Thus, the gravest omission from the ‘general picture’ was that of a witness to testify to the cooperation between the Nazi rulers and the Jewish authorities, and hence of an opportunity to raise the question: ‘Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?’ 

-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
 

In England, on the “Day of Praise” for Margaret Thatcher, who died on April 8, 2013, Labour Party MP Glenda Jackson was the sole voice of memory: With Thatcherism, virtues transformed into vices: “‘the vices of greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees’” (The Guardian, April 10, 2013).

In the U.S., the liberal press beat the Liberal drums ahead of her funeral procession.

The Iron Lady is gone. Gone!

Many in the Liberal press rushed to resurrect images of the Reagan-Thatcher partnership, reminding readers and viewers of the horrors of a world ruled by the Right. Their union privatized and deregulated everything in sight, and drastically crushed the effectiveness of worker unions.

What these Liberal reports failed to admit, what could have been more educational for generations under 40, and more truthful in understanding the nightmare we find ourselves in is to confess that the sea change initiated by the Reagan-Thatcher partnership depended on the Liberal’s “big chill” in the 1980s.

The Liberals “chilled out.” In the 1960s and early 1970s, they burned draft cards, after Reagan’s inaugural, they built bonfires in the yards of their newly purchased suburban homes and set ablaze their anti-war signs, Huey Newton posters, Soul on Ice, Wretched of the Earth, Communist Manifesto. They donned suits and occupied offices of business for profit and so-called “non-profit.” They became the face of federal and state institutions, including the press.

The face of domestic and foreign oppression.

Liberals had been among the masses of student movements throughout the world during the 1960s and 1970s. Along with students in Germany, they had asked crucial questions: “how, after all, could the automatons of mass society do anything as willful as work with elites in the Nazi Party?” (Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea). Liberals in the U.S. asked questions too, as Robin notes, not just about “the ethics of collaboration, but the mindset - racist and careerist - that had given rise to it, and the hierarchical institutions - the party, the firm, the academy - that housed it.”

[H]ow a concern for private careers and class comfort had encouraged many to support, and blinded others to, the racism of American society; how a veneer of affluence hid pervasive inequality and hierarchy; how the anti-communism of the Cold War was plunging the United States into another war that, to its victims, looked like nothing so much as the racist imperialism of old Europe. (Fear) 

Oh, yes, these questions debated with the Left had been on the Liberal’s table for discussion - until Reagan rhetoric conjured “‘super predators’ - drug-addled youth [Reds, Blacks, Browns] who were poised to plunder and kill” (Family Relations, April 2003, Vol. 52, No. 2). And the wars came - the war on poverty and the war on drugs. And if you were not Black or Brown or poor, you had nothing to worry about. Work hard, raise a family, and enjoy the success and the affluence of the American Dream, at last!

It was a partnership made in heaven - or rather, made in fear of hell - the Right and the Liberal class. Greed was good! Family first! History is the history of class struggle - And did the Liberal class not struggle in pursuit of their interests? Even documenting for all the world their own about-face and lock-step celebrations of the “good life,” with classic Motown hits playing in the background (The Big Chill).

Only in recent years did Michelle Alexander, a member of the Liberal class, inform the true gatekeepers of over 2 million mostly Black and Brown U.S. prisoners of the consequences of their “support” and “blind” allegiance to the Right.

And yet they persisted, offering the “articulate,” worldly, multicultural, anti-Black, millionaire, Liberal Barack Obama to the masses of poor, low-waged workers, Red, Black, Brown, masses they have helped maintain on the bottom rungs of the capitalist food chain through fear and hatred and only encounter on “Praise Days” when artificial representations of Pow Wows and Civil Rights commemorations of “fallen” as in “dead,” murdered, heroes and at fundraisers and charity missions to South America or Africa to help starving children. The Liberals persisted: partnering with the Right, with “Brand Obama,” Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and “just war” corporations supplying more shiny new Communication Management Units for troublesome dissenters at home as well as the technology for the advancement of drone warfare, now an effective method for targeting and eliminating “terrorists” abroad.

Lying with faces turned from history - he is the legacy of Crazy Horse, of Dr. King, of Caesar Chavez, of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements - Liberals, white and Black, jumped for joy when the Savior took his seat in the White House. Joy to the world!

Dissenters beware! Beware!

How does the Right do it? Usher in fascist and totalitarian states and make it seem as if everyone had a hand in the idea?

Try, try, try as they might to distance themselves from Reagan-Thatcher, Bush I and Bush II, domestic and foreign policies, the Liberals cannot distance themselves from the consequences of their relationship with the Right and its growth in the last 30-plus years.

The Liberals played at being betrayed and shocked when they discovered the Right had gambled with their investments and had deflated the “American Dream” balloon so that only a group as silly and outdated as the NAACP could continue campaigning for the deception.

“To cave in” is the definition of a Liberal. It is the Liberal’s history to serve as facilitators of the Right. Remember history, European and U.S.? But then, the Liberals “chilled out,” burned those books, and made sure the box bookstores where shelved with self-help, dieting, and parenting books while classrooms in higher education purged any thought that did not enhance an acceptance of careerism and collaboration.

So that Obama is a master at caving in to the Right and Righteous Capitalists comes as no surprise to anyone who has endured the Right’s determination to efface this planet and the life on it. (Just ask, for example, the Lakota people who have been fighting courageously to defend their right to exist and to save their lands from corporate tyranny). To that goal, the Right draws everything and everyone who become little Eichmanns, in their own way, “registered” to a “base set of values hitched to a genocidal project” (Fear).

The Fiscal Year 2014 budget proposed by the Liberal White House will cut some $100 billion from Social Security. Three hundred and seventy billion dollars in cuts to pharmaceutical companies and care providers will mean seniors will pay more in Medicare premiums. The first “Democratic” president ever to propose cuts to Social Security, but then this is the “genocidal project” of the Right necessitating collaboration from the Liberal class, particularly from those in very, very high positions.

Richard (RJ) Eskow writes in the Huffington Post that Obama has an “‘ideal plan’” (“Why Obama’s Social Security Cuts Are Our Wake Up Call,” April 7, 2013). “But he doesn’t say what his ideal plan would look like - and he certainly isn’t fighting for a better one. He also claims his budget offers ‘tough’ reforms, which rings of self-satisfaction rather than sorrow.”

Why would a devoted, ambitious social climber feel anything but “self-satisfaction rather than sorrow”? Family values, after all! The security of the future for his wife’s mother, his wife, and his children is not in question. Eskow continues: “He’s decided on his next move. What’s yours? This budget represents a moral challenge for everyone...” (But that moral challenge did not arise just last week)... “especially those of us who voted for him.” Well, I will not hold my breath waiting on that “ideal plan” or for Liberals to overcome deep-rooted, pathological fears. We do not have that long nor will the Right wait to see how the Liberals will respond to their own audacity.

Besides the Righteous capitalists have already figured out a way to put a value on your breathing. It is called the Obama Health Care Plan!