Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,983]

2 hours ago, IMissEden said:

Adults will continue trying to sort this for the true sakes of others, while dangerous ideas go back and forth between for fictional sakes. 

What's up my AI friend!

Was wondering when you would pop up with your usual awkwardly constructed pseudo-English RW prattle.

Who are these 'adults' you speak of?

The neo-nazi adjacent (and that is being generous, as some of their members are actual, dyed-the-wool neo-nazis) AfD?

Perhaps the batshit crazy lower regions of the yank MAGA/QAnon movement? You know, the ones who still think (amongst other lunacy) that JFK Jr is alive and well, hiding out for the right time to trod onto the stage with Trump and declare him the God Emperor of the planet?

Edited 9 hours ago by Vesper

[IMissEden 21]

Ain’t locals 

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1 hour ago, IMissEden said:

Ain’t locals 

If you did a historical search of this forum, you would see that I have been very critical of Sweden's immigration policy (especially in re refugees) for ages here, and for many years before I joined TC.

But no, your low wattage AI style mindset only is able to spew out the most simplistic of RW agitprop, with no backgrounding or higher level realisations that issues like immigration have complexities that defy RW childlike posturing and its inane sorting of people into binary, 'black/white, no grey allowed' silos.

I also am far from a hardcore lefty. I am a fairly centre left social democrat, one who absolutely believes in a synergy between a vibrant, AND well-regulated capitalist system and a wide social safety net/welfare state, a synergy that has proven to produce a very high standard of living and quality of life. I also detest far RW ideologies, in many of their various and sundry manifestations.

[Fulham Broadway 16,909]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

What's up my AI friend!

Was wondering when you would pop up with your usual awkwardly constructed pseudo-English RW prattle.

Who are these 'adults' you speak of?

The neo-nazi adjacent (and that is being generous, as some of their members are actual, dyed-the-wool neo-nazis) AfD?

Perhaps the batshit crazy lower regions of the yank MAGA/QAnon movement? You know, the ones who still think (amongst other lunacy) that JFK Jr is alive and well, hiding out for the right time to trod onto the stage with Trump and declare him the God Emperor of the planet?

The AI bot Miss Eden never replies  -still waiting for evidence from he, she, it, about its assertion of the ''systematic killing of young girls in the UK'' amongst other lies

[Vesper 28,983]

4 hours ago, cosmicway said:

It's an arduous task to do what you say.

awww, afraid of some actual research work, lolol

fine, reduce it to 7 (7 in honour of the Pleiades, who were the 7 daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione)

7 posts from @Fulham Broadway that are 'nutcase' in your opinion

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Why history is always political

In his work on republicanism as a living idea, J G A Pocock showed that contesting history is part of a robust civic life

https://aeon.co/essays/history-is-always-political-and-contest-over-it-is-a-good-thing

At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism. The past few decades have seen the rise of this hybrid profile, and while some have claimed that politicians need historians so that we can transform current political debates and use their expertise to help us project ourselves into the future, critical voices have warned that ‘rapid-fire’ superficial histories might serve political aims at the price of historical accuracy.

Therefore, defining J G A Pocock (1924-2023) both as a historian and a political actor stands in need of clarification since, arguably, he does not fit into a two-camp debate on the usefulness of history, but instead he shows how history inhabits us at a much deeper political level.

Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book The Machiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, it will have inspired scholars and public debates for 50 years. The Machiavellian Moment presents a fluid, non-linear and geographically diverse history of republicanism as a transatlantic political language that can travel among different periods and contexts, namely, from classical antiquity to Renaissance Florence, early modern England and colonial America.

Niccolò Machiavelli (detail, 1843) by Lorenzo Bartolini, Uffizi Galleries, Florence. Courtesy Wikipedia

The book generated academic and wider public controversies, since Pocock decentred the history of the foundation of American politics when he placed the American Revolution as only an episode of an Atlantic republican tradition. In other words, he traced the intellectual origins of the foundation of the United States as far back as the ancient Aristotelian ideal of citizenship and Florentine civic humanism. In doing so, he challenged, first, the understanding that the US Declaration of Independence was a pinnacle of modernity, the deliberate and singular foundation of a polity, and, second, the view that the debates surrounding America’s foundation were coined in a liberal vocabulary. In Pocock’s interpretation, these debates were neither fully liberal nor completely unprecedented in history.

This revisionist history was, additionally, written by a London-born New Zealand expatriate living in the US. He was a citizen of the British Commonwealth whose work revised the existing narratives about a former British colony reclaiming its political identity and cultural independence. In a way, this was a familiar story, since he experienced the contestation of political identities as an integral part of the history of the British peoples and conceived of British history as the history of several nations interacting with an imperial state.

Despite its significance, Pocock’s best-known book was not originally intended for the general reader, and it is famous for its evocative style and erudite character. On the contrary, he himself acknowledged that his interlocutors were highly specialised academics. The Machiavellian Moment, he later admitted, ‘was intended to be difficult’, written in a ‘complex and discursive style’ not meant to simplify the contradictions and complexities that were present in the story he was trying to tell. Given the breadth and depth of his work, it is no wonder that the substantive conclusions argued by Pocock remain relatively opaque or misunderstood.

The Machiavellian Moment is a study of the formation and transmission of classical republican ideals in the Western world. In doing so, it offers a sweeping view of the survival of the Aristotelian concept of the good life based on active citizenship and civic virtue, and the effort to avoid corruption and political instability. Three historical moments sequence this story: Florentine Renaissance, 17th-century England, and the American Revolutionary context. Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington are the primary drivers of this transformation and, in terms of the conceptual constellation around which republican language revolves, concepts like time, virtue, corruption and liberty are central. Pocock shows how Machiavelli, in line with Aristotle’s concept of active and virtuous citizenship, was particularly concerned with sustaining civic virtue in a moment of instability and decay in Florence, which precisely points to the expression ‘Machiavellian moment’ as the difficulty he faced in reconciling an ideal of citizenship with the uncertain and temporal character of republics.

Two other Machiavellian moments are later framed within a republican mindset, which according to Pocock shows the persistence and coherence of this tradition over time and space. On the one hand, Harrington’s goal in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) was the design of an ‘immortal’ English commonwealth – again trying to escape corruption and finitude – which authors inspired by Harrington later adopted in the 18th century. On the other hand, in founding the American republic, the Federalists were concerned with representative institutions, arguing that strong constitutional arrangements could save the republic from corruption. During that time, it was commerce and the rise of commercial society that posed the most significant threat, as wealth encouraged corruption. In Pocock’s account, their concern was preserving virtue and political stability, which required stopping members of society, including political representatives, from indulging in luxury, selfish passions and increasing their economic power at the expense of the public.

