Hey Charlie!
I penned a longish piece but after coming back to it two days later I decided to place it on the back burner. It was too something..., let's say.
If you want to make a difference in the political space, well as in your own life, you need to be honest, bold and provocative; you need to challenge the prevailing wisdom and the lack of it wherever you find either.
Many of the smaller, 25K-50K followers, sporting blogs in Dore-landia are, IMO, falling short of challenging political realities head-on. By challenging I mean critically questioning, as opposed to taking an absolutist contrarian stance.
What distinguishes Jimmy Dore, Craig Pasta J., and a bit less so Kit Cabello from the bourgeois PMC neoliberal "left" represented by the the like of censoring Briahna Joy Gray, Katie Halper, and now, increasingly, the censoring Sabrina Salvatti, is their self identifying, anti establishment, left-populist, post-partisan, brand of political conceits, if not yet of committed to activism politics.
Into this breach steps Charlie Brown? Perhaps. Let's see what we find there:
We find the carcass of Third party politics presenting as a zombie on the move. Well, fuck that!?
We find Cornel West, a likely CIA plant like Gloria Steinem, remaining unscathed by the lack of vetting which, as we know, ought to have ended not merely his political career but seriously tarnished his "leftist/Marxist/SocDem pretensions and legacy.
We find RFK Jr., (appealing to all the anti-Covidians) challenging neoliberal capitalism with free market capitalism. An FDR redux come to save capitalism for the capitalists again. There's damnably little there for the working class. And, given that his "free market" identity cannot be easily reconciled with, say, regulatory Keynesian welfare liberalism, populism should want to have damnably little to do with it.
We find seemingly class conscious Dore-landian actors and those to the ideological left of them; both fake and confused, forgetting everything they know, or sense, about most rudimentary class-analysis, and singing high praises to state-capitalist/neoliberal China and the capitalist BRICS+; to 'multipolarity' which itself points only in one direction, far as I can tell: neo-feudal technocratic globalism, a Unipolar World Order; newer and better.
We find all that and so much more, including our daily share of opportunities to take one's own and their conceits to task.
Concretely though, at the present, the willfully unvetted Cornel presents a rarefied opportunity.
In the spirit of challenging authority; in this case the authority of the flat-on-their-arses falling anti-authoritarian left-populist Dore-landians, you might consider doing what they did when they were endeavoring to populate and make viable their own channels: bounce off of their segments with informed critique where you find them falling short of the task which they have purportedly set for themselves.
Jimmy D. has repeatedly pranced around like an inflated peacock making claims to having been the first to have done this, that and whatever. Well, he'll come around to West in due time but you should nail down your receipts. The easy vetting of Cornel has been done. There are more details, more embroidering which can and ought to be furnished, but the topic itself should be milked until it blows up all over the "left" internet, taking the Chris Hedges,' Norm Finklesteins, and many others with it.
So what informs the foundation of your platform other than healthy instincts and good common sense (don't let these be subsumed by any dogma!)? Where might the ideological support for your guarded politics come from?
1) At wikipedia for starters, and later at soft panorama look into Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy.
2) Libcom.org is a resource for everyone fighting to improve their lives, communities and working conditions." Start with Bakunin and Proudohn, move onto Rocker and Pannekoek, and keep going but don't rush it beyond the most cursory acquaintance, if at all,
3) Elections: A Trap for Fools, Jean-Paul Sartre
As for daily go to sites:
and although no longer what it used to be with Alex Cockburn(RIP) as chief editor:
Now that you have a Disqus account we can take on the finer points in the comments.
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