The Silent Death of the American Left

From CounterPunch:

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.

More here.

I'm increasingly starting to think that maybe the Greens kind of got it right a few years back when they kept running Nader again and again.  It's just that they didn't go far enough.  And they didn't keep it up.  As long as Americans continue to think that the Democrats are the party of the American left, then that's what they are, which renders meaningless the entire concept of left-wing politics.  Because, you know, subtract the social issues, and the Dems are actually pretty conservative.  That means that Americans don't really understand that there are, in fact, alternatives to corporate rule, that we don't have to live paycheck-to-paycheck, constantly worried about drowning, never having any real hopes to improve our lot in life.

So the fake liberal party needs to pay.  Dearly.  They need to be savaged so mercilessly, so continuously, that it becomes understood that they are the party of the wealthy elite, that they work tirelessly to rip you off, that they are liars, that they're corrupt, that they're the enemy.  When their defenders tell you that opposing them will put the Republicans in power, you need to up the volume and just freak out on them.  That's all we have?  A choice between right-wing politics and psycho far right-wing politics?  A great big "fuck you" is all that such a rhetorical ploy deserves in response.

The whole voting for Nader equals a vote for the Republicans thing seemed to make sense a decade ago, even though I disagreed at the time.  But as the years have gone by, things have only gotten worse.  Just as many on the left predicted back in the day.  Keeping the Republicans at bay, at this point, strikes me as nothing but a sophisticated sleight-of-hand maneuver to accomplish conservative goals without the GOP's direct involvement.

So we should go to war with the Democrats.  Or, at least, that's where my thinking is at the moment.

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