The Legacy Left sees the elephant but misses the rest of the living room
I give up on the Nation Magazine and the "Legacy Left". [NOTE] The interminable stream of "final notice" letters from the magazine has ceased; I think they finally got the message. However, the last issue I received completely supports my abysmally low opinion of them.
The news and opinion section, minus ads and full page illustrations is a mere 24 pages. In those scant pages, the content is nothing more than Resistance, #MeToo, Russiagate, and hate Trump. The top line on the cover is "The Resistance Turns One". A section inside is titled "Women's Fury Unleashed". There are four articles on racism: racism against Moslems, ICE raids, Trump as racist, and the return of White Supremacy. Trump is pilloried in no less than five separate articles. He is "the greater menace", "the end of truth", "a reality show president", "the death cult of Trumpism", and Trump's "Ruling Passions" are "money and pulbicity".
There is very little economics and almost zero foreign policy. If the country has problems, you will only hear about them from the Nation if they can be blamed on Trump or the GOP.
The Legacy Left shares with the FoxNews right the delusion that we are living in 1960s America where the middle class is dominant, the corporations are under the rule of law, and the Cold War is still going strong. They take the "mistakes have been made" approach to the rolling disaster that is the US today; and those mistakes have been made exclusively by the GOP.
There is no mention of the hatchet job the DNC pulled on Bernie, no mention of Hillary's disastrous campaign or her email server, no mention of the DNC's asssertion that it has the right to be partisan in the primaries. No mention of the bipartisan support for more neocon warmongering all over the world, or bipartisan support for arming "good" terrorists and for bigger military budgets. No, according to the Nation, the only problems America has are caused by the GOP - and Russia.
Trying to get value from reading The Nation is like trying to pick brown M&Ms from the bottom of a bedpan. It is sad that the oldest continuously published periodical in the US (founded 1865) is as thought-policed as any other corporate media platform. It is sad that the editor's husband, Stephen Cohen, who is a renowned, 70 year old Russian scholar, is villified as soft on Putin by his wife's magazine. But that is the Legacy Left. It is a sad sham that mocks genuine activism for economic justice and peace.
But the article that really clinched the non-deal for me was: Marilynne Robinson - This Cruel Parody of Representation, which begins:
Under Donald Trump, The Republican Party's...
Right from the beginning, all blame for the disenfranchisement of the American voter are belong to Trump/GOP.
This is the same rancid trope they've been pushing ever since Hillary lost. Complete GOP control of the government has allowed the corporate-captured fake leftwing to focus completely on negativity and on attacking the GOP. (Vote Blue - yeah, right. :eyeroll:) This rhetorical stance allows the author to ignore the fact that, if they had power, the corporate Democrats would be just as neoliberal and neocon as the GOP, only friendlier on social issues (women, gays, blacks, hispanics, and Moslems) that take no profits away from the globalist bottom line. The author rounds up the usual suspects: the NRA, the rightwing SCOTUS, racism, Trump, and Putin.
Russia's fingerprints are all over our recent election, and nothing is done about it...the Russian tamperers apparentl favor Republicans....
American oligarchy, in stark contrast with the Russian version, is not in the control of the state and is not beholden to anyone's vision of the national interest...
When I read the bolded text I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
The opportunistic nationalism of the Russian system and the calculated atomization of the American non-system both exclude from consideration the people and the polity. Neither the Russian nor the Americans linger over the question of society's well-being or its future.
She manages to talk in the passive voice about the fact that Russia was looted , while failing to mention that the West enabled the looting and that it happened when a Democrat was President. She recites this looting only to scare Americans that "it could happen here", without giving any thought to how the looting of Russia might have affected Russian politics and Russian attitudes towards America.
Masses of captial...have flowed into fantastically overpriced real estae in London and New York, into lawyers' pockets, into dubious banks and shell companies...Only think what a billionaire could extract from Yellowstone.
She is equally distant and takes no responsibility for the Democratic push for Identity Politics. According to her, this somehow magically appeared without any agency.
We seem to have broken up into any number of smaller identity groups,...many of these groups take strength from the belief that the larger culture is hostile and corrupt.
This in the middle of an essay about how hostile and corrupt Trump is. WTF?
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None of this is news to c99p; but I didn't want to waste the stomach acid that reading this pile of propaganda masquerading as "leftwing" politics produced. Oh, and the cherry on the cake? Check out this email the Nation just sent me:
The Nation - Subscribe for #MeToo stories you won’t find anywhere else
NOTE:
Legacy preference or legacy admission is a preference given by an institution or organization to certain applicants on the basis of their familial relationship to alumni of that institution, with college admissions being the field in which legacy preferences are most controversially used. (Students so admitted are referred to as legacies or legacy students.)
