"It’s easy to see what various parts of the left want to dismantle — capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the
nuclear family — and much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next.... The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return.... To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own."
So the advice to the left is: Find some "beautiful dreams" to replace all that you are trying to destroy or people aren't going to find all that destruction too appealing.
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93 comments:
If your policy idea doesn't include a plausible vision of the future it's not an excellent policy idea.
Oh no...they have a wonderfully articulate and plausible vision of the future, and here it is.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a 40 something gender-ambiguous toddler screaming into a microphone at you over imagined transgressions, forever"
She masturbates herself when she writes this drivel. I’m sure they all
do.
"much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next"
Everyone equal, some a little more equal than others. Everyone submit to Big Brother. Everyone secure all the time, forget freedom. Everyone shiver and fry for the sake of the planet.
"offer the false promise of return"
The past of the less unequal post-war period touted by lefties? Like, when we were not being invaded every day? Romantic, I know.
"To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own."
Its beautiful dream is full atomization, aided by transgenderism and abortion on demand by women alone at any time; Big Brother control, with surveillance of wrongthinkers and restrictions on freeacters; and kowtowing to Gaia, beautifully destroying the evil western way of life and humanity's colonization of the planet. What's not to like?
It's a shame that people really believe this shit. They are freaking crazy....and they want the rest of us to accept and follow their craziness whilst America burns down to the ground.
"Find some "beautiful dreams" to replace all that you are trying to destroy or people aren't going to find all that destruction too appealing."
"Trying to destroy"? You mean they're not there yet?
If your "excellent policy ideas" don't have inherent in them a plausible vision of the future then they're not "excellent." Quite the opposite.
I really wish the Left / Democratic party would drop the disguise and run on such "excellent policy ideas" as dismantling capitalism and destroying the nuclear family. Be honest and open about those goals and I'm sure they'd never lose another election.
Didn't Obama sell that Schlock?
The left has to complete it's chemotherapy for another four years before they can articulate a coherent plan.
the left want to dismantle "hetero-patriarchy"? Indeed - that's what the nutters want.
We need an army of White Left Pete Bootyjudges, and superior trans clothing thieves ruling over us with... ah... such precision and aptitude... leading us to a glorious fun-filled future where leftist capitalists are left alone- and mom and pop shops and the middle class are smothered and destroyed.
To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own."
Michelle Goldberg writes, in "What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?" (NYT).
Beautiful Dreamer
First she says ""Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, " and then proceeds to tell us she (and her fellow travelers) want to abolish our economic system, prisons, families, and the method by which we propagate of our species. AND she doesn't have anything to replace it with.
Deep thinker, that one…
Really, I haven't had a lot of respect for Goldberg but I didn't, until now, think she was an idiot. But, wow.
If your vision is anti-capitalist, one assumes it includes more poverty. If anti-incarceration, one assumes more crime. If anti-nuclear family, one assumes more social pathology. This is what the existing data predicts. So if people are asked to imagine different outcomes, they're asked to embrace fabulism. How about some love for reality as it is?
Hetero-patriarchy? What fresh bullsh*t is this, a new front in the language wars?
Overlooked: Cis-utero-matriarchy
You mean the life of Julia wasn't appealing?
What a surprise.
Utopia always looks beautiful though, doesn’t it? What more need they say?
The Left has taught us very well that fairness is not an objective of public policy. There is no room for the concept of fairness. The exercise of Power is simply one of force, and the more arbitrary the exercise is, the more unfair it is for those who disagree, the more powerful one actually is. It all works very well - until the physical conflict breaks out.
Conservatives lose because they assume that a competition of ideas on a level playing field is the basis of our society. The Progressives make no such self-defeating assumptions, and reinforce their cover by using the words 'Saving Democracy' a lot.
donald: "She masturbates herself when she writes this drivel. I’m sure they all do."
That would qualify her for Althouse blog LLR-democratical status as well.
The trouble with wanting to dismantle heteropatriarchy and the nuclear family should be obvious: those are the only organic forms of population replacement, and it is very clear that in place of encouraging live births into intact families the current Leftist Monoparty is pushing hard to bring in as many illegal aliens as possible to replace normal reproduction amongst the citizens whom our leaders are supposed to represent. Michelle appears to dance around this former conspiracy theory without actually acknowledging it.
