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i honestly don't see a way around the interminable bad-faith humourless assholery. we have to start invalidating it. i think we either flat out ignore it, or just go straight through it

But, instead, we're going to get a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul austerity policy and the attendant authoritarian measures to keep Peter under control.

The Tories have vacated their position as the default party of UK govt, and - more importantly - Toryism is hanging by a thread as the default politics of UK governance. It really is there for the taking, the politics of the labour movement as the default politics of UK governance.

Burnham would win that fight handily if he had the intention and wit to pick it, but I sincerely doubt he has.

The kicker is, this isn't 2017. Legacy politics is far far weaker, Burnham would be a much stronger opponent than Corbyn (who still made a good fist of it), and there's the thumping great commons majority too.

There's also party management. There's not many Labour right MPs with better jobs available to them, but there are plenty more that would be at their side unless their positions as Labour MPs were threatened - 3-line whips, whip suspension/withdrawal, the full playbook Starmer used against the left.

Part of picking and defining that fight has to be to create clear water between a new politics and legacy politics, else it just looks like the usual personality pantomime. That aligns with what it would take to win back support, and with being bold enough to keep the govt platformed above the fray.

Even the smallest meaningful step away from austerity would provoke a Corbyn era jumping of the shark from legacy media etc, and if that's not a fight that's explicitly picked and defined, legacy media and aligned politicians would get the strategic advantage of defining that fight.

The decision tree goes like this:

I would love for Burnham to take a different course, but his strategic decision tree is just too stark for the "so-called soft-left" to stomach (I was active in the party during the Corbyn years, so I have a good handle on what that dynamic in the party is like).

New Labour had the Neoliberal/Thatcherite/Reaganomics magic money tree that both caused and was burnt to ash by the 2008 financial crisis. Austerity economics requires authoritarian measures to control discontent, lest it threatens the interests of concentrated wealth and power.

Indeed, I wrote this thread on what I see as the similarity between GC type views and Muskian white supremacy. It also pertains to my views on the difference between politics of masked cruelty playing to an audience of cowardice, and politics of unmasked cruelty playing to an audience of malice.

How does one convince someone that they have potency, and that that potency lies with our common humanity, not with their most destructive feelings?

The lesson, I think, regards how we might act to facilitate impotence rationalisations falling away in favour of the resolution of shame, rather than being traded for protection rationalisations.

I don't think the lesson here is really about those that have fallen into protection rationalisations, they're simply not needed to gain consensus for a politics that would genuinely - without the falsehoods of rationalisations - strive to protect the rights of all human beings as human beings.

This is the psychology of malice, and malice knows no balance, knows no bounds. It corrodes our common humanity through its practice. It becomes the instinctual response within the remit of a relevant protection rationalisation, replacing the corrective potential of shame.

A rationalisation that regards the protection of something - "western culture", "women" - works differently. The shame isn't even acknowledged, the shameful acts are instead recast as laudable. Those that are harmed are deemed unworthy of protection, even deserving of harm.

Cowardice is though - at least - a balance. If the comfort offered declines - as we see, for example, with the cost of living/affordability crisis - or the shame becomes too great - the genocide, ICE, Epstein, etc etc - the potency of the situation becomes more difficult to rationalise away.

There's an obvious comfort in feeling aligned to power, allowing such rationalisations to align us to power despite the shameful acts of that power, and taking our comfort over what we feel to be right is the deal that cowardice offers.

Typical rationalisations of the old "centrist" politics tended to be what we might call "impotence rationalisations". "Tough choices", just "the way of the world", things are "more complicated than that". The shame is acknowledged, but the ability to resolve it is rationalised away.