I recall a conversation with a friend a few years ago when some of our friends were going woke left or antivax MAGA right … we were wondering if they’d return to normalcy. I still wonder.
I’ve held out hope my whole adult life that a viable third party would emerge to no avail. But if the right candidate could come along and say we want neither virtue signaling woke left or revenge-seeking reactionary right, maybe they’d build a real movement.
Fine piece! And that was one hard time you went through..glad you pulled through it though.
I think all 'ism's are traps. All movements get corrupted, twisted, deformed over time, as the darker human emotions take over and murder the inner purity. It's insane what feminism has deformed into in these modern times--an ugly, scowling, scheming Witch.
Best I think is to place your faith in the Divine within and the love of closed ones. Rest is pretty much a shrill, mad, bewildering clownshow.
I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about the shambolic DNC convention a few months ago (https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-dnc-implodes), but more notable than that are the terrible and extreme policies which are STILL being actively upheld and defended. It's very strange: no one explicitly argues that alleged migrant sex offenders should be protected from federal scrutiny or deportation, yet that is the policy in dozens of locations, and people who oppose the law are tarred as 'hateful' or motivated by fear (which is technically true I suppose... but so is the left). Gender ID as a matter for child custody in CO? Male sex offenders housed in women's prisons in a dozen different states? I could go on and on. These policies are rarely advertised, but they exist all the same.
Thanks for writing with great clarity this political trajectory. It's great you could help your parents and family, and I hope they are well. I also remember where I was around '07-'08, reading the news about the Lehman Brothers and the financial collapse in college and about to enter the workforce. I also followed my paternal attraction to Obama 1's energy and loved it, it gave comfort and clarity and a narrative that made sense, and later Bernie's principled leadership.
On Bernie: "His biggest sin was correctly identifying Clinton as a stooge of the financial industry, not because of misogyny, but because she was untrustworthy in comparison and refused to answer any substantive critique directly." Well said.
Instead of getting a MA History I taught abroad following my first degree, also from a state school, and not a top 50, nor 100. But I've received high-level education and good upbringing, fortunately, yet way outside the concentric circles of class, somewhere just stepping over the "lower-middle" line. I taught abroad and learned to code-switch in verbally-focused, quasi-xenophilic and expatish ways but without the clarity or desire of a career outside of "rogue teaching" [i.e. outside the American school networks], and never in a leftish elite-class way.
I never thought this would be a problem until I finally started a MA History in 2020 and was quite unsocialized to the narrowing university longhouse, but I tried to adapt. I tried but something in me was increasingly isolated and alive and wanted to fight back. Anyway, great writing. Some great lines and clarity here. I'm curious how we as a culture and a country keep moving out of this.
Yes, I finished the degree. Almost didn't. The achievement was worth it, but I don't think I connected with the right networks to advance how I wanted.
Thanks for writing this. So much to say, but 'Identitity Politics' or anything that requires to make it your 'identity' will lead to identitify confusion. Just look at all these children caught in the trans 'movement'. This may be their reality, just like what's reality on their phone at this instant, but it won't be in five minutes or five years from now. Immediacy + Idiotacracy = death of a civiliation.
The UniParty is legion but you still find left/right, dem/repubs, lib/conservatives, blue/red and on and on. It's a divide and conquer tactic that people continue to engage in and still works well enough to keep you on your side of the field.
What's the saying, "poltics is downstream of culture"...show me your "guy/gal" and I'll show you your friends and where you stand on just about anything. It's sad that many of my relatives were probably where you were twenty years ago, but more sad that they are still there. NYTs lifers that believe everything that's printed or published from it's barren bottom. They refuse to look at anything else. I don't watch/listen to MSM of any kind...been healthier for it.
About five years after 911 is when I started questioning everything...every.single.thing. I started to see patterns previously unrecognized in my media haze. When you understood that nothing really changes no matter who is in the WH, or your favorite congress critter is willing to sell you out for thirty pieces, then you begin to awaken to the fact that you have to get your own life order, prepare every neededful thing, get with like-minded friends, and work it all locally. No one is coming to save you in a secular/politcal sense. They are there to reap the rewards of their evil sowing. You see it all around you...people worshipping their own idols, including themselves.
At the end of the day, I'm a Believer...and doer, and know where my trust/faith is place and where it will matter in the longest run of all. Keep going...your words are motiviation!
Thank you! Re this: “What's the saying, "poltics is downstream of culture"...show me your "guy/gal" and I'll show you your friends and where you stand on just about anything.”
This is why I go after feminism, not the party, and after class rather than race or gender, because both class and ideology underpin friendships, and feminism is a default ideology of the educated. It keeps us from being doers, as you say.
An illuminating well written argument of your viewpoint. Agree with your description of the Dem's 2024 choice as "another empty pantsuit". Still, it was pantsuited Pelosi who got health insurance for 50 million Americans. The "bailout" to bankers was more a problem of horrible communication by the Dems. Every dollar of the "bailout" money to keep the financial system functioning was repaid to the U.S. Treasury, with interest. Great essay nevertheless. (Response from an aging carpenter)
I definitely recognize Pelosi’s role in pushing for the public action. I have to sometimes remind myself because of how often I’ve been angry about her since
I’ve always thought Sanders would have lost to Trump, probably by a more sizable margin than Clinton did. In a battle of two authentic-sounding populist New Yorkers for the Midwest and Florida, the one who stresses tax cuts and less immigration probably beats the avowed socialist whose young supporters cheer for single payer health coverage and free college.