It was either Machiavelli or Locke who provided the philosophical underpinning for a new society

As what Pocock later called a ‘tunnel history’, The Machiavellian Moment revitalised the presence of republicanism in the history of political thought by mapping across centuries the efforts to maintain struggling republics. But it was the book’s final chapter – ‘The Americanization of Virtue’ – that had Pocock involved in most controversies. Pocock linked the American Revolution with classical republicanism as far back as Machiavelli via Harrington’s influence in Britain. He wanted to show how the language of classical republicanism was present in the nation-building efforts to guarantee popular virtue against the corruption and decay represented by commerce. Crucially, this meant that a modern US society retained early modern values, and the American Revolution, instead of marking a break with the old regime, was a chapter of European history. The Declaration and Constitution were thus not completely unprecedented, which in a way minimised their significance by partially dissolving them into longstanding political languages with roots in the old world.

George Washington (1795) by Giuseppe Ceracchi. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

In contrast to Pocock’s views, Leo Strauss and his followers, for instance, held that there were only superficial connections between republicanism and the US founding, and that the exaggerated continuity of republicanism missed the influence and inaugural character of liberalism. They contended that Pocock, in highlighting the presence of republican pasts, had left little space for liberal ideas and liberal thinkers like John Locke. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), under the influence of C B Macpherson, had also pictured Locke as a honorary Founding Father, and liberalism, with its defence of individualism, commerce and limited government, as providing the philosophical basis for an emerging republic. The stage was set for a debate on antithetical positions: republicanism, rooted in the paradigm of civic humanism, reason and virtue, was contrasted with liberalism, defined by possessive individualism, emerging capitalism and private passions. The virtuous citizen/patriot stood opposite to the economic man, and it was either Machiavelli or Locke who provided the philosophical underpinning for a new society.

The idea that republicanism and liberalism were mutually exclusive political traditions and languages was a historiographical as well as a political commonplace and remains a widely accepted framework for understanding political discourse even to this day. The historian David Craig has noted that Pocock’s book helped popularise, as well as problematise, a clearcut division between liberalism and republicanism. Commenting on The Machiavellian Moment a few years after its publication, Pocock acknowledged that the book ‘consistently displays republicanism as being at odds with liberalism,’ although what he wanted to convey was the existence of a complex tension between republicanism and liberalism in the minds of America’s Founding Fathers.

Particularly with his last chapter, Pocock was successful at being provocative and fuelled a debate that resonated at historiographical, cultural and political levels. Time, politics and context were intricately intertwined categories. How people understand their pasts, and the history of how they write about their pasts, have political implications and determine (not entirely but crucially) the political experience at any given time. It is historians who undertake the fundamental tasks of writing and rewriting historical narratives and, in doing so, shape present political identities. Following Pocock’s approach, history is the most powerful element in the construction and destruction of self-knowledge of political societies, and one of the engines of a shared sense of community. Pocock’s words in this regard stand out: ‘what explains the past legitimates the present and moderates the impact of the past upon it’. In other words, Pocock’s critique of a liberal past also entailed a challenge to a liberal identity. It is in this sense that history fundamentally matters and historians are political actors.

For an author who has devoted a great deal of attention to the political implications of societies’ historical imaginations, it makes sense to turn the spotlight on him and ask how The Machiavellian Moment was read politically in different contexts. This is an opportunity to contextualise Pocock’s text within a wider framework of reception and draw on some details of his professional biography – fittingly, as contextualism was a cornerstone of his own method.

The debates over the reception of The Machiavellian Moment have come to form a historiographical debate of their own. In the years following its publication, Pocock wrote several pieces addressing his numerous critics, both in the US and elsewhere. For sure, he wrote as a specialised historian, although the political implications could hardly be missed. One of them was the essay ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology’ (1981), in which the reader gets to dive into the ideologisation of his book. Pocock provides a justification of his own approach to republicanism among different historiographical (and ideological) schools. For him, the last part of the book presented two conceptions of liberty, the ‘active-participatory’ and the ‘negative-liberal’, which were both used in the political scenario of the 18th century and at the time in which he wrote the essay. It was the coexistence of republican and liberal ideas and the possibility of using the language of republicanism that some American historians later perceived as a threat to the liberal foundational constitutionalism, that is, as a problematic rewriting of the historical narratives underpinning political discourses. Scholars on the Left like Joyce Appleby, Isaac Kramnick or John P Diggins saw Pocock’s doubt that Locke, Montesquieu and David Hume provided the basis for the Federalist papers as doubt about America’s political character and cultural identity as derived from liberal values, that is, as an alleged departure from individualism, constitutional pluralism and commercial values.

His aim was to problematise the intellectual origins of the foundational myth as exclusively liberal

America, Pocock said, became a ‘very unclassical’ republic and that is why, he contends, a foundational myth served a political purpose and had the potential of speaking to contemporaries: it was a nation, he wrote, ‘founded in experiment’, in which a covenant created a bond among individuals. According to this so-called foundationalist myth, US history and society originated thanks to a conscious and deliberate act, or rather as an act that could be separated into two moments: the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. The language of liberal rights, most notably articulated by Locke, served as the blueprint in this process. In this ‘foundational culture’, citizens judge the performance of the republic according to the observance of these principles. And therefore the existence of political corruption would not only mark a decadence, but also shake the very foundation of the (liberal) republic. In other words, liberalism became integral to the nation’s identity, and doubts about this correspondence amounted to attacks upon a cultural identity. What was at stake in situating either Locke or Machiavelli at the roots of US political history was Americans’ own understanding of who they were and are. In Pocock’s words in 2017, ‘in debating the fundamentals of their government, Americans debate who they essentially are.’

This debate was by no means confined to US academia. In this sense, Pocock was accused by Italian historians including Renzo Pecchioli of being an exponent of the ‘ideologia americana’. For instance, Cesare Vasoli reproached The Machiavellian Moment for being less a work of history than a work of ideology targeting the political roots of US culture. Pecchioli argued that Pocock’s interpretation pictured the US as the culmination of a republican tradition originating in Europe, and in doing so it positioned Florentine republicans as one link in the chain of a global republicanism. Reclaiming the singularity of European Renaissance republicanism, Pecchioli labelled Pocock’s history of republicanism as ‘neoliberal’, by which he meant that the global continuities described by Pocock masked instead a form of appropriating and undermining the significance of European traditions. Pocock was thus reduced to representing an ‘American liberal imperialism’ and, being unaware of his own ideological bias, he had established a liberal history of republicanism. Interestingly, the tentacles of this allegedly liberal expansionism even seized its political counterpart, republicanism. Pocock defended himself with his elegant and sharp rhetoric by showing that his Italian critics had misunderstood his conclusions, and that, quite on the contrary, the so-called republican thesis was not a strategy aimed at imposing an ideology of American liberalism onto the trajectory of European history. His aim was not to uphold American traditional liberal values, but precisely to problematise the intellectual origins of the foundational myth as exclusively liberal.

In sum, Pocock was paradoxically under attack for being too liberal, but also for not being liberal enough. Said differently, Pocock was criticised for being too American and for not being American enough – all the more intriguing for a New Zealander. In a way, these examples vividly illustrate the existence of a powerful but too simplistic correspondence between American identity and liberalism that Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment precisely challenged.

Pocock was never comfortable engaging in these debates, as he himself acknowledged. In the foreword to the French edition of The Machiavellian Moment, he wrote that the book had been ‘too successful for his own comfort’, creating a ‘vehement’ debate in a ‘confused and complicated scene’. Still, he was acutely aware that historical narratives are read differently in different contexts, since – as a historian of historiography himself – he devoted his career to situating ideas in the contexts to which they belong.

