Dr. King Was Right About Liberals
Super-Tuesday Shows How Liberal Fear Dominates Hope and Vision
Corporate Democrat and Media Sabotage of Sanders Will Backfire
[Updates below]
In his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among many other things, expressed frustration and a clear understanding of white liberals. King wrote:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
The abject Liberal fear behind the cowardly Super Tuesday support of Joe Biden is sickening:
the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;
In that sense, after an unprecedented sustained assault and smear campaign against Sanders, the corporate media’s 24/7 exaggeration of the new Coronavirus threat greatly magnified the pre-existing fear of 4 more years of Trump. Heckofajob media!
[Update 3/18/20 – Looks like we were out front on highlighting the role of the virus:
Why is Joe Biden enjoying such tremendous, consistent success against Bernie Sanders after spending the entire race up to South Carolina as a third-place laggard? […]
I suspect, however, that COVID-19 stands as the most plausible explanation. ~~~ End Update]
In a cruel irony, the liberal corporate Clinton-Obama Democrats – in their fearful and self interested sabotage of Bernie Sanders – have virtually assured a Trump second term, exactly the thing they claim to have been so fearful of.
But while the rank and file liberal was driven by fear, the DNC and media leadership were corruptly stoking and manipulating this fear to protect their power, privilege, and wealth. They actually would prefer 4 more years of Trump to a Sanders Presidency and Sanders controlled Democratic Party.
I fully understand the liberal cowardice and corruption and lack of vision at play because I’ve worked with these people for decades.
But what I do not understand is the strong support of Biden by black voters, given Biden’s awful record on core black issues and Sanders longtime leadership on civil rights, including putting his own ass on the line as a college student. My guess is that is a cultural and political amalgam of what Glen Ford termed “the black mis-leadership class”; exploitation by heretical “Prosperity Gospel” hustlers and ideologues; manipulation by Neoliberal corporate Democrats and their Foundation friends (that’s where we got politicians like Cory Booker and the charter school project, a faux “community driven” scam created by right wing billionaire’s and their Foundations); and, because the black community has the most to lose from 4 more years of Trump, a fearful conservatism that rejects Bernie and embraces a “vote blue no matter who” mindset.
[Update: Adolph Reed schools me on “the mystique of the black vote”
The black political class, to put it bluntly, uses the status of “representing” black people to accrue benefits for themselves and elite strata among black Americans. In pursuing such interests, it is not unusual for them to advocate anti-democratic positions. […]
Since 2016 the black punditry has converged around a narrative that Sanders has difficulty appealing to black voters, even as polls have shown repeatedly that his program is more popular among black Americans than any other group. This effort recently hit a comic plateau when the The Root produced a report purporting to evaluate the Democratic candidates in relation to a “Black Agenda.” The report, based on criteria crafted by anonymous “experts,” ranked Warren first with Biden, Buttigieg, and Steyer also ahead of Sanders. Tellingly, Buttigieg and Steyer offered decidedly class-skewed racial programs centering on entrepreneurship and business development, and Sanders was graded down for having had the temerity to consider mobilizing a primary challenge to “the first black president.”
Another facet of this black politics is that, in reducing all of black Americans’ concerns to race, it undermines our abilities to organize the majoritarian social movement response we need to combat the ever more naked assertion of ruling-class power against all working people in the United States. ~~~ end update]
Biden’s longtime anti-black record includes, and this list is off the top of my head, without research:
1) support of legislation that expanded corporate/banking/credit card/financial abuses that effectively echo racist policies like “red lining” (they go way beyond pay day loans, limits on consumer protections, and making it harder to declare bankruptcy);
2) the Obama-Biden 2008 Wall Street bank bailout that ignored people and Main Street and disproportionately devastated the black community and black home ownership and equity;
3) the New Jim Crow prison industrial complex criminal justice policies that are just as racist as Hillary Clinton’s “super-predator” and Bloomberg’s Stop & Frisk;
4) his political exploitation of suburban white racist fears of bussing and school integration;
5) his use of his Senate power in support for wars and the military industrial complex budgets that drain resources from domestic social programs;
6) his Senate role in the confirmation of right wing judges (and who can forget the dissing of Anita Hill?);
7) his embrace of notoriously racist republican southern senators;
8) Biden’s Neoliberal austerity ideology that threatened social security and Medicare and starved domestic social programs (remember it was Bill Clinton who cynically “ended welfare as we know it”, greatly expanded the racist war on drugs and prison industry complex that has destroyed millions of black lives, and deregulated Wall Street that led to the 2008 financial crash); and
9) Biden’s outright fabrication of multiple lies about his alleged personal involvement as a civil rights activist (the lie on getting arrested while visiting Mandela is just the tip of a large iceberg of lies – read THIS for Biden’s remarkable pattern of deceit:
How could a black voter vote for a man who looked them in the eye and lied like this?
Sanders supporters can see exactly what is going on and – as Glen Greenwald recently brilliantly wrote, read “Democrats Craving A Brokered Convention” – it replicates the corruption of Chicago ’68 and will produce similar results.
There are tectonic forces gathering and they need a time and place to discharge the energy generated by the DNC & media’s betrayal.
I’m sure that the National Security State apparatus fully understands this and is already gearing up for “The Mugging In Milwaukee” – preparing their pre-Convention surveillance of progressives and left individuals and groups, planting spies and agents provocateur, and planning a military lockdown of the city, a project which is sure to make Bloomberg’s police state tactics in the 2004 Republican Convention in NY City look like a Boy Scout camp.
The only good that can come of this is the decline – or death – of the Democratic Party and the emergence of a true alternative left – labor – climate – progressive – democratic Socialist – “Green New Deal” party.
However, the South Carolina results, as well as those of several—e.g., Virginia, where Biden bested Sanders 53-23, and 53% of voters indicated preference for Medicare for All—of the Super Tuesday states, underscore the need to dig in and build on the potential the Sanders moment has provided us to take up the slow, unglamorous work of building organically rooted working-class politics around issues that connect directly with people’s lives and concerns all over the United States.
Amen, Bro!
[Update: 3/7/20 – based on Biden’s record, – which is hidden in plain sight – Norman Solomon and several others are right about Joe Biden:
Bernie should have been beating the shit out of Biden for MONTHS about all this. It will be very difficult to make this argument now, from Sanders’ position off weakness.
Political lies kill – just look what Obama and Clinton did under the lie of liberal progressive democrats.
The US media has been lying about “lunch bucket Joe” Biden’s record for decades. Those lies are coming home to roost right now. ~~~ end update]
[Update: 3/9/20 – Chris Hedges – a real writer (something I do not even prentend to be) – in his Truthdig column today makes exactly the same points as I, but of course it is written a lot better:
The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.
Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump another term in office.
[Update: 3/9/20 – We’re on a roll! Another of my favorite writers, Paul Street at Counterpunch opens with an honest assessment of the black vote for Biden:
I suppose the politically correct thing is to pretend that corporate-imperialist Joe Biden winning the Black vote isn’t like the late Jeffrey Epstein being hailed as a mentor of teenage girls.
[Update 3/10/20 – the Joe beatdown goes on!
- Listen to Jeremy Scahill destroy Biden: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT JOE
- Megan Day at Jacobin goes there too: Joe Biden Is Not All There Mentally. Running Him for President Is Incredibly Dangerous
- Glen Greenwald at The Intercept nails it: Democrats and Their Media Allies Impugned Biden’s Cognitive Fitness. Now They Feign Outrage.
end updates]