Schemes and dreams

This is a fun video to watch. Rachel Blevins is quite concise in laying out the problem. So what do we do?

Sam Husseini has a scheme. The idea, here, is to get (D) voters and (R) voters to pair up and to desert the duopoly. It's encouraging to see that the human imagination is being employed here, more or less in the way in which speculative fiction is encouraging. (Here I'm operating with the Margaret Atwood definitions, in which speculative fiction actually tries to portray a future whereas science fiction is a genre of fantasy which uses props which were once considered "futuristic.")

I did cringe a bit when Husseini said "it you're a leftie, it has to be somebody who prefers Trump over Harris." Now, I suppose "lefties" prefer Harris over Trump in actual practice, though to say so is to emphasize how pointless it is to be a "lefty" in today's America. A related problem of course is that there are plenty of lefties who already prefer Trump over Harris. Husseini seems to be deluded as to how thoroughly bad Biden foreign policy has been. It goes way, way beyond genocide.

The catch, of course, is that the two parties have different modes of public presentation.

1) The Democratic Party of today presents itself to the public in the way in which a relatively new cult presents itself to the uninitiated. You are to buy into their fantasy version of the world, in the same sense in which Scientologists claim to believe in "thetans" and so on, and if you don't, if perhaps you've kept your eyes open and can see the vast gulf between Dem rhetoric and Dem actions (see e.g. Kamala Harris' pronouncements on Israel/ Palestine), you are their inferior, you belong in what Hillary Clinton called the basket of deplorables. The ferocity with which the Dems pursue initiation ("Trump is HITLER! Study Project 2025!" and so on) must sufficiently compensate to meet the cult's need for solid foundations. They can offer you nothing because they are riding on a reputation of having offered you something when Lyndon Baines Johnson was President.

2) The Republican Party of today presents itself as a cult which has achieved maturity. They've achieved what they think is an optimal mix of truth and falsehood, and maybe they fool you into thinking they are communicating with you when in fact they are communicating with their followers. Their ideology can be slipped in because otherwise well-meaning people already subscribe to their core, privileged white adolescent Ayn-Rand-worshiping male, or fundamentalist pseudo-Christian, tenets. They are totally convinced that there's such a thing as the "Franklin School," per Mark Levin, and that America is ruled by a "far left." They can offer you nothing because you've already bought into the notion that you're going to get nothing from them.

The cult populations themselves come in the form of another binary, and so for instance you have a) the vast population of volunteers, whose sad lives are spent doing the dances for free, and b) the well-paid, who are willing to say that up is down, big is small, and two-plus-two is five (apologies to George Orwell) because doing so achieves them a meal ticket. The volunteers, then, will need deprogramming.

Moreover, "deprogramming" must itself be deprogrammed. The problem is not that the two-party volunteers need to reorient their lives upon a rational basis, for in fact they already view themselves as doing just that. Everyone must start with Castoriadis:

Man’s distinguishing trait is not logic but imagination and, more precisely, unbridled imagination, defunctionalized imagination. (247)

The trick for the individual is to be able to see, which is to say, to imagine, a reality which it benefits that individual to see. The important thing is to show that the sorry notions of reality promoted by the Democrats and by the Republicans do not benefit their volunteers.

At any rate, kudos to Rachel Blevins and Sam Husseini for making a stab at genuine argumentation of the sort which beats talking points by a country mile.

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QMS's picture

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I have a visceral negative reaction to R & D duopoly policies
knowing that whatever promises their marketing teams promote
in election season soon turn to vapor. Have seen enough circus acts
already to realize the jugglers and clowns are just distractions.

Thanks for the vid.

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truth is considered foreign influence, world peace is a threat to national security

His logic as to how the Dems planned all the seeming chaos makes sense. Evidenced by timing of debates (all previous ones done after conventions), timing of conventions (all previous ones occurred one week after the other), and he says Dems announced their convention plans in Spring of 2023. They had the early debate to suddenly recognize Biden’s limitations. So the plan was in place for Biden to step aside.

Even if there’s enough time and enthusiasm to implement his Vote-Pact solution this year, I see a flaw. With all the demonstrated planning the Dems have done, does he think the Dems will stop with Harris’s selection and PR blitz? Surely they have a plan in place to steal the November election. They rigged the 2016 and 2020 primaries, eliminated the 2024 primary, and probably stole the 2020 general election. I wonder if Hussein has anticipated how to counteract whatever they have planned for November. Otherwise any voting strategy seems moot.

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Anya

@Anya That's the ticket!

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Cassiodorus's picture

@Anya they'll do it in the name of "saving democracy."

Anyway, here's Lee Camp on the cult nature of the Democrats:

Be sure to study Project 2025 or something.

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"Forget the lesser evil -- fight for the greater good." - Jill Stein

@Cassiodorus
The yuks can be found from the other guys --waxing indignant about the "Marxist" Harris and her ultra-left ideology.

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I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Cassiodorus's picture

@fire with fire I later went back and added something about that to this diary. The people who think there's a "far left" in this country are the same ones who have marked out being pro-genocide as a "moderate" position. In short, they're cultists.

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"Forget the lesser evil -- fight for the greater good." - Jill Stein

QMS's picture

@Cassiodorus
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Do these politicians actually read their scripts before they present?
Perhaps self reflection is not in their tool kit. Such bad form.
Who's grass and what roots gave us this new 'choice'?
Bottom-up seems to mean ass to the sky in this context.
Ain't pretty.

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truth is considered foreign influence, world peace is a threat to national security