Pocock died in December 2023, a few months short of his 100th birthday. His death sparked well-deserved tributes across the world and heartfelt reflections on his legacy, with a number of academic events subsequently organised in his memory. Participating in some of them, I found that, when approaching his extensive body of work, a two-fold commonsense division emerged. On the one hand, one could look at his historical practice, that is, his studies on the history of legal and political thought and the history of historiography, where a number of monographs stand out: The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975) and the six-volumes of Barbarism and Religion (1999-2015), his study of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) by Edward Gibbon.

On the other hand, Pocock was also celebrated for his theoretical and methodological contributions on how to study the history of political thought, mostly spread across journal articles and essays, and many of them collected in Politics, Language, and Time (1971), Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985) and The Discovery of Islands (2005). Among those who have praised Pocock’s methodological contributions, many have emphasised the significance of the notion of ‘political language’ as an idiom, rhetoric or specialised vocabulary (such as the language of ‘common law’, ‘civil jurisprudence’ or ‘classical republicanism’). Political debates can be conducted in a variety of languages (notice the plural form), since languages could coexist with each other, be adopted by different authors and travel between discursive contexts variously located in time and place. A somewhat less discussed theoretical point in Pocock’s work is his view of the intimate link between historiography and politics, which led him to believe that histories are political narratives that should be perpetually open to discussion.

Historians narrate what was and is to be admired or despised, imitated or avoided

In the two-fold division described above, his substantive monographs and his methodological writings are typically mapped separately within Pocock’s impressive production and often presented as independent from one another. This would suggest that, depending on the reader’s interest and focus, one could engage with Pocock as a historian of political thought while possibly remaining unaware of Pocock the theorist and political actor, and vice versa. However, an interesting path (among many) into Pocock’s oeuvre involves looking at how his insights on historiography illuminate his work as a historian of early modern republicanism and the political debates surrounding the reception of The Machiavellian Moment.

I take Pocock’s extensive reflections on the role of historians in the abstract as an invitation to consider his own writings in this light: he personified, according to his own formula, a historian who is also a political actor. In this picture, expert historians are prominent public figures who are far from comfortable seclusion in so-called ivory towers. Historians occupy a central, privileged position for crafting and re-crafting shared meanings and political identities. They narrate what was and is to be admired or despised, imitated or avoided.

Pocock’s views are related but not identical to those of his close associate Quentin Skinner. In defending the importance of contextualising intellectual history, Skinner had to counter accusations of antiquarianism and address critiques about the public irrelevance of historical knowledge. Building on this defence, Skinner has shown, for example, that political freedom has been historically linked to the absence of coercion, thus highlighting that these insights could be potentially helpful when navigating present-day politics. His strategy has been to underline that the past could be put to use in the present. In doing so, he nicely articulates a defence of the role of the historian as a public intellectual who brings together past, present and future, but his point remains susceptible to the pitfalls of political punditry.

While for Skinner history can be a political tool, Pocock’s claim is that history writing is, to some extent, political in itself. Pocock’s intricate relations between history and politics crucially merges the polity and the academia, that is, political debates and academic discourses are not simply in a constant dialogue, but rather they are forms of each other. In this sense, according to Pocock, historians are not potential partisans in disguise who use and abuse historical records for political purposes. History is not to be used for political intervention, but instead we get to inhabit the history that we believe. The downside is that the historian’s role carries an almost too heavy weight, as is apparent when examining the reception of The Machiavellian Moment.

Ideas about the inseparability of history and politics run through many of Pocock’s theoretical essays. For instance, in ‘The Historian as Political Actor in Polity, Society and Academy’ (1996), republished in Political Thought and History (2008), Pocock radically asks: ‘what kind of political phenomenon is a history?’ and ‘what kinds of political reflection, or theory, may the various forms of historiography constitute?’ His replies emphasise the circularity of history writing as a political act and inevitably lead us to picture a degree of both contestation and consensus in public debates.

Contestation logically implies the existence of different narratives or positions on historical events. History has therefore shed its singular nature and embraced pluralism, which manifests in the existence of several possible ‘histories’ and ‘pasts’ – within the constraints of evidence. Pocock is far from falling into the relativist trap, by which, if anything goes, everything goes. In terms of what can be said about the past, he emphasises that histories are invented but also verified, which means they are both ‘discovered’ and ‘constructed’. In turn, the existence of multiple histories also leaves us with the possibility of upholding multiple political identities coexisting within a polity. In this regard, Pocock ends up giving competing stories about a polity a prominent place in his theory, as these stories constitute political identities, foster a sense of belonging and otherness.

He further elaborates on these ideas in the article ‘The Politics of Historiography’ (2005). The processes by which political societies ‘acquire pasts’ and ‘re-tell contested narratives’ in ‘endless’ and ‘multiple’ ways enhance citizens’ experiences. In fact, narratives form historical ‘myths’ that function to ‘uphold the continued existence’ of societies, that is, to bind them together and establish their autonomy and sovereignty. This is not to say that historians should be mere instruments of governmental propaganda (although they might have been), but rather that a degree of disagreement and pluralism is integral to both the historian’s craft and the citizen’s experience.

There was no history without politics, and no politics without a contested political identity

Pocock’s career and biography might provide some clues to further contextualise his approach. Although he moved to the US in 1966 and remained there until his death, Pocock grew up and spent most of his early life in New Zealand. He travelled between Britain and New Zealand while doing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, yet he retained his New Zealand citizenship and considered his home country to be instrumental in shaping what he called an ‘antipodean perception’ of history. The Machiavellian Moment, which he conceived during the years spanning his own transit between ‘the South Pacific Ocean’ and ‘the Mississippi Valley’, is fittingly also a history determined by the ‘voyaging’ of people and ideas. As he said in his Valedictory Lecture (1994), he had traced the ‘journeying’ of the Atlantic republican tradition. A bold statement follows, struck through by his own pen in the manuscript of this lecture, admitting that ‘only a mid-Pacific being … can truly develop a mid-Atlantic perspective’.

Being part of a family of settler descent, histories were naturally in motion, determined by ‘voyagings’ and generated by settlements and contacts. British history, which for him included the American Revolution, was a global phenomenon with locations in two hemispheres. And, as far as we accept that histories and political identities are inseparable, a sense of political contestation easily arises from a contested history. When thinking of history as the creation of autonomy, sovereignty and political identity, history writing sets the scene for a ‘contest for power’ in a postcolonial world. Both hegemonic and ‘subaltern’ (ie, subordinated) positions generated non-final histories that were never quite settled and were required to find ways to enter into a respectful dialogue. It is with these theoretical points in mind that I suggest framing the controversies generated by The Machiavellian Moment. The insistence among many American academics in reading Pocock’s work as a challenge to US history and identity was artificial from the perspective of a historian like Pocock who was ‘never quite at home’ and who had personally witnessed the struggles that configurate the political identities of the ‘British peoples’. For Pocock, there was no history without politics, and no politics without a contested political identity.

