Look out, look out, don’t lose your minds
Not your call, dude.
Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left. This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that. America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.
— James Comey (@Comey) July 22, 2018
First of all…please. When do Democrats ever rush to the left of any kind, let alone socialist? Democrats never do anything but drag us ever farther to the right, in the name of exactly that kind of “oooh everybody wants to be in The Center” bullshit. Voting for one socialist in one primary in New York is not “rushing to the socialist left” let alone losing anyone’s mind.
Second, it’s not his job to tell us not to move to the left. Granted his real job got yanked away from him in the rudest way possible, but that doesn’t free him up to be a freelance private unofficial cop of all our politics. I doubt that anyone asked him for advice on which direction to rush in, and if anyone did that’s anyone’s problem, not ours.
Third, G-man doesn’t like the left; well knock me down with a 2 by 4. We know: the FBI thinks the left is demonic. That’s probably a big part of why we’re in this mess: all those decades of treating the left like a fatal highly contagious virus.
Fourth, “America’s great middle” my ass – that sounds like Trump crooning over the flag. There’s nothing especially great about the middle. Many lefty policies would be great for this country, and treating them as akin to a disease is old news and stupid.
Fifth…if it weren’t for Comey we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Sixth, it’s obnoxious (and, again, kind of Trumpish) to assume all the sense and balance and ethics are in the middle.
Seventh, the middle is way to the right of where the middle was ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. It’s not as if “the middle” is some kind of Platonic essence of immutable perfectness; it’s just a label, and a way of saying “don’t change anything.”
Eighth, we’re not “losing our minds.” That’s just rude. One election in one city isn’t “losing our minds.” Comey isn’t our daddy and we don’t need him telling us to get a shave and do our homework.
Ninth who even asked him?
I have a feeling I could go on this way indefinitely so I’ll just stop abruptly now.
“… not his job to tell us…”. “…freelance private cop of our politics”.
I agree with everything else you said Ophelia, but the parts quoted above are over the top. Mr. Comey is not telling anyone what to do. He is expressing an opinion as is his legal and ethical right.
His legal right, sure. His ethical right? Absolutely not. Comey burned his integrity to cinders when he broke professional protocol, in response to a skewed set of political priorities, to injure Clinton’s campaign, thus aiding Trump’s. Ethically, Comey needs to STFU at least until he figures out where he went wrong. And probably past that point, in deference to others with better judgment.
And those skewed political priorities: Comey was in a better position than most at the time to know who was manipulating them and how. In full knowledge of much that we in the public are only now learning, he did what he did anyway. No, it is not ethical for him to lead, or think himself qualified even to guide.
Another conservative telling lefties to not be on the left. Yawn.
This is one thing where I agree with PZ Myers, when the rightwing are essentially Donald Trump, the center is halfway to crazy town.
Centrism is not by default correct, in fact in some cases it can be worse than either extreme because a lot of the time it amounts to half-measures which then get used to discredit doing things properly.
All too often it is a means of showing token support for necessary reforms, without actually addressing the substance of those reforms.
Is he saying more than ‘don’t vote for another Jill Stein?’
Not that he has any moral height from which to say anything.
In my experience, it’s a form of virtue signaling. I’m better, because I’m not an extremist, because I don’t want to change everything, break everything, and take us into some radical extreme experiment where you and I would be sabotaged by women and minorities (or by Trumpistas).
It is a point of virtue with many of my white, male friends to announce that they are a “moderate”, a “centrist”, in the “middle”, because the fallacy of the golden mean is constantly at work. It is also lazy because you don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out which side, if either, is correct, and you can claim “nuance” without actually having any.
Ah yes, that’s a good point – it is virtue signaling. It can be other things too, as virtue signaling generally can, but it is that. It’s nearly always the left that’s accused of it, so it’s good to point it out when it’s the right.
Bruce @ 1 – well sure, I know that literally speaking he is only tweeting his opinion. But there are implications and overtones that the literal doesn’t capture. He expressed his opinion in a rather bossy de haut en bas way – that “please, please” especially, as if we were a grave danger to the republic and he were the desperate guardian angel trying to talk us back from the ledge. Plus he’s seven feet tall, a former prosecutor, a former Deputy (or Assistant?) Attorney General, a former FBI Director. Overtones.
