Tez Ilyas, the British – Pakistani comedian summed it up with his tweet “I’m distraught that Trump won. I’m delighted that Harris lost. Schrödinger’s observer.”[1] He followed it up with a series of comments on Democrats lamenting the loss and apportioning blame. The general tenor of many of them was “I hope all the Latinos and Arabs get deported and/or bombed.” Not hard to see why they didn’t win the vote amongst those sections of the population. You see, genocide in Gaza is hardly a noble left-wing cause, is it? But both in the US and abroad many commented that the “Left” had lost.
Right wing Gender Criticals gloated, and not without reason, that letting men in skirts into women’s sports, dressing rooms etc., was dead. But it was described as the death of a left-wing policy, which only makes sense if you think, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Joe Biden and a whole host of capitalist politicians and billionaires are somehow on the left. Comrade Zuckerberg, I presume, said the striking worker as the Facebook CEO handed him an autographed copy of the Communist Manifesto. I think not.
The trans ideology is a thoroughly reactionary ideology born in the bosom of a right-wing party, one that is very pro-capitalist, has overthrown left-wing governments around the world and stifled dissent. Whilst some might be familiar with Republicans’ backing for death squads in Latin America in the 1980s, the Democrats were never to be outdone, they did their own share of murder and torture. The Republican Eisenhower overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1956, but the Democrat Truman had previously tried to do so in 1952. Eisenhower also overthrew the last democratically elected president of Iran in 1953, but the work to do so, began under the previous president, the war criminal Harry Truman. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, Vietnam under both Kennedy and Johnson and the invasion of the Dominican Republic under the latter. The list is long and even the original pussy grabber Clinton was not averse to the odd invasion or two, particularly in Haití. The point is there is nothing left-wing about the Democrats.
There are those who harken back to a mythical bygone golden age of the Democrats, claiming that it once represented workers. Again, it is not true, not even in the mythical New Deal of Roosevelt. The New Deal did not lift the US economy nor give benefits to the US working class, but rather it was the second world war that did that. Without the war, the New Deal would have floundered and would never have produced the economic boom of the post war years.[2] FDR was of course a racist, which is why he imprisoned the Japanese for non-security reasons. Even so, the post economic boom was one that didn’t apply to blacks and as blacks fought and died, let’s not forget, for civil rights, it was governments of all hues that dragged their heels. Eventually the Democrats were forced to cede on the issue, under Kennedy and later Johnson. This led to the Dixiecrats leaving the Democratic Party for the Republican Party and white voters abandoning it for purely racial reasons. Whilst there was prejudice against women, Catholics and Jews amongst Democratic voters, it was racial equality that drove those particular Democrats away.[3] So much so, that whereas in 1960 all the senators from the South were Democrats, now hardly any are. In the current Senate, before Trump’s recent victory, only four were, two from Virginia and two from Georgia. Perhaps this era of Democrats being on the side of the ordinary person is the one they yearn for. But it is imaginary. A mirage-like oasis that appears in the desert where there is none.
Or maybe they mean a man who allied himself with racists in the South at one point but then went on to reinvent himself: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy is the man who, along with his sidekick Brzezinski thought it would be a good idea to arm the forerunners of the Taliban in Afghanistan.[4] The Democrats may like to portray themselves as the party for women, but they had other ideas in Afghanistan. Or perhaps they mean Bill Clinton, the original pussy grabbing president, who suffered none of the opprobrium rightly heaped on Trump from liberal feminists, and even those who did have now forgiven him. Clinton once bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to distract us all from his abuse of Monica Lewinsky and Biden applauded him for doing so. The factory produced half of all medicines in the country including vital anti-malarial tablets.[5] And then there is Obama who dropped more bombs than any other president and even joked about drone attacks on young men wanting to date his daughters. The liberals, feminists, identitarians of all shades laughed that murderous misogyny off, as if it were nothing. He was black and a democrat, he can joke about controlling and owning his daughters and murdering young men, boys really, who might want to date them.
