From Internet to Book

“The Populist’s Guide to 2020 – A New Right and a New Left Rising,” by Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti, 2020

These two hosts from the popular internet show “The Rising” fill this book with individual commentary chapters on ‘core rot’ in the U.S., the election and individual candidates, the media, identity politics and theories of change.  They take a somewhat simple class line as their lodestar.  They seem to be trying to combine ‘populism’ from the left and right on certain agreeable issues.  Enjeti is a Republican who opposes libertarian economics while endorsing conservative social issues, though he barely talks about them.  So he is lukewarm in his support for Trump and also barely talks about him.  Ball is a firm Sanders’ backer who trashes the other candidates with facts and excoriates the U.S. and the Democratic Party for failing the working class.

They are both actually funny and work with facts to undermine the corporate media narratives like Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate and the pathetic impeachment attempt.  I’ll center this review on Ball, though Enjeti semi-accurately reams both Democrats and Republicans on finance issues from a capitalist perspective.  Neither is a socialist of any kind, so their critiques only go so far, nor are they as sharp as more left-wing journalists or comedians.  Ball is a former MSNBC journalist who was purged along with people like Ed Schultz for being too left.  She joins a increasingly long list of leftish journalists who have run afoul of their corporate news organizations.  The recent shutdown of Truthdig, purges of leftists at Alternet, ownership changes at Salon that led to an exodus, pro-intervention commentaries at the billionaire-owned The Intercept - all bode further ill for muckrakers and critical journalism.

Ball likes polls and finds many that confirm U.S. citizens know that Washington is controlled by corporate interests.  She finds Sanders, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard as interesting candidates who were consistently torpedoed by the corporate-controlled media.   She reams neo-liberal diversity fakes like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Deval Patrick  and ‘wine-track’ candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.  Amy Klobuchar is never mentioned.  She sees only Sanders and Biden to be real, representing opposing views of the future within that party.  She knows Biden has no answer to what is going on in the world except more of the same – which is what got us to Trump.

Ball points out that the Democratic Party leadership has no moral authority anymore except in narrow circles of the upper middle-class.  For instance Barney Frank, of Dodd-Frank fame, now sits on the board of a bank!  She takes on the new cold war and Russia-baiting pushed by military and CIA spooks.  In a side-note, she calls for an end to the drug war and full legalization as a way to deal with the opioid and crack crisis affecting the proletariat.  They both look into the well-known media cover-ups from NBC and ABC news over Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinsten – who were both connected to elites.  Ball skewers MSNBC, her former employer, for becoming the InfoWars of the Democratic Party, which actually damaged the left.  Even Bush-era neo-cons are now welcomed there in the big tent of ‘anti-Trumpism’ – the main politics the Democrats have now.

IDENTITARIANISM

Of most interest is Ball’s take on identity politics.  It is clear that being a woman, Latino or African-American politician is not the criterion EVEN for Democrats, given the Republican politicians and appointees that are women, Latino or African American.  Almost no one votes on this basis, but don’t tell that to diversity liberals. Only if candidates are almost identical will someone prefer a minority if they care. 

For instance the media made out that Sanders and Warren were almost identical, but anyone looking at their politics and history see large differences.  As Warren said, “I am a capitalist, but markets need rules.”  She sponsored the “Accountable Capitalism Act” in 2018.  On the other hand Sanders describes himself as a ‘democratic socialist.’  He, not she, first came up with bigger, partly-transitional programs like the Green New Deal, Free College, Medicare for All and others.  Ball describes their approaches as technocratic (Warren) and mobilizing the population (Sanders) – representing two different theories of change. (Whether this is true is another matter…)  So Warren supporters, disregarding these large differences, claimed it was ‘sexism’ not to vote for her.  Now she is on Biden’s short list for VP or Treasury, so that should give you an idea of where she actually stands with the DNC ruling elite and their politics.  When AOC endorsed Sanders, the upper-middle class feminists melted down over the endorsement.  AOC was supposed to endorse a woman or minority, damn the politics.

In a way, it is just changing the face of the oppressor.  As Ball jokes, when will the media celebrate Andrew Yang’s Asian-American diversity, Tulsi Gabbard’s Samoan diversity and Sander’s Jewish diversity?  Never.  The endorsed candidate of many national security types and billionaires, Pete Buttigieg, was supposed to corral the youth vote due to his ‘youth.’  He was actually the kind of young person old, rich people like!  Even gay organizations did not endorse Buttigieg.

Ball reams the elite media mono-culture which has no clue about the working class, still thinking they are just a bunch of yahoos.  Even when unions are supposedly a base of the Democratic Party – which shows the abusive relationship neo-liberals have with labor. The Working Families Party, a fake independent labor group, threw their support behind Warren, a former Republican with no prior ties to the labor movement.   Juan Castro fell behind Sanders with working-class Latino voters.  Biden got more working-class ‘black’ votes than so-called ‘black’ candidates.  And so on… pure identity politics failed on its own logic.

Ball doesn’t understand the concept of special oppression within the proletariat, which identity politics tries to rip off, so ignores it.  She also does not mention the red-baiting and Russia-baiting by the CIA, Democrats and press that hit Sanders during the Nevada primary, though that perhaps happened after this book went to press.  Red-baiting is another ideology that unites Republicans, Democrats and even social-democrats, Schactmanites and anarchists – all united against ‘totalitarianism.’  See this popular front!

Liberals doing this don’t realize they practice their own form of bourgeois totalitarianism.

Ball notes the victory of a Democratic Party candidate for governor in Kentucky, Andy Beshear.  As she notes, the teachers strikes and right-wing acts by the Republican Bevin gave Beshear the victory – especially because he centered on economically populist themes.  So now we come to another real flaw in Ball’s logic.  Her unstated angle is to make the Democratic Party a ‘working-class organization.’  Not possible, no more than Sanders could.  The actual Left has to concentrate on building a new mass-based, labor-populist party from the ground up.  If it starts winning, it will begin to take proletarian democrats, independents, former non-voters and unions with it.  There is no other choice.

P.S. - I do not analyze why these two share a show, but it is probably because it draws more viewers.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “Bullet Points and Punch Lines,” “Chapo Trap House,”  or use the words ‘Sanders,’ ‘journalism,’ ‘Russia-gate / Russiagate’ or ‘Labor Party.’

Call or knock for a book.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 21, 2020