[Peace-discuss] Cockburn and identity politics

[C. G. Estabrook]

Establishment pundits assessing the career of the country's best political columnist, the late Alexander Cockburn, are principally revealing their own compromised positions.

The dishonesty and equivocation of contemporary liberalism, particularly in its identity-politics phase, is quite astonishing. I suppose that, once you've made your peace with capitalist exploitation, that's necessary if you're to push meliorative efforts. 

See Chris Hedges, *Death of the Liberal Class*. (Don't be put off by his non-Marxist use of the term 'class' - unfortunate because the economic use, so long suppressed in American discourse, is just now being revived.)

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com is neither a liberal nor a leftist, but he offers a generally accurate account of Cockburn's work, including the following: 

"‎...While the rest of what used to be called the left in this country drifted into Democratic party politics and from there were recruited into the Obama cult, Alex Cockburn stood aloof: scathing in his indictment of Obama’s wars and the current regime, he deviated from contemporary leftist cant in important ways, such as his critique of Obamacare:

""The liberals are howling about the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her 'Death Panel' talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.

"'But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize 'imbeciles.' Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan'..."

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/07/22/alexander-cockburn-rip/

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