All back to the vibes thing. The idea that Dems were the ones itching to go to war but Republicans were just smol peace loving isolationists was just insane if you actually knew or read anything about these parties such as they've existed since what the 80's/90's? The neocons of the Bush era got parodied a lot for their desire to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun. Dems were parodied for being Whole Foods kumbaya types. Trump literally did airstrikes against Iran in his first term!
But alas the *vibes* (well disingenuous stuff online) said Kamala was a warmonger and it stuck.
Her line about the "lethal fighting force" at the DNC is used as proof of this; it's been mentioned in this comment thread a couple of times already.
I haven't gone back and combed through every convention speech of the modern era, but I am willing to bet that there are similar sentiments expressed in all of them, by all candidates. Americans don't want war on their shores; more important, they don't want to elect a wimp. It's almost a pro-forma line.
Anyone who was watching what Trump did and said in his first term wouldn't have fallen for the idea that he wasn't into foreign adventuring. He very much is, and he kind of loves doing it forcefully, too.
I mentioned this on Brian Buetler's substack, but there really is this Dem PTSD about going to war that goes back to the Reagan 80s when Democrats got pilloried for being whiney "spit on soldiers coming home" party (all a myth by the way. As in, Vietnam soldiers coming home and getting spit on seems to be entirely a myth). Then Iraq War "you're either with us or against us" crap. So again, the Dem candidate in 2024 has to overcompensate to show how "tough" they really are (especially a female candidate going up against someone who is trying to be cartoonishly masculine).
Upshot is that since November, 2024 I've been in the camp that Harris tying herself to Lynn Cheney wasn't really impactful at all. The Harris campaign erred in thinking there was some small but meaningful portion of GOP voters (basically Nikki Haley primary voters) who could be swayed to vote Harris if they saw an acceptable establishment GOP politician side by side with Harris. This seems to have been very much mistaken. But I thought the criticism that this cost Harris votes with swing voters or young men was probably off as well. I'm now beginning to think that this might have actually had some very real impact as to why young men seemed to swing right in 2024 (at least temporarily. Based on recent polling, seems as though the Trump administration is doing its level best to make sure that swing was a blip and not a real realignment like 1980).
There was a Vietnam vet who became a sociologist who did find that the spitting on vets things was real, but that Korean War vets were one of the demographics most likely to do it.
Hmm, that’s super interesting (also crabs in a bucket) it wasn’t hippies spitting on vets, they were getting spat on by their FELLOW vets. Buckets, crabs, etc. (Did the KoWar vets feel like the Vietnam vets got too many goodies or…?)
Conservative commentators? Or conservative politicians?
I don't listen to a lot of conservative commentators, or any political commentator, for that matter. I like my sanity. I made an effort to listen to a couple of Rogan podcasts because he was considered a force in the 2024 election, and I had to see what was up. He was all in on Trump as a peacenik, and he talked about his friendship with Tulsi and how she was just a reasonable anti-war operative.
It's not so insane if you consider that the entire appeal of Trump was that he was a clean break from the GOP of the past, and one part of his strategy was to appeal to the anti-war left (a portion of the Bernie types) who could be persuaded because of the populist vibes that he gave off, similar to Bernie. This is how Trump got the anti-vaxxers too, by cozying up with RFK Jr., a noted left-winger! Once the political spectrum became establishment vs. populist instead of left vs. right, it makes sense - the populists have always been the more isolation, anti-war ones. Going to war means meddling with international affairs, which was always a more globalist-coded thing.
It proves that most people cruise on vibes when it comes to politics. Because if you looked at Trump's first term, it was obvious that he loves meddling in international affairs. Sometimes with force.
His whole reason for running for president in 2016 was that he couldn't stand watching the world "take advantage of the US", and he wanted to rectify it. He bombed Syria three months after taking office! Almost all of 2019 was taken up with accelerating the war with the Islamic state and recapturing territory. But, vibes, you know.
And this is something that the “pure MAGA” types like MTG don’t like about him. He actually does like meddling in foreign affairs and takes a clear side in the Middle East (the Israel-Saudi-Gulf side, opposed to the Iran-Assad Syria side). But in American politics, someone who displays too much knowledge about foreign policy gets establishment and globalist-coded, and that codes for “warmonger” because the foreign policy of the US regardless of party has always been internationalist and aggressive. Trump sounded like he was different from all of them, talked a lot about taking care of home more in a way that sounds more similar to a typical person, and the people believed that. Both Hillary and Kamala sounded too knowledgeable about foreign policy, and people who know a lot about that get coded as “neocon”, just as how on the left, people who know a lot about economics get coded as “corporate shills” because they tend to be more pro-market than the left.
Fuck the “leftist” dirtbags who made their personality pretending the Democratic Party is what the Republican Party actually is. They are 99% responsible for the “Donald the Dove” bullshit, because it was another angle to attack Clinton, the usurper of the rightful President Sanders.
Yeah, I did find it pretty odd that most of the anti-war protests were aimed at Harris when it was obvious Trump would do the same or worse. Granted she probably seemed easier to persuade.
It's because leftists can hope to influence the Democratic party but they have no hope of influencing the Republicans.
Calling Biden "Genocide Joe" and painting Kamala as a hawk was an internal power struggle where they tried to shift them left by threatening to withhold votes. With Trump there is nothing to shift because they have no leverage over him, so there's far less outcry.
It's also why the Gaza encampments died after Trump was elected, even as Israel re energized their efforts with him in charge.
Actual real Palestians get vastly worse deal, American campus activists got to do preening virtue signaling.... for ultimately far far worse outcomes for the people they supposedly were supporting.
And probably 50/50 odds of West Bank annexation. Woo, super.
I don’t know that campus activists are really the ones calling the shots here. I’m genuinely not sure what the best option would have been for protesting the war, but having a polite conversation with one another about how bad the war is I don’t think would have moved the needle all that much either.
The Ivy-&-Ivy Plus campus activists were most definately significant drivers.
And since the US was not doing either the bombings and ground war (that would be Israel) nor the initial trigger (that would be Hamas), and that for anyone with a modicum of awareness should have known Netanyahu Regime is pack-filled with extremists whom a Trump/Christianist-Republican administraiton would in now way restrain, the proper godamn thing would be to realise going on about "Genocide Joe" was stupid goddam indulgent tubby spoiled American virture posturing.
Israel has never been an American sock-puppet and it was fucking naive as fuck what the activist crowd did
I can imagine Middle Eastern normies who were already on the fence about Harris deciding to vote against her for that reason. But the idea that large numbers of pro-Palestinian activists gave their vote to Trump is very much citation-needed for me. If that truly did happen, then yes, those people are genuinely too stupid to function.
Yeah, immigration activists love to do the same thing with the same “reasoning.” Obama’s speeches were interrupted constantly (and frankly he should have been less nice to them.) I think they were doing to that Kamala in 2024, which is… kind of amazing, considering her opposition.
(Because you replied I will limit my kvetch about your unfair and inaccurate description of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to this self-referential sentence.)
It's because of the latter. Trump wasn't going to listen to left-wing activists, but Kamala had incentive to, since she was at risk of losing their votes.
This ridiculous posturing is why I think presidential campaigns should be six weeks long. Tops. Four would be better. Less time for the spinmeisters to lay out these narratives. Kamala as the war dog and Trump as the Prince oh Peace is just the most recent, and one of the most egregious examples.
Wonder how Joe Rogan is doing today? He was all in on the "Trump will keep us safe with deal making, and my buddy Tulsi Gabbard will help him because she's just a gal who wants everyone to get along" spiel.
From what I can tell, most other democracies have campaigns for elections that last like a few weeks tops, like Canada and Britain. Our lasts like literally two years. A part of that is because of primaries but geez
I moved back to Canada last year, just a few days before the federal election was called, and it was amazing how quick and untraumatizing the whole process was.
You’re really onto something here. A crazy number of right-wing men have derided ME, a woman who is quite open about being a working class woman who has never earned very much money as being “affluent.”
My last job, which I held for a few years, was as a hospital cleaner. There were, surprisingly, lots of things I did like about that job (especially being involved in union work as a steward/rep) but there’s no denying that it was certainly minimum wage, frequently unpleasant, and also VERY strenuous manual labour over long shifts. Most of my co workers were women, as is common at cleaning jobs.