Sanders’ and AOC’s focus on billionaires is a way in which they’re not radical enough (neither are most other Democrats). As good as it is to soak the rich, a Democrat who wants to win will have to slug the upper middle class, too, both economically and culturally.
I get where you’re coming from. My issue is that we should have gotten the chance. If he had lost, then I’d have been fine with never getting it again. But the working class agenda never has been given a chance to be tested. And the result of two women losing in a row, unfortunately, will be that people think women in general can’t win when the reality probably is that those two specific women couldn’t win. Agreed, we can’t just focus on billionaire as the top 10% are the ones hoarding opportunity and the most expensive and necessary goods like housing education and healthcare.
"The Democratic Party has systematically erased class politics in favor of symbolic gestures palatable to its credentialed donor base. We saw them double down on this in 2024, yielding the material to the MAGA movement. I squarely blame them for what happened, even as I look at the Trump show with horror."
I couldn't have said it better myself, despite having had plenty of practice yelling at Democrats that they were going to put Trump back in office.
Very well said, Anuadha. We need more people on the working class, including the Left, to abandon the Democrats and leave the Capitalist Duopoly entirely.
I must say, however, that as a class warrior, I do not support competition, i.e., the idea of a meritocracy defined by ways of qualified people fighting against each other to reach the "top" where only the most qualified of the qualified receive a job in this or that area. Instead, the way towards an economic democracy is *cooperation.* That means all qualified people receive a job doing what they do best, because there is no longer a "budget" limiting who can have a job or not. Working together is far better than working against each other. In this type of situation of high stakes competition, you tend to have the most ruthless and underhanded, and those who play office politics the best, rise to the top rather than the "most" qualified.
I do get your point, however. It needs to be about actual qualifications and not about who you know; what your politics are; and how good you are for optics.
Thanks Christopher. Practically speaking, I don’t see how we can get the right people on the job via cooperation; there will still be covert ways people will find (esp women because that’s the sort of system we prefer) to undermine fairness. In a system where we had unlimited budgets such a thing may happen, but in the current world it’s neither desirable nor do I see how it’s possible. Also, suppressing competition suppresses excellence; there’s still something intrinsically satisfying about doing the work, and if I’m better at it than the people around me, I want the rewards to reflect that or why bother?
I think with extreme competition and a limited budget that can only offer a few jobs to the qualified, you get far too many qualified people as losers. I don't think that level of high stakes competition produces excellence so much as a lot of frustration and people willing to do anything to get to the "top," which means all sorts of ethical compromises. That includes the office politics I mentioned.
You said: "there’s still something intrinsically satisfying about doing the work, and if I’m better at it than the people around me, I want the rewards to reflect that or why bother?"
The thing is, if there are numerous people who are good at what they do, then many who are good will be turned down due to a lack of "budget" and those who end up getting the jobs are too often those who are not the "best" at the work itself but those who play office politics the best. As noted above, we get a plethora of talented people who worked hard but get nowhere not because they cannot do the job, but because there simply wasn't enough jobs for the "budget" to pay for. That shows that a system that runs on money can never be one where those with the most merits benefit. Instead, those with the right connections, talent for manipulation, and with the best luck tend to get the best opportunities.
Good food for thought. Your insights do seem to mirror those of my children, who are your age. I don't know enough about the 'too feminine' angle here to truly argue it. I accept that you reached your conclusion about too much feminine perspective in the Democratic Party honestly and in good faith.
I will only say this about that. Watch the show Mad Men. My generation of women are pretty bitter about and scarred by how mid-century American culture treated us as we tried to enter the workforce. The comment about being tired of Bernie Bros threatening to rape them highlights the fact that for many of older women, we will never be shed of the perception of men in the workforce or other power structures being physically dangerous at worst and exclusionary at best. This is not to say we can't change our minds or that we are dead set on excluding men. But it does say there is some context to our wariness of men and their motives.
But the Democratic Party is absolutely what I would call corporate. It is betraying the working class and has been for a very long time. The working class called them out on this by voting for Trump. Working class voters may not be sophisticated, by they are not stupid.
Democrats must return to the political positioning and mindset of FDR. He came from the pinnacle of the upper class, but he joyfully stabbed that class in the back and embraced the working people of this country. I want the Democrats to protect FDR's New Deal using the very same kind of political fire he did and that Sanders does now. How can Democrats ignore the rapturous response Sanders is getting?
Democrats need to do as FDR did. FDR said many times that he 'welcomed' the moneyed class's hatred of him. It meant he was doing something right. We need to throw our rich donors overboard and get with the working class program. I'll be damned if I'll send them any more small donations to the DNC now that I know the party only listens to the rich donors who are not my friend.
Thank you for reading Cynthia and I get where you’re coming from. When your generation entered the workforce, the norms were masculine and I have indeed seen Mad Men. Presuming that’s close to accurate, I can imagine how awful it was.
Much like when white people find it unfair to be held responsible for the racial sins of generations past, I feel as though women of my generation are often not believed when we say that things are terrible; it is thus because women my age and one generation above have grown up with this massive sense of entitlement to special favors for being women. We’ve simultaneously been told we can be bosses and that we’re children who should never have to be accountable for our actions, and that’s created some really insufferable attitudes for someone like me to tolerate.
Today’s feminism is psychological and social, not political. Abortion is nominally a political demand but there’s nothing else material on the agenda as you have also noted re: democrats. It is a totalizing ideology that taught me to be fragile and provides a moral cover for mean girl behavior. The behaviors we’ve evolved to display like covert sabotage of other women haven’t been eradicated by feminism, though they should have been if the sisterhood was real. The behaviors went underground and now you can’t even question them unless you want to be accused of not supporting women.
The biggest lie I’ve uncovered as an adult is that of the sisterhood. Where I wanted open competition and meritorious consideration, all I got was exploitation and social consequences for having a personality deviant from most women.
While I empathize with your experience and know it was true, the world is entirely different right now and that feminism isn’t today’s. Men are not like that anymore.
I am Anuradha's age and see what you are saying. A lot of boomer women are understandably scarred by egregious injustices that happened during their formative years. I can't take that pain away from them -- they have a right to have whatever reaction they have to their experiences.
The other side of it is that I can't take that pain away from them -- I wasn't even around when the experiences in question generally happened, so how can I rightly be expected to compensate them for their wounds?
The left needs to handle this nuance better. People who have been victimized for a variety of reasons including but not limited to gender have a right to express their pain and should not be told to just shut up. However, there has to be a way to do this that doesn't cross the line into punishing others who weren't even involved in the original grievance.
💯 Thanks for the good post. There are multiple ways for us to thread this needle without trying to compensate each other for our trauma. As you say, this is not actually possible. However, we can be empathetic and open to how individual experiences color and nuance individual perspectives.
A lot of this issue goes away when we avoid generalizations and have meaningful conversations about the specific challenges we are dealing with in our own inner lives. We should all recognize and interrogate whether we’re playing out a script that no longer fits and whether that script is helping the cause or hurting the cause.
Then, let’s men and women both agree to work as an effective team to achieve the common, universal goals we all have politically, culturally, socially, etc. Men per se are not the enemy. Women per se are not the enemy. We are all people in the world dealing with our own crap.
Those who subvert our strategy into an all women v. all men choice are not helping to achieve progress. Distinguishing between verifiable facts on the ground today and the script in our head is very helpful. That takes an open mind and some challenging conversations.
We should identify the pain that is there and figure out how to transcend it together. Perhaps we can figure out how to synthesize our different experiences into actionable political strategies. For instance, I think us old veterans of the ‘battle of the sexes’ have some visceral knowledge about what can go wrong in what I call “Man World” (use a deep movie trailer voice to say that) that might be helpful to our cause. But we should never assume that is necessarily all there is to the matter. We need newer perspectives as our cohort of men is starting to fade from the scene.
But Donald J Trump is the poster boy for what is wrong with how some men act. And these guys are extremely physically dangerous to women. Trump is actively perpetuating the kind of male dominance we are very familiar with. Look at the abortion situation as an example. Those of us who have been through the wars took one look at Trump in 2015 and thought “there is a man who will ruin your life and never look back”. We were not one bit surprised at the rollback of abortion rights.
I welcome all good men, who outnumber the bad guys, to visibly rally to our side. I want them to get in other men’s faces and denounce the systematic oppression of women because it is the right thing to do. That kind of political solidarity matters.
We can do this. I actually don’t think it is particularly complicated or hard. It requires building bridges between individuals via personal interaction and connection. Not to be silly, but I am reminded of the Planet of the Apes movie:
Warren first made waves during the Great Recession: holding WS accountable, consumer protection, etc. There's a video somewhere of her grilling HRC in a green room, questioning HRCs unabashed move to NY Senator, WS malfeasance, letting the working class languish, etc. Fast fwd a few years: new haircut, new pantsuits, new vids 'drinkin a beer' in a multi million $ home in the toniest of Cambridge neighborhoods, total rollover to the DNC/MA D machine and all it entails (Bernie bashing, TDS, etc). Ed Markey did the same thing...these folks are ghouls...meat puppets dressed up as human beings. NOTHING but pod people. Their 'policies' have little substance, if any: they are power/$$ mad and wholly owned by the donor class; and they sold out ordinary American citizens in order to access the highest echelons of the PMC.
If The Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good in determining whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Note how protesters of the Civil Rights movement, people who did genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor's dogs, only to end up as self-serving machine politicians. Note how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered, becoming tenure-seeking academics bleating about "changing the system from within the system"
Yeah, I'm with you. She would be President if I were the only voter.
Although I noted you used the past tense in the essay when discussing her. Other than the fact that she's an insider at heart - she only ran for office when Obama stiffed her for the CFPB job and they offered her the Senate seat to go quietly - and thus not going to abandon the party, is there a reason you're less of a fan now?
When she claimed that Bernie said a woman couldn’t be president and when her campaign threw a tantrum about Bernie’s campaign saying that her constituency is wealthy educated white people - these two instances of infantile behavior lost me forever.
Yeah, that was ugly. I remember when it came out, because I knew it was going to go terribly for her. Her staff had a lot of Democratic big shots on it, and I wondered if that was the problem: those people HATE Bernie. But at the end of the day, she's responsible for what they do.
I've been close to political consultants and spent a decade in a "community" of professional Democrats. Can confirm that you're right - they control the narrative more than the candidate, very often.
