Consider the long history of the American left and compare that history to the extent to which any American liberals have had the power to deliver any of the claimed program of that left and it's clear that there is a left which has been acceptable to the American People and there is a left which not only has never been acceptable but which has had its greatest effect in history as thwarting the ability of the acceptable left to gain office in the numbers to make any change. The relatively conservative Lyndon Johnson in his Great Society, in his appointments to the Supreme Court made more radical change in reality than the entire history of the "real left" which is, in fact, the play-left. He did that even as he got sucked into expanding the Vietnam war that he inherited from that darling of 1960s romanticism, the romanticized figure of John Kennedy, who was far more reluctant to make the kind of change that the vulgar Johnson was more eager to make.
The left I wrote about yesterday, as represented in the Left Forum and in such publications as The Nation has been a millstone around the neck of the real left, the left which is real by virtue of its ability to gain office and deliver equality, justice and a better life for people and the protection of the environment on which we all depend. Its real role in discrediting traditional American liberals and liberalism, its role in being a tool of fascism to wield against the real and effective left is the reason that I have attacked them using their real history, which is what gets me hate mail.
The glamour of the play-left, the left which has been impotently asserting its right to be considered the real left which would in some glorious future rule and deliver its program was in its asserted radicalism, its devotion to the old testament of Marx-Engels or the various new testaments of Lenin or Mao or some other would be messiah, or, more naively wacky, the anarchism as proclaimed by Emma Goldman or some other romantic figure. That the subsequent century shows what they produce is holding up some of the most viciously murderous, anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic regimes in the history of the human species as good and desirable and good models to follow and, with that, the discrediting of the entire left. That is what is real about them.
The most radical of politics find its only real existence in the proof that it can attain power through acceptance by The People and, so, make good on the goals of more equality, more democracy, a better material and spiritual existence for all of The People and the environment. The record of those heroes of the play-left, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and all of the lesser gods of the pantheon of dialectical materialism which held power proves that literally everything claimed by that part of the old left was a complete and total lie. The record of anarchism is of the predictable and total impotence of that most delusional of all somewhat popular political ideologies. Anarchism is and was always a total delusion, it would have done what Marxism has proven to do about as quickly, usher in a rule by organized criminals in a system of violence in which the least moral, and most viciously, amorally violent would rule. That has been the record of almost every revolution since the 1790s. I would include that which produced the United States because its Constitution enabled and enhanced the power of the slave owners and Northern commercial interests and the genocidal conquerors, I reject the romantic nostalgia of the all too real American right as much as I do that of the idiots of the play left.
America, to name only one place, needs a revival of the real left and it will take the active rejection of the anti-democratic pseudo-left, an abandonment of the nostalgia for the cinematic and academic figures of the history of the pseudo-left, a clear eyed, hard assessment of the groups which have produced nothing that was not counter-productive when it wasn't a self-discrediting distraction for the real left which is electable - rightly electable on the basis of its devotion to producing equality, democracy and freedom in the context of mutual moral obligation.
The Left Forum - Nation magazine left is a fraud which will never produce more in the way of results than it has produced now. After a century of their promotion of their ideologies they have never been farther from being credible with more than a rump of largely campus based radicals who I doubt are even a significant minority at City College or the other venues where they congregate.
The next time they try to peddle their Hollywood 10 bull shit, look at the real ideology of people like Lester Cole, Lillian Hellman who were enormous admirers of Stalin as he was murdering tens of millions, invading countries and thwarting every freedom. doing the romantically raised up French Revolution in a reign of terror decades instead of merely years long. I can't but believe that their real allegiance was to the kind of red-fascism that Stalin made real because they remained loyal true believers as that red-fascism was exposed, fully. There has to be more than the mere fact that the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohn were morally repugnant to make Stalinists figures deserving respectful remembrance. It is as morally repugnant to hold Stalinists up as figures of respectful remembrance as it is Nazis.
Let me repeat that despite what the manipulative movie plot asserts or moldy folkie sings, you're not obliged to take one of those two sides, you can reject them both because both of those sides deserve to be rejected.
Thinking of the presence of unreconstructed Stalinism in the 2018 Left Forum I realized it's not really surprising that the Marxist left never had much trouble with Stalin because their ideology is basically anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, opposed to freedom and amoral in the way that materialism always will be in the end. Their use of the language of democracy, of the First Amendment was always tactical, a daffy, unrealistic scheme of getting their propaganda heard and duping The People into adopting what they could see on display in the Soviet Union, Mao's China and in the lesser communist states. If they gained power they would as quickly as Lenin and his thugs did, make sure that there was no opposition to them, as violently and as ruthlessly. And the American People knew it and they weren't buying it.
I think today the most obvious binding force of the Left Forum left is a deep and snobbish hatred of America. A lot of that was as true of the British and French left immediately after the United States saved their asses from Hitler. These days, reading The Nation, looking through the program of the Left Forum, it's clear they have more affection and toleration of the Russian strong-man Putin than they do for any figure in the Democratic Party. That is what I think is the real basis of the objection of some of the staff writers at The Nation to the line being pushed by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and her husband, Stephen Cohen in their support for Putin's subversion of American democracy. There is so much to legitimately condemn and criticize about the United States, especially its ruling class, its corporate media, its racists and military imperialists but everything you can say on that goes ever so much more for every single Communist state and the Putin crime family.
The American People will never buy that bull shit, anyone who claims to be in favor of equality and civil rights who gets sucked into the play-left is delaying the time when those become real, that suckering of the real left of the potentially real left has been going on since the "real left" broke the old Socialist Party in 1919. Every year the Left Forum includes marginal figures in pop-music, movie-making, comedy, which they claim is the vanguard of some kind of radical change and every year that radical change fails to take hold. The marginal figures remain marginal and they always will, if one of them managed to advance in their career, they'd dump that shtick, fast. The Left Forum is the fever dream of the impotent, the obscure and the never to happen. It isn't real. It never will be. It is a delusion.
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