Playing the Field

Anthony DiMaggio, in his recent polemic on Counterpunch, Rise of the Right: How the Vaudeville Left Fuels White Supremacy, asserts that
there is a heavily corporatized, nominally left segment of the punditrywho are mainstreaming and popularizing Republican talking pointsmainstream[ing] the idea of a left-right political alliance in the U.S populariz[ing] noxious reactionary propaganda and normalizing rightwing views, bigotry, and neofascistic politics. These are not individuals that any thoughtful leftist whether one who advocates for liberal reform, progressive transformation, or socialism should entertain.
DiMaggios vaudeville lineup includes Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, Caitlin Johnstone, and Krystal Ball, among others. (Ill call them the Left-Fielders, because it will economize words, and I like cute analogies, too, and theyre way out there.) According to DiMaggio all these players have, for all intents and purposes, thrown their lot in with the neofascistic Trumpian movement. They have “driven Democratic voters toward the Republican Party,” they “send Democratic voters to the right in general elections,” and they are, DiMaggio constantly asserts, normalizing white supremacy and the rights neofascistic politics.
Whew! Hell of an indictment.
I reject it. I reject the idea that any thoughtful leftist and socialist (as I consider myself) should accept the charge that these pundits are responsible for normalizing the neofascistic Trumpian movement. Frankly, I think its ridiculous, and cant survive any fair-minded perusal of the entirety of their work.
(I also guess that within DiMaggios framework, I would beand would be content to beconsidered among the others.)
I also know that DiMaggios piece represents the thinking around which another nominally left segment of punditry has coalesced. (Lets call them the Shortstops, because theyre out to prevent anyone from getting to a forbidden base, and Im stuck with the stupid baseball analogy.) There are quite a few who have dug in their heels on it, and who will never be able to see or hear these Left-Fielder commentators as I do. I also know there are a lot more who are unsure of what exactly is going on here. I just urge everyone of those will give everyone a fair hearing and decide who is presenting the more cogent case.
I am not going to go into specifically defending all of the accused against all of the charges in DiMaggios indictment. Though I accept grouping them together for the purposes of this argument, they are different political actors, with whom I have different levels of agreement on specific issues. But I will comment on some of the key elements that underlie the discourse of DiMaggio and the Shortstops that I think are important to notice.
One element that I find novel to DiMaggio is the charge that these people are a heavily corporatized segment of the punditry. Really? Every one of these folks either never was part of, or they left, a corporatized media organization. They all seem to make money, as some of them did quite handsomely in the corporate media environments they took the risk of leaving. But that does not make them corporatized.
They are, it seems to me, the epitome of self-produced, independent media journalistsindependent precisely of corporate media conglomerates. Their ability to make money to sustain their work outside of corporate institutions is what gives them the strength to challenge those institutions influence.
Its also what has the corporate media (which now finds these quite successful journalists to be competitors), as well as the U.S. government (which finds them dangerous underminers of trust), pissed off at them and engaging in a furious effort to destroy their ability to act independently, via censorship and demonetization.
Jonathan Cook catches whats going on quite sharply, in his excellent post on the plight of Craig Murray, who, all American leftists should notice and protest, has just gone to prison in Scotland for his independent journalism:
When social media took off, one of the gains trumpeted even by the corporate media was the emergence of a new kind of citizen journalist. At that stage, corporate media believed that these citizen journalists would become cheap fodder, providing on-the-ground, local stories they alone would have access to and that only the establishment media would be in a position to monetise.
The establishments attitude to citizen journalists…only changed when these new journalists started to prove hard to control, and their work often highlighted inadvertently or otherwise the inadequacies, deceptions and double standards of the corporate media.
I find the corporatized charge so blatantly false that I cant understand why its there, except as a hollow rhetorical gesture to signal that the author wants you to perceive his discourse as coming from the left.
Whatever anyones motivation, the most important thing in this regardand I would like to know DiMaggios and the Shortstops position(s) about itis that any thoughtful leftist should avoid endorsing the program of eliminating independent journalism that Jonathan Cook describes above, and that is amplified in a particularly nasty way by this noted warrior of the anti-Trumpian-fascism Resistance:
But lets consider the charges that DiMaggio makes about things Left-Fielders have actually said or done.
