Editor’s Note: We’ve been trying for a long time to get articles on the current elections and there aftermath that are not just praises of Bernie Sanders (not because we disagree with those, or agree, but because we are a not for profit magazine prohibited by the IRS from being in support of any candidate or political party. So below we finally got one such article, which we print without endorsement in any way of its thesis.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
4 July, 2016
Political Revolution and Self-Deceit
A large segment of the American Left seems to remain trapped within the compulsions of rote ideology. Despite all the blazing brilliance of the minds of American leftists, (we could hardly have a higher degree of raw human intelligence at our disposal), our collective mind cannot properly apply itself, in a self-aware manner, to the nuances of our predicament.
Self-aware strategic thought and behavior remain beyond our capacity. We cannot ‘act’. We can only ‘react’.
We lack the self-awareness to understand that it is our reactionary mindset itself that makes us entirely predictable, and therefore easily manipulated, by our brilliantly clever and immensely powerful Enemy. Our Enemy knows that if he does ‘A’, we will very predictably, and reliably, do ‘B’.
In “What Comes After the Sanders Campaign?”, published on Portside on July 1, ( http://portside.org/2016-07-01/what-comes-after-sanders-campaign-three-views ), three eminent and distinguished American leftists tell us that it is imperative, above all else, that we keep on reacting in this same rote and predictable way. These eminent and distinguished leftists clearly do not realize that what they are suggesting is that we should keep dancing, like puppets, on the ends of the very strings that our Enemy holds in his own hands.
Pick your Poison
The two candidates that comprise our current dilemma in the political arena are both odious to a decent respect for the best interests of the common citizens. Both are dishonest in the extreme. Neither presents proposed solutions to our predicament that will address its dangers, (from the perspective of the best interests of the common citizens), in a rational way, and thus both would likely only bring more disaster down upon us. Neither can be trusted in anything they say. Telling people what they want to hear, and lying for political expediency, is just what they do, and each does it with no trace of conscience or shame.
One, however, has challenged the very foundations of the neo-Liberal agenda, of globalization and cruel domination, that has been perpetrated upon the world’s common people by the world’s Elites, (led by the US Power Elite), for these past several generations.
This candidate has pointed directly at the ways and means by which this agenda only serves the Elites, and only brings miseries to the common people.
He has openly challenged the policies of world domination that these Elites have pursued, pointing to the disastrous results produced by overthrowing stable regimes, in any nations that will not obey us. He has pointed out with great emphasis that these policies of overthrowing sovereign governments has only created the chaos in which the forces of deadly calamity have thrived.
He has advocated for cooperation with all the world’s great nations, through tough negotiations that represent our own people’s best interests. He advocates for “making deals”, tough deals, that serve our own people’s best interests, with the very nations that our self-serving Elites have targeted for destruction, and are imminently willing to risk apocalyptic war to defeat, (simply because these powerful nations defy our imperious commands).
This is the candidate that the collective American Left has decided we must defeat at all costs.
This is NOT a man to be trusted, to be sure. He is clownish in his deportment, and presents an attitude that lacks what we think is a proper respect for our nation’s diverse peoples. He is dangerous in that he is willing to foment violence by his followers in order to lend power to his position. That is the mark of a fascist, and none of us fail to see that.
The other candidate, however, enthusiastically serves, full on, and without a trace of reservation, the interests of our true Enemy, the US Power Elite. She has taken hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from them, and has already acted in various capacities, as the nation’s First Lady, as a US Senator, and as Secretary of State, to serve them wholeheartedly and with great vigor.
She is a full-on proponent of the neo-Liberal agenda of globalization. She speaks with great gusto and deep conviction of US world domination, (by the “one exceptional and indispensable nation”), as if it is our obligation and destiny. She has already led the way in the destruction of entire nations, killing masses of people without conscience. She has laughed and celebrated as the predictable deadly calamities for those nations’ peoples have ensued.
She now openly advocates for the destruction of more nations, for the killing of more people, to enforce and expand US World Rule. Though she is lying now, (without compunction), for political expedience, she is a four-square champion of trade agreements that are as resounding as the Magna Carta in their effects, agreements that rob government itself of power, and gift that power directly to mega-corporations, to private interests that are completely beyond the power of mere citizens to affect or control.
In the latter, in lending all the power of government to directly augment and enforce the power of private interests, she has gone even far beyond the petty arousal of violent ‘fascist’ instincts in her followers. She has duped her followers into supporting an openly avowed proponent of the very policies that are the heart of highly organized Fascism itself. And even as she does, she smiles and insists that she is a ‘progressive’.
And this is the candidate that the American Left, (including the stalwart leader of what we are imaginatively calling a “political revolution”), has decided that we must help elect. This candidate’s Party, which like the candidate herself, has taken the bribes from the Power Elite, and fully supports their agenda, is the one to whom we think we owe our allegiance.
