Jill Stein isn’t Anti-Vaxx, She’s Anti-Capitalist
But they don’t want to talk about that
Neoliberal pundits have so internalized the supremacy of leftism, and are so terrified of the inexorable radicalization of the world’s workers, that they have ceased to argue against it. Tasked with defending economic cannibalism against Marx, they’ve been reduced to making shit up.
They’ve got nothing, and they know it.
Jordan Weismann, a man who is writing in Slate, has invented for Jill Stein a position against vaccinations. When she unequivocally denies being against vaccinations, he says he knew that, but that she hasn’t said it enough.
When they were going with the BernieBro line, it was at least impossible to definitely prove or disprove. But if you accuse Stein of being against vaccinations, all you have to do is ask. Or look at her Twitter. Or at Snopes. Boom, she’s not against vaccines. You can check it in 30 seconds, maybe 45 on a mobile. The only thing keeping the lie from a gasping death is that you’d figure they wouldn’t make something up so easy to look up.
How did these people get an empire?
Jill Stein and the Green Party explicitly support vaccinations. And the odds are rank-and-file Green Party members do, too. As Jeb Lund was so good to show in Rolling Stone last year, eschewing vaccinations is a product of class, with those wealthy enough to access quality medical care the least affected by medically reckless decisions.
Weismann might have known this himself if he were a leftist, but because he lives in a world of Dungeons & Dragons-style Good and Evil, he can only understand anti-vaxxers as morally weak dumb-dumbs who must be clubbed into the 21st century. Or, more likely, this is just a bad-faith accusation.
The average Slate reader, in my estimation, is a miserable person with the desire but not the determination for suicide. I should know, I spent years reading literally every bitter missive they published. And I remember when they lost their standard bearer, Christopher Hitchens, who better than anyone knew the Slate project: to remind the reader that though they may be scum, they are better than the people who don’t read Slate. It’s a bitter consolation prize, but it’s better than nothing.
The shame of it is the brief relief comes from the same place that gets people to read Slate to begin with. Neoliberalism teaches: there is justice in every fibre of this economy, and you are rich or poor because you are wise or dumb. But Marx, and the pagan materialists before him, knew: you are rich and poor because god is dead, and those who seek to find order will do no better than those who draw constellations on the random stitching of stars in the night sky. Neoliberalism is astrology of the markets.
The fundamental difference between Stein and, say, Clinton and Trump, or even Gary Johnson, isn’t their various opinions on the spurious link between vaccines and autism. (Though, as has been noted, both Clinton and Obama both entertained the possibility until relatively recently.) It is Stein is basically anti-capitalist[1].
And that is what makes this discussion so unpalatable. Hillary Clinton (that’s who this is about, right?) subscribes to the neoliberal consensus. How can she be taken as a pro-science candidate, when she refuses to acknowledge the observable fact that capitalism is a toxic economic system, an artificial framework which does nothing but breed proverbial wolves and make impossible the expression of virtue?
Yet this is to be generous. Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, and the rest of the indistinguishable hungry bunch, aren’t stupid people. They know capitalism isn’t good for most people. In fact, you can ask most people and they’ll tell you. But these people aren’t most people. And where capitalism is bad for most people, it’s really really good for a few people. Which people? These people. These awful, awful people.
Breathe easy, comrades. They verge on self-destruction.
[1]: Stein’s platform says she wishes to move away “from the greed and exploitation of corporate capitalism [emphasis added],” which seems like a needless and unfortunate equivocation.
