The “moderate” tweet was in response to this, BTW:
I did hesitate about posting it, for fear of irritating folks who identify as moderate. But I went ahead anyway, because it all depends on what you mean by moderate, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about.
Bernie’s a moderate; he’s about as close as you can get to being a capitalist while still remaining left-wing. The SocDems of the less-conservative wing of the Democrats are moderates, too; capitalists who’d be DemSocs if they took one step left. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
OTOH, the people who define “moderate” as “somewhere between the GOP and Dems”…well, for those folks, the Tweet doesn’t strike me as inaccurate.
Is it just economics, a desire for a strongly mixed economy (e.g. SocDem capitalism + welfare safety net, regulate business only if clearly necessary)? Or a preference for careful incrementalism over radical change? Or both, or neither, or that and something else?
I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.
“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”
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That’d make the basis of a good thread at the other place, but if I post it I’ll probably raise nationalism hackles.
Yeah that’s big standard fence-sitting, with all the “I just believe in freedom of expression” and “I disagree with racist speech, but” and “everyone is equal” necessary to squirm into that position. A real moderate recognizes the far shift right in US politics.
Frankly, if they fall for this propaganda… and they hate those of us who oppose Nazis, perhaps because we oppose genocide or at least oppose our own fucking extermination… then they enable the Nazis.
I try to keep the left vs liberal snark posts to just those required for demonstration purposes, but this one is purely gratuitous. Too good to resist.
