On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 01:42 PM, Richard Modiano wrote:

"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."

The people I have in mind are fellow workers, real flesh and blood humans that I see on the job, not the abstractions you are describing. Unless you are claiming psychic powers you have NO idea who these people are. Your generalizations may apply to some generic mass but they do not apply to the people I know.

Your friends, eh?  And of course you are a worker and anyone who calls your bluff is a mere "abstraction" and not a worker. How convenient. But on your thin evidence, this little clique of yours are concerned only with bourgeois rights and with nothing more concrete. That's what I call abstract. But who am I to contest the tenets of revealed religion?

I also am a worker--it's laughably arrogant, though very revealing, for you to claim sole title to workerhood--and my assertions are based on hours of direct contact with and conversations with living human beings as well as serious reading and hours of study--not on the self-referential murmurings of a mutual-admiration society.  

I repeat--real liberals, like Bernie Sanders, begin with a profound appreciation of economic and political inequality and not with the moral abstractions about god-given rights that the vast majority of pseudoliberal Biden supporters are offering up.  Then they go all wrong. But Sanders and AOC differ sharply with the facile rights-mongering of most Biden supporters, who will never stop wanting to have their cake and eat it too and who mostly pursue their phony liberalism insincerely. Real American liberalism in the FDR-AOC-Sanders sense is an endangered species that Biden will do his best to eliminate as he pursues the chimerical and politically disastrous war on the left that is at present his sole policy position apart from a possibly serious attempt to resolve the pandemic. 

Considering the imminent availability of more than one effective vaccine, the latter should not be outwith the capacities even of a reactionary neoliberal government if it at least understands the rudiments of actual governance.  Even Bush Jr. could have managed it with a little help from Poppy.

The election of Biden is a four-alarm calamity for the traditional semi-social-democratic American liberal--a species barely represented last week in McPherson Square or Lafayette Square.  More importantly, it is a disaster also for American socialism.  Whoever does not pivot immediately to all-in resistance against the Biden abomination is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Of course, there is "liberal" in the "neoliberal" and "classic liberal" sense.   Perhaps that's what you and your ragged-trousered apostles have in mind.