Epstein Files | Patel: Trust us

[finesse]

I need to stop for my own mental health anyways lol

Too late. Besides ,you're on a roll.

 

[superrific]

1. You're setting up a false binary. Of course people with similar backgrounds can come to different conclusions. That doesn’t invalidate material analysis any more than two siblings choosing different religions invalidates the role of upbringing. A materialist lens doesn’t pretend to explain everything, but it does offer a framework for understanding why certain worldviews dominate and others get marginalized. That’s not a replacement for other kinds of analysis; it’s a corrective to the idea that ideas float freely, unshaped by power or interests.

2. I don’t pretend to be a corporate lawyer. My point wasn’t about your legal credentials, it was about worldview. You’re describing the boundaries of what is legally permissible under current corporate structures, while I’m trying to talk about what might be politically possible if we shift the framework. I’m not surprised that Delaware law doesn’t enshrine shareholder supremacy in literal terms. But I don’t think you’d deny that, in practice, maximizing shareholder value is still the north star of most major corporations. That’s the issue I’m raising: how economic norms, not just legal texts, shape behavior.

Also, no one said worker co-ops are going to build semiconductor plants overnight. That’s a straw man. The real question is whether we can diversify ownership models and democratize economic decision-making in some sectors, especially where there’s already a public role, like energy, healthcare, or housing.

3. The point isn’t that media gatekeeping caused the financial crisis. It’s that elite institutions, media included, lost legitimacy after a series of historic failures, from Iraq to Wall Street deregulation to growing inequality. People don’t turn to figures like catturd because they’re just anti-gay or racist. Many turn to them because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that official channels stopped telling the truth or representing their interests.

4. Of course countries don’t call the IMF for fun. But that doesn’t mean the medicine they’re given is neutral or technocratic. It reflects a certain ideology: austerity, liberalization, and market primacy. You say they’re called when everything else fails, but what’s been ruled out before that? Land reform? Capital controls? Public investment? The IMF prescribes a very specific treatment plan, and it has a long track record of worsening conditions in the name of “stability.”

1. I don't want to set up a false binary. We've in the past come to an agreement that a) people tend to have their worldview shaped by their own experience and interests and b) tends is the key word there, as it's oversimplified with respect to a lot of people. I'd say it's a bit odd to be relying too heavily on material analysis in today's politics, which is characterized by a) college educated liberals voting against their own economic interests out of concerns about justice, fairness and social liberties vs b) a working class voting against its own interests because of concerns about wokeism. But anyway, we all know that people sometimes vote on the economy and sometimes not.

So if we can agree on that, maybe we can paint with a narrower brush? It's not just me who takes offense at the "neoliberal elites ruined everything" narrative. There are plenty of folks on this board who would -- who will, one supposes -- benefit greatly from Trump's tax cuts (even if they would benefit more if they weren't lawyers), and yet who consistently vote Democratic.

2. Land reform is frequently the reason that countries require IMF assistance, so yes it gets tried. Public investment too. The reason that Argentina went broke is that they went all-in on the public investment approach, but the public corporations were horribly inefficient. So eventually the government, not getting enough revenues to cover its generous pension programs, had to start selling off the public investments. That gave them enough income to see things through . . . until they were out of investments to sell. Then the shit hit the fan. Were those assets auctioned at firesale prices in corrupt bidding processes? Sometimes they were. And that's a challenge for any leftist political program that requires state involvement. Governments are too often corrupt.

3. Most states now have established a relatively new form of public-minded incorporation: the "benefit corporation" or "b-corp." It's been in the news because OpenAI was trying to reincorporate as a for-profit b-corp (can't remember if it went through with it officially), but most b-corps are small businesses. For instance, the Park Slope food coop -- a famous worker-coop with a long pedigree -- is being sold. If it was a b-corp (don't know if it is or not), the new buyer would have to respect certain principles on which the company was founded, such as the market has to remain a coop for all eternity.

The uptake on b-corps surprised me; I didn't think they offered enough to make it worth the trouble, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Anyway, there is a corporate form available for these small businesses.

