It’s not odd that these rallies are attracting crowds uncommon outside of Presidential campaigns because that's exactly what these rallies are—a Presidential campaign for an AOC/Bern ticket, unrealistic for many reasons, including the Bern’s age and the undeniable reality that America remains a center-right country.
The Bern’s railing against the “Establishment” is laughable because unfortunately the antiestablishment left of the ‘60s—the Bern’s generation—largely has become the establishment of the 21st Century throughout the West and the anglosphere, having taken bureaucracies, public sector, cultural, and even many corporate bureaucracies. This socialist, leftist establishment is out of touch with the center-left American consensus which accounts for two Trump presidencies.
I suspect you're right, and this may be the part where the Bern passes the torch to a new generation of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is really what he and AOC are even though they cosplay as Democrats.
But Bern fans are die-hards and the Bern is a classic narcissist so it wouldn't surprise me if he was at the top of the ticket with her as VP followed by his resignation or death to get her into the Oval Office.
He was talking about the Democratic Establishment, not just “the establishment”. A subtle but real difference. It was that democratic establishment that hid Bidens cognitive decline and permitted inequality to persist. He was really going after fellow democrats and I think he is right about 90% of his points.
I think Bernie’s in the right here. His audience knows the spirit of the word oligarchy, even if it’s not something that they use in everyday speech. Thousands of people, clearly, are responding to it. The fact Trump’s audience enjoys being spoken to in words children could understand doesn’t mean that everyone else does as well. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
Besides, “kings” is a poor suggestion for a substitute because, by definition, a country only has one king at a time. And the objection isn’t just to Trump, it’s to Trump and Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and Thiel and just about any other billionaire you could think of. Reduce it to being about “kings” and you miss that the power behind the throne is also part of the problem.
Certainly defining an "oligarchy" would need to be done ... and may require some sleight-of-hand as it seems "oligarch" = "a billionaire progressives don't like". (assuming it isn't the usual meaning of "Putin's dog walker who ended up owning a giant mine in the Arctic")
Would Soros, Gates, or Buffett be numbered among the "oligarchs", or is the term reserved for billionaires in the Trump camp?
The Democrats have completely lost the plot. They are so used to their privilege, so used to their entitlement, they just expect people to show up. 36 percent of the electorate did not show up. That means that 67 percent of the electorate does not support Trump. Both the Democrats and GOP can barely get 34 percent of the electorate to the polls anymore in any given year. The common truism is that when there is a good turnout, Dems win. That maybe true, but the Dems have no message, no response, to Trump. And meanwhile, people are waiting. Now, it’s true that the GOP has bound itself to MAGA, and likely, barring extreme election fuckery, MAGA will out by 2028 because they are as incompetent as they are fascist. However, the Democrats need to cancel the Faustian deal Clinton made with the neoliberal right, and not make the same errors. The idea that low-level consumer manufacturing is ever coming back to the US is deluded. But Americans need real opportunities and not just shit jobs in service industries. The Democrats have to get over their entitled bullshit.
You read the Tea Party newsletter so we don’t have to! Thanks for your service 😎 But for real this was a great post . I think it’s always worthwhile to think about language in politics. Look at how the right constantly uses “dog whistle “ messaging where coded words are used to convey ideas that might be expected in socially unacceptable ways, especially regarding race.
If all Slotkin can do is criticize she is part of the problem with Dems. If Americans cannot learn one word we've already lost. Even a 7th grader can learn one word. Michigan doesn't seem to have much fight in them. Witmer had to kiss the ring she says for her constituents. Maga tried to kidnap her last time. Maine fought him and won. Caving to a bully never works. Slotkin should find something positive to do with her time.
What word describes folks with money that use it to bully and game US capitalism? Fat cats and billionaires? Royalty? Kings and queens? Taking potshots at American reading skills is the kind of looking down on people that made MAGA what it is. As well as the kind of talk that the left hates. But there is a silver lining there - the majority of Americans find this kind of attitude repellent, as more politicians are discovering.
People who attracted to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders are also smitten to the use of big words in those speeches. They think they understand what is being said, but it's all encoded so they don't realize what's going on.
Maybe Slotkin can start policing language when she can fill stadiums. And perhaps she can stuff her elitist notion that Americans are too stupid to understand the word “oligarchy” up her ass. (We need to dumb it down, They know what a king is because Disney.
I’m more interested to hear in what Slotkin has to say than what Bernie or AOC have to offer. She actually had to win against a Republican in a swing state while the other two occupy very safe seats.
A real basic tenet of good government is that you should do your best to uplift the civic discourse. I'm not a fan of Pete going on Shultz's pod, but that is essentially what he's trying to do - the funny thing is that centrists like Slotkin are basically embracing the narrative (some) on the left have made - that the average voter is too dumb to appreciate certain messaging and policy. Maybe in a country with many issues around adult literacy, this is wishful thinking, but we should want our civic society to be better; I grew up in a household where my dad and grandfather, both blue-collar workers, read two or three newspapers a day. We can and should expect more.
