The Democrats love Trump

Why are people still incredulous that the Democratic party does not oppose Trump?

The Democratic party (the real party: the insiders, the pundits, the elected politicians) love them some Donald.

Trump is paying off the billionaire class and their sycophants and fucking the working class. The Democratic party is all about, well, paying off the billionaires and their sycophants and fucking the working class.

It's a match made in heaven.

Our Trump-defeating hero, Joe Biden!

I'm convinced that Joe Biden sexually assaulted Tara Reade.

Noted feminists Amanda Marcotte and Jezebel's Emily Alford have come out swinging to support... Biden.

Nathan J. Robinson lays out the whole sordid story.

Trump is going to win in a fucking landslide.

And the Democratic party will lie down and let him.

Abandon all hope

According to Brad DeLong, your country should [a]bandon all hope of running a successful developmental-state industrial policy if:

1. You have landlords (or some other parasitic class interpenetrated with those from whose ranks your bureaucrats are drawn): then you are doomed, because the more effective your government’s ability to use levers of state power, the more the distribution of income and wealth will be frozen into a form pleasing to your anti-developmental current upper class. You need to start with a remarkably equal and definitely not inherited-inequality distribution of income and wealth. If you do not start there, abandon all hope.
2. You do not have an ideology of economic development shared by your elite: if your elite judge each other by, say, how rich they get and do not judge each other by whether they have contributed to society’s growth mission, abandon all hope.
3. You do not have an effective educational system for training and an effective examination system for selecting your bureaucrats. If your bureaucrats cannot outsmart the private sector and foreign managers whom they are attempting to regulate, outproduce, midwife, or garden, abandon all hope.
4. You do not have an ideology in which government service is a high prestige occupation. If your best and your brightest do not regard government service as a good thing to do, abandon all hope.
5. You do not have a firm and reality-based conception of what industrial structure you want your country to develop into. If you cannot point to another country, and say: we want to become like them, and here are the first stage investments and capabilities we need to develop to do so — if you cannot do that, abandon all hope.
6. You do not have the factor-mobilization prerequisites—the power to mobilize savings for investment, to massively upgrade the technical education level of your population, to move people out of low productivity into high productivity occupations, to build the infrastructure and the links to global value chains. If you do not have the factor mobilization prerequisites to make a success of industrial policy, abandon all hope.
7. You do not have access to the markets that will buy at a price that will cover your costs the goods you produce if your industrial policy is successful. If world markets are not open to you and you have to rely on domestic demand from a poor population, abandon all hope.
8. You do not have the power to judge which private businesses are successful and need to be fertilized, and which are unsuccessful and need to be pruned back. The best way to do this is to lower the value of your currency and then watch which of your firms are successful exporters—to use foreign countries markets’ as devices for telling you who is making high-quality goods at a reasonable price. But you have to do this somehow. If you cannot measure where you are succeeding, abandon all hope.

[It should be noted that the United States fails not just one or two but most of these tests, especially the first. We have access to international markets, but not much else.]

Capitalism and Perfectionism

The Dangerous Downsides of Perfectionism, by Amanda Ruggeri

“As many as two in five kids and adolescents are perfectionists,” says Katie Rasmussen, who researches child development and perfectionism at West Virginia University. “We’re starting to talk about how it’s heading toward an epidemic and public health issue.” . . .

Perfectionism, after all, is an ultimately self-defeating way to move through the world. It is built on an excruciating irony: making, and admitting, mistakes is a necessary part of growing and learning and being human. It also makes you better at your career and relationships and life in general. By avoiding mistakes at any cost, a perfectionist can make it harder to reach their own lofty goals. . . .

Perfectionism . . . isn’t defined by working hard or setting high goals. It’s that critical inner voice.

Take the student who works hard and gets a poor mark. If she tells herself: “I’m disappointed, but it’s okay; I’m still a good person overall,” that’s healthy. If the message is: “I’m a failure. I’m not good enough,” that’s perfectionism. . . .

[F]or perfectionists, performance is intertwined with their sense of self. When they don’t succeed, they don’t just feel disappointment about how they did. They feel shame about who they are. Ironically, perfectionism then becomes a defence tactic to keep shame at bay: if you’re perfect, you never fail, and if you never fail, there’s no shame.

As a result, the pursuit of perfection becomes a vicious cycle – and, because it’s impossible to be perfect, a fruitless one.

The author points squarely at capitalism as a cause, arguing that we live in a society that demands perfectionism. A society...

Where we are so literally valued for the quality and extent of our accomplishments that those achievements often correlate, directly, to our ability to pay rent or put food on the table. Where complete strangers weigh these on-paper values to determine everything from whether we can rent that flat or buy that car or receive that loan. Where we then signal our access to those resources with our appearance – these shoes, that physique – and other people weigh that, in turn, to see if we’re the right person for a job interview or dinner invitation.

[Social scientists Thomas] Curran and [Andrew] Hill have a similar hunch. “Failure is so severe in a market-based society,” points out Curran, adding that that has been intensified as governments have chipped away at social safety nets. Competition even has been embedded in schools: take standardised testing and high-pressure university entrances. As a result, Curran says, it’s no wonder that parents are putting more pressure on themselves – and on their children – to achieve more and more.

“If the focus is on achievement, then kids become very averse to mistakes,” Curran says. “If children come to internalise that – the idea that we only can define ourselves in strict, narrow terms of achievement – then you see perfectionistic tendencies start to come in.” One longitudinal study, for example, found that a focus on academic achievement predicts a later increase in perfectionism.

Similarly, the gold-star method of parenting and schooling may have had an effect. If you get praised whenever you do something well and not praised when you don’t, you can learn that you’re only really worth something when you’ve had others’ approval.

If other strategies, like making children feel guilty for making a mistake, come in, it can get even more problematic. Research has found that these types of parental tactics make children more likely to be perfectionists – and, later, to develop depression.

Fear of failure is getting magnified in other ways, too. Take social media: make a mistake today and your fear that it might be broadcast, even globally, is hardly irrational. At the same time, all of those glossy feeds reinforce unrealistic standards.

The Marching Morons

One of the funniest SF stories, and one that is really scary when you think about it, is The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth.

It's funny because Kornbluth is a great writer. It's chilling because it perfectly captures how our rulers see the ruled. The ending doesn't really make sense, but Kornbluth most probably couln't have sold it (and might not have been able to overcome his own sentimentality) without the comeuppance in the end.

I don't know how the billionaire class, the top 0.01%, feels about the workers. It's likely that they're mostly sociopaths who simply don't see other people (even other billionaires) as people, just as objects.

But I am part of the professional-managerial class, and I know the the PMC in the top 10 or 20%, the ones who do the grunt work of managing the day-to-day operations of society, think that almost everyone not in the PMC are morons, most of whom can be made marginally productive with enough discipline and coercion.

The PMC gets away with feeling this way because workers mostly feel the same way.

The almost in "almost everyone" is the key. Most workers believe that all the other workers — especially workers with trivially lower social or economic status (coughBlack peoplecough)— are morons, but they themselves (and maybe a few of their friends) are the rare exceptions.

Did you lose your job because of the coronavirus quarantine? You don't have any wealth? Well, you must be a moron. Can't get a new job? Then you're not useful: lie down and die get out of my sight, loser.

But I lost my job and have no wealth? Hey, I'm the exception! I'm not a moron! Help me!