Is the democratic party under deliberate demolition?

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I have some concerns about this from a few angles:

1) Bret Weinstein was banned from Facebook. He's not a right-winger, if anything he's trying to bring a center-left back which is willing to work cross-isle not on corporatist issues but on issues of common weal for the people.

2) The Democratic party has given labor and working class issues to the Republican Party as they've alienated the working class in favor of intersectionalism, critical race theory, and identity politics. Really the only thing they can say is that there's a tense battle between the corporatists and socialists in the party - and the DNC seems to be doing its level best to keep the socialists from winning all the while giving them just enough coverage to keep the left wing interested in the DNC.

What really got me thinking about this - there was some discussion somewhere about the potential of the Democratic party losing the vote of black men. Technically that makes sense, particularly as they're predominantly working class, can't find work if an administration isn't business friendly, and it's debatable whether the new system of intersectionalism has them now equivalent to gay white men in terms of their interesectional ranking. The democratic party doesn't seem to just be losing votes - they seem to be throwing them in the air as if they're not even needed (and if you're going to predominantly appeal to minority trans interesex that's what... 0.01% of the population at best?).

It really makes me wonder if we're headed toward having two parties who are irredeemably corporatist, that so much of what we've seen with the democratic party lately - particularly with the debates over the last year - is something like the last stages of a root canal, where the thing looks robust from the outside if one's looking at the veneer but the nerves are all scraped out.

I'm sure some of this is a 'no s--- Sherlock' but really - I think now it's looking less like just a clever or in-the-know thing to say that both parties are neoliberal and you get to choose between cynically bible-friendly and cynically woke-friendly, it's getting to the point where the same political oligopoly is likely to start using Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of expendable account and post reviewers, or blue checkmarks on Twitter, to get rid of anyone - right or left - whose challenging their power.

I also wonder as well if so much of what's been happening in Portland as well as the whole CHAZ thing might have been a big distraction. It's nothing new either, particularly thinking of what happened in Charlottesville where the right wing activists who showed up were funneled into AntiFa and BLM by the police when the event was shut down and there've been clear stand-down orders in so many of these instances. Pallets of bricks getting dropped off in the right places is eerily similar.

Conspiracy theory? Maybe but of what I think is more of the emergent and non-lofty kind, ie. enough money in the right places rearranging the table.

Taking a look at German history between ww1 and 2: ww1 was a European catastrophe, but the winning powers forced reparation payments onto Germany. Germany responded with hyperinflation -basically to screw the french, because the reparations were now being paid in worthless currency. But that also destroyed all monetary savings. The working class was rebelling and everyone owning wealth was afraid things could go the way of Russia - i.e., revolution, civil war, followed by a totally new social hierarchy. So they did everything to stop the Socialists - even accept those brutish National socialists, who only took that name to appear attractive to the working class, and they came up with a story of how loosing the first world war was actually the fault of *some* rich people - jewish bankers - but not others (german bankers), while at the same time creating a story about how jewish people were less-than-human and filthy. It's quite remarkable that they managed to portray jewish people as both "like rats", and as secretly controlling the world - a war on two fronts for the impoverished working class, basically.

If you take a look at neoliberal America today, it's an jnteresting lens to look through: what are the two fronts the lower middle and working class is caught between? - educated liberal elites and immigrants for the conservatives, and corrupt, conservative, racist but wealthy republicans and the uneducated, racist working class AND the religious right for the libs. The epitome of this is George W. Bush, who's somehow Republican aristocracy, decadent hillbilly, and born again Christian, all at once.
For the neoliberals, it's perfect- they are only enemies for class conscious lefties, everyone else considers them basically on their team, and would rather risk Trump than Bernie.

Divide and conquer.

Some do believe the whole focus on Portland is a big distraction. But to be honest, what is happening here is not really that big. The majority of people here are not protesting. All the boarded up buildings we are seeing are from businesses that closed due to corona, nothing to do with protests. But the rest of the city does not look like that. It's amusing and upsetting at the same time seeing our town being in the media spotlight and seeing it being twisted and exaggerated. But I look at it as maybe it will keep people from moving here because we have enough people here already and we don't need our town to get more expensive.

We also do not condone violence here and people spray painting buildings and when they busted into Oregon Historical Society.

I do believe Trump is using Portland to win votes. The moment he said on Twitter we were out of control and had terrorists, I knew he was full of it. I live here. Unless he meant another Portland I don't even know about

Edit: Ignore me. I'm always getting my facts mixed up...

Last edited by xX0Xx on 24 Oct 2020, 7:34 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Yes, they're some of the busiest white knights out there.

