A LOT has happened since I started this. Trudeau called an unnecessary election. The Taliban re-took Afghanistan. Oh well ...
So my last post was basically about how "liberals" or "progressives" harm themselves by pushing bullshit elite narratives and by damning to HeLL everyone who votes the wrong way. The basis of the post was an editorial from a guy (perhaps a centrist, I don't remember) who articulated right-wing grievances and whom Glenn Greenwald hosted as a guest writer on his substack. The editorial described some of the passably credible concerns Trump voters had about the 2020 election; the way that the contrived "Russiagate" conspiracy theory undermined the credibility of the anti-Trump "resistance" and all the institutional co-conspirators; how the Silicon Valley tech-giant's concerted suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story only confirmed MAGA-types that they are the victims of powerful forces who are not afraid to engage in outright smears and lies while suppressing alternative voices. ["Stop the Steal" people deserve a fair hearing. But they also deserve to hear how hypocritical they're being. I mentioned that last time but since then I've remembered Greg Palast's documentation of the illegal ways Trump was conspiring to steal 2020.]
I offered some caveats as I posted quotes from the editorial, but much of what it says is valid. The fact that this editorial was hosted by Glenn Greenwald is itself significant though. Glenn Greenwald is a harsh critic of the Democratic Party. (He had been a harsh critic of the Republican Party when it held the presidency.) He criticizes left-wing "identity politics" and "cancel culture." He appears regularly on the Tucker Carlson show on FOX News. I mentioned at the beginning of the last post that Greenwald has said and done some things that are difficult to defend. (I linked to a David Neiwert post about Greenwald's over-the-top defence of the civil liberties of a violent nazi when he --- Greenwald, not the Nazi --- was a young civil rights lawyer.) But it seems to me to be petulant and childish and partisan to write-off Greenwald because you disagree with or don't understand his decisions. There is precious little criticism of the Democratic Party from US progressives. Whatever you think of some of his other views, Greenwald has offered important critiques of that party of cynical, hypocritical posturing oligarchs. And nobody can dispute the importance of Greenwald's contributions to the Snowden revelations or the [genuine] resistance to the fascist Bolsanaro regime in Brazil. Partisans like Democrat hack-blogger "Driftglass" will denigrate the Snowden revelations while he's busy nuzzling into the asshole of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz because he's shameless and hopeless.
I think I'm going to try to wrap this one up quickly. At the time I read them, a series of CounterPunch articles calling ALL Trump supporters irredeemable fascists and ANYONE who even considered trying to talk to them (Glenn Greenwald, Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Dore, Caitlin Johnstone, Matt Taibbi) as either dupes or advocates of fascism, really stuck in my craw. But shit has obviously been happening, and this is just a blog post that very few people read. (I blog merely to vent. But I don't intend to spend a great deal of my time venting.) Particularly egregious of these CounterPunchers has been Paul Street. It seems that Street has decided that the 73 MILLION US-American voters who voted for Trump are all hopeless fascists and that it's the height of stupidity to try to talk to them. Instead, Street advocates .... well, I'm not sure exactly. I think he advocates shunning this entire population entirely whilst voting for the "dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats" every election before going back to criticizing the Democrats for being corrupt, authoritarian sell-outs.
Mr. Street, if I'm wrong, please correct me. I've been going through your essays on CounterPunch and I've not been able to quickly find the editorials that appear from you (or is it Anthony DiMaggio?) in the run-up months to US presidential elections which always seem to say "Yes, the Democrats are dismal and dollar-drenched, but, gosh darn it! The Republicans are just so horribly awful that once again we have to vote for them as 'the lesser evil'."
[This is just a blog post. It's just me venting.]
Now, I'm certainly caustic of right-wingers. I actually believe that "right-wing populism" can just as accurately be called "fascism." That's because I don't believe that "fascism" is, itself, a coherent, fully-formed political philosophy. It's a grab-bag of prejudices, bigotries, delusions, conspiracy theories, and entitlements. Sometimes I call fascism "socialism for stupid people." [I guess in the same way that libertarianism is "capitalism for stupid people."] But not everyone who votes right-wing are themselves right-wing. People who bloviate right-wing nonsense on social media are one thing. But the more numerous types who might vote right-wing but who hardly even think about politics between elections are another thing altogether. Remember, some of Trump's voters had voted for Obama. Trump told US-Americans (mostly white, Republican supporters) who had been suffering from de-industrialization, austerity, stagnant wages, etc., ... that he would bring those good-paying factory jobs back. Democrat-hack "progressives" tried to shame them with: "I see! So you think you'll get your factory jobs back and the refugees at our southern border and our undocumented fellow human beings and Black people abused by our racist justice system and our racist economic system aren't deal-breakers for you! How selfish! How privileged!" But one could just as easily retort: "So! You want to vote for Hillary because a Wall Street stooge/war monger with a vagina is important to you. And the tens of millions of refugees she's created and the million+ deaths she's caused as a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, and the destruction of Libya and Syria aren't important to you? How privileged! How self-centered!"
