Weimar Media, Weimar Dems

Reflections on Honey-Worded Appeasement and Delusion

American liberal mainstream media and the dismal Dems are so Weimar.

This morning while I was making breakfast an NPR reporter took an upbeat tone as he told listeners that “former president Trump will make a campaign stop to talk to his supporters in Wausau, Wisconsin.”

What fun! This story was presented as if Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump was any other American presidential candidate.  The buoyant news reader evinced nary a hint of a wisp of a sense that the maniacal and deranged fascist arch-criminal Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump is running to exact bloody vengeance and turn the country into a white Christian nationalist and crony-capitalist nightmare state.

The popular liberal talking head Joy Reid, of whom I am no fan (thanks to her brazen woke imperialism), made a partial recognition of reality on MSDNC two nights ago.  She asked the “mainstream media” (of which seemed to not know she’s part) to put the 2024 election horse race aside and deal with the complete dark insanity of the fact that the demented maniac Trump is again a major party presidential candidate and has a real shot at winning the presidency back.

But Reid followed the mainstream liberal media and Democratic Party rule of now not calling Trump a fascist even though she knows very well that the label fits.  You can call Trump and his running mate and other Republifascists “weird,” “authoritarian,” “far right,”  “dangerous,” and “an existential threat to democracy.” You can call Trump a felon.  But another and more appropriate F-word – “fascist” – appears to be largely taboo in the mainstream liberal media this election season. The revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian explained the reason for this rule (I would put money on this having been explicitly directed in managerial memos at leading mainstream liberal media institutions) eleven days ago:

“Why do the Democrats avoid calling out the actual fascist nature of Trump and the Republicans? Because, to acknowledge the fact that one of the two ‘legitimate’ ruling class parties of this system is fascist can call into question the legitimacy of the system as a whole. [And]…the Democratic Party is deathly afraid of mobilizing masses of people in the way that would be necessary to decisively defeat the fascists, because the Democrats fear that this could lead to things ‘getting all out of control,’ threatening their whole system.”

Damn straight.  Getting real about (a) how supposedly democratic and progressive “America” hatched a fascist movement that took over one of its two viable political parties and (b) what is required to defeat fascism raises deep questions about US capitalism-imperialism and the Democratic Party that the “party of inauthentic opposition” (as Sheldon Wolin once accurately labelled the dismal Democrats) prefers kept in the closet.   

Also on N“P”R yesterday,  the happy talk show host Scott Simon interviewed an elite liberal academic and author who explained that Russia is “at it again,” creating “social  and political divisions” in the USA during an election season.  Right, as if right-wing Russian propaganda (in which I myself have regrettably participated in[1]) could magically create the sharp rifts that radiate across the savagely class-, race-, ethnically-, regionally-,  politically-, culturally-divided and hyper-polarized “United” States. As if Russian propaganda has created a society in which the capitalist “One Percent” owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent and two-thirds of the population lives from paycheck to paycheck. As if Russian propaganda produced the United States’ stark racial segregation and inequality and racist mass incarceration.  As if dastardly thought-manipulators in Moscow have generated the sharp social and cultural divisions of race, class, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education, and region (city versus country, coasts vs. interior).  As if Russian agents turned Hillary Clinton into a transparently elitist and demobilizing agent of neoliberal capitalism in 2016.  As if sneaky Putin nefariously devised the archaic US Minority Rule electoral, party, and governance structure that captures, encourages and deepens such divisions.

Behind the academic’s analysis lay a standard liberal narrative: “we are one nation, indivisible.  There’s no such thing as a Black America and a white America, a rich America and a poor America, a capitalist America and a working- class America, a rural America and a metropolitan America, and a Blue America and a Red America, etc.  No, we are The United States of America, by God!  Don’t let right-wingers divide us!”  (I’m sure the academic Scott Simon interviewed has a more nuanced understanding than this but this is the groove in which she was running and that she reinforced.)

