Janine Jackson interviewed RootsAction’s Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon about Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Party for the July 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York (5/20/25)

Janine Jackson: In early June, Raina Lipsitz explained for FAIR.org how media can write about a political candidate in a way that sows doubt about their fitness without attacking them directly. “How to Subtly Undermine a Promising Left-Wing Candidate,” it was headlined.

Since then, Zohran Mamdani, who New York magazine described as “Crash[ing] the Party,” has won the Democratic mayoral primary here in New York City, and things have got a lot less subtle. We have billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman declaring that he will bankroll anyone—you hear that? anyone—who will keep Mamdani out of office. Breaking news as we record, Ackman has said current Mayor Eric Adams will be recipient of his riches—not, as he’s declared, due to any particular fitness on Adams’ part, but because he fills the brief of not being Zohran Mamdani.

Suffice to say, fissures are being revealed, lines are being drawn. And whatever you think of Mamdani or New York City in particular, the question of whether the Democratic Party, as it is, wants to be a part of the future or not is on the table.

And here’s the thing: Plenty of people are not being scared off by the idea that things could change. Elite media have no place in their brain for this concept, and we can expect to confront coverage reflecting that.

Joining me now to talk about this revealing, interesting moment are two people near and dear. Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential and many other things.

Norman Solomon, also in at FAIR’s founding, is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and author of numerous titles, including War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out in a new paperback edition.

They are, together, co-founders of the independent initiative RootsAction, where Jeff is policy director and Norman is national director. They both join me now by phone from wherever they are. Jeff and Norman, welcome back to CounterSpin.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Janine.

Jeff Cohen: Great to be with you.

New York Times (6/16/25)

JJ: They’re talking about Mamdani, but they’re telling us about themselves, and the values they represent all the time. I’m talking about news media.

So it’s worth taking a second to breathe in this New York Times editorial; I call it the “sniff heard round the world”: “He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.”

There’s just one sentence, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “trade-offs” for good governance: It’s hard to think of a clearer example of media’s transmission of the idea that somehow politics isn’t really for people. So, Jeff, Norman, why would anyone ask why people are disaffected with electoral politics, when this is the smart person’s explanation of how they work?

JC: It’s pretty revealing when you look at New York Times editorials, because I think middle-of-the-road news consumers, liberal news consumers, they know not to trust Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Murdoch’s New York Post. People understand that’s right-wing propaganda.

The moment we’re in, Janine, as you’re suggesting, it’s a teachable moment. Now people are realizing you can’t trust the New York Times, either. You can’t trust these corporate centrist news outlets.

You bring up a Times editorial. Last August, the Times said that they were no longer going to make endorsements in local or state races, but eight days before this primary election, they wrote an editorial that you would’ve thought they wrote so that the billionaires who were funding Cuomo, with this dark money Super PAC known as Fix the City, that was funded by Michael Bloomberg, it was funded by DoorDash, it was funded by Bill Ackman, the hedge fund guy….

It’s almost like the New York Times wrote an editorial attacking Mamdani, after they said they would no longer be making endorsements in local races, it’s almost like they were writing it so they could provide ad copy to Fix the City and attack ads.

Norman Solomon: “Chief Justice John Jay…said, ‘Those who own the country ought to govern it.’ And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media.” (Photo: Cheryl Higgins.)

And I watched the NBA, the pro basketball playoffs, on WABC, channel 7 New York City, and they kept quoting the editorial in the attack ads against Zohran Mamdani. And one of the quotes was, “He’s got an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Another quote, “He shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.” And then, “We do not believe Mr. Mandani deserves a spot on New Yorker’s ballots.” So you had quote after quote.

When the editorial writers of the New York Times are writing an attack on a mayoral candidate like Zohran Mamdani, and they know that there’s a dark money PAC that’s spending millions of dollars to attack him—basically, they were writing copy. And every time a coach during the NBA playoffs called a timeout, I cringed, because I knew there’d be another attack ad that I’d be watching against Mamdani.

