Category: the left
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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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The Progressive Ideology and finance
One of the most consistent and loudest and falsest “criticisms from the left” of the Obama Administration has been that it failed to properly punish and re-regulate the financial sector. The criticism is usually heavily made up in populist cosmetics: Main Street versus Wall Street, the 99% versus the 1%, …
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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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Confessions of an ex-leftist who became a mindless Obot
Years ago I heard Professor Cornel West speak in New York. It was a virtuoso performance, drawing on Sartre, Marx, Dubois, Douglas, and Dewey and many others I am too ignorant to cite, and in a spectacular style that swung from AME preacher testifying to Malcom X’s cold precision to…
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Color and class blind “progressives”
The professional “left” in the USA, the left of entertainers, professors, lobbyists, and “progressive media” is now mostly a suburb of Libertarianism – a suburb that has preserved only certain habits of speech and some historical myths from the old left. By way of illustration consider Corey Robin’s 3500 word…
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Slavoj Žižek for the win
My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative to global capitalism. – in LRB response to critics Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008 Above is Žižek’s response to critics of his earlier article which begins with: One of the clearest lessons of…
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