It is now clear that Trump will make his re-election
campaign a full-out racist attempt to pit Whites against non-Whites. I think that is a fight worth having. If the campaign is fought on that terrain and
we lose, I am not sure Americans deserve a democracy.
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Many outstanding scholars - Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Michael J. Klarman, Howard Zinn, Kenneth Dolbeare, to mention just a few have argued that the US Constitution was a counter-revolution in that the Framers rushed to Philadelphia in order to end, once and for all, the militant and armed democratic uprisings that were taking place in all 13 states. My guess, is that if we look at the reverence for property rights, barriers to voting, and the capture of the government by oligarchs, and the very design of our political institutions, much of what distresses us today is in virtue of the design of the Constitution, not because some set of sacred principles of the founding period have been violated. I think we deserve a democracy, given that we have never had one. The closest we have come, perhaps, was the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.
I know she's not the favorite columnist of many who follow this blog, but I suggest that Maureen Dowd has something useful to say as we approach the next election:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-trump-impeachment.html?em_pos=small&ref=headline&nl_art=2&te=1&nl=opinion-today&emc=edit_ty_20190729?campaign_id=39&instance_id=11248&segment_id=15650&user_id=3eb544acf33074153136256ee3f4e9dc®i_id=46623236emc=edit_ty_20190729
I managed to get through the first 5 paragraphs, before, being so jarred by the consistent straw-manning, logical fallacies, and general flippant attitude, that I ex-ed out before suffering net permanent harm to my frontal lobes, and possibly vital arteries.
I can now see why Dowd is no one's favorite around here, and will return to my normal routine of avoiding establishment op-eds!
My god. "Staggeringly stupid" barely begins to describe this. I've have to leave it at that, not having the stomach even to begin to enumerate the ideological nonsense spewed here. Suffice to say it bears precisely zero relation to any progressive positions associated with the Sanders/AOC wing.
Onto brighter notes, a "here, here" for Jerry's comment. To which I would just like to add two points:
(1) In addition to its strong counter-revolutionary dimensions, the "founding" period was also--as Barbara Fields has quite brilliantly argued--when the racialization of slavery took full-blooded hold in the US. Yes, that's right, slavery as the cause of racism, and not the other way around. (See her magisterial essay "Slavery Race and Ideology in the US," or "Ideology and Race in American History.")
(2) I know that insight is hardly new to this blog, as Prof. Wolff has in fact elaborated on the same a number of times. But I mention it because I can't think of anything that is more must reading at this current moment than Barbara Fields and the need to move beyond "the fiction of race" and the evasions of "race relations."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/karen-barbara-fields-racecraft-dolezal-racism/
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields
Consider these a kind of cleansing or penance for having clicked on that egregious Dowd link.
Sorry, just to clarify the first para ("staggeringly stupid" etc) refers to the Dowd piece. (Just realized I could've been more explicit.)
E.J. Dionne is another venal pragmatist whose columns I follow:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kicking-trump-out-is-the-important-thing-fights-over-how-to-do-it-shouldnt-get-in-the-way/2019/07/28/0f3d1086-afeb-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html?utm_term=.e9b447f6e7e9
I think we need a strategy for actual effective resistance rather than the current ineffective pro-forma resistance in the case that Trump is re-elected with another minority vote similar to 2016.
"I think we need a strategy for actual effective resistance rather than the current ineffective pro-forma resistance in the case that Trump is re-elected with another minority vote similar to 2016". Well ill-said.
Since DP keeps using "pragmatist" in his ideologically-coded way, I'll keep repeating that it is precisely that, an ideologically-coded way of passing off "centrist" as something other than what it is, as if that is simply what it means to be "hard-headed" or "grown-up" or "realistic." Why not just use the more honest "centrist" or "incrementalist" as labels for this position--namely, one that hews as close as possible to the status quo while still retaining an identifiable difference from the Right, done in part by sanctifying existing constraints as natural or otherwise immutable? Use of "pragmatism" for this position really is just dishonest bs, a way of implying that those to one's left are somehow "soft-headed" or "childish" or "idealistic." Rather than simply committed to more left-wing ends and a more transformative view of how real change works?
Again: "...Why not just use the more honest,'centrist' or 'incrementalist' as labels for this position--namely, one that hews as close as possible to the status quo while still retaining an identifiable difference from the Right, done in part by sanctifying existing constraints as natural or otherwise immutable?" Professor Wolff, why are so many illiterates commenting on your blog?
Regarding the TP and DP discussion, I think I may have discovered a further source of our disagreements with DP, and our inability to reach any kind of mutual understanding with one another. In order to show this, I first want to develop what Talha has already said, cogently, despite Unknown's claim, which is backed with zero evidence besides a lucid quote, that Talha is illiterate. Next I'll connect it to a deeper problem.
