freedom and reason

Throughout history, the ruling classes and their functionaries and scribes have operated with what we might call the Big Person theory of history – that is, history as the telling of biographies that legitimizes their rule (Pharaoh, etc.), makes the social order appear open and progressive (Obama, etc.), or hides asymmetries of power behind the failure of weak leaders or the horror of terrible ones (Stalin is socialism, yet Hitler was anomalous). It’s the stories of firsts and singular accomplishments, personalities and prophets, heroes and foes, individual winners and losers. It’s hard to resist the lure of celebrity. The master statuses of the famous and infamous draw our attention. Sometimes we live through them. The cult of personality is the result of socialization in a hierarchical society.

In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes, “To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity [the selection, simplification, and emphasis of fact that is inevitable for both cartographers and historians] but an ideological choice. It serves-unwittingly-to justify what was done.” Zinn contends that, as a scholarly and a moral matter, we must highlight and condemn “the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress.” 

“One reason these atrocities are still with us,” Zinn writes, ”is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.” 

In a famous passage he writes, 

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) – the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress – is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they – the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court – represent the nation as a whole.

I have long embraced Zinn’s point of view – even before I read his words! This is why I bristle at the corporate media and liberal academics pushing the line that Clinton’s inevitable run for president represents a great moment in the history of equality. A member of the elite is held up as breaking barriers that still remain in place for millions of women. It’s liberal feminism as branding. It shouldn’t impress us.

We saw a similar thing during the Obama presidential campaign. All the while he was denying that his race was significant (quite the contrast with Clinton’s claim that the mere fact that she is a woman carries historic significance), the media nonetheless guided the public to support Obama by appealing to his identity as a black man, insisting of course on a whitewashed version of black identity (“Denounce your former pastor Jeremiah Wright – and even your own grandmother – as bigots”), so that spectators could feel part for a “historic moment,” one that allowed them to tell themselves that they had played a role in breaking down the barriers that reproduce inequality and that put black citizens at risk for police brutality and violent street crime. 

In reality, the public participated in a corporate propaganda campaign to repackage American empire. A black Democrat with an Arabic name who denies there is a black America. He couldn’t have been more perfect. “We’re glad that nasty business of racism is behind us,” the public could say while wrenching their shoulders out of joint to pat themselves on the back. And then, “What’s this Tea Party deal?” And now, “Trump!”Celebrating as a special moment the fact that Clinton will be a female presidential candidate not only neglects all the women who have already been female presidential candidates, but masks the misery and corruption that follow her from office to office. And the blood dripping from her hands.

This is a woman – I identify her gender because she and her supporters do – who was put in charge by her then-governor husband of de-professionalizing public school teachers in Arkansas, humiliating them by forcing them to take tests, undermining their unions. She worked with her then-president husband to sell a crime bill to the public that played a key role in throwing hundreds of thousands of young black men into prison, slandering the targets as “super predators” who “must be brought to heel.” She stumped for the notorious trade deal NAFTA, which resulted in the loss of more than three-quarters of a million good paying jobs in America. She stood behind her husband who ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the New Deal-era program for poor children, thus throwing millions of poor people, disproportionately black, off of welfare. She stood by the Clinton administration’s sanctions against Iraq, which led to the deaths of half a million children under the age of five. Then-state secretary Madeline Albright, who stumps for Clinton, said the children’s deaths were “worth it.” Clinton advocated the bombing of Yugoslavia (by her own admission she called her husband and, in her words, “urged him to bomb”), which resulted in mass civilian casualties. 

This is a woman who, as Senator from New York, voted to authorize President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, a war crime that resulted in the deaths of more than a million people and led to the rise of ISIL. As senator, Clinton did nothing to stop the widespread torture program perpetrated by the Bush administration. She supported the Wall Street bailout. She supported the PATRIOT Act and its reauthorization. As senator and secretary, and now as candidate for president she supports the illegal annexation of Palestine by Israel and periodic invasions and massacres in Gaza. “We are here to show solidarity and support for Israel. We will stand with Israel, because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones,” she said of Israel illegal 2006 invasion of Lebanon. For years she blocked ways forward for gay and lesbian rights. “Marriage is a sacred bond between a man and woman.” 

