Category: Politics

This is a long, depressing, blockbuster of a piece.

Back in the 1960s I worked on Labour Party political campaigns as part of their youth group, the Young Socialists. My friends and I were definitely on the left, but still mainstream; it was a shock for me to arrive at university in 1969 and encounter the REALLY hard left of student politics.

But now, Labour is just another center-right party, bought and paid for by the City and Israel. It was obvious when Corbyn was defenestrated, but now we have the documentary proof. Sad, and disgusting.

When I’m filling in an opinion poll, I am usually asked which party I support. And when I choose Democrat, the next question is “Do you consider yourself a strong Democrat or a weak Democrat?” I always choose Strong, because #reasons, but what I want to say is, “I’m a Roosevelt Democrat, because of fundamental principles.”

So here they are, straight from FDR. (Yes, I’ve verified every quotation.) True last century, maybe even more so today.

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”

“Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, and not as ostriches nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.”

This is how normalization works.

People are quickly discovering what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad. And it will be felt as a relief. No longer will they have to echo bien-pensant hypocrisies, they can engage in frank, honest assertions of their self-interest.

And:

“Plutot Trump que le Wokisme” seems to be the slogan of the center-right that once whinged about the Constitution and our sacred norms.

From https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/welcome-to-vichy-america . Read the whole thing.

My Congressional rep, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D), attended today’s Inauguration and posted happy selfies on her FB page. I would have understood if she had turned up wearing dark colored clothing, with a black arm band to mark the mourning for President Carter, and spoken of our debt to Martin Luther King for whom today is a national holiday. If she had approached it as a civic duty on behalf of her constituents, but one undertaken with regret.

But she didn’t.

#primary2026

This:

“The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends.

(Frank Ruda, quoted by John Ganz. )