Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

You'd think they'd learn.

Boring Jeff Mackler, retired union hack and National Secretary of Socialist Action (SA), ran for president (of the United States!) in 2016. The campaign was a total flop, consisting only of a half-hearted tour through southern New England. Following the announcement in June, Boring Jeff's candidacy all but disappeared from the pages of Socialist Action.

That was then--only 4 months before the November election. I speculate he ran for Prez only because SA no longer wanted to "critically support" the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), likely because the latter explicitly rejected antisemitism. Mr. Mackler was just a last-minute stand-in candidate so comrades could express their Jew-hatred at the ballot box.

This year--a full 17 months before the general election--one infers they're more serious about running a real campaign. And true to form, Boring Jeff made what I guess he thinks was a dramatic announcement. No--he didn't ride down an escalator. No--he didn't address a crowd of thousands, or even hundreds. Not even dozens.

The big reveal happened at a Socialist Action National Committee Plenum--likely an audience of about a dozen people. Boring Jeff's campaign strategy closely follows that of his apparent mentor--Leonid Brezhnev. Leave it to a bureaucrat to make a bureaucratic announcement to an audience of fellow bureaucrats.

Though this time it's serious--so serious in fact that it looks like Boring Jeff hasn't even changed his shirt since 2016. I sure hope it's been laundered--otherwise the campaign will stink to high heaven.

Jeff Mackler in 2016

Jeff Mackler today

So we'll grant them a pass on 2016, but now they've got 17 months to run a real campaign. Can they actually get it together? Count me skeptical.

Because they're already making excuses:

"At best, and at great cost, socialists are able to achieve “legal” ballot status in just a handful of states—and even then, no matter the seriousness of our campaign efforts, we are consciously excluded from coverage. How could it be otherwise when the nation’s corporate media are owned and controlled by the exact same ruling-class forces that select the candidates to be their representatives in the first place?"

Admittedly, grouplets of about a hundred people don't have the same media clout as the Democratic Party, which got nearly 66 million votes in 2016. Because, you know, 65,999,900 voters were stupid and only went along with the media. Only the last 100 were of sufficient independent mind to vote for Boring Jeff.

But, as said, this year is different. They might actually try to win some attention, just as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) did just by her lonesome. At very least Boring Jeff might ride down an escalator. Or get a Twitter account. Or set up a real Facebook page. Or change his shirt. Or break from the Brezhnevian campaign strategy. Minimally I'd expect them to get on the ballot in a few states--though they make no commitment to do so.

In my day the Socialist Workers Party ran successful campaigns: Jenness & Pulley in 1972, and Camejo and Reid in 1976. Those were the days when pathetic candidates like Boring Jeff were put out to pasture.

Anyway, I've got the perfect campaign slogan for them:

The End is Nigh!

Because, we confront "a near-term climate catastrophe that threatens the future of life on earth." I don't know what "near-term" is. AOC says it's twelve years. I suspect Boring Jeff will grant us a short reprieve--30 years? I hope it's at least that long--I don't want to live long enough to see the end of the world.

Either way, Boring Jeff's proposal is hopelessly inadequate to the problem. He says

We need a party of our own—a mass working-class party based on an independent, reinvigorated, democratic, fighting trade-union movement allied in struggles in the social, political, and economic arenas with the organizations of the oppressed and exploited.

That'll cool the planet! Short of blocking out the sun, a mass working-class party based on... organizations of the oppressed and exploited is the best refrigeration method ever devised by the human race.

Boring Jeff obviously doesn't believe his own bullshit about imminent climate catastrophe.

And neither does the vice-presidential candidate, Heather Bradford, also a member of the

Heather Bradford

National Committee and present at the Plenum. Presumably she raised her hand when they asked for volunteers to be vice president. Ms. Bradford is "the organizer of Socialist Action’s branch in Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis., in the Lake Superior region. Bradford works full time as a women’s advocate at a domestic violence shelter and part time at an abortion clinic and as a substitute public school teacher. She is the secretary of AFSCME Local 3558, a delegate to the Duluth Central Labor body, and a union steward."

Nothing dishonorable in any of that (except maybe the abortion clinic), but is she really the lady whose finger you want on the nuclear button in the event Boring Jeff can't finish his term of office? I don't think so.

Ms. Bradford seems more invested in feminism and LGBTQ rights than is seemly for somebody who believes in the imminent end of the world. You'd think she'd focus on the more immediate problem.

For all of that, one wonders why Socialist Action is fielding a presidential ticket at all. Because Jill Stein's Green Party campaign in 2016 echoed Boring Jeff's platform almost 100%, including antisemitism. The Greens are much closer to being the mass working class party that Boring Jeff so desires than SA could ever hope to be. Yet SA labeled the Green Party as middle class, and so excluded them from consideration. Though I fail to see how the Greens are more middle class than SA, represented as it is by teachers' union bureaucrats.

The only reason for a separate SA campaign is their commitment to purist, Brezhnevian tactics. For without the blessing of the Plenum of the National Committee, no person is worthy of running against Donald J. Trump.

By the way, perhaps Ms. Bradford, with her busy schedule campaigning around the country, doesn't realize that it's supposed to snow in her hometown Duluth this weekend (May 18th).

So much for global warming.

Further Reading:

• How Trump Wins
• How Socialist Action Helps Republicans in 2018
• Jeff Mackler on Trade

'Against the Current' Celebrates 200 Issues

Against the Current (ATC) is the bi-monthly publication of Solidarity, which split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) a few years after I left the movement. The group is a breath of fresh air because they've disavowed the "vanguard party" formalism, becoming instead a much more open, flexible movement on the larger Left, albeit with some very Trotskyist core principles. Accordingly their magazine offers more than most publications on my beat, and despite their infrequent publication schedule, I've posted 22 articles under the Solidarity label. I note that my pieces are among my best, but only because the articles I comment on are similarly thought-provoking.

