Thatâll teach me to make silly jokes! A few issues back, in a fit of self-indulgent whimsy, I mocked some ex-comrades of ours who had abandoned socialist politics to enlist in George W Bushâs neo-conservative crusade to bring bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism to Iraq. In a little skit, I had one of them confuse the Communist Manifesto with âthe Bourgeois-Democratic Manifestoâ.
Now they and others have in all seriousness produced what I conjured up as an absurdist joke â a âBourgeois-Democratic Manifestoâ. Politics today, as many have already noticed, has become satire-proof!
Mysteriously but appropriately, perhaps, for people evidently travelling fast to the right, they have named their manifesto after a railway station â the Euston Manifesto.
They say â and as if they have just discovered the political equivalent of penicillin â things that Solidarity and Workersâ Liberty have said, defended, and fought for over the last three decades. In 1990, for example, we wrote:
âWe live in a labour movement grown spiritually cross-eyed from the long pursuit of realpolitik and the operation of double standards, a movement ideologically sick and poisoned. In terms of moral ecology, the left and the labour movement is something of a disaster area because of the long-term use of methods and arguments which have corrupted the consciousness of the working class. The most poisonous root of that corruption was the Stalinist movementâ. (Socialist Organiser 447, 10 May 1990).
But where we have said those things in an effort to build a better left, they say them as part of breaking from the left.
The âEuston Manifestoâ consists of a preamble; a âstatement of principlesâ, fifteen of them; an âelaborationâ of them; and the conclusion.
They are, the authors say, âdemocrats and progressivesâ. For decades the use of âprogressiveâ told you the speaker was, most probably, Communist Party or CP-linked.
Author's Doppelganger: They like to recycle and play with old CP formulas and verbiage, then?
Oddly, or not so oddly, there are bits of patented CP language and old CP ideas and policies, scattered throughout the Manifesto. And the approach is vintage CP âPopular Frontâ stuff.
âMany of usâ, they say, âbelong to the leftâ â but not all. They reach beyond the left to âegalitarian liberalsâ. They âpay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progressâ. Boldly they âreject the notion that there are no opponents on the leftâ and âthat there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our rightâ.
Curiously, in the form of a general manifesto we are offered a very narrow polemic against the kitsch-left. The Travelling People of the Euston Manifesto define themselves by negativism towards the kitsch-left.
Yet, though their impulse is to oppose the kitsch-left, with their âdemocraticâ and âprogressiveâ popular front the Euston Travellers parallel the SWPâs âpopular front with clerical fascistsâ. They disagree with their choice of allies, not with their approach.
Doppelganger: At least Eustonâs popular front with âegalitarian liberalsâ is better than a popular front with clerical fascists.
Is it? It might be, I suppose, but in both cases, the ally to the right limits what the accommodating âPopular Frontâ âleftâ can do. For practical purposes the grouping can go no further than its most right-wing element agrees to. That is as true for the Travellersâ ideological popular front with liberals and conservatives as it is for the SWPâs electoral and political popular front with Islamic clerical-fascists.
Doppelganger: They donât claim to be socialists.
Some of them do, but evidently it doesnât matter much to them. They say that the project âinvolves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or notâ.
Doppelganger: What about their principles?
They want âdemocratic norms, procedures, and structures... freedom of opinion and assembly, free electionsâ, and âthe separation of state and religionâ. They âvalue the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken holdâ. They want âthe separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powerâ.
Their second principle is: âno apology for tyrannyâ. They âdraw a firm lineâ between themselves and those âleft-liberalsâ who âexplainâ, indulgently âunderstandâ, or apologise for tyrannical regimes, and movements that aspire to create such regimes.
Number three is âhuman rights for all. We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declarationâ of the UN in 1948, to bind âall states and political movements, indeed... everyoneâ.
Doppelganger: Aha. The categorical imperative in politics â do unto others as you would have them do to you. About time someone thought of that!
They proclaim themselves âegalitariansâ. But nothing rough or precipitate, mind you! They âlook towards progress in relations between the sexes (until full gender equality is achieved)... [and] between those of various religious affiliations... [or] diverse sexual orientationsâ.