Why? Why this vial of poison instead of that one? Why the highly skilled operative who gives her direct support to our Enemy, rather than the bumbling clown who at least pays lip service to opposing our Enemy?
Why, at this very moment when our Enemy has been momentarily thrown into some measure of consternation by having his power base challenged, or at least severely re-arranged, have we decided that the candidate who directly represents the interests of our Enemy is the “lesser of two evils”, the one to whom we must lend the weight of our own energy and efforts? Why does “Dump Trump”, an effort to support the avowed champion of our Enemy, make more sense to us?
Why have we decided that her odious opponent, who has rebelled from under our Enemy’s control, and is directly challenging our Enemy’s most basic agenda, is ‘more evil’, and therefore must be the object of all our fighting spirit and energy? Why fight this one, rather than the other?
Why fight either? Why not fight our Enemy himself?
Why do we agree to fight on ground that our Enemy has chosen, rather than on ground that favors us? Why fight the fight our Enemy wants us to fight, against this surrogate or that, rather than fight our Enemy himself?
Dog Whistles and Puppets Strings
We are behaving exactly as our Enemy has expected that we would. We are cooperating, without reservation, in our Enemy’s most basic application of the oldest existing strategy of social control, “divide and rule”. We hate Trump so much for what we have decided is his “racism, misogyny, and xenophobia”, (the very issues that our Enemy uses with such consummate skill to divide us), that we cannot even hear, we do not seem to even perceive, that he he is presenting a direct challenge to our Enemy’s most basic positions. Trump is shaking the very foundations of our Enemy’s basic agenda, but we remain willfully unaware of that.
We never point to this. We never mention it. It’s as if we are not even aware of it.
Trump is saying these things, out loud, in broad daylight, and it’s as if we have disconnected our minds. We have gone deaf. We do not even hear him say these remarkable things. We have struck ourselves dumb. We cannot see that we could seize and turn these open and brazen challenges to the Power Elites, in the minds of the citizenry, to serve our own cause. We cannot do that because we have disconnected our own self-aware powers of mind in favor of our passions. We can only obey our own highly emotionalized compulsions, reacting, like reliable puppets, to those who hate us by (so predictably) hating them in return.
We respond, like reliably trained hounds, to these ‘dog whistles’, (“racism, misogyny, xenophobia, oh my!”), even as we decry the ‘dog whistles’ to which Trump’s own followers respond.
It is in our failure to properly ‘identify the enemy’, (which I have tried to point out is the most basic tenet of warfare), that our own failure and downfall is even now being wrought. We have agreed to fight the forces that our enemy wants us to fight. This clever and powerful Enemy has used race issues, gender privilege, immigration issues, gay rights, and every other kind of ‘identity issue’ he can stir up into a well-hyped froth, (even recently making a major international cause-celebre out of ‘transgender rights’, which affect less than one third of one percent of the population), to divide us into as many rival groups as possible.
Our enemy has used these ‘identity issues’, as well as the other reliable, well-tested, highly emotionalized, and aptly named ‘wedge issues’, (abortion rights, gun control, etc etc), to divide us into so many rival groups, each at the others’ throats, that NONE can see that we ALL share the SAME Common Enemy. We fight each other, and thus our Common Enemy rules over us all.
This is a VERY old story, folks. How many times have we each read it? And yet still we have not learned? “Divide and rule”. It is as old as civilization itself, and yet here we are, swallowing this age old bait, (hook, line, and sinker).
Even with all the brilliant mind-power at our disposal, we have allowed ourselves to be made, yet again, into puppets, dancing on these very strings that our Enemy holds in his own hands. (Our Enemy must surely chuckle in well-earned satisfaction at this sight).
We hate Trump SO much for violating our cherished precepts of ‘identity politics’, (precepts we have come to hold so dear that we have lost our self-aware powers of self-possession and discernment, and have given ourselves over to irrational emotionality), that we cannot even see that between the two candidates before us, Trump is the candidate that challenges our enemy’s position of power, and Clinton is the one who supports it with all of her strength and enthusiasm.
The dog whistles are calling on every side. We respond dutifully to the ones we hear. We choose Clinton, (the one who had laughed girlishly, and ghoulishly, over her contracted murder of a sitting head of state of a sovereign nation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU ).
Senator Sanders fought the good fight, and he fought it well, but in the end he proves himself to be the reliable ‘judas goat’ candidate that so many warned at the outset that he was. He was sent out among the sheep, (unwittingly, not suggesting that his fight was not completely genuine and sincere), to keep them busy, to occupy their energies. In the end, here he is, reliably (and so predictably) leading the sheep back into the Enemy’s corral.
