Things Fall Apart – By Rob Urie (Counterpunch) / May 5, 2023
The US is currently on the precipice of WWIII, Americans are dying from preventable diseases at far higher rates than the citizens of nations with functioning governments, the Biden administration is ‘fighting racism’ by racially targeting Black Socialists for arrest, large banks are once again being bailed out, nearly all of the hysterical charges leveled against the American right in recent years have been disproved, the Biden administration is doing its best to bury dissent with propaganda and censorship, and the politicians in line to assume political control are the most corrupt, least capable, people in the country. The US is in a bad way.
The current press practice of channeling ‘left’ and ‘right’ news to their respective audiences has its basis in a struggle for power. With the establishment press acting as government propagandists to the urban bourgeois while the right-wing excludes the power of capital from its explanations of government dysfunction, Americans are left talking past one another. There is no shared basis for discourse, and therefore for resolution of differences. In fact, this ‘aesthetic’ politics, based in sentiment tied to Federal policies that lift the fortunes of some groups while crushing the fortunes of others, misrepresents factual (material) political differences as a matter of personal taste.
The historical basis of left analysis in class politics has been flipped on its head, with the liberal-left channeling Jonah Hill’s character in the movie Don’t Look Up when he prattles on about the ‘cool rich.’ The joke was directed at Donald Trump’s followers, if not his donors. But it fits the establishment left even better. The CIA, FBI, NSA, MIC (Military Industrial Complex), and large corporations now represent the institutional base of this new-new-left. These used to be the base of the old political right. So, the choices are to imagine that these institutions are now forces for good, or that the CIA has finally realized its long-held dream of manufacturing an ‘anti-communist left.’ My vote is for the latter explanation.
CONTINUE > https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/05/things-fall-apart-3/
