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This posting is about my response to the mass media hysteria after the Trump victory and transition to the Trump presidency.
The media, controlled as they are by “moderates,” is unable to explain the quandaries that the progressive movement is facing as it tries to grapple with its future, especially as it relates to the “white working class.” I might have been similarly baffled had I not studied social movements in U.S. history. I refer to the sharp turn to the pseudo-Left enacted by the inheritors of the Mugwump-ish conservatives after the shock of the Bolshevik revolution and the growing sympathy in this country for revolt among the working class and its allies. Behold how the (“moderate”) Nation magazine reacted to another apocalypse—this time to Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to the Versailles Conference that ended World War I: https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/. Briefly, editor Villard urged his readers to emulate the populist-progressives to prevent looming socialist revolution and the rule of the international Big Money.
(Yet Oswald Garrison Villard was no democrat in his preference for elite, non-Jewish rule. Such is the vexed lineage of social democracy. Is it any wonder that “the Left” is unable to unmask itself?)
“Nativist” is the more polite term for “racist”—a moniker that Democrats prefer to affix to their rivals among Trump supporters. It is no surprise, then, that liberals, unembarrassed by 20th century New Left history, should not publicly understand that affirmative action, like all of “identity politics,” is inherently a quota system that is racist in its conception. Some on the Right complain that reverse racism exists. Such persons are apparently oblivious to the leftist insistence on “white supremacy,” a variant on the anti-imperialism of the counter-culture/New Left. (I.e., Dems insist that white workers are structurally unable to modify their own racism, because they indirectly profit from non-white subordination; we remain mired in the social relations of slavery. Upward mobility is only a fond fantasy perpetrated by laissez-faire capitalists to fool “the people.”)
The Old Left believed in “history”—in the inevitable triumph of socialism through class consciousness.
The New Left said goodbye to all that, and counted on its own inherited moralism, elitism and subtle racism to vanquish threats from below. Is it any wonder that the Democrat Party is boxed in, with nowhere to go?
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The Clare Spark Blog 