New York, NY - When the recent Occupy movement emerged, I was hoping that it might sweep away the vestiges of the old, authoritarian left that had been a longtime fixture of the US activist scene. Unfortunately, however, this hierarchical left still continues to exert significant influence over both old and new media, and shows no sign of abating. That is a pity, as this particular political tendency - which some might even call Stalinist - has been dragging the rest of the left into the mud and giving fellow radicals a bad name.
"When the hierarchical left encounters a situation that doesn't fit into its normal frame of reference, it seeks to change the subject."
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The lockstep left's retrograde tendencies have been placed on particularly vivid display when it comes to the Arab Spring. At the beginning of the revolt, in Tunisia and Egypt, it looked as if local populations might slough off dictatorial rule backed by Washington. The prospect of a breach with the US and its client state Israel provided little reason for the authoritarian left to protest, but as events unfolded further, prominent writers began to run into difficulties.
Unlike Mubarak, who maintained warm ties with Washington, Gaddafi had been at odds with the West until fairly recently. Thus, Libya presented something of a quandary for the authoritarians.
When the hierarchical left encounters a situation that doesn't fit into its normal frame of reference, it seeks to change the subject. Take, for example, Robert Dreyfuss, a columnist for The Nation magazine, who sought to shift attention away from Gaddafi in an effort to focus the reader's attention on other issues.
The authoritarian left and the Gaddafi conundrum
To be sure, Dreyfuss concedes in one of his columns, Gaddafi's departure "can't be bad, as far as the long-suffering population of Libya is concerned". He then, however, seeks to discredit the Libyan opposition, implying that it is a mere pawn of NATO and Western interests. In another column, the Nation columnist goes yet further, calling out the Libyan opposition as essentially traitorous dupes who promise to "hand over [Libya's] oil resources to its Western backers".
Another Nation columnist, Alexander Cockburn, went much further than Dreyfuss (full disclosure: I once interned for Cockburn, and over the years I have occasionally published articles on Counterpunch, a website which he co-founded). Over the course of the Libya imbroglio, Cockburn sought to minimise the brutality of the Gaddafi regime while again casting aspersions on the opposition and its alleged ties to al-Qaeda. "Gaddafi was scarcely the acme of monstrosity conjured up by Obama or Mrs Clinton or Sarkozy," Cockburn rather questionably remarked.