There is some progress on removing requirements for credentials on job postings, for what that’s worth. My company (financial services) removed degree requirements from nearly all jobs 4 or 5 years ago. Our prior CEO was a woman from a family of police officers who had a bachelors in an irrelevant field and had started in the call center.
I personally also believe it should all be about demonstrated competence, and almost no one cared about anyone’s degree even before the formal removal of it from postings. The toughest part is getting your 1st job if you don’t have credentials.
Removing requirements for credentials is actually seen as a DEI move by many because it particularly boosts blacks and Hispanics; it’s still the right thing to do because it’s the right policy.
You’d be shocked at how the woke and feminist contort themselves into illogical knots to refute this argument. I’ve made the exact one to people invested in this as a logical extension of their own program and they claimed that it would actually reverse all the progress we’ve made for women and people of color. Presumably because competition would be more open.
I tried to push back hard against unnecessary degree requirements at my last org when I was asked to rewrite my own job description. I ran into a different kind of HR logic: my supervisor explained that a degree requirement allowed the hiring manager to offer a higher salary. Apparently unexamined was the implication that pay should reflect the credentials of the worker rather than the work being done.
Convincing ourselves of virtue… this is the biggest thing I see. Our local city council member in NYC just posted about the importance of having an “anti-capitalist” policy agenda… she represents Bushwick / Cypress Hills in Brooklyn (super far left). I chuckled to myself like, “what does it mean to have an anti capitalist policy agenda in our neighborhood?” As a small business owner who helps other people start small businesses of their own, I was kind of bewildered. I think we need more investment in the neighborhood. More money coming in. More people climbing the ladder… along with a bunch of practical things like less trash, good schools, safe streets, etc… But alas! The priority for our neighborhood is anti capitalism.
Apparently now some in the DNC want to remove David Hogg as Vice Chair because he's a white male and they don't have the right proportion of representation among their leadership. Regardless of your opinion of Hogg, this is idiotic.
And declaring you're anti-capitalist is really a move to gather symbolic moral capital (ironically) among your peers; I mostly hear this from women in my cohort these days. Something something capitalism. Nothing really of substance.
Once you understand that Team D is the political manifestation of the class consciousness of the PMC, with various grievance groups as junior partners, while Team R plays a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, with white evangelicals as sidekicks, everything they do makes total sense.
To give an example: when goodthink liberals say "Defund The Police!(R)" what they mean is "take money from the undeserving (blue-collar cops, mostly less educated and famously unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar degreed social workers who can be counted on if nothing else to uphold up-to-the-minute standards of Political Correctness).
It’s always about being slightly kinder to those not in the ruling class- never about actually shifting the balance of power so workers are able to have a greater say in their daily lives or giving them the means to have some actual economic and personal self-direction.
The proposed solutions to the wages are guard rails like minimum wage instead of sectoral bargaining agreements or greater worker ownership in their company. Reforms to healthcare are usually designed to maintain some form tiered healthcare system: either subsidies or a public option so that the quality of healthcare you can afford is depends on your employer.
Or with universities: even Bernie only went as far as to say we should have free public colleges, but not get rid of private universities generally. As long as education is used as a class signifier, it will continue to get worse.
Note also that none of the performative wokeness changes the way the economic pie gets sliced.
In fact, the unspoken assumption is that, as a natural aristocracy of taste, morals and education, it is only fitting and natural that the PMC appropriate for themselves the lion's share of The Goodies. The rubes would probably spend that money on Billy The Big mouth Bass replicas or unlicensed Trump memorabilia or something.
iPhones and TVs, don’t ya know. And the other funny thing about this is that those exact same people will call you immoral for pointing out that single motherhood isn’t actually good for children or society. It is never consistent.
I remember at one of the protests in the summer of 2020- I think it was New York- the protesters were mocking the cops there for their lack of elite education, while they touted their own credentials in a smug display of superiority. I remember thinking at the time "Is this what the left has come to?" No class solidarity, only condescension towards those they see as below them? Seems this was more emblematic than I suspected at the time.
People who don't declare themselves in allegiance simply get no grace or assumption of humanity. In fact, feminism/progressivism/wokeism denies what makes us human: the faculty of reason.
And yet the Democrats have learned nothing. Their new big 'star' is AOC. Nuh-uh. Get set for a very long MAGA reign, folks.
The best I can say about her is she's under 70.
I recall a conversation with a friend a few years ago when some of our friends were going woke left or antivax MAGA right … we were wondering if they’d return to normalcy. I still wonder.
I’ve held out hope my whole adult life that a viable third party would emerge to no avail. But if the right candidate could come along and say we want neither virtue signaling woke left or revenge-seeking reactionary right, maybe they’d build a real movement.
Or at least they’d be big on Substack. ☺️
Fine piece! And that was one hard time you went through..glad you pulled through it though.
I think all 'ism's are traps. All movements get corrupted, twisted, deformed over time, as the darker human emotions take over and murder the inner purity. It's insane what feminism has deformed into in these modern times--an ugly, scowling, scheming Witch.
Best I think is to place your faith in the Divine within and the love of closed ones. Rest is pretty much a shrill, mad, bewildering clownshow.
