“My father always told me . . . He said when you think you’ve done all you can do and you think you can’t do no more . . . do some more.”
—STEVE HARVEY
Absorbing the litany of horrors committed in American history by both Knuckle-Dragging Conservatives™ and Well-Meaning Liberals™, a reader might be compelled to call us on our shit and demand, “Okay, assholes, but where was the Left during all of this?”
Besides doing the grassroots organizing and agitating that pushed those Well-Meaning Liberals™ into backing social and economic reforms, the answer is: getting shot, arrested, deported, spied on, and purged. Since socialists, Marxists, and left-wingers of all stripes were the only people challenging the hegemony of capitalism in America, they were targeted for harassment, intimidation, and death at all turns. The list of left-wing martyrs destroyed by state and right-wing vigilante violence reads like a who’s-who of activists in the labor and civil rights movements, from Albert Parsons to MLK. The strongest, smartest activists for justice in this country did not seek to “reform” capitalism and its hierarchy but to destroy it—so capitalism and its hierarchy destroyed them first.
Under that pressure, the Left cracked. Driven from the ranks of increasingly business-friendly labor unions and with its political parties shot through with informants and provocateurs, the movement splintered into microsects and retreated into the ivory tower of academia (from which the Marxists were eventually also purged).
However, this neo–Gilded Age is creating wealth disparity and precariousness that have millions of Americans questioning the underlying logic of capitalism in a way that hasn’t happened in generations. Lefties are again at the tip of the spear against a desperate capitalist system that’s readying a blood-soaked, militarized response to climate and economic catastrophes.
And believe us, those catastrophes are coming. You don’t have to be a mindset genius to realize that the engine of capital, running on greed and the vampiric logic of profit, will fuck up the world over and over again. Who knows what will happen first: A new speculative bubble that obliterates people’s wealth as it enriches an ever-ascendant class of inbred oligarchs? A final wave of automation that destroys everyone’s job, leaving no one left to buy anything and crashing the economy? Or the first singular 100,000-plus-death-toll climate event caused by decades of thrashing the planet for profit?
Of course, there’s a chance that a natural extinction event like a supervolcano or meteor will wipe out all human life, letting capitalism off the hook. But barring that merciful possibility, the parasitic system that runs our world will 100 percent, for sure, you betcha end up ruining or killing at least one person you know in your lifetime.
That is, unless we finally stun the beast, reach for the cattle gun, and scoop its brains out; unless we find a moment or series of moments to claw back power from the Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses and Charles Kochs, whose wealth could instantly end world poverty four times over.
Finding some happiness in this hellworld is essential for your mental health, but it’s not enough. No one would blame you for simply “getting by”—zoning out after work, ordering the occasional GrubHub delivery, and saving up for a PS4. But you’ll still feel the dread. Fact is, there’s no way to truly escape the anxiety and alienation, let alone the economic and ecological catastrophes we’re going to witness in our lifetimes.
Getting by is not enough. But neither is ceaseless anger, sadness, and fear. That will burn you out quickly, and what you need is energy to sustain you, to motivate you to be a part of something bigger. Spending every single moment thinking about politics (particularly on the Internet) will turn you cynical, hysterical, and probably reactionary. Let’s avoid that.
What we all need—as far as our ancient, wise, giant brains can tell—is a good-humored, thick-skinned, and maybe even optimistic struggle against the world outside. You may be thinking that that’s easy for us to say, since we’ve stumbled onto some success and money for our very dumb but also very brilliant comedy show. But the truth is, we really did believe this stuff when we were broke, and we’ll believe it a year from now after we foolishly invest all our money in BitcoinDark and lose everything.
It’s true—we don’t know much. But we know this: as the liberal opposition to Trump (and whatever nightmare comes after Trump) reveals itself to be feckless and incompetent, more and more people are going to realize that there is no reforming a system built on exploitation and nonstop, infinite economic growth. Socialism will emerge as the only genuine alternative to the savage, hopeless, gangster system of capitalism—an alternative that offers an actual future, one in which there are enough resources to take care of everybody and to take on humanity’s challenges with a dab of dignity.
That, or we’ll all drown in boiling seawater. Always good to have options.