Anti-Leftist Politics in Modern World History

What clinched my resolve to write the book was the political drama in the United States surrounding the financial crisis of 2008–9 that brought on the Great Recession. At that time, even Alan “Ayn Rand” Greenspan, “for decades … regarded as the high priest of laissez-faire capitalism,” was advising that American banks would have to be nationalized.2 Out of perceived practical and even national self-interest, we were witnessing the possible shift toward government ownership and control of large portions of American capitalism’s financial and manufacturing sectors. There’s no telling where that would have gone—chances are it would have been temporary, yet it would have been an important development and precedent. In any case, after decades of neoliberalism, it was a breathtaking spectacle with astounding implications. Many of the reflexive critics of anything deemed “leftwing” in the United States would have derided it as a “socialist” solution to the crisis. However, in the end, there was a crucial and conspicuous pullback by the newly elected president, Barack Obama, who, despite being ridiculously maligned no matter what by Rush Limbaugh-type conservatives as a “socialist,” insisted that the US government should not be in the business of banking or manufacturing, yet it should provide massive subsidies to save them from collapsing, because they were “too big to fail.”3 The supremely contradictory proposition and reality was that of “free market capitalism,” in which the US government was not taking over big banks and businesses, yet sustaining them with massive government subsidies. This is often referred to as “socialism for the rich,” which, of course, is no socialism at all. It is plutocracy—the rule of the rich—along with callousness toward the needs of the working and lower middle classes that had been ravaged by decades of neoliberal capitalist economic globalization and financial trickery. 

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