The War on Empathy

“I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I 

think empathy is a made-up, new age term 

that – it does a lot of damage.”

-  Charlie Kirk, racist violence instigator

I've been wanting to post my chapter on empathy on here for awhile now. 

When I first published my book in 2014, many were still trying to make the “compassionate conservative" brand happen and callous economic policies were still being sold as tough love by both conservatives and centrists alike. Denying cruelty was still a bipartisan reflex back then. Apologists would say things such as “Sure, you can always find fringe figures, but those kooks don't really represent conservatives as a whole." 

Never mind how many of those kooks had already gotten obscenely wealthy by trying to out-bigot each other. Their violent rhetoric and manifest racism were both routine and gleeful. And yet strangely, despite millions of listeners and paid subscribers, they still didn't “really" represent anyone.

Then, in 2016, The Donald got into office. Two years later, Adam Serwer wrote an essay on Trumpism in The Atlantic entitled “The Cruelty is the Point." But as Serwer subsequently emphasized in his book by that title, cruelty had always been a dark part of our country's politics. Trump was just the latest iteration.

Centrists still defend fascists, but since the fascists have stopped masking their aims and attitudes, doing spin for their benefit has become a bit more difficult. As I wrote in my previous post, both Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth openly embrace a kooky theology that says empathy's a sin. The notion's nutty, but not novel. Secular libertarians have been trying to associate empathy with tyranny since Ayn Rand. The Tea Party just injected that idea into religion.

But I wasn't just trying to identify one shitty tendency in that chapter. I tied it into three others that define conservatism itself – their obvious animosities towards liberty, equality, and democracy. These three ideals are central to America’s identity and as interdependent as the legs of a tripod. And the right despises them.

This ain't a strain to explain. Once you become a second class citizen, you lose some of your rights, right? Well, it also works the other way, so when you lose some of your rights you become a second class citizen. That's just one example of liberty and equality's inherent interdependence.

Indeed, equality was built into Thomas Jefferson's definition of freedom: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Equal rights. Yes, as a slave owner, he was a hypocrite about it, but he was nevertheless articulating a self-evident truth. 

Conservatives oppose this “no harm/no foul" formulation of freedom because they favor a more restrictive definition and the inclusion of others disquiets them. Why? Because they're authoritarians and correctly perceive that liberty and equality both subvert hierarchy. 

Indeed, the linkage between these two ideals becomes clear in the word “insubordination." By disobeying authority, you are undermining the established order of things. Your defiance gets painted as a threat to society. By refusing to be bossed, you are asserting both your freedom and your status as an equal. By stark contrast, “knowing your place" means doing as you're told and accepting the notion that you're less than.

And democracy ties into this too. Having the vote is both a badge of equality as well as a weapon to defend your other rights. Without it, you're a second class citizen and it's easier to take away more of your rights. 

So, lose any of these three and you'll soon lose the other two if you haven't already lost all simultaneously.

You're probably wondering what any of this has to do with empathy. Well, empathy encourages solidarity and solidarity helps hold the tripod together. It's the glue of a free society. 

Without equality, universal rights are neither universal nor rights. They become special privileges instead and the portion of the population that still enjoys them predictably begins shrinking the minute exclusions get instituted. As Thomas Paine explained, “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach unto himself.” Paine was making a call for solidarity with everyone whose freedom becomes threatened. He called it a duty, but he also framed solidarity as intelligent self-interest.

James Madison also saw solidarity as intelligent self interest. Indeed, he saw political diversity as a bulwark for defending everybody's rights. In Federalist #10, he argued that diverse interests could ally to prevent one strong political faction from dominating all the others. Moreover, Madison thought a larger country would be harder to control because it would contain a greater diversity of competing interests:

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. 

- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 54. 

Unfortunately, this only works when these diverse interests each have a voice in government. If some have no power to contribute to the collective defense they become non-factors in any political conflict. And potential oppressors understand this and act accordingly. They seek to shrink the sphere – only politically rather than geographically. Consolidating power invariably requires dis-empowering minorities. So, the power hungry will always weaponize bigotry for their own benefit. It's a built-in incentive, which is why we see it repeatedly deployed across human history. In short, tyranny and bigotry always go together.

