True Left

The Search For Direction

(Introductory note: This began as a social media status that got so long it should be an article, which got so long it needed to go into the book – most people aren’t interested in reading online articles longer than 1500 words or so. This is now an edited-down version of what will be that section of the book.)

There’s a long-standing observation about politics in the United States that we have no “true left” in our country.

This is demonstrably untrue; there are any number of individuals, events, situations, and entities proving otherwise every day, including your present author.

The underlying point of the observation – that the left we do have tends to be much closer to the center and less likely to resist or reject the prerogatives of capitalist power than in the rest of the world – has some merit. Unfortunately, that merit tends to be obscured by the gaping logical holes in the statement.

Also unfortunate is that while the observation has merit, there’s no chance of addressing it effectively head-on without first addressing the reasons it happens.

There is a much larger problem here that we seem to be refusing to see because it’s uncomfortable.

Not Looking For Harris’ Flaws

First I want to talk about Biden and Harris. I was against Biden dropping before he did it. When he did and endorsed Vice-President Harris my immediate response was “this is who we’ve got to beat Trump with, so let’s do it.”

My reasoning for this is simple: there’s absolutely nothing positive to be gained from opposing or even energetically criticizing her at this point. Of course Harris isn’t perfect or flawless, but she’s literally the only thing standing between us and absolute catastrophe – historical, global, catastrophe – in November.

I will not be so thirsty for traffic – or ersatz “street cred” among performative “leftists” – that I feed narratives to the GOP and the right wing by airing criticism here and now. The only purpose would be to draw attention to myself, and if my intentions were honorable and presented in good faith and I was successful in them by raising criticism of and opposition to Harris in public discourse, Trump would win the presidency.

Ergo, I won’t be doing that. She needs to win. There is nobody else and it’s years past when we should’ve been thinking about it if we’re going to lay credible and serious claim to thinking about it now.

Yet still, some of my friends and readers and supporters and colleagues on the left persist in discussing how Harris isn’t a true leftist and we must instead find a real progressive option and get behind them if we’re ever going to progress in this country.

All of those statements taken individually are true, but at the same time taken as an integrated part of reality they don’t change the basic equation. Harris must win this election. There is no other option.

Good Cop, It’s All Rigged, Blah Blah Blah

Is that frustrating to me? Yes. I’ve been saying – publicly – for decades, since I was in middle and high school in the Reagan 80’s, that if we continued allowing it to be okay for our presidential choices to be reduced to the worst idea imaginable versus the second-worst, eventually we would end up in exactly this situation.

Things could be much worse. There could have been a contested primary, or the DNC could have decided in some internal power struggle to go with a much worse candidate.

In circumstances where we’re lucky to have a viable opposing at all, we’re beyond fortunate to have Harris as that candidate whether I agree with her on everything or not. She’s good at her job, she’s proven already to be a great candidate who is extraordinarily popular, and in a matter of a few weeks she’s turned the entire mood of this country around.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me a ton right now about all these self-appointed experts and analysts and activists and pundits and thought leaders and influencers trying to find some way to generate traffic by criticizing Harris.

Harris and her campaign, from the minute Biden dropped out to the minute I’m writing this sentence, have done things about as perfectly as they possibly could be from a standpoint of both the merits of their positions and the results. They’ve not dropped a single ball one time nor even looked wobbly, and I’m not sure they’re going to.

Better Than Merely Lesser Evil

We’re in a very complex moment where a population that fundamentally craves stability and consistency has no stable and consistent direction to turn, and there are radical changes at hand that must be addressed and not resisted, because they benefit all of us in the end.

By the evidence to date Harris and her team are very much tuned in to all of these realities and are doing a masterful job of navigating them. That by itself is a display of leadership far superior to anything of which any Republican or most Democrats are capable.

The “official” voice in my head is thinking 300-ish electoral votes would be a good, solid finish.

The unofficial voice is increasingly convinced we could see a genuine landslide in Harris’ favor in November.

