(Correction: this is a rage and grief fueled stream of consciousness rant)
If I had a podcast, I would call it Average Citizen. The phrase is often used as an elitist putdown of what “average people” know and can do. It situates the average citizen at a removal from, I don’t know, the above-average citizen. Of course, they do not admit that out loud because that is not nice. Nice people are not supposed to see race or class or the fact that Joe Biden has lost it, or as we say, he been lost it. The meaning is always coded: “average citizen,” “everyday Americans,” the people with “kitchen table issues,” the famed “working class” that the papers of record usually go to interview in diners.
Politically, the average citizen is my only concern. Not because I don’t care about others but because I understand that if we tend to the average, the least of these, the Stranger amidst us, only then do we ensure a just world for ourselves. This makes sense in a way all other arrangements do not. Every faith tradition agrees on this, and every defensible ethical tradition, from East to West and North to South, pretty much does, too. Aboriginal people all over the world understand this. People seeking restoration after genocide, enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism understand this. People seeking liberation of any kind understand this. Think of what unites all of the political and civil movement leaders who have ever been assassinated in this country, and you will tragically see it is this same idea that we have to tend to the least of these that made them dangerous enough to kill. The likelihood that all these people are wrong but Larry Summers an’ dem are right is silly, and yet, that silliness which polite society calls (neo)liberalism, and people with sense call racial capitalism, is the blueprint we exist under.
I am on the Left because it turns out that a neoliberal rising tide doesn’t lift all boats. One, what is a “rising tide” to someone’s strong and well-maintained boat (yacht in some cases!) might be deadly to someone’s fragile raft. As the reality of the modern so-called West has consistently shown, not all boats are created equal. Two, and more importantly, as Jack proved in Titanic, not everyone has a boat. To be The Left, which--I cannot stress enough, the present Dems are not--is to be interested in making sure everyone has a decent boat. A boat, for when the tide rises, for when the storm comes, for when it’s time to get out, or else you will die. The neoliberalism of the Dems has enabled these right-wing goblins incrementally and consistently, allowed them to amass and consolidate generational power, flex the organized criminality of corporate lobbies, and destroy the social safety net and the planet. And why? Because while the means of rightwingers were often unsavory, most of their ends satisfy neoliberals just fine.
As a Lefty, I have been told for all my 30+ years living in this country that my politics are trash. Not only am I told a real Left is “not viable,” I am also told that every move the Democratic party had made to the right, only to lose more than it gains, is the fault of people like me. It shouldn’t surprise that we’re here again. In the aftermath of that debate that proved what con artists we are dealing with, a debate in which critical domestic issues and the genocide of Palestinians all went undiscussed, I am already hearing ye olde refrain: Whatever we Dems decide to do about this Biden mess, the Lefties better fall in line. Fall in line when we’re dying from the heat? Fall in line when I don’t have bodily autonomy and the Democratic candidate can’t give a proper debate answer about it? Fall in line when most of us work to live yet cannot have a life, or secure a good life for our kids or elders? Fall in line when the unregulated and corrupt SCOTUS thinks maybe-kinda-sorta we should have a king-president with total immunity? Fall in line when the US, the most powerful military and “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the world, believes it is above international laws meant to prevent war crimes and genocide? Fall in line when the president of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that drafted Trump’s future agenda, is the latest in a long line of right-wing goblins routinely threatening political violence? Maybe it is the loud and wrong enablers of “establishment Democrats” and their supporters that need to fall in line. Or, at the very least, they need to grow up and stop sounding like whiny children at the grown-up table.