Unreconciled

American liberalism was much ado about how members of minorities, most descended from various immigrant groups, could join the bourgeois class of respectable citizens. Reform Judaism was all about this. This liberalism is conservative. It is still with us. The problem is of course not that it is wrong but that it isn't much.

Most of American liberal political culture is still focused on this project, a nineteenth century legacy. When people on the liberal-left start doing this, it is as laughable as it is obnoxious. They are of course implacable and militant.

Slavery was not caused by prejudice and its abolition was not the repudiation of prejudice.

The Holocaust was not caused by prejudice and an empire that enforces the repudiation of all prejudices might well continue to murder poor people here and elsewhere.

The discourses of anti-racism and anti-anti-semitism are therefore, though correct on their own terms, more of an obstacle and distraction than anything else. (Yes, though, what they affirm must be affirmed and what they deny denied). American liberalism is obnoxious. I find it little more than that. It is an alibi for the corporate state.

That state is violent and thuggish. When its enforcers are from a protected minority group, to their thuggish stupidity is merely added the claims they know they can make for their status. We do not have equal liberty in America, only equal right to acquire the wealth that makes it possible to be treated decently at all, violent liberty to protest uselessly about it, and equality of status which means that every one can be a boss and must be respected for their own property right in personality and identity.

The bosses' state has given thugs it employs weapons to use against the people that state rules. If they are black, this fact is irrelevant or worse, part of a discourse that pretends to be liberal and in fact is perfectly fascist. If they are female, they will use their femininity, also as part of the weaponry. If they were soldiers torturing prisoners, they would wield Americanism in whatever way they can. Good cop, bad cop, liberal Democratic torturer and right-wing Republican one. And the problem is not American culture either, because culture is irrelevant now. All culture now is equally interesting and equally irrelevant when wielded by the people in power. We should all appreciate every culture and appeal to none. Your own will not protect you, nothing will. All rhetoric that can be used will be, and in the final analysis all that matters is the brutality of force used in the service of capital. People are irrelevant to it. Any including all or any of us may be casualties in its warfare. Your identity is irrelevant. Your minority status is irrelevant and I owe it no particular respect. but liberalism was a lie to begin with anyway.

If this sounds like I have a bitter quarrel with liberals that could erupt with almost any member of any of our minorities, that is true. If they bait me as a racist, misogynist, antisemite, and they will, whatever, I am not amused. This is a real quarrel. This is why I think the political left if and when it matters at all should repudiate our liberalism, including about race, gender, and everything else. My saying this tells liberals I am on the right and against their identities, but that is merely another symptom and feature of the quarrel. It is a quarrel I care much about. I expect to lose. We lost in Germany, leading to the rise of fascism, and long before the Americans brought about a victory of their own, now claimed on behalf of the Jewish people the Americans did nothing to save or offer refuge. The Holocaust was one result of our (the left’s) defeat, and the Americans marketed their own narrative about its causes (evil, the prejudice they call anti-semitism, mental illness (Hitler was obviously a madman, as if that were the cause), Europeans being European and therefore oppressors and not liberals who love everyone like Americans), which is the one the American Jewish world overwhelmingly follows. My faction almost always loses, we fight losing battles and must be content with our partial gains.