NS: To get into the sports metaphor, in the news department, they’re supposed to be referees; they don’t have their hands on the scale. They’re simply reporting the news. But the tonality of coverage, not just in the New York Times, but elite media generally, has been skeptical to alarmed to setting off the sirens that something terrible might be about to happen if the New York City voters don’t wake up.

And when the New York Times editorials talk about something like trade-offs, what they mean is that there is a transactional world that they believe is about democracy, or should be, their version of democracy. I recalled the statement from the first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, who said, “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media that, after all, have billions of dollars in assets. That’s what they are accustomed to trying to look out for and protect. I think it’s notable that there’s a long pattern, I mean this has been going for decades.

New York Times (6/24/20)

And, again, we’re talking about Fox News and so forth, we’re talking about the New York Times, and in its editorials, the wisdom of its handpicked and, we’re told, very well-informed, erudite editorial board—-a few years ago when Bernie Sanders was surging in the primaries, and it looked like he might be the Democratic presidential nominee, the New York Times went into overdrive of alarm. They published a very big editorial saying Bernie Sanders is just not qualified to be president. He’s dangerous. These socialistic ideas just won’t work.

And after that, years went by, and the New York Times ran a huge editorial about how horrible it is that there’s so much income inequality in the United States, and it’s getting worse and worse, the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class and the poor.

And I think that is really a replica of the split screen approach of the New York Times and the media establishment, which is, on the one hand, to make sure that progressive candidates don’t get very far, if they have anything to say about it as news media outlets. And on the other hand, it’s sort of victims without victimizers, the moaning that there’s poverty and there’s income inequality that’s become so extreme, but there are no victimizers, and certainly Wall Street should be protected rather than attacked.

JC: The beauty of the Mamdani campaign—multiethnic, multigenerational—is there were thousands and thousands of volunteers knocking on doors, and many of them are young. This reminds me of the Bernie Sanders campaign that Norman brought up. Many of them are getting a real education that you can’t trust the right-wing media, and you also can’t trust the media that sees itself as corporate center or corporate liberal.

I love, in the editorial of the Times, eight days before the primary: “Many New Yorkers are understandably disappointed by the Democratic field.” Well, there were some New Yorkers disappointed: It was the New York Times editorial board, which was blasting Mamdani, but they couldn’t, as they usually do, endorse the corporate centrist Cuomo, or be nice to him, because of all of his scandals.

But when it comes to New Yorkers as a whole, they were pretty enthused by the Democratic field, because voter turnout was the biggest in 36 years. So I think what we’re getting here is a real education about how the media spectrum is center-right, including from the New York Times to the New York Post, from the Washington Post to the Washington Times, from MSNBC to Fox News, it’s basically a center-right spectrum. And when a candidate is outside of that spectrum, proposing ideas that are rarely heard inside the center-right spectrum, and is popular, that’s when even the corporate liberal, the corporate centrist media, freak out.

Truthout (6/27/25)

JJ: The first tool in the quiver is blatant Islamophobia. Folks will have seen Senator Gillibrand’s unhinged rant. And we see the distortion and the weaponization of antisemitism. And I just wonder, Norman, Jeff, what you have to say about the idea of using antisemitism as somehow a go-to to attack a candidate who has made very clear—and I mean, again, it’s not about Mamdani, it’s just about the utility of this tool to pull out against anyone who’s trying to do anything different.

NS: It’s really a very strong, powerful and pernicious combination of the zeal to, at all costs, protect corporate power and to protect Israel, which, after all, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both unequivocally reported last December, continues to engage in genocide in Gaza. So this is a very powerful and I think dangerous confluence of the concentration of power in the United States.

And all you have to do is read the screed that was put out, hours after Zohran Mamdani won the primary, by Bill Ackman, whose net worth is upward of $9 billion. And the accusation, and I’m quoting here, was “socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country,” and also accusing Mamdani of being anti-Israel and antisemitic. And so that combination is really part of the—I won’t say witches brew, it’s a warlock’s brew of the power structure in the capital of capitalism in the United States, in New York City.

