Coop Scoop: When Right Meets Left

For the Right it's about the Deep State. For the Left it is US Imperialism.

April 9-10

Marc Cooper

I have never subscribed to the so-called Horseshoe Theory that If you go far enough to the extreme right or to the extreme left you wind up being on the same side. Not exactly true.  Both extremes hold wildly conflicting world views and adhere, theoretically, to a completely different bundle of ethics and values.

In practice, however, both extremes can wind up holding very similar or even identical political positions even though they have arrived from very different departure points and routes.  The extreme right holds that an invisible but omnipotent “deep state” controls our society with a rigid overly liberal bias. What better petri dish in which to whip up one conspiracy theory after another.  It’s easy to do when you portray your enemy as unseen but all powerful.

Into that seeming void, right wing conspiracists can plug in the immediate enemy of choice.  Perhaps illegal immigrants who we learn are encouraged to come by such bogeymen as George Soros and then when they arrive in the U.S. they are coddled and cushioned by corrupt Democratic officials working on behest of, right, the Deep State.  The goal of this operation: to de-Americanize America and turn it brown, while adding a whole lot of new Democratic voters to the rolls.

One can also take a shortcut to full conspiratorial paranoia by becoming fluent in Qanon, as the clearly-addled Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Thomas, has. Consider that text she sent Mark Meadows two days after the electoral defeat of Donald Trump.  Picking up some real rubbish from the Web or from a Q-comrade, Thomas wanted to believe the whole election was an elaborate hoax, but one generated by her side to trap illicit liberals. She texted: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

Then she added of this fanciful, if chilling, set of conspiracy theories: “I hope this is true.”

Sure. Just as true as other texts referring to “water-marked ballots” along with the moon being made of green chase.   This would all be hilarious if Thomas was not the wife of a reactionary Supreme Court Justice, or if she did not have immediate access to the top levels of government, and if she had not been repeatedly received warmly in the Oval Office brining Trump lists of who should be hired and fired.

DEEP STATE VS CORPORATE AMERICA

Liberals and progressives certainly have the right to guffaw over Ginni’s delusions. But, I would posit that the more extreme parts of the American Left, especially those that thrive online rather than on the ground, are equally infected with conspiracy theories and are equally as ridiculous and off base as their right wing counterparts.

Indeed, the phrase “deep state” originated on the left, not the right, and was sometimes just called the “permanent state.” I clearly remember a piece by Tom Hayden around the 2000 elections in Tikkun where he argued that the permanent state – defense bureaucrats and lobbyists for example—were a major obstacle to reform.  He was right, of course.  But over the past two decades, as the Left continues to shrink, too many of its adherents have abandoned reasonable thought and have retreated into hoary slogans and knee jerk responses left over from 1968.  This has led to absolutely rampant conspiracy theorizing.  When you continually fail, or come up short, it’s very handy to have at your disposal an omnipresent unseeable enemy.  The Christians have the Devil to blame.The Left has other variants available when describing who really runs the show, especially when things go poorly.  The “ruling class,” “corporate America,” and let us not forget that golden oldie --- The CIA! To which we can now add sinister generalizations like “NATO,” “US Imperialism” and so on down the line.

We have been drowned in news about right wing conspiracies for the last five years. So let’s take a little closer look at the leftist variety,

The Russian war against Ukraine has been a perfect showcase for this tendency.  I call them the Internet Left.  They have no real existence on the ground (Thank God). They have no real constituency except others like them who spend hours on the keyboards tapping away at their resentments and fantasies. But, wow, they sure have become loud and dominant on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. As I noted above, they wind up taking the identical positions of the Pro-Putin Right, even though their argumentation departs radically from the Trumpies

These are real zealots.  They post or tweet, and I am not kidding, up to 100 times a day. One of the headwaters of this bullshit stream is an online magazine called Grayzone, headed up by Max Blumenthal, the son of Hillaryland eminence gris Sydney Blumenthal.  But the younger Blumenthal is no Clintonite.  He’s probably better described as an acolyte of Assad’s Syrian dictatorship for which Max has carried a whole lot od water.  Grayzone itself has been accused of being Russian-funded, and it has not really been denied. One typical piece of Blumenthal’s work is this humdinger:  Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

You know, just asking questions…Like Tucker Carlson.

