People who are hardcore "reformist" by temperamental bent never see themselves for what they are: extremists of the center, and repulsively self-complacent, too. 

Bush2 embracing Hillary: they are all part of the same criminal mafia. They have no real ideological or principled differences, both are servants and part of the plutocracy. For centrists, this lack of real principle is of no consequence.

As the Trump administration comes apart at the seams and the Dempublican party marches us into ever-increasing cold war escalations, I look back on my young career in political commentary, on where it’s been and where it seems to be going.

From this vantagepoint I suppose thus far it could all be summed up as one long exchange in which I say what I reckon is going on in the world, and my fellow lefties rush in to say “Shh! Don’t say that! How do you expect to win over the centrists saying things like that?”

This has always puzzled me. I guess the idea is that if woke progressives tone-police ourselves extra carefully and keep sharing our ideas nice and sweetly, eventually establishment Democrats will turn around and go, “Well gosh darn, I guess everything I’ve been taught about my country and how it works is completely wrong after all! Let me go cut the cable, cancel my subscription to the Washington Post and start working on a grassroots presidential campaign for Ajamu Baraka!”

Or something like that; I’m not really sure how they imagine it would work to be honest. Do these people have any idea just how pervasively indoctrinated consumers of mainstream media are? Do they have any idea how big an ideological gap there is between anti-war socialism and the neoliberal neoconservative omnicidal death cult known as centrism? Do they truly expect that massive gap to be bridged, that ingrained-since-birth propaganda brain box shattered, by polite yet compelling arguments?

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]ersonally I can’t imagine such a thing happening often enough to make it worth the effort. Changing one’s worldview that drastically requires either a herculean amount of inner work or expert-level conceptual fluidity, both of which are very rare occurrences in people. I’d have better luck writing articles for young earth creationists about the reliability of carbon dating. The mainstream narrative about what America is and how it works is drummed into their minds from early childhood, and is constantly reinforced by all media they consume. There’s no efficient way to heal delusion that’s piled that high and that deep head-on, which is why I and others like me have been turning our focus toward throwing sand in the gears of the corporate propaganda machine itself.

When people talk about “horseshoe theory”, they are talking about this dynamic without realizing it. Horseshoe theory states that people on the far right and the far left have more in common with one another than they do with the political center; they’re not on opposite ends of a linear continuum but rather like a horseshoe, closer to the other end the further they move from the center. This is typically used as a smear against lefties by centrists, who point out the areas in which we’re closer to the Trumpsters than we are to them.

What they don’t realize, of course, is that so-called centrism as we know it today is nothing other than an insane, twisted, extremist ideology that only passes for a “center” because the billionaire class has used its influence and mass media propaganda to manufacture the status quo. Naturally, therefore, the further away one gets from the insane narratives advanced by that propaganda machine, the less belief will be invested in their insanity. Whether you move to the left or to the right of mainstream, you’re moving further away from the braying, psychotic mind viruses pouring from the talking heads on TV, and their gibberish about Russia, Syria, and the way America works will look more and more absurd. It doesn’t mean right-wingers get closer to abandoning their ideas about fiscal policy or left-wingers suddenly lose interest in civil rights, it just means that the further away one moves from centrist bullshit, the less one stinks of it.

Indeed, looking at the direction it seems to be heading, American centrism as it exists today is the single most depraved and dangerous ideology in the history of civilization. Many toxic ideas have seized hold of large groups of humans at different times, and millions have died as a result, but only the neoconservative policies of Washington’s centrists threaten to wipe our entire species off the face of the earth. The relentless drive toward perpetual war, the needless cold war escalations with the world’s only other nuclear superpower, and the childish carelessness with which these agendas are pushed forward pose a threat to terrestrial life more immediate than anything our species has ever dreamed up before, and the center’s ecosystem-killing neoliberal economic policies aren’t far behind.

So I’m fine with upsetting these people, personally; their leaders are evil and their followers are too deeply indoctrinated to be of any use in this fight. I’d rather work with people who see through the lies wherever they’re at on the ideological spectrum in disrupting the propaganda machine than waste energy trying to convince the deeply propagandized establishment Democrats that their entire worldview is wrong. I’d rather kill the thing that’s making them sick than try to convince them to get healthy. The loosest bits of our obstacle here seem to be around the edges, so that’s where I like to work.

From where I’m sitting, centrism is the very disease that needs to be cured; trying to cure that disease by appealing to the centrists is like trying to dry off with a bucket of water. Stop worrying about upsetting the centrists; they are at best too deluded and at worst too evil to be of any use anyway. Make lots of noise, create lots of movement, wake up the people around the edges, kill the propaganda machine, and eventually the centrists will be shaken awake by the commotion. But I guarantee you they’ll be the very last ones to wake up.

