I won't be shamed into voting for Clinton

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

https://socialistworker.org/2016/06/30/wont-be-shamed-into-voting-for-clinton

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.

Disorder under the heaven

Slavoj Žižek, a DiEM25 early signatory, casts his critical eye on the ‘disorder’ of the EU in the light of Brexit. He reminds us that “crises are painful and dangerous” but they are also “the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won”. He writes that the Brexit outcome offers us “a unique chance to react to the need for a radical change in a more appropriate way, with a project that will break the vicious cycle of EU technocracy and nationalist populism.” In a manner reflecting fully the DiEM25 manifesto, he concludes that” “The true division of our heaven is not between anaemic technocracy and nationalist passions, but between their vicious cycle and a new pan-European project which will addresses the true challenges that humanity confronts today.”

https://diem25.org/disorder-under-the-heaven/

Late in his life, Freud asked the famous question “Was will das Weib?”, “What does a woman want?”, admitting his perplexity when faced with the enigma of the feminine sexuality. A similar perplexity arouses today, apropos the Brexit referendum: what does Europe want?

The true stakes of this referendum become clear if we locate it into its larger historical context. In Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the political space. Till recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body, a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s…) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic…), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (ecologists, neo-Fascists, etc.). Now, there is progressively emerging a one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities, etc.; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups. The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the ex-prime-minister Donald Tusk and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers. The stakes of Radical Center today are: which of the two main parties, conservatives or liberals, will succeed in presenting itself as embodying the post-ideological non-politics against the other party dismissed as “still caught in old ideological specters”? In the early 90s, conservatives were better at it; later, it was liberal Leftists who seemed to be gaining the upper hand, and now, it’s again the conservatives.

The anti-immigrant populism brings passion back into politics, it speaks in the terms of antagonisms, of Us against Them, and one of the signs of the confusion of what remains of the Left is the idea that one should take this passionate approach from the Right: “If Marine le Pen can do it, why we should also not do it?” So one should return to strong Nation-State and mobilize national passions… a ridiculous struggle, lost in advance.

So what does Europe want? Basically, Europe is caught into a vicious cycle, oscillating between the Bruxelles technocracy unable to drag it out of inertia, and the popular rage against this inertia, a rage appropriated by new more radical Leftist movements but primarily by Rightist populism. The Brexit referendum moved along the lines of this new opposition, which is why there was something terribly wrong with it. To see this, one should only look at the strange bedfellows that found themselves together in the Brexit camp: right-wing “patriots,” populist nationalists fueled by the fear of immigrants, mixed with desperate working class rage… is such a mixture of patriotic racism with the rage of “ordinary people” not the ideal ground for a new form of Fascism?

The intensity of the emotional investment into the referendum should not deceive us, the choice offered obfuscated the true questions: how to fight “agreements” like TTIP which present a real threat to popular sovereignty, how to confront ecological catastrophes and economic imbalances which breed new poverty and migrations, etc. The choice of Brexit means a serious setback for these true struggles – suffice it to bear in mind what an important argument for Brexit was the “refugee threat.” The Brexit referendum is the ultimate proof that ideology (in the good old Marxist sense of “false consciousness”) is well and alive in our societies. For example, the case of Brexit exemplifies perfectly the falsity of the calls to restore national sovereignty (the “British people themselves, not some anonymous and non-elected Brussels bureaucrats, should decide the fate of the UK” motif):

“At the heart of the Brexit is a paradox worth articulating! England wants to withdraw from the bureaucratic, administrative control of Brussels, control seen as compromising its sovereignty, in order to be better able to organize the dismantling of its sovereignty (by way of more radical submission to the logic of global capital) on its own. Does this not have the markings of the death drive? The organism wants to die in its own way, on its own terms. This is the paradox at the heart of American Republican thinking: we want to ‘take back our country’ in order to be better able to submit it and pretty much all of life to the logic of the market.”(Eric Santner, personal communication)

Is this paradox not confirmed by a quick look at the conflicts between the UK and the EU in the past decades? When they concerned workers’ rights, it was the EU which demanded limiting the weekly work hours, etc., and the UK government complained that such a measure will affect the competitiveness of the British industry… In short, the so much vilified “Brussels bureaucracy” was also a protector of minimal workers’ rights – in exactly the same way as it is today the protector of the rights of the refugees against many “sovereign” nation-states which are not ready to receive them.

When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which deviation is worse, the Right one or the Leftist one, he snapped back: “They are both worse!” Was it not the same with the choice British voters were confronting? Remain was “worse” since it meant persisting in the inertia that keeps Europe mired down. Exit was “worse” since it made changing nothing look desirable. In the days before the referendum, there was a pseudo-deep thought circulating in our media: “whatever the result, EU will never be the same, it will be irreparably damaged.” However, it’s the opposite which is true: nothing really changed, just the inertia of Europe became impossible to ignore. Europe will again lose time in long negotiations among the EU members which will continue to make any large-scale political project unfeasible. This is what those who oppose Brexit didn’t see: shocked, they now complain about the “irrationality” of the Brexit voters, ignoring the desperate need for change that the vote made palpable.

For this reason, one should fully support the EU stance that the UK withdrawal should be enacted as fast as possible, without any long preliminary consultations. Understandably, the Brexit partisans in the UK now want have a cake and eat it (or, as a commentator viciously remarked, they want a divorce which will still allow them to share the marital bed). They desperately want to strike a middle road (Boris Johnson’s proposal that the UK should maintain free access to the common market was quite appropriately dismissed as a pipe dream).

The confusion that underlies the Brexit referendum is not limited to Europe: it is part of a much larger process of the crisis of “manufacturing democratic consent” in our societies, of the growing gap between political institutions and popular rage, the rage which gave birth to Trump as well as to Sanders in the US. Signs of chaos are everywhere – a couple of days ago, the debate of the gun control in the US congress turned into a banana republic chaos, with congressmen involved in rough-and-tumble that we usually associate with Third World countries… Is this a reason to despair?

Recall Mao Ze Dong’s old motto: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” A crisis is to be taken seriously, without illusions, but also as a chance to be fully exploited. Although crises are painful and dangerous, they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. Is there not a struggle also in heaven, is the heaven also not divided – and does the ongoing confusion not offer a unique chance to react to the need for a radical change in a more appropriate way, with a project that will break the vicious cycle of EU technocracy and nationalist populism? The true division of our heaven is not between anemic technocracy and nationalist passions, but between their vicious cycle and a new pan-European project which will addresses the true challenges that humanity confronts today.

In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, T.S.Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today. Now that, in the echo of the Brexit victory, calls for other exits from EU are multiplying all around Europe, the situation calls for such a heretic project – who will grab the chance? Unfortunately, not the existing Left which is well-known for its breath-taking ability to never miss a chance to miss a chance…