Liberal supporters of the
Democrats save their nastiest attacks not for Republicans but for anyone who
criticizes them from the left. Khury Petersen-Smith says he's tired of it.
June 30, 2016
Comment: Khury Petersen-Smith
IT'S BEGUN.
They tolerated--barely--the
progressive campaign of Bernie Sanders so long as he never came too close to
threatening Hillary Clinton's hold on the Democratic presidential nomination.
As dismaying as his on-the-mark criticisms of Clinton's Wall Street-connected
candidacy might have been, he was at least bringing some enthusiasm to an
uninspiring election and a stale Democratic Party.
But now, the managers of the
Democratic Party machine and their allies in the mainstream media are speaking
with one voice: The party's over.
Those who were excited about
Sanders' candidacy--and the notion that the U.S. political system could offer
something besides austerity, war and oppression--should be thankful for the
memories of a hopeful winter and spring. But now, goes the argument, they need
to accept Hillary Clinton as the candidate to support this fall.
We should all take note that
it isn't the right wing campaigning against universal health care, free college
tuition and student loan debt relief, and other planks of Sanders' social
democratic platform as "unrealistic." They're too busy scrambling to
manage their own crisis in the form of Donald Trump and his impact on the
endlessly pathetic and dysfunctional Republican Party.
It is, instead, the Democrats
who are doing their best to dash the hopes and lower the expectations of people
who dared to think that U.S. politics might have something to offer to working
class people, women, people of color or LGBT people.
HOW WILL they do it? How will
the Democratic Party corral a generation that has become aware of and sickened
by racist mass incarceration, Wall Street's dictatorship over the U.S. economy
and politics, and permanent war--and get them to support a candidate who has
devoted her political career to championing those very things?
One tactic has been to get
political figures seen--rightly or wrongly--as the most party's most
"progressive" faces out front in backing Clinton: Elizabeth Warren,
Barack Obama and, yes, Bernie
Sanders himself.
But that's not all.
Party leaders and their
liberal supporters are cynically using outrage at racism, sexism, homophobia
and transphobia, and economic inequality--generated and crystallized by
resistance movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter--to shame
progressives and leftists into supporting Clinton.
Liberal commentators have in
particular targeted Sanders supporters who, disgusted by the various
undemocratic maneuvers used against their candidate and by Clinton's own dismal
record, say they can't stomach voting for a candidate who epitomizes everything
Sanders' "political revolution" was supposed to be against.
But their insults extend to
anyone who challenges Clinton and the Democrats from the left and want
something better.
In March, New York Times
columnist Charles
M. Blow took to the Times op-ed pages to denounce as "bonkers" people
on the left who question whether Clinton deserves their vote in November.
Blow began by recounting an
exchange between Sanders supporter Susan Sarandon and MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
In the midst of other remarks, Sarandon said that she wasn't sure what she
would do in November if Clinton were the Democratic nominee, but that some
argue a Trump presidency would be so over the top that it would force a needed
revolution.
Blow hit the roof. "The
comments smacked of petulance and privilege," he wrote scornfully.
"No member of an American minority group--whether ethnic, racial,
queer-identified, immigrant, refugee or poor--would (or should) assume the
luxury of uttering such a imbecilic phrase, filled with lust for doom."
It was another example of a
proven fact about liberalism--Democrats and their media cheerleaders save their
deepest contempt not for right wingers, but for those who challenge them from
the left.
The idea that the left should
hope for a Trump presidency to provoke resistance is wrong. But Sarandon's
aside about that prospect wasn't the central
thrust of her interview anyway. She spoke for the most part about her
opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, militarized police, sexism and
discrimination, and the ruin of the working and middle classes by corporate
greed--all of which give her strong reasons to oppose Clinton.
Blow conveniently ignored the
political points, while baiting Sarandon--and, by extension, other Clinton
critics--along the lines of race, sexuality and nationality.
BLOW ISN'T the only one. On
the blog Bustle.com, Mari Brighe wrote: "The point is that if you're
happy to let a GOP candidate win the presidency because Sanders isn't the
Democratic candidate, you're not nearly as progressive as you think you are,
and you probably should examine your own social privilege."
