freedom and reason

I oppose war and other forms of belligerence (such as the use of assassination, drones, and no-fly zones). I oppose the unsustainable levels of current military funding and the development of new weapons system, especially small-scale nuclear weapons. I oppose the global arms trade and proxy warfare. I oppose logistical and material support for monarchies and dictatorships. I oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. I oppose government surveillance and the suppression of free speech and dissent and the persecution of whistleblowers. I oppose aggressive policing, the drug war, police militarization, and mass incarceration. I reject the glorification of the military and police. I condemn the failure of governments to adequately protect and defend civil rights and liberties. I oppose corporate control over our regulatory agencies and special legal protection for corporations. I oppose government collusion with the financial sector to increase consumer debt and prey on vulnerable populations. I oppose trade agreements that hurt workers and the environment. I oppose fracking, offshore drilling, and other destructive extractive energy practices. I oppose the health insurance industry and private control of medical services. I oppose devolution of public functions–the government, military, schools, corrections, and policing.

Given these opinions (and I hope that you stand with me on most or all of these issues), it would be contradictory for me to support the nominee of the Democratic Party Hillary Clinton. As is Barack Obama (who I opposed in 2008 and 2012), Clinton has been on the opposite side of all these issues. Clinton is a hawk, eager to use the military to shape the world in the direction her corporate backers desire (Hillary the Hawk). The ideology that guides her foreign policy is neoconservatism and she is garnering the support of the same right-wing policymakers who designed George W. Bush’s foreign policy (Robert Kagan and Other Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton). Clinton voted to authorize Bush’s use of force in Iraq and as Secretary of State led the Obama administration in the use of force, for example in Libya (Clinton defends her Iraq War vote; The Libya Gamble: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Push for War & the Making of a Failed State). She is a dedicated and uncritical supporter of Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza (Where does Hillary Clinton stand on Israel?). As Secretary of State she organized arms deals with Saudi Arabia and other belligerent nations and subnational groups (Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors). And her stance towards Iran has been belligerent, portending war if elected (Clinton says U.S. could “totally obliterate” Iran).

Clinton is a vocal supporter of security walls and fences and increased and more aggressive border patrol (Hillary: I Voted for Border Fence to Keep Out Illegal Immigrants). The rise in immigration at our souther border is in large measure attributable to the support of Clinton for right-wing regimes in Central America, for example in Honduras, where she supported the coup that overthrew a democratically-elected government (Hillary Clinton’s dodgy answers on Honduras coup). Clinton has been a steadfast supporter of government surveillance and suppression of dissent and persecution of whistleblowers (Hillary’s Evasive Views on the NSA). Her record in support of aggressive policing, the drug war, and mass incarceration is longstanding. She has characterized black youth as “super predators” who need “to be brought to heel” (Why Hillary’s Super-Predator Comment Matters). She has also been a longtime supporter of welfare reform, which is code for the dismantling of major support structures for poor families (Why it Matters that Hillary Clinton Championed Welfare Reform). Her defense of civil rights and liberties is far from robust–at points condescending and even contemptuous (Hillary Clinton Talks With BlackLives Matter; Black Lives Matter Activist Interrupts Hillary Clinton “I am NOT a Superpredator.”)–and has only emerged in light of Sander’s campaign and protests of her campaign events by Black Lives Matter activists. There is nothing in her history that suggests that her lip service to Black Lives Matter will inform her presidency.

Clinton’s devotion to corporate control over regulatory agencies and financial policies is notorious. She is Wall Street’s candidate (Hillary Clinton is Wall Street’s preferred candidate). She was an enthusiastic advocate for NAFTA (Hillary Clinton on NAFTA) and for other trade deals (Hillary Clinton Emails: Secret Negotiations With New York Times, Trade Bill Lobbying Revealed In Latest State Department Release), and while taking a position against TPP in the primary, if she does not change her position during the general election, her support for the trade deal as president is considered to be all but guaranteed (Will Hillary Clinton Flip-Flop Again on TPP After Election Day?). She is an advocate of fracking and other extractive energy industries, believing that these practices can be environmentally-sound (How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World).

She is a defender of the Affordable Care Act, which is an insurance industry scheme to advance the privatization of the health care system (Why Hillary Clinton and Obamacare Will Not Solve the Health Care Crisis). During her tenure as First Lady, she designed a health care scheme of managed competition. Her past and present positions reflect her opposition to single payer universal health care system. Her New Democrat philosophy is represented in the political figures she surrounds herself with, politicians and policymakers who have been aggressively pushing for and have secured significant and growing privatization of the education system (Hillary’s Family Ties to School Privatizers).

Her recent change of mind on gay marriage (she steadfastly opposed it until it was clear to most that it was going to happen) (Hillary Clinton’s Gay-Marriage Problem), her support for reproductive freedom (which is uncertain given her promise to Republicans to support a constitutional solution to late-term abortions if they would compromise the life of the mother–Hillary Clinton: I Could Compromise on Abortion If It Included Exceptions For Mother’s Health), her status as a woman (Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, was a woman, etc.), and the presence of a clown (and Clinton associate) heading the ticket for the other political party are not things that negate a principled opposition to Hillary Clinton the politician. A Clinton presidency means more war, more inequality, more privatization, and more surveillance.

As a life-long socialist, I have never been a member of the Democratic Party or any other bourgeois party. I never donated any money to any Democratic candidate at any level. However I have voted for Democrats in the past. John Kerry was the last Democrat who got my vote for president. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2008 (and regret not voting for him in 2000 and 2004). I voted for Jill Stein in 2012. In casting votes for Democrats I had to tell myself things to negotiate action that compromised principle and truth. Things like: A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. And: A presidential election is just one vote every four years; it’s what you do in the meantime that changes things.