There are narratives that dominate US-American politics. (There is also Republican voter-suppression, gerrymandering, the over-representation of rural regions and voters everywhere but especially in the Electoral College and the Senate, and I forgot to mention last time the schemes described by Greg Palast in his [happily mistitled] "How Trump Stole 2020.") There's the Republican narrative of military glory, hard-working white people vs. entitled mud-people, Faith in Christ, denial of global warming and everything else that suggests that "the American Way of Life" might not be compatible with the survival of the environment. Then there's the Democratic narrative which in the 21st Century appears to be the use of crude identity politics to cement the loyalty of various demographics while doing nothing for them that would impinge upon the freedoms and wealth of Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs.
I would suggest that the Democratic narrative is not an effective means of peeling-off any lukewarm adherents of the Republican narrative. It might work for the shameless hacks who can't stop finding excuses for the Democrats' decades-long policy of "kinder, gentler" neo-liberal austerity and who genuinely have orgasms from their delusions about the divine wisdom and benevolence of Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but outside of that rarefied circle, those creatures are universally despised. And, again, while true-believer Democratic dupes don't notice all the crimes of their beloved leadership, ordinary people and right-wingers do. Calling for adherence to the Democrats while making excuses or ignoring their betrayals is a losing strategy.
Certain writers/bloggers/YouTubers/etc., have decided to try criticizing the Democratic Party as hopeless, discouraging people from trusting in/voting for it, while simultaneously reaching out to right-wingers who appear similarly dissatisfied with corporate neo-liberalism. "Right-wing populists" are the sort of people who rejected the clown car of status-quo Republican candidates in 2015 and who chose Trump as their party's candidate (primarily for his promises to bring back the factories lost under free trade and to end the forever wars). These are the voters who rejected Wall Street servant Eric Cantor in favour of an immigrant-hating "Tea Party" primary challenger.
Before continuing, I'd like to grab what was said in the Greenwald/Cooper editorial quoted in my last post:
I encourage people on the Left to recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in front of them. You’re not going to agree with the conservatives on everything. But if in 2004 I had told you that the majority of the GOP voter base would soon be seeing the folly of the Iraq War, becoming skeptical of state surveillance, and beginning to see the need for action to help the poor and working classes, you’d have told me such a thing would transform the country. Take the opportunity. These people are not demons, and they are ready to listen in a way they haven’t in a long, long time.
During the last Democratic Primary Bernie Sanders agreed to a "town hall" discussion of FOX News. Elizabeth Warren (who I have little respect for now) refused to appear on FOX for the excellent reason that FOX News is a shameless propaganda outlet that pushes a racist, misogynistic culture of hate. Sanders did the opposite for the excellent reasons that tens of millions of US-Americans watch FOX News and he was trying to get as many votes as he could. And Sanders' FDR/social-democratic-lite policy proposals of health care and (surprisingly) advocacy for immigrants were so popular with the audience that the FOX News hosts were unable to disguise his popularity. It was the same story when Sanders went on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan used to be a tight-assed, short-fuse, anti-drug conspiracy theorist in his youth. He has since mellowed into a pro-pot conspiracy theorist in middle-age. He appears to have been and remains and will always be a garden-variety sexist male; capable of having decent relationships with individual women (his mother, his wife, his daughters) while seeing random other women as an undifferentiated mass of neuroses and orifices. Which is to say that he is not a committed woman hater like Paul Elam or other "Mens Rights Activists." Just a representative of the everyday sexism of his society.
Is Joe Rogan a "right-winger" though? He says that he isn't. And he's both honest and correct on this. He supports gay rights. He's pro-public health care. He's anti-imperialist. The fact of the matter is that Joe Rogan's politics are essentially an incoherent mishmash. To his credit he admits to being something of a doofus and warns people against listening to him for any guidance in life. He is the sort of "non-political" person who I will be talking about throughout this post. A representative of the sort of person who could vote for Trump after having voted for Obama twice. Sanders went on Rogan's show for an hour long discussion and it was a brilliant success. Many thousands of people (Rogan's audience is in the tens of millions) said that they'd been led to believe that Sanders was a far-left loon but that upon listening to him talking with Rogan they had a great deal of respect for him.
