The White Frost

No, 2016 isn't when Winter came. It's when the Orangetroopers finally smashed in the last flimsy media windows of the remnants of the American middle class, exposing them to the Ice Age the rest of us have been living in since 1975.

Now the cold and frost are seeping in, the electricity is flickering out, the pipes are starting to freeze. And where are the self-proclaimed American Leftists older than the age of 40? (I'm in my late forties myself, so I take this particular betrayal personally.)

Almost all of them are too busy trashing Hillary Clinton the way the KPD trashed the SPD in 1933, or else cheerleading the bombing of Syrian kids by Assadist war criminals, or else repeating Putinist lies about how Ukraine's genuinely popular, overwhelmingly peaceful and genuinely progressive democratic revolution was actually a CIA coup, or heaping abuse on America's finest citizen journalists whenever these latter dare to write carefully-researched, fact-checked, insightful and well-written journalistic exposes of the Despot.

Some future game designer will create an anti-neoliberal interactive open world called Escape from Plutonia, where one of the non-character players will spout lines like, "Yes, forwards, comrades, let us conquer the leading heights of the Facebook with the same failed strategies which brought ninety years of failure and worship the good overseas plutofascisms we know nothing about, as opposed to the domestic plutofascism we can't be bothered to resist!"

The disease afflicting these self-proclaimed Leftists is far more pernicious than the phenomenon of digital fake news, which is as old as the internet. It is the disease of imperialism. They think that because they denounce the occasional US war crime, this gives them the right to spout knowledgeably about 45 million Ukrainians whose language, culture and history they don't need to know -- because empire. They can proceed to proclaim final judgement on the countless other languages, cultures and struggles of the 85% of the planet who live in the industrializing world -- because empire. And if there's anything they don't know, they will interview the one and only native informant in the university system (the same university system which the Despot will now destroy, by the way) who will confirm what they already knew -- because empire.

You might think critiquing a few fringe Leftists is a waste of time. Not so. It's important to understand they are just one instance of the larger dysfunction of the American Left, from the smallest blogger to the likes of Thom Hartmann and Chris Hedges, formerly decent souls who now take money from Putinism's loathsome and despicable propaganda channel.

We have to be honest: there is no Left anymore in the United States. It will have to be created from anew, out of the tools, institutions and practices of the digital commons, and in dialogue with the resistances being born in the industrializing world.