While watching Harris's speech, I wrestled with holding in one hand what her Mom and Aunties told her - 'treat others as you would like to be treated' - and in the other hand the bit about 'the most lethal military force in the world'.
I am excited about the Harris-Walz ticket when compared to Trump-Vance or even Biden-Harris. The meta trajectory shift of her winning versus him is enormous. But you are so correct in that we mustn't simply ride this artificially sweet high to November, then crash back into a state of neoliberal normalcy. Our generational calling is to embrace our deep knowing that these systems are unjust and unsustainable and to condition ourselves for the long-term grassroots organizing to be the change at the local and state levels. To resolutely and mindfully walk through the rough terrain before us - together.
I'm throwing my name in the hat here in Oakland, CA - I'll be on the ballot this November to represent my district in City Council. Other than friends and family and community members who know me, I have no notable endorsements. Free from being beholden to donors or power players, I'll answer from the heart at candidate forums and voter guide questionnaires, speaking into being the social and political shifts that so many of us yearn for. Earthseed style. With love~
Edward, I was a dedicated dem for years, but I think you are missing something fundamental. The party has been utterly co-opted by the neoconservative right - men and women who we collectively called ‘monsters’ not ten years ago. The ghouls that wrote and signed the PNAC declarations are all in for Harris; this includes Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, etc.
The democratic party of my youth believed in freedom of speech, good government, worker rights, and an end to wars. (Ok, at least they pretended those things.) The ‘left’ didn’t cozy up to the CIA or the FBI or the NSA. They didn’t censor political views or destroy dissidents. And they certainly didn’t actively participate in genocides. Those were hallmarks of the insane right wing.
What we have now in Kamala is a hard right administration - her speech could have spilled from Dick Cheney’s mouth - but with modern, woke packaging.
An argument in favor of Trump: If Trump had provoked a hot NATO war with Russia, backed a genocide, drawn up plans to engage is possible nuclear confrontation on three fronts - Russia, China, North Korea (this is from the NYTs, I am not making it up); used all the three-letter agencies to enforce censorship against American citizens, ordered social media to kill unflattering stories about his own family, and used the FBI, CIA, IRS etc to target dissidents and journalists: the left and the liberals would have screamed bloody murder. They would have fought these degradations of our democracy with tooth and nail.
However, because this horror show was produced by democrats, the liberals and the so-called left have done nothing but applaud this ongoing terror. There is nothing exciting about Harris. She is just another puppet for the new inverted totalitarian fascism we live under and pay for.
There is nothing decent and normal about sponsoring a genocide. The Biden-Harris admin / Dems are a moderate Republican party with a far-right foreign policy. They're warmongering neocons. What's more, Dems cut ALL criminal justice reform from the platform released last Mon.
Trump could easily win by running to the left of Harris.
The Dem convention was creepy to watch. No one knew or cared what Harris's policies were and they are willing to overlook that the current Dem administration is doing a genocide -- all to keep Trump out. This is what fascism looks like.
Harris has made clear she'll continue the genocide -- that she will not stop arming Israel or condition US aid in any way -- and she used rhetoric to advocate war with Iran. The Dems have been taken over by the neocons. Immoral and insane.
People being able to overlook atrocities and crimes against atrocities isn’t fascism, it is the imperialist norm in a first past the post “representative democracy” like the United States; fascism is when the imperialist and colonial violence and repression that a country had been inflicting on the rest of the world is turned inward and inflicted on the population of the country itself, a possible future that gets more and more likely the longer this imperial repression continued
I recently attended a screening of Borderland: The Line Within (https://borderland.skylight.is/), a documentary on immigration/ICE that just came out this year and it is worrying how immigration has turned into a big money, big surveillance policing project with ICE pulling in more money each year and expanding their reach. It seems like after seeing the cultural (though not really material) pushback against police in 2020, politicians looked for the way they could continue to increase policing and its funding and hit on expanding ICE. The documentary shows a map produced by researchers with ICE detention centers all across the US, including in the middle of the country far away from borders.