Doppelganger: They are firmly in the ranks of progressive, liberal humankind? And thatâs all?
No, theyâre better than that. They âlook towards progress... towards broader social and economic equality all roundâ. More even than that. âWe support the interests of working people everywhereâ â and even âtheir right to organise in defence of those interestsâ. âDemocratic trade unions are the bedrock organisations for the defence of workersâ interests and are one of the most important forces for human rights, democracy-promotion and egalitarian internationalismâ.
Doppelganger: I bet I know what comes next. âWorkers of the world, unite!â Am I right?
No. They want âthe universal adoption of the International Labour Organisation Conventions â now routinely ignored by governments across the globeâ. That, they say, âis a priority for usâ.
Doppelganger: Remind me what the ILO is.
It was set up by the Treaty of Versailles, as part of the League of Nations, 87 years ago.
Euston gets even better. âWe are committed to the defence of the rights of children, and to protecting people from sexual slavery and all forms of institutionalised abuseâ.
Doppelganger: Ah, sure the poor craeters! They mean well, anyway. Donât be so meaen and snide about them! How are they going to achieve these things?
They think trade unions are a good thing.
Doppelganger: And how will they move âtowards broader social and economic equality all roundâ?
Thereâs the rub! They âleave open... the question of the best economic forms of this broader equalityâ. âThere are differences of viewpoint amongst usâ on that.
But the Travelling People are âprogressivesâ. They are against âstructural economic oppressionâ.
Doppelganger: They are against wage-slavery then â against the exploitation of the working class? Nothing is more âstructuralâ than the means of production being in the hands of the capitalist class, and the working class having to sell its labour power and thereby itself into exploitation.
You may think that. The Euston people feel that they could not possibly comment. They differ on the economic âsolutionâ.
Doppelganger: They also want âthe benefits of large-scale development... to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countriesâ. How?
Evidently, they donât know, but âwe support radical reform of the major institutions of global economic governance (WTO, IMF, World Bank) to achieve these goals, and we support fair trade, more aid, debt cancellation and the campaign to Make Poverty Historyâ. They explain: âDevelopment can bring growth in life-expectancy and in the enjoyment of life, easing burdensome labour and shortening the working dayâ.
Doppelganger: They are against privilege?
Not so fast! They are against âunjustifiedâ privilege and âunjustifiedâ power. What âprivilegeâ do they consider justified? They donât say.
Doppelganger: These are youngsters â right? Cutting their political teeth? Students? Sixth-formers?
No, no. These are grown-ups, some deep in their tired and disabused middle age, or even elderly. The main author of the manifesto, Norman Geras, is a retired professor at Manchester University. The other is the Observer journalist Nick Cohen.
Doppelganger: Jaysus! But theyâre new to politics, surely?
Geras was a member or supporter of the Mandelite âFourth Internationalâ for decades. He has written a book on Rosa Luxemburg.
Doppelganger: Theyâll have some stuff to say outside the common run, then?
Well, they are against racism. They âoppose... the anti-immigrant racism of the far Rightâ.
Doppelganger: And the racism-fomenting agitation of the New Labour government?
Donât know. They donât mention that.
Doppelganger: But at least they nail their colours firmly to the mast. They are against racism.
The truth, though, is that it would very hard to find other than fascistic morons in Britain who are not âagainst racismâ in general. The problems begin after you have proclaimed âanti-racismâ as a principle.
When the Travellers repeat a very tame and delimited version of what almost everybody proclaims, they are reinventing the wheel...
Doppelganger: They do a lot of that?
Lots and lots of it. Sometimes, as in their notions on democracy, it is the square wheel they reinvent! Perhaps thatâs why they take the name of a railway station.
Doppelganger: Give up! Thereâs nothing funny left to say about the politics of Euston station.
Donât be a faint-heart! Maybe itâs because they know that their grouping is a badly-buckled fifth wheel on the left-hand side of the neo-con float in the post 9/11 carnival of reaction!