Anyway over my time holding that job I had plenty of men— more than I could have ever imagined and particularly older men— tell me I ‘probably make more than them’ (this even when they knew full well what my job was!) or straight up laughed at me when I referred to it as manual labour. Which like, it literally is. I knew a lot of the maintenance guys (plumbers, carpenters, electricians etc) in the hospital and I don’t think most of them would have denied that being a cleaner was physically more gruelling despite their jobs also being manual. But other guys? Male patients often? Seemed to think I was there as idk, window dressing, even while I was literally on hands and knees scrubbing a floor or operating heavy machinery lol
"Working, as did Kelly, on the transition from medieval to modern, Judith Bennett has argued that while women’s work changed, the status of that work did not: whenever a particular type of work became more prestigious, as with weaving or brewing, men took it over, and tasks identified as female remained just as low status, low-skilled, and poorly compensated as before."
From the Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe
Some people have highly malleable/creative definitions of “elite”. There seems to be a widely-held belief that anyone who votes Democrat is an elite, which makes about as much sense as saying all Republican voters are tech billionaires.
yeah me too! and they get furious that i'm "well-educated.” i don't even have a bachelor's degree! i am however smart as fuck so i understand the confusion :)
As a firmly middle-class man who is dicking around at his white-collar job (i.e., reading CHH instead of completing my TPS reports), I just want to note that between this article and Saturday's comment section on MST, I clocked the fact that we've gotten two CHH "Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" references since Friday.
Which, ya know, fair play. It's an amazing short story. I also appreciate you adjusting the reference to meet the needs of the article. On Saturday, you were the child in the basement, tortured endlessly to give us the most unhinged Twitter discourse (thank you for your service). Today, angry and confused young men on the internet writhe in agony so that Jessica in HR can enjoy her matcha.
I don't think I realized what a versatile metaphor the "tortured basement child to allow for broad success they'll never know" was!
me not reading the ones who walk away from omelas is kinda the kid in the basement which enables my enjoyment of these pieces by continuously disabling the part of my brain that nitpicks about scifi shorts i've read
Ursula LeGuin was a freaking genius. (And, the fact that her parents were famous anthropologists shows through in her works; she brings out her inner anthropologist as well as her wonderful prose.) And, I read a quote from her that the name “Omelas” was inspired by her seeing “Salem OR” in a rear view mirror!
The "Gen-Z Boss and a Mini" video remains the most baffling viral trend I have ever seen. The narrative around it was completely contradicted by all facts (the video was an intentional marketing piece, they are entrepreneurs running their own business, and they are not American) and yet the story about HR women goofing off with silly games ran wild anyway. Truly the dumbest election cycle.
Well Kamala did say she wanted America to have the most “lethal” military in her DNC speech so it was totes joever.
The aspect of the male resent towards the “rich” women, that I never understood, is why don’t they want the fake email job where they can join the girls dancing? It sounds like a pretty good deal to get paid a bunch to do nothing while being surrounded by beautiful women. It’s one of the reasons I miss my teaching job in China because, as the only male teacher, I had my own personal harem.
It’s a weird juxtaposition of them being black pilled losers but also admiring Andrew Tate for being an alpha male with Bugattis & bitches. If they truly subscribed to the Nietzschian notion of being the ubermensch, they would grind for the fake email job. Ultimately I see these young men as baby bitches who want the money but don’t have the discipline to grind for it.
I guess slightly related to this, I found it extremely funny that ppl (many of whom those angry online men) hate “female coded polite speech” while the are extremely horrible at taking any slight hint of criticism. Like my guy, you literally just explode at more blunt feedback, where is your self awareness lol
A thing they don't tell you about professional life is that you can spend a whole workday with your emotional state rocking back and forth based solely on subject lines in Outlook...
That goes back to my conclusion that they are losers because even if there is some structural bias against men, be sooo good you get the job anyways. You can’t idolize Andrew Tate & friends then lack the ambition to win at life.
Totally agreed, like to be very uncharitable, essentially they are saying “I deserve everything including high status to girls without making extra effort myself like an ancient aristocrat”
There's been a sort of ideological Convergence of Loserdom online in the last few years. The left- wing version of this (r/antiwork) is with people who think that capitalism tkeeps them from enjoying permanent summer vacation. The right-wing version of this (X the everything app) is that girlbosses have taken away men's God-given right to a cushy job where they do nothing and the money and women just roll in.
The problem with this sort of exaltation of laziness just floating around in the Zeitgeist is that it gives lazy, no-account young males -- I refuse to dignify them by calling them men -- an excuse to just stay in their old bedroom in mom and dad's house playing video games and utterly failing to launch.
What little I’ve seen of r/antiwork was more about abusive bosses and employers, but maybe it wasn’t representative? I’d hate to mock people who get mistreated by their workplaces, which seems extremely common.
lol so true!!! Like I feel like this comes down to extremely aggravated victim complex - I guess the sense that they are entitled to get everything without making any effort but somehow they don’t get it???
Based on the four days I worked in an office I’d like an “e-mail job”, but they seemed reserved for mostly young and middle-aged women, with a few young men, and then a few grey-haired men as the bosses (strangely no women seemed to be top bosses, only old-ish men), unlike my regular job doing building repairs, which is all men, but there is a lady who drives the forklift across the hall.
Only the custodians at work seem equally men and women, and their current boss is a woman (though their previous boss was a man).
1. It doesn't really fit in the point this post was trying to make, but I recall seeing a ton of "Kamala will do the middle-east war" things from the left as well. There was a ton of "Since The Ghost of Karl Marx isn't running I just won't vote because Kamala and Dems are really just Neocons now anyway!" nonsense and, since we are revisiting this stuff in the wake of the attacks on Iran, I don't want it to be forgotten...because it was also fucking stupid.
2. I am firmly a left-of-center guy. My wife and I both have white collar jobs. I don't think I harbor any misogynistic bias against women in office jobs. BUT! I will stand 1000% behind the belief that "Gen Z boss and a mini" is one of the most nail-on-chalkboard abrasive things I have ever encountered in my life.
I briefly heard about it when it came out. I watched it and I didn’t really feel any great way about it besides “that one over there is kind of hot”. Should I have?
I don't totally disagree. I will say that I am mostly off social media (no Twittter or FB for years, less than weekly pop-ins to Threads) and this video found me anyway. Additionally, for me anyway, it was a different tier of annoying than normal annoying social media stuff. I have no idea why, but it was.
It's funny because this really shows how siloed the internet can be. I have literally only ever encountered mentions of that video via CHH. I haven't even seen the thing. I'm morbidly curious now but i don't think I could watch it and communicate an honest reaction after knowing the type of discourse it spurred...
The canard about Republicans being the "party of peace" is literally the most ripe piece of bullshit that I have ever heard. I have no idea why people would believe this, except for that whole old saying attributed to Hitler about people believing something if you say it enough.
We should all understand now that Republicans/conservatives lie A LOT!
If you had told little ol’ me back in ‘84 with Baby’s First Vote, that the *REPUBLICANS* would be considered the PEACE party in 2025, I would have laughed you out of the room! This was the era of constant fear of nuclear war, and jokes about Uncle Ronnie pressing the big red button, etc.
I don’t remember the “Kamala will start a war” campaigning at all!
But I’m a 57 year old blue collar Californian instead of a draft-age young man in a swing state, so I guess I wasn’t targeted?
All I really remember about the 2024 “campaigns” was Harris asking me for money hundreds of times, and Trump asking me for money about a dozen times, neither asked me for my vote, or articulated a reason to vote for them, so I didn’t.
I now regret that, as so far Trump 2.0 has been worse that anything that Harris could’ve plausibly done.
Yeah it was 100% memes; idk if it actually affected a single vote. but a lot of weird online right wingers seemed to earnestly believe it.
I appreciate your ability to reflect openly on your voting choices; most people conveniently for get the votes/non-votes they regret! I know it's embarrassing to reflect on my screw ups.
Online commentary I think we have to learn is 50 percent plus in delusional posturing and drama llama-dom. Less seriously one takes it the better at current benchmarking.
I trust that those people are now seeing the error of their ways, and are busy drafting apologies to the parents of folks serving in the military, as well as to the entire country, as we speak.
Excuse me, our Austin correspondent is reporting that Veterans For Trump have referred to the attack on Iran as “fake news” and that their message to military families and the rest of the country is, quote, “EAT SHIT”, end of quote. More after this commercial break.
I often have a hard time telling whether insane right-wing takes come from a place of extreme cynicism or extreme gullibility - often i end up suspecting it’s a totally radioactive mix of *both*. Maybe an actual right-winger in CHH’s readership can explain “Kamala will start a girlboss war in Iran because reasons” for me.
