The American comedian Lee Camp – the most censored comedian-journalist in North America – revealed on his YouTube channel on January 16 who will be the next President of the United States. Camp mentions that U.S. presidential elections last for most of an entire presidential term, which differs from most other countries where election campaigns are limited to a few months. After Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa primary, Democrats look shamefacedly at their own leadership. In a stunning act of prestidigitation, and as a way of dealing with the harsh reality, Camp puts an end to the dreaded horserace and calls a winner. “Here is the truth about who will win the next presidential election,” he says, “so that we can move on to other things.”1
“The winner will be the rich, racist, corporatist, sociopathic, corrupt, vapid, skinsuit predator. That is who is going to win. The man who has supported every American bomb landing on every innocent child is going to win. The man who has achieved nothing to help the people actually struggling across this nation and around the world. The man whose vacant eyes are somehow less scary than his morally bankrupt action. The man who has done and will do nothing, nothing, to move this country and the world towards a sustainable future – a future we’d be proud to pass on to our children, as opposed to a festering pile of overheating dying refuse that has been excreted out of the anus of capitalism. The man who has grown America’s brutal police force, built up America’s brutal prison system, grown America’s Orwellian surveillance state, built up America’s genocidal military and grown America’s bloodthirsty corporate oligarchy until it is bulging at the seams. That is who will be the next President. It will be the man who continues to tell you that wage slavery is freedom, that surveillance is privacy, that war is peace, that thick oily extinction is sustainability, that locking up the innocent is justice, that crushing the hopes and creativity of the young is education, that ignoring systemic racism is somehow forward thinking and progressive, that crushing debt is success, that government propaganda is intrepid journalism, that pushing for nuclear war is security, that destroying and or extracting the wealth and happiness of every other country is diplomacy, that a rigged, bought out shitshow election is a free and fair democracy, and that lies are truth while truth is fake news. That guy will win the presidential election. That guy will be the next President of the United States – whether it’s Trump or Biden or DeSantis or Gavin Newsom, it will still be that guy.
All of these politicians agree on most policy issues, Camp says, referring to the notion of a bipartisan consensus that no honest commentator would dispute. I myself have discussed this issue in the conclusion of Bernie Bros Gone Woke.2 The last chapter of the book, titled “Less than Bernie,” discusses the five stages of left grieving after the defeat of the Bernie Sanders campaign at the hands of the Democratic Party establishment. One may as well say at the hands of the establishment since, after the failed bipartisan impeachment trial, the Biden administration waited approximately an entire year to get the case against the Trump-led insurrection underway. In the interim, the liberal or social democratic left had a strange relationship to the January 6 coup attempt, suggesting that it was a badly organized farce, to be ignored as the public focuses on more important things, rather than a well-organized stand-down of D.C. metro police, Capitol police, the U.S. military and the national guard, which is exactly what it was. To this day, we hear commentators on the supposed left suggest that the Democrats are misusing lawfare against Trump. What is to be done? “Less than Bernie” describes a conversation between Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor and owner of Jacobin, and a few in his entourage who were depressed after Sanders capitulated. Sunkara suggests to them to get real and not start talking about a third party. This political perspective is borne out years later by staff writer Branco Marcetic’s article after the Iowa caucus, suggesting that Joe Biden and the Democrats had better offer voters something more than “I’m not Trump.”3 But everyone knew then that Biden would do nothing and we know the same thing now.
