I had a long, articulate piece written up that the trash Substack interface lost. It even had detailed complaints about my DSA state legislator. The tl;dr:
Housing, medicine and electricity are a huge fraction of the economy. The DSA and their fellow travelers explicitly want to nationalize all three. They aren’t a Maduro level threat, but a pat “the welfare state isn’t socialism” underestimates the risk were those loons to gain power.
Jon Stewart's podcast The Weekly Show is at least pretty good. He snapped out of that disastrous spell that was seen in the Apple show and is back to his old self. Smart and funny. You know the type, Jeff.
JFH was actually a visionary. He saw that in a few years, thanks to the great depression, you could buy a house for a nickel.
Walker, in a few years, ended up in Europe hiding from corruption charges. I could see Mamdami, in a few years, hiding in Europe, trying to escape the pitchforks.....
I agree 100% that the right made socialism a meaningless term. It parallels what the left did with “white supremacy,” “racist,” and “fascist.” 20 years ago, calling someone a racist or white supremacy had power. It steadily lost power as every Republican nominee was denounced as such…like Mitt Romney. Then in 2020, making eating Thai food as a non-Thai person was white supremacy or adjacent. Shockingly, it lost its effect. Then the actual racists feel emboldened. It’s the boy-who-cried-wolf problem.
However, I think some DSA types, with an iq above room temperature, (so a minority), have read Marx and honestly believe in state ownership of the means of production. Mamdani has said as much. Sanders used to say stuff like that…and his honeymoon was to the Soviet Union, which he praised. It then collapsed a few years later, so great timing. De Blasio has said things close to that. He was a young leftist who loved the Sandinistas and honeymooned in Cuba. Mamdami’s father’s beliefs are also hair-raising. He’s tried to rehabilitate Idi Amin’s reputation.
In his acceptance speech, the mayor-elect said perhaps one of the most hair-raisingly totalitarian thing I’ve ever heard from an American politician:
"We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
After the end of the Second World War, there was a concerted effort to discredit national socialism and Japanese imperialism - trials, collective guilt, extensive documentation. Apologists were not welcome in academia or any respected institution. That worked for about 80 years - even actual fascists didn’t use the term to describe themselves. It was a term to discredit rivals.
This never happened after the fall of the USSR. I think part of this was because it was such a terrible system that few would pine for it. The only remaining communist countries, with state control of the means of production, are Cuba and North Korea. These are basket cases of their own making. China has backslides on that a bit under Xi, and Chavez and Maduro basically turned Venezuela toward that model.
There was was also pure pragmatism. Russia was not occupied by any foreign power; it possessed nuclear weapons and conventional forces. The goal was not to remake it, but to welcome it into the family of nations and support market reforms and democratic transition across the former eastern bloc. The weren’t widespread trials and executions.
The failed Asian communist experience were so terrible, that you don’t see a lot of native apologists. The only people who praise or excuse Pol Pot are academics in North America (Chomsky*cough*) and Western Europe, and the handful of still living members who are unrepentant.
The sheer horror of socialism/communism in the 20th is hard to fathom. The Second World War killed about 55 million people. The Black Book of Communism put the death toll of communist at around 100 million. If that’s 40% too high - that’s still 60 million.
And this is getting long, but I would say, to the extent Trump has an ideology, his closest analogue is Jaun Peron. Corporatism economic polices - heavy state direction and input into production, labor relations, and so forth, without direct state ownership - and the aesthetics of fascism.
His behavioral analogue is Hugo Chavez. Someone pissed off Chavez, and he’d expropriate their business or land, then give it to incompetent cronies. Trump gets pissed, he changes policy, tries to slap tariffs on them or otherwise mess with their life. Though Trump will not be the subject of as many fawning Guardian articles.