"Do these people have any idea just how pervasively indoctrinated consumers of mainstream media are? Do they have any idea how big an ideological gap there is between anti-war socialism and the neoliberal neoconservative omnicidal death cult known as centrism?"

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The Russians did not overthrow the government of elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in order to put Shah Reza Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne, to then murder and torture his way into history via his dreaded secret police SAVAK, leading to the revolution which made Iran an Islamic Republic. No, that was the United States via the CIA, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. The Strangelove Brothers, Kissinger and Brzezinski, later kept the love flowing for years, although their Iranian buddy’s nasty habits were well known.

The Russians did not use the CIA to support Osama bin Laden and other islamist jihadis fighting the Soviet client government in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, provoking the Russian invasion, and resulting in the birth of Al-Qaeda (after bin Laden became outraged over the presence of US military bases in his native “holy land” of Saudi Arabia). Again, that was the United States, with help from the Saudis, at the behest of Dr. Strangelove SORRY I MEAN Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Russian-hating Pole, beginning in the late 1970s.

The Russians did not support and arm Saddam Hussein in Iraq for years, ignoring his brutal crimes against his own Shiite population and backing him in his war of aggression against Iran. That would be, yet again (but you’ve guessed it by now) the United States, which later -- embarrassingly! but some of these people simply refuse to behave at some point -- found itself spending vast sums of money to massacre a large part of his army, and still later … but we’ll get to that shortly.

The Russians did not enact draconian sanctions against Iraq which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 civilians, many of them children, due to a lack of desperately needed medicine, simultaneously carrying out regular “no-fly zone” bombing raids … that would be (surprise!) the United States under the Clintons, whose not-particularly-sentimental Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said of those dead children, “… we think the price is worth it.” Some fanciful observers have spread silly theories that such policies could inspire resentful persons to turn to terrorism. 

Former Secy. of State Madeline Albright: The death of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, many of them children, was a price she (along with her accomplices in the American establishment) were quite willing to pay to topple Saddam. To this day this living ghoul receives a deferential treatment on the whore media, and among legions of liberaloids. The rotten empire takes care of its own.

The Russians did not invade Iraq in 2003 in order to avenge the humiliation of their President’s father after the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein remained in power, and the same Russians did not mount a massive propaganda campaign with the help of presstitute media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, including an award-winning performance by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations where he displayed falsified evidence of fictional Weapons of Mass Destruction, to persuade Americans and others to support this illegal invasion. Personally, I don’t even think such a thing would ever have occurred to the Russians.

The Russians, therefore, are not responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi state, for the more than one million civilian casualties since the invasion, for the massive waves of terrorism and sectarian violence and refugees entering Turkey and Europe which have resulted, or for the birth of ISIS in the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison -- the same ISIS which was formed by former Saddam military officers imprisoned there. These officers had been a bit irritated when the US disbanded the Iraqi military after the invasion and left them to fend for themselves, another brilliant decision by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld administered through US Imperial Viceroy J. Paul Bremer, he of the three-piece suit worn with combat boots. Some of those same Iraqi officers had previously worked with Al-Qaeda in Iraq (first formed there AFTER the US invasion), so one could say that the United States is doubly responsible for the existence of ISIS. At any rate: we can assert with a high degree of confidence that it was NOT THE RUSSIANS.

The Russians did not join together with the UK and France in 2011 to destroy the Libyan state in a major bombing campaign which killed an estimated 30,000 civilians, following US/UK support for Libyan rebels designed to set up the “revolution” in Africa’s most prosperous nation. The Russians then did not abandon the country to its fate, which soon turned out to be rival governments and militias, a growing ISIS presence, actual slave markets where helpless refugees are sold like cattle, and thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean after paying human traffickers to take them to Europe in tiny, overloaded boats. The Russians did not respond to a question about the death of Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi -- by sodomization with a long blade -- by laughing maniacally and loudly on national US television and proclaiming, “We came, we saw, he DIED! Ha ha ha!” That would be a certain former US Secretary of State who thought at the time that she was a shoo-in to be the next President. And anyway, Russian dramatic performances tend to be a bit more tasteful and skillful. No, the failed state that is Libya today, oozing terrorism and refugees, is once again on the account of … three guesses and the first two don’t count … well, this time America had help from two other NATO partners, let’s be fair.