Against the Current is a serious publication and is worth reading.

So it is appropriate that the paper, founded in 1986, celebrates its 200th issue this month. An article entitled ATC Turns 200 (issues)! (by The Editors) summarizes what's changed and what hasn't over the past quarter century.

I'll begin my critique with a caveat. 

Solidarity is not just ideological (like me), but also partisan. Marx understood the concept: the partisan's goal is to change the world, not merely to interpret it. Me--I'm satisfied with interpretation--I've given up trying to change anything. I am not a partisan, which gives me the luxury to be more reserved and thoughtful. Unlike me, Solidarity has to rally the troops.

President Trump is a partisan, and as such he's a famous teller of tall tales. The difference between a "tall tale" and a "lie" is the teller doesn't expect you to actually believe him--it's just an applause line. Most famously, nobody in his audience ever believed the tall tale ...and Mexico will pay for it, which is why he suffers no political damage now when he can't deliver. His political opponents embarrassed themselves by awarding him Pinocchio's for lying.

The Editors tell their own tall tales, and it's my duty now to point some of them out.

"Back then, the Reagan administration was knee-deep in bloody genocidal counterinsurgency wars in Central America..." "Genocidal" is a gross exaggeration in this context. The word means "relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large group of people of a particular nation or ethnic group." There was no attempt on either side to wipe out an entire ethnic group. "Genocide" is a tall tale.

More important is the consequence of decades-long imperialist ravages in Central America, bringing tens of thousands of refugees and desperate asylum seekers today to the U.S.-Mexico border, where they’re subjected to world-class atrocities by U.S. border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The claim is that today's refugee crisis on our southern border is a result of the Contra war in Nicaragua that ended in 1990. The premise is that if the US had not supported the Contras, Nicaragua would today be a modern, prosperous nation from which people would not flee. This beggars belief. Much more likely--had the Sandinistas remained in power--is that Nicaragua would at best look like Cuba (now tightly rationing food staples), and at worst like Venezuela (the complete destruction of a country). In both cases the waves of refugees would have been both much larger and come much sooner.

The notion that ICE is committing "world-class atrocities" is a world-class tall tale.

The Editors correctly note the decline of the American labor movement since 1986, but then suggest the trend is turning around.

The decline of organized labor has also been largely continuous, with defeats vastly outnumbering victories. Yet just when things looked bleakest for working class America, a spreading strike wave by teachers has breathed new life into what looked like a dying labor movement....

The teachers’ strike wave has been for higher wages, certainly, but even more about dignity and decent working conditions, supporting students and building alliances with communities. Here again, the processes that capital unleashed have led to today’s profound social crisis – but also to a popular reaction, and none too soon!

They overstate the importance of the teachers' strikes. First, they are public employees and are striking against middle class taxpayers, not the bourgeoisie. Then (at least in Kentucky) the strike was a futile protest against the bankrupt pension plan promised them by their union. And finally, the whole thing was a flash in the plan.

And then,

...resulting from this cascading disaster, from the “birther” backlash against the Obama presidency and from the cesspool of the Trump presidency, there’s been a massive growth of white-nationalist organizing and violence, Islamophobia on both government policy and popular levels, and a general rise in racism.

Trump’s Muslim travel ban, like the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the massacres at the African American church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh – these are symptoms and symbols of the times we live in now.

Here, too, everything is exaggerated. There has been no "massive growth of white-nationalist organizing and violence." The neo-Nazis organized a once-off, international "Unite the Right" rally intending to show off their strength--all they could muster was about 500 people. By comparison, the NAACP convention draws 10,000 people every year. Even some Trotskyist-sponsored events pull a larger crowd. The whole thing was a dud.

Mass shootings, unfortunately, are a fact of life. If anything, they've become less common under Trump than under Obama, The Editors' anecdotes notwithstanding.

So all of these exaggerations are tall tales, intended to rouse the passions of the already-converted. The article is not addressed to me. While in a more sober frame of mind our editors realize that this is all over the top, nevertheless they are not lying. They can say all of this and more, and I'll still take them seriously.

But on one issue I do find moral fault. Like most Trotskyists (excepting only the SWP) Solidarity is deeply antisemitic. Now they will deny that, claiming to be merely anti-Zionist. And surely it is possible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic--again, see the SWP as an example. But it is impossible to support BDS or Hamas and still pretend that it is merely political anti-Zionism.

Another article in ATC by Julia Kassem illustrates the point--her very language betrays her. She refers to Jews as "occupiers." Apparently Jews living in Tel Aviv pollute the very ground they walk on with their filthy footsteps--"occupying" otherwise sacred ground. BDS will prohibit any Israeli Jew from speaking--regardless of topic--just because they're Jewish.

And settlements in the West Bank are intolerable because Jews live there--and for no other reason. That's antisemitism. Now I don't belittle the settlement problem--the land dispute is real. But that can be solved financially. The problem anti-Semites have is not about land, but rather with the very idea that Jews are living there.

Antisemitism isn't a problem of tall tales or partisan exaggeration. No--it really is a problem. On this issue my friends in Solidarity cease to be enthusiastic partisans with a worthy (if hopeless) cause, and instead become evil.

Further Reading:

• "Primacy of the Working Class"
• A Leftist Criticizes the Left on Immigration
• Democratic Centralism