Read the first two paragraphs of Andy’s regular political gossip column : in this episode, Andy takes the rhetorical guise of a Thatcherite Miss Lonelyhearts:
History can be funny sometimes, can’t it? And if a slight smile didn’t cross your face at times as you watched or heard the president’s speech to both Houses of Congress on Wednesday night, I’d be worried about you. I mean: who ever would have thought that a) Joe Biden, of all people, would one day be president; b) that he would be elected with slim Democratic majorities in both Houses after a close election; and c) that he would then unveil the most brazenly leftist, spend-and-borrow agenda of any president since, er, Nixon? I mean seriously. Until a couple of years ago, I sure didn’t.
You might have fantasized about an Obama presidency, perhaps, sailing on a generational wave of optimism, radically transforming American society by bending the arc of history toward moral justice, or whatever. That’s a much more intuitively appealing narrative — and quite a few people tried to squint their eyes to make it happen. But history fucks with you. It decided to land the first black president with a quintessentially conservative disposition, the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and two never-win wars, neither of which he was able to end. Revolution was never on the agenda, however fetid the fainting spells of the far right because of a black man as the symbol of America.
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I just might be engaging in a bit of self-serving hyperbole, on the above characterization! But read this paragraph a bit further on in his ‘political story’ :
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Today’s huge swing leftward is therefore in part a consequence of the GOP’s abandonment of fiscal conservatism. I mean: if the GOP can gleefully borrow trillions to give the plutocrats a handout during a boom, why can’t the Dems do the same to pay for childcare and education for those struggling in the wake of an American pandemic?
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The first sentence, in this paragraph, might leave an inexperienced reader/interpreter of Andy’s political vignettes a bit confused. The toxic political mirage that ensorcelled both the Republicans and the New Democrats was Neo-Liberalism, that precipitated the Crash of 2008. The Pandemic simply magnified the utter failure of Capital, and its cadre of political operatives, to a reform of that Capital, in any cogent way. Dodd-Frank was the Corporatized ghost Glass-Steagall! Andy’s political ‘evolution/de-evolution’ can be described by this ungainly triptych: Thatcherite/Neo-Conservative/Neo-Liberal. The bit between his teeth, Andy proceeds at full gallop, noting that ‘I’ is the noun that dominates this essay. No Surprise!
Old Socialist
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