Say a powerful group has a plurality but not a majority. In other words, they are the biggest group, but they still don't make up over half of the total. Maybe they have 40% but no other single group has more than 20%. They can't bully too overtly at this point or they risk everyone allying against them. First, they must turn the other groups against each other. It's called “divide and conquer." Next, they whittle away at marginal groups, disenfranchising them. The biggest group can thereby turn their plurality into a de facto majority by becoming the majority of those who still hold any power. They don't necessarily need to grow their own numbers if they can shrink other groups' instead.

The incentive to do this always exists and thus the rest must always resist it. Indeed, this dynamic describes much of our country's history – the struggle between those who want to expand the franchise vs those who wish to restrict it. The ideal of democracy is still being realized since, while (almost) everyone has one vote, undemocratic institutions like the Senate and Electoral College mean they don't have equal worth.

This is why the right finds diversity terrifying. Even the slightest uptick in the number of different people around them alarms them. They see any more than the token one as a dangerous and outrageous invasion.

Whatever their individual level of enthusiasm for democracy, many founders worried that their revolution wouldn't last. Some feared that greed and ambition would eventually bring another aristocracy and thought seriously about how to best prevent it. A few of them, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine had even suggested capping wealth and redistributive taxation. But I covered that in another chapter. Just a few generations removed from the revolution, Abraham Lincoln wrote about this shrinkage of liberty he was witnessing and it filled him with utter disgust:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to [Tsarist] Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. (emphasis original)

- Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:323.

Empathy boosts solidarity by adding a potent emotional component. It activates solidarity and sustains it when things get difficult. It steels decency. In short, empathy is both a trigger and an energy source.

It's also important to note that the boosting goes both ways: Practicing solidarity strengthens empathy. Tackling problems together makes you more familiar with both the problems and those you're supporting. The shared experience creates a bond and you're also more likely to notice similar problems elsewhere. Just noticing things grows empathy which in turn raises your antennae and makes you notice even more things. It's a virtuous cycle, and an awakening that makes you more vigilant and civic. In other words, “woke."

Obviously, anyone trying to sabotage our free society would logically start by vilifying empathy, and that's what we're plainly seeing today and everyday. Empathy isn't an earmark of tyranny, but smearing empathy historically is. All the familiar power dynamics in play prove it. As always, the oppressors are projecting.

So, without further ado, here's my chapter on that:

On Kirk, Newsom, and Klein

Let's revisit a grisly incident to see what it says about things.

After a career of dismissing mass shootings and stoking political violence to silence those he disagreed with, Charlie Kirk got shot on a college campus while debating gun death numbers. It's almost poetic.

To most people, this was just irony at work. But to centrist bullshit artists this was yet another opportunity to play genteel edgelords and prove that they can spin almost any position no matter how repugnant or factually bankrupt and still seem smart and reasonable to their readers. 

Thus, they rushed to paint a totally unrecognizable portrait of Charlie Kirk. They turned the dead young demagogue into a non-violent champion of free speech who only loved a good debate. Naturally, they said they disagreed with Kirk on most things, but then they portrayed him as some modern Socrates. Their portrait was so grotesquely distorted it would make Dorian Gray's howl with laughter and prompt any startled guests to immediately investigate the attic.

So, let's investigate the attic, because there's a mess of interesting things up there. I'll talk about Kirk first, then his amoral apologists. It's going to be a long look at most everyone involved because it's enormously important to recognize the rhetorical reflexes that still shape establishment twit opinion. They made and maintain the hellscape we inhabit today, and we must understand how they did it before we can fix it.

A Constitutional Tantrum

Donald Trump suggesting the Constitution should be tossed out if it doesn’t give him what he wants proves that conservatives don’t really revere the document and never did. Ditto with history, liberty, and everything else they claim to venerate. Their patriotism's fraudulent. They just want power.

It's what they always do. They mythologize the past and then weaponize it against the present. It's just authoritarian propaganda without even a mote of honest history in it. I talked about that in my 2014 book.

But let's not try to beat conservatives at their own game by cynically playing the patriot card and calling the Constitution “sacrosanct" as the Biden White House has. Trying to out-right the right never works and it's invariably pathetic. Moreover, the founders themselves never saw that document as sacrosanct.

To the founders, the Constitution was a compromise that nobody was entirely happy with. It was a contract and everyone fought to make sure the parts of it they liked got enforced. It was later generations which made it holy writ. The founders not only made the Constitution amendable, they talked of the possibility of future generations jettisoning it entirely – just as they had done with the Articles of Confederation. We see this in the papers of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other founders. This was their attitude toward constitutions in general, both federal and state: Everything is replaceable.