ON EDIT:
In my coinage, the Legacy Left are the frauds who pretend to be liberals. They got into the media by claiming to be like real liberals of yore: Bill Moyers, Seymour Hirsch, the old Keith Olberman. Even though they couldn't pass the liberal entrance exam, they got into "college" based on the former reputation of their parent media (e.g., the Nation, Democracy Now) Or, maybe they were real liberals at some point, until they decided the King's Shilling was too good a paycheck to pass up. In short, they may be the next generation; but they aren't talented enough or progressive enough to earn the top billing they have.
Comments
Sounds like The Nation
has turned into a clone of Salon.
I woke up this morning determined to drink less, eat right, and exercise.
But that was four hours ago when I was younger and full of hope.
I used to subscribe to the Nation during the Bush years
I religiously read every magazine I got and now looking back at that time, I realize what a waste it was. So many websites have sold out and all they write about now is Russia Russia Russia, GOP, Russia Russia Russia, Trump, Russia...
As you stated, nothing about what really matters. "The democrats are doing everything they can to ...", while in reality they are working with him and them.
Sadly, Amy Goodman has gone over to the dark side with Russia, Russia, .... Plus she's advocating for regime change in Syria. She has people on her show that pushes the neocons' agendas. There are still a few websites that are trying to push back, but that may be coming to an end after net neutrality is rolled back. There are a few states that are going to fight this, but there are only 50 democrats who have signed on to legislation to stop it. Every day I get an email saying that I need to write my congress creature and ask them to sign on to the bill. If we have to beg them to do what's right, what are the chances that it will be stopped? It still has to pass the house and Trump needs to sign it. Yeah, right.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
@snoopydawg So, Democracy Now! should
So, Democracy Now! should be aptly named Democracy-Dead-Now!, so sad.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
@snoopydawg
I was going to say, how sad it has become to watch Amy Goodman trot out the "the Russians meddled" trope, as it was universally proved.
WTF is this meddling anyway? After 18 months the best they have come up with is some posts on facebook? Seems to me if the US is going after foreign nationals for breaking American laws, then they should also be afforded protections in the Bill of Rights, namely The First Amendment, the one about freedom of speech...
Its now a "fact" that America is "worried" about...
its election security. I saw that in a CNN push poll asking people about Russian "meddling". And that poll about a worry about a non-existent act of "meddling" will soon be a solid fact leading to some further draconian measures that get in the way of the wrong people voting or the wrong websites remaining uncensored.
LOL. 16 years after the HAVA act allowed e-voting to steal votes, we are "worried" about a few comments on Facebook; but we are not worried about easily hacked, trade secret code voting machines from companies run by rightwing fundamentalists.
The spin is so fast you get dizzy.
You are so right to laugh at the people
who are so concerned about Russia and not admitting that the republicans have done far more to keep people from voting than Russia ever could. In regards to this new information that Russia did indeed interfere, one site is saying that Russia probably hacked the voting rolls and changed people's party affiliations. LoL. This is exactly what happened in the New York primary. And probably in many other states. Remember the members here that claimed that they couldn't vote because that happened to them?
This concern that our very democracy is on the line is hilarious.
clapping:
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Something was clearly amiss w/ Brooklyn Dem primary voter rolls.
Interestingly, the Democratic party machine in NYC seems to be in such a strong position that they are able, of all things, to get the blame shuffled off onto the Republican woman in charge of the Republican voter roll.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/new-york-primary-voter-purge/
@snoopydawg
Especially when one of the two permitted private political parties providing approved candidates for whom voters are actually allowed to vote says that they aren't obliged to pay any attention to votes anyway.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
After those 18 months of not finding evidence of interference
the intelligence agencies are now saying that Russia did indeed hack into 7 state's voting machines. One link to the article goes to another one that states that the agencies believe that the Russians were responsible for the hacking. This information was given to the media by someone who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to release the information.
Isn't that how most of the articles on this have started out? No names and no concrete evidence. Just innuendos. Again.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
The Russiagate BS seems to have thoroughly colonized Wikipedia.
Easy to do because of Wikipedia’s explicit assumption that, in the absence of solid evidence to the contrary, mainstream media sources are “reliable,” ergo it is fair to take any statement from such sources and cite it as fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016
That’s a pretty fishy use of “the” in there — that’s one way of catapulting the “all 17 intelligence agencies” lie without, however, saying so in so many words. Clever!
Also: the phrase “with high confidence” should be in quotation marks, at the very least, since the wording comes from the report of said intelligence agencies. In any other circumstance the phrase is the sort of thing Wikipedians flag as vague (Wikipedia guideline “Words to watch: unsupported attribution”). In this case the phrase suggests (undoubtedly as it was intended to do) near-certainty without actually committing to anything meaningful that can be pinned down.