As Secretary of State, Clinton supported Obama’s drone killing operations. She prevailed over Vice President Biden’s objection to sending 20,000 troops to Afghanistan. She played a key role in legitimizing the 2009 Honduran coup d’état that saw the installation of a fascist government. She persuaded Obama to bomb Libya. Upon hearing the news of the torture-murder of Muammar Qaddafi at the hand of US-backed “rebels,” she quipped “We can, we saw, he died,” and then cackled. Not only was the bombing of Libya illegal under international law, it wasn’t even approved by Congress. She was at the center of distorting the facts on the ground in Syria, urging the arming of the insurgents in Syria with a manifold increase in killing and destruction. Hillary Clinton signed an agreement committing millions of tax dollars to the building of the Caracol sweatshop assembly park in the north of Haiti. She sold her office to funnel money into the Clinton Foundation in exchange for arms sales to nations with terrible human rights records, including the Mecca of beheadings and suppression of women’s rights Saudi Arabia. The Saudis used the weapons to bomb Yemen. She described US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak and his wife, who used rape as a weapon, as “friends of the family.” She ordered American officials to spy on high ranking UN diplomats, including collecting their biometric information. She is on record threatening to “obliterate” Iran and opposed Obama’s peace agreement with Iran. She supports the death penalty. She aggressively supported the TPP under Obama (despite what she says today). Same with the Keystone XL pipeline. And then there is her enabling of her husband’s aggressive sexual and violent behavior towards women. 

Zinn writes,

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

The evidence is clear. Hillary Clinton is on the side of executioners. The corporate media and public liberal intellectuals are portraying Clinton’s rise to the Democratic Party’s candidate for president as a historic moment in the history of a nation that always does right in the end. In telling this story as the only story worth telling, they are blocking from view the suffering of millions of people caused by policies Clinton and her ilk have deployed and supported. They are portraying a functionary of the ruling class as a civil rights hero. 

Hillary Clinton is not a champion for women. She is not a champion for workers. She is not a champion for poor people. Clinton represents corporate power and wealthy families. She is not one of us. Just as Obama’s election did not change the suffering of black America, the election of Clinton will not ameliorate the suffering of women under capitalist patriarchy. It will just give it cover. 

I recognize that argument and critique touch on subjects that can be very personal. But if we can’t agree to observe basic rules of rational discourse, then opportunities to discuss important issues are missed, even obstructed. A free society depends on the free expression of ideas in the context of rational public discourse. Jürgen Habermas identifies several presuppositions necessary for rational public discourse:

• participants use similar linguistic expression (some arguments may be about clarifying expressions);
• participants do not exclude or suppress relevant arguments;
• the only force in determining the outcome of the discussion is the superior validity/soundness of an argument (a goal of discussion should be that participants are motivated by a concern for better arguments);
• no rational claim is exempt from criticism.

We would do well to adopt these standards and the rules associated with them. For example, an argument may be sound or valid despite which side of the debate a person takes. A criticism of an argument hailing from a particular community can be valid even when the arguer is prejudiced with respect to that community or there is an asymmetry of power between members of communities. The argument stands on its own; its truth is not determined by the character of the arguer. It is valid if it follows the rules of logic and sound if supported by fact. 

Another basic rule is that a relevant and rational critique may be sound or valid even it offends members of the community advancing the position being criticized. That some are offended by relevant utterance has no bearing on the truth of the utterance. It is crucial that the utterances in question are relevant and rational. An utterance that demeans persons may be justifiably excluded or suppressed; however, excluding or suppressing speech requires explicit justification. It is not enough to claim to be offended. Moreover, a person’s identity or status is no reason for blanket exclusion or suppression of speech. The question is whether the speech is rational and relevant. 

I have to interject a pragmatic point here (some advice) that actions disrupting public events make protesting look bad and hurts their cause, however much I may agree with them. The conclusion many observers of such actions reach is that the disrupters don’t have a rational counterargument and that they suffer from authoritarian desire. The second assumption is true, but the first assumption may not be, and therefore an opportunity to engage the speaker and present the counter claim is lost. Observers may also suspect that the disrupters are more interested in engaging in behavior that draws attention to them or makes them feel empowered without actually affecting anything, in essence engaging in a type of egoism and recreation, not real political action. Most people see mob action and people don’t like mobs. Disrupting public events only serves to delegitimize the cause of protest they wish to advance. 

The demand that public forums which people are free to attend or to exit should be spaces safe from observations, opinions, and arguments that some may find offensive is an expression of authoritarian desire, even if that is not the intent. This demand flips free speech on its head. Public forums should be places safe for the free expression of arguments and opinions that some may find offensive – and this means demanding spaces that are free from disruption (this is true not only for speeches, but for concerts, art shows, plays, etc.). Shutting down discussion and debate is not a legitimate exercise of free speech; it is an act violating the right of free speech.

