Politics is a struggle for dominance

The controversy du jour is just another iteration of the same argument we've been having since the "dangerous people of the internet" began to challenge elite consensus media back in the early 2000s.  Politics is actually about real things that affect real people. Too much of the professional blathering about politics is done by detached upper class careerists who, at best, are indifferent to outcomes and at worst have a material interest in maintaining the power relationships of the status quo. Anything that challenges that status quo is deemed "uncivil" and therefore not how you're supposed to do politics. It's a sucker's proposition and it needs to be burned and buried.

Anyway, if you want to dive into it today, here's one point of entry.

Ignoring that politics is about dominance is therefore deeply dangerous as well as oblivious. You can’t escape the game by pretending it isn’t happening, you can only lose it. Republicans recognize that the aim of politics is to crush the other guy; Barack Obama spent eight years refusing to recognize this. There’s nothing noble about being too polite to fight for dominance; it just mean that the people you’re supposed to fight for will continue to be the ones dominated. In Heer’s pejorative use of “dominance politics” we can get a good insight into why Democrats are bad at politics: they actually seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that you’re supposed to be trying to win. In this worldview, compromise is a goal rather than a tactic, and it’s almost tawdry to say that you believe your side should win and the other side should lose.