@Walter Hinteler,
Kissinger represents Republican ideals. Not so surprising Republicans would embrace his policies.
It *should* be surprising that Democrats do.
But, Ds and Rs are really identical when you get down to the brass tacks.
Kissinger is just one more piece of evidence.
@Lash,
Quote:But, Ds and Rs are really identical when you get down to the brass tacks.
You bet. Also, just as Donald Trump changed his party identification to Republican for reasons of cheap convenience, Bernie Sanders is now a Democrat. Sanders and Trump are really identical when you get down to the brass tacks.
(PS... in case it ain't clear to dumb people, the equivalence I've just drawn is deeply idiotic. That was the point. The equivalence preceding mine is that idiotic.)
@Olivier5,
Problem is most Boomers were not hippies, most of them did not march against the war, etc.. I'm sure there are some leftie idealists who turned right as they got older, but most of the right-wing Boomers now were never really on the left in the first place.
@blatham,
We have at least three democrat candidates who were Republicans, one quite recently.
Dems vote for Republican military build ups.
Dems hang with Saudi princes just like Republicans.
Dems perform for billionaire donors just like Republicans.
The donors get the SAME THINGS from both of them.
Dems corral immigrants just like Republicans.
Dems beg Wall Street for money just like Republicans.
Dems protect the anti-people status quo just like Republicans.
Wake up.
@nimh,
Yes. There's a very convenient myopia in that piece. If I could have counted up all the students in my high school or first years of university who were reading Marx or flipping through their underground newspaper to find R. Crumb cartoons, there were far more who weren't doing those things.
Still, one could argue that we ex-hippy types shifted in our day to day concerns towards greater focus on career, solvency and family and thus became, in a sense, "complicit" with the system in which we found ourselves, sure. But I have my doubts that the author of the piece presently lives on a commune and turns on his laptop only after cranking up his organically-powered, non-polluting electrical generator.
Edit: From the age of 15 through to 20, let's say, we will inevitably think differently than we'll think later in life. Young people can be enthusiastic, hopeful and yet tend to romanticisms, idealisms and black/white formulations which later prove erroneous. All police are not, as it turns out, pigs.
Edit the second: I'll add another point here. Though popular culture often celebrates certain historical events, it can, for whatever reasons, forget others. Woodstock is one example of the first.
New York's Hard Hat Riot is an example of the second.
@nimh,
But, many of them did turn away from their ideals.
Hippie>Yuppie>I like my Reagan money.
@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:OK Boomers, Wake Up!
Sanders is the person you used to be but forgot about.
by Dave Lindorff, Sunday, December 22, 2019
... we were marching against war, against nuclear weapons and arms spending, and condemning the empty consumerism of our parents.
So in other words, immature people are progressives. Then some people grow up.
@Lash,
Lash wrote:How they’ve wound up thinking Kissinger is a good guy for the Democratic nominee to consult on foreign policy shows the disconnect is complete.
Kissinger seems pretty sound on foreign policy. Perhaps not militant enough or idealist enough for my tastes, but he has a good head on his shoulders.
@Lash,
Lash wrote:Dems vote for Republican military build ups.
And rightly so. We need to protect the nation from the bad guys.
@blatham,
blatham wrote:From the age of 15 through to 20, let's say, we will inevitably think differently than we'll think later in life. Young people can be enthusiastic, hopeful and yet tend to romanticisms, idealisms and black/white formulations which later prove erroneous. All police are not, as it turns out, pigs.
Like I said a few posts back, immature people are progressives. Then some people grow up.
@nimh,
nimh wrote:Problem is most Boomers were not hippies, most of them did not march against the war, etc.. I'm sure there are some leftie idealists who turned right as they got older, but most of the right-wing Boomers now were never really on the left in the first place.
I think it’s not aimed at boomers who turned right, but at boomers who turned incrementalists.
Dave Lindorff wrote:And we were, for the most part I would argue, happier and freer than we are today.
For christ's sake, the guy was only 18 during the "Summer of Love". Sure he was "happy and free" — his parents were most likely bankrolling his education. Most of us left college to enter the workforce and were perfectly aware that school days were over. And as the glow of our college experience began to fade we realized that society didn't reflect the sort intellectual utopia we enjoyed while staying up late in our dorm rooms and arguing man's fate with fellow student radicals. No, the actual day-to-day world turned out to actually be a lot more like ******* high school. And anyway, I'm happier and freer now than I could have dreamed back when I was trying to sell radical newspapers to Puerto Rican laborers in the garment district.
Quote:Some of us even became Republicans or Neo-liberal Democrats, worried more about our own gain than about those who were being left behind or crushed by what we used to call the "System," and ignoring what our nation was and still is doing to the world.