There are no industrial b-corps, though. Not that I know of. You cannot run a steel mill with inflexible fairness principles. Well, you can and there's a name for it: bankrupt steel mill. THIS isn't a worldview. This is empirical reality. It's not a fun reality, but that's the way the world works. The evidence is staggering. I can't rule out the possibility that there is some ideal form of organization that is workable and just, if only we reorganized society in that manner. But there's also no evidence in favor of that view. It's just hopium and anecdote. I don't think it's a good idea to overturn the whole apple cart in order to chase a dream that might or might not be real.

In other words: there are no alternatives to shareholder primacy that I can see. The irony here is that shareholder primacy works according to your materialist analysis. I'm sure you've thought about that, so it's not news to you. I'm confirming and explaining it. The law favors the board. But the law also allows the board to be compensated with stock, which makes the board into shareholders, and thus their interests are aligned with shareholders, so shareholder primacy becomes the same thing as managerial primacy. The whole system depends on managers always pursuing their own interests. It's economic self-interest all the way down.

But the alternative is a dual-mandate system that has the distinct disadvantage of relying on people to balance those dual mandates. Is that a decision you want to entrust to Jamie Dimon? It will be even worse, because if they are pursuing their own interests, they can shape the dual mandate however they want, in the way that advantages them most. This is one reason I brought up Marty Lipton. In the real world, the dual mandate model creates monstrosities like the management of whatever company Gordon Gekko took over. Did Gordon Gekko improve matters? In one way, yes. In another, more comprehensive sense, no.

4. If you want an example of a company that doesn't give a fuck about its investors, I would offer you: Tesla. It doesn't give a fuck about them for an odd reason: the shareholders of Tesla are Musk fanboys in a stable configuration of investment wealth that has surprised everyone with its longevity. But anyway, Elon does what Elon wants, right? And one of the things he wanted to do was invest billions of dollars in something called a Cybertruck.

That was a common story in corporate law. In fact, one reason that debt-financing became the norm in the merger world is that the interest payments were seen as a feature, not bug: because the profits had to be paid out as interest payments, those profits couldn't be wasted on pet projects like the Cybertruck. To the extent that shareholders are, these days, organized enough to demand dividend payments, it functions the same.

The point is that shareholder primacy rules because it works the best. Is it possible that we could have a benevolent AI emerge that has no material interests of its own, and thus could be trusted to make allocation decisions for companies without agency costs. If so, we don't need shareholder primacy. If not, then shareholder primacy works better than everything else.

 

[Paine]

1. Criticizing the abundance agenda, and then citing the problems the abundance agenda tries to challenge as the basis for your own argument, is a take I suppose. Why is rent eating half their paycheck? Why is it way more expensive to build in California than in Texas? That's a fact. Texas' way is not necessarily better for many, many reasons, but if housing is a major problem, build more housing!

2. Why does the political and economic system keep those efforts small or underfunded? Is it because of neoliberalism? Or because every time a Dem president expands labor rights, the subsequent GOP administration undoes that progress or more.

3. You want to know why I'm frustrated by Nader and the Naderites? Well, here's an anecdote. A while back, the Supreme Court issued one of the most anti-union decisions since the 1890s when the Sherman Act was interpreted to be a union-busting tool. It was authored by Alito. Alito was the driving force behind it -- having complained about unions endlessly until he finally got a majority to take them down.

If Ralph Nader had not run for president in 2000; if he hadn't been out there talking about a uniparty and blurring the distinctions between the two parties, Samuel Alito would not have been a Supreme Court justice. In all likelihood, Justice Tatel would have been writing opinions upholding union rights. Oh, and campaign finance reform -- another issue where Roberts and Alito did so much damage even before Citizens United.

The reason that unions are underfunded is not Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It's GWB and Trump and Ralph Nader. It isn't neoliberalism. As applied to labor rights, that term is even more bullshit than usual. If you knew anything about labor law, you'd know that there are more volumes of NLRB adjudications than all federal court cases. Well, I don't know if that's technically accurate, but the density is much higher. That's because the NLRB is always changing its stripes. Dems come in and expand union rights through adjudications. Then the GOPers come in and retract those rights in subsequent adjudications.

1. I don’t reject the idea of abundance. I reject a narrow “abundance agenda” that frames every problem as a supply constraint and sees deregulation as the universal fix. Yes, housing scarcity is real, but the deeper problem is who controls land, credit, and development, not just how fast we can build. Texas builds more, but it’s also dominated by predatory landlords, sprawling car dependency, and wage exploitation. You don’t solve extraction with more extraction. A left-wing abundance politics should challenge concentrated ownership, not just zoning codes.