Thanks for reading and welcome to my corner
I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about the shambolic DNC convention a few months ago (https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-dnc-implodes), but more notable than that are the terrible and extreme policies which are STILL being actively upheld and defended. It's very strange: no one explicitly argues that alleged migrant sex offenders should be protected from federal scrutiny or deportation, yet that is the policy in dozens of locations, and people who oppose the law are tarred as 'hateful' or motivated by fear (which is technically true I suppose... but so is the left). Gender ID as a matter for child custody in CO? Male sex offenders housed in women's prisons in a dozen different states? I could go on and on. These policies are rarely advertised, but they exist all the same.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-dnc-implodes
Thanks for writing with great clarity this political trajectory. It's great you could help your parents and family, and I hope they are well. I also remember where I was around '07-'08, reading the news about the Lehman Brothers and the financial collapse in college and about to enter the workforce. I also followed my paternal attraction to Obama 1's energy and loved it, it gave comfort and clarity and a narrative that made sense, and later Bernie's principled leadership.
On Bernie: "His biggest sin was correctly identifying Clinton as a stooge of the financial industry, not because of misogyny, but because she was untrustworthy in comparison and refused to answer any substantive critique directly." Well said.
Instead of getting a MA History I taught abroad following my first degree, also from a state school, and not a top 50, nor 100. But I've received high-level education and good upbringing, fortunately, yet way outside the concentric circles of class, somewhere just stepping over the "lower-middle" line. I taught abroad and learned to code-switch in verbally-focused, quasi-xenophilic and expatish ways but without the clarity or desire of a career outside of "rogue teaching" [i.e. outside the American school networks], and never in a leftish elite-class way.
I never thought this would be a problem until I finally started a MA History in 2020 and was quite unsocialized to the narrowing university longhouse, but I tried to adapt. I tried but something in me was increasingly isolated and alive and wanted to fight back. Anyway, great writing. Some great lines and clarity here. I'm curious how we as a culture and a country keep moving out of this.
Sanders' biggest sin was in disrupting The Coronation. Who the hell did he think he was?
Thanks Anthony! So curious, did you finish the degree?
Yes, I finished the degree. Almost didn't. The achievement was worth it, but I don't think I connected with the right networks to advance how I wanted.
Thanks for writing this. So much to say, but 'Identitity Politics' or anything that requires to make it your 'identity' will lead to identitify confusion. Just look at all these children caught in the trans 'movement'. This may be their reality, just like what's reality on their phone at this instant, but it won't be in five minutes or five years from now. Immediacy + Idiotacracy = death of a civiliation.
The UniParty is legion but you still find left/right, dem/repubs, lib/conservatives, blue/red and on and on. It's a divide and conquer tactic that people continue to engage in and still works well enough to keep you on your side of the field.
What's the saying, "poltics is downstream of culture"...show me your "guy/gal" and I'll show you your friends and where you stand on just about anything. It's sad that many of my relatives were probably where you were twenty years ago, but more sad that they are still there. NYTs lifers that believe everything that's printed or published from it's barren bottom. They refuse to look at anything else. I don't watch/listen to MSM of any kind...been healthier for it.
About five years after 911 is when I started questioning everything...every.single.thing. I started to see patterns previously unrecognized in my media haze. When you understood that nothing really changes no matter who is in the WH, or your favorite congress critter is willing to sell you out for thirty pieces, then you begin to awaken to the fact that you have to get your own life order, prepare every neededful thing, get with like-minded friends, and work it all locally. No one is coming to save you in a secular/politcal sense. They are there to reap the rewards of their evil sowing. You see it all around you...people worshipping their own idols, including themselves.
At the end of the day, I'm a Believer...and doer, and know where my trust/faith is place and where it will matter in the longest run of all. Keep going...your words are motiviation!
Thank you! Re this: “What's the saying, "poltics is downstream of culture"...show me your "guy/gal" and I'll show you your friends and where you stand on just about anything.”
This is why I go after feminism, not the party, and after class rather than race or gender, because both class and ideology underpin friendships, and feminism is a default ideology of the educated. It keeps us from being doers, as you say.
When Obama secured the nomination, my mom said, “Turns out we’d rather elect a black person than a woman.”
I replied, “I think it’s just that we’d rather elect a person than Hillary.”
I didn’t register the hilarity of this until just now
An illuminating well written argument of your viewpoint. Agree with your description of the Dem's 2024 choice as "another empty pantsuit". Still, it was pantsuited Pelosi who got health insurance for 50 million Americans. The "bailout" to bankers was more a problem of horrible communication by the Dems. Every dollar of the "bailout" money to keep the financial system functioning was repaid to the U.S. Treasury, with interest. Great essay nevertheless. (Response from an aging carpenter)
I definitely recognize Pelosi’s role in pushing for the public action. I have to sometimes remind myself because of how often I’ve been angry about her since
I’ve always thought Sanders would have lost to Trump, probably by a more sizable margin than Clinton did. In a battle of two authentic-sounding populist New Yorkers for the Midwest and Florida, the one who stresses tax cuts and less immigration probably beats the avowed socialist whose young supporters cheer for single payer health coverage and free college.
Sanders’ and AOC’s focus on billionaires is a way in which they’re not radical enough (neither are most other Democrats). As good as it is to soak the rich, a Democrat who wants to win will have to slug the upper middle class, too, both economically and culturally.
I get where you’re coming from. My issue is that we should have gotten the chance. If he had lost, then I’d have been fine with never getting it again. But the working class agenda never has been given a chance to be tested. And the result of two women losing in a row, unfortunately, will be that people think women in general can’t win when the reality probably is that those two specific women couldn’t win. Agreed, we can’t just focus on billionaire as the top 10% are the ones hoarding opportunity and the most expensive and necessary goods like housing education and healthcare.