The Travellers are for a two-states settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. They are vehemently against anti-semitism, which they think is growing alarmingly. But they even manage to be just a little peculiar and seriously off-target on anti-semitism. They write that things have ânow developed to a point where supposed organisations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groupsâ.
Well, yes! But where have they been for the last 15 and more years? The SWP stepped up its level of its âanti-Zionismâ as least as far back as 1987-8. It was part of its turn to kitsch anti-imperialism then. (It suddenly decided to back Iran in the Iran-Iraq war on the grounds that the USA was on the side of Iraq â as it had been for the whole near-decade of the war!).
The significant anti-Semitism of the kitsch left is not in their occasional association with open anti-Semites, but primarily in their own âanti-Zionismâ, and specifically in the wish to destroy Israel, and to back those who go beyond merely wishing it to try to do it. The formula in the manifesto is perhaps deference to signatories who have only lately cottoned on to left-wing anti-Semitism.
The Travellers are âunited against terrorâ ââin all its formsâ. âThe deliberate targeting of civiliansâ is, they note sternly, âa crime under international lawâ. That it is done in a just cause cannot make it right.
Doppelganger: Thatâs fine, surely? No cause can justify the deliberate slaughter of civilians. No militants in a truly good cause would want to.
You donât think a would-be democratic manifesto should at least refer to terror by states âby Bush, for example, or Sharon, or Olmert?
Doppelganger: Thatâs the kitsch-left line: âBush is the worldâs no.1 terroristâ.
In terms of civilians killed â with indifference or criminal recklessness, if not with deliberate intent â surely there is truth in calling the âgreat statesmenâ terrorists. Equating Bush with bin Laden is a reductio ad absurdum of something that is nonetheless true.
And âterrorismâ? Terrorism today is the deliberate slaughter of civilians. What about terrorism that targets rulers and tyrants?
Doppelganger: Marxists have always opposed that!
Yes, but we sided morally with the terrorists âfor instance, those who killed the Russian Tsar in 1881.
Doppelganger: Quibbling! You agree with the Travellers on âmodernâ terrorism!
With the branding, by an unholy alliance of Establishments, of all struggles which use âunofficialâ violence as evil, wrong, unjust? Leftists who had not lost their political bearings, who had not suffered a complete moral collapse, would insist on the distinctions and brand the âwar on terrorâ for the hypocrisy and sham and succour for tyrant regimes that most of it is.
Doppelganger: Ah, but surely they oppose Bushâs wars?
Read their tenth principle: âa new internationalismâ. For practical politics, this is the most important thing in the manifesto.
âHumanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the âcommon lifeâ of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a âresponsibility to protectâ.â
They âstand for an internationalist politics and the reform of international law â in the interests of global democratisation and global developmentâ.
In practice, this means open-ended support for âinterventionâ by the USA â âa great country and nation⊠the home of a strong democracy with a noble traditionâ â wherever its interests can be presented as pursuit of democracy, or desirable âregime changeâ.
Now, it is true that there is more to imperialism than the true idea â which came to some of us with our mothersâ milk â that it is a foul, dirty thing.
Marx thought that the British rule in India was immensely progressive â ending the thousands of years of a stagnant Asiatic mode of production, opening up new possibilities. Engels applauded the seizure of Texas and California from stagnant Mexico by the dynamic and progressive USA.
And British rule did bring the progress Marx expected in India, though more slowly than he expected. Bourgeois democracy in India is the child of the British Empire. World War Two was an imperialist war on both sides. Nonetheless it brought the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule, and created the possibility of reconstructing bourgeois democracy in western Europe.
Doppelganger: So you are saying imperialism may be progressive?
It is a matter of historical fact that imperialism, throughout the 20th century, as well as bringing the immense destruction of two World Wars and countless lesser wars, also triggered progressive developments, and opened immense possibilities not there before. So, after all, has capitalism!
Without the epoch of capitalism creating its preconditions and, so to speak, putting it on Historyâs agenda, socialism would be impossible.
It is not even entirely ruled out â though it looks increasingly unlikely â that imperialism will bring some approximation to bourgeois democracy, or at any rate something better than the rule of the quasi-fascist Baâth party, to Iraq.