Kind of an interesting piece. It's not what Trump promised and the odds of KH doing anything, anything at all, were long.
But here we are. Will the theocracy fall? Will Iranians be able to liberate themselves? If Iran reinvents itself and is no longer the destabilized-in-chief of the Middle East, is that a good thing?
Well... As Americans wil never learn, it happens the interests of the Farsi speaking Shia are highly divergent from the interest of the Wahhabite Sunni on the other side of the Gulf.
and as like with Russia (Sov to non-Sov), it turns out magical thinking doesn't erase the fundamentals, even if a regime change occurs
It also happens that other human being are not alien creatures but like Americans also tend to Rally Round the Flag when attacked by an inimical outside power group (here US with Israel)
Sure, though it'd be a very different world if that conflict took place between non-theocratic democracies.
Of course, this raises the point that the last time the U.S. supported the overthrow of an Iranian regime, it... uh... did not push the country in a democratic direction.
One can look to the perverse outcomes from overthrowing Sadaam in Iraq that didn't end up either with the Magical Pro American secularism that the Bush The Younger spin-doctors predicted.
The idea that the Wahhabites in the Gulf (which are not just the Ibn Saud, it's also the Emiratis and the Qataris albeit in different family flavors) who are nastily oppressive to their own Shia minorities (and not democracies) are somehow going to sing Kumbaya with Iran or vice-versa over a deep and long-standing major power play between Shia and Farsi versus Wahhabi Arab is just pure magical thinking, ahistorical and just ... American mega naivete (in no way saying this is permanent nor unchangeable but us sending bombers in alliance with the Israelis is not a path to "oh let us rally around the Americans because they're self-deluding themselves that everyone sees them the way they see themselves"
Joint with Israel is stupid bunging, and nerving Netanyahu agenda, not our agenda.
(let me add none of this from a pacifist position but there are clever ways to do things and there are bungling ways to do things.)
So the thing is, Iran was already neutered as a regional power by last summer (which was an unalloyed good). But now, the regime has its back to the wall, and that's a dicier affair.
By definition, overthrowing a despotic regime is risky business. It may well be that enough of the Revolutionary Guard and other military units remain in place to suppress the Iranian people. We won't know that for a while.
As an aside, a country neutered today may or may not remain so going forward. Absent regime change, count on the theocracy to make trouble.
Well, she did a horrible job convincing people she *wasn't* going to.
She called Iran the "greatest adversary" of the U.S., said we need to "ensure Iran never becomes a nuclear power", and constantly peppered her speeches with hawkish language about needing "the most lethal fighting force" or whatever.
And she wholeheartedly backed the genocide in Gaza, against the wishes of her entire base.
Trump's campaign, meanwhile, completely lied about his intentions. But it was on her to draw a distinction, and she didn't really do that.
All of these are things that basically every US President has done or said. I don't think we've ever had a President say "I would definitely never (insert military thing.)" They often refuse to answer hypotheticals.
Most voters desperately want to move away from the foreign policy of previous U.S. presidents.
There are ways of framing it to signal you oppose military action, but won't take it off the table completely. You can always say "war is the last resort". She chose to say things like:
"We will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend U.S. forces and interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. And we will continue to work with our allies and partners to disrupt Iran's aggressive behavior and hold them accountable."
I can't blame people for thinking she was a warhawk.
I never even heard of the quote at the time, and it would have made zero difference for me, because a. it’s absolutely banal bipartisan boilerplate that every presidential candidate in history has said and b. come on, who is more itching and twitching to start shit between Harris and Trump? Clearly there’s a moral imperative to believe the “they’re eating the dogs” guy.
I never bought into Trump being anti-war, but he spent the entire campaign lying that he was, and Harris spent the entire campaign trying to sound tough. I can't fault people who don't follow politics closely for being misled.
Key word being "rumored" - she didn't want to risk publicly breaking with Biden on it, which was a horrible miscalculation given how the issue played out for him.
Well we had nuclear agreements before that very much kept them from nuclear arms. If anything Trump ripping that up increased their nuclear program and made them less likely to make deals like that.
It's the difference in having a strong military led by someone who understands diplomacy and has trusted advisors with experience to know when and how to use it vs a leader who does things because they look cool on social media.
She backed Israel over Hamas, in keeping with the general sentiments of the American voting public and majority of voters who she needed to gain the new votes from.
The Lefty proggy fringies calling Gaza genocide* are not a base, they are a fringy fraction that are packed into geographies and demographics that the Demnocrats are already over-performing on while losing in the other geographies.
I am not personally in any kind of favor to Israeli actions in Gaza or otherwise but it bunlgling progressive delusion to go on and on about themselves being a "base" when the election math makes them utter losers.
(* it is not, it was something bordering on ethnic cleansing like say Bosnia, but not a genocide however much internet drama llamas have to insist everythin gis the most dramatic word they can dig out of Bluesky)
Laugh your internet drama llama ass off ll you want, incoherence and innumercy remain
The election is 2024. Not 2026. 2024 and that data shows that your BlueSkyism is gross exaggeration of the terminally online political obsessive.
and no the Democrats are not getting voted out over this, because Foreign Policy is a marginal issue outside of the tiny tiny minority politial obsessives.
Now I wish I could find it, but I am pretty sure it was Pew, just don’t want to go digging. Basically, foreign policy in general and I/P in particular was NOT something voters thought mattered. What ranked in the top three was always the economy, jobs, crime and immigration (depending on who you asked of course). People care about their own wallets, really, not what is happening on the other side of the world, unless it directly affects them.
But of course the pro-war centrist wing would rather lose elections than listen to their own party and give up their slavish devotion to a foreign country.
But I am not "pro War" - just because people point out you're utterly wrong and delusional doens't mean they are Pro anything.
I am against Trump's idiotic attack, as much as I was against the Iraq war from day 1. (as my comment in the past 48 hours in this very thread already demonstrated, just as I am not a supporter of anything Israel did after it's initial riposte against Hamas after Hamas' attack)
However the reality is the mass public doesn't vote on FP.
Your delusions aside.
And it's not my party twat, I am not a member of any party.
The "propaganda" was coming from Harris's own campaign! She was trying to convince everyone she was a hawk. Well, it worked, and she gave us Donald Trump.
Yeah I agree! Very-online people can be so weird about that stuff, she obviously wasn't trying to convince everybody she was a massive war hawk, it's just propaganda from people who hate her so they want to believe it.
And it's also pretty inaccurate to say "she gave us Donald Trump" because of her position on the middle east, it implies that if only she had a more Leftist stance there that Trump wouldn't have won.
Middle east foreign policy soundbites were way less impactful than cost of living or social issue messages overall. And it's not clear to me that the average voter would have been thrilled about those lefty messages about Gaza or not having a powerful army anyways...
On the boilerplate point, I remember when leftists had memories longer than a goldfish. Now it seems like every leftist is discovering politics for the first time.
Lots of confidence from the side that lost the popular vote to Donald Trump. But of course, Democratic royalty can never fail, they can only BE failed.
"It's okay that she supports mass murder in the Middle East, all presidents do!"
"Never mind that she back the actual policy of genocide for years, it doesn't matter because Trump is bad too"
"What's wrong with Liz Cheney?"
You would think her humiliating defeat, and the subsequent crushing wave of left-wing candidates would lead to some introspection about this, but I guess there's a reason for the term Blue MAGA.
I think one problem is that leftists spend a lot of time critiquing the foreign policy specifically of democrats, ostensibly because that’s who they believe they are more likely to win over and influence, but the way that this filters downstream to people who pay no attention is to a belief that democrats are uniquely warlike.
I don’t even really blame leftists for this. It’s unreasonable for me to expect them to specifically triangulate their criticisms in a galaxy brain way to adjust the downstream narrative. It’s just unfortunate.
An example of this is how Obama became very associated with lots of drone strikes, and then Trump’s first term did even more of them, and nobody seemed to notice or care or criticize him for it, and so Obama remained more associated with the policy. Leftists were too busy criticizing other things about Trump and nobody else actually minds the drone strikes that much to criticize Trump over it so nobody cared.
To be fair, though, Republicans’ “flood the zone with shit” strategy has been extremely effective, and I won’t even pretend that I have any idea how to prioritize the absolute tsunami of outrages coming from this administration. Do you?
Your points on the cognitive dissonance is fair, but to play devil’s advocate, if I had to steelman the pro-Trump anti-Kamala argument it would be that even though both sides could conceivably be painted as equally war/peace oriented, the overall motivation, messaging and ‘vibes’ of each one’s interventions would be very different.
