Democratic strategy since 2015: TrumpBad & performative 'inclusion'

is it working yet?

As a national party, the Democrats have effectively reduced themselves to a fund-raising agency. Meanwhile, much of the rank-and-file has lost any capacity for honest self-criticism.

After having forgone social media, except for occasional check-ins with relatives, for several months to write a novel, I jumped back in, even diversifying into Bluesky, a professed alternative to Twitter, X. Because billionaire moron Elon Musk runs X, someone decided there had to be an alternative. The result, from what I can see so far, is a second, even more ideologically siloed platform than the still ideologically diverse X. One more grain of evidence added to the existing mountain that digital platforms—for reasons that have been written about by many (usually using those platforms, as I am now)—just do this. They self-organize into hateful little tribes, each with its own manners, metaphysical convictions, and insider linguistic formulae.

Bluesky denizens, not all of them, but definitely a majority—like Democrats (many of them are Democrats)—have never dismounted the TrumpBad bandwagon long enough to engage in the kind of honest self-criticism that might point them down the road to eventual political efficacy. They do spend a fair amount of time denouncing the people who’re trying to explain why the American Democratic Party has focus-grouped itself into a state of national (not all states . . . yet) irrelevancy. Perhaps that’s because they still take their direction from Wall Street (have since Slick Willy Clinton . . . Trump’s not the first con artist in the Oval Office).

They had access to a guy who could have channeled post-2008 precarity-populism in to a national resurgence—Bernie Sanders—but at their Wall Street master’s behest, they stomped on him like a spider.

During this latest plebiscite for American regent, the Dems first tried to hang onto the senescent old scoundrel they’d used—with floods of cash—to derail the second Bernie run (the anti-Bernie appeal was that he was un-electable, take that, you irony-junkies!). When Biden had a full-on cognitive meltdown during a debate with an illiterate slumlord (who’d also beaten the “more electable” Hillary Clinton . . . Trump’s defeat in 2020 is down to one thing—Covid), they went into the back room and appointed (with no democratic process) a relentlessly arrogant and annoying candidate who never got past 14 percent in the last round of primaries, and who would—rather than articulate a single policy—“protect democracy” (irony alert, again). You really cannot make this shit up!

The problem? The singular horror? The crux of all that ails us? Trump and his supporters. All this talk of democracy, and yet . . . and yet . . . Trump won the popular vote. Let’s not re-examine ourselves, though. Let’s not figure out anything about the Trump coalition (that’s what it was). Let’s not take a single grievance seriously. Instead, we can (a) denounce them wholesale a small-minded bigots and (b) withdraw into our silos and sociologize/psychologize/pathologize them. Then we’ll feel more better. Nice and smuggly in our DNC bubble wrap.

Don’t get me wrong (which many will at this point, often as prologue to straw-manning or trying to irony me to death). A fraction of Trump’s coalition are bigots, and the next four years will be another clown-car shit-show, accompanied by a media-fueled mass-anxiety disorder. But I can also say—and yes, I know how inflation was a global phenomenon, as well as how monopoly capital gouged us—that, as retirees on a very modest fixed income, we saw our buying power bleed out to the tune of almost 30 percent over the last four years, while Democrats touted the casino-capitalist gains at Wall Street as evidence of an economic recovery. Winning in the face of that is an uphill slog from the get.

What’s the solution? Declare Transgender Day on Easter, and materially support the genocide of Palestinians. Democrats are sooooo much smarter than Republicans, because . . . more graduate degrees.

The data show that, apart from these “peripheral” issues, the overwhelming dissatisfaction with the Biden administration was economic. But what this other stuff—genocide, gender ideology, pwog arrogance—provided was the margin of victory (that’s how American politics works, duh). In Michigan, where I live, Palestine directly handed Biden a loss, when the Muslim margin, who edged him to victory in 2020, just couldn’t get past the images of thousands of child amputees or the IDF pissing on dead Palestinian grandmothers. In other places, that margin was definitely related to bone-headed shit like the Easter surprise and the surge of pre-adolsecent girls being convinced by the internet that they need fucking puberty blockers.

