Cruz Channels Lenin

 

Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Height, 1960. Tell them the Republicans are the "party of the working class". Via Wikipedia.

I've long found it fun to say that American conservatives are the most doctrinaire Marxist ideological faction, in the sense of believing in the reality of class struggle, except that they want the proletariat to lose the war and give way to the permanent dictatorship of the revolutionary bourgeoisie instead of the more conventional other way around.

But I always meant it as a joke line, insightful but not meant to be taken literally, until I saw this from Rafael Theodore Cruz channeling Vladimir Il'ich Lenin here:

Today’s Dems are the party of the rich.

GOP is and should be the party of the working class. https://t.co/WMTDtKTzwU

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 29, 2020

Really? 

Note on ideology

A little outdoor Joe.

I like this insightful piece by Zack Beauchamp/Vox, though at first sight it's just validating something I've been trying to say for years:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s theory of victory was simple: An unapologetically socialist politics centering Medicare-for-all and welfare state expansions would unite the working class and turn out young people at unprecedented rates, creating a multiracial, multigenerational coalition that could lead Sanders to the Democratic nomination and the White House.

“When we bring millions of working people, people of color and young people in the political process, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders wrote in a February 2 Facebook post....

In the end, this approach failed. It was former Vice President Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders, who assembled a multiracial working-class coalition in key states like Michigan — where Biden won every single county, regardless of income levels or racial demographics. Sanders had strong support among younger voters, but they did not turn out in overwhelming numbers. In at least some key states, they made up smaller portion of the primary electorate than in 2016.

But where I'd just have said Sanders was misled by his fear of alienating the "white working class" into putting economic issues up in front of race and gender, and ended up courting a working class that didn't exist, Beauchamp brings out some other thoughts that might lead to some more positively helpful conclusions, starting with bringing Marx into it:

Is This Phase One of Lumpy Identity Politics?

In a really annoying exchange with some Rose Twitter folks:

The headline is bullshit, and tries to do that "Bernie supporters are the same as Trump supporters" thing. It tries to imply that mostly uneducated people support Bernie. There is nothing elitist about wanting all working people to have a decent life, no matter their education.

— DrLearnALot🌹 #JusticeForEricGarner (@DrLearnALot) July 13, 2019

I was offended too. Nobody likes to be erased.

— DrLearnALot🌹 #JusticeForEricGarner (@DrLearnALot) July 13, 2019

I'm sick and tired of MSM erasing people who support Bernie (and it's always only Bernie, never anyone else).

— Ed ☘️ (@therealedshore) July 13, 2019

Erased! That's a funny idea of what polls are supposed to do. "Waiter, send this poll back! It's ignoring me, merely because I belong to a minority!"

Metablog

The moth Darwin predicted must exist, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, using its preternaturally long proboscis on the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, pollinating it, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This is in reaction, I'm not sure it qualifies as response, to comments from Thornton on yesterday's Douthat post, in which he suggests I should stop arguing with Douthat (admittedly not a very dignified position), mentioning Marx, or being "ideological". I think. And some other stuff.

I'm so sick of idiots tied to masts: the First Amendment Liberals obsessed with Antifa, the Socialists obsessed with single payer health care (now that the economy makes it harder to obsess about nationalizing the banks), and the Conservatives convinced that they have to come up with some deeply principled reason for everything they do. Because trying stuff and seeing what works is just so... unprincipled.

Well, there you go. "What works" at accomplishing what? What do you want to get done? That's a question of principles, which don't necessarily have to be based on a big philosophical system. I want cops to stop killing black people, and I want the government to make sure everybody in the US gets good medical care as is done without too much fuss in other countries, because duh, or because I'm a Rawlsian, or because I'm an unbelieving Jew, or whatever, or because I picked a goddamned side from my Democrat parents. But the other side won't let me, for reasons I consider specious and unprincipled indeed, and on the basis of arguments made in what I call "bad faith". That's my problem, Republicans, Not being tied to a mast, though I understand how one gets annoyed with the one-issue hobbyhorse who won't even allow you to agree with him if you don't use the magic words.

Reality that politics is about identity and that ideology is just identity for educated elites from the majority race.

So really, he's a Marxian thinker himself, this being the fundamental point of the manuscripts Marx and Engels assembled in 1845-46 but couldn't find a publisher for, that came out at last in 1932 under the title The German Ideology. Blindness to the identity origins of one's ideology is where bad faith comes from.