We all need to be vigilant moving forward as to the difference between a cultural/aesthetic improvement and a material one. The worst case is that we have a lot of aesthetic changes which cover up the continued harm and make people complacent again.
I really appreciated this piece this morning, and I have also been pondering what it could mean for this country if the right lost the culture wars. Armchair accelerationists on either side aside, I feel very deeply that we are witnessing a once in a century chance for a new left to grow up from the grassroots and become a major player in local and national politics.
I'm not a gifted writer, so excuse me, but something about these last several years has been happening that seems to be lost in all the online arguing and in your face turmoil. People care about the environment and about the kind of life they can build for themselves, and more people than you'd think care about doing that in a way that doesn't stomp on the necks of others. But they need to be activated, to be given oxygen enough to carve out their own space without constantly fighting in the mud with the right wingers, and something in my gut is strongly telling me that with everything you just wrote about, it's possible for once to convince more people than ever that "politics" isn't just something that happens *to* them every four years, and they can be a part of a process that helps dismantle the systems that hurt them and their families.
Like I said I'm not a particularly gifted writer but hopefully what I'm saying in the context of what you wrote makes sense. I just think we can turn this hope into something real if we can avoid the doomerism of the last 16ish years.
Basically I think what I'm getting it at is it suddenly seems possible that we can push the DNC to end up being "the new right" and use this moment to reset the Overton window and carve out a better left and a better populace that understands their responsibility to their community and locality...overly optimistic of me? Maybe. But something feels very real and very different about this moment if only we can look at it with eyes wide open.
A thoughtful analysis. Let’s hope (and advocate for) the implementation of critical progressive policies once the hopefully successful presidential and down-ballot elections are behind us.
The regressive effects of Trump, and McConnell and company, need to be reversed, especially in the Judicial arena, that are impediments to a progressive agenda. The core drivers of the party will be revealed in the what and the how.
This is why I'll never vote for either party ever again. Covid is surging and they're in deep denial and they're going to get more people killed and disabled😷 The DNC convention🥴
We are not a society that “celebrates progress.” Perhaps we are to one degree, we like new things, but that is not progress.
We are a deeply selfish and manifestly violent culture. And as such profoundly uncaring at any real level. The degree of violence in the discussion of the military, the determination to close the border, and the open complicity with genocide is matched only by proto-human societies like the Romans and the Rus, not by the occasional actual cultures of kindness and progress of the human spirit that occasionally flit across our path.
The center is not one, because there is no center. There is no middle between abortion and non-abortion. There is no median acceptable tolerance of torture, nor a halfway point of genocide. When we say we are in the center, we are not making policy, as it is not possible, we are simply constructing linguistic castles in the sand.
The poles between which a center is claimed to exist are not tax and no tax or accept trans and don’t accept trans, they are deeper and as such more intransigent. We could consider them as freedom to and freedom from, or acceptance and abhorrance towards cruelty. We could ask whether one side believes fervently they deserve the freedom to do whatever they wish, without regard for the impact on others, and the other side wants freedom from the pathological horror of this former freedom.
But any center is not a position from which one can derive policy, it is a detente or a war frozen for a microsecond.
Kamala is more likely to win, partly because people who enjoy the status quo more than they fear the alternative are desperate to believe it can be sustained, despite its obvious contradictions and illogic. And perhaps Trump will lose because, quite simply, he is no longer entertaining.
But the language of centrism (and as I have claimed, centrism is just language, no more) and the profound cruel illogic of Neoliberalism will inevitably reproduce populism, even if not in the Trumpian manifestation. Neoliberalism demands the suffering of an unseen and unheard other to fulfil its promises, and the suffering will inevitably find form and force, whether as fascism or any of the cruder forms that were birthed by Plato and seem unkillable.
Until we can finally see the linguistic nihilism and idiocy of the idea of the center, progress is not possible. And, perhaps, it is not, in any language that is comprehensible to those who believe in the center. But I would like to believe that love is possible, so perhaps we should work at that, for while a political center is an impossibility, a universal like love just may be.