"The Democratic Party has systematically erased class politics in favor of symbolic gestures palatable to its credentialed donor base. We saw them double down on this in 2024, yielding the material to the MAGA movement. I squarely blame them for what happened, even as I look at the Trump show with horror."
I couldn't have said it better myself, despite having had plenty of practice yelling at Democrats that they were going to put Trump back in office.
Very well said, Anuadha. We need more people on the working class, including the Left, to abandon the Democrats and leave the Capitalist Duopoly entirely.
I must say, however, that as a class warrior, I do not support competition, i.e., the idea of a meritocracy defined by ways of qualified people fighting against each other to reach the "top" where only the most qualified of the qualified receive a job in this or that area. Instead, the way towards an economic democracy is *cooperation.* That means all qualified people receive a job doing what they do best, because there is no longer a "budget" limiting who can have a job or not. Working together is far better than working against each other. In this type of situation of high stakes competition, you tend to have the most ruthless and underhanded, and those who play office politics the best, rise to the top rather than the "most" qualified.
I do get your point, however. It needs to be about actual qualifications and not about who you know; what your politics are; and how good you are for optics.
Thanks Christopher. Practically speaking, I don’t see how we can get the right people on the job via cooperation; there will still be covert ways people will find (esp women because that’s the sort of system we prefer) to undermine fairness. In a system where we had unlimited budgets such a thing may happen, but in the current world it’s neither desirable nor do I see how it’s possible. Also, suppressing competition suppresses excellence; there’s still something intrinsically satisfying about doing the work, and if I’m better at it than the people around me, I want the rewards to reflect that or why bother?
I think with extreme competition and a limited budget that can only offer a few jobs to the qualified, you get far too many qualified people as losers. I don't think that level of high stakes competition produces excellence so much as a lot of frustration and people willing to do anything to get to the "top," which means all sorts of ethical compromises. That includes the office politics I mentioned.
You said: "there’s still something intrinsically satisfying about doing the work, and if I’m better at it than the people around me, I want the rewards to reflect that or why bother?"
The thing is, if there are numerous people who are good at what they do, then many who are good will be turned down due to a lack of "budget" and those who end up getting the jobs are too often those who are not the "best" at the work itself but those who play office politics the best. As noted above, we get a plethora of talented people who worked hard but get nowhere not because they cannot do the job, but because there simply wasn't enough jobs for the "budget" to pay for. That shows that a system that runs on money can never be one where those with the most merits benefit. Instead, those with the right connections, talent for manipulation, and with the best luck tend to get the best opportunities.
Good food for thought. Your insights do seem to mirror those of my children, who are your age. I don't know enough about the 'too feminine' angle here to truly argue it. I accept that you reached your conclusion about too much feminine perspective in the Democratic Party honestly and in good faith.
I will only say this about that. Watch the show Mad Men. My generation of women are pretty bitter about and scarred by how mid-century American culture treated us as we tried to enter the workforce. The comment about being tired of Bernie Bros threatening to rape them highlights the fact that for many of older women, we will never be shed of the perception of men in the workforce or other power structures being physically dangerous at worst and exclusionary at best. This is not to say we can't change our minds or that we are dead set on excluding men. But it does say there is some context to our wariness of men and their motives.
But the Democratic Party is absolutely what I would call corporate. It is betraying the working class and has been for a very long time. The working class called them out on this by voting for Trump. Working class voters may not be sophisticated, by they are not stupid.
Democrats must return to the political positioning and mindset of FDR. He came from the pinnacle of the upper class, but he joyfully stabbed that class in the back and embraced the working people of this country. I want the Democrats to protect FDR's New Deal using the very same kind of political fire he did and that Sanders does now. How can Democrats ignore the rapturous response Sanders is getting?
Democrats need to do as FDR did. FDR said many times that he 'welcomed' the moneyed class's hatred of him. It meant he was doing something right. We need to throw our rich donors overboard and get with the working class program. I'll be damned if I'll send them any more small donations to the DNC now that I know the party only listens to the rich donors who are not my friend.
Thank you for reading Cynthia and I get where you’re coming from. When your generation entered the workforce, the norms were masculine and I have indeed seen Mad Men. Presuming that’s close to accurate, I can imagine how awful it was.
Much like when white people find it unfair to be held responsible for the racial sins of generations past, I feel as though women of my generation are often not believed when we say that things are terrible; it is thus because women my age and one generation above have grown up with this massive sense of entitlement to special favors for being women. We’ve simultaneously been told we can be bosses and that we’re children who should never have to be accountable for our actions, and that’s created some really insufferable attitudes for someone like me to tolerate.
Today’s feminism is psychological and social, not political. Abortion is nominally a political demand but there’s nothing else material on the agenda as you have also noted re: democrats. It is a totalizing ideology that taught me to be fragile and provides a moral cover for mean girl behavior. The behaviors we’ve evolved to display like covert sabotage of other women haven’t been eradicated by feminism, though they should have been if the sisterhood was real. The behaviors went underground and now you can’t even question them unless you want to be accused of not supporting women.
The biggest lie I’ve uncovered as an adult is that of the sisterhood. Where I wanted open competition and meritorious consideration, all I got was exploitation and social consequences for having a personality deviant from most women.