Instead of acknowledging the
countless actions that Barack Obama's Democratic Party has taken to alienate
previously enthusiastic supporters--the record number of deportations and
bombing no less than seven countries in the past seven years, to name a
couple--Brighe shifts the blame to those who refuse to ignore these injustices.
It turns out that we're the real
enemies of the oppressed in this country--because we won't "look past your
signs, your ideals, your clever slogans and your movement, and realize that
you're standing on our necks," Brighe concluded.
Michael Arceneaux, writing
for the Guardian, wheels out another old line to claim that the people most
committed to the principles of solidarity with the oppressed, here and abroad,
are the problem, not the solution. "Cling to your self-righteousness all
you want," Arceneaux writes, "but be very clear that only some people
can afford this kind of sacrifice."
So taking action to make Black
Lives Matter, building solidarity with Palestine, resisting Wall Street,
defending women's right to choose abortion--all fights that Hillary Clinton
has, during her career, helped to make necessary--are sideshows compared to our
concern for our own egos. Arceneaux lectures us to "do something besides
pretending that your lack of vote does anything but suit your own moral
superiority at the expense of others."
WHAT THESE writers are doing
is taking disgust at Clinton's conservatism and twisting it. They present
principled opposition to oppression and inequality as privileged
self-indulgence.
But in the face of so many
outrages--from legal decisions that blame rape survivors for the actions of
their assailants or that further empower already out-of-control police, to the
unending destruction of the environment--principled opposition to injustice is
something that we need more of, not less.
But the scolders in the
service of Hillary Clinton are prepared to demean the awareness raised, for
example, by the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings by trying to harness it for a
candidate whose support for the criminalization of African American youth is
clear.
These writers are also
disregarding what seems to be a greater willingness among progressives and
leftists--Black activists in particular--to defy the logic that we have to
accept the "lesser evil" to fight the greater evil.
Are they calling Samaria
Rice--the mother of Tamir Rice, murdered by the Cleveland police, who has seen
nothing but betrayal from politicians--"privileged" because for
her refusal to endorse a presidential candidate? Similarly, Michelle
Alexander, author of the The New Jim Crow, is hardly speaking from a position
of blinding self-involvement when she
identifies the Clintons as central architects of mass incarceration and
calls for a political alternative.
Those who try to shame us into
voting for Clinton avoid the substance of criticism so as to avoid
acknowledging her long record of political crimes. Adding to those already
mentioned, consider Clinton's
call for the detention and deportation of child migrants from Central
America in 2014.
Or her
personal role in defending and promoting the 2009 coup in Honduras. The
coup continues to have catastrophic repercussions in Honduras, including the
recent assassination of human rights activist Berta Caceras. Yet Clinton takes
pride in her role in in her memoir Tough Choices.
These opinion articles and blog
statements that attempt to shame us into supporting a politician we oppose
share other features in common. They accept the all-or-nothing, narrow logic of
the U.S. elections--the idea that if you aren't actively supporting a
Democrat's bid for office, then you're assisting a Republican's victory.
It isn't the fault of ordinary
people outraged by injustice that the U.S. electoral system is so undemocratic
that it offers such a limited "choice." Perhaps the shamers should
examine the hidden-in-plain-sight secret of U.S. "democracy": Most
people don't vote. An honest look at that reality would reveal widespread
alienation from politicians and from a government that is disinterested in
representing the will or interests of regular people.
Instead, the blame is heaped
on us. This points to the conservatism of writers like Charles Blow. Behind the
shaming of Clinton's critics on the left is an embrace of the status quo.
Thus, in the same column cited
above, Blow writes that "there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Not only
that, but...there were also 84 federal judiciary vacancies with 49 pending
nominees. The question of who makes those appointments matters immensely."
Yet when you consider the
injustice handed down in the Stanford rape case and the countless acquittals
and non-indictments of cops who murdered Black people, the undemocratic and
oppressive role that courts play in this country should be questioned.
Instead, Blow points to the
justice system as a reason to participate in Election 2016. The idea that we
should vote for Clinton in the belief that she might be more likely to appoint
justices sympathetic to oppressed groups and social movements is a celebration
of an arena where we're powerless.
It's one of many examples
where Democrats implore us to vote for our enemy and hope for the best. Don't
blame us for refusing to do so.
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