what frustrates me about the interminable conversation about the "lesser evil" and "do you really want Trump to win" isn& #39;t just that candidates like Biden are precisely what lesser evil politics gets you, it& #39;s that people ignore the way neoliberal hegemony *works*

what happens in country after country is that the right-wing bogeymen come to power and do the initial demolition work, then the center-left comes to power and rebuilds the new system to be more stable, thus cementing that demolition

the latter isn& #39;t just an ineffective or insufficient response to the former, it& #39;s an integral part of the same movement! it& #39;s not like patching a hole in the dike while awaiting more substantial repairs, it& #39;s putting a cement ring around it so it can& #39;t be resealed

when Obama and other Dem functionaries praise Reagan or GWB, they& #39;re not just engaged in a process of historical forgetting, they& #39;re acknowledging their own place in a shared lineage

the apparent hostility between the two wings of neoliberalism is real, but it& #39;s more like two Viking chieftains squabbling over who gets to lead the raiding party rather than a principled disagreement about whether monasteries should be sacked