I started this blog on June 1, 2018 with a post on the Marxist concepts of the base and superstructure. This is the end of the first year, and my 32nd post. Here’s an overview of that year.
Month: December 2018
What was your first protest like? I’ve been thinking lately about mine. It goes something like this.
I woke up yet again to the sound of my dorm neighbor’s TV blaring. Usually it was gospel music or some TV preacher’s program. The neighbor was studying to be a minister or gospel singer. At least, I think that’s what he was doing.
But this time it was CNN. Not that I cared. I think I pounded on the wall and asked him to turn that shit down, or something else suitably appropriate for an 18 year old college freshman who didn’t appreciate being woken up at the most ungodly hour of 9:30am.
I’m 35, and I believe most of you can do the math here. This was September 11, 2001, and I was a college freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_Happened_audiobook_1.png
Let’s start here: It’s hard to write a book about your own failure. And that was Hillary Clinton’s task in What Happened. Silicon Valley and the business press are full of schlock extolling the virtues of failure, but that’s shit people write after they’ve succeeded. They look back at how they learned from failure. Lessons from the road, and other nonsense.
That’s not the kind of failure Hillary Clinton is writing about in What Happened. What Happened is like writing a book about that time you hit a home run in Game 7 of the World Series, but you got thrown out because you inexplicably forgot to touch first base on the way in. Then your team lost. And then you retired.
Al Gore made a movie after he lost the presidency, and he forged ahead with a new career in stopping climate change. I don’t see a tomorrow for Hillary Clinton’s political career, even on the scale of Al Gore. It’s all the day after November 8. The presidency was supposed to be it for her: the defining moment of the career of the first woman president.
So that’s the kind of failure she’s writing about in her book. I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s politics. I didn’t caucus for her in the primaries or vote for her in the general election. And I’m not interested in revisiting that debate. I’ve said what I have to say on those issues.
But I do think it took some chutzpah for her to write about the election, especially so soon after it. What Happened is supposed to be the story of how that event…well, happened.
The Democratic Party has had a tough time keeping the left in line. Lately it’s engaging in endless hand-wringing over alleged “Bernie-or-bust” Democrats, even though more Clinton primary voters supported John McCain in 2008 than Sanders primary voters supported Trump in 2016. More recently, Democrats frame their arguments to the left in terms of harm reduction.
Is ‘harm reduction’ a new argument? Or is it just a warmed over version of the ‘lesser evil’ argument? Is it a good argument? As a result of these considerations, should we vote based on harm reduction?
I’ll address these questions below.
Source: Alisdare Hickson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/42730197674)
As I said in my previous post, I’ve been sitting for awhile on the question of whether Trumpism is a fascist movement. But to answer this question, I needed to first sketch out what fascism is. A lot of people use ‘fascist’ to mean something like ‘very bad.’ Even historians and social scientists use the word without thinking about the economic and political contexts in which fascism grows.
So I offered five historical conditions where fascism grows. And a starting point for defining it. That starting point was: Fascism is the emergency management mode of capitalism. It arises during times of serious crises and left-wing threats in order to save capitalism from itself.
Here we are, then. Is Trumpism a fascist movement?