What lay beneath these rationalizations was fear of Republicans. Democrats were the lesser of two evils. This irrational way of thinking was rooted in early socialization, functioning a lot like deep religious sentiment. Indeed, the two-party system functions like a theological system, a cosmology with good and evil, goods guys and bad guys, ready saints and persistent devils. Thankfully, although not immune from the tactics, my socialism – and atheism – kept me from being a member of the congregation.

There was a time before 2008 that I couldn’t bring myself to compromise my values in this way. My double consciousness gave way to principle. In 1996, after the Clintons – and make no mistake, they are a team – pushed through a draconian crime bill, ended the major public support program for children living in poverty, and secured NAFTA, I boycotted the election. Maybe I didn’t think Bob Dole was scary enough. But then I returned to my pattern and voted for Gore and Kerry. George W. Bush was plenty scary.

What became clear to me in 2007-2008, as the United States was sinking into the deepest recession since the Great Depression era, is that it was the neoliberal direction of the Democrats that was a principle cause of the economic crisis and that, moreover, these policies were creating the context for the rise of neofascism in the United States. The policies of both parties had also created a radical backlash, and anti war and anti corporate movements proliferated. So there was promise. But not with Democrats. Obama was an elite project to repackage corporate rule and American empire, a handsome multicultural face to absorb radical energy on the left and neutralize it with identity politics.

Rather than taking the crisis created by his predecessors as an opportunity to launch a new New Deal and to ratchet down the global war on Third World populations, Obama did what I predicted he would do: he used the situation to further entrench corporate power and expand imperialism. His actions advanced the circumstances that constituted part of the proximate cause of the rise of the Tea Party that led to the candidacy of Donald Trump. And Trump is not the worst of the worst. He’s no Ted Cruz.

Much like Obama, Sanders channeled the returning and growing discontents on the left. This is why I said from the beginning that I was not supporting him for president. I always suspected he would function as a Judas goat. And, in any case, the Democratic Party is a deadend. I pushed his candidacy in the primaries hoping to take away some votes from Clinton, to use the conversation as means of exposing the truly vile character of the Clintons. Those of us who were suspicious have been vindicated.

I have (hopefully finally) purged my consciousness of the irrational and self-defeating habit of voting out of fear of Republicans. This will be the third presidential election cycle that I won’t be lending my consent to corporate rule and imperialism. I won’t be voting for a warmonger. I won’t be voting for a racist. I won’t be voting for a lying and corrupt politician. I won’t be voting for an agent of Wall Street.

I will be casting my vote alongside millions of principled and forward looking Americans for Jill Stein. I’m with her. It’s a step in a new direction, the path out of the neoliberal state and towards democratic socialism. She may not win, but no struggle is advanced by supporting the status quo. Change is made by acting on principle and an adequate theory of the world. It is made when peoples abandon their self-defeating habits. It must begin somewhere. I urge you, do not give into fear manufactured by the corporate war party. Do be tricked by illusions. Withdraw consent from the corporate two-party system for a better future.

It would be nice not to have to say this, but so many people believe it, I feel the need to say it: Hell is a mythical place those who designed Christianity and Islam created to coerce people through fear into believing in their god and his alleged earthly manifestation Jesus or his messenger Muhammad.

There is no horrible place full of torture and misery waiting for you after you die for refusing to believe such a ridiculous and hateful thing. Hell is a human invention (just as god is). It is, moreover, the invention of sadistic and manipulative minds carried forward by ignorant and irrational thinking.

That people would feel compelled to teach their children this terrifying myth testifies to the irrationality ubiquitous in Christianity and Islam. I am so lucky to have had somebody in my life who had the good sense and common decency to catch me at a young age and free me from a terror that my immature mind might has assimilated into its core before I was cognitively able to see the ridiculousness of such a notion.

Why smart people believe nonsense is the consequence of letting adults, themselves victims of mythology, inject things into developing brains.

Another of the objectionable features of Christianity and Islam, and this is tied to the previous objection, is the way belief in these myths dispossess people of common moral sense. No proper guardian with the extensive control over his domain claimed by the followers of this god (the latter is a plagiarism of the former) would punish forever those he says he loves for refusing to accept that which his followers not only have neither evidence nor reason to believe, but which contradicts everything a thinking person could know about the universe she actually lives in.

To think such a terrible thing—to love an abusive father, to revere a psychopath—expresses damage to one’s capacity to love. Is it any wonder that so many Christians and Muslims are so incredibly hateful and judgmental of those who not only don’t believe their hogwash but—and this one falls especially on Christians—believers who fall short of the glory of which they claim everybody falls short?

When a person is told to believe something on faith, that person is being told to put aside their critical faculties and believe in the unbelievable. It sets people up to accept all manner of absurdities on faith. Faith teaches that there exists beyond this world something more important than this world, that something exists beyond humanity that is more important than human beings.

Faith-belief prepares the ground for perpetrating and tolerating all manner of terrible things, from shaming and stifling young and impressionable minds to burning bodies at the stake to free their souls. Asking that we accept the promise of a life that extends beyond the one we have is an invitation to limit our lives by fear and unreason. That a perfect being who says he loves us would test us in the flesh before judging whether we should enjoy eternal life. What a truly immoral notion.

Some think I should be happy that I escaped it and leave it there. That’s like leaving people to drown when you know how to swim.

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.