New Populist Focus for Radicals

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When George Bush Jr. won the presidency, a lot of really intelligent people looked around and asked what the hell the people of this country were thinking? They wondered if their country was truly full of stupid people, truly full of ignorant people. They sneered at the sentiment expressed by the Republican voter; "He seems like a nice guy, or someone I would like to have a beer with." A lot of my contemporaries were compelled to make some of the same statements of contempt for this feeling. I believe that this generalization is wrong, elitist, ultimately counter-productive, and that there is a need for a refocusing of left-wing populism.

The first is involved in the rather pathetic ability of the left-wing, whose ideology would most behoove the working class, to mobilize populism in their favor. There is some groundbreaking political analysis being done by a young man in California, Michael Shellenburg (as I read in Sun Magazine), who has the opinion that the reason a man like John Kerry, an intellectual and a war-veteran, could not win against a man like George Bush Jr. was that people felt (key word there) that Kerry, were the to sit beside him in a bar, would judge them on their intelligence, while Bush would judge them on their values. I think this holds enormous and powerful truth. Even though I think Democrats and Republicans are cut from the same cloth and represent the same fascist ideology of capitalism, even though I think that these two parties are different only in words not in actions, I see a new direction for Lefties in this new decade.

If perhaps, we could develop a movement that perhaps applied to working class people rather than intellectuals alone, would have more working communists and a lot less "liberal communist" or "communist CEO's" like Bill Gates. Contrary to current popular belief, communism is an ideology that maintains a majority of the homey-values of the inherent working class of America. In fact, it would maintain these values with high priority and with action, rather than with the lip-service that is payed by our current political system. Imagine a government that does focus on community, does give self-determinative powers to individuals, expands liberty, and values hard work and strong ethics for their own sake.

I have been noticing a lot of rather common patterns in our lexicon of communal and common knowledge. We hear it referred to as "common sense" as a means of contrasting with high-level intellectual discourses commonly displayed by most left-wing representatives. There is a enormous amount of powerful truths that have been left untouched by the liberals of the Democratic party and even the more egalitarian left-wing, who have turn their nose up at such vulgar excuses for reason and policy (I use the word vulgar because its Latin root literally means common people as it refers to Vulgar Latin of the common folk). Their reasons, ironically, have been rather reactionary, a capitulation to the right-wing who has ,rather unopposed, swept in an placed themselves as the representative of the down-to-earth-salt-of-the-land-hard-working-folks, even though i out of a hundred of them come from working class backgrounds and they routinely represent large business interest rather than working class interest. They have gotten very good at choosing hot-spot populist topics and then going against the stream of their ideology to convince the working class that they are on their side, ie. immigration and gun-laws or Constitutional Rights (this is so long as they can maitian a right-wing fundamentalist Supreme Court that will happily reinterpret the Constitution to give citizen rights to Corpoations that are in reality merely property entities).

Communism above all other ideologies aligns itself with common people because it means to maintain individual liberties in the face of tyrannical Capital, as it is by nature, it means to establish strong locality and community to nourish and protect that individual, it means to extend all of the fundamental thing included in the Bill of Rights and more importantly the ideas expounded (and then forgotten) within the Declaration of Independence, it means to raise the standard of living for people in general through the more efficient use of resources, labor, service, and the priority to deal with every humans' need, and finally it means to compensate every individual justly for the hard labor they do for the nation. Are these not all pillars of populist sentiment?

Communism means to protect the values of this nation. It means to actually realize the American Dream as an ideal rather than a vague and empty fantasy, it means to value hard work and personal ethics in each individual, it means to help the sick and feed the poor, it means to help the children learn to be healthy and more importantly happy humans (not just how to be adults...), it aims to allow the private practice of Church with the invasion of the public, it means to protect the individual liberties of the people like free speech, free thought, free press, free expression, and free life, it means to defend family, in contrast to the way that Capital has destroyed them and rebuilt them in a twisted and exploitable fashion, and finally it means to protect working class people, who only wish to live lives in peace and in the pursuit of happiness.

I think a new era of left-wing populism is possible. I think it will begin when the left wing reclaims the inherently Radical ideas that are responsible for this nation's founding. It can be very persuasively argued that the Constitution was written merely to protect the property rights of the New ownership class of this country, of white men and rich men, and it has been done so by the Left for ages. While we can recognize this and rejects this founding factor, we must also recognize that the people of this country are just like any other and have root in nationalism. The movement will not be a fascist one, built upon flag waving and anthem singing, it will be a people's movement focused on making life more livable in this country. And there are some ideas, especially in the Declaration of Independence, that can help take us there. We merely have to reclaim the historical precedence for egalitarianism, revolution, freedom, equality and justice for all that is within this nations founding. We need to act in a manner that actively rejects the negative factors of our founding and rather than rejecting the entirety of our founding, we need to reclaim it and make it our own again. (A great expansion on this, put in nice, big intellectual words for your convenience can be found in Slavoj Zizek's new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce somewhere near pages 130-140.)