“A second and relatively weak card Democrats played was conjuring up an Imaginary Hillary Clinton, a defender of womens’ and human rights who held hands with The moms of killer cop victims,..”America Might Not Deserve Trump, But Dems and Hillary Deserved To Lose” by managing editor Bruce A. Dixon [at Black Agenda Report (BAR) Wed, 11/09/2016 ]
Anti-feminism (misogyny) is in your face, you just don’t know how to recognize it. And so is with fascism, which today, as in the past, is present in BOTH the extremes right and left. You may have noticed that during and after the elections the media (both MSM and Leftists’) have refused to label Trump as a ‘fascist’; they are leisurely willing to postpone judgment on him until, I don’t know, his third term?
It is no coincidence that both the right and the left voters are willing to ignore the signs of fascism in front of them. As it is no coincidence that Hillary Clinton won two campaigns by popular vote but lost the big prize on both (2008 primaries and this presidential elections). I don’t buy that it was bad luck or bad campaign management.
This is how the American Left sees Hillary Clinton, as opposed to how they see Trump in the image below.
They see Trump as the hero who will ‘kill Netanyahu’ with “kindness”. They have high hopes on this man’s ‘humanity’, which they didn’t have for that ‘evil feminist woman’. Also, notice the article pointed at by the small arrow; it is relevant to the conversation further down.
In this presidential election cycle, the Left ditched the experienced woman with a progressive record for the totally inexperienced, unqualified and unfit to serve, proud of being a scheming elitist, openly racist, hate-monger lewd alpha-male billionaire who has done nothing for anyone except for himself and his family, creates homelessness as part of his business and profits from promoting compulsive gambling…because he speaks ‘anti-globalism‘. They even preferred the other white racist and ignoramus Libertarian Party dude (Garry Johnson) over her. It can’t be that they are voting for ethical and moral candidates over her.
(The Left here are the ‘leaders’ of the socialist and communist groups and their online ‘think-tanks’, like Black Agenda Report, Counter Punch, Workers Party, Information Clearing House, OpEd News; and Sanders supporters and some people in the BLM and other progressives who became Hillary-haters and, what I call, Trump Apologists. I exclude from my criticism of the Left the people at The Nation magazine because they were the only group that refused to jump to Trump’ swamp as his admirers. They notably wrote an article few days before the election titled ‘Hillary Clinton is not the enemy”, for which they got a lot of flack from the Trumpist leftists.)
In this post I will try to show
- Where the misogyny/anti-feminism was in these elections,
- That it is one of the three most obvious characteristics of fascism, and
- What the new millennium Left has in common with fascist ideologies.
I do not say nor believe that the Left is purposely fascist. My point all along this election cycle has been that their own misogyny (anti-feminism) and poverty of political analysis has caused them to lose their ideological bearings, getting dangerously close to a modern full-blown fascism. Also, that their inability to practice a modicum of personal and political self-assessment keeps them blinded to their ideological errors and useless to the working class they claim to advocate for.
I will start the discussion with the third point.
Hidden Affinities Between The Left And Fascism
Fascism, as with everything in this life, is not without internal contradictions. When the understanding of the history and psychology of this ideology is not clear, it is easy to see as ‘revolutionary’ that which in reality the manifestation of contradictions in fascism.
I propose that these unnoticed contradictions in the practice of fascism is what attracts the unsuspecting Leftists. This leads me to believe that the millennial progressives who supported Trump and Libertarian (of all ideologies, for crying out loud) Party’s Garry Johnson (and they were many) over Hillary Clinton are ideologically untrained; and that the aging Bolshevist Leftists, most of whom voted as the young inexperienced millennials, have devolved their intellectual power to the lowest confines of the American white-working class.
Hitler Running for President
If Adolf Hitler were to show up today and run for president, the Left would support him over Hillary Clinton.
Because, based on his pseudo-anti-globalism positions, they view Trump as a ‘revolutionary’ and ‘friend’ of the (white) working class, they would also find candidate Hitler to be revolutionary because he was anti-capitalist.
Hitler was an ultra–nationalist conservative, and as such he hated anything or anyone who would put their interests above that of the nation. Capitalism and globalism are those things. But then he realized that he needed the capitalists to quash the labor, socialist, ethnic and feminist movements (the ‘others’), which he accused of putting their unclean interests over that of the nation’s.
Capitalists and globalists can make peace with Fascists because, ultimately, they have the same interest: suppressing freedom and democracy, and preserving the patriarchy.
