The Lame Left, Part 3

Afflictions 7 and 8: The Pink-Brown Left and the Paranoid Portside

Dear Readers: My multi-part series on the “lame” US left’s seventeen worst afflictions will resume below. I paste in the series’ introduction in italics before each installment so you may want to skip that going forward.

A (repeat) housekeeping matter: please contact me at streetbook17@gmail.com if you have tried and failed to become a paid subscriber.  I got into my STRIPE account (through which Substack handles writer payments) the other day and found a 8 or so examples of failed attempts in that regard (no small matter). It’s usually about an error in entering credit card or bank info or the bank refusing the transaction. Unfortunately I am not permitted to see who underwent failure but if you write me we can probably figure it out and I can tell you what went wrong.

An additional technical problem: I cannot currently add subscriber buttons to these posts from my PC without causing my Substack page to lock up. If anyone reading this is also a Substacker and knows anything about how to fix that please clue me in in the comments or at streetbook17@gmail.com

The Lame Left, Part 3

Intro (repeated)…Call me an American revolutionary Marxist, socialist, and/ or communist. Just  don’t tell me I’m “on the [US-American] left.” Part of the problem here is that the dominant US media politics culture has let the neo-McCarthyite right dilute the term “the left” so far as to mean anything from hot yoga and wind farms to Madonna, drag queen story times, M&M mascots without high heels, organic vegetables, academia, the Brookings Institution, the AFL-CIO, and the dismal, dollar-drenched corporate-imperialist Democratic Party. The term has been watered down almost beyond recognition. At the same time and more to the central point of this multi-part essay, which will continue through at least next week,  most of what can legitimately be said to constitute “the left” in the United States today is hopelessly and depressingly dysfunctional. Thanks to two intimately related deficits — the lack of any serious notion of a revolutionary societal alternative to capitalism-imperialism and the absence of a properly scientific, evidence-based theory of how to understand and change history in a desirable fashion — the US-American left(s) is(are) stuck in a self-defeating cycle of failed efforts reflecting a doomed project: trying to achieve meaningful human liberation through their country’s nation’s dominant deeply conservative institutions, short of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels knew to be the proper socialist goal: “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (imagine!).

The alternative to such truly radical change, Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, was “the common ruin of all.”  Those words feel haunting 175 years later, in a time when it is now clear as day that we must — as I argued in a recent Paul Street Report — kill (overthrow and transcend) capitalism before it tips humanity into an epic and potentially terminal environmental catastrophe.

In this and the next two or more Paul Street Reports I will go through 17 different pathologies on the US “left,” such as it is: (1) sheep-dogging electoralism and parliamentary cretinism; (2) economism and trade unionism; (3) hyper-identitarianism; (4) dependence on foundations; (5) sentimental standpoint proletarianism; (6) geopolitical neo-campism; (7) the pink-brown Left; (8) conspiratorialism; (9) anarchism; (10) mutual-aid-ism;  (11) localism,; (12) single-issue-ism; (13) pacifism; (14) academicism; (15) pessimism; (16) retreat to self-ism; (and last but not least); (17) anti-communism.  Many of these afflictions overlap and mutually reinforce each other, making up a kind of simultaneous equations system of defeat and surrender.

Part 3

The first installment (Part 1), published two Thursdays ago, tackled the first four of these left afflictions. Last Thursday’s installment (Part 2), looked at pathologies 5 and 6. Today’s installment (Part 3) confronts the two flat-out nastiest US left afflictions of all: 7 and 8. For what it’s worth, these are by far and away the two US left categories that have generated the most hatred directed my revolutionary Marxist way in recent years.

7. “A Blanket Pass” to the Right: The Pink-Brown Jimmy Dore-Trumpen-Tucker-Taylor-Green/e/wald Left (JD3TL)

Also specific to the neoliberal and post-Soviet era (like the Putin Left and the hyper-identitarian wokester Left) and also (like the Putin Left) predominantly white and male is the curious rise within the USA of a pink-brown Trumpenleft, heavily overlapped with the Putin left and containing an indeterminate of mostly white and male ex-Bernie Sandernistas (from pathologies 1 and 2). This bizarre, weirdly soft neo-Strasser-ite tendency (Gregor and Otto Strasser tried to uphold a workerist and socialist tendency within the capitalist fascist German Nazi Party) is linked to a reptilian handful of grifters including (in descending IQ order) frequent Tucker “Goebbels” Carlson Fatherland News guest Glenn Greenwald; Krystal Ball (it may be unfair to include her and my apologies if so); Max Blumenthal; Caitlin Johnstone; he late Diana Johnstone (who once wrote me that climate change has nothing to do with capitalism and likens Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Front to the Vietnamese national liberation movement); and last but not least the comically knuckle-dragging Boogaloo Bois fan and fellow Carlson guest “Jimmy F*#king Dore.”

