Liberals and progressives, which one Pete Buttigieg is, and whether local DemoDisneyDixiecrats are either.

Valletta, 2016.

I'll give a respectful nod to Pete Buttigieg for being that rarest of breeds, a Maltese-American. The Knights Templar aside, I'm not very impressed with Mayor Pete's positions so far.

This article interests me for two reasons. Secondly, it briefly surveys Buttigieg's policies to date, and these come up lacking. But before doing so, the author contrasts the political identifiers known as liberal and progressive.

There are an increasing number of Democrats locally referring to themselves as progressive. I've even done it at times, so no stones are being cast by me. I'm not sure being a progressive interests me much any longer, probably because so many local progressives are liberals -- and the governing elite is neither.

Anyway, I consider myself less of a "progressive" and more a Social Democrat of the mixed-economy, European model; since there's no place for such a beast in L'America, I scrape by as a pants-down independent.

And while independence may never be enough to win an election, it's an honest designation and describes me pretty well. I'm comfortable with that. Groucho Marx was supposed to have said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

Yeah, that's me.

Here's the link, with the opening passage about the difference between liberals and progressives. Broadly speaking, I agree with the author's assessment.

Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive, by Jacob Weindling (Paste)

The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo.

This is important because whether or not it gets covered, the dramatic ideological split on the left will have a massive impact on the 2020 election. In 2016, 43% of the Democratic Party did not vote for the party’s hand-picked nominee. Progressives are not some small faction of the party, and in fact, given that millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, you could define our generation—the largest in human history—as largely “progressive.”

I bring this up because Pete Buttigieg is having a moment in the early 2020 Democratic Primary, and the former McKinsey consultant has (falsely) branded himself as a progressive ...

Thomas Frank and The Baffler on the betrayal of populism by liberals.

It's No. 42 of The Baffler, on the topic of populism.

What’s to blame for our disgraceful turn toward fascism? “The scourge of populism,” your Ivy-educated tutor answers confidently. But the liberal framing of populism as an uprising of unruly rednecks in MAGA gear, writes founding editor Thomas Frank in his introduction to Issue no. 42, is a betrayal of “the faith in ‘the people’ that built unions and fought World War II.”

Yes, I know: What is ...

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems and art. We publish six print issues annually, as well as online content every day of the cursed workweek.

Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Chris Lehmann and headquartered in New York. We publish both new and established voices, and our regular contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein and Astra Taylor. You can subscribe here for as little as $24 a year.

Our regular subjects include Silicon Valley snake-oil, the deadening weight of consumer capitalism, our faithless media, and the redemptive promise of people claiming control of their own lives. Submit your own dyspeptic work for our consideration over here.

The Baffler is owned by the non-profit Baffler Foundation and the majority of our budget comes from tax-deductible donations. We are as charitable as a church, and certainly more fun. Please give us your money. We will beg and/or threaten dogs as necessary.

Frank's introduction is choice. A subscription to The Baffler is likely to be a Saturnalia present to myself. 

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The People, No, by Thomas Frank (The Baffler)

An introduction from our founding editor

THE BACKLASH AGAINST LIBERALISM was thirty years old when this magazine dedicated a special issue to it in 1999; today it has been running for a full half-century and it is ready for its testimonial dinners and commemorative postage stamps. In its early days, the backlash was startling and strange: it was ordinary people siding with the Chicago police when they brutalized protesters; it was the hardhat as a symbol of reaction; it was a Republican presidential candidate claiming to speak for the “silent majority.”

The common man appeared to be in open rebellion against liberalism, and it was no passing tantrum. Dozens of tax revolts and busing riots and flag battles later, The Baffler tried to gauge the volcanic perversity of the spectacle. Populism, we thought in 1999, had once been a phenomenon of the left; it was a mobilization of the people united in outrage against bankers, industrialists, or just “the establishment.” How had it come to pass that middle-class Americans now poured into the streets to demand that the taxes of the rich be cut or that the coal mines be deregulated? And how could the backlash keep going as it dismantled the middle-class arrangements on which its fantasies were based?

Well, continue it did. Today a spiteful disciple of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order agenda sits in the White House. The shade of segregationist George Wallace stalks the land, and the crypto-racist spirit of the white backlash is playing on TV all day, every day.

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

The incandescent perversity of the thing, however, is completely lost to populism’s growing chorus of detractors. In 1999, we thought right-wing populism was a historical mystery that needed to be unraveled and understood; in the minds of its legions of analysts today it’s no mystery at all. For them, the common people’s incomprehension of liberal values is as unremarkable and self-evident as is the superiority of Yale over Southeast Missouri State. Populism, much of our ruling punditburo now believes, is a creature of the ill-informed right by its very nature. Bring aggrieved plebes together in movements and mass rallies and of course they will start chanting the name of Trump. That’s just who ordinary Americans are. In this democracy, it’s the people themselves who are the problem.

