Dave's Daily Dose 10/7/2021

Dunkin' Vox-nuts

• This article’s a week old, but the headline is just priceless: “The case for a more radical climate movement”.

  Me: “HAH, WUT?”

  I mean, seriously? This is nuts. Count this (last) week as the moment that I became convinced that the mainstream left is indeed detached from reality. I still consider myself a leftist, as a con-prog, and that will never change. But Jesus, people, we have to stop kidding ourselves! There will be no “climate solution” if American politics eats itself from within, and the Russians and Chinese are the only ones left standing to fight over whatever smoking hole we leave behind. The climate movement is putting the cart before the horse here, because they’ve convinced themselves they’re at the head of a popular groundswell, instead of the well-financed pack of elite-darling activist NGOs they actually are.

  Too often, the left rants on about how our nation’s priorities are all screwed up, and we really need to address the climate emergency. And I really do sympathize! But all this obsession about “priorities” obscures and prevents discussion about something that’s far more important: “sequencing”. As in, “how in the sweet fuck do we even get from here to there?”

• It’s funny to hear from Bret Stephens on The Bulwark, knowing how much hate and derision he gets from the left.

  I think where these Never Trumpers go wrong, is that for all they want to have this respectful “comity” and — well, it’s not exactly “centrism”, but I’d call it “rule from the center” — they lose their own thread because they’re too stuck in the two-party, zero-sum mindset. Too much of our politics truly is blinded like this, and it gives us this false sense that we have to search for a bunch of solutions that reason tells us won’t actually work — superficial comity, “rule from the center” in a system that doesn’t incentivize it in the least, etc.

  You can only bang your head against the same brick wall so long before you just die of brain damage and never even demolish the stupid wall you set out to.

• I’m growing to suspect that there’s got to be some sort of identifiable difference between issues where we can expect some change in our lifetime, and those that are irretrievably “polarized”.

  The delineation isn’t really easy, though. Gay marriage seemed polarized, right up until it wasn’t. Immigration seemed depolarized, right up until it polarized.

  This is going to be a difficult analysis, so it’s going to take some time. Offer up your own opinions, too!

• This NYT flag redesign is absolutely ridiculous and laughable. And it’d be really easy to just wave it off as “typical liberal nonsense”.

  But I’d push back. This is really the trademark of center-lefties who obsess over appealing to demographics they have long since lost. It’s signaling their centrist virtues! They want to be seen as reaching out to the other side. That’s why this is about flags; they see that the other side really cares about The Flag, so they figure they can renew civic unity by renewing the symbol. The whole thing is a futile exercise in diplomacy.

  The funny thing is, the most likely outcome is that the other side sees this sort of proposal as further leftist sacrilege and impurity, or at least naïve ignorance, not a good-faith attempt to reach out.