#republican naïveté

[tomorrowusa]

The biggest benefactor to Hamas in the US is not the radical chic fringe but Republican former President George W. Bush.

Because of recency bias, many people have forgotten what an awful president George "Dubya" Bush was. But in addition to two recessions (including the Great Recession), two rounds of tax breaks for the filthy rich, neglecting national security which led to 9/11, and starting an unnecessary and destabilizing war in Iraq, Bush helped to bring the terrorist group Hamas to power in Gaza.

Gaza has not had an election since 2006 – one which was instigated by George W. Bush. That election turned out to be a disaster.

It was in January 2006 that the Palestinian territories held what turned out to be their last parliamentary elections. Hamas won a bare plurality of votes (44 percent to the more moderate Fatah party’s 41 percent) but, given the electoral system, a strong majority of seats (74 to 45). Neither party was keen on sharing power. Fighting broke out between the two. When a unity government was finally formed in June 2007, Hamas broke the deal, started murdering Fatah members, and, in the end, took total control of the Gaza Strip. Those who weren’t killed fled to the West Bank, and the territories have remained split ever since. In other words, Hamas’ absolute rule of Gaza is not what the Palestinians voted for back in 2006. In fact, since the median age of Gazans is 18, half of Hamas’ subjects weren’t even born when the election took place. Since they have known no alternative, have absorbed little information but Hamas propaganda, and have witnessed periodic outbursts of violent conflict with Israel throughout their lives, it is impossible to know what they really think about their rulers. But we need to ask another question: Why did the 2006 elections take place? The explanation lies in the political ideals—or, more correctly, the naïveté—of President George W. Bush. (Much of this comes from the reporting for my 2008 book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.) Bush entered his second term, in January 2005, convinced that his mission was to spread democracy around the world. He assumed that democracy was the natural state of humanity: Once a dictator was toppled and the people could vote for leaders in elections, freedom and liberty would bloom forth. For a moment, it looked like he might be right: The world was witnessing the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first parliamentary elections in post-Saddam Iraq. More pertinent, the Palestinian National Authority held its first election, and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party—which had recognized Israel’s right to exist and supported negotiations for a two-state solution—won handily. Around this time, Israel was withdrawing from the Gaza Strip—not just pulling out troops, but evicting some 8,000 Jewish settlers (most of whom were paid to resettle in the West Bank). Suddenly there was a vacuum of local authority. Bush thought democracy would fill a vacuum, so he urged the Palestinian Authority to hold parliamentary elections.

Create a power vacuum and the most determined group, not the most appropriate group, will rush in to fill the void. That happened to be Hamas.

One problem, though: Radical parties—notably Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which had boycotted the 2005 presidential election—decided to compete in the 2006 parliamentary contests. Six weeks before these elections, Dennis Ross was on one of his frequent trips to the Middle East. As the Middle East envoy for Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, Ross had more experience negotiating with Israelis and Palestinians than any American. He was no longer in the U.S. government, but he knew all the relevant players. Ross was leery about holding elections. He thought that if there were elections, militias such as Hamas should be banned from participating; they should have to choose between joining the system and waging violence against it—they shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways. Members of Fatah, fearful that Hamas might win, approached Ross and asked if he could quietly urge the Israelis to block the election. An odd alignment was taking shape. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Ross asked himself. Fatah and Israel were against holding the elections; Hamas and President Bush were in favor. Ross communicated all this to Robert Zoellick, a former colleague from Bush Sr.’s days who was now deputy secretary of state. Like Ross, Zoellick worried the election could be disastrous. He urged his boss, Bush Jr.’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to urge Israelis to do some things to improve Fatah’s prospects—for instance, to ease up on border crossings in the Palestinian territories and let Abbas take credit for the gesture. Rice refused, saying that the U.S. shouldn’t put its thumb on the scales. A former hardheaded adherent of realpolitik, Rice had recently adopted Bush’s view of the world: She thought, or at least acted as if, elections were a magic potion for curing political ills and that the U.S., having delivered or blessed them, should sit back and let the historical forces flow naturally. To her (and most American observers’) surprise, Hamas won. It proved to be only the first yank in the unraveling of the Bush-Rice dogma. Civil war broke out between Hamas and Fatah, leading eventually to Fatah’s expulsion from Gaza, Hamas’ total dictatorship there, and a resumption of rocket fire from the enclave into Israel—prompting the Israeli blockade on Gaza’s northern border (which Egypt, whose leaders hated and feared Hamas as well, reinforced with a blockade on the southern border).

The bottom line...

