Liberals against the Left

Lately we've seen more examples of liberal erasure of the left via the equating of left and right. A couple of years ago, my friend Korinna Patelis wrote a brilliant article on this phenomena in Greece that we published in Theory & Event. In the UK, this erasure manifest in the occlusion of Lexit and subsequent ceding of the terms and terrain of Brexit to the right. In the US, we've seen this most recently in liberal equating of any critique of HRC with a right-wing attack.

The basic move begins with the claim that HRC isn't trusted because she has been attacked from the right for over thirty years. Liberal feminists repeat this trope, adding the point that the basis of right-wing attacks is sexism. HRC herself furthers this narrative as she says she recognizes that people have a hard time trusting her, that she has to earn this trust, and that this is hard because of the decades of attacks from the right.

But the fact that the right attacks her and that some of these attacks are sexist does not mean that all attacks are from the right and that all attacks are sexist. Attacks from the left emphasize her involvement in the coup in Haiti, her militarist adventurism in Libya, her support for war in Iraq, her embrace of Israel, for starters. When liberals ignore these facts of HRC's political position, when they erase the critique, they are implicitly supporting these positions. Coups, regime change, imperialism are reinforced as the bedrock set of liberal positions.

The same holds for big money in politics, the rule of finance capital, and the buttressing of oligarchy. The liberal equation of all attacks on HRC (or the Democrats or Obama) with right wing attacks negates the left, It doesn't consider or engage left arguments, it doesn't tolerate them, it erases them as left, proceeding as if they did not exist at all.