JThe Bulwark’s J.V. Last has a terrific article today talking about the success of the last 40 years, liberal masochism, neoliberalism and what really motivates MAGA. I could quibble with a few points but I have to agree on the main one which is that liberals need to stop so much navel gazing and confront the fact that the Republicans have become something that’s not recognizably democratic much less economically motivated.
I’ll just share this one excerpt:
George Packer is a nice liberal and he has written a novel, The Emergency, in which a fictionalized version of the MAGA right is militaristic and dangerous, but the woke left is super annoying. His general view seems to be, See? This is how we got here! Both sides have problems!
And I agree. Both sides do have problems. For example, conservatism’s big outrage of the moment is that a teaching assistant in an undergraduate psych class at Oklahoma University gave a student a bad grade. This teaching assistant seems to have been motivated by political animus against conservatives.
That is an example of liberalism’s excess. Of “woke.”
On the other side, the president of the United States is sanctioning war crimes as part of a program of extralegal killings while he kind-of, sort-of pushes toward an unprovoked conflict with Venezuela.
The both-sides thing pretty much always follows this pattern: On one side there will be a person somewhere in private life doing something rude, or stupid, or pernicious, because they are woke. And on the other hand there will be a high government official using the awesome power of the state to cause harm.
There are progressives on Bluesky who are super annoying to Nate Silver.
Also, the Supreme Court majority has authorized masked agents of the state to detain anyone who looks Hispanic or is overheard speaking Spanish.
There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of college activists who do not like Israel. One of them swung a flag near a Jewish student at an Ivy League school and this flag may have grazed her eye. This is very bad. There should be consequences for it.
Also, in 2021 the Republican president and a coterie of conservative legal minds attempted a violent overthrow of the government.
Today the Republican party attempts to remove birthright citizenship while the president of the United States talks about stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship and the Republicans controlling the federal government engage in Confederate fet-life while actively pushing various white nationalism memes.
As he says, to believe this false equivalence is to aid authoritarianism. It’s absurd, and it has been as long as I can recall whether it was the panic over long hair and loud music back in the 60s or 90s era “political correctness” or this inane “woke” stuff today. And too many liberals end up spending way too much time arguing amongst themselves over that stuff rather than simply dismissing it as an irrelevance in light of right wing tyranny that’s taking place all around us.
I wish they had a gift article feature but if you are thinking of subscribing to anything I recommend the Bulwark. Yes, it’s full of lapsed right wingers and sometimes that can be a bit much. (I know, I know …) But the videos and podcasts are informative and entertaining and the daily newsletters are always worth reading. And, I’m sorry, they have a perspective on things that I often find to be more perspicacious than what a lot of the liberal intelligentsia is putting out. I think they understand the right better than many traditional lefties do and they see us a little clearer as well.