While I empathize with your experience and know it was true, the world is entirely different right now and that feminism isn’t today’s. Men are not like that anymore.
I am Anuradha's age and see what you are saying. A lot of boomer women are understandably scarred by egregious injustices that happened during their formative years. I can't take that pain away from them -- they have a right to have whatever reaction they have to their experiences.
The other side of it is that I can't take that pain away from them -- I wasn't even around when the experiences in question generally happened, so how can I rightly be expected to compensate them for their wounds?
The left needs to handle this nuance better. People who have been victimized for a variety of reasons including but not limited to gender have a right to express their pain and should not be told to just shut up. However, there has to be a way to do this that doesn't cross the line into punishing others who weren't even involved in the original grievance.
💯 Thanks for the good post. There are multiple ways for us to thread this needle without trying to compensate each other for our trauma. As you say, this is not actually possible. However, we can be empathetic and open to how individual experiences color and nuance individual perspectives.
A lot of this issue goes away when we avoid generalizations and have meaningful conversations about the specific challenges we are dealing with in our own inner lives. We should all recognize and interrogate whether we’re playing out a script that no longer fits and whether that script is helping the cause or hurting the cause.
Then, let’s men and women both agree to work as an effective team to achieve the common, universal goals we all have politically, culturally, socially, etc. Men per se are not the enemy. Women per se are not the enemy. We are all people in the world dealing with our own crap.
Those who subvert our strategy into an all women v. all men choice are not helping to achieve progress. Distinguishing between verifiable facts on the ground today and the script in our head is very helpful. That takes an open mind and some challenging conversations.
We should identify the pain that is there and figure out how to transcend it together. Perhaps we can figure out how to synthesize our different experiences into actionable political strategies. For instance, I think us old veterans of the ‘battle of the sexes’ have some visceral knowledge about what can go wrong in what I call “Man World” (use a deep movie trailer voice to say that) that might be helpful to our cause. But we should never assume that is necessarily all there is to the matter. We need newer perspectives as our cohort of men is starting to fade from the scene.
But Donald J Trump is the poster boy for what is wrong with how some men act. And these guys are extremely physically dangerous to women. Trump is actively perpetuating the kind of male dominance we are very familiar with. Look at the abortion situation as an example. Those of us who have been through the wars took one look at Trump in 2015 and thought “there is a man who will ruin your life and never look back”. We were not one bit surprised at the rollback of abortion rights.
I welcome all good men, who outnumber the bad guys, to visibly rally to our side. I want them to get in other men’s faces and denounce the systematic oppression of women because it is the right thing to do. That kind of political solidarity matters.
We can do this. I actually don’t think it is particularly complicated or hard. It requires building bridges between individuals via personal interaction and connection. Not to be silly, but I am reminded of the Planet of the Apes movie:
“Apes together strong”.
I don’t think man’s world actually exists anymore. Where do you see it?
Gawd...Warren. What a despicable trashcan of a human being she is.
tell me more
Warren first made waves during the Great Recession: holding WS accountable, consumer protection, etc. There's a video somewhere of her grilling HRC in a green room, questioning HRCs unabashed move to NY Senator, WS malfeasance, letting the working class languish, etc. Fast fwd a few years: new haircut, new pantsuits, new vids 'drinkin a beer' in a multi million $ home in the toniest of Cambridge neighborhoods, total rollover to the DNC/MA D machine and all it entails (Bernie bashing, TDS, etc). Ed Markey did the same thing...these folks are ghouls...meat puppets dressed up as human beings. NOTHING but pod people. Their 'policies' have little substance, if any: they are power/$$ mad and wholly owned by the donor class; and they sold out ordinary American citizens in order to access the highest echelons of the PMC.
If The Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good in determining whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Note how protesters of the Civil Rights movement, people who did genuinely heroic things, they faced down Bull Connor's dogs, only to end up as self-serving machine politicians. Note how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered, becoming tenure-seeking academics bleating about "changing the system from within the system"
Yeah, I'm with you. She would be President if I were the only voter.
Although I noted you used the past tense in the essay when discussing her. Other than the fact that she's an insider at heart - she only ran for office when Obama stiffed her for the CFPB job and they offered her the Senate seat to go quietly - and thus not going to abandon the party, is there a reason you're less of a fan now?
When she claimed that Bernie said a woman couldn’t be president and when her campaign threw a tantrum about Bernie’s campaign saying that her constituency is wealthy educated white people - these two instances of infantile behavior lost me forever.
Yeah, that was ugly. I remember when it came out, because I knew it was going to go terribly for her. Her staff had a lot of Democratic big shots on it, and I wondered if that was the problem: those people HATE Bernie. But at the end of the day, she's responsible for what they do.
You have it backwards. They are responsible for what she does. Which IS the problem.
I've been close to political consultants and spent a decade in a "community" of professional Democrats. Can confirm that you're right - they control the narrative more than the candidate, very often.
There is some progress on removing requirements for credentials on job postings, for what that’s worth. My company (financial services) removed degree requirements from nearly all jobs 4 or 5 years ago. Our prior CEO was a woman from a family of police officers who had a bachelors in an irrelevant field and had started in the call center.
I personally also believe it should all be about demonstrated competence, and almost no one cared about anyone’s degree even before the formal removal of it from postings. The toughest part is getting your 1st job if you don’t have credentials.
Removing requirements for credentials is actually seen as a DEI move by many because it particularly boosts blacks and Hispanics; it’s still the right thing to do because it’s the right policy.
