Counterpunch’s Jonathan Cook recently published a scathing essay, “Bolsonaro: a Monster Engineered by Our Media”, in which he deftly disassembles an argument put forward by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, to the effect that social media have undermined the role of legitimate journalism in protecting democracy from demagogues.
“When debate is no longer through regulated media, courts and institutions, politics will default to the mob,” Jenkins wrote, and Cook justly rakes him over the coals.
The view from the actual Left looks more like this: “The mob” has traveled well beyond Fed Up with structures of power and economy that have not demonstrated much concern for them in well over a generation, and the corporatized information system has not really served to give them a voice to articulate their real needs, let alone educate them in alternatives. We therefore cannot blame “the mob”, who now live in Outrage, for lashing out at their tormentors.
“The true left, “writes Cook, “— whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US — does not control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US.”Point taken. More means of communication, broader access to information ought to lead in the long run to a better-informed public. On the face of it, that makes an awful lot of sense.
In the long run. Have the Many made good decisions in backing DT or Bolsonaro? Well no – not if the goal was finding real solutions to the glaring problems that plague us. And Cook rightly points this out. His beef is with the self-serving nature of the corporate media, not with the Many themselves.
And my beef with Cook’s otherwise insightful essay has to do with the rather broad assault on Practicality that his position implies. Coming from a fairly standard reading of Marx, Cook argues that establishment figures like Obama and HRC will never really address the needs of the Many, because they are the lapdogs of economic and political interests that, above all, want to keep socialism (however defined) out of the house. If they can’t strangle it outright, they will content themselves with putting the urge of the Many toward collective action to sleep.
Point taken. I have long maintained that the Democrats are not really the solution — they are part of the problem.
And yet, Cook’s frustration with quasi-left publications like The Guardian notwithstanding, we do well to remember that neither of the Right-Wing demagogues-du-jour came to power with overwhelming public support…they claimed mandates where none existed, which is telling: not only are the Many divided over what to do about their situation, but in fact not all corporatist assaults on the Common Good are equally bad.
Only a very pernicious form of false equivalence allows some on the Left in the US to think that a vote for HRC was simply a vote for the corporatocracy.
False equivalence — the argument that all bad is equally bad, and that therefore there is no good in voting for anything that is bad — is very, very dangerous.
While we may acknowledge that figures like Obama and HRC are only acting in the interests of the Many insofar as that might happen to coincide with the profits of one or the other faction of the plutocracy, nevertheless you will never convince me that the Many (and indeed, the Planet!) are not far worse off with a Trump or a Bolsonaro than they have been under quasi-liberal figureheads like those just mentioned.
Look around you.
One can imagine an HRC presidency that looked the other way while corporate profit-taking at the expense of the environment carried on in one way or another. But can anyone seriously imagine HRC rolling back environmental safeguards through executive order?
One can easily imagine American militarism continuing apace under an HRC government. But can you seriously believe that she would have completely destabilized all of our global alliances and alienated all of our traditional friends in favor of You Know Who?
One can easily imagine a losing fight on behalf of labor in Washington under an HRC government. But can anyone seriously imagine her appointing a series of rabidly anti-labor, anti-feminist, anti-pluralist “justices” to the SCOTUS?
It must be remembered that, in the liberal democracies anyway, ALL progress toward a more humane economic system and toward the even minimal defense of the environment that we have now have come through the hands of “liberal” politicians, most of whom were nevertheless either members of the elite outright (FDR, for example) or else deeply beholden to them (Obama, LBJ, etc.).
And conversely, traditionally conservative elements in our governments have led the charge in repealing and rolling back these important policies. Always.
False equivalence is the enemy of practicality and indeed the enemy of politics itself. It holds that there is no benefit at all in settling for half-measures; there is no middle ground available to work toward what would be, after all, the truly Common Good.
The Many are divided — that is a natural outcome of the situation we find ourselves in. But if all but those whom one disagrees with are equally bad, there is no hope of uniting against our common oppressors around those things we can agree on!
The proof of the pudding: the Left in America had a golden opportunity to put a stake in the vampire’s heart. Had we stopped sniping at each other for a moment, we could have dealt a staggering blow to the realenemies of the Many, the ones who actually refuse even to acknowledge us at all. Then, perhaps, we might have been in a position to force the Democrats to give us a seat at the table.
We must agree on the problems first, before we can discuss the solutions!
But some of us cannot see past false equivalence, and that has nearly done us in.
Illustration: https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/logical-fallacies/false-equivalence-logical-fallacies/
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