The dystopian accounting looks like this: Every "right wing" conspiracy theory has proved true and every "left wing" conspiracy theory is actually projection of what they have already done disguised as a "warning" about what Trump will do.
"Excellent policy ideas..."
Seriously?
DEI? Spend $$$ TRILLIONs to combat a climate non-crisis? Inventing new ways to tax anything and everything? Continue the transition from a Nation of Laws to a Nation of Lawyers? Renounce sovereignty? Embrace, celebrate and support deviency of every imaginable kind? Demonize people of accomplishment? Neuter humanity? Track and regulate all human activity?
The left used to provide "dreams". A colorblind society. Zero population growth. Enviromental paradise. Merit based jobs and benefits. Freedom of speech. Everyone just "Doing their own thing". Oh, and great art and movies based on "artistic freedom".
But that dream turned out to be a con-job. Just like the dream of "socialism" and the "workers paradise" turned out to be brutal dictatorship.
The left needs beautiful dreams of its own: human rites, diversity, political congruence, redistributive change, ethnic Springs, progressive prices, labor and environmental arbitrage, Green blight, cisgender couplets, rent-a-womb... woman, not rape-rape, CAIR, trans/homophobia, Pro-Choice [ethical] religion, friends with "benefits", keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, sequester the "burden" of evidence in darkness, grooming, wicked solution, witch hunts, class-disordered ideologies, eugenics, terrorists' trade, take a knee, VP, etc.
Heteropatriarchy.
That describes the sorry world we live in, doesn't it?
Let's get rid of that.
Deeply thunk.
"The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future."
I saw Vivek for the 5th time last night. His stump speech lays out a compelling vision and action plan. He says that the GOP needs to give people something to "run to." He says faith, family, rule of law, fossil fuels, nuclear family and parents have the right to decide how their children are educated.
The full Council Bluffs town hall is on X. Worth watching.
I call Vivek the fresh legs America First 2.0 candidate with a specific action plan.
The right the advantage of living in reality and acknowledging biology and the history of humanity.
She's got it exactly backwards. What the right has to offer is a vision where everybody has the opportunity to make their way, where they have choice in education, where they have the opportunity to select their path in life. Not a world in which they are scolded for not using made up pronouns or agreeing with actual biology when it comes to men and women.
One is a vision of individuals having the right to live for their own sake as long as they do not trample on the rights of others to live for their own sake, with government getting out of our way and doing only what is listed by our laws for them to do: national security, the courts, and secure and fraud-free elections.
The left wants to dictate your every thought and action, and even dictate who goes to which school and where they are to live. So very Soviet of them. Michele Goldberg is as predictable as the Lions blowing a 2 game lead in the division with 5 weeks left to go.
No view of the future, other than what they don't want.
But zero understanding of the material factors and culture that created today, where they have the luxury to indulge their fantasies.
Because "today" is a given. Its nice features (clean water, electricity, iPhones) just appeared out of thin air, and so will persist no matter what destruction of modernity they commit.
(Talking with my young (30 and younger) relatives and acquaintances, a common element is their near-total ignorance of history, especially the history of material stuff / engineering.)
But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out.
They may think their policy ideas are excellent, but in almost all cases they are untried and uncertain to work. For a library of prior tries, see Reason . com and its outstanding "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" series.
My favorite part of the Biden administration (after all the illegal entrants shipped to the border) is the DEI air traffic controllers, and the decline of out civilization into the Gavin Newsum Streets of Poop-Francisco.
Who needs competency and excellence? - we need low IQ insane people (see *ride space mountain's link above) protecting our skies, and running our lives.
"The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people"
What is an "atomized" person? Someone who's disconnected from Goldberg's collective, I guess.
He is not of the body.
Let's be heroes, let's be martyrs, let's be radical thinkers
Who never have to test drive the least of their dreams
-Frank Turner, Love, Ireland, and Song
"Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future...."
OK that is the second time in two days I have spued coffee all over my keyboard!
I will take "things that only a liberal will believe" for $500 Alex!