Doppelganger: So we should support the imperialism of the USA, the UK, and other advanced countries! You say Marx supported the British in India?
Honest analysis and recognition of what is happening in the world is a duty we owe to reason. It is not âsupportâ for capitalism, or abandonment of socialism, to say that the dominant world capitalist system continues to do âprogressiveâ things.
But if we recognise progress, or potential or probable progress, we do it from our point of view. We do it as socialists, mortal enemies of capitalism.
We do not need to tell lies â least of all to ourselves âabout capitalism and imperialism. They are bad enough without that!
Marx on India is a good model here. He saw great historical progress in the British rule in India, and yet when the âIndian Mutinyâ broke out in 1857 â a backward-looking, regressive, reactionary (or mainly reactionary) movement â he indicted the British rulers for the savagery with which they put it down. âWe have here given but a brief and mildly-coloured chapter from the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjectsâ.
Marx recognised progress; but he stood apart from the British bearers of progress to India. He took no responsibility for them or their deeds â from which, remember, he expected, in the long term, immense advantage. He maintained his own viewpoint and his political independence.
He did not banish from the record the venality, profiteering, and robbery by the colonial power, or the terrible consequences of the neglect by the British of the prerequisites for Indian agriculture which the old Asiatic despotism had maintained.
Doppelganger: He was irresponsible, then!
No, he was responsible to the task of maintaining an independent, revolutionary, communist outlook on the world. Politically he was not a âdevelopmentalistâ, but a class-struggle revolutionary.
The Travellers are âdevelopmentalistsâ, people for whom the possibility of objectively progressive developments triggered from above is all-important.
There is a curious continuity here. For many decades, âsocialistâ â Stalinist â politics was defined by the pursuit of industrial development, as measured by crude economic statistics, regardless of human cost. That was supposedly development towards socialism. Would-be Trotskyists, too, bought into that view. For them, the USSR was âin transition to socialismâ. Stalinism defined the core value of âsocialismâ as the development of economies from backwardness to industrialisation.
With the Travellers we have something similar, but they are talking about capitalist development and imperialist-sponsored âprogressâ.
The Travelling people declare themselves for âa critical opennessâ. Self-preening, they say: âpolitical honesty and straightforwardness are a primary obligation for usâ.
But in fact the Travellers themselves now stand with forces in contemporary society that canât tell the full truth.
Thus, they say nothing about the casual barbarity with which their âgood guysâ of contemporary history â because they are bourgeois, because they are imperialist â lace, poison and subvert even potentially good works, like smashing the Saddam regime.
They justly denounce the kitsch-left for dishonesty and for double standards. Yet they themselves use double standards. In a revealing sleight of mind, for example, they misquote the slogans of the Great French Revolution of the 18th century (in the last point of their statement of principles, no.15).
âWe reaffirm the ideas that inspired... the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarityâ.
âSolidarityâ? The French revolution said: âfraternityâ. Fraternity did not explicitly exclude the competition of capitalism, the âwar of all against allâ; indeed, historically, it cleared the way for it. Solidarity explicitly does.
Here the crusaders for truth themselves employ the same sleight of mind and lamentable standards as the kitsch left.
Fighting the âdragonâ of kitsch-leftism, they adapt to the shape of what they fight.
Doppelganger: Try not to be so f...ing pretentious!
All right then, forget Nietzsche! Take what Lenin said about what he saw as the warping of Rosa Luxemburgâs ideas by over-preoccupation with her political fight against Pilsudskiâs Polish Socialist Party.
âTo a mouse there is no stronger beast than the cat, it is said. To Rosa Luxemburg there is evidently no stronger beast than the âFracyâ.â (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914).
Loathsome though the politics of the SWP and much of the ârevolutionary leftâ are â the allies of Islamist clerical fascists, Baâthist quasi-fascists, and reactionary âanti-imperialistsâ â there are more powerful, and not less loathsome, forces in society!
The Travellers are an anti-SWP group, an inversion of the SWP.
The SWPâs mechanical inversion of official bourgeois politics makes them not an independent force but only a foolishly dependent negative imprint. The Travelling peopleâs inversion of the SWP turns them into a positive offprint of bourgeois politics.