You have no right to silence a speaker because the speaker’s utterances offend you. You may wish to live in a world where you do not have to hear points of view with which you disagree or that offend you. To the extent that you can accomplish that by not interfering with the freedom of others to hear those points of view, have at it. But when you act to prevent others from hearing the expressions of others, you’re out of bounds.

Suppose a society in which women feel compelled to have surgery because of a standard of beauty imposed by the prevailing culture. The surgery are sought because they make women look more like the cultural images of women distributed by the culture industry. Suppose further an argument that this culture norm is oppressive and should be changed, that is it reflective of patriarchal conceptions of gender that should be overthrown.

Now suppose that those who have had surgery or who want to have surgery counter that, however wonderful eliminating the norm may be, it is not practically possible, that our society is marked by cultural notions of femininity and masculinity, therefore their choice to have the surgery is legitimately embraced, understood, and even part of a type of politics based around gender identity. Suppose they contend that criticisms of their politics is therefore a type of loathing and victim blaming, a form of bigotry.

Are we supposed to be content with a counterposition that takes offense at being confronted with the problem of culture and choice? Is it right that we should be accused of being bigots on the grounds that we raised an objection to an oppressive culture norm? Yet persons who have surgery to look more like the gender images produced by patriarchal culture will get angry with you if you criticize the culture that compels them to go under the knife and problematize the defensive politics rationalizing that choice.

Through a strange alchemy an argument that we should build a culture where people are not judged by the norms of the patriarchy is transformed into bigotry and, on this basis, marginalized, effectively inoculating from criticism the political expression of the internalization of an oppressive culture norm. 

The act of decrying rational criticism of culture and politics is a massive barrier to developing a politics that seeks to dismantle oppressive social and ideational structures.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. West and tall. We see further into the future.” —Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1998)

This is the same person who said at a Clinton campaign event, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She later apologized for the remark.

Actually, she did not apologize for the remark, which she admits to having “uttered a thousand times to applause,” but instead apologized for using it in the context of a Clinton campaign event. “I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another,” she explained in an op-ed for the NYTimes.

But this retraction raises a very serious question, namely why she has not apologized for her role in causing the deaths of half a million women and children in Iraq. Does she still believe, as she told Lesley Stahl on 60 minutes (in 2001), that “the price was worth it”?

That’s the trouble with liberals. Noam Chomsky crystalized it well in his notorious debate (on Firing Line in 1969) with William F. Buckley:

“A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.”

Chomsky’s point is essentially a restatement of C. Wright Mills observation in The Causes of World War Three (1959):

“The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as “functions” of a rational social machinery – men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima – are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally – and absurdly – planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.”

Update: May 21, 2024. I wrote this essay on the cusp of my awakening. The spirit is correct here but the language used reflects socialization in the woke factory of higher education. I am going to critique this essay from my present state of mind.

We are born without any labels. Depending on when and where a person is born, a number of labels are assigned. I did not choose to be white. I did not choose to be a boy (and, now, a man). I did not choose to be heterosexual. I did not choose to be an American. All of these labels represent historically-variable and socially-constructed things that, taken together, comprise identity. The identity is imposed and learned. There is nothing essential about these categories. They are, nonetheless, social facts.

I could emphasize the labels assigned to me and embrace an identity that I did not choose. If I embrace my white heterosexual male identity, and pursue this as a politics, then I become racist, sexist, and heterosexist person. Yet, as a person who is forced to wear the white heterosexual man label whether I embrace it or not, I am still marked as an oppressor. I must take the blame for something I did not choose to be. If I attempt to refuse to wear the label, then I am denying my privilege. Thus, I am not even allowed to complain about this situation, because to do so is an expression of privilege. 

However, I am not stuck on the horns of a dilemma. I can choose to be an person who criticizes and struggles against the oppressive structures that have made me a white heterosexual man. This is morally compelling because these are the same structures that make a person a black homosexual woman, with all the forms of oppression that come with those labels. I can recognize, to take one of those labels, that we do not live in a colorblind society while, at same time, believe that it would be desirable to live in a society where color labels are no longer applied and carry no meaning except as facts in history books.

I have come to wonder whether those who are oppressed by the imposed categories of a multilayered system of oppression are actually pursuing radical politics by embracing the labels assigned to them and retreating into groups based on them. I understand why Martin Luther King, Jr., in combating the psychological trauma of white supremacy, told children that their skin was beautiful. But was King seeking to reify the prevailing racial categories and build a new society based on the color differences the oppressor originally developed to maintain the capitalist order? No. Clearly he wasn’t. So why are others?