The Russians did not provoke the war in Syria. Nor did Bashar al-Assad. The Russians did not encourage demonstrations in Syria which produced a predictable heavy-handed response, and the Russians did not then proceed to arm and fund islamist fighters from both inside and outside of Syria in a war which has killed half a million persons, and has drawn a large number of countries into a proxy conflict still mendaciously referred to in NATO media as a “civil war”. The Russians have long been allies of the Assad family, which enjoys the support of a substantial majority of the Syrian population. Believe me. The Russians did NOT do it. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did it, working from a blueprint which had been created by earlier US governments.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hich brings us to Ukraine, where we REALLY have a bit of mass confusion to deal with. It is common knowledge that the Russians provoked that mess by “invading Ukraine and annexing the Crimea” in 2014, right? Surely I’m not going to challenge THAT conventional wisdom?!

Actually … yes. I am.

About 15,000 people marched through Kiev in 2016 to honor Stepan Bandera, the leader of Ukraine's Neonazi collaborationist movement. Amazing how the American media manages to miss even something as massive and obvious as that.

It was not the Russians who promised themselves, in return for their agreement to support German reunification in 1991, that NATO would not expand eastward. And it was not the Russians who appointed former Dick Cheney staffer and leading neocon Victoria Nuland as Assistant Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It was not the Russians who spent (by Nuland’s own recorded admission) five billion dollars to lay the groundwork for a NATO-EU presence in Ukraine. No Russian accompanied her and Senator John McCain to pass out cookies on the Maidan in Kiev and encourage crowds to finally overthrow Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, which shortly thereafter came to pass with the help of a number of participating murderous snipers who have yet to be identified. Once he was out of power -- in a US-supported coup directly on Russia’s borders in violation of numerous commitments, obviously involving designs on Russia’s naval presence in the Crimea -- Russia did in fact respond rapidly to protect its national interests and those of the Russian-speaking majority there, who gave that action widespread support. But Russia did not “invade” Ukraine. That, once again, was America. Invasions do not always involve troops. Sometimes they involve money and subterfuge … in the case of the CIA and friends, quite often in fact.

Neocon Victoria Nuland among her impeccably putschist friends. A de facto proconsul in charge of US-supported subversion. Cartoonist did not have to exaggerate to get the main point across.

And Russia did not “annex” the Crimea, unless a vote of 98% of the population to return to Mother Russia, of which they had always been a historical part until the 1960s, is considered invalid. No responsible party has challenged those numbers. What could be more legitimate? What’s that you say? International Law? And who is citing “International Law”? Would that be, by any chance, a country which does not recognize the International Criminal Court? Puh-LEEEEEZE. No, the Russians did not “annex” the Crimea. ONCE AGAIN it was … well this time it was NOBODY. The population of the Crimea was overjoyed to rejoin its cultural homeland.

I have not even mentioned drone killings with thousands of collateral civilian deaths, or a number of other terror-producing factors. Nor have I discussed Israel’s role in this history, nor gone into any detail about Saudi Arabia and its war against the Houthis in Yemen, which the Russians are not supporting as I write this.

But we’ll save all of that for another piece. Let’s sum things up here. It won’t take long.

Ukraine Neonazis proudly sporting shirts with the "Totenkopf" insignia, the feared SS symbol. SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), rendered in English as Death's Head Units,[2] was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps for the Third Reich, among similar duties.[3] While the Totenkopf (skull) was the universal cap badge of the SS,

Much of the catastrophic, disastrous, ruinous conditions in large swaths of the modern world, particularly the Middle East, North Africa and the Hindu Kush, and much of the islamist terror which continues to spread there and outwards into NATO countries -- through the auspices of a very sophisticated public outreach program by ISIS -- can be pretty directly chalked up to United States and NATO policies since the 1970s, very often administered and carried out by the CIA and/or the US military with or without their allies; and much of that policy was initially conceived as a means to contain and weaken Russia. Of course, the roots go much farther back. This paranoid, delusional obsession with Russia has been at the root of much Western insanity and horribly destructive policy since the Bolsheviks 100 years ago. Russia IS a nation armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. But America can take responsibility for that too -- and for the entire dynamic beginning in 1946 which engendered the Cold War and the arms race between NATO and the Eastern Bloc, under the incredibly ignorant, racist and power-drunk direction of that great American, Harry Truman -- as brilliantly documented by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in “The Untold History of the United States”.

The Russians did not do it. But thanks to a poorly “educated” population which barely remembers last year, much less the history of recent decades, and forms many of its ideas regarding the rest of the world through watching vulgar Hollywood movies and TV shows featuring evil Russians victimizing innocent Americans, the Russians make damned convenient patsies.

