I am going to take a break today from the hilarious analysis of the Biden Problem to examine two artifacts of Left discourse. The first is something provoked by Ben Norton in an interview with Briahna Joy Gray. The second is an article by Nick Pemberton, titled Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Each of these pieces demonstrates a problem with Left discourse. First, the interview:

And much as I might sympathize with Ben Norton -- and I greatly sympathize with Ben Norton -- I still feel obliged to argue that what's coming down the pipeline is not "fascism." Fascism was a dynamic ideology for a dynamic time. Hitler tried to conquer the world. Franco in fact conquered Spain. Mussolini conquered Ethiopia. Fascism was an ideology for the time between the two world wars, in which what was left of the old monarchies had disintegrated but the Cold War global order had not yet been established.

Our era does not share the dynamism of 1919-1939. The best that was said of Mussolini was that he made the trains run on time. Neither Biden nor Trump cares if the trains run on time. Fascism was motivated by nostalgia -- nostalgia for a time, specifically 1884-1885, when the Great Powers of Europe could decide to carve up Africa on a whim. Hitler was motivated by the US conquest of the native peoples of North America and of its enslavement of Africans. If you want to think of a leader who acted out of nostalgia for the fascists, think of George W. Bush, who conquered Iraq and destroyed our civil liberties. In sum, the authoritarianism that dominates the red states today is real, and definitely a bad thing. But if it were in fact fascism, our fight against it would take the character of the French Maquis in their fight against the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators, and not of Tennessee legislators.

Rather, our era appears as a total descent into a new Dark Age, an age in which -- as Antonio Gramsci once said -- the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born. To continue the Gramsci quote: "in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The Republican and Democratic Parties are, then, morbid symptoms. I suppose such forces as dominate those parties could become fascist if they were to discover some of the dynamism that characterized fascism. But that hasn't happened so far, and to the extent that it would happen, it would be a minor interruption in the slow-motion disintegration of global systems which characterizes our era. What we have now is, well, imagine if the Three Stooges were to be granted global dominion by a plutocratic elite and allowed to perpetrate their slapstick violence upon the rest of us unopposed. Or imagine if our cutest house-cats were to grow to the size of monsters.

"Moving people to the left," Ben Norton's goal, is not all by itself going to prevent such a Dark Age. (It might work if combined with something else.) The terms "Left" and "Right," apparently, refer to the seating chart of the National Assembly which was formed at the beginning of the French Revolution. So if we are to move people to the left, does that mean we should have another French Revolution? Will another French Revolution mitigate climate change, or bring peace to Ukraine?

Here are more questions. If we are against neoliberalism, does that make us Right -- or Left?

If we defend the Palestinians against incursions by Israeli settlers, are we "Right" for endangering "Israel's right to exist," or are we "Left" for defending general human rights?

Now, clearly, I can be assumed to be on the "Left" for opposing capitalism, whereas the "Right" is in favor of eternal capitalism, infinite exploitation on a finite planet. But capitalism is not an "issue." Capitalism is a religion, the Religion of Money, and I am attempting to become an apostate. Under capitalism, capital is sacred. And capital is money designed to make more money, or M - C - M' according to the discourse laid out in the fourth chapter of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital. The problems arise when we try to lay out all of politics as if it were made up of "issues."

Okay, now the Pemberton piece. Nick Pemberton's piece in today's Counterpunch, "Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," encounters those problems. Pemberton argues that anyone who supports Tucker Carlson in any way is a member of the "Post-Left." Pemberton moreover argues that "the post-left cheers on Russia and China, and while I certainly think there is a case for doing so, they have never actually articulated what their case is." (If you want to sit by, popcorn in hand, and watch as Russia and China allow the rest of the world to defy the US-led hegemonic political order, does that make you Left or Post-Left?)

If you actually go to the "Post-Left Watch" page on Twitter, you'll see their mission statement:

Highlighting and keeping receipts on post-left (right-wing politics with vaguely leftist aesthetics) pundits and podcasters.

But it's unclear that all of the people who went on Tucker Carlson's show counted -- or count -- as advocates of right-wing politics. (Pemberton's piece has a list of them.) And it's also unclear as to whether Tucker Carlson's being fired from FOX "news" "must be celebrated as a form of democracy and freedom." These issues deserve my focused apathy. I really don't care. Under capitalism FOX "news" is enshrined as a market leader in entertainment-propaganda, a force for crap in the world. Firing Carlson will not improve them.

In the same vein, I also don't care about any of Briahna Joy Gray's doubts about the candidacies of RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson. The point of RFK Jr. and of Marianne Williamson is that they are not Joe Biden, and the longer and louder their candidacies are, the more likely it will be that we will get to see the real, material, physical human being named Joe Biden. Nick Pemberton would like to make some room in his life for an ideology which isn't "materialist." Here's what he says:

Just about all of the pro-Carlson Left have renounced the Leftist label. They are Post-Left. I am able to see this because I confess to taking a similar dark turn. I wanted to replace ideology with class. I wanted to replace an ideological approach with a material approach.

The problem here is not in the wish to overcome ideology, for what could be more idealistic than that? The problem is believing that you really could have an ideology that is solely materially informed.

But Nick Pemberton is still not enough of a materialist. And, right now, America needs to be "materially informed" enough to understand how comically stupid it is for the Democrats to run Joe Biden for another term. America is clearly not there yet.

Okay, break's over.