The One Thing Hillary Clinton Gets Right About the Far Left

Hillary Clinton is out with a new, stupid book in which she blames her historically embarrassing loss to Donald Trump on just about everybody besides herself whilst simultaneously calling for “unity” within her Democratic Party. It’s absurd, self-aggrandizing trash, but then what else should we expect from Clinton at this point?

The worst part of this, honestly, is that now we have to listen to Hillary Clinton promote this new offense against literature, taste, and humanity as she embarks on a book tour and related media appearances.  In one such appearance, a video produced by Vox, I was startled by a kernel of truth among the bile spewing from her mouth.

While discussing her political philosophy, Clinton decried the state of discourse in American politics, saying:

“We’ve shrunk the political process to such a narrow set of questions, and that’s in the interests of both the far right and the far left, both of whom want to blow up the system and undermine it.”

Both the far right and far left "want to blow up system and undermine it and all the rest of the stuff they talk about." —Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/fTEJs2Wygw

— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 13, 2017

Her vague critique of the political process (who has shrunk it? Is it really the “process” that’s shrunk? What narrow set of questions is she talking about?) is as bland as meaningless as most of the stuff that comes from her mouth, but that second part, about the far right and far left, is spot on.  Not for the reasons she thinks it is, but there’s a vein of truth among the gangue.

Hillary Clinton, like the rest of the cadre of “radical centrists” and neoliberals that have dominated the Democratic Party for going on four decades, wants to conflate the actions of far-right cryptofascists like the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan with far-left groups such as antifa (a term which they either are incapable of understanding or purposefully obfuscating).  In their little world, violence is clearly defined by the State and any strong convictions (whether they be left or right) are dangerous.

This attitude demonstrates their fundamentally bourgeoisie privileged mindset.  Explicit devotion to a cause – such as anti-fascism or anti-capitalism – is alien, because the only cause or belief they are committed to is that of the status quo that has benefited them so greatly.  To someone like Hillary Clinton, communists and anarchists really do look exactly the same as fascists and nationalists, because she is correct:  both groups, far left and far right, do want to blow up and undermine the system that has made Clinton wealthy and powerful.

It is a system that produces enough food for every single person on the planet, and then some – yet 795 million people are starving.  It is a system where empty homes outnumber the homeless six to one, and yet human beings are still forced to sleep on the street.  It is a system that is literally destroying the planet on which we all live.

The far right is aware on some level that this system is evil, corrupt, broken, unsustainable.  They are unable to pinpoint the source of the corruption because they lack a materialist understanding of history and society; they turn to racism, nationalism, xenophobia, patriarchy, etc to understand and explain the brokenness they sense.

That is where the right and left differ, and it is the most important distinction there is.  The Left understands why society doesn’t work for the vast majority of people, and so must oppose the defenders of the status quo like Hillary Clinton as well as the reactionary forces that seek to destroy all hopes of progress to a more just society.

It takes empathy, wisdom, and humility to see that even if this world has treated you well, most human beings on Earth are suffering needlessly.  Hillary Clinton has none of those traits.  She and her ilk cannot hope to do anything more than make tiny adjustments to a broken system in order to keep things running the way they are.  Imagine a car driving down a road – Clinton and the liberal (in the classical sense) establishment are behind the wheel, making small corrections to the right or left as the car drifts ever so slightly.  The far-left and far-right want to turn the wheel in their directions – left to socialism, progress, and justice, right to reaction, regression, and oppression.  The driver is content to stay the course, but only because they do not see that the car is speeding towards a brick wall.  The car will turn, or it will stop, one way or another.

Make sure it turns left.