So the message is that Republicans are succeeding by pushing a false happy narrative, so Democrats should come up with their own false happy narrative?
The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future.
"dislocated and atomized people"
This? This is how she sees people who only wish to be left alone to pursue their own visions of "happiness" for themselves and their families? The left has warped a loose reference to "general welfare" into an all-encompassing political theory of central command over, and management of, the collective population. It celebrates "diversity," but disallows truly diverse pursuit of happiness based on individual vision, responsibility, and merit.
...as our Republic was originally designed to encourage and support. Her choice of descriptive words starkly reveals her personal, Left-inspired, "vision" of the future, which is naught but the omnipotent totalitarianism that is the Left's true dream....
Michelle Goldberg was born to play the SNL character Debbie Downer.
What are Democrat "excellent policy ideas"?
- Leave the southern border wide open
- Waste money on bullshit climate change
- Destroy the First Amendment
- Codify Abortion up until the moment of birth
- Raise Taxes
- Vilify agriculture
- Increase inner city crime rates
- Push absentee voting to promote fraud
- Oppose Voter ID
- Let non citizens vote
- Populate the US military with undocumented immigrants
- Wipe out student debt to perpetuate the college scam
- Shut down coal plants
- Mandate mRNA shots
- Finance the war in Ukraine forever...
Seriously?
An Interesting take from ex-NY Timed opinion editor James Bennett on that paper’s new wokeism.
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
That dream: Squeezing all profit from the American way of life will we finally live in the utopia we deserve. A utopia where no one has more than another and everyone shares in the absolute joy of knowing that everyone else is as miserable as they are. A complete tragedy of the commons.
Based on this snippet, it is clear that Michelle Goldberg has zero familiarity at all with American politics.
What's driving former progressives to the right? The INSANITY of progressive hate..
heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family THESE are the things progressives hate..
Hi my name's Willow My pronouns are: I AM GOD. I HATE the nuclear family and want kids raised by the state
Sounds like something not many people would rally behind
Reminds me of what a denizen of the former Soviet Union said after the fall of communism there: “Communism didn't work – but it had a better dream.”
the left has one policy that drives everything they do: "put us in charge of everything".
Let's Alienate 90% of americans.. Then replace them with drug dealing pedophiles from Honduras..
THAT has GOT TO BE a winning plan!
The whole 'progressive' 'forward' thing is the tragedy. How about learning from the mistakes of the past instead of repeating them?
Since Marx, leftists have been trying to see a pig in a poke. They have plenty of beautiful dreams. It's the realization of those dreams that has people running in the opposite direction.
I have a deal for socialist dreamers: if you need someone to make all the big decisions for everybody in order to get to the dream, I'm offering my services. That includes my complete authority over the elites on campus and at the NYT, etc. Deal?
Michelle seems not to understand the continuous nature of revolution in the Woke ideology. There is no rest. It is to be unrelenting Maoist struggle session forever, only changing in their target. That is their utopia. Welcome to Hell.
In a heady attempt to harmonize with Ann's selections for the day, I'll go with a Brigham Young quote here:
"I frequently think of the difference between the power of God and the power of the devil. To illustrate, here is a structure in which we can be seated comfortably, protected from the heat of summer or the cold of winter. Now, it required labor, mechanical skill, and ingenuity and faithfulness and diligence to erect this building, but any poor, miserable fool or devil can set fire to it and destroy it. That is just what the devil can do, but he never can build anything. The difference between God and the devil is that God creates and organizes, while the whole study of the devil is to destroy."
Why would anyone pay this woman to write? Excellent policy ideas?! Sure, if you like your populace to starve to death (Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao). The lack of knowledge or awareness (self or otherwise) of these supposedly educated people is mind-boggling. Does this woman know nothing?!
The worst contagion of Marxism is the idea of New Man (making the world anew as though wiping out the past alone is what is needed to abolish all of the “bad stuff”). Incredible!
When I skimmed the article at the link I was scared for a moment. Mark Russell turned right wing? Then I googled and found out MR died in March at 90. Article about some other Russell.
How many thousands of times must I read, 'If only Democrats were better rhetoricians, they would never lose! It's only Republican deviousness fooling the proles that keeps them a major political party!'
