Communist Party USA
A spectre is haunting America, the spectre of middle-class leftists turning to the right. Sadly, it’s happened before. As with most cases of history repeating itself, the first time was a tragedy — that was when Trotsky’s “New York Intellectuals,” grouped around the magazine Partisan Review, joined the Cold War against the USSR. Today’s disembodied spirits, however, hovering over the graves of Trump’s failed January 6th insurrection, are more on the order of a political farce. Take the strange cases of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Once darlings of the internet left, they seem to have ended up quite somewhere else. Duane Townsend of the Independent writes: “The journalism of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and their exposure of the crimes of police, the military, and Wall Street have been of great benefit. But lately they’ve both spouted conservative hyperbole about the left.” Indeed, these two increasingly seem to identify the main danger as “deep state” Democratic Party “authoritarianism,” rather than the increasingly fascistic power grab by Trump and the Republican Party. An alarming chorus that fakes left. What’s the deal? Greenwald and Taibibi are not alone: Others are lending their voices to an alarming chorus that fakes left but upon close examination objectively swings right. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s begin with Taibbi. Consider his take on one of Trump’s favorite “news” outlets: “Fox [News] is one channel that no longer represents real institutional political influence in this country anymore,” he says. Really? Someone might have told Donald Trump. Taibbi continues: “The financial/educational/political elite with all the power is on the other side, and I think they’re the people to be worrying about.” Now listen to Greenwald on Fox: I would be on [Fox News] every day if I didn’t say no sometimes. Why is that happening? It’s bizarre. You look at any article on my work and it’s “far leftist Glenn Greenwald” and now I’m the most frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s show. How did that happen? I think the reason is so many people on the left and on the right . . . have so much more in common in terms of their political views and their common enemies than either want to recognize. . . . Those old labels [left and right] don’t really tell us much anymore. Before the election, Greenwald opined on enemies real and imagined: The CIA and the Deep State operatives became heroes of the liberal left, the people who support the Democratic Party. They are now in a full union with the neocons and the Bush-Cheney operatives, the CIA, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. That is the union of power, along with mainstream media outlets, that are fully behind the Democratic Party, which is likely to at least take over one branch of government, if not all of them, in the coming election and that’s a very alarming proposition, because they are authoritarian, they believe in censorship and suppression of information that exposes them in any kind of a critical light. For Greenwald, the Democratic Party is “the epitome of fascism.” The struggle against Trump then, in his view, is a distraction. We have little to worry about Trump et al., supposedly now marginalized by the “global elites” on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. This despite the fact that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. A parallel and likely related ideological trajectory has occurred with another journalist, Caleb Maupin, who writes for the Russian news agency RT and the grouping around the Center for Political Innovation. Maupin writes in a popular style, speaks glowingly…
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Signaling left, turning right: The “radicals” rebranding populism
