The Left And The Right Vs Liberty
On Wednesday, June 12th Bernie Sanders gave a rousing speech on his brand of socialism, attacking today’s broken capitalism. By now, many have seen or heard Bernie’s speech. In his opening remarks, Bernie called on Americans to “analyze the competing political and social forces” behind the current conditions in the United States. He called upon us to “stand up and fight against the forces of oligarchy and authoritarianism”. Sanders spoke of the need for a “new vision to bring our people together in the fight for justice, decency, and human dignity”.
Muddying The Waters
Both pseudo-fascism and democratic socialism exist to a certain extent today. Bernie would see the former completely replaced with the latter. He described Donald Trump’s policies as corporate socialism, a way of describing corporate subsidies that was first popularized among libertarians years ago. But let us not be fooled about the left’s corporatism and all the corporate subsidies that would likely result from the Green New Deal and the solar and wind subsidies which are already given away. Yet, he also seems to think the problems we face today are the result of “unfettered capitalism”. Well, which is it, is the American economy an example of corporate socialism or unfettered capitalism? The two are mutually exclusive. He would have us believe a free market is highly regulated, where the costs of corporate bailouts and subsidies are dumped onto the backs of American taxpayers, the very antithesis of free market capitalism. This is pure doublespeak from Bernie and we ought not be fooled by such rhetoric.
Simultaneously, Bernie Sanders would expect Americans to be so naive as to think his brand of socialism is kinder, gentler, and less burdensome on the American people than what we have today. As if neither the right nor the left has taught us anything about the nature of government, he expects people to believe democratic socialism will leave people freer than the pile of right and left winged socialist garbage we have now. As if expanding the power of the federal government can do anything but make more people less free.
The Nature Of Government
With every new federal law, with every new federal regulation, and with every new federal program, comes the increase in breadth and depth of the federal government’s intrusion into and control over the daily lives of ordinary Americans. Lest one mistake this basic fact as a sophism, let me be perfectly clear so you might grasp the totality of what it is I am saying. It is precisely the function of law, together with law enforcement, to coercively inhibit or induce human action, to force people to do or not do certain things. Often this comes at the behest of some concentrated interest group, and always through the violent means of threatening to extort, kidnap, inflict injury on, or kill those who resist and refuse to comply with enforcement.
Violation of any law along with the subsequent and continual resistance against its enforcement, no matter how trivial and how unjust the law, means eventually, attempted detainment and imprisonment, and ultimately, the killing of those who resist being detained. People generally try to follow the law or submit to being detained when they are caught not following it. They are brought before a court and incarcerated if it is found they have indeed violated the law. A perfect example is the federal government’s barbaric and disastrous war on drugs. Outlaw recreational drugs, impose fines and imprisonment as punishment, imprison those who don’t pay said fines, and murder those who resist being imprisoned. That is their playbook, not only for curbing drug use but for every single law on the books today. This includes taxation, which made possible the Wall Street bailouts and quantitative easing from the 2008 crisis that everyone on both sides of the aisle was so unhappy about. There’s a reason that felt like highway robbery. It was! Literally. It is the nature of government, its core, and overarching function; violent imposition of the will of some on the whole of society.
Why is it we can recognize the brutal violence and injustices of laws since repealed but remain completely blind and indifferent to the fact that every law is violent and brutal? Do people really just not care that using the government to get what they want means threatening innocent people with extreme violence? I wonder, would they do it themselves or can they only stomach it because they outsource their dirty work to the government and its thugs. Is using violence to achieve things people value the way to unify a nation? On the face of it, that seems absurd. And in practice, we’ve seen the disturbing results – a nation divided along the party lines of whom the muzzles of the government’s guns will be pointed at. And it isn’t too difficult to figure out, it’s you! They are aiming at you. Always you.
Should We Blame The Rich?
Sanders seems to think the problem is capitalists and capitalism. That a handful of billionaires are responsible for everything wrong with today’s economy and for the rise in right winged populism and xenophobia in the US and around the world. That is profoundly naive and out of touch with conditions on the ground. The US has a long history of xenophobia. It’s never been something that hasn’t been present to a significant degree in this country. And it’s something that is present in just about every socioeconomic class. So, it’s a bit dubious imply that capitalism makes people poorer, poor people are tricked into hating minorities, and that capitalism is responsible for racism and xenophobia.
But, maybe I’m standing up a strawman in my representation of his arguments. He did conflate “unfettered capitalism” with corporatism. So let me steelman his argument for a moment and see which makes more sense. Given he used both corporatism and “unfettered capitalism” to describe our current economy, it is possible what he means by “unfettered capitalism” isn’t freedom from regulation but freedom from worry about the bottom line. That because large corporations get large subsidies and bailouts from tax payers, they are free to play fast and loose and take absurd risks that hurt the rest of us when they don’t pay off. Fair enough, but even if that’s what he means by “unfettered capitalism”, he still has the problem of connecting that to the rise in right winged populism in the U.S. today. And he is inappropriately letting the well-intentioned government programs intended to increase home ownership off the hook.
During and after the financial crisis of 2008, there were popular movements that gained national attention. There was the Occupy Wall Street movement and the TEA Party movement. In terms of pure economics, one radical right wing movement and one radical left wing movement. Both fought against corporatism. Both fought against bailouts and subsidies for the failed corporations of the 2008 crisis. The emphasis from the right was on reducing government spending to reign in the national debt and lower taxes. At the time, the debt was a little over ten trillion dollars. Today, just a decade later, it has more than doubled in size. The emphasis from the left was on cracking down on lobbyists and addressing income inequality through government action as well as a general anger toward using tax payer funds to bail out the failed corporations of the time. What didn’t happen was a backlash against immigration and a rise of right winged populist nationalism of the likes we are seeing now. And all this against the backdrop of continuing war in the Middle East. We would wait nearly eight full years before seeing the rise in right winged populism Bernie is talking about now.