For example, in the Massachusetts state constitution, Adams proclaimed that, “[T]he people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity and happiness require it."(1) 

Likewise, Jefferson felt, “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation." Accordingly, he believed, “Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

Elsewhere, Jefferson opined, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."(2)

Therefore, original intent says “Forget original intent."

The Constitution has always had profound problems and it still does. It's saccharine historically illiterate gibberish to deny this. We need to fix these problems, the sooner the better. For example, we should abolish the Electoral College and the Senate for starters. Both are long overdue.

But allowing an orange authoritarian narcissist to stay in power after America had passed a mandate to remove him isn't among the legion of reasons we need to overhaul or perhaps replace the Constitution.

The proper response to Trump's comment is to point out that conservative love of the Constitution is either superficial or bullshit. It needs to be said. And it needs to be said for three different reasons: First, it's the truth and thus must told on principle. Second, it's politically smart because Democrats do not go on the offensive enough. And third, a functioning democracy needs citizens who think seriously about history.

Otherwise, we get to where we are now.

But bipartisanship-fetishizing centrists cannot see this. Their mythology obscures truth almost as much as conservative mythology does. Trump is the embodiment of conservatism, not an aberration from it. It's obvious in all his comments – including those on the Constitution.

We cannot afford to politely ignore this anymore.

_____________

1) John Adams, Article VII, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780.

2) Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Kickerbocker Press, 1904), 12:12.

Rockets Red Glare

Okay, I finally watched President Biden’s spooky-lit speech and of course I have some thoughts on it.

Long story short, Joe Biden said some profoundly true and long overdue things which were nevertheless still pretty weak tea and dishonestly polite. As I’ve noted often before, the right’s racism and hostility to democracy are nothing new. True, Donald Trump embodies both, but he definitely didn’t invent them. I know Biden was trying to throw vanishing moderate Republicans a lifeline, but it's pointless at this point.

After all, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was the maiden voyage of the Southern Strategy, so Republicans have been weaponizing racism for longer than I’ve been alive and I’m now in my mid-50s. Think about that: Roll it around in your head for a moment.

No, really: Use this paragraph break as a break and actually think about that for a moment.

And now please ignore everyone calling Trump some kind of unprecedented aberration because they are historically illiterate imbeciles sadly trying to ignore a half century of GOP bigotry. What is so often called “Trumpism” is just Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. I mean, you knew the Tea Party was racist, right? You recall the unhinged Militia Movement from the 1990s, right? Stop defending the indefensible by painting the recent past as some halcyon era of comity. It's vomitsomely dishonest. You know better.

Seriously, consider your dignity – why risk it to bolster the rediculous myth that there was just recently a reasonable Republican Party to negotiate with? At this late date, it's long past time give up the ghost. Don't compose retroactive rationalizations. Resist the sinister temptation to fritter time away with silly centrist revisionism. Just adult-up and take the L so that you can finally move forward and begin winning again.

Remember winning? It doesn't come from sleeping with the enemy or making stupid excuses for them.

And it's not just conservative love of racism: They've long loathed democracy too. In my 2014 book, Conservatism is Un-American, I argued that liberty, equality, and democracy are interdependent like the legs of a tripod – each leg supports the other two. Conservatives have always sought to shatter these three ideals. Usually, they concentrate their assault on equality, but they occasionally go after freedom or democracy too. “We are a republic, not a democracy” remains a favorite slogan of the racist John Birch Society which had opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and it has become a popular slogan with Republicans today. This incidentally illustrates how tightly equality and democracy are intertwined. 

Timidity & Perfidy

The Supreme Court’s recent murder of Roe v. Wade re-revealed two ugly truths that most Democrats have long chosen to ignore: First, that the party’s centrist leadership has always been ambivalent about abortion. And second, that they see activists as pests to be patronized and stereotyped.

During the 2008 campaign, then Senator Barack Obama had promised Planned Parenthood that he would codify Roe v. Wade on day one. “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Of course, he didn’t. And when later asked why it had dropped by the wayside, he replied that it was “not the highest legislative priority" adding, “I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.”(1)

That sobering moment is the Rosetta Stone for understanding decades of self-sabotaging centrist politics. Obama was an enormous disappointment on a host of issues, but this is not about Obama: It’s about centrist ideology, it's hostility to the Democratic base, and the absurd political behavior it fosters.

Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorite slogan that there is “no litmus test" on abortion. She says that a lot, maybe even as often as she praises Ronald Reagan.(2) In May of 2017, Pelosi paradoxically said voicing alarm on abortion access was “hurting the party”(3) even though abortion was “fading as an issue." 

The key to reconciling that apparent contradiction is the centrist myth that activists are out of step with ordinary voters. Translation: It's only those whacko activists who care about it and they don't really count. Centrists have adopted a favorite conservative stereotype that ultimately insults nearly everyone else: It posits that caring is crazy and the public is lazy and/or conservative – and it's all pure projection.

It's also a tread worn excuse that polls routinely refute. Indeed, centrists seem allergic to doing anything popular whether its passing Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college, forgiving student debt, or in this instance defending abortion rights. Centrists project their own disinterest onto the electorate.

Just two months ago, Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn supported anti-choice incumbent Henry Cuellar (D-TX) against pro-choice challenger Jessica Cisneros. The incumbent carbuncle is also anti-union and pro-NRA. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that later fact sort of stood out after two recent mass shootings. Pelosi may be ambivalent about issues her party cares about, but at least she’s consistently so.(4) Edit: Cuellar and his wife have now been indicted on federal bribery charges.

Pelosi's not alone. In 2019, Biden’s freshly-minted presidential campaign had to rapidly backtrack after the backlash to their confirming that he still supported the 1976 anti-choice Hyde Amendment. It was an awfully awkward reversal since it highlighted Biden’s lengthy anti-choice record in the Senate. In 1974, he said Roe v. Wade “went too far" adding, “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” And in 1982, Biden backed a constitutional amendment that would allow states to ignore Roe v. Wade. Getting snippy with pro-choice voters in 2019 probably didn't help.

Deadly Ineptitude

Just what the fuck does it take already?

That’s the boiling question people are asking a lot lately about many different recent events.

For openers, two particularly horrific mass shootings had happened not too long ago.

The first shooting was in Buffalo, NY where a white supremacist massacred grocery store shoppers in an African American neighborhood. His racist manifesto was filled with stock conspiracy theories he had copy & pasted from 4chan and he had targeted an area with a high concentration of blacks for his attack.

The second was an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, TX where the local cops did absolutely nothing to stop the carnage going on inside the school for over an hour. Instead, they tased, pepper sprayed, and handcuffed desperate parents who begged the cops to do their jobs.

And there were two mass shootings just this Fourth of July – one in Highland Park, IL and another in Philadelphia, PA. But there have been very many other mass shootings in between Uvalde and these. Mass shootings are like roaches in that regard: For every one that gets press, there are many more that don’t.

Nearly everyone’s exasperation is palpable. And that’s fueled in large part by the knowledge that nothing is going to change as a result of these infuriatingly familiar tragedies. We’ve all been here too many times before to entertain the cruel fantasy that this will actually change anything.

Our cynical politics regard concrete goals as “unicorns” and “ponies” so only posturing is considered “realistic.” Political pantomime is “adult,” but advocating actual action is “childish.” You can apply this to any number of issues – abortion rights comes to mind right now, but that topic's for my next post.

So let's discuss mass shootings a little longer before going into our country's incompetent Covid response.

Why the Right is Wrong on Property

This blog is long overdue for a new post. Moreover, this post itself is long overdue too.

I published my book back in the spring of 2014. Not long after, I posted a sample chapter on this blog. That chapter was about conservatives' insane Nazi analogies. I chose it because it was timely then, but I always thought the heart of the book was the chapter on economic equality. Many of America's founding fathers thought a rough economic equality was crucial for a republic to function. Therefore, the notion that socialism is un-American is nonsense and it is important for ordinary voters to know this.

I probably should have done this years ago.

So without anymore delay, here is another free chapter from my 99 cent ebook tucked behind the cut.

Chronically Dishonest

We keep having these distracting debates about whether Joe Biden is senile at the expense of examining his compulsive lying. I’m no clinician, but it's obviously compulsive because: a) He keeps doing it despite constantly getting caught and b) The lies are clearly not thought-out beforehand - and thus easily caught.

The scandal that sank his 1988 presidential campaign went far beyond plagiarism. He made all sorts of boorish Trumpian boasts. Academically, Joe Biden claimed that he got three degrees in undergrad and had graduated from law school in the top half of his class, winning accolades all along the way.