So, in a sense, we’re talking about that crucial ten percent that does not consistently align with one party. But it’s not a homogeneous ten percent. It’s a kaleidoscope of various beliefs and issues, and a crucial handful of single-issues. Democrats and pwogs don’t care about politics as an instrumental activity; they’re more interested in retaining their standing with funders on the one hand and virtue-signaling their ideologically-policed social in-groups on the other.

Please note: Trump won with a multi-racial coalition! He didn’t win with a majority of black votes, for example, but he did increase his share sufficiently to kick Kamala Harris’s ass. It matters! (I voted a straight Democratic ticket, for the record. It’s a tactical, not a moral, choice.)

So-called progressives have the unfortunate habit of dividing the world into various abstract identities, then scratching their heads (or intentionally ignoring) when “members” of said identities contradict and-or dislike them. Trump won a bigger share of black voters than any Republican for half a century. Trump won almost half of that ridiculous abstraction “Hispanics.” (African America—which is not, culturally-speaking, all black citizens of the US—is still far more homogeneous than what we classify as Hispano-Latinas or whatever moniker you apply to this uselessly diverse category. A Miami Cuban is far different than a NewYorican, who is far away again from a Logan Park cholo, who is nothing like a third generation Meso-American in my town of residence, who has little in common, besides being bilingual, with the chicanos who used to hang around my late brother’s Galveston bait camp and never missed a local rodeo.)

You know what two things put a lot (no, not all) of so-called Latinos in the same boat? Catholicism and a reactive detestation of the neologism Latinx, the latter they (rightly, in my view) see as just more “progressive” cultural imperialism.

You know what differentiates the majority of black voters from pwogwessives? Atheism. Black voters, by and large, are, like me, God-botherers. Sixty-nine percent of atheistic voters are Democrats, 17 percent independents, and 15 percent Republicans. Seventy-four percent of black voters are theists, the majority Black Protestants.

You know what else joins most so-called Latinos with most African Americans? A rejection of gender ideology. They have no affinity with any public figure who, when questioned, can’t give a straight answer to the question, What is a woman? Republicans ran through that equivocator’s pause like Israeli tanks through a Palestinian schoolyard.

This stuff that unites them with a lot of white working class voters. No they do not want a drag queen presented to their kids in a public school!

You know what’s kept most black voters in the Democratic Party, in spite of the vast cultural divide between petit bourgeois white Democrats and African America writ large? Fear of Republicans, ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. That’s fading into the historical background now. (No, I’m not saying many white Republicans have lost their negrophobia; it’s still the bonding agent for a substantial fraction of the party.)

Meanwhile, white progressive racism hangs on. (OMG, what does he mean by that? I study academic treatises on race! I post memes against oppression! I say the right code-words!)

Not to leave myself un-criticized, I was, in the past, a member of two communist cadre organizations. One perennial complaint (not from my latter organization, because we had an aggressive affirmative action criterion built into membership intake) was that leftist organizations had trouble recruiting and keeping “people of color” (another meaningless insider term). We ignored (almost intentionally) the main reason the left had a hard time recruiting black and “Latino” members, as well as anyone who was genuinely working class — atheism.

I wrote a provocative Facebook post some time back in which I just said, “The whitest and male-ist and most petit bourgeois phenomenon in the US is atheism.” Of course, people chimed in with “exceptions,” whereupon I explained that this was a statistical, not an essential, claim. These ^^^ three categories are all over-represented among American atheists. Leftists, themselves over-represented in these three categories, are largely irreligious or anti-religious, too. This is not the case among African Americans or Latinos — the two largest “people of color” cohorts in the US. I heard a black guy exclaim once, “they took everything else from us, and now these so-called saviors want to take away God?!”

When this is posed to leftists, especially of the petit bourgeois/academic/PMC variety, more especially the white ones, they’re caught on the horns of a dilemma. They’ve repeatedly declared the priorities of “identity” and “inclusion” in their defenses of whatever they take to be (I’ll just use one example) “black culture,” but one of the constants in whatever exists that might be called American black culture is Christianity — which is one of the things that has to be jettisoned in the name of the permanent revolution against . . . well, everything from the past: God, family, tradition. After all, Marx said that the dead suffocate the living, and Thomas Jefferson said that the dead should not rule the living. (Black culture for Jefferson was named Sally Hemmings.) In all my time with the left, even with a cadre organization that was half black, I never heard a single black person say, “Abolish the family.” White pwogs, however, can be found saying this stupid shit with increasing frequency.