While attempting to read Pocock’s own career and contributions to the history of political thought as part of contemporary political debates, I am purposely avoiding simplistic definitions about his political sign in present-day terms. Many critics understood that The Machiavellian Moment was an attack of contemporary liberalism per se, but in fact his belief in the inherent contestability of histories accordingly required a robust pluralism and organic liberalism. Allowing different and sometimes opposite points of view was, he argued, a necessary condition for the historical profession to take place. To put it differently, the historical profession, as Pocock envisaged it, required a liberal political setting: ‘History is a field of study in which many explanations can, and must, exist together.’ (My emphasis.) In a sense, all history writing enables the creation of multiple worlds and facilitates a constant redefinition of the continuities and discontinuities that link past, present and future.

[Vesper 28,983]

superb article, well worth the read

How America Invented the Red State

According to conventional wisdom, the last quarter century of elections has proved that most of the country leans conservative. It all started with a map.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/red-states-walz-vance/

On November 8, Tim Walz had to face the music. The scene was Eagan, Minnesota, where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet—a site of sacred importance to the Dakota Sioux, who recognize the area “as the center of the earth and all things,” and also where the Minnesota Vikings recently moved their headquarters. The music was John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town.” As the Minnesota governor and now-failed vice presidential candidate took the stage to deliver his final word on the 2024 election, Mellencamp’s song blared from the speakers:

  Well, I was born in a small town
  And I live in a small town
  Probably die in a small town
  Oh, those small communities

Walz set out to reassure the millions of terrified Democratic voters that everything would be all right in the coming years. “Minnesota always has and always will be there to provide shelter from the storm,” he proclaimed. He touted his progressive legacy as governor, made promises to bridge divides with his Trump-voting, conservative constituents, and even took one final shot at his vice presidential opponent, JD Vance: “I can order doughnuts, people.”

But the speech was overshadowed by the ambivalence of Mellencamp’s song. After all, Walz had just lost his home county in Minnesota to Donald Trump and Vance, even though Blue Earth County went to Joe Biden in 2020. This was no small matter: Walz spent two decades there as a high school teacher and football coach before going on to serve for 12 years as its congressional representative in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He was a dedicated member of his community, and yet his community had rejected him in favor of a real estate developer from New York and a Yale-educated Rust Belt upstart who, Walz had quipped, couldn’t tell the difference between a Hot Pocket and a runza. (It’s a meat-and-cabbage roll popular in Nebraska.)

The leadership of Walz’s party had also seemed to reject him, but only after weeks of enthusiastically supporting him. He entered the competition for vice president in late July as a bit of a dark horse. In the taxonomy of Democratic types, Walz falls into the Bernie Sanders category, in contrast to his then-opponent Josh Shapiro, who mimics Barack Obama in both his centrist politics and in every last cadence of his speech. And yet after the Minnesota governor went viral for calling Vance “weird,” he was selected as the man for the job.

It was off to the races from there. It looked like the Democratic Party had discovered an effective way to neutralize Vance while simultaneously advancing a rural-progressive agenda. The down-home, aw-shucks prairie-populism routine reached such dizzying heights that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign was at one point selling $40 Harris-Walz camo hats—something that would have been inconceivable under Obama-Biden, Clinton-Kaine, or even Biden-Harris. The party had finally found its voice from the heartland.

But by early October, the campaign had moved so far to the right that Walz started to seem like an anachronism, or even a stage prop. The Harris team obviously wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. The campaign seemed to have decided to make a play for some of the red states in the Midwest, but its strategy for doing so involved enlisting Dick and Liz Cheney as surrogates and promising a stronger immigration policy than Trump’s. One of the strangest of the campaign’s many strange choices was to stage a photo shoot in which Walz, wearing an orange hunting vest and looking very much like Dick Cheney, stood in a field with a shotgun—apparently having forgotten that most Americans of a certain age associate “Dick Cheney” and “hunting” with the time the then–vice president shot a guy in the chest. It was the party’s progressive-populist ambitions running straight into the blind alley it had engineered for itself after a decade of suppressing its left flank.

It’s tempting to say that, to the extent this election was a referendum on how we feel about the heartland, American voters preferred Vance’s wonkishness to Walz’s homespun populism. Unfortunately, the election itself never quite got there: Neither the presidential nor the vice presidential debate meaningfully dealt with rural America. And yet the long-term effect of this election will likely be an ever more firmly entrenched red wall in the predominantly rural states in the middle of the country. As with every election since the turn of the millennium, this will drive Democratic Party operatives to continue conflating the population of red states with both “rural” and “white”—despite the fact that Trump gained ground in more than 90 percent of the nation’s counties since the last election. This was the case even in the so-called blue wall, which includes Minnesota, where he won four counties that had gone to Biden in 2020. And in the paradigmatic blue state of California, more than half a dozen formerly blue counties are now, so to speak, in the red. After all of the Harris campaign’s promises that America wouldn’t be “going back,” the Democrats will be plotting their next move with the opposition holding the White House and both chambers of Congress. “Look who’s in the big town,” Mellencamp sings.

The map and the territory: Trump posted this image of the election results on Truth Social.

The same day that Walz addressed Minnesotans in Eagan, Trump posted a map on his social media network, Truth Social, showing the electoral layout of the country: tiny, isolated pockets of urban-liberal blue surrounded by fearsome, sprawling masses of rural-conservative red. For once, the president-elect felt no need to add commentary. The implication was obvious: that the country is predominantly conservative, simply because there is more red on the map. That conclusion is dubious in the demographic sense, but it does get at an undeniable material feature of American politics in the early 21st century: Conservative legislatures and interest groups control more raw resources, and specifically more land, than liberal ones, and in this country land has always equaled power.

The map, however, didn’t always look this way. In his book The Big Sort, the journalist Bill Bishop shows that before 1976, the electoral map was thoroughly mixed, with Democratic rural enclaves in the South and the Midwest balancing out Republicans still living in urban areas on both coasts. More than 40 percent of San Francisco voters went for Republican Gerald Ford in that year’s election, and more than 10 rural counties in the windswept Texas Panhandle went for Democrat Jimmy Carter by landslide margins. Going back further, the New Deal era was a boon for rural-liberal politics, and left populists had built durable labor-farmer alliances throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

By 2000, this dynamic had changed, with conservative political machines having entrenched themselves in rural communities during the 1980s and ’90s. Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of appealing to white voters in segregated states had become a blueprint for conservatives in parallel to an intense capitalist restructuring of the economy: Corporations relocated textile, furniture, and semiconductor manufacturing as well as food industries like meatpacking to rural areas in the Sun Belt, creating what the historian Mike Davis called the “new union-resistant geography of American industry.” The move was accomplished by exploiting surplus land that had been freed up during the farm crisis and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s monetary-policy-induced “shock” of the 1980s, using nonunionized workers—farmers, housewives, unemployed miners—who had lost their jobs as a result of these crises. And it happened at the exact moment that the nation’s mineral extraction industries began facing increased competitive pressure from the Middle East and South America. America was not so much deindustrialized as it was reindustrialized in more rural regions, using unwitting rural workers as scabs.

