Counterpunch Topic: "Watershed Moment on the Mall" by Bill Martin

Bill Martin’s latest article on Counterpunch, "Watershed Moment on the Mall," revisits the Washington Square/Covington Catholic schoolboys incident. Oh that kerfuffle again? Yes, that again. Another long, sprawling piece in which Martin again voices his problems with what he calls the IdPol Left (that is, the identity politics left) as seen through the reaction to that little incident. I put up his previous article, "The Fourth Hypothesis: the Present Juncture of the Trump Clarification and the Watershed Moment on the Washington Mall," last February, offering my opinions and pasting in a healthy excerpt that explains why he sees the IdPol Left failing. Essentially, his critique is this:

The horrible attacks on a smiling male teenager, Nicholas Sandmannn, speak to the essence of the Left now—that it has no ideas, that it has subordinated itself completely to anti-universalist and anti-working class Identity Politics, that its “methods” are snark, name-calling, the crude neo-positivism of throwing out a “fact” or two (joined with the inability to analyze or even read), arrogant and superior attitudes toward “ordinary people,” creating/falling for stunts, doubling down on judgments that were ridiculous to begin with, and now simply nothing more than pure, self-righteous hatred, and the accompanying vitriol.  

 Of particular interest in this article is the reactions he got from other leftists, including long term comrades of Martin’s, such as this one:

Former Kasama Comrade: Bill Martin, you realize you are flirting deeply with racism with your contextual derision of idpol here and your defense of the Maga kids who were *already in Washington for a fascist rally* when they displayed their intense bullying racism at elder Phillips? Your embrace of white supremacist identity politics is disturbing to say the least.

Martin's response:

My response: did you want me to respond on this, or are you simply making a statement?
 What do you mean by “contextual” in the first sentence?
 Do you assume that people who are opposed to abortion rights are “fascist”? (For the record, I support reproductive rights; the people who are going to destroy these rights are the ones pushing for abortion rights so broad that a baby could be born and yet still “aborted,” as in Virginia. But that’s not my main point. I don’t think someone is a fascist because they oppose the right to abortion. But perhaps you do think this.) I watched many long videos of what happened, I don’t see the “intense bullying racism” that you see, or perhaps simply assume.

 What is your conception of “elder Phillips”? He’s someone who joined the Marines, and “when he came back from Vietnam,” some hippie girl spit on him and called him a baby-killer, so he had to beat up the hippie’s boyfriend, except none of that ever happened because he didn’t go to Vietnam, etc.

 I think you and the IdPol Left are living in a world of binaries that I reject, and that I think have to be rejected if anything good is going to happen. That I might be “flirting” with some dangerous things goes to the risks that need to be taken to get out of this binary logic. I’m already writing the next article, of course, which will contain a postscript responding to some criticisms of my position offered by Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor at CounterPunch. [The reference is to the present article.]  Here’s something I said about the risks of my position:

Obviously this has been a sore point in these last three years, as many people around me and also not around me have jumped to the conclusion that I’ve gone “from Maoist to Trumpist,” that I’m just repeating GOP talking points, etc.—and some of this is from people who have been close friends over three or four decades! None of this is true, exactly, but I do not deny in proposing what I take to be some experimental theses in light of the inability of existing ideologies of Left and Right to come up with anything worthwhile, I could be rightfully accused of flirting with some things that are far from pristine. I don’t see how we are going to practice tikkun olam in this world, to heal, repair, and transform the world, if we do not take some major risks. Frankly, though, I think my proposals involve far less risk—risk that we’re going to see the entire globe wrapped up in what Weber called “New Egypt,” or Adorno’s “totally-administered society”—than the path the current Left is taking.

And here’s something I wrote in a parentheses that goes to the binary problem: (The idea of going “beyond Left and Right” has become fairly worn out, but in any case I am trying to do something different. That also means, though, that individual ideas or actions that come from a place that might conventionally be thought to be “Left” or “Right” can be considered for themselves. I’m a little suspicious of the motives of the new Muslim Congresswomen who have criticized the State of Israel, for example, but I’m still pleased that they took this necessary step, and I of course reject the ridiculous howls of people on both the Left and Right who are calling these criticisms “anti-Semitic.” Indeed, I reject these howls as themselves anti-Semitic, because they trivialize anti-Semitism for narrow efforts at power-machination.)