DiMaggio seems to think its a damning charge against the Left-Fielders that some of them call (posture about) the Democratic Party authoritarian.
Well, it is, and I dont see how any thoughtful person can deny it.
Its a party with an anti-democratic structure that gives extra votes to party officials and super-delegates and cheats and manipulates elections.  Its a party whose previous president inaugurated the unprecedented use of the Espionage Act against journalists and whose current president has just imprisoned Daniel Hale, and is seeking to put Julian Assange in prison for 175 yearsa deadly dangerous attack on freedom of speech and the press.
Its a party that spent the last five years endorsing the most authoritarian elements of the U.S. capitalist statethe national security and intelligence agencies and the military, and whose current president is now siccing those agencies on domestic violent extremistsdefined as those who oppose capitalism, corporate globalization or perceived exploitation or destruction of natural resources and the environment and might try to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercionlike, you know, strikes and mass demonstrations.
And it is a party, both out of and in government, that colludes with, threatens, and directs the Silicon Valley oligarchs about what and whom they should exclude from the social mediain fact, the public forathey control.
Yes, its authoritarian. Referring to other authoritarian actors, or trying to pooh-pooh the importance of that, will not make the obvious go away. Not-so-thoughtful leftists may approve of this authoritarianism, because they think it is being used against white supremacists and Trumpian neo-fascists, but it is disingenuous, to say the least, to deny its there. I dont see why any leftist, whose purpose is not to whitewash the Democratic Party of what they know is a taint, would argue about it.
Nor do I understand why DiMaggio, or any political analyst, would think leftists should be all aghast at Left-Fielders talking about a deep state. Under one name or another”permanent government, bureaucracy, etc.the concept of a deep state has been a standard part of political theory sincewell, forever. Its positively banal, and straw-manning locutions like conspiratorial rhetoric and threatening and ominous just make the speaker sound desperate. The recent use of the specific term deep state traces back, I believe, to a rather thoughtful essay promoted and discussed by Bill Moyers, who must have been normalizing Trumpian neo-fascism and white supremacy in 2014.
Again, why would any leftist, who was not trying to deny or hide the concept in order to protect the permanent imperialist regime from scrutiny, or who wasnt utterly bewitched by the sound of it coming from one fools head, denounce anyone for using it?
But lets go to the big one, which leads to the big thing: Left-Fielders go on Fox! Shocked, shocked! Guilty as charged. Hang em high! Who can deny that talking to Tucker Carlson is the normalization of white supremacist television?
Well, gee, who can deny that talking to Wolf Blitzer is the normalization of Zionisti.e., Jewish supremacisttelevision? And who can deny that talking to Nicole Wallace is the normalization of imperialist television? Indeed, who can deny that talking to anyone on CNN or MSNBC is normalization of CIA television?
Really, Wolf Blitzer was the spokesman for what white nationalist, white Zionist Richard Spencer calls “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, andone that I turn to for guidance.” Niclole Wallace was the Communications Director for the war criminal George W. Bush. CNN and MSNBC proudly pay the likes of James Clappermanager of the mass surveillance program he protected by lying to Congressand John Brennanhigh priest of the drone assassination program who shepherded actual fascists into power in Ukraine. Which of them, from a thoughtful leftist point of view, has done less harm than Tucker Carlson?
Unless racism and colonialism targeting Palestinians dont count, unless imperialism and the mass killing of Afghanis, Iraqis, Libyans, and Syrians dont count, unless enabling Hitler-loving fascists in Europe doesnt count, the answer to that question is: None.
There is no leftist logic that supports denouncing anyone for talking to Carlson on Fox and not denouncing them for talking to any one of those other media personalities on any of their networks. Anyone who denounces one and not the other on the claimed leftist principles of anti-fascism and anti-racism is hiding somethingfrom you, and maybe from themselves.
Why, then, do we not see such denunciations from DiMaggio and the Shortstops?
Well, first of all, it would be politically ridiculous to insist that no leftist ever talk to any host on any network that was implicated in promoting racism, imperialism, or other things that the Shortstops think fit the bill as reactionary attitudes. Because its not about the host or the network, its about the audience. If you forgo talking to reactionary hosts, you avoid talking to wide swaths of the American people. The logic of the Shortstops position is that leftists must take a vow of silence, which signals their virtue but also prevents them, politically, from getting to first base. Its a way of making politics impossible. Take me out of the ballgame.
