The Left is irrelevant.
Pundits deliberate daily about its continued existence as a viable movement.
Morally corrupt power brokers and self-serving murderers have replaced the colorful, rabble-rousing icons of a bygone era. A group of egoist literati and highbrow academics has appropriated the Left’s once proud, ‘storm the barricades’ agenda for its own.
As disillusionment and crippling fear sets in, frequent logical missteps lead to asinine musings of “solidarity” and guttural denunciations of “the West.”
Rendered powerless in the face of overwhelming opposition at home, the Left has turned outward instead of inward, allowing the Right to run amuck with its far-reaching domestic agenda: union-busting, corporate welfare, rollback of social welfare programs, dismantling of labor standards and environmental safeguards, infringement of Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, and massive increases in ‘defense’ spending.
If the results of last Tuesday’s midterm elections are any indicator, then the Left better start paying more attention to what’s going on at home.
No more tired, empty slogans and wanton violence at antiglobalization protests.
No more blanket attempts at casting the perpetrators of 9/11 as ‘anti-imperialist revolutionaries.’
No more blatant support for criminal syndicates and murderers in the Occupied Territories, no more anti-Semitic denunciations of Israel.
No more rallying behind an absurd regime in Iraq, just because you’re frustrated by the politics of the ruling junta at home.
No more ‘journalists’ on roller blades, and midnight rants amongst members of the Indymedia collective, about who can and who can’t play editor this week.
No more quibbling over trivial details and writing rhetorically about an unreachable utopia.
We don’t pretend to be innocent here. In many ways, we’re just as guilty as the next Lefty rag, and a lot of what we’ve written on these pages proves it.
We’ve always taken a hard stance on the antiglobalization protestors, so it’s still all right to say, “go play with your puppets.”
We’ve been overtly pro-Palestinian, but like Yasar Arafat, have had our kaffiyehs on too tight.
We’re still not convinced that the Bush and Co. have made their case on Iraq. Nevertheless, we won’t get in bed with a “filthy menace” to ward off our nightmares of imperial overreach.
While we were busy tangling with the “become the media” crowd and the Foucault-Derrida-Lacan et al-reading Leftist academics, the Right was racking up big points…
In case you haven’t been keeping score, the forces of the Right are real, and they are winning.
So how do we win?
We win by bringing our own tear gas to antiglobalization protests, and using it against the morons that make the Left look stupid. We win by recognizing the historical necessity for the existence of the state of Israel, and the idiocy of sensationalized politics. We win by redirecting the energies of the antiwar movement, making it a means to an end rather than an end in itself. We win by starting an intellectual civil war within the newspapers, magazines, and academic journals of Left persuasion. We win by providing everyday Americans with a practical alternative to the disconcerting freak show on the Left, and the corrupt agenda of the runaway Right.
Through trying to come to terms with what it means to be Left-intellectuals, we’ve arrived at some fresh conclusions.
It’s not too late for others on the Left to do so as well.