Camp wants to be realistic and cut the bullshit, which is a smart position to take and standard on the extra-parliamentary and post-neoliberal left. However, it is not simply that nothing changes when it comes to the bipartisan consensus, which responds the demands of global capitalism, but that the American left also refuses to change. By this I mean that the American left refuses to be a genuinely socialist left. One small indication of this is Camp’s inclusion in his sketch of the notion that the creativity of young people is being crushed, and the other that Americans are ignoring systemic racism. These two points stand out from the rest as what you might consider cultural or identity issues. I will not reiterate here points about why the concept of systemic racism is essential to American liberal ideology since the Cold War era and will refer readers to the work of Touré and Adolph Reed instead (very few do as good a job on this as they do), to Cedric Johnson, Walter Benn Michaels, Norman Finkelstein, and to likeminded scholars. The terms systemic and structural racism sound more sociological and less problematic than they actually are, especially when considered from the perspective of socialist class politics. In addition, there is no question that young people are disadvantaged by the world we now live in and that young people need good conditions to thrive. Parents are especially aware of this. However, it is understood that political and cultural appeals to youth and childhood are typically a psychological projection of the concerns of adults. The reference to children is one of the countless ways in which the universalist aspect of politics is culturalized and particularized, with for example, politicians in the past being known to kiss babies to demonstrate their humanity. One cannot imagine, at this moment in time, Benjamin Netanyahu kissing a Palestinian baby, but that’s not the point. In a similar manner, the economic concerns of the average household are often used by conservative commentators to make ordinary people appreciate their calls for belt-tightening measures, which comes around to diversion as conservative policies further enrich the wealthy. Something similar happens to political theory when you replace a comprehensive social vision with concern for vulnerable children, or for any other disadvantaged social group. It isn’t that one should not identify the many ways in which specific groups are disadvantaged, but that doing so is often part of an issue-oriented politics that avoids the difficulties of political universalism. This discussion is not something that you will not find in Camp’s discourse or in the discourse of most American leftists, especially in official politics, academia and the media, where such thinking is proscribed as totalitarian. And you are not likely to find in the activist, new social movement and NGO sectors either, except as a definition of what left politics used to be, say, before Stalin, Mao and Castro.
The problem is that issue-oriented politics tends to be liberal and postmodern. It allows people to express concern and outrage, but it does not organize anything that is actionable and that would involve the masses. That kind of politics will get you fired or marginalized. By and large, piecemeal issue-oriented politics is the protest politics of the middle and professional class, who pick and choose among the options and on occasion seek to mobilize a Jesse Jackson-style rainbow coalition. It tends also to focus on victimized groups who could benefit from the sympathy and largesse of well-intentioned liberals. It does not offer people autonomy because autonomy is the repressed underside of postmodern leftists, who have failed to properly “work through” the last two hundred years of history. This failed politics of trauma and recovery is one of the reasons why people are turning to the political right, which pretends to offer people a more comprehensive vision: be the top who causes the traumas rather than the bottom who suffers them. How many liberals and postmodern nihilists have not also bought into that political fantasy?
The recent January 13 Palestine solidarity march in Washington D.C. attracted over 100,000 demonstrators. Socialist Equality Party leader Joseph Kishore has mentioned that like the 500,000 strong demonstration in London, the perspective of those who organized the demonstration is unfortunately that of an “impotent middle class” that “leaves unsaid all the most important things that must be said.”4 He gives as one example the short speech by Cornel West that appealed to people’s sense of morality but that did not suggest what political means could change things. West also called on Biden and Antony Blinken to change their ways, as if these people are prone to moral exhortation. I noticed myself that West’s celebration of people’s manifest plurality as multiculturally “squishy” presented a somewhat pliant version of his usual sermonizing – but this was a large crowd, no doubt. I would vote for West, but moralizing around identity, even if not especially in the worst conditions, cannot replace the need for a comprehensive political vision and strategy. Kishore mentions that the Trotskyist SEP was denied the opportunity to speak at the rally. Perhaps this was the case also for other political party representatives, excluding Jill Stein. This brings me back to children’s creativity.
