Leftist Media Has Been Childishly Irresponsible For Another Presidential Cycle - Hate Mail

I didn't suggest that the magazines of the left fold and go out of business, I said that they were dangerously irresponsible and had been over and over again, especially during election years.   Though if they did all go under I wonder if the effects in politics would be noticeable in anything but a loss of citations on the web for some of the daffiest ideas that are still being promoted.  Such as that voting for the Green Candidate, probably what is becoming their modest version of Harold Stassen, Jill Stein*, is a moral, wise, courageous and - stupidest and most dishonest of all of all - an efficacious act.   The total inefficacy of such acts is best viewed by the advocacy of such journals to vote for Nader, though other names could serve the same purpose.

It occurred to me while I was reading the articles that led to that post, I've been reading The Nation and Progressive for about fifty years, Mother Jones for forty and In These Times almost since its beginning and I doubt the combined force of those in our politics would have really made much of a difference at all.   Even the best of their journalism is turned into nothing by the absurd self-indulgence of articles urging people to vote for absurdly futile presidential and other candidates who have had absolutely no rational prospect of winning the election.  And there were the odd article by those daffiest of self-indulgent preening play-leftists, containing the smug assertions of the moral superiority of their principled decision to not vote.  It was often lightly passed off as a joke when it was about as irresponsible a thing as could be advocated.

If there is some clue as to the futility of a publication of the left, it is when they urge people to either not vote or to throw away their vote on some candidate who will never win instead of the candidate who, when they took office, would produce anything from not as bad as their opponent, to much less bad than their opponent to entirely better than their opponent.

If it were a matter of what to buy in the way of food instead of voting any magazine that advocated you either never buy it or to spend all of your money on candy instead of even substandard but nutritious food would be excoriated as being dangerously irresponsible.  But those magazines and their like have been advocating the political equivalent of that for the left for more than a century.   Advocating that Americans throw away their vote on people who will never win an election makes a mockery of the blood and lives lost in order to win the vote.   People on the left should appreciate just how much of a dereliction of responsibility it is, far more so than conservatives who, somehow, don't seem to be encouraged to waste votes on never-will-win candidates as often as we on the left have been encouraged to do.** And their electoral success should show that voting for someone who can win is surprisingly effective as compared to voting for people who won't ever win. 

The magazines of the left have learned nothing from some extremely tough experience, they are run by self-indulgent, irresponsible children who have no respect for their readers or their real lives in the reality they live in.  Perhaps it is due to the fact the the pool of talent from which they draw is too affluent or too removed from the wider reality most people face as they don't live in New York City, San Francisco or other urban oases of what has been relatively liberal governance and their ambient social milieu.  From whatever bubble of unreality they are issued from, they don't work for us out here in reality.   They don't even work for most of the people in those cities, their local political influence is about as much.  If their ideas worked we wouldn't face the prospect of devolving into fascism.  We need something else that takes reality into account more regularly and which has some basic grasp on the facts of American politics as it really exists in the wider world.

This was the year I lost my emotional attachment to those magazines and many other leftist venues of media.   After the hard experience of the Bush II regime, of how its imposition was aided by the Greens, after the denials of its responsibility for helping bring that about, they're ready to do it all again not two decades later.   All of the people in charge of those publications, the people who choose what they publish,  were old enough at the time to have learned from the Bush II catastrophe.  They have learned nothing and I'm not buying them anymore.

* She would have to be their modest version of Stassen, everything about the Greens would be honestly seen as being as modest as could be.  Stassen's absurd, perpetual quest to become president was probably more realistic.

** Again I have to wonder if the fact that so many of those who have run and written for magazine of the left have been influenced by their atheistic faith in the Marxist dialectic accounts for their absurd faith in that most widespread of all leftist, mostly atheist, magical thinking, that revolution will come from fascism.  It's clear their beliefs depend on some kind of automatic, pseudo-scientific magic as opposed to facing the reality that when your behavior enables fascism, you get fascism.

Update updated:  Let me break this to you as hard as possible, no one in the universe but you cares about your symbolic, principled vote for the Greens.   Even other preening egomaniacs who do what you do don't care, they're too busy preening in their own symbolic virtue.  You are political narcissists.