I stopped following
Amy Goodman years ago when the concessions made to her by WBAI almost destroyed the station. She got her Firehouse studio because of those giveaways (at least that's what I remember).
Meanwhile, people like Robert Knight, may he rest in peace, were vilified and kicked off the station because they dared to put forth the idea the September 11th was possibly an inside job.
The lure of money and power seems to always be too much for some. They will sell out anyone and anything to achieve these ends.
Yaldabaoth, Saklas I'm calling you. Samael. You're not alone. I said, you're not alone, in your darkness. You're not alone, baby. You're not alone. "Original Sinsuality" Tori Amos
Congratulations on your gastric fortitude!
Right then I would have either fallen to the floor laughing or choked on whatever beverage I was imbibing.
And yet you made it through the next comment:
Congratulations, arendt, you survived the harshest gastric acid secretion test medical science could devise (straight HCl please!)
The "American non-system". WTF is that? The elite have a very good system of bleeding us dry. As far as lingering over society's well-being, identity whores like the Dems are doing a fucking nice job of paying no mind to that. The 99ers are busy working to stay alive while seeing the American Dream being diverted into the American Nightmare.
Its really hard to debunk in-your-face projection
It's a "trapdoor argument" in that the claim can be made in a word or a sentence, but to explain why its absolute bullshit might take a paragraph or more if the basic concepts needed to refute the TA have been erased by the version of Newspeak that the media has foisted on us.
This is the same problem comedians have with current politics. They ask "how can we satirize this stuff? Its already satire." We are faced with weaponized satire. Satire that they dare you to respond to so they can label you a Putin-lover or a deplorable - both utter lies, but well-established lies backed up by the Mighty Wurlitzer.
In Russia the state . . .
controls the oligarchies. In the US the oligarchies control the state.
We all have been raised in a Binary World.
One or the other.
This or that.
Good or bad.
Up or down.
In or out.
White hats, black hats.
Republican or Democrats.
Liberal or conservative.
Sometimes it's almost impossible to conceive of a "neither" option, even if that happens to be where the reality of the situation and the hidden truths lie.
The last thing that vested interests want is a population that has not chosen a side. Unaffiliated and with eyes open the population may begin to question the endless stream of false dichotomies that prop up the lies and deception that keep us serving the interests of oligarchs and war profiteers.
So when someone asks me to choose a side, I say "No thanks." Reality lies elsewhere.
“What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Binary, when it benefits TPTB
Agreed totally, but I was going going comment on this:
We're expected to believe Trump is a completely incompetent leader with a staff at war with each other, no direction, etc. and that Trump has single-handedly undone every good thing this country ever stood for in less than a year. It doesn't seem to me the guy can be a total buffoon and a right wing mastermind of the highest order.
The truth would have us take a closer look at the Obama years, and we can't have that, now can we...
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
Right, the schizoid premise of incompetent but dangerous
Boogeymen are always the same. They are a "threat", but don't worry. Mommy and Daddy will protect you.
Trump truly is a boogeyman, nothing but a tearaway jersey for the 1% looting.
OTOH, the Russian military is a false boogeyman. False because a) they are not incompetent; b) they are merely too small to be a threat. If the MIC didn't need a big enemy to justify their vampiric budget demands, they could see that Russia isn't attacking anyone and didn't deserve any of the ineffective sanctions deployed against it. It is merely protecting its turf and its near geographic neighbors turf (formerly known as a sphere of influence). Russia is seen as a threat because it refuses to agree that the entire planet and all its resources lie within the American sphere of influence.
Because they have nukes we would be insane to push them too hard. But the assholes leading this country are insane. They are pushing the Russians, with threats to attack for bullshit cyber-warfare, with arms to the Ukraine, with military exercises in the Baltics and the Black Sea and missile sites all over eastern NATO.
Choices vs decisions
People always look at me funny when I try to make this distinction.
Decisions are picking among options, like which candy do you want from the vending machine. You aren't allowed to stock the machine, so your decisions are limited by what others have already chosen.
Choices are totally unlimited. You can choose to give all your money to a village in Africa or live in a commune or any of a million unexpected, unscripted things that step way outside of "making a decision" among the increasingly unpalatable options served up by the global vending machine known as the internet and our political/economic system.
I say "none of the above" about 20 times a day. Most especially, I choose to buy from anyone but Amazon, and now, Whole Foods. This is a hard choice because it forces me to waste time looking for alternatives and usually raises the cost and inconvenience. But I know that if I take the easy choice, I am constricting my future chances of keeping the game of a decent democratic society alive. I know its on life support, but its my choice to try to keep it going.