First thing, a lot of us didn't follow that course. Second, achieving economic stability and preserving a semblance of social consciousness are not mutually exclusive. And thirdly, there are many people like McGentrix (just a handy example based on the bio he used to have on his profile) who are perfectly happy that they jettisoned all that muddy youthful idealism because a lot of it just didn't hold up to scrutiny in the real world.
Quote:In fact, those of us who are not supporting Sanders in this coming election year need to do some soul searching about who we really are and what we really stand for. ...
Bullshit. If I support Sanders it will because he demonstrated enough support to secure the nomination, not because he's the aged embodiment of some youthful fantasies. Nostalgia is hardly an inspiring, let alone radicalizing, political force.
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@hightor,
Quote:perfectly happy that they jettisoned all that muddy youthful idealism because a lot of it just didn't hold up to scrutiny in the real world.
The real world is what we make of it. Nothing more. In the 50's the real world in America was segregationist.
@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:
The real world is what we make of it. Nothing more. In the 50's the real world in America was segregationist.
....and, in 2020, it's trying to make a comeback...
How ‘Centrist Bias’ Hurts Sanders and Warren
The media has a bigger problem than liberal bias.
By David Leonhardt, Opinion Columnist, New York Times, Dec. 22, 2019
John F. Harris is about as mainstream as the mainstream media gets. He spent 21 years at The Washington Post, including as its political editor. Then he became the founding editor of Politico, where he is now a columnist.
Last month, Harris wrote a columnthat I can’t get out of my head. In it, he argued that political journalism suffers from “centrist bias.” As he explained, “This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.”
The bias caused much of the media to underestimate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016. It also helps explain the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.
Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. It’s an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets — national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks — really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.
In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.
But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that bothpolitical parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.
This seemingly radical possibility turns out to be quite common, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — author of the classic book, “The Vital Center,” no less — pointed out. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.”
Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible. This year’s Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: Are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?
The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: Are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?
I recently took a detailed look through the coverage of the wealth tax, favored by both Sanders and Warren, and centrist bias seeps through much of it. The coverage has slantednegative, filled with the worries that centrists have — that the tax wouldn’t work in practice or would sloweconomic growth.
Experts who favor a wealth tax, like Gene Sperling, Felicia Wong and Heather Boushey, or whose academic research suggests it would work, like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, have received less attention than experts who don’t like the idea. For that matter, the complaints of obscure billionaires have gotten more attention than the arguments of sympathetic experts. “Billionaire whining about a wealth tax,” as Ilyana Kuziemko, a Princeton economist who’s sympathetic to a wealth tax, told me, mostly isn’t newsworthy.
I’m not suggesting that journalists lather the wealth tax with praise. There are real questions about it, and journalists are supposed to be skeptical. I’m also not suggesting that Sanders or Warren is necessarily the best nominee. As regular readers know, I’m a moderate on Medicare, immigration and college debt, among other subjects. John Harris, for his part, confesses to “a pretty strong bout” of centrist bias.
But maybe that’s why we recognize it and pine for more objective coverage. Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one. If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?
Once you start thinking about centrist bias, you recognize a lot of it. It helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat. (Well-funded deficit advocacy plays a role too.) Centrist bias also helps explain the credulousness of early coverage during the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, largely supported each war.
The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be. Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do — no less, no more.
@Olivier5,
Quote:Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible.
There are a number of things being conflated or insufficiently separated here.
First, seeking a centrist position on some political disagreement is a natural and reasonable position in many cases. We recognize varying interests and acknowledge that in a democracy no one can get everything they want so we all make trade offs.
That reasonable formula, however, can become unworkable where one party has or works towards domination of others. That is, when there is a significant asymmetry of power or the active desire for that. Mitch McConnell or Grover Norquist or Charles Koch are
not interesting in splitting the pie down the middle.
But in the topic this writer is discussing - American political journalism - is a different situation with differing dynamics from political operations. Journalists adopt habits for a set of reasons including "bad" reasons, ie profit for the publication's owners or perhaps wanting to become a celebrity player in the political/media world (Jim VandeHei, Matt Drudge, Chris Cillizza). The more common problem though is the one very capably addressed by
Jay Rosen.
If you're interested in political journalism but unfamiliar with Rosen's work, then nuns should come to your home and rap you on the knuckles really hard.
@blatham,
blatham wrote:
That reasonable formula, however, can become unworkable where one party has or works towards domination of others. That is, when there is a significant asymmetry of power or the active desire for that. Mitch McConnell or Grover Norquist or Charles Koch are not interesting in splitting the pie down the middle.
Are you suggesting that Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrat leadership are at all interested in sharing power with Republicans? Or are any other Democrats for that matter? Obamacare and other legislation in the last Administration were passed by Democrat Majorities without any accommodation or negotiations with Republicans. The Democrat Majority in the House of Representatives has abandoned its responsibilities as Legislators in a desperate pursuit of Impeachment for President Trump. That's hardly a triumph of reasonable power sharing.