The way pwogs and even, regrettably, some old-leftists get past this contradiction — we love black culture/we oppose Christianity (or “religion”) — is by avoiding it in conversation. It’s okay to shit all over the faith of other white people; but they’ll walk on eggs over the issue with black people, even embracing selective black pastors in phony shows of racial solidarity. (Forget about Latino Catholics, though. Pwogs hate Catholics, and never miss an opportunity to denounce the Church. And yes, there are black Catholics — a couple hundred million worldwide [they must be the unenlightened ones . . . maybe the pwogs can fix them].)

White “progressives” can and will say that white religious people are backward, and even mock their faith, but they’ll hold their tongues about black people, about whom they believe exactly the same thing, in a selective and tokenistic display of pandering, which translates: they think black people are too stupid to see this hypocrisy. Progressive racism!

All of us already know what white pwogs think, from the difference in the conversations they hold with white folks like them and with black people — this conversational code-switching also being characteristic of your everyday, garden variety white racist who takes the racial epithets out of his vocabulary within earshot of black people.

Remarkably, they don’t think the people they’ve pigeonholed in their identitarian taxonomies realize it! (too backward?) And yet, as someone whose family and workmates have been “people of color” for longer than most pwogs have been alive (Christ, POC is a stupid fucking phrase! But, yay, we’ve gone to a new level of abstraction now with BIPOC . . . the PMC Bureau of Language has spoken), I can tell you that most of the folks I know and knew from these phenotypes and ethnicities never tire of having a laugh at the expense of white liberals, who most of them hold in greater contempt than they do the white bubbas (to whom I’m also related). In the Army, I saw more class-consolidated friendships between white bubbas, black, and brown soldiers than I did between the “ethnicities” of educated civilians. They listened to different music, but they believed in God (and sports, and the power wielded over them by their petit bourgeois officers).

(BIPOC includes Asians [yet another flaky category, including everything from Mongols to Chinese to Japanese to Hmong to third generation Korean-American Californians who don’t speak a word of Hangul], American indigenous [229 ethnicities and 574 nations], over a hundred Pacific Island ethnicities, Arabs, Druze, Kurds, Persians, etc. etc., seven major ethnolinguistic groups from South Asia, etc. etc. etc. . . . thousands of African ethnicites genotyped from 1327 polymorphic markers . . . how are all these dropped into the same BIPOC category? Oh yeah, they’re not “white” . . . and so “whiteness” again becomes the sun at the center of the HR linguistic solar system, sheesh! Do y’all even listen to yourselves?)

Okay, rant over. Back to TrumpBad/performative inclusion, the strategy, the strange attractor, the lodestar, the metaphysical constant. And back to Bluesky. (Spoiler alert, in comparing Bluesky to X, X is still 100 times more ideologically diverse! The ridiculous child who owns it does not, ad hominem, change that. It’s demonstrable by viewing the content.) Bluesky has become the anti-X silo.

Let me highlight. Recent post and follow-on comments, regarding Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. I’ve followed him on X for some time, and even interacted with him here and there. In part, because we have something in common apart from our criticism of performative petit bourgeois politics. He likes to fish. We’re both anglers. He’s also a black guy (I’m still white) with which angling is un-associated among the elites whose tails he likes to pull.

our son

our granddaughter (get used to it)

Harper is, in the lingo of the elite cool-kids, BIPOC, but he’d probably tell you where to shove this HR shit-terminology. I like Dr. Harper. He’s sharp. He writes well. He’s intellectually courageous. He has a wicked sense of humor. Some of the Bluesky denizens, not so much. Here’s an X post:

When he uses the term “woke,” he’s referring (pretty obviously, if you actually stay with his narrative and don’t take it out of context) to university administrators (of whom he has direct experience) engaging in “performative social justice.”