I'm not familiar with that particular model but Mark Blyth has an economics lecture from last summer called 'How We Got Here and Why', he's the guy who did the Global Trumpism lecture in 2016 and a follow-on to it last summer as well.

In 'How We Got Here and Why' he describes an oscillation between economic systems where you had a lot of specialist economies where capital had the whip-hand on labor, the gold standard was in effect which strapped the systems to boom-bust because it didn't allow for smoothing fluctuations, it was bad during WWI, WWII pretty much ushered in the end of that system as the elites realized they couldn't keep it up without a complete flip of power - you then had Keynesian economics from the late 1940's through the 1970's where the main focus was peak employment - during that time you had the cost of labor constantly going up and forcing innovation along with it, Mark Blyth would suggest that massive capital flights from Europe in the late 1940's post WW2 left the US with more than half of the world's total capital by the early 1950's and Eric Weinstein would argue that you had the peak of low-hanging fruit in physics in the 1950's and 1960's, so there were a couple things really rocketing the US economy upward.

Somewhere in the 1970's not only did that uphill momentum slow down, there's a graph people often reference that maps worker wages with productivity, and it was somewhere around 1973 where wages and worker productivity broke their connection and they've been drifting farther apart ever since (Mark maps the consumer credit bubbles of the 2000's as an almost perfect fit for that gap between productivity and wages). With the neoliberal revolution of the 1980's labor lost increasing control and the situation began to look much more like the first economic regime mentioned - just less violence for various reasons including more ways for the economy to buffer hard stops.

Where that leaves us - it took two world wars to institute Keynesianism. We're hanging out in that spot that's a bit like the gap between the two world wars. What worries me is that if there's any peaceful way to get the problems solved they're not in anyone's immediate interest who has power, and even saying someone 'has power' is tricky because like anything else it's a Hobbesian competitive race of all against all and no one at the top, looking at their immediate competitors, would say 'lets slow down the race' (Daniel Markovits got into this with Sam Harris on Making Sense #205).

The scary thing about that then is we're left in a place where it's not like we can stop things from kicking off - they most likely will kick off unless someone has such a masterful stroke of genius that they're able to come up with a solution that plays within the rules of Darwinian game theory and serves everyone's best interests so well that people at the head of the race are willing to take a pit stop for it. That's an almost superhuman request no only of any one person but just about any think-tank out there even. I'm not even sure if you could give that problem to a machine learning algorithm and get an outcome where people who aren't willing to take a haircut don't take a haircut.

Therein lies the problem with actually solving any of this - its all straight-ahead with the relatively hard-coded portions of human programming, tragedy of the commons, multi-polar traps, etc.

The really weird thing - I'm listening to Bret Weinstein and Douglas Murray (posted a day ago) right now and I find it strange how many Portlanders don't even agree on the state of downtown. I have a hard time discounting anyone's read of it who lives there because, well, I don't. You might find that episode interesting, it was Douglas's first time in Portland, Bret was talking to him about his read of things, and breathing many 'I'm not crazy' sighs of relief that Douglas was admitting that he only saw the state of the downtown area as it was on places like South Africa or India. It's bizarre enough where it's tempting to say that perhaps everyone is correct to some degree if they're coming at with different metrics for their assessments but then, like anything in the real world, it has to reconcile somewhere.

That was an interesting read and it makes sense. I guess deep down on some level we all sense that something really bad is in the making, maybe this was how people were feeling in between the first two World Wars? A sense that something wasn't right in the world?

But I'm not an expert on political matters. Sometimes I feel foolish for getting my facts mixed up. I'm just worried about the world and my country though.

From the outside (Australia), looking in, they seem to be taking a similar path to other (often left-wing) parties such as out "Labor Party". They have a historical "base" (such as working class people), which provides the majority of their support.

Over time, they seem to decide that they need to ensure more votes, and so move from policies which primarily support these "core" groups into other policies which appeal to additional groups, generally spending more effort to listen to these new groups rather than their original supporters. Unfortunately, sometimes these new policies are not in the best interests of the original core groups, and at some point, the "core" group realise this, and so migrate towards an alternative party which has better policies for them.

With the Democrats, beside the "deplorables" comments, you have policies which will negatively impact on certain states (fossil fuels\fracking), attacks on policing (defund, etc.) where it is the businesses\properties\communities of their "core" group being most affected, or having people who have more money than these supporters will ever see in their lives telling them how they should live, or how "lucky" they are.

The problem is, given you (effectively) have a single "right" and a single "left" wing party, each should be working to court the centre and those on the other side nearer the centre due to the unlikelihood of the outer extremes voting for the other party. The Republicans are reported as being (of late) "far" right, I believe, resulting in likely support from the outer and so meaning they can focus on policies which support the middle. The Democrats, however, instead of focussing on the centre, have decided to chase the votes for those further "left", lowering the focus towards the centre, and allowing it to be targetted almost unopposed by the Republicans.

