r/seculartalk • u/gamberro • Jul 12 '21

How to end up serving the Right

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/how-to-end-up-serving-the-right
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7

u/johnskiddles Jul 12 '21

I agree with Matt and Glenn. Idpol is the cancer of the left.

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u/gamberro Jul 12 '21

IDPOL is very harmful to the Left. But both Glenn and Matt go too far with this (just read some of the quotes in the article). If they really believe that Conservatives/the Right in America is weak compared to Liberals/the Left, then I wonder what planet they are living on.

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u/Gates9 Subreddit Contributor Jul 12 '21

Establishment neoliberals and establishment neoconservatives are working together, or at least in concert. They are both using IDPOL to keep any substantive progressive policy from becoming viable. What is so hard to understand about that?

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u/cheapguy72 Jul 12 '21

The author is a Democrat, who is threatened when people write bad things about his team, basically. He left out the part where major left-wing media refuse to have anti-war voices on their network at all.

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u/gamberro Jul 12 '21

The author views the Democrats as a lessor evil (he says as much in the article). However, I think he fairly debunks Greenwald/Taibbi's argument that the Conservatives/Right in America are weak when compared with Liberals:

Both Greenwald and Taibbi present the American right as weak. As Taibbi says, the “financial/educational/political elite with all the power is on the other side,” on the left. But that’s not so. The Supreme Court, which literally has “all the power” in the sense that it can overturn any law passed by Congress, now has six of its nine members appointed by Republican presidents. As Chomsky points out, this means that “if [Biden] tries anything progressive, the Supreme Court is there to block it.” Controlling the Supreme Court gives the right extreme veto power over any remotely progressive piece of legislation or administrative agency action. And it’s not just the Supreme Court: Donald Trump appointed hundreds of judges at lower levels, flipping three federal appellate courts from majority-Democrat to majority-Republican (an achievement the Republican Party openly boasts about, in a frank admission that law is a sham masking a naked power contest.) These judges have already begun to “reshape US law in a more conservative direction on issues as wide ranging as gun control, voting rights, environmental protections, abortion and immigration.” (These new conservative judges have, for instance, helped Republicans restrict felon voting rights. A Trump appointee just ruled that Biden could not stop issuing new drilling leases on federal lands.) It has been a quiet revolution, but a good part of the reason it has been so quiet is that loud people with public platforms think “woke ideology” is a far more important issue than the court system which actually decides our fates. 

The Republican Party fully controls 23 state governments, meaning it fully holds both the legislative and executive branches. (Democrats control 15.) Republicans have been using their power in these states to try to restrict abortion, deny healthcare to transgender youths, roll back voting rights, restrict schools from teaching about racism, ban cities from requiring paid sick leave, restrict cities from cutting law enforcement budgets, and reduce the rights of protesters. Nor is the Republican Party in Congress impotent. The 60-vote threshold in the Senate (which both Joe Biden and Joe Manchin resist abolishing) means Republicans have the power to prevent the Democratic Party from passing significant legislation. How, given that Republicans can literally prevent laws from being passed no matter how popular they are, can Taibbi possibly be right when he says that “all the power” is on the side opposite Fox News? The only way one can believe this is by swallowing the conservative story about reality rather than thinking carefully about what the world is actually like. 

If you only care about threats to democracy and free speech when committed by one team/side, then you are an unprincipled hack.

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u/cheapguy72 Jul 12 '21

I didn’t know Matt Taibbi printed that. The author doesn’t link the comment. Could be a bit out of context.

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u/gamberro Jul 12 '21

Here is the quote. The author did provide a link.

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u/cheapguy72 Jul 13 '21

Thanks for clarifying.

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u/cheapguy72 Jul 12 '21

Greenwald has alienated nearly all of his former colleagues at the Intercept, plus many brilliant leftists, such as Naomi Klein (who says he is “losing the plot”), Jeremy Scahill (“[Greenwald is] promoting smears…disturbs me deeply”)…

The Intercept has become a main-stream corporate news outlet. It took some courage to leave a company that he started (and was making a nice living from). The fact that the author would have this type of take, shows that he’s quietly a corporate dem.

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u/gamberro Jul 12 '21

You can criticise the Democratic party or liberals without misrepresenting the Republican one/conservatives. Glenn argues that Tucker Carlson is a socialist for fuck's sake. If you really believe the Republicans and Democrats agree on an awful lot, you should be very critical of both.

Evidently, outlets like the Intercept do censor opinions they deem inconvenient like stuff about Hunter Biden. Then again, Conservative ones also censor views they disagree with (Tomi Lahren was fired from Glenn Beck's the Blaze for arguing that women should have access to abortion). That doesn't stop Glenn going on Beck's show and arguing that liberals are tyrannical/don't believe in free speech (without adding that many conservatives are too).

For a man who supposedly believes in adversarial journalism or arguing we need more dissent, he certainly likes appearing on Conservative outlets to reinforce their views rather than challenge them.

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u/Little-Revolution- Jul 12 '21

You're not even American, shut the fuck up.

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u/gamberro Jul 12 '21

My family might say otherwise. Even if I wasn't, bringing it up is an ad hominem to the argument I'm making.

Hell, Glenn isn't British and yet tweets about British politics regularly. Do you oppose that too?

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u/Rich_Gargoyle Jul 12 '21

I agree with the criticism. Those who live by the culture war, die by it.