Oh, it's not just the secular play-lefties of my generation I was slamming, the likes who hang out at Eschaton and similar blog communities nor was I speaking just of our elders, almost all of whom have died and turned to dust. I have been utterly disillusioned with many of those who are in middle age, those once bright young things who began blogs c. 2002 and people who have Youtube channels like The Majority Report, The Young Turks, Ring of Fire. Even the brightest of them, like Michael Brooks, is obviously incapable of learning anything from even the hardest of experience. Trump. I have looked into the backgrounds of a number of them and they are typified as white, usually from an economically comfortable to privileged family background, often having gone to expensive private schools, colleges and universities, exactly the kind of people who are best positioned to weather the Republican-fascists as they hold out for their dream never-will-be-president, Sanders, Nader, or the like.
Distressingly enough, Michael Brooks doesn't read the results of the enormous 20th century real-life experiments in Marxism which, even if they swept away a bit of feudalism, instituted neo-feudalism that was worse than what it replaced, at times, such as in North Korea, the Soviet Union and China during some of their overt communist periods, Romania, etc. They are typically super-capitalist dictatorships that enslave and oppress millions, tens of millions, the largest slave state today, with hereditary enslavement, is officially Communist, starving slaves in their millions, ruled by a fat princeling who is Trump's best buddy, according to our worst president. Marxism is and always was a delusion of 19th century romantic German theory which was always anti-democratic even as it sought to redefine democracy to make it consistent with violent dictatorship. In the United States, the only political effectiveness that Marxists have ever enjoyed was the damage it did to the traditional American left, American liberalism which was a development of Christianity. It still is, the extent to which such latter day Marxists put their faith in the socialism of Bernie Sanders who will never be more than the Senator of Vermont, whose supporters, such as the Young Turks and Majority Report crew are engaged in attacking Elizabeth Warren who could possibly become president due to her lack of ideological purity.
It's as if it's a game for them, after the Bush II disaster, after the Trump disaster.
For those guys who straddle the now non-existent fence between "journalism" and entertainment, their primary interest is their careers in infotainment. Their audiences are mostly the white, the comfortable, the not-all-that-bright (especially as can be read on their comment threads). They clearly don't mind ratfucking the election from the purity-play-left, no more than the Green Party has done in, now, multiple elections, right up to and including 2016 - the lefty magazines enabling in that enablement even as the choice was between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I don't trust Majority Report any more than I trust In These Times or The Nation, these days. I certainly don't trust any of them who have links to Russia Today and other obvious Putin propaganda outfits. And a rather disturbing number of them do. I suspect there has been a seamless transition in foreign as well as domestic relationships between what was the KGB and secular-lefty organizations to match the ones between right-wing organizations and international fascism. Now that the commies have all made that tiny little baby-step from Marxism to fascism, you have to wonder what the difference ever was.
A number of years ago, as I was talking to an experienced state legislator who had worked for a union before he went into politics, he said that he realized that as a union steward he could benefit the lives of a few people in his union, as a legislator he could benefit the lives of all workers, unionized or not. We also discussed the complete difference between making laws that make lives better, the difference between what was possible at any given point and the dreams of idealists, those which might someday become law and reality, those which have no prospect of becoming law anytime soon.
For a Bernie Sanders who, even in his most deluded moments knows he is never going to be president of the United States, it's a luxury to promise his adoring fans the moon which is not attainable, while preening in their adulation and idiotically given contributions - and I'd like to know exactly where that money is going in the Sanders campaign as much as I would the Trump campaign, especially if his wife or other family members are getting any of it.
A candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the election, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, etc. who may well have to eat their words in a way Bernie never will face, cannot promise the moon with the stars thrown in as Bernie can. If it costs them the support of Cenk or Sam or their audience, that's a price that they may have to face, it's not as if the past fifty years has shown the play-left is a reliable base of voters. They are proven to as probably be spoilers as they will be supporters, they never, ever seem to be bothered by the role they and their like have played in putting and keeping Nixon in office, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now Trump.
All of that bullshit from the past, all of it, has to be dumped by the real American left, the left that has some chance of winning control of the government and changing laws for the better. All of those dear dead old commies who Hollywood likes to resurrect to dishonestly present as heroes, the ones still breathing, the next generation who are Bernie bots, etc. all of them are a dead weight on the real left who have a chance of winning elections and changing lives. There isn't a single good idea that they might have generated that wasn't available in a more practical form which has a chance of becoming law, there isn't any one of them you can really trust - look at how during the Hitler-Stalin pact they were slamming FDR as they turned all Chamber of Commerce c. 1939 on doing business with Hitler.
I pointed to how ineffective they were in the reality of getting the United States out of Vietnam, how they couldn't mount an effective presidential campaign against Nixon in 1972 after they helped put him in office in 1968. The legend of the American left as told casts some of the worst of them in an absurdly good light while it demotes those who actually did things to change things. There is a huge price in treating history as entertainment and entertaining narrative. Given that we have a series of leaders of countries and states and localities to show us that presenting history and politics as media attractions is extremely dangerous, all of that should be dumped. The younger, living lefties who feed on that are idiots, their sound and fury signifies nothing except more repetitions of what was done wrong as they build their media careers.
If AOC, if Ilhan Omar, if the one I think may show the most promise of that group, Ayanna Pressley, are smart, they will try to steer clear of the play-lefties who will inhibit their effectiveness. They should try to navigate through them without collecting too many barnacles and limpets. They might stay in the congress with those impediments, they won't do a thing to get anything done. Nancy Pelosi who steered the House Democrats to two victories, is a far, far better person to learn from than Bernie Sanders who has never much led more than his fan club.
Note: The legislation that Nancy Pelosi passed in the House only to have it die in the Senate, even before the racist, billionaire financed, reaction to Barack Obama and Obama's own timidity and emotional need for Republican approval led to the 2010 disaster, would probably have revolutionized the lives of tens of millions and had a ripple effect in such improvement over the entire world. She has repeated that in less than the year she has been speaker again and if Democrats took the government back next year, the groundwork she has laid could - the Senate not screwing it up again - compete with what FDR and LBJ managed to do. I'm sure a President Warren would sign all of it, a Biden would probably Obama it up.
Bernie Sanders mounted an enjoyable but useless day long filibuster. I'm sure he would have voted for pretty much of what the House sent up but he certainly didn't have the political chops to make things happen, even when he was in the House.
Nancy Pelosi, having made actual change, is to the left of all of the Madonna of the Future Marxists in American history. I don't think Henry James knew it, but he painted the political theory of the secular American left, perfectly.
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