The Center seems kinda Right leaning
Seems about white, I mean Right, I mean….
They’re mostly just white people.
And also, mostly white guys and white women who largely agree with the opinions of those white guys.
If you have such a uniform group vs. a very large, diverse group such as the left (or left of center) you can’t be surprised when you start to see how easy it is to appeal to the right.
But maybe its also the fact that the news is mostly white too.
And white people tend to forget when they pick their ideas first.
Take, for example, when Beth Mandel couldn’t define woke.
Jonathan Chait defended Mandel,
Anyway, Mandel is in fact able to provide a definition of the term “woke.” Are progressives going to like this definition? No. I’d suggest arguing with her ideas instead of pretending she’s a complete moron who doesn’t know what the word means.
He didn’t seem to act that way when he mocked Rashida Tlaib on Defund the Police
I assume the game is that if somebody objects that “no more policing” and “no more incarceration” are unworkable or extreme solutions to the problem, then Tlaib’s supporters insist she doesn’t actually mean “no more.”
And you see a similar pattern going out when David Shor responded to BLM by acting as there was an electoral threat it posed and Matt Yglesias defended him.
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So maybe it isn’t even that its easier to appeal to the right, maybe journalists are biased towards white people.
On a deeper level though, I think we could consider Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. Both were seen as progressive, Taibbi investigating Wall Street while Greenwald challenged the Iraq War and even helped the president of Braziel, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, get out of jail.
But Taibbi has defended conservatives lately as has Greenwald.
And, in their case, it IS whiteness but its a bit more complex I think. I think they were happy to challenge a system when they could fight an external enemy but when THEY were challenged as part of the problem, that was too much.
Issues like trans rights and BLM do this.
They make us realize how we’re part of the problem. I look white and, if I’m being honest, I haven’t helped black people even though my mom’s black. I haven’t been great to women.
I think the problem is that we were playing progressivism on Easy Mode for the most part. And maybe Trump’s actions in 2016 made it clear white people were willing to take more than people of color were.
Or women.
Or transpeople.
And those groups often got sacrificed every time Trump looked for a quick target and Dems weren’t sure how far they could defend them without losing the asshole vote. Which didn’t help those minorities.
Thus we get a ‘politically homeless’ movement that suddenly realizes its closer to the right since it doesn’t want to IDENTIFY as conservative, but more than willing to make a coalition with it against people who criticize them.
And people like Matt Taibbi are now allying with billionaires he used to criticize. Or at least he WAS until Musk screwed him.
Under these circumstances, there’s a tendency to assume a consensus on issues that are obviously right wing then insist that are at some rational center, but really aren’t.
And how should we react to that?