And on the American Left we have twisted our intelligence to follow our emotions, and thus think that by picking the one poison, which is every bit as fatal as the other, by supporting the party and electing the candidate who directly supports our Enemy’s agenda, in every detail, we are somehow serving OUR cause.
The ‘Right Wing’ is NOT our Enemy
Professor Solomon urges us to fight ‘the Right Wing’, which has, at least temporarily, broken free of our Enemy’s control. The Right Wing has, at least for the moment, been cleverly coerced into challenging our Enemy’s power, (after providing our Enemy with a reliably duped power base for so long). For all that we perceive as his clownishness, Trump has seen that the very foibles of the confused and irrational Right Wing, which had been used to such devastating effect to bolster the power of the Elites for so long, could be leveraged against the very Elites who created it. He saw this path to power, and his overweening personal ambition compelled him to walk it.
Professor Solomon tells us that the ‘Right Wing’ is our enemy. He could not be more wrong. The ‘Right Wing’ is an artificial construct that our Enemy has created to divert our attention from himself. Our Enemy has used his power over the nation’s means of communication to skillfully manipulate people’s fears and irrational emotionality into a belief system, (which we call the Right Wing), that directly undermines their own self-interests.
Naked propaganda. Outright lies. Subtle misinformation. These are the tools our Enemy has used. The ‘Right Wing’ is constructed from fear, prejudice, hatred, and every other human foible our Enemy has managed to stir up into this froth of a highly irrational, highly self-contradictory, and highly emotionalized belief system.
In his failure to properly “identify the enemy”, Professor Solomon, despite all the magnitude of his brilliant intellect, his long and valuable experience, and his analytical acuity, concludes that what we must do now is help further empower the Democratic Party, an institution which we ALL can see is wholly controlled by the Power Elite, (our Enemy). We must help elect the candidate who enthusiastically supports our Enemy’s power. Professor Solomon concludes that our priority must be to defeat the candidate that is presenting a direct challenge to our Enemy’s power, while doing our best to ‘reform’ the corrupt party that lies completely in our enemy’s troth.
Professor Schwartz comes right out and says it. He tells us that “…racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist and anti-Muslim politics must be defeated and defeated soundly”. Never mind mounting a fight against our true Enemy. Professor Schwartz wants us to fight against ethereal ‘issues’. Never mind focusing our energies and efforts on defeating the Elites that run our nation, and want to rule the world. Professor Schwartz is far too upset that the the most favored and instinctual ideological precepts of the American Left have been violated. The ‘dog whistles’ are calling, and Professor Schwartz responds to them in an entirely predictable manner. “We must fight the very fight that our Enemy wants us to fight”, is what Professor Schwartz is telling us. We must fight the yeomen folk of our nation whose fears and foibles have been stirred into these primitive and self-defeating pitfalls.
“Racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist and anti-Muslim politics” are NOT our enemy, folks. These are only tools that our enemy uses to divide us. It is precisely by thinking and acting as if these ‘issues’, are ‘the enemy’ that we makes ourselves into puppets, dancing on the end of our true Enemy’s strings.
What’s the Score?
In the game of politics we keep score by counting up how many are on our side, and how many are against us. The object of the game is not to fight blindly against those who are against us. The object is to get the most on our side.
I have tried to get people on the American Left to see that we can never achieve our objectives with so many tens (hundreds?) of millions of the nation’s ‘yeoman folk’ against us. 19th Century industrialist Jay Gould’s old boast, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half”, is every bit as true today as it ever was.
The object of the ‘game of politics’ is to get the most people on our side. Currently, the most people are NOT on our side. The most people are under the bamboozled spell that our Enemy has cast over them.
C’mon, folks. Let’s take a glance at the scoreboard. Do we REALLY think we are as close to ‘taking the lead’ as so many among us like to claim we are?
Do we REALLY think the time has come to draw our swords and charge into the teeming, confused, but well armed ranks of the Common Citizens who oppose us?
I have tried to get people to understand that our task is NOT to fight this teeming army of the misinformed. Our task is to address that army’s highly confused and self-contradictory belief system. Our task is to resolve the highly emotionalized fears and confusions among the nation’s folk, who populate the Right Wing, not fight against them in knee-jerk reaction to what they have been bamboozled by our true Enemy into believing. We can just plain and simply NEVER achieve our objectives with so many of the nation’s folk against us.
When we decide that the nation’s confused ‘folk’, the Right Wing, are our Enemy, when we decide that their irrational fears and confused belief systems make them only worthy of being despised by us, we are just dancing on strings. We are fighting exactly the fight that our Enemy wants us to fight, and in so doing we are not only turning away from fighting our Enemy himself, we are agreeing to fight the very people we need to win to our side, and thus are directly harming the most vital interests of our cause.