This is the reason that so many of the prized manifestos of the left these days resemble nothing so much as ritualized scolding—or, rather, concerned letters from mom gently reminding the lowly of their precarious place in the New Economy hierarchy. Before long, chide the solons of liberalism, they’ll have to retrain and repatriate to one of the coastal warrens of tech monopoly and lifestyle liberalism—places where they don’t look too fondly on MAGA hats.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, meanwhile, the Tea Party movement of 2009 is now in the midst of a full-on populist makeover. Never has there been a phonier, more transparent bid to mislead an angry public. Supposedly a protest against bank bailouts, it was actually launched from among the futures traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—and then backed to the hilt by Beltway libertarians looking for a way to distance themselves from the badly damaged Republican brand. The movement’s Number One heroine, Ayn Rand, spent decades dreaming up ways to express her contempt for democracy and its beloved average citizen. The Tea Party movement’s great demand for solving the problem of out-of-control bankers—more bank deregulation—seems to have been developed as a kind of thought experiment to gauge the outer limits of human gullibility.

Yet in the fast-growing field of populism studies, the Tea Party movement is widely understood to be the realest deal there is. This is what populism looks like, the new Trump-addled cohort of populist diagnosticians confidently tells us; indeed, it is an almost perfect example of the species. That anti-bank catechism the founders of American populism preached in Kansas a century ago is the outlier, the mystery. That faith in “the people” that built unions and fought World War II is something completely forgotten. Don’t call those things “populism”; don’t even think of them at all.

The story of how racist right-wing demagoguery came to be the meaning of “populism” rather than a perversion of the populist impulse is a fascinating one, but what’s even more critical now is the implication of the change.

What does it tell us when liberals, faced with epic political corruption, spectacular bank misbehavior, and towering inequality, take that opportunity to declare war on populism? It tells us that they’ve lost any sense of their own movement as an expression of the vast majority. It tells us they have no idea why they believe they should be entrusted with power in the first place. And it reminds us that their particular brand of class-based self-delusion is a luxury that the rest of us can ill afford.

"The Pieties of the Liberal Class," wherein Democrats decry Trump's policy actions even as they hide their own like deeds.

To me, this sentence summarizes my experiences with the hallowed American two-party system.

"We could only take leaders at their word if they opposed a policy not only when the enemy was implementing it, but when their own side was implementing the same policy."

Hence another timely reminder that condemning Republicans for what Democrats do themselves fails to resonate, whether nationally or down the street, up on the third floor.

The Pieties of the Liberal Class, by Jason Hirthler (CounterPunch)

 ... In his excellent polemic, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin wrote that we could only take leaders at their word if they opposed a policy not only when the enemy was implementing it, but when their own side was implementing the same policy. On this score, all the Obama liberals fail the test, as do the equally haughty conservatives. Their fake outrage, their pious contempt, and their theatrical astonishment are forms of political posturing and, as the conservatives themselves say, “virtue signaling”. Power evidently corrupts us so thoroughly that when we gain power, our singular value becomes retaining power. We are often principled until our principles confront the opportunity to increase our power. Then they are deprioritized. How does an electoral system that votes on federal seats just twice a decade militate against this human frailty, a moral infirmity we all share?

As Chris Hedges remarks, we still have the “iconography and language” of democracy, but we are made to “kneel before the dictates of the marketplace” and “structure our society around the primacy of profit.” We are left with an institutional “facade.” Which is why it is so proper to treat with derision the reeling hysteria of politicians who claim, in comical hand-wringing interviews, that “our democracy” is under attack. Why it is so perfectly appropriate to mock the mastheads of our major newspapers, which admonish us that, “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” as though the Washington Post, owned by a CIA contractor and the richest man on earth, is some kind of bulwark against corporate fascism. It is the very vanguard of corporate fascism. It is not a barricade being manned by scruffy journalists firing lead at would-be usurpers. What a farcical notion, yet one embraced by the liberal class, who fail to see the corruption of their party as a summons to revolution.

This human capacity for self-delusion may be the final nail in the coffin of our species.

"Meanwhile capitalism does what it does — mostly unabated — and inequality once again becomes the scourge of our times."

The book is Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War, by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. I have not read the book, although maybe there'll be time to do so soon, but the point of mentioning it, and excerpting the final section of Hartman's assessment, is to draw a line in the anchor crosswalks.

Hartman's essay is comprehensible to me. In short, I know what he's talking about, and referring to. If you're running for local office as a Democrat, and ask me for my vote, I'll be asking you to display a working knowledge of the history recounted by Hartman. It's as simple as that.

If you can't, then off my porch you'll be going.

It's not about expressing lockstep agreement; it's about being familiar with the material. If you're identifying as a Democrat, then I need to know where you stand in the context of what's being discussed in books like this.

As a Democratic candidate for office, if you can't comment sensibly about matters like this, you're wasting my time.

Got it?

