Just noticed two recent posts back-to-back on this feed were about different people defining modern popular left-liberalism as a mental infirmity, so smoothly I didn’t notice the thread until now looking back

Of course that’s nothing new, you see precedent in “pointy-headed” and ‘bleeding heart”, the old saying about being so open-minded your brain fell out

Which is to say that’s exactly the idiom in which this stuff does ultimately get dismissed not logically as incorrect so much as viscerally as unworthy, god knows that’s the way it’d been going in the other direction

Bonfire of the Vanities was released in 1987 and praised by Manhattan types for its verisimilitude. There’s a scene where a character - a white ethnic prosecutor, educated as a good modern - seethes through a dinner with his wife and her fellow college-grad girlfriends sniping at the horrible way The System treats minorities. While he knows the job of cleaning up petty criminality - “garbage collection” is necessary to maintaining society even if that’s mostly locking up nonwhites who are dangerous more from patheticness than maliciousness; but he knows he could never convince them and they’d just regard him as repulsive matter-out-of-place

In 1989 a white ethnic prosecutor himself ran for mayor of NYC - Rudy Giuliani. He lost the closest race in city history. In 1993 he won, against the desires of polite society, by 1997 he was inevitable, obvious all along in retrospect. No one felt weird, even in the fanciest circles, saying that it was important for the state to wield repressive force against even underprivileged minority miscreants.

Really, if those ladies still felt that it was THEY that shut up. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican presidents - people were surprised Roe still existed for him to save - on the pledge of “it’s the economy, stupid”, to jettison all the cultural, or minority, or whatever issues and sell the Dems as not-moneybags.

And really ever since he became the nominee and his Arkansas machine merged with the Democratic Leadership Council merged with the national Democratic Party, people (Hillary! People ticked about Neera Tanden’s role in the Hillary apparatus should know that was a lot of Hillary’s role in the Bill Clinton apparatus!) paid a LOT of attention to a LOT of petty shit to separate the Dems from the pushy fringy activists

Basically by capturing the donor base - off-the-reservation activists were defunded by instructing Dem Party donors to refuse them any donations. On penalty of being cut off from whatever power Dem Party links gave you, ask Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein about how well that worked vis-a-vis funding romantic challenges to the whole system. (Well, ask them in 1999 and then again in 2019)

Or anyone who just needed a real estate issue resolved. (As late as the ‘80s the Nation of Islam might have been more useful in resolving a real estate issue than the elected government! But then Giuliani got his turn)