The visual representation of this shift also changed. The byzantine nature of our civic system requires ever-innovative means of rendering politics intelligible to the lay public, and the rise of television in the 20th century drove cartographers to new competitive heights. In its coverage of the 1976 election, for example, NBC constructed a 14-foot-high molded plastic map that lit up each state as it went for either Carter or Ford. The colors were the opposite of what they are now: Carter’s Democrats were red, Ford’s Republicans were blue, and the light bulbs burned so hot that they almost burned the studio down.

It wasn’t until the 2000 election between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore that the major networks landed on the color-coded visual of Republican red and Democratic blue. Why the colors were reversed is a mystery, but the image was nonetheless plastered onto millions of TV screens for 36 nail-biting days as Florida recounted its votes, and, after Gore and the Democrats surrendered without much of a fight, it became seared into the average American’s political imagination.

This was ironic, because nobody expected the layout of the map to be permanent. Politics, and the way we represent it visually, changes constantly. “I’m working hard to change the image of our party so that sea of red…isn’t there” in 2004, then–Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe optimistically told The Kansas City Star in April 2002. “We can’t win the White House unless we win states in the Midwest, in these rural areas and Southern states.” But with the 2002 midterms, the notion stuck: The red states were now synonymous with the heartland, and from then on out they would be virtually written off by Democratic strategists up through 2016, with New York Senator Chuck Schumer infamously promising that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose…we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

The vexing question of the red-state voter has understandably caused a great deal of indigestion among many on the left. The left-populist writer Thomas Frank considered it “the preeminent question of our times”: Why did Nebraska’s McPherson County, for example—the poorest county in the Midwest, where New Deal liberalism had once reigned supreme—vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 election by a majority of greater than 80 percent?

Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? attempted to answer that question. Economic decline, he argued, had made heartlanders susceptible to political demagoguery about cultural wedge issues “like guns and abortion…whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” This led heartlanders to vote against their own interests, which in turn had destroyed their communities. “All they have to show for their Republican loyalty,” Frank wrote, “are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, [and] a new overlord class.”

Echoing Frank, his fellow left-populist writer Joe Bageant, a self-proclaimed “redneck” from the rural borderlands between Virginia and West Virginia, indicted liberals’ culpability in this process. “If the left had identified and dealt with this dissatisfaction early on,” Bageant raged in his 2007 book Deer Hunting With Jesus, “if they had counteracted the fallacies the Republicans used to explain that dissatisfaction…we might have witnessed something better than the Republican syndicate’s lying and looting of the past six years.” Both writers sought to develop—or perhaps revive—a better form of liberalism, one that would meet the needs of rural voters: a left populism that looked like the New Deal left populism of the early 20th century. Tim Walz’s surprise elevation in 2007 to the House of Representatives in a predominantly Republican district was a decent enough template—it demonstrated that an anti-corporate message that welded farmer and labor power could be effective. But the next decade would prove to be an infertile epoch for that template, and the optimism of red-state populists like Frank and Bageant was short-lived.

In camouflage: Tim Walz at the 2024 Minnesota Governor’s Pheasant Hunting Opener in Sleepy Eye in October.(Anthony Souffle / The Minnesota Star Tribune via AP) Betting the farm: Tim Walz at the Farmfest agricultural forum in August 2023, in Morgan, Minnesota.(Glen Stubbe / The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)

After the 2008 recession, the victory of Barack Obama, and the rise of the Tea Party, populist analyses of the heartland were replaced by another type of analysis—let’s call it “red-state anthropology.” The red-state anthropologists, who would go on to generate a small library of literature on the subject over the subsequent decade, were patronizing and clinical. To them, everything wrong with the average red-state American was a pathology that needed fixing. They believed, contra populists like Frank and Bageant, that developing a different kind of liberalism to meet rural needs was pointless. It’s not that they thought it was impossible. It’s that they didn’t want it to happen: With Obama in charge, the Democratic Party was fine as it was. It was the rural base that needed to change. But change could happen only after the rural mind had been mapped out and conceptualized.

Writers like the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild posited that the red-state American has a propensity for emotional and mental volatility—and for nonrational ecstasy. According to Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land, red-staters justified the environmental degradation of their communities not out of rational calculation but out of “emotional self-interest—a giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.” The reader is left to assume that this is not the case for the rational-minded blue-stater.

In 2018, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow isolated red-state rural communities further still, finding them worlds apart from the rest of America—almost akin to the mythical remnants of precapitalist modes of society. In The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America, Wuthnow argues that rural communities are held together not by the drive for profits and social control over labor markets but by “basic moral principles, such as honesty, hard work, neighborliness, and faith, as well as tacit agreement on social norms such as being friendly and participating in community events.” He claimed that rural people dislike Washington, DC, because it is a big city, and people in small towns do not like big cities. “The basis of small-town life is not only that it is ‘rural’ but that it is ‘small,’” he helpfully explained.

Beth Macy’s 2018 book Dopesick added more fuel to the fire, forever cementing the association of opioids with red states. It’s not that the opioid crisis didn’t start in rural America—it certainly did. But Macy treated the crisis like a literary device, an epic struggle of good versus evil, rather than what it was: an effect of the economic process by which red-state rural areas transitioned out of “masculine” extractive work, like agriculture and coal, and into “feminine” service work, like healthcare. The result was a moral panic in which religious groups targeted community members for shame and punishment, fueling the crisis rather than easing it. It was not mythic at all, but all too modern. But because Dopesick lent an astonishing amount of deference to local rural police officers, their views contributed to its Manichean, dehumanizing narrative. The book became, predictably, a popular drama on Hulu.

In 2019’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, the Vanderbilt University sociologist Jonathan Metzl articulated an idea that has since migrated to the anchors’ desks of MSNBC. “A host of complex anxieties prompt increasing numbers of white Americans…to support right-wing politicians and policies,” Metzl wrote, “even when these policies actually harm white Americans at growing rates.… As these policy agendas spread from Southern and midwestern legislatures into the halls of Congress and the White House ever-more white Americans are then, literally, dying of whiteness.” They are voting “against their own biological self-interests, as well as their own economic priorities.” The advised course of treatment for red-staters, Metzl argued, is to accept profit-driven neoliberal policies like Obamacare as a measure of solidarity toward their fellow Americans.

Hillbilly effigy: JD Vance at the Farm Science Review event in London, Ohio, in September 2022.(Gaelen Morse / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It is no surprise, with the concurrent rise of red-state anthropology, that many liberals enthusiastically endorsed Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s 2016 memoir about growing up in Rust Belt Ohio. Hillbilly Elegy was the perfect synthesis of the populist and anthropological modes of red-state analysis. On the one hand, Vance combined plainspoken, nonacademic prose with an authority derived from personal experience. His extended family is violent. His mother is a drug addict. His neighbors are all “welfare queens,” and, as he goes to great lengths to point out, “all were white.” His coworker at a tile warehouse, Bob, is lazy; after Bob gets fired for being a “terrible” worker, he becomes angry, which we are told was “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.”