But this is James Comey, the Democrats’ Beacon, the Sage of Democratic Strategy!
I know he has a reputation as a straight shooter (and a nifty note taker), but he can sit down.
An entirely unearned reputation, made to seem real mostly by the repetition of the phrase, “known to be a straight shooter,” in my opinion.
“Don’t play into the Trumpist’s hands!” shouted the man who, a week before the election, did just that.
Centrism is also highly relative. The set of political positions that would make you a “centrist” in the U.S. would make you a solid right-winger in, say, Canada, while Canadian centrists would be fairly solid liberals by U.S. standards. So taking pride in being “centrist” for the sake of being centrist implies either that you would actually adopt a different set of policy preferences if you lived in another country, or that by some strange coincidence, the center of the political spectrum in the country in which you live just happens to be the Platonic ideal position as well.
I mean, if you happen to believe in a set of views that makes you a centrist, fine. Many people would probably describe my politics that way. But I would never claim that my views are correct because they’re in the center, and I think it’s a little odd when others do. And I find most of the political discussion that fetishizes centrism qua centrism rather tedious — all that pining for the lost days of bipartisanship (read: the good old days before the parties finished realigning, when conservative Southern Democrats could team up with conservative Republicans for “bipartisan” conservative policies) and invoking of the golden mean fallacy.
The world in general and the United States in particular cannot afford the luxury of letting the November midterms be anything but a referendum on Trump. If the Dems absolutely must indulge their radical wing and chase unicorns, I would prefer they at least waited until such time as there were not a clear and present danger occupying the White House.
Strangely enough, that’s what a lot of people in the USA think…whatever is “center” in the US is “center” in reality because the US is center of the universe. I don’t know anyone who claims to be a centrist who could actually understand that their views would be conservative in other countries…or that they would have been conservative here once upon a time before the definition skewed so far right.
And I don’t actually agree with most of them that they are center…if you think Jordan Peterson is right on, you think women have brains that are evolved for housework and childrearing, and you think black Americans really aren’t quite as competent as white ones, you are not a centrist. You are a white supremacist who also happens to be misogynist, so stand up and own your reality. (And that is what one of my self-proclaimed “centrist” colleagues believes).
From an outsiders perspective… America is a deeply religious and socially conservative society with a strongly individualist yet authoritarian streak. While there are some apparent contradictions, those are resolved when one realises that culturally there are probably several Americas that overlay that more amorphous whole. This leads to pockets that differ from the whole and individual expression that differs as well. But there is little to refute that politically the description above fits best nationally.
Even Obama, whom I admire in many ways, was not all that different from Reagan in terms of real politik. I mean, yes, he sounded more erudite and considered and clearly had a bit more going on. But he was actually very right-wing, militaristic and authoritarian. The most left-wing President you’ve had during my lifetime would be off the charts right-wing in my country, not to mention over the top religious. We can go weeks or months without hearing a politician mention religion. Like the rest of the world, your politics have slid rightward since the 1980’s. The US ‘centre’ is not something I/we want a part of.
Jib Halyard @ 12 – what radical wing? What unicorns? What are you even talking about?
Rob, above – Yes, from an insider’s perspective too, depressingly enough.
#12
Funny how it is never the time for progressive candidates. Not now, because removing Trump is too important so just vote for ‘centrists’. Not during the presidential election, because the Republican dominance of the legislative branch will check a progressive president,and the image of progressive politics will be tarnished with this failure.
I’ve seen it time and time again, and my question is always: when is it time to vote for progressive values?
Holms @16 – yeah, convenient, isn’t it? It’s really just another way of saying, hey, you “special interest groups” (meaning anyone who believes in actual equality), if you just sit there and wait, sooner or later the white men who run the place will get around to giving you some rights. But if you push, you’ll just annoy them and then they’ll vote for Trump, and we’ll all have to suffer just because you wanted to be considered fully people and fully citizens. You’re being unreasonable.
It’s radical to be on the side of equality. At least according to Jib.
The New York Times has been very disappointing over the last couple of years on multiple fronts (obsessive coverage of Hilary’s emails, suck-up access journalism re Trump, hiring Bari Weiss), but man, is Michelle Goldberg a breath of fresh air on the editorial pages, and on this topic she just nailed it.