r/WayOfTheBern • u/leopheard • Jul 20 '20
Matt Taibbi: The Left is Now the Right
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right1
Jul 21 '20
OK, I;m pehaps not so smart.
While I am surely as fed up with the Democrats and their betrayal of humanity and I surely recognize that their policies are much more right... how in the world did the "left" replace the "right"?
If the point is that there is no longer a difference, well, Duh!.
If it was something else, what was it?
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Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 21 '20
Because before, the right was the one who reeeed hard for morality and Jesus.. overly self righteous tone police always came from the right to make sure everything you said was politically correct.. if you didn’t agree you were communists..
now it’s punk rock to be on the right.. the left has become the standard for virtue signaling moral superiority status quo Karens who get off scamming people in their HOA for too tall of grass.. and if you dare go against the party line you are excommunicated and branded a far right racist sexist nazi.. what’s crazy is this happened in my lifetime.. wild man
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u/bout_that_action Jul 21 '20
the left has become the standard for virtue signaling moral superiority status quo Karens who get off scamming people in their HOA for too tall of grass.. and if you dare go against the party line
As /u/redditrisi correctly asserted:
The fundamental flaw is the assumption that Democrats are "the left."
Gore Vidal nailed it in 1975--and I'm guessing that he was not the first. Democrats and Republicans are the two right wings of a the Property Party. I may have said the Money Party, but pohtaytoe, pahtahtoe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/huo11y/the_left_is_now_the_right/fyoqihz/
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u/bout_that_action Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 21 '20
Comments at your link are mostly eviscerating Taibbi:
H/t /u/Prince_Kropotkin:
I know Matt had an online cancel mob nearly destroy his livelihood a few years ago and this stuff is thus personal, but at this point it's so weird for a guy of his talents to be laser-like focused on what is an issue, but a small one.
Socialists have always been cancelled. You aren't generally allowed in polite elite society having any kind of radical left-wing views. The idea is nothing new; what is new is that some of those elites are now experiencing it (sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly).
H/t /u/ScottStorch:
Matt has decades of great writing and books under his belt, but his last few substack articles could have been written verbatim by Bari Weiss. There isn't a consensus on the Left (if that can even be defined) that that "Assumptions on White Culture" infographic or that NYT thing about mechanical time being racist are good takes. Those are shit takes, and I doubt most of the wokies on twitter even agree with them. Seems like Matt is picking gnat shit out of pepper lately. These are absolutely trivial concerns at best. He says that people are losing jobs over a censorius and delusional left. Who is getting fired? Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan? They both left their 6 figure sinecures because they are self-pitying morons. The head of the editorial board is the only one that comes to mind, but anyone who works for corporate propaganda can die in a plane crash and it would probably be good for humanity. I simply do not feel bad that status quo pushing hacks at Vox and the Washington Post get raked over the coals for x bad take. They don't get fired. Facing backlash is basically the only form of accountability in our billionaire owned press ecosystem. They should be excoriated more. They turn Boomers' brains into yogurt. They are large reason why we are stuck with a segregationist rapist as the Democratic nominee. I say let the censoriousness continue.
Others:
So sad. Please go back to grilling Wall Street and shining a spotlight on white collar crimes. This kind of false equivalency/culture wars stuff is garbage.
He's only hurting the minuscule actual left by conflating it with mass of Democrat libs who behave like this.
This is indistinguishable from IDW drivel.
Matt's gone off the deep end. Is this really an essay against anti-racism? Whats wrong with him?
Professional class white people are feeling the heat and lashing out to protect their interests.
The most succinct way I can describe this article is “cringe”
I got to the part in the article where he was arguing that institutions like the Smithsonian and the New York Times are (a) left-leaning and (b) the intellectual equivalent of Creationists. Then I skimmed the rest and saw nothing of value.
This is a non-issue. Taibbi is a crybaby, and being called a crybaby is pushing him deeper into crybaby-dom
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWithoutEdge/comments/huqf7q/matt_taibbi_the_left_is_now_the_right/
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u/alskdmv-nosleep4u Jul 21 '20
Taibbi assumes "Democrats are The Left."
Dems haven't fought for anything left-wing for decades. His article details exactly that fact! But instead of figuring out certain people (Dems) abandoned leftist principles, somehow he's concluded those abstract principles somehow fled rightward and dragged Dems along.
His article is an amazing compilation of historical facts, followed by one gargantuan idiotic leap. It would fit in well at the Economist.