Tag Archives: Fascism

Bad Faith Crashes into “Noncompatible Leftism”

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Screenshot from Bad Faith episode on YouTube, with a pensive Briahna Joy Gray. leaning her chin on her fist, on the left side of split screen, listening to guest Gabriel Rockhill speaking on the right.

Briahna Joy Gray, former spokesperson for the  Bernie Sanders primary campaign of 2020 and host of the popular podcast Bad Faith, did her listeners a real service recently by having on as a guest Villanova professor of philosophy Gabriel Rockhill to talk about his new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? and how the CIA constructed what Rockhill calls “compatible leftism.”

According to Rockhill, an unabashed revolutionary Marxist, during the Cold War the CIA groomed anti-Soviet, self-identified “Marxists” from the Frankfurt School (including Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse), funding their scholarship and bringing some of them to the US to teach at elite American universities. The point was to influence a movement in Western European and North American Marxism that would shift its focus from class conflict to culture and turn it into a theory and criticism factory, thereby draining it of its anti-capitalist power and removing it as a threat to the capitalist imperialist political order that created the CIA for exactly such purposes. Rockhill classifies these scholars and more recent ones like Michel Foucault and Slavoj Zizek into the “compatible” left because it has no interest in altering the power structure. Rather, it fits comfortably into it. (Horkheimer, considered one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, for example, would eventually shock lefties by defending the Vietnam War as a bulwark against Red China!)

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has never been part of the left. It has always been a party of capital. Any “left” impulse the party has ever had (and probably will ever have) has come only from popular movements outside its infrastructure, which mirrors the national political structure: money on top, people below.

Gray does a superb job of supporting Rockhill as he explains these foundational facts of capitalist empire to her listening audience, sharpening the focus with illustrations from her own experience as a Harvard-trained lawyer and political player/influencer of the left. Rockhill’s book seems clearly to have resonated with her, even excited a sense of hope in her.

But then, nearly a third of the way through the three-hour podcast, Gray reveals a knee-jerk tendency in her approach to conversation that can sometimes undermine the intended irony of her show’s title.

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Republicans in Congress Are Fine with Musk Power Grab

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First phone lines in Kathmandu being laid in 1959 with help from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This photo is from an archived USAID site. At the time of this posting, the USAID site itself was dark.

There are some extraordinary admissions from powerful Congressional Republicans in a NOTUS article by Haley Byrd Wilt, Shifra Dayak and Ben T.N. Mause :

In interviews on Monday night, Republican senators — including members of the Appropriations Committee tasked with setting funding levels — dismissed Musk’s moves to consolidate his power and seize sensitive government systems to shut down spending. They say that Musk, in rejecting appropriations laws passed by Congress, is simply following Trump’s priorities.

Some, like North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”

“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”

Other Republicans argued that Musk is making the government more efficient, and they said they’re glad — if nobody on Capitol Hill is going to slash spending — that someone has finally taken charge.

“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty said. “The agency is out of control.”

And Sen. John Hoeven said “they need to be accountable.”

Yes, a Republican says, a US agency that has been at the center of foreign aid (and secret foreign policy) for more than half a century needs to be held accountable, but the party’s choice for effecting that? The world’s wealthiest man and his team of barely legal social media minions, none of whom has been vetted by Congress or any other Constitutionally empowered entity.

Or do they want to make the case that the Constitutionally-elected and seated president picked him to wield extraordinary powers over the government, so it’s virtually Constitutional somehow? No, they don’t say that. They admit it runs “afoul” of the Constitution–but who cares?

Adios, “strict constitutionalism.” Hello, interesting times.