U.S.: Centrist Democrats manufacture consent

Two passages from my reading today:

"The freakout among centrist Democrats is an expression of a deep, deep terror at the realization that regular people are starting to understand that the long-reining political paradigm does not represent them or their interest and are rapidly becoming open to alternatives. This is a very large threat to both their political power and their income. The commentators and pundits you’re no doubt seeing lose their minds have made an incredible living off peddling moderate political positions on behalf of the wealth class to anxious liberals and supposed independents. They’re hired constantly by the party and its stakeholders to do everything from give talks to strategize and make advertisements to going on corporate media to offer milquetoast opinions in order to manufacture consent. They get book deals, are invited to the wealth class’s shindigs, and are continually glandhanded into class solidarity. The Democratic Party, as a political representative and partner of the wealth class, is inextricably intertwined with these people and its purpose is their purpose.

Recently I published an article about the problem of the entrenched Democratic machine. An entrenched machine isn’t just reliant on stakeholders, it requires a superstructure that voices the party line and attempts to keep the base in check. This is why you are bombarded with “vote blue no matter who” rhetoric when it’s convenient and why it falls by the wayside when insurgent candidates emerge who better voice the desires of the base. This is why you are consistently fed article after article by corporate media about how “dangerous the Left is” while you’re also bombarded by pieces that normalize things like AI, flock cameras, anti-trans rhetoric, and the need for the party to “reach across the aisle” to fascists. When there aren’t alternatives - say, independent media or social media or insurgent candidates - you’re supposed to be convinced this is just the way things are."

— Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches Mailbag, August 17, 2026

"We should not bother to treat the arguments seriously. We should not behave as if transphobia is the bitter fruit of benign misunderstanding.

The mainstream, obscene contempt for trans people is no mystery. Americans may be bigoted but we are not imbeciles: we know that people fear what they do not understand, and we know that that fear can be harvested and manipulated for political gain. We know these things because we experience the fear and bigotry ourselves and we see them in our friends. Transphobia has been incubated on the center-left for at least as long as I’ve been reading what it has been printing. It has been proliferated for years by that great mirror of the vast American middle, The Atlantic which has been at the forefront of this “battle” since long before Trump announced his first campaign. And it is no coincidence that that organ continues to hector that Harris lost the election because Biden was too woke. “She talked about trans people too much” When? How I wish she had! “and about protecting immigrants” Did she? Did Biden? Somehow I can’t recall “and both of them bellowed with pride repeatedly that Harris was a black woman running for the highest office in the land” Right?? If we’re going to get slashed for championing the vulnerable I wish we could at least be guilty of the courage.

The Atlantic and its fellows in the middle package anti-trans sentiment in prettier packaging than Trumpites. The center left doesn’t want to be brave, it wants to be seemly. Bigotry is less vile when it is seemly. That is how much of America likes its hates. And we have so many of them. They are what propelled the unseemly hate to high office: Trump did not swell his base, he merely failed to ignite the fury of the opposition. The fat, comfortable middle refused to turn out and vote because the fat, comfortable middle has been fed on seemly hatreds.

The middle does not express its hates the way Trump does but, well, don’t they basically agree? After all, when we press them on it, the thing they most fear from Trump seems to be his unseemly manner. They don’t like a scene, and the scene is what they will spend the next four years screeching about while trans children grow fearful."

— Celeste Marcus, CIS Or Subhuman, Liberties Journal, November 2024

Also:

I wrote this because most journalists facing this pressure can’t. The paper we count on to check authoritarianism spiked an investigation into the Democratic Party because the party’s lawyers threatened to sue. Holding authoritarians accountable starts with holding your own side accountable.

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— Adam Bonica (@adambonica.bsky.social) August 17, 2026 at 11:05 AM