By Stansfield Smith
February 1, 2020
Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert wrote an
Open Letter to the Green Party, asking them to support the 2020 Democratic candidate regardless of who wins the nomination. The Open Letter was in response to an article well worth reading by Howie Hawkins,
The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem.
It has become all too common over the last 15 years to see erstwhile anti-imperialists, or at least harsh critics of the US government’s brutal policies at home and abroad, fold under corporate America’s unrelenting onslaught on humanity and the planet. It is reminiscent of how the mass Marxist Social Democratic parties capitulated to the impending imperialist massacre of World War I, or how the Western capitalist nations caved in to Hitler from 1937 on, until they saw the “greater enemy,” the Soviet Union, take the full fury of the Nazi forces and begin to beat them back.
But let us look at what they say: the Greens should not run in states that take votes away from the Democratic nominee able to beat Trump. This argument is founded on a considerable amount of old-fashioned arrogance, an assumption that Greens are nothing more than disenchanted liberal Democrats who should come back home in a time of need. There is little evidence that in 2016 Green voters would have voted for Hillary against Trump if there were no Green candidate. Some may have, just as some may have voted for Trump, and probably a great number would not have bothered to vote.
The Open Leter also expresses a good dose of liberal middle-class arrogance in the assumption that Hillary was the lesser evil compared to
Trump and his deplorables. Of course, we can never know what Hillary or any other losing candidate would have done as president, because they never won. It does seem pretty clear, though, that the national security state would have been happy with her functioning as its obedient champion in the White House. But now we have Trump, who openly attacks national security state war-mongering and its corporate media fake news. It also seems likely that Clinton would have involved us in a new war, which Trump periodically makes noises about but so far has avoided.
Hillary would also have been the lesser evil for the liberal elite by making the US empire more “respected” at home and abroad – that is, making the brutal operations of the empire more palatable for them. She would have made liberals prouder about what America supposedly stands for in the world, just as they were proud of the America of President Obama, as “
the shining city on the hill.” Thinking the US empire represents a force for good in the world is a heartfelt need for American liberals.
For anti-imperialists the opposite is the case: what tears off the mask US imperialism wears, what shows the empire’s selfish greed and inhumanity to the world are important steps forward for people’s political education. In that, Trump, not having gone through the standard politicians’ dog-training school to learn how to cover up one’s greed, lies, and crudeness, has done a worthy job in showing to the world the true nature of the empire.
So long as liberals can think US imperialism is slowly improving, slowly reforming its excessive abuses, so long as they can rationalize some of its abuses, and so long as they can live comfortably inside the system, that for them is good enough.
But reality tells us US world hegemony is coming to an end. China is slowly pushing the US out of first place, and — shocking to liberals –is providing a vastly superior example of how to deal cooperatively with other countries, how to eliminate poverty, how to combat climate change. We are into the period where, as an empire declining in productive wealth, the US must become more nakedly a bully to maintain its control. It must rely more and more on endless war, on economic warfare, on corporate media disinformation, having less wealth available to buy acquiescence.
Both Clinton and Trump knew that and were on board with it. Clinton used traditional feel-good liberal rhetoric. Trump was outspokenly “America first,” and “white people first.” The difference between the two parties exists mainly on the level of rhetoric.
How to explain this ongoing liberal-left capitulation to corporate America’s pro-Democratic Party agenda? The working class, the great opposing power to capital, has not fought the corporate rulers and been defeated. It has not yet begun to fight. When it has been aroused and well led, as in the 1930s and 1940s, workers took on the biggest corporate giants, General Motors, US Steel, the coal barons, the US government and martial law, and beat them. In the late 1950s and 1960s working people, Black and white, rose up and crushed the entrenched 75-year-old Jim Crow system. However, the US working class today, the only giant powerful enough to combat corporate control, still remains for the most part quiescent, leaderless. It will again emerge from the shadows and make history.
Liberal-left intellectuals do not identify themselves primarily as allies of this one great countervailing power to corporate America. Probably they don’t even see it. Rather, they see a progressive milieu which can function as a pressure group in the orbit of the Democratic Party against what they see as a right-wing milieu around the Republican Party and Democratic Party bosses. As a result they operate from a perspective of weakness, and feel the popular force behind them continually diminishing since the last mass social upsurge, in 2002-3 against the war in Iraq. Consequently they have slowly and steadily shifted rightwards over the years.
However, mass movements and mass struggles come in waves followed by periods of quiescence, and inevitably a great new wave will appear.
