Drawing By Nathaniel St. Clair
The hordes of Democratic Party pundits, anti-Trump Republicans, and
former national security state functionaries who supply CNN and MSNBC
with endless streams of jibber-jabber, along with their counterparts at
The New York Times and
Washington Post, are pulling out all the stops — trying to convince Democrats that only a “moderate” can defeat Donald Trump.
They speak for the dead center, and they are dead wrong.
They do have a ready audience, however; in part because apologists
for the Democratic Party have been fairly successful at passing blame
for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 onto everything other than her
corporate and Wall Street friendly politics. Running against Bernie
Sanders, Clinton’s politics epitomized moderation.
Alarmingly many potential Democratic voters just don’t get it. The
Democratic Party’s leaders and publicists have seen to that; they peddle
their snake oil well.
The hard truth, though, is that the “centrist” politics they promote
helped get us to where we now are.
Try convincing the targets of their
propaganda operations otherwise, however; it isn’t easy.
That the next, long overdue recession continues to tarry does not help matters.
Neither has the election that the British Labor Party lost so
ignominiously a few weeks ago. Its consequences will be dire — over
there. Back here, they could be as inconsequential as elections in any
of several economically or militarily more formidable US allies in
Europe or the Far East. That would be not particularly consequential at
all. But this will not be the case; they will matter a great deal.
UK elections matter more than those in other countries – in part
because we have a longstanding “special relationship” with the Brits
that we don’t have with, say, the French or the Germans or the Japanese,
and because we are accustomed to thinking that “the English-speaking
peoples” as Churchill called them — Americans, Canadians, Australians,
and New Zealanders — are somehow joined at the hip.
In the final analysis, though, if the UK under Boris Johnson
diminishes itself further by leaving the EU, or even if it
self-destructs by causing Scotland or Northern Ireland to break away,
Americans will have little reason to take notice.
Corporate media, however, are doing all they can to make Americans
notice enough to draw the wrong lesson from Labor’s electoral debacle.
Their barely hidden objective is to convince potential Sanders or Warren
voters in this Spring’s caucuses and primaries that promising “pie in
the sky,” as they claim the Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership
did – in other words, promoting genuinely, not merely cosmetic,
departures from the status quo — is an all but certain path to defeat.
Knowledgeable commentators who are not too blatantly in the thrall of
Tory or Blairite ideology tell a different story. They explain how it
was not Labor’s socialist (or social democratic) agenda that did the
party in, but divisions within it over Brexit, and power struggles
between the party’s left wing and its functional equivalents of
mainstream Democrats. They tell us that Corbyn, a bona fide socialist
and anti-imperialist, could have played his hand better, but that, in
the end, he was defeated by circumstances largely beyond his control.
Brexit was the main culprit; it divided the Labor Party, just as it divided the UK generally. The
ancien régime’s defenders took take full advantage of the fallout from the Brexit vote, something Corbyn was unable to do.
Moderates, in and out of Labor’s ambit, had it in for Corbyn for many
of the same reasons that their counterparts in the United States have
it in for Sanders and Warren. The election gave them an opportunity to
act on their class-interest based animosity.
Like George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president in 1972,
Corbyn is an estimable figure whose candidacy was supported by large
segments of his party’s base, but who was effectively undermined by his
party’s establishment and by the media that serve it.
Does this bode ill for progressives on this side of the ocean? Are these latest British elections relevant at all?
Tip O’Neil, the Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1977 to
1987, famously declared: “all politics is local.” This is, at best, a
gross exaggeration; politics, especially at the national level, is
national too.
It can also be, or appear to be, international. Thus, Britain and the
United States sometimes seem to march in tandem, Britain leading the
way.
Margaret Thatcher begat Ronald Reagan, and New Labor begat
Clintonism. More recently, the UK’s Brexit vote was followed by Trump’s
election.
Sometimes, the far greater power, the United States, manages to take
the lead. Thus, now that the dust from the Brexit vote has settled, the
UK has a Trump of its own. Johnson is better educated than Trump, more
worldly and smarter, but he is every bit as cartoonish and vile.
It is therefore understandable that Corbyn’s shellacking would be on
peoples’ minds, especially at a time when, with nationalism and
illiberalism everywhere on the rise, much of the world seems hellbent on
taking a great leap backwards.
Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of this sad turn of events, but
thanks in part to the bad example he sets, as president of what is
still the world’s only superpower, authoritarian politics is taking hold
the world over – in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, India, Hungary,
Poland, and the Philippines, among others. Too bad for the people who
live in those places that these are countries in which liberal norms are
notoriously less secure than in the US or the UK.
If all politics really were local, illiberal backsliding could be
more easily isolated, minimizing the harm. But politics is not nearly
local enough. And since efforts to derail progressive initiatives in the
United States have, if anything, intensified of late, and since it is
widely believed that the British election is of at least some relevance
to American leftists pondering how best to proceed, it is of paramount
importance to learn whatever constructive lessons we can from what
happened to Corbyn and the Labor Left.
Forces intent on maintaining the old regime in the UK besmirched
Corbyn, preposterously but nevertheless with some success. If and when
their American counterparts adapt their methods, it is urgent that their
efforts be resisted with all the militance we can muster.
***
Of the many candidates still vying to be the Democrats’ nominee for
president, the billionaires and the moderates ought to be ruled out from
the get-go. This is not the place to rehearse the many reasons why; but
see my last piece, “
Enough Absurdity; Time to Get Smart.” It is different with Sanders and Warren. Either one would be OK, though, in my view, Sanders would be a whole lot better.
He is more authentically left-wing, more Corbyn-like, as it were. If,
and only if, the emerging Democratic Left plays its cards right, being
like Corbyn is the very opposite of a recipe for defeat.
A Sanders candidacy would wean workers away from the Trump fold – not
by advancing kinder gentler versions of the neoliberal policies that
made Trump inevitable, but by undoing the conditions that made Trump and
Trumpism possible.
Doing so would have a salutary effect on the entire body politic,
even in the short run. In the slightly longer run, a Sanders presidency
would help roust that great sleeping giant, the American working class,
from its soft-on-moderates slumber, setting it free it to resume its
historic mission. For remaking the world in ways that are ecologically
sound, just, and fit for human habitation, we cannot currently do better
than that.
I have three misgivings, however. Even taken together, they do not,
in my view, make Warren the better choice, but they are worth reflecting
upon and dealing with.
The first is that the time is past due for a woman to be elected
president. The main reason why this is important, I think, is so that we
can get beyond the point where it is important.
Others, of course, would disagree; they think that electing a woman is important, perhaps even all important, in its own right.
That was certainly the view of many Clinton supporters in 2016. At
this point, though, even many of them realize that, despite all their
brouhaha about “the glass ceiling” three years ago, the country is, and
long has been, “ready” for a woman president. It is finally dawning,
even on those who want a woman elected most, that, as James Carville,
Clintonite extraordinaire, might put it: “it’s the politics, stupid.”
By that measure, Warren is not at all bad; Sanders, however, is a whole lot better.
My second misgiving has to do with age. This is a problem for Biden
too, of course, and also for Trump, though, in his case, all the
valences change – enough to allow finding comfort in the thought that as
long as there are strokes, all is not lost.
Both Sanders and Warren are in their seventies, but he is roughly two
presidential terms older than she. Clearly, at this point, they both
have all their marbles and then some. But, as the saying goes, old age
is not for sissies; anything can happen.
It is surely of some relevance that, for doing what needs to be done
and what they both want to do, eight years, much less four, are not
nearly enough; and that, going by the odds, Warren has a better chance
than Sanders of still being in top form in eight or even four years’
time.
Being older than Warren and younger than Sanders, and approaching the
point where friends and acquaintances are at least as likely to be dead
or out of commission as still in their prime, the pertinence of this
consideration is something of which I cannot help but be aware, and upon
which I can speak with some authority.
Being every bit as Chosen as Sanders, I have some authority on that
too, and I also cannot help but be aware of the Jewish Question. Hence,
my third misgiving: it is that nominating him might not be, as we say,
good for the Jews.
Before Trump, I used to think that in the United States, being Jewish
was of no political consequence whatever. How could it be when, for
example, Sheldon Adelson, a character straight out of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
could be all buddy buddy with some of the vilest Republican crackers in
all creation, seemingly without objection or even notice from anybody?
