Largely agree with all of this, and think this sentence is brilliant:
The so-called “two-party system” is really just one corporate party with two different functions: the Republican party which blatantly advances plutocratic interests, and the Democratic party which hijacks any revolutionary movement against those interests and diverts it back into less obvious establishment loyalism.
There are just two areas where I do have to take issue with you. The first is the needless profanity in the title. At this point, profanity doesn’t actually shock or surprise anyone. A writer as talented as you are doesn’t need to rely on that crutch, and it does no more than signal vulgarity and bad taste.
The other, more substantive area where I’ll take issue with you is in your giving credence to the grotesque and repeatedly rebutted nonsense of #BlackLivesMatter, viz., that we are living in some sort of police state that disproportionately does violence to blacks. To be clear, I believe the war on drugs is a big mistake and also believe wholeheartedly that people should have the freedom to be idiots, and the rest of us should get to profit off of their idiocy through tax revenue made off of drug sales rather than wasting tons of tax revenue on the legal and penal systems that have to exist to deal with these people in the current state of things. But, when it comes to the specific issue of police violence against blacks, the Vanity Fair article you cite — the same one everyone on that side of the issue seems to cite — is full of holes (most notably, downplaying and misrepresenting the critical Roland Fryer study), but easier than discussing the holes one by one is to refer you to this detailed analysis of the issue by David Shuey. For anyone who wants a briefer exposition about why the specific notion that there’s an epidemic of cops killing blacks is off base, I’ve done that for you here.
Because I know from having read your stuff, Caitlin, that you’re open-minded and independent-minded (a mindset I share) and don’t just say baaa like a good sheep to the tune of any party orthodoxy, I implore you to familiarize yourself with the proof that no epidemic of anti-black police violence is actually going on, and that this story is largely a media-manipulated concoction being used by the corporate mainstream media to drum up black and other minority support for the Democratic Party’s corporatist agenda.
