It
comes as no surprise that The Nation
magazine endorses Hillary Clinton for President (10-24-16). As the leading
left-liberal publication, The Nation
huffs and puffs high-minded principles before surrendering to the
Democratic Party establishment. Nonetheless, it’s always
interesting to see how they arrive at their submission.
Of
course, it’s all about Trump. He’s not on our side. As a
statement of the obvious, that conviction is unmatched. But is
Clinton on our side?
The
Nation’s editors assemble a
tortured list of Clinton positives and Trump negatives that stretch
the truth, shrug off uncomfortable facts, and hail irrelevancies. She
exhibits “grace under pressure,” they tell us. She has been a
“forceful advocate of health-care reform” since 1992. And for
wild-eyed fantasy: She “is running on the most progressive platform
in the modern history of the Democratic Party.”
Trump’s
charge that the elections are “rigged,” on the other hand, is “an
assault on the very basis of democratic governance itself.” So the
elections are not rigged in favor of the rich, white, and powerful?
With
amazing audacity, the editors simply dismiss Clinton’s obscene bond
with corporations and foreign tyrants, a bond that is sealed with
tens of millions of dollars of barely-concealed quid pro quos. They
assert that “progressives will have to continue to push her” away
from these rich and powerful benefactors.
As
for her super-hawk foreign policy, The
Nation concedes that Clinton is
wrong on everything from Palestine to Russia and Syria. Though she is
seemingly “intent on deepening a New Cold War,” we are invited to
“break her hawkish habits,” as though her role in killing tens of
thousands is akin to curbing a smoking habit or losing weight.
Presidential
candidate Jill Stein is the fly in The
Nation’s ointment. She is all the
progressive things that Ms. Clinton is not. She stands against the
corporate, war-mongering tide and not with it. Here, The
Nation engages in a remarkably
clumsy dance around the Stein option, laying alleged failings of the
Green Party at her feet: “...her cause has not been helped by the
Green Party’s reluctance, or inability, to seek, share, and build
power, with all the messy compromise this often entails. Instead of
the patient-- and Sisyphean-- task of building an authentic
grassroots alternative, the Greens offer a top-down vehicle for
protest.”
But
isn’t building an “authentic grassroots alternative” exactly
what the Stein candidacy is all about? Isn’t Stein reaching out to
The Nation
readers, Sisyphus, or anyone else interested in changing the bankrupt
political scene in order to build precisely the power that the
editors claim to want to see? The apparent truth is that The
Nation would like Jill Stein to go
away and take her principled positions with her, clearing the way for
a heavy dose of lesser-of-two-evil scare tactics.
The
most-tenured Nation
columnist, Katha Pollitt, bats clean-up on the magazine’s Hillary
team. She relishes the opportunity, entitling her column The
Case for Hillary. In offering her
brief, she gives a list of 12 reasons, beginning with reproductive
rights: “I’m putting this first because they’re crucial to
everything you care about…”
[my italics]. Everything we care about? As important as reproductive
rights are, does Pollitt really believe that reproductive rights
trump all concerns? Did she consider African American mothers whose
sons have been murdered by police? Did she even weigh the daily
slaughter of hundreds if not thousands throughout the world at the
hands of US weapons or the weapons of its surrogates? Does poverty,
lack of health care, and inferior education count in her
reproductive-rights calculus?
Pollitt,
like far too many upper-middle class white liberals, is blind to
class and race. Those from other classes or races are not part of
“us,” and the concerns of the “other,” though real, are not
significant barriers to the “simple human happiness” that she
argues flows from reproductive rights. Like the Evangelicals standing
on the other side of the abortion barricades, she is incapable of
imagining anything more important to others than that battle. She,
like the right-wing fanatics, trivializes all other wrongs.
Against
the Big Lie
Pollitt’s
defense of Ms. Clinton reaches disturbing dimensions when she raises
oft-repeated lies about Communist sectarianism leading to the
empowerment of Hitler. She references a supposed moment when
“...German communists scorned the weak-tea socialists in the 1932
election with the slogan ‘After Hitler, us.’” Like other
similar red-baiting slanders that circulate on the left in every
election cycle, this one bears little or no relation to the truth.
Defenders of lesser-of-two-evilism assert that the German Communists
stood in the way of working class anti-fascist unity, that they
welcomed Hitler’s rise, that they spurned joint action. These
charges are meant to apply supposed lessons from history to the
politics of our time, suggesting that independent militancy and
principles stand in the way of unity against the specter of
extremism. If disaffected voters would throw their votes at the feet
of the slightly-lesser-evil, like the German Communists should have
done, we could avoid the specter of a greater evil.
While
there are many for-hire historians who will affirm these claims, they
are based on fiction.
The
“1932 election” that Pollitt cites was, in fact, five critical
elections: a first-round presidential election in March, the second
and final round, the important Prussian Landtag election in April, a
Reichstag election in July, and another-- the last relatively
legitimate Reichstag election-- in November.
