We can’t even start a conversation about reckoning until liberals stop buying Fauci bobble head dolls. No one has admitted error.

The original sin was Obama's choice to help foreclose on tens of millions and lie about it. This is documented in @rehundt's "A Crisis Wasted." To succeed Obama had to kill the listening ability of Dems, aka eliminate bringers of bad news. So now they can't even see error.

The systematic dishonesty was explicit, as many including Elizabeth Warren and Neil Barofsky noted. But what hasn't been noted is that Dems and progressives then shaped their entire institutional makeup around avoiding bad news. It's why we couldn't see Obamacare sucked.

It's why we couldn't see RBG was a corporate goon, and instead built up an entirely fake persona around her. It's why we laud Fauci, even though he downplayed Covid at first and then sought crazy amounts of unreasonable control and called himself 'science.'

It's why we couldn't see what China was doing, or why the working class was turning against globalization, even as Obama was pushing the TPP. We couldn't see Trump's arguments about trade.

That's all just racism. No, in fact, it was just our inability to listen.

The Civil Rights era was one of the most important and morally significant movements in U.S. history. But in the late 1970s, it took a neoliberal turn as well and gradually ossified into human resource divisions and obscure academic turf fights. We can't see this either.

There's a long list. Obama Solicitor General Neal Katyal is an MSNBC contributor and New Yorker writer. He also reps J&J in a proceeding to avoid liability for putting asbestos in talc marketed to black women. Progressives just don't know about that.

#Resistance hero Andy Slavitt, who ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under Obama and was temporary Covid star, made his money running a company that defrauded the government through billing fraud. www.fiercehealthcare.com/antifraud/cms-administrator-nominee-andy-slavitt-headed-company-at-center-bi...

I'm a Democrat because Democratic policies are still better than GOP policies. The right is delusional about what their own leaders will and are doing. But the divide between being in touch with voters and the political machinery of Dems has never been wider. We can't listen.

A lot of progressives believe what I believe, but they can't say it publicly. And that's the problem with progressive/Dem machinery. We have built a political operation that actively suppressed obvious truths.

I would note the only exceptions are in antitrust and trade policy, but that's because anti-monopolists built our ideology in explicit opposition to Obama's Too Big to Fail framework while fair traders did the same against Bill Clinton's globalization framework.

After the midterms, 'soul-searching' should not devolve into centrists vs progressives. Neither allows honest discourse.

We have to change who has power in America. That starts with learning to listen again.

I wrote this up in a number of places. Here's one. www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/matt-stoller-dont-blame-capitalism/