2. Why are those efforts kept small and underfunded? Because capital defends its power. Because neoliberalism shrank the public sphere, deregulated finance, and pushed market solutions to every social problem. Because even under Democratic administrations, corporate lobbies are too often prioritized over working people. Clinton’s welfare reform, trade deals, and banking deregulation were not imposed by Republicans. Obama had a supermajority and still barely lifted a finger for labor until the last two years of his presidency. Biden made real progress with the NLRB, but it’s still playing defense against 40 years of bipartisan market orthodoxy.

3. Damn, you act like Nader appointed Alito. Blaming Nader is a way of avoiding harder questions: Why was the race even close after eight years of peace and prosperity? Why couldn’t the Democratic Party deliver enough to its base to decisively beat a guy like Bush?

You say it’s not Clinton, Obama, or Biden’s fault, but the record speaks for itself. Union density didn’t collapse under Trump, it collapsed under Reagan and stagnated under Democrats who never made rebuilding labor power a central pillar of their agenda. Expanding rights through NLRB adjudications is not a long-term strategy. It’s precarious by design. The left isn’t asking why the GOP attacks labor; we know why. We’re asking why the Democratic Party never made labor power its non-negotiable priority rather than treating them as another "group."

 

[Paine]

1. I don't want to set up a false binary. We've in the past come to an agreement that a) people tend to have their worldview shaped by their own experience and interests and b) tends is the key word there, as it's oversimplified with respect to a lot of people. I'd say it's a bit odd to be relying too heavily on material analysis in today's politics, which is characterized by a) college educated liberals voting against their own economic interests out of concerns about justice, fairness and social liberties vs b) a working class voting against its own interests because of concerns about wokeism. But anyway, we all know that people sometimes vote on the economy and sometimes not.

So if we can agree on that, maybe we can paint with a narrower brush? It's not just me who takes offense at the "neoliberal elites ruined everything" narrative. There are plenty of folks on this board who would -- who will, one supposes -- benefit greatly from Trump's tax cuts (even if they would benefit more if they weren't lawyers), and yet who consistently vote Democratic.

2. Land reform is frequently the reason that countries require IMF assistance, so yes it gets tried. Public investment too. The reason that Argentina went broke is that they went all-in on the public investment approach, but the public corporations were horribly inefficient. So eventually the government, not getting enough revenues to cover its generous pension programs, had to start selling off the public investments. That gave them enough income to see things through . . . until they were out of investments to sell. Then the shit hit the fan. Were those assets auctioned at firesale prices in corrupt bidding processes? Sometimes they were. And that's a challenge for any leftist political program that requires state involvement. Governments are too often corrupt.

3. Most states now have established a relatively new form of public-minded incorporation: the "benefit corporation" or "b-corp." It's been in the news because OpenAI was trying to reincorporate as a for-profit b-corp (can't remember if it went through with it officially), but most b-corps are small businesses. For instance, the Park Slope food coop -- a famous worker-coop with a long pedigree -- is being sold. If it was a b-corp (don't know if it is or not), the new buyer would have to respect certain principles on which the company was founded, such as the market has to remain a coop for all eternity.

The uptake on b-corps surprised me; I didn't think they offered enough to make it worth the trouble, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Anyway, there is a corporate form available for these small businesses.

There are no industrial b-corps, though. Not that I know of. You cannot run a steel mill with inflexible fairness principles. Well, you can and there's a name for it: bankrupt steel mill. THIS isn't a worldview. This is empirical reality. It's not a fun reality, but that's the way the world works. The evidence is staggering. I can't rule out the possibility that there is some ideal form of organization that is workable and just, if only we reorganized society in that manner. But there's also no evidence in favor of that view. It's just hopium and anecdote. I don't think it's a good idea to overturn the whole apple cart in order to chase a dream that might or might not be real.

In other words: there are no alternatives to shareholder primacy that I can see. The irony here is that shareholder primacy works according to your materialist analysis. I'm sure you've thought about that, so it's not news to you. I'm confirming and explaining it. The law favors the board. But the law also allows the board to be compensated with stock, which makes the board into shareholders, and thus their interests are aligned with shareholders, so shareholder primacy becomes the same thing as managerial primacy. The whole system depends on managers always pursuing their own interests. It's economic self-interest all the way down.

