Anthony DiMaggio, in his recent polemic on Counterpunch, Rise of the Right: How the Vaudeville Left Fuels White Supremacy, asserts that
there is a heavily corporatized, nominally left segment of the punditry... who are mainstreaming and popularizing Republican talking points... mainstream[ing] the idea of a left-right political alliance in the U.S... populariz[ing] noxious reactionary propaganda" and normalizing rightwing views, bigotry, and neofascistic politics. These are not individuals that any thoughtful leftist - whether one who advocates for liberal reform, progressive transformation, or socialism - should entertain.
DiMaggio's "vaudeville" lineup includes "Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogan, Caitlin Johnstone, and Krystal Ball, among others." (I'll call them the Left-Fielders, because it will economize words, and I like cute analogies, too, and they're way out there.) According to DiMaggio all these players have, "for all intents and purposes, thrown their lot in" with the "neofascistic Trumpian movement." They have "driven Democratic voters toward the Republican Party," they "send Democratic voters to the right in general elections," and they are, DiMaggio constantly asserts, "normalizing white supremacy and the right's neofascistic politics."
Whew! Hell of an indictment.
I reject it. I reject the idea that any thoughtful leftist and socialist (as I consider myself) should accept the charge that these pundits are responsible for "normalizing" the "neofascistic Trumpian movement." Frankly, I think it's ridiculous, and can't survive any fair-minded perusal of the entirety of their work.
(I also guess that within DiMaggio's framework, I would be--and would be content to be--considered "among the others.")
I also know that DiMaggio's piece represents the thinking around which another nominally left segment of punditry has coalesced. (Let's call them the Shortstops, because they're out to prevent anyone from getting to a forbidden base, and I'm stuck with the stupid baseball analogy.) There are quite a few who have dug in their heels on it, and who will never be able to see or hear these Left-Fielder commentators as I do. I also know there are a lot more who are unsure of what exactly is going on here. I just urge everyone of those to give everyone a fair hearing and decide who is presenting the more cogent case.
I am not going to go into specifically defending all of the accused against all of the charges in DiMaggio's indictment. Though I accept grouping them together for the purposes of this argument, they are different political actors, with whom I have different levels of agreement on specific issues. But I will comment on some of the key elements that underlie the discourse of DiMaggio and the Shortstops that I think are important to notice.
One element that I find novel to DiMaggio is the charge that these people are a "heavily corporatized" segment of the punditry. Really? Every one of these folks either never was part of, or they left, a "corporatized" media organization. They all seem to make money, as some of them did quite handsomely in the corporate-media environments they took the risk of leaving. But that does not make them "corporatized."
They are, it seems to me, the epitome of self-produced, independent-media journalists--independent precisely of corporate-media conglomerates. Their ability to make money to sustain their work outside of corporate institutions is what gives them the strength to challenge those institutions' influence.
It's also what has the corporate media (which now finds these quite successful journalists to be competitors), as well as the U.S. government (which finds them dangerous "underminers" of trust), pissed off at them and engaging in a furious effort to destroy their ability to act independently, via censorship and demonetization.
Jonathan Cook catches what's going on quite sharply, in his excellent post on the plight of Craig Murray, who, all American leftists should notice and protest, has just gone to prison in Scotland for his independent journalism:
When social media took off, one of the gains trumpeted even by the corporate media was the emergence of a new kind of "citizen journalist". At that stage, corporate media believed that these citizen journalists would become cheap fodder, providing on-the-ground, local stories they alone would have access to and that only the establishment media would be in a position to monetise...
The establishment's attitude to citizen journalists... only changed when these new journalists started to prove hard to control, and their work often highlighted inadvertently or otherwise the inadequacies, deceptions and double standards of the corporate media.
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