Original Article: The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 10:22 PM
NotARepublican Emporium Hillary represents as an ideal the educated professional, feminist and cosmopolitan in outlook--liberal individualism: something that tasks the mind to achieve. Sanders may be more each of us as brothers and sisters, common identity, where it's easy to imagine it being about mental slippage.
Original Article: Our terrified hyperpatriots: Here’s what Palin, Trump and anti-Muslim extremists fear most
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 9:41 PM
This article doesn't seem so much concerned about the hyper-patriots as liberals who might potentially be slipping. It shores up and warns. The (German) Left's response to the recent episode in Cologne was that the sexism you saw on display there was no different than it is amongst non-migrants. "Cologne" shouldn't direct you so much to target migrants' "culture," but sexism in general in society. And hearing this, the outrageous silliness of it, the German middle class got that much closer to desisting in their enjoyment in being deemed worthy for their cosmopolitan, progressive outlook, for beginning to want someone to take a closer look at the ostensible facts behind the Leftists' case for equivalence.
Original Article: The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 8:20 PM
It is possible that after a great sacrificial war (WW2) and a debilitating Depression, we're still only going to allow ourselves so much permission. Following that, it is not a matter of savvy compromise but a reflection of how much many of us liberals are still uncomfortable with ongoing growth, that we needed to ensure some groups got a beating (1980 and after) while genuine progress did persist ahead. These groups "contain" projections of our weak, vulnerable childhood selves, and by giving them the beating we increasingly felt we deserved for our increasing autonomy, our self-attendance, our ostensible sinful narcissism, we're okay with growth continuing. Then and only then. This is projection; this is using people as poison containers--carriers of our ostensible sins. The Clintons were under this hold just as much as everyone else. They're certainly not evil, and collectively this all were going to be able to handle.
The thought is that Sanders reflects a young generation's ability to tolerate growth less conflictedly/ambiguously. They were raised by boomers who spared the rod, unlike their own parents. They weren't only socialized into an order, but allowed to go their own way. They didn't feel as much at an inherent level that they were terribly spoiled and bad every time they reached for the cookie jar. So a victory for Sanders means greater benevolence, an end to some-prosper-but-most-fall Clinton/Obama era, and back to society that raises all boats. Maybe. But it is possible that a Sanders victory would mean people wanting to surrender that sense of themselves as particular, as highly individuated and richly developed individuals, for the clouding and obfuscation involved in become part of a populist miasma.
Taking that into consideration--that Sanders victory is akin to one by Trump, in that it means a kind of collective devolution into a hive-mind, the folk, the Volk--it might actually be the more progressive win if Hillary gets in. Sanders is the embodiment of our desires; he sways at our bequest. Hillary is apart from us, prizing her own distinction and autonomy.
Original Article: They’ll always lose the culture wars: The right loves fighting lost causes– but liberals keep winning
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 7:54 PM
Aunt Messy Emporium Her saying that she was dismayed that the progressive 1920s were followed by the conservative culture of the 30s/40s/50s, didn't strike me as especially Jerry Falwell-like. It stuck in mind. One decade of advancement; three of regression.
Original Article: They’ll always lose the culture wars: The right loves fighting lost causes– but liberals keep winning
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016 6:01 PM
One day perhaps this particular viewpoint will itself be seen as regressive, something a current generation of Leftists would need to hold onto to maintain their psychic equilibrium, regardless of the evidence that surfaces. They are comfortable with ambiguity, complexity, transgressions; the opposites need a polarized, complexity-spared view of everything.
The counter is that this generation of Leftists were advanced in that they had less of a need to project their own unwanted characteristics--their "badness"-- onto other people, but weren't capable of doing it without romancing those they're protecting: that is, everyone subjected to the bigotry of the Right couldn't possibly be on their own a collection of regressed bigots, possessed of no culture really worth protecting--infused, as it all is, with aspects of racism--but always a valued people with cultural heritages that enrich the world. A more advanced Left wouldn't need to posit a Cinderella story--the oppressed one is actually the more beautiful--onto the world around them. They just stop the oppression, and look at the oppressed, square. Maybe they're better, maybe they're worse: doesn't matter: bigotry arises out of abuse--hurt people hurt people--and is no one's fault, just something to be eliminated from the world.
No group composed of progressives is just going to open their borders so that a gang of MRA bigots could join in. The progressiveness would get drastically watered down. America's problem may have been that those who settled in the North--those from intact families that fled European oppression for their more advanced Religious views--didn't find some quick way to foreclose the South to the single men, the later-born sons, and convicts who came there. If one's level of tolerance for societal changes that actually enrich and empower you is high, it tells you a lot about what kind of background you've come from. For sure, you've had parents who didn't abandon you or brutally punish you as spoiled brats--your parents didn't project onto you--when you ventured outside prescriptions. Since you're talking parenting, not habits but dispositions towards children born out of a leakage of very little love through a generational chain, it's not something to be addressed quickly with the right kind of pamphlet information.
If you let a lot of people like that in and the Republic continues to move along a progressive path, it may be just that you don't realize that it has already affected your Republic, and is why you could only get away with a punitive sort of neoliberal evolution which ensured huge groups would suffer while society made genuine advancements in its attitudes, rather than something more generally provisioning; and possibly that you're looking right now at the peak before the crash: Trump gets in, devolution sets in--union leaders who urge Democrat but can't, alas, control their base--because the truth of (parenting) heritage could not be balked forever.
The author of this piece is what Dawkins, Maher et al. call a regressive liberal, that is, those who are irresponsibly projecting a particular, pleasing framework on the world, just at the time when the support columns for their advanced views are collapsing. In their view, people like this are going to need to start talking borders and making judgments that would make them sound like bigots, even to themselves... they've got to be this brave, even while knowing that the advanced psyche is always the one that isn't polarized, that is always ready to assimilate fluid complexity. They charge them as being unwilling to taint their preferred sense of themselves, and so cling to a world view that makes them feel virtuous even as the facts of reality--"you were all were supposed to vote Democrat, not Trump--only bigoted whites vote Trump!"--force them to detach themselves and go recluse.
Progress, incremental attitude adjustment, is likely inevitable. But it's that when it goes downhill it can be so bad that it can look like it'll never get back up. This is the 1930s and 40s and even 50s, after the Jazz Age 1920s (Paglia wrote about this recently; how distressed she was at the extent of the fall.) And it could come pretty close to being smothered: there are a number of scholars who argue that Jews got targeted in Germany because Germans were jealous of their (the Jews') ability to handle Weimar-era, quick, progressive cultural change, when they were so threatened by it and desired quickly to reset to nativism, known roles, and shortchanged opportunity.
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