It’s gone so very badly: is there a way out?

Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was seen as the biggest slap in the face to the leftists among my baby boomer generation. The ultimate truth is, however, that we’ve had so many real and symbolic slaps from the Vietnam-era youth movement and baby boomer cohort that a big slap in the face on Tuesday, November 5, 2024 was of exponential force. , but not unexpected. Many of those who stood up from social movement after social movement have been brought back to their knees, and at this point in a person’s life there is no time to get back on their feet. It is not a cliché that a person or a movement can only go to the barricades so many times, either in real time or symbolically, and continue to stand. Only relatively few people have done the latter, and not to ignore the great movements for social change and peace that have taken place since 1975, the end of the Vietnam War.

This is not the political system that a cohort of the legendary youth movement might have imagined. It would have been hard to imagine or accept the march of the far-right and Trump into key positions of the second term.

Most of the people I knew from the Vietnam era became assimilated careerists, if indeed they were lucky enough to find a trade or profession that afforded them some measure of material comfort. Of a car full of friends traveling north from Ottawa to visit a family acquaintance who had become expatriate in that era, no one maintained any connection to the radical values ​​of the 1960s, or even moderately liberal ones, in the decades that followed. followed. One of the group of friends claims he thought we were on Cape Cod during that trip, a difference of about 400 miles, with a nearby river in Canada rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

This is Kelly Hayes in “Let’s move beyond blame to fight each other in the face of fascism” (truth8 November 2024):

“The left is deeply alienated and isolated, warped by trauma and disillusionment. Some are bitterly disappointed by allies they believe have failed to adequately support Palestinian survival and liberation. Others are furious at leftists who didn’t support Harris or rally behind her like they did for Biden in 2020. Everyone has opinions about who failed and how. I think there’s a lot of blame to go around.”

While Donald Trump has threatened to penalize leftists who criticize him, and especially those he considers leftists in the media and those who dare to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza, here is an example that he already played with the former editor of the magazine. american scientist who dared to call Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists”: “The editor-in-chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, has resigned more than a week after posted comments on social media that called some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump “bigots” and “fascists” (“Editor resigns after calling some Trump supporters ‘fascists.’” New York Times15 November 2024).

Reflecting on truth article cited above, Gray Area covers the finger-pointing of Democrats who were not long ago on the bandwagon of the failed Harris campaign (“The Collapse Begins” Gray Area15 November 2024).

A truth of the failed and tormented among Democrats, if the election can actually change anything material in the US against wars and the military-industrial complex, is that the march to ignore and penalize both the working class and segments of the middle class has begun. in the ashes of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society because of the Vietnam War. The march to endless wars, the marginalization of workers in a globalized economy, the destruction of the environment, among many other wrongs, has continued for half a century. That Richard Nixon, a warmonger, was the last New Deal president speaks volumes. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are initiatives of his administration, and almost nothing came later from the hands of Democrats.

Where do I go now? I don’t know because reaction forces are already on the ground and well equipped and funded. Look at the repression of those, especially on campuses, who rose up against the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza for an example of what lies ahead. Trump has Iran in his sights. He has a lot of support among his nominees for his administration and a lot of money to throw at Iran. Trump and his ilk of right-wing bigots will make resistance both necessary and much more difficult.

Biden authorized (November 17, 2024) US-supplied long-range missiles to be used by Ukraine to strike Russia. The players change, but the land and air wars are the same. Biden condemned a march of about 10 people marching through Columbus, Ohio carrying Nazi flags. Biden, however, will not condemn the Nazi symbols of Azov Brigade who took part in the war in Ukraine. The modern version of the WW2 brigade are today’s “freedom fighters”. As of this writing (November 19, 2024), Ukraine has fired US-supplied missiles into Russia in a war that could have ended through negotiations long ago.

American exceptionalism is in the dustbin of history, but the fanatics: political, economic, social and religious fundamentalists, won’t let us stop it.