And when you get down to it, aside from violent schizophrenic streaks of anger, most people who rant about wealthy Jews may as well be ranting about neoliberal globalists as to blame for their own economic woes. I guess the left just totally dropped the ball here by failing to offer something would have prevented the irrational hatred that grew up in a vacuum for want of an actual solution.

But, woe if the revolutionary party does not measure up to the height of the situation! The daily struggle of the proletariat sharpens the instability of bourgeois society. The strikes and the political disturbances aggravate the economic situation of the country. The petty bourgeoisie could reconcile itself temporarily to the growing privations, if it arrived by experience to the conviction that the proletariat is in a position to lead it onto a new road. But if the revolutionary party, in spite of a class struggle becoming incessantly more accentuated, proves time and again to be incapable of uniting the working class about it, if it vacillates, becomes confused, contradicts itself, then the petty bourgeoisie loses patience and begins to look upon the revolutionary workers as those responsible for its own misery. All the bourgeois parties, including the social democracy, turn its thoughts in this very direction. When the social crisis takes on an intolerable acuteness, a particular party appears on the scene with the direct aim of agitating the petty bourgeoisie to a white heat and of directing its hatred and its despair against the proletariat. In Germany, this historical function is fulfilled by National-Socialism, a broad current whose ideology is composed of all the putrid vapors of disintegrating bourgeois society.

Maybe.

But I feel like this time, the right has gone a bridge too far with Trump apologizing for these hateful people. At some point Americans might respond to identity politics if it's in reaction to worse identity politics. If we see more of this KKK stuff close to election day, I think that'd be the kiss of death.

What would be really bad is if the Dems count on this happening but don't change their platform to address the economic issues, and Trump pivots to that closer to election day. In fact maybe this is his strategy? 4d-chess.jpg

Also, the author's summary of Bannon rings true to me.

Bannon reminds me of an overambitious undergraduate who plans out a senior thesis that he cannot possibly complete: yeah, it makes sense at a glance and it ties a lot of things together, but you're never gonna pull it off.

Many people find identity politics to be a tad extreme, but with recent events.. let's just say, most people hate the actual KKK and neo-Nazis. The Dems are probably going to run someone like Kamala Harris on a platform of "oh my god let's end white nationalism and get back to running the country like real sophisticated adults".

I actually realized the other day that Americans are in an extremely subtle rhetorical trap.

There are two groups of Americans: the right, and everybody else. The right refers to the latter as "the left" as a catch-all pejorative. But the thing is, they long ago succeeded in banishing any actual leftist thought from the country. And yet you've got this loose band of people who have no unifying economic vision that are cooperating against the right under various guises like identity politics, but nevertheless are content to refer to themselves as "left-leaning" or just plain "left", or maybe progressive, without ever stopping to think about what that might entail if it meant more than "not on the right".

This obviously cannot win elections in the long run, because it doesn't do anything super interesting for the common citizen, beyond extending constitutional rights to more groups of people. Sure, they properly fund government agencies and lobby for more responsible levels of taxation, but those are neither sexy issues, nor should they have been up for debate if not for the Republican scorched-Earth tactics of "small government" as a religion.

In other words, a return to "business as usual".

BTW, you guys see that VICE special on HBO? Check it out just to see Reeve's face to face dialog with some of these nuts. Seething with anger and armed to the teeth. Really puts a face on these anonymous ****posters, and it ain't a pretty one. I certainly hope the FBI and DHS is monitoring the one who said that Charlottesville was just the beginning and that we should expect to see a lot more violence.

It's a dumb question, but what are they so angry about? I mean, they have... uh, you know, they're a bunch of young, white males... what is it that they want, is it that they just don't like black people, they don't like Jewish people, they don't like gay people, they don't like anyone who is not who they are?

Hillary lost because of sexism and the Comey letter. Deal with it.