I generally like to keep my different blogging hats separate but one of my other main areas of expertise on a different blog is geopolitics and what’s actually going on in different situations which is often radically different to media narratives. It’s fair to assume that Harris’s foreign policy would probably be a continuation of Biden’s and one thing that people don’t realise is that Biden’s foreign policy was arguably more ‘America first’ (and only) than Trump’s.
My experience from analysing this stuff is that in terms of high level messaging, Trump is very in your face, abrasive and transactional, however when it comes to behind the scenes stuff, his administration tends to be remarkably sensible and reasonable to deal with - you need to treat things like a negotiation, but when you do, it’s usually a negotiation between equals and a country's interests will usually be respected. Meanwhile the Biden administration would play the high handed moral card before then doing whatever was most nakedly within their own interests regardless of what others needed - the US was the senior and most morally upstanding partner here as far as they were concerned, and if it wanted something then all its allies must put up and shut up. The UK and Australia are two perfect examples here - the two are the US’s ‘best’ allies and yet they arguably enjoyed much better and more respectful relations under Trump than under Biden.
In many ways this is the exact same dynamic as the progressive who preaches equality and inclusivity but treats you as a child, vs the conservative that calls you a slur and demands things outright but otherwise treats you like an equal. You can then combine this with the ‘vibes’ based stuff that you and others have already done a really good job of articulating and you reach some fairly reasonable predictions on how Harris vs Trump would handle Iran:
Domestically Harris would probably justify an intervention on Iran in terms of women’s rights and liberal values (and may not have intervened in Venezuela at all), and would firmly pitch an invasion at liberal upper-middle classes, with lower class men being told that insofar as they were brought in it was about time they stopped moping around and being male wastes of space and stepped up to fight for once in their life. Internationally it would be justified for the same reasons plus some stuff around international law. Policy wise they would largely fixate entirely on what US strategic interests would be - allies would be expected to fall in line, whilst Iranians would be consulted only in the context of seeking to cultivate progressive groups, and would generally want to be held at arms distance otherwise (particularly those deplorables who don’t fit liberal narratives). The US political leadership would effectively be entirely dominant in dictating what happens there, and in order to appease high level media, democracy would probably be pushed early at the expense of good governance, similar to what happened in Iraq.
Trump meanwhile would pitch an invasion on maintaining American interests and defeating an evil dictatorship, largely ignoring liberal upper middle classes and framing any young male contribution as an expression of patriotism and their own fighting prowess. Internationally it would be justified in terms of the US’s own strategic interests and the evilness of the regime demanding regime change. Policy wise there would be unilateral action but allies’ concerns would be dealt with as they arrive, and the Iranian people would probably be incited to direct action without any real appeal to western values, being instead expected to act for themselves and then enter into negotiations with the US over the result. Democracy would probably be suspended for a long time, however there would be more institutional continuity.
Regardless of which of these are true and whether these are completely accurate, in America’s interest, the best policy for Iranians etc, it’s easy to see how that framing of these would leave liberals and human rights IGOs preferring and trusting Harris more with interventions, whilst conservatives, young men and honestly most of the people actually in the countries in question would probably prefer Trump; indeed, he continues to be extremely popular amongst the actual people of Venezuela and Iran who are generally pro-intervention (people similarly forget that the Iraqis were too).
If I had to reframe this as a devil’s advocate, it wouldn’t be that one is a warmonger whilst the other is a peace lover, it’s that one will launch an assertively liberal girlboss war from the position of assumed moral and political superiority, and the other will launch a conservative action man war from the position of international equality without moral pretensions. YMMV may vary as to which you prefer.
yeah, the idea that Trump treats other countries as equals, given everything that happened this term is ehh...
That said I do see the point that he treats everything as more transactional and less principled, which can be good and bad, but I would say mostly bad.
And the fact that to Trump, everything is transactional, meant that honest-to-god Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to winkle the funds to build several thousand homes out of him by merely massaging his ego. “Here, have this fake newspaper giving you lots of credit for being bigly yuge best!” “Zohran, you are my pal!”
I don't know if you are political analyst, but you should be. Your second paragraph is a succinct summation of our current situation. It's very clearly stated, too.
I think Trump remains popular among his cohort because they understand having to make a less than ideal deal to get what they want.. Most of them have purchased a car. We know what it entails.
That makes sense but the “liberal” framing of war was also something that Bush was into as well, and is part of why he has fallen out of favor of the GOP.
I’m glad you posted this, and its arguments seem reasonable except for one—that Kamala going to war would involve “lower class men being told that insofar as they were brought in it was about time they stopped moping around and being male wastes of space and stepped up to fight for once in their life”.
This seems like a strawman, and I’d like to know what evidence you have for this claim.
E.g., have the liberal Western European governments that have recently talked about preparing their population for war with Russia (a policy I strongly oppose) framed it in this hostile-to-young-men way?
I read a lot of stuff from hawkish progressives online, and I’ve honestly never seen this kind of rhetoric from them.
I’ll reframe that slightly, and say that what would probably happen is that Harris would make some well-meaning but misjudged comment which gets quoted out of context to make it sound like that’s what she was saying. Things would then split with younger progressives doubling down on the idea and producing a bunch of mocking TikToks, right wing influencers seizing on said TikToks and reposting them as rage bait telling young men that Harris hates them, and older columnists hemming and hawing before producing some milquetoast comment on male sensitivity and role models that spectacularly misses the point.
It’s hard to compare Europe here as in all the hawkish northern countries the general attitude isn’t ‘let’s go to war’, it’s ‘Russia will probably attack us soon and we need to be ready’; it wouldn’t be anywhere near as politically contentious and would just be framed in civic duty terms.
All back to the vibes thing. The idea that Dems were the ones itching to go to war but Republicans were just smol peace loving isolationists was just insane if you actually knew or read anything about these parties such as they've existed since what the 80's/90's? The neocons of the Bush era got parodied a lot for their desire to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun. Dems were parodied for being Whole Foods kumbaya types. Trump literally did airstrikes against Iran in his first term!
But alas the *vibes* (well disingenuous stuff online) said Kamala was a warmonger and it stuck.
Her line about the "lethal fighting force" at the DNC is used as proof of this; it's been mentioned in this comment thread a couple of times already.
I haven't gone back and combed through every convention speech of the modern era, but I am willing to bet that there are similar sentiments expressed in all of them, by all candidates. Americans don't want war on their shores; more important, they don't want to elect a wimp. It's almost a pro-forma line.
Anyone who was watching what Trump did and said in his first term wouldn't have fallen for the idea that he wasn't into foreign adventuring. He very much is, and he kind of loves doing it forcefully, too.
I mentioned this on Brian Buetler's substack, but there really is this Dem PTSD about going to war that goes back to the Reagan 80s when Democrats got pilloried for being whiney "spit on soldiers coming home" party (all a myth by the way. As in, Vietnam soldiers coming home and getting spit on seems to be entirely a myth). Then Iraq War "you're either with us or against us" crap. So again, the Dem candidate in 2024 has to overcompensate to show how "tough" they really are (especially a female candidate going up against someone who is trying to be cartoonishly masculine).
Upshot is that since November, 2024 I've been in the camp that Harris tying herself to Lynn Cheney wasn't really impactful at all. The Harris campaign erred in thinking there was some small but meaningful portion of GOP voters (basically Nikki Haley primary voters) who could be swayed to vote Harris if they saw an acceptable establishment GOP politician side by side with Harris. This seems to have been very much mistaken. But I thought the criticism that this cost Harris votes with swing voters or young men was probably off as well. I'm now beginning to think that this might have actually had some very real impact as to why young men seemed to swing right in 2024 (at least temporarily. Based on recent polling, seems as though the Trump administration is doing its level best to make sure that swing was a blip and not a real realignment like 1980).
There was a Vietnam vet who became a sociologist who did find that the spitting on vets things was real, but that Korean War vets were one of the demographics most likely to do it.
Hmm, that’s super interesting (also crabs in a bucket) it wasn’t hippies spitting on vets, they were getting spat on by their FELLOW vets. Buckets, crabs, etc. (Did the KoWar vets feel like the Vietnam vets got too many goodies or…?)
Did conservatives use the lethal talking point because I only heard it from leftists like Hasan ?
Conservative commentators? Or conservative politicians?
I don't listen to a lot of conservative commentators, or any political commentator, for that matter. I like my sanity. I made an effort to listen to a couple of Rogan podcasts because he was considered a force in the 2024 election, and I had to see what was up. He was all in on Trump as a peacenik, and he talked about his friendship with Tulsi and how she was just a reasonable anti-war operative.