No. 13 of their principles is commitment to âthe traditional liberal freedom of ideasâ. But donât run away with the idea that theyâll cut up rough in defence even of that. They hasten to add that it must be âwithin the usual constraints against defamation, libel and incitement to violenceâ.
Britain has immensely restrictive libel laws (laws which, like so much else in liberal bourgeois-democratic society, greatly favour the rich). Who decides what is âdefamationâ? Especially under Blairâs new âanti-terrorâ laws, who decides what is âincitement to violenceâ (or âglorifying terrorismâ, as the new law puts it)? The liberal democratic courts, of course!
The Travellers say boldly, however: âRespect for others does not entail remaining silent about their beliefs where these are judged to be wantingâ. The philistinism and cliche-clotting of the language is itself an important part of their new politics!
Doppelganger: But they support âhuman rights; the pursuit of happiness... the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behindâ. Here at last they raise a rallying cry; they nail their theses to the door of the cathedral. Here they stand; they can do no other! The Martin Luther touch. Something they will dig in and fight for. Itâs good!
Not quite. They hasten to add â and it is characteristic of their whole enterprise: âWe are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the worldâ.
Doppelganger: These are our truths, but, erâŠthey may be wrong! Here we stand â but we may be persuaded to move!
They desire to have more backbone than the invertebrate liberals they criticise, but â moderate in all things, and with a proper sense of the intractabilities of the world ânot too much!
I prefer Trotsky. âRevolutionary ardour in the struggle for socialism is inseparable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truthâ.
Only the most feeble, liberal notion of class (as a duty of care to the poor), and no notion at all of class struggle, is in this manifesto. In a revealing passage, they complain that âeven educated and affluent peopleâ have bad attitudes, as if âaffluentâ people are those who can normally be expected to favour enlightenment, and it is scarcely surprising if the proles are yahoos.
Do not think, however, that they merely defend the status quo. Within their bourgeois-democratic âdefencismâ, they understand that âthese democracies have their own deficits and shortcomingsâ.
Doppelganger: Because they are bourgeois class democracies? They bear the stamp of the bourgeoisie and embody â in access, control of assets, etc., if not in formal rights â the rule of the capitalist class over the working class.
No, none of that Marxist old guff! They say it is now a âbattle for the development of more democratic institutions and procedures, for further empowering those without influence, without a voice or with few political resourcesâ. This, they affirm âis a permanent part of the agenda of the Leftâ.
Doppelganger: Permanent? So a society where no-one would be left without influence, voice, resources is a myth-mirage that can never be attained?
They state that âthe proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the countryâs infrastructureâ.
Doppelganger: Surely you agree with that?
Yes, but also no! Read what they mean by it. They unceremoniously bundle Third Camp socialists into the same ash-can as the sharia-socialists and reactionary âanti-imperialistsâ. They are opposed not only to those, âbut also to others who manage to find a way of situating a way of situating themselves between such forces [the sectarian militias in Iraq] and those trying to bring a new democratic life to the countryâ [Bush, Blair, etc.]
Those who are not entirely with them, and with Bush and Blair and their allies in Iraq, are against them. The parallel with the attitude of Stalinism when it was vigorous and expanding is striking here. These are the âPabloitesâ of post-Stalinist bourgeois arrogance and expansion!
Doppelganger: Remind me who the Pabloites were?
âPabloitesâ were would-be Trotskyists who looked to Stalinism to carry through the socialist revolution and saw their own role as critical cheer-leaders and auxiliary propogandists.
Doppelganger: But they do not agree with the invasion?
No, not all of them. But they all defer to those who did and do support the invasion. They agree to denounce those âmany left opponents of regime change in Iraqâ who perversely refuse to understand why âothers on the Leftâ supported it. By âdishing out anathemaâ they âbetray the democratic values they professâ.
Doppelganger: What are they themselves doing if not anathematising those who reject their â in fact, Bushâs and Blairâs â politics?