After massive increases in the national debt from long and expensive wars, corporate bailouts, massive quantitative easing, and with the specter of the PPACA looming over the country, a doggedly slow recovery from recession, a rise in immigration on the southern border and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, is it any wonder why many people made a sharp right turn in 2016? If one listens to their arguments against immigration, it has more to do with the United States’ massive welfare state, the PPACA and disappearing jobs than anything else. People are worried about the national debt, how the welfare state is contributing to it and how an influx of immigrants can exacerbate problems caused by massive national debt and a shrinking job market. They see rising national debt in conjunction with a terrible job market and more people coming into the country to take care of than the country can afford. If you think it’s simple enough to point the finger at hardline right wingers, capitalism and billionaires and pretend the only xenophobic folks out there are neo-Nazi tiki torch whites because that suits your own agenda, fine, but that makes you an elitist fool. And I’ll point out, that just as Bernie says a living wage is life and death. What is it you think these people are fighting for, if not their livelihoods? To them, these right winged talking points are as much life and death as the left wing talking points are for the left. And these aren’t billionaires. These are ordinary Americans.
With all these welfare programs and regulations that the left proposes, and the economic conditions of working-class conservatives, it’s a wonder those on the left haven’t seriously tried to answer the question of why there is such a thing as a poor conservative. After all, Bernie’s got the cure, right? And with regards to racism in general, let’s not forget to ask ourselves, where is racism the biggest source of contention today? Black Lives Matter and the struggle against police brutality and inequality in prison sentencing is neither a movement against xenophobia nor can these problems being fought against by BLM be explained away by pointing the finger at billionaires and capitalism. Yes, the prison industrial complex is a major source of exacerbating mass incarceration in general. No, it by itself cannot explain why courts sentence young black men more harshly than any other group of people when socioeconomic status is controlled for. It cannot explain why police seem to be much quicker to kill young black men than any other group of people.
It’s funny to me, that in his speech, Bernie Sanders took the same page from the playbook of the authoritarians he warned about. He railed against right winged authoritarians scapegoating minorities and fanning the flames of populist right winged nationalism. Then he turned and did the same thing to one of the most reviled classes of people in the country: billionaires and the one percent. “Billionaires don’t pay people enough.” “Billionaires collapsed the economy in 2008.” “Billionaires are responsible for right winged populism.” All while forgetting that small businesses operate on tight margins and are a large part of the economy. And that the US government’s push for home ownership was the reason the sub-prime loans that broke the economy existed to the degree that they did in the first place. But it’s not politically feasible to demonize small business or criticize government programs that make it easier for people to own homes. So, he goes after Bezos and the Waltons, hoping we’ll be stupid enough to elect him on his campaign for a federal fifteen dollar per hour minimum wage, on the basis that the evil super rich people can afford to pay a “living wage” and they’re evil for not doing so. Just like Trump’s rhetoric is a dog whistle for white nationalists, so is Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric a dog whistle for socialists and authoritarian communists. You can accuse me of red-baiting, but there’s a reason he calls himself a Democratic Socialist vs a Social Democrat or Progressive and has spent his career apologizing for brutal communist dictators. Never mind the Marxist class warfare rhetoric.
We can sit here and complain about rich people ruining the economy for the rest of us and blame them all we want for the rise in right winged populism. But until Bernie and the rest of the left understand it was largely blowback from the left turn the country took in the Obama years, all they will succeed in doing is creating an even larger radicalized right winged movement in response. What else would one expect to happen when the move from status quo is more left-wing policy under the moniker of Democratic Socialism.
A Country Divided
It is clear to me, in looking at the Democratic front runners for the 2020 election and the likelihood of Trump being the Republican candidate in the general election, that we are playing a game of who can swing the pendulum to the furthest extreme of their camp’s ideology, with each election resulting in harder pushes from the losing side, not realizing that the harder you push to one side, the harder the pendulum swings back in the other direction. One ought not complain about the right sowing division when they sit on the left complaining about and demonizing the right. It takes more than one group of people to create division and the left is just as guilty as the right.
While the right demonizes minorities and marginalized people, the left takes to demonizing old white guys and rich people and appeasing nut jobs running amok on college campuses while feeding the nanny state. And on and on it goes. All this while each side continues to claim to be for unity, blaming the other side for a country divided. If you know anything at all about human psychology, the first thing you should understand is the harder you press against someone’s values, the harder they will dig in and push back. Maybe if the two sides stopped slinging mud at each other long enough to listen, they’d actually be able to have a real conversation. It’s pathetic that we have popular childish demagogues running from within each party, each accusing the other side of childish demagoguery, in childish demagogue rhetoric, standing up at a podium demagoguing about the other side’s demagogue. Give me a break!
Let’s Fix How We Communicate
If you want the madness to stop, walk away from the pendulum. Walk away from political parties. Talk about issues and how to solve them in ways that don’t offend other people’s values. And most importantly, recognize that there are other people with different values than you. A lot of other people. Do the American thing and respect those values, even if you don’t agree with them. Stop treating people like their values don’t matter. They matter to them, as yours do to you. And stop dehumanizing people to give yourself permission to shit on their values by shitting on the people. They’re still people, which means they have feelings and they get upset and even downright pissed off. So, if you want to glue this country back together, stop pissing each other off all the damn time!
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