It’s bad enough I had to link to the piece. I don’t intend to give it more oxygen as the headline tells you everything. We also find a guy named Aaron Maté teaming up with Blumenthal to report on even more “false flags” planted by US imperialism. Maté’s been prolific on Ukraine, constantly trying to discredit the victim of the invasion, but his real hobby horse is the Syrian chemical gas attack of four years ago that he claims was yet another put up job by the gringos.

There’s also that straggling survivor known as Covert Action Magazine that burst onto the scene 40 years ago by naming names of CIA agents. Unfortunately, it never let go of the CIA to whom Covert Action attributes veritable superpowers. Here is their latest contribution to the pile of lies about Ukraine. “Was Alleged Russian Army Massacre of Civilians at Bucha Actually a False Flag Event Staged by Ukrainian Nazis?

Are we seeing a pattern here?  You bet we are!  In the logic of this Internet Left, nobody has any agency in this world other than the CIA.  The 2014 mass uprising in Ukraine in which almost a million Ukrainians took to the streets to oust a corrupt pro-Russian regime is blithely written off as “the CIA coup.”  And in this narrative, since then the US and its CIA have been building up Ukraine as some sort of neo-nazi aggressor who would eventually attack Russia. (insert laughter here).

After the first few days of the war, as the brutality of the Russian invasion became clear, it became politically impossible for these Tankies to overtly support Russia. Instead, they have settled on a truly repugnant, disgusting strategy: While the Russians bombard civilian areas, taking out hospitals and train stations and force as many six million refugees to flee, these “lefties” sit comfortably on their asses and whack away all day long and all night trying to discredit Ukraine. They have taken the unique situation of the formerly extreme-right Azov Battalion that had about 900 member at the start of the war and blown it up as proof that Ukraine is a nest of a neo-Nazis. I am not going to take any time to knock down their false assertions. There’s an excellent piece in the April 7 WaPo fully debunking the neo-Nazi charge, You can look it up.

The Left’s Original Sin: Fuck America

I’ve thought long and hard about where this craziness comes from and I have settled upon at least some partial answers, or at least some solid theories.

I posit that there is a sort of unwitting original sin corroding the current American Left. The last big upsurge of the Left was, of course, during the war in Vietnam.  That conflict produced enormous waves of protest that shook hundreds of campuses and that shut down Washington D.C. on more than one occasion. This all gave birth to the New Left that shined brightly from the early 60’s until the early 70’s when it fell apart.

That New Left, of which I am a proud veteran, started out primarily as a protest movement, not one for social change. The change part came secondarily as the movement arose and became self-aware. That movement, naturally, was rife with anger at the U.S. government, red-hot anger, piled on a sense of betrayal that many of us 18-19 and 20 year olds felt, a betrayal of all those American values we were taught in grammar school in the 50’s. Fuck America was our view. And I am willing to say we were right…then. At least from our parochial view of being subject to a draft in a war we firmly opposed.

Therein resides the original sin I referred to.  The American New Left never really matured. It suffered a body blow when its demand to end the draft was implemented and so many young people dropped out of political engagement.  Then came Watergate, and the onset of the Reagan Revolution. And the Left had no real organization to confront this sea change. It had no real organic links to the working class which it hilariously claimed to represent. No real leftist structures survived the 60’s except tiny mostly Maoist groupuscles (who by the way were instrumental in destroying SDS). The left became much more proficient at protesting than doing any real organizing.

Excluded and self-exiled as well from the mainstream, the remnants of the New Left had almost zero traction in American politics from 1970 onward. 

Then came Occupy in 2011 and Bernie five years later and suddenly we have the emergence of a true social democratic tendency in American politics gathering under the banner of “democratic socialism.” But co-existing with the Berniacs (of which I was one) are those boomers and also a younger generation who remained under the influence of those New Left politics of protest.

The rump group of Democratic Socialists of America, that had been maybe 3-4,000 progressives working inside the Democratic Party in 2015, ballooned along with Bernie’s rise to maybe 80,000 members today.

But along with serious activists trying to effect some local change, there is also a contingent of hard leftists inside DSA who seem intent on breaking that organization with sectarian and divisive politics.  It’s so called International Committee is galavanting around the globe feating such phony and authoritarian leftists such as Maduro of Venezuela.  Their intent is to expose, of course, US imperialism.