Am I allowed the observation that none of these labels are essential and to express a desire for a world in which there are no labels? Or am I making an error in thinking this is, or for wanting it to be possible? If the latter, what is my error?

Socialists, feminists, and civil rights activists challenged class, gender, and race oppression in the 20th century. Engagement with these radical forces by the defenders of the status quo nonetheless led to substantial gains for members of historically exploited and oppressed groups. Millions escaped poverty. Workplaces and commodities were made safer. Black Americans ate and voted alongside white Americans. And women controlled their bodies.

By the 1970s, capitalist elites had moved determinatively to stop this progress. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington typified ruling class concerns when, in his contribution to The Crisis of Democracy, a collection of essays organized by David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, he decried the “democratic challenge to authority.”

A conscious strategy of suppressing worker rights and globalizing production and markets weakened the organizations of labor. Conservative cultural and religious identity soothed and substituted for the loss of political power and and cultural prestige. Meanwhile, multiculturalism, promoting diversity and tolerance in place of equality and liberty, fractured the struggle for gender and racial justice among the younger generation.

As a consequence, radical politics, which could, on the basis of an analysis of social structure, organize workers across gender and racial lines, has seen its replacement by an identity politics premised on the notion that historical antagonisms are organic and essential to humanity, that there is, moreover, a group-based consciousness inaccessible to those who are not authentically members of that group (group membership to be determined by cultural signs and gatekeepers), and that, therefore, rights are to be in part determined on the basis of group association and identification. The result of these developments is a mode of politics that, while appearing progressive, undermines the politics of class struggle that is the right of labor.

At the core of multiculturalism lies a confusion about democracy, freedom, and human rights. Educated in a milieu of moral relativism, a generation has come to believe that freedom and equality are based not on one’s objective social position and right to personal freedom, but rather determined by the degree to which a person is permitted to express their ethnic, racial, or religious identity in an uncritical way. In this view, identity functions to efface its socially-constructed character. As ideology, it dissimulates the forms of exploitation and oppression that exist within its traditions.

For example, religious-based oppression, such as the Islamic veil, representing the imposition of modesty and gender roles in Islam, is redefined not only as a right women born under Islam are free to embrace, but as a symbol of gender empowerment. This redefinition of the situation of women under Islam finds young American women expressing solidarity with Muslim women in the standard cultural appreciation format of taking a day to experience the exotic. “World Hijab Day” stands as a protest against “Islamophobia.” In this view of things, tolerance of an unreasonable tradition becomes required to be a reasonable person. In Europe, where the situation is worse, women are warned by their governments to avoid arousing Muslim men if they wish to remain unmolested.

This situation has produced a popular understanding of political struggle as polarized between, on the one side, younger workers and students, devoted to diversity, globalism, and tolerance as hallmarks of freedom and equality and, on the other side, older workers, disproportionately white, who, screwed by globalization and the neoliberal restructuring of their republics, express an economic nationalism that is sometimes accompanied by white racial, super-patriotic, and conservative Christian sentiments. Their desire for democratic control over their life chances thus becomes associated with racism and xenophobia. It is said that it is better to let the technocrats handle such matters as politics and economics. The disempowering of the working class is thus reinforced. 

The result of this spectacular ideological achievement is that the democratic spirit that desires emancipation from economic exploitation, and from racial and religious group determination, is not merely marginalized, but conflated with the falsely-conscious politics of white working class conservatism. What is more, by effectively neutralizing class struggle and consciousness through the strategy of multicultural programming, the globalists have enlisted young Americans and Europeans in the neoliberal project that is deepening economic insecurity and entrenching oppressive and divisive cultural and religious systems of control.

Thus the natural allies to a renewal of the socialist project, or even to return to social democracy, side with unelected global elites. They take their side while characterizing working class anxieties as expressions of bigotry, leaving the political ordering of the latter to charismatic reactionary who misdirects the fractured masses.

Does it ever occur to folks that Noam Chomsky’s vote-for-the-Democrat-in-states-that-matter-because-the-Republican-is-worse advice means that the professor is telling us to vote for Democrats who are worse than the Republicans that he told us we had to vote against in a previous election cycle? If one were to consistently follow Chomsky’s logic, then it’s conceivable that Trump would be a reasonable choice as long as a candidate could be found who can be portrayed as worse than Trump—a death spiral not inconceivable given the road we’re on.

