Letter to the Left: Get It Together
By David Talbot, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon
The Left is lost. I say this as a lifelong leftist.
As I plow through my seventh decade of activism, the political fortunes of the U.S. Left, which have long depressed me, seem more dismal than ever. A big part of this political failure, of course, comes from the fact that we tilt against the biggest capitalist superpower in the world. The elite in this country is savvy and has enormous financial resources; it knows how to pit one oppositional group against another while constantly singing its own praises and entertaining us to death. It does anything and everything to hold onto and extend its power.
But the Left itself is also to blame for its repeated failures to take power.
Let’s talk about one key way. We don’t value our leaders. Some on the left don’t even want leaders. Instead, they talk endlessly about “process” and “identity” — that’s how unserious about taking power they are. Tribalism too often trumps winning coalitions.
As history has taught us, no social surge for change is sustained — that is, makes a difference — unless it’s organized. That means protest movements must have leaders, people blessed with vision, charisma, and, yes, accountability to those they lead.
The civil rights movement was led by Martin Luther King Jr. ,who couldn’t have accomplished what he did without the militant activism of leaders like Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.
The Vietnam peace movement finally cut off Congressional funding for the war due to the diligence and discipline of leaders like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Even the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ‘70s — which was in some ways a rejection of the New Left’s top-down sexism — boasted leaders and essayists like Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Bella Abzug and bell hooks. (For more on the centrality of leaders in the 1960s-‘70s protest movements, see the 2021 book I co-authored with my sister Margaret Talbot, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution.)
Despite the essential role that leaders have played in these movements, we don’t have a good record of protecting them. Historically, when our leaders get too powerful, too threatening to the ruling elite, they kill them. Good liberals don’t like to acknowledge this. But, yes, that’s how the powerful in America have imposed their rule — through the barrel of a gun.
Of course, the powerful prefer to assassinate the character of oppositional leaders. The other way is messy and can produce martyrs. And since the elite controls the Big Media in this country, that’s easy.
There are countless supine, lapdog journalists who eagerly do the bidding of media moguls. They do it because that’s their job, and they want to keep it. They do it because that’s what their colleagues, the rest of the news pack, do. They go along and get along. They never question authority. Frankly, despite the journalistic prizes they’re fond of bestowing on each other, they’re not that brave or bright. They’re dutiful creatures. What they won’t do for a pat on the head from their masters!
Look what the Big Media did to Senator Bernie Sanders when he threatened the Democratic Party’s ruling elite. The New York Times and The Washington Post often ran more than one news article (that’s right, news, not opinion) a day in their pages smearing him.
The corporate media is doing even more to tear down Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A barrage of hit pieces. Some subsidized by the pharmaceutical industry, one of his most powerful antagonists. Some produced by news organizations that essentially now function as propaganda arms of the national security state, another big target of Kennedy. Yes, in the land of the free, the CIA and other security agencies run our free press. (We won’t even get into Hollywood here, what movies and TV shows are allowed to depict. Suffice it to say that Vladimir Putin would lustily cheer the patriotic spy dramas churned out by Netflix, Prime Video and the other streaming services if they waved a different flag.)
You expect the Big Media to attack Kennedy — after all, he’s crusading against the corporate powers that control communications in this country. But what is more disheartening is to watch leftist commentators who should know better lap up the swill about Kennedy. As they gleefully participate in his character assassination, they never stop to ask themselves: When has a serious critic of corporate power ever climbed so close to the White House?
Some on the left excuse and even applaud President Biden’s perverse decision to withhold Secret Service protection from Kennedy. Despite the recent threats to his safety. Despite the controversy (some of it generated by the corporate media) that swirls around him. Despite what happened to his uncle and father.
Yes, the Left is clueless about the importance of leaders. Take another example: as we approach the 60th anniversary of the violent end of the Kennedy presidency, left-wing scholars and authors still fail to grasp JFK’s historical significance. The Left has never understood President Kennedy’s sharp break from the Cold War orthodoxy of his day, which was allied with the highly lucrative military-industrial racket, I mean complex. The Left never understood why JFK was killed and why it still matters.
I have great admiration for progressive intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh. But when it came to President Kennedy, they were bamboozled.
Photo of Noam Chomsky
The Left’s intelligentsia helped create a false and destructive narrative for the JFK assassination and cover-up. They argued that the killing did not much matter, because President Kennedy was a Cold Warrior and there was a continuity of power after he was violently removed. They were (and are) dead wrong.
As we’ve long been told, those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Yes, the American Left is partly to blame for its chronic loser status. We fail to protect, or even appreciate, our leaders. We eat our own.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you David for a clear description of the gone off the Deep End Left.. the Right is not appreciably different... both are little more than Corporate Lackeys.. RFK Jr stands out in any objective analysis of American Leadership... Thank God he is running the most High Integrity Campaign out there...
The forces of Corporate Corruption are bearing down on him and will do so till election day... none the less more and more Americans are waking up.. they Know Main Stream Media cannot be Trusted... We have had enough of their BS.. Time to take this nation back from the Uni-party/ Big Brother.. It starts with the election RFK Jr... Let's get it done.. Everyday concrete steps... We Can Do It...!
With all due respect to author David Talbot with his valuable contribution to today’s Kennedy Beacon, I have never paid a great deal of attention to political labels like “left,” “right,” or “center.” As a 32-year veteran and analyst for several federal civilian agencies, we were supposed to remain politically neutral, which in fact I did. At the same time, I had a ring-side seat as witness to the decline of America through the increasing deregulation of the financial industry in the 1980s and 1990s and the onset of today’s regime of endless wars following 9/11.
Along the way, I became a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, later publishing my story in a book entitled, “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.” After spending more than 20 years at the U.S. Treasury Department I concluded that the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 effectively ceded the government’s constitutional prerogative of money-creation to the privately-owned banking system. In another post-retirement book, entitled “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform,” I advocated the abolishment of the Federal Reserve and the restoration of a central publicly-controlled monetary system for our country.
Today, I support RFK, Jr., for the presidency. I came to this position after reading Mr. Kennedy’s eye-opening book on “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
Two nights ago I met Mr. Kennedy at his Meet and Greet in Annapolis, Maryland. There he gave his incredibly important indictment of the capture of our government, society, and way of life by corporations and the billionaire class who run the big hedge funds like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. He also called out the Biden administration for its disastrous policy of prosecuting a losing proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that benefits mainly corporate America.
For me, the current crisis in our country goes beyond politics to the question of whether our nation can even survive the misrule and misdeeds of the corporate-government complex presided over by brain-dead politicians who care nothing for the people of America who are watching their hopes and dreams go down the drain while the billionaire class prospers.
Finally, I want to mention my own book on our country’s history, the betrayals we have experienced, and my hopes for the future. The title is “Our Country, Then and Now.” https://www.claritypress.com/product/our-country-then-and-now/
In this book I express my support of Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy in the election of 2024. Remember, in the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln won with a popular vote of 38 percent, with his opponents splitting the rest of the vote three ways. So it can be done. And it was Lincoln who saved the country in its darkest hour.