Michelle Goldberg has distilled decades of her advocacy into the devastating admission that she hasn't a clue about what will emerge to replace everything she seeks to destroy.
Onward, comrades, to the glorious progressive future! Whatever it might actually turn out to be. Because we are the good people.
In most areas progressives merely claim that everything will be destroyed if the party prescription is not followed. There is no beautiful vision, but you can avoid being put back in chains, dying in a pandemic, and drowned by melting glaciers. Avoidance of pain is the only future you have to look forward to. At best, life won’t get worse.
LOL funnies from Goldberg!
You don't need a grandiose Vision; you only need answers to such homely questions as "What happens after we turn all the convicts loose?"
Destruction of the nuclear family is a beautiful dream? Or even a good policy idea? Codswallop--which is the favorite policy dish served up by the Left.
Destruction of the nuclear family is a beautiful dream? Or even a good policy idea? Codswallop--which is the favorite policy dish served up by the Left.
"capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family "
Dismantling capitalism = Taking apart the only successful economic model proven to date to replace it with....well mostly the left advocates for that which has produced the worst outcomes.
Dismantling the carceral state = Replacing effective solutions (i.e. policing) with non-effective solutions that have repeatedly exhibited worse outcomes. (See: Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Baltimore, and more)
Dismantling heteropatriarchy = ~45% of the population should be looked down on because of past abuses they likely had no part in.
Dismantling the Nuclear family = Lets take the most proven, successful, stable, and important element of a strong society and challenge it while ignoring that the groups within our society without a strong nuclear family culture have the worst outcomes.
...
It's not that the left doesn't have a vision for each of these things, it's that the result of each of those areas being expressed in a vision is a vile or ridiculous future dream.
"Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas..."
Really? Where? When? So far the policy ideas they have forced on America and the world for the past three years haven't worked out too well.
Michelle Goldberg. Is a ten-foot pole long enough?
The ever delusional Goldberg. Progressive policy ideas are in action from QuidProJoe. Even apostate progressives have seen the flaws. What does she think she is talking about?
The ever delusional Goldberg. Progressive policy ideas are in action from QuidProJoe. Even apostate progressives have seen the flaws. What does she think she is talking about?
But "the left" does have a beautiful dream, which is especially appealing to today's young: a soft socialism, like you never left school. You don't have to worry about having enough food or a place to live, and the good caring people from the government will take care of your problems.
What a ditz! They have "excellent policy ideas". They just can't say where those excellent policies might lead. Michelle thinks that's a problem. They need to cook up some lies.
The left -"I wish we have one of them Doomsday Machines" - doesn't realize that they do have that machine and that they are that machine.
Progressive policies of the left?
You're soaking in them.
Rit said...
"That dream: Squeezing all profit from the American way of life will we finally live in the utopia we deserve. A utopia where no one has more than another and everyone shares in the absolute joy of knowing that everyone else is as miserable as they are."
Except for people like the Biden Crime family.
Michelle seems not to understand the continuous nature of revolution in the Woke ideology. There is no rest. It is to be unrelenting Maoist struggle session forever, only changing in their target. That is their utopia
Yes she must have missed the other Michelle declaring that "Barrack will not allow you to remain comfortable and uninvolved." The "beautiful ideas" are never the thing: Revolution is always the thing.
...heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family...
Dear Michelle,
The future won't arrive by stork.
Let's see:
- grooming children
- somehow trying to get people to believe that there are an infinity of genders.
- Supporting two wars. One with the potential to kick off WWIII.
- Firing, suspending, demonizing, people who did not feel comfortable putting an experimental vaccine in their body.
- 30% inflation.
- Absoutely NO FISCAL CONTROL.
- Turning our colorblind society goal, into a caste system.
- Turning the DOJ against their political enemies.
- Supporting one of the biggest crooks in modern history as POTUS.
- Supporting and encouraging an ACTUAL invasion at our border, while claiming that we must do and spend any and everything to secure Ukraine's border.
- Supporting and attempting to gut the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendment. AND DOING IT.
The Left’s messaging problem never gets remedied, does it?
