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Does it seem to you that Muslim immigrants are more an enemy of western civilization than Blue Tribe progressives?
Communists are and he's aligned with the recent push for the DSA to pull a tea party into MAGA transformation of the Democratic party. Plenty of gripes are fair with the democratic party, but the DSA is much much worse.
I think MAGA or something like it was where the Republican party was always going to end up. I likewise think that Communism or something like it was always where the Democrats were going to end up. I would prefer we get the masks off and the cards on the table sooner rather than later; We, collectively, are in a better position to handle the present problem now than we will be in another five years of decline, and we will be in a better position in five years than we will be in ten. I'm not certain that sooner is better; maybe delaying might produce some unexpected, out-of-context perturbation that dramatically shifts the trajectory in a positive direction. But based on the available information, confrontation seems inevitable, and the sooner the better.
I don't know where you doomer types get this sense of unceasing decline from. In the last few years we've cured obesity, gained the ability to catch rockets that went to space, taught computers to speak, built cars that drive themselves and shrunk batteries enough that everything we have can be wireless.
To the degree that we're declining it's almost entirely due to these populist currents causing awful short sighted political decisions. No, it's actually not good that we're going to have brain dead communist populists fighting brain dead right wing populists over who can hold back progress more effectively in 2028. In would in fact be much better for everyone if the communists were kept marginalized.
A lot of people think the 1990s were pretty good years, and they're my personal bet for America's high-water mark. Would you care to make a list of the worst political decisions made since 1990, and see how many of them were populist vs elite, or however you'd frame the dichotomy?
This is where the sense of unceasing decline comes from.
When were they marginalized in the first place?
Family of mine died of disease we now have cures for in the 90s. Populism was less in some ways back then, but I'd much rather live in 2026 than in 1996.
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense. I'll put forward many of the politics around BLM and the Trump Tariff fiasco as the kinds of fruits I see populism yielding. I'm not very interested in going point for point on which side was worse or who's tit justified which tat.
I know republicans have accused democrats of being communists forever but they really aren't. They have trouble saying no to their leftist flank for sure, and I've always criticized them for that as a major failure, but there are actual major differences between the DSA crowd and the mainstream democrat crowd. Obama did not make space for people who praise Mao. If the Democrats never marginalized the DSA then how do you understand the current conflict in the democratic party? Why is the DSA primarying long standing members if they were there all along?
Ultimately politics just can't deliver what so many want from it. It's not the source of prosperity, it's not the fount of culture. It does matter and is necessary to settle coordination problems and keep things moving along. But there's this terrible cycle where politicians promise that the government will deliver what is not in its power to deliver, then they fail and populists think the reason for this failure is because the politicians are insufficiently diligent or forceful. The force vector making things worse from politics is founded in your sentiment upstream, that things might as well get worse, we might as well have an actual communist party so that all the masks come off and we can have this end of history battle between the two failed 19th century ideologies. It's a derangement. I'm of the bold opinion that the Democratic party getting worse is in fact bad, that it has been bad that the Republican party has gotten worse under Trumpism.
This deserves a more in-depth response, but I really need to get to work, allow me to whack only the tallest poppy:
Do you recognize a conflict between these two statements?
Obama condemned Ayers in his 2008 run and the connections between them are pretty sparse. There's a world of difference between Obama and this batch of explicit DSA candidates.
I went and looked, and it seems to me that the available evidence indicates that you are straightforwardly correct. My apologies, and thank you for the correction. @Iconochasm is correct that Obama launched his career in Ayers' living room and invited him to the opening of his presidential library, but that is not enough to sustain, as I've heard repeatedly over the years and believed, that Ayers was Obama's mentor, or to use, as I did here, Ayers as an example of a Maoist that Obama embraced.
You've written a bit more about your understanding and critique of populism in this thread:
...I do not think this is a very good or useful way to define populism. Democracy being what it is, those who make a career of amassing and wielding power and influence are always going to seek to secure popular support for their preferred policies, and collapsing those policies down into simple narratives about ingroup and outgroup is always going to be a highly effective way to secure such support.