Whereas in reality: “Biden does not mention the moot court competition on his resume, and did not win the political science award at University of Delaware, where he received a single B.A. in political science and history.” Oh, and he actually graduated 76th in his law class of 85 students. Not the top.

Biden made these bogus boasts because he got into a tiff with a New Hampshire man in 1987. Biden said “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do.” It seems he hasn’t changed greatly. This cycle, he challenged a voter to a push-up contest and, yes, another IQ test. “You wanna check my shape on it, let’s do push-ups together here, man. Let’s run. Let’s do whatever you want to do. Let’s take an IQ test.” But back in 1987, this was how Joe Biden launched into a bombastic polishing of his academic record. 

Of course, failing a class for plagiarism was part of his actual academic record. He was generously allowed to retake the class. That ignominious moment should have scared him straight, but he kept on plagiarizing and lying after he got out of law school. Like I said, it’s a compulsion. And it’s life-long.

That brag about his class ranking was spontaneous and defensive. But Biden’s lies are not always concieved in the heat of passion - not that being easy to rile into lying is okay in a presidential aspirant. Biden frequently repeats lies quite casually when he is not under pressure and that is quite likely compulsive as well - especially if you keep telling it after repeatedly being asked not to by your staff. Joe Biden has a rather Reaganesque love of to retelling the same tall tales.

For example, in his '88 campaign, Joe Biden had also claimed he marched with the Civil Rights Movement - much to the chagrin of his long-suffering aides: As the New York Times noted last year, “More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood - and kept telling the story anyway." Again, that’s a compulsion.

Atrocity Propaganda

In his famous essay “Notes on Nationalism," George Orwell wrote, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Call me crazy, but I think that the same dynamics apply to partisans of every description. 

And I think that atrocities include mean tweets.

Recent data analysis has confirmed what most sober observers have already guessed a long time ago - that Bernie Sanders supporters do not act any worse online than any other candidate’s.

I’m dropping a line to let you catch your breath, in case you need it.

That’s right: They are no worse - which also means their opponents are no better. Most campaign supporters do not cross lines in their passion and the few poop-tossers who do can be found on all sides. If you doubt that, you can consult the Orwell quote above or the data findings below.

Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist and graduate student at Harvard University, looked at negativity on Twitter expecting to find more on the Sanders side. Instead, he found “Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower.” The only difference is “Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers" suggesting this may help perpetuate the Bernie Bro myth.

Why did he expect to see more negativity from Sanders supporters?

I believed that Bernie's followers are more likely to like him because they are more likely to experience the very negative life circumstances that Bernie Sanders wants to fix. People in a negative situation are more likely to interact negatively with people, particularly those anonymous online people that they have no in-person relationship with. So I had anticipated that Bernie's followers on average would have a much higher chance to be negative. This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV.

I can honestly say that I have seen this specific negativity online. It is raw and it is real. When some callous centrist pompously snarks that Sanders supporters are asking for “ponies,” many may well say, “Fuck you, my [loved one] died from rationing [his/her] meds” or “Fuck you, my [loved one] lost a limb in Iraq” or “Fuck you, my [loved one] got killed by a cop who got away with it.” Etc.

These people do not want others to suffer as they and their loved ones have suffered. They lack that reactionary attitudinal defect that dictates others should struggle needlessly too - that it is somehow “unfair” to improve things. They don’t want to watch society make the same stupid mistakes and they are willing to make a noise and inconvenience themselves and others to prevent it from reoccurring. 

That is a noble sentiment that should never be maligned or marginalized. It’s basic civic decency and the cynical self-anointed “realists” who seek to stifle it are poisonous to participatory democracy. These “realists” are, at best, oblivious to how change takes place. But that ignorance eventually festers into defensive hostility. Democracy is messy and common, so genteel people are always profoundly uncomfortable with it. The privileged don't like to listen - which is how we got here.

The deploring of rude Sanders supporters is essentially tone-policing writ at large. These people have righteous grievances, but how they express them becomes the dominant press narrative which coincidentally conveniently eclipses those grievances. Of course, that's how tone-policing works - it's a silencing tactic. It’s how the guilty party and/or its wealthy sympathizers change the subject and blame the victim. It’s a ridiculously shitty reflex that is quite common among civility fetishists.

