Why Leftists Mistrust Liberals

From CounterPunch, my favorite University of Texas journalism professor, Robert Jensen tries to get at why liberals always seem to dump on the left:

Some of my best friends are liberals. Really. But I have found it is best not to rely on them politically.

Bashing the left to burnish credibility in mainstream circles is a time-honored liberal move, a way of saying “I’m critical of the excesses of the powerful, but not like those crazy lefties.” For example, during a discussion of post-9/11 politics, I once heard then-New York University professor (he has since moved to Columbia University) Todd Gitlin position himself between the “hard right” (such as people associated with the Bush administration) and the “hard left” (such as Noam Chomsky and other radical critics), implying an equivalence in the coherence or value of analysis of each side. The only conclusion I could reach was that Gitlin -- who is both a prolific writer and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society -- either believed such a claim about equivalence or said it for self-interested political purposes. Neither interpretation is terribly flattering for Gitlin.

Perhaps more important than such cases are the ways in which liberals can undermine the left even when claiming to be supportive in a common cause.

Click here for the rest.

Malcolm X once said something to the effect that he preferred the straight-up racism of conservatives because liberals will say all the right things while at the same time plotting to screw over black people--at least conservatives are honest about what they are. How right he was. The reality is that liberals, now utterly demonized by the right wing, serve the establishment in a very important way: they are apologists. That is, the liberal point of view is essentially that the basic power structure in the US is both sound and just; it simply has problems from time to time that need to be fixed. Consequently, liberals keep the body politic, really the entire population, from ever considering any real systemic changes in the United States. Conservatives owe liberals a great debt for that. They don't ever have to debate against a really different point of view--liberals do that for them.

My arguments with liberal Democrats about Nader and the Greens have made, for me, this theory into frustrating reality. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to simply explain to a liberal that he's playing directly into corporate hands by opposing the left. They, like their conservative counterparts, just can't hear it. When you get right down to it, there's not much difference: both liberals and conservatives support the establishment and lambast anybody who doesn't.

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