THE MYTH OF THE LEFT

Our political environment is based on weaponized misunderstandings and advantageous illusions. It's time we disabuse ourselves of these lies and create something better.

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Bourbon Talk Political Q&A Livestream, October 23rd, 8pm eastern

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In a dangerously polarized world, there’s at least one thing most everyone can agree on.

The Left is the problem.

For Republicans, it’s woke socialists. They’re everywhere. The universities pump them out by the thousands. They’re protesting a multi-discipline building named after a racist. Silencing speakers when they’re not learning CRT and pledging their lives to transhumanism and aggressive atheism.

Culturally they have all the power. Cancel culture threatens every straight white man. Movies, television shows, even the commercials and football games, for god’s sake, are so woke it hurts. You can’t even turn on the tube for seeing a same-sex transgender mixed-race family eating Cheerios while declaring their pronouns.

Why, their dangerous ideology is so omnipresent and poisonous that it’s literally forcing Republicans and conservatives to consider becoming fascists and raising a strongman authoritarian to put things to right.

And the Left’s control over the Democratic Party? Absolute and total.

Even some Democrats agree. The reason the party keeps losing elections, they tell you, is a suicidal relationships with the Left. What’s necessary, they’ll never stop telling you, is a movement toward the Center. Give up on the more “radical” stuff that freaks out the fabled independent voter. Quite talking about institutional racism and inequality and seek out moderate Republicans.

It’s the only way.

This liberal point-of-view is echoed by Democratic politicians, published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, bandied about on the “Leftist” airwaves on CNN. It is, in a word, everpresent.

And so, it needs asking: what is the Left? Because outside of Bernie Sanders or members of the isolated “Squad,” no one can particularly define it.

Sometimes, in attack ads, it’s Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and even Joe Biden. But those claims are always accompanied by the subject’s picture photoshopped alongside Sanders and AOC, though both are largely ostracized by the party structure. And there are hardly any pictures at all because they largely do not work on projects together.

So, again, what is the Left?

Historically speaking, the Left is a term for people looking to fundamentally change the political system, whether through redistribution of wealth or through attempts to address systemic inequality. Routinely this includes socialists, democratic socialists, and other like-minded individuals and organizations.

In other words, a grouping that has no power or actual influence in American politics. Or, largely in Western politics in general, which is not an accident but the result of centuries of struggles and decades of deliberate action.

“The Left” is not real. Well, at least not “real” if “real” means a workable coalition of influence. The Left has been marginalized, sheered away from public discourse. It exists as a strawman, or rather a ghost that haunts moderates and conservatives alike. A specter that legitimizes their stances and actions, a warning of what could be if steps are not taken to prevent ruin.

Politically, the Left has been effectively neutralized. This was achieved through elections, propaganda, the machinery of the major parties, and, in a bizarre and disturbing story, victim of a worldwide conspiracy to kill and undermine Leftists who might challenge the status quo.

What we do have, though, is a facsimile of the Left that is communicated through our media by publications, corporations, and the parties themselves in order to profit and consolidate power.

This is the story of one of the most consequential misunderstandings in American politics. It is the story of the myth of the Left and it is a story we must learn if we are to ever escape this death spiral and worsening crisis.

And we begin with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. in 1976 and a political assasination that would be largely lost to history.

On September 21st, 1976, Orlando Letelier was driving through Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. with his friends Ronni and Michael Moffitt. Letelier was an expat from Chile, a political exile following the CIA-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende and seizure of power by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Despite his exile, Letelier remained a vocal critic of Pinochet and the neoliberal regime that had dismantled his country’s rightfully elected government and replaced it with an austerity-focused dictatorship.

As they rounded Sheridan Circle, an explosive fixed to the car exploded. Orlando and Ronni would die from their wounds while Michael would go on to make a recovery.

The bombing shocked Washington, D.C. Almost immediately it was clear that Letelier had been targeted for assassination, and it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Pinochet, an American ally, had ordered a killing within the United States. A killing, it should be mentioned, that also took the life of an American citizen.

This was hardly an isolated incident, though. In the wake of World War II, the United States and its allies had constructed multiple campaigns around the world to counteract what they saw as the dangerous influence of the Soviet Union. Across the world, efforts like Operation Gladio and Operation Condor focused on locating socialists, communists, and leftist alike, dismantling their bases, and neutralizing their power at any and all costs. In the U.S., this meant utilizing law enforcement and intelligence bodies to surveil threats to power, including the Civil Rights Movement, and carrying out arrests, illegal surveillance, and targeted killings. Elsewhere, it meant partnerships with fascists and organized crime. In Condor, which included dictators like Pinochet who had brought their nations under “control,” it meant creating a worldwide operation that could target and kill leftists anywhere, regardless of country and location.

