By Roger Mills
The US political left has a problem.
It's not a new problem. This problem is as old as the left itself. That is, the US political left is splintered, fractured. It consists of many segmented and separated, isolated parts and pieces that cannot seem to form any type of united front against our common enemy. The enemy of humanity at large. The enemy of personal and individual liberties. The enemy of collective and communal rights and privileges.
Unlike its counterparts on the right, the US left is partisan, parochial, balkanized, if you will. There is no cohesion in the US political left. Each tiny segment of the US political left is jealous of its own personal and private domain. It wants nothing to do with other factions of the US left.
Each one has its own pet peeves, its own political agenda, its own political organization which cannot, will not cooperate with others. There is an Us and Them mentality, even within our own set of groups, organizations, ideologies.
The political right has no such problem. While they fight among themselves, they are as one when faced with an outside political force. The Democratic wing of the US political right might have a facially separate organization from the Republican wing. They may even war over which wing gets to control the spoils of class war waged in the name of corporate greed, servility to Wall Street, the military industrial complex or imperialism.
One of those two wings might even, someday, manage to destroy the other wing, but that would be ok with the ruling class, as it would leave the other in total, complete and utter control of the political landscape.
How should this concern the US political left? The class war they wage on a global scale will, as the song goes, remain the same. Meanwhile, the US political left continues its petty fights among itself, each and every division claiming more political and/or ideological purity than any and all the others.
The problem is we care more for our individual organizations than we do about the poor, the working and the marginalized folk that we claim with such ferocity, even vehemence that our purity and ideologies purportedly serve. The fascization of the US political right is nearing its functional completion; while the US political left remains balkanized, fragmented, splintered, the right suffers no such problem.
The fascization of the US political scene took a serious turn not under a Republican, but under Bill Clinton, and has been on an increasingly rapid pace since. Growing in strength, complexity and organizational structures, it will soon have the capacity to control or suppress nearly every element of the body politic.
If the US political left doesn't overcome this balkanization, and form a united front right now, in this particular election cycle, we may never again have the opportunity to serve those we claim to represent.
I say CLAIM to love because in effect we love our parochial, segmented, partisan and individual political circles much, much more than anything else.
If we, the US political left, do not now put aside our petty grievances and coalesce around the strongest, the most popular and the most renowned leader, the most proven through the fires of activism which has presented himself for the service of humanity in decades, we, likely will have lost any future hope of forming the united front we must if we are ever to have ANY chance of liberating humanity from the grip of utter despair, total subjugation and complete oppression.
Either we overcome ourselves and support Dr. Cornel West now, or we resign ourselves to tacitly submitting to the continuing consolidation of fascist control of all forms of communication, personal and collective, private and public.