COVID-19 has accentuated the split among progressives that began with #ForceTheVote and highlights more fundamental disagreements whose consequences open-up a vast expanse of political ambiguity that requires actual thought rather than the continued application of ideology to respond to.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Bernie's two presidential runs revealed there are a lot of people in the country willing to vote for a progressive candidate and that about half of all Democratic voters could align themselves with a 'democratic socialist''. #ForceTheVote, unfortunately, exposed that so much of this majority was born out of an alliance of convenience provisionally struck between the most strident political activist strains of American liberal culture and what must be considered a newly constellated fringe group of cross-party affinities. Which is to say: an alliance between an ultra-woke ideology of racial, gender, minority rights that displaces everything into 'identity', and those more concerned with, perhaps, civil liberties and the simple desire to reconstitute a sense of shared common good and an economic re-balancing in a nation everyday becoming oriented around the privatized exploits of billionaires whose meaningless production and extravagant consumption define its pointless ideal.

The response since Bernie prematurely withdrew his 2020 primary campaign has been: disillusionment and a retreat from the political domain, with the wounds and memories of a few brief moments (just after Nevada) thinking it had been done; a turn to the Republican party and the right wing who now, in the wake of January 6th, seem like the party most capable of expressing a radical politics equal to the problems facing the world; and a redoubling of efforts to form a viable Third Party that might not fall victim to the corrupting forces within either of the two major political parties. All of which is happening in the context of a global pandemic that is itself causing a reorientation of political loyalties.

Over the past 6-years or so, what have always been considered fringe political movements—the Green party, those organized around Ralph Nader's presidential runs, and the alternative mediated left loosely orbiting around DemocracyNow!—through the Bernie campaign were transformed from their narrow, limited potential into a political force that palpably seemed on the cusp of running the country. Now, after 4-years of Russiagate and almost 2-years of COVID-19, the fracture of the Bernie coalition sees a sizeable majority splinter off in the direction of the elected progressive members of Congress (e.g., 'the squad') who see the extension of their political potential in an alloy with establishment Democrats through which the majoritarianism of their politics is properly reflected in actual institutional power. The question for them becomes playing the 'inside game', conceding battles (like #ForceTheVote) that are only symbolic for the more juvenile and irresponsible of the coalition that will never be pleased with any ideological impurity. In this way, uncomfortable compromises are undertaken only reluctantly as a way of achieving larger goals: of taking small, piece-meal advances as the 'hard reality' of the context enforces it, while maintaining a politics that is all the time still 'serious' and commensurate with its involvement at the national level and, thus, viable for future opportunities.

In contrast to this has been the field of mediated progressive politics that circulates amorphously and precariously—uncertain of who or what it is any more—around Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal,, Aaron Mate and the rest of the Greyzone, and a range of other, but not many, organized, stable, and crowd-funded online national journalistic endeavors. On the one hand, these people are called 'ideologically pure' and thus exclusionary to the point of being critiqued as nothing more than a grifting media cult of nihilists who only want to burn down the entire establishment system while transforming that hatred into capitalist success and dollars. On the other hand, because of this radical political impulse, they are also now compared to the insurrectionists who were allowed to storm the Capitol on January 6th and slandered as 'right wing' because of their explicit attempts to engage (or simply to dialogue) with people from across the political spectrum in order to continue to expand their politics and understanding, or for simply agreeing with a more deeply ingrained right-wing suspicion of government and authority.

Now, after 2-years of COVID, and after the farce of Russiagate, the fracture in the progressive wing has only grown. Those (like DemocracyNow!) who were willing to jump on the Trump criticism train in order to exact some kind of political revenge by trolling Republicans with a fiction that followed the precise logic of the 'birtherism' of Trump and Tea Party Republicans during the Obama years, have forged an alliance of sorts with establishment Democrats who used it to deflect from their own inadequacies and corruption that led to Trump's election. In this sense, progressive politics around race, gender and climate, particularly, became ostensibly central to the establishment Democratic politics through their cooperation on Russiagate. This was supported by the emerging belief that these progressive congress-people, rather than being ready to disrupt and shut-down government like the Tea Party to extract concession for their constituents, were actually willing to play the 'long game' and could thus be superficially accommodated (and maybe even thrown a few token policy concessions here and there as fulfillment of their campaign concessions to the Bernie left).