The Sanders campaign took the success of the podcast and contrived an "endorsement" of Sanders from Rogan. (Rogan hadn't formally endorsed anyone but had said he liked Sanders.) And this brought on a deluge of the sort of self-defeating, identity-politics-driven stupidity that this post is also about. Many US progressives and/or Hillary Clinton-loving shitheads condemned Sanders for associating with this standard bearer of misogyny and transphobia.
I have to ask such people who condemn Sanders for appealing for the votes of the FOX News and Joe Rogan audiences while not compromising on his policy proposals or his values: Would you rather have paid maternity leave because of the victory of a politician who won the votes of people you despise, OR would you rather continue to exist in the world of Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce/Oligarch shills who mouth "woke" platitudes (and might even believe them) but who otherwise do nothing for you? But at least they won't sully themselves by appealing to rednecks! No! Feminist icons like Hillary Clinton don't appeal to rednecks. They go after the votes of "respectable" John McCain-Mitt Romney-David Frum-William Kristol suburban Republicans (while shitting on their own party's base who can either like it or lump it).
Which brings me to CounterPunch's Paul Street again. Lately, he's been writing as if he wants to seal-off any and all of the 73 million people who voted for Trump and then .... well, it's not clear what then. Street despises the "dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats." So I'm not really sure what he's proposing. But anyhow, he says that reaching out to Trumpian/FOX News fascists is a waste of time:
Bernie Sanders has the Trumpenproletarian brain worm – the one that helps normalize rising Amerikaner Republican fascism by claiming that the mostly petit-bourgeois and affluent base of the white nationalist Amerikaner Party of Trump (APOT, the new name of the Republican Party) is just everyday “populist” working-class people and therefore potentially progressive.
The “independent” Senator Sanders recently told The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that the Democratic Party doesn’t “fully appreciate” the need to speak to the struggles of the white working class. “We’ve got to take it to them,” Sanders said, referring to the Caucasian (section of the) proletariat. “I intend, as soon as I have three minutes, to start going into Trumpworld and start talking to people,” Sanders told Dowd. “it’s absolutely imperative if democracy is to survive that we do everything that we can to say, ‘Yes, we hear your pain and we are going to respond to your needs.’” If Democrats fail to do that, Sanders added, “conspiracy theories and big lies and the drift toward authoritarianism” will continue.
...
How in the name of God did significant swaths of what once seemed to be an emerging Left fall prey to the insipid red-brown fascism-denial and fascism-normalization of those like Glenn Greenwald (his resume now includes at least 41 appearances on Fatherland News), Jimmy Dore, Joe Rogan, Krystal Ball, and Matt Taibbi? The answer to that question requires another essay. I’m not sure I have the stomach to write it[2]. The dismal capitalist-imperialist Democrats deserve no small part of the blame, of course.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all Bernie’s fault. (I knocked on doors and caucused “for” Bernie – well for Single Payer health insurance and heightened contradictions inside the Democratic Party – in Iowa in January of 2020.). Still, Bernie’s not helping the situation with this nonsense about how it is good and necessary to “go into Trumpworld.” If he does go there, I hope he wears an especially strong mask as the Delta Variant goes into that covidiotically vaccine-resistant milieu with a very different kind of agenda.
Actually, I think I finally get Street's strategy. As opposed to Jeffrey St. Clair's perpetual sneering at anyone he disagrees with, Street's revolutionary plan is to self-righteously condemn 3/4's of the country [voters for the two major parties] as worthless human garbage in essay after essay until disease, old age, or some catastrophe brings his life to an end. (Again: I'm not saying that some of the values of people who would vote for Trump are not deplorable. But I'd also say that about some of the values of people who vote Democrat or old-style Republican. And I'm not saying that the Proud Boys or the assholes with the "6MWE" t-shirts [ie., six-million Jews wasn't enough] aren't dangerous, frightening fascists. What I AM saying is that Paul Street is a fucking idiot "purity pony"... [Irony! Hillary/Biden/corporate Democrat fanatics accuse leftists of being "purity ponies" while they call for the rejection of people who don't uniformly agree with all their values!] .... if he believes that anything can be achieved by ignoring the tens of millions of people who could go either way when it comes to voting between two shit political parties in a brainwashed society.)
