A big part of the failure to misidentify my politics and all the rest of it is the failure of too many individuals to understand the difference between left and right wing politics—that is, to even understand their own politics. Indeed, many people who identify as “on the left” have internalized right wing politics and put them central to their worldview, believing these are actually left wing politics. (See The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.)
Recently I blogged about this concerning the progressive attitude towards women, which I showed is profoundly right-wing and misogynistic (Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind). Let me give you another example. Over the last few years, millions of people have illegally crossed our southern border. There were 232,972 illegal border crossings last month alone—and that’s not counting the got-aways. Progressives demand that they be brought into our communities, given the right to vote generous public services, and put on a path to citizenship. Some describe themselves as “internationalists,” claiming that the goal of international socialist movement is to build a world without borders. They appeal to Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and the Internationale.
But what did Marx and Engels actually argue? They tell us in the Communist Manifesto (I wrote the preface of the Skyhorse edition of that book) that “the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle,” and, because praxis must be informed by objective theory, “[t]he proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” Of course! It will not do to throw open the borders, allow the country to be overrun with foreigners, and turn things over the transnational corporate powers—these are fascist powers—to design a world that is even less democratic than the one we now have. On the contrary, the American socialist’s goal—if he is correct in his thinking—is to establish a popular democratic society in territory of the United States, secure the rule of law that makes that possible, democratize industrial production and extend liberties and rights to everyone on the basis of equality, and then socialize these accomplishments across the globe.
In 1870, Marx wrote Sigfrid Meme and August Vogt (who were in New York): “After studying the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” After explaining the importance of the Irish ridding themselves of the English colonizers, thus weakening the English capitalist class, Marx noted the obvious: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.”
Indeed the Irish worker did lower the English worker’s standard of life. And that was the point! As I have shown in essays on Freedom and Reason, among other things, today, hundreds of billions of dollars are transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor—and hundreds of billions more through off-shoring, yet another method of exploiting cheap foreign labor. Moreover, the net cost of immigration is hundreds of billions to taxpayers. “This antagonism,” Marx writes concerning the English situation, “is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.” He may just as well as been writing about the America situation.
Today, the globalists are flooding the West with immigrants to burden the social welfare system. They then tell citizens that they have to give illegals work permits so they can get jobs and not burden the welfare system. Work permits for illegals displaces native born workers who then further burden the welfare system. This makes more people dependent on the parties whose electoral strategy involves enlarging the proportion of the population who vote for a living (in contrast to working for a living). Meanwhile, wages are driven even lower and the corporate firms the political establishment represents make out like bandits.
How did the so-called left in America, the progressive, come to advocate transnationalism, or globalism? How did they end up casting their lot with Horace Kallen and the other transnationalists who desire was the disorganize the modern nation state? How did Americans forget that it was the industrialists who drew tens of millions to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to impoverish the native working class and put more wealth and power in the hands of the corporate elite? How did Americans forget that, with the closing of our borders in the 1920s, that the working class set the preconditions that made possible the golden age of American prosperity and the solidarity that saw the civil rights movement and modern feminism through to substantially realize the American Creed in the actual conditions of community life? And how do we find ourselves again in a situation where corporations impoverish us with foreign labor while denying the right to those who fled their homes to stand unified against their own national bourgeoisie where the proletarian revolution would matter, weakening the power of our own national bourgeoisie?
The answer to the seeming contradictions I have cited (and there are others) is what I argued in that other essay, that what passes for the left today is not left at all. Progressivism is the projection of corporate state power and, as such, it is a rightwing politics. The home of progressivism, the Democratic Party, is the Party of the professional-managerial class, which runs the administrative state and attendant technocratic apparatus. It’s not the party of the left or the working class. Moreover, as I also noted, that the political right also believes progressivism is socialism (some even think it’s communism). Even those conservatives who define themselves as populist, and find Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Naomi Wolf compelling figures, are mistaken about the character of the system.
Hence I find myself misunderstood by both sides of the partisan divide. The progressive left, not understanding what left wing politics actually is, i.e., liberal and populist-nationalism, believing that these are rightwing politics, find my writings aligning with the right. The populist right, believing that socialism is what the progressive left is advocating, associate my identification as a man of the left with the progressive agenda. Neoconservatives and neoliberals—both projections of the corporate state—loath me because my critique is aimed at the heart of the mass deception that creates the confusion.
freedom and reason 