Photo credit: Wikimedia, Buffalo on a dry prairie, Unsplash
The Last New Leftist
I agree with the observation of a relative that there is no political left in the US. There certainly is no economic left. Try to make a dime writing on what’s called the left, and standing on a traffic island with a homeless sign will work better. There are many talking heads on YouTube on the left, but hardly any do much to bring about needed change. These talking heads attempt to pontificate on subjects they know little about. An economist becomes a historian. Try to hire an electrician who claims to know plumbing. If the left meant a better world and helping people, then after the Vietnam era the left was a colossal failure. The Weather Underground certainly did not represent the left!
I am a writer and a journalist, and I stopped getting paid many, many years ago for my articles. The first time was an article on gun violence written for the Palm Beach Post. The editor had the absolute audacity to remove my final paragraph before publishing the piece in which I had concluded by writing about the NRA.
I once worked in political campaigns and marched in protest and resisted the insanity I’ve seen before me during and since the Vietnam War. The Democratic Party is worse than useless; they helped give us Trump, and protest only works in a world where conscience exists and it doesn’t!
A few months ago, I noticed that the site to which I contributed articles since about 2008, hundreds of articles for which I did not receive one penny, began publishing only about one of every three articles I submitted. My articles seemed to be of the same quality as in the past. The latter is my opinion. The site, CounterPunch, does not pay for its contributors’ work, and the organization freely admits this point. This is an interesting issue, as during their fundraising drive each year, they get hefty matching grants. They claim that only 1% of their readers contribute to their enterprise, and I have been one of them over many years. A site on the left which does not pay for the labor of its writers, its foundation, its workers, is a marginally interesting operation. I joked once that I needed to send that publication $1 with every article I wrote and ask for 25 cents to be returned to me as payment for my work. I would have included a return postage stamp with each $1 contribution. My conclusion is that they don’t give a shit!
The left has been a great, great disappointment in my life, beginning shortly after the end of the Vietnam War. My disappointment with the left did not begin with CounterPunch, which does publish excellent writing! It seems vaguely strange that while my memoir was listed at the end of each of my articles published at CounterPunch, no one at that publication ever offered to read it or review it. Friends disappeared into careers following the Vietnam War. Some began the process, not unusual, of acting in ways diametrically opposed to the values and actions of their youth. Idealism was passé. Though many remained loyal to their beliefs, the leader of a group in my home state, a peace group, did not miss a step in her support of the first Gulf War in 1990-1991. No matter what a person believes about that war, it seems a bit bizarre becoming a prominent pro-war voice during war. That war could have been prevented if George H.W. Bush had not been so intent on eradicating “Vietnam Syndrome,” the hesitancy of those people in the US to send the military to fight wars far away as had been done in Southeast Asia. The government says I have Vietnam Syndrome, which is a kind of humanistic blessing.
The left was never against veterans. Veterans were important members of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. A number of soldiers in Vietnam refused to engage in lost causes in battle. Fraggings of unpopular officers became especially damaging to the ability of the government to continue an unpopular war.
Some leftists, now dead, like Philip and Daniel Berrigan, despite their heroic actions for peace and against war and weapons, had a gaping blind spot in their lack of support for women’s reproductive rights. When their actions are lauded in the present, there is no footnote mentioning their horrendous lack of support and outright antipathy for women’s health and rights vis-à-vis reproductive issues. Today, because of the far right’s attempt to control women’s lives and bodies, some women are forced to have children they did not plan for, or travel long distances to have an abortion. Others will condemn women for being sexually active. It’s fairly amazing at how far this idiocy and the ideology of the far right and “religious” right go!
As the decades passed, it became clear that left activism was a thing of the past despite the presence of many gray heads at demonstrations even up to the present in the resistance against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. That genocide is bankrolled and weaponized, to a degree, with US dollars. Individual extremists’ and groups’ dollars also go into the coffer toward the obscenity of genocide. US allies assist this, also. Demonstrations were no match for the ascendant far right typified by Trump and his acolytes. The US is now governed by one far-right party, and the Democrats have long been either absent or part of the neoliberal equation.
I agree with the late left theorist and protester, Abbie Hoffman, that each generation needs to find its own way in activism and protest to find a path to a better world. That better world now fades at the horizon.
The long goodbye and slide of the New Left has been apparent for many decades and began immediately following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. A globalized economy did the rest to workers’ rights and unionism. Many say that unionized labor is the answer to this far-right movement in the political, economic, and social systems in the US and elsewhere, but unions have only been somewhat supportive of progressive-left politics. During the antiwar movement in the US, it was tradesmen in the Wall Street district of Manhattan who viciously attacked students and other antiwar protesters. And this was only a few days after the massacre of students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. A few days later, police in Mississippi killed and wounded protesting students at Jackson State, but the left, to some degree, was slow to recognize that massacre. The union to which I belonged, along with others, turned belly up when cost-of-living adjustments were largely wrecked and abandoned by the Democratic Party and others in my home state. Many public employees, some who lived alone and had retired many years ago, were left with little on which to survive. While a positive sign, a win or two for Starbucks employees across the US is hardly the harbinger of left politics. The battle for unionization at conglomerates like Amazon and Walmart is hardly a blip on the radar.
When I cite left politics and economics, I refer to the ideals set forth in the Port Huron Statement (1962), and through the actions of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement in combination with the Vietnam-era peace and antiwar movement.
What does this mean at ground level? A living wage for those who work and support for those not able to work. Medical care, including dental and vision care. Housing that is safe and livable, along with a livable environment. Food that is healthful and plentiful. Schools that educate all and are subsidized by local, state, and federal governments. A government with checks and balances and a foreign policy that is peaceful in solving of disputes among nations by diplomatic means. An economy, above all, that works for people when they are able to work without either crass materialism as its end or low wages. Industry that produces useful and sustainable goods and services.
This is a form of democratic socialism that appeals to me. There are both markets and publicly supported organizations such as schools, public works, grants to subsidize environmentally important projects, etc. It is certainly not communism, but the attacks against communists and communist thinkers during the 1950s through McCarthyism were anything but helpful. So-called free markets that exist today under a predatory system of capitalism are anything but free. The current administration is in full view in their lust to get important metals and chemicals from around the world by any means possible. The party of the multimillionaire class and billionaire class is in full view! Their crass greed and callousness for human values is breathtaking!
A final thought about war. The last just cause in war in which the US fought was World War II. Defeating Hitler and fascism in Italy and militarism and colonialism coming from Japan were heroic efforts. Some say that defeating Al-Qaeda was an equally just cause. That fight quickly turned into endless wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, nations that are hardly showplaces for democracy today. Many in the US view these wars, that included regime change in the case of Iraq, as necessary, yet those wars lost needless lives and fueled the military-industrial complex. The summary page of Brown University’s Watson Institute’s Costs of War project is well worth reading. It is the old equation of guns v. butter.
The mass media has become a cheerleader for war. During the Vietnam War, the media slowly became a critic of that war and helped to end it. Protest did the rest, including protest by some in the military. Those values and actions are largely absent today.