This newsletter will appear at the start of New Year’s weekend, and the inevitable articles are already appearing expressing the dread of 2024 in the United States. Considering what it will be like a year from now, after the 2024 election, no one can imagine anything good. Either Biden will have won, in which case there will be widespread violence and disruption from the right and disillusioned resignation on the part of liberals and moderates who think Biden has done nothing, or nothing for them, and will accomplish nothing for another four years because he’s old and senile.
The article you mention by Michelle Goldberg spins out of the same echo chamber as the one by Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce the week before in In These Times. It is the popular Resistance faux outrage of "whatever happened to Uncle Toby." Goldberg adduces examples of people “defecting” from mainstream perspectives—she lists Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand—and never once considers it might be linked to people like her disregarding everything they have to say and caricaturing them as racist Trump-adjacent grifters with sexual skeletons in their closet. This attitude will tend to alienate not just the people she’s talking about, but a big percentage of the people watching. The problem is the one she lists: entitled people proud not to listen.
I shouldn't give the impression that I don't admire any negative leftists. I admire Noam Chomsky endlessly, and he's almost always in a Rintrah, not a Palamabron mode, to use Blakean terms. There perhaps we could agree to admire, or so I hope.
Doug, Goldberg's article does fall rather into two halves, and I'm not terribly interested in the one you point to, the defection of people to the right. There are only a small number of them, and there seem to be psychological reasons for their slide--you could add Naomi Wolfe and Robert Kennedy. Russell Brand certainly has nothing to say to my male students that would be healthy for them. He is not a leftist--he's a cult leader. My interest is in how the left alienates perfectly sane and not necessarily entitled people by its self-righteous power trip, to put it bluntly. I identify as a progressive, and I'm saying we could do a lot better than this. Accusation of sin is not productive. And who watches the watchmen?
I appreciate the generosity of spirit behind your "like." Thanks. Michael
The article you mention by Michelle Goldberg spins out of the same echo chamber as the one by Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce the week before in In These Times. It is the popular Resistance faux outrage of "whatever happened to Uncle Toby." Goldberg adduces examples of people “defecting” from mainstream perspectives—she lists Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand—and never once considers it might be linked to people like her disregarding everything they have to say and caricaturing them as racist Trump-adjacent grifters with sexual skeletons in their closet. This attitude will tend to alienate not just the people she’s talking about, but a big percentage of the people watching. The problem is the one she lists: entitled people proud not to listen.
I shouldn't give the impression that I don't admire any negative leftists. I admire Noam Chomsky endlessly, and he's almost always in a Rintrah, not a Palamabron mode, to use Blakean terms. There perhaps we could agree to admire, or so I hope.
Doug, Goldberg's article does fall rather into two halves, and I'm not terribly interested in the one you point to, the defection of people to the right. There are only a small number of them, and there seem to be psychological reasons for their slide--you could add Naomi Wolfe and Robert Kennedy. Russell Brand certainly has nothing to say to my male students that would be healthy for them. He is not a leftist--he's a cult leader. My interest is in how the left alienates perfectly sane and not necessarily entitled people by its self-righteous power trip, to put it bluntly. I identify as a progressive, and I'm saying we could do a lot better than this. Accusation of sin is not productive. And who watches the watchmen?