Category: progressives
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Saint Bernie and that horrible woman: why the “left” is so reactionary.
On the eve of the fateful 2016 Presidential election, in a pre-election “explainer”, Dissent magazine told its readers a completely false story that St. Bernie Sanders was bringing us socialism, whether we deserved it or not, but evil neoliberal Hillary Clinton was a fanatical devotee of the harshest form of…
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The Celebrity Apprentice Left and health care
Democrats have been attempting to pass universal national health in the USA since the Truman administration proposed national health insurance and other reforms in 1945. “Under the plan I suggest, our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now — on the basis of…
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White Workers and the evil neoliberal Democrats
Most working class Americans will vote for Hillary Clinton but white people, particularly white men, will likely remain the base of the Republicans and the right thanks to racism. The civil rights movement and the (qualified) support of that movement by Lyndon Johnson and liberal Democrats and Northeastern Republicans, generated…
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What, another post on anti-neoliberalism?
Most of the time when some earnest leftie uses the word “neoliberalism”, he (and it is almost always a “he”) means to imply nothing more than that he is a smart person in possession of some deep knowledge about how things work with the cool nomenclature. Sadly the more sophisticated…
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Movement Progressives have learned nothing
As we collapse into election 2016, it’s clear that Movement Progressives, many of whom have coalesced around Bernie Sanders, have learned nothing. The author of this 2010 blog post just cited it as evidence that his complaints about President Obama were well justified – and the dense material of often…
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Rhetoric 101 and President Obama
Obama’s famous speech in which he says there are no red states, no blue states, just the United States, and his other pleas for unity are incessantly derided by people who appear not to have basic language skills. Here’s the last paragraph of President Lincoln’s speech at his first inaugural.…
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Ta-Nehisi Coates and the broken culture of progressive America
Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past whose historical vestiges still afflict black people today. Coates. There is a tiny little fictional Obama who lives in the tiny little stale imaginations of progressive intellectuals – one that they don’t ever want to bother to…
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The politics of Matt Tabbi’s big con
Aside from racism, the most important source of political power for the far right in the United States is apathy and despair. The same political forces that murdered people for registering to vote in Mississippi just a few decades back and that are still desperately working on voter suppression tactics…
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Criticism from the left
Suppose you were a left liberal, what we used to call a “progressive” writing about President Obama’s proposed 2014 budget. You might write something like this: The 2014 budget makes some steps towards: fixing the economy, with a $50B infrastructure investment fund, to a healthier society with things like universal…
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Matt Taibbi’s big con
Matt Taibbi is so good at whipping up indignation about the evil bankers that it’s easy to overlook the crackpot and diversionary nature of the story he is telling. It would be useful if there was public pressure, for example, to provide a postal bank that would give people an…