Not All The Insanity Comes From New York Media And East-Coast Academics

I am about convinced that the majority of those who operate as left of center surrounding San Francisco bay are entirely nuts,  I read the article by Michael Lerner at Salon this morning and it left me trying to remember a leftist from the San Francisco, Berkeley area who is not clearly living in a fantasy world.   Thinking about what I read from them and in magazines from that area, I'm not able to put together a list.

Lerner, who I have respected in the past, has a luantic proposal that what Bernie Sanders needs to do to keep Hillary Clinton from ruling as a monster is to start a sort of Tea Party of the left, BEFORE THE ELECTION.

His fantasy of a long-lasting movement of the left of that sort is, of course, missing one huge component of the Republican-fascist Tea Party, the financial backing of billionaires, the hate-talk radio that blankets the nation and the total support of CNN, FOX and other cabloid and broadcast TV stations and networks.  There is absolutely no prospect of any of those to fuel a "Tea Party of the left" without it nothing like that is going to happen.  The only prospect of a Bernie Sanders "Tea Party" would be to mount a spoiler campaign that would endanger the country by installing one of the two actual fascist strong men who will be the Republican nominee this November.   With his article in Salon, at this point in time, in this election year Lerner is recklessly, irresponsibly unrealistic.

The fantasy that the way to exercise influence in the one of the two real, national parties that really will elect the president and the congress, governors and legislatures, is to threaten to spoil their chances of winning has been being exercised by the left since 1968 when they helped put Richard Nixon in the presidency.

They helped put Ronald Reagan in the Presidency twelve years later and helped put George W. Bush in the presidency twenty years after that.

There is a pattern, a Democratic president doesn't give the left what they can't deliver and the left runs a spoiler or in some other way punishes the Democratic candidate and the result is a horrific Republican holding the presidency and installing fascists in the Supreme Court.  If Nixon had not won in 1968 it is unlikely that George W. Bush would have been installed by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Nixon appointee, vote suppressing thug, legal and judicial hatchet man, William Rehnquist.

There is no mistaking the fact that the loss of the election in 1968 was the turning point, the failure of the champion of the left to win in 1972 solidified the descent of the country into a right wing mode which the media has been only too eager to push on.   The left, meanwhile, seems to have not learned much of anything because it repeated the same behavior, turning it into a pattern.  The sharper down turn happened after 1976 when the Supreme Court, the Republican right and some entirely misguided liberals, issued the Buckley v. Valeo ruling which made money equal speech to enable billionaires to monopolize the speech which was politically potent, that broadcast electronically, and the poor with, effectively,  none.  It was liberal institutions such as the ACLU who worked with the Republican right to do that.  If you doubt that is true, look at their briefs filed in such cases, time after time. 

The left seems to have trouble understanding that without the backing of the bigger money, without the for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder  backing of big media, their power to make threats to move their agenda is an absurd exercise in self-delusions of grandeur.

A POLITICIAN HAS TO WIN ELECTIONS, THEIR PARTY HAS TO CONTROL THE LEGISLATURE AND THE EXECUTIVE TO DO ANYTHING, AS BARNEY FRANK POINTED OUT A WHILE AGO, IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT THAT MEANS THEY HAVE TO WIN BOTH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND THE MID-TERM ELECTION.   NO POLITICIAN WHO LOSES AN ELECTION IS IN THE POSITION TO DO ANYTHING. WINNING ELECTIONS AND HOLDING SEATS IS THE KEY TO GET TO DO SOMETHING. LOSING POLITICIANS DON'T DO A DAMN THING FOR ANYONE.

The satisfaction of the play left in preening in their purity as they feel good about punishing Democrats is far greater among those with higher incomes, I'm sure.  People who are cushioned by their education, their profession, their family and social milieu from the effects of the horrific governments we've had.  

I have long concluded that the New York based left, as exemplified in the annual Left Forum,  is largely a collection of idiots.  I say that as someone who is to the left of Bernie Sanders on most of the issues I've read him on.  I say that as a non-Marxist, non-Fabian, democratic socialist and radical egalitarian.   I say that as someone who came to understand that the practical need to win elections and to control a majority in the legislature contained more wisdom than all of the sterile, insane, lunatic theorizing of the high left.

ANY LAW MADE, ANY PROGRAM PUT INTO PLACE, WHICH IMPROVED THE LIVES OF REAL PEOPLE, REAL SENTIENT BEINGS, THE REAL ENVIRONMENT, IS ENTIRELY MORE RADICAL THAN ANY PROPOSAL WHICH WAS NEVER MADE REAL IN THE WAY THAT POLITICS CAN MAKE POSSIBLE.  BUT YOU'VE GOT TO WIN THE ELECTION AND TAKE OFFICE IN THE NUMBERS TO MAKE THAT POSSIBLE.


As I'm typing this out NPR has Senator Jeff Merkly on and he's not sounding much more realistic than Lerner.  It leads me to suspect that the people of Oregon gave him too easy a time getting elected, something I think Bernie Sanders suffers from.   I don't know any politician who has lost races who would be so out of touch with such basic political reality. The idiot is still talking about Sanders having "a path to victory", as if that were true and as if Sanders with his small-donation campaign would stand a real chance against the Republican-fascists in November.   It's disturbing to hear a Democratic Senator who sounds like someone whose understanding of politics is so out of touch with reality.  What the hell is wrong with you people?

The loss of George McGovern in 1972 and the pattern of leftists participation in electoral defeats for the past 48 years is something the left should learn from but that doesn't seem to be happening.  If Hillary Clinton loses in November it will stick to the left, it will tell everyone, including some on the left that there is something wrong with those on the left which seems to be irremediable.

When Benjamin Franklin noted that experience keeps a costly school but a fool will learn in no other, he left open the possibility of those fools who won't even learn from the hardest of that kind of schooling.   With leftists like that, I despair of us ever regaining any influence.