It all depends on whether we show up, which is why I’m not celebrating a lot of positive poll numbers. The only poll that matters, happens on election day, and we have to make absolutely certain the victory is so iron-clad and unambiguous that it’s simply not subject to credible challenge at any level.

Fortunately, we have a solid candidate to get behind and not just a “better than pure evil” placeholder or puppet.

Yet some persist in imposing ideological purity tests on Harris while utterly ignoring her opponent’s catastrophically evil flaws.

Right there is where that much larger problem that we’re not ready or willing to talk about has consequences, and it’s time we did the talking.

Ready for it? Here it goes:

True Left

Here is the reality of the “true left” in the United States of America in August, 2024.

First: A true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good if we’re no longer allowed to vote, or our system is retooled into a despotic facade of democratic process.

Second: This sort of ideological purity test is more often egotistical virtue signaling on the part of the speaker than it is any grounded and coherent objection worthy of the attention being asked of it.

Third: We tend to crap on true leftist options in this country.

How all that shakes out as a set of values when you filter it through a hundred or two hundred million voters doesn’t make us look very good in aggregate in terms of our national character and “who we really are.”

We’ve elected some real losers in this country and allowed plenty of others to hold power simply because we were high on our own flatulence and they kept feeding us raw vegetables.

I think until we take a hard look at that, a true leftist option isn’t going to do us any good, because the problem isn’t about a lack of truly leftist or progressive options.

It’s about our failure to live up to the world we say we want to live in.

It’s about our refusal to work genuinely to create that world to any extent beyond that which is convenient to our existing interests and privileges – and that includes social approval and the material benefits that come with it.

It’s about our willingness to be misled when it appeals to our egos, emotions, or sense of entitlement.

I know that’s not easy to hear or accept, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.

But this is the reality of our time, and we have to face it and address it because if we don’t, we’re just going to keep cycling through flirtations with autocracy until eventually one of them works and we spend a few hundred years with the human population largely impoverished and enslaved until we fight our way back to a more moral social structure.

We have to stop falling for appeals to our lesser impulses.

Baiting The Hook

That’s how they catch us, every time. “They” being the power class in any socioeconomic system and “us” being those not holding significant power. They appeal to our egos and our conviction that if we just “play ball” the right way, we too will be part of the ownership class, but we never really are. Not most of us. The things we think of as “ours,” the cars and homes and all of that stuff, they’re not really ours until we’re done making payments on them.

For most of us that day never comes.

Most of us, one way or the other, continue to both tolerate and fall for this con because we believe that by successfully participating in the con we’ve earned a share of the ill-gotten gains of the con.

Sometimes it even works. Sometimes people really do make out pretty well by being absolute bastards to other people and accruing wealth and power all their lives and dying wealthy and powerful. Not very often though; usually people who die wealthy were born that way.

They’re the ones who keep all this mess going, and they do it because the mess preserves their privileges. They don’t care about the long-term cost or the sustainability or whether someone else or thousand of other humans are being relentlessly exploited to ensure those privileges.

They encourage the rest of us to think in the same terms, making us all complicit and making it more difficult for us to change our own behavior due to feelings of guilt and shame when we look at ourselves honestly in the middle of the night.

A certain percentage of the population always seems susceptible to this notion that if they’re willing to turn a blind eye to exploitation, they’re allowed to reap the benefits of that exploitation with a clear conscience. So long as they’re not holding the whip, their hands are clean.

They con us into thinking like that, and we fall for it because we all want to be comfortable and have some power in our lives and the world around us, and we’re surrounded from birth by constant messaging that surrendering to the machine by becoming part of it is the only way to achieve that comfort and power.

They sell us on the idea that there’s no way out of the hole except by climbing over someone else at a disadvantage compared to us, they lead us to believe this is the only way to do things, and then use our guilt and shame over doing what we believe we must to survive, to keep us doing it when we realize we don’t have to.

They do it to preserve their power, and we let them do it because we believe that our cooperation will give us access to that power.

Until we fix THAT problem, all the true leftists in the world aren’t going to help.

Until we fix that problem we aren’t true leftists ourselves.