So am I the only one who sort of feels that the ‘Left’ is currently doing better than the Right because the actual Right has veered wayyyy off into Handmaid’s Tale territory and the Left has conveniently slid into what is basically Center Right position, giving a lot of talking points that used to be Right wing in, like, the 80’s…… and the actual Left just does not exist.
Absolutely! By international standards, our "left wing" party is actually right of center. There are several notable Republican president's in our past whose policies were more progressive than our recent Democratic ones.
The problem with this framing is that Democrats are also “the right.” By a global standard, America’s political parties are both right-wing, just one is more extreme than the other. It’s just that the US has a fucked-up two-party system that skews everyone’s understanding of the political compass to the point that Biden and Harris get called radical communists and people actually believe it.
I appreciate your heartfelt words. However, the climate crisis is by far the biggest threat to our immediate survival. The astonishing extinction rates from our massacre of the natural world is right up there as well. Governing all of this is oil, which built the house of cards about to fall down. Oil has built this insanity, the growth of human population and our state of overshoot. When the energy expended to harvest oil exceeds the returns, the house of cards will fall down. That point is approaching rapidly. Everything we have, good and bad, is built on oil.
Climate tipping points for the Amazon and Arctic are at hand. We need radical vision, communication, and action NOW. Harris can't communicate this during the campaign, it would be jeopardized to tell the truth of our situation. Let's hope she understands the gravity of our dilemma and delivers a galvanizing message of truth that inspires people to fight for an entirely new vision and economy that dismantles billionaires and corporations, reduces consumption radically and replaces a consumption economy with a circular one. We're out of time for anything less.
Thank you for this. It is so hard to be hopeful, though hope is a prerequisite for resistance. As a really old social justice activist, I have watched the shifts this way and that since the 70s, and if I can remember to keep that whole time frame in view, I firmly believe progress happens. It happens in fits and starts, and looking for it is often like watching the hour hand on a clock, but it does happen. It doesn't happen from the top, and that's what I believe is most important to know. Any progress we see at a federal level has worked its way from the ground up. Of course, we can't lose focus on the federal government, because every time we do, we lose ground. For anyone who feels hopeless in the face of the continual recycling of the same neoliberal framing in different jargon, I would urge you to look to community level activism as the fertile ground for truly liberating changes. It takes time. Way more time than we have, and yes, time is running out. But we have to keep trying anyway, and that requires finding the hope that motivates resistance.
Coins thrown to the crowds, while the economic structure remains unchanged, firmly in the hands of empire. The U.S. is a dying empire, and when the other countries switch from the dollar, the U.S. economy will collapse. Dems will do nothing about that.
I never thought I'd see the time in my life where the Democrat party had 'increase spending to build a strong military' as part of their platform, but here we are. I wonder, since the history of our country includes numerous shifts in major political parties, if we are seeing another such shift begin. Will the GOP fade onto the sidelines as the Democrats stake out territory to the right of center and a new party forms to the left? (Or, more likely I suppose, an existing left leaning party gains traction.)
Wow what’s in the water out your way - the dnc has absolutely not won the culture war - they nullified our primary votes and appointed the most unpopular candidate during the previous primaries. Oprah? Really? Digging up Hillary? Who thinks we are stupid to understand what’s going on in Palestine!!! The Dems have really lost a part of their constituency and they don’t even know it - too busy mixing the kool aid.
While I see where you're coming from, I also feel that we are in a new place with civic engagement and that we. The people can guide this administration much more than we have been able to guide any administration for a long time. This is partly because so many of us have been tuned out, but I feel that if we tune in and we start talking to each other and tour politicians, We could end up in a very different place than we have been.
While watching Harris's speech, I wrestled with holding in one hand what her Mom and Aunties told her - 'treat others as you would like to be treated' - and in the other hand the bit about 'the most lethal military force in the world'.