But the alternative is a dual-mandate system that has the distinct disadvantage of relying on people to balance those dual mandates. Is that a decision you want to entrust to Jamie Dimon? It will be even worse, because if they are pursuing their own interests, they can shape the dual mandate however they want, in the way that advantages them most. This is one reason I brought up Marty Lipton. In the real world, the dual mandate model creates monstrosities like the management of whatever company Gordon Gekko took over. Did Gordon Gekko improve matters? In one way, yes. In another, more comprehensive sense, no.

4. If you want an example of a company that doesn't give a fuck about its investors, I would offer you: Tesla. It doesn't give a fuck about them for an odd reason: the shareholders of Tesla are Musk fanboys in a stable configuration of investment wealth that has surprised everyone with its longevity. But anyway, Elon does what Elon wants, right? And one of the things he wanted to do was invest billions of dollars in something called a Cybertruck.

That was a common story in corporate law. In fact, one reason that debt-financing became the norm in the merger world is that the interest payments were seen as a feature, not bug: because the profits had to be paid out as interest payments, those profits couldn't be wasted on pet projects like the Cybertruck. To the extent that shareholders are, these days, organized enough to demand dividend payments, it functions the same.

The point is that shareholder primacy rules because it works the best. Is it possible that we could have a benevolent AI emerge that has no material interests of its own, and thus could be trusted to make allocation decisions for companies without agency costs. If so, we don't need shareholder primacy. If not, then shareholder primacy works better than everything else.

I think we’re coming from very different starting assumptions about what is politically possible and what kind of systemic change is needed or feasible. I’m more optimistic about transformative alternatives and the need to rethink economic power structures, while you’re focused on what has worked pragmatically so far and the risks of unintended consequences. That's fine.

At this point, I don’t think continuing this back-and-forth will shift either of our core views much, but I do hope the conversation adds some value for others reading along. Always good to challenge each other, and I respect your willingness to engage so thoroughly.

Let’s leave it here for now.

 

[superrific]

1. I don’t reject the idea of abundance. I reject a narrow “abundance agenda” that frames every problem as a supply constraint and sees deregulation as the universal fix. Yes, housing scarcity is real, but the deeper problem is who controls land, credit, and development, not just how fast we can build. Texas builds more, but it’s also dominated by predatory landlords, sprawling car dependency, and wage exploitation. You don’t solve extraction with more extraction. A left-wing abundance politics should challenge concentrated ownership, not just zoning codes.

2. Why are those efforts kept small and underfunded? Because capital defends its power. Because neoliberalism shrank the public sphere, deregulated finance, and pushed market solutions to every social problem. Because even under Democratic administrations, corporate lobbies are too often prioritized over working people. Clinton’s welfare reform, trade deals, and banking deregulation were not imposed by Republicans. Obama had a supermajority and still barely lifted a finger for labor until the last two years of his presidency.

1. Fine. If you want to focus on the deeper problems associated with abundance, have at it. Ezra wants to win elections now. Different perspectives. Could be complementary if people will let it.

2. Obama had a supermajority for about six months. There was no way that labor rights were going to be addressed while the economy and financial system were in the crapper and Obamacare was being hashed out. And then what's her fucking name insulted Curt Schilling because she didn't know anything about baseball and then well, we know. It's amazing how much history gets decided by stupid trivialities like that.

Anyway, Obamacare looks the way it does specifically because the unions were involved, because Obama was respecting labor power. If I recall correctly, the unions weren't supportive of the public option. It didn't give them much, because they all had negotiated the so-called gold plated insurance into their contracts. That was because of the tax advantages -- it was cheaper for the company to provide more benefits than more money, even though they are basically fungible. So we got the different tiers of public insurance, IIRC, for that reason. We also, IIRC, retained the favorable tax treatment for unions even though it made it much harder to pay for the Medicaid expansion.

 

[superrific]

Saying “fascists are fascists because they’re bad people” is the essence of a moral-psychological diagnosis that abandons any structural analysis. That’s exactly the problem with leaning too hard on Adorno in 2025.

