Regressive liberals, reactionary progressives: The New Left?

“A cabal of anti-Trump fanatics cooked up the Russia collusion story, and don’t-rock-the-boat bureaucrats went along with it, so we now have a behemoth investigative monster chasing unicorns.”—Ann Coulter

When an economic Cro-Magnon can make what passes for a left in America look like political Neanderthals, you know we’ve got big problems. The rush to passionately embrace the “Russiagate” story is only one, though a big one, of the moves of what was once called a liberal progressive segment of the American people so far to the right that mad dog conservatives are fighting to maintain their position as least logical pretenders to sanity. What is going on here?

A system so dangerously troubled that its dominating minority is losing control fast enough to warrant radical message changing to its subjects thereby causing irrationality to rule more blatantly than ever before.

Decent people have always known that poverty is an aspect of reality that should be changed but market forces, god and whatever other supernatural powers could be blamed made it impossible so the only thing to do was to be kind to the poor, maybe pray for them and send an occasional check to charity and all would be as well as possible. But the appalling and growing inequality rampant in a capitalist dominated market system has made poverty so frighteningly obvious among a former middle class sinking dangerously close to that status itself that the information flow must reflect excuses that explain away the social conditions.

Sun spots were once used as a potential rationale to explain the economic forces of a stock market and as such were no more or less logical than the religious-scientific belief in the buying and selling that relies on investments made by a tiny segment of a population, all of which would ultimately create the best possible world for almost everyone. Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as experts in market analysis. Living in a time which has seen the inequality gap between humans grow wider than ever in fairly reliable history, while trillions of dollars of wealth are spent on warfare and hundreds of billions on pet care is likely to provoke more thought than usual about the alleged wisdom of such a system. Thus, reality TV, American politics, Marvel Comics and other fantasy productions to keep the remaining solvent sector occupied with the status of special identity groups and kept divided from one another enough to protect the wealthiest from any chance that unified democratic action might threaten their dominating role.

A generation ago conservative anti-Russian-communist fanatics made some liberal types smirk at their backward and narrow-minded political stance but that has now been adopted by progressive anti-Russian-capitalist fanatics swept up in the farce called Russiagate. This dementia-based view finds an American oligarchy of billionaires ruling a minority of the electorate into voting for the capitalist party with two slightly differing factions and calling that “our democracy.” At beating our minds into such mush it now claims that Putin and Russia are somehow responsible for the electoral college and alienated just enough Americans in a disintegrating system to be swept up in fervor for things Facebooked next to photos of our dogs, cats and lunch that allegedly “meddled” in our sacred electoral process. A handful of bumbling Russian financial hustlers picked up dumb items from anti-social American media and furthered their entry into semi-empty American heads. OMG! To think that any foreign power in our wonderful globalized economy would have an interest in another nation’s political economic life is so far-fetched it makes American meddling in foreign politics seem, uh, fictional? The Russian wino who led that nation into near disaster was a creature of American foreign policy and the Putin regime has led that nation from capitalist total disaster to only regular capitalist disaster, which is far more than can be said about the present American gang and its recent predecessors.

It’s as though the sinking Titanic crew and passengers were forced into concentrating on who the captain was and how many gay Latinos, Jewish transsexuals, white supremacists or black female impersonators were working in the kitchen while the water approached their lungs and all lifeboats had already left. We may not have reached that moment yet but at the rate things are moving and the near complete vanishing of a real American anti-capitalist left, it could be here sooner than anyone might wish. Opposition to Trump is important but really no more so than opposition to any CEO of a major corporation could be, but the business is the problem and not it’s chief clerk, bookkeeper or toilet cleaner, no matter how personally pinheaded, egomaniacal or TV famous. And Trump is opposed by the ruling power oligarchs of America and was never supposed to be able to gain his position as powerful figurehead with less power than the figures who own him. But as long as this “new left” takes on the work of the “old right,” the conditions of capitalist America will get worse and bring on material tragedies much bigger than a single oaf, or a single oafish identity group, might be able to fathom. Stop Trump’s worst possibilities, of course, but the worst possibilities of murderous, anti-human and perversely anti-social capitalism are far bigger problems for humanity and must be dealt with by a movement that goes far beyond celebrity leadership personalities and deals with political economic substance by creating radical systemic change. At this sad point, what passes for an American left is a major part of the problem and hardly anywhere near offering a solution.

Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.