By the way, the Russians did not “interfere in our Democracy” either. We have no democracy.

by ROBERT JENSEN

“There’s a disagreement in the planning group, about inviting you,” an organizer told me, hesitantly, during a phone call this spring to finalize the details of my speaking slot in a “diversity-and-inclusion” event.

I sighed and prepared to respond, knowing that the objection to my participation likely had to do either with my writing after September 11, 2001, that was critical of the U.S. empire or more recent essays challenging the ideology of the transgender movement from a radical feminist position.

---

Missouri transgender teen Lila Perry began to feel like a girl when she was 13 and started appearing as one in school this year when classes began in August.

This time the problem was 9/11; one of the sponsoring groups pulled out rather than be associated with an event that included me, a reaction that was common in the years following the terrorist attacks. The debate over transgenderism has been contentious more recently; earlier this spring, a talk I was scheduled to give was canceled when someone objected and another talk was interrupted by protestors who hoped to shout me off the lectern.

These incidents are a minor annoyance in my life, hardly worth attention except for what they reveal about the culture’s difficulty engaging in coherent and constructive arguments about issues that generate strong emotions. The health of a democracy depends on people’s ability to argue—to propose public policies and articulate reasons why others should adopt those policies. Democracy atrophies when substantive arguments are sidelined by dogma, when claims are asserted with self-righteous certainty but not defended with reason and logic. There’s nothing wrong with people being emotional about politics, so long as it doesn’t shut down dialogue.

After several months of furor over high-profile conservative speakers who have been thwarted in some way on college campuses (Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter all made news this way), it’s illuminating to reflect on the far less dramatic challenges to my writing, which have come from both the right and the left. My focus is not on concerns about my constitutionally protected freedom of speech (it has never been significantly impeded) but rather on the danger of a political culture in which critical self-reflection and thoughtful debate become more difficult, perhaps impossible in some times and places.

One of those times and places was the United States after 9/11/01. Like many in the anti-empire movement—a grassroots global justice movement challenging U.S. military and economic policy and demanding that policymakers take seriously our shared moral principles and international law—I argued that a mad rush to war would be counterproductive. When an op-ed making such an argument—that the United States consider a more rational course of action, and that we reflect on a history of U.S. crimes in the developing world—was published in a Texas newspaper a few days after the attack, I was the target of an ad hoc campaign (thankfully, unsuccessful) to get me fired from my teaching job at the University of Texas at Austin.

---

The health of a democracy depends on people’s ability to argue—to propose public policies and articulate reasons why others should adopt those policies. Democracy atrophies when substantive arguments are sidelined by dogma, when claims are asserted with self-righteous certainty but not defended with reason and logic. There’s nothing wrong with people being emotional about politics, so long as it doesn’t shut down dialogue.

---

A decade later, a series of online essays about the transgender movement (available here, here, here, and here) led to another ad hoc campaign to exclude me from left/liberal spaces because I argued that the intellectual claims of the trans movement appear to be incoherent and the political program that flows from it undermines feminism. Like many in the radical feminist movement who take such a position, I didn’t contest the experiences that transgender people describe but offered an alternative analysis that I believe provides a more compelling account of sex/gender politics.

These two cases are dramatically different in many ways, of course, but some similar features deserve attention.

Challenging the foundational mythology of the United States—the claim that we have always been the moral exemplar of the world and today are the only force that can ensure a safe and stable world system—provokes a predictable reaction from most of the right and center in U.S. politics, which has made acceptance of those myths a litmus test for being a “good American.” When one invokes history to challenge the myths, conservatives rarely attempt to engage in real debate, preferring to dismiss critics as the “blame America first” gang and label any debate over policy as a failure to “support the troops.”

Challenging the biological claims and underlying ideology of the transgender movement—the claim that reproduction-based sex categories are somehow an invention and that cultural gender norms can be challenged separate from a feminist critique of patriarchy—provokes a predictable reaction from most of the liberal and left end of the political spectrum, which has made acceptance of those claims a litmus test for being “progressive.” When one invokes basic biology and a radical feminist critique of the transgender movement’s individualist gender politics, left/liberals rarely attempt to engage, preferring to dismiss critics as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and label any disagreement about policy as bigotry.

Because I work for a public university, I believe it is part of my job to take my research and teaching into public. Because I’m a tenured professor, I can engage in public debates without much fear of losing my job. In that public writing and speaking, I don’t shy away from provocative statements when I believe they are justified by the evidence and are important to democratic dialogue, striving to support the claims I make with evidence and logic.

