Too Far Left To Be Part of the Left
In 2020 I wrote articles and did a lot of social media promotion for the Bernie Sanders campaign. As I recall it was in July of that year that a group of pro-Biden folks came at me with quite a bit of venom. I can’t remember most of the things they said, the names they were calling me, etc.. There is one point that one of them made that still pops up in my mind every now and again though. The funny thing about what this person said is that they said it without a trace of irony: “You know, you’re too far to the left to be part of the left. It’s people like you that are destroying the left. You’re ‘alt-right adjacent.’” It was the first time I’d heard that term, “alt-right adjacent”. Aside from making my day with their ingenious “too left to be left” crack, and putting aside the fact that the term was just the sort of dreck that people like Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd were spouting at the time, I realized a year or two later that there was some truth in what my attackers were saying about the adjacency between aspects of the MAGA movement and the actual progressive left.
How and Why “Populism” Became a Dirty Word
Another quite funny thing that started happening in the US around 2015 was the concerted effort by the corporate legacy news media to demonize populism. This began in 2015 just before Donald Trump’s political campaign really took off. This was also the same period when Bernie Sanders’ campaign was beginning to gain a serious and quite large following.
The initial fear mongering by the US donor class that centered around the “dangers” of a populist uprising, were an attempt to knock down Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump. If you’ll recall, when Trump first entered the race in the Republican Party primary, the Hillary Clinton team were playfully promoting the idea
of Trump being the Republican candidate. Their thinking at the time was that it would be wonderful if he became the 2016 Republican nominee. If that happened the election would be a cakewalk for the Dems. Or so they thought.
Then, about six months later it became clear that Donald Trump was not only the Republican frontrunner, he also had a massive following of quite dedicated people who wanted to see him go all the way to the White House. This was the point in the US, when the corporate “left” donor class and their media minions began going blitzkrieg in their attempt to associate populism with the most base aspects of human nature.
Bernie, the “socialist” infiltrator and Trump the “fascist” monster, were being spoken of as wing-nuts, as “threats to democracy”. The potential Hitler and/or Stalin of the 21st century. You’re catching the irony here, yes? A Democracy is, by definition, a form of government in which We The People choose the candidates that WE feel are best qualified to carry out OUR mandates. The corporate swamp had been penetrated from both sides and the reptilian corporate Military Industrial Complex donor class guard were slithering out of its propagandist depths in full force.
The Anti-Democratic Political Donor Class
Bernie Sanders was the most popular politician in the US from 2016 to 2020. Trump was popular too, but Bernie was THE man of the people up until the moment the donor class and the DNC put the kibosh on his candidacy in 2020. Politicians like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Ron DeSantis and Mitt Romney are all primarily servants of corporate power. That’s where their money and all of their support springs from.
It’s been clear for quite a while now to just about everyone except for the most indoctrinated among us, that our Democracy has been seriously violated in the 21st century. Hundreds of billions, trillions, of our tax dollars have been taken and used by a contingent of obscenely wealthy corporate globalists to generate and perpetuate wars all over the world. This has been the central aim of those who’ve been promoting a “New World Order” since 1990, when the unipolar era, the era of total US dominance began.
We, the US, have become the undisputed scourge of the earth in the 21st Century. 20th Century America was largely admired as a country by people all over the globe. We’re loathed and feared now, by a majority of the world’s population
They Didn’t Want Sanders, Now They’ve Got Trump
This is where the real progressive left and the MAGA movement meet. On the domestic front, obviously, we have quite a few differences to be worked out among us when it comes to issues like guns, abortion, etc.. That said, our similarities, as human beings who care about our families and our friends, who, despite the corporate media’s promotion of our differences, have WAY more in common than those who’ve been controlling our thinking would have us believe.
We’re done with decades of war for profit. We’re done with being gaslighted by a donor-owned media and a political class that have disconnected themselves (for cash) from the needs of the vast majority of our population. Democracy was blocked in 2016 and 2020. Bernie Sanders was, by far, our most popular politician. But the donor owned political class, people like Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, knew better than us. They knew better than to let real democracy work.
They installed their preferred Democratic Party candidates instead. They inserted candidates that wouldn’t challenge the neocon governing model, of perpetual war and corporate control of our institutions. Well, they got their way twice. But not this time. In 2024, democracy functioned. They didn’t want Sanders. Ok, well, now they’ve got Trump and a republican senate and congress.
We, all of us, need to be vigilant from now on. So far the 21st century has been a blood-soaked, greed-laden corporately controlled fiasco. It’s time to start learning to work together. Yes, we have differences. Yes, it will be a challenge. But we have to keep moving with and not against the real democratic process. We must keep challenging our leaders and reminding them that they work for us and not the other way around.