Worried about the popular state of the lesser-of-two-evils rhetoric, John Halle (through an email conversation with Noam Chomsky, it seems) has enlisted the professor in an attempt on Halle’s blog to explain the lesser-of-two-evils argument to the ignorant masses who still don’t get it: An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting) Because so much is at stake, and because Chomsky has enchanted so many people, I wade into this mess of an argument. (Note: “Professor Chomsky requests that he not be contacted with responses to this piece.”)

“1) Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.”

Note the negative construction of the function of voting. It is constructed in this way because the authors are defending a position that is rapidly losing its currency. Let’s make voting a positive action: Voting is an expression of moral judgment and political action concerning policies and legislation that reflect our aspirations, interests, and values. That includes reforming the corrupt system designed to limit choices to those primarily beneficial to corporate elites. In order to reform the system, votes should be cast for politicians other than establishment figure who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. One-person-one-vote is by definition an act of personal self-expression, but it also an expression of solidarity with ideas and with people who share those ideas. Thus Halle and Chomsky’s first point fails as soon as the character and purpose of voting is clarified. 

“2) The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested ‘swing state’) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.”

False dilemma. Halle and Chomsky are seeking a self-seal prophecy by attempting to convince voters that there are only two choices: vote for Clinton or vote for Trump by not voting for Clinton. There are other consequences to the act of voting in 2016. The act of withdrawing consent from the two-party corporate-run electoral system can have an effect if enough people choose that action. Failure to pursue alternative action means that you have participated in a way that you hope will result in a Clinton presidency. And while the character of a Trump presidency is uncertain—as of right now we have the bluster of a publicity-seeking entertainer with a history of support for liberal policies trying to appeal to conservatives (or trying to throw the election for Hillary)—the character of a Clinton presidency is much less uncertain. We’ve heard the rhetoric that this election is about life and death. Indeed. Ask the survivors in Libya and Syria.

“3) One of these candidates, Trump… [a bunch of stuff Trump has said that sounds scary to liberals and progressives].” 

I could write a paragraph that would make Hillary Clinton much more of a monster than Trump and all I would need to do is present the facts of her speech and her record. For example, we are told, on the basis of his current rhetoric, that Trump is a racist so we must vote for Hillary. But arguing that black youth are “super predators” with “no conscience, no empathy” who society needs to “bring to heel” is racist speech with no equal. Moreover, it is racist speech made in support of a draconian crime bill that expanded the circular state and damaged the lives of millions of people. Black men represent less than 6 percent of the US population. By the end of Clinton’s first term as president, more than 50 percent of prison inmates were black men. Now multiply that example several times and spread it around the world. Hillary Clinton is the choice of Wall Street, the carceral-surveillance state, and the military-industrial complex.

“4) The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.”

What evidence is there that indicates even a marginal probability that suffering under Trump will be significantly greater than under Clinton? It’s not there. What is more, not only will suffering be great under Clinton, but she will have the support of liberals in the New Democrat project to entrench and expand the neoliberal agenda. Social Security and Medicare are at stake here. More war and surveillance will be the consequence of choosing Clinton. Mid-term elections under Clinton will likely increase conservative Republican presence in the House and Senate. If a President Trump were to attempt the things Clinton is almost certain to pursue if president, liberals will rebel. The mid-term elections would like not be kind to Republicans. It is possible that suffering under a Clinton presidency will not be as acute as it might be under a Trump presidency, but the harm done in a Clinton presidency will be deeper and longer lasting than that under a Trump presidency. Halle and Chomsky are pleading with people to add to the momentum of the evil spiral.

“5) 4) should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential-namely, in a contested, ‘swing’ state.”  

But, as we have seen, 4) is problematic. Therefore 5) is problematic. Moreover, 5), even if 4) were accepted, does not constitute a sufficient basis to vote for Clinton under these circumstances because of what I pointed on in my response to 1). 

“6) However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.”

Who will repeatedly make this accusation? Halle and Chomsky, among others. These are the people who want to see Democrats remain in power. We’re being told that if Trump wins because we voted on the basis of my statement concerning the reason for voting, then it’s our fault if people suffer. But if a Trump presidency is as bad as Halle and Chomsky think it will be, then it will be Trump’s fault along all the people who voted for him. However, those who choose the right-wing Democratic candidate (Clinton) instead of the progressive Green Party nominee (Jill Stein) will have used their political agency to perpetuate the status quo.  The continuation of the right-wing populism that is plaguing our nation will be the consequence of voting for Clinton.

