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Oscar's avatar

Ryan: "And so, to me, if the left and the center-left don’t come back with a forceful kind of recreation of a better world that stems the tide of this rising fascist energy, at some point they’re going to be over overwhelmed by it, no matter how kind of popular, and clever, and, you know, 80 percent you can make your issues that you’re running on."

Exactly right!

There is also an ideological bias that the Dmitri person interviewed by RG exhibits in abundance.

For example:

Bernie Sanders did not flounder or fail in 2016: he was swamped in the 2016 Convention by Super Delegates voting against him, undemocratically named by the Clintonian, neo-liberal Democratic Party leadership, who put their collective hands together very forcefully to push down on one plate of the scales. That got us someone many, myself included, saw as a sure looser set up to oppose the outrageous candidate for these outrageous times, the cruelty-reality-show star for the cruelly self-satisfied crowd of his admirers and followers.

There isn't, no matter how many times it is said, an "extreme left" in the USA, at least not one in any way that matters. Surely, if one takes the time, one would find some Maoist somewhere, or a supporter of bomb-throwing anarchism. But those are rare oddities, they are not a movement in any way that matters. But people here hae been trained to think that anything to left of Biden (or even Manchin) is "Extreme Left."

"Medicare for All" was a sure loser in a electoral campaign? Why?

"Defund the Police", in its crudest interpretation, was a bit of nonsense of the kind that is heard in fraught times, such as when police officers were murdering people and getting away with it, with Grand Juries composed mostly of Whites opening the door for the murderers to go free. But there was also a different and thoughtful position under the same lemma, that "Defund the Police" meant to take the funds that were being used to pay for things the police was not trained to do, and to use that money instead for funding the work of, for example, social workers that were trained to do it.

And nowhere in this discussion a word has been said about the need to mobilize the population here and world-wide, to get the coming Climate Warming catastrophe to be less catastrophic.

We have problems, terrible problems, looming ahead because of that not being taken care of with the overriding urgency necessary. To concentrate instead on such things as winning over "swing voters", people that, depending on how they feel that day would much rather vote for Trump-dominated Republican candidates than for Democratic ones, or the other way around, is worse than a waste of time. It is a recipe for everybody loosing everything that matters in the historical equivalent of the blinking of an eye.

I agree that the immediate task urgently at hand is doing the outmost to keep the Republicans getting the Presidency in2024, but what if that is achieved? What then? Looking anxiously to 2028?

But never mind: we should do what we have always done: keep hitting out heads against a brick wall, instead of going through the open door in it. Because we are so very smart and good at figuring out how to come ahead in politics: just pour enough money into it, and stir.

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Charlie Cooper's avatar

I am glad that you did this interview because it gives a good picture of someone whom I consider to be an enemy of equality. I wish, Ryan, you had asked him about economic inequality, U.S. militarism, or how to fix the climate crisis.

His ideas are very consistent with his status as a hanger-on to a billionaire. **Let's talk about race and sex and don't mention how much lower my guy's tax rate is than the school janitor's.**

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