Individual leftists still exist, but they have no power or place in government.
The rightwing media that works in line with corporatism, which virtually owns the government, is the major force at play in this country right now. Many would call it fascism.
Governments are almost exclusively made up of right wingers. They are in favour of Capitalism, that is, and are direct beneficiaries of it. They aren’t just owned by the right wing, they ARE the right wing.
The two extremes of realistic options we have left (excuse the pun) are:
Capitalism with state interference - which government members benefit from, because obviously they ARE the state. And,
Capitalism without state interference - which government members also benefit from, because they are all direct beneficiaries of a free market due to their sway and financial riches.
Whether these powerful people are counted as individuals or a collective state makes no difference - it is still fascism in either case.
The left is not included in the above range. Left parties are tiny - surprisingly so, and nobody takes them seriously if they remember or know that they exist at all. The media constantly reinforces that the above range is the only one available. In doing so, they have long since launched a successful ideological campaign that has associated all Leftist terminology with ineffectiveness, unrealistic desperation and by associating it with failed attempts of the past.
Nobody thinks the left:
a) is big enough to do anything,
b) has anything new, and
c) has anything practically realistic to it to not fail again.
Leftist counter-campaigns attempt to associate right wing problems with left wing solutions, and they do so correctly. But beyond this, they cannot seem to overcome the above 3 problems.
The left has no ground to stand on as long as it doesn’t avow the hardness of the world.
It’s like Marx said, not as the anarchists say; capitalism transforms, through a dialectic with increasing demand, a different form of capitalism: socialism.
The left wing as a consistent entity cannot exist. It is always radical, transforming, self-incriminating and absolving, brilliant and absurd. In neurobiology it is seen as activity in the (pre)frontal lobes whereas conservative, right wing, hardlinerspoliticks stems from much deeper, closer to the fear centers and reptile brain.
I can’t help but conclude that none of the two sides to this dichotomy are in themselves sustainable. They need an actively disrupting dichotomy to persist, to keep the debate hot and the minds sharp. Competing ideas about the distributions of both physical and metaphysical goods are propagated by both physical and metaphysical means, as tension between desire and privilege, or privilege and necessity, form the basis of this constantly self-challenging phenomenon, human culture. The only way to persist as a left wing is to use the given of it’s mor(t)al enemy, find a commonly valued ground, and pick a fight.
As currency is information, the radical left has devised a weapon again; Julian Assange is now playing the game at a level on which I haven’t seen a politically unaffiliated man in my lifetime yet. He’s set out so many threats that he is now prepared to turn himself in? I wonder what this is going to amount to. Just another bubble of rebellion which bursts by the first touch of hard power? Or is this significant?
There is no left in power, though… to our great detriment. Since rightwing corporate fascism is basically inhuman and ultimately destructive to humans and the ecosystems needed to support life, I can only conclude that most of humanity is in the grip of insanity.