What are you gonna do?

Inequality is the reason some people find such significance in the ceiling height of an entrance foyer or the hop content of a beer while others will never believe in anything again. 

- Listen Liberal,  Thomas Frank

Shortly after posting my last piece about the left rift over Force the Vote, I came across a Revolutionary Blackout Network video on YouTube that advertised its evisceration  of Nina Turner for a friendly interview she did with David Sirota who had apparently recently crossed swords with RBN.  The video also featured something about a recent Sabby Sabs interview with Mr Force the Vote, Jimmy Dore.  Nina Turner and David Sirota are both familiar to me as the strongest of Bernie Sanders allies.  What could they have done to inspire the wrath of Dore-bots?  Having just spent all of my venom in writing my blog post, I perversely expected to fuel up some reserve rage by rage-watching it to find out.  Something else happened.  Listening at length to the two hosts reveling in Sirota/Turner hate and Dore/Sabs love something somehow broke through to me.  Maybe it was a commenter, without a standard issue democrat or republican or billionaire in sight, urging the hosts to “keep punching up”.  It hit me… I am up.  I am the up the Revolutionary Blackout dudes were being urged to keep punching.  

While I never fully apprised myself of the details of this latest leftist sectarian outrage, I started watching with a kind of startled attitude as vapors of enlightenment found themselves suddenly permeating the boundaries of my understanding and they were telling me something contradictory to my knowledge of myself:  I am not the ally of these revolutionaries.  I am the enemy.  Could it be that my revolution is not their revolution,  their revolution is not mine?  

They are of course way ahead of me.  They recognize that my revolution is a watered down lily-livered half-assed ball of nothing.  Their revolution is for keeps.  What I didn’t realize until that little hiccup in the universe let me bust through my wall of ignorance was that their revolution is quite a bit closer to the real thing than my recovering liberal’s daydream.  What hit me was that for some people in that quadrant of things there is no redemption in the current system at all.  While I have on paper been feeling the same thing for quite a while,  it was suddenly quite clear to me (who still votes for Democrats-- the constructors of our current failing political order-- to try to prevent the architects of it, the Republicans, from irretrievable victory over everything) that the stakes aren’t the same for me as they are for the real revolutionaries.  I am still clinging to the raft built from the extra scraps thrown my way by the neoliberal capitalist order because I’m white and somewhat college educated and have a demonstrated history of at critical times, when it gets right down to it “playing by the rules.”  What I realized was my commitment is vicarious and underdeveloped and could use some shock therapy.  I am not ready (at all) to switch allegiance from my left-light heroes to the Jimmy Dore universe mind you, but I have a heightened consciousness of my lameness.

As if that is not enough self-exposure for a week, the next night I’m watching a news story about Solomon Peña, the MAGA GOP candidate in New Mexico who has been charged with organizing drive-by shootings at the homes of state Democratic officials following his unconceded loss in November's election for State Representative of NM's 14th district after receiving only 26% of the 7,712 votes cast.  I learned watching the story that the gent has a felony on his record.  Not for some political thing like industrial sabotage or drug use, but for smash and grab robbery.  And I’m thinking, hey!  Why would a convicted felon, a Mexican-American in a border state be MAGA.  The old me would say “Because he’s crazy!” and be done with it.  But the newly humbled me had a little flash of insight.  Finally.  After 7 or 8 years of being told this by people like Thomas Frank (and agreeing whole-heartedly, but apparently with a corner of my soul still reserving judgment).  Because for some people—many people, a shit ton of people—Democrats are the enemy. Indeed, Peña's democratic opponent, Miguel Garcia had actually sued to get Peña removed from the ballot on the basis of his felony conviction, which the judge (rightfully) rejected as Peña's time had been served.  Garcia's appeal of the decision was still pending by election day.  

Democrats used to be the party of the worker and the downtrodden which included ex-cons.  Now they sue to get them off the ballot.  Republicans are at least honest about their contempt for the losers of society, and Trump was the most honest of all because he was also honest about the winners. Democrats on the other hand claim to be on your side while they’re screwing you over.  We know this; I have known this forever; it’s why I stopped being a Democrat when Bill Clinton-- the king of progressive neoliberalism as Nancy Fraser calls it*--  was still president. But as miserable as my life is as a result of bipartisan commandeering and curtailing of What Is Possible, as hard as everything is for me, it’s still easy enough for me comparatively that I have had the luxury to pretend nothing’s wrong when it suits me.  So in my imagination, this Peña character has different things at stake.  He probably followed a rabbit hole of truth that got him to the opposite side of what Democrats were selling and to the default champion of the disillusioned, Trump.  And if my neat story is wrong and he didn’t, someone did.  I’ll bet a lot of people did.  They were never betrayed by Republicans because Republicans never promised them anything they didn't do, like Change you can believe in.  