On the other hand, Vance demonstrated his anthropological expertise by citing a number of scientific studies to support his thesis that the culture of rural white Americans “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” One was a sociological survey published in the Journal of Adolescence in 2000 that, Vance wrote, “suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.” This took the anthropological position to its logical endpoint: The red-state white worker was biologically and psychologically alien, someone who didn’t even make sense without the proper diagnostic equipment.

It took about eight years, and Vance’s evolution from writer to politician, for the anthropological mode to sour. By that time, much of the liberal goodwill toward red-staters—but also toward the left—had burned off. An era of upheavals—Covid, inflation, rent strikes, the George Floyd street insurrections, rising worker militancy, the October 7 Hamas attack, record numbers of migrants at the southern border, and the Democratic Party’s suppression of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign and the Black Lives Matter social movement—had left liberals reeling, and they responded with a kind of cynical fatalism and a new analysis.

Early iterations of this new take on red-state pathology began cropping up in the pages of The New York Times under Paul Krugman’s byline. There, he began to flesh out a theory of the rural areas as parasitic drains on civic society. After citing the anthropological maxim in 2019 that “rural America is increasingly a world apart,” Krugman went farther in a 2022 column: “Rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America…. Rural areas…pay fairly little in federal taxes while receiving large benefits from Social Security, Medicare and other government programs.” It was a liberal version of the accusation that conservatives lob at “welfare cheats,” and Krugman has since hammered the point home repeatedly.

In their recent book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman pushed Krugman’s red-state fatalism even farther. Rural Americans, the authors claim, are draining America of its vitality not out of selfishness or misguidedness but out of a variety of inherent deficiencies. “Rural Whites are the most conspiratorial cohort in the nation,” they write. “No group of Americans boasts a higher degree of support for, or justification of, violence as an appropriate means of public expression and decision making.” This is because of their “veneration of White culture and values,” to the point where their “democratic attachments are…faltering.” We are told that these people are an “essential minority,” “armed with outsize electoral and mythic powers,” who are, ultimately, “holding America hostage.”

Meet the new boss: Donald Trump hugs JD Vance at an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida.(John Moore / Getty Images)

The argument has certain similarities to those of both Vance and another conservative intellectual, Charles Murray, the author, with the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, of the social Darwinist tract The Bell Curve. In a 1993 essay titled “The Coming White Underclass,” Murray applied eugenicist talking points about “welfare queens” and “illegitimate” fatherhood in the Black community to poor whites; Schaller and Waldman reproduced many of Murray’s framings in White Rural Rage. Borrowing an anecdote from Dying of Whiteness, they refer to an unemployed and disabled man named Trevor who told Metzl he would not sign up for Obamacare because he didn’t want his tax dollars going to welfare queens and migrants. “Never mind that, unemployed and disabled, Trevor almost certainly drained more from public coffers than he ever contributed in state or federal taxes,” Schaller and Waldman write, sounding very much like Murray. The authors gloss over the fact that Trevor is not from a rural area but from a suburb of Nashville.

That conflation of “red state” with “rural” produces, in the mind of its audience, a specific image, one that can serve as an object of derision, scorn, or, ultimately, surrender. But what is most troubling about Schaller and Waldman’s book—and what the entire project of rural divination amounts to when it’s stripped of a class analysis—is the obsession with, bordering on a fetishization of, whiteness. White Rural Rage frequently mentions the economic despair and immiseration in rural communities. But that despair is always ultimately disqualified because of its proximity to whiteness.

Nixon’s Southern strategy had indeed harnessed the existing racism in the countryside to win elections, and so helped to frame the contours of rural backlash to progressive policies. But this ideological project had run parallel with economic developments, adding up to a cynical view of humanity and the way its affairs are ordered—a view that met with consensus from the liberal center. Left movements of the 20th century, such as the Communist Party USA of the 1930s or Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition of the 1960s, had argued for a way out: Repeated confrontations with capitalists would align the interests of white and Black workers. But Schaller and Waldman see little possibility for anything of the kind. They take Nixon’s cynical assumptions for granted and push them even farther. The status of white rural workers is fixed not only in terms of class but in terms of geography, their intransigence rooted in both the soil and the blood. Rather than being in need of transformative social welfare or multiracial working-class solidarity, red-staters are “an anchor dragging down the rest of the country.” Whiteness becomes a kind of dematerializing solvent for all social questions, an eternal and ethereal substance moving throughout history, the persistence of which can never be defeated.

It was a position very much consistent with the calcified, end-of-the-road liberalism of the Biden years. The material and social reality could not be overcome, and so the people themselves were to blame. The kernel for this thinking went back to the way the federal government, under both Trump and Biden, handled the pandemic. Responsibility for not spreading the coronavirus was placed on individuals, morally as well as logistically, rather than on the government—at the exact moment that the government expanded its social safety net to adjust for the economic disruptions of lockdown. This safety net, arrived at by an obvious contradiction, was a boon to rural areas in terms of employment, municipal revenue, and administrative capacity. It was not lost on anyone when that safety net was allowed to expire under a liberal president.

And yet, just weeks after Biden dropped out, here was Kamala Harris gesturing toward the common man with her running mate, Tim Walz, as if that safety net had not just been offered to the public and then unceremoniously yanked away. Trump’s name on the stimulus checks of 2020 stuck in the collective memory, but the slow burn of Biden’s infrastructure proposals lacked the public visibility—and the immediate impact—of the end of eviction moratoriums or the disenrollment of millions of beneficiaries of the expansion of Medicaid.

That was a clue to how the campaign would proceed. Walz would be a symbolic gesture up front, an idealistic appeal to get voters through the door. Once the doors were closed, the mask would come off and Democratic voters would find themselves in a hall of mirrors. One has to wonder, given Mellencamp’s reassuring lyrics at the November 8 event, whether Walz himself did not also make this horrifying discovery.

Gentleman’s agreement: JD Vance and Tim Walz debate in October.(Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)

Perhaps the most enlightening data point from the 2024 election came in early October, when Walz and Vance shared the stage for their vice presidential debate. That debate seemingly promised to hold the key to the eventual results in November, as the long-awaited showdown over heartland authenticity. What viewers got instead was anticlimax. For the first half-hour, the two men agreed on most matters, from immigration to foreign policy. Rural America was barely mentioned except as a way to touch on deindustrialization, trade with China, and opioid addiction.

The lack of any substantive discussion of the rural question was the clearest proof that the Democrats had nothing to offer the electorate this time. The Republicans had laid down their Authentic Heartlander card: Vance is an anthropologist turned fatalist, whose solution for the plight of rural America is higher birth rates and a return to traditional values—with the whiteness on both counts heavily emphasized. To counter that, the Democrats reached for the only weapon they had: a populism that, after two decades of psychometrics and hand-waving and condescension, had been suffused with fatalism, poisoning anyone who tried to wield it, even an old hand like Walz.

In retrospect, the dynamic revealed what had been under the surface all along: that rural America exists as nothing more than a myth in the imaginations of both parties. There was, after all, a reason the rural white red-state subject had to be constructed in the first place. Over the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s, rural America went through massive structural changes: Land was consolidated, farms sold, mines closed. As the extractive industries that had been specific to rural areas for so long began to disappear, this organized abandonment shrunk the tax base and left municipal governance in crisis, just when Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” was revolutionizing the prerogatives of local governance.

