LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA

Middle class liberals went from arguing Bernie Sanders is too radical for the suburbs to supporting, at least tacitly, burning down buildings (disproportionately immigrant owned) as a political shortcut. Many then pivoted again to support the candidacy of Antone Melton-Meaux against Ilhan Omar. Melton-Meaux has been critical of both BLM and #metoo from the right and is the most transparent candidate of capital I’ve seen in a long time. (Strangely enough, he’s too chickenshit to run on “rebuilding Minneapolis,” something that might actually gain traction.)  This is why people outside of the states have so much trouble sorting out our politics. We’ve never had a party of labor, the populists were smashed by business and the state, so this professional managerial class muddle confuses everything. It’s incredibly frustrating. 

State power (that is the ability of the state to use brute force) has increased beyond any somewhat comparable moment in history, yet the state’s ability to everyday govern has decreased to historically poor levels. People (across the political spectrum) typically make sense of this through various conspiracy theories, some more attached to reality than others. (Many are nakedly conspiratorial, others have elements of structural analyses, usually done by trained post-structuralists of course.) America is ground zero, but this is not exclusively an American phenomenon. (China is a possible counter-example, though their competence is both exaggerated and relies heavily on the brute force part of the state.)  This creates a stalemate of sorts. The state lacks legitimacy, but also can’t be replaced. You can add Ross Douthat’s Laschian critique of societal “decadence” (drift may be a better word) to this context. His analysis is largely correct in my view and he’s also right that it’s relat