“7) Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.”

This expectation is contradicted by recent history, where the attempt to saddle the candidacy of Ralph Nader with horrors of the Bush presidency was followed by the highly-successful campaign of an insurgent progressive candidate (Bernie Sanders) and millions of voters who are now vowing to vote against the establishment candidate of the Democratic Party.

“8) Conclusion: by dismissing a ‘lesser evil’ electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.”

This does not follow. Not seeing Trump elected is not the core of what the left is attempting to achieve by refusing to vote for Clinton. That would constitute a miserable political core. At its core, the movement to withdraw consent from the New Democrat direction is about changing the character of the game the ruling class has been playing with mass action. In practical terms, increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat erodes confidence in the two-party system and thus represent an investment in the future of progressive politics. Failure to withdraw consent is an act continuing the neoliberal dismantling of democracy. 

The argument Halle and Chomsky are pushing is the type of rationalization generated within the narrow parameters of the rational choice model that their utilitarianism suggests. It is not an argument for a pragmatic political strategy of dismantling the two-party ideology that currently benefits the interests of the ruling class in order to build a mass-based political party representing the interests of working families. 

The majority of voters are neither Democrat or Republican. Tens of millions of voters stay home because neither of the major party candidates represent their aspirations, interests, and values, and they have been persuaded by the public education system and corporate media, buttressed by the LEV crowd, that there are only two parties to vote for. Until the left starts raising the profile of third party candidates, these tens of millions of people will continue to sit home on election day, and a minority of highly motivated voters will cast their votes to continue the status quo. 

“Although the logic behind lesser evilism is impeccable, the principle seldom applies directly in real world circumstances. In political contexts especially, there are too many complicating factors, and there is too much indeterminacy.” The Logic of Lesser Evilism

Moreover, however impeccable we regard the logic in abstract form, the lesser evils argument restricts the argument to one presidential cycle. It does not consider, as I did above, the long-term consequences of the vote. It is only concerned with making sure that Trump is not elected. And this is a concern for the Democratic Party, not for working class voters.

The following account is fictional.

A devoted Christian man, Bobby Blarns, pledging allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan, a Protestant sect determined to restore traditional Christian values to American society, perpetrated a mass murder at an black community center. Forty-nine black people are dead.

You might suppose that his allegiance to the KKK tells us something about the motive behind the shooting or that, at least, we might consider the possibility. But we are told by politicians and pundits that, on the contrary, we must resist wondering whether belief and association had anything to do with the shootings. The media decries “Christophobia” at the suggestion that the shooter’s ideological commitments had anything to do with his crime. There is nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the politicians tell us, that would cause anybody to kill members of another group. Indeed, Christianity is a “religion of peace.” And, although the KKK claimed responsibility for the attack, it’s unclear whether Blarns was really associated with that organization.

Make nothing of the shooting of blacks at an office party last year by a devoted Christian couple. Or that time when Christians knocked down those skyscrapers killing nearly 3,000 people. Or that time a Christian shot up military recruitment facility killing four recruiters. Or that time a Christian soldier killed 13 people and wounded 30 others at an Army base while shouting: “Jesus is the way and the truth and the light!” Or all the abortion clinic bombings and shootings at the hands of Christians. Only to Christophobes do these events suggest pattern and cause. Tolerant and reasonable people know better.

Back to the real world.

We should be thankful that Christians in the United States are not shooting up gay bars and knocking down skyscrapers. At the same time, we should acknowledge what lies behind abortion clinic bombings: religious zealotry. We must recognize that Christian terrorism does exist. But we also must recognize that it pales in comparison to Islamic terrorism.

But I have to wonder: if Christian terrorism were on the scale of Islamic terrorism, would anyone doubt for a moment that progressives would be out in force calling it what it is and rightly condemning it?

Since 1990, there have been eleven fatalities in attacks on abortion clinics or abortion doctors, attacks clearly motivated by the Christian teaching that abortion is murder. Progressives had no problem identifying the problem: Christian zealotry. Muslims Syed Farook and Tashfeed Malik killed fourteen people at an office party last year. Muslim Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay bar this year. Both attacks were motivated by Islamist teachings. Yet we are told to avoid blaming their belief system for these attacks.

When I was out there naming Christian doctrine as a motive in the abortion clinic attacks, nobody complained. Nobody around me was going on about my “Christophobia.” I didn’t once hear that accusation. But when Muslims motivated by Islam six times more people in just the last two years (and since 1990, the toll from Muslim terrorism exceeds 3000 persons—and that’s just in the United States) those who identify a motive are accused of “Islamophobia” for suggesting that an ideology is playing a role in terrorist violence.

