -- or, if it's not completely wrong, it's a political failure mode, which is why the interview with Spencer is such a trainwreck.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I think another notable point of this is how much of this is motivated by viewing ideology as an aesthetic. He talks about liberalism as being stale and non-threatening, which work as artistic critiques, but not as ideological ones.
 

vimothy

yurp
There was an interview with Mark Lilla, an academic who wrote a critical article about the Clinton campaign that was widely shared after the election, in Vox recently. He describes the two competing notions of politics, one of which (what he calls "identity liberalism") is common currency among young-ish university educated people all over Europe and the US:

Well, the term I've been using is "identity liberalism," and that's important because identity liberalism, in my view, is a kind of pseudo-politics that, despite whatever one thinks of the claims being made, distracts attention away from issues and focuses it on questions of personal identity or social recognition.

Now, these are important questions, but they're not, strictly speaking, political questions. They take our attention off of what politics in a democracy is about, namely acquiring and using power by occupying institutions. And you can only do that by winning elections at every level of government and by staying elected.

My view is that the only way to accomplish this is to present the principles of liberalism in a way that as many people as possible in the country can affirm them and feel that they resonate with those principles. So I say identity liberalism is a pseudo-politics because those engaged with it think they're doing politics, and they are doing a kind of movement politics, but the core aim of political action in a liberal democracy is not to speak truth to power but to acquire power, and that requires persuasion and appeals to commonalities.

If you go back to that interview in Vice, the Reeve basically accuses Spencer of being a "fraud" because he's using memes to manipulate journalists and convince people that he's right. And Spencer says, that's exactly what I'm doing: I'm using propaganda to spread my ideology, and it's working. Reeve can't even process that.
 

vimothy

yurp
I think another notable point of this is how much of this is motivated by viewing ideology as an aesthetic. He talks about liberalism as being stale and non-threatening, which work as artistic critiques, but not as ideological ones.

That's a good point, although he's not exactly wrong from an aesthetic point of view.
 

vimothy

yurp
Many people, not just the alt-right, are committed to this aesthetic of radicalism and challenging the system and breaking down what is dominant. If you find that notion appealing, it's going to work to undermine whatever legitimacy the system has in your eyes. And if that's characteristic of liberals, who identify with a post-war period in which they challenged a stale and relatively conservative establishment, they're going to be vulnerable to this critique.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Many people, not just the alt-right, are committed to this aesthetic of radicalism and challenging the system and breaking down what is dominant. If you find that notion appealing, it's going to work to undermine whatever legitimacy the system has in your eyes. And if that's characteristic of liberals, who identify with a post-war period in which they challenged a stale and relatively conservative establishment, they're going to be vulnerable to this critique.

This is applicable to the rise in libertarianism as well. The personality type who up to 10 years ago would have been a chomskyite is now more likely to be a Ron Paul fan.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Note the line at the very top of this image.

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vimothy

yurp
The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The seemingly sociopathic levels of amoral cruelty found in comment threads wherever Pepe memes lurk suggests an unpleasant answer to the question posed long ago by Plato’s Ring of Gyges – would we behave morally if we could be invisible and thus consequence free?

And this doesn’t apply exclusively to the Alt-right. A new generation of liberal left-identitarians display chilling levels of pack pleasure when conducting career-ending, life-destroying hate campaigns against people for minor infringements against the liberal moral code such as off-colour jokes. Some examples were chronicled in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I think what has led so many young white men in the US in particular to openly flirt with the Alt-right online is a sense that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Why grovel when you can join an anonymous army of trolls to fight back with pure offensiveness. This is what the Alt-right offers.

But like the US socialist writer Shuja Haider recently argued: “It should go without saying that left-liberal identity politics and Alt-right white nationalism are not comparable. The problem is that they are compatible.” Tumblr needs 4chan just as neo-masculinist misogynists need a perpetual supply of listicles about man-splaining, and the Alt-right needs finger wagging “Dear white people” liberal commentary to denigrate ordinary white people at every opportunity. None of them would make sense without the other.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/a...ally-all-about-1.2926929#.WG8tRfnL7ms.twitter
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Maybe in that case, but it's not delusional to imagine that the Democrats are looking forward to a time when demographic changes have rendered the votes -- and therefore the interests -- of the white working class superfluous. (That thesis doesn't look quite so certain now, as discussed by Sean Trende here, in the aftermath of Trump's success, but it has been a popular idea for the last decade or more and is reflected in the contemporary preference for identity over class-based politics.) Given that the Democrats have abandoned those who were previously among their core constituents (for a new coalition, made up, as described by Lawrence Summers, of "the cosmopolitan élite and diversity"), it's hardly irrational for those same constituents to look elsewhere.

Class always trumps identity politics. Immigrants reaching middle class usually vote conservative.
 

vimothy

yurp
Martin Wolf in an epochal mood -- "The long and painful journey to world disorder": https://www.ft.com/content/ef13e61a-ccec-11e6-b8ce-b9c03770f8b1

Economically, the postwar era can be divided into two periods: the Keynesian period of European and Japanese economic catch-up and the subsequent period of market-oriented globalisation....

The first economic period ended in the great inflation of the 1970s. The second period ended with the western financial crisis of 2007-09. Between these two periods lay a time of economic turmoil and uncertainty, as is true again now. The main economic threat in the first period of transition was inflation. This time, it has been disinflation.

Geopolitically, the postwar era can also be divided into two periods: the cold war, which ended with the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, and the post-cold war era....

The first geopolitical period of the postwar era ended in disappointment for the Soviets and euphoria in the west. Today, it is the west that confronts geopolitical and economic disappointment.

The Middle East is in turmoil. Mass migration has become a threat to European stability. Mr Putin’s Russia is on the march. Mr Xi’s China is increasingly assertive. The west seems impotent.
 
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