In a fairly recent edition of System Update (Dec 13, '22), a news and politics program put out by Glenn Greenwald, the security-state analyst drew attention to three issues that have muddied the waters of the left/right dichotomy in the post-2016 scene. Explicitly questioning the usefulness of that framework for approaching contemporary politics, he showed how disorienting those longstanding (and sometimes obfuscating) coordinates can actually be in our present conjuncture. Setting aside the clichés with which Democratic media consumers and left-liberal tribalists have been saturated since the année derangée of 2016, Greenwald looks at concrete issues and asks the question – "What does it even mean anymore, these terms right and left, conservatives and liberal"? Let’s look at the three issues.
On the first issue, Greenwald alludes to the question of media and information censorship. In a string of recent developments from FBI raids to the Twitter files, Greenwald draws attention to the increasingly intimate nexus that binds apparently left-wing tranches of the media, political parties, and the professional class, on the one hand, to the agencies of state-security and big-tech capital, on the other. Greenwald contends that this nexus should make us question the left/right dichotomy when we try to understand current political developments and our proper relationship to them. Explicitly, he draws our attention to
… the question of whether or not our political discourse should be policed and censored by a combination of big-tech billionaires, the US security state, and the US Government. If you are opposed to this union of state and corporate power, to censor our political discourse, does that make you on the right or the left? Is it a left-wing or a right-wing position, to want big corporations and the government to censor the internet?
Or, look at the US security state, whether we trust the FBI, and the CIA, and the NSA with unlimited powers, or we want them interfering in our election as they did before the 2020 election by lying about the Hunter Biden laptop. Is it a left-wing or right-wing view to say that we don’t trust the CIA, and the FBI, or the security state any longer? It always was a left-wing view, but polling now shows that Democrats and liberals overwhelmingly trust those US security state agencies far more than Republicans and the American right does, meaning that it is very difficult to look at it through this prism any longer?
The question here is evidently about authority and dissent. When did the left become the advocate for political censorship and the institutions of the security state? When was dissent replaced by authoritarian proclivities? The answer of course is that they didn’t and haven’t. This is not the ‘left’ in any historically or intellectually meaningful sense of the word, unless we take time-honored Cold War and anti-communist detractions at face value.
Greenwald then moves onto the issue of military interventions and proxy wars, the Syria Intervention and the Ukraine War in particular. Channelling the long-standing anti-war movement on the left, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, Greenwald asks whether the left, if unprompted by its own increasingly untethered opinion-forming organs, would conventionally stand by a military intervention that produces 6,000,000+ refugees (Syria) or the transfer of $70+ billion from pressing domestic needs to a proxy war in Eastern Europe (Ukraine).
Look at the war in Ukraine. Typically, wars are often opposed by Democrats, or so Democrats like to say, and supported by Republicans. Except in 2011, when Obama wanted to involve the United States in a regime-change operation in Libya, all the no-votes in the House came from Republicans. It was enough to deny him war authorization, and yet he went forward and participated in that war anyway. Every last no-vote on whether to continue to give Ukraine tens of billions of dollars for our proxy war against Russia came from the Republican Party. Is it a right-wing or a left-wing view to oppose US involvement through tens of billions of dollars in the war in Ukraine.
As Greenwald points out, criticism of precisely this kind of projection war spearheaded by the Democratic Party, former Neocon Republicans, and the US security state has been forthcoming from both the traditional European left and Donald Trump. How do we square that circle? How does that map onto our conventional coordinates? He goes even further.
I think it’s a really interesting thing to remember that Donald Trump in 2016 ran against standard Republican dogma. Not just Bush-Cheney foreign policy about how the US should be changing governments around the World, but also standard Reaganomics on foreign policy that, in the era of global institutions and free trade agreements, it’s no longer enough with de-industrialization to just cut taxes for wealthy corporations at the expense of the American worker.
By turning explicitly to Donald Trump, Greenwald confronts the real problem. This is of course the fulcrum around which so much denial, confusion, and disorientation has pivoted since 2016. It is the most difficult thing to handle, but also the most crucial one for understanding the current political conjuncture in the Atlantic sphere. We shall come back to this in subsequent articles.
