For an International Left

Steve Bannon is running around Europe organizing right-wing groups into The Movement. In response, Senator Bernie Sanders warns against "the rise of a new authoritarian axis".

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

He doesn't call it socialism, but it's clearly not enough to simply defend the status quo.

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

We must look honestly at how [the post-second world war global order] has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same.

Update (October 8):  Walden Bello examines the rise of right-wing movements around the world. He argues the "right has now married ... traditionally left-wing concerns to a vicious racist, chauvinistic, and anti-immigrant agenda".

Call it a welfare state, but only for members of the dominant racial and cultural group.

Update (October 26):  Brazil is on the brink of electing a far right candidate to be president.

Update (December 2):  The Progressive International has issued an "Open Call".

The time has come for progressives to form a grassroots movement for global justice: to mobilize workers, women and the disenfranchised all around the world behind a shared vision of democracy, prosperity, sustainability, and solidarity.

A Symptom, Not the Cause

Barack Obama kicks off his fall campaigning at the University of Illinois telling students the country is in a "backlash" moment.

You happen to be coming of age during one of those moments. It did not start with [Fuckface von Clownstick] ― he is a symptom, not the cause. He is just capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years. A fear, an anger that is rooted in our past but is also borne in our enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

Update (September 13):  Andrew Bacevich refers to Fuckface as "no more than a pimple on the face of this nation’s history" with no lasting impact.

[He] is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more [Dear Leaders] -- or someone worse -- to come.

Update (October 24):  In an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Chris Hedges elaborates on the "disease".

[Fuckface] is the product of a failed democracy.

[Sheldon] Wolin showed how there are no institutions left in America that are authentically democratic. What exists is the leaching of entertainment into politics. It is the manipulation through the public relations industry as well as a system that's calcified the lockout of third parties or insurgent candidates. Substantive social and political issues are marginalized. Manufacturing consent by the news media and popular culture at large is the norm. [Dear Leader] knows how to manipulate emotion and to operate in that sphere of mediated reality.

Update (December 27):  Paul Street quotes Chris Hedges.

[This] administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. [Fuckface von Clownstick] is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that [Dear Leader] and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not [Orangeman]. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience. … If we do not stand up, we will enter a new dark age.

Update (January 13, 2019):  More from Paul Street on the dangers of a "national emergency". And in an interview with Chauncey DeVega, Timothy Snyder says Fuckface is the national emergency.

Update (February 17, 2019):  Andrew O'Hehir agrees there is a national emergency, just not the fake one von Clownstick declared.

[I]t’s possible [Dear Leader] has done us a favor, by making clear to anyone with their eyes open that we can’t go back to the supposedly stable world of NATO and the International Monetary Fund and free trade and fiscal austerity, where “democracy” and “capitalism” and “freedom” were seen as synonymous and interdependent and the financial sector was treated as a priestly caste with unique access to divine knowledge. (I wasn’t going to use the buzzword “neoliberalism,” but I just did.)

That regime bred disastrous inequality, conferring more and more power and wealth on the ruling elite while condemning everyone else to lives of nonstop work, debt slavery and consumer diversion. It sowed bitterness and nihilism by convincing most people around the world (not incorrectly) that the political and economic system was stacked against them and democracy was a sham constructed to protect the interests of the powerful. Broadly speaking, it dealt with the crises of Islamic fundamentalism and widespread migration in piecemeal and self-destructive fashion. It was paralyzed for decades before the worsening climate crisis, unable or unwilling to navigate between the urgent need to reshape the world economy and the sacredness of the profit motive, and so bringing us to the brink of catastrophe (if not over it).

Update (February 18, 2019):  Paul Street has a list of 31 actual national emergencies.

1. Class Inequality
2. Poverty
3. Plutocracy
4. Bad Jobs
5. Corporate Media Consolidation
6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid
7. Gender Inequality
8. Native American Poverty
9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking
10. [Von Clownstick]ism/Fascism
11. The War on Truth
12. Gun Violence
13. Sexual Violence
14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy
15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia
16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies
17. Neo-McCarthyism
18. Health Care and Health
19. Bad Schools
20. Child Abuse
21. Depression and Substance Abuse
22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights
23. The Dreamer Nightmare
24. Vote Suppression
25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution
26. [Dear Leader] and the Imperial Presidency
27. Election Madness/Electoralism
28. Guns Over Butter
29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism
30. Amazon
31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide

Update (March 25, 2019):  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agrees with George Takei that "we have serious issues to sort out".

[R]emoving [Fuckface] will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalization that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified and reanimated.

In order for us to heal as a nation, we ALL must pursue the hard work of addressing these root causes.

It’s not as easy as voting. It means having uncomfortable moments [in conversation] with loved ones, with media, with those we disagree, and yes - within our own party, too.

It’s on all of us.