Hey guys! So, tomorrow’s article is going to kick off a series: “Dave’s Silly SCOTUS Scoreboard”, for June’s usual SCOTUS whirlwind. I’ll be giving a play-by-play, and keeping a scoreboard - which will be updated in this month’s threads - of my own personal ruling on each SCOTUS opinion as they are issued.
On to The Roundup!
The whole “SoCiAlIsM iS oNlY gOvErNmEnT oWnErShIp Of ThE mEaNs Of PrOdUcTiOn!1!” thing always strikes me as a bit reductive and ahistorical. I know it’s intended to defend against the right’s habit of gaslightingly labeling everything the left wants as “socialism”, but it’s grating sometimes.
The reason why it rankles me is that although Marx genuinely and literally did write those very words as his official definition of socialism, he was writing this all in service to a larger sense of economic equality, which was itself a backlash to capitalist exploitation.
Thus, while I think that Marx would be a bit confused today about why history took several twists and turns from what he expected it to do, and that he wouldn’t recognize European social democracy properly as his own notion of socialism, he’d also find its macroeconomic features rather recognizable as achieving what he meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” — though, of course, not without its setbacks.
He’d probably also declare that the first generation of Marxist Revisionists were ultimately proven correct by all this, though God knows whether he’d seethis a tolerable form of the Communist project.On a related note, the real reason “Real Communism” has never been tried is because revolutionary government of any kind is rather unstable, and tends to result in authoritarianism. On this point, Marx was absolutely wrong in his expectation that communism could only be achieved through revolution.
Although, we should note that his intellectually formative moment was literally writing about and trying to inspire the Revolutions of 1848, so it’s kind of forgivable that he’d be locked into that mindset.
Anyways, as I said above, real socialism was achieved not through revolution, but through an apocalyptic war that convinced Europe to dedicate itself really hard towards making multiparty republican democracy work, which just kind of ended up resulting in the proletariat actually having a stable vehicle through which to electorally effectuate its socialist demands.Fuck “fuck -isms”. It’s lazy, nihilistic posturing.
Hungary’s anti-Orban coalition is evidence of Dave-rger’s Law in action. It took them a while to get over their differences, since the opposition was initially fractured across the political spectrum, but they’re clearly doing exactly what the Law predicts under the zero-sum electoral and political circumstances1.
I predict that the next stage, if Orban doesn’t plunge Hungary into outright authoritarianism, will see these coalitions trading wedges with each other, perhaps occasionally breaking up, until a further round of reforms stabilizes the system as either two-parties with primaries/ballot access restrictions, or a more traditional multiparty PR system.
Given that they already have MMP, the tendency ought to militate in the latter direction. But again, that’s only if Orban doesn’t consolidate authoritarian power.Polarization Really IS Bad. Liberals who respected mask mandates are now mostly OK being maskless with each other, but because of the hue and cry conservatives raised, most of us libs simply can’t trust them to have been responsible enough not to be that one asshole who gets that tiny 1-5% infection past our vaccine.
These are the sorts of social wounds that reshape societies, folks. I’m not trying to be glib, I’m trying to highlight that we’re already suffering from the aftereffects of the societal damage that the Scots-Irish endured for 1000 years, and the cycle is only continuing. At some point, we need to understand and stop this shit, not just sit here calling everyone racists because it soothes our consciences and is superficially true.Liberals are freaking out, but the silver lining is that if Breyer intends at all to strategically retire, he’s probably waiting until after Biden’s reconciliation bills pass to trigger this next confirmation battle.
Yeah, I know, fuck me. He’s not being strategic. He’s just being a God Damned Liberal.
Which is part of why I insist on making such a distinction between liberals and progressives.Just reflecting on On Totalitarianism and the recent Israel-Palestine flare-up:
I don’t like to make many moral proclamations about such a gray area as the Israel-Palestine situation. I’m not tied to either side, and I don’t see the solution even lying in American politics to begin with.
But… I will say this:
The statelessness of the Palestinian ought to shock and dismay the conscience of the Israeli, because it echoes the statelessness of the European Jew before (some of them) became Israelis.
In this case, those precise circumstances are an MMP system that theoretically should have worked out OK, but under which Orban managed to assemble a bare supermajority.
Speaking of catastrophes deriving from bare majorities or supermajorities, the main contrast here between abolishing the filibuster or Obama’s supermajority window, and Orban’s supermajority, is that Orban actually used his to rewrite the rules to exclude any opposition. That’s the other part of why (besides the opposition being ideologically fragmented, as I described earlier), despite having MMP, Hungary took a whole decade to even begin to recover. It’s actually quite remarkable that the opposition has managed to recover so fast!
American Democrats, by contrast, don’t actually stand to lose much by using bare majorities to enact systemic reforms. Yes, they’ll lose the inevitable backlashes, but the systemic reforms that are actually on the table promise to reshape the GOP’s incentive structure. Orban’s reforms, to contrast back again, were just meant to crush his opposition.