These operations were incredibly successful and laid the foundation for political efforts to eliminate Leftist influence from politics, including labor organizing, which had been one of the main challenges to power for centuries. Over time, it was no longer necessary for bodies like the Democratic Party to seek support from labor unions and instead they turned to the deep pockets of corporations and the developing professional managerial class.

It is no accident that these actions laid the foundation for the neoliberal consensus that would take hold in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In fact, all one has to do is look at Chile - Orlando Letelier’s home - where the threat of a socialist Allende administration was so terrifying that the CIA and the United States government carried out a coup and handed power to a military dictator who would then, under the tutelage of neoliberals, institute austerity and “free-market” discipline.

The world we live in would look incredibly different had this not been the case. If the Left had not been systematically hunted down and kept from the public discourse. And what happened next was so strange that we’re still struggling like hell to understand exactly what occured.

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One of the more insidious aspects of neoliberalism is the transfer of influence from politics to consumerism. As the market is the realm of “experts” and technocrats, voters are intentionally disconnected from power and instead pushed to express their preferences via their purchases and wealth.

It’s no surprise, obviously, that this has led to authoritarianism and a society so obsessed with personal interest that it is willing to destroy democracy if it means consumer convenience. And what has replaced an actual working politics of the Left has been a marketplace of expressed leftist ideas that do nothing to challenge the actual structural problems the Left is supposed to wrestle with.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene decries the influence of “woke” and “communist” corporations, it’s important to state, for the record, that corporations are hardly leftist. In fact, the only ideology of the corporation is to pursue profits. Everything else is public relations and marketing. But what we are seeing from corporations is an understanding of what the American public actually believes and an active effort to sell them the illusion of those ideas in action.

“The Left” that Republicans constantly scream about and Democrats wrestle with is a result of this marketing. It is a result of something called marketing segmentation, or focused marketing on a group. While a majority of Americans understand that the country is on the wrong track, that our economy is wired to benefit an elect few, and that things are beginning to fall apart, there are no political avenues to effectively solve the problem. Capitalism has become hypercapitalism following the neoliberal consensus. All of the regulations have been lifted. The brakes have been beaten off. And we are relegated to choosing what sneakers to buy based on whether the corporation selling them reflects our “values.” We are left to choose our streaming services based on whether what we see on our TVs and laptop screens looks like the world we would like to live in.

Nike is a perfect example of this in action. The shoe giant has, for decades, plundered the resources of the world, forced people to work in terrible conditions for cents on the dollar, and has contributed to climate change on a level that’s hard to understand. And yet, when Colin Kaepernick became a lightning rod for protesting police violence, Nike has quick to slap his face on their advertising. And why? Because they cared about police violence or inequality?

Hardly. Corporations and their members calculate these decisions based on the number of customers it will appeal to. And, in an increasingly unequal United States, the number of people with disposable income are, at the very least, expressively Left or liberal. They define themselves based on tolerance and acceptance, even if those principles are not carried out in their daily lives. In this way, buying Nike shoes becomes a means of expressing Leftist ideals without having to risk your wealth, property, or engaging in dangerous political organizing.

And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that “Leftist” Nike’s owner Phil Knight has now been revealed to have began pumping millions of dollars into Republican campaigns.

Corporations have grasped that neoliberalism and the neutralization of the Left has created a market for Leftist expression without the burdens of Leftist existence. Just as the neoliberals envisioned, Americans use their dollars to vote while their votes have become largely devalued. This fits within that mindset as those with means are now able to avoid the worst outcomes of the increasingly exploitative system while also expressing views that could change that system without ever actually threatening change of the system at large.

And, as a result, we have now come to live with the illusion of a Left that concerns both the Republican and Democratic Party. And why? Because it reflects an inherent understanding among the American people that this system has reached its terminal point and that something needs to change. It is increasingly obvious that a Leftist solution is necessary should this thing not collapse into authoritarianism, and because this threatens both the GOP and the Democrats stranglehold on ideology, which is necessary for a center-to-far-right consensus to hold, it is decried by everyone according to their own principles.

This, when carried out over time, leads to an increasingly accelerating movement to the Right and a legitimization of authoritarianism that is necessary to keep neoliberalism churning along. The GOP says fascism might be necessary while the media and political class say, let’s go to the center, which is being dragged further and further right with every passing day. Now, the center isn’t a center. It’s a point on a scale that is sliding and sliding and sliding.

Advocating for trans and gay rights isn’t Leftist.

Fighting for women to have bodily autonomy isn’t Leftist.

Wanting to learn actual history about how inequality is baked into the system isn’t Leftist.

These are centrist ideas necessary for a system to even function properly.

What is terrifying to the status quo is that when these things are properly framed as centrist and beyond debate is when the true Left-Right paradigm reveals itself. And then, all of the Nike shoes in the world won’t stop people from realizing the entire game.