It's not so insane if you consider that the entire appeal of Trump was that he was a clean break from the GOP of the past, and one part of his strategy was to appeal to the anti-war left (a portion of the Bernie types) who could be persuaded because of the populist vibes that he gave off, similar to Bernie. This is how Trump got the anti-vaxxers too, by cozying up with RFK Jr., a noted left-winger! Once the political spectrum became establishment vs. populist instead of left vs. right, it makes sense - the populists have always been the more isolation, anti-war ones. Going to war means meddling with international affairs, which was always a more globalist-coded thing.
It proves that most people cruise on vibes when it comes to politics. Because if you looked at Trump's first term, it was obvious that he loves meddling in international affairs. Sometimes with force.
His whole reason for running for president in 2016 was that he couldn't stand watching the world "take advantage of the US", and he wanted to rectify it. He bombed Syria three months after taking office! Almost all of 2019 was taken up with accelerating the war with the Islamic state and recapturing territory. But, vibes, you know.
And this is something that the “pure MAGA” types like MTG don’t like about him. He actually does like meddling in foreign affairs and takes a clear side in the Middle East (the Israel-Saudi-Gulf side, opposed to the Iran-Assad Syria side). But in American politics, someone who displays too much knowledge about foreign policy gets establishment and globalist-coded, and that codes for “warmonger” because the foreign policy of the US regardless of party has always been internationalist and aggressive. Trump sounded like he was different from all of them, talked a lot about taking care of home more in a way that sounds more similar to a typical person, and the people believed that. Both Hillary and Kamala sounded too knowledgeable about foreign policy, and people who know a lot about that get coded as “neocon”, just as how on the left, people who know a lot about economics get coded as “corporate shills” because they tend to be more pro-market than the left.
“noted left-winger”
Fuck the “leftist” dirtbags who made their personality pretending the Democratic Party is what the Republican Party actually is. They are 99% responsible for the “Donald the Dove” bullshit, because it was another angle to attack Clinton, the usurper of the rightful President Sanders.
Yeah, I did find it pretty odd that most of the anti-war protests were aimed at Harris when it was obvious Trump would do the same or worse. Granted she probably seemed easier to persuade.
It's because leftists can hope to influence the Democratic party but they have no hope of influencing the Republicans.
Calling Biden "Genocide Joe" and painting Kamala as a hawk was an internal power struggle where they tried to shift them left by threatening to withhold votes. With Trump there is nothing to shift because they have no leverage over him, so there's far less outcry.
It's also why the Gaza encampments died after Trump was elected, even as Israel re energized their efforts with him in charge.
quite the perverse outcome in the end.
Actual real Palestians get vastly worse deal, American campus activists got to do preening virtue signaling.... for ultimately far far worse outcomes for the people they supposedly were supporting.
And probably 50/50 odds of West Bank annexation. Woo, super.
I don’t know that campus activists are really the ones calling the shots here. I’m genuinely not sure what the best option would have been for protesting the war, but having a polite conversation with one another about how bad the war is I don’t think would have moved the needle all that much either.
The Ivy-&-Ivy Plus campus activists were most definately significant drivers.
And since the US was not doing either the bombings and ground war (that would be Israel) nor the initial trigger (that would be Hamas), and that for anyone with a modicum of awareness should have known Netanyahu Regime is pack-filled with extremists whom a Trump/Christianist-Republican administraiton would in now way restrain, the proper godamn thing would be to realise going on about "Genocide Joe" was stupid goddam indulgent tubby spoiled American virture posturing.
Israel has never been an American sock-puppet and it was fucking naive as fuck what the activist crowd did
I can imagine Middle Eastern normies who were already on the fence about Harris deciding to vote against her for that reason. But the idea that large numbers of pro-Palestinian activists gave their vote to Trump is very much citation-needed for me. If that truly did happen, then yes, those people are genuinely too stupid to function.
Proving they know absolute jack shit about how to win influence in internal dynamics.
Yeah, immigration activists love to do the same thing with the same “reasoning.” Obama’s speeches were interrupted constantly (and frankly he should have been less nice to them.) I think they were doing to that Kamala in 2024, which is… kind of amazing, considering her opposition.
(Because you replied I will limit my kvetch about your unfair and inaccurate description of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to this self-referential sentence.)
It's because of the latter. Trump wasn't going to listen to left-wing activists, but Kamala had incentive to, since she was at risk of losing their votes.
Rightful President Sanders. Now that's funny. But makes so much sense that is your MO
Sorry, what's my MO?
lol, no
Whenever you see the guy you think you're having a conversation with, say "hi" for me.
Found the person who wasn’t around for Dukakis
(Akshully if you ask ME, Clinton was a great candidate, hamstrung by literal *decades* of media smears and James Effin’ Comey)
This ridiculous posturing is why I think presidential campaigns should be six weeks long. Tops. Four would be better. Less time for the spinmeisters to lay out these narratives. Kamala as the war dog and Trump as the Prince oh Peace is just the most recent, and one of the most egregious examples.
Wonder how Joe Rogan is doing today? He was all in on the "Trump will keep us safe with deal making, and my buddy Tulsi Gabbard will help him because she's just a gal who wants everyone to get along" spiel.
To be fair, the nutjobs would have made the accusation even if the campaign had been 10 minutes long.
From what I can tell, most other democracies have campaigns for elections that last like a few weeks tops, like Canada and Britain. Our lasts like literally two years. A part of that is because of primaries but geez
I moved back to Canada last year, just a few days before the federal election was called, and it was amazing how quick and untraumatizing the whole process was.
Rub it in our faces why don’t cha
You’re welcome! ☺️
You’re really onto something here. A crazy number of right-wing men have derided ME, a woman who is quite open about being a working class woman who has never earned very much money as being “affluent.”
My last job, which I held for a few years, was as a hospital cleaner. There were, surprisingly, lots of things I did like about that job (especially being involved in union work as a steward/rep) but there’s no denying that it was certainly minimum wage, frequently unpleasant, and also VERY strenuous manual labour over long shifts. Most of my co workers were women, as is common at cleaning jobs.
Anyway over my time holding that job I had plenty of men— more than I could have ever imagined and particularly older men— tell me I ‘probably make more than them’ (this even when they knew full well what my job was!) or straight up laughed at me when I referred to it as manual labour. Which like, it literally is. I knew a lot of the maintenance guys (plumbers, carpenters, electricians etc) in the hospital and I don’t think most of them would have denied that being a cleaner was physically more gruelling despite their jobs also being manual. But other guys? Male patients often? Seemed to think I was there as idk, window dressing, even while I was literally on hands and knees scrubbing a floor or operating heavy machinery lol
Your job was not respected because it’s coded as female.
Many such cases.
"Working, as did Kelly, on the transition from medieval to modern, Judith Bennett has argued that while women’s work changed, the status of that work did not: whenever a particular type of work became more prestigious, as with weaving or brewing, men took it over, and tasks identified as female remained just as low status, low-skilled, and poorly compensated as before."
From the Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe
I’m a guy and I’ve been called “affluent” and a member of the elite by knuckleheads online and I’m like my brother in Christ I drive a 2012 Mazda 3
Some people have highly malleable/creative definitions of “elite”. There seems to be a widely-held belief that anyone who votes Democrat is an elite, which makes about as much sense as saying all Republican voters are tech billionaires.
yeah me too! and they get furious that i'm "well-educated.” i don't even have a bachelor's degree! i am however smart as fuck so i understand the confusion :)
For a minute, I was wracking my brain trying to think of a prominent woman hated by the right whose initials are M.E.
Well my car is 21 years old, so you’re elite by my standards … joking! This is exactly what I wrote about today. Just posted it.
As a firmly middle-class man who is dicking around at his white-collar job (i.e., reading CHH instead of completing my TPS reports), I just want to note that between this article and Saturday's comment section on MST, I clocked the fact that we've gotten two CHH "Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" references since Friday.
Which, ya know, fair play. It's an amazing short story. I also appreciate you adjusting the reference to meet the needs of the article. On Saturday, you were the child in the basement, tortured endlessly to give us the most unhinged Twitter discourse (thank you for your service). Today, angry and confused young men on the internet writhe in agony so that Jessica in HR can enjoy her matcha.
I don't think I realized what a versatile metaphor the "tortured basement child to allow for broad success they'll never know" was!
me not reading the ones who walk away from omelas is kinda the kid in the basement which enables my enjoyment of these pieces by continuously disabling the part of my brain that nitpicks about scifi shorts i've read
^ I chuckled at that
If you’re into Omelas themes, check out The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin.
