honestly I don’t understand what the word liberalism means to people these days either
Haha
To the left it refers to neoliberalism, which is basically a center-right thing. To the right it refers to anything other than far-right extremism.
The right uses it as an entry point to illuminati theory and antisemitism. The left, for do-nothing centrism and a priority for capital over human rights. It is in the former sense that lattes and California art schools are invoked.
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Yeah, I struggle with that because I spent significant energy in my teens and twenties in the struggle to reclaim its FDR-era American usage, and to see a self-identification become universally loathed is…something
The european-derived meaning is more logically coherent but I can’t stop myself from flinching everytime I read it from the left
Thank Bill and Hill for changing the language. Anything associated with them goes straight in the dumpster, however much merit it may have had before they came around.
The history as I understand it (gosh we’re off topic now) is that left-leaning Democratic politicians started avoiding ‘liberal’ as a self-appellation in the '80s (this is the same era as the Great Sort of conservative Democratics into the Republican party and vice-versa, precipitated by the civil rights era), it was exacerbated by right-wing talk radio and its effect on mainstream culture in the late-80s, early-90s, so that by the early Bush years left-leaning Democratics had moved to ‘progressive’ as a label. The 2002-2006 blog movement put a lot of work into reclaiming liberal and the effect that Netroots Nation had on the 2008 Congress led to it being a normal Democratic label again. To change again in 2016 or so, when the Sen. Sanders-associated left tries to define itself against the mainstream Democratic party.
if it helps you can try gradually coming to loathe a lot of the cultural figures associated with that era, like the NPR alums now trying to corporatize podcasting, that helps
oh I incorporated that back in the 2000 election
gosh then I’m just not sure what you’re missing
maybe it’s living in “no-we-can-do-a-good-job-honest” seattle this long
The problem is that the Democratic Party as reformed by Bill in the '90s and populated by Hill in the last couple decades is a center-right group, so anything they claim as a label is gonna be toxic to people who… like, want to have a standard of living in a habitable world.
It’s the (overdetermined) cultural attachment to political writing through academics and my personal tendencies towards group consensus combined with my experience in Democratic party politics; I’m concerned with adjusting the preconditions for success and understanding structural failures. Statement’s like @aderack’s are incomprehensible to my understanding of the people that make up the Democratic party and their goals. I’m immersed in institutional and leadership failure in my work and school and that colors my understanding of how the Democratic party works. I’m well aware of the limitations of my suburban place of work both in the art it can produce and the extent that its very strong Democratic affiliation can reach on areas like, oh, say, “good schools” and any meaningful economic and social justice. (we’re quite off topic from cartoons now, I’m sorry)
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I just don’t see what good anyone’s well-meaning effort is supposed to be if it’s all directed toward this vaguely communal we-found-out-how-to-be-corporate-on-their-terms-and-feel-good-about-it post-80s-more-relieved-than-triumphant Gen X mindset that took the death of the labour movement pretty much for granted and invested virtually all of its political energy and thought into Obama, who accomplished basically nothing. like, the American political era for which you retain that fondness could not be more mothballed than it is right now. I think you can accept that moving forward and still have a tendency toward group consensus!
can’t hold on to having been ahead of your time forever
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wait since when is calarts style supposed to be different from disney style, calarts is just a gatekeeping institution for work in the animation industry pretty much set up by disney to keep the poors out of animation.
Rebecca Sugar didn’t even go to calarts, do words not mean things?
Yes, exactly. Everything in that, both in detail and implication.
it can still be a recognizable aesthetic even if its provenance isn’t so literal! you can have aesthetic critique and structural critique separately at the same time even though it’s hard and people frequently have a knee-jerk reaction to diminishing the structural critique by association! I’m not willing to have the mere existence of reactionaries weight my intuitively liking or not liking or grouping or not grouping my own perception!
Like, Butch Hartman, one of the most prominent examples of a far-right hyper-conservative cartoonist is a calarts alum.
look, lots of words are tainted. my anecdotal support for the judgment I am attempting to pass is that two guys from my high school both went to cal arts and they both exclusively draw stuff that looks like invader zim b-roll
it’s a term mostly pushed now by reactionaries and youtube clickbaiters (aka reactionaries) about modern cartoons that, surprise, have an inclusive/progressive bent
this is the beanmouth image i was referencing
It’s not even a fair take since all of those cartoons are to varying degrees designed to have a flexible style that can be modified from artist to artist, so in practice you get all these wildly different “off-model” drawings that these exact same people also whine about. and these images are not official pieces of art and were edited to look more similar lol
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I’m sure that Rush Limbaugh drinks coffee with steamed milk, also.
I’ll also mention for the sake of being positive about modern animation that, as someone who has bad taste in outwardly progressive aesthetics (I read houellebecq to calm down), I am constantly charmed by the tonal approach of 2017 ducktales, which I think is made by a lot of the same artists who are usually tarred with this brush and is very good and deliberate about twiddling its bits to avoid being too similar to this stuff (even though it features the vocal talents of loathsome liberal lin manuel miranda), so I’m not convinced that the parts of the bad faith critique that come closer to truth can’t be overcome with effort that is in fact missing in some cases (no doubt for lack of resources).