How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy | The Grayzone - Christian Parenti:
March 31, 2022 - "It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it.... For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
"Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to 'remove themselves from society,' and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]
"In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: 'one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.' [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: 'Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.' [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own....
"Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5]....
"All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town 'deplorables' might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane. End of story. For this set, Covid vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman to wave against the specter of 'contagion'; while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions....
"All of this is contingent upon the status of Lockdown Leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous 'frontline workers' ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep.... Never mind that we are in the tightest labor market in 40 years and should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions. Instead, most of the left – including some trade unions – has supported measures that divide, distract, and intimidate the working class. It is a tragic and disturbing spectacle.
"The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability.... The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere....
"Here is my theory of the crime: a reckless smash and grab operation by Big Pharma, assisted by our totally captured public health agencies, has been allowed to run unchecked, like a cytokine storm of bad policy, because of the unique political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election in which mass Trump Derangement Syndrome short-circuited the critical faculties of almost the entire journalistic class and Democratic Party ecosystem, including the so-called movement left.... Dating back to the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976, a corrupt symbiosis between industry and the regulators has fueled a dynamic of pandemic-hyping moral panic. [8] In the pre-Trump era these would-be moral panics had limited traction because the critical capacities of journalists and politicians were intact enough to thwart the worst excesses of the pharmaceutical-public health 'pandemic industrial complex.' [9] But the fear created by Trump destroyed that capacity for correction."
Read more: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/31/left-covid-lockdowns-mind-autopsy/
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