Take your average leftist.  Don’t know any?  Neither do I.  Today the term “liberal” is as close as white people come to calling each other nigg…. Uh… Ni…. you know, the “N word” that is not “Npasta” or “Ncats” and gets your site blocked while allowing old-fashioned tit f-ing to get through since degrading women is still respectable while words for class hurt…..  Those ancient professors… The ones with moldy copies of Marx on their shelf?  Even they no longer call themselves the “L Word.”   Mainly because they don’t want to be seen as a Lib…. Li…  they want to talk about Raceclassgender but as Race_____gender….  Perhaps they are afraid of troubling some student and knocking them out of their Safe Space, cause a meltdown with a few key trigger words.

No, “L Words” hide from their term.  They don’t own it nor remake the term to “shift the paradigm” so that the pejorative term of the oppressor is used by the oppressee.  They don’t slap skin and say, “What up my Liberal.”  This is in part that outside of nursing homes, the Liberal no longer exists in this country.  The free book bins are full of Marxism and various studies about class and economics.  The unions are weak or corrupt, “workers” see themselves as almost-mega rich if only they win the Lotto, “the people” want lawn care and Target sales, and there are no public intellectuals or Conversations For Tomorrow.  The formerly “L Worders” shrink away or have recast themselves as “Progressives.”  “Progressives” are fascinated with making non-profits “sustainable” and having school teachers “held accountable” (that’s accountable, not paid well or intellectually advanced), cheese, and positive liberty for everyone as long as it doesn’t get in the way of Tuesday’s therapy appointment.  Progressives are “fiscally conservative” but “socially progressive.”  As long as Adam and Steve can get married, they don’t care how many gay homosexuals were used in China as slave labour to allow the stock in such-n-such multi-corpor-conglom to improve by quarter’s end.  It is not the fire and brimstone of “Der Verkers of Der Verld Uniting” but “did I get enough vitimin D today?”  “We can start a youth service, but in five years it must pay for itself.”  “Of course we need to compromise with the [Demopublicans] to allow some benefits to both rich and poor.”  “Private Public ventures can solve social issues that the government used to.”  “We voted last year, so we’re done.   Now all we need to do is read the New York Times on Sunday.”

The left, then, is dead in-as-much as it is a voice in any economic or political conversation.

This death has not been sudden.  It has been a slow loss of public forums and a shift in the traditional pillars of intellectual thought away from questioning power, to identifying and codifying power groups – especially sexual groups and sub-groups.  The fey former L Worders, the progressives, have been fixated on race and gender to the desolation of “class” and the abandonment of the civic space to those hard-nosed neo-cons, Demopublicans, and “fiscal conservatives.”  Academia, home once of pinks and reds, are little more than puppy mills of dissertations of specialized forms of knowledge that appear as wholly invented as they are entirely useless.  Historical tomes on women in traditional Azerbidagastanistianian between the years 1952 and March, 1953, white papers on gender politics of west African pygmy lesbians, and article after article by our friendemies at the NYT on some culture of some group or another and how – wow, just like the rest of us – have a long tradition of music, food, and some funny clothes they no longer wear but we’re reminded, defines them as a people.  Out of our nationalized minds, the former civic, we have lost the call of the left of Bread, Land, and something else….  The former left among us wrapped up in inanity of key non-issues elevated to the status of national priority: abortion, don’t ask don’t tell, US support for Israel.

Or, reproductive rights, gay marriage, Zionism, woman’s issues, hate crimes, antisemitism, etc, etc.  Like those foolios who argue endless that nothing in the Bible is supported by Science thinking they are scoring points for Team Reason rather than wasting time (think, trying to yell down a crazy cat lady that she needs to be a zany dog person) we have allowed minor issues to wash over our key problem with a neo-Slavery that is equal in its opportunity and apparently able to drown out our neo-abolitionists in an ocean of “Red vs. Blue” nonsense and fringe concerns heightened to flashpoints of national identity by our MSM masters.

These “left of center” causes reflect the psychology of those who have studied far too much Foucault and far too little practical thought.  They have led to thirty years of white noise “culture war” to junk up the airwaves and distract from our loss of the middling classes, industrial base, loss of innovations, fair taxation, and our increasing inability to have a connection to government, our resources, or take shelter from powerful interests.   The only success the “Left” has had in these years has been to provide the “right” with a bug bear large enough to swallow the entire nation (that there is no “liberal media” is another matter).  The politics of the passive Progressives not only has not prevented our slide into the mouth of idiocy (an idiotocracy?) the “key issues” have fed the angry mobs of rightward leaning masses to grab their pitch forks, Frankenstein rakes, and torches, and storm the Ivy Towers, Ivory Leagues, or whatever target the boobs have been directed to attack.  Meanwhile, while the right-wing is attacking the tree house of Socialism, the Progressives are milling about the traditional whipping boys of safe 1968 paradigms rather than mobilizing the population to support universal healthcare, a reduction in military spending, a reduction of support for nations not in need to humanitarian aid (read, bread, rice, not F16s).  One cannot blame the failures of the past thirty years of selling our land out from under us only on the Free Market fools without laying equal blame at those Progressives who have not fought in the streets for our liberties, but have retreated into inanity in counting what “our” means or defining “streets” or determining that Cookie Monster must remind children that “cookies are a sometimes food.”  With the election of the next administration (not “new” but “next”) that failure is complete.  We can see that while some windows had dressing applied, the deck chairs have been moved, our set of alternatives has shown us Bush, and Bush Lite and while there has been this shift in tone and hue, there is no change at the red meat level.

This failure of the left to lead may be in part a reason for masses of “independents” and a rise in alternative politics.  This is not “alternative life” or “communes” in alternative politics but an increase in people removing themselves from the discussion and starting over.  Tearing it down.  People taking their lives back from talking heads, TeeVee Babies, and the-masses-of-asses, and seeing that the entire system is bunk – not just one side or other (again, this author believes there are not two sides anymore, but a single entity split down the scalp).  It is perhaps that this alternative politics is best described by the growing community of people who discuss collapse, or are “collapse aware” in a rational and meaningful way (see TSHTF and TEOTWAWKI below).  These people currently span an entire political spectrum from academically-minded individuals from affluent backgrounds who have never lifted a pitchfork to working class DIY folks who hunt and fish for sport their entire lives.  Perhaps that spectrum is itself out-of-date as much as people in post-Tzarist Soviet Union no longer asked “what degree of nobility are you?” because it had been made entirely meaningless.  The rise in alternative politics is interesting, since those Founding Fathers – the one’s our current corporate lackeys seem to tout (even though they cannot name, quote, or have read so much as a blog about) – did not see political parties as essential to democracy, but deleterious.  The new consciousness that is awakening won’t lead to revolution. It won’t revive the Left as an historical beast nor be part of the right wing’s total victory (what the hell do they want anyway?).   Things will be torn down.  That much many of us are guessing.  However, we won’t march in the streets, the masses won’t organize, there will not be a revolution.  It won’t be televised because it won’t happen in a way we expect.  And there is a chance that TeeVees won’t work powered on the sun, clean coal, or dogs running on tread mills.   If there is a reaction to the current trends, it may indeed be set by forces external to our own party affiliations or traditional modes of thinking.  How’s that for a paradigm shift?  What would you say about it Lenin?

When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state.
Vladimir Lenin