Obama also had the votes to codify Roe v Wade into law and thus avoid the current debacle of an extreme right wing Supreme Court overturning it and leading many feminists to say that we have to put up with some genocide in order to try and get abortion rights restored by the people who refused to codify them in the first place. The reason they never moved on the issue is that it meant women felt compelled to vote for them as a safeguard. Like Jimmy Carter, women’s rights were not that central to his policy. He stated categorically that the Freedom of Choice Act was not his highest legislative priority.[6]
The Democrats are not left wing, not even whilst taking LSD or magic mushrooms could you visualise that. But of course, the Dems made a cause out of putting men in skirts in roles and calling them women. They endorsed Woke ideology as their own. But again, this is another abuse of language. Many on the right have described Wokeism as a left wing, Marxist even, ideology. Liberals in search of some street cred and the blurring of the lines between what is left wing and liberalism have eagerly accepted that, knowing it not to be true. No matter how often it is said, liberals and the right have sought to claim Wokeism as such. So much so it provoked the philosopher Susan Neiman to write a book entitled Left Is Not Woke. She opens her book reminding us of some basic points.
What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which undergird the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers call them benefits, entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms make things like fair labor practices, education, healthcare, and housing appear as matters of charity rather than justice.[7]
These issues are a matter of class, something the Democrats never mention nor the liberal and Woke commentators. In the US many of them can’t even bring themselves to say working class, a wave of nausea overcomes them at the mere mention of the phrase. They prefer the term Working Middle Class. There is no working class for them.
Of course, the issue is not helped by the fact that many formerly left-wing organisations have become mild social democratic parodies of their former selves. Organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in Britain and their modern unified front in Ireland, People Before Profit, still talk about socialism occasionally, will when pushed describe themselves as such but are so timid that they differ little from the Labour Party of the 1970s. It is not exclusive to Britain or Ireland either. The New Anti-capitalist Party in France (NPA – Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) is a hotbed of woke nonsense and the organisation is so social democratic now that it supports NATO in Ukraine, US regime changes in Libya and elsewhere as well as the attempted regime change in Syria. It even supported an electoral pact with Macron. The NPA knows a lot about which pronouns to use, but very little about class. They are now just liberals and liberals are as Phil Ochs once said “Ten degrees to the left of centre in good times and ten degrees to the right of centre when it affects them personally.” A treacherous bunch altogether. The last verse of his song Love Me I’m a Liberal, sums up perfectly these groups.
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
But to go back to the original idea here. In no sense of the word can the Democrats be described as leftwing and in the US elections there were only two major candidates, Harris and Trump, both of them right wing, both supporters of genocide. They disagree on which war to fight, should it be China or Ukraine, but wars they want and were always going to get. In the US one right wing party lost the election, the other right-wing party won it, as has always happened.
The blurring of lines and the meaning of words has a real impact. If to be left-wing is to support Harris and right-wing to support Trump, then there is as Margaret Thatcher once said no alternative. Thatcher’s boast was that her greatest success was the invention of Tony Blair and New Labour, the flip side of the Tory coin. In Britain now, whoever you vote for, you vote Tory, likewise in the US whoever you vote for you vote right-wing.
The abuse of language about what is Left and the understanding of left politics is at such a low point, that some idiot out there thinks Rosa Luxemburg just lost the US presidential election. For the uninitiated, Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist murdered by the police in the abortive revolution in Germany in 1919. Kamala Harris who had boasted to great applause from the public in her election campaign of ensuring that the US would always “have the strongest most lethal fighting force in the world,"[8] would have gladly had the German police or the US one, for that matter, execute a modern-day Rosa Luxemburg to the applause or at best muted silence of the Woke. The Left did not lose. They were not in the running, ever.
[1] See.
[2] Counterpunch (11/12/2018) Why World War II, Not the New Deal, Ended the Great Depression. Louis Proyect.
[3] See Kuziemko, I. & Washington, E. (2015) Why Did The Democrats Lose The South? Bringing New Data To An Old Debate. National Bureau of Economic Research. USA.
[4] See declassified file.
[5] The Intercept (27/04/2021) 1998: Bombings of Sudan and Aghanistan. Jeremy Scahill.
[6] See https://x.com/freedomrideblog/status/1853181474133995937
[7] Neiman, S. (2023) Left is not Woke. Polity Press. New Jersey. Para 4.2
[8] See.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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