I don’t mind being criticized and invite challenges to my ideas. What’s disturbing in both cases is that I was routinely denounced as being morally and/or intellectually inadequate, but rarely did those denunciations include a response to what I actually was writing.

For months after 9/11, any critique of U.S. foreign policy was rejected out of hand, taken by many as evidence that critics were colluding with terrorists. It wasn’t until the failure of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were undeniable that such critiques were taken seriously, and even then the debate focused mainly on failed tactics rather than the fundamental question of why the United States pursues global power through imperial strategies.

Radical feminist critiques of transgender ideology continue to attract denunciations, especially after the Obama administration issued rules about transgender students’ rights, which seemed to settle what the liberal position should be. Conservative/religious objections to that policy have been widely debated and covered by journalists, but the more substantial analyses of radical feminists are largely ignored in the mainstream and vilified in left/liberal circles.

All of this is troubling, but even more disturbing for me has not been what is said in public but what people tell me privately. After 9/11, a number of faculty colleagues took me aside and told me that they thought the UT president’s denunciation of me was inappropriate, but only a couple of them spoke out publicly. The faculty council and the faculty committee charged with defending academic freedom were silent on the university president’s clumsy ad hominem attack on a professor.

Similarly, after a local radical bookstore issued a statement declaring me unfit for future association with the store, many left/feminist friends and allies told me privately that they disagreed with that decision, but to the best of my knowledge none of those people publicly challenged the store’s statement. Rather than risk similar denunciation, people found it easier to say nothing.

Reasonable people can disagree respectfully about many things, including the appropriate analysis of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and how best to understand the claims of transgender people. But in a democracy, weighty public policy decisions—such as going to war or endorsing the treating trans-identified children with puberty blockers—should emerge from the widest possible conversation in which people provide reasons for their policy preferences and respond substantively to good-faith challenges.

If that process is derailed, whether by forces from the right or the left, the deterioration of responsible intellectual practice undermines democracy.

by PAUL STREET

Beneath this smoking shit-screen of externalized culpability, the DDDs continue down the same right-wing, corporate-neoliberal path that has led to their electoral marginalization – this while certifiable morons like the prattling MSNBC cretin Chris Matthews claim the Democrats have gone “too far left.”  An essay posted on the Sandernista zine Jacobin last March bore the remarkable title “Democrats Against Single Payer.” Bruno Marcetic detailed how the dismal dollar-drenched Dems’ longstanding effort to “quell their base’s clamoring for a comprehensive, public health-care system” had morphed into “the open, public disparagement of such a goal — not just by Democratic leaders, but by leading liberal commentators…” as Marcetic observed, the criticisms that leading liberal Democrats like Paul Krugman have levelled at the obvious social-democratic national health insurance solution curiously mirror those that the right makes against anything and everything left progressives advocate: “too radical…too expensive; it’ll mean raising taxes; it’ll involve giving the federal government too much power.”  Marcetic noted the absurdity of liberals denouncing Medicare-for-All even as the “moment is ripe for making the push for single payer”:

“It’s not just that the GOP has spectacularly failed to gut Obamacare. Polling suggests Americans are more amenable to the idea than ever… the last few months have seen a spate of editorials in local newspapers extolling the virtues of single payer and necessitating the need to pass it. The long list includes the: Redding Record Searchlight, Berkshire Eagle, Reno Gazette-Journal, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Grass Valley and Nevada County’s Union, Winston-Salem Journal, Eugene, Oregon’s Register-Guard, Napa Valley Register, and the Florida Times-Union. Similar editorials have also appeared in major papers like USA Today, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun…Even Mark Cuban has come out in favor of the policy. Do Democrats really want to be outflanked on the left by Mark Cuban?”

A master opportunist, self-promoter, and overpaid presstitute, Chris Matthews is another disgraceful "pundit" on US television. He thinks—with no sign of shame—that the Democrats have "veered too far left." A genuinely sordid creature, but par for the course in the cesspool of capitalist communications.

But, of course, it’s not about what Democrats do or don’t want. The Democratic Party is a brothel owned by elite capital.  It’s about pleasing corporate and Wall Street paymasters, who are perfectly willing to be passed on the portside by that notorious health-care Marxist Mark Cuban (whose last name says it all).  To make matter worse, the triple Ds pander not only to the One Percent (the 0.1 percent really) but also to the professional class, which has good employment-based health care thanks to its privileged position within the capitalist division of labor.