And we’re seeing this in so many different guises, certainly in media, it is pervasive, whether it is the New York Times or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal, that’s a part of the theme. And it’s also coming from the power structure of the Democratic Party. The two most prominent New Yorkers in Congress, both, as we speak, are refusing to endorse Zohran Mamdani, even though they are Democrats, he’s a Democrat.

And we’ve had, for instance, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, of course from New York City, saying that when he’s asked whether he’s going to endorse, the reply is, Well, Mamdani has to show New Yorkers that his Jewish residents of New York City are people who he wants to protect. Well, that’s preposterous, and it’s really a way of saying that if you are not supporting Israel with its genocide, then we have reasons to think that you wouldn’t protect Jews, which is an absurdity with an agenda. It’s part of a decades-long scam in media and politics in the United States that equates Israel with Judaism, and Israel with quote “the Jewish people.”

JJ: And that erases masses of New York Jewish people and Jewish people around the country; they’re completely erased in this conversation, as though they were not speaking their truth and their values and their opposition to Israeli actions.

New York Times (6/25/25)

JC: Janine, there was a New York Times news story the day after Mamdani won the primary, and it had this reference that Mamdani’s “running on a far-left agenda, including positions that once were politically risky in New York—like describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, calling for new taxes on business.”

Well, FAIR has pointed out that, for decades, the polls have shown that even though we have a very narrow debate in mainstream media between center and right, that on economic issues, the public is very progressive. So Pew did a poll in March, 63% of all US adults want taxes raised on large businesses and corporations. It’s been that way for decades. And the New York Times is telling us that’s “far-left” or “politically risky”?

And then, on the issue of Israel, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs did a poll of US Jews 14 months ago, May of last year, and found that back then, 30% of US Jews and 38% of US Jews under the age of 44, they were calling what Israel was doing in Gaza genocide. Those numbers are much huger now. So there are a couple million Jews in the US that are calling what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide.”

And yet in so many Mamdani articles, I see this comment, “He has emphatically denied accusations that he is antisemitic,” but yet the New York Times and other news coverage keeps emphasizing it.

We have evidence from Trump’s comments and Trump’s policies about his racism; but you don’t see, in every other article or every third article, “Mr. Trump has emphatically denied accusations that he is a racist.” But you keep hearing this in Mamdani coverage, and there’s no evidence at all that he’s antisemitic. He’s just critical of Israeli action in Gaza and elsewhere, as are millions of Jews in this country and around the world.

New York Times (3/18/25)

NS: And very much, this kind of media coverage and messaging, it’s a toxic combination of Islamophobia and willingness to promote Israel as some kind of paragon of virtue, even while the genocide continues. I think there’s no clearer incarnation of this mix than Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, the most powerful Democrat, arguably, in the country. And a few months ago, Chuck Schumer, in an interview with a very approving Bret Stephens, the columnist of the New York Times, said, and I quote, “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Well, if that’s Chuck Schumer’s job, he clearly is falling short; he’s falling down on the job. And there’s a real panic here.

And then the other clearer aspect of what Chuck Schumer is providing nationally, in terms of politics and media, is his well-earned nickname, “the senator from Wall Street.” And that has been a nickname that he got decades ago. It got new heights just after the financial crisis of 2008. By the following year, the fall of 2009, he had received more than 15% of all the year’s contributions to every senator, from Wall Street.

And when you look at the last year’s donations, when the Schumer campaign committee had to report to the FEC, the six-year donor total for Schumer was $43 million. And more than a quarter of that just came from the financial sector, the real estate interest and law firms and lawyers.

Well, clearly, the real estate interests are going crazy right now, because they’re afraid of a rent freeze. They’re afraid of social justice. They want their outlandish profits to be remaining in full force. So this is really a class war being waged, through media and politics, from the top down.

JJ: And the energy that we get is very much “let’s you and him fight,” you know? Racism, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism are all tools that powerful rich people take up to protect their power and riches. It’s much beyond Mamdani, it’s beyond Bernie Sanders. It’s beyond any individual candidate. They will pit us against one another, and then maybe we won’t notice that we’re being robbed blind. That’s the big picture, in some ways.

JC: Agreed. The threat of Mamdani is he’s such a unifier, and that people of various ethnicities, generations, they’ve united behind him. They heard his message, in spite of the millions of dollars of attack ads, and mainstream media seem to be freaking out, from right to center.

Rising Up (7/2/25)

JJ: I think it’s important to understand that he’s not a unicorn. Sonali Kolhatkar had a show the other day: Across the country, there are people, there are candidates, rising up. There are people who are unapologetic, and they’re resisting the nightmare that you can put Trump’s face on, but it’s not his alone. We know it’s a bigger systemic problem.

We’re talking about Mamdani. Mamdani is not alone. There are folks rising up.

And let me just say, finally, we’re talking about a void, in terms of public understanding and information and energy, and it’s a void that you both have long identified. And that’s why RootsAction exists, right? It’s like people are tired of “Democrat versus Republican,” and want a place to put their energy that is neither of those.

NS: Yeah. Well, the media and corporate power structures, that are so interlaced, to put it mildly, they see genuine democracy as a terrible danger, and any semblance of horizontal discourse in media and politics, and people organizing and communicating with each other, that’s just a terrible threat to the hold that the gazillionaires have on the political process.

Jeff Cohen: “These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas.)

JC: These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.

So you had AIPAC, powerful Israel-right-or-wrong lobby, intervening in Democratic primaries with Republican money, and knocking out progressive congressmembers like Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. And once you knock out the progressive candidate, and you’ve chosen the Democrat and you’re a right-wing lobby, AIPAC, which loves the Republicans, well, you have both candidates in the race, you cannot lose. That’s not democracy.

And mainstream media understands that’s not democracy when they’re always pointing out, accurately, that the supreme leader of Iran gets to choose and sanction who gets to run for president, who doesn’t. Well, if you’re these billionaires, they believe they should choose both choices for you, and limit those choices, and they freak out when there’s more than just the two choices that they like.

JJ: And then I would say, media make it their job to pretend that, actually, you’re choosing from all the available, reasonable options.

JC: Yeah, if ever there was a time for news media, and thank God we have independent news outlets in New York and elsewhere, and we have nonprofit news outlets in New York and elsewhere. This is a really educational moment about how flawed the democratic system is, how the democracy is so constrained by this money.

And who never complains about campaign finance? The television channels that get all the money from the billionaires to attack a Mamdani in favor of a Cuomo. And now we’re going to get millions of dollars of ads against Mamdani in favor of a very corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.

But, again, this should be an educational moment about how limited democracy is, and journalists should be explaining the problems of democracy, when the billionaires can have this much power over every aspect of the race.

NS: As we’ve been saying, this is a teachable moment, and it’s a learnable moment. And so many people are learning that the gazillionaires are freaking out.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with authors, activists, RootsAction’s co-founders Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. You can start with their work online at RootsAction.org. It will not end there. Thank you, both Jeff and Norman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JC: Thank you, Janine.

NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Authorities also are prohibiting Tibetans in Sichuan province and elsewhere from organizing and participating in prayer sessions online, said the sources who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. 

The measures come as Beijing intensifies efforts to assimilate Tibetans and adapt Tibetan Buddhism so that its tenets and practices conform with the ideology of China’s Communist Party.

While authorities have demolished religious objects and structures at times at Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, this is the first instance of religious symbols at ordinary people’s homes being destroyed.

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Since the beginning of July, Chinese authorities have conducted searches of all homes in at least four villages in Ngaba county, said the sources, one of whom lives in exile and the other who is inside Tibet.

They are forcing Tibetans to remove prayer flags hoisted on rooftops and to destroy religious objects, said the source from inside Tibet.

Among the objects being dismantled are concrete structures resembling chimneys outside homes where Tibetans perform Sang-sol, or incense offerings, to mark important religious and personal events in their lives, he said.

While authorities have not publicly disclosed the reason for their actions, Tibetans expect similar inspections in neighboring Tibetan areas, both sources said. 

No online prayer sessions

Tibetans in Sichuan province and elsewhere are also prohibited from organizing any religious prayer sessions online in their social media messaging groups or chat groups, one of the sources said.

“Individuals who have initiated these prayer sessions have been summoned for interrogations by Chinese authorities,” he said.

China has continued to restrict and control Tibetan religious practices and shown no willingness to resume formal negotiations about greater autonomy for the region with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, according to the most recent annual report by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Beijing also bans Tibetans from observing significant cultural, religious and historical events such as Tibetan National Uprising Day and the Dalai Lama’s birthday. 

But Tibetans have defied these prohibitions, despite possible severe consequences.

During the Dalai Lama’s birthday on July 6, monks from monasteries in the Ngaba area were confined to their compounds under police presence to enforce such restrictions, said the first source from inside Tibet. 

With the birthday of Kirti Rinpoche, the head of Ngaba’s Kirti Monastery, approaching in August, Chinese authorities have already implemented online restrictions and threatened Tibetans against posting any photos or well wishes, said the second source.

In March, Chinese police arrested Pema, a Tibetan monk from Kirti Monastery for staging a solo protest while holding a portrait of the Dalai Lama on the streets of Ngaba county.

Pema, who was working as a teacher for the preliminary Buddhist study section at the monastery, also shouted slogans against Chinese policies in Tibet during his protest and was immediately arrested. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi and edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.

Photograph Source: Photo by Dan Dennis

War rages, horrid war
Even in our bones; our double nature sounds
With armèd discord.

– Prudentius, Psychomachia

“The cultural critic Raymond Williams. He had this idea of how every era has what he called a structure of feeling, which is basically the way that people experience the times in which they live.”

– David Marchese, interview with Don DeLillo, The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 11, 2020

“Embrace the Chaos. Our movement is embracing the chaos.”

– John Fredericks response to Republican Party’s embrace of chaos as they elect — or try to — their Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy finally was elected after three days of voting. But did he bend to a “structure of feeling” that is foreign except on a fugacious fringe to both the way feelings are structured by Liberal/Blue and Conservative/Red states. And if so, isn’t this embrace of chaos fringe therefore rootless and vaporizing?

Republicans have since Reagan marched in step behind Market Rule which after all is a Rule and not chaos. More accurately it demands an order of business in which debts are paid, interests protected as an order of law as well as conscience, and capital trickles down to the wage earner. The whole hocus pocus must be treated with an air of fair and just distribution. It’s all in Econ 101.

But of course, the play of the market is itself stochastic. It has no order. So, you could say chaos is on the scene in a way. A very big way.

This is a psychiatric line I won’t pursue, namely, that a political party led by an economic theory that substitutes market play for legislative plan becomes eventually increasingly dark, screw loose and chaos driven. True, a few have made a lot of money along the way and that money keeps compounding on the road to really obscene wealth. Wealth and attendant power keep The Rule in place.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been struggling to represent what I call an American psychomachia, “a battle between virtues and vices for the soul of Man.” The effort of politics to represent such is messy, comical, and tragic, a kind of flat rate packaging in which what doesn’t fit is tossed. On the Dem’s side, it’s clear that the structure of feeling that leads to some variety of socialism can’t be packaged. An open anti-capitalist platform is a platform too far. On the Repub side, there’s an existential threat to its existence now because an organizing principle of Market Rule has led to a plutocratic order increasingly difficult to endorse. A 20%/80% split with prosperity compounded by the former via investments and a compounding of salaried, insecure jobs by the latter is not a scenario promising Repub electoral victories.

Enter Donald J. Trump. What we have is a meeting of a roulette system of indiscriminate reward and a human excretory product of that system who becomes the savior of those who have the wealth of wages standing beside those who have the wealth of inheritance, dividends, and ownership of labor. The entire drama is cockamamy and the chaos loving dramatis personae are out of their minds. Those who remain fired up by Trump have only that structure he provided, those feelings he provided. They are so tied to his megalomania that beyond a rage to chaos there is no transmittable structure. Without outside fueling, that rage will burn out.

Those, however, who experience the world within a structure of feeling that precedes Trump persist. Their feelings have been festering since Reagan line-item vetoed wage earner life and arranged a mobility of wealth to more and more wealth. All Repubs have to do is hold on to those feelings and somehow detour them into Market Rule. In short, they have to adapt to a populist outrage they don’t viscerally comprehend, excise the Trump tumor on the elegance of Market Efficiency, and excise the chaos created by nutjobs in their own ranks elected to office.

Dems, for their part, have provided Trump with life support. Former President Trump’s own longevity is Dem’s dependent because they feed the anger of those who don’t feel or experience our era as they do. They feed anger by assuming positions presented as absolute and universally acknowledged when in fact they are moot. Basic and essential rights for all as sponsored by Dems, personal choice supremacy and a self-empowerment authorizing such, and the path to freedom through diversity as a unifying path are political goals set in a political arena. They are neither basic nor essential unless we ourselves give them such imprimatur. And our “saying” is open to review.

I point out that the Dems’ declaration of basic rights is not universally held, that personal choice belies the worldly context of choice as well as the socially constructed nature of subjectivity, and that diversity is not a creator of unity but an introduction of possibly irreconcilable difference.

My point is not that Dem’s ruling dicta are unworthy but like all structures of feeling, they can be challenged. They do not stand on grounds of absolutes universally held but rather on a privileged structure of feeling. This means politics is played on a bottomless chess board with no player authorized to declare trump, to mix chess and pinochle metaphors. That Mr. Trump has declared himself the trump card in the game is not metaphorically but sadly real.

Regardless of how strongly any of us claim the truth of our dicta they nevertheless rest on structures of feeling derived from experiences in motion within the movement of time and place. No solemnity of imprimatur or appeal to celestial authorization obviates the shaky grounds on which our politics rests. If we defer to Natural Law theory, we run up against the conjecture of necessary and natural moral restraint which takes us back to an absolute. Once again that absolute is posited by us, and we do so from within our structures of feeling. Back to shaky grounds. The bottomless chessboard.

Laying claim to a high ground of rights and personal choice not to be questioned is imperial, not democratic, although we may link them to our founding documents. But neither the rights of independence declared in the Declaration of Independence as insured by the “Powers of the Earth,” the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” compelled acceptance by England, for instance. Luther asserted he had divinity backing his, but it didn’t compel a Church divinely backed in opposition. It seems the divine could play both sides.

Although the Declaration did not set the laws or establish our government, what “We, the People” ordain in the Constitution assumes the validity of the litany of self-evident Truths, declared in the Declaration. None of these are self-evident. If the Creator endowed us “with certain inalienable Rights” neither that bequest appears in the Bible, nor are “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” there either. Appealing to Nature as a foundational source for our rights, whether the natural world or our own human nature, is prima facie a shaky appeal. However, the dissenting and rebelling ways in which the Founding Fathers experienced their era, and both created and responded to a structure of feeling that represented those experiences did ground our Constitutional order.

The present push for a new Constitutional Convention is premised on a denial of the inalienable Rights of the Declaration as well as an 18th century ordaining and establishing of documents that nowhere mention Market Rule or replaces the English monarch with le ROI, return on investment. Need it be said that promoting the general Welfare smacks of the New Deal, the Repub nemesis. In short, we now live in “any authority is denied” era, not even Constitutional authority has credible legs. So much “fake news.”

It’s not surprising that an angry dissent to the Dems expansion of rights, always deemed basic, has been commandeered by the Repub avatar, Trump. He delivered votes they could not themselves garner. In the aftermath of the 2022 Congressional elections, Trump is clearly not a manageable avatar but rather a real threat to any Republican success at the polls. It would not be cynical to suggest that Repubs are working as hard to remove him from any influence as are the Dems.

Trump was at one time a happy gift to Repubs whose own ruling dicta of Market Rule is parasitic on structures of feeling, attaching itself now to a structure of feeling angrily reacting to the Dems. Book titles such as The Party of Death, If Democrats Had Any Brains, It’s Time to Fight Dirty, Guilty By Reason of Insanity indicate that there is a fertile field of anger to exploit.

In itself there is no structure of feeling to Market Rule which can be sold to those who don’t speak money or have money. Maximization of profit to shareholders is not a salve to those who are not shareholders. Profit not People is not a People rallying cry. “Greed is good, greed works” Gordon Gekko tells us in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street but in fact it’s people who work and greed that lives on the productions of those people. The chessboard here does have a bottom and that bottom line is always profit, whether its education, pharmaceuticals, warfare, health care, ecosystems, food, shelter, air, water.

Profit making has no relationship with or commitment to evolving human experiences and the feelings resulting. Thusly, it limits itself to a defense against what threatens or could conceivably threaten profit making. In an anti-capitalist posture, the Dems are such a danger, but the Dems themselves keep such a posture in check. Perhaps this is because they are heavily invested in our chosen economics, or also because, as Clinton believed, globalized capitalism could not be attacked but only leaned into.

Unfortunately, there is not enough Dems recognizing, as Einstein wrote in his 1949 article “Why Socialism” that the “profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individual.” More drastically, there is not enough financial and societal support to establish a viable third party in the U.S. which would not lean into our crippling economic system. The necessary structure of feeling based on experience that would respond to socialism as suitable for our era does not yet exist.

Nurturing feelings that keep any anti-capitalist threat in check, including “radical socialists” among Dems, is almost the whole of Republican Market politics. The invisible hand of the Market, Repubs insist, doesn’t need intrusive legislation. It needs to be left alone by government. Free thinking, liberty seeking Americans share that view and thus for Repubs feelings so structured are a point of entry into lives they care nothing about and for which they will do nothing.

An assumed high ground structure of feelings underlies and triggers the Dems’ platform of principles, thus explaining why it fails to deconstruct the “essentialism” of its principles, for instance what the present Supreme Court is doing regarding Basic Rights. What prevails on the Dem side is a diagnosis of those who do not share its bottomless high ground structure. The Dem talk then is of those who are adrift in dysphoria, disaffection, immiseration, conspiracies, addictions, especially to the irrational. These are all conditions in which an intervention is required, an intervention made by those on a high ground of feelings assumed by those who propound a rational moralism to their own feelings.

An entire structure of feelings antithetical to the high ground structure is not unobserved but rather deplored. They nevertheless exist, such as feelings in which God’s will is held to be superior to personal choice sovereignty, feelings of indifference at the very least to what is different, or, foreign to one’s own habits of heart and mind. We cannot ignore an angry antipathy to the politics of imposed diversity, the level of diversity and tolerance being calculated via personal decision, not mandate. There is in our society a structure of feeling in which who and what is on the margin is positioned there purposefully so a center will hold and not dissolve into chaos. Or the marginalized are seen to be choosing their own marginalization.

Such feelings feed the anger of the Dems as totally as the Dems feed the anger of those who Trump gathered to himself. To repeat: he never represented the whole of a “structure of feeling” demographic but only those on an explosive burn, a fit of rage they felt was condoned biblically but was actually set off by a huckster. None of that delegitimatized the reality of that structure of feeling, as abhorrent as it has been from a High Ground view.

A Market Rule, which has not attachments to human life-worlds or the planet beyond exploiting all in the name of profit, has no structure of feeling but plays the two we do have toward its own end, one promising much to some, and nothing to many.

For example, profits can and have been made without demanding basic and intrinsic rights for the consumer/exploited. Workers have equal rights except during the one third of their lifetime they are “on the job.” Personal choice is no more than choices manufactured and branded not only outside personal choice but destructive of it. Diversity and immigration are “whatever” issues to Market Rule unless it means cheap labor. Repubs assume a non- interfering, “Get back to where you want to be,” “We don’t pretend to be your elite life monitors good fellowship.” All this masks the plutocratizing effects of their economics which is closer to a “Leave us alone, get Big Government off our backs” negative freedom structure born of the frontier spirit, than the morality legislating Dems.

Dems are on a humanitarian mission to elevate the oppressed as well as their oppressors. This mission elevates the missionaries themselves, who are as assuredly living on the winnings of investment as are Repubs. While Market Rule Repubs are not there to help anyone but themselves, they offer what privilege the predation of our economics offers them as accomplishment to be emulated. They align the structure of their own acquisitive feeling with the “Everyday American” who wants to be rich, who doesn’t want to replace that hope with a dream of economic equality wherein no one is rich.

Dems bow and bend to the existence of “an enlightened self-interest.” This is no more than a delusion, a leaning into competitiveness propelled by greed. It’s also a wise recognition that the Golden Rule, written across all religions, that the interests of others are equal to your own self-interest is not a powerful structured feeling in the U.S. Dems will do an after-competition distribution triage on every public stage, careful to step around any anti-capitalist position, or erase those Dems who take such a position.

The troubled liberal conscience seeks relief in charitable and philanthropic ways, rising up against gun violence, extinction of the lower orders, denied rights to the latest marginalized to attract their attention, police shootings of Blacks, treatment of immigrants at the borders, assertions of biology over choice, and every issue but the predations of an economic system, the bogus Wizard behind a curtain, they won’t expose. As worthy as all such concerns are they present as do the symptoms of an underlying disease. Treat the disease and many of its symptoms will disappear.

None of what Dems offer goes down well to those whose life-worlds are of a different making. So much of what Dems offer smacks of gentrifying invasion, dilettante priorities on the new global gastro tourism level, and an insistence on minority claims totally foreign to the Red States. So much of it is casually secular when those of religious faith are not casually religious. Dems join with Repubs in believing that you’re sad if you don’t have a stock portfolio, don’t know the majesty of dividends and compound interest, don’t realize, to quote Gordon Gekko again, you’re nothing if you don’t have ten million.

Repubs have a Siri and Alexa robot assistant “Uh huh, uh huh” response to a structure of feeling Dems want to elevate to woke levels, which goes beyond racist awareness to a kind of reconstruction of all social levels not urban, secular, professionalized, tech savvy, non-hunting, NASCAR oblivious, gentrifying upper middle class. On this level of emotional and experiential response, tied to conditions relative and positional and not universal, anyone’s god is gone, your personal choices trump biology, who has a womb and can give birth is debatable, heterosexuality is “old school,” being trans is cooler than being cis, and podcast Influencers expand the world’s knowledge and creativity. Some and more of this Dems have jumped on while Repubs have for the most part sat out and let the Dems feel the rage.

It doesn’t help that reasoning beyond our experiencing requires an authority that is unfaithful. I mean our reasoning faculty. It can be easily made to work both sides of the street. Thus, our foundations are shaky to say the least, but their absence and the infidelity of reason have never been able to keep us from experiencing changing times within structures of feeling we ourselves live within.

Though structured in individual life-worlds and as now within two opposing cultural life-worlds, structures of feelings we now find ourselves within are mercurial and blow in the wind as the times inevitably change and so to do our experiences. Political parties must adapt to those changes or go the way of the Whigs. Habits of heart and mind hold longer in cultures not driven by a Prime Directive of rapidly accelerating economic growth and the accompanying delusion that such defines all notions of progress. Now we are rushed on by IT as it rushes toward an AI/Robotics whose effect on human life-worlds is unknown. No one seriously sees human choice at work here.

So, we may not be transitioning to other structures of feeling as we should expect in speaking about feelings but rather to another plane entirely; the experiencing of the world in which we live in ways that have nothing to do with feeling. A robotic salvation of humanity? For some this may mean an answer to our divided ways as we avert our fractious feelings, and we all come together within the neural networks of AI’s “greatest thoughts and minds of humankind.” Non-fractious legislation via algorithm.

Perhaps however we will remain within our life-worlds of feeling and experiencing but have them altered dramatically as the life-world of our planet, indifferent to the advances of the neural networks of AI, erupts in one life threatening catastrophe after another due to our persistent unintelligent intrusions in our planet’s natural rhythms. The structures of our feelings laid to rest.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph Natoli.