I'm not leaning on Adorno. I'm leaning on the empirical evidence showing that he was right all along. Being right all along is less of a compliment, perhaps, than it might seem. Being right is lucky. Betting on the highest probabilities is genius. Sometimes those go together, sometimes they don't. Adorno was brilliant and insightful, but the authoritarian personality was speculative. Good speculation in the end.

At what point would you accept that moral-psychological diagnosis? What if God himself came down and told you, "I made these bad people on purpose." Would you still insist on structural analysis? Obviously that's a gross exaggeration, but there is a lot of evidence for the moral psycho diagnosis. Should we discount that evidence because it's unfashionable?

 

[Paine]

1. Fine. If you want to focus on the deeper problems associated with abundance, have at it. Ezra wants to win elections now. Different perspectives. Could be complementary if people will let it.

Would be a good convo for the Abundance thread. That one slipped off the map pretty quickly though.

 

[Paine]

I'm not leaning on Adorno. I'm leaning on the empirical evidence showing that he was right all along. Being right all along is less of a compliment, perhaps, than it might seem. Being right is lucky. Betting on the highest probabilities is genius. Sometimes those go together, sometimes they don't. Adorno was brilliant and insightful, but the authoritarian personality was speculative. Good speculation in the end.

That’s really the heart of our disagreement. You interpret recent history as confirming the primacy of personality, while I see it as confirming the primacy of class. At this point, I don’t think either of us is going to shift our core beliefs based on this back-and-forth.

If God came down and told me that he made these people authoritarians and that it was unchangeable, then honestly, I would stop caring about political change altogether.

I engage in politics because I am a humanist. I believe people can change, that systems can be transformed, and that progress is possible. If it were 100% confirmed that 30, 40, or 50 percent of the population had immutable authoritarian personalities bent on destroying everything I value, I wouldn’t waste my energy on debate or reform. I’d retreat and prepare to defend what matters by other means.

But I don’t believe that. I believe in the power of ideas, conditions, and struggles to shape human behavior and society.

 

[superrific]

That’s really the heart of our disagreement. You interpret recent history as confirming the primacy of personality, while I see it as confirming the primacy of class. At this point, I don’t think either of us is going to shift our core beliefs based on this back-and-forth.

If God came down and told me that he made these people authoritarians and that it was unchangeable, then honestly, I would stop caring about political change altogether.

I engage in politics because I am a humanist. I believe people can change, that systems can be transformed, and that progress is possible. If it were 100% confirmed that 30, 40, or 50 percent of the population had immutable authoritarian personalities bent on destroying everything I value, I wouldn’t waste my energy on debate or reform. I’d retreat and prepare to defend what matters by other means.

But I don’t believe that. I believe in the power of ideas, conditions, and struggles to shape human behavior and society.

You don't have to assume they are unchangeable. Personality isn't destiny. The MAGA extremists managed to keep it in their pants for a while before Trump unzipped before the country. Perhaps they can again. Or will find that they have to. But it's a different kettle of fish than class interests, yes?

The issue of the working classes being conservative and counter-revolutionary for cultural reasons was addressed by Daniel Bell in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism book. I wish I could recommend it but I found it hopelessly boring. Maybe you might enjoy it more.

 

[superrific]

Would be a good convo for the Abundance thread. That one slipped off the map pretty quickly though.

I didn't even see it.

 

[Paine]

You don't have to assume they are unchangeable. Personality isn't destiny. The MAGA extremists managed to keep it in their pants for a while before Trump unzipped before the country. Perhaps they can again. Or will find that they have to. But it's a different kettle of fish than class interests, yes?

The issue of the working classes being conservative and counter-revolutionary for cultural reasons was addressed by Daniel Bell in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism book. I wish I could recommend it but I found it hopelessly boring. Maybe you might enjoy it more.

That’s true, personality isn’t destiny. People can and do change, and none of this is set in stone.

That’s exactly why I think it’s politically unhelpful to lean too hard on personality as an explanation. When liberals or/and leftists (it has become fashionable for segments of both) frame large chunks of the population as psychologically defective or inherently authoritarian, it too easily turns into pathologizing. Not just of the far-right, but of working-class people more broadly, especially those who don’t share professional-class norms.