I first coined the term “Trumpenleft” (adapted from the brilliant CounterPuncher Eric Draitser’s mocking phrases “Trump Left” and “Trumpenproletariat”) in (I think) 2018. I did so as something of a politico-nomenclatural jest meant to capture the Orwellian idiocy of the remarkable number of vaguely left-identified people who were reacting with bitterness and anger against my elementarily accurate observations that the Republican Party had gone neofascist under Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump and Steve “All Hell’s Going to Break Loose” Bannon.  It turned out to be more than word play. My most recent book, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (2021), includes a chapter on fascism denial that contains 8 pages refuting 18 false narratives advanced by a surprisingly widespread cast of, well, Trumpenleftists during the Trump presidency. I list these narratives in the appendix to this essay but you’ve got to get the book to seen them full critiqued and exposed as absurd.

This mostly white and male cohort includes ex-“Berners” whose response to the corporate-Democratic quashing of the Bernie Sanders movement has been not a “leftward” turn to revolutionary socialism/Marxism/communism but rather a look for imagined proletarian, populist, and anti-elite comrades on the “populist” (fascist) right. Seeming to want a Lenin (or Chomsky) Prize for having figured out something that every seriously radical Left thinker knows – that the Democrats are a corrupt capitalist and imperialist party beholden to corporate and imperialist elites – these odd fellows (mainly male) absurdly accuse even principled revolutionary Marxists who refuse and repudiate Republican Amerikaner neofascism of alliance with the neoliberal Democrats.  They align themselves with the neofascism and white nationalism of the Trump-era Republican Party (and of European politicos like Le Pen and Gert Wilders)  in the name of a “left-right populism.” They reject Sanders’ and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al’s alliance with liberals. 

Here is an I think useful online reflection sent to me by the clever and insightful Dutch socialist Pepijn Uitterhoeve:

“It took me a while to getting around to [write] this because Glenn Greenwald is so distasteful, but there's kind of a coherent political project he's engaged in, and you can see this reflected in the politics of Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Revolutionary Blackout Network and to some extent Krystal Ball - and I try to be maximally charitable here, staying away from accusations that they're grifters [I grant no such charity – P.S.]. Their position is that it's key to unite as many people as possible against The Elites. They're not explicitly anti-capitalist. They're not interested in traditional left-wing values like anti-racism, feminism and the like. They're not interested in any critique whatsoever of right-wing hobby horses. They're willing to give right-wingers a blanket pass on all their horrifying bullshit as long as they would please please please help in the fight against the people in power. They want to say to the Right: we don't care about your obsession with the nuclear family, your disregard for women's rights, your preoccupation with sexuality, orientation, or gender roles. We can look past your naked racism towards migrants and various minorities, your support for police brutality and your science denialism. We want you to help us take down these people who start wars, deny you healthcare, make everyone impoverished, curtail your rights and treat you like useful but disposable pawns in an empty, irrelevant, meaningless fight between corrupt interchangeable ruling parties. In short, they reject the Left-liberal coalition that Sanders was trying to build. They want to instead build a ‘populist’ Left-Right coalition. And they explicitly prioritize the Democrats as a target, because after all that's the cheapest ticket to getting the ear of a reactionary….What I find interesting [about the JD3TL] is the degree to which right-wing positions are adopted and amplified. It's a really weird situation where it's all give and no take. The Tucker Carlson right-wing that's being courted gives zero concessions. They'll go along with anti-war positions, because anti-war positions have traditionally had some currency among some of the Right. But you don't see right-wingers anywhere making passionate arguments for things like Medicare for All, which Dore knobs want…”

Bulls-eye! 

The Trumpenleft, whose name I have expanded in the above sub-heading (JD3TL) insists that there’s no real difference between the two US major parties and even that the Democrats are every bit as fascist as the Republicans.  These beliefs or claims of belief are false on numerous levels and criticizing this false equivalence hardly makes one an apologist for the Weimar Democrats, who retain a commitment to the ever-fading values and procedures of bourgeois constitutional democracy and rule of law, such as they are. It just means that one isn’t a mentally and/or morally deficient jackass who is either incapable of or cynically opposed to grasping obvious divisions within the US capitalist ruling class and differences between its two reigning political organizations.

