Starting out at the narrow end, Kyle took two more tests. Neither of them is well-documented, and this limits their utility in a number of ways. But they’re both sociopolitical so let’s jam.
Kyle Takes ‘8 Values’ Political Compass Test
Turns out Kyle is a lot more nationalist and I’m a lot more ‘libertarian’ (which seems to mean anti-authoritarian in this context), but we both end up as “Libertarian Socialists”. Sure, okay.
Kyle Takes Political Compass Test JUST FOR LEFTIES
Like he says, this one is a lot more specific, and the differences between us are sometimes quite stark.
My ‘Revolutionary’ score is 63%, while his is just 28%, which makes him much more of a ‘Reformist’.
There’s a 30-point gap in our views on Nationalism (KK) vs. Internationalism (AV).
There’s a 20-point gap between how we feel about Nature, with my views characterized as ‘Ecological’ while he’s ‘Neutral’ between the natural and ‘Production’.
Overall he ends up a reputed believer in ‘Centrist Marxism’, which seems to amuse him greatly, and I’m a ‘Left-Wing Nationalist’, which pisses me off. How can I be a Nationalist of any kind, with such low nationalism scores on both of these tests? Probably a wrinkle in the definitions.
If I was choosing a label for myself from among those offered, I would have picked Green Anarchist, a position that the test says I am 87.4% compatible with, where Kyle sits, astonishingly, at 0%, dead last among the possible choices.
No doubt this has something to do with him being an East-Coast big-city boy, and myself a denizen of the least-peopled and most-forested parts of the deep West.
This difference, and the 20-30% ones above, are really telling. Kyle is solidly in my top five favorite political analysts working online, and yet under a very left-leaning microscope, we’ve got some amazingly disparate positions.
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In the middle, I have this for you. Remember a few days back, when Jimmy Dore and I were excoriating Pelosi over her failures and contradictions about stimulus?
Well, now I’m offering you the other, centrist/corporatist view on her … strategies, courtesy of Nitin Chhoda.
Of course I don’t believe any of it for a New York second, but should you still hold positive regard for the Madame Speaker, now you can argue with my anarchic utopian foolishness with style and fact.
Chhoda, as I’ve said before, is THE source for hot fresh stimulus takes in a sea of hyperbolic clickbait, and I will be watching him religiously in the coming critical week.
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Thirdly, on to the macroscopic.
Thomas Frank is very much one of the good ones. I heard a second longform podcast interview with him this week, on Rumble #143 with Michael Moore.
Mostly he talked about populism, as in the linked article above. But even more compelling to me was what he had to say about the fall of the Democrats after the FDR peak, and especially post-Carter. They used to be the true populists, and the party of the working (“middle”) class.
His basic thesis is that they consciously and deliberately abandoned average people in favor of the donor and ‘professional/managerial’ classes. It got worse under Clinton (NAFTA et. al.). It got worse under Obama.
Unions died off. Pensions died off. Real wages, in relation to what they could buy, fell and fell. In 2020, the days when one parent with a high school education could support a family of five are gone. Working class kids delay marriage or even moving out of “their parents’ basement” and take no end of shit from boomers about being lazy slackers for their troubles.
In addition to the slow-motion economic disaster and deepening income inequality, the political effect has been to push the national discourse further and further to the right–the Dems would be their own worst enemy, except that they’ve drifted with that same flow. There’s very little functional difference between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell. The warfare between them is about as compelling and real as WWE wrestling. Their long-term goals are the same, give or take an abortion or a gay marriage here or there. Keep the cogs of empire turning, and make sure your friends get paid.
We the People?
Fuck them. Let them eat cellphone minutes.
When people like Elon Musk talk about solving the inherent unsolvable problems of earthly civilization by escaping this wrecked world and heading out for Mars, I find myself rooting for them to burn and drown with the rest of us. It seems more just and right that way, to me.
To bring it all back ’round to something more soothing, I leave you with a different formulation of the same wicked impulse, from T-bone Burnett.