I am excited about the Harris-Walz ticket when compared to Trump-Vance or even Biden-Harris. The meta trajectory shift of her winning versus him is enormous. But you are so correct in that we mustn't simply ride this artificially sweet high to November, then crash back into a state of neoliberal normalcy. Our generational calling is to embrace our deep knowing that these systems are unjust and unsustainable and to condition ourselves for the long-term grassroots organizing to be the change at the local and state levels. To resolutely and mindfully walk through the rough terrain before us - together.
I'm throwing my name in the hat here in Oakland, CA - I'll be on the ballot this November to represent my district in City Council. Other than friends and family and community members who know me, I have no notable endorsements. Free from being beholden to donors or power players, I'll answer from the heart at candidate forums and voter guide questionnaires, speaking into being the social and political shifts that so many of us yearn for. Earthseed style. With love~
I wish I lived in Oakland so I could vote for you.
Edward, I was a dedicated dem for years, but I think you are missing something fundamental. The party has been utterly co-opted by the neoconservative right - men and women who we collectively called ‘monsters’ not ten years ago. The ghouls that wrote and signed the PNAC declarations are all in for Harris; this includes Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, etc.
The democratic party of my youth believed in freedom of speech, good government, worker rights, and an end to wars. (Ok, at least they pretended those things.) The ‘left’ didn’t cozy up to the CIA or the FBI or the NSA. They didn’t censor political views or destroy dissidents. And they certainly didn’t actively participate in genocides. Those were hallmarks of the insane right wing.
What we have now in Kamala is a hard right administration - her speech could have spilled from Dick Cheney’s mouth - but with modern, woke packaging.
An argument in favor of Trump: If Trump had provoked a hot NATO war with Russia, backed a genocide, drawn up plans to engage is possible nuclear confrontation on three fronts - Russia, China, North Korea (this is from the NYTs, I am not making it up); used all the three-letter agencies to enforce censorship against American citizens, ordered social media to kill unflattering stories about his own family, and used the FBI, CIA, IRS etc to target dissidents and journalists: the left and the liberals would have screamed bloody murder. They would have fought these degradations of our democracy with tooth and nail.
However, because this horror show was produced by democrats, the liberals and the so-called left have done nothing but applaud this ongoing terror. There is nothing exciting about Harris. She is just another puppet for the new inverted totalitarian fascism we live under and pay for.
Well said, S.L.
Kamala has thrown Berkeley under the bus to say she’s from Oakland, because that’s more « black » and « working class. »
There is nothing decent and normal about sponsoring a genocide. The Biden-Harris admin / Dems are a moderate Republican party with a far-right foreign policy. They're warmongering neocons. What's more, Dems cut ALL criminal justice reform from the platform released last Mon.
Trump could easily win by running to the left of Harris.
The Dem convention was creepy to watch. No one knew or cared what Harris's policies were and they are willing to overlook that the current Dem administration is doing a genocide -- all to keep Trump out. This is what fascism looks like.
Harris has made clear she'll continue the genocide -- that she will not stop arming Israel or condition US aid in any way -- and she used rhetoric to advocate war with Iran. The Dems have been taken over by the neocons. Immoral and insane.
People being able to overlook atrocities and crimes against atrocities isn’t fascism, it is the imperialist norm in a first past the post “representative democracy” like the United States; fascism is when the imperialist and colonial violence and repression that a country had been inflicting on the rest of the world is turned inward and inflicted on the population of the country itself, a possible future that gets more and more likely the longer this imperial repression continued
don’t know if you noticed, but - that’s already happening.
Are you suggesting that we in the US face a comparable level of violence and repression from the state than the targets of American imperialism?
I recently attended a screening of Borderland: The Line Within (https://borderland.skylight.is/), a documentary on immigration/ICE that just came out this year and it is worrying how immigration has turned into a big money, big surveillance policing project with ICE pulling in more money each year and expanding their reach. It seems like after seeing the cultural (though not really material) pushback against police in 2020, politicians looked for the way they could continue to increase policing and its funding and hit on expanding ICE. The documentary shows a map produced by researchers with ICE detention centers all across the US, including in the middle of the country far away from borders.