The system was rigged against Hillary from the start.

https://www.google.com/amp/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/hillary-clinton-political-outsider-president/story%3Fid%3D33898281

Yeah let's think about it. Lol

The problem here is: what if, sometime down the road, we get someone who is more effectively fascist, and unlike Trump is competent and likable? Such a thing is not an impossibility. We have no bulwarks against fascism, and I think many in the business community would openly welcome it. Which means I see it as a realistic threat in 2024, 2028.

lol, I love these lines. liberals like to pick and choose their favorite causes for the election, not get a landscape of every cause and which were more potent. which means they'll struggle when Kamala Harris doesn't inspire huge crowds yet polls well with 35 year old young professional white women.



the whole way they tried to push Hillary as a historical figure was so awkward. it was part of some weird, like, pre-back patting about how important they all were.

Really weird how Americans just completely lack the vocabulary to talk about the kind of stuff addressed by Jon's Trotsky quote.

Listening Anderson Cooper try to fathom how a white person could possibly want to join this Nazi protest, when mainstream political ideology can't explain why "young white males" have anything less than idelic prospects in life:

It's like there's this big, gaping piece of the puzzle missing in people's conception of politics and economics where leftist thought is supposed to be, and which the language of identity politics that fills the vacuum, and through which Cooper is trying to use instead to size up the situation, with laughable murky results. He literally cannot comprehend their anger.

I don't think the business world would welcome a hard white nationalist government, unless the country faced an existential threat. Even then, there's so much ink that's been spilled demonizing Nazis that it'd be wildly unpopular and forced.

I don't think it would be shaped with quite the same open racist rhetoric. It will be more about instilling order, forcing and structuring tiers of society like a fascist regime, but I don't think it can win on the racist white vote alone, it will just depend on that structure in some way.

In other words, a return to "business as usual".

BTW, you guys see that VICE special on HBO? Check it out just to see Reeve's face to face dialog with some of these nuts. Seething with anger and armed to the teeth. Really puts a face on these anonymous ****posters, and it ain't a pretty one. I certainly hope the FBI and DHS is monitoring the one who said that Charlottesville was just the beginning and that we should expect to see a lot more violence.

...[Bannon] openly talked of his feud with Trump's chief economic adviser Gary Cohn — energized but concerned allies who worry Kelly won't look positively at undercutting Trump on North Korea and knifing senior officials publicly.

"The only thing I would change if I were in his shoes is I don’t like that he named Cohn," a Bannon ally said. "He can say globalists, everyone knows who that is."

(As if to reenforce the word association, Breitbart, the news site Bannon formerly ran, bracketed Cohn's name in globes on its front page on Wednesday.)

I don't think it would be shaped with quite the same open racist rhetoric. It will be more about instilling order, forcing and structuring tiers of society like a fascist regime, but I don't think it can win on the racist white vote alone, it will just depend on that structure in some way.

The recently-fired Bannon, in the midst of his very personal hobby, was not able to comment today on his departure.

...the previous tenants “were not very upstanding people” and had “severely damaged” the property.

They had “put padlocks on all the doors, installed video cameras, and had ruined the bathtub, kitchen counter, and floor.”

Worse, though, was that it had been a “party house,” she said, known for frequent drug use.

Carlos Herrera, who owned the house with with his wife, Andreina Morales, painted a picture of what initially seemed to be a normal tenancy but soon evolved into an almost daily parade of debauchery and drug use, including run-ins with the police.

“The conclusion is she was probably cooking meth in here,” Herrera said of Bannon’s ex-wife. That would have explained the damage done to the bathtub and kitchen sink.



Curtis heard the same stories of porn, drugs, and debauchery over and over again.

“Each person gave accounts that the house was used to film pornography, had a constant flow of men, women — and even children — at the house and that blatant drug use was occurring at all hours of the night and day,” Curtis said.

At least five people told him tales of drug use and porn at the house.

Felix, a handyman who frequently worked on the property, told Curtis he had personally “witnessed women and men being filmed in the act.” He described the buckets of chemicals and bags of trash and rags he had to remove. He spent hours scrubbing the master bathtub, “which appeared melted by some form of acid.” Felix suspected the bathtub had been used for “making drugs.”

Curtis heard similar stories from the pest control service man.

“In fact,” Curtis said, “he did so in an almost gleeful and boastful manner.”