“It’s Going to be Okay”

Confronted with statements of concern and/or disgust over how they are giving the nation state away to an ever more neofascistic, white-nationalist Republican Party, “Indivisible” liberals I know tell me that “things are going to be okay” since their party will “win power back in 2018 and 2020.” The secret to this great transformation by these Democrats’ reasoning is that Trump’s white rural and working class voters are going to come back to their (dollars and) senses and vote their “pocketbook interests again.” This “rational” working class voting behavior will emerge when formerly deluded Trumpenproletarians realize that Donald Trump is a big super-rich bastard who played them with his faux-populist shtick and who is only in it only for himself and others in his billionaire class.

 “Endless Sellouts of Working People”

Donald Trump certainly is that bastard. And if the normal historical pattern holds, the Democrats should pick up Congressional seats in next year’s mid-terms.

Still, there are four great problems with the liberal “things are going to be okay” argument.

First, the Democrats kicked the working class – white and non-white – and its lunch-pail “bread and butter” issues to the curb a long time ago. It hasn’t been anything remotely close to the “party of working people” since at least the middle 1970s Carter Interregnum. Its leading figures since –  the Clintons and Obama – have been slimy and duplicitous vanguard neoliberals deeply committed to the rightward Big-Business friendly abandonment of the poor, the working classes, social justice, and the common good. The Democrats are the globalist and automation-happy party of NAFTA, financial deregulation, welfare shredding, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street – along with the socially liberal majority wing of the “educated” professional class (more on that entity below) and the giant Pentagon system, which pre-empts the social state with a war machine that eats up more than half of federal discretionary spending (even the “democratic socialist” Bernie F-35 Sanders is a noted “military Keynesian”) while functioning as a giant form of corporate welfare to high-tech firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

One of the secrets to Trump’s success with the white working class was his insistent harping on how the Clintons, Obamas and other Goldman Sachs-bought U.S. “leaders” from both major parties had eagerly participated in the “free trade” dismantlement of American manufacturing.   The insane racist insult clown Trump wasn’t wrong about that.  The DDDs let him absurdly pose as a protector of blue collar jobs by functioning as a party of corporate globalization for decades. “I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” candidate Trump memorably intoned, echoing the rhetoric of Democratic Party icon Franklin Roosevelt.  “These,” Trump added for good measure, “are the forgotten men and women of our country.  People who work hard but no longer have a voice.  I am your voice.” As Thomas Frank notes in the new afterword to his widely-read book Listen Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?:

“There was brilliance in the billionaire’s bluster. By denouncing free trade and the culture wars, [candidate Trump] was dynamiting the consensus orthodoxy that had dominated Washington for many years.  This orthodoxy had, among other things, made possible endless sell-outs of working people by Democrats, who could savor their Tom Friedman columns and celebrate globalization’s winners and still count on the votes of the angry working class because such people had ‘nowhere else to go.’ Clintonism would only work, however, as long as Republicans did their part and adhered to free-market orthodoxy.  Take that consensus away and leave the Democrats as the only party of globalization, and they would immediately be exposed to a working-class revolt within their ranks…Trump was openly calling for such a revolt.”

The coup de grace was Trump’s claim that he could be workers’ “voice” since he was so wealthy that he didn’t need to depend on those Roosevelt called “the economic royalists” to attain and keep power.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

Second, even if the Democrats were to meaningfully serve the pocketbook interests of Joe and Jane Six Pack over those of the hyper-opulent global investor class, it’s not at all certain that would register in the voting booth.  U.S.-Americans commonly vote the way they do for reasons that have nothing to with rationally calculated material interests. In their recent book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press, 2016), esteemed liberal political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show that deeply rooted social identities and affiliations influence political choices far more significantly than “individual rationality” in the United States. U.S. voters are badly informed about the issues and uninterested in politics. They act mainly on “emotional attachments,” not “rational choices.” Group affiliations tend to trump even their values, not just their interests. “Most [American] people,” Achen and Bartels find, “make their party choices based on who they are, not what they think. Partisanship, like religious identification, tends to be inherited, durable, and not about ideology or theology” (emphasis added). Party affiliations and voting behavior tend to be fixed in childhood, lasting across generations and despite changed circumstances.

Rational Hatred of the Professional Class

Third, liberal Democrats typically miss a key point on who the white working class most directly interacts with when it comes to the infliction of what the sociologist Richard Sennett called “the hidden injuries of class.” So what if Trump is an arrogant One Percenter? It is through regular and often aggravating and even humiliating contact with the professional and managerial class, not the mostly invisible corporate and financial elite, that the working class mostly commonly experiences class inequality and oppression.

