The thing that troubled me about the Shakespeare conspiracy, the idea that the bard’s works were actually written by someone else, Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere or Shakespeare’s sister or whomever, is how it subversively appeals to those elitist persuasions who believe that commoners are incapable of conceiving or accomplishing anything noteworthy. In reality of course, as noted by the Trump dynasty’s existence, the monied class never enters the realm of higher learning because they have earned a place there through studious labors. The bank accounts of their parents deal with opening doors on their behalf, while the broken backs of those commoners provide the cobbled stepping stones to those doorways and pilfered wealth.
That veiled arrogance obviously persists to this day, in many regards. In fairness, earlier this week was National Video Game Day, which for me calls to mind the quote from Charles Darwin, “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
For the last week or so, Matt Stoller, a prickly fellow with the Open Markets Institute, has had a public hard-on for a book from journalist Chris Arnade concerning how the current field of liberals and Democrats lack self-awareness in terms of the ease of their own lives. Stoller has gone on twitter rants, retweeted by the likes of Glenn Greenwald, proclaiming how the left are not really seeing the impoverished they claim to be fighting for while instead rather wrongfully equating their social status with that of the actual have-nots. A particular line of his which made me wish to punch through the back of his undoubtedly thin skull, was this:
As though less threatening would be the fantasy shared by centrists of there somehow ever being a “good” capitalism. Nativist capitalism is rarely in the wrong by the accounting of Stoller and his ilk, yet when competitors such as China engage in the exact same conduct after the fact it is pitched as nothing but nefarious. But the masses unobserved by the liberals and Democrats, written about by Arnade and leapt upon by Stoller, are the left. Or at least, that is relentlessly where the true left comes from, as there is nothing left-wing about accumulating money or power or social cookie points. The needs of others will always come first, as incomprehensible as that may be by the standards of the DNC or the GOP. For quite a long, long time now, state- and national-level politicians are predominately millionaires, even billionaires, backed by persons of even greater wealth and holdings. Commoners literally cannot afford an office, meaning that left-wing politics have no representation in any branch of government. By conflating the left with the liberals and Democrats, Stoller is ignorantly projecting his own fallacy in turning a blind eye to those unobserved masses, the one and same grievance he charges others with sanctioning. Perpetuating what he claims to oppose. The only romanticism maintained by liberals and Democrats is the one maintained by conservatives and Republicans, that of dominance. The point missed entirely by Stoller’s twitter feed and by the majority of commercial pundits as well, is that of course liberals and Democrats are not representative of the left. The people in the streets are too fucking busy with surviving aftereffects of the reindeer games in DC, and among them the left with helping others to survive, to have time or resources to play in the games themselves. An effectively simple purity test to divine these liberals and Democrats from the left, is the belief in that purely fictitious thing of a “good” capitalism. There are persons who suffer its ramifications, and there are persons who rationalize their own rightwing core. As I’ve written before, conservatives leaning to the left will always save more lives than liberals leaning rightward, because the further right you go, the more emphasis is given to personal wish-fulfilling than to the needs of anybody else.
If my definition of self-sacrificing left vs self-aggrandizing right doesn’t wash with the vast numbers eager to rationalize their own ideological inconsistencies and private preferences, then let’s just call it good vs evil instead, and watch the sweat stains grow in their trendy clothes, their overpriced business suits.
Normally a coifed example of just the sort of liberal Stoller called out, author Dana Schwartz recently observed that technically, there is legally no such thing as illegal entry crossing into domestic borders when asylum is being sought. In keeping with UN standards and regulations, there are actually protections on the books to safeguard asylum-seeking immigrants and refugees explicitly from such charges. In a couple of recent articles hereabouts however, I’ve commented on a lawsuit in Oklahoma where attorneys representing the federal government argued in court that the people of this country do not actually have a right to a climate capable of sustaining life. Which means that by arguing in defense of corporate-rendered crimes against the environment, these attorneys representing the federal government were arguing in favor of crimes against humanity, as the International Criminal Court has previously equated the two, with crimes against the environment being crimes against humanity. This open contradiction negating national and international law regarding border crossings and climate change exists only because, to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, politicians in DC are just capitalists, and nothing better. Persons among the true left may well be up for bending national and/or international laws, but only to make better the human rights of others, and absolutely never for the sake of profiting oneself or one’s favored affiliation.
The stories of such people are not self-perpetuated because there’s more important things to do than signal boosting one’s own ego. And they are commonly suppressed by modern culture. Everyone knows about Kim Kardashian, but to learn anything about Peace Pilgrim, or Fred Woodworth, one must go digging on one’s own.
So one can maintain the romantic belief in a “good” capitalism, or one can stand opposed to crimes against humanity. Matt Stoller, professional toad, has declared where his feet are placed: stuffed down his ass-licker.