Decisions vs. Choices
Excellent discrimination between choices and decisions. Unfortunately, I find very few who even understand the problem let alone how to deal with it. This essay is one of your better efforts and that is saying something. You obviously were on a roll as evidenced by this disgusting metaphor: "Trying to get value from reading The Nation is like trying to pick brown M&Ms from the bottom of a bedpan." Thanks for making a depressing situation somewhat humorous.
-Greed is not a virtue.
-Socialism: the radical idea of sharing.
-Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, 1962
I was motivated by sheer aggravation
I had given up on The Nation, but Mrs. Arendt said there is this good article. So, I picked up the "good" article and steam was coming out my ears in no time.
It was really sad to see some really good comments on the loss of representation poisoned by the "one side of a fistfight" take of the author.
My fake liberal BS detector has been going off more and more frequently. But it has been hard to sum up the general tactic. This article gave me a clean target. Then, the statistics of the coverage in the issue (and it was a double, special issue) placed the target right in the middle of the McResistance target zone. It was time to open fire.
I'm with OPOL. Its all BS all the time. Trust no one.
I really want "Legacy Left" to catch on
because its who they are; and lots of middle class folks have experienced being screwed by a legacy (although they usually blame the minority quota system).
Its catchy, its alliterative, its short, its insulting, and its true.
You described the Dims motivation
for everything they do:
“...that take no profits away from the globalist bottom line.”
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
That is the motivating factor on both sides of the aisle
All the rest is kabuki theater to obscure this essential fact. Scratch either side of the political establishment and you will find they are made of the very same coin.
The status quo is working perfectly. All the thrust and parry, the crying and weeping, the grand orations in the public halls of our "democracy" are naught but drama, signifying nothing. Just costuming and stage trickery, all designed to keep you from looking behind the curtain.
But the difference is that’s what Pubbies do and ADMIT it.
The DIMS do the same thing but lie about it.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
Even that is no longer true
The Dems now do it in our faces and could care less if we know. The one thing I've noticed is all those bastards, both sides, carry that same shit eating smirk on their faces.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
As I stated in comments in this mornings OT,
I am too old for this bull shit. My patience is all used up. I cannot tolerate stupid one minute more. If I had a more adventuresome mate, I'd sell every GD thing, put my money in a sack and everything I own in a backpack, and head to Europe or a warm deserted island somewhere. They have used me up and wore me out. I don't want to put up with any of it anymore. I think the Nation ceased to be relevant somewhere around 1990.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
All I can say to that is
Ditto
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
let us know if you find a good place
Dems are totally irrational.
1. "We make the decisions and you follow them!"
2. Dems lose
3. Dems blame others and never consider making different decisions
thus the conclusion: Dems don't care
The Dems are like a very bad baseball manager (or office manager) who can't get results and blames the players (or the workers). Clearly the smart move is to fire that manager and get someone else in. Amusingly that thought is seen as undercutting the belief in the manager's infallibility.
Just to mention,
the warm inhabitable islands are probably infested with billionaires seeking a place to hide from the catastrophes their profiteering hath wrought - and the angry, drained-dry populations of The Poors who they have made overwrought.
Best to take the high road - and leave them to the rising seas. You can wave bye-bye to them from half-way up Mount Whatever.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Some of the less stupid Richie Riches...
have been buying land on the high plains in Argentina and Uruguay - home to fascists since WW2. IIRC, Poppy Bush bought some land there. (That was after he got paid $500,000 for giving a buried-on-page-97 speech for Reverend Moon in the mid 90s.)
The smart rich are hiding in South America, where they figure the radiation clouds from the northern hemisphere won't reach, where they are a thousand miles from any population center, surrounded by their own paramilitaries, sitting on farms to provide them with food.
I sure hope the Chinese or the Russians have those locations on their doomsday list.
The rich are hydra-headed, or to use another analogy, bacterial. You have to get them all, or they will come back bigger and nastier than ever. We are learning that today as the last vestiges of the New Deal are on the chopping block - because FDR failed to get the fascist rich.
I'm sticking with The Nation, for now anyway,
same with Democracy Now!. I wouldn't really call it loyalty, maybe it's just "for old times' sake". I understand your objections completely, of course. That's why I quit Mother Jones. We're all getting on in years, both the writers and the readers of the Legacy Left publications. How will the kids inform themselves ? We'll have to wait and see.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
Websites like caucus99percent?
The the highly propagandized MSM has caused a huge increase in alternate sources of truth:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy/videos
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/
https://theduran.com/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/
http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/cartoons/
https://geopolitics.co/
Lee Camp & Jimmy Dore & Kyle Kulinski
Are pretty good too. Should also include The Intercept and David Sirota where ever he is now.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Thanks for the list.
And thanks to anyone who adds to it.