I have come to the conclusion that the worst of left wing journalism has exactly the same business model as FOX and hate-talk right wing media, in general. They have a target audience and they provide them with that most irresistible of all addictions, some other group that they can hate and loathe and hate and loathe en masse and in a frenzy of communal clicking so as to preen in their superiority to them. Really, it's a business model that has made such things as pro-wrestling into a huge business. That is what the Salons, the Alternets, and even the Nations, Mother Jones and In These Times are doing. And, considering that the model, pandering to the worst in people, has worked a lot better to put Republicans in office than liberals, what's good for lefty media is really bad for liberalism in reality. That is only to be expected, liberalism depends for its very existence on making appeals to the best in people, not exploiting their strongest weaknesses and lowest inclinations.
Perhaps the people who write for those companies and the people attracted to comment on their websites are entirely unrepresentative of most liberals, I hope they are because if they aren't, we're dead. But even if they are a minority of those deputed to be on the left, the experience of the past fifty years is that they can provide us with a margin of loss due to the self-indulgent petulance encouraged by such media venues. Bernie Sanders' campaign talks about rage which he intends to channel into change, what I see is tantrums that will lead to another horrific Republican regime so close on the heels of the Bush II disaster.
I am also coming to think one of the endemic problems of the left is that it is too reliant on the artificial hot-house of colleges and universities, academics who have more invested in their publications and tenure than in making what change can be made. I mentioned the Hegelian delusion of thinking that if the dialectic is pushed to fascism it will, scientifically and with all of the power of an irresistible force to Marxism. I've been reading assertions that boil down to that since I was a teenager - in other words a very long time. The only result of that in reality has been fascism.
Liberalism, real liberalism, isn't a mere alternative and opposite force to conservatism, not in the traditional American meaning of those words. The fact is that liberalism is all about a totally different view of life, in the West, based on the morals derived from the Hebrew prophets, the morals that are set up to ensure equal justice, equal rights, a decent living to everyone on an equal basis. They are the morals that Walter Brueggemann talked about in that video I posted last Sunday, they are asserted exactly in order to prevent the development of a society in which the rich and powerful are able to extract from those beneath them to enhance themselves.
That liberalism is an entirely different thing than a society which is set up for that kind of extraction, exactly the society that Republicans, American conservatives, have succeeded in imposing on us. They have done so through a combination of seducing people through an appeal to their most attractive weaknesses and basest of pleasures sold with a lying and attractive program of entertainment. And in that they were enabled, aided and abetted by liberals whose model of liberalism was based in the "scientific", "enlightenment" interpretation of the same extractive society but which they also called "liberalism." That "enlightenment" style liberalism merely took the mechanism of that extractive exploitation out of the hands of the traditional, medieval aristocracy and put it in the hands of those most able and willing to do the extraction without any moral restraint. The faith of such liberals that, somehow, magically, nature would make it all come out right in the end is one of the most idiotic and stupid ideas which the savants who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights foisted onto the new nation. The results were the moral atrocity of the early 19th century, the civil war, the gilded age and they remain with us in the imperial age and into its present decay. Whatever correction that has happened was not due to nature, it was not due to the movement of the dialectic, it was due to people struggling against that and for the morality that is its only true corrective. There is a reason that during the entire period of the abolition struggle and, later, the civil rights struggle that there was a constant invocation of the Hebrew prophets, invoked by people who knew their Bible, it was because that was the very text that provided the knowledge needed to struggle against the system of extraction.
The lefty media has rejected that force, the very source of it, out of academic fashion and a pretense that what they are engaged in is science. How much that has to do with its role in maintaining the losing posture the left has been perpetually stuck in might be considered. There are a lot of reasons that we lose so consistently when the policies that come from real liberalism would help the large majority of people. But they can't even understand that because they have been so thoroughly propagandized by TV, radio, Hollywood, and now the internet, so seduced with the suicidal pleasures presented to them, so entertained to death that they are powerless to resist even the billionaires who are crushing us and destroying the possibility of life.
The secular left has been selling us on a totally imaginary, inevitable, pseudo-scientific faith in how things happen. The influence of Marx and Engels and other atheist pseudo-scientific thinkers of the 19th and 20th century have been a dead weight on the real left, the left that takes its thinking from the Hebrew tradition, both before and after Jesus. I said that Christianity got into trouble whenever it ignored or got too far from those roots, the very roots that informed the teachings of Jesus, liberalism gets into the same trouble when it abandons them for some ridiculous pseudo-scientific assertions that these things happen by forces of nature, even assertions of them being a manifestation of physical laws. The very fact that a decent, egalitarian society is the rarest of rare phenomena, and so vulnerable to decay and destruction is all the proof anyone would need that it is not a product of nature, it is a product of our better nature, of actions and intentions and predilections nurtured out of our rising above what happens "naturally". Things only got worse when people figured they couldn't escape the force of natural selection, especially in the Freudian posturing around that. The secular-lefty media have been the biggest saps there are for that kind of stuff.
The more I come across articles where "scientists" argue against religion, the more I am convinced it is the work of know-nothings who think science IS a replacement for religion. Which may have been a popular idea in the 19th century, but that doesn't mean it was any more correct then that it is now.
ReplyDeleteAnd the more I study the matter and look to people like Brueggeman for insight, the more I agree that liberalism is founded on the ideas of justice espoused by the prophets, not on some principle derived from "reason" alone (which itself needs some kind of straw to make its bricks, and where does that "straw" come from?). The focus of the prophets, even when they were berating the idolatry and betrayal of Israel (the children of Abraham, not the modern nation state), was always on the individual. It was always about stewardship and oikonomos and people. It was never about institutions and people in power and power politics.