America's Lefty Media The Worst And The Best Of It

I go from tearing my hair out as I hear the Majority Report crew, Sam Seder, Michael Brooks,Jamie Peck,  Matt Lech spout the typical New York City lefty bubble bullshit of insisting on the stupidest of things, doing really stupid things like pushing the buttons of the Bernie bots, the goddamned Greens, the rising tide of similarly disastrous delusion that is coming from the Democratic Socialists*  to thinking they have some of the best commentary these days. 

Here's an example of what I like that they do, asking why and how Donald Trump and the many others like him in American life have gotten away with being gangsters for so long and why that is bad in the way that having him in the presidency is.

Yeah, more of that, less with the delusional thinking that Bernie Sanders would be a serious candidate for president or the idiotic idea that the election of AOC is the beginning of the Marxist millennium or something.  Encouraging dopey college kids in that kind of delusion has been a feature of the "left" for my entire life.  It's been part of the marketing strategy of the lefty magazines and publishing houses.  In his obituary of Christopher Hitchens Alexander Cockburn said that he used to warn his friends at New Left Review and Verso that the Hitchens who they loved when he was attacking Mother Teresa was no one they should put their faith in.  It should never, ever be forgotten that Hitchens, as Cockburn also pointed out, was always pretty much the same guy even as the lefty media took him to their bosom and nurtured him.   I figured that out from reading him in The Nation way back when I was still a subscriber.  You eventually have to ask what the hell is wrong with the American lefty media.

Well, with the behavior of such magazines as The Nation and In These Times during the 2016 campaign and, lest it be forgotten 2000,** them helping to deluded the "left" with pie-in-the-sky that turned into the shit sandwiches of the Bush II and Trump regimes, the last thing the American left needs is for Majority Report to have a similar marketing strategy of attracting America's Stupidest Lefties and encouraging that line of unrealistic bullshit.   

There is nothing, no fevered dream of any Marxist or Democratic Socialist or, God help us, Anarcho-syndicalist that is more radical than a bill that is adopted by a state legislature or the Congress which is made law and which makes things better.  That's something that the American left has not learned since the days when Victor Berger was derided as a "sewer-socialist" as he saved the lives of poor people and others by getting his city to clean up the water supply.  Any real leftist, any real, American traditional style liberal will have to fight against the elitist, often affluent "left" which doesn't really care about winning to do such radical things, it's all an abstract game to them.  It's why they were able to support Stalin and Mao within living memory, it's why they dream longingly of Lenin and lie about Che.  It's never any skin off of them if Republican-fascists win.  With the antics at The Nation I'm not entirely convinced there isn't some equivalent blackmail of Richard Cohen to that rumored to be held over Donald Trump.  There was something they had on him from the time of Brezhnev.   And it is a known fact that those dear old commies of the Gus Hall era and earlier were being paid in pretty much the same way that Putin has funneled money to Trump.  Though I doubt the Soviets were as free with their money as Putin was with his and his fellow (many of them ex-commie) oligarchs.

* I pray that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is smart enough to refuse to play their Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.  The DSA has produced exactly one successful candidate, or, rather, has had one as a member, a very smart, very talented (very Catholic, by the way) young woman who won in an overwhelmingly Democratic district in a very atypical American city.   It would be the stupidest thing in the world for Democratic Socialists to mistake that one member of the House as a power base from which to make demands on Democrats who have to get elected in far more typical districts in the country which is, by and large, quite unlike NYC.  I'll remind you that the same New York City also maintains the Republican scumbag Peter King in office, the DSA can't even convert New York City, never mind the entire country.

** Not to mention 1968, 1972 and 1980, and arguably 2004 which, in retrospect, were exactly the same kinds of disasters aided and helped by Americas Stupidest Lefties being led into delusion by America's foremost lefty publications.