The Silent Death of the American Left

[Questionable]

Is there a Left in America today?
There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?
Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?
We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?
It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.
Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.
This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.
We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.
Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.
Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.
Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.
Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.
What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces.
The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever

Obama mentions the plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of white corporate culture.
The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare. Where’s the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The sit-ins in congressional offices?
A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the Obama administration’s infamous memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph, a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama’s killer drone strikes. Let’s recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The war had come home.
Where are those protests today?
The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.
Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.
How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…
One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.
We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/...american-left/

[Hexen]

Well first of all, I don't think Counterpunch is a reliable source since I heard some rather questionable things about it.

[Red Nightmare]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.

[Questionable]

Well first of all, I don't think Counterpunch is a reliable source since I heard some rather questionable things about it.

Like what?

Do you dispute the information they have relayed in this article? It seemed spot-on to me.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Oh, there is definitely a Left here in America.

The problem is, we don't have a Left PARTY. We are shackled with the two party system of center-right Democrats and right-wing Republicans.

Because we don't have any possible way of getting a Left Wing party involved in Congress, leftism has become stale in the U.S.

(Yeah, I know that reformism and politics don't neccessarily help further the revolution, but it would AT LEAST give the American Left some confidence, if not some visibility).

[cyu]

This guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End...d_the_Last_Man was all the rage for a few months.

About the only people who take the idea seriously these days are demagogues

[Hexen]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.

True special thanks for the Red Scare/McCarthyism/Cold War propaganda and moral panics till the point that even terms "socialism"/"communism" have become loaded language and now post-Soviet Union "End of History" mindset and hardcore liberalism ("Communism sounds nice on paper but in practice it failed because of human nature" and such).

Like what?

Do you dispute the information they have relayed in this article? It seemed spot-on to me.

I think I remember reading somewhere that Counterpunch is owned by conspiracy theorists/reactionaries/"progressives" Green party/etc people or whatever but I don't remember where (sort of like "Common Dreams" which all they post is doom & gloom and such).

[Red Nightmare]

True special thanks for the Red Scare/McCarthyism/Cold War propaganda and moral panics till the point that even terms "socialism"/"communism" have become loaded language and now post-Soviet Union "End of History" mindset and hardcore liberalism ("Communism sounds nice on paper but in practice it failed because of human nature" and such).

I fear that the Left has been so obfuscated by propaganda in America that many people are not even willing to learn more about leftism due to the negative association even though they might find that they actually agree with the underlying principles of communism if they only knew what it truly was. I basically blame cultural hegemony.

[Turinbaar]

The breakdown happened rather early because of red hunting. Jessica Mitford recounts in "A Fine Old Conflict" that at a certain point in the late fifties, the members of various local Parties and their central committees who were FBI infiltrators began outnumbering genuine socialists. The sixties brought about alternatives, but they suffered in similar fashion.

[ed miliband]

maybe "the left" is dead because the material conditions that produced it no and facilitated its existence longer exist?

[Let's Get Free]

Historically, 'the Left' has failed monumentally. What war, depression or ecocide did it ever prevent? The Left now exists mainly as a fading protest vehicle or annoying lifestylism. It hasn't been a source of inspiration in many decades. It is, in fact, silently dying out.

[Mytan Fadeseasy]

maybe "the left" is dead because the material conditions that produced it no and facilitated its existence longer exist?

I would think that the current capitalist crisis would create the material conditions that would encourage people to seek an alternative.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You have to understand that no one gives a shit about many of the things listed in that article. Well, not no one, but the average American really doesn't care that much about kids dying in Pakistan, sad but true. Nor do they care about the spotted owl 'still going extinct' or a whole slew of other things that The Left cares about and obsesses over.

That's not even to say that such issues shouldn't be issues of concern...I too am disgusted over what this country does overseas on pretty much a daily basis. But the opposition to the war in Afghanistan...yes, if you go up to Americans and say, "should we be at war in Afghanistan?" most will probably say "no". But are they actually willing to do anything about that other than give their opinion? Are they ready for "mass demonstrations", "nationwide strikes", "systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting", etc, all presumably led by a non-impotent Left? No. The war simply doesn't affect a large enough percentage of the American population, not even close. People may not like the wars but they'll tolerate them.

And forget it when we talk about things like privacy and civil liberties. The lack of fucks given over those issues by Americans is awe-inspiring.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Basically the article makes it sound like there's a large discontented political opposition out there just waiting to be had, and I'm skeptical of this notion. Then there's a whole poor pitiful pearl, let-me-play-a-song-on-the-world's-tiniest-violin lament about how the Left isn't whipping this latent political opposition into shape.

[KurtFF8]

One would expect an article on the "death of" the American Left to actually talk about the American Left. But after reading the article, you wonder if the author even acknowledges an existing Left that can die in the first place.

The whole article is essentially talking about the disappointment in the failure for a major Left resurgence rather than any analysis of an existing Left "silently dying out."

It probably has to do with the fact that sites like Counterpunch tend to not want to discuss the "sectarian" groups for fear of looking biased or getting caught up in old battles. Although I could be wrong on this last point.

[Geiseric]

Well the fSUs collapse like it's creation kind of corresponded with the decay of the established marxist movements worldwide.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.

I think you need to read up on your history comrade. While at this time the left is miniscule, that has not always been the case -- it has been rather large at times within the past hundred years. There has always been an ebb and flow. Sadly, we are in the midst of a major ebb.

[Lynx]

Richard Wolff talks repeatedly about a powerful union movement in the 1930s that forced Roosevelt to institute the New Deal. Contrast those historical events to the sound of crickets we hear today.

[Crabbensmasher]

Eh, as Henry Ford always said, consumerism is the key to peace. People just aren't as restless anymore. This is, in my opinion, because they are either enjoying a higher standard of living, or being told that they are. Probably more so, but not completely the ladder.

The left, the radicals, are being made to feel irrelevant. I know nobody wants to hear it, but I think the collapse of the USSR changed a lot of peoples' mindsets. Even though it was grossly misinterpreted and so very flawed, the USSR was always seen as a viable alternative, even in America. Even the centre left; the moderates, reformers and social democrats. They knew that "socialism" existed out there, and some parts of it even worked.

And then it collapsed. Suddenly, the "socialism" they were so familiar with didn't work anymore. Capitalism had won. Any alternative was wrong, and so, they heaved themselves back home and never said a word again.

I'm not saying all of the left were Soviet worshippers, and they certainly weren't, but I'm willing to bet there was a big decline in the early 90s. I can't say I'm really informed about American politics, but the left certainly took a massive hit in other parts of the world.

So, now, as far as the average American is concerned, there are no alternative ways of running the world. If times get bad, you try to fix the system, not change it. And if you have your McDonalds and new Ford Sedan, why really care anyway?

[Paul Pott]

We are still in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, just as the era from 1919 to 1939 was the aftermath of the first world war, and then from 1929 on, capital's crisis as well. In 2013, the working class movement is still without direction and in disarray globally.

Up till now, conditions in the United States allowed the ruling class to maintain a fairly comfortable hegemony through ideological means and material means such as collaborationist unions, credit, and welfare, all backed up by the mightiest economic machine in the world where one generation on average got better paying employment than the last. (We still have a higher standard of living than people in the 50s and 60s, when capitalism was at its furthest from major crisis) That paradigm has already crumbled and the global economy is currently held together by the efforts of central banks.

Capital's crisis will deepen in the near future, and that's when the working class movement will rebuild itself.