The Shortstops know this, but avoid a much as possible acknowledging it in their discourse. They will just refrain from attacking Glenn Greenwald for talking to Rachel Maddow (in the alternate universe where she invites him again), while continuing to selectively anathematize and castigate based on some implicit principle.
Its worth remarking on DiMaggios claim that:
theres no evidence thats been presented that any of the efforts to cultivate a left-right alliance have attracted a single Republican or Trump voter to the progressive-Democratic-Sanders left by drawing 2016 Trump voters (or Trump supporters in general) to Bernie Sanderss 2020 primary campaign.
First of all, I reject DiMaggios straw-man framing about some alleged campaign by Left-Fielders to cultivate a left-right alliance. Is that something like Joe Bidens reaching across the aisle, which actually empowers reactionary politicians and guarantees regressive policies? Or is it just a silly way to make talking to ordinary people with reactionary attitudes seem like organizing the Nuremberg rally?
And I dont know about a single voter in an election, but I do know that,
if your operating principle is that it is impossible to change the minds of people with reactionary attitudes, your operating principle is, again, that doing politics is impossiblevia Fox or MSNBC, both of whose audiences need a lot of mind-changing.
And I do know that Bernies appearance on a Fox town-hall did have a positive effect on public attitudes toward single-payer health insurance, and I do know that Tucker Carlson, in front of the largest audience in cable news, changed his mind to support Julian Assange because of his conversations with Jimmy Dore.
But these are effects on policies, not votes, so they dont count for DiMaggio.
I think it is more important to change minds about the Assange case or Medicare-for-all than to send votes to Democrats. For DiMaggio, not so much. At the core, DIMaggios principle of selection for which media appearances to denounce is nothing more thoughtful than Democrat vs. Republican/Trump. The implicit message: Its OK to talk to Democratic-allied racist and imperialist media and their audience; its verboten to talk to Republican/Trump-allied media and their audience.
DiMaggios Shortstop discourse is insistently about normalizing Trumpian neo-fascism and white supremacy and Republican talking points.
Youre not criticizing Trump/the Republicans enough, so youre normalizing fascism! On the other hand, implicit, but unmistakable: You can never be normalizing fascism by not criticizing the Democrats enough.
This points to the political analysis that separates the Shortstops from the Left-Fielders. DiMaggio and the Shortstops think that Trumpsometimes personally, sometimes as a synecdoche for the Republicansis a unique and powerful fascist threat and that the Democratic Party is a bulwark against it.
Thus, the overriding concern for what has “driven Democratic voters toward the Republican Party” and what “send[s] Democratic voters to the right [or keeps them at home!]in general elections.” Its a generalized, hyped-up version of the same argument, about the same topic, we see every four years: the election, and how we get votes for the Democrats.
DiMaggio thinks that the Left-Fielders are responsible for sending voters away from the Democratsnot the policies of Obama (the decimation of Black family wealth), Biden (mass incarceration), and the ruling-class-purchased Clintonite Democrats. And he thinks that it’s the Left-Field pundits, and not the chaotic, restrictive, anti-democratic, designed-to-enable-fraud American electoral system, that “undermine[s] public confidence in elections.”
Riiiiight. Talk to the black people who stayed home or, even cast a protest vote for Trump, in 2016 and 2020. And think about why Trump gained votes from Black & men (+6) and women (+5), Latino men (+4). and white women (+3)but not white men, who shifted toward Biden (+7). Must have been Caitlin Johnstones normalization of white supremacy.
DiMaggio and the Shortstops know this very well. At the end of this vaudeville article, he comes around to saying: any left worthy of the name should be mobilizing and empowering disillusioned and disadvantaged demographic groups that have been left behind in the neoliberal era by two political parties that increasingly represent plutocratic, elite business interests.
Unfortunately, this comes across as another throwaway line to establish leftist bona fides. He doesnt seem to notice how it clashes with the bulk of the essay, which is devoted to deriding people who are doing just what he urged. Hes correctly characterizing the lay of the land, but when he gets to work, he cant see the forest for the Trump.