Working people see hyper-opulent “rich bastards” like Trump, Bill Gates, and even Warren Buffett on television. In their real lives, they carry out “ridiculous orders” and receive “idiotic” reprimands from middle- and upper middle-class professionals —from, to quote a white university maintenance worker I spoke with last summer, “know-it-all pencil-pushers who don’t give a flying fuck about regular working guys like me.” This worker voted for Trump “just to piss-off all the big shot [professional class] liberals” who constantly disrespect and order him around.

It is not lost on “the white working class” that much of the professional class elite tends to align with the Democratic Party and its purported liberal and multicultural, cosmopolitan, and environmentalist values. It doesn’t help that the professional-managerial elite is aligned with the politically correct multiculturalism and the environmentalism that many white workers have pocketbook and other reasons to see as a threat to their living standards, status, and general well-being.

White workers are certainly getting punked by Trump’s arch-plutocratic presidency.  The Trump administration is loaded with members of the very same financial elite he denounced on the campaign trail. But the working class would also have gotten punked by an arrogant corporate-neoliberal Clinton II presidency if Hillary had won. And the same time, working class anger at all the professional class know-it-all with their Hillary and Obama bumper stickers on the back of their Volvos and Audis and Priuses is not based simply on some “uneducated” white working class failure to perceive common interests with the rest of the “99 percent” against the top hundredth. Among other things, a two-class model of America deletes the massive disparities that exist between the working-class majority of Americans and the nation’s professional and managerial class. In the U.S. as across the world capitalist system, ordinary working people suffer not just from the elite private and profit-seeking capitalist ownership of workplace and society. They also confront the steep oppression inherent in what longtime left economists Robin Hahnel and Mike Albert call the “corporate division of labor”—an alienating, de-humanizing, and hierarchical subdivision of tasks “in which a few workers have excellent conditions and empowering circumstances, many fall well below that, and most workers have essentially no power at all.”

Over time, this pecking order hardens “into a broad and pervasive class division” whereby one class — roughly the top fifth of the workforce —“controls its own circumstances and the circumstances of others below,” while another (the working class) “obeys orders and gets what its members can eke out.” The “coordinator class,” as Albert labels the professionals, “looks down on workers as instruments with which to get jobs done. It engages workers paternally, seeing them as needing guidance and oversight and as lacking the finer human qualities that justify both autonomous input and the higher incomes needed to support more expensive tastes.”

And it does so with a specifically meritocratic ideology that helps make it an enemy of the working class. As  Green Party leader and Teamster union activist Howie Hawkins noted last summer, “The Democratic Party ideology is the ideology of the professional class. Meritocratic competition. Do well in school, get well-rewarded.” (Unfortunately, perhaps, his comment reminded me of a bumper sticker I’ve seen on the back of more than a few beat-up cars in factory parking lots and trailer parks over the years: “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.”).

The other side of the coin of the professional class’s meritocratic ideology is that those in the working and lower classes deserve their order-receiving and poorly paid fate. They didn’t pay attention in class and do their homework. Professional class good and smart, working class bad and dumb.

It all comes with ballot box implications. Many white workers will vote against their supposed “pocketbook interests” by embracing an ugly, super-oligarchic Republican over a supposedly liberal (actually neoliberal) Democrat backed by middle- and upper middle- class elites who contemptuously lord it over those workers every day. This is something that distinguished law professor Joan C. Williams (herself the product of a white working class family) put her finger on two days after the 2016 election in a Harvard Business Review essay titled “What So Many People Don’t Get About the Working Class.” As Williams wrote:

The Dignity of Working Men also found resentment of professionals—but not of the rich. … Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. … That’s another part of Trump’s appeal…”

“Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. ‘Directness is a working-class norm,’ notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, ‘If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. … I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.’ Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being ‘a total wuss and a wimp.’ … Of course Trump appeals. [Hillary] Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.”

Middle- and upper-middle-class, college-educated liberals, progressives and leftists who cluck about how “foolish” Caucasian proles don’t know who their real 1-percent enemy is don’t get it. The white working class experiences and all-too rationally perceives the professional “elite” as its main class oppressor on a day-to-day basis.

Trump may not necessarily lose that many points with white working class voters for serving his fellow billionaires. He scores with those voters by smiting the smug, arrogant and disrespectful, two-faced and “politically correct” professional class.

“We are the [Indivisible] 99 percent” …NOT.

