The basic problems of the American "left" come into sharpest relief in presidential election years, years when their biggest impact, politically, is in the question as to whether or not they will vote realistically for what can be instead of either not voting or voting for some never-could-win Green spoiler or other. I've been having an argument about that at the, I now, in the past several weeks for the first time hope, fading venue of that kind of left, In These Times.
With just over a month to go in which American democracy, if not the human species, could receive the body blow of a Trump presidency, In These Times is running articles by the paid Green Party hack, David Cobb their 2004 "presidential candidate" and the current campaign manager for Jill Stein, encouraging people to vote for her. Seeing it led me to ask the question of how many paid staffers and others the Greens support as opposed to the number of office holders it can lay any honest claim to. In an competing article in which the meat-headed Kate Aronoff says that "The Left Deserves Better Than Jill Stein" she claims their current figure is 137, though when I looked at the list at a Green website, I couldn't get past 80, though I didn't count people who held appointed office. I'd like to know who gets the money that people are suckered into donating to them. I assume Cobb gets a good chunk of it for what might, actually, be a full-time position.
Aronoff, as noted over the weekened, isn't going to suggest to readers of In These Times that they vote for the one and only candidate who stands between us and having the addled, perhaps coked up Donald Trump in the White House. I have a feeling that she wouldn't think doing that would be good for her burgeoning career in lefty journalism, she might get accused of wanting to be another Sidney Blumenthal by the publisher and editor.
While I will say that In These times is among the most delusional of the lefty mags, it isn't alone. To one extent or other all of them and their electronic equivalents such as The Young Turks and the .... well, I'm not sure they'd like being called "venerable" Democracy Now have been as riddled with non-reality. Which forces the question of why these folks, all of them convinced of and ready to announced or at least imply their intellectual brilliance, insist on remaining in the political wilderness that their left has been in for its entire existence?
I noted in one of my comments there this morning that their "left" has been and to a stunning extent remains wedded to the delusion that Americans, able for the past 99 years to see what happens when Marxists take control of a government - violent, brutal, dictatorship - would ever tolerate the possibility of that happening here. Marxists have sealed the coffin on their ideology shut, sealed the vault around it and dumped yards of reinforced concrete over it. No one in their right mind, seeing that history repeated over and over again through the 20th and into the 21st century would give up even the most imperfect democracy for it. Anyone on the left who maintains any residual claims of that as possible or, most delusional and discrediting of all, desirable, has sealed their fate as a crackpot. Yet that "left" is present in most if not all of the media venues of the secular left.
I think it's time someone said that they should be seen as having the same status for the left that overt neo-Nazis should for the right. Counted in numbers killed by Marxist regimes, many of which had the support of western European and North American lefties who, though, seldom chose to live in their imaginary paradises, themselves. Such folks as Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, in his Trotskyite days, chose to come here, to the right-wing hell hole that so many a lefty claimed the United States was. Hitchens, of course, took that baby step from Trotskyite fascism to neo-con fascism, Cockburn didn't, even as he wrote some of the most offensive tripe about the virtues of the Soviet Union when even no one there still believed that kind of stuff.
Marxist and other "third parties" of some other fringe ideology and their perennial popularity among lefty romantics are a symptom of why that left never has and never will gain much more than marginal influence in American politics. Those with control of lefty media, even when they're not frothing ideologues or megalomaniacal crack pots (Lyndon Larouche also started out on that"left"), are wedded to those insane ideas. They are not going to ever be more than a problem for the real left, the left that is interested in doing what is possible to really take office, to really make and implement laws to really make life really better or even possible.
For In These Times, Democracy Now or anyone else on the left to be giving the Greens a soapbox from which to delude people into not stopping Trump is definitively discrediting and we should all look forward to their demise. Their behavior in the face of a possible Trump or Cruz presidency, so soon after the disaster of the Green aided Bush II regime has certainly earned them the distrust if not hostility of the real left.
I hope that this is the year that finally shuts down the Greens, I'd start by asking for their books to be open so we can see how much money they've duped people into giving them and who got it. I suspect there are a few tales to be told by those figures.
"Which forces the question of why these folks, all of them convinced of and ready to announced or at least imply their intellectual brilliance, insist on remaining in the political wilderness that their left has been in for its entire existence?"
ReplyDeleteBecause being outcast proves they are right to cling to their ideology and keep it pure for the reckoning sure to come. Or some such thing.
I've seen enough of it now with the Tea Party and Sanders supporters on-line, still screeching about Hillary's "corruption" and insisting that only a politician pure in heart and soul will save us from our electoral sins. Feh.
I was a fan of "Democracy Now!" for some time; and then I got tired of it. I think it was when Amy Goodman woke Noam Chomsky, then half-way around the world on a trip to Asia, to demand his response to some world event, and to tell him what he was expected to say by the questions she asked. I think Chomksy regretted taking the call after a few minutes, because his ideas were more subtle and discerning than her questions. People like Chomsky see the complexities of the world (even if I think he, too, is a bit too insistent on his version of reason as the only possible template for reality); ideologues see only what they want to see.
Christianity is afflicted with such people, too; and the cure is community, where believers agree on a few small things but disagree on so many other things, and all must learn to live with those disagreements. We don't do that very well, but we are called to do it if we want to follow the example of the Christ. I think it's actually much harder than living in a monastic community, and it is meant to keep us from pulling so far away from the world that we think our bubble is the reality which will save us.
When the only salvation is making the first last and the last first; and you can't do that in a small group. That kind of dynamic requires as much of the world as possible.