But the so-called “abuse” by the victims almost never goes beyond that much deserved “Fuck you.” It doesn’t escalate to harassment, stalking, or doxxing - at least no more so than it does for supporters of any other candidate. And yes, every candidates’ - including even Elizabeth Warren’s.

Incidentally, comedian Kate Willett wrote a moving account of losing her boyfriend because he could not afford the care he needed. It doesn’t contain any Fuck you-s, although she is certainly entitled to use them. Her stand up is outstanding and definitely has clear feminist sensibilities. You can hear more here.

I don’t think most people really appreciate just how insanely hateful anti-Sanders attacks have been or the extent that they have been normalized. This is important, because when attacks against a particular person or group become normalized, they cease to be noticed.

Recently, two separate MSNBC hosts have used two separate Nazi analogies against Bernie Sanders (who incidentally is Jewish) within only two weeks of each other. Not long afterwards, a white supremacist snuck into a Sanders rally and dropped a Nazi flag in the stands. Yet for some reason, no network covered it. I suppose it would hamper to their "just another old white guy" narrative.

In any case, just imagine seeing any of that and thinking that “Bernie Bros” are the real problem. One host, Chris Matthews, finally got fired after a pattern of odd historical hyperboles, but the other, Chuck Todd, kept his job. It was not because his analysis was in any way more accurate or measured, but because he lacked Matthews’ avuncular flair. You can slander if you’re bland. That’s apparently the rule.

And these are professional broadcast journalists for fuck’s sake. Imagine how amateur assholes act online - probably not terribly professionally. I’m going to go out on a limb and say somewhat worse. Why, you might even call them rude - even the blue check marks.

Twitter is littered with little unhinged Chris Matthews clones who are sexist toward any women who support Sanders. And many are even far, far worse than Matthews. Their rape rhetoric is pretty threatening. It’s not hard to imagine it and you don’t have to imagine it.

And of course, if you are a Person of Color who supports Sanders (and over half of Sanders’ base is PoC), you get plenty of racist attacks from supposedly “moderate” Democrats.

NEWS FLASH: Moderate politics do not make moderate temperament. Indeed, they do not even make moderate politics because how pollsters categorize moderates actually masks extremism because moderation is conflated with not following party orthodoxy.  But I digress.

The point here is it should not surprise anyone that the “Permit Patty” types who phone the police on blacks for simply being nearby also address grown men of color as “boy” online. And if you are a Woman of Color, you get the sexism and the racism - often combined. Imagine tweeting this: “Picture Nina Turner acting the part of the surly housemaid on The Jefferson’s except it’s The Sanders lake house."

Don’t flinch, centrists: These are your people. Acknowledge your offspring because it is even less dignified to deny them. Denial is both obvious and ridiculous. Acknowledge your bastards at long last. 

And I've only shown a few examples of hateful centrists, but they certainly ain't rarities. You can find an exhaustive catalog in this Twitter thread. Also in this thread. Oh yeah, you have no idea.

So why aren’t there also lots of articles about them? It’s almost as if the corporate media does not actually care about online civility and is just trying to stop Bernie Sanders any way they can. Huh.

I’m hardly arguing that obnoxious Bernie Bros don’t exist - quite the opposite. I’m saying that every candidate attracts grotesque supporters and that Sanders’ worst ones don’t even remotely represent his movement and they are no worse than other candidates’.

When some people say “Well, I’ve never been attacked by X candidate’s supporters” I always ask if they have ever critiqued that particular candidate’s policies. For example, have you spoken about Kamala Harris’ pretending to be a “progressive prosecutor" with one of the K-Hive? As the name suggests, they will swarm you - and not politely. That’s Twitter. Expressing a political opinion in a public online forum draws vitriol. Who knew? But the point here is it’s easy to think a particular faction is well-behaved if you have never angered them. And for the very same reason, it is even easier to be oblivious to your own faction’s insane nastiness. After all, you haven’t attacked yourselves.

It is also worth noting that not all mean tweets are created equal. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." Nobody enjoys being told they are wrong, but that is hardly abuse. Yet Sanders surrogate David Sorita is routinely called “toxic" for tweeting links to The Congressional Record and C-SPAN even as he is the target of actual toxic content. Nina Turner sparked an odd outcry for rather accurately calling Michael Bloomberg an “oligarch.” Personally, I think “plutocrat" is more precise, but oligarch certainly works.