Street continues to luxuriate in his self-righteousness in a follow-up essay of spittle-flecked rage about "Bootlicking Grifters, Trumpenleft victims and the Bourgeois-Democratic God That Failed." Again; I'm not going to pretend that Trump isn't at least proto-fascist. I'm not going to pretend that "right-wing populism" isn't proto-fascism. I'm not going to pretend that most right-wing voters are obnoxious, frightening people. I'm not going to deny that the genuine fascist/terrorist/racist nutbar supporters of Trump and "QAnon" aren't horrible, dangerous people.
What I AM going to dispute is Street's snivelling self-righteous stupidity. As I write these words I'm recalling an older Michael Moore piece where he hung out with members of the North Michigan Militia and one of them at the end expressed sympathy for Martin Luther King. Here's a link to a video clip. I remember they went on a roller-coaster ride. The point is that if you're going to claim to be trying to bring change to society (as opposed to me who has seen the uselessness of the Left and now only use my writing to vent my spleen) you're going to have to reconcile yourself to the goddamned FACT that this will require reaching out to people who don't agree with you on everything. And I'm not talking about the actual nazis with the pro-Holocaust t-shirts. I'm talking about the shlubs who don't have all the facts and who don't pretend to but who can tell with their own eyes that the game is rigged and whose lives have been ruined by the bipartisan shit-show in Washington. Certainly some of the things these people believe in are toxic. But that's humanity. That's going to be "DEMOCRACY." Appeal to people's self-interest in ways that improve the interests of the majority. Anyway, here's Paul Street again:
The red-brown Trumpenleft idiocy fueled by running dog grifters (more on this term below) like Greenwald, Ball, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, Caitlin Johnstone, Fredrik DeBoer (below) and others (now apparently including Tom Frank) takes numerous other and related forms: joining fascists in claiming that Donald Trump was and is a product and agent of (um, white) working-class alienation and “populism”; claiming that Trump is an anti-imperialist (how absurd); reflexively rejecting and mocking numerous and obvious ways in which it is elementarily accurate to understand Trump and Trumpism as fascist; fundamentally misunderstanding and misrepresenting the Trump and far right base; falsely claiming that the mainstream media and intellectual class widely denounced Trump as a fascist (it did not); arguing that there’s no fascism worth talking about in the U.S. until the disease takes decisive hold of the nation’s military and ruling class; charging that acknowledging danger on the Amerikaner right makes one an apologist for the dismal corporate and imperial Democrats (no matter how much Left contempt an anti-Trumpist/anti-fascist like myself shows for the dismal Dems); claiming that there are no differences between the two dominant ruling class U.S. parties (false); constant lecturing about the corporate and imperial nature of the Democrats (as if everyone on the Left doesn’t already know about that); vulgar pseudo-Marxian downplaying of the significance of racial, ethnic, and gender oppression; absurdly claiming that race and gender are just ruling-class “scams” to divide the working-class; joining fascists in denouncing anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-nativism and anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia as nothing more than liberal elitist “virtue-signaling” and political correctness; dismissing real struggles and popular mobilizations like Black Lives Matter as liberal and even “deep state” diversions; joining fascists in accusing Left and liberal critics of the fascist white power Trump presidency and Trumpismo of “Trump Derangement System;” claiming (against social scientific evidence) that the January 6th Capitol Rioters were mainly working-class people driven by economic anxiety and anger at economic inequality; joining fascists in opposing the banning of Trump and other malignant white nationalist neofascists from social media platforms and calling that banning authoritarian censorship; joining fascists in downplaying the horrific and lethal nature of January 6th and Trump’s broader effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election; being more concerned about Trump’s “free speech” access to Twitter than a recent spate of red state laws criminalizing public school teaching about white systemic racism; being more concerned about Trump’s access to Facebook and Instagram than one ever was about Trump’s access to the nuclear codes; joining fascists in embracing conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and numerous other phenomena; saying nice “populist” things about (white) nationalism and nativism; making “owning the libs” more important than recognizing, much less resisting white nationalism and the white power movement; trumpeting the idiotic and dangerous cause of red-brown right-left unity; constant harping on the need to “reach out” to mostly petit-bourgeois white right-wing people instead of to the nation’s mostly truly oppressed and dangerously demobilized masses; apologizing for and sometimes even embracing anti-vaxxery and anti-maskery while a deadly pandemic works its way through the species.