That dynamic has led to real political costs. It fosters a kind of liberal contempt that’s easy for reactionaries to weaponize. It narrows the scope of what seems politically possible because if the problem is just “bad people,” what’s the point of organizing or building coalitions?

I think we get further by focusing on material conditions and power structures, not because that explains everything, but because it keeps us grounded in what can actually be changed by political action. That’s where I still see hope.

 

[hedge]

There is nothing apolitical about how foreign capital moves. It moves toward exploitation, deregulation, and regimes willing to discipline labor.

This sounds pretty much like water following the path of least resistance...

 

[Paine]

This sounds pretty much like water following the path of least resistance...

That’s a fair analogy in some ways.

Capital does flow like water toward the path of least resistance, but the key is that the “terrain” it flows through isn’t natural; it’s shaped by political choices.

Governments build the channels. They cut away labor protections, weaken environmental standards, and offer tax incentives not because of gravity, but because of pressure from international institutions, corporate lobbying, and a prevailing economic orthodoxy.

So yes, capital follows the path of least resistance, but it’s a path engineered to serve its interests. The question becomes: who has the power to redirect that flow?

 

[hedge]

Basically, fascists are fascists not because of class interests but because they are bad people.

"What was the matter with the master-at-arms?"

 

[hedge]

When I posted that I was enjoying this thread it hadn't even gotten started good yet. Kinda like saying "damn this is a good match" after the third set of the French Open finals yesterday...

 

[hedge]

The question becomes: who has the power to redirect that flow?

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must...

 

[heelinhell]

1. Criticizing the abundance agenda, and then citing the problems the abundance agenda tries to challenge as the basis for your own argument, is a take I suppose. Why is rent eating half their paycheck? Why is it way more expensive to build in California than in Texas? That's a fact. Texas' way is not necessarily better for many, many reasons, but if housing is a major problem, build more housing!

2. Why does the political and economic system keep those efforts small or underfunded? Is it because of neoliberalism? Or because every time a Dem president expands labor rights, the subsequent GOP administration undoes that progress or more.

3. You want to know why I'm frustrated by Nader and the Naderites? Well, here's an anecdote. A while back, the Supreme Court issued one of the most anti-union decisions since the 1890s when the Sherman Act was interpreted to be a union-busting tool. It was authored by Alito. Alito was the driving force behind it -- having complained about unions endlessly until he finally got a majority to take them down.

If Ralph Nader had not run for president in 2000; if he hadn't been out there talking about a uniparty and blurring the distinctions between the two parties, Samuel Alito would not have been a Supreme Court justice. In all likelihood, Justice Tatel would have been writing opinions upholding union rights. Oh, and campaign finance reform -- another issue where Roberts and Alito did so much damage even before Citizens United.

The reason that unions are underfunded is not Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It's GWB and Trump and Ralph Nader. It isn't neoliberalism. As applied to labor rights, that term is even more bullshit than usual. If you knew anything about labor law, you'd know that there are more volumes of NLRB adjudications than all federal court cases. Well, I don't know if that's technically accurate, but the density is much higher. That's because the NLRB is always changing its stripes. Dems come in and expand union rights through adjudications. Then the GOPers come in and retract those rights in subsequent adjudications.

Can we add Roberts taking a torch to protecting minorities' voting rights in Shelby ?

naive Nader voters put in motion so much destruction and undoing of the progress we were making as a country. It began 2001 but we continue to suffer the effects in 2025. And let's give Jill Stein voters an assist that kept the trend going...

 

[Paine]

I wish I was only 67. I'm 73.

Paine, you're still throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You and I have a very different view of what an expert actually is and you imply it's your whole generation. To me, an expert is someone who is in a profession that has standards of education and certification. They have ethical standards and they have peer reviews and publications where their results are read, judged and criticized. The press and pundits definitely don't qualify. Neither do lawyers, but mainly because what the law is is so subjective. Where have these experts misled you? That you have let other people interpret these things for you and convince you that their spin is actually true when the same press, pundits and politicians have knowingly lied to you for damned near a century puts a lot of onus on your generation.

