@The Liberal Moonbat

...language — written and spoken. And nothing more. It is a reflection upon the person doing the writing or the organization doing the publishing.

A bigot can be politically correct. A naive liberal can be politically incorrect.

Political correctness is appliance that acts as a filter to maintain speech that is inoffensive to a large and diverse audience. It is the customary language of polite society.

Anyone can use or misuse politically correct language. Such language neither reveals nor confirms the mindset or motives of the speaker.

And all this brain-melting NewTruth I've been seeing since circa 2014 that DIRECTLY contradicted the consensus I'd seen before?

I'd heard the term "political correctness" off and on my whole life - but I'd never understood it, let alone the hate.

Now I do. I guarantee you it has singlehandedly resurrected the legitimacy of a right-wing that had previously been dead to the hearts of countless young Americans. I TOTALLY get the South Park guys now.

@DonMidwest This is exactly what I often find myself arguing about on this site. Many people here want to blame "the people" for where we are, when, in fact, "the people" haven't had the power to make a meaningful political choice for twenty-five years. After the Clintons had control of the Democratic party and the Bushes and Newt Gingrich had control of the Republican party, it was all over. There is no meaningful choice to be made under those circumstances. And in fact, it was very difficult for "the people" to make a meaningful political choice from 1988-1994. Dukakis vs Bush was an early iteration of the same politics we faced in 1994 and still face today--sometime take a look at why the League of Women Voters stopped hosting the presidential debates. It was because they wouldn't lend their name to bipartisan corruption.

The last time "the people" made a meaningful political choice, I was twelve years old. They chose Reagan. That was a bad choice, a very bad choice. It's easy to walk into a prison--or an asylum--but it's hard to walk out. For similar reasons, once they chose Reagan, it was quite difficult to extricate themselves from the politics that had been built around them like prison walls. I still think that between 1984 and 1994 there was a chance, if enough people had been awake and motivated enough, to defeat this monstrosity. By 1994, there was no electoral way out. Nevertheless, the people tried, repeatedly. They followed Howard Dean. They followed Paul Wellstone. They followed Barack Obama. They followed Bernie Sanders. In other words, they followed two guys who were intimidated into obedience, one guy who was a Manchurian candidate working to advance the politics the people wanted to change, and one guy who was a real mensch and had to be murdered. None of these efforts availed them.

It's easier to walk into a trap than out of one.

both have a comprehensive world view

a new idea for me is ENTRAPMENT in this interview about a book by Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko: The Political Theology of Neoliberalism

In political theological terms, you emphasise how neoliberalism ‘demonizes’ us, or blames individuals and populations for social problems. What is unique about the neoliberal form of demonization? How important is this concept to the neoliberal moral order?

AK: In the research for my previous book, The Prince of This World, I came up with my own particular definition of demonization, based on my understanding of the theological tradition. We are all familiar with the idea of ‘demonizing’ someone in the sense of casting them as evil, etc. What I add to that is an element of entrapment. That is to say, in my study of the theological sources, it seemed to me that God passive-aggressively creates demons by putting them in a situation where he knows they will rebel against them, then blaming them for it. The key here is the element of choice – even though their choices were artificially constrained, they did choose to do what they did, and hence they are morally responsible for it.

I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.

And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.

Familiar with terms like "cycle of poverty" but this blaming the victim is built into the ideology

With both factions working for corporations there are slim margins in elections so one only has to cheat enough to win. This election even the democratic party is noticing.

You explain that democracy is an essential part of neoliberalism, as, ‘on the deepest level, neoliberalism relies on consent for its legitimacy’. At the same time, neoliberal systems tend to demand technocratic expertise, which is at risk of disruption when exposed to the whims of the people. To what extent is democracy a weakness of neoliberalism?

AK: The neoliberal approach to democracy fits with the general strategy of entrapment: they give us just enough democracy to be able to say that we chose neoliberalism, but not enough to actually overturn it. If you look back over the neoliberal era, only Reagan commanded really strong majorities – which made sense, because he was trying to change the previous system to a neoliberal one. Once neoliberalism was firmly established, however, we saw the emergence of very narrow election results, with both parties presenting fundamentally similar programs. Obama is the only U.S. president since Bush Sr. to get more than 51% of the popular vote – a result that was pretty mediocre in previous eras.

There’s a reason we’ve had two Electoral College flukes in as many decades after a century with none, and it’s because the neoliberal strategy is intentionally to ‘eke out’ a narrow victory in order to avoid having a strong mandate for change. And under our system, very close elections can sometimes go to the loser rather than the winner – a result for which the ‘people’ are still blamed in mainstream discourse.

In terms of technocratic rule, I think it’s telling that the only alternative that has been allowed to arise is precisely the buffoonish brutality of Trump. If the people must be given a real choice between two options, it must be a forced choice – a choice between having a government and having a total shitshow. Yes, the American people chose the competent choice, though not enthusiastically enough for it to matter. And now many centrist liberals are more or less openly fantasizing about a coup, or some other outcome where the unelected bureaucrats somehow ‘take down’ Trump. When push comes to shove, neoliberals are willing to ditch democracy – but in this case, push came to shove in a way that they didn’t expect, so they were caught off guard.