\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOh, def. the first. A major way this\u2019ll shake out is Democratic machines at the city level will be the ones that have to align against the left first (you\u2019re seeing it already here in Portland)
\n2 things I\u2019m reminded of from late \u201890s/early \u201800s Dem blog discourse, the figure of the \u201cconcern troll\u201d who wanted what you did but was timid to aggravate the right too much lest\u2026?, and the charge of establishment Dems compulsively \u201chippie-punching\u201d, making sure to distance themselves from the left
\nOf course I associated \u201chippies\u201d with drug sybaratism and \u201cpeace\u201d in a \u201cchill out, man\u201d sense but of course I did, that was after The System had processed them down to a System-compatible flavor.
\n\n\n\n\n\nLong-term a major theme of the Trump Era will prove to have been that he goaded the left into fully revealing they had intentions incompatible with the current system before they had the necessary strength to replace the current system
are we talking about The Left that has been calling for revolution for over a century or The Left that is the DNC or what?
\nIn fact, what happens if you don\u2019t suppress the left enough and the right loses patience? ::guestures around:: This! Concerned?
\nHunh, are you sure this isn\u2019t a Portland thing? I\u2019m a bit distant from the action in the US but haven\u2019t really gotten this vibe at all.
\nTo me, it looked like the point at which the US left\u2019s cheques started bouncing was when Trump was elected in the first place, and they\u2019d mostly been on the defensive since then. There\u2019s no real point during the \u201cTrump era\u201d where I\u2019ve had the sense that an out-of-control left is driving people to the right in significant numbers \u2013 there was definitely some weird politics surrounding the unrest, but it seemed like it was mostly just playing along with public opinion rather than going against it, and I got the impression that Trump\u2019s \u201closing patience\u201d there was one of the factors that kept it going an unusually long time, since it kept it going longer than it otherwise would have.
\nIDK, maybe it\u2019s just that I\u2019m more left-wing than you and that colours my perceptions, but my main impression of the left throughout this has been \u201cconsistently standing in the way of substantive left-wing desires while paying lip service to wedge issues as a sop\u201d, which is\u2026basically business as usual? On the right, it seems like far-right militia types are more active, but that\u2019s the only real change I can see from the outside. Which is not a small change, but it\u2019s not exactly \u201cthe right\u201d in a political sense, either, and they\u2019ve been on the upswing since before the rise in left-extremism.
\nOP makes more sense if you treat the Biden-Harris alliance as a Clinton-wing Democrat party dedicated to bringing back the 1990s.\u00a0 Bringing back the SALT exemption to restore CA and NYC/Westchester homeowners for example.\u00a0 They\u2019re very clearly not\u00a0\u201cThe Right\u201d, but they\u2019re also mostly here to stop\u00a0\u201cThe Left\u201d as well as\u00a0\u201cThe Right\u201d and bring back the normal times.\u00a0\u00a0
\nAnd honestly, I flip back and forth on that every 30 minutes or so.\u00a0\u00a0
\n/It sure feels like, in particular, \u201cWe hate the Green New Deal on national TV and love it on our website\u201d is trying to have both sides, I just have no idea where they end up in reality.\u00a0\u00a0
\nHm, but in some respects it feels like US society is moving away from the 90s consensus en masse, even on the right? At least the economic elements of the 90s are on the outs in a lot of cases; the cultural and regulatory elements seem to have people nostalgic in some cases.
\nAt the same time, it\u2019s hard for me not to note that Obama felt very much like middle-of-the-road neoliberal consensus-builder, and a lot of the shift away from that model since then seemed to come from how badly it turned out when he tried it. It feels like a lot of the modern extremism in US politics started with the Tea Party shift whereby reaching across the aisle became less useful because it had less impact on the severity of the opposition.
\nI guess part of what\u2019s complicated is that \u201cthe left has gone too far\u201d can refer to, like:
\n\n
\n- People who want more socialist economic/regulatory policy
\n- People who are big on \u201cwoke\u201d/prog/SJ stuff
\n- Radical revolutionary types
\n\n\nbut those are different groups who often hate one another!
\nBut I agree with you that it seems like Biden and a lot of the establishment Left is fighting on both fronts to try to present itself as a \u201cstable\u201d choice to people who are tired of everything being crazy; I was perplexed by how it was framed upthread because I saw this less as a threat posed by the right and more by one posed by the centre; swing voters seem to care less about cultural stuff and more about economic security and a lack of things on fire.
\nI\u2019m curious to see how this shakes out if they win and we get a slight de-escalation. Right now, this approach works well because Trump is not respectable or conducive to stability, but it might be a harder sell outside those circumstances.
\n\n
\nWhat I\u2019m really curious to see is if there\u2019s eventually any migration for the more \u201cexciting\u201d Democrats to migrate into the establishment and thereby influence its policy approach; that would involve them \u201cselling out\u201d to some extent but it would also help with the fact that the party\u2019s policy approach hasn\u2019t really updated much and they\u2019ve been trying to paper over this with increased focus on the shallow sort of identity-politics progressivism, which annoys everybody.
This is something I often think with regards to his “beer summit”: Obama the man was super-cautious not to push hard on race; in reaction the coalition that finally elected a black president and expected that to mean things were frustrated and had a sense of their power so pushed it through non-electoral including administrative and judicial channels; the Clinton/DLC/DNC effort to freeze out anyone who promoted nonpermitted leftism from influence or even attention failed
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