I’m doing elder Phillips the favor, unlike the IdPol Left who is treating him like some sort of “pet” or “totem,” of taking him seriously–and, doing so, I see that he is full of crap. He provoked the confrontation; if you watch to the end of the longer video, you see that he was surrounded by big guys who displayed plenty of breast-beating toxic masculinity. Phillips did not confront the Black Hebrew Israelites who were shouting racist and homophobic things at the other Native Americans. He is a career-activist who gets money from George Soros, like so many these days on the “left,” and he needed some sort of confrontation/stunt to make his day worthwhile (when the previous attempt to disrupt things at the National Cathedral failed).

Clearly his whole backstory and what he was doing got away from Phillips and blew up to something much bigger than he was prepared for. But none of that is really the point, the point is that the IdPol Left seized on this with their ready-made binary categories, including the “rural” and “deplorable” categories provided by Hillary Clinton, and immediately put out a hateful narrative that they have to stick to, because that’s all they have. So, then, because I don’t fall for the IdPol Left narrative, that same narrative, working in terms of a false-binary, has to designate me as a “embracing white supremacist identity politics.” That’s the trap the IdPol Left has locked the whole “left” into, and it doesn’t help anything.

Then there’s this response from Jeffrey St Clair, editor of Counterpunch, which St Clair gave Martin permission to include:

I admit it is a weird piece in which poor Nathan Phillips, one the gentlest people that I ever encountered in AIM, comes off as more of a villain than Elliot Abrams, an honest to goodness Indian killer, who receives only a fleeting & dismissive mention. All I can say for poster boy is that he should (though almost certainly doesn’t) consider himself fortunate that he didn’t pull that shit in the face of Leonard Crow Dog or Russell Means. (As for 16 year olds getting death threats, Sandman’s brief week of notoriety was nothing compared to what Trump did to the Central Park Five.) As for Alex, he was, of course, quite sympathetic to Bill Clinton, vigorously opposed his impeachment (one of the few hostile divisions among us) and famously outed Hitchens in the Nation and the NYPress for selling his services to the Dole campaign. Katrina had a different pretext for stripping him of his 2^nd page and later reducing his column to once a month. (By the way, you do say that the US is out of Syria. We’re not.) The first question Alex asked every intern, and many prospective writers for CP, was: “Is your hate pure?”

Martin's response:

Regarding Nathan Phillips, certainly I am willing to accept that he is a gentle and perhaps, within his own conception of what he is doing, a well-intentioned person.  In the interviews I heard with him, he seemed confused and as if he was badly improvising his story.  I’m willing to accept that he didn’t really know what he was doing when he took a ninety-degree turn and suddenly got up in the face of a sixteen-year old Catholic school boy from rural Kentucky and banged his drum a few inches from that boy’s face.  I’m willing to accept that it is possible that Nathan Phillips personally did not know how the images of his confrontation with Nick Sandmann would be blown up and manipulated.  So perhaps these things speak well of Nathan Phillips.

 But exactly what “shit” did Nick Sandmann “pull in the face of” Nathan Phillips? 

And what kind of argument is it to say that there were others from the American Indian Movement who would have—what?—also turned a corner to get in the face of a kid and then, not liking his composure and comportment, inflicted physical violence on the kid?
 I also fail to see what kind of argument it is to say that Sandmann got off easy compared to the Central Park Five.  Undoubtedly that is true; but what does that justify?  In actuality, though, as with the other stunts of the Democrats and IdPol Left, this one has backfired.  While I’m sure that this same liberal/left coterie will say that those who have come to the defense of Sandmann are just other deplorables like he his, that only shows how clueless the left is.  What needs to happen is for this left amalgam to come to the defense of the horribly persecuted such as the Central Park Five, instead of exhausting themselves in hate for a white kid who was just standing there.

So, yeah, Nick Sandmann will come out of this quite well, I think—is the argument that he shouldn’t?  And how would that help the Central Park Five or other victims of the combination of State Racism and probably liberal feminism in the case of the woman who falsely accused them?

My former Kasama comrade said that it doesn’t particular matter what can be said for or against Nathan Phillips, it really comes down to the look on the face of Nick Sandmann—“that privileged smirk.”

And it doesn’t matter, apparently, what the Black Hebrew Israelites were up to in all of this.

 I think both matter very much, even to the person who said it doesn’t matter. Why did Nathan Phillips get up in the face of Nick Sandmann, banging a drum inches from his face, and not in the faces of the Black Hebrews?  The latter were yelling all kinds of slurs at both the Covington students (there were girls there, too, by the way) and the Native Americans with Phillips.  Two women from Phillips’s group confronted the Black Hebrews and were told that talking to the Black Hebrews was not their place, and to send their husbands over.  The Black Hebrews were saying homophobic things to the Covington boys, and racist things to the two black students among them.  In response to the Black Hebrews yellow at one of the black students that they had better get away from those white boys, that his organs were going to be harvested, one of the Covington boys said back, “We love him!”

