"Surely
the re-election of Barack Obama has, at long last, put the kibosh on
the hoary notion that the "Professional Left" poses any kind of threat
or counterbalance to the malignant spread of empire, within and without.
Slice the timeline any way you like –10 years, 20 years, 30 years – and
you’ll still come up with the same sad salami: a political world
shifted so far to the right, so deep in the pockets of Daddy Warbucks,
General Ripper and Elmer Gantry that even Boss Tweed might blush for
shame. This is what the Prof-Left has to show for its decades of working
diligently within the system.
Of course, America’s hard-right
turn (or reversion) to militarism abroad and Hobbesianism at home is not
solely the result of the Left’s egregious failures; far from it. It’s a
brew made up of many poisons. And yes, failure can be honorable at
times. But there is nothing honorable about what happened to
"progressives" in Campaign 2012. After years of consciousness-raising –
unmasking atrocities, tracking corruption, decoding propaganda,
speaking truth to power, etc. – where did the Prof-Left end up in
November? Supporting a lawless, cynical, corporate-coddling warmonger
who has taken the tropes of imperial sway to their logical conclusion,
their final solution: the arbitrary, unchecked power of life and death,
not only over the grubby barbaroi but even over his own subjects. As the
scripture saith, our professional progs strained at a gnat – but
swallowed the whole damn camel.
Nowhere was this betrayal of
principle more naked than in the very arena which, we were told, had
"transformed" politics forever, shattering the old paradigms and giving
unprecedented voice and power to reform and resistance: the progressive
blogosphere. Yet here the cognitive dissonance was so jarring that it
hurt just to look at it. (God knows what it must felt like inside those
conflicted craniums.) Here you found stern denunciations of White House
death squads, drone wars, whistleblower persecutions, corporate
whoredom and other outrages standing cheek-to-cheek with gushing paeans to
presidential cool, testy rebuttals of Tea Party attacks, minute
nit-pickings over polls and soundbites, and sage tactical advice to
ensure victory for … the same man they were simultaneously slating for
murder and repression. For all their "savvy" caveats and subtle nuance,
their Chomskyean parsing of narrow moral choices in a brutal power
system (Democrats, said one prominent progblogger, are "2% less evil,"
so one must support them), in the end, the netrooters were as
avid as David Axelrod in their partisan plumping for more drones,
deaths, deportations, drilling, drug warring and all the other draconia wielded happily by Obama in his first four years.
This
is a "movement" that has finally collapsed beneath the weight of its
own incoherence. You cannot denounce state crime while supporting its
perpetrators. Or rather, you can – but you will look like a
fool. You will look like someone who has nothing to offer beyond a
pallid, unprincipled tribal loyalty to a clapped-out party of
bloodstained bagmen. And all the "ordinary people" out there whose
consciousnesses you are trying to raise will sense this hollow core,
this estrangement from reality. They will know you have no answers for
the suffering they endure in a heartless system, that you can provide no
understanding of what the system is doing to them – because you are
part of the system, you speak its language, you play its games, you
support its crimes, you cheerlead for its criminals. Why should they
listen to you? And so the people you seek to help and enlighten turn
away – to those whose certainties, however false, seem more coherent; or
to ever-more frantic, frenetic diversions; or to a grim, ground-down,
burnt-out , grudging acceptance of a system that seems inescapable, more
like a natural order than a hell of our own making.
I certainly
don’t exempt myself from this critique. (Except maybe for that 2012
criminal-supporting thing.) For 35 years now, in print and on line, I’ve
been doing the same kind of consciousness-raising and outrage-recording
described above. (And I must confess that for too much of that time, I
also hewed to the "2 percent" line that induces moral blindness when the
criminals ride donkeys, not elephants. The hardest consciousness to
raise is always one’s own.) But the 2012 election seems to me to
represent a milestone of sorts, or a turning point or – hell, why not? –
a new paradigm. Decades of dissent – not just pallid
progblogging or Beltway-liberal lobbying, but the real deal, down in the
trenches, courageous, unsung, dedicated – has not slowed the imperial
juggernaut, whose depredations are more brazen, more entrenched and more
accepted, even celebrated, than ever. Something ain’t working. The
tongues are all broken. The message is not getting through.
So
what now? At this point, all I know is that I don’t know – which is, so
they say, the beginning of wisdom. And that’s what I want to do in this
column: begin again, re-think, see more, learn more, get away from the
camel-swallowers and my own calcifications, and meet our new reality
head-on."