I second the recommendation! It’s a fantastic trilogy.
Ursula LeGuin was a freaking genius. (And, the fact that her parents were famous anthropologists shows through in her works; she brings out her inner anthropologist as well as her wonderful prose.) And, I read a quote from her that the name “Omelas” was inspired by her seeing “Salem OR” in a rear view mirror!
The "Gen-Z Boss and a Mini" video remains the most baffling viral trend I have ever seen. The narrative around it was completely contradicted by all facts (the video was an intentional marketing piece, they are entrepreneurs running their own business, and they are not American) and yet the story about HR women goofing off with silly games ran wild anyway. Truly the dumbest election cycle.
Well Kamala did say she wanted America to have the most “lethal” military in her DNC speech so it was totes joever.
The aspect of the male resent towards the “rich” women, that I never understood, is why don’t they want the fake email job where they can join the girls dancing? It sounds like a pretty good deal to get paid a bunch to do nothing while being surrounded by beautiful women. It’s one of the reasons I miss my teaching job in China because, as the only male teacher, I had my own personal harem.
It’s a weird juxtaposition of them being black pilled losers but also admiring Andrew Tate for being an alpha male with Bugattis & bitches. If they truly subscribed to the Nietzschian notion of being the ubermensch, they would grind for the fake email job. Ultimately I see these young men as baby bitches who want the money but don’t have the discipline to grind for it.
They DO want the fake email job. For some reason they don't think men ever get them! (Of course, when I had one, most of my coworkers were male. lol)
Everyone wants a fake email job until they have to write the damn emails. At 11 at night on a Sunday.
I guess slightly related to this, I found it extremely funny that ppl (many of whom those angry online men) hate “female coded polite speech” while the are extremely horrible at taking any slight hint of criticism. Like my guy, you literally just explode at more blunt feedback, where is your self awareness lol
“The F**k Your Feelings crowd sure has a lot of feelings”
It's "F**k Your Feelings," not "my feelings."
Omg exactly lolll
“My feeling is valid yours is not”
Everybody gangsta till they actually have to write an email
This made me laugh unreasonably hard.
have you ever had to write an email? *shutters*
A thing they don't tell you about professional life is that you can spend a whole workday with your emotional state rocking back and forth based solely on subject lines in Outlook...
That goes back to my conclusion that they are losers because even if there is some structural bias against men, be sooo good you get the job anyways. You can’t idolize Andrew Tate & friends then lack the ambition to win at life.
Totally agreed, like to be very uncharitable, essentially they are saying “I deserve everything including high status to girls without making extra effort myself like an ancient aristocrat”
There's been a sort of ideological Convergence of Loserdom online in the last few years. The left- wing version of this (r/antiwork) is with people who think that capitalism tkeeps them from enjoying permanent summer vacation. The right-wing version of this (X the everything app) is that girlbosses have taken away men's God-given right to a cushy job where they do nothing and the money and women just roll in.
The problem with this sort of exaltation of laziness just floating around in the Zeitgeist is that it gives lazy, no-account young males -- I refuse to dignify them by calling them men -- an excuse to just stay in their old bedroom in mom and dad's house playing video games and utterly failing to launch.
What little I’ve seen of r/antiwork was more about abusive bosses and employers, but maybe it wasn’t representative? I’d hate to mock people who get mistreated by their workplaces, which seems extremely common.
lol so true!!! Like I feel like this comes down to extremely aggravated victim complex - I guess the sense that they are entitled to get everything without making any effort but somehow they don’t get it???
100%. Email jobs are AWESOME and like most awesome things, they are disproportionately held by upper / upper middle class white men.
Based on the four days I worked in an office I’d like an “e-mail job”, but they seemed reserved for mostly young and middle-aged women, with a few young men, and then a few grey-haired men as the bosses (strangely no women seemed to be top bosses, only old-ish men), unlike my regular job doing building repairs, which is all men, but there is a lady who drives the forklift across the hall.
Only the custodians at work seem equally men and women, and their current boss is a woman (though their previous boss was a man).
Two comments:
1. It doesn't really fit in the point this post was trying to make, but I recall seeing a ton of "Kamala will do the middle-east war" things from the left as well. There was a ton of "Since The Ghost of Karl Marx isn't running I just won't vote because Kamala and Dems are really just Neocons now anyway!" nonsense and, since we are revisiting this stuff in the wake of the attacks on Iran, I don't want it to be forgotten...because it was also fucking stupid.
2. I am firmly a left-of-center guy. My wife and I both have white collar jobs. I don't think I harbor any misogynistic bias against women in office jobs. BUT! I will stand 1000% behind the belief that "Gen Z boss and a mini" is one of the most nail-on-chalkboard abrasive things I have ever encountered in my life.
For the record, I said it was annoying when it came out! I just did not think it was worth crashing the global economy over. Lol
Yeah, my comment 2 was not counter your post. I just wanted to make it clear there is a third option in addition to:
"Gen z boss and a mini is rad!" and "it's proof that women don't deserve jobs!"
What if, "it's just the most annoying thing imaginable...and *probably* not worth crashing the global economy over...probably..."
No, I totally agree. I’m just pointing out that we agree lol
I briefly heard about it when it came out. I watched it and I didn’t really feel any great way about it besides “that one over there is kind of hot”. Should I have?
YMMV! Maybe I am in a unique category of "Don't hate women but do HATE that video" lol
Tbf most social media nonsense like that is annoying as hell. The best thing anyone can do is ignore it or better yet just stay off social media
I don't totally disagree. I will say that I am mostly off social media (no Twittter or FB for years, less than weekly pop-ins to Threads) and this video found me anyway. Additionally, for me anyway, it was a different tier of annoying than normal annoying social media stuff. I have no idea why, but it was.
It's funny because this really shows how siloed the internet can be. I have literally only ever encountered mentions of that video via CHH. I haven't even seen the thing. I'm morbidly curious now but i don't think I could watch it and communicate an honest reaction after knowing the type of discourse it spurred...
The canard about Republicans being the "party of peace" is literally the most ripe piece of bullshit that I have ever heard. I have no idea why people would believe this, except for that whole old saying attributed to Hitler about people believing something if you say it enough.
We should all understand now that Republicans/conservatives lie A LOT!
Especially to themselves.
If you had told little ol’ me back in ‘84 with Baby’s First Vote, that the *REPUBLICANS* would be considered the PEACE party in 2025, I would have laughed you out of the room! This was the era of constant fear of nuclear war, and jokes about Uncle Ronnie pressing the big red button, etc.
Attributed to Goebbels, isn’t it?
I don’t remember the “Kamala will start a war” campaigning at all!
But I’m a 57 year old blue collar Californian instead of a draft-age young man in a swing state, so I guess I wasn’t targeted?
All I really remember about the 2024 “campaigns” was Harris asking me for money hundreds of times, and Trump asking me for money about a dozen times, neither asked me for my vote, or articulated a reason to vote for them, so I didn’t.
I now regret that, as so far Trump 2.0 has been worse that anything that Harris could’ve plausibly done.
Yeah it was 100% memes; idk if it actually affected a single vote. but a lot of weird online right wingers seemed to earnestly believe it.
I appreciate your ability to reflect openly on your voting choices; most people conveniently for get the votes/non-votes they regret! I know it's embarrassing to reflect on my screw ups.
Online commentary I think we have to learn is 50 percent plus in delusional posturing and drama llama-dom. Less seriously one takes it the better at current benchmarking.
If you're not online much, or at least not in political spaces, it was easy to miss.
There was a giant "Veterans for Trump" billboard in an Austin suburb, saying that Kamala would get our boys killed in foreign wars.
I trust that those people are now seeing the error of their ways, and are busy drafting apologies to the parents of folks serving in the military, as well as to the entire country, as we speak.
Excuse me, our Austin correspondent is reporting that Veterans For Trump have referred to the attack on Iran as “fake news” and that their message to military families and the rest of the country is, quote, “EAT SHIT”, end of quote. More after this commercial break.
I often have a hard time telling whether insane right-wing takes come from a place of extreme cynicism or extreme gullibility - often i end up suspecting it’s a totally radioactive mix of *both*. Maybe an actual right-winger in CHH’s readership can explain “Kamala will start a girlboss war in Iran because reasons” for me.
Kind of an interesting piece. It's not what Trump promised and the odds of KH doing anything, anything at all, were long.