One
surely unimpeachable perspective on these elections was that of
journalist Carl von Ossietzky. Ossietzky was a prominent and
respected left-wing commentator associated with the left wing of
social democracy and often critical of the Communists (KPD). From a
family of fallen aristocrats, Ossietzky’s anti-fascist credentials
and integrity were impeccable-- he received the Nobel Prize in 1935
and died in a Gestapo prison hospital in 1938.
In
his newspaper columns in Die
Weltbühne, Ossietzky tells a story
far removed from the fantastic anti-Communist narrative. In the
lead-up to the first round of the Presidential elections, the Social
Democratic Party, despite being Germany’s largest party at the
time, chose not to run a candidate against both the reactionary
incumbent President, von Hindenburg, and Adolf Hitler. It argued that
the party’s stance was not pro-Hindenburg, but anti-fascist, a
splitting of hairs that did not impress Ossietzky: “It is not that
fascism is winning, but that the others are adapting it… A passing
insult tossed by the demagogues of the Berlin Sports Palast jerks ten
Socialist deputies from their seats, and forces them to prove
themselves as fatherland-lovers… the initiative lies with the
right.” Ossietzky writes: “Readers continually ask me for whom
one should vote on March 13th. Is there really nothing better, they
ask, than pursuing this fateful and discouraging policy of the
‘lesser evil’?”
He
goes on:
As
a non-party man of the left I would have been happy to vote for an
acceptable Social Democrat… Since there is no Social Democratic
candidate then I will have to vote for the Communist… It must be
emphasized that a vote for Thälmann means neither a vote of
confidence for the Communist Party, nor major expectations. To make
left-wing politics it is necessary to concentrate strength where a
man of the left stands in the battle. Thälmann is the only one; all
the others are various shades of reaction. That makes the choice
easier.
The
Social Democrats say: “Hindenburg means struggle against fascism.”
From which source do the gentlemen draw this knowledge?
It
is nonsense to describe Thälmann’s candidature as simply a gain of
numbers. Thälmann will probably receive a surprisingly high number
of votes… The better that Thälmann does, the clearer it will be
what a success could have been won with a united socialist candidate…
Within
a week of his election, Hindenburg-- designated the “anti-fascist”
candidate by the Social Democrats-- called for the banning of all
left-wing party-affiliated mass organizations. Before nine months
passed, the Reich President had appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor and
handed rule to the Nazis. Ossietzky knew at that time what a colossal
mistake it was for the Social Democrats to refuse to run a candidate,
to support Hindenburg, and to refuse to support Thälmann: “Invisible
hands are at work in the web and woof of official policy, trying to
bring Hitler, thrown out through the front door, in again up the back
stairs.”
In
January of 1933, immediately after von Schleicher was deposed as
Chancellor and prior to Hindenburg appointing Hitler, the German
Communists suggested a united general strike; the Social Democrats
rejected the offer to collaborate.
Ossietzky
urged unity between Communists and Social Democrats as early as April
of 1932. After the Nazis made major gains in the important Prussian
Landtag election, Ossietzky saw only two effective responses: either
the Social Democrats invite the KPD into the existing Prussian
government (something that they had refused to do) or the two parties
form a united front. The KPD had already raised the second option one
day after the election. The Central Committee called for “mass
meetings of the workers in every factory and every mine… in all
trade unions…[to] compile a list of joint demands, elect action
committees and strike committees composed of Communist, Social
Democratic, Christian, and non-party workers…”
Despite
the negative portrait painted of KPD tactics by liberal commentators,
the German people showed their growing confidence in the KPD in the
two Reichstag elections. Of the three major parties, only the KPD
made gains in both elections, adding nearly 30% to its deputies while
the SPD lost nearly 16%. Clearly, the KPD’s militant anti-fascism
was growing in popularity with the working class.
It
is probably too much to hope that liberals will retire the
red-baiting canard of Communism ushering in fascism, any more than
there is hope that partisan Democrats will cease blaming Ralph Nader
for their pathetic surrender to the right in the 2000 election.
Clearly,
the lesser-of-two-evils approach will not go away anytime soon,
though it has failed to halt the many decades of the rightward drift
of the political center. Could it be that those who own the two
parties are sponsoring this persistent shift to the right in order to
gauge just how long liberals, labor, and the left will tolerate it
without making a break with the Democratic Party establishment?
One
would do well to put aside Cold War textbooks and liberal smugness
and take a long look at the dynamics of oppositional politics in the
Weimar era leading up to Hitler’s ascension to power. There are
lessons from that period beyond desperately collaborating with
bourgeois and reactionary parties. The severe economic crisis of that
time was only answered by a demagogic and extreme nationalist
movement and by the militantly anti-capitalist, revolutionary
movement.
The Social Democratic Party chose a different path: it
sought to manage capitalism along with its bourgeois parliamentary
counterparts. They failed. Disaster ensued.
Zoltan
Zigedy
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