The Left would have been heads-over-heels with Hitler for creating a ‘third party’ with the name National Socialist German [American] Workers’ Party. Interesting historical note: Hitler intentionally put ‘socialist’ in the name to make his group palatable to the working class because they were strongly attracted to the economic reforms socialists were achieving. But Hitler himself detested socialism.
So, or ‘thus’, the American Left would have flock to this ‘socialist’ party just as they flocked to Bernie Sanders because, in the beginning of the primaries, Sanders was running as a ‘socialist’. But he did the opposite of what Hitler did. Sanders, faced with a MSM which conditioned coverage of his campaign on him dropping the ‘socialist’, fled from ‘socialism’. BY March/April, the MSM was covering him as a “progressive” or a ‘social democrat’, depending on their clicks needs, and refused to vet his Congressional voting record. Ultimately, capitalists and pseudo socialists have the same interests.
Of Conservatives, Paleo-conservatives and Fascists
The point I’m trying to make is that the Left’s ideological deficiency doesn’t allow them to see that even Conservatives, paleo-conservatives and other brands of conservatism, are anti-globalists; but that doesn’t make them revolutionaries nor does it make them automatic allies of the labor movement or of the ‘others‘ in the Identity Politics crowd. On the contrary.
The Left is (willfully?) oblivious to the fact that, like they, Fascism not only doesn’t challenge the patriarchy ideology, it promotes it. The Nazi party message of its goal for German economic supremacy was directed exclusively to the white-male workers; women’s place was not in the ‘market’. In 1934, Hitler told the women in the Nazi party that there was no room for the ‘battle of the sexes’ in the party. The American Left would have been happy with that program.
And they would have been mesmerized with Hitler’s manly authoritarian personality, just as they are with Trump’s. But they would have also been mesmerized with the other alpha-male authoritarian fascist, Stalin, who also challenged capitalism but was a fascist in heart and spirit.
I have tried to show how, in my view, the American Left has lost its ideological bearings, coming dangerously close to supporting Fascist ideological stances out of ignorance. MSM (which represents the interests of the oligarchy) have made a supremely efficient use of propaganda symbols and codes to attack Trump (a member of the elite conservative class) over issues that divide them without putting their own class on the chopping-block, and attacking Hillary Clinton for being a feminist threatening the patriarchy.
Make no mistake, the oligarchy is divided, and so is the conservative elite over how to attack each other without empowering the ‘others’. Either one who wins the elections is in danger of receiving a coup d’etat from the oligarchy. But the American Left can’t hear the boots marching towards them.
At this point in our nation’s politics, I refuse to believe they are fascists at heart. I think they are sweetly misguided, to say the least.
Now I discuss how anti-feminism is the preferred tool of fascists to stop women running for power on the progressive side. I will start, of all places, with the emails.
On Hillary Clinton and Being Sick of Hearing About Emails
Hillary Clinton stated recently that it was the release of the emails few days before the elections what defeated her. I respectfully disagree with her.
The emails was a year-long 24/7 campaign in the media, both MSM and Leftist’s’, against her (Bernies criticized him for not hammering on her with the emails). By the time the white dudes at the FBI dumped to the public the last batch of emails, the word ’emails’ in the campaign had become code for ‘Hillary Clinton corruption’.
The public didn’t even bother to read them. The MSM reported that people were not reading them, and incorrectly assumed that it was because they were already set to vote for her. What had apparently happened was that, by the end, voters who did not like her but were planing on voting for her holding their noses, couldn’t take any more ‘evidence’ of Hillary’s ‘corruption’; they just gave up on her.
The media underestimated the efficiency of their psychological job of opinion-shaping through public character assassination. Their work at associating the word ’email’ with ‘corrupt Hillary’ was an absolute success, even though there was nothing incriminating there.
So, it was not the last batch of emails that did her in. First, it was the unrelenting MSM portrayal of HC as corrupt, even more so than Trump and more ‘disliked’ than him (even though she won the popular votes). It started when she was First Lady (no emails and no Iraq then) and the Israelis were angry at her for supporting the Palestinians, and continued in the 2008 primaries where Karl Rove turned it into a multi-million dollars weapon of misinformation and character assassination against her.
This one from her 2008 run, clearly an early Rove product. Note the amount of hits.
Up to then, the attacks on her were on her feminism, insinuating that she is a ‘corrupting lesbian’; no ‘politically corrupt Hillary’ at that time, only ‘evil depraved man-eating feminist Hillary’. She won the popular vote, but lost the primaries. Sounds familiar?
