The Left Didn't just Fail, It Was Slaughtered

In my previous post I alluded to the specter lurking in Chris Hedges' article, 'the "Phantom Left'. In his follow-up, 'A Recipe for Fascism' , he again disdains the 'liberal class' but while America's bourgeoisie surely deserve his scorn, his assertion that 'a disenfranchised and angry underclass is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them' is both faulty analysis and a distortion of history. The hopes of the underclass have never figured in our political thinking.

Thanks to racism and mass immigration the socialist movement that transfigured Europe and inspired Africa and Asia never took root in America. The influx of poor Eastern Europeans coupled with the Great Northern Migration of the recently freed slaves was considered a threat by the lily-white unions. So while it is true that groups like the Wobblies and the Congress of Industrial Workers managed to diffuse some of the fear by showing that united, women and ethnic minorities could extract concessions America's labor force remained largely segregated and hopelessly divided.

As an English visitor observed in the years before WWI: "menial work is increasingly felt to be beneath the dignity of the free white American. The intelligent, highly paid American is actually in the position of a ruling class. He is served and attended by negroes and alien immigrants very much as the ancient Athenian was served by a Thracian or an Asiatic."

It is this privileged status that the globalization that began after WWII has been steadily turning on its head.

The 'Problem is the Blacks'

On Monday, April 28, 1969, Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman noted in the White House diary: "President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to. Problem with overall welfare plan is that it forces poor Whites into same position as Blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality."

The reality that the Nixon Government faced was how to manage white resentment as they saw their privileged status collapse in the face of Asian competition. Nixon had hoped to find a latter day Booker T Washington willing to temper black ambitions and accommodate negro subservience. Unfortunately for the Nixon Republicans and the capitalist power structure the 1960's press for equal rights made finding such a leader all but impossible. As Haldeman wrote:
"[the President] broods frequently over problems of how we communicate with the young and Blacks. It's really not possible except with Uncle Toms and we should work on them and forget militants."

The American system's solution to its middle-class problem developed on the tactics employed in the 1950's to discredit the Socialists and and destroy the Communist party. The War on America's emerging democracy otherwise known as Cointelpro was replaced by 'the War on Drugs'. By flooding black neighborhoods with illegal drugs and then issuing Draconian sentences for minor offenses the petty bourgeoisie was able to protect its endangered status and the politicians indebted to big business had fewer unhappy voters to try and content. That a Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, would merge the strands and expand the practice speaks volumes about 'liberal policies and their commitment to the poor.

When Clinton entered office, the entire prison population-local, state and federal-was just over a million. By the time he left it had doubled to over 2 million, the highest rate of incarceration and highest total of prisoners held in a democratic state in the history of the world.

60% of those federal inmates were in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. For the beleaguered white middle class it meant the boon of hundreds of new prisons, police weapons and corrections officers. A system grown so large that like our predatory banks it is now "Too Big to Fail". The largest public construction since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, the prison industrial complex helped expand the bubble once revered as the 'Great Clinton Economy'. It was a cynical strategy drawn from a reactionary tactic but brilliantly devised: 'Increase incarceration by nearly a million, add a couple of million workers to create and maintain a sprawling prison infrastructure, and voila! Lower unemployment and a healthier economy.'

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, the cost of the scam has now come due and middle class anger or not, he has no such option.

The Power of No

First let me say that the young are not stupid. Certainly not in the way that some of our supposed grown-ups sound when the discussion turns to matters like global warming, gay marriage or the policies of Barack Obama. On the whole, they are far more broad-minded and savvy, but they are absolutists. However, by sitting out this year's midterms America's young have done something that when they look back from the wisdom-producing distance of ten or twenty years they will probably admit was pretty stupid. How stupid will depend on how we survive the next several years.

The Phantom Left

Chris Hedges, in excoriating Jon Stewart's "Rally for Sanity" pins the blame for our current political apathy and civic dysfunction on the vanquished Left:

"The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy."

I admire Chris Hedges but despite his persuasive points I mildly disagree. Jon Stewart's audience may be liberal but despite being cast as such by our corporate media, it is not the Left, it is the 'hip' bourgeoisie. The comics were there to plead, not for Malcolm X or Emma Goldman, but for the status quo, a status quo that the young who do fret about their future rightly suspect is less democratic than authoritarian and fascist. When the campaign that promised you "Change" sees your standard-bearers like Van Jones and Dawn Johnsen tossed from the bus, voting begins to feel like a farce.

And yet, if there is any political space where the system still allows movement it is on issues the liberal class as a whole holds dear: namely civil liberties and the environment. The issue that once inspired the evanescent American Left was not the quality of the air but the workers' standard of living. Tangible, material things that Leftists like Eugene Debs died fighting for:

“I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man."

Twenty years after the collapse of Soviet Communism Debs' altruism would likely earn snickers from the Stewart crowd. Poverty is no longer a scar on a country's civilization in a world surrendered to Monopoly Capitalism. Social Darwinism is the de facto order of the day. The consequence for our privileged young is a dispiriting paralysis: why sacrifice when everyone expects to have to cope on their own?

But in allowing the political void to be filled by the abandoned proletariat's unreasoned passions, when our hopelessly dysfunctional state confronts the crisis of its own neglect it will be the Becks and Limbaughs leading the way right off the cliff and into nihilism. As Chris Hedges knows very well, it has happened before-- "the masses realize very well that they cannot direct themselves."-- Moeller van den Bruck, author of Das Dritte Reich

The young can only hope that the clowns are right: that history can only repeat itself as farce.