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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
4 comments
Being “center-left” or “liberal” or “progressive” no longer means anything at all. It no longer contains any ideology. It’s just allegiance to one’s tribe, and opposition to all other tribes. Still, I see a silver lining in this cloud, though admittedly it may be just wishful thinking on my part.
There are, or were, some liberals and progressives who did actually believe in some ideology. George Lakoff tried to identify liberal ideology in his 1996 book “Moral Politics.” In a speech around a decade later, he got it down to just one word: He said that =empathy= was the heart of the progressive worldview. Around that same time, Paul Waldman came up with a very appealing one-sentence summary: a progressive is someone who believes “we’re all this together.”
Neither of those men has ever seen himself as a socialist, as far as I am aware. But empathy is not far from solidarity. And Waldman’s sentence is not far from the Wobblies’ “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
Unlike Lakoff and Waldman, most liberals and progressives were not abstact thinkers; they could not have articulated a basic belief system. Nevertheless, they mostly agreed to the same policies as Lakoff and Waldman, and I believe they were still influenced by shared attitudes. To some degree, I think that Lakoff and Waldman were just articulating what a great deal of the center-left were feeling.
And now it is gone. Obama and Clinton have trampled all over those feelings. Sanders was at least partly a progressive, but Obama and Clinton trampled all over him too. Still, I don’t believe that the cynics of the DNC have destroyed all hope. They have merely gotten it lost.
And now the center-left is lost. It is groping around blindly, trying to figure out where it belongs. I have hope that some of it will find a place in the true left.
Many people have given definitions of “liberal,” but I like Peter Camejo’s best. He said a liberal “likes capitalism, but not what capitalism does.” I’m not certain what Camejo had in mind, but here is my interpretation: Liberals have empathy for their fellow human beings, but they have been fooled by capitalist propaganda. They like the things that they mistakenly believe capitalism does; they do not like the things that capitalism actually does. So their heart is in the right place, but they’ve got their heads up their asses.
And what I’m hoping is that, now that they’re wandering around lost, some of them may finally be getting their heads into the right place. So I’ll keep preaching to them, hoping to lead some of them into the light.
ERIC SCHECHTER HAS SENT THE FOLLOWING COMMENT:
Being “center-left” or “liberal” or “progressive” no longer means anything at all. It no longer contains any ideology. It’s just allegiance to one’s tribe, and opposition to all other tribes. Still, I see a silver lining in this cloud, though admittedly it may be just wishful thinking on my part.
There are, or were, some liberals and progressives who did actually believe in some ideology. George Lakoff tried to identify liberal ideology in his 1996 book “Moral Politics.” In a speech around a decade later, he got it down to just one word: He said that =empathy= was the heart of the progressive worldview. Around that same time, Paul Waldman came up with a very appealing one-sentence summary: a progressive is someone who believes “we’re all this together.”
Neither of those men has ever seen himself as a socialist, as far as I am aware. But empathy is not far from solidarity. And Waldman’s sentence is not far from the Wobblies’ “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
Unlike Lakoff and Waldman, most liberals and progressives were not abstact thinkers; they could not have articulated a basic belief system. Nevertheless, they mostly agreed to the same policies as Lakoff and Waldman, and I believe they were still influenced by shared attitudes. To some degree, I think that Lakoff and Waldman were just articulating what a great deal of the center-left were feeling.
And now it is gone. Obama and Clinton have trampled all over those feelings. Sanders was at least partly a progressive, but Obama and Clinton trampled all over him too. Still, I don’t believe that the cynics of the DNC have destroyed all hope. They have merely gotten it lost.
And now the center-left is lost. It is groping around blindly, trying to figure out where it belongs. I have hope that some of it will find a place in the true left.
Many people have given definitions of “liberal,” but I like Peter Camejo’s best. He said a liberal “likes capitalism, but not what capitalism does.” I’m not certain what Camejo had in mind, but here is my interpretation: Liberals have empathy for their fellow human beings, but they have been fooled by capitalist propaganda. They like the things that they mistakenly believe capitalism does; they do not like the things that capitalism actually does. So their heart is in the right place, but they’ve got their heads up their asses.
And what I’m hoping is that, now that they’re wandering around lost, some of them may finally be getting their heads into the right place. So I’ll keep preaching to them, hoping to lead some of them into the light.
“Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as experts in market analysis.” – Spot on the money!
We remain irrationally tied to collective mythologies that posit nonsense such as: “the miracle of the market,” “the invisible hand (of the market) that raises all boats,” “unchecked individual greed promotes collective good,” “unlimited economic expansion can exist on a finite planet,” and essentially enshrining “the divine rights of corporations.” Reading and interpreting today’s “stock market numbers” is essentially the modern equivalent of predicting the future by “reading chicken entrails” or “tea leaves.” Capitalism is a vastly destructive mythology who time must come to an end if a habitable planet is to survive.
The *true* left has been intentionally marginalized for decades now, as the only potential force which could bring the capitalists to their knees, and then capitalism to its grave. “It’s not ‘the left’ trying to take over the world and shut down free speech and all that other bad stuff – it’s ‘the right’!!” –
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/vgi/backgrounders/collectivist%20plot%20omg.html