The disproportionately white and male Trumpenleft is grossly tolerant and/or sickeningly approving of Trumpism-fascism’s white supremacism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, fundamentalism, trans-bashing, conspiratorialism, authoritarianism, and eco-cidalism. It engages in related empirically false neo-Strasserite fantasies about Trumpism-fascism’s supposedly proletarian (and potentially socialist) base. Consistent with the Trumpenleft’s race-gender demographics, some Trumpenlefties have purveyed the notion that the problems of racism/white supremacism, sexism/patriarchy, nativism, homophobia and trans-bashing are nothing more than ruling class diversions, even “scams” (to use the language of the leading Facebook Trumpenleftist and thankfully retired political scientist Gary Olson) concocted with help from “PMC” (professional managerial or middle class) liberals to divide the proletariat.

Among the many things these often knuckle-dragging jackanapes fail to understand is the difference between real populism, which is opposed to the corporate and financial ruling class, and fascism, which always backs the capitalist “elite” while directing the anger of the purporetedlyh superior national “us” against culturally and (usually) racially demonized Others – against the hated and supposedly inferior and criminal “them.” The demonized Others/“them”are accused of stabbing the once illustrious nation in the back in alliance with nefarious globalist elites. The hated Others/“them” must be politically if not literally eliminated in order to restore national, cultural, and racial greatness.  

There is considerable overlap between this left category and the Putin left.  It’s been remarkable how often folks who have absurdly told me that (a) the bourgeois-democratic Democrats are “as fascist” or even “more fascist” than the Republi-fascist party, (b) racism and sexism are fake and diversionary issues (“scams”!) that matter only to bourgeois identity politicos, and (c) Trumpism’s base isn’t really all that bad (it’s the [um, white] working class don’t you know?) are the same left folks who back thoroughly non- and anti-Marxist monsters like Putin and Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Aleppo. Many of these neo-Strasserite cretins dig Moscow’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. Like the Putin left, they seem incapable of, or cynically opposed to grasping the difference between  revolutionary Marxism on one hand and the mainstream “liberal” Democrats on the other hand. This matches the false conflation of Marxists and liberals that is part of the fascist ideology with which these dodgy pink-brown Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy “How ‘Bout Those Proletarian Boogaloo Boys?”  Dore and Glenn “Tucker Carlson’s Mouthpiece” Greenwald fans play faux-populist footsie.

The tenth child of a South Side Chicago Irish cop, the openly demented Dore has recently informed his predominantly right-wing audience that the Q-curious neofascist Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene is a “left-wing” champion of the working class.  Dore’s more gifted and affluent friend Greenwald has also recently embraced the openly neofascist maniac Taylor-Greene.

The JD3TL shares the habit of reflexive what-about-ism with the Putin left. Any reference to the fascist menace posed by the Republican-Amerikaner Right elicits automatic reference to the undeniable sins of the dismal and imperialist Dems, as if Trumpist neofascism is somehow justified by Clinton-Obama-Bidenite neoliberalism – and as if a serious radicals like the present writer don’t regularly and radically criticize both political wings of the US capitalist-imperialist order. 

I almost hesitate to include Greenwald in the “Trumpenleft.” Despite his many pre-Trump alliances with pinkish leftism, Greenwald entered the public eye as the nasty and dedicated lawyer for the Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale. It strikes me that his frequent appearances on the nightly fascist Hate Hour conducted by Tucker Carlson, the Joseph Goebbels of US neofascism, is richly consistent with his origins. Perhaps he is just returning to form. Last I looked, this money-hungry and far-from-stupid (unlike Dore) “journalist” has left  Substack for Rumble, which is highly popular among far-right Web-users.

I considered adding the supposedly progressive Democrat-turned “conservative” Trumpian nationalist Tulsi Gabbard to the acronym and label but her past “left” identification seems too shallow to merit inclusion. The ex-Congressperson, Hindu-nationalist, and possible Krishna cultist Gabbard is associated also with the Putin left, with whom she shares a creepy alignment with the Syrian butcher Assad.