[T]he election that put Hamas in power was not inevitable; it was premature. Israel and the leaders of the neighboring Sunni Arab nations, who inveighed lavish rhetorical support for the Palestinians but did very little to back it up, could have done more to help build the elements of a civil society and negotiate a peace. But ultimately, they didn’t want to. Elections only tightened the bonds of conflict and lent it a veneer of legitimacy. Hamas’ murderous assault on Oct. 7, the subsequent escalation of violence, and the possibility of a widening war—these are the latest and most bitter fruits of the elections’ legacy.

At best, Bush and Condoleezza Rice were foolish and naïve. They felt that elections in countries with little in the way of democratic institutions would solve all their problems.

Bush, Rice, and Vice President Dick Cheney also repeatedly fawned all over what they called the first election in Afghanistan in 5,000 years. Afghanistan, like Gaza, had no background in democracy and we know what good those elections did Afghanistan in the long run.

Fred Kaplan, the author of the Slate article which is excerpted above, recently spoke with Brian Lehrer at WNYC. You can hear their conversation here...

The U.S. Role in the Israel-Hamas War

[kitty-pelosi]

it has been validating to see folks broadly wake up to the fact that the Democratic Party doesn’t really do anything, and that the middle class is generally only on the side of black and poor people when Republicans are in power.

America is a festering corpse, with a gas bubble about to blow its rib cage out and launch whale viscera across the beach. the concept of “harm reduction” and putting Democrats in power is a fallacious idea that’s been identified for what it actually is - feminist imperialism seeking to preserve and maintain the privilege of the empire over its subsidiaries. This is done often through the cooptation of queer and black folk - who are literally not being helped but are being used as props to accrue tokens of diversity, equity, and inclusion which the upper middle class identifies as Ultimate Justice

and at the same time I couldn’t be more disgusted with my people who throw their heart into the Democratic Party in hope - out of naïveté or stupidity or callousness. what these people don’t know is that they won’t ever be loved by the system that they want to love them, and by doing so they have lost the love of the only people who would have given it to them

[roobylavender]

this is something i was talking about with a friend but pursuing higher education is emotionally so isolating when you start to realize that for most of the people around you this is truly a means to acquire wealth and to conform and gain prestige. like ig it speaks to some naïveté on my part but while i didn’t go into law school necessarily believing everyone was here to help people i still feel like i’ve been so blindsided by how self serving people are and how positively it’s framed to pursue this luxury big law lifestyle. like it’s not even down to just a white people thing anymore, you will find people like this across all races. and no one seems to be as angry as you at things that are worth being angry about. you are regularly confronted with the most blasé fascists and casteists and racists you could find positively anywhere and you leave conversations feeling like you’ve been painted to look like the crazy one for believing in abolition or other social causes. i have some friends and some people i enjoy interacting with casually but i don’t feel like i have community with anyone even though i’m being more social bc it feels like everyone i meet is willing to forgo principles in the name of getting a job. so what if you work with the district attorney and prosecute people for drug crimes, it’s another entry on your resume. so what if you’re interning for a republican senator, once you get to know them closely enough you realize they’re just another human being. so what if you clerk at a law firm that prides itself on destroying class action lawsuits, you’re making big law money and paving the way. it’s like this everywhere and i honestly feel like i’ve never been lonelier

[pennyserenade]

Oof! I didn't know that about Jimmy Stewart turning down TKaM over political controversy 😬😬😬 I wanted to marry him when i was 6yo (my mom had to explain that he died a little after I was born).

yeah, one of my most heartbreaking realizations was that jimmy stewart was a true republican 😭 it seems so incredible that he’d feel that way after he did movies like it’s a wonderful life, mr. smith goes to washington, & even anatomy of a murder! i could understand why you’d want to marry him, though - i always cry when i watch his movies, and i’m half convinced it’s because of his boyishness and that unique mumbling thing he does, mixed with this naïveté his characters always have to overcome. i do love jimmy stewart movies so this news was a BLOW to me. but as i said many times before: many men can be cool and nice, but none of them can be gregory peck

[menalez]

I'm a Brit and watching from the sidelines in horror at the US prospect of picking between two genocide maintainers, anti migration, racist, rich men both with a past of violence to women (structurally and interpersonally) who operationally both function to maintain and expand American imperial interests.

Then I look at my own country and we have two parties. One- creates poverty from neoliberal and right economic policies. They massage a wealth divide. They notoriously glass cliff woman and racial minority politicians, supports genocide and actively wishes to continue falsifying its imperial legacy and shirks their geopolitical role in creating immigration issues and pursuing inflammatory rhetoric that centralises hegemonic interests.