But here we are. Will the theocracy fall? Will Iranians be able to liberate themselves? If Iran reinvents itself and is no longer the destabilized-in-chief of the Middle East, is that a good thing?
Well... As Americans wil never learn, it happens the interests of the Farsi speaking Shia are highly divergent from the interest of the Wahhabite Sunni on the other side of the Gulf.
and as like with Russia (Sov to non-Sov), it turns out magical thinking doesn't erase the fundamentals, even if a regime change occurs
It also happens that other human being are not alien creatures but like Americans also tend to Rally Round the Flag when attacked by an inimical outside power group (here US with Israel)
(also see Iraq).
Sure, though it'd be a very different world if that conflict took place between non-theocratic democracies.
Of course, this raises the point that the last time the U.S. supported the overthrow of an Iranian regime, it... uh... did not push the country in a democratic direction.
One can look to the perverse outcomes from overthrowing Sadaam in Iraq that didn't end up either with the Magical Pro American secularism that the Bush The Younger spin-doctors predicted.
The idea that the Wahhabites in the Gulf (which are not just the Ibn Saud, it's also the Emiratis and the Qataris albeit in different family flavors) who are nastily oppressive to their own Shia minorities (and not democracies) are somehow going to sing Kumbaya with Iran or vice-versa over a deep and long-standing major power play between Shia and Farsi versus Wahhabi Arab is just pure magical thinking, ahistorical and just ... American mega naivete (in no way saying this is permanent nor unchangeable but us sending bombers in alliance with the Israelis is not a path to "oh let us rally around the Americans because they're self-deluding themselves that everyone sees them the way they see themselves"
Joint with Israel is stupid bunging, and nerving Netanyahu agenda, not our agenda.
(let me add none of this from a pacifist position but there are clever ways to do things and there are bungling ways to do things.)
So the thing is, Iran was already neutered as a regional power by last summer (which was an unalloyed good). But now, the regime has its back to the wall, and that's a dicier affair.
By definition, overthrowing a despotic regime is risky business. It may well be that enough of the Revolutionary Guard and other military units remain in place to suppress the Iranian people. We won't know that for a while.
As an aside, a country neutered today may or may not remain so going forward. Absent regime change, count on the theocracy to make trouble.
Massively ironic coming from the side that launched the attacks.
Count on Powers that are in competition to make trouble
theocracy has pretty much f-all to do with it.
Well, she did a horrible job convincing people she *wasn't* going to.
She called Iran the "greatest adversary" of the U.S., said we need to "ensure Iran never becomes a nuclear power", and constantly peppered her speeches with hawkish language about needing "the most lethal fighting force" or whatever.
And she wholeheartedly backed the genocide in Gaza, against the wishes of her entire base.
Trump's campaign, meanwhile, completely lied about his intentions. But it was on her to draw a distinction, and she didn't really do that.
All of these are things that basically every US President has done or said. I don't think we've ever had a President say "I would definitely never (insert military thing.)" They often refuse to answer hypotheticals.
Most voters desperately want to move away from the foreign policy of previous U.S. presidents.
There are ways of framing it to signal you oppose military action, but won't take it off the table completely. You can always say "war is the last resort". She chose to say things like:
"We will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend U.S. forces and interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. And we will continue to work with our allies and partners to disrupt Iran's aggressive behavior and hold them accountable."
I can't blame people for thinking she was a warhawk.
My theory is that as a woman she felt like she needed to be extra hawkish to convince sexist people she's not "weak".
While I'm sure this was her calculus, when you're dealing with millions of human lives at stake it's completely unacceptable.
Her opponent on the other hand is widely known for never saying anything unacceptable. Clearly people made the right choice.
We have to expect better from our own candidates
I never even heard of the quote at the time, and it would have made zero difference for me, because a. it’s absolutely banal bipartisan boilerplate that every presidential candidate in history has said and b. come on, who is more itching and twitching to start shit between Harris and Trump? Clearly there’s a moral imperative to believe the “they’re eating the dogs” guy.
I never bought into Trump being anti-war, but he spent the entire campaign lying that he was, and Harris spent the entire campaign trying to sound tough. I can't fault people who don't follow politics closely for being misled.
The joys of virtue signaling Purity Ponyism.
Real winners.
Sure seems like it's the pro-war centrists that are losing
How many campaign promises go unfulfilled though? This was a pretty obvious case of positioning, not a promise to go wild in the ME.
We know that when it came to I/P Harris was long rumored to be a voice for moderation, more than Biden.
Key word being "rumored" - she didn't want to risk publicly breaking with Biden on it, which was a horrible miscalculation given how the issue played out for him.
Well we had nuclear agreements before that very much kept them from nuclear arms. If anything Trump ripping that up increased their nuclear program and made them less likely to make deals like that.
It's the difference in having a strong military led by someone who understands diplomacy and has trusted advisors with experience to know when and how to use it vs a leader who does things because they look cool on social media.
I agree and I wish she would have highlighted this more instead of letting Trump outflank her on "anti-war" rhetoric.
She backed Israel over Hamas, in keeping with the general sentiments of the American voting public and majority of voters who she needed to gain the new votes from.
The Lefty proggy fringies calling Gaza genocide* are not a base, they are a fringy fraction that are packed into geographies and demographics that the Demnocrats are already over-performing on while losing in the other geographies.
I am not personally in any kind of favor to Israeli actions in Gaza or otherwise but it bunlgling progressive delusion to go on and on about themselves being a "base" when the election math makes them utter losers.
(* it is not, it was something bordering on ethnic cleansing like say Bosnia, but not a genocide however much internet drama llamas have to insist everythin gis the most dramatic word they can dig out of Bluesky)
Lmao, no. Check any poll. Most recently:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx
It's the mainstream view now, and Democratic politicians have to catch up or get voted out.
Laugh your internet drama llama ass off ll you want, incoherence and innumercy remain
The election is 2024. Not 2026. 2024 and that data shows that your BlueSkyism is gross exaggeration of the terminally online political obsessive.
and no the Democrats are not getting voted out over this, because Foreign Policy is a marginal issue outside of the tiny tiny minority politial obsessives.
Your delusions notwithstanding.
Now I wish I could find it, but I am pretty sure it was Pew, just don’t want to go digging. Basically, foreign policy in general and I/P in particular was NOT something voters thought mattered. What ranked in the top three was always the economy, jobs, crime and immigration (depending on who you asked of course). People care about their own wallets, really, not what is happening on the other side of the world, unless it directly affects them.
We have evidence it cost her:
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaza
Exactly. Right or wrong it is reality.
The DNC's own autopsy agrees with me.
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaza
But of course the pro-war centrist wing would rather lose elections than listen to their own party and give up their slavish devotion to a foreign country.
Your shrieking strawmen are almost entertaining.
But I am not "pro War" - just because people point out you're utterly wrong and delusional doens't mean they are Pro anything.
I am against Trump's idiotic attack, as much as I was against the Iraq war from day 1. (as my comment in the past 48 hours in this very thread already demonstrated, just as I am not a supporter of anything Israel did after it's initial riposte against Hamas after Hamas' attack)
However the reality is the mass public doesn't vote on FP.
Your delusions aside.
And it's not my party twat, I am not a member of any party.
>constantly peppered
>cites something she said once at the dnc
sure jan
Are you familiar with the concept of an "example"
Yes, saying something at one of the few mass-viewership events of the entire campaign should be taken seriously
I'm also familiar with "I read a tweet and think I have deep knowledge of the thing to which it is referring"
We're talking about her own words, verbatim.
“Entire base” I wish.
Supporting the genocide is mainstream among elected Democrats, but a fringe view among actual Democratic voters
The "propaganda" was coming from Harris's own campaign! She was trying to convince everyone she was a hawk. Well, it worked, and she gave us Donald Trump.
Yeah I agree! Very-online people can be so weird about that stuff, she obviously wasn't trying to convince everybody she was a massive war hawk, it's just propaganda from people who hate her so they want to believe it.
And it's also pretty inaccurate to say "she gave us Donald Trump" because of her position on the middle east, it implies that if only she had a more Leftist stance there that Trump wouldn't have won.
Middle east foreign policy soundbites were way less impactful than cost of living or social issue messages overall. And it's not clear to me that the average voter would have been thrilled about those lefty messages about Gaza or not having a powerful army anyways...
LMAO. Yeah, she didn't actually mean what she said in a scripted speech on the national stage. This is QAnon levels of delusion.
Is it propaganda to say she backed the genocide in Gaza and campaigned with Liz Cheney, or are we supposed to ignore reality on that too?