He did the same thing in a previous essay that nicely deconstructs the misleading notions of working class support for Trump. He urged Bernie Sanders to start by talking to people in the rustbelt and elsewhere that the Democratic Party has spent the last few decades demobilizing via its plutocratic policies, which resulted in millions of former supporters flocking from the party and migrating toward non-voting. At the same time, he ridiculed Bernie for saying: Weve got to take it to themI intend as soon as I have three minutes, to start going into Trumpworld and start talking to people.
So, weve got to talk to people left behind by the two neoliberal, plutocratic political partiesbut not those people who voted for Trump, not in the media they watch, not by criticizing the inherently-better one of those parties too much, and not by talking about the structures of the deep state that determines their common purpose. Got it.
Theres another, most fundamental, attitude semi-hidden in all this discourseand it has everything to do with class politics and the nominally left. Its not just about whom leftists are permitted to talk to in the media; its about whom they are permitted to consort with in the audience. DiMaggio comes close to saying it: Not only the pundits, not only the hosts, but the audience itself is irretrievably damned, if its not sufficiently upset about Trump. Maybe even voted for him. Seventy million+ did. Cant talk to them.
There is one concept, dominant in the U.S., that understands left politics as built upon using a checklist of progressive socio-political attitudesmost of which have no material effect on peoples lives, let alone on the structures of socio-economic poweras a prior condition of solidarity with working-class people. For this concept, agreement precedes solidarity. Before you work with, or even talk to, working-class people with “reactionary socio-political attitudes,” you have to set them straight, and they better listen.
Theres another conceptthe core of historical socialist movements throughout the worldthat understands left politics as built upon support of the multi-racial, multi-gendered working-class based on material interest, no matter what ideas they have in their heads. For this materialist concept of class struggle, agreement results from solidarity. You get popular support and build a revolutionary movement by respectfully defending and fighting for the peoples material interests, not by looking for people who have the same ideas as you and attacking those who dont. Solidarity in the fight for material and social empowerment will make new forms of agreement possible.
Or it wont. Of course, if there are too many people too adamant in their reactionary attitudes, the working class will loseas it has been doing. But, guaranteed, the necessary changes in attitudes will not come as a result of placing hectoring before solidarity. This is bedrock socialism: you work withand I mean withthe working class that exists.
DiMaggio and the Shortstops may make gestures to the second concept, but their operational engine is the first. For them, anyone whos evinced the slightest wavering on correct attitudes toward a bunch of things on the woke checklistbut mainly now Trump, Trump, or Trumpis an enemy whose sins you must not normalize by talking to them. They are all irredeemable white supremacists and anyone talking to them is just normalizing that. That seems to include the entire audience of Fox, and all who voted for Trump.
But not the audience of MSNBC or those who voted for Biden? After all, according to DiMaggio, 27 percent of Democrats are white supremacists. Or the functional equivalent. Or fit the bill. Or something.
So you have to write off not only the seventy-four million Trump voters but also twenty-million or so Biden voters. Almost 100 mil. Playing that game is not the thoughtful leftist way to make a revolution; its a foolish way of making politics impossible. Unless the point of your politics is just to get votes for the Democrats.
As far as Im concerned, based on my thoughtful analysis of the American polity, there is no reason for leftists to be any more reluctant to talk to a working-class Trump voter than a working-class Biden voterabout policies. For me, neither has any more reason than the other to be peremptorily excluded from conversation because of the foolish electoral choice I think s/he made.
Despite DiMaggios repeated concern about this, whether votes are sent to the Democrat or Republican is not the main issue. Neither candidate and neither party has any claim, by any leftist metric, to be substantially better than the other. The Democratic Party is not an essentially more progressive institution than the Republican; its job is to be, and it is, the most effective obstacle to any serious progressive reform. The current Democratic president is a proudly reactionary politician who has done more damage during his career to the multi-racial working-class, to black people in particular, and to millions of people throughout the world than his predecessor has or is likely to. By any leftist metric. By far.
I presume DiMaggio and the Shortstops disagree with that (though they may not want to try making that case too loudly), because if you read his piece with that in mind, you see that its all about Trump vs. the Democrats and who votes for which.
In his previous essay, DiMaggio correctly skewers The narrative that the Republican Party is the true representative of your average joe and jane. But he then suggests that the Left-Fielders believe and promote that narrative. Thats a patently false proposition, which he, with intentional or careless illogic, derives from their (or at least some of theirs) strong stance that the Democratic Party is no more the representative of the working people than the Republican, and that leftists shouldreally muststop thinking it is.