Democrats tell us how blue states are wealthier.

So, they lose with progressive economics.

Their money is shifted to red states, like what happened with the progressive SALT taxes that many blue states fought against.

They seem to be at war with coherent reasoning and thinking - at least in any overt way. It then seems that what they give lip service to, and what they actually do, are two very different things. If they had any seriousness at all about the things they provisionally let on that they would be then AOC would be on a fast-track to the front. What was really fascinating was to watch the debates and see that the two people who likely got ignored, mismanages, even slandered the most (Yang and Gabbard) were probably the most lucid thinkers and overall people of integrity and vision and it was clear that that a large part of why they had no chance of advancing was precisely those attributes whereas anyone who has a garish grin, good jokes, the right kinds of forgetfulness, and a seeming capacity to divide anything they actually believed from what they said (a place were Julian Castro didn't seem to have a chance either) belonged out front.

It could be the old thing that ideas don't win - people and personalities do, possible but I can't think of many situations looking backward where I saw seniority so obviously beating merit on national TV.

I saw someone mention elsewhere that it seems like there is a shift underway, with the Democrats moving from the party of the working class into one for the "Elites", with the Republicans moving from the "Elites" to the working class, which does seem to fit in with the policies each party is presenting and those they are targetting\those coming out in support of each side.

Should this be the case, a form of "cognitive disonance", where people feel they need to support the party that historically represented their interests but may not be doing so now, and oppose a party which, while historically they saw as against their interests, is now trying to help them, would certainly explain a lot of the partisanship and tension occuring at present.

I'm convinced the only thing holding the Democratic party together is the utter trainwreck that is Donald J. Trump. Once he is gone the party will collapse under its own deep divisions.

I think that sounds like a bunch of nonsense conspiracy stuff...to me. And the only reason maybe they find quite a few black men signing on is some black men are like super social conservative. LIke there is more than race stuff in this country some people from more marginalized groups still join the status quo. Like for damn sure black lives matter, but that does not mean the black community is without issues and from what I hear sexism is a prelevant issue even in that community. I mean just look at Kanye sure he is a black artist, but he is also super sexist and that is problematic. I mean what kind of an a**hole says 'I almost killed my baby daughter' or whatever as an opening statement for running for presidency is like...'ok wow dude maybe get some therapy and learn some goddamn self control' perhaps if you are at the point you are almost murdering your baby children running for president isn't the brightest idea?.....huh.

Portland, Maine is usually the other Portland that comes to mind, but Maine is a solid blue state as well. One of their senators, Susan Collins, is a moderate Republican and doesn't like Trump. But even she is struggling, because she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh and acquit Trump in the impeachment trial.

There are many other Portlands.

I think you're quite right on a lot of this.

Unpacking your points above - the 'money' is moving to Silicone Valley as the technology changes. That money doesn't have reliance on labor because its promise is reduction of labor and even replacement with automation and AI. Having no sense of nobles oblige and treating people like they're disposable has been common when there's been a lot of labor but with this, ie. the near obsolescence of labor, it's coming closer to disappearing entirely.

On top of that you do have conservative talking heads being quite open-armed to defectors from that party, a good example where Tucker Carlson over the past few years has been sounding increasing like Jimmy Dore, all the while many left of center have just ramped up the dialog that if you do defect it's proof that you've really always wanted to parade around in sheets and burn crosses, or goose step in swastikas, all along and you're just doing what you wanted to do anyway. Doubling down and name-calling is really the language of power and it's power asserting itself when it's losing it's ammunition in the way of facts (that move then is something of a rash attempt to keep what they had while gaining what they didn't).

So maybe my initial read of this with a bit too much Chomsky-doom (and to be fair if I had to give a diagnosis of what seems to ail Noam Chomsky these days - he made many bold claims, many of them correct at the time, but he's stuck invested in defending most if not all of them all the way out - as famous thinkers and opinion leaders are wont to do).

What worries me a bit then - we might be without any clear conservative and liberal party to vote for.

Where that last point is an issue - Bret Weinstein and Douglas Murray had a great conversation about this and it's something that's struck me before but the idea is that you have liberal tendencies to explore untapped potentials and possibilities, you have conservative tendencies to do the accounting and tally up whether the change will be a net improvement, and having these forms of logic in dynamic tension with each other is critical for having a system that doesn't either clamp down on progress on one hand or lead us off the cliff while dreaming of a utopia on the other.

The trick is - can we keep that dynamic tension without any clear labeling?