You know, it’s instructive to now and again peruse even the most rabidly left-wing journals like Jacobin. Because, quite often, you’ll realise that we agree on a great many things, however much Jacobin writers may end up grabbing the wrong end of the stick (and, as often as not, jabbing it in their own eye).
For instance, that the Washington political establishment, on both sides, is a festering swamp of elite cronies and warmongers.
Earlier this month, presidential centers representing 13 former presidents put out a letter calling for Americans to “protect democracy,” in an implicit rebuke of Donald Trump. Given past presidents’ own assaults on democracy, it’s a hard pill to swallow.
Of course, being Jacobin, it has to kick off with a laughably off-target attack on “the right”, and the Bad Orange Man in particular.
The foundations and libraries of every president since Herbert Hoover, except for the Eisenhower Foundation, signed onto the letter. It rebukes a long list of Trump’s obstructions of political norms (though without calling Trump out by name): inspiring and encouraging violence among supporters, serially violating the law, and challenging the 2024 election results, including with a failed coup attempt.
Hmm. Inspiring and encouraging violence among supporters…? You mean, like BLM and Antifa? Which, unlike the Trumpers, staged months on end the most damaging political riots in American history, including straight-out killing dozens of people? Challenging the election results… as Al Gore did, in 2000? (Jacobin does acknowledge this, sorta, but frames it as wicked Dubya “stealing” the election… which sounds exactly like what a Trumper would say.)
A failed coup attempt…? What, are they talking about the violent riots in Washington on Inauguration Day 2017? Or when leftists stormed the Supreme Court (part of the Capitol, it should be noted) during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings? Or when BLM/Antifa actually burned historic buildings across the street from the White House and tried to storm the White House itself?
Leaving aside Jacobin’s hilarious un-self-awareness, though, they’re right about one thing:
In fact, many of those same presidents whose centers and libraries are calling to “protect democracy” have engaged in their own share of attacks on civil liberties and majority rule […]
That the Bush Foundation in particular came up with the idea for the letter is a juicy bit of Orwellian irony. Though he’s been increasingly rehabilitated in the public eye, with no small help from the Democratic Party, Bush’s eight years in the White House were a gross affront to democracy.
As Caitlyn Johnstone has pointed out, the fact that Bush, and his British collaborator Tony Blair, aren’t fronting the Hague makes a mockery of Western governments’ fulminating against Vladimir Putin for doing nothing different than they did.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent congressional anthrax scare, Bush took advantage of and stoked Americans’ collective fear to expand the powers of the presidency and violate constitutional rights. The Bush administration promptly passed the Patriot Act, closely based on a bill from the 1990s written by Joe Biden that had earlier been rejected by both parties for its illegal expansion of government surveillance.
Indeed, it was a damning indictment on America’s political class that, in exactly 200 years, it had gone from the presidency being contested by two intellectual titans of the day — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — to an indecent squabble between a grinning doofus and a mid-wit liar.
But, if I thought that the USA couldn’t elect a worse president than Dubya, they soon made a fool of me and elected Barack Obama.
Barack Obama similarly built out illegal domestic and foreign surveillance efforts, including prosecuting and torturing whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, and Edward Snowden. The Obama administration also expanded the unilateral executive use of drone warfare without congressional approval, which included claiming the authority to assassinate American citizens without a trial or due process.
Like his predecessors, Obama carried out or supported disastrous regime change efforts, launching military intervention in Libya, intervening in Haiti’s elections, and legitimizing Honduras’s right-wing coup government. His administration also detained undocumented immigrants en masse — building and making use of the same facilities liberals correctly described as concentration camps during the Trump presidency.
Jacobin
At one point, Jacobin almost gets it, when it notes that Trump merely didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was: a maverick outsider. As one left-leaning American friend of mine put it, Trump is the rich kid who’s never had to care what other people think of him. What Jacobin misses, though, is that that’s what makes him dangerous to the very Washington establishment it purports to hate.
But if they were so capable of shucking off their leftist blinkers, then, well, they wouldn’t be Jacobin.
