Red Star: Centrism: A disease of the heart

Twice in 20 years, a president rose to power without the democratic backing of the American people. Twice, the opposition party failed to fight.

Twice, the centrists warned us to be civil, to listen, to give the billionaires, the generals, the oil men and the real estate developers a chance to raise wages, bring peace and fight climate change.

We’re reaping the bitter fruits of centrism. Ideologically, liberalism has no response to the crisis of the last 10 years. We’re facing a mass extinction due to climate change. Cap and trade and subsidies won’t do a thing to slow it down. A centrist policy raised premiums on tens of millions of Americans, while wise men at think tanks and The New York Times told us single payer can never be the answer. Their solution to the immiseration of the American people is to act like no one in the upper Midwest was worse off after eight years of blue rule. The bailouts that shifted the cost of recovery onto millions of working class people should discredit the economic center of American politics forever.

If Trump and the Republican party are an existential threat to democracy, as many centrists claim, is the solution on Twitter or in the streets?

We’re going to be fine, the biggest issue in the world is that a college student was rude to a race scientist.

The style of politics I’m attacking is anything between David Brooks and Paul Krugman. This territory includes a lot of the media blob, a lot of smug Tufts students and everyone who pretends to have read both Thucydides and the Constitution. This is a style of politics that attacks problems with means-tested, inadequate, market-oriented solutions. Of course, it was these reforms that destroyed the social safety net and created the mass incarceration crisis.

But none of that matters. Because America is good because America is great.

Policy papers that don’t address the material inequality of American capitalism have no substance because they don’t address anything that changes the lives of millions.

The prisons, the 60,000 dead from opioids, the stagnant wages, the dying towns, the unaffordable rent, the trillion dollars in student loans, the wars without end, the spying, the 2008 collapse, the destruction of unions, the mega droughts, the fires, the hurricanes, the lead in the water, the carbon in the air, fascists with guns, rapists with power and continued segregation are all aspects of a capitalist system in systemic crisis.

There’s no going back to Nov. 7, 2016. We’re living in an age where liberal pieties have no meaning, where facts of poverty, slaughter, mass extinction and racism are laid bare for the whole world. Light shines on all the horrors. Centrists close their eyes and hearts.

The political future is bleak. It doesn’t have to be. Join a socialist party, join a union, join an LGBTQ gun club. We have a moral duty to fight as hard as humanly possible for a decent future. Centrists can have their comfort, while radicals bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.