My other choice is another party who is saying this is all bad, let's get the tories out! Then use fluffy language to try to differentiate the way they aim to maintain the structures and factors that allow for all the strife we face but with no critical analysis of how we ended up in the situation. They want the same socioeconomic systems, want to also kick you in the face but with a softer boot.

I also have to play tactical voting so I'd vote green party as they align most to my economic and environmental interests and best choice for refugees, but on social issues like gender, royals, military they're still not far enough left. But England's crappy overton window this is a minority position. If I was still in my uni consistency I'd be voting green (interesting how they call it when students are home 🙃) but last election was a shit show minority seat and we've had a wanker tory MP who I badly want to vote out. This guy is bottom of the barrel, his alternate labour candidate is very much hearts and minds liberal wash but he is the only other opponent who can unseat him.

But I fucking hate Sir Keir Starmer, affectionately named Keith Starmer, Kiddy Starver, who loves racist criminal systems, won't take a firm stand on safe refugee routes and people are drowning, loves capitalism and cap doffing. I also despise the labour party and the whole British political system and its culture wars.

We all love scoffing at America but here we have the same issues, they just have a different polish.

Sorry for the blog, love your content! You make me a better feminist

the UK does operate similarly in the sense that the two parties that are typically in power are either labour or tories. but honestly i don’t think it’s AS bad in the sense that at least tories & labour do have some visible differences. meanwhile the differences between democrats & republicans at this point seem to mainly be how they present themselves, bc in practice they’re pretty much aligned on most fronts.

personally i think the UK’s system is more hopeful bc in general i do feel like there is less corruption and more fairness in the system but also i havent seen labour in power for an extremely long time (when i googled it, it seems the last time there was a labour PM was early 2010…) and UKIP grew in power + the UK seriously shot themselves in the foot with brexit + tories have been effectively making the UK worse. so perhaps that’s just naïveté on my part. but at least from what i’ve seen, the same hopeless mindset americans have doesn’t seem to persist among the brits… then again maybe the brits are seeing their govt thru rose-coloured glasses as u have stated so,, maybe that’s why.

idk much about the stuff u mentioned on labour not being particularly good tho. i know they also put in policies that were bad for working class ppl, but idk much else beyond that. also i know they’re frequently accused of being antisemitic tho i’m unsure how true that is

[artcalledpourbrush]

PutinTrumpStitt Evol empire Evil empire Villainess Tri get a Affecto The sarcasm should be felt 3 PTS Of millions of persons Naïveté We don’t count as points Mark the heads for triage If Putin decided Demo / Repub? Exactly egregious ecclesiastics I triage as so EEE Worth 3 points SellrecycleSale PutinTrumpStitt in inventory Primative human history games Assassins creed is as far as we go back That’s why you don’t know The cycles The spinning of wheels War is far outdated We don’t reach together They know the game 1 Clarity/Color/Flaws 2 Weight 3 Price 3points of discussion 3 evils of empire Invasions Virus History deletions Whoah IVH Not HIV But it’s working out quite the same in numbers Invasions since BUSH, virus by Trump, add history deletions by hooded Stitts now add Ukrainian lives lost Add the numbers Can we play into Prior home boys above In casualty numbers Hey Kayne You fit into the three multiplied in later UR no no. # 4 You shook Trump hand! Did you pee in toilet or never saw it! Stick to three beyond is • ••• •• Just more unDemocractic Un Demo Cratick Democracy say it with pretty ease Rebuke I mean republunatician does not roll out so easy Republican There I said it Putin. Trump. Stitt. Who’s last name is encorected Stitt He’s taking away the histories They bombed near downtown Tulsa Hundred or something years ago Putin is doing it now Trump like Presidents Kept this stuff around a World going It’s not hard to see Planes The planes The planes bombing You can’t just love one of Three? All tied together stringed with 3 big fat buffoons I mean balloons I don’t wish to burst bubbles at this time I’m not playing My chest to navel Promotes a heart Go on screen all three of you evils Tell everyone around a Globe What it is that you love? That would prove loyalty to all US Here on Earth You other tyrants can also Come on give it to us? Triage Boys and Girls Men & Women Fashions PutinTrumpStitt Don’t like me in In their faces Take sway away the panda’s Xi don’t like me Behind the walls PutinTrumpStittXi PutinTrumpStittXi 2xs forever Just look up Closed down Voted in Pay for in Taxes PTS X

[iowafed]

