It is five days after new years, days away from the Republican-fascist take over the entire Congress, they have the Supreme Court and I read somewhere that the tabloid soothsayers are predicting Jeb Bush will win the presidency in 2016. I'm feeling a lot like it's 1932 and we're in central Europe. And yet, to read the major organs of the left, online, you'd think that we had another election to piss away on the pipe dreams of the snobs who love insulting just that margin of voters who could make all the difference in preventing the total disaster that we are already experiencing. I can tell you, on January 1st, 1964 or, even more so 1965 there is no one who would have predicted what happened in the fifty years between the Johnson landslide and the ensuing half-century of the left losing everything, stupidly, absurdly, arrogantly and, most of all irresponsibly.
1. The left will never win politically until it recovers an entirely unfashionable sense of morality, such things as valuing its core values and their political success more than they do in crouching in in a cowardly insistence that all we want is a level playing field and the theoretical ability to be heard because, you know, 1st amendment. Unless a number of the idols, sacred to the pseudo-left are toppled, things like media deregulation, the permission of the media to lie in support of corporate fascism, it will get worse. The fact is that those are the tools that the Republican-fascists have used to destroy progress and they were handed them by the pudding-headed legal theories of ivy tower liberals of the past.
2. The left will never win politically until we finally dump the pseudo-left, the people who will never win because they care more about reliving some fantasy of the leftist hopeless cause which was never more than a variation of what produced fascism, Nazism, etc. It is an absurd romance about the nonexistent which will never happen. What will have to go? I am sorry, but things like the folks who dutifully attend The Left Forum and those who carry the flame for Emma Goldman and other paragons of impractical, romantic, impossible fantasy futures some of which no rational person with a respect for reality would have ever believed could happen.
3. The left will find any possibility of winning from people more interested in practical success than in any kind of "theory". So, no one who follows George Lakoff or, help us, Peter Singer or (insert the names of scores of other "theorists) will be involved. In fact, any group of individual who brings up theorists and their theories are probably good people to avoid like the plague. They ARE the plague to political success of a real left. Anyone who invokes neo-Darwinism, neo-Marxism, is a neo-Trotskyist or other ist or ism is worse than your regular theorist, they're hopeless true believers in things that are deadly to the left.
4. If the billionaires were going to save the left it would have happened already.
They won't. If any of them wants to prove me wrong, what's keeping them from doing it? Not lack of funds.
5. Move-On, Occupy, The Green Party, "third parties", independent candidates etc. would have produced something by now if they were going to. They won't.
6. And I won't bother with the media, old or "new" and online.
Actually few of these are predictions, as such but I predict that if there is ever a left which succeeds politically, it will be in line with most of the above if not all of it. The left we've got now is just proposing to do more of the same that has gotten us where we are now. They are the embodiment of the people who keep doing the same thing expecting the results to be different.
Update: Someone didn't like me including the media in my list of what won't save us. I will write more on that later today. RMJ comments that maybe we need a good dose of Reinhold Niebuhr. It's an excellent prescription. The great Black Liberation Theologian, James Cone recommended that George W. Bush read The Irony of American History. I think that the left could do with a good, serious reading of it as well. Perhaps I should change the name of my blog to The Irony of Leftist History, which abounds in irony and much more, a basic misunderstanding of the reason for the left to exist and what any real left must consist of and what it can't be and still remain any kind of left which is an alternative to the far right. Ironically, it consists largely of things which the academic and "left" left have left behind as unscientific and unfashionable for things such as Marxism, anarchism, etc. What the "left", which I call the pseudo-left has left behind are things like democracy and, even more basically, moral obligations, without which, equally assumed, the exercise of rights becomes an unequal privilege of those with power at the expense of those without power.
The rejection of moral obligations, equally assumed. are the basis of that abandonment of the real program of the left by the left. And we were led there by those either raised in privilege or those who had privilege as an achievable aspiration. They chose their own "enlightened" self interest over assuming their burden of moral obligations. That is the cross which, if not taken up, the entire program of the left is perverted and turned into a variant on the right, which is also based in a libertarian stand when it comes to the rejection of moral obligations while championing rights, which will, then, be a privilege enjoyed by those with power and their families. The biggest irony of the elite and academic left is that we are now enjoying the fruit of their conception of civil liberties, which was an easy sell to the right because it was never at odds with their self interested program. It was a boon to them.
As an example, it was the sacred ACLU paved the way for the disaster this country is about to enter with its program of civil liberties cases. One of my key insights in the past year came with the fiftieth anniversary of the Sullivan decision, which gave media a permission to lie without any danger to themselves. The primary victim of that were liberals and liberal politicians. It was that great organ of establishment liberalism, the New York Times which contested and won that decision, they bragged about being the ones who got the right to lie established in law. That it was also the New York Times which did so much to lie the United States into invading Iraq as well is hardly a surprise. The generation at the Times who did that grew up and came of age during the era of costless lies that their parent generation bought for them.
