Ryan Cooper

Alon Levy has an interesting post about ideology, technocrats, and public works. He suggests that competent socialism is impossible, because any extensive program of public works will of necessity end up being more interested in competence than ideology, and therefore will invariable slide into neoliberal technocracy. This is based partially on what he see as an actively anti-competence spirit in the American left. After giving a reasonably fair definition of neoliberalism, Levy concludes: The populist left today defines itself in diametric opposition to some subset of the above points, and this requires defining itself against the notion that competence in governing is important. This is unmistakable in Jacobin, the most important magazine of the American far left today...see [Jacobin editor Bhaskar] Sunkara in this extended rant , calling Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias less than human. Klein is "a technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly sear...

Some aggro person on twitter reminded me to respond to this from Elias Isquith: @ryanlcooper @cd_hooks pic.twitter.com/3zItc9nFXy — Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) October 19, 2016 I'll quote so everyone can read clearly: If we agree that the Southern Strategy was premised on leveraging white racial resentment against economic liberalism — that working class whites were more willing to give up liberal economic policy than whiteness — then how do we imagine a coalition that is racially egalitarian and economically leftist will function if allowing the white working class to go its own way is not an option . First, let me restate: my point about downscale whites and coalition building applies specifically to union organizing . If we view all Trump voters as irredeemable racists who must be shunned and cut out of any sort of leftist institution (as this person appears to be arguing here ), then that leaves a big chunk of the working class able to serve as scabs and a reserve l...

Mike Konczal has a pretty good post discussing whether or not left-wing economic policy might win over white working-class Trump voters in the future. He discusses four broad policy directions: "a more redistributive state, a more aggressive state intervention in the economy, a weakening of the centrality of waged labor, and a broadening, service-based form of worker activism," and argues that all of these will repulse white conservatives even more from the left. Konzcal aptly notes that the major engines of conservative politics are highly moralized notions about desert (to wit: poor people, especially minority ones, deserve their fate) and a love of coercive hierarchy as such, the most important of which is the racial hierarchy with its roots in antebellum slavery. Therefore, those four policies, which involve new transfers and government action to benefit the disproportionately black and brown bottom of the income distribution, and union organizing among increasingly bl...

A recent episode of Chapo Trap House featured Chase Madar, a civil rights attorney in New York. Here's an excerpt dealing with Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell.  This starts at about 20 minutes in: MADAR: It's a 600-page book subtitled "America and the Age of Genocide." And what's most striking about it is really what's not in this 600-page book — again, subtitled "America and the Age of Genocide." Those postwar genocides that the US had some kind of hand in — supplying intelligence, condoning, complicity — are airbrushed from this. The Indonesian massacre of Communists and fellow travelers in the 1965-66, death toll in the hundreds of thousands, we don't know how many, is simply not mentioned even once in this book...the word " Guatemala " is not even in the index. In fairness, East Timor — this was a genocide committed by Indonesia when they invaded in 1975 — that gets exactly one sentenc...