Perhaps I am blind to what Nick Sandmann and his friends were all about, but it is not willful.  I do not see in his face what liberals and leftists see, and I doubt that I am any less experienced with the privileged smirks of privileged white boys, men, girls, and women, than my former comrade is.  Certainly in my twenty-eight years as a college professor at a university in Chicago, where at least half the male students are devoted members of a religious cult known as Chicago sports, and who are resentful that they should have to take courses in philosophy in order to earn a liberal arts degree, I have seen plenty of smirks.  And of course I saw plenty of these smirks growing up, going to college, and as an instructor in graduate school.  But I have looked at the videos and pictures of Nick Sandmann from many angles, and I do not see a smirk there.  It seems to me that he did a pretty good job of keeping his cool, under the circumstances.  You can even see him reaching over with a calming hand to one of his classmates who did appear ready to try to stir things up.

I think the IdPol Left (and, again, whatever “other” left that thinks it is somehow apart from the predominant trends, even while going along with them) is simply predisposed to see evil and “privilege” in especially all white males these days (even if the ones seeing it, such as my former comrade, are white males themselves).  This New Phrenology fits perfectly well with how Identity Politics works—name it and blame it.

My article was not about Elliot Abrams.  If there is a need for my affirmation that in no way can Nathan Phillips be compared to Elliot Abrams, then I am happy to supply this. [In fact, Martin did not mention Elliot Abrams in his previous article, not once.]

“Antiabortion plus Maga plus laughter at an old Indian guy equals fascism” (it doesn’t appear to me that the Covington boys were laughing at Nathan Phillips)—that is also a good example of the kind of “thinking” the IdPol Left does these days.

That the IdPol Left needs “fascism” and “white supremacy” in order to make sense of itself, and that a white male who has been bullied by other white males in his life has an emotional reaction to what he thinks he sees in the face of a white 16-year-old boy is not a basis for understanding anything in the world today.  Indeed, these sorts of reactions ought to make anyone interested in an actual, critical examination of things question this liberal and left narrative.  It’s the sort of need for fascism and these feeling-based reactions that have made the left dupes of the Democratic Party.

Of course there is real white supremacy in this world, in this society.  But I think there is far less of it in actual white people than what the IdPol Left narrative claims. There is resentment that has been intentionally stirred up in many white people, especially white working-class people, by both the IdPol Left and a handful of truly racist agitators, for their own purposes.  There are many people from the working class who have had it with being told they are deplorable and worthless and simply shit, and now they seem to be told this not only by privileged white liberals and other privileged professionals and academics, but also by this so-called “left,” such as represented by my former Kasama comrades.  Who does all of this serve?  It would be very hard to show that this serves any emancipatory purpose whatsoever. 

And this:

Perhaps there is something behind what Alexander Cockburn meant by his question, “Is your hate pure?”, that can be get to the point another way. Surely Cockburn did not mean, “Are you willing to hang on to your position on every question come what may and regardless of who raises an objection—and, if necessary to hate the person/people who made the objection?”  I feel pretty sure that Cockburn did not mean for anti-systemic radicals to allow themselves to fall into conventional distinctions of left and right; on a number of important points, Cockburn himself did not all into this binary, much to the chagrin of some.

In a previous thread on Facebook (right after “The Trump Experiment” came out), there was some concern expressed by some well-known career leftists about where Alex might have come out on the present situation, clearly concern that he might have come out closer to where I am, than to either conventional leftism or Identity Politics leftism.
 Alain Badiou argues that the primary affect that should be attached to real politics is courage.  There are some key points in Jacques Derrida’s framework in Politics of Friendship that I disagree with, but I do accept his basic argument, which I think is also common to Sartre and Badiou, that real politics comes from an affirmation that is not simply the negation of a negation.  Yes, the latter is in play, and has to be dealt with, but the affirmation of a creative human act (whether it be in politics, science, love, or art) has to exceed the work of the negative.

Not that raw hate is what any real Marxist, as opposed to unthinking IdPol Leftists, would call “negation” in any meaningful political or creative sense.

The IdPol Left (and Hillary Clinton’s noxious “Love trumps Hate” bullshit and the way all the Dems got fired up by it) vastly overestimates—for their own purposes—the amount of hate involved in motivating the so-called “right” and the deplorables.  This is just self-justification for the IdPol Left and liberals to hate even more in return.