You’d be shocked at how the woke and feminist contort themselves into illogical knots to refute this argument. I’ve made the exact one to people invested in this as a logical extension of their own program and they claimed that it would actually reverse all the progress we’ve made for women and people of color. Presumably because competition would be more open.
I tried to push back hard against unnecessary degree requirements at my last org when I was asked to rewrite my own job description. I ran into a different kind of HR logic: my supervisor explained that a degree requirement allowed the hiring manager to offer a higher salary. Apparently unexamined was the implication that pay should reflect the credentials of the worker rather than the work being done.
And that’s standard HR logic for you. And Hr is 70% female, so what does that say about that sector’s commitment to equality of opportunity
You mean HR lack of logic, right?
Convincing ourselves of virtue… this is the biggest thing I see. Our local city council member in NYC just posted about the importance of having an “anti-capitalist” policy agenda… she represents Bushwick / Cypress Hills in Brooklyn (super far left). I chuckled to myself like, “what does it mean to have an anti capitalist policy agenda in our neighborhood?” As a small business owner who helps other people start small businesses of their own, I was kind of bewildered. I think we need more investment in the neighborhood. More money coming in. More people climbing the ladder… along with a bunch of practical things like less trash, good schools, safe streets, etc… But alas! The priority for our neighborhood is anti capitalism.
Bushwick is about as far 'left' as Madison Ave. Artisnal mayonnaise boutiques and day spas ARE capitalism.
How dare you want trash picked up on your streets! Or people to actually get good jobs! White supremacist! Redneck! Trotsky sympathizer!
Brooklyn...the Portland (OR) of the EC.
Having lived in NYC (though Queens, the best borough!) and now PDX, can confirm!
I was born in Queens (Flushing) but alas, grew up in north Florida
Apparently now some in the DNC want to remove David Hogg as Vice Chair because he's a white male and they don't have the right proportion of representation among their leadership. Regardless of your opinion of Hogg, this is idiotic.
That’s honestly amazing because Hogg is the least harmful white man they could have chosen. He utterly lacks any masculine presence.
This comment made me LOL. While not super helpful, the term "beta male" does capture something (especially here in Portland, OR)... :D
I hate to say it but leftist men are often that. They are useful idiots for authoritarian feminism.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/3396846/david-hogg-dnc-vice-chairperson-discrimination-kalyn-free-challenge-election/
And declaring you're anti-capitalist is really a move to gather symbolic moral capital (ironically) among your peers; I mostly hear this from women in my cohort these days. Something something capitalism. Nothing really of substance.
Once you understand that Team D is the political manifestation of the class consciousness of the PMC, with various grievance groups as junior partners, while Team R plays a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, with white evangelicals as sidekicks, everything they do makes total sense.
To give an example: when goodthink liberals say "Defund The Police!(R)" what they mean is "take money from the undeserving (blue-collar cops, mostly less educated and famously unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar degreed social workers who can be counted on if nothing else to uphold up-to-the-minute standards of Political Correctness).
It’s always about being slightly kinder to those not in the ruling class- never about actually shifting the balance of power so workers are able to have a greater say in their daily lives or giving them the means to have some actual economic and personal self-direction.
The proposed solutions to the wages are guard rails like minimum wage instead of sectoral bargaining agreements or greater worker ownership in their company. Reforms to healthcare are usually designed to maintain some form tiered healthcare system: either subsidies or a public option so that the quality of healthcare you can afford is depends on your employer.
Or with universities: even Bernie only went as far as to say we should have free public colleges, but not get rid of private universities generally. As long as education is used as a class signifier, it will continue to get worse.
I believe that Sallust said that few humans really want freedom. What they want are kinder masters.
"The cat is free and will never consent to be a slave..."-Rousseau
Note also that none of the performative wokeness changes the way the economic pie gets sliced.
In fact, the unspoken assumption is that, as a natural aristocracy of taste, morals and education, it is only fitting and natural that the PMC appropriate for themselves the lion's share of The Goodies. The rubes would probably spend that money on Billy The Big mouth Bass replicas or unlicensed Trump memorabilia or something.
I couldn’t have said this better.
Thank you for the kind words.
I’m partial to smart kitties. 🐈⬛
Two of mine don’t know their names but one does and you can tell he’s the one “thinking”
"Voting against their own interests". One of the most arrogant takes ever.
Amen! Anytime I hear someone earnestly say that, I am tempted to shout, “Who the hell are you tell people what their interests are?!”
iPhones and TVs, don’t ya know. And the other funny thing about this is that those exact same people will call you immoral for pointing out that single motherhood isn’t actually good for children or society. It is never consistent.
And they all bought Teslas awhile back....watching those heads explode is quite the entertainment
I remember at one of the protests in the summer of 2020- I think it was New York- the protesters were mocking the cops there for their lack of elite education, while they touted their own credentials in a smug display of superiority. I remember thinking at the time "Is this what the left has come to?" No class solidarity, only condescension towards those they see as below them? Seems this was more emblematic than I suspected at the time.
Indeed. This is all I see around me these days. The only class solidarity is to the other educated peers with corporate jobs.
People who don't declare themselves in allegiance simply get no grace or assumption of humanity. In fact, feminism/progressivism/wokeism denies what makes us human: the faculty of reason.
They should try being cats, if only they were open to the experience.