[Peace-discuss] [Peace] BOOK REVIEW, CALEB MAUPIN, DEMOCRATS, FRANKFURT SCHOOL, POLITICS, RIGHT WING JERKS, TULSI GABBARD

[David Green]

Well worth reading, and watching YouTube video re Marcuse that is linked to.

On Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 12:36 PM Karen Aram via Peace <
peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

>
> BOOK REVIEW <https://orbitt.net/category/book-review/>, CALEB MAUPIN
> <https://orbitt.net/category/caleb-maupin/>, DEMOCRATS
> <https://orbitt.net/category/democrats/>, FRANKFURT SCHOOL
> <https://orbitt.net/category/frankfurt-school/>, POLITICS
> <https://orbitt.net/category/politics/>, RIGHT WING JERKS
> <https://orbitt.net/category/right-wing-jerks/>, TULSI GABBARD
> <https://orbitt.net/category/tulsi-gabbard/>
> A WARNING OF THE IMMINENT DANGER OF A KAMALA HARRIS PRESIDENCY
> <https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/a-warning-of-the-imminent-danger-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency/>
> OCTOBER 17, 2020
> <https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/a-warning-of-the-imminent-danger-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency/>
>  MAX PARRY <https://orbitt.net/author/max-parry/>
>
>
> <https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/a-warning-of-the-imminent-danger-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency/kamala_harris/>With
> the 2020 U.S. presidential election less than a month away, there is
> widespread speculation concerning Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s mental and
> physical fitness at 77 years of age if he were to defeat incumbent Donald
> Trump on November 3rd. The former Vice President and Senator from Delaware
> would surpass his opponent as the oldest to ever hold the office of the
> presidency if victorious, while his generally acknowledged cognitive
> decline has led many to question whether he is even capable of serving a
> single term. Given the concerns about his health, the likelihood that
> Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, would become his successor has
> put the controversial former prosecutor and California Attorney General’s
> own politics under scrutiny, though not to a degree sufficient with the
> odds she could very well become commander-in-chief in the near future.
> Trump himself suggested it was the hidden motivation behind House Speaker
> Nancy Pelosi’s recent introduction of a 25th Amendment commission on
> removing a “mentally unfit” president to enable the replacement of an
> incapacitated Biden with Harris after the election. Even *Saturday Night
> Live* recently joked about Biden’s poor first debate performance as a
> Harris term in-the-making — but as journalist Caleb Maupin explains in his
> new book *Kamala Harris and the Future of America: An Essay in Three
> Parts <https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B08HGZK7P4/dissivoice-20>*,
> the prospect of her becoming president is no laughing matter.
>
> Maupin’s ambitious essay surpasses the redundant analysis of the
> vice-presidential nominee by placing her political success in a broader
> historical context while forewarning the unique danger of a budding Harris
> administration waiting in the wings. The majority of the critical
> examinations of Harris during the campaign have critiqued her rebranding as
> an outwardly “progressive” figure in stark contrast with the reality of her
> career as a ruthless criminal prosecutor turned establishment politician.
> While that is true, Maupin’s analysis takes an important step further by
> formulating the rise of Harris, who is the first Jamaican and South
> Asian-American nominee on a major party ticket, as the culmination of the
> U.S. left’s failures in the last several decades resulting in its present
> deteriorated state preoccupied with liberal identity politics. More
> specifically, a result of the defeats suffered by the so-called New Left of
> the 1960s and 70s which had long-term consequences for progressive politics
> in America today.
>
> Although not a biography, Maupin does link Harris’s psychological profile,
> personality traits and upbringing with her political career which he
> parallels with the life stories of previous presidents and other political
> figures. Born in 1964, Harris was raised in a hub of the organized left in
> the Bay Area by immigrant parents who were politically active during her
> early childhood in Northern California. While not a communist, her
> estranged Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University
> professor and Marxian economist whose work influenced the progressive
> domestic reforms in his native island country during the administration of
> Prime Minister Michael Manley, a democratic socialist who introduced land
> redistribution, socialized medicine and free education until Jamaica’s
> neocolonization by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) decimated the
> Carribean nation with enormous debt, as explored in the documentary *Life
> and Debt* (2001). Young Kamala grew up attending civil rights protests in
> Berkeley with her parents until their bitter divorce which resulted in her
> Indian-American mother gaining sole custody. Maupin dares to ask — is her
> chosen career path as a criminal prosecutor and top legal officer
> disproportionately locking up black men unconsciously motivated by a
> vendetta against her father? Could it even explain her thinly-veiled contempt
> for the progressive politics <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HZjLnj7WGM> she
> now pretends to uphold as a politician?