Needless to say, it is perilous to be black or brown or Muslim in
America; but Jews, it seemed, were safe. I was so sure of this that it
didn’t even bother me that my fellow tribesman, Stephen Miller, Trump’s
favorite hate monger, evidently thinks so too. It is practically
axiomatic that anything that Miller believes is untrue.
It was different, of course, in places like Ukraine, the Democrats’
new favorite country, where old school fascism – and therefore classical
anti-Semitism — though repressed within the Soviet Union, never quite
expired.
Thus, when Communism imploded, it rose again there and elsewhere in
eastern and central Europe, when, with the help of American meddlers,
anti-Russian governments were established and took hold all along
Russia’s borders.
But even with Steve Bannon and others of his ilk empowered during the
Trump campaign, I never thought that anything like that could happen
here – not, anyway, before Charlottesville.
Obviously, I was wrong. Long before the day of infamy when Trump and
his trophy bride descended that gilded Trump Tower escalator, the Donald
was busily kicking over rocks where the ancient demons had been lying
dormant and out of sight.
Then, with him in the White House, those demons came back to life and
flourished. And so, by now, we might as well be back in the 1930s, but
for one salient difference: that there is a state of Israel now, and
real anti-Semites love it. This doesn’t diminish the intensity of their
hatred of Jews, but it does affect how they express it.
The Trump-induced resurrection of anti-Semitism coincides with and
feeds into a developing crisis of legitimacy that threatens support for
Israel and for Zionist politics generally. Trump did not bring this
crisis on; it has been taking shape for decades. But by handing the most
noxious Zionists the moral equivalent of a blank check, Trump and Jared
Kushner, his settler-movement loving son-in-law, have effectively
licensed them to act out in any way that they think will help their
cause.
In enlightened secular circles, Jewish and otherwise, support for a
culturally Jewish, Hebrew-speaking homeland for Jews, after centuries of
persecution in Europe and especially after the Nazi genocide, continues
to resonate.
Nevertheless, the idea that Israel can rightfully be an ethnocratic
settler state no longer quite cuts it in the twenty-first century.
Neither does the idea that the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine
fulfills a “promise” that a God few still believe in made to the
patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, characters who probably never
existed at all, and who are almost certainly not direct ancestors of
Jews alive today.
It doesn’t help either that what was once deemed “a light unto the nations” has become an international pariah state.
How could any right-thinking person, Gentile or Jew, not think of it
that way – after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living within
Israel proper, the imposition of an Apartheid regime over Palestinians
in the territories occupied by Israel during the Six Day War, and the
increasing awareness of the fact that Palestinians living within
Israel’s internationally recognized borders are, for all intents and
purposes, second-class citizens?
The Holocaust has had to become Israel’s legitimization myth – not in
the sense that it didn’t happen, obviously it did, but in the way that
Zionists have come to use it to justify subsequent wrong-doing.
There is, after all, only so much legitimacy that can be squeezed out
of the horrific suffering of European Jews during the Nazi period,
especially inasmuch as the World War II era is rapidly becoming an
historical memory of no more immediate relevance to current thinking
than, say, the Civil War period or World War I.
It doesn’t help either, with memories of Apartheid South Africa still
in peoples’ minds, that Israel’s vaunted democracy has always been a
Herrenvolk affair, a democracy for a master race, or that the
Herrenvolk
is again becoming a minority in the land it rules – not quite to the
same extent that white South Africans were when they were running the
show there, but to a considerable extent even so.
For decades, it was comparatively easy, psychologically, for liberal
Zionists to live with the contradictory notion of a state that is both
Jewish and democratic, when they know full well that whatever else a
democratic state may be, it is a state of its people, of an
undifferentiated citizenry, not of a particular religious or national
group.
This contradiction has become increasingly difficult to gloss over in
recent years. It is especially troubling that the Israeli occupation of
the territories it seized more than half a century ago, in the Six Day
War. is still going on, and that there is no end in sight.
Israel’s defenders have been trying for decades to confound
anti-Zionism and all but the mildest criticisms of Israeli policies with
anti-Semitism. Fortunately, but also remarkably in view of all the
effort they have expended, they have had only limited success.