This was the core message of the Democratic National Convention (DNC)  speech (which I am partly paraphrasing above) that catapulted the arch neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Barack Obama to national political prominence in 2004[2]. It was a recurrent theme in the recent DNC in Chicago: Americans are  united in their glorious diversity but oppressed by those like Trump “who try to divide us.”

(A spine-chilling spectacle of alleged American “unity” across racial lines was on display on nationalist television before the inauguration of the 2024 NFL official season last Thursday night. As the Black singer Coco Jones' voice hit the phrase "land of the free" in the slave-owners’ National Anthem, with military officers holding the Star Slavers’ Banner behind her, a Darth Varderian black B-2 Stealth Bomber flew low over the offensively named Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium. The television cameras showed white and Black players standing in dutiful respect, some with hands over their heart. No more bent knees in response to the continuing epidemic of murderous racist police violence! Led by a Black drummer, tens of thousands of frothing and predominantly white Chiefs’ fans roared their approval and began their ominous Indian chant (watch and hear it here) and “Tomahawk chop,” cruelly mocking the Indigenous first nations people who were genocidally liquidated to make way for the “United” States’ march from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean.

I was reminded by this year’s DNC speeches of something Avakian wrote in 2019, the next to last year of Trump’s (first?) presidency:

“When Trump comes out with some of his fascist diatribes and rabid attacks, you’ll hear these Democratic Party hacks complain: ‘He’s not uniting us, he’s dividing us’—as though everybody could be united if the president, instead of raving in a rabid fashion, were to say the right honeyed words. And (going back to [the 17^th Century British bourgeois theorist John] Locke, for example) this is all part of attempting to act as if everybody in society is just an individual. Of course people are individuals, but they are not just individuals—they are, beyond that, part of social relations and, most fundamentally, [capitalist] production relations, and this has real consequences in how they live, how they perceive things spontaneously, and how they act, to a significant degree. These things are built into this society, and you can’t just supersede them or wave them away by saying honeyed words ‘to unite us instead of dividing us’” (emphasis added).    

Exactly right, as usual with Avakian, the mere mention of whose names gets many US “left intellectuals’” eyes rolling and spit forming[3]. 

All the major media yesterday reported the arrest of last week’s Atlanta suburban high school shooter’s father for criminally  giving his disturbed 14-year-old son an AR-15.  He did this even though authorities interviewed the son and the father because the son had made online threats about shooting up his school last year.

That raises an interesting question. If the shooter’s dad can be arrested for murder and manslaughter for giving his son a rifle used to kill four people, when do we arrest “Genocide Joe” Biden for giving the longstanding mass-murderous, racist, Judeo-fascist, occupation and apartheid state of Israel vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction – including 2000-ound bombs – to kill forty thousand people (including at least 16,456 children and over 11,000 women) in Gaza since last October? The very question is cancelled in advance by our liberal mainstream media and Democratic Party in the not-so United States of America.

Speaking of Weimar, you know what Kamala Harris says to those who bring up Biden’s “iron clad” support for the Judeo-fascist genocide in Gaza: “STFU unless you want Trump to win.”

Notes

1. I wrote briefly for RT (the “RT America” Website) back in 2019 and 2020. It was gross. They didn't say so but the assignment was to give them some lefty street-cred while they advanced Trump and white nationalism in the US. My handlers were not stupid; they were quite sharp about US politics, in a fucked- up way. I quit sending them stuff fairly soon. A regrettable but at least brief episode.

2. For a comprehensive radical critique of that brazenly national-chauvinist and imperialist speech, see Paul Street, “Keynote Reflections,” ZNet, July 29, 2004.

3.  The abject refusal of these “intellectuals” to consult Avakian’s prolific body of work reminds me in an ironic way of that Coventry Direct television commercial where two gold miners underground are yelling up to an older couple whose life insurance policies they want to buy, telling them “Hey, anybody listening? You’re  sitting on a gold mine! Hello?” The couple won’t pay any attention to them. The difference of course is that Coventry Direct is trying to make a parasitic profit whereas Avakian’s remarkable intellectual richness is about moving humanity off the lethal parasitism of the profits system.