The invention of the red-stater provided the liberal establishment with an alibi, absolving it of the obligation to win the votes or practice politics on behalf of a group of people who were increasingly displaced and insecure, wandering from abandoned industrial parks to jails to hospitals. But those people were not good or evil; they were not sacred; they were not authentic or homespun or virtuous. They were not, in fact, uniformly white. They were a population that had once served a distinct role in furthering the cycles of profit accumulation and global land dispossession—and who were now starting to resemble, ironically, the very people that their government and business leaders had spent generations displacing worldwide.

Campaign rhetoric has reduced that population to an identity category, defined by its members’ consumption habits, the dirt on their clothes, the TV they watch, the towns they live in, the amount of money they make, the politicians they vote for, their level of education, even the ideas in their heads. This view disregards the social relations undergirding their existence: their relationship to the means of production and their relationship to the land. Attention to the economic reality would have revealed the crisis of red-state America in the second half of the 20th century for what it was: a roller coaster of deindustrialization and reindustrialization, attenuated by worker exploitation that resulted in no major political victories for rights or representation, but instead in further estrangement from their communities, their fellow workers, and even themselves.

The long-sought populist revival never materialized, because the economic base for it no longer existed. The numbers of farmers and miners had dwindled, replaced by nurses and McDonald’s workers. This was not an alluring picture for the stump-speech simulacrum of populism. Women working in fast-food kitchens or drawing blood did not hold the same narrative weight in the American political imagination as men chipping coal from the earth. On an even more fundamental level, the notion of worker power had been so degraded, so thoroughly eroded through geographical displacement and deunionization, that many could summon only the old, century-withered forms of social change: voter education and a better Democratic Party.

The agony of defeat: Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, react after Kamala Harris concedes the election at Howard University.(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

The Democrats could not employ a different analytic, because that would have required an acknowledgment of their role in creating rural America’s manifold crises to begin with: neoliberal economics, beginning under Jimmy Carter; the 1980s Atari Democrats’ focus on technology-driven jobs and technocratic methods of governance; Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” and NAFTA. To the party, the sudden appearance of the red state was a siren—calling on them not to actually do something, but to mystify and abstract the changing structure of the rural economy. The ensuing moral panic about the red-stater found liberals embarking on a journey to construct a political subject that would one day be controllable and amenable to their end-of-the-road political project. They conjured ghosts and specters out of the past, borrowing here from the populist informants on the ground and there from the anthropological experts in the ivory tower. The Democratic Party had to produce both Tim Walz and the neutralization of Tim Walz.

For now, the right controls the map. That is its bastion of geographical—yet not necessarily demographic—support: where its material power is most easily reproducible through land, minerals, livestock, guns, and a bloc of displaced, disorganized workers. But the right has to chart an increasingly narrow terrain of contradictions. Today, the ideology of land and ammunition buttresses the hegemony of natalism and deportation. But the profit motive beckons, and the amount of resources shrinks every day. With it, so does the patience of the working class.

[Thor 2,419]

9 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Not sure about that. The rich (billionaires) know their only threat comes from the left and social democrats. So they get their otherbillionaires, the ones that own the corporate media to back the far right, and divide people. 

The billionaire media owners and their editor lickspittles condemn the left and 'migrants' as the 'problem'. Scaring people like you that they are all ' Commies'. People fall for it every time.

I know this easy avenue of billionaires vote right - they want to keep themselves rich notion is thrown out, but wasn't there near double the billionaires backing Harris/Biden than the other way around this last election? 

[Fulham Broadway 16,909]

23 minutes ago, Thor said:

I know this easy avenue of billionaires vote right - they want to keep themselves rich notion is thrown out, but wasn't there near double the billionaires backing Harris/Biden than the other way around this last election? 

No idea, but will take your word for it, but to me the yanks have little choice over what determines their future. Harris/Biden might have been a better candidate for women LGBTQ etc but the foreign policies probably would still be the same - a Zionist biased administration that would result in more of the same.

[Vesper 28,983]

21 minutes ago, Thor said:

I know this easy avenue of billionaires vote right - they want to keep themselves rich notion is thrown out, but wasn't there near double the billionaires backing Harris/Biden than the other way around this last election? 

Musk ALONE dumped in 277 million USD for Trump and other Republican candidates.

No other billionaire was close to that, and the ones who were closest (granted off by margins), where almsot all Trump/Repub donors.

Counting Musk, just the top 10 RW donors combined gave around £953 miilion to Trump and the Repubs, and the top 12 RW donors gave over 1 billion combined.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spent-least-277-175722943.html

 

the rest

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,909]

22 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Musk ALONE dumped in 277 million USD for Trump and other Republican candidates.

No other billionaire was close to that, and the ones who were closest (granted off by margins), where almsot all Trump/Repub donors.

Counting Musk, just the top 10 RW donors combined gave around £953 miilion to Trump and the Repubs, and the top 12 RW donors gave over 1 billion combined.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spent-least-277-175722943.html

 

the rest

 

 

Staggering amount of leverage ! Musk expects a return, in terms of business lube and tax dodges.

Talking of leverage AIPAC spent 100m on Dems and Repubs - and spent 14.5m to get rid of israel critic Jamaal Bowman. -which is why Reps and Dems stand and clap like dogs every time Netanyahu speaks at Congress

[Vesper 28,983]

ffs

our current RW government in action

Sweden ends funding for UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA

https://www.reuters.com/world/sweden-will-no-longer-fund-unrwa-aid-agency-minister-says-2024-12-20/

OSLO, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) but instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Nordic country's aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, told Swedish broadcaster TV4 on Friday.

Israel, which will ban UNRWA's operations in the country from late January, has repeatedly accused the agency of being involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel that triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.

 

Sweden's decision to end funding for UNRWA was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channelling aid to the Palestinians via the agency more difficult, Dousa said.

Sweden plans to increase its overall humanitarian assistance to Gaza next year, he added.

"There are several other organisations in Gaza, I have just been there and met several of them," the minister said, naming the U.N. World Food Programme as one potential recipient.

 

The United Nations General Assembly threw its support behind UNRWA this month, demanding that Israel respect the agency's mandate and "enable its operations to proceed without impediment or restriction".

 

[Thor 2,419]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Musk ALONE dumped in 277 million USD for Trump and other Republican candidates.

No other billionaire was close to that, and the ones who were closest (granted off by margins), where almsot all Trump/Repub donors.

Counting Musk, just the top 10 RW donors combined gave around £953 miilion to Trump and the Repubs, and the top 12 RW donors gave over 1 billion combined.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spent-least-277-175722943.html

 

the rest

 

 

My point was - the notion that right party means billionaires support them isn't simply true. 

The left has more billionaires supporting them. So maybe the left keeps people wealthy too? 

[IMissEden 21]

30 minutes ago, Thor said:

My point was - the notion that right party means billionaires support them isn't simply true. 

The left has more billionaires supporting them. So maybe the left keeps people wealthy too? 