Thatâs all right! Double standards against the double-standards-blighted left are perfectly all right. Not only do they reject the idea that there are no enemies on the left; they reject the idea that there are friends on the left who disagree with their conversion to Bush and Blair.
They are fed up with left and liberal âprogressive opinionâ operating with âdouble standardsâ which make it see âlesser (though all too real) violations of human rightsâ at home, or in countries it dislikes, as âmore deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worseâ.
Doppelganger: Whatâs wrong with that? The kitsch left operates with stark double standards.
Indeed. But, as weâll see, they slip into the stance that âthe main democratic friend is at homeâ.
They âroundlyâ condemn âthe violation[s]... at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of ârenditionâ must be roundly condemned [as] a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical creditâ â and then direct their fire at the âdouble standardsâ by which âtoo many on the left... treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by farâ.
As a general statement about the left, it is true. But the idea that the main enemy is at home and our proper first concern is with the crimes of âour ownâ is also true. As when Karl Liebknecht first proclaimed it in World War One â knowing that Russian Tsarism was also an enemy, and a worse one than the German government â the core idea can be separated from its corruptions â those that arise if all notion is lost of scale and proportion; if the idea that there are, or may be, worse in the world than âour ownâ bourgeoisie and its allies, is lost; or if the guiding idea becomes âmy enemyâs enemy is my friendâ.
The Travellersâ motto is, by contrast: the main enemy is not at home, or in the USA. That is where the hope of the democratic future lies!
You must keep that in mind! Donât forget that you must defend the workersâ state â sorry... bourgeois state â because it is âprogressiveâ. (You see why they adopt old Stalinist language).
Donât be unfair to our rulers; even where they fall, it is from the standards for the establishment of which they âbear the greatest historical creditâ. None of the enemies of that âgreat nationâ, the USA, with its ânoble traditionâ is fit even to clean its moral galoshes, so to speak! (The Euston Travellers will do that!)
Amnesty International compared Guantanamo with the Stalinist gulag (in a comment by its secretary-general, Irene Khan, in her preface to AIâs 2005 annual report). She presumably meant it was similar in type, not the same in scale or duration. The Travellers are outraged at this âgrotesqueâ comparison!
But surely Guantanamo is the same sort of thing as the gulag â even if it would be nonsensical to compare the US regime in general with Stalinâs Russia.
The point is that, like the Stalinists and âPabloitesâ of old, the travelling people feel that the righteousness of the perpetrating powersâ cause mitigates, if it doesnât excuse, what they do.
Nowhere is the parallel with the attitudes of the old Stalinists and present kitsch-left so blatant. For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a great outcry arose in the West in response to hard knowledge becoming available about Stalinâs slave labour camps, Ernest Mandel and others of the âorthodoxâ Trotskyists denounced the left-wing (and recent left-wing, like David Rousset) organisers of the outcry, and worked to blunt public awareness of the camps. The outcry was preparation for war, donât you see, and you must never forget that the USSR is progressive compared to its opponents!
On things like Guantanamo, it is indispensable for any socialist or serious democrat to be hard and merciless in criticising âtheir ownâ government. The travellers claim to âroundly condemnâ Guantanamo â but immediately hasten to defend its perpetrators from too-rough criticism. The kitsch left could not ask for better help in its foul attitudes than that its critics adopt such a posture.
The Travellersâ conclusion sums up what they are: âWe must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic âanti-imperialismâ and/or hostility to the current US administrationâ (emphasis added).
They are the anti-anti-Bushites! But if you define yourself as the inverse of people who are themselves shaped by a simple-mindedly rigid and mechanical inversion of dominant capitalist and imperialist policies, then you turn into... a positive image and epitome of the Establishment.
You may choose to see that Establishment not as it is and has evolved and is evolving, but in an idealised âessentialistâ notion of it ârooted in the 18th century! Leave aside for now the limitations of 18th century Whig âdemocracyâ. Just as the Islamic fundamentalists who want to go back to the 7th century cannot do that, and in fact would construct a present-day caricature of it, so too the would-be time-travellers of an idealised capitalist democracy end up backing the all-too-real and none-too-democratic capitalism of Bush and Blair.