1. If the gates have fallen, it's because the people who were supposed to be standing at them failed so spectacularly that the public stopped listening. You can sneer at “catturd” all you want, but that doesn’t explain why decades of elite gatekeeping gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, mass incarceration, and historic inequality. The “flooding of the zone with shit” didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened after a generation of gatekeepers used their position to protect a broken status quo. People lost faith not in expertise itself, but in the institutions that dressed up self-interest and ideology as neutral expertise. You want a better informed public? Start by rebuilding trust through accountability, not censorship.
2. You say democratizing corporations is “bullshit,” but this just reflects how narrow your framework is. Nobody is suggesting that a Fortune 500 company becomes a town hall overnight. But there are concrete proposals and historical models, from worker co-ops to codetermination to public ownership, that challenge the current dogma of shareholder supremacy. And yes, India experimented with forms of industrial democracy and faced challenges, but that doesn’t discredit the concept any more than the 2008 crash discredits capitalism. You’re arguing from a place of professional habituation: corporate law, as it stands, is your map, so anything outside of it looks like fantasy. But the point of politics is to redraw the map.
3. You're misunderstanding what a materialist analysis is actually saying. It’s not that genuine disagreement doesn’t exist. It’s that our ideas, values, and political positions don’t emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our material conditions: our class position, economic interests, and relationship to power. That doesn’t erase sincerity or intellect, it contextualizes them. People often sincerely believe things that happen to align with their position in a hierarchy. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s how ideology operates. What’s baffling is how someone trained in law, a field that constantly grapples with motive, power, and incentive, acts like this is some alien concept. Material interests aren’t a reduction of all disagreement, but they are a key lens for understanding why some ideas flourish and others are pushed to the margins. That’s not conspiracy.
4. your ire is still directed at the one guy who dared to criticize the corporate capture of both parties. Nader didn’t steal your vote. If anything, he revealed that the center-left had no plan for a post-industrial economy except “trust us.”
5. You're treating IMF-style restructuring as if it’s gravity: inevitable, neutral, and universal. It’s not. It’s a political project that reflects a specific vision of development and global order. Countries in crisis often have few choices precisely because institutions like the IMF only offer one model: open up markets, cut public spending, attract capital.
So many assumptions here.
1. I understand that concept of materialist analysis. But you offered it as a theory of disagreement, which it's not and your post more or less admits as much. Ideas and political positions are shaped, in part, by . . . ok, what's the other part? Of course our views are shaped by our environment. Of course people talk their own book, as they say on Wall Street.
But if Ralph Nader and I were coming from roughly the same place (his bio is not unlike mine), why did we reach such different conclusions? Why do I think Nader's economics are ridiculous, whereas he thinks they are wonderful? This is what a theory of disagreement has to explain. I'd recommend Jurgen Habermas if you'd like a fuller, more detailed treatment. But for a message board, maybe I can point out that your analysis that Nader was "criticizing the corporate capture of both parties" replicates what I've been saying. It's always virtue against decadence. I'm a big fan of speaking truth to power, but I think it's important to get the truth part right and that's where the left fails so miserably. They are too often focused on the "to power" part.
2. "You’re arguing from a place of professional habituation: corporate law, as it stands, is your map, so anything outside of it looks like fantasy" is a perfect example of the perverse dynamic here. You don't know shit about corporations. Nothing. I know that as surely as I know that ZenMode knows jackshit about anything he prattles on about. The idea that my view is too narrow holds about the same water as any of ZenMode's nonsense.
Apparently that doesn't stop you from a preposterous accusation that somehow I'm just a slave to my map. You have no idea what I've written about corporate law. You don't know why I went into corporate law -- it was, actually, to bring a liberal perspective to a field that was too often dominated by conservatives. I have plenty to say about the ways corporate law can distort public debate: for example, any time you hear a CEO go on TV and talk about how he has to do some horrible thing because fiduciary duties to shareholder, he's lying. That's not the way fiduciary duties work.
But it is simply the truth that worker co-ops cannot build semiconductor plants. Public ownership has a long track record of abject failure. It's also true that the shareholder supremacy you talk about is not the law. Delaware corporate law is quite the opposite: it's board of directors supremacy. You probably see those two things as the same, which is why you shouldn't be talking about corporate law. When you don't know the terms of debate, probably you should read or listen more.
3. Elite gatekeeping of media gave us the financial crisis? Really? REALLY? Do you know what caused the financial crisis? You don't. It wasn't fucking gatekeeping media. In fact, people like Paul Krugman saw right through the bullshit and if we had all listened to Paul, we'd have nipped it in the bud. Alas. The Iraq War was boosted primarily by Fox News. In other words, it was caused by the barbarians, not the gatekeepers. You weren't alive back then, so you probably don't remember how much pushback the claims of WMDs etc got questioned in the gatekeeping media. Yes, there was Judith Miller from the Times, but that's a single example. Fox News, though, allowed for demagoguing.
Catturd was not created by a breakdown of legacy media. It was created by a decades long propaganda effort that has created an alternative reality for so many people. They weren't disillusioned with legacy media because they didn't trust it. They were disillusioned because the gatekeepers were saying things that the catturds of the world didn't like. In particular, gay rights. And the refusal of the mainstream media to indulge the racism of the right.
4. Why do you think countries turn to the IMF? Not because it's fun for the government -- actually, it's usually quite the opposite. They turn to the IMF because their own economies have been run into the ground. Usually it's terrible policy, although sometimes countries get battered by natural catastrophes like extended droughts that deplete capital.
The IMF is the last resort. They get called when everything else fails.