“Divide and rule”. Get the rubes to fight each other, and they will be too lost in those efforts to fight us. Devastating…………It works like a fatal charm……..
Pick Neither Poison
I am certainly not suggesting that we should give any support to Trump, just because he gives lip service to opposing our true Enemy’s agenda. We can ALL see that he is NOT a man to be trusted. He serves no ’cause’. He only serves his own ambition. Once in power, he might do anything, without adhering to anything he has said before. He might very well realize that challenging this powerful Enemy can have FATAL consequences, for example, and cut an expedient deal with them. (If I were a ‘gambler’, that’s where I’d put my money).
But why would anyone think we should support his opponent, who fully and enthusiastically supports our Enemy’s agenda, without a trace of hesitation or reservation?
Why will we agree to play in this game at all, when we ALL can see that it is a rigged game? We ALL can see that it has been rigged by our Enemy, to give him every advantage, at every turn?
Why even play it at all? Why not create our own game? Why not ACT? Why must we always REACT?
Senator Sanders’ much vaunted ‘political revolution’ has already ended, folks. It ended the moment he declared that our priority must be to defeat Trump. It ended the moment he threw his support to our true Enemy’s self-avowed champion, and duped us into concentrating all our attention and efforts on the meaningless symbolism of the ‘party platform’.
It actually had ‘ended’ before it even began. It ‘ended’ when Senator Sanders PROMISED, over a year ago, that he would support the Democratic Party, and its candidate, if they would give him permission to run a campaign within their party. (He was not even a Democrat, let’s recall).
The ‘judas goat’ is even now, before our very eyes, doing his best to lead the sheep back into the Enemy’s corral, (as was always so predictable that he would). All his genuine and sincere passion is now reduced to pathetic efforts to try to convince us that having some limp-noodle effect on the meaningless symbolism of ‘the platform’ will represent ‘victory’ for us.
Senator Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ was never an authentic ‘revolution’, of course. It was never any more than a political campaign. It never had a chance to prevail in a rigged contest. It was predictably defeated. This entire story was written before the events played out.
It was NOT a victory, folks. We did NOT win. We LOST! (And yet we claim trophies, we name our ‘victories’, even as we now grovel in our disarray and confusion, in our obvious defeat).
Revolution? We want a genuine “political revolution”? That is a MUCH different game.
A political campaign that ends with its champion urging his followers to support their Enemy is NOT a revolution!
If Senator Sanders were a true ‘revolutionary’, he would continue to lead his forces to fight for their cause. He would not care which party or the other might benefit in the short term from our fight against our true Enemy. hje would know that it is the long term that matters. He would fight on through the election, and far beyond. He would lead his forces to the ballot box, and then, when all the votes are counted, he would lead them into the streets. He would see that fighting for our cause under a Trump regime, or a Clinton regime, would make no definitive difference. Each would offer certain advantages, and certain other disadvantages.
Senator Sanders is clearly NOT a revolutionary. He is a US Senator, and as such, is a card-carrying member of ‘the Establishment’. He dutifully swore an oath of fealty early on in the process. It WAS over a year ago, long before the first vote was cast or counted, that he promised that he would support the Democratic Party’s nominee if he lost. He would NEVER have been allowed to even participate in this corrupt party’s rigged process had that blood oath not been sworn.
Revolution? C’mon, folks…..We do great disservice to the true meaning of this word when we use it so carelessly. Have we really deceived ourselves so thoroughly that we truly believe that this charade we are witnessing, as we now cast about in aimless confusion, as our ostensible ‘leader’ has joined our Enemy’s camp, (exactly as he promised he would), deserves to be called a “revolution”?
(Isn’t it fun to cry “Wolf!”? What will we cry when the wolf really comes?)
If we want to give more than lip service to this word ‘revolution’, if we want to do more than play ‘make believe’ by perverting its meaning into meaninglessness, the first step we must take is to “identify the enemy”. We must come to understand against whom our fight must be waged.
As long as we fail to clearly identify whom it is we must fight, as long as we foolishly fight the fights our Enemy wants us to fight, as long as we so agreeably dance on the end of these strings, the very idea that we have any ability to cause or foment a genuine ‘political revolution’ is just a giant exercise in self-delusion.
Identify the Enemy…….
“If you know the enemy, and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory won you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy, nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”…. Sun Tzu…..
Do we think we can defy such ancient wisdom? REALLY?? On the American Left we cannot seem to properly identify our enemy, and self-awareness is a rare commodity.
C’mon, folks…..We can awaken from these follies…….We can do this……..
Zwarich
Bent Birch Farm
63 Webber Rd
Brookfield, MA 01506