"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
I realize that in the Manichaean environment of modern politics, everybody's somebody's fascist or communist. Surely, however, people who make a point of commenting on politics would have a basic grasp of the viewpoints of those they consider their ideological foes, right?
Not so fast.
Jacobin is an explicitly socialist quarterly that sets itself up as a younger, hipper alternative to traditional, stodgy outlets of the American far Left like The Nation. Think Reason but for beard oil-using craft beer drinkers who prefer Das Kapital to Atlas Shrugged.
From where they're sitting, you can't slide a sheet of paper between the political positions of Joe Biden and, say, George H.W. Bush, so they greeted the recent inauguration with a cover spoofing the incoming administration and the general Democratic reaction to it with a bit of tongue-in-cheek Byzantine iconography.
You'd think that if depicting Obama and the Clintons as seraphim weren't enough of a giveaway that it was satirical mockery, the RQ-4 Global Hawk drones flanking them would be, but no. Plenty of commentators have spent so much time huffing their own side's farts in hermetically-sealed political bubbles that they seemed to think it was serious.
Tim Pool, citizen journalist. https://t.co/DoJi26j7IL
— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) January 21, 2021
(Including some I'd have thought would know better.)
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