We all need to be vigilant moving forward as to the difference between a cultural/aesthetic improvement and a material one. The worst case is that we have a lot of aesthetic changes which cover up the continued harm and make people complacent again.
I really appreciated this piece this morning, and I have also been pondering what it could mean for this country if the right lost the culture wars. Armchair accelerationists on either side aside, I feel very deeply that we are witnessing a once in a century chance for a new left to grow up from the grassroots and become a major player in local and national politics.
I'm not a gifted writer, so excuse me, but something about these last several years has been happening that seems to be lost in all the online arguing and in your face turmoil. People care about the environment and about the kind of life they can build for themselves, and more people than you'd think care about doing that in a way that doesn't stomp on the necks of others. But they need to be activated, to be given oxygen enough to carve out their own space without constantly fighting in the mud with the right wingers, and something in my gut is strongly telling me that with everything you just wrote about, it's possible for once to convince more people than ever that "politics" isn't just something that happens *to* them every four years, and they can be a part of a process that helps dismantle the systems that hurt them and their families.
Like I said I'm not a particularly gifted writer but hopefully what I'm saying in the context of what you wrote makes sense. I just think we can turn this hope into something real if we can avoid the doomerism of the last 16ish years.
Basically I think what I'm getting it at is it suddenly seems possible that we can push the DNC to end up being "the new right" and use this moment to reset the Overton window and carve out a better left and a better populace that understands their responsibility to their community and locality...overly optimistic of me? Maybe. But something feels very real and very different about this moment if only we can look at it with eyes wide open.
A thoughtful analysis. Let’s hope (and advocate for) the implementation of critical progressive policies once the hopefully successful presidential and down-ballot elections are behind us.
The regressive effects of Trump, and McConnell and company, need to be reversed, especially in the Judicial arena, that are impediments to a progressive agenda. The core drivers of the party will be revealed in the what and the how.
This is why I'll never vote for either party ever again. Covid is surging and they're in deep denial and they're going to get more people killed and disabled😷 The DNC convention🥴
https://x.com/AcrossTheMersey/status/1826767637894103228?t=8RA_oj1rE83PqlQGXEdMiQ&s=19
We are not a society that “celebrates progress.” Perhaps we are to one degree, we like new things, but that is not progress.
We are a deeply selfish and manifestly violent culture. And as such profoundly uncaring at any real level. The degree of violence in the discussion of the military, the determination to close the border, and the open complicity with genocide is matched only by proto-human societies like the Romans and the Rus, not by the occasional actual cultures of kindness and progress of the human spirit that occasionally flit across our path.
The center is not one, because there is no center. There is no middle between abortion and non-abortion. There is no median acceptable tolerance of torture, nor a halfway point of genocide. When we say we are in the center, we are not making policy, as it is not possible, we are simply constructing linguistic castles in the sand.
The poles between which a center is claimed to exist are not tax and no tax or accept trans and don’t accept trans, they are deeper and as such more intransigent. We could consider them as freedom to and freedom from, or acceptance and abhorrance towards cruelty. We could ask whether one side believes fervently they deserve the freedom to do whatever they wish, without regard for the impact on others, and the other side wants freedom from the pathological horror of this former freedom.
But any center is not a position from which one can derive policy, it is a detente or a war frozen for a microsecond.
Kamala is more likely to win, partly because people who enjoy the status quo more than they fear the alternative are desperate to believe it can be sustained, despite its obvious contradictions and illogic. And perhaps Trump will lose because, quite simply, he is no longer entertaining.
But the language of centrism (and as I have claimed, centrism is just language, no more) and the profound cruel illogic of Neoliberalism will inevitably reproduce populism, even if not in the Trumpian manifestation. Neoliberalism demands the suffering of an unseen and unheard other to fulfil its promises, and the suffering will inevitably find form and force, whether as fascism or any of the cruder forms that were birthed by Plato and seem unkillable.
Until we can finally see the linguistic nihilism and idiocy of the idea of the center, progress is not possible. And, perhaps, it is not, in any language that is comprehensible to those who believe in the center. But I would like to believe that love is possible, so perhaps we should work at that, for while a political center is an impossibility, a universal like love just may be.
