About a month ago I wrote a diary in Caucus99percent which discussed an important argument offered by David Rovics.

The gist of it was this: one of the reasons why Republicans are politically in the ascendant is that they have "rhetorically outflanked the Democrats to the left." I liked this Rovics podcast because for a lot of people his argument seems contrary to common sense. "Everyone knows" the Democrats are "to the left" of the Republicans. What has in fact happened is that, while "the left" has been caught supporting the Clinton - Obama - Biden agenda of neoliberal corporate domination (while explaining away this support through a repertoire of "left-wing" rhetorical gestures), "the right" has commandeered this same repertoire of gestures for the sake of a different collection of nonsense.

Thus at the same time nobody is a "leftist" while everyone is a "leftist." Nobody is a "leftist" because everyone supports an agenda that is regressive, and we can go over the details of all this regression in the comments section if readers so desire. Everyone is a "leftist," on the other hand, because everyone is using the language of justice and anti-racism and (in some cases) anti-capitalism in order to justify their regressive agendas.

As if to outdo Rovics, Emily Janakiram has a glorious article out in the most recent issue of The Baffler titled The Right's Fight for Women which discusses the Right's appropriation of left-wing rhetoric in America after the Dobbs decision, in which the anti-abortionists have won a red-state victory. Here's a fun quote:

To pseudo-socialist antis, abortion access is a tool of capitalists to trick women into abandoning their true calling as mothers in order to make them more effective wage slaves—ignoring that actual Marxist feminists, including Engels himself, consistently argued that women’s liberation from the unwaged drudgery and violence of the home is an essential part of the communist horizon.

Now, to combat this and other species of nonsense, Janakiram does indeed defend abortion rights rather stoutly in her piece. So you should read this piece from beginning to end. But, to be clear: fine-sounding language does not make you a good guy.

Rather, you are a good guy if you enjoin a struggle for an actual better world. And an actual better world is not a police state in which the cops go after women who have had sex with men, nor is it a violent place where cadres of self-styled fetus vigilantes perform "direct action" against those who have had abortions. But fine-sounding language masks this truth, as if an actual better world were to be attained by finding the right language and attending the appropriately left-sounding political theater to accompany that language. This ability, of the fine-sounding language to mask the truth, is why so many anti-abortionists have distinguished themselves as being not kewl while desperately thinking they are.