The Right, The Left, and the United States

[barts]

Not infrequently, certain volconites who shall not be named in deference to The Forum Rules, damn what they call the Left for all that is wrong in the United States. I'd like to put to rest the canard about the Left in the United States.

No where in the United States, except perhaps infrequently in some cities and towns, is there any legislature and very few elected officials that can remotely be charged with the Right's epithet of "The Left" or "Liberal".

At the federal level and the state level, the United States has two parties. Both are Right Wing. The Democrats by any international standard of political norms are well to the Right of Center; the Republicans are the extreme Right. Both parties share essentially the same ideals of unfettered capitalism; a domineering military; an imperial, "beyond the law" executive branch and Commander-in-Chief"; and a contempt for fundamental social programs that virtually all other countries take for granted: a sound, state-funded public school system from pre-K to University; universal single-payer health care; and a social safety net to alleviate the suffering and give hope to the less well off. So Right Wing are the Democrats and Republicans that neither could be elected in any other country in the world, except perhaps in a few dicatorships posing as democracies.

Both parties are willingly and totally beholden to avaricious corporate interests and the American oligarchy. Neither party can nor does truly represent the ordinary American who in true "Yankee Trader" tradition is treated with contempt as merely a sucker to be fleeced. The suckers just got stuck with the bill again, didn't they? Almost a trillion dollars this time to bail out the financial corporations who fund both McCain's and Obama's campaigns, and the suckers are still told--and most still believe--that universal, single-payer health care is too expensive.

It was Clinton, from the so-called Left, who gutted or repealed the laws that would have prevented the current financial crisis. It was Clinton who reformed the welfare laws in the U.S. and inflicted untold misery on the poor. He reduced the number of people on welfare by putting them and their kids on the streets and in the prisons and cemeteries. It was Clinton, and ironically Gore, who gutted the Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Mind you they were puppets of a Republican controlled Congress for most of their tenure. Nevertheless, Clinton and Gore fearful of being bitch-slapped by the Republicans were willing Right Wing enablers.

Apart from a few brave souls, like Ralph Nader who is a figure of ridicule in much of the American meme, there is no Left in the United States--not even at the trade union level--with any influence over either legislation or the public discourse.

It is political and economic nonsense for Americans to discuss a Right / Left divide in the United States. It doesn't exist. Moreover the two Right wing parties have so corrupted the electoral system that a modern, progressive third party would find it almost impossible to form, build membership, and elect members to a legislature.

The corollary to the fact that the Left is extirpated from U.S politics is that on virtually every indicator of quality of life, the U.S. lags behind countries that do have a strong Left/Progressive political and economic presence.

So, my Yankee friends, when you speak of Left and Right in America you are not debating political and economic philosophies, but rather dogmatic party allegiances. These are, in fact, religious debates, little different than those we see between antagonistic Christian sects who worship the same (how ironic) loving God. Your God is "America". Your King is the President. Your Saints are on Mount Rushmore and in the monuments on the Washington Mall. Your Sacred Texts are under glass and guard in the Smithsonian.

Yours are not trivial debates, however. Like religious ones they can lead to great suffering--as those who have lost their homes to either man-made or natural catastrophes or who been financially ruined or died due to lack of affordable health care can attest.

There is no Left in American politics. And, Americans--ordinary people, the "suckers"--suffer greatly for it as they struggle, unnecessarily, in the richest country in the world.