“So We Bounce On”

Fourth, so what if the dismal Democrats get back in power? Given their proven, longtime status as craven whores to big capital, their strong connection to the elitist, worker-hating professional class, their fierce attachment to nasty, working class-shaming neoliberal identity politics  and the underlying inability of even an imagined social-Democratic president (a Bernie POTUS) and party (dream on) to bring about meaningful progressive change in a neoliberal and globalized capitalist system, we can be fairly certain that the Democrats’ next time in office will simply give way to another round for the ever more apocalyptic, ecocidal, and neo-fascist Republicans. As Frank notes at the end of his new Afterword to Listen Liberal:

“Even after the debacle of 2016, liberals show little taste for…self-examination. On the contrary: They have just run a campaign that embodied everything objectionable about the professional class outlook, and in the aftermath of its failure, they have insisted on blaming everyone but themselves.  As I write this, Democratic insiders can be heard blaming Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton’s loss.  Or blaming the sexism of the public.  Or blaming ‘fake news.’  Or blaming real news.  Or blaming Russia.  Or blaming the FBI.  I have even heard some declare that any effort to win over working-class voters is a tacit capitulation to racism.  Better to lose future elections than to compete for the votes of those who spurned their beloved Hillary….”

“So we bounce on, from government by one group of affluent people to government by a different group of affluent people.  Consensus-minded centrism [ala the Clintons and Obama] yields to authoritarianism [ala Dick Cheney-George W. Bush and Steve Bannon-Trump], which will self-destruct in time and allow the consensus-minded another shot, which they will inevitably fumble, and so on….” (emphasis added)[1].

If we’d gotten Hillary or even Bernie in 2016, we’d be looking at Trump, Pence, or some other rancid, arch-reactionary white nationalist and horrid right winger with Republican control of Congress and the states in 2020 or 2024.  I’m not sure it wasn’t better to get Trump in 2016 than Trump (or some other horrid right-wing monster) in 2020, to be brutally honest. You can get neo-fascism now or later under neoliberal hegemony.

Everything’s not going to be okay when and if Democrats get back into power.

For “A New Organizing of Institutions”

I was very impressed by this comment from Yasser Louati, talking to Amy Goodman about the election of the revolting anti-worker neoliberal investment banker Emmanuel Macron as President of France two weeks ago: “France does not need an umpteenth new president; it needs a new republic, a new constitution, a new organizing of institutions.”

Much the same can be said about the United States. Political institutions that claim to be “democratic” while offering voters a binary choice between regressive and dissembling neoliberal shills like the Clintons, Obama, Emanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Angela Merkel on one hand and neo-fascistic white nationalists like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Frauke Petry and Donald Trump on the other hand do, not deserve our respect.

The United States doesn’t need a new and 46^th president as much as it needs a democracy, a new constitution, a new organizing of institutions – including its absurdly archaic and plutocratic election and party systems, which don’t even include direct popular election of the U.S. presidency for crying out loud.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the end of his life with the belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in “men” as in the oppressive institutions and social structures that reigned over them.  He wrote that “the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters. He had no interest, of course, in running for the White House of all things.

The Orange-Tinted Royal Brute who currently befouls the Oval Office is an offense to humanity. Perhaps he will be forced or voted out of office in coming months and years. In the meantime, there’s “the fierce urgency of now” (King).  We need to be building great social and political movements for King’s project and Louatti’s recommendation now. The environmental clock telling us to undertake a radical and eco-socialist “reorganizing of institutions” is ticking with each new carbon-cooked planetary day.

The U.S. ruling class is divided and befuddled like no time in recent memory.  Good.  Let us build the organizations that might carry out the great popular and democratic revolution required to save the social and ecological commons and thus preserve chances for a decent and democratic future. Given capitalism’s systemically inherent war on livable ecology – emerging now as the biggest issue of our or any time – the formation of such a new and united Left popular and institutional presence has become a matter of life and death for the species.  “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued sixteen years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”

Endnote

1. Listen Liberal is a good and witty read because the self-confessed “New Deal liberal” Frank is of course quite brilliant and clever. I’m not sure there’s anything in the book I didn’t already know. Many of his arguments are ones I’ve made myself in more explicitly left and radical ways without his nostalgia for the Democratic Party that once was and with none of his hope that the Dems will ever be anything all that better than what it is now. One very laudable thing that really stands out in Listen Liberal though is the significant extent to which he connects the DDD’s failure not just to its corporate/Wall Street/1% captivity but also to its allegiance to the values and ideology of the professional class. I think Frank may tend to under-sell the significant extent to which he already had this analysis in the concluding parts of his heralded 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? because he got oddly and embarrassingly seduced by the hopey-changey Barack Obama phenomenon and candidacy (sort of the ultimate epitome of the very convergence of corporate neoliberalism and professional class ideology that Frank so cunningly critiques) in 2007 and 2008.