8. The Conspiratorial Left

Now we turn to the depressing malady of left conspiratorialism, a natural and indeed classic outcome of the absence of a scientific approach. The right-wing has no monopoly on this disorder, which renders its victims incapable of grasping the historical and social-structural taproots of modern evil and oppression.  Almost anything that involves the making and enacting of decisions atop structures of concentrated wealth and power (like US capitalism-imperialism) becomes a dastardly conspiracy in the “paranoid-style” mind.  Rather than confront the underlying and interlocking oppression systems (of class, race, empire and gender) that openly produce terrible outcomes, rather than scientifically investigating and critiquing the society they inhabit, conspiratorialists concoct elaborate and shadowy detective stories, fanciful who-done-its seeking to identify small cabals and perfidious individuals to blame.

Take the 9/11 jetliner attacks and how they were exploited by the George W. Bush administration.  Left conspiracy nuts put their JFK obsession aside long enough to devise elaborate and unsubstantiated narratives on how 9/11 was an  “inside job” perpetrated by the Bush43-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz puppet masters and their CIA and Pentagon agents in the search for “a new Pearl Harbor” (the language of the Project for a New American Century’s retrospectively haunting pre-9/11 call for a US military ramp up and invasion of Iraq and Iran) to justify imperial war and terror abroad and repression at home.  In reality, the attacks were thoroughly predictable and significantly predicted Islamo-terrorist “blowback” (a venerable CIA phrase popularized on the left by the historian Chalmers Johnson) resulting from the United States’ long petro-imperialist intervention in the internal politics of the super-strategic-because oil-rich Middle East. Among the many US provocations in that region that led many observers (the present writer included) to expect significant terrorist blowback on US soil (I was thinking suitcase bomb, not hijacked airplanes, to be sure) by the late 1990s: “the immense slaughter of Iraqi civilians during the Gulf War; the devastation of Iraq by U.S.-instigated sanctions throughout the [1990s], the U.S.’s crucial role in supporting Israel’s 35-year occupation of Palestinian territories, its support for brutal dictatorships throughout the Middle East that repress the local populations, and on and on.” (Peter Mitchell and John Schoefell, “A Note on the Events of September 11, 2001,” p. xiii in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky [New York: New Press, 2002]). 

The 9/11 attacks were of course naturally and also quite predictably exploited (as Chomsky foresaw pretty much the minute the planes hit) by the arch-petro-imperialist neoconservatives atop the messianic-militarist neocon Bush43-Cheney regime as, yes, “a new Pearl Harbor,” leading to the horrors of the US War of (“on) Terror and the criminal, mass-murderous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, all in line with the long provocative and opportunist history of US capitalism-imperialism. This was not a mysterious conspiracy atop the US government.  It was US imperialism, imperial blowback, and standard US-imperial exploitation of that blowback, aided and abetted by the majority of the nation’s ruling political and media classes. The record of Orwellian deception and criminality is available to anyone who bothers to investigate.

Or take the Covid-19 pandemic, the predictable and to no small extent predicted outcome of global capitalism’s relentless, systemically inherent accumulation-/“growth”-addicted assault on previously existing boundaries between homo sapiens and multiple and ever-mutating zoonotic viruses that transmit between species.  Unable or unwilling to follow the science on this grave problem, unsolvable under the world capitalist system (like the related climate catastrophe), a depressing number of  left- and formerly left-identified folks have fallen for conspiracy “theories” that make wild and unsubstantiated, Internet-fed claims about a Big Pharma plot to reap super-profits by manufacturing viruses in weaponized biolabs in order turn to turn us all into “vaccine slaves.”  This is how your former “socialist” friend became a Ron DeSantis cheerleader who thinks that “Anthony Fauci is a Nazi” and that January 6^th wasn’t really “all that big a deal” compared to the “real fascism” of Covid 19 vaccination and masking.  It’s all part of the globalist “Great Re-Set,” don’t you know? It’s not that big a leap from this kind of “theory” to neo-fascist Great Replacement Theory, blood-libel neo-Nazi QAnon claims that George Soros and his friends atop the Democratic Party dine on human children, and science-denialist eco-fascist claims that global warming is a “radical Left hoax” meant to suppress humanity’s holy right to burn every last fossil on the planet.