On the boilerplate point, I remember when leftists had memories longer than a goldfish. Now it seems like every leftist is discovering politics for the first time.
Lots of confidence from the side that lost the popular vote to Donald Trump. But of course, Democratic royalty can never fail, they can only BE failed.
"It's okay that she supports mass murder in the Middle East, all presidents do!"
"Never mind that she back the actual policy of genocide for years, it doesn't matter because Trump is bad too"
"What's wrong with Liz Cheney?"
You would think her humiliating defeat, and the subsequent crushing wave of left-wing candidates would lead to some introspection about this, but I guess there's a reason for the term Blue MAGA.
Great one, CHH! And I agree with you again that so much of the "discourse" is about class. Can I still use the word discourse?
I'd been thinking that at the age of 86, in reportedly failing health, being wiped out in a millisecond is a pretty good way to go.
I think one problem is that leftists spend a lot of time critiquing the foreign policy specifically of democrats, ostensibly because that’s who they believe they are more likely to win over and influence, but the way that this filters downstream to people who pay no attention is to a belief that democrats are uniquely warlike.
I don’t even really blame leftists for this. It’s unreasonable for me to expect them to specifically triangulate their criticisms in a galaxy brain way to adjust the downstream narrative. It’s just unfortunate.
An example of this is how Obama became very associated with lots of drone strikes, and then Trump’s first term did even more of them, and nobody seemed to notice or care or criticize him for it, and so Obama remained more associated with the policy. Leftists were too busy criticizing other things about Trump and nobody else actually minds the drone strikes that much to criticize Trump over it so nobody cared.
This is very much post-2015 Sanders leftists. Previous generations of leftists weren't afraid to go after the foreign policies of Nixon, Bush, etc.
I do blame them for it though. It just seems unprincipled (and honestly, cowardly) to go after these issues only with Dems.
To be fair, though, Republicans’ “flood the zone with shit” strategy has been extremely effective, and I won’t even pretend that I have any idea how to prioritize the absolute tsunami of outrages coming from this administration. Do you?
Your points on the cognitive dissonance is fair, but to play devil’s advocate, if I had to steelman the pro-Trump anti-Kamala argument it would be that even though both sides could conceivably be painted as equally war/peace oriented, the overall motivation, messaging and ‘vibes’ of each one’s interventions would be very different.
I generally like to keep my different blogging hats separate but one of my other main areas of expertise on a different blog is geopolitics and what’s actually going on in different situations which is often radically different to media narratives. It’s fair to assume that Harris’s foreign policy would probably be a continuation of Biden’s and one thing that people don’t realise is that Biden’s foreign policy was arguably more ‘America first’ (and only) than Trump’s.
My experience from analysing this stuff is that in terms of high level messaging, Trump is very in your face, abrasive and transactional, however when it comes to behind the scenes stuff, his administration tends to be remarkably sensible and reasonable to deal with - you need to treat things like a negotiation, but when you do, it’s usually a negotiation between equals and a country's interests will usually be respected. Meanwhile the Biden administration would play the high handed moral card before then doing whatever was most nakedly within their own interests regardless of what others needed - the US was the senior and most morally upstanding partner here as far as they were concerned, and if it wanted something then all its allies must put up and shut up. The UK and Australia are two perfect examples here - the two are the US’s ‘best’ allies and yet they arguably enjoyed much better and more respectful relations under Trump than under Biden.
In many ways this is the exact same dynamic as the progressive who preaches equality and inclusivity but treats you as a child, vs the conservative that calls you a slur and demands things outright but otherwise treats you like an equal. You can then combine this with the ‘vibes’ based stuff that you and others have already done a really good job of articulating and you reach some fairly reasonable predictions on how Harris vs Trump would handle Iran:
Domestically Harris would probably justify an intervention on Iran in terms of women’s rights and liberal values (and may not have intervened in Venezuela at all), and would firmly pitch an invasion at liberal upper-middle classes, with lower class men being told that insofar as they were brought in it was about time they stopped moping around and being male wastes of space and stepped up to fight for once in their life. Internationally it would be justified for the same reasons plus some stuff around international law. Policy wise they would largely fixate entirely on what US strategic interests would be - allies would be expected to fall in line, whilst Iranians would be consulted only in the context of seeking to cultivate progressive groups, and would generally want to be held at arms distance otherwise (particularly those deplorables who don’t fit liberal narratives). The US political leadership would effectively be entirely dominant in dictating what happens there, and in order to appease high level media, democracy would probably be pushed early at the expense of good governance, similar to what happened in Iraq.
Trump meanwhile would pitch an invasion on maintaining American interests and defeating an evil dictatorship, largely ignoring liberal upper middle classes and framing any young male contribution as an expression of patriotism and their own fighting prowess. Internationally it would be justified in terms of the US’s own strategic interests and the evilness of the regime demanding regime change. Policy wise there would be unilateral action but allies’ concerns would be dealt with as they arrive, and the Iranian people would probably be incited to direct action without any real appeal to western values, being instead expected to act for themselves and then enter into negotiations with the US over the result. Democracy would probably be suspended for a long time, however there would be more institutional continuity.
Regardless of which of these are true and whether these are completely accurate, in America’s interest, the best policy for Iranians etc, it’s easy to see how that framing of these would leave liberals and human rights IGOs preferring and trusting Harris more with interventions, whilst conservatives, young men and honestly most of the people actually in the countries in question would probably prefer Trump; indeed, he continues to be extremely popular amongst the actual people of Venezuela and Iran who are generally pro-intervention (people similarly forget that the Iraqis were too).
If I had to reframe this as a devil’s advocate, it wouldn’t be that one is a warmonger whilst the other is a peace lover, it’s that one will launch an assertively liberal girlboss war from the position of assumed moral and political superiority, and the other will launch a conservative action man war from the position of international equality without moral pretensions. YMMV may vary as to which you prefer.
A lot of this seems like a stretch, to put it mildly, but I appreciate you putting this in a rational, non-gullible-rageball-coded way.
yeah, the idea that Trump treats other countries as equals, given everything that happened this term is ehh...
That said I do see the point that he treats everything as more transactional and less principled, which can be good and bad, but I would say mostly bad.
And the fact that to Trump, everything is transactional, meant that honest-to-god Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to winkle the funds to build several thousand homes out of him by merely massaging his ego. “Here, have this fake newspaper giving you lots of credit for being bigly yuge best!” “Zohran, you are my pal!”
I don't know if you are political analyst, but you should be. Your second paragraph is a succinct summation of our current situation. It's very clearly stated, too.
I think Trump remains popular among his cohort because they understand having to make a less than ideal deal to get what they want.. Most of them have purchased a car. We know what it entails.
I think this is an excellent and nuanced analysis, but I don't think most of us normies were hearing that during the campaign. Or thinking it.
From my conversations with my more conservative friends, it went something like this:
"Kamala is hanging out with a Cheney, she said "lethal fighting force" in her DNC speech; thus she will take us to war!"
Versus, Trump says America First! and that means no wars! We are done with that nonsense.
That makes sense but the “liberal” framing of war was also something that Bush was into as well, and is part of why he has fallen out of favor of the GOP.
I’m glad you posted this, and its arguments seem reasonable except for one—that Kamala going to war would involve “lower class men being told that insofar as they were brought in it was about time they stopped moping around and being male wastes of space and stepped up to fight for once in their life”.
This seems like a strawman, and I’d like to know what evidence you have for this claim.
E.g., have the liberal Western European governments that have recently talked about preparing their population for war with Russia (a policy I strongly oppose) framed it in this hostile-to-young-men way?
I read a lot of stuff from hawkish progressives online, and I’ve honestly never seen this kind of rhetoric from them.
I’ll reframe that slightly, and say that what would probably happen is that Harris would make some well-meaning but misjudged comment which gets quoted out of context to make it sound like that’s what she was saying. Things would then split with younger progressives doubling down on the idea and producing a bunch of mocking TikToks, right wing influencers seizing on said TikToks and reposting them as rage bait telling young men that Harris hates them, and older columnists hemming and hawing before producing some milquetoast comment on male sensitivity and role models that spectacularly misses the point.
It’s hard to compare Europe here as in all the hawkish northern countries the general attitude isn’t ‘let’s go to war’, it’s ‘Russia will probably attack us soon and we need to be ready’; it wouldn’t be anywhere near as politically contentious and would just be framed in civic duty terms.
Yes, your scenario of how this would likely go down seems terrifyingly realistic.