Perhaps this tweet sums up the absurdity best. "I called @briebriejoy Bernie's Goebbels and all the berniebros are like omg how can you compare a Jewish candidate's spox to a Nazi. Then they turn around and accuse another Jewish candidate of being an oligarch. You can't make this shit up."

No, I suppose you cannot. That last daft tweet is almost adorable. The other stuff, less so.

Orange on Orange

Fun Fact: Within 24 hours, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump had mixed up the locations of recent mass shootings. It's easy to dismiss this as trivial coincidence, but both do this sort of thing a lot.

The two Orange Ones are pretty similar. Both old boys are gaffe-prone, handsy, senile false populists with hair issues. They're both obsessed with IQ scores and crowd sizes. They're so similar that it's difficult to distinguish their statements from one another, hence there is a Trump or Biden quote quiz. 

They both make absurd boasts about their abilities, support, or accomplishments. Trump trumpets that he has a “great relationship with the blacks,” while Biden brags he has the “most progressive record of anyone running.” Time after time, they say strange things that would make a cat laugh.

Also, both seem loath to make sincere apologies, which is often a non-issue because angrily doubling-down (frequently incoherently) is their favorite response to criticism so it rarely gets to the non-apology point.

For example, when Corey Booker said Joe Biden should apologize for waxing nostalgic about the “civility" of segregationist senators, Biden shot back that Booker should be the one to apologize(!) As with Anita Hill, Joe Biden tried to smooth things over with a phone call - but of course no apology was part of that. As a New York Times headline explained “Joe Biden Called Cory Booker. But Apologize? It’s Not the Biden Way." Eventually he did, but it took a lot of push back, which does not bode well if being a decent adult decision-maker still matters after Trump.

The fact that the two Oranges ones got in a silly tiff over who would win in a schoolyard fist fight tells you all you need to know. Mixing up cities is their least significant similarity, but it adds to the total - and more importantly draws attention to it.

To clarify, I'm not saying Biden is as bad as Trump. But what I am saying is the less like Trump our candidate is, the better. And we can do much better and thereby improve our odds.

Some centrists don't get this. They see these dismal similarities as advantages for Biden that will “win over” Trump voters. Their argument is both shallow an amoral. It puts personality over policy. To them, the above litany of defects are actually assets because they think both candidates come across a genuine guys who bluntly say what they think. In short, they both talk like Archie Bunker.

These centrists think that's all the populism we need - the persona, not the policy. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk of breaking up the banks, Joe Biden has spent his political career promoting the banking industry's interests. Biden wrote the draconian bankruptcy bill that made it easier for creditors to squeeze and hound borrowers. Vocally opposing that vicious bill is in large part what put then Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren on the political map when she famously clashed with him in the 2005 Senate hearings on it. But that's not the form populism centrists feel comfortable with. They want a candidate who says “malarkey" but defends billionaires. And so they support Joe.

And of course, these timid centrists think Biden being a straight white guy is also important. At a Biden rally, HuffPost reporter Brain Marans discovered, “Everyone here who I have spoken to who is firmly in Biden's corner cited electability. Two women said they thought a woman is too risky for that reason; a man said Buttigieg being gay might turn off some voters too." Of course, “electability” is in the eye of the voter so myopically pursuing it as a strategy might actually backfire.

Portraying racial and social conservatism as political prudence has been a centrist standby since the late 1970s - hence Biden's anti-busing stance then and his Nixonian “law and order" focus on crime thereafter. He personifies the centrist effort to conspicuously disown the 1960s and the 1970s.

These are not just poor judgment calls or personal failings: This is longstanding centrist strategy. Their professed faith is that “liberal overreach” caused conservative ascendance, so veering right is their knee-jerk response to every setback - and every advance. Advances absolutely terrify them.

It’s political motor memory: mollycoddle bigotry and befriend big business (which means betraying labor). Prior to his infamous Sister Souljah Moment, Bill Clinton's top advisers had told him he “must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” Well, Joe Biden had been distancing himself from liberalism for far longer.

This is all not a little ironic when you consider Biden hitching his wagon so tightly to being President Obama's Vice President. We all saw an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama weather insane barrages of racism and Islamophobia and still crush his Republican opponents, yet centrists still think we need an old school white guy to win.

Biden’s target audience loves Obama without realizing what Obama’s presidency proved was possible. I wrote about this some before in a blog post entitled “Omitting Obama.” Eight years of “O” have had zero impact on their thinking.  It's as if they hadn't happened.

