Democrat ID Politics In The Breach, Plus

The NY Times has lost its goddamn mind (again), plus

Soylent Green is people (credit Weldon Berger)

Democrat ID Politics In The Breach

I am less than fond of the Democratic party in O! so many ways, but identity politics have never bothered me. They do bother lots of “centrist” pundits and political consultants who are blaming Harris’s loss in part on the party’s catering to this vast array of interest groups. (They also bother some people on the left, but that’s a different story.)

You see DEI mentioned a lot, as if diversity, equity and inclusion are bad because the policies piss off racists and left-behind white workers—never mind whether they’ve been left behind because corporate interests and private equity billionaires have stripped their communities of assets and hope and substituted oxycontin, or simply because the employment field has opened up to more people.

People: Black people, female people, trans people, gay people, Native people … the distinguishing characteristic here is “people.” DEI seeks to make employment and education and other opportunities available to qualified people who have traditionally been excluded from them. Identity politics works to serve the interests and needs of traditionally underserved and often persecuted communities of … people.

It’s not identity politics. It’s people politics. It’s recognizing that particular groups of people are treated differently, by which I mean worse, often a lot worse, sometimes homicidally worse, than the straight white male benchmark of our society.

Now, with the Chucky the Homicidal Dummy regime erasing every hint of recognition within government agencies of the extraordinary accomplishments of women, people of color and other groups recognized, celebrated and protected by identity politics, we can start to see what a political life without identity politics, or with identity politics limited to white men, looks like.

It’s bleak! Surprise!

The only special interest groups the Democrats need to dump are the billionaires and corporations they rely on for funding, whether it’s funding the PACs and superPACs that are the lifeblood of Democratic party consultants, or funding campaigns. Democrats have been rightly if not sufficiently criticized for abandoning their one-time focus on working-class Americans of all stripes; that this practice went into high gear with the New Democrat embrace of corporations and the wealthy during the Reagan years is no coincidence at all.

The reactionary attacks on DEI and identity politics, the absurd fixation on critical race theory, the erasure of our history where it highlights both the abuse and the accomplishments of people who aren’t white, straight men, the assault on public school funding (via vouchers, among other things) are all aimed at resegregating this country and removing from public view people regarded as deviants by Birchers, Nazis (have you seen Elon Musk’s brutal rejection of his trans daughter?) and Christian Nationalists.

This is not really a good time to abandon Democratic voters of any identity in favor of catering to the worst instincts of people who also need the kind of help that Democrats once delivered through the New Deal and the Great Society.

And it is not the time to continue coddling our malefactors of great wealth, no matter how warm and fuzzy they may sometimes seem. Elon Musk is not uniquely evil among the stupendously wealthy; he is only uniquely mouthy and now, uniquely positioned.

The NY Times has lost its goddamn mind (again)

Nowhere in the “analysis” pictured below appear the words “ethnic cleansing” or “crimes against humanity.” What we have seen from the paper during the few days since Trump announced his plan to scrub the Gaza landscape of Palestinians is a rapid drift from “this is absurd, right?” to “this could happen, maybe?” to “might not be such a bad idea, all things considered.”

Today, long-time reporter and short-time Jerusalem bureau chief Peter Baker allows as how the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank juuuuust might kill the last hope for a sovereign Palestinian state in Palestine.

That paper will normalize any fucking thing at all, given a few days.

Diversion

Hide the catsup.

Story here.

Music

Hot Sauce Johnson, Truck Stop Jug Hop, “Lost Picasso”

Sally Field redux

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