The Trumpenleft and False Equivalence
"No political “Left” can or should exist that:
+ cannot or will not walk and chew gum at the same time.+ fails to forthrightly and unambiguously oppose the United States’ current fascist, racist, eco-cidal, and sexist presidency and its noxious white Amerikaner base.+ reflexively and constantly responds to every liberal and Left criticism of Trump by saying “but/what about Hillary” (and/or “but/what about Obama,” “but/what about Pelosi,” and “but/what about Schiff,” etc.+ constantly lectures fellow and actual leftists about something we already know very well: the dismal, dollar-drenched, neoliberal-imperialist corporate Democrats are a deeply ruling class and imperialist party.+ automatically assumes that to oppose Trump is to support the Democrats and the corporate-imperial “deep state.”+ cannot or will not distinguish solidaristic working-class anti-racism/anti-Nativism/anti-sexism from bourgeois identity politics.+ cannot or will not process sociopolitical data demonstrating that Trump’s base is linked by a combination of white racism and authoritarian values, not working-class economic grievance.+ falls for the moronic mainstream narrative that Trump is an electoral product of the “white working-class.”+ thinks that someone could simultaneously be on the Left and support Donald Trump+ fails to adequately distinguish between Trump and previous Republican presidents.
Factions are warring within the American ruling class. So-called deep state agents (that is, ruling class/power elite players both within and beneath the parliamentary and electoral surface of U.S. politics and policy) have been opposing Trump for reasons that reflect elite interests (corporate globalization, investment stability/predictability, imperial and national credibility and branding among other things) that (as Trump’s “left” defenders rightly point out) have nothing to do with principled, democratic, and popular opposition.
Think of understanding this as a form of basic left mental walking. Does this elementary mental stroll mean that one cannot at the same time chew gum by opposing the Trumpenstein and working for its fastest possible demise based on one’s understanding that the current White House is neo-fascistic, racist, ecocidal, and sexist and headed by a malignantly narcissistic and epically corrupt maniac who takes pleasure in terrorizing immigrant children and flouting civilized norms and the rule of law – and who, by the way, is doing everything he can to accelerate the process of turning the entire planet in a Greenhouse Gas Chamber? Of course not.
The first 300 times I heard “but Hillary” and “but Obama” automatically thrown up as responses to left criticisms of Trump, I shrugged and went along. One can cite dozens if not hundreds of my own publications and talks on how awful the Inauthentic Opposition party, the Democrats is, with special attention to Obama and the Clintons and the role they and their neoliberal party have played in birthing the fascistic Trumpenstein presidency.
The second 300 times I heard “what about Hillary,” “what about Obama,” and “what about the Democrats” in response to principled left criticisms of the Trump presidency, I said “okay, fine, but perhaps you have observed by now that the president’s name is Donald Trump, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and the white-nationalist GOP now has all three branches of government [though the Democrats got half of Congress in January of 2019] Please consider that the current titular chief of the American Empire is always Public Enemy #1 and that Trump is particularly noxious in ways that numerous serious thinkers reasonably identify as fascistic. You are sounding like a badly broken record. Your what-aboutism is starting to sound like inverted lesser-evilism.”
After the third 300 times I heard the reflexive what-aboutist response to Trump on “the left,” I started removing people from my in-box and drone-bombing them out of my “social media” lists. Actual leftists don’t need perpetual harangues on the awfulness of the Democrats. We’ve understood the other capitalist-imperialist party’s dismal dreadfulness since and before Upton Sinclair called the Democrats and Republicans “two wings of the same bird of prey” (in 1904). Failing to grasp that one can oppose both Donito Assolini and the corporate-Wall-Street CIA Democrats at one and the same time is a form of not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not very bright.
Principled and actual leftists ideally want the Trump-Pence regime overthrown through a mass popular rebellion that confronts not just Trump and Trumpism but the whole damn capitalist, imperialist, racist, sexist, and ecocidal system, Democrats included, that gave rise to Trump. Radical/actual leftists (myself included) have been advocating for that since the day Trump graduated from the Electoral College.
The actual Left at its best has always understood that it must oppose racism, Nativism, ethno-centrism, and sexism in the process of building popular and working-class solidarity in the struggles for reform and revolution. Yes, elite Democrats criticize Trump and the Republicans from a “progressive-neoliberal,” bourgeois-identitarian standpoint. We know that. But that standpoint has nothing to do with actual and principled Left politicsand it is offensive to merge such politics with the neoliberal identity politics of the corporate Democrats and media. Calling Trump out as a racist and a sexist as one part of a movement for working-class revolution is not the same as former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice calling Trump a racist and sexist as part of her advocacy for a more robust U.S. imperialism. Anti-racism/-sexism/-nativism/-homophobia/-nationalism/-chauvinism is part and parcel of the struggle of the working and lower class many against the obscenely wealthy and disastrously powerful Few. . ."
Comments
Post a Comment