“Why isn’t she running away with it?” David Brooks asks. Turns out, it’s because of woke! It’s also because Democrats insist on hating oil, and generally catering only to the most extreme of the extreme left–if only she would pivot to the center! Some of the most distilled, unfiltered bullshit I’ve ever seen, even considering the source.
The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”
how can anybody look at the dems parading dick cheney around while shitting on everybody to the left of reagan and actually believe this
I mean the other way I would state it is actually they’ve prioritized the needs of people who will literally never vote for them
Yeah it’s just bafflingly wrong. He says something a little later about how Kamala is sort of doing what he says, but she just doesn’t have time to swing the Democratic priesthood around, and anyway it’s all performative and she’s really a death to America commie like the rest of them. It’s almost breathtaking how incorrect this column is.
When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.
Wow, he almost gets it, but in the policy example he gives he turns around and gives examples of policy that has been under assault from right wing propaganda. Liberal “priests” as he puts it support things that Americans don’t care about.
Like affirmative action isn’t popular, but lets ignore years of propaganda that has lead people to believe that unqualified POC are getting jobs over white people. Shifting to renewable energy isn’t popular, but lets ignore years of propaganda that tells you that if you move away from fossil fuels you’ll be putting thousands of industry workers out of a job and affecting millions who depend on them for their transportation. Immigration policy that doesn’t treat migrants like criminals isn’t popular, lets ignore the years of propaganda that tell you that only gangs, murderers, and removeds are coming through the borders.
Its such an incredibly stupid way of looking at the issues facing American politics in general. The reality is that the parties are religious in nature because their most ardent supporters, especially the Democrat Party, truly believe that their party actually cares about them and the things they believe in. So no matter what they do materially (increase funding for the police, fund wars and genocide, cut social safety net programs, privatize services, etc) they continue to believe that they actually represent what they believe in. Even when they start to realize that they don’t they still come up with ways to justify that suppport (no one is perfect, lesser of two evils).
Honestly I wouldn’t expect any better from this out of touch shithead though.
For Brooks, culture is something that’s out there, and which arises, fully formed, from some kind of pervasive but nebulous ether. Politics (and economics) is fully downstream of that, and is completely parasitic on this ex nihilo culture. This is pretty much a paradigm case of your brain on idealism
: it’s the ideas–in the form of culture–that shape our political economy on this view, but not the other way around; politics and power never “act back” on culture, but are forever subservient to ideology. This gets the arrow of causal influence almost perfectly backward. As you say, the predominant beliefs of most Americans are shaped by decades of material conditions–propaganda, immiseration, austerity, and political capture by the richest of the rich. Even if we grant that he’s right in describing the views of most Americans (which I think is actually pretty suspect too), Brooks never thinks to interrogate why and how people come to have the views that he attributes to them; we just think what we think, and then shape our world in response to that bundle of ideas that God has placed into our minds. Politicians, on this view, are merely weathervanes whose job it is to act based on the ideological winds, forever hostage to their vagaries and totally unable to shift their direction.
More from the intellectual giant who brought us “suddenly realizing that everybody else has internal lives and thoughts and existences at the precocious age of his mid fifties”
did he have to do drugs about it?
It’s been a while since I read it but I think he had to be divorced about it, then had the sudden realization in a train station that all the people around him weren’t actually NPCs and had internal lives of their own just like him
i can kinda see how young children and teenagers can stumble onto this realization later than others, but to not realize this until fifty? …at least he got there eventually, I suppose.
brainIt’s because he started having sex again
Chapo had an amazing reading series on that one, episode 311
It’s probably something not uncommon among conservatives, really. The chauvinism at the base of their worldview’s gotta come from somewhere, I figure.
No. But he did divorce his wife and marry his much younger assistant.
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The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched… Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision.
Good observation. It’s because both parties have the same vision, voters project whatever they want onto their favored party, and triangulation is a matter of cultural signalling, not setting and meeting political goals.
The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”
Obviously incorrect.
When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.
Oh yeah? Podcast hosts? You sure about that man? You don’t think it might be about donors, consultants, and think tank fellows?
Harris clearly understands the problem. She has tried to run her campaign to show she is in tune with majority opinions.
Yes! She has! She is following the polls on every issue, just like the last 3 dem candidates! You even said earlier that she is sticking to Biden’s policies on everything! So she should be winning, right??
The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.
I can tell someone’s been reading Slate Star Codex
Sometimes it seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain
Wow dude, sick own
world’s most infuriating imbecile. needs to be taken out to the alley and put down.
How detached from reality are these people?
Wouldn’t it be cool for your job to be “say the dumbest, wrongest shit imaginable to millions of people once a month or so, and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing it?”
It’s like he saw this clip from Blazing Saddles(CW ableism): But instead of having a nice chuckle he spent the next 12 hours
his own farts until he could 
it into a justification for the Dems to, somehow, be even more regressiveI found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
