Oh Look, A New Narrative from the Kremlin

Hey, remember when we were told that the Democratic Party was too focused on brown people and their "identity politics" to win a national election? 

Remember how it was time to reach out to white working-class voters instead?

Well things have changed. New orders have come in.

It looks like the Russian Federation has gotten a bit freaked by the election of Jones over Moore in Alabama. So their news, and their dupes and useful idiots in the West (like The Intercept), are working full-time to divide up the coalition which kept Moore out.

If you'll recall, back during our general election, the narrative that kept being pushed was that Bernie was the "people's" choice and the black women (who are a majority of the actual base of the Democratic Party in the United States) are irrelevant (because defacto their votes are worth less than those of rural, white, voters.1

That was then.

But now they lost Moore. So the new narrative being pushed is that "black women are being ignored by the Democratic Party." Which is true, but mightily rich coming from those sources. But the purpose of this new narrative is to divide the Democratic party. Before it was a matter of following the Bernie line of "Don't think in terms of identity politics, only care about the single abstract thing which matters to my white, educated base!" But now we're all about the identity politics because blacks and white liberals working together beat Moore.

So the new line is that the DNC only cares about white people. Not that it wasn't caring enough about them (which is how they lost the Electoral College.) Eastasia has always been our enemy, etc. 

And that, for both the Russian Federation, and their useful dupes and willing agents, simply will not do.


1. See the 3 million more votes that HRC received than DJT and yet still lost -- ).

Scumbag Parents

 
The Benghazi wrongful death lawsuit brought against Clinton has been dismissed.  

"Secretary Clinton did not portray plaintiffs as 'odious, infamous, or ridiculous...'" but I will. They used the death of their own child to score cheap political points in order to elect a racist puppet of a foreign regime.


Patricia Smith, the mother of State Department information officer Sean Smith, and Charles Woods, the father of CIA operative Tyrone Woods -- just what kind of parents are they? Ones more than happy to use the death of their own kids in order to make sure rich people get some tax breaks, that's who.

Your Guide to Breaking News

Trans Pacific Partnering

Here's an interesting take on the TPP.

But yeah. Looks like the Chinese won that one.

Race and the anti-class

"Identity politics" and the "political economy" is essentially the schism between Blacks and Whites in America.

Marx is pretty much the father of all modern thought on the political economy. Even anti-Marxists have to go over to Marx's house to pay respects before moving on to complain about his math, or how his analysis of the present system held up but his predictions for the future all fell apart. And mostly, ever since Marx, economists of the left and right have wanted to put everything under an economic header.

So things like racism and sexism were always put under economics, even by left-leaning economists. To them, racism and sexism exist to support the economic hierarchies. So we have to get rid of economic oppression before anybody can really be "free". And, in fact, sexism and racism are just part of capitalism and once we're rid of them everything will be just all right.

And, of course, this has turned into "If we fight sexism and racism and homophobia now, we're just wasting time because we really need to be fighting banks [or something]."

But my treason is thus: 

• Racism and sexism are completely unexplained by Marx or any other governing philosophy
• Homophobia: also unexplained by Marx.

Even Bernie Sanders has missed the bus on this one when he complained about "identity politics" and how he's sad the Democratic Party "can't talk to the white working class".

“One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics" -- Bernie Sanders

See, "beyond" means that we get to the "superior" thing which is the political economy. Or in other words, "what white people care about."*

Vox put it best when it said:

Sanders’s comments represent a flank of the Democratic party that partly blames Clinton’s loss on her strong embrace of race and gender issues, which could have turned off white male voters in particular. Meanwhile, the marginalized groups who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats fear being thrown under the bus, as they have many times before, so that the party can curry more favor with white Americans.

(This is where I put out that Sanders more often says things which contradict his quote above. He's coming along, albeit too slowly for my tastes.)

 

White progressives, well-versed in traditional left-wing notions of how workers trump (heh) women and blacks, are completely down with marginalizing a majority of the population as long as white men get good jobs. And that's because traditional leftism and actual anti-racism are mutually incompatible. 

 

It is increasingly clear that it was neither white economic anxiety operating in isolation nor the white working class as a monolithic group that won Trump the White House. Rather, it was the fact that Trump’s campaign, in an extension of at least five decades of Republican strategy, was able to use overt white racism and white racial resentment to exacerbate and manipulate misplaced anxieties about relative group power and privilege in American society.
Historically, to be white was to be the quintessential American. In the United States, whiteness also proceeds from an assumption that white people are always and forever to be dominant and consequently the most powerful of all racial groups. This is white identity politics as both a practice and ideology. It is also the not-so-subtle meaning of Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again!”

 

People aren't racist because it helps them economically. The capitalist ruling class isn't actually helped by racism (note the revolt among businessmen when Gingrich targeted affirmative action.) But there are a lot of racists. Most of these racists are on the right. But we ignore the racism on the left at our peril.

*I'm caveating that Sanders seems to be able to be talked out of this nonsense though. His hard-core supporters are a different matter.