It's not Donald Trump or for that matter Jimmy Dore who I think are owed a break from me.  Dore appeals to his followers the way Trump appeals to the type of MAGA person I'm imagining– i.e.,  the disaffected and  disillusioned who really have nothing to lose by siding with the enemy of their enemy.  Of course both Trump and Dore are con artists.  Trump’s dishonesty about his own class allegiances is invisible to them because they appreciate his honesty about their common foes.  Something similar is going on with Dore who reflexively, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and similar folks, take stances against the leftist establishment that in particulars rejected them.  They’re if not reactionaries, reflexivaries.  But I have to admit that they engage my reflexes.  I reflexively have never liked Jimmy Dore and my reflexes have backed me off from former admiration for Greenwald and for Taibbi whom I once felt were on my side.  Now I see that my side is what repulses them, and I do see their repulsion, if not through their eyes, through the eyes of the legitimately aggrieved who understandably drift toward that pole and away from the soft racism of low-stakes reformed liberalism.

In all seriousness, I really don’t want to lose this insight ever. I have been reading about it for a long time.  Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders is one of the best expositions of it as I realized only on my second reading of it.   Vivek Chibber too (who the BNR hosts favorably quoted in a Michael Brooks clip on last weekends’ show).  I have had vague recognitions of it for years, but never quite as self-implicating, and to my way of thinking meaningful as what I’ve recently experienced.  I don’t know where it leads. I doubt it leads to becoming a Jimmy Dore partisan but I really hope it leads to a more informed and broad minded orientation toward what’s next.

As if to drive the point home, after thinking about all of this on my own, I came across the following passage in Nancy Fraser's Cannibal Capitalism:

We will moralize about the need for civility, bipartisanship, and respect for the truth while ignoring the deep-structural sources of the trouble. Sailing high-mindedly above the concerns of the benighted “deplorables,” we will discount the claims of those critical masses across the globe that are rejecting neoliberalism and demanding fundamental change. Failing to recognize their legitimate grievances (however wrongly interpreted and misdirected), we will render ourselves irrelevant in the present struggle to build a counter-hegemony.

If you  substitute horseshoe left, or red-green alliance or Jimmy Dore/Glenn Greenwald/RBN contingent for “deplorables” it’s my new fear about myself.  Not that I think that that's where it’s at which is where I ain’t.  I just think while that side is full of the tailing of MAGA folks and provocation of the civil left which is where I recognize myself to be—i.e., on the civil left, a left probably of my own imagination that dreams of things morphing peacefully to a better world via voluntary surrender of the neoliberal order—I don’t think there’s enough engagement with the real concerns of people who think Jimmy Dore is a better place for their allegiance than the public influencers I like who, like me, reject what Dore is selling.† I don’t care about Jimmy Dore -- and probably never will-- but I’d prefer to be part of a left that includes me and my people AND anyone who wants to replace this shit hole of a sociopolitical order with comprehensive democracy – real democracy a la sortition, and an economy that meets needs for everybody.  I know that’s pie in the sky but for starters I’d like to see a renaissance of legitimate 100% fully representational public good over profit for innovative ideas and solutions.

I guess what’s different for me is that in spite of how hard I think I have it, I can see that my stakes are not the same as the real revolutionaries.  Their revolution is a mess, and I don’t really want to be a part of it (at this juncture) but I feel for it.  I would love to see someone who could gather that side of things and mine under one flag that would get us all to the promised land without breaking anyone’s promises.  

~~~~~

* If you read one book on what's wrong with capitalism, why it has to go and what it should be replaced with, you could do no better than by reading Nancy Fraser's brilliant 2022 commentary on our present crisis and prospects for ways out of it, Cannibal Capitalism.

† Somewhere it has to be said-- as long as we have two parties that always win to the exclusion of all others, that are essentially alpha and beta flavors of the same thing, electoralism is not likely to be anything but a sideshow on the road to revolution.  Therefore electoral strategies like Force the Vote and Third Party voting are essentially performances.  As to the importance that should be placed on them, different strokes for different folks.