So am I the only one who sort of feels that the ‘Left’ is currently doing better than the Right because the actual Right has veered wayyyy off into Handmaid’s Tale territory and the Left has conveniently slid into what is basically Center Right position, giving a lot of talking points that used to be Right wing in, like, the 80’s…… and the actual Left just does not exist.
Absolutely! By international standards, our "left wing" party is actually right of center. There are several notable Republican president's in our past whose policies were more progressive than our recent Democratic ones.
This is it. The ‘left’ should become the new moderate right, and we should have a brand new left which is actually leftist.
The problem with this framing is that Democrats are also “the right.” By a global standard, America’s political parties are both right-wing, just one is more extreme than the other. It’s just that the US has a fucked-up two-party system that skews everyone’s understanding of the political compass to the point that Biden and Harris get called radical communists and people actually believe it.
I appreciate your heartfelt words. However, the climate crisis is by far the biggest threat to our immediate survival. The astonishing extinction rates from our massacre of the natural world is right up there as well. Governing all of this is oil, which built the house of cards about to fall down. Oil has built this insanity, the growth of human population and our state of overshoot. When the energy expended to harvest oil exceeds the returns, the house of cards will fall down. That point is approaching rapidly. Everything we have, good and bad, is built on oil.
Climate tipping points for the Amazon and Arctic are at hand. We need radical vision, communication, and action NOW. Harris can't communicate this during the campaign, it would be jeopardized to tell the truth of our situation. Let's hope she understands the gravity of our dilemma and delivers a galvanizing message of truth that inspires people to fight for an entirely new vision and economy that dismantles billionaires and corporations, reduces consumption radically and replaces a consumption economy with a circular one. We're out of time for anything less.
Thank you for this. It is so hard to be hopeful, though hope is a prerequisite for resistance. As a really old social justice activist, I have watched the shifts this way and that since the 70s, and if I can remember to keep that whole time frame in view, I firmly believe progress happens. It happens in fits and starts, and looking for it is often like watching the hour hand on a clock, but it does happen. It doesn't happen from the top, and that's what I believe is most important to know. Any progress we see at a federal level has worked its way from the ground up. Of course, we can't lose focus on the federal government, because every time we do, we lose ground. For anyone who feels hopeless in the face of the continual recycling of the same neoliberal framing in different jargon, I would urge you to look to community level activism as the fertile ground for truly liberating changes. It takes time. Way more time than we have, and yes, time is running out. But we have to keep trying anyway, and that requires finding the hope that motivates resistance.
Coins thrown to the crowds, while the economic structure remains unchanged, firmly in the hands of empire. The U.S. is a dying empire, and when the other countries switch from the dollar, the U.S. economy will collapse. Dems will do nothing about that.
I never thought I'd see the time in my life where the Democrat party had 'increase spending to build a strong military' as part of their platform, but here we are. I wonder, since the history of our country includes numerous shifts in major political parties, if we are seeing another such shift begin. Will the GOP fade onto the sidelines as the Democrats stake out territory to the right of center and a new party forms to the left? (Or, more likely I suppose, an existing left leaning party gains traction.)
This could actually be a solid reset. I don’t hate it.
Wow what’s in the water out your way - the dnc has absolutely not won the culture war - they nullified our primary votes and appointed the most unpopular candidate during the previous primaries. Oprah? Really? Digging up Hillary? Who thinks we are stupid to understand what’s going on in Palestine!!! The Dems have really lost a part of their constituency and they don’t even know it - too busy mixing the kool aid.
This perfectly captures my hopes and reservations in this moment. Thank you for putting words to it all.
While I see where you're coming from, I also feel that we are in a new place with civic engagement and that we. The people can guide this administration much more than we have been able to guide any administration for a long time. This is partly because so many of us have been tuned out, but I feel that if we tune in and we start talking to each other and tour politicians, We could end up in a very different place than we have been.