Here comes the sentence that is so hard to write. Before I write it I want you to promise to read my expository context for writing it. Ok?

The American Left still suffers from way too many of its adherents actually hating the country they claim to want to change. Hating the government. Everybody in it. And not so coincidentally, hating a lot of ordinary people who live in it.  This is the “protest” reflex instilled in the 1960’s.  Worse, when you have no real skin in the game, when you have zero political relevance, when you self-marginalize, you have nothing at risk, nothing to lose, by taking extreme or even absurd positions. The highest expression of this came in the early 70’s with the rise of the Weatherman faction of SDS.  The antiwar movement was already in decline and infighting was peaking.

The Weatherman faction of SDS landed on a bizarre theory that ALL American workers were beneficiaries of US Imperialism and therefore were not a class to be counted on for change. Especially those sectors who benefitted from “white-skin privilege.”  America was unredeemable according to the Weatherman, and they transformed the Maoist slogan of Serve The People into Serve The People Shit. All Americans were now the enemy and the Weathermen saw themselves as an advanced Third World vanguard destroying America from within.

The Weathermen were seriously deluded rich kids who dabbled in low-level terrorism, went underground for years, and now in their golden years are somehow goddamn college profs and lawyers – at least those that did not blow themselves up in that Greenwich Village townhouse. And in some redoubts the legacy of these jerks is actually celebrated as some sort of heroic if mistaken venture.

Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn

The Weathermen should not be glorified even a half century later. There was nothing good about them. And their attitude that America and Americans are the Enemy of Humanity should be studied as it reveals much of what is dysfunctional in the left today. The Weathermen were everything leftist activists should not be. Arrogant, violent, indifferent to ordinary people. And bereft of any serious political talent.

So, coming back to the present, what difference does it make Weathermen-inspired Max Blumenthal, for example, thinks about anything?  And if it does not matter, why am I bothering to write about it? It’s because of their outsized influence on the Web.

This conspiracy theorizing on the Left is a strong incentive to demobilize.  That’s what ticks me off. How can you organize, how can you build alliances, how can you build capacity when you are convinced that all is pre-determined by the CIA and nobody around you can really be trusted? And in this country that does not have strong progressive institutions, there is always a young generation searching for change and it really would not serve them to fall in among the Internet Tankies, though too many do.

Last week in a SDS Veterans Facebook group that teems with these pro-Russian “tankies,”  a very well-known, long time and smart lefty veteran economist posted something about supporting Ukraine. The tankie piranhas immediately went to attack mode. He was called a corporate whore, a DNC whore, and was branded a “war criminal” by several other bozos. I’m sorry but this is really crazy stuff. It’s really damaging and depressing. And it makes working with ANY group of lefties hard to impossible, depending on how many “haters” there are.

I have spent decades among the leftist movements of many countries: Mexico, Central America, South America, Korea, South Africa, Spain, France and Italy.   Nowhere among them do you find the sort of alienation that the American left suffers.  No Mexican or Italian leftist is going to freak out if someone waves a national flag in their face. In fact, leftists often carry their national flags. Chilean leftists sing their national anthem with gusto. They are not corporate whore or war criminals. They merely possess a natural pride of place that seems to go lacking around here.

The war in Ukraine ushers in a new chapter in American politics and not for the better.  The progressives inside the Democratic Party will now be on the defensive as Biden increases military spending, as talk of reducing deficits is once again in fashion and as we hover near an expanded war.  Even worse, we are only 200 days away from an historic midterm election that will, without a doubt, mark a Republican victory (at a time when the Republican Party is in full crisis mode). If things line up a certain way, this could be the onset of a generation’s worth of Republican governance in the U.S.

This is a code red situation for all liberals, progressives, radicals and – in fact—for the entirety of the American people.  The Republican Party is a now a bona fide anti-democratic autocratic outfit who intends to drive a steamroller over liberal democracy.

Democrats are very unreliable allies at best.  But any part of the left that thinks or in this case dreams of confronting the Republicans, eventually defeating them, and some day, one day, governing, must absolutely make alliances with millions of rank and file Democrats and even some Democratic electeds because…because.. that’s the way world works! Branding anybody who disagrees with you as a “Democrat Whore” or “War Criminal,” is one of the best ways around to prolong and strengthen illiberal rule.++

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