Thirdly, and finally, Greenwald moves on to Tucker Carlson, who many see simplistically as “the #1 rated conservative television host”. While Carlson does work within a number of traditional conservative themes, there is more going on here.
In 2021, there was an uprising in Havana, where anti-Castro and anti-government protesters gathered in larger numbers than usual, and both Republicans and Democrats, the establishment wings of both parties, immediately rose up and said it is our duty to intervene in Cuba and support the Cuban protesters to overthrow their government. And that night I was invited to go onto Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about some other issue, namely Joe Biden’s attempt to manipulate the term disinformation to censor the internet, and he [Carlson] on his own accord brought up the fact that Republicans had spent the day not focused on Joe Biden’s authoritarian attempt to censor the internet, but instead what was going on in Cuba…
In that video, basically, Tucker Carlson said why are idiot Republicans on the Hill spending their day talking about how the US government needs to go and fix the government in Cuba, instead of focusing on the authoritarianism in our own country… Is that a left wing view? It always was. ‘Let’s stay out of Cuba’. But if that’s a left wing view, why is Tucker Carlson – ‘the #1 rated conservative television host’ – articulating that view.
For Greenwald, the continued popularity of the left/right labels in mainstream media discourses are not just a matter of complacency or a lack of imagination in finding new and more representative alternatives. It’s about the promotion of internecine discord in the population, whether conscious or unconscious, but that is nevertheless encouraged by divisive interests that benefit from social fragmentation that enables them in various ways (i.e. cynical electoral coalitions, political disenfranchisement, etc.). He concludes.
I think that one of the things that we have to abandon is the idea that we can be instantly categorized and pigeon-holed by the media, using these manipulative terms that almost have no meaning any more, as demonstrated so vividly last night by what they did to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and to realize that these are terms of distraction and division that have no real meaning.
To the extent you want labels, I think the much more relevant label is the war between people who are in the establishment and support the establishment in either party and on either side, and people who oppose the establishment because we see it as so fundamentally corrupted. And whether you can see politics clearly, and whether you can do journalism well, in my view, is determined above all else by where you fall on that dichotomous scale, not these old archaic terms used by the media to divide us, of who’s a conservative and who’s a liberal. Something that barely means anything in this age, where Democrats love Neocons, consider Bill Crystal and David Frum their thought leaders, adore the CIA, and the FBI, and the NSA, and the Justice Department, and want those security agencies to join with corporate power to censor our political debates through the internet.
This really is the defining statement of a critical political position somewhere between what are (sometimes unhelpfully) labelled “populist” and “left-heretic” positions. Following on from Greenwald’s “dichotomous scale”, I would recommend the coordinates established by the dutch academic Kees van der Pijl, in his States of Emergency (2022).
On the one hand we have a cosmopolitan cadre that works for the oligarchy and is concentrated in the big cities. It shares the urban space with a growing immigrant population mainly there to serve it. Facing it is a marginalized [multiracial] domestic population that has become largely redundant. In this complex configuration of forces a political stalemate has crystallized in which the labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ are losing their cogency.1
Although significant elements of the immigrant population are beginning to move into alignments with the ‘domestic’ position, further complicating the framework, this summary comes closer to the mark. Through this extract, Van der Pijl moves from a left/right framework to a centre/periphery framework, and that is probably more instructive than the left/right schema. In the rent-seeking economy of the 2010s-2020s, it is one’s proximity to gate-keeping positions, interest and rent-bearing capital, and control over information dissemination that empowers. The linear schematic of history and the long march of Progress have less of a bearing in this environment.
Instead of the left/right dichotomy, perhaps a more consistent and reliable denominator in a period of institutional legitimacy crisis can be found precisely in demonstrable and implied attitudes to instituted authority. Where does a person, organization, or grouping lie in relation to that? However, it might be best to ditch all the labels and just listen to what people say and do, rather than accept what we are told about them through a creaking framework of dubious hashtags.
Endnotes
Kees Van der Pijl, State of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2022), pp. 3-4.