Was the GWOT Iraq War populist? It seems to me that it must be, by your definition. Certainly it involved a great deal of collapsing complex policies into simple narratives about ingroups and outgroups, second-order effects blamed on hated outgroups, etc and so on.
But I would not agree that the GWOT was populist. Specific elites had the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Hussein's government as explicit policy goals, as part of a broader strategy to reshape the politics of the middle east in a direction they thought preferable in the long-term. They then, with a great deal of organized deceit, seized on an acute crisis to collapse these policies into simple narratives of the sort you describe, the better to sell them to the public. To the extent that opposition arose, it arose much more from the grassroots and individual organization, rather than being driven by institutions and the social networks that inhabit them; to the extent that the anti-war movement enjoyed elite support, that support was far more fragmentary and arising from individual effort and organization than top-down institutional action.
The Iraq war was genuinely popular, at least for a time, but that popularity was secured by the specific machinations of specific leaders, notable among them being Colin Powell lying to the world about Iraq's WMD, backed in lockstep by the full might of the federal Bureaucracy, and even considerable portions of the entertainment and media industries. And in fact, this elite commitment to what turned out to be a straightforwardly disastrous set of policies was what planted the seeds for the populist backlash we see now: the rise of populist political insurgents like Ron Paul and the Tea party on the right, and the antiwar movement, Occupy Wall Street, Social Justice, Bernie Sanders/the Squad, and now actual communists on the left.
You say:
...But this appears to me to be straightforwardly untrue. Humans inevitably make mistakes, but it does not seem to me that there is a "base rate of bad governance". Specific policies are good or bad. Specific ideologies encourage specific bad or good policy choices. Elite rule, technocracy, whatever label we're applying to anti-populism, is supposed to deliver superior policy choices and thus superior outcomes, and if it doesn't actually do that, I think it is extremely important to be able to recognize that fact!
My understanding of Populism is essentially wisdom of crowds as opposed to relying on institutional knowledge production of Elite Rule/technocracy/rule-of-experts. Institutional knowledge production can be very powerful, but by its nature it is resistant to accountability, self-critique and self-correction, such that it can easily decay into serious tyranny. If elites homogenize around a bad set of ideas sufficiently to insulate themselves from all contrary evidence, critique or consequences, what alternative is there but Populism? Knowledge must be generated somehow if we are going to cooperate together.
Democrats have not all or even mostly been Communists. The overwhelming majority of Communists in America have either been democrats, or have been allied with democrats, or have drawn support and political cover from Democrats, and that support and cover has been voluminous, both in the past and right down to the present day. Explicit campaigns to protect Communists have been part of the Democrat auto-hagiography for my entire life, and continue to be treated so long after the general principles those campaigns supposedly enshrined have been torn down and trampled out of existence. At some point, this ceases to be tolerance and becomes complicity. I believe the Democrats passed that point some time ago, and I do not believe that they have had or will have the capacity to meaningfully restrain the Communists they have nurtured and protected for so long.
The Democrats treated Communists as outriders, as useful tools to be managed and exploited at arms-length. This is in notable contrast to how the Right has treated Nazis and White Supremacists, given what seems to me to be the evident moral equivalence of the two groups. We did not give the Nazis and WS types tenure in our institutions, we did not appoint them sinecures from the public purse to teach our young, we did not enshrine them as celebrity prophets or moral authorities or social critics. Angela Davis is pretty clearly morally culpable for the murder of a federal judge. Ayers and his cohort are in fact central examples of terrorists. Chomsky really was a vocal defender of Pol Pot's genocidal madness, and so on and on.
And now, having been fed and protected and maintained within the tribal apparatus for decades, these outriders are exploiting institutional crises to make a play for the throne, and Blue Tribe has no meaningful defense against them, precisely because they have not been marginalized! Meanwhile, the right continues to maintain its cordon sanitaire against the Nazis and WNs, and until recently even anyone so-labeled, even well past the point where doing so makes any sort of practical sense. Our insurgency came not from an extremist fringe, but from a broad-based, grass-roots, moderate center; as many have noted, Democrats pretty clearly won the 2024 election, given that Trump, Musk, RFK Jr, and influential supporters like Joe Rogan all were quite recently moderate democrats.
