Cory Doctorow: "How the #KochBrothers played w…" - Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

The Right's Hardliners Would Rather Lose Election Than Culture Wars: and the finance wing knows it

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rights-hardliners-would-rather-lose-elections-than-culture-wars-bc4a1ae3867a

A detail from the Gadsen "Don't Tread On Me" flag, showing the snake's top third. The snake is wearing an explosive-studded suicide vest.

Chris Walsh (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10844205@N00/3849282178/

CC BY 2.0 (modified)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pizzaburgers #CultureWarBullshit #PartyPolitics

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#Conservative movements: an unstable coalition of finance #oligarchs and swivel-eyed loons.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rights-hardliners-would-rather-lose-elections-than-culture-wars-bc4a1ae3867a

In most countries, the conservative coalition is composed of two main factions:

The finance wing: these are the billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires, millionaires, and their lickspittle Renfields. They stand for low taxes, financial secrecy, and the unregulated right to pollute, cheat their customers, and steal their workers’ wages while destroying their bodies and minds. They claim to be generally anti-regulation, but they’re ardent partisans for regulations that ban unionization.
The swivel-eyed loons: these are the everyday workers who stand to lose their transit, their rent control, their labor protections, their savings, and access to clean air, clean water, decent education and a dignified retirement if the finance wing gets its way. These people are, understandably, unhappy about living in that world, so the finance wing placates them by promising policies of breathtaking cruelty against out-groups.

The problem is that the finance wing doesn’t want to live in a world where they can’t hire smart workers from overseas, where their kids can’t get birth control or abortion, where workers graduate from school thinking the universe is 5,000 years old, or where their queer kids get discriminated against, ostracized, or worse. And they certainly don’t want to live in a world where all those people who are angry at them have caches of assault rifles and stockpiles of ammo.

But still, they vote for it.

#pizzaburgers #CultureWarBullshit #PartyPolitics

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

How the #KochBrothers played with fire - and got burned

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rights-hardliners-would-rather-lose-elections-than-culture-wars-bc4a1ae3867a

During the Obama years, some of the Republican Party’s leading finance wing bosses started playing with fire. The Koch Brothers poured a fortune into the creation of the Tea Party, a hardline group that made it clear that the would rather lose elections than lose the culture war. They primaried career GOP politicians and replaced them with swivel-eyed loons (and normie politicians who were willing to vote like swivel-eyed loons).

These hardliners changed the conservative coalition’s balance of power. By making it clear that they would rather see Democrats in office than Republicans who reneged on their culture war promises, they put the fear of (an evangelical) God into their leaders.

The Tea Party marked a turning point for the US conservative movement and then conservative movements around the world.

Hardline conservative policies — total abortion bans, groomer panics, institutionalized racism, historical revisionism, support for white nationalist — are not popular.

Ideas like universal medical care, expanded transit, humane immigration policies and infrastructure spending enjoy commanding majority support among both Republicans and Democrats.

But the hardliners threw the steering-wheel out the window. They’ve made it clear to GOP party bosses that they would rather lose elections than lose the culture war.

#TGOP #TeaParty #TimeForSomeGameTheoryMotherfuckers

Jul 16, 2023, 04:41 PM··Web

20boosts·28favorites

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#Republicans fear their base. #Democrats hate their base.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rights-hardliners-would-rather-lose-elections-than-culture-wars-bc4a1ae3867a

It’s true that the Democrats’ finance wing is just as invested in not paying taxes or workers and just as committed to despoiling the Earth as their Republican counterparts.

Sure, they pay lip service to social progressivism, but it’s the anemic form of progressivism that promises to replace a world where everything is run by 150 white, male CEOs with a world where half of those CEOs are people of color, queer, and/or women.

But there is a crucial difference between Republicans and Democrats: Republican party bosses hate their base, but also fear them. They know that the base would rather give an election to Dems than elect Republicans who sell them out.

By contrast, the Democratic Party’s grandees have zero fear of the base or the party’s left wing. For decades, they simply assumed that union members, people of color and progressives would Vote Blue No Matter Who. They sold us out and told us they had no choice, and we just ate shit.

#liberalism #leftism #materialism

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#Biden serving #pizzaburgers

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rights-hardliners-would-rather-lose-elections-than-culture-wars-bc4a1ae3867a

Biden will but a firebreathing trustbuster like Lina Khan in charge of the FTC, but he’ll also life-appoint federal judges like Jacqueline Scott Corley, who will seize on any flimsy excuse to confound Khan’s attempts to protect the American people from predatory monopolies.

Most of Biden’s coalition wants pizza, but a powerful group of insiders wants hamburgers. Biden’s given us all a pizzaburger, and he views the fact that we are all equally dissatisfied with his solution as evidence that he’s struck a Solomonic compromise.

The country is on fire. It’s baking. It’s drowning. We’re running out of time. Republican bosses don’t want the same thing as their base, but they’re delivering it anyway, because that base has jettisoned “my party right or wrong,” in favor of “we’d rather blow this whole thing up than back someone who sells us out.”

The Democrats have started to fear their base — a little. But they still mostly hate us. Until and unless they know that they have to earn our support, the best we can hope for is pizzaburgers — heavy on the burger.

#LinaKhan #FTC #MicrosoftActivision

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