>
> Maupin also argues that Harris was likely groomed for her present role as
> Biden’s running mate by the Clintonite wing of Democratic Party once it
> became apparent Hillary was not in a position to run again in 2020, citing a
> 2017 closed door meeting
> <https://pagesix.com/2017/07/15/kamala-harris-meets-with-democratic-elite-in-hamptons/> in
> the Hamptons with elite party donors and apparatchiks. Despite her own
> early exit from the primaries after a knockout blow in the debates
> delivered by Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii who sharply criticized
> her record as a prosecutor, Harris was already vetted by the party
> leadership to be Biden’s heir apparent. For the Democratic establishment,
> she is the perfect choice to derail the emerging progressive faction of the
> party led by Bernie Sanders which champions a similar brand of the social
> democratic politics championed by her father. This could also hold
> disastrous geopolitical implications, as the world is still reeling from
> the four years spent ravaged by the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton’s
> State Department which oversaw the wholesale destruction of several nations
> in the global south. We can only expect the same regime change policies
> from Harris if she is cut from the same cloth.
>
> Maupin then uses Harris and her Berkeley upbringing to explore the history
> of leftism in the United States, tracing the New Left’s ceding of
> leadership roles to students and marginal groups while discarding labor
> rights and the class struggle back to the influence of the Frankfurt School
> of Social Theory. The philosophical movement of intellectuals and academics
> associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany,
> otherwise known as ‘critical theory’, put forward that both capitalist
> societies and Marxist-Leninist states like the Soviet Union were equally
> rigid “totalitarian” systems. The interdisciplinary sociological school
> viewed Marx’s prediction of revolutionary emancipation in the 20th century
> as an evident failure and rejected the historical materialism of orthodox
> Marxism, arguing that forces of economic change were undermined by the
> dominant ideology of the ruling class represented in mass media which
> produced false consciousness in the working class. Theorists such as
> Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse attempted to reformulate Marxism with
> Freudian psychoanalysis and other disciplines while critiquing mass
> consumer culture and modern technology.
>
> As the impact of the Frankfurt School gave rise to the New Left in the
> U.S. and Western Europe, mass social movements became housed in the
> universities instead of the factories. This was favorable to the ruling
> class, as student-led counterculture revolts were much easier to control in
> comparison with a revolution organized by the workers. If any authentic
> revolutionary leaders did emerge, they were quickly neutralized. After the
> student protests of 1968, the New Left withdrew further to its comfort zone
> in the realm of ideas and out of the streets, which was perfectly alright
> with the powers that be since they were intellectuals who denounced
> Marxism-Leninism. Soon the academy would be dominated by an even more
> pessimistic and “anti-authoritarian” ideology, postmodernism, which
> rejected the value of all universal truths and grand narratives. How did
> this all happen?
>
> Maupin emphasizes that the intelligentsia of the New Left were actively
> supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through its clandestine
> Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) program during the Cold War, which
> sought to subvert the sympathies of liberals and the non-communist left
> with the Soviet Union through the covert funding of prominent literary
> magazines
> <https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/>,
> journals, international conferences, modern art exhibitions
> <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html>,
> and other cultural activities. The objective was to promote an intellectual
> consensus on the Western left that the Soviet Union was to be opposed as
> much as capitalism and it was indisputably successful. Meanwhile, the
> Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed how in
> the previous decade the CIA had played an enormous role in introducing
> drugs to the counterculture as part of its domestic espionage against the
> anti-war movement in Operation Midnight Climax, a sub-program of Project
> MK-Ultra, where the Bay Area became a petri dish for its human
> experimentation. With the drug culture came the popularization of eastern
> mysticism and eventually, the New Age movement.
>
> As it happens, the relationship between the CIA and the New Left’s
> intellectuals goes back to its origins. One of the most prominent
> idealogues of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse — often referred to as
> the “father of the New Left” — spent almost a full decade during the 1940s
> working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the
> CIA, and as an anti-Soviet intelligence analyst in the U.S. State
> Department. This was not just during wartime but continued well after WWII
> was over in West Germany until 1951 when Marcuse immigrated to the United
> States to work as a professor at universities on the east coast, the same
> year that the CCF was founded. However, one interesting fact that Maupin
> overlooks is that while Kamala Harris was growing up in Oakland in the
> 1960s, Marcuse relocated his teaching career out to the west coast at the
> University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where his work continued to be
> cited as an influence by the middle-class student activists and radicals of
> the counterculture as the left drifted further away from the socialist
> countries and the working class. The documentary The documentary *Herbert’s
> Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise*
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GvTqZ3VxJA> examines Marcuse’s time in
> Southern California in the late 60s.