These are the same people who believe a New York Businessman taking about restricting immigration from countries with a history of terrorism is “fascism,” but bombing the actual fuck out of Muslim countries in Yemen, Libya, and Syria represents the work of a “successful and scandal-free president.” The same people who claim to stand up for women, homosexuals, and other oppressed groups, but who then wear the symbol of oppressive modesty in solidarity with a totalitarian culture.

I am a person of the left, a socialist who believes in gender and racial equality and who opposes religious oppression. It’s a lonely place to be these days.

I don’t know anybody who was killed in Orlando, but they were fellow Americans, most of them were gay, and they were systematically murdered by a Muslim man professing jihad and allegiance to a terrorist organization that orders itself in a strictly Koranic fashion, which took credit for the massacre. I don’t know any of the people who were killed by Muslims in San Bernardino, either, but they were fellow human beings, and they deserve to have the cause of their deaths honestly identified without the truth-tellers suffering charges of scapegoating and bigotry. And New York City. I count as a personal friend not a single one of the nearly 3,000 persons who died because of Muslim terrorists hijacked plans and flew them into buildings on 9-11. I did not know them. But I know they had friends. Because humans do. And they had family. Children. Dreams unfulfilled.

So you have not been directly affected by a Muslim (that you are aware of). No Muslim ever called you faggot (I have heard this rationalization). But you can no longer be safe because you don’t live in a Muslim country where you would face the death penalty for being gay. Muslim attacks on US soil mean that you can no longer count on a vast ocean to protect you from Islam in action. It’s here now. The barbarians are inside the gates.

I had somebody ask me, “Are you this passionate about the queer people who get killed by white people every day?” White people? How did race get into the conversation? “White Christians have tried to pass over 200 anti-gay/trans laws in my country.” Homophobia is a real problem in the black Christian community, too, pushed by the black Churches. But not just black Christians. Black Muslims push homophobia, as well.  That a discussion concerning the religious oppression of and violence towards homosexuals gets turned to a discussion about race tells us that there is an ideological barrier to having honest and rational discussions about the problem of hateful and divisive ideology. Why say “white Christians”? Why not just say Christians have tried to pass anti-gay/trans laws? And you do know that the majority of Muslims in the United States are white? 

Please tell me about the time a Christian man walked into a gay bar in the United States and killed 49 people while shouting “God is great!” When did Christians for religious reasons hurl gay men from towers on a regular basis in the United States? That hasn’t happened in my life time. The notion that there is a reasonable equivalency at present is strained. I grew up in the South. In the Church of Christ. My atheism was difficult for those around me to process. That made life somewhat uncomfortable. My father and mother’s work in the civil rights struggle did not sit right with the white Christian nationalists at all (and here whiteness is relevant). So we were kicked out of the church. And out of the preacher’s house. Into a rain storm.

The horror of 9-11 is incomparable to those experiences. I would think myself far too important if I believed that my suffering – the childhood trauma of being ejected from the only home I had ever known by a gang of angry Christian men with crewcuts and ax handles – could compare to knowing that one’s escape from death was blocked by the fiery wreckage of a passenger plane flown by men who, as they made their heroic contribution to jihad, shouted, in Islam’s sacred tongue, “God is great!” Your only options to burn to death or jump to your demise. Maybe somebody would hold your hand on the way down.

Christians have bombed abortion clinics and shot doctors and others. It’s true. It’s also true that their motives came from Christian teachings about the “horrors” of abortion. But adding up all the victims of Christianism over the last two decades only gets us one-fifth of the way to the total number slain by Omar Mateen in a single night. In a single gay bar in Orlando. Does Christian homophobia excuse Islamic homophobia? I condemn laws spawned by Judeo-Christian ideology. But we are talking about Islam, an ideology that criminalizes homosexuality and prescribes the death penalty for it. Not in ancient times. Now.

If you are not prepared to identify Islam’s contribution to homophobia among its followers, how will you be able to identify the source of homophobia among Christians who kill gays? This double standard is not merely annoying. It’s deadly. Where is the sense of proportion? The awareness of world and history? Despite the large percentage of Christians in the United States, the country still managed to win gay marriage in all 50 states. I have friends and relatives and colleagues who can get married now – and many of them have! Were the United States governed by sharia, even partly influenced by it, does anybody seriously believe gay marriage could happen? Do readers know the percentage of Muslims in Islamic countries who believe homosexuality is moral? At best 1-2 percent. How about Muslims living in Britain? A scientific poll could not find a single British Muslim who believes homosexuality is moral. Religious belief is something one carries around with him. In contrast, more than half of Christians in the US believe homosexuality is morally acceptable.

