Michael Lind: The Far Left is Brain Dead thanks to its Funders and Enablers

Excerpt from Michael Lind's new article at Tablet: "The End of Progressive Intellectual LifeHow the foundation-NGO complex quashed innovative thinking and open debate, first on the American right and now on the center left."

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

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Unlike academics who recite the approved current center-left positions on all issues, genuine intellectuals, even if they happen to be employed by universities, are unpredictable. Often they are unpopular, because they criticize their own allies and appreciate what other schools of thought get right. They do not indulge in contrarianism for its own sake but tend to be controversial, because they put loyalty to what they consider to be truth above party or faction. Needless to say, such intellectual mavericks tend to perform quite poorly when it comes to the boot-licking, rote repetition of political slogans, acronym-juggling, groupthink, and “donor servicing” that constitute the forms of intellectual activity favored by big foundations and NGOs, whether of the right or of the left.

Continue ReadingMichael Lind: The Far Left is Brain Dead thanks to its Funders and Enablers

The Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back

Joe Biden's reckless/incoherent rhetoric could get us all killed. I'm talking about his recent rhetoric. That's on top of the fact that American news media has been pummeling us with non-stop unreflective pro-war messages leading up to the current sorry state of the world. We are where we are not because of a sober cost-benefit foreign policy analysis. This war has turned into theater or, perhaps, the existential version of the Superbowl, where U.S. officials refuse to open up a dialogue with Russia. That would be the thing that grown-ups would do when their conduct is nudging up the nuclear clock which, in 2018, was already at two minutes to midnight.

Here's a "solution." In case Joe Biden says something incoherent or reckless, the Washington Post headline writers are there to save the day. You see, Biden didn't mean what he said, that thing that could result in a civilization-ending nuclear holocaust.

Glenn Greenwald:

President Obama's own arguments about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine — namely, that “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one” and therefore the U.S. should not risk confrontation with Moscow over it — were widely maligned as Kremlin assets if not agents. Others who urged the U.S. to try to avert war through diplomacy — by, for instance, formally vowing that NATO membership would not be offered to Ukraine and that Kyiv would remain neutral in the new Cold War pursued by the West with Moscow — faced the same set of accusations about their loyalty and patriotism.

Most taboo of all was any discussion of the heavy involvement of the U.S. in Ukraine beginning in 2014 up to the invasion: from micro-managing Ukrainian politics, to arming its military, to placing military advisers and intelligence officers on the ground to train its soldiers how to fight (something Biden announced he was considering last November) — all of which amounted to a form of de facto NATO expansion without the formal membership. And that leaves to the side the still-unanswered yet supremely repressed question of what Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland referred to as the Ukrainians’ "biological research facilities” so dangerous and beyond current Russian bio-research capabilities that she gravely feared they would "fall into Russian hands.” . . .

As a result of the media's embracing of moral righteousness in lieu of debating these crucial geopolitical questions, the U.S. government has consistently and aggressively escalated its participation in this war with barely any questioning let alone opposition.

The central question for Americans from the start of the war in Ukraine was what role, if any, should the U.S. government play in that war? A necessarily related question: if the U.S. is going to involve itself in this war, what objectives should drive that involvement?

Prior to the U.S.'s jumping directly into this war, those questions were never meaningfully considered. Instead, the emotions deliberately stoked by the relentless media attention to the horrors of this war — horrors which, contrary to the West's media propaganda, are common to all wars, including its own — left little to no space for public discussion of those questions. The only acceptable modes of expression in U.S. discourse were to pronounce that the Russian invasion was unjustified, and, using parlance which the 2011 version of Chris Hayes correctly dismissed as adolescent, that Putin is a “bad guy.” Those denunciation rituals, no matter how cathartic and applause-inducing, supplied no useful information about what actions the U.S. should or should not take when it came to this increasingly dangerous conflict.

That was the purpose of so severely restricting discourse to those simple moral claims: to allow policymakers in Washington free rein to do whatever they wanted in the name of stopping Putin without being questioned. Indeed, as so often happens when war breaks out, anyone questioning U.S. political leaders instantly had their patriotism and loyalty impugned (unless one was complaining that the U.S. should become more involved in the conflict than it already was, a form of pro-war "dissent” that is always permissible in American discourse).

Matt Taibbi knows how to connect the dots:

Continue ReadingThe Washington Post has Reckless and Incoherent Joe Biden’s Back

Ukraine, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem with Whataboutism

I'll start by saying that Putin is a bad actor who is acting aggressively and killing innocent people. But I also need to add that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals. Is there really a problem saying both of these things? Turns out that I'm going light on the United States here. As Noam Chomsky recently stated, the United States thinks that it owns the entire world.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Except in today's tribal crazed environment, where the U.S. is entitled to protect its borders through its militarily-enforced hyper-extended sphere of influence but Russia is not allowed to resist NATO's death machines from being parked on its own borders, "because Putin is Hitler." End of Argument. Freddie DeBoer expands on a story about mass hysteria, fact-denial and hypocrisy that risks getting all of us physically roasted in a nuclear holocaust:

The people who say “whataboutism” don’t want to talk about carpet bombing in Cambodia. They don’t want to talk about death squads in El Salvador. They don’t want to talk about reinstalling the Shah in Iran. They don’t want to talk about the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. They don’t want to talk about giving a hit list to rampaging anti-Communists in Indonesia. They don’t want to talk about the US’s role in installing a far-right government in Honduras. They don’t want to talk about US support for apartheid in South Africa. They don’t want to talk about unexploded ordnance that still kills and maims in Laos. They don’t want to talk about supporting the hideously corrupt drug lord post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They don’t want to talk about aiding literal Nazis and Italian fascists in taking over the government in Albania. They don’t want to talk about giving support to the far-right government’s “dirty war” in Argentina. They don’t want to talk about the US-instigated far-right coup in Ghana. They don’t want to talk about our illegal bombing of Yugoslavia. They don’t want to talk about centuries of mistreatment of Haiti, such as sponsoring the coup against Aristide. They don’t want to talk about sparking 36 years of ruinous civil war, and attendant slaughters of indigenous people, in Guatemala. They don’t want to talk about our drone war in Pakistan. They don’t want to talk about how much longer this list could go on. So when do we talk about that stuff, exactly? . . .

Well, OK, fine: I denounce Putin. I denounce his invasion. I support neither and have never suggested I did. Now will you, dear reader, denounce the oceans of blood the United States has spilled in pursuit of its own selfish interests, in the past century? Or do you have some jury-rigged excuse for every American crime I listed above and all the ones I didn’t have space to fit?

If you want the world to operate under the principle of self-determination of countries, you need to start with the country that is the indisputably most powerful and influential country on earth. And if you’re American your first priority and greatest influence lies in America’s government. I will repeat myself in saying that, if you don’t want to acknowledge our role in the world, it’s so much better simply to say, “I’m an American, I think America comes first, I don’t care about the wrong we do, love it or leave it.” That’s not a very enlightened attitude, but it has the benefit of a certain grim integrity, of plainfaced honesty. To insist that you care about self-determination and the principles of non-interference, and to maintain that the United States has the moral authority to opine about them, and to ignore our bloody history… for me, personally, it’s a bridge too far.

Continue ReadingUkraine, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem with Whataboutism