I'm familiar with the problem, but disagree with your description of it.
Politics runs on hope. You cannot organize political power without offering a narrative about how that power will improve the lives of the people providing that power. Since narratives are just words, narratives can be lies, and lies are generally easier to sell than truths in the short and even the medium and long terms. The only defense available against the advantages of deceit is trust built up by reliable behavior long-term, of good governance and good policies reliably leading to good outcomes.
Our current elite system built what trust they've enjoyed by creating the consensus impression of good governance and good policies, assisted in no small part by extremely strong narrative control arising from a functional monopoly over the mechanisms of knowledge production, and by a large patch of low-hanging technological fruit to be picked. But now the abundance of technological progress has dwindled to a single, narrow corridor of dubious safety and benefit, and the monopoly on knowledge production has been shattered, and in fact the governing elite consensus has been obviously, catastrophically wrong so many times in a row that their credibility has collapsed.
All of this is to say that the terrible cycle you're pointing to is an emergent property of human society under the conditions that we are currently stuck in. Politicians have to promise a relatively hopeful future, and to the extent that this is not possible, they will lose to extremists who at least have not yet been proven useless and wrong.
And this was where things were always going. Progressives secured their social dominance by claiming credit for the post-war boom years; that these conditions were highly artificial and unrepeatable was not something they were willing to admit in their narratives until the 2000s, when they transitioned to the Globalist narrative. Now the Globalist narrative is played out, and they have nothing coherent to replace it with; hence the decay into explicit race and class warfare, which at least can provide a coherent narrative, even if a ghastly one.
The Democrats founded massive government entitlements under FDR, and have ceaselessly pushed for the expansion of those entitlements in the multiple decades since. There is no plausible alternate path where they might do otherwise. There is no plausible path where this ceaseless expansion of federal control over the economy does not result in large-scale financial ruin. They were always going to go for open borders. They were always going to go for speech controls, and general restrictions on individual freedom, for massive social engineering campaigns, for making compulsory whatever is not prohibited. These ideological currents have been running strong for three hundred years across the entire western world; how could any of this be otherwise? The concern was that they would continue these trends slowly and carefully with sufficient competence that resistance would continue to be minimal and easily smothered by their mechanisms of social control. It seems good to me that we can, in fact, lay such concerns to rest. Nor do I concede that my ideology is failed, or particularly 19th-century.
One of my formative political experiences was watching the federal government burn dozens of men, women and children alive on national TV, cover it up, have the cover-up fail, and nonetheless escape any meaningful consequences. I'm not sure I agree that the Democratic party is in fact getting worse; I am not willing to endorse the old version either.
Another of my formative political experiences has been observing the Blue Tribe celebration of Progressive politics in Europe. They have been holding Europe up as an explicit example of what could be possible if Red Tribe would just get out of the way for my entire politically-aware life. And now, I can see exactly what it looks like when Progressive politics is allowed to operate without meaningful opposition from Red Tribe, and it looks to me like hell on earth. Why should these empiric observations not contextualize my understanding of Blue Tribe and the Democratic party right down to its core?
Another of my formative political experiences was voting for Bush II on the grounds that he promised to stop engaging in foreign "nation building", and then watch as he dove head-first into the GWOT in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Should America have off-shored its industrial base? Should America have recentered itself around a "service economy"? Should America have attempted to secure and maintain a position as global hegemon? Should America have attempted to forcibly reform and modernize the middle east? Was the Civil Rights regime a good idea? These are serious policy questions, and our answers to them appear to have had serious consequences in the real world. I do not concede that there is some monolithic, undifferentiated "we" that is responsible for the policies resulting from these questions, such that any consequent failures can be attributed to some amorphous "base rate of bad governance." Opposition to industrial offshoring in the 90s was explicitly populist, and support for that offshoring was explicitly emergent from elite/expert consensus. Likewise for American hegemony and foreign adventurism and the Civil Rights regime. Socialization of these failures cannot be allowed, or the elites responsible for them will continue generating such failures until our ruin is absolute.
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