Talha is of course right that ANY political position can have pragmatic goals towards its realization. Nazis can in principle be pragmatic, so can communists, and so can centrist democrats. I hate to say it but Hitler had his pragmatic moments, so did Lenin. One can also be e.g., a pragmatic lover, businessman, attorney, or pastor. In the present American political landscape however, pragmatism has come to be seen as exclusively a property of the centrists in the Democratic party. They are pragmatists because they are neither very left, and as Talha indicates, not the Right - in the sense of being members of the Republican Party - but can break bread with, and haggle with, the republicans, while telling the left to shut up, get in line, and be pragmatic like they themselves are (note this schematic necessarily entails the constant economic and political shift rightward, not leftward, that Talha and I, along with Chomsky and others, have been arguing just IS American history since at least the 70s). Hence, their pragmatism is the ability to work with the right, and brow beat and bully the left. Note, it is NOT a pragmatism of WORKING WITH THE LEFT AND RIGHT IN TANDEM, nor is it a pragmatism of working with the left and brow beating and bullying the right. Given that ANY political platform can be pragmatic, this is a very perverted sense of pragmatism that DP, EJ, Dowd, and other obvious centrists are advocating. It's ultimately a silencing tactic, a preservation of the status quo, and gate keeper liberalism.
What makes pragmatism especially insidious in the case of DP, is that DP has yet to actually indicate a set of moral, political, or economic principles, upon which he bases his pragmatism (the same can probably be said for EJ, who I can't stand to listen to on NPR, but unfortunately have listened to). DP is not alone in this failure, many centrist dems share it. I'll give an example to demonstrate this point. Let's take any serious Libertarian, like Ron Paul. Once you know the moral principles Ron Paul believes in, it's not hard to deduce IN TOTO how he will (or at least should) vote on ANY issue. Now he may be pragmatic in getting bills passed, or what fights he will or won't have with congressman, but ultimately, we know what he bases his pragmatism on (natural rights and property rights), and where his politics are headed. We can thus infer legitimate reasons for all of his pragmatic strategizing.
But can we say the same thing about Obama, or Clinton, or Harris, or Booker, or Biden, or DP, etc? What I mean is, in all sincerity, I don't have a fucking clue why Obama/Clinton/DP does or does not support certain policies. I can make no deductions about how they will or will not vote based on a set of principles they antecedently espouse (I can however make voting predictions about them based on campaign funding, and who they surround themselves with). As such, I don't actually know what they are working towards, and as such, I don't know if their accomplishments/victories are even victories or accomplishments (hence at THEIR MOST PRAGMATIC THEY AREN’T EVEN PRAGMATIC!)! Where is centrist liberalism trying to take us? Why is it trying to take us there? Does anyone know? I sure as hell don't. The fact there are no serious answers to my questions reveals the moral vacuousness and total fraud behind the centrist claims to be pragmatic.
This is especially the case with DP. He suffers from the old philosophers point that, in not being able to present a view, he probably doesn't understand it. Thus, whenever he is pressed on any topic of substance, he deflects to linking to other people's views, which he can't even summarize for us. This is a classic dodge tactic, which reveals he doesn't know the actual mechanisms as to why and how he thinks what he thinks (which we now see is the case with most centrist dems), he just knows someone else thinks it for him, probably isn't a moron (big mistake), and therefore relies on them to do his thinking for him.
At bottom this quest for pragmatism is the quest to paper over a nihilistic void in the pursuit of power.
Hey, Chris.Thank you for referencing my "lucid quote" about Tahla's illiteracy. You might take some lessons in lucidity yourself (not to mention literacy).
I don’t consider myself a centrist in today’s political lineup. My policy preferences--e.g., Medicare for All, drastic and rapid action on climate change, a complete reworking of a tax code that presently screws the bottom half, troops in umpteen countries--are well to the left. But those are minority preferences. They have no chance of being enacted in the foreseeable future. In these circumstances, since I can’t have all of the loaf, I want as much as I can get. That requires the support of voters to my right in order to get a majority, and that requires accepting positions that I find less than ideal, but better than the status quo.
There is an inevitable “center” in any large political system. Unless the term is seen in the context of the entire political system, it is meaningless. The center of the country and the Democratic Party today, I believe, is left of where it was in 2016. The task is to move it further to the left, but not to lose everything I the attempt to achieve Utopia
"You might take some lessons in lucidity yourself (not to mention literacy)"
Thanks, and since you clearly have no lessons to offer, and have reached conclusions without sharing your foundational premises, I won't be taking the lessons - or advice - from you!
Chris,
I’m not sure if your “foundational” objection is directed at me or not, but in the even that it is, I must confess that my foundations are mundanely Humean: “ What is honorable, what is fair, what is becoming, what is noble, what is generous” in my subjective view. All else is tactics: how to get as much as I can without endangering what I’ve already got.
My very subjective impression is that politically Chris and David Palmeter probably share most of the same political goals and probably would vote for the same candidates.
I'd say that the difference between them is cultural. I can't stand Maureen Dowd myself: I never read her and in fact, I avoid the New York Times. Among the regular commenters in this blog there is a culture which sees Maureen Dowd and the New York Times in general as reference points and there is another culture which finds them distasteful. I use Ms. Dowd and the NYT as indicators of the difference, which I do not fully understand myself. There are probably political analysts who are to the right of Maureen Dowd whom I read with pleasure (I can't think of any off-hand, but I'm sure there are some), but Maureen Dowd represents something, which is not just political in nature, which turns me off completely.
S. Wallerstein,
I seldom read Dowd either. I'm put off by her snide style. Although I had the copy of the Times in which this column appeared, I hadn't read and did so only after a friend emailed the link. I am a regular reader of E.J. Dionne, and found, in this case, that they were in complete agreement in a view that I also have: the important thing is to beat Trump; what comes after is secondary.
DP,
My foundational objection was not aimed at you.
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