A modern distinction between "liberals" and "leftists" — from Ted Rall

© 2019 Peter Free

 

11 July 2019

 

 

Let's start with where we are today — and then proceed regarding distorted, propagandized semantics

 

As I recently said:

 

 

The United States' key anti-humanitarian weakness is its near absolute focus on encouraging selfish individualism.

 

 

This societal weakness results in a logically inevitable race designed to rocket the privileged few upward to godly pedestal status — cloud-high above the dirt-grubbing, wealth-lacking many.

 

 

This has been Ayn Rand's spiritually repulsive philosophy in action

 

It is not at all working the realistically righteous way, that she probably thought it would.

 

Meaning that Rand's purported natural selection — of the capable and deserving from the not so — is based on a series of astonishingly unobservant and stupidly unanalyzed assumptions and outcomes.

 

Talk about paying no attention to "real" reality, when one has all the evidence available to do so.

 

Extreme libertarianism, like hers, is blindly obtuse.

 

 

Post-Rand — the "liberal" versus "leftist" distortion — what these terms used to mean

 

An American "liberal" used to be, essentially, a person who thought that:

 

 

people are not as drastically separated in ability and deservingness as non-liberals think

 

and

 

even if they are, their God-granted souls deserve not to be massively punished for the alleged lack of capacity that they purportedly demonstrate

 

and

 

the New Deal's societal corrections to "the Rabble be damned" — laissez-faire principle — were both effective and wisely bestowed.

 

 

A leftist, in those days, was someone who thought that Marx's critique of the capitalist system was valid. They thought that society should be organized, so as to grant self-determining power to the "proletariat". The word "proletariat" referring to most of us who work, but who lack the excess wealth necessary to invest and control others.

 

Trivialized, this is the "power to the people" societal construct premise.

 

 

In sum — in the 1930s

 

A 1930s American "liberal" thought that capitalism could be modified, regulated or controlled into being bearable.

 

A "leftist" recognized that capitalism inevitably eats itself and crushes the overwhelming bulk of humanity under its clawed feet. A fundamental change in societal system was necessary.

 

 

Today, however . . .

 

. . . given the United States' plunge into a fascistic form of wall-to-wall corporatism, the liberal-leftist spectrum has shifted so far politically "rightward" as to be unrecognizable.

 

Bernie Sanders, an old-fashioned 1930s New Dealer if there ever was one, is now labeled as a pinko-commie leftist-socialist.

 

And anyone even slightly to "left" of him is thought to be an out-and-out communist of the Stalin-Mao variety.

 

 

What is depressingly amusing about all this

 

Americans, generally, have no clue what non-violent leftism really is.

 

They are unfamiliar with Marx's thoughts. Those thoughts having been propagandized into becoming absolutely taboo, from each American's birth to his and her graves.

 

Nor do we recognize the validity of persuasive historical and theoretical arguments that Maoism and Stalinism are the opposite of Marx's proletarians-in-control principle. Substituting an autocratic state for "you and me being in charge" simply doesn't fly.

 

Russia and China both substituted power from the government top, in place of where it was supposed to reside — among informally organized groups of working people.

 

The peaceful — societally bottom-up — anarcho-syndicalist concept is something that almost no Americans have ever heard of. Primarily because, we as a culture, are both too ignorant and too incurious to think about how society should be justly constructed.

 

It is a truly rare American who ever thinks about societal constructs in even a marginally basic way.

 

We have been propagandized into a stasis that melds (i) lack of curiosity with (ii) vanished goal selection, (iii) disappeared evidence-gathering and (iv) evaporated analysis. An American state, in short, displaying bovine and easily manipulated stupidity.

 

 

Enter Ted Rall — and a conceptual distinction well suited to today's distorted terminology

 

With the foregoing discussion in mind, I was struck with the relevance of Ted Rall's recently published and useful "liberal" versus "leftist" distinction.

 

It is suited to our confused times.

 

Rall seems to recognize that Americans are hopelessly ignorant about what these terms actually mean. So, he takes the two — as they are currently construed — and draws a valid, action-oriented distinction between them, anyway:

 

 

Liberals and leftists identify many of the same problems.

 

Only leftists understand that real solutions require serious pressure on the ruling elites.

 

The credible threat of force—for example, a peaceful protest demonstration that could turn violent—may be enough to force reforms. But reforms always get rolled back after the left stops watching.

 

Ultimately the rulers will have to be removed via revolution, a process that requires violence.

 

Liberals do not demand change; they ask nicely.

 

Because they oppose violence and credible threats of violence, they tacitly oppose fundamental change in the existing structure of politics and society. Unlike leftists they are unwilling to risk their petty privileges in order to obtain the reforms they claim to crave.

 

So, when push comes to shove, liberals will ultimately sell out their radical allies to the powers that be. And they will run away at the first sign of state oppression.

 

If you can’t trust your ally, they are no ally at all.

 

© 2019 Ted Rall, The Difference Between Liberals and Leftists, CounterPunch (11 July 2019)

 

 

Liberals ultimately identify with plutocrats, whom they say they oppose

 

That's an excellent example of the utility of brainwashing.

 

If you can con the public into thinking that only trivial changes are desirable, you are all the way to an oligarchist's idea of heaven.

 

 

The moral? — Historically, significant societal change has never been non-violently achieved

 

You either physically rattle the crap out of the cage.

 

Or you scare the cage builders into desisting.

 

Both involve the same coercion that is now exerted (down upon the rest of us) by those on top.

 

This structural reality and its implications are what Chris Hedges — who is, in my estimation, a conflicted pacifist — means by understanding the nature of power.