Years ago a proLife &proAbort interview was given. 2women.
The proLife woman had such an eloquent statement that the woman of the proAbort support literally whined to the host: see, if we could only frame our cause in such a way…
They can’t. They will never be able to.
Ask yourself why?
If we could only…
RideSpaceMt:
Holy shit- freaking warn me, next time!!!
Where I come from, sounding off like that is a signal of mortal peril!
I’m looking for the blood. That person is- disturbed.
Oh.
I guess you did. Next time- I will read the entire comment.
My hat's off to anyone who can stand to read her.
"But zero understanding of the material factors and culture that created today, where they have the luxury to indulge their fantasies.
Because "today" is a given. Its nice features (clean water, electricity, iPhones) just appeared out of thin air, and so will persist no matter what destruction of modernity they commit."
I actually would like to sit down with Goldberg and ask her where she thinks these things came from.
It sounds better in the original German. Or Russian. Or Chinese.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Asks: Is It Still OK to Have Kids in Face of Climate Change?
It all makes more sense when you realize these people don't have a future.
This is the dumbest thing I've read in a month or two.
The Left has been dreaming beautiful dreams and promising paradise on earth for over a hundred years, but delivering beggary, hunger, totalitarian enslavement, millions of refugees, and mountains of corpses.
38 nations declared themselves to ruled by the principles of Marxism over the course of the past century. 36 of them abandoned it, amidst what is likely the most widespread suffering in all of human history, and the 2 remaining compete to be the most oppressed and impoverished countries in their respective hemispheres.
It would be preferable to fight a bloody civil war, and force a national divorce with extensive population resettlement, than to take the chance that the leftist scum will get it right after 38 previous failed attempts. They are not my countrymen. They are my very worst enemies.
I had to look up carceral state.
Apparently it involves putting criminals in jail.
I am puzzled as to why Naomi Wolf is described as "a former liberal feminist" solely because she is against the mRNA Covid vaccines. Can't you be a liberal feminist and also against mRNA vaccines? Apparently not.
But I have seen commentators dig back into her past and opine that, say, The Beauty Myth was inadequately researched. Did anyone on the left say that at the time? Well, of course not. Her view on certain vaccines now retrospectively taints everything she's ever written or done.
To paraphrase Coleman Young on Jesse Jackson:
"The only thing Karl Marx ever ran was his mouth."
"All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return"
Who's getting in the way of that, and who brought things to where they are today? 50 years ago, Saying "Merry Christmas" wasn't perceived to be an insult by... well, just about anybody. Now? Not so much. And whose fault is that?
From "Let It Be Christmas", by Alan Jackson:
Let it be Christmas everywhere
In the hearts of all people both near and afar
Christmas everywhere
Feel the love of the season wherever you are
On the small country roads lined with green mistletoe
Big city streets where a thousand lights glow
Let it be Christmas everywhere
Let heavenly music fill the air
Let every heart sing let every bell ring
The story of hope and joy and peace
And let it be Christmas everywhere
Let heavenly music fill the air
Let anger and fear and hate disappear
Let there be love that lasts through the year
And let it be Christmas
Christmas everywhere
This is what leftists these days object to?
Blogger Shoeless Joe said...
I really wish the Left / Democratic party would drop the disguise and run on such "excellent policy ideas" as dismantling capitalism and destroying the nuclear family. Be honest and open about those goals and I'm sure they'd never lose another election.
BLM had exactly that on their front page mission statement and corporations voluntarily gave them $100s of millions. I doubt anybody’s actually read the mission statement.
A hundred million sacrificed to the vision of the Workers' Paradise in the last century wasn't beautiful and inspiring enough?
It was only a few days ago that Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post complained that only right wing opinions get published in the NYT.
So there's an entire left that's left of even Goldberg.
The left's "beautiful dreams" were adequately described in the novel 1984.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Miss "show white people they're being replaced" can kiss my ass.
the left needs beautiful dreams of its own
Be careful what you wish for…
I remember that bloggingheads where Goldberg was so stupid and vapid and intellectually dishonest that you told her you were on the verge of hanging up with her.
You should call her back now, just so you can hang up on her for real this time.
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