This is the sort of mental and moral poison that is encouraged by hours spent reading, watching, and listening to fash-sliding “left” grifters like Fatherland News favorite Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson pal Jimmy “Boogaloo” Dore, Krystal “Reach Out the Right” Ball (who nearly always appears next to an insipid Tucker Carlson knockoff named Saagar Enjeti), Joe “Don’t Get all PC on Me” Rogan, and scary dudebro Matt “Marcuse is a Quack and I’m a Normal Guy” Taibbi.
Now, some of what he accuses these "grifters" of doing is true and problematic. It deserves to be criticized. Michael Moore has blindspots. Jimmy Dore has blindspots. Glenn Greenwald has done some problematic things. Some of what he accuses this whole group of people of, they don't do. It's a complicated debate. Jimmy Dore causes me to cringe sometimes, when he sympathized with that asshole kid from the racist private anti-abortion school (a lot of the "abuse" that that teenaged asshole received was people typing online that he was a teenaged asshole) or his confused yammerings about the side-effects of his COVID vaccinations. Dore is willing to talk to people. Because he's not particulary sophisticated, he occasionally gets trolled. That's a cost of being willing to talk to people. But he has stood up to the Trump-lovers who populate his comments sections by saying that if they were in the desperate straits of Central American refugees that they'd do exactly the same thing. Dore pushed "Force the Vote on M4A" and exposed the moral corruption and pathology of the Left. (CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair is so deranged by Jimmy Dore that he abandoned his and his website's correct appraisal of the Democratic Party as a graveyard for progressive ideals by siding with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez against Dore's "abuse" of her ... yelling about her abandonment of her principles and goddamned campaign promises in a YouTube video filmed in Los Angeles while AOC is either in Washington DC or NYC .... perhaps because AOC has a pretty face and a nice rack.)
This is a big problem that I have with the Left. For all my criticisms of CounterPunch (which began with their hysterical, sexist pile-on and smears of Caitlin Johnstone) I still read them and occasionally get valuable information and analysis from them. Paul Street on the other hand appears to positively revel in his irrelevance. [That has a nice sorta ring to it doesn't it?] If you go out to talk to working people, White, Black, Brown, etc., ... you're going to occasionally hear things you don't approve of. Deal with it. Get over it. Grow the fuck up. Or just admit that you're not serious about trying to change anything.
So, what I've been trying to say is that while I am certainly pessimistic about the chances of redeeming a convinced right-winger from their nasty delusions, I have always maintained that there are people whose conservatism is based on ignorance and that it is these people who are capable of sanity. And, recently, I also pointed out economic and geographical factors that produce a conservative culture, which rules out the other factors of stupidity and fear. Finally, I'm convinced that millions of people who voted for Trump (especially those of them who had previously voted for Obama) aren't genuinely political at all. I simply can't believe that the 73 million people who voted for Trump are dyed-in-the-wool fascists. Therefore I support the efforts of people like Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Dore and Caitlin Johnstone to try to find common ground with such regular people to fight against corporate neo-liberalism and I reject the pompous, self-righteous, self-absorbed blowhards who condemn them and who appear to advocate for the permanent division of the USA into warring camps of "Republican," "Democrat," and a tiny band of tiresome Marxists and other left-progressives who routinely debase themselves with incoherent (but simultaneously boring) "lesser-evilism."
Street goes on again and again about how the image of the working class Trump voter is over-emphasized. But as someone who is (after a brief half-decade as a middle class professional) working class, I can tell Mr. Street that the conservative working class is very much a thing. And it isn't just the white working class. I know Black fellow workers who despise Muslim immigrants. South Asian and Filipino immigrants who hate Blacks. And on and on it goes in various permutations of prejudice and social conservatism. When Andrea Horwath was on CP24 condemning a Doug Ford cabinet minister for wearing a flak jacket on a ride-along with the cops to Jane and Finch a Black co-worker (I was watching this in the lunchroom cafeteria) yelled at the television that the cabinet minister was right to do so!
This might be anecdotal, except of course for the whole swaths of the Mid-West that were festooned in pro-Trump campaign signs and which also went to him in large numbers. Trump's voters might very well skew affluent. But he still has millions of working class supporters and they are NOT all fascist and their votes would help a truly progressive political movement like, say, a Democratic Party that had Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate and a "Squad" that wasn't brow-beaten into compliance and that didn't sabotage/rob progressive candidates of their victories. (Again, Street is offering his readers LITERALLY NOTHING to organize around so he can go fuck himself.)
‘What Happened to Glenn Greenwald?’ – Consortiumnews
What Happened to Glenn Greenwald? - CounterPunch.org
Rise of the Right: How the Vaudeville Left Fuels White Supremacy - CounterPunch.org
1 comment:
Post a Comment