NO NORMAL PERSON WANTS WHAT CAPITALISTS ARE FORCE-FEEDING US, EVEN IF MARIE GLUESENKAMP PEREZ THINKS WE DO

Republican fascism is on the march, so, naturally, it's time for The New York Times to publish yet another profile of Democrat-bashing, self-mythologizing rural congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. This is the fourth major piece about Gluesenkamp Perez to appear in the Times in less than two years, following a Magazine profile in July 2024, an Annie Karni interview immediately after the 2024 election, and a podcast appearance with Ezra Klein last May. As I noted at the time, even Klein was at times put off by Perez, specifically by her contempt for liberal protestors who were decrying human rights abuses by the Trump administration.

(Her point was that liberals should be focused on issues critical to rural Americans and not get worked up about immigrants being shipped off to an El Salvadoran torture prison without due process. By contrast, she had nothing but nice things to say about Trump supporters who fixated on Hunter Biden.)

The current piece is a typical liberal-media love song to rural Volk, written by ... um, a Vanity Fair writer names James Pogue who somehow thinks he's become one of the Volk because he writes about them and drives his own big-ass truck. Here's the photo Pogue uses on the splash page of his website:

Come and take it, liberal man!

Gluesenkamp Perez is best known as a champion of "right to repair," which she and Pogue present as, somehow, the central economic and cultural issue of our time, one that separates ordinary icky liberals from, you know, normal people.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

For the past half-century, the promise of affordable mass consumption has been the central justification for a host of changes that reshaped America as we know it, driving inequality, disrupting life in whole regions and contributing to a pervasive feeling that we’ve been reduced to “hapless consumers,” as Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez put it to me, describing what she calls the “high cost of cheap goods.”

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This reckoning has been central to the MAGA movement. The Trump administration’s mass deportations and tariffs are the twin pillars of an attempt to create an economic system governed not by gross domestic product data and consumer spending, but by conservative values and nationalist geostrategic ends. Kids don’t “need 37 dolls,” Mr. Trump has said. They should have “three dolls or four.”

Democrats have avoided a reckoning of their own. Their party remains defined by faith in the power of data and expert knowledge, and this has made it difficult for Democrats to really understand criticisms of a system that has brought many Americans a vast bounty of easily measured material wealth. It’s hard to entertain criticisms of the liberal technocratic order when you’re trying to defend it against a populist insurrection.

There's so much bullshit here it's hard to know where to start. First, does Pogue seriously believe that capitalism as we know it -- even cheap-goods capitalism -- would collapse if consumers are allowed to repair their own washer-dryers? The fat cats would lick their wounds and make money the billion other ways they're allowed to.

And does Pogue seriously believe that President Trump's "37 dolls" remark was seen by MAGA voters as a statement of shared values? Does Pogue literally not understand that MAGA simply pretended that Trump didn't say that, because it's unthinkable that Daddy would be so mean to his children?

But the group libel here is that Democrats -- meaning, presumably, rank-and-file Democrats as well as Democrats in D.C. -- want the uglier aspects of 21st-century capitalism because we're all invested in elitism. Writers like Pogue believe that every Democrat is a froufrou elitist. They're as oblivious to ordinary Democrats -- let's take as an example the late Renee Good, who we know never attended a cocktail party with Jamie Dimon -- as they think we are to rural Americans. Yes, ordinary Democrats sometimes vote for corporatist Democratic candidates, but always against unabashedly corporatist Republicans, because the Democrats are better on other issues and at least hint at support for programs that limit capitalism's cruelty.

Do rank-and-file Democrats want capitalists to lock everyone's consumer products? Of course not. No one wants that except the bastards who profit from it.

WASHINGTON D.C. (July 8, 2025) – According to a new national poll, more than 83% of Americans support the REPAIR Act (H.R 1566, S. 1379), which would create a national vehicle right-to-repair law, ensuring consumers’ right to choose how and where they fix their vehicles; 77% support the SMART Act, which would amend patent laws to give consumers more vehicle repair choices....

According to the poll conducted by The Tarrance Group, and commissioned by the CAR Coalition, support for vehicle right to repair is strongly bipartisan, with 84% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats supporting the REPAIR Act....

Other key findings from the survey:

* 98% of respondents said it is important to them to be able to choose where they get their car repaired.
* 89% said car owners should be able to access their own vehicle data.
* 86% of Trump voters and 83% of Harris voters support the REPAIR Act.
* 78% said independent repair shops should have access to vehicle data for repairs.
* 72% said automakers should be barred from restricting data access.

And as it turns out, five states have passed electronics right to repair legislation. Want to guess which ones? New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado -- all blue states.

Gluesenkamp Perez's central idea is massively popular -- but she needs us to believe that she's a pariah in her party for backing it, because being a Democrat-basher is central to her brand. It might get her reelected again. But it's a lie.