None of those left pundits believes that the Republican Party is the true representative of your average joe and jane; they address why so many average joes and janes could believe it is. What are the material and social and ideological conditions that make such a ridiculous and dangerous paradigm possible?
The answer is not because of anything those pundits say, but because of all the devastating policies, delivered with all the smug attitudes, by Democratic presidents and politicians, andtheir allied media. Those politicians, policies, media, and attitudes are the conditions of possibility for absurd American billionaire populism; they are what the Left-Field pundits are targeting, to the vehement dismay and disapproval of DiMaggio and the Shortstops.
They are right to do so, and they are being effective, which is why there is such vehement opposition. Glenn Greenwald is a persuasive voice on the Democrats dangerous dance with authoritarian censorship, Matt Taibbi is a trenchant voice on media smugness and hypocrisy. And Jimmy Dore opened and exposed the progressive can of worms with his Force The Vote campaign, which refused to back off, for the sake of Democratic Party amity, from asking congressional nominal leftists to do what was eminently possible and what they had promised. People on the left are persuaded by them, which is why the Shortstops are so insistent that you not listen to them, and why field managers like Keith Olbermann want to shut them down entirely.
The Left-Fielders are punching at the libs to expose the conditions that make reactionary populism possible, while DiMaggio and the Shortstops are  punching at those pundits, in order to deflect attention from those conditions and defend the Democratic Party.
In the current US politico-ideological climate, what other voices, besides the Left-Fielders DiMaggio ridicules, are doing a better job of exposing those conditions and of, precisely, speaking to and for groups left behind by two plutocratic political parties? DiMaggio and the Shortstops want us to reject those voices, and listen instead to….? (Besides Neil Postman.)
Watch this clip of Bernie Sanders fumbling around under Krystal Balls questioning about why he wont challenge Biden:
If elections are what youre interested in, you have just watched the capture of Congress by those nasty Republicans next year and the victory of the next fake-populist Republican president in 2024probably not Donald Trump, and maybe not a Republican, or even white. (Theres a new mayor of New York Id like you to meet.) Krystal Balls (not very harsh) questions are not responsible for that; Bernie Sanderss (non-) answers, and the refusal to implement social policies that would benefit the majority of people those (non-) answers represent, are.
If you are interested in the nature of the American polity, you have just watched a lesson in the unified mission of the two see-saw parties to make sure that nothing fundamentally changes in the U.S. capitalist-imperialist system, and the submission of the most progressive politician weve seen in decades to itvia his submission to the Democratic Party.
And the Democratic Party will graciously hand over power to the Republicans because that is their job: to get progressives to go along with fundamentally changing nothing, while blockingthe necessary changes and taking their turn going down on the see-saw. Until they conjure up the next fascist ogre. Rinse and repeat.
It is not Krystal Balls exposure of this pathetic game that deserves vehement denunciation; its the game and the players exposed.
Krystal Ball has no leftist reason to shrink from interrogating Bernie Sanders, and there is no leftist reason to attack her, or any leftist pundit, for doing so. Because white supremacy?
DiMaggios and the Shortstops shallow, fear-mongering instrumentalization of terms like white supremacy and fascism as synonyms for Trumptheir omnipotent villainexplains nothing. They function as scare terms, directed to leftists, who already reject the Republicans, to push them away from thoroughly understanding the deeply pernicious role of the Democratic Party in creating the very problems that those terms seek to analyze.
Im concerned that we are seeing the unfolding of that nasty, often-forewarned, political reverse psychology: Anti-fascism becomes the banner under which the most effective enablers of fascism in the world (Ukraine, Latin America) do their work; anti-racism becomes the banner under which the policies most harmful to black people (for-profit healthcare, student-loan debt, marijuana drug war, wage-slave minimum wage) are maintained and extended, et al. But Caitlin Johnstone.
Because if you want to identify the villain, you cant hide half of its face: Its not Trump, its Trump vs. Biden (and Trump vs. Clinton) that captures the true image of the ugly mug of neoliberal, plutocratic and imperialist American politicsneofascism, white-ethno-religious supremacism and all.
I may be way out in left field, but I can see whos trying to get around me and ends up playing center.read more