Unfortunately, the politics of convenience that arose around Russiagate eventually became real. No longer tongue-in-cheek or 5-dimensional trolling chess reaction to Donald Trump, that Russia influenced the 2016 election with Facebook pages and stupid memes became a matter of belief for a large segment of the DemocracyNow! and TYT oriented audiences. The feeling of inclusion they felt through their mainstream acceptance seemed like a validation of the success of their political strategy: Mehdi Hassan had an NBC Peacock show; The Intercept got exclusive interviews with AOC; Cenk and Ana were invited onto Cuomo Primetime and Brian Stelter's forgettable show; and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer made public displays of solidarity that were reciprocated by their progressive counterparts. This alliance has only become stronger through COVID as most of these progressives are in lock-step with establishment Democrats and the Democratic administration's policies on the virus.

Excluding the initial months of the pandemic when nothing was clear and everything seemed like a national emergency requiring everyone's cooperation, continued acquiescence on the part of large segments of the progressive left with indefensible and unscientifically substantiated lockdowns, masking, and mandated vaccination have crystallized differences of political strategy between the fractured progressive left into clear matters of ideological incompatibility. With the current situation, after almost 2-years of nonstop COVID-19 hysteria, it is no longer a matter of expediency to cooperate on compromise policy that sells itself using the radical activist language of progressive politics and that finds its core legitimacy in its radical human-rights centered critique (that is here directed towards protecting 'public health'); rather, cooperation on draconian and repressive social restrictions and the discursive policing and censorship their enactment has relied-upon raises fundamental questions about the ideology this (liberal) 'splinter' of the progressive movement adhere's to and whether or not it has been co-opted by the more ordinary desires of our culture (desires for fame, desires for power, and desires for money) or whether or not it is the ideology itself that is the underlying issue.

All of this puts those progressives who: still do believe in some form of civil liberties, even during a global pandemic; that want more than token economic concessions in the wake of the financial crisis and COVID policies that have further transferred wealth to the upper 1%, eviscerated local businesses while strengthening tech companies like Amazon; that feel the political system is corrupt and broken beyond recognition and that want to see more fundamental structural problems like the Supreme Court, Electoral College, Rank-Choice Voting, the Revolving Door, political donations addressed; that want real reform of the healthcare system and Medicare For All, rather than billions upon billions handed over to pharmaceutical companies to profiteer off publicly funded research that is then sold back to the public at extortionate level, and that, during COVID, have seemingly been handed a source of profit in perpetuity and the ability to shape public policy in ways unimaginable in domestic affairs until the pandemic; that want to end the Forever Wars and prevent the New Cold War, cut the Pentagon budget, get military equipment out of police and off the streets; that want an end to all 9/11 surveillance authorizations and end the state of exception under which we've been living since then—all of these things and countless more has now “marooned” a large segment of the unrepresented progressive left on a “political no-man's land”.

Just at the moment that a shared vision for the future was emerging with a real chance of getting some of it implemented, deep ideological fissures now appear as chasms that further alienate large numbers who, until recently, were considered 'left' and 'progressive'. On the one hand, this undermines the collective ability of the left to articulate a coherent politics in response to what is everywhere around the world occurring now; but, on the other hand, it raises the question—even if this split could be reconciled—of what it actually would look like to have these policies implemented by a political party that is so obviously authoritarian. This should present a real dilemma for progressives: what is it exactly that one is fighting for as a progressive? Is it only policies, or is there a broader issue of ideological rot in (American/global liberal) culture that needs to be addressed before policies would even matter? In the context of a two-party system, what are the consequences of continuing to base a political strategy on inter-party dynamics that requires yet more unquestioning obedience to a political party whose authoritarianism itself now appears as its core ideological weakness, and that only serves to validate the long-standing caricature of its political opponents that siphons support to its 'opposition' Republican party? In the context of so much ambiguity, is there even a viable Third Party politics currently being articulated that could represent a heterogeneous multiplicity that isn't just more of the same inherently totalizing post-structuralist ideological radicalism? And, might it be the case that all of our politics have become the victims of rote, unreflective ideological elaborations that stunt thought, inhibit real questioning and dialogue, that fragment into a multitude of seemingly distinct claims that actually all express the same underlying logic? And if so, what is its significance?

Understanding this context and the kind of transformation in understanding and the thinking required is essential for responding to questions of how progressives should proceed from this juncture, no matter what happens with Omicron.