Tag: clinton

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Privileged Narrative: The Legitimation Crisis of the Implacable Radical Center

Change doesn’t happen with this much encouragement from the neoliberal centers of power.  Real change won’t be marketed like the latest iPhone.  It won’t be packed neatly and endorsed by the “experts.”  In fact, it’ll be called bad names.  It’ll be made fun of, insulted, talked down to, ridiculed.  The innuendo and probing and narrative construction will go on 24/7.  Television news, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR – doesn’t matter which consumer infotainment product you subscribe to – will be suspicious, hesitant to cover it, and have pundits who cynically mock anyone with a plan or vision of anything substantially different that might disrupt the status quo.  But this is what change would look like.  And if it actually does happen, television personalities will be completely astonished and chalk it up to a strange twist from out of the blue.  They’ll have no idea.

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The Kremlingate Delusion

It’s a dangerous tactic played by the conspiracy-minded, at worst it rattles the saber for war against another nuclear power, fueled by hawks on both sides of the isle. And at least it perpetuates a cynical politics of blame and externalization, a politics of blindness as harmful as McCarthyism, and uses Kremlingate as a cudgel against the alienated populist progressive left.

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Why Liberal Comedy Failed

Why, we may ask, is satire news prone to this kind of burn out? I propose that it is prone because it really offers no substantive challenge to the status quo. Sure, it can snidely critique the ludicrous or offensive behavior and activities of politicians and elites, but stripped of this, it has no real point of view. As Chris Hedges noted, these “liberals are tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and ineffectual reforms.” So it becomes, instead, an activity of cynical liberal identity politics, because their shows, whether being run by Viacom like at Comedy Central, or at CBS, are part of the same system of wealthy coastal elites that rural America resents.