The Left has not had real power in the United States for a very long time. We’re starting to re-learn how to build that kind of massed democratic power, but the people who currently run things don’t want us to change the systems that gave them their wealth and power. There are – as there have always been – efforts to use real concerns and real differences to undermine efforts at building the solidarity we need to overcome the accumulated power of the aristocracy. Nobody has all the answers (that’s part of why we’re stronger in solidarity), Nomiki Konst is one of the people working to figure out and provide at least some of them:
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Has the USA ever had the Left with real power?
One of the tragedy of USA history is that it demolished its esp. mainstream Left rather completely with McCarthyism.
Since then McCarthy era, it seems to me (& am not alone) that the USA has had a rightwing which is the Democratic party and mayvbe 60% of its population and a far right wing verging on fringe extreme right wing which is the – being generous – quasi-fascist Republican Trump-cultist 40% or so based on his core poll numbers and disturbing unmerited popularity.
In terms of how most of the developed world (& many other less developed national political spectrums) sees things politically the USA hardly has a centre let alone a powerful significant Left. For instance things like universal healthcare are accepted as mainstream and dfenedd even by rightwing politicians in Australia (Medicare) Britain (NHS) and indeed Cuba among somany other places. Gun control is where the USA is an extreme distant outlier in regards to most of the world accepting and having it and looking at the United Sates in horrified bafflement and so on.
Good analysis by Nomiki Konst here – thanks. The US Left (and centre) must unite to defeat the extreme fringe – in politics & ideology if sadly not in numbers – Trumpian reich wing. The prospect and implications of failure for 2020 is appalling for the whole planet given US power and influence and likely global consequences.
The left had enough power in the beginning of the 20th century – and by left I mean socialist and labor movements – to exist as a credible threat when FDR pushed the New Deal through.
I think McCarthyism was partly BECAUSE of the scale of that change – using the Red Scare to crush that power, as well as using it as a weapon against efforts for racial justice.
Konst is a self-entitled collaborator in U. S. imperialism is a liar. She has worked for a think tank that has supportes U. S. interventional warfare in Syria and Libya, and no doubt, supports the continued destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and illegal U. S. sanctions against Iran. As such, she is now on a list of war criminals to be tried for their crimes as soon as I get enough pocket money. Big-mouth celebrity coaches should know better to just shut the fuck up, because their lies and deceptions will be discovered sooner or later.