Bluesky responses?

“fuck off, Harper” (okay, that showed him . . . he’s a bad Negro . . . this from someone who claims to be a political theologian)

followed by lots of ironic comments on “lib Valhalla” (ME: far easier than engaging his point about this performative virtue serving as a smokescreen for exploitation ««true)

“I will tell you my biggest problem with Tyler and more generally, my biggest problem with people at the Atlantic: a lot of the time I don’t even know what they’re trying to say. You’d have to be even more online than I am to know what the fuck they’re talking about.” (ME: you mean you don’t know what they’re trying to say? Or is this just more defensive snark in lieu of an argument? I find his points quite easy to understand, and I don’t even have a graduate degree)

«"If we didn’t have a DEI office, the university would be nicer to pro-Palestinian protesters" is quite the take» (ME: hookay, Mr. Straw Man, where’d he say that exactly?)

“correlation between being pro-DEI and pro-palestine has to be like .9 or something” (ME: yeah, maybe [you haven’t supported this] except he wasn’t talking the kids in flex-cuffs with pepper-spray in their eyes; he was talking about triflin’-ass administrators, and DEI is HR-speak for achieving representative samples of BIPOCLGBTQIAWDVRUMOHT+&? among the elite.)

ME with an excursus: Lesbian, bisexual, and gay refer to sexual orientation, not to any actual kind of person beyond that. Transgender now refers to nothing anyone can pin down, but it has to do with declarative “identity,” or more ontologically impossible still—being born into the wrong body. Queer, I can’t get a straight answer to that that doesn’t, like BIPOC, just reverse-value and preserve the centrality of the very thing it’s supposed to undermine [the hetronormative binary]. Intersexed, in medical terms, refers to a birth defect . . . in HR/pop-poststructural speak, idk. Asexual, I assume, means someone who doesn’t do sex [like the nuns I know?]. The + sign, I assume, covers every other self-designated “identity” [I’m a rooster].)

^^^Saying these obvious things makes me, apparently, a fascist. Whose been a socialist since before I left the Army 29 years ago, and whose family includes black, white, Korean, Japanese, Osage, Hawaiian, and Mexican. Rainbow fascists. That, my friends, is how ideology works. Or in the case of politics, about which I’m writing this rant, garbage-in/garbage-out failed strategies and serial defeats at the hands of the very people the “left” used to say they represented.

More replies from the Hate-Harper silo on Bluesky:

“He’s a tenure-track professor who writes in prominent magazines! There’s no “not getting promoted” here. He seems genuinely attracted to anti-wokeness on an aesthetic level.”

responded to with . . .

“I think it's more that he’s repulsed by wokeness on an aesthetic level. Which, fair. Sometimes I am too. But he’s refused to acknowledge that it’s aesthetics.” (ME AGAIN: Okay, now it’s me that doesn’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. He totally acknowledges, even emphasizes, that its aesthetic cover . . . maybe I do need that graduate degree . . . but the “tenure track professor” thing is pretty fucking obviously an ad hominem retrenchment.)

“Harper needs to go and work in a state university in a red state for five years and then come back and tell me how its actually “woke” that is killing academia. Just ahistorical, ignorant, one-sided nonsense.” (MORE ME: beam me up Scotty . . . no rational life here . . . he never said “woke is killing the academy”; he said his colleagues don’t have medical insurance and his students were going broke trying to pay tuition, while hypocritical university bosses paper over these exploitative practices with “performative social justice.”)

“Tbf his point isn’t that wokism killed academia, it’s that if we weren’t so nice to trans people we would’ve won the class war by now. Source: like, y’know… vibes. A really, really strong hunch?” (ME: ahhh, ffs, is this horseshit all you got?)

Go Democrats! Go Pwogs! Go lose again!

It’s tough, I know, that the only institution that almost has the remaining power to challenge the dangerous Republican coalition is the very one who created and co-signed the conditions that led us here. And that the Democratic coalition is now in a hostage situation with one of its own essential margins bunkered down in a smug ideological camp, where they’ve, likewise, lost the capacity to see errors in themselves.

Here’s a picture of my lunch. Buen provecho!