Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Excellent description of the Radical Chic

It's all about posturing. As this article On Becoming Anti-Bernie describes:
That led me to more research. I concluded that the fact that Sanders only got three bills through Congress (two of which were for naming post offices) wasn’t the only meaningful measure, so I looked at the legislation he introduced during his senate career. It turns out that, every year, year after year, he introduced the same legislation to make a point, and no one else ever seems to have signed on to it. To me, this looked like showmanship rather than governance — an exercise designed to highlight his own support for a very progressive agenda. The hard work is to draft a bill that your co-legislators can get behind, in the political climate that exists and in the place where you work. I concluded that Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives.
That's why I came to despise the Radical Chic, best exemplified by Nation contributors Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone (married to each other) - they are all radical posturing and holier-than-thou attitude - and reveal themselves to be incredible hypocrites in the process. Bernie Sanders with his pristine do-nothing progressivism is tailor-made for the utter uselessness of Henwood and Featherstone.

Actually uselessness is giving them too much credit - they consistently attack feminists if they don't think they're impoverished and humble enough, as "lean-in feminists" or "bourgeois feminists." 

Radical Chic hypocrites Henwood and Featherstone are absolutely contemptible and I will not subscribe to The Nation as long as it publishes them.