The pest control worker described witnessing drug use each time he came to the house, “even at early day hours.” He told Curtis it would blow his mind to know what “what went on in the house.”

An unnamed male tenant, he said, who was “a heavy set man,” offered him “girls for sex and/or drugs in lieu of payment,” but he never accepted because he could lose his job.

When the oven range needed repair, the repairman refused to come to the house. Despite the service warranty, Curtis said, he was told no one would come “if the same people were living in the house because ‘that house is evil and the people are evil.’”

The company ultimately agreed to send someone after being assured the prior tenants were gone.

When Curtis opened the gate, the repairman said with seeming relief, “You aren’t him.”

He proceeded to work on the range and also share his own horror stories about the previous tenants.

He told Curtis that on several occasions, when he would arrive to service the house, “the tenants would scream at him to leave and threatened him with violence.” At other times, when he was allowed into the house to perform work, he observed topless and naked men and women and the constant presence of drugs, which they would sometimes offer to him.

He told Curtis it was “the worst experience of his life” and that he “did not want anything to do with those ‘evil people.’”

“You have no idea what kind of evil stuff went on in the house,” he said.

One day, Curtis said, a woman came to the house asking for “Steve or [his ex-wife].” She appeared distraught when he told her they no longer lived there. She stood outside the gate for several minutes in a daze.

“I assumed she was probably a regular visitor to the house looking for drugs from the previous tenants,” Curtis said, “but I didn’t realize just how bad the drug use in the house had been at the time. I firmly told her to leave and to not come back.”

Meanwhile, according to the realtor, the neighbors had formed a committee “in an effort to get the owners to evict” the tenants before they ultimately left.

In September 2016, upon returning from a filming in the South Pacific, Curtis came home to a pile of mail addressed to Steve Bannon and his ex-wife. Curtis would write “return to sender” on the mail, but “the flow of bills, notices from the city of Miami, and letters from the Bank of Ireland started piling up.”

That’s when the landlord finally told Curtis about the identity of the former tenants.

“He told me that [Bannon] was indeed the previous tenant who caused such drama,” Curtis said. And now that Bannon had joined Trump’s presidential campaign, everyone was looking into Bannon and his history.

“He told me the FBI had contacted them, as well as several reporters and journalists,” Curtis said, “and that I should expect to be contacted as well.”

“It was an unusual situation, to say the least,” he added.

But it was more than unusual. It was also a health hazard.

Shortly after Curtis moved into the house, he started to experience a variety of symptoms: fatigue, inability to sleep, eye and skin irritation, chronic chest pain, and dizziness.

The symptoms would subside when he was away from the house for weeks at a time and they would resume when he returned.

In March, Herrera finally admitted to Curtis that the prior tenants had manufactured meth there. That’s when Curtis went to stay in a hotel. Again, his symptoms subsided.

He also purchased kits to test for methamphetamine in the house. At first, he focused on the kitchen, master bathroom, and guest room. The tests showed a high level of contamination, so Curtis ordered six more tests and had them shipped overnight.

The contamination was through the roof. So Curtis hired a company to test the house at well. The test confirmed “levels of meth and very high levels of cocaine.”

In May, Curtis moved out of the house.

He still suffers from health problems related to living in the house once occupied by Steve Bannon.

Fascism was, scientifically speaking, crazy-town. Their only consistent economic policy was a kind of extra-ill-conceived Social Darwinism, which sought to breed a more successful man by further punishing the poor with austerity and anti-labor policies, and further privilege the rich with bail-outs, pork, and monopolies.

I wouldn't worry about what a 21st century fascist movement is "going to have". Fascism is simply the purest expression of neoliberalism, as she is done.

So, uh, what's going to happen worst case scenario in the United States?

Ask the judges who've been giving criminals (black men) lighter sentences in exchange for vasectomies.

The **** you think's the worst case scenario in the United States?

That shouldn't surprise anyone. Corporations are centrally planned dictatorships. Unions bring democracy to them.

/pol is kind of pathetic now.

Maybe the left as well needs to be louder about what we stand for and why it's good, instead of allowing people to distract and mislead.