>
> Prior to his work in the OSS, in Weimar Germany the young Marcuse had been
> a pupil of philosopher Martin Heidegger even as his mentor infamously
> joined the ascendant Nazi Party, though the relationship came to an end
> once Marcuse’s own academic career was obstructed by the Third Reich in the
> early 1930s. One of the major thinkers associated with the New Left
> promoted by the CCF was a former lover of Heidegger’s, Hannah Arendt, who
> penned one of the most seminal and harmful works in equating the Soviet
> Union with Nazi Germany as twin pillars of authoritarianism in *The
> Origins of Totalitarianism*. In particular, Maupin takes aim at Arendt’s
> essay *Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil* where she
> famously observed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s thoughtless conformism
> and ministerial disposition in his lack of remorse for his atrocities while
> covering his trial. Maupin interprets her notion as implicitly concluding
> that lurking underneath the surface of every ordinary hardworking person is
> a potential fascist, therefore anyone who would try to organize them for a
> collective cause is a threat to society. This cynical, psychoanalytic
> definition of fascism as rooted in what Adorno called the “authoritarian
> personality” replaced the Marxist economic understanding. Yet in spite of
> her work, Arendt controversially participated in the shameful post-war
> apologia and rehabilitation of Heidegger’s reputation.
>
> Critics might say that Maupin’s diagnosis of the Western left as the
> manipulated brainchild of Western intelligence agencies is oversimplistic,
> conspiratorial or risks espousing a form of vulgar Marxism. Indeed, it is a
> touchy subject for those too personally connected to the artistic and
> intellectual milieu of the time to accept the undeniably significant role
> played by the CIA in subverting leftist politics, arts and culture in the
> second half of the twentieth century. Some on the left will inevitably try
> to dismiss his analysis by likening it to the right-wing canard of
> “cultural Marxism” spoken of by paleoconservatives simply because of the
> overlap in mutual subjects of criticism. Nonetheless, there is a small
> kernel of truth at the heart the right’s mostly fictitious narrative of
> Western Marxism’s control of academia but unfortunately, what they
> misinterpret as a plot to “subvert Western culture” was hatched at CIA
> headquarters in Langley, Virginia — not the former Soviet Union. Today’s
> pseudo-left which recoils working people is truly an imposter generated by
> the CIA’s cultural cold war program to replace actual Marxism, the real
> casualty of the pervasiveness of Western Marxism in universities.
>
> Others may find Maupin’s assessment of the Frankfurt School and thinkers
> of the New Left to be too dismissive of their contributions. Ironically,
> Adorno’s worthwhile conception of “actionism” applies to the left-wing
> anti-intellectualism and leaderless, spontaneous voluntarism of the very
> movement to which the Frankfurt School gave birth and is even more relevant
> per Maupin’s thorough description of what he calls the “synthetic left”
> today. Look no further than the ‘propaganda of the deed’ which dominates
> Antifa and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests this year. In *Thesis
> on Feuerbach* <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/>,
> Karl Marx articulated the predicament of revolutionary politics in his day
> being restrained by the gap between thought and action, or “*philosophers
> have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
> change it*.” One could say the mantra of the Western left now seems to be
> taking action without any thought whatsoever. Or as Lenin wrote in *What
> is to be Done?*
> <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm>, “*without
> revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement*.”
>
> If the idea that Kamala Harris represents an apotheosis of the New Left’s
> failures feels like a bit of a stretch, it is only because the examination
> warrants further inquiry which Maupin should continue in his work,
> regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election. Nevertheless, in just a
> little over 125 pages he manages to comprehensively piece together the
> trajectory of the Western left from the end of WWII to what can only be
> described as its “stinking corpse” today, a term once used by Rosa
> Luxembourg to describe the treacherous Social Democratic Party of Germany
> (SPD) after it voted to support the imperialist bloodbath of WWI in 1914.
> Maupin’s use of Harris and the environment she grew up in as a springboard
> to investigate the shortcomings of the Western left generally is a
> formidable exploration that is desperately needed at a time where the
> American people are faced with the probability of enduring yet another
> destructive administration and no authentic left to represent it.
>
> The post A Warning of the Imminent Danger of a Kamala Harris Presidency
> <https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/a-warning-of-the-imminent-danger-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency/> first
> appeared on Dissident Voice <https://dissidentvoice.org/>.
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