I see the use of "oligarchy" in the same way I see the use of "woke": a symbol that means something in the mind of the person regardless of its' actual definition. Maybe someone does not know the dictionary definiton of "oligarchy", but the point is more symbolic than definitional. Ask ten people what "woke" means and you maybe get seven different answers, but the end goal to use it as a symbol.
When it comes to Bernie, I think people just know he's a big-word guy at this point. Maybe the eyes glaze over at the text, but they know what he's getting at because his message has never changed. Maybe you can get a messsenger to bring the readability more in line with the norm (I don't think AOC is that messenger), but I think people know what they're getting with Bernie and approach it accordingly.
The problem with the Democrats is not just messaging. Their coalition is changing.
They lost their lock on big labor back in the Reagan era. As manufacturing declined they lost the blue color vote generally. It doesn’t help that government regulation helped kill it.
Now government workers, including teachers, are a major constituency. It’s one of the major reasons Democrats resist anything which threatens to downsize government, or even reduce its rate of growth. Regulation delays everything. “Shovel ready” projects aren’t, because almost anything can be delayed indefinitely. Even projects that Democrats supposedly want , like high speed rail, bog down. They don’t see a problem with that.
They managed to co-opt the civil rights movement. Now they are frantic to hold on to minority votes. Their activists try to do so by demonizing whites. Their demographic triumphalism about the USA becoming a majority-minority country doesn’t help. It feeds fears of “The Great Replacement”. You say that’s a paranoid conspiracy theory, but you should spend some time reading what Democrat activists have written on the subject.
I think theres some truth to the idea that making things simpler reasonates with a broader audience. Arguably the reason that people came to see Bernie was not because on the name of the tour but because of his general persona.
I think I have to agree with Bernie: Americans are not uniformly stupid. Ok, judging by the quality of thinking in these 'comments', we have some learning ahead. Bring it on!
It’s not odd that these rallies are attracting crowds uncommon outside of Presidential campaigns because that's exactly what these rallies are—a Presidential campaign for an AOC/Bern ticket, unrealistic for many reasons, including the Bern’s age and the undeniable reality that America remains a center-right country.
The Bern’s railing against the “Establishment” is laughable because unfortunately the antiestablishment left of the ‘60s—the Bern’s generation—largely has become the establishment of the 21st Century throughout the West and the anglosphere, having taken bureaucracies, public sector, cultural, and even many corporate bureaucracies. This socialist, leftist establishment is out of touch with the center-left American consensus which accounts for two Trump presidencies.
I actually think Bernie is doing this as a power building exercise for his agenda rather than a presidential race, he isn't running again.
AOC might.
I suspect you're right, and this may be the part where the Bern passes the torch to a new generation of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is really what he and AOC are even though they cosplay as Democrats.
But Bern fans are die-hards and the Bern is a classic narcissist so it wouldn't surprise me if he was at the top of the ticket with her as VP followed by his resignation or death to get her into the Oval Office.
He was talking about the Democratic Establishment, not just “the establishment”. A subtle but real difference. It was that democratic establishment that hid Bidens cognitive decline and permitted inequality to persist. He was really going after fellow democrats and I think he is right about 90% of his points.
I think Bernie’s in the right here. His audience knows the spirit of the word oligarchy, even if it’s not something that they use in everyday speech. Thousands of people, clearly, are responding to it. The fact Trump’s audience enjoys being spoken to in words children could understand doesn’t mean that everyone else does as well. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
Besides, “kings” is a poor suggestion for a substitute because, by definition, a country only has one king at a time. And the objection isn’t just to Trump, it’s to Trump and Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and Thiel and just about any other billionaire you could think of. Reduce it to being about “kings” and you miss that the power behind the throne is also part of the problem.
Yes “king” implies that the problem is Trump so electing corporate donor funded Democrats fixes the problem.
Oligarchs implies that wealth inequality and low economic mobility is the problem and that the status quo ante Trump was the problem.
Certainly defining an "oligarchy" would need to be done ... and may require some sleight-of-hand as it seems "oligarch" = "a billionaire progressives don't like". (assuming it isn't the usual meaning of "Putin's dog walker who ended up owning a giant mine in the Arctic")
Would Soros, Gates, or Buffett be numbered among the "oligarchs", or is the term reserved for billionaires in the Trump camp?
You make an awful amount of assumptions about the left. Why do centrist libs assume everyone one else is stupid?
Yes, Soros, Buffet and all the rest long beloved by liberals are Oligarchs, and should be taxed back into the middle class.