I had a long, articulate piece written up that the trash Substack interface lost. It even had detailed complaints about my DSA state legislator. The tl;dr:
Housing, medicine and electricity are a huge fraction of the economy. The DSA and their fellow travelers explicitly want to nationalize all three. They aren’t a Maduro level threat, but a pat “the welfare state isn’t socialism” underestimates the risk were those loons to gain power.
Wait, does being a paid subscriber not get us Jeff's gratitude anymore?? That was the most valuable part!
Jon Stewart's podcast The Weekly Show is at least pretty good. He snapped out of that disastrous spell that was seen in the Apple show and is back to his old self. Smart and funny. You know the type, Jeff.
Here you go on gubernatorial: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/779603330/where-does-the-term-gubernatorial-come-from
Seems like chief goober generally is the office these folks actually are running for… maybe there is some subtle wisdom there.
JFH was actually a visionary. He saw that in a few years, thanks to the great depression, you could buy a house for a nickel.
Walker, in a few years, ended up in Europe hiding from corruption charges. I could see Mamdami, in a few years, hiding in Europe, trying to escape the pitchforks.....
I agree 100% that the right made socialism a meaningless term. It parallels what the left did with “white supremacy,” “racist,” and “fascist.” 20 years ago, calling someone a racist or white supremacy had power. It steadily lost power as every Republican nominee was denounced as such…like Mitt Romney. Then in 2020, making eating Thai food as a non-Thai person was white supremacy or adjacent. Shockingly, it lost its effect. Then the actual racists feel emboldened. It’s the boy-who-cried-wolf problem.
However, I think some DSA types, with an iq above room temperature, (so a minority), have read Marx and honestly believe in state ownership of the means of production. Mamdani has said as much. Sanders used to say stuff like that…and his honeymoon was to the Soviet Union, which he praised. It then collapsed a few years later, so great timing. De Blasio has said things close to that. He was a young leftist who loved the Sandinistas and honeymooned in Cuba. Mamdami’s father’s beliefs are also hair-raising. He’s tried to rehabilitate Idi Amin’s reputation.
In his acceptance speech, the mayor-elect said perhaps one of the most hair-raisingly totalitarian thing I’ve ever heard from an American politician:
"We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
After the end of the Second World War, there was a concerted effort to discredit national socialism and Japanese imperialism - trials, collective guilt, extensive documentation. Apologists were not welcome in academia or any respected institution. That worked for about 80 years - even actual fascists didn’t use the term to describe themselves. It was a term to discredit rivals.
This never happened after the fall of the USSR. I think part of this was because it was such a terrible system that few would pine for it. The only remaining communist countries, with state control of the means of production, are Cuba and North Korea. These are basket cases of their own making. China has backslides on that a bit under Xi, and Chavez and Maduro basically turned Venezuela toward that model.
There was was also pure pragmatism. Russia was not occupied by any foreign power; it possessed nuclear weapons and conventional forces. The goal was not to remake it, but to welcome it into the family of nations and support market reforms and democratic transition across the former eastern bloc. The weren’t widespread trials and executions.
The failed Asian communist experience were so terrible, that you don’t see a lot of native apologists. The only people who praise or excuse Pol Pot are academics in North America (Chomsky*cough*) and Western Europe, and the handful of still living members who are unrepentant.
The sheer horror of socialism/communism in the 20th is hard to fathom. The Second World War killed about 55 million people. The Black Book of Communism put the death toll of communist at around 100 million. If that’s 40% too high - that’s still 60 million.
And this is getting long, but I would say, to the extent Trump has an ideology, his closest analogue is Jaun Peron. Corporatism economic polices - heavy state direction and input into production, labor relations, and so forth, without direct state ownership - and the aesthetics of fascism.
His behavioral analogue is Hugo Chavez. Someone pissed off Chavez, and he’d expropriate their business or land, then give it to incompetent cronies. Trump gets pissed, he changes policy, tries to slap tariffs on them or otherwise mess with their life. Though Trump will not be the subject of as many fawning Guardian articles.