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Parochialism: Why Even Liberal-Leftist US Voters Are America Firsters

“For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party's policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people.

The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the ‘lesser evil’ and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.”

Indeed. Even Noam Chomsky believed (probably still believes) in the ‘lesser evil’ dogma. He advocated a vote to John Kerry in 2004. Massad rightly calls such a dogma a myth and parochialism.

Frantz Fanon, however, “understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists of the colonising countries.”

Update: A couple of days later the editors/the author changed the title to ‘Why even progressive US voters are America Firsters’, which makes it a very vague. What is a ‘progressive’? Is the change meant to atone to the ‘progressive liberals’ and ‘leftists’?

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