Michael Moore enlists with General Clark: the pathetic—and predictable—logic of protest politics
By David Walsh
27 January 2004
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Moore motivates his support of Clark by a near-hysterical fear of George W. Bush. This approach ironically elevates the current occupant of the White House to a stature that he hardly deserves. The Bush presidency is a symptom of the thoroughly diseased state of American capitalism. Bush is the mouthpiece for the most predatory, ruthless sections of American big business. His regime, no doubt the most reactionary in modern US history, has not, however, fallen out of the sky. It is the sharpest expression of the rightward lurch by both the Republicans and Democrats in response to the crisis of the profit system. No one who seriously examines American society could conclude that Bush is the source or at the center of its problems. In the end, Moore’s magnification of Bush is a reflection of his own prostration before the American political establishment.
The demonizing of Bush becomes the justification for opportunist politics. Nothing matters, according to this line of reasoning, except the defeat of Bush at the polls. “Why expend energy on the past
when we have such grave danger facing us in the present and in the near future?” writes Moore. A whole host of liberal-left groups and individuals in the US will attempt to use arguments like this over the next nine months as a bludgeon against socialist opponents of the two-party system.
<snip>
Why has the left failed to construct a mass movement in the US? The strength of American capitalism no doubt played a significant role. But this failure has persisted despite the obvious and growing crisis of the system. The absence of a coherent, consciously considered and worked out ideology, indeed the contempt for theory that Moore and others exhibit, has played a huge role. The right wing in America has no intrinsic power or popular appeal, its relative dominance is a function in part of the intellectual bankruptcy of this sort of “left” pragmatism, thoroughly incapable of orienting itself to the historic needs of the working class and the construction of a principled mass movement.
Moore doesn’t have time for thinking; frankly, he only has time for foolish, thoughtless decisions. If former general Clark were to be elected, how would America be different? Instead of the reckless, unilateralist policy of the Bush administration, we would experience the more calculated, perhaps better managed exploitation of broad masses carried out in cooperation with the European and other ruling elites. In short, the return of a Clinton. This is a perspective that is no perspective at all.
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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/moor-j27.shtml
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