Saying a plague on both houses and refusing to help when one party has repeatedly tried to drag us in the right direction while the other party is conducting a campaign of lies and subversion is really not a very pragmatic approach. It's a hell of a lot easier to reach what you want when the country is heading in generally the right direction. The left's foot dragging has hurt everyone. Really, what actual policy or candidate do you or have you supported that can win in the south, the west or the midwest? You can't change anything when you can't win.

It wouldn't surprise me in some of my personal ideas aren't more outre than yours when it comes down to it but the country isn't going to support them. Time makes a difference. There have been huge changes in the 73 years I've been alive. I don't want to keep handing any of it back because I ignore the good in the quest for the perfect.

I somehow missed this reply in real time, but it deserves a response.

I don’t reject expertise in the way some populists on the right do. I agree that professional standards, peer review, and institutional knowledge are crucial to a functioning society. But I think you’re misunderstanding where my skepticism is coming from.

I’m not talking about throwing out expertise. I’m talking about the fact that in recent decades, many of the people and institutions who claimed the mantle of expertise, particularly in politics, finance, foreign policy, and media, failed in massive, visible ways. The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, the Covid response, the collapse of local journalism, and the bipartisan economic consensus that hollowed out working-class communities were not engineered by the MAGA right. They were often driven, rationalized, or rubber-stamped by credentialed experts in high places.

That doesn’t mean we abandon all expertise. Rather, it means we need to reckon honestly with why public trust has eroded and why institutions that should be defending democracy and the common good have so often been captured by elite interests.

People aren’t stupid. They’ve watched “the experts” bail out Wall Street while their towns die, tell them globalization will be a net positive while their jobs are offshored, and treat their skepticism as ignorance rather than a rational response to betrayal.

This is why I focus more on the failures of Democrats and liberal institutions. It’s not because I think they’re as bad as Republicans. It’s because in communities like this, everyone already knows the GOP is a wrecking ball. My concern is how liberal leadership has often failed to meet the moment, and how that failure has opened the door to reactionary politics.

As for pragmatism and electability: I want to win too. But I think our chances improve when we offer people something clear, material, and rooted in dignity, not when we keep chasing the political center or trying to guilt people into voting for a status quo they feel has failed them. The reason figures like Bernie resonated was because they spoke directly to people’s material needs without talking down to them. That’s the path forward, not “perfect versus good,” but credible versus hollow.

You’ve lived through real change. That matters. But I think the risk now is that without a reckoning and a bolder vision, we’ll keep losing ground to a right-wing movement that has no such hesitation.

 

[Paine]

That’s true, personality isn’t destiny. People can and do change, and none of this is set in stone.

That’s exactly why I think it’s politically unhelpful to lean too hard on personality as an explanation. When liberals or/and leftists (it has become fashionable for segments of both) frame large chunks of the population as psychologically defective or inherently authoritarian, it too easily turns into pathologizing. Not just of the far-right, but of working-class people more broadly, especially those who don’t share professional-class norms.

That dynamic has led to real political costs. It fosters a kind of liberal contempt that’s easy for reactionaries to weaponize. It narrows the scope of what seems politically possible because if the problem is just “bad people,” what’s the point of organizing or building coalitions?

I think we get further by focusing on material conditions and power structures, not because that explains everything, but because it keeps us grounded in what can actually be changed by political action. That’s where I still see hope.

I’m noticing that my last point here about the limits of personality-based explanations for political behavior hasn’t been responded to. I think that silence is meaningful. When we frame political divisions primarily as fixed psychological traits, it leads to a dead end in terms of building inclusive, hopeful movements.

It’s worth reflecting on what that means for anyone interested in lasting social and political change. If a large share of people are seen as inherently authoritarian or “bad,” then organizing becomes less about solidarity and more about exclusion or defeatism. That kind of framing risks alienating the very people whose support we need to create real progress.

This isn’t just a theoretical debate; it shapes how we build coalitions, craft messages, and imagine the future. I believe in a politics rooted in human potential, material conditions, and shared struggle. If we lose that, we lose everything.

I welcome others who want to think through how we can maintain that hopeful, grounded approach to change.

 

[05C40]

"What was the matter with the master-at-arms?"

For those of you, who like me, were poorly educated in the classics, not because of the schools I attended, but because of internal shotcomings, this quote is from Herman Melville's "Billy Budd." TGF Google. In college, getting me interested in the Classics, was like trying to paint plastic.