The recent film Linoleum (Colin West, United States, 2022) has an “it’s that guy” moment when Cameron Edwin’s imaginary (because stillborn) son recognizes in the newspaper the (temporally) younger father figure who steals his father’s (Cameron’s) science show. Among the season’s latest films, this depiction of a somewhat failed scientist having a midlife crisis is less sadistic than Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, United States, 2023), less trite than Dream Scenario (Kristoff Borgli, United States, 2023) and less banal than the gold-diggers-are-okay No Hard Feelings (Gene Stupnitsky, United States, 2023), but it does have something in common with all of these. The imaginary rocket that Cameron wants to put into space has the red and white checkerboard pattern that one recognizes from the French Tintin comic books. The film structure is akin to sci-fi time warp scenarios like those found in Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, United States, 2014) or Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, United States, 1985), such that different characters (Marc, Cameron and Mac) are in actuality different versions of Cameron himself at different stages of his life.
The Möbius strip logic of the film is perhaps what Camp is alluding to when he talks about the creativity of youth. He may be talking about young people but he may also be talking about adults. Hipster talk is possibly philosophical or sophisticated but it is also important to master if you identify to some degree with the cool people who make these kinds of films – or if you want to reach them in some way. Excluding the audience, the people that these Hollywood cinema people work for are some of the same people whose moon rocket debris fell into Cameron’s backyard. Cameron is warned by these authorities to not tamper with the wreckage but he instead salvages the material to fulfil his childhood dream of landing his own rocket in his own backyard. It’s all very Freudian. Very complicated. In fact, it’s so complicated that it must be explained through a children’s TV show, which is the reflexive “play within a play” aspect of this … let’s not call it something that would offend sensibilities.5 Let us refer to this as the crushing of children’s creativity, or, letting the cat out of the bag, that is, so long as the cat stays in the bag and children are not so creative as to be anything more than children, because that’s how you make money. It’s a lot like Palestine, in fact, except it’s a movie rather than a genocide, so it’s not the same thing. Better to make movies than genocides. Most would agree. The point I’m making, which is similar to the point that is made in Linoleum, is that the American liberal left, which is in something like a state of Alzheimer’s when it comes to radicalism and sexuality, needs a new floor – a new basis on which to conceive its culture and politics. Without this, that guy will continue to do it for you.
Notes
1. Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp, “LIVE: This Is Who Will Win the Presidency,” YouTube (January 16, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpSzsD69NRA.
2. Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2022).
3. Branco Marcetic, “Trump’s Victory in Iowa Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Biden,” Jacobin (January 16, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/01/iowa-caucus-gop-primaries-trump-desantis-haley.
4. Joseph Kishore, “One hundred days of the imperialist-Zionist genocide in Gaza,” World Socialist Web Site (January 16, 2024), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/16/pers-j16.html.
5. For example, after I recently chuckled at and further commented on George Galloway’s statement that he trusts Anthony Blinken (or some similar character) as far as he can throw the Republican nominee from New Jersey, someone hacked the Biden-Harris poster I made for this blog (posted January 15) and changed the words ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ to ‘Infation Reductio Act,’ with an allusion to the notion of reductio (ad absurdum). This I suppose refers to the six-pack rings that some tourist was leaving in front of my apartment a few weeks ago, with further allusions I won’t get into here but all of it a right-wing version of respectability plus retribution, a kind of social justice road rage with hurt feelings and self-loathing deployed as a pretext and justification for hatemongering. This is the sort that is depicted in No Hard Feelings when Maddie’s offhanded remarks to two jerks at a party are interpreted as homophobic, with everyone at the party turning full posse on her. This gives you an idea of what Möbius strip means in a surveillance context and politically hostile environment in which everything you say can be used against you – an anti-liberal far-right politics of generalized victimization and scapegoating in what Mark Selzer once referred to as the pathological (not to mention humourless and brutally stupid) public sphere, which was depicted well enough by Werner Herzog in his 2001 film Invincible. The goal is to stand out from the zombie horde while you also try to fit in, like in the film Dream Scenario. See George Galloway, “JUSTICE DELAYED – MOATS with George Galloway Ep 308,” YouTube (January 14, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMolx86Kdg.