Beyond the Whack-a-Mole Left, by Andrew Hartman (Jacobin)

Though often condemned to the fringes of American political life, the radical left has changed the course of US history.

 ... Brick and Phelps are not entirely without hope. They point to “green shoots,” including the millennial embrace of socialism, which since their book was published has gained political force through the Sanders campaign.

But grizzled historians that they are, Brick and Phelps remain skeptical that a movement capable of a mainstream left-wing revival is visible:

If new layers of youth had come to see capitalism as unstable, destructive, and inequitable, how to connect that observation to imaginative political practice, how to challenge the established order and offer plausible visions of a better future that popular movements can bring into being — in other words, how to move from margin to mainstream — remained opaque.

In spite of their pessimism, Radicals in America highlights some left-wing successes — with the qualification that “radicalism becomes invisible, paradoxically, in its victories.” One such invisible victory — the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which protects the rights of a previously excluded group of Americans — occurred due to radical organizing and protest.

But one of the reasons left-wing successes like the ADA feel so fleeting is because their effects seem far removed from the labor question that informed a more cohesive American left before 1945.

When it comes to the question of labor — or, more accurately, when it comes to class struggle — the Right is winning. The Left’s invisible victories need to be understood alongside this perplexing fact. As Brick and Phelps write in their shrewd conclusion:

Following the high point of the cascading radicalizations that ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, American political history shows two seemingly antithetical trends: one conservative, toward growing inequality, weakened unions, and an emphasis on private, market relations as a way of life; the other liberalizing, toward greater participation by women and people of color in most aspects of social, economic, and political leadership and a dramatic easing of sexual proscription to make gay and lesbian identities more legitimate.

There is an enormous difference between “liberalizing social relations,” which radicals can chalk up as a victory, and “democratizing and equalizing social relations,” which the Left has failed miserably at achieving. As Brick and Phelps rhetorically ask:

What does it mean that anyone of color can sit in the front of the bus, for example, or that it contains a wheelchair lift, if buses, heavily used by the working poor and elderly, now come with much less frequency and at greater cost to riders because of privatizations and cuts to public transit budgets?

Radicals in America offers a powerful history of how the Left has both succeeded and failed to bring its views into the center of American political life. The fight for gay marriage is a prime example of how once-radical ideas can become widely accepted.

But to make victories like these more substantive and widely shared, we need a broad socialist movement in the United States. Our task is to bring that marginalized idea into the mainstream.

In the end, Bill Maher is irrelevant. Read a damn book, will you?

Don't you even start on me. I've had this poster since I was in high school. It is intended as metaphor, suggesting thoughtful repose. 

I watch almost no television of any sort. To me, life is short -- and television is a vaster wasteland than ever. Meanwhile there is writing to do, books to read and plenty of music for inspiration.

It happens that I used to pay sporadic attention to Bill Maher, though his name has appeared at NA Confidential only a handful of times since 2012 or 2013. I'm not certain why I stopped viewing clips of Maher's on social media; perhaps because my social media feeds lean left, and fellow "liberals" decided Maher was kryptonite.

Either way, there's nothing conscious about it, at least on my part. Maher remains entertaining and instructive in my estimation, and at some point, he drifted off my radar. I've probably been busy reading.

Lately I've seen several instances of disavowal on the part of left-leaning friends, and this has provoked a mild curiosity. I do recall charges of Islamophobia; duly noted.

I can't help observing that given our vacuous, late-night, sound-bite culture of skin-deep irrelevance, it's hard to grasp why it matters much. We're getting our news from late night comedians and talk show hosts.

This is the part that should be bothering you.

Why Liberals Need Bill Maher’s Tough Love, by Matt Wilstein (Daily Beast)

Many progressives have written off the ‘Real Time’ host, but his importance to the late-night landscape should not be dismissed.

With the constant barrage of bad news coming out of the White House these days, sometimes it seems like the late-night shows can barely keep up. Night after night, hosts like Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah struggle to find what they hope is a unique comedic point of view on the latest Donald Trump outrage.

But in the year and a half since Trump was elected president, Bill Maher has taken a different approach. Yes, there is still plenty of anti-Trump material in his weekly Real Time monologues, but unlike pretty much every other late-night host on TV, he spends almost equal time holding liberals to account.

One of the biggest criticisms of these types of political comedy shows, even before the Trump era, was that they are simply preaching to their like-minded choir. Just as our Facebook pages reinforce the positions we hold dear, our late-night shows do the same. This is part of what has aided The Late Show’s sprint to the top of the ratings race over the past 18 months. Yes, the news is terrifying, but if we can laugh about it with Colbert at the end of the day, maybe things will be OK.

Real Time with Bill Maher has a different effect, and in turn has been alienating liberals more and more in recent months. But perhaps Maher is performing a more important service for Democrats than they realize. Even if his critiques often come off as “This is why Trump won” moralizing, there is value in acknowledging that Republican incompetence does not negate Democratic mistakes ...