Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 9, Issue 6

[Francis Nowak via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

> BUT GRANDPA'S GOT MORE WRINKLES THAN DAD

What's the traditional purpose of a party? The "OLD OLD OLD" problem of
politics is that printing is a capital-intensive game. A run of posters is
expensive. A TV segment is expensive. All forms of communication reward
scale: a big run is cheaper per-issue than a short run.

This is not really a politics problem: it's a technical problem. Exceptions
to this rule have typically relied on state subsidies for political
parties: e.g. the German system.

So you get the growth of big-tent parties that can effectively pool
resources, suppress internal disputes, and essentially produce bigger print
runs than their adversaries. Parties that have such economic, social, and
cultural capital that you must be part of them to be anything to do with
politics at all.

The problem of these parties is they push people together that frankly hate
each other. The UK liberal party went from a dominant position to a dead
party, despite all of its entrenched advantages, essentially because of
personal enmity between Lloyd George and Asquith.

Even with the ferocious repressive mechanisms at work in the UK political
system: the whip's office, the deep connections between press and party,
the center still could not hold.

Today, the omnidirectional mutual hatred of the big tent parties is still
there, but the centripetal forces are weaker. The disciplinary tactics have
started to break down - the resources available to defectors and outsiders
are much greater. Everybody is leaking. Threats made in private become
uncontrollable scandals.

You can't hold the center together when everybody has the ability to
publish their opinions, without the party, or even against the party, to
88.7 million followers. That's how many people were following Trump on
twitter at his height. That's why no matter how much the Republican party
resisted it, they've eventually come to heel. Trump is a weird, atypical
politician precisely because he doesn't fit the politics of party line and
teamwork that characterizes a big, high-fixed-capital enterprise.

Biden is an absolutely typical politician for that system. If he wasn't
president, he'd be on the board of a defense contractor. If this was 1990,
he would crush Trump. Trump wouldn't even be imaginable. He would be doing
his reality TV show, and the audience would be laughing at him.

Another note to Nixon: he came from a time where you could be an
exceptionally ugly politician, and he had the misfortune to outlive it. His
face dripped under the TV set lights. He looked like a homunculus.

The problem with Biden is not about Biden: the problem is he's outlived his
political moment. If this was 1984, dementia would be no problem
whatsoever. Reagan won with a landslide. Nobody would have had a camera at
a small brewery, and if they did, it would have been Super-8. The clip
would have got absolutely nowhere, and the incoherence would have been lost
in the mists of low-fi TV screens, if they ever got that far.

Macron or Le Pen, Roxas or Duterte, Clinton or Trump, Massa or Millei - and
every time, the reason it's Macron, or Roxas, or Clinton, or Massa, is
because the threat of the right is so great you are told to circle the
wagons around a centrist candidate. And instead of coming up with
strategies and candidates that fit the new conditions, you're supposed to
blame spooky Putin and to pretend that an old man is not old, while you
roll the dice on your basic rights.


On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 10:16 PM Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 6 Mar 2024, at 13:11, Francis Nowak wrote:
>
> > "Beer brew here is used to [unintelligible] to make the brew beer
> > [unintelligible] ooh earth rider thanks for the great Lakes" - Joe Biden,
> > 2024. I mean, he's a pretty old guy, like a lot of the guys packing the
> > upper reaches of the US political scene. You remember Mitch McConnell
> > freezing mid-speech a while back? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at the
> > wheel at age 87, leaving the Republicans with an absolute majority in the
> > Supreme Court, to the terrible detriment of women across America.
>
> Of course. And as much as I respected RBG, it was clear (and I argued) for
> years before her all too timely demise that she should step down to avoid
> that all too predictable result. And I've said the same about every other
> gerontocrat in the party and beyond, Biden included. But that's just one
> part of a forward-looking, pragmatic assessment of how the Dems can and
> should actively embrace shifting demographics and, with that, dramatically
> new policies. Not, like the above, ChatGPT-esque "old old old" noise with a
> cherrypicked quotation on top to make it seem lifelike.
>
> > Trump's also pretty old (77 to Biden's 82), but I think he's lived a more
> > relaxed kind of life, and his general speaking style (remember Covfefe?)
> > makes a virtue out of unintelligibility, digression, left-field
> > interjection, as the relentless chaos-machine of Trump's subconscious
> > steers him through. You remember all those quotes you used to read from
> > Trump where he came across as unhinged? If you watch him speak, it's not
> so
> > much that he's mad, as it's just all ad-libs, off-the-cuff, like a slime
> > mold reaching out a tendril one way and the next, hoping he'll find
> > something.
>
> I don't see anything useful in this.
>
> > For me, I don't get why anybody feels obligated to close ranks around
> > Biden. Nixon had it right: the whole mechanism of politics in a two-state
> > America is about who hates who. It is not a system where people vote for
> a
> > good candidate - it's a system where people vote for keeping the worse
> > candidate out. And that's why Biden is there in the first place: if the
> > electoral system strongly biased towards charismatic, competent
> candidates,
> > nobody could imagine Biden coming out on top. I mean, would he even be in
> > the top fifty percent of US citizens? Would Mitch McConnel? Would Nancy
> > Pelosi?
>
> I don't see anything useful in this either, but I do see "Nixon had it
> right." 🧐 When you start with that premise, without also considering how
> the right's subsequent embrace of his lawless cynicism shaped its growing
> extremism, it's no surprise you'd see what came as inevitable. But it
> wasn't and it needn't be.
>
> > Practically, you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy, but do you
> > have to pretend you're voting *for* him? Half of the USA would vote for a
> > dog with mange if it was on the ballot, and it meant Trump wouldn't get
> in.
> > Half of the USA voted for *Trump*, so Clinton didn't get in.
>
> So concerted efforts to, let's see here... turn the aircraft carrier of
> student debt... ramp up antitrust enforcement... "onshore" major industries
> like microchip manufacture... roll back the rise of "junk fees"... rein in
> the excesses of crypto... not give the fossil-fuel everything it wants...
> none of that matters because mumble mumble hold your nose mumble mumble
> Hillary Clinton mumble mumble mangy dog? the Biden admin has done 👉🏼 far
> 👈🏼 more to redress generational injustices than any president in my
> lifetime, and that matters because *all* issues are generational now.
>
> But (1) nettime isn't really the place to debate domestic US issues, and
> (2) even if it were I'm not sure how to debate an argument like BUT
> GRANDPA'S GOT MORE WRINKLES THAN DAD. I don't see much worth debating here.
> I try to be more generous and less acerbic than this, but your reply
> sounded more than anything else like a Daily Mail opinion piece. You're
> hardly alone in that respect.
>
> Ted
>
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