ARA Friday Alert

Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman Details Decades of GOP Plans to Cut Social Security and Medicare Despite some Republicans’ claims to the contrary, columnist and economist Paul Krugman reminded readers this week that many in the GOP do want to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare, writing that “to believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political…

[wilwheaton]

Over the last three years, a political narrative has developed that Republicans in Congress secretly dislike Trump but overlook his personal degeneracy in the interest of enacting their agenda. Wednesday should explode that fiction forever. The Republican identification with Trump is total. Again and again, histrionic Republican congressmen equated hatred of the president with hatred of themselves and hatred of the sacred 63 million. They spoke of Trump with an awe and a maudlin devotion bordering on religious; Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican, declared that Trump had been given less due process than Jesus Christ himself. [...] At the start of this administration, many who are horrified by Trump, me included, thought that at some point the Republican fever might break, leading conservatives in Congress to check a dictator-worshiping buffoon for the sake of the Constitution they claim to revere. I’ve become ashamed of my naïveté in imagining any overlap between my ideas about what is valuable in this country, and theirs.

on Wednesday, the most diverse Congress in history declared that even the most powerful white man in the world should be bound by them. When Republicans act as if that’s a sacrilege, they show us what they worship.

[pscottm]

Notably, this principle not only denies that existing Republican laws to restrict the franchise are unfair, but even that any such laws could ever be unfair. The idea “that somehow or another that we can’t count on states to conduct elections right or fairly is a premise that I have a problem with,” Murkowski blurted out. All these voting laws, written entirely by Republicans, many of them open supporters of Donald Trump’s lies that he won the election, enjoy the presumption of good faith by their national GOP colleagues.

Why would state-level Republicans ever design voting restrictions for any purpose other than the fairest possible election process? What motive could they have? The presumptive naïveté boggles the mind.

Obviously, Senate Republicans grasp the situation perfectly well. It’s not that they lack the imagination for how their state-level colleagues might be tempted to rig voting laws to burden minorities; they simply do not consider it a problem. The message of their states’ rights rhetoric is to rule out any federal voting protection tout court. And they have given a green light to every Republican state to go as far as they want; the federal government, having tied its own hands with the filibuster, will do nothing to stop them.

[alarmist-nonsense]

“The Republican Party is attempting to win the election through legal, semi-legal, and extralegal means. Donald Trump is not preparing a coup attempt in any traditional understanding of the term. This needs to be emphasized so we can prepare effective strategies for November and beyond. In the previous section, we have seen the fruits of an effectively deployed anti-fascist strategy. Every strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, and one of the risks of focusing chiefly on fighting fascism is that it can reinforce democracy—and with it, capitalism and the state.

Stealing elections is how democracy works. It’s how it has always worked. If you legitimize a monopoly on coercive force and authority by claiming to represent the will of the people, then obviously subsequent power struggles will focus on defining which people constitute “the People,” giving a bullhorn to the ones in your camp and silencing the others. When we discuss the specific ways the Republicans are planning to steal this election, let’s not encourage the ahistorical naïveté that this is somehow shocking or unprecedented.”

[tomorrowusa]

Normally I don't post GOP ads here, but the sentiment in this one supporting Ukraine provoked discussion during the second Republican debate on Wednesday.

Of course I agree with the content; it's almost indistinguishable from what Congressional Democrats say about Ukraine. In terms of national security, aid for Ukraine is one of the best investments the US has ever made. And it puts the United States firmly on the right side of history. Assisting Ukraine to maintain its independence is just and moral.

The ad is aimed primarily at people like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the Putin Caucus on Capitol Hill. It probably caused Tucker Carlson to go into spasms.

At the Wednesday debate, Ramaswamy put his profound ignorance and naïveté on international display by saying we should let Putin have Eastern Ukraine to keep Russia from getting too friendly with China. I know, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – but that's par for the course with Vivek.

[cheryls-blossomed]

It’s naïveté at this point to say that Tr.ump is continuing denying the election results that Biden won as a grift for money and McConnell enabling him is only because he’s hoping this drives out Tr.ump’s base for the Georgia Senate runoffs. Republican leaders will do anything to stay in power and consolidate power, even if it means denying the will of the people. Even after the CISA already said the election was the most secure in American history, a statement that comes from Tr.ump’s own administration, but one he and his GOP enablers ignore or outright deny. 