The Democrats have completely lost the plot. They are so used to their privilege, so used to their entitlement, they just expect people to show up. 36 percent of the electorate did not show up. That means that 67 percent of the electorate does not support Trump. Both the Democrats and GOP can barely get 34 percent of the electorate to the polls anymore in any given year. The common truism is that when there is a good turnout, Dems win. That maybe true, but the Dems have no message, no response, to Trump. And meanwhile, people are waiting. Now, it’s true that the GOP has bound itself to MAGA, and likely, barring extreme election fuckery, MAGA will out by 2028 because they are as incompetent as they are fascist. However, the Democrats need to cancel the Faustian deal Clinton made with the neoliberal right, and not make the same errors. The idea that low-level consumer manufacturing is ever coming back to the US is deluded. But Americans need real opportunities and not just shit jobs in service industries. The Democrats have to get over their entitled bullshit.
You read the Tea Party newsletter so we don’t have to! Thanks for your service 😎 But for real this was a great post . I think it’s always worthwhile to think about language in politics. Look at how the right constantly uses “dog whistle “ messaging where coded words are used to convey ideas that might be expected in socially unacceptable ways, especially regarding race.
If all Slotkin can do is criticize she is part of the problem with Dems. If Americans cannot learn one word we've already lost. Even a 7th grader can learn one word. Michigan doesn't seem to have much fight in them. Witmer had to kiss the ring she says for her constituents. Maga tried to kidnap her last time. Maine fought him and won. Caving to a bully never works. Slotkin should find something positive to do with her time.
What word describes folks with money that use it to bully and game US capitalism? Fat cats and billionaires? Royalty? Kings and queens? Taking potshots at American reading skills is the kind of looking down on people that made MAGA what it is. As well as the kind of talk that the left hates. But there is a silver lining there - the majority of Americans find this kind of attitude repellent, as more politicians are discovering.
People who attracted to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders are also smitten to the use of big words in those speeches. They think they understand what is being said, but it's all encoded so they don't realize what's going on.
Maybe Slotkin can start policing language when she can fill stadiums. And perhaps she can stuff her elitist notion that Americans are too stupid to understand the word “oligarchy” up her ass. (We need to dumb it down, They know what a king is because Disney.
I’m more interested to hear in what Slotkin has to say than what Bernie or AOC have to offer. She actually had to win against a Republican in a swing state while the other two occupy very safe seats.
A real basic tenet of good government is that you should do your best to uplift the civic discourse. I'm not a fan of Pete going on Shultz's pod, but that is essentially what he's trying to do - the funny thing is that centrists like Slotkin are basically embracing the narrative (some) on the left have made - that the average voter is too dumb to appreciate certain messaging and policy. Maybe in a country with many issues around adult literacy, this is wishful thinking, but we should want our civic society to be better; I grew up in a household where my dad and grandfather, both blue-collar workers, read two or three newspapers a day. We can and should expect more.
I see the use of "oligarchy" in the same way I see the use of "woke": a symbol that means something in the mind of the person regardless of its' actual definition. Maybe someone does not know the dictionary definiton of "oligarchy", but the point is more symbolic than definitional. Ask ten people what "woke" means and you maybe get seven different answers, but the end goal to use it as a symbol.
When it comes to Bernie, I think people just know he's a big-word guy at this point. Maybe the eyes glaze over at the text, but they know what he's getting at because his message has never changed. Maybe you can get a messsenger to bring the readability more in line with the norm (I don't think AOC is that messenger), but I think people know what they're getting with Bernie and approach it accordingly.
The problem with the Democrats is not just messaging. Their coalition is changing.
They lost their lock on big labor back in the Reagan era. As manufacturing declined they lost the blue color vote generally. It doesn’t help that government regulation helped kill it.
Now government workers, including teachers, are a major constituency. It’s one of the major reasons Democrats resist anything which threatens to downsize government, or even reduce its rate of growth. Regulation delays everything. “Shovel ready” projects aren’t, because almost anything can be delayed indefinitely. Even projects that Democrats supposedly want , like high speed rail, bog down. They don’t see a problem with that.
They managed to co-opt the civil rights movement. Now they are frantic to hold on to minority votes. Their activists try to do so by demonizing whites. Their demographic triumphalism about the USA becoming a majority-minority country doesn’t help. It feeds fears of “The Great Replacement”. You say that’s a paranoid conspiracy theory, but you should spend some time reading what Democrat activists have written on the subject.
I think theres some truth to the idea that making things simpler reasonates with a broader audience. Arguably the reason that people came to see Bernie was not because on the name of the tour but because of his general persona.
You compared knowing the definition of the word "oligarchy" to understanding Mandarin.
You focus on the fact that American adults average an 8th grade reading level.
You think Trump's plain and simple language makes him accessible.
This whole dumb essay made me feel dumber.
Congrats on your Tea Party Patriot affiliation.
You should sign up for their vocabulary seminars.
I think I have to agree with Bernie: Americans are not uniformly stupid. Ok, judging by the quality of thinking in these 'comments', we have some learning ahead. Bring it on!