Jingszo !

The Paradox of Tolerance in a nutshell. When you give fascists an inch, they take a mile.

Liberals have spent the last 40 years trying to triangulate between moderate amounts of social murder and more extremist policy, because they have been bullied into believing the Middle Way is how you win elections. As the electorate has grown more polarized, they've adopted a strategy of begging reactionaries for their votes while they scream at progressives for failing to get in line and accept compromise.

What we're seeing among younger and more modern liberals has been its own brand of Blue MAGA

To his credit, Khanna has been preparing for this moment for years, doggedly selling a left-wing answer to MAGA populism that he has dubbed “progressive capitalism,” or more recently, “economic patriotism” (or sometimes, half-jokingly, “blue MAGA”). Since 2016, Khanna has made repeated visits to MAGA districts like Warren, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to field-test his big idea: investing billions of federal dollars in American tech and steel companies to build new factories and create jobs in middle America, without trade wars and demagoguery. Democrats, Khanna argues, need to offer “a bold economic transformation of rebuilding this country, rebuilding our industrial base, using technology to have massive advances in society—those are all things that we didn’t do, and we didn’t have a policy, we didn’t have the grand vision.”

Khanna is an unlikely populist: His California district covers Silicon Valley and includes many of the most powerful tech companies in the world, including Apple and Nvidia. As Democrats’ self-styled tech whisperer, he advertises his friendships with Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, and breaks with party orthodoxy on issues important to tech bros like “free speech,” the civic value of X.com, the right of TikTok to operate in the US, and the virtues of Bitcoin. At Pete’s Diner he offers a generous interpretation of Musk’s sure-seemed-like-a-Nazi salute at a Trump rally. “It’s a combination of making clear that any gesture like that is something to be avoided,” says Khanna, a trained lawyer, “while also giving people the benefit of the doubt about what they’re saying they’re doing.”

Khanna has unlikely fans on the right, most famously Steve Bannon, one of Trumpism’s primary architects, who singles Khanna out as a favorite Democrat who speaks the same populist language that he does. “Man, what an uphill fight he’s got,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast after Khanna became the sole Democrat to stand up and applaud when Trump spotlighted a 13-year-old boy with brain cancer during a congressional speech in March.

The Friday after we meet at the diner, Khanna appears on Real Time With Bill Maher and gets steamrolled by the splenetic ESPN host Stephen A. Smith, who excoriates Democrats as out of touch and unable to compete in the spectacle-style politics of the Trump age. Khanna counters, “Do we have to have the celebrity president? Is it all about coolness?”

Maher practically laughs him out of the studio: “That horse has left the barn,” he says sourly.

There's a strain of Democrat that is once again adopting the strategies of the Republican Party - just as they did under Clinton and Obama in the wake of the Reagan/Bush Era - under the cover of "sensible moderation". More privatization, more rhetorical economic populism (without any of the materialist policy to make it a reality), more jingoist xenophobia, more kowtowing to the plutocrats - all in hopes of branding liberalism as Republican Lite once again.