This was the ‘kiss of death’ for HC. It is the beginning of the Hillary bashing tradition. This photo was used to portray her as a lesbian in the MSM. Then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (R) and kisses Suha Arafat, wife of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, November 11, 1999. (photo credit:REUTERS)
And second, the Leftists, both during the 2008 primaries and now. Sanders, his followers, and the rest of the Left have been even more vicious on their attacks on her than the MSM. They attacked her as an ‘evil woman‘, ‘babies killer’…The MSM couldn’t get that nasty this time. They had published, just as these primaries started, a series of reports about violence against women in India, other parts of the world and in the USA; so they couldn’t attack Hillary with the same crude misogyny they used in 2008, it would have been too easily recognized as such.
So they let the Left do the dirty job for them while they focused on ‘dishonest Hillary’ and ’emails Hillary’. That’s why Sanders rolled through the primaries unvetted by the media, to contrast the evil feminist with him, the saintly and totally trustworthy and ‘innocent’ non-politician outsider man who became the victim of that corrupt woman. Trump thanked Sanders for providing the ammo to ‘kill’ Clinton, all the name-calling and accusations of corruption and rigging the system. Yes, they helped him win.
So, it was not the email that did her in. It was the years-old brutal misogynistic campaign portraying her as, literally, and evil and corrupt witch/bitch, which has never failed to convince the unwary and those who can’t stomach a woman in the presidency. ‘Those’ include the men in the oligarchy, owners of the MSM, etc.
The “Two Minutes of Hate”: Shout it! Goldstein and Feminists! (One minute each, please.)
Hillary Clinton has always identified her self as ‘feminist’, and did so openly recently on a Rachel Maddow interview. Hillary’s ‘brand’ of feminism has always been heavily under attack by right-wingers, but more openly by the Leftists, both men and women. Most of the criticism centers around the fascist old mantra that: 1) economic class struggle (male, i.e.) and 2) the fight against imperialism are more important than women’s and all other Identity Politics issues, and 3) that feminism takes away energy from those fights:
“We suggest that feminist enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is reflective of a profound crisis of US liberal feminism, which has long embraced or accepted capitalism, racism, empire, and even heterosexism and transphobia.” Leftist Jacobin magazine
That statement is an example of a ‘totalitarian‘ ideology: everything is wrong with all the members of that class, i.e., Hillary’s female followers and feminism in its entirety. Even if you disagree with some feminists, branding all of them as imperialists and racists is incorrect and aligns you with right-wing ideologies: Feminist/feminism is an evil for both the fascists and the Left.
‘Two minutes of hate’. Scene from ‘1984’ move based on George Orwell’s novel.
Note: While more than half of all men voted for Trump, many millions voted for Hillary. When I refer here to fascist and misogynist men of all color and nationality, I am not referring to the millions of men who had the intelligence and heart of letting a woman and women’s issues be part of the progressive agenda.
The Fascist Inside Me
In the new millennium, when Isis stomps around the Middle East reducing women and girls to the status of sex-slaves, when world-wide institutionalized male violence against women is at its peak, including here at home, the American Left, through their male misleadership, lament that Hillary Clinton raised women’s issues to the same levels of the male working class. Yes, male, because, by ridiculing the inclusion of women’s issues (like BAR in the quote did), they conveniently forget that women are in the labor force and have particular needs there: Men generally don’t suffer sexual harassment and sexism in the job.
This perpetual hatred to things that are of women’s interests’, this anti-feminism, is one of the three most recognized characteristics of the ideology of fascism, together with ultra-nationalism (hatred of all ethnic groups they identify as, in the USA, non-American) and racism (hatred of all non-whites).
As I have discussed recently on this blog, the now trending Identity Politics is part and parcel of fascism. People were labelled with symbols that became associated with hatred, to identify them as the ‘other’ in public: The Jewish with the star and the homosexuals with the pink triangle. Identity was destiny in 1930s Germany.
But the Left insists that the Hillary Clinton’s feminist agenda, her inclusive program, is distracting to the sacrosanct white-working class’ interests. Now they want the Democratic party to put the interests of these white working class men above that of the rest of us.
That explains in part how we got to this crossroad in the USA politics.
Sanders dismissing Trump’s comments about imprisoning women who have abortions as “stupid remarks” that do not deserve media attention.
Note: Because the American Left has sided with Trump and the fascists in this presidential elections, and this is an inartful blog, I referred to them as the Zombie Left. You know what a zombie is, don’t you? A zombie is an unnatural creature with no brain and no heart created by their masters for the purpose of dragging the living beings to their hellish underworld.
American Zombie Leftists
Recommended books:
by S. William Halperin
If you want to understand today’s Left and its relation to Fascism, this it the book you need. I highly recommend it.
Another excellent book, this one by Kevin Passmore.
crazy USA presidential elections: Trump is NOT the People's president (Est. 2015) 