kamelred posted:

every liberal who says they value education secretly suspects that better education can only lead to more liberals, demonstrating i think the degree to which they are just totally prepared to hand over the political reigns to google or whoever and give up the whole charade altogether

they were quite open in calling for formal disenfranchisement along these lines after the election of bush and trump. in fact from my facebook i get the sense that trump himself is less an adversary for these types than the people who voted for him, and who therefore ought to be disqualified from voting in the future. sure, you'll see lots of complaining about the man himself but the fangs really come out when it comes to his supporters. like for example theres a whole genre of feel-good puff piece that emerged after the election revolving around stories like "white trash trump voter hit with medical bankruptcy" and other occasions for smug misanthropic schadenfreude, which one could accept from someone who realizes stalin is cool but, obviously, amounts to an immensely hypocritical posture from the sort of person that pretends to give a shit about healthcare and so on. all the old horror stories about the company boss bitchslapping employees who voted democrat exist now as crowdsourced twitter blacklisting campaigns and again, its not easy to give a shit in such cases except to the extent that it tells you something about like, who is really the scrappy opposition movement here

in my head a lot of this stuff traces back to a style of analysis kicked off by whats the matter with kansas--not the book, which i havent read, just the question: why can middle america be persuaded by appeals to things like values, desires, ambitions, or vision as opposed to qualifications, experience, pedigree, or other features of mercenary technocrats? put another way: why do they vote against their "interests"? a question anyone not consumed by total cynicism can see is wrongheaded. cue the "but why do they hate us???" blubbering. it makes sense to characterize this as anti-democratic but its also just anti political, the primary feature of technocracy, like its just unbearably tacky to want things. one should rather admire the qualities of individual elites and select the most faithful steward of the capitalist system in every instance. that seemed to be very much the character of the hillary vs. trump debates among those who actually cared

its no surprise, then, that the default mode of armchair political analysis for liberals today centers around how masterfully putin duped the unwashed masses. they're all prepared to believe that democracy is just amoral information warfare, any resentment towards their terrible leaders is just a pathological contempt for reality and science, which are liberal, and the primary task for their movement is just to patiently explain elite consensus to everyone who will listen (i don't think noted buffoon sam harris would take any issue with their view, incidentally, which kind of tells you just how reactionary "centrism" has gotten). theres nothing democratic about this, obviously, and its supremely exasperating today to hear the old line about liberals are the real fascists and have to kind of pause and go "hmm." that all this is now framed as concern for the health and integrity of american democracy is completely nauseating and i pray every night that a movie star or someone will say so because i have no way of getting through on my own

i agree with this with the slight quibble that what's the matter with kansas isn't as bad as its reputation. it's been 10 years since i read it and i'm sure i'd hate it more now but the central conceit is that they're claiming to be against the elites while voting to cut their taxes, ie that poorer republicans are being manipulated to vote against their class interests by reference to shit that's mostly irrelevant to their lives like opposing gay marriage, which i still think is broadly true. plus the author recently wrote Listen, Liberal which is one of the better normie-left critiques of the democrats' abandonment of the working class in a long time

cars posted:

but fwiw I don’t think that style of liberal believes at all anymore that if they patiently explain things and people are educated enough to understand, then they’ll “win”.

the Putin thing goes deeper than that: for most liberals pushing it, it’s a semi-conscious lie, a propaganda line they’re touting because they think it’s believable (and they’re also trying to convince themselves).

They clearly don’t really believe that the U.S. is now a puppet state of Russia, not only because that’s absurd given the military and economic power difference between the two, but because if they did believe that, they would probably treat it with more seriousness than they did “Donald Drumph”

and they don’t, it’s just an election sales pitch for their party, they think they’re brainwashing some wedge of those poor xenophobic idiot plebes into hating Republicans and figure that’s the only way they’ll beat them

yeah this is also true and you can see it in the tension between "Droland Drumph is a fascist enemy agent" and "it's unfair to be mean to the lady who lies for him professionally" and "it's fine for democrats in congress to support his nominees and vote to not restrict his surveillance powers"