This group, the Nice Liberals with Big Egos, re-emerged recently, making big splashes in social media:

Anti-Iran letter published in the Guardian receives backlash and withdrawals

At any rate, the letter exploiting their good intentions in The Guardian to oppose the regime in Iran at this time is receiving more bad press every day. It's really just kind of silly: the letter suggests that let's stand there on the battlefield, with 90 million Iranians fighting for survival against an Israel/ US conjoined twin which doesn't care how many it kills, the more the merrier, and say tsk tsk both sides are bad. Maybe the claim is factually true, but everyone is going to notice the lack of attention to context. So this stuff has an effectiveness of about zero. We can change the world with strongly-worded letters regardless of the situation, unless we can't, in which case we live in the physical world. I guess we could look at the purpose this stuff is supposed to serve; it beats the furious debate about etiquette going on on Facebook these days. Caitlin Johnstone remarks:

Whenever I say this online I’ll get some Trotskyist or anarchist babbling about the need to express “solidarity” with Iranian political prisoners or whatever, but whenever I press them on what actual, material benefit those expressions of “solidarity” bring to the people they’re meant to help, they can’t point to anything solid.

Bill Fletcher Jr. responded to Johnstone's comments as follows:

The words of a cynic. Having worked on defense campaigns, including a campaign to free a political prisoner from what was then Zaire--and the campaign was successful--one of the greatest dangers for political prisoners is being forgotten. International solidarity campaigns both remind he world of these prisoners, e.g., Marwan Barghouti, but also can, at different points, pressure the tyrants. Cynicism, by the way, can never pass for radical politics.

Well that's something. Were the US and Israel trying to annihilate Zaire at the time of the campaign?

But what the letter does do, quite effectively, is to offer the public a mask-off moment for the Nice Liberals with Big Egos. Anyone supporting this letter is one. It's also easy to see some other people spending a lot of time, big egos, nice liberalism, and outrage opposing this letter. That also seems like an overestimate.

Most elementally, a Nice Liberal with Big Ego is defined by a vast overestimate of what counstitutes "the Left" in the US, accompanied by a vast overestimate of said "Left's" actual power. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told us in the Democratic Party convention two years ago, Kamala Harris is working tirelessly to make a ceasefire in Gaza happen, or some nonsense of that sort. In actuality, "the Left" in the US is a tiny entity, having wasted most of its time, money, energies, imagination, ethos, pathos, logos, and soul voting and campaigning for right-wing Democrats. Remember "The Squad"? Eight members of Congress. Remember Cori Bush? Here's the AIPAC tracker on her replacement, Wesley Bell:

You know those stories about candidates who were outspent a zillion to one and nonetheless won their races? This isn't one of those stories.

Of course, the problem is not the overestimates of the power of "the Left," or of good intentions, or of utopian dreams, in themselves. Rather, the problem is in the purposes these overestimates are to serve. FOX News tells us: "Oooh there's this big and scary Far Left in the US, proposing a better world or something horrific like that." Meanwhile the accused "Far Left" in Congress huffily announces that they're doing nothing of the sort.

Meanwhile, in non-nice-liberal-with-big-ego news, the current purchasers of our Congress, AIPAC, tell us:

Just as a further side note, Max Blumenthal told Judge Napolitano yesterday that country after country in South America was basically being put under control of forces aligned with Israel. So it's not just the US:

For the past forty-five years or so, our political class has been deathly afraid that five or ten people out of a country of 300+ million people might choose to be part of a real Left, and so their hirelings have been waging nonstop campaigns of verbal and legal abuse against the Green Party or (see above) anything fun happening in Portland Oregon, and this is why our century had two rigged primaries against Bernie Sanders. And in all cases you have the Nice Liberals with Big Egos there reminding us that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This time, the voters are told, if they vote really hard for the Creatures of Money in Congress, said Creatures of Money will behave in a slightly better way than what they did last time when they funded a genocide or six.

And ultimately we have Trump Two going off the deep end with the entire political class's endorsement, you see, because the Nice Liberals with Big Egos wasted nearly two years of our time cheering on Biden, and then Harris, instead of switching over to Stein. I guess that if they'd switched over to Stein it would have revealed them -- today they are small-time political actors speaking to tiny audiences, many others having become bored with their emptiness, while much of the rest of the US is either aligned with Republican wingnuts or Creatures of Money.

And it revealed that they are all living in the shadow of the hate-campaign waged against Ralph Nader for running in 2000 and in 2004. Nader, you see, ostensibly denied candidates with the letter (D) next to their names opportunities to do to us what a President with the letter (R) next to his name in fact did to us. I would have preferred a switchover to Stein; it would make the decline of the US more entertaining.

So what should the Nice Liberals with Big Egos have done?

Well, most obviously, they should have created a party of their own a long, long time ago a party which would have satisfied them, rather than pretending that one of the existing parties would suffice. There was, I recall, that brief moment when there was going to be a new People's Party, but apparently some nobody named Nick Brana ruined it, so it vanished. But we're forty-five years in from Reagan, and the political atmosphere is more like this.

What should they do now?

Well, as regards the War on Iran, it would seem that the Nice Liberals with Big Egos have, per Hamid Dabashi, lost the plot. So what does the plot look like? Well, once the US finally concludes that it has lost this war, and that it's not going to win any further wars in west Asia, hopefully there will be an opportunity to enact a sea-change in its internal politics. Perhaps there's a foreshadowing of such a sea-change in Zohran Mamdani. We should be ready for that monent.

But immediately, as Dabashi suggests:

A little humility, please

We can only change the world sometimes. We are not legion: rather, our self-proclaimed leaders have destroyed our credibility, and so we are a small group. In some of the rest of our time on Earth we might do well to prepare for those moments in an increasingly precarous future when we can change the world. Let's seize the day when we get that chance.