Lately, though, determined to restore the waning legitimacy of the
Zionist idea, they have intensified their efforts, doing all they can to
turn what had been a comparatively harmless logical howler, calling two
very different things one and the same, into a pernicious ideological
fetish.
And so now, they call even longstanding opponents of racism in all
its forms anti-Semites. In Corbyn’s case, the charge, leveled
straightforwardly, would be too implausible for anyone expecting to be
taken seriously to claim. His enemies therefore charged with something
slightly different – being soft on anti-Semitism within the party he
leads.
Of course, the anti-Semitism his detractors had in mind was not
anti-Semitism at all, but anti-Zionism. Inasmuch as Corbyn has been an
anti-imperialist solidarity activist his entire life, and therefore a
proponent of justice for Palestinians, this “charge” actually does have
some basis in fact. The facts in question, however, are grounds for
praise, not condemnation.
To be sure, anti-Zionism can and sometimes does morph into genuine
anti-Semitism. If anything like that actually went on in Labor Party
circles, it ought to have been dealt with aggressively and expeditiously
by the party’s leader. Thus, if Corbyn was guilty of anything, it was
of not handling such situations as aggressively or as promptly as he
should have.
This is not at all the same thing as condoning them. Even in a world of “alternative facts,” that charge cannot be sustained.
Nobody really knows how much, if at all, the smear campaign directed
at Corbyn contributed to Labor’s defeat; this is not the sort of thing
that can be measured precisely or in uncontroversial ways. It very
likely did do some harm, however. To the extent that it did, British
Zionists have a lot to answer for.
Because they do, because their efforts on behalf of Boris Johnson – a
bona fide racist, Islamophobe, and anti-Semite — succeeded at least
somewhat, we can predict, with considerable confidence, that if
Democrats run Sanders, a comparable smear campaign will be attempted
against him.
It will be a case of “monkey see, monkey do.” And it will encourage
real anti-Semites to strut their stuff in ways that will likely give
even Stephen Miller cause for concern.
If Warren shows that she too has a decency streak and a backbone, she
could be a potential victim as well. Unlike, say, Biden or Cory Booker
or, for that matter, any of the other moderates, including the Boy
Wonder, Mayor Pete, Warren may have it in her to do the right thing.
Up to this point, however, she has given Zionists little cause to
after her. To her credit, she has resisted AIPAC’s advances. But so far,
her politics has seemed to stop at the water’s edge.
Sanders is a different story. He is no Corbyn, but he has spoken out
in solidarity with Palestinians, even when he could have more easily
remained silent.
It is not hard to find reasons to fault his positions on
Israel-Palestine over the years but, this side of “the squad” and a few
others, he is as good as any Democrat at the national level gets.
Of equal or greater importance, he is helping, as he did with
socialism, to change the national conversation – not as much as it needs
to be changed, but to an extent that would have seemed unimaginable
only a few years ago.
As it becomes increasingly difficult for corporate media to treat the
Sanders campaign as if it weren’t happening, we should therefore expect
that, before long, we will soon be hearing a lot about “self-hating
Jews” and other nonsense that not long ago seemed, like anti-Semitism
itself, to have gone extinct, but that has now revived as defenders and
beneficiaries of the old order feel increasingly anxious and insecure.
This is what must be fought against — this time, though, with more
boldness and strategic acumen than Corbyn and his allies were able to
muster.
Evading the problem, say by nominating someone not Jewish – someone
other than Sanders — is no way to deal with it; far better to bring the
problem to a head and then to confront it head on.
At this point, evasion may not even be an option. Had Sanders been
the candidate in 2016, before the Trump effect fully took hold, being a
Jewish socialist would probably have been a good deal less disabling
than having a Kenyan father was for Obama in 2008.
But that was then; the consequences of Trumpian rule are an
unavoidable fact of life now. There is no turning the other cheek, no
taking refuge in noxious Zionist nostrums; fighting back is the only way
to deal with the real anti-Semitism Trump and Kushner and the others
have let loose upon the fragile body politic of America today. It is the
only way to deal with all things Trumpian.
Anti-anti-Semites, in this historical moment, therefore have a
twofold task: first to assure that Democrats nominate a candidate who is
worthy of being a target of a smear campaign, and then to see to it
that he (or maybe she) not only prevails over it, but also exposes it
for the reactionary nonsense it is.