The US ruling classes have nothing to fear from the conspiratorial left, which focuses not on structures, institutions, and ideologies of class rule, empire, and oppression but rather on an endless series of imaginary plots attributed to nefarious elites, the untangling of which sends people down long black holes of bias-confirming “research” on the World Wide Web. I am reminded of something Noam Chomsky said in one of many public discussions he engaged in during the 1990s and that are captured in the previously cited book Understanding Power.  In a sub-section of that interview book titled “Self-Destruction of the U.S. Left,” he says that “there’s a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities.  There are parts of [the left]…where huge amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy, or something – as if anybody should care.  The energy and the passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self-destructive.” 

In my experience, for what it’s worth, conspiratorialists are the most menacing bunch one confronts on the left.  Their taste for dark and mysterious conspiracies and their weakness on institutional, historical, and social-structural analysis predisposes them for collaboration with like-minded sorts on the heavily conspiratorialist right, with whom they share the paranoid mindset. I know currently and formerly left-identified people who have fallen hook, line, and sinker for numerous wild conspiracies shared with the far right, from Covid-19 as the product of a US-Chinese bioweapon research to the notion that the global elites are poisoning us with chemtrail poisons planted in airplane fuel. It all has something to do with Hunter Biden’s lap(top) and the ANTIFA assault on the US Capitol.  

(I do not mean to suggest that bona fide conspiracies never exist. Of course they do. I, for one, have never really believed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and will be somewhat  unsurprised if conclusive evidence ever shows that James Earl Ray had collaborators in the imperial police state. But when conspiratorialism becomes a substitute for radical thought and all one’s energies are poured into unravelling elaborate mysteries, the ruling class wins.)     

Appendix: Eighteen False Trumpenleft Narratives, 2017-2021*

1. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist aligned one with both the Democratic Party and the capitalist and imperial American system that the Democrats have long supported.  

2. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist affiliated one with a deceptive narrative that had long been trumpeted by the Democrats and the liberal media with the intent of distracting the populace from the capitalist-imperialist system and the Democrats’ captivity to that system.

3. Left anti-Trump/-fascism activists failed to grasp that “the Democrats are fascists too.” The Democrats and the Republicans are the same, there’s no real difference between them.

4. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist reflects a failure to see that fascism only happens when the state commands the economy under a corporatist scheme directed by a maximal leader atop a one-party dictatorship.

5.  Beneath all his racist and sexist strongman bravado, Trump was really just another neoliberal capitalist president.

6. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist misunderstood and betrayed the proletarian, “white working-class,” base of Trump’s “populist” support, alienating people the Left need to “reach out to” and thereby failing to advance the working-class unity required to fight capitalism and neoliberalism.  

7. Identification of Trump as a fascist is invalidated by the (supposed) anti-imperialism of Trump.

8. Identification of Trump as a fascist was contradicted by Trump’s response to COVID-19, which, “if Trump had been a fascist” would have involved “draconian” crackdowns in pursuit of authoritarian rule.

9. Fascism only holds relevance when there exists a revolutionary socialist Left and working class that the ruling capitalist class wants violently smashed.

10. Antifascists in the Trump years were plagued by “Trump derangement syndrome” (TDS), an obsession with Trump himself and his evil, which (supposedly) no longer held relevance once Trump was removed from office.

11. Fears of Trump’s fascism were overblown because Trump never won the allegiance of all but a small fraction of the nation’s corporate and financial ruling class, which turned decisively against him[i] after the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.

12. “Trump is too much of an undisciplined clown and a buffoon to be taken seriously as a fascist.”.     

13. “Trump can’t be a fascist since he never said he was a fascist.”   

14. “January 6th wasn’t that big a deal, it was just more of Trump’s feckless ‘antics.’”

15. People concerned about Trumpism-fascism failed to see that "Trump's open white supremacism was preferable to the Democrats’ more cloaked white supremacism” (in the social media words of the Green Party’s 2016 vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka) because the former produces mass protest while the latter “puts the people to sleep and keeps them off the streets.”

16. Calling Trump and his supporters fascist invites repression of the Left.

17. Calling Trump and his movement fascist was symptomatic of leftists’ habit of overusing the “F-word” to the “the point that it has been stripped of much of any meaning” and became an “empty signifier that, at most, means ‘really bad person on the right.’”

18. People who called Trump and his supporters and allies fascist failed to understand that Trump posed two greater menaces than fascism.

* To see my full and richly annotated critique of these narratives you must get a hold of a copy of This Happened Here and read the concluding section of its fourth chapter.

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