Whether you see class in purely cultural terms or just want others to, Joe Biden sounds like a plausible populist - and even better, an acceptable one. And centrist “realism” makes Biden’s awkward racist record acceptable as well. They want to take any talk of class or economic equality off the table, but a little light racism is fine with them and always has been.

That's not hyperbole. If any comfortable conventional pundit has recommended that Biden go on the offensive with his own Sister Souljah Moment, I have not heard about it. But I'm pretty certain they are thinking of it. [And it finally happened. See the second edit below.] There is no credibly denying this when apologists paint his disadvantages as advantages. Because how are they advantages? You can't portray Biden’s racist past as irrelevant if you think it is an advantage today.

And if you are rationalizing that Joe Biden is cleverly fooling people, ask yourself if Amy McGrath’s disastrously dishonest campaign roll-out fooled anyone. Then ask yourself how anyone so utterly befuddled as Joe Biden can be an agile mastermind.

Low-key racism will not peel away any votes from Trump. Those who voted for Trump out of racism are overwhelmingly already Republican and not gettable. Those “Reagan Democrats" left the fold long ago. Do not confuse them with “Obama-to-Trump" voters.  The two subgroups are not the same.

Obama-to-Trump voters who defected over economic issues such as NAFTA are gettable. After decades of contempt and neglect by the Democratic Party establishment, Obama's presidency seemed to reverse this distressing self-sabotaging trend. His actions did not always align with his soaring populist rhetoric (and his 2008 language was almost Sandersesque), but Obama did at least save Detroit with the auto industry bailout. That's why the Blue Wall never failed him: Because voters care about “pocket book issues." They always have. They always will. It's a political constant. What moron cannot acknowledge this obvious fact?

By stark contrast, the Clinton name brand was so tightly tied to the betrayal of NAFTA that the party might as well have run Mitt Romney instead of Hillary Clinton. When Hill defended Bill's economic record, it was like Mitt saying we should let the Motor City go bankrupt. They are equivalent gaffes. They were equally obvious and disasterous examples of self-sabotage. This is how you throw states away.

Many working class voters wrongly rationalized that Trump didn't really mean his racist rhetoric and was just doing it to get attention. Now they know better and are gettable, but we can still fuck it up in a number of ways. Naturally, centrists have advocated or already practiced all of them.

Scolding them for staying home, voting third party, or voting Trump will fuck this up. Scorning or slandering economic populism will fuck this up. And finally, embracing racism will also fuck it up. It's not only morally abhorrent, but strategically senseless: Racists are not going to vote for racist-lite when they have the option of voting full-throated racist. They will predictably stick with Trump.

Trying to woo those voters will fail as spectacularly as trying to woo conservative suburbanites did in 2016. It will also demoralize the base, which also happened in 2016. Yes, demoralizing your base with infidelity is definitely an immense liability. Enthusiasm determines turnout. Who knew?

The point here is the racists are not coming back and we should not even try to get them back. They're solid Republicans now and hopelessly lost.

But by contrast, those Obama-to-Trump voters are gettable. Thus, the key to winning is fighting against inequality across the board - racial, sexual, economic, etc. It's good politics because it's not awkwardly hypocritical and it promotes crucial coalition-building.

Let’s revisit that infidelity analogy. If your current partner sees you still trying to seduce their bitter enemy (who you incidentally have zero chance of bedding anyway), how forgiving is your sweetie going to be of your fruitless pursuit? But winning back someone you had lost by now behaving yourself seems a lot more likely - provided you prove you are truly serious. Picking Biden doesn't signal seriousness, picking Sanders does. Biden is more malarkey, Sanders is no bullshit.

So what does your fed-up partner want to see and hear? Not more manipulative gas-lighting and guilt trips.


EDIT 09/10/19:

Consider this brilliant Twitter ridicule the Cliff Notes version of my post.

Second EDIT 09/12/19:

CALLED IT!  Today on “Morning Joe," Bill Maher advised “This race is begging for someone to do a kind of a Sister Souljah moment with that far left.”

Third EDIT 12/28/24:

There have been ample examples of how these two men parallel each other since I first wrote this post five years ago. Just this past July, Biden claimed “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” which was much like Trump bragging “I’ve done more for the Blacks than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” This is a lifetime reflex with both men. Neither was ever fit to be president.