On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 04:17 PM, Richard Modiano wrote:

"There are no liberal Democrats any more"

I was not talking about Democrats. I was referring to people who are appalled at Trump's attack on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, his border concentration camps, caging children, etc. but who fail to draw the connection between these injustices and capitalist property relations. These are the kind of people who vote for the "lesser of two evils" but are NOT Democratic Party stalwarts.

The people you are describing are Democrats. That is, they walk and quack like "centrists," ie  ducks who are interested only in "God-given" bourgeois rights in the abstract, find Libertarianism daring and enticing, and who are 100% ready to support "compromise" when it comes to "socialist" nonsense like universal healthcare, free college, and all the other Bernie Sanders mildly social-democratic stuff.  Most of them experience sexual arousal when they hear the word "entrepreneur."  This is a social disease.

You will never make real liberals out of these smug bourgeois asswipes.  Furthermore, the nice-guy act in most cases is paper-thin--what they are for is gentrification and a tidy little investment portfolio and not being challenged in any serious way intellectually, politically, or otherwise.  They are "liberal" to the insignificant extent that they are because it gives them the right to be offended by violations of bourgeois decorum, which they detect everywhere because in reality most of them are mad as hell and as paranoid as Trump. In that, they go well beyond the limits of the "love me" liberal of the Sixties, who they will tell you was naive and immature and ill-versed in the stern necessities of the marketplace, which they now unreservedly embrace.  They are in love with virtue-signaling and smugness and the ineffable contours of their own expensively toned buttocks. They have friends at the Chase Manhattan.

It's perfectly possible to have a BLM sign on your tiny urban tree lawn and still be a Karen.  You can no more trust these fakers than you can a Trump republican--in most cases they are far more treacherous because, like Mack the Knife, they keep the messer hidden where nobody can see it until it's used to lethal effect/

They will support the Biden-Harris-Emanuel war on "socialism" right down to the property line. 

Of course you can have a nice chat with such people at cocktail parties.  So what?  

Real liberals are concerned from the start with social inequality as such and not as some bullshit godgiven individual rights issue.  Very few Americans post-Reagan can even grasp how this is possible.  That, not " engaging" with fake liberals, is the problem the Left faces.  

"Why can't we all just get along" is a fair question.  But there are good reasons why we can't.  All that post-Popular Front Kumbaya bullshit is dead and has become dangerous.