Do I think Tr.ump’s garbage is going to amount to anything of real substance? No, I don’t. For all their nonsensical, conspiracy theory peddling grand-standing on twitter, simultaneously the hack legal team jettisoned a huge part of their legal challenge in PA, because it’s literally garbage, like all their suits. And that’s separate from their continuous court losses, because their suits are utterly frivolous. But I also think it’s foolish to underestimate dangerous autocrats who are in the highest positions of power, because this affects so much more than this election. Because of the conspiracy theory bullshit that they are peddling, you can bet that the GOP will use these utterly garbage and frankly defamatory pretenses to openly cheat and do whatever the fuck they want (which they’ve already been doing in their years long attempt to undermine the democratic process through any possible form of voter suppression) in the future, because they’ll claim this absolute garbage they made up gives them the go-ahead. 

[carsonshawson]

White women do not get to claim simple “naïveté” when it comes to politics. Jodie is a grown woman and doesn’t seem to be particularly stupid - she’s just CHOOSING to date a man who is a Republican. Whether or not he supports Trump is irrelevant, he still votes for a party that is toxic to all people in this country, particularly those who aren’t white/rich/male. I don’t HATE Jodie for this, but I did believe that she was better than overlooking her own morals for the sake of a relationship.

bruh we don’t even KNOW if he VOTED republican a lot of people are registered as wtf ever their parents registers as bc they are rich and indifferent

[pyomorphic]

the DNC is more responsible for trump than the RNC.

republicans represent maybe 25% of the american population. even with gerrymandering and voter suppression, they would still be swept away in every single election if the remainder of people were politically engaged. the way that republicans win elections is through depressed voter turnout.

the 2016 presidential election was characterized by depressed voter turnout. the dnc decided unilaterally, without any consideration for the will of the populace, that their corporate shill war hawk candidate was the next in line to inherit the throne. on top of that they boosted trump to ensure that he was the republican nominee.

but here’s the thing: nobody fucking wanted hillary. her implicit promise was 4 more years of obama. 4 more years of the politician who backed down on every campaign promise and completely failed to make anyone’s life better, on top of ruining the lives of millions. she promised no fundamental change. she represented an abandonment of hope. “this is as good as it gets. hope for a better future is naïveté.” or, in their words, “america is already great”.

the dnc doomed the election before it started. had the dnc nominated a candidate which actually had the ability to produce a mass movement based on fundamental change to the status quo, they would have handily embarrassed trump at the polls. but they didn’t. instead they gave the election to trump on a fucking platter.

support for the dnc is cowardice.

[autokratorissa]

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, not a cross on a ballot paper, and whoever holds that gun, and no one else, decides what is and is not legitimate violence, “power consist[ing] [solely] of the intervention of physical force.” Politics is, at its core, about the winning, maintenance, and expansion of power. All else is illusory, and an indulgence. The communist party considers all possible avenues in the struggle towards the acquisition of state power, and once it has achieved it, it will do anything to safeguard and maintain that power---it “will never give up power without a physical struggle,” not having “the naïveté to abdicate for lack of having a majority of votes, if such a thing were ascertainable [...], because it would be ridiculous to subordinate the revolution to a 100 per cent acceptance or a 51 per cent majority.” There are no morals in politics; only expedience. The sooner any revolutionary movement accepts this the sooner it may win its aims.

Democracy is not something that descended from heaven, and it must always be compared with other alternatives of governance and control in regard to their efficacy in attaining both short- and long-term goals of the political movement. The bourgeoisie, who prostrate themselves before the altar of democracy in peacetime, during periods of crisis soon turn to the fascist terror to secure their wealth and privileges. To think the socialist state and the ruling proletarian class can and would be any different is a fantasy, and a dangerous one if we wish to face, having won power, a future other than victorious counterrevolution.

If democracy ever truly meant something, it died with the Greek poleis. The various republican models, admittedly having advanced to a new stage of development with the advent of the liberal representative systems, share precious little in common with the demokratia of Athens or Corinth. Our modern state forms are more akin to the Roman republic, with its elections, Senate, and consuls, than the direct rule of the Athenian citizenry. This is not a fundamentally bad thing, but the fact remains that political democracy of the form practised in the advanced capitalist nations is not an actual democracy, and misuse of terms is if nothing else an easily remedied irritant.

And do not mistake me here for arguing that common piece of the political left, namely, that capitalism is no true democracy, and socialism will birth a democratic society worthy of the name. This is true, in ways, but it is not an axiomatic good that this is so and those that clearly see it as such are still, in the final analysis, liberals. Democracy is one of the most deeply flawed political and economic ideals ever realised, and we must be ready to cast aside all pretences and realities of it if it becomes advantageous for the political movement. Materialist politics is the programme of escaping morality and embracing functionality. This is the central tenet.