The Big Lie about the Left in the U.S.
The Big Lie about the Left in the U.S. is that the Left exists in some substantial and influential way in the country.
The Truth about the Left in the U.S. is that the Left does not exist in some substantial and influential way in the country. Period.
The little lies that feed into the Big Lie include that universities and professors, K-12 public schools, the mainstream media, and Hollywood are all powerful instruments of liberal propaganda.
These little lies have cousins in the annual shouting about the “war on Christmas” and hand wringing by Christians that they are somehow the oppressed peoples of the U.S.
These lies little and Big are a scale problem in that the U.S. is now and has always been a country whose center is well to the right, grounded as we are in capitalism more so than democracy.
The U.S. is a rightwing country that pays lip service to progressivism and democracy; we have a vibrant and powerful Right and an anemic, fawning Middle.
Wealth, corporatism, consumerism, and power are inseparable in the U.S.—pervading the entire culture including every aspect of government and popular culture.
The Left in the U.S. is a fabricated boogeyman, designed and perpetuated by the Right to keep the general public distracted. Written as dark satire, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle now serves as a manual for understanding how power uses false enemies to maintain power and control.
Notably during the past 30-plus decades, conservative politics have dominated the country, creating for Republicans a huge problem in terms of bashing “big government.”
But dog-whistle politics grounded in race and racism benefitting the Right and Republicans have a long history.
In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. confronted Barry Goldwater’s tactics The Big Lie about the Left in the U.S. | radical eyes for equity: