Why the Future of the World Depends on the Emergence of a Genuine American Left

And why it is so unlikely

I never thought I’d believe such a thing as the title of this piece. Over the years, I’ve developed an instinctual distrust of American politics and the kind of politicians who emerge out of that system. And yes, while I have a distrust of politicians generally, it is the American politician who leaves me feeling queasy at best, infuriated at worst, and does so more than any other nation’s politicians.

Some Context – The Three Betrayals That Radicalised Me

On the left we often the hear the question, “What radicalised you?” For me, three things, or to be exact, three betrayals, immediately spring to mind - Tony Blair, the Iraq war, and Barack Obama.

Though Blair was a British politician, who’s feigned advocation for socialist principles taught me my first lesson in the foolishness of trusting politicians, his over-eager determination to wage war on Iraq was a tragic and embarrassing solidification of the U.K.’s status as an American stooge. And though the UK has been integrating into the American empire since World War II, it wasn’t until Tony Blair that any morsel of autonomy was swept away. In his desperation to join in on any American attack on Iraq, Blair belied a confidence in Britain’s role in 21^st-century geo-politics, as if his bloodlust was nothing more than grotesque attention seeking, akin to that of an up-and-coming gangster willing to commit murder in order to be fully initiated into the mob. And what made it so unbearably embarrassing was the state of the mob boss, a certain George W. Bush, who was, and is, a walking satire, and genuine imbecile.

Imbecilic presidents aside, nothing damns America and its politics more than the Iraq War. Though many criminal wars have been instigated and conducted by the U.S., embarking on an invasion of a country in the name of over 2,000 of their own murdered citizens, knowing that the country in question had nothing to do with their murders, is the lowest of the low. And as cowardly as American politicians and their military commanders are (and yes, the same goes for all Imperial nations, including my own), going at a practically unarmed country (or disarmed, if you consider the years of U.S. imposed sanctions) under a false pretext is still a shocking course of action to take.

Let’s be clear, as it is always better to state such actions in order to fully appreciate the scale of cowardice and evil intention – rather than put all their efforts into perpetrators of 9/11, the U.S. government instead split their so-called “War on Terror” into two factions. On one hand, there was the war in Afghanistan, where Osama Bin Laden was said to be based, and on the other hand, Iraq, who were said to be in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, intent on America’s destruction, and harbouring WMD’s that could be deployed within 45-minutes (according to Tony Blair at the time).

No matter what we think of American foreign policy, their wars, and the enemy of their own making who attacked the U.S. on 9/11, not many people would have been surprised by the war in Afghanistan. You could have disagreed with it on moral grounds, but it would have been hard to argue with the rationale, whereas Iraq was the complete opposite. The evidence for war in Iraq was always flimsy at best. And though there was debate and excuses made at the time, it is pretty much generally accepted now that the war in Iraq was launched on lies and manipulation. Claims made since that say the intel was “misleading,” or just simply incorrect, as if that makes it any less terrible, is depressing proof that we live in a world where certain people, in certain positions, can be complicit in the murder of unimaginable numbers of people and get away with it, and that the war, and the industrial scale manipulation of people into supporting it, tells us everything we need to know about our governments (specifically the U.S. government in the context of 9/11 and the lack of effort put into getting justice for those killed), and the value they place on human life.

Barack Obama was a much lesser betrayal to me personally, but a betrayal, nonetheless. Like Blair, Obama’s election was supposed to be a start of something new and better. Though I wasn’t naïve enough to imagine Obama overthrowing capitalism, I thought he would prove to be a step in the right direction. Wrong.

While Blair taught me not to trust a politician, and the war on Iraq confirmed my suspicions of the U.S. as being a malevolent, imperial entity, Barack Obama taught me a lesson that is best summed up by Adam Curtis – “Never trust a Liberal. Ever.”

The Political Spectrum According to Americans

What is so alarming about the wider world of U.S. politics is the notion that Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and Liberalism itself, are somehow left-wing. In the last decade or so, with all the woke and anti-woke, culture war nonsense that has exploded in the age of social media, a great many Americans have exposed themselves as having no understanding of political divides, and of left-wing politics, in particular. When you hear terminology like “post-modern Marxism” or “cultural Marxism”, for example, and listen to people’s understanding of those terms, then you know you’re dealing with people that have profoundly misunderstood what Marxism is. And furthermore, when you hear opinions that equate free healthcare to Soviet style Communism from people who preach Christianity and advocate for the right to bear arms, then you become terrified in the knowledge that these people, thick as mince, are representative of the most powerful nation in the Western world, one that is backed up by immense military capabilities. There is no doubt, when confronting that truth, that we have, at some point, taken a wrong turn as a civilisation.

For there to be so much woeful misunderstanding of Marxist thought, and of left-wing politics in general, not to mention an understanding of what is, in fact, left-wing, we can only assume that the demonisation of the words “socialism” and “communism” has been a much more thorough conditioning than anything we, outside of the U.S., can scarcely imagine. But though we can’t scarcely imagine how the American psyche got itself into this mixed-up state as to what Marxism/socialism/communism is, or as to how it could come to be that liberals such as Obama and the Clintons are seen as left-wing socialists, we have seen in the social media age exactly what decades worth of propaganda can produce: an acute dumbing down of the electorate.

Being dominated by American companies and, therefore, American users, Western social media is a cesspit of dumbed down takes when it comes to politics. The misunderstandings and ignorance’s of the political spectrum (itself a mere construct, in fairness) that Americans have, has been able to inform the understandings of people in other Western countries, especially here in the U.K. Hearing clowns like Tommy Robinson talk about the U.K. having a “Marxist education system” is hilarious, embarrassing, cringey, and infuriating all at once. You literally don’t how to feel or what to do about such immense stupidity. And it is stupidity. It isn’t a clumsy attempt at propaganda. Robinson generally believes it, enamoured as he is by Jordan Peterson, and Peterson’s truly impressive ability to be so confident about being so wrong on literally anything.

What if the Only Path to Global Liberation Runs Through the Most Ideologically Hostile Country on Earth?

In my short time on Substack, I have seen that an American Left, a genuine, class-conscious, anti-imperialist one, does exist. But I was still surprised to see a news story that, for me, came right out of the blue. Apparently, without me knowing, the unimaginable has become a possible reality – a socialist politician is in the running for an actual position of power in a U.S. city.

Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assembly member, has been speaking in genuine anti-imperialist language, and what’s more impressive, for an American politician that is, has been speaking coherently. After emerging as the Democrat nominee for the mayor of New York, social media has been unsurprisingly partisan, with American liberals hyping this up as a momentous event, and Mamdani as some kind of hero for the everyman, whilst people on the Right have been declaring an Islamic caliphate in New York. But for those of us who see the U.S. as the ultimate imperial power, and wholly malevolent in intention, there is the fear of a familiar story beginning to play out.

The US of A has a way of producing figures who seem to gesture beyond its ideological limits, only to end up reinforcing them. As mentioned, Barack Obama was supposed to a victory for hope and a more dignified approach to politics but ultimately governed as the soft face of empire. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flirted with socialism before becoming a meme-generator in the court of capital. Even Bernie Sanders, for all his integrity, functioned as a pressure valve, raising hopes only to fold behind the party line. He’s now appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Looked at from this perspective, I won’t be getting my hopes up just yet. And this isn’t cynicism, it’s just recognising the unprecedented nature of Mamdani’s success, and the understanding I have of America not just as imperial and ultra-capitalist, but one of fervent nationalism, all of which make the notion of a left-wing emergence, with internationalist principles, an unlikely one.

Liberalism as a Remnant of a Colonial Mindset

Malcolm X once said that the white liberal only differs from the white conservative in one way: “the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.” The white liberal, he says, also seeks power, like the conservative, but the liberal has “perfected the art” of posing as the friend and benefactor of black people, which we can also apply to oppressed or marginalised people, generally.

I would also say that there does exist in the white liberal a kind of infantilisation towards marginalised groups, something that could have evolved out of some kind of white supremacy idealism and the just as weird white saviour complex. It is something that is very patronising, and is seen in the policing of language, and of what is acceptable and what isn’t, what will offend and what won’t. It is, essentially, a self-righteousness with an agenda, a means to power. In this way, the liberal doesn’t want to destroy empire, they simply want to lead it with better manners.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that present-day white liberals are bonafide racists, rather that the mindset of liberalism, as with conservatism, is a remnant of a society constructed upon a belief in white supremacy. What’s more, these labels – liberalism, conservatism, and yes, socialism, are just that. They are labels. Social constructs. But what liberalism and conservatism teach us is that we still have a way to go to purge ourselves of the hereditary mindsets that have evolved out of colonialism and empire.

Personally, the only label I’m willing to apply to myself, at this point in human history, is anti-capitalist, and to speak as an anti-capitalist, is to truly speak truth to power. For an American, this truth to power is spoken from the heart of empire.

If the World is to be Freed from Capitalism’s Death Spiral, Can it Happen Without the Collapse, or Radical Transformation, of the American Empire?

Let’s say, hypothetically, that a socialist revolution took hold in a Western European nation like the U.K. Let’s say that tomorrow, there will be a sudden surge of mass mobilisation, public ownership in all areas, and abolition of rent extraction. Would the United States tolerate it? I’d imagine there would be an intervention taking the place the very next day.

Just look at the history – Chile, Iran, Indonesia, Congo, Cuba, Venezuela - all socialist aspirations around the world haven’t failed because they were unpopular. They’ve failed because America intervened to make sure they did. The United States doesn’t just see itself as world policeman, it sees itself as the remedy, no, immune system of global capitalism. It protects private ownership with drones and sanctions, defends capital’s interests through coups, bribes, and trade deals, surrounds itself with compliant “liberal democracies,” whose primary function is to maintain the illusion of choice while deferring to the imperial core. In short, if the American empire doesn’t want socialism to exist, it won’t. Therefore, it can only start from within.

American culture is the ultimate example of capitalist realism, not just that capitalism is the only viable system, but that no one can even imagine what an America without that system would look like. This is because America is the heart of the global capitalist system.

The U.S. dollar functions as the world’s reserve currency, underpinning international trade, debt, and value. Its military enforces capital's reach. Its tech monopolies extract data and attention across borders. Its culture colonises the imagination. And its financial markets dictate policy in countries it will never understand.

If the American Left ever succeeded in disrupting that system, via radical wealth redistribution, de-dollarisation, nationalisation of key industries, or withdrawal from imperial entanglements, it wouldn’t just transform domestic life, it would send a systemic shockwave through the architecture of global capital. Which would mean, of course, across the entire world and in every aspect of human life. If the American Left ever truly succeeded, then, it wouldn’t just change America, it would change everything.