Correct 

[IMissEden 21]

Facts are so much simpler than fiction. Common sense, so much more widespread than these overthought, over identified confusions. Hence, things being sorted, while the youngest and ergo most immature keep espousing strange fan fics, slander, bait, and essentially mass hysteria. 
 

I would Google and truly understand mass hysteria. Fundamentally it’s obviously hard to recognise that the sky is blue if trained from all angles throughout life to accept it as white. 

[Vesper 28,983]

7 minutes ago, Thor said:

The left has more billionaires supporting them.

Republican billionaire money contributions dwarf Democratic billionaire contributions. 

This article is from October, before Musk and some of the biggest others dumped even more dollars in a last minute money frenzy:

 

Why Most Billionaires Still Favor Donald Trump and the Republicans 

https://www.newsweek.com/why-most-billionaires-still-favor-donald-trump-republicans-opinion-1967643

Since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, American politics have been flooded by a tsunami of spending by a dizzying array of organizations. One of the lasting impacts of that decision has been to dramatically empower the country's roughly 813 billionaires by allowing them to spend more or less unlimited amounts of cash on our elections. Democrats certainly boast their share of billionaire donors and supporters, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, if for no other reason than that you don't want to bring a matchbox car to a NASCAR race. But Republicans remain the party of not only the billionaire class but of the wealthy more broadly, as measured both in campaign contributions and voter preferences. 

Which party benefits more from this endless stream of billionaire scratch is an incredibly easy question to answer. Open Secrets maintains a list of the top 100 individual contributors to both parties and their various outside groups during this election cycle. Republicans have been the beneficiaries of this spending by a margin of $879 million to $327 million for Democrats. Yes, you read that right – America's wealthiest citizens have already spent well over a billion dollars on this election. Open Secrets characterizes 59 of them as solidly or leaning Republican/Conservative and just 39 as solidly or leaning Democratic/Liberal, with two "on the fence."

It's not just campaign contributions. While exit pollsters don't specifically survey billionaires, they do ask about how people who make less than or more than $100,000 a year voted. Trump won that wealthier group in 2020, which of course includes billionaires, 54 percent to 42 percent. This has been true in every modern election with the exception of 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Trump himself tied with this group.

 

This is pretty stark data. So, to think that Democrats are the party of billionaires, you have to first take the biggest bong rip in human history and then, your head flooded with THC fog, proceed to ignore the fact that Republicans reliably serve the billionaire class's interests and enjoy a decisive advantage in terms of getting them to spend their largesse influencing the outcome of our elections.

Remember that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is currently propping up the entire Republican effort to hold the U.S. House of Representatives. Musk isn't just writing checks—he's turned Twitter, the social media website he paid $44 billion for, into a right-wing influence operation by letting any knucklehead buy a blue check and propel themselves to the top of the algorithm. Twitter, rebranded X (perhaps to stand for the generation that Musk so odiously embodies), is now an impenetrable cesspool of Nazis, influence-peddlers, grifters, disinformation artists and cranks that marches once-fringe far-right ideas proudly into the mainstream.

It makes sense that Republicans enjoy the backing of most billionaires because the Trump campaign as always is promising to do their bidding in a very straightforward fashion. Trump hasn't exactly been generous with sharing his policy proposals (since they largely do not exist), but one thing we do know is that he is planning to drop the corporate tax rate again to 15 percent after cutting it dramatically to 21 percent with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He has no plans whatsoever to raise any further revenue from rich people, full stop.

snip

 

[IMissEden 21]

The amount of conspiracy theories from these kids too. Shocking. It’s wow, suddenly the exaggerated caricatures long painted of others, falsely, adopted so truly. And genuinely ignorant of. You cannot explain xyz to xyz IQ. So too, cannot explain xyz to xyz. There are barriers people can inherit in life that feel as true as breathing, but are as made up as Lego. Understand that. But won’t. Some. Ever. That’s people. They get by seemingly same as others, same enough, it doesn’t stand out. But look closer if have means to. And see, a lot of very sure people, are so sure because they’re stupid. Whatever the saying is, I know how much I don’t know type thing. 

[IMissEden 21]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Republican billionaire money contributions dwarf Democratic billionaire contributions. 

This article is from October, before Musk and some of the biggest others dumped even more dollars in a last minute money frenzy:

 

Why Most Billionaires Still Favor Donald Trump and the Republicans 

https://www.newsweek.com/why-most-billionaires-still-favor-donald-trump-republicans-opinion-1967643

Since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, American politics have been flooded by a tsunami of spending by a dizzying array of organizations. One of the lasting impacts of that decision has been to dramatically empower the country's roughly 813 billionaires by allowing them to spend more or less unlimited amounts of cash on our elections. Democrats certainly boast their share of billionaire donors and supporters, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, if for no other reason than that you don't want to bring a matchbox car to a NASCAR race. But Republicans remain the party of not only the billionaire class but of the wealthy more broadly, as measured both in campaign contributions and voter preferences. 

Which party benefits more from this endless stream of billionaire scratch is an incredibly easy question to answer. Open Secrets maintains a list of the top 100 individual contributors to both parties and their various outside groups during this election cycle. Republicans have been the beneficiaries of this spending by a margin of $879 million to $327 million for Democrats. Yes, you read that right – America's wealthiest citizens have already spent well over a billion dollars on this election. Open Secrets characterizes 59 of them as solidly or leaning Republican/Conservative and just 39 as solidly or leaning Democratic/Liberal, with two "on the fence."

It's not just campaign contributions. While exit pollsters don't specifically survey billionaires, they do ask about how people who make less than or more than $100,000 a year voted. Trump won that wealthier group in 2020, which of course includes billionaires, 54 percent to 42 percent. This has been true in every modern election with the exception of 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Trump himself tied with this group.

 

This is pretty stark data. So, to think that Democrats are the party of billionaires, you have to first take the biggest bong rip in human history and then, your head flooded with THC fog, proceed to ignore the fact that Republicans reliably serve the billionaire class's interests and enjoy a decisive advantage in terms of getting them to spend their largesse influencing the outcome of our elections.

Remember that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is currently propping up the entire Republican effort to hold the U.S. House of Representatives. Musk isn't just writing checks—he's turned Twitter, the social media website he paid $44 billion for, into a right-wing influence operation by letting any knucklehead buy a blue check and propel themselves to the top of the algorithm. Twitter, rebranded X (perhaps to stand for the generation that Musk so odiously embodies), is now an impenetrable cesspool of Nazis, influence-peddlers, grifters, disinformation artists and cranks that marches once-fringe far-right ideas proudly into the mainstream.

It makes sense that Republicans enjoy the backing of most billionaires because the Trump campaign as always is promising to do their bidding in a very straightforward fashion. Trump hasn't exactly been generous with sharing his policy proposals (since they largely do not exist), but one thing we do know is that he is planning to drop the corporate tax rate again to 15 percent after cutting it dramatically to 21 percent with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He has no plans whatsoever to raise any further revenue from rich people, full stop.

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Why do you exclusively post from established lefty sources as opposed to centrist. That is not true information whatsoever.