Brad DeLong : I had thought that my brilliant-but-at-times-highly-annoying coauthor @Econ_Marshall was making a more sophisticated point—that here in America “libertarianism” is a Frankenstein’s monster that got its lightning-bolt juice from massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Dismantling the New Deal and rolling back the social insurance state were not ideas that had much potential political-economy juice back in the 1950s and 1960s. But if the economic libertarian cause of dismantling the New Deal could be harnessed to the cause of white supremacy—if one of the key liberties that libertarians were fighting to defend was the liberty to discriminate against and oppress the Negroes—than all of a sudden you could have a political movement that might get somewhere. And so James Buchanan and the other libertarians to the right of Milton Friedman made the freedom to discriminate—or perhaps the power to discriminate?—a key one of the liberties that they were fighting for in their fight against BIG GOVERNMENT. And this has poisoned American libertarianism ever since.
Good point but libertarianism was toxic to begin with. Who wants feudalism?
except for those who imagine themselves as feudal lords of course
I think some people (e.g. “freemen on the land”) believe that if the government just goes away, they could just be left to live out their lives without any government interference… not getting the fact that the government taking a portion of their income is how the government is able to prevent a feudal lord from setting up and taking all of their income.
“…socialism never took root in America because because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires…”
Of course now we have giant corporations instead of feudal lords but they amount to the same thing.
libertarianism used to involve ending feudalism and capitalism and building socialism.
It doesn’t mean that in the US. Here it just means Republican who doesn’t want to admit it.
In the rest of the world, it refers to something more anarchist, but it’s seldom used because it’s easier to just say anarchist.
Nah, Libertarians pick some sides from the right wing and some from the left. They would very much oppose having to pay the government to build a wall, militarizing the police, requiring people to have certain IDs, having the government tell them they’re not allowed to have an abortion, etc. They do take the Republican side on some things, but they’re also very opposed to several of the Republican ideals. At least, that’s how I remember it from 20-30 years ago, haven’t really kept up. But it was a bit of far-right and a bit of far-left with hardly anything from the middle.
The rightward shift of both parties such that Republicans address their far-right ideals while the Democrats have become too far right to address their far-left ideals could cause them to side with the Republicans more now.
Personally I think it was their inverted Bolshevism, making them kind of half-assed Marxists. Remember that apart from the 20s, the Soviet power structure was pretty sexist, racist, opportunistic, propped up by magical thinking, etc. Combine this with Bircher/Evangelical modeling of Mao and Pol Pot for their movements and you get a close-minded appearance of opposition of libertarian-fascist against socialism, but really I think they just feed off each other in cycles of slowly ramped up fascist “Capitalism” taken down by chaotic and unstable revolutions.
The revolutions hardly ever actually get to socialism. Usually it’s just back to sham elections that put a fascist back into power, just like in Brazil, Argentina, etc.
Apart from the right to get high they’re pretty indistinguishable from centrist liberals on social issues. Platitudes in public, little or no action against structural racism except what can be weaponized against vital institutions.
…is probably a misquote.
The actual Steinbeck quote is this:
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
He wasn’t saying “the poor are too stupid to see their true interests”. He was saying “most, but not all, of the self-declared communists I met were middle-class poseurs”.
well, I didn’t attribute it to Steinbeck, did I? 
but your quotation comes from one of Steinbeck’s writings for Esquire. “A primer on the thirties.”
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1960/6/1/a-primer-on-the-30s
sometimes it’s nice to get more than the same two paragraphs, even if it doesn’t change much.
Fuck all of this. The media are supposed to report the facts, not complete racist bullshit. There is nothing remotely true about anything in the stories, except that the prisoners were fed (Salisbury) steak (from prison grade meat and from a prison kitchen), and the prison guards are not being paid (at this time, but they’ll be paid later). Omitting and/or glossing over these details is disingenuous. Using stock photos of gourmet steaks to represent Salisbury steak is a deliberate lie. That “I been eatin like a boss” headline? That just makes me want to deck the next journalist I see.
Wanna bet that none of the journalists know what a Salisbury steak is?
^This.^
Salisbury steak is the meat you get after your leftover beef has been repurposed five times, covered in the brown sludge you get when you scrape a week’s worth of dirty dishes. Salisbury steak is to steak what cow chips are to potato chips.
Of course, growing up in relative comfort, there is probably a fair number of journalists who don’t know this
EtA:
I was charitable to call it leftover beef. God only knows what kind of meat it is, especially in a prison 
Cripes, they probably don’t know how to pronounce it, let alone what it is, or they wouldn’t be making a fuss about something like hamburger steak, but less likely to be pure beef.
Well, let’s put it this way: USDA regulations specify that hamburger is strictly beef and strictly skeletal meat (i.e., muscle, not offal). That doesn’t mean that it is good quality beef, granted. The USDA regs for packaged Salisbury steak, however, specify a minimum of 65% meat, of which 25% may be pork. Beef heart can be used.
Any way you look at it, it’s extended ground beef. I’ve had good Salisbury steak, but there ain’t any guarantees.