Maybe you’ve been noticing this too?: How vaccination mandates and government Covid policy, accompanied by barbs all over the place about “misinformation,” is doing a great job of dividing what we’ve considered the progressive left. Now what we get is the so-called “Anti-vaxers” vs. the “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers,” even though most who are “anti-mandate” or even who have questions about these particular (EUA- “Emergency Use Authorization”) vaccines aren’t exactly always 100% “anti-vax,” and even though the “Fauci Followers” of the left, however faithful they are at the moment, usually distrust Big Pharma and official government information. Whew!
Why is the left always so good at getting divided and conquered? Or maybe it’s just that there are people out there who are more intent on seeing that kind of division get done to the left than to any other group! Basically, if you’re paying attention, dividing and conquering the public is a long-standing tradition in this country. Those who have an interest in doing so can best be described as the power elite. Oh yes, and if you want to know where the power is, money is pretty measure of where it resides.
The potent presence of this new fracturing force (is there no end to Covid’s ills?) really hit home for me when I heard about how government policy over mandates is probably going to break up New York State’s Green Party this year, perhaps pretty much wipe it out of existence- We’ll see. Will that “third” party fade so entirely in New York so as to become just a ghostly relic of an alternative to the corporate duopoly that people once held significant hope for?
But then, after thinking about the Green Party, I realized that we are seeing this fracturing in various ways all over what has been traditionally been considered the progressive left. Did you think that the way that people were holing up and sequestering during Covid was anti-social enough?; well now people are walking away from age-old relationships over this. In some cases, it’s like they don’t even recognize the very basic principles that once steadfastly connected them.
What, no possibility for a united middle ground here if the two sides were dialoguing?
Maybe not. If not, the issues of government handling of Covid and the corporate media blasting those polices non-stop into the culture are doing a truly superb job of weakening and annihilating coalitions that were already comparatively weak, poorly populated, and ineffective in trying to deal with the pervasive corporatism dominating society.
I could observe that between these two sides, one side might be a little more open minded and have a better, more tolerant understanding of the other’s point of view and its origins, while saying, conversely, that other side may be more prone to shutting down dialogue and information exchange, and it may be a side much more prone to argue for or to demand censorship and to advocate for a totalitarian treatment of others. One side in this debate is anti-authoritarian, the other is not. . . With the split, both sides are going to try to claim the mantel of “true left,” “true progressive” thinking.–
– One of the sides in this split will claim that mantel by saying that it is anti-social for those on the other side to “downplay” the menace of Covid by questioning whether the public’s fear is proportional to the illness's actual threat, and anti-social if those on the other side “gullibly” wonder if, in fact, there might be measures and treatments going unadvertised and unpromoted that could ward off illness, fortify healthy resistance and that could treat Covid in ways that diminish the terribleness of what we've been worrying about 24/7 non-stop– (Shouldn't we rest assured that the health industry has always acted in the best interests of the public?) That side will think that those who make arguments for personal freedoms or who venture to explore ideas that might diminish the perceived peril of Covid and the prescribed vigilance it certainly requires are selfish violators of the Star Trek principle of needed self-sacrifice we heard enunciated in that once climactic exchange between Kirk and Spock: “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, . . . or the one.”
While the left further fractures into the splintered shards of increasingly small, self-contained, self- referential bubbles (as is the problem with the country in general). . . (Sorry that’s not an internally consistent metaphor) . . . . Something else interesting is happening. . .
Anti-authoritarian sentiment and a belief in personal freedoms is uniting one side of this split left with people on the right, with libertarians, with independents, definitely with lots of varieties of anti-corporatists, even with people across the spectrum who may consider themselves to have no basic political philosophy, only perhaps to have pragmatic instincts about things they feel are askew. Maybe, like Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party, who concurred on this, they are against what they view as the corruption and crony capitalism that occurs when corporations capture the government.
Is the broad spectrum uniting of all these elements in what may be termed the “Medical Freedom Movement” frightening to those in power? It’s suggested that it is and that an example of the growth of these new alliances that could be troubling to them was the recent anti-mandate rally in January in Washington D.C.. The anti-mandate event in D.C. was just days after another rally by the D.C. mall’s monuments. The earlier event was a “March for Life” anti-abortion rally, greatly diminished in attendance from prior years. That rally from several days before, made the front page of the New York Times above the fold. The anti-mandate event at the Lincoln Memorial did not get such conspicuous coverage by the Times.
Time Magazine, not downplaying or disparaging the anti-mandate rally the same way the Times did, choose to admonish and forebodingly scold that this coming together of folk of different political stripes under an anti-mandate banner represented something in the nature of Svengali-like hypnotism. Their January 26 headline was: “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.” I don’t know what the photo they used to underscore their headline was actually intended to illustrate: Right-wingers being taken over, or the “anti-vaxxers” who are taking over the right. . .
.. . I feel that it is usually destructive to pigeonhole people, but, for the sake of de-pigeonholing those featured in the photo Time chose, I can assure you that the group depicted, including the woman putting her hands together in a prayer clasp, were a group of non-corporatist, left-of-democratic-party-mainstream Democrats (or at least recent Democrats), including, if you look, one who wore a big “Black Lives Matters” button. If you know what I look like, you’ll know why I can speak with authority on that subject.
I’ve also written about how we have to get away from the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions, since both the Republican and the Democrat parties are controlled by corporatist money and interests; viewed with the slightest bit of perspective, the two parties can be seen to work more like a tag team pursuing the same goals than anything else.
I wrote about how we need a new political “color.” Unfortunately, “purple” has already been grabbed by the “Purple Project,” which while purporting to be a populist styled erasure of Red/Blue differences, is actually just more top-down corporatism for those realizing that the “Red Team/Blue Team” stuff is total mishegoss. I wrote then that “green” with its connotations of environmentalism wasn’t the best choice because it was already taken by the Green Party. Now if the Green Party is one more of those groups going to further fracture its pursuit of principles in the face of the Covid policies coming from government and Big Pharma, that just confirms the need for a new color for new emerging alliances.
PS: Here is the Monday, December 13, 2021 statement of the National Black Caucus of the Green Party, “We Say No To Mandates,” that explains the political stance and direction they are taking. I am unaware that the Greens in New York State on the other side of this split have articulated their position or the ways in which they disagree and can’t go along with what the Black Caucus expressed here.