Christianity has progressed on this issue. Islam hasn’t. Islam abhors homosexuality. Islamic law recommends death for gays. Islam is the source of homophobia in the Muslim world and Muslim communities across the West. Islamic belief licenses ISIS to throw gay men from towers.

I don’t know any of ISIS’s gay victims. But they’re human beings and I mourn for them. I must tell the truth about what and who murdered them.

Mohammed A. Malik, who attended the same mosque with Omar Mateen, reported him to the FBI. The FBI dropped the ball. Malik met Mateen at a Iftar dinner. He watched Mateen break his Ramadan fast with a protein shake. They became friends.

In 2014, a man from their Mosque, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, became the first American-born suicide bomber, driving a truck full of explosives into a government office in Syria. Abu-Salsa was a happy person, so nobody thought he would be a terrorist. Mateen had the dark outlook, but Malik still didn’t believe he was capable of violence.

Abu-Salsa was a fan of the lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki, the same Yemen-based imam who influenced the Fort Hood shooter. In 2009, Nidal Hasan perpetrated what apologists describe as a case of “work place violence.”

Mateen also watched the video lectures and told Malik that they were “powerful.” This was why Malik turned him in to the FBI.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Malik wants people to know that his community abhors hate. The imam at the mosque where he, Mateen, and Abu-Salsa studied Islam did not preach violence or hatred, he assures his readers.

But there is a deeper question we need to address. What did Mateen and Abu-Salsa learn in that mosque, in their community, in their culture, that provided the context in which the videos of Anwar al-Awlaki were circulated? What is in the environment that made watching them such a powerful experience that two members of community would go on to commit horrific acts of terrorism? Ideas don’t drop out of the sky. Why don’t al-Awlaki’s videos move me? Why do they scare me instead?

German antisemitism created a context in which Nazism could thrive. Without a fertile ground of Christian conservative-nationalist ideology, with its hateful attitudes towards gays and Jews and women, it would not have been possible for Nazism to take hold of so many people. The same is true for white supremacy and Christianity in the United States.

When people grow up in a culture rooted in warped conceptions of justice, morality, sexuality, gender relations, etc., they are more susceptible to extremist outgrowths of the underlying ideology. It is not only easier to groom them for terrorist operations, but they are at a greater risk of “self-radicalizing,” an unfortunate term for a very real phenomenon.

We saw this with Dylann Roof, who shot several people at a black church in South Carolina. The phenomenon is not exclusive to the Muslim world. Extremism and terrorism are not random or happenstance. They are the result of the availability of extremist directions associated with mainstream religious, conservative, and nationalist ideologies in a person’s environment.

We can draw a least two conclusions from Malik’s testimonial, the release of the transcripts from the night of the shooting (finally released unredacted), and the many other facts in this case. First, we can put to bed the question of whether the shooter was motivated by Islamic belief. Omar Mateen’s motive is clear. He was an Islamic soldier in the project to establish a caliphate. The Islamic State has declared war on the West and Malik answered the call. To be sure, Bush and Obama (and Clinton as Secretary of State) helped create the power vacuum that allowed this poisonous ideology to spread (and maybe that is what they wanted), but getting hung up about the past isn’t going to protect women, homosexuals, atheists, and other despised groups today and tomorrow. The West is going to have to take serious steps to defend its security and its ideals and these steps are going to have to reckon with the ideology of Islam.

Second, we can see the importance of advancing the critique of religion generally and of Islam particularly. Extremist notions do not occur without the support of deeper and more fundamental notions of right and wrong. Islam creates and supports profoundly immoral and unjust system of social relations. Islamic law codes and penalties are barbaric. There is nothing in any religion that necessarily provides the basis for an adequate morality.  Religion exists – like white supremacy – to divide the population and provide justifications or short-circuiting universal moral actions. Islam is the religious ideology that is at present causing the most trouble in the world.

It is not just that we can no longer allow a hateful ideology to hide behind religion. We have to understand that this is what religion is: a system that gives people the motive to divide, hate, and oppress. Religious people who act violently are not appealing to religion to cover for actions spawned by some other cause. Religion causes their actions. It is not just violence that makes religious thought a problem. We can get distracted by extremism. It’s the normal character of the religion itself that is most objectionable.