Reflections on Climate, Normalization, Memory, Experience, and Binary Thinking

Dear readers, I built on my most recent audio to pen a long CounterPunch essay criticizing the absurd and snotty fascism denial of Adam Marantz, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and numerous intellectuals and academics who are failing the moment. Read that essay here.

Today I have some semi-random and somewhat personal reflections that readers may find useful, or at least entertaining. Apologies in advance if you find them depressing.

The climate catastrophe is inducing me to wake up earlier for a curious reason. I have long loved and still crave the cool breezes of April and May. And more and more, that cool is receding. A weather check tells me that we’ll be in the 80s here in Iowa City soon. How horrific: the 80s in April in the upper Midwest.

But that’s what we get for letting capitalism turn the planet into a Greenhouse Gas Chamber — for letting the capitalist mode of production survive and not radically replacing it with a revolutionary socialist system that privileges the common good over private accumulation. Big mistake!

If there’s any dampness on the ground in Iowa City I can hear the continuous roar of the endless procession 18-wheelers and SUVs and fearsome Ford F-150s up on Interstate-80 two miles north. Overhead I regularly see the crisrossing jet streams of ecocidal jet planes (the “Flyover Zone” is a real thing). These are “normal” background sounds and sights of capitalism’s constant poisonous carbon emission, undaunted by climate scientists’ ever more dire and urgent warnings about how fossil fuel-addicted “humanity” — um, capitalism — is pushing us past our “Goldilocks Zone”: beyond the thermal spectrum within which decent life is possible.

(I wonder how many of us know that America has never extracted and burned more oil and gas than it has under the supposely climate-friendly president Joe Biden. )

So I’m out with (my border college-pit mix) Oreo at 7 AM trying to get as much of that beautiful crisp air on our skin, fur, and hair as I can before the thermomter starts rising and before I am tempted to resort to the ironic “cure” of air conditioning, which relies on fossil fuels (though, in fairness, wind energy is big in Iowa).

Green-eyed Oreo, the North American Marxist-Leninist Dog of the Month in January 2024

One reason to listen to “old” people — and indeed to know and study history — is that doing so can help you develop a sense of how things have changed over time. There are now untold millions of children and young adults who have no experiential sense of how new and unnatural it is to have mild winters (interrupted by a polar vortex or two, courtesy of menandering jet streams) followed by overheated Aprils and Mays and then summer droughts (interrupted by occasional epic downpoars that swamp water management systems) in the Upper Midwest and Great Plains.

The lethally risen temperatures of today are “normal” reality for a teenager.

My first experiential understanding that the climate was truly changing came in the 1990s, when an epic heat wave killed thousands trapped in urban heat islands in Chicago, and an epic rainstorm flooded our basement in DeKalb, Illinois, wiping out much of my collection of history books.

I recall an awkward early 1970s junior high substitute teacher who told my class about the Greenhouse Effect and warned that the planet was going to heat up. He was teased so mercilessly (for being a substitute and “goofy” to boot) by sadistic thirteen years olds (myself included) that he broke down in tears, left, and never returned.

I also recall the City of Chicago flooding the Midway Plaisance with water that turned to ice in December, creating a giant ice-skating rink that lasted through February in the mid-late 1960s. That could not happen today.

The climate crisis ranks absurdly and recklessly low in polling data on US voters’ top issue concerns. It’s depressing to recurrently see it near the bottom of the rankings, for nothing else that we care about will matter on a dead planet. That’s materialism 101, no?

I’m not into single-issue politics and those who read me know that I think the climate crisis is the outcome of “growth”-addicted, inherently cancerous capitalism and that global warming cannot and will not be remotely solved under the capitalist-imperialist system. That said, if I had to choose one of the official single issues that pollsters ask about as my top one, then I’d have to pick climate for the reason I just gave: there’s no democracy, no social justice, no equality, no love, no art, no music, no socialism, no communism, no liberation, no futbal, no No-Hitters, no Caitlin Clark shooting logo threes, no poetry readings, no concerts, no learning about distant galaxies on a dead planet.

Beware of new normals.

One of the reasons that Marx, Engels, and other socialists and communists of the mid-19th Century ended up believing (incorrectly but undersandably in their time) that the Western industrial proletariat was a revolutionary class destined by historical law to be the “gravediggers of the bourgeoisie” was that they witnessed the righteous rebellions of working people who were confronting full-time wage labor and the dark, air- and river-poisoning “satanic mills” of early dehumanizing industrial capitalism not as the “normal” way of things — life and “the economy” — but as a new and disastrous system and imposition. These first and second generation proletarians still had direct memories and cultures rooted in pre-capitalist and pre-industrial lifeways and work lives. Industrial capitalism has not yet become the “way of things” — the new normal — for these workers.

I worry that people easily become too used to shocking images and stories. Vast swaths of Gaza blown to bits by US bombs, children buried in the rubble… “oh well, that’s life.”

Another ship of desperate Africans fleeing climate-related poverty drowned in the Mediterranian… “well, yes.”

Yet another mass shooting ends the lives of innocents in a school, restaurant, or shopping center…"that’s standard now.”

Mothers and children trying to escape US-imposed misery in Latin America caught in razor wire laid by vicious nativists at the southern border… “of course.”