That date, fifty years ago, marked the peak of of achievement of the left in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Acts, major civil rights laws and many other things. As I've recently mentioned, it was a mere four years after that when Richard Nixon, supported by the media, narrowly won the election and began the process of weakening and destroying the real left and its achievements, a process which continues down till today when it is a Democratic president who has constantly talked about putting Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table. That Medicaid, a program for the weakest and least among us, was already on the table, along with the welfare that the previous Democrat, Bill Clinton traded away while getting NAFTA, only adds to what I've said in this update. There were, of course, other things going on, the war in Vietnam (the Harvard boys war) and the advantage taken by Nixon of the backlash against the civil rights progress. But if the left was not, as well, enabling the privileged and was appealing to and assisting the far larger body of poor and oppressed working people it would have survived and very possibly prevailed. It didn't, but you've heard me on the disaster that conceit and snobbery has brought to us many times before. I am sorry to say it's a topic that is always topical as the best and the brightest seem unable to learn from that enormous mistake.
4. If the billionaires were going to save the left it would have happened already.
They won't. If any of them wants to prove me wrong, what's keeping them from doing it? Not lack of funds.
5. Move-On, Occupy, The Green Party, "third parties", independent candidates etc. would have produced something by now if they were going to. They won't.
6. And I won't bother with the media, old or "new" and online.
Actually few of these are predictions, as such but I predict that if there is ever a left which succeeds politically, it will be in line with most of the above if not all of it. The left we've got now is just proposing to do more of the same that has gotten us where we are now. They are the embodiment of the people who keep doing the same thing expecting the results to be different.
Update: Someone didn't like me including the media in my list of what won't save us. I will write more on that later today. RMJ comments that maybe we need a good dose of Reinhold Niebuhr. It's an excellent prescription. The great Black Liberation Theologian, James Cone recommended that George W. Bush read The Irony of American History. I think that the left could do with a good, serious reading of it as well. Perhaps I should change the name of my blog to The Irony of Leftist History, which abounds in irony and much more, a basic misunderstanding of the reason for the left to exist and what any real left must consist of and what it can't be and still remain any kind of left which is an alternative to the far right. Ironically, it consists largely of things which the academic and "left" left have left behind as unscientific and unfashionable for things such as Marxism, anarchism, etc. What the "left", which I call the pseudo-left has left behind are things like democracy and, even more basically, moral obligations, without which, equally assumed, the exercise of rights becomes an unequal privilege of those with power at the expense of those without power.
The rejection of moral obligations, equally assumed. are the basis of that abandonment of the real program of the left by the left. And we were led there by those either raised in privilege or those who had privilege as an achievable aspiration. They chose their own "enlightened" self interest over assuming their burden of moral obligations. That is the cross which, if not taken up, the entire program of the left is perverted and turned into a variant on the right, which is also based in a libertarian stand when it comes to the rejection of moral obligations while championing rights, which will, then, be a privilege enjoyed by those with power and their families. The biggest irony of the elite and academic left is that we are now enjoying the fruit of their conception of civil liberties, which was an easy sell to the right because it was never at odds with their self interested program. It was a boon to them.
As an example, it was the sacred ACLU paved the way for the disaster this country is about to enter with its program of civil liberties cases. One of my key insights in the past year came with the fiftieth anniversary of the Sullivan decision, which gave media a permission to lie without any danger to themselves. The primary victim of that were liberals and liberal politicians. It was that great organ of establishment liberalism, the New York Times which contested and won that decision, they bragged about being the ones who got the right to lie established in law. That it was also the New York Times which did so much to lie the United States into invading Iraq as well is hardly a surprise. The generation at the Times who did that grew up and came of age during the era of costless lies that their parent generation bought for them.
That date, fifty years ago, marked the peak of of achievement of the left in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Acts, major civil rights laws and many other things. As I've recently mentioned, it was a mere four years after that when Richard Nixon, supported by the media, narrowly won the election and began the process of weakening and destroying the real left and its achievements, a process which continues down till today when it is a Democratic president who has constantly talked about putting Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table. That Medicaid, a program for the weakest and least among us, was already on the table, along with the welfare that the previous Democrat, Bill Clinton traded away while getting NAFTA, only adds to what I've said in this update. There were, of course, other things going on, the war in Vietnam (the Harvard boys war) and the advantage taken by Nixon of the backlash against the civil rights progress. But if the left was not, as well, enabling the privileged and was appealing to and assisting the far larger body of poor and oppressed working people it would have survived and very possibly prevailed. It didn't, but you've heard me on the disaster that conceit and snobbery has brought to us many times before. I am sorry to say it's a topic that is always topical as the best and the brightest seem unable to learn from that enormous mistake.
You're making me think we need a good dose of Niebuhr.
ReplyDeleteAgain.
"4. If the billionaires were going to save the left it would have happened already.
ReplyDeleteThey won't. If any of them wants to prove me wrong, what's keeping them from doing it? Not lack of funds."
Nelson Hunt poured millions into his pet causes some 30 years ago.
Anybody even remember what he spent it on?
In the end, money is not the ultimate cause everyone wants to think it is.