A US presidential contest pitting an ecocidal imperialist warmonger versus an open, Hitler-channeling fascist…."oh well.”

One of the United States’ two major capitalist-imperialist political parties goes virulent and Nazi and other one stays hollow and Weimar… “aint that America.”

Shifting gears…. a Trumpelenftish Iowa City friend recently told me for the third time that “I still think your best work was when you were taking down Obama.” Bullshit. I’m smarter now than when I was writing about and against what a neoliberal imperialist ruling class Goldman Sachs Council on Foreign Relations dirtbag Obama was. I like and stand by the work I did on and against Obama and the Obama phenomenon and presidency (including two books), but the writing and speaking I did on all that was too mired in the worn-out culture and politics of the failed American “left.” Since Trump and since working with and reading serious revolutionary communist opponents of US capitalism-imperialism, I have returned to the revolutionary communist (and I think more truly “Marxist”) path I was starting to glimpse on before academic and non-profit social policy careerism sent me down various anti-revolutionary/anti-communist paths (many of which are detailed in my “Lame Left” series).

My friend’s comment says more about him than it does about me. He’s locked into a binary mindset, a consequence of too many ugly confrontations with elitist faux-progressive campus town Dems. This mindset does not permit him to seriously grasp the fascism that has overtaken the post-republican Republican (now Republi-fascist) Party (with no small help from the dismal Dems, to be sure). It also leads him to reflexivly identify criticism of the Republi-fascists with defense of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats. That has nothing to do with me.

The main target of my political writing has long been the currently sitting head of the American Empire. Before Obama was a bourgeois-liberal-adored presidential candidate and president, I took relentless political and intellectual aim at the horrific, criminal, and messianic militarist George W. Bush presidency. Before Bush43, I began my political writing career going after the pivotal neoliberal presidency of Bill Clinton. I have been unsparing in my criticism and indeed denunciation of the warmongering and ecocidal capitalist-imperialist Biden presidency, even if the continuing, even deepening and sharpening specter of Trumpism-fascism and the sickening likelihood of a second Trump presidncy — something for which I think Biden holds considerable blame — has continued to (I think legitimately) preoccupy me in the last three-plus years.

On that note, here are the concluding paragraphs of my CounterPunch essay today:

‘….On a happier note, Marantz and Steinmetz-Jenkins deserve credit for shooting down a fatuous confusion advanced by many of the disproportionately old, white, and male Trumpenlefties I have encountered in the last eight years – the moronic notion that to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist is necessarily to mark oneself as an ally, defender, and enabler of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats.  “Like everything else,” Marantz notes, the “fascism debate” has “passed through the negative polarization filters of American politics…Once mainstream Democrats started talking about Trump as a unique threat to democracy…the question of whether Trumpism represented a democratic emergency got al mixed up with the question of whether you wanted to be the kind of person who agrees with mainstream Democrats.”

Steinmetz-Jenkins drills down deeper on this question, noting the tendency of some portside-aligned commentators and activists to “see the fascism debate as the continuation of the debate between those who supported Hillary Clinton being the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 versus those who preferred the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders [it should be “and those,” not “versus those” and “the social-democratish candidate Bernie Sanders,” not “the socialist candidate Bernie Sanders – Street].” Through this (distorted) lens, Steinmetz-Jenkins grasps, “those who invoke charges of fascism against Trump are viewed by their critics on the left as part of the political establishment that has dominated the Democratic Party for decades.” Steinmetz-Jenkins correctly notes that this “left” take on the matter “telescopes the fascism debate into a narrow political perspective that does not do justice to its diverse perspectives and concerns.” Further:

“It also doesn’t map onto key figures of the fascism debate when it presumably should.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a key figure of the fascism debate [really? – P.S]  along with plenty of Marxist thinkers critical of liberalism, for instance, think that the United States has a real problem with fascism. At the same time, many liberal thinkers…and conservatives are equally critical of comparing the  present to Europe’s fascist past.”

(Fun fact: AOC had to be shamed into calling Trump and the Republi-fascists fascist by RF activists back in the day)

But this raises a question for Steinmetz-Jenkins: where the F are any of those “plent[iful] Marxist thinkers” who take the Amerikaner Trumpist fascist menace seriously in his anthology?! I am talking about contemporary socialist and communist analysts of the US today, not the ancient essays by Leon Trotsky (1940) and Angela Davis (1971) that Steinmetz-Jenkins includes in Part 1 (titled “Classic Texts”) of his badly titled new book.  Good grief, but did Steinmetz-Jenkins think to reach out to Henry Giroux, Anthony DiMaggio, me, John Bellamy Foster, the  revolutionary communist leader and writer Bob Avakian, Carl Boggs, Refuse Fascism, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Socialist Equality Party (whose World Socialist Website has been strong in characterizing Trump and Trumpism as fascist)? How about the left presidential candidate Cornel West, an early backer of RF?  None of these names or organizations (Refuse Fascism? Hello?) appear anywhere in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ index even when some of those names have published polished academic historical and social science monographs on precisely the topics covered in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ anthology. This omission is creepy but less than surprising in the self-protective bourgeois racket that is so-called higher education in the neoliberal era.’

That’s it for today.