Lupe Fiasco and Liberal Denial

The remarks discussed here were made in June, but I came across them only recently and found them worth writing about. It is rare for anyone featured in the mainstream media to acknowledge the fact that Obama is responsible for murdering innocent people, much less draw any damning moral conclusions from it. It is also rare for anyone to offer a radical critique of voting. As a result, rapper Lupe Fiasco’s appearance on CBS’ “What’s Trending” would have been notable in and of itself. Just as notable, however, is the reaction from liberals like Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of the Internet talk show The Young Turks. Their inability to understand, much less refute, Fiasco’s truth-telling offers crucial insights into the nature of liberal denial.

When asked by “What’s Trending” host Shira Lazar about his criticism of Obama in the song “Words I Never Said,” Fiasco gave this response, which can be viewed in The Young Turks segment posted above:

FIASCO: In my fight against terrorism, to me, the biggest terrorist is Obama and the United States of America, you know. So for me, it’s like I’m trying to fight the terrorism that’s actually causing the other forms of terrorism. The root causes of terrorism is the stuff that the U.S. government allows to happen, you know, and the foreign policies that we have in place in different countries that inspire people to become terrorists, you know. And it’s easy for us, because it’s really just some oil, which we can really get on our own.

LAZAR: So who are you looking to vote for in the 2012 presidential race?

FIASCO: No, I don’t vote.

LAZAR: Oh, you don’t vote? Really?

FIASCO: No, I don’t vote. I don’t get involved in the political process –

LAZAR: But why?

FIASCO: Because it’s meaningless, to be honest.

LAZAR: Really?

FIASCO: First of all, I’m a real big believer in that if I vouch for someone, I’m going to stand behind everything that they do. . . . If I’m going to say I stand behind this person and write on a piece of paper that says, ‘Hey, I stand for this person,’ then I have to take responsibility for everything that he does, ’cause that’s just how I am as a human being, right? So politicians aren’t going to do that, because I don’t want you to bomb some village in the middle of nowhere.

LAZAR: So what if no one voted? What would happen, though?

FIASCO: Who knows? Let’s try it out, see what happens.

The full interview can be viewed here. Needless to say, TYT hosts Uygur and Kasparian are not amused by Fiasco’s anti-voting message. In fact, they address his statements on voting first, perhaps sensing that this critique poses a greater systemic threat than calling an individual president a terrorist. They reliably trot out the establishment line during their commentary:

UYGUR: Not voting is a disastrous idea, and then the worst candidate wins, and then what have you accomplished? . . . Look, I’ve got bad news for you. Politics is always the lesser of two evils. . . . You choose the guy who is not as bad as the other guy, okay? Sad day for you, that’s how our system works, unfortunately, and we fight to make it better. And you don’t fight to make it better by not voting, okay, and not participating.

KASPARIAN: Right.

First notice how Uygur conflates electoral politics with politics as a whole. Lazar, in the Fiasco interview, makes the same mistake. She is clearly shocked that an overtly political artist like Fiasco not only does not vote, but refuses to vote as a matter of principle. Neither she nor Uygur is able to conceive of a political world in which voting is only one of many political actions, and might even be undesirable, given the other options. They have no room in their worldview for civil disobedience, general strikes, revolution, or the myriad other methods that have been used historically to change the existing political order. For them, electoral politics is politics. There is no other kind – at least none worth thinking about, and certainly not worth pursuing.

It is also striking that Uygur acknowledges the system he defends is irrevocably evil. He lectures that “politics is always the lesser of two evils,” then reassures us that this is not the result of some systemic flaw, but – as I have written before – that it is in fact “how our system works.” In other words: the system is designed to allow only evil choices. Every vote cast is a vote for evil. One might logically conclude from this that the system itself is evil. Uygur does not draw wider conclusions from his Freudian slip, claiming that “we fight to make [the system] better.” But he has already admitted that his chosen method for doing so – voting – is always guaranteed to result in the triumph of evil. Because Fiasco refuses to participate in an electoral system that will make him an accomplice to evil, he is ridiculed as naïve.

But Uygur is not done:

Now, of course, the main comment is him calling Obama a terrorist. Everybody is going to flip out over that. So, do I think Obama is the biggest terrorist? Of course not. Do I understand the point he is trying to make? Yes. . . . I get his logic, I disagree with the ultimate conclusion, but he’s saying, ‘Look, we’re causing certain events throughout the world and we need to examine our own actions.’ I think it’s an interesting and thoughtful point, whether you agree or disagree.

Except that’s not the point Fiasco was trying to make. He made the point he was trying to make, and it bears little resemblance to Uygur’s watered-down interpretation. Fiasco didn’t say the U.S. is causing “certain events.” He said the U.S. is committing terrorism, with all the moral censure that term carries for a post-9/11 American audience. His meaning is self-evident. It also happens to be true. If Obama is not a terrorist, then the word “terrorist” has no meaning. Fiasco reiterated this point, at greater length, in a later interview with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

[Obama] never piloted a drone from a hundred miles away and dropped a bomb on a wedding or a birthday party. But at the same time too he should receive the same amount of credit for those actions of the people that are under him and the organizations that he heads. He should receive the same credit and the same title that Osama bin Laden gets. What’s the difference between somebody walking a bomb in strapped to their chest into a wedding full of innocent people or a bomb coming from a stealth fighter two miles up and coming into the roof into a wedding full of innocent people? What’s the difference? At the end of the day you’re killing innocent people.

Uygur is unable to face this truth. He cannot even bring himself to accept that Fiasco meant what he said. Notice how he dismissed out of hand the idea that Obama could be a terrorist, much less the “biggest” terrorist (“Of course not”). Such statements are so unfathomable to Uygur’s core belief system – so antithetical to the way he sees the world – that he automatically assumed Fiasco was employing hyperbole. He could not process it. Hence the “I understand the point he is trying to make” nonsense, when in reality Fiasco had already made his point, loud and clear.

Kasparian thinks the same way, and makes the same mistake:

KASPARIAN: Yeah, I think the way he portrayed his ideology was all wrong, like calling him a terrorist will automatically make people dismiss what you’re trying to say. But, you know, when I think about what he’s really trying to say, I can see what you mean where you say you understand him. . . . [Briefly discusses U.S. support for Israel and how the War on Drugs has caused narco-terrorism in Mexico.] So I understand what he’s saying as well, but calling Obama a terrorist I think automatically makes people dismiss you because that’s a little ridiculous.

UYGUR: Right, it’s over the top.

Never mind Kasparian’s particularly insane implication that one should refrain from calling Obama a terrorist, even if he is a terrorist, because it will “make people dismiss what you’re trying to say.” Rather than accepting that Fiasco meant exactly what he said and going from there, Kasparian takes it upon herself to explain what he “really” means. Like her co-host, she simply cannot imagine holding Obama to the same moral standard as bona fide, officially-designated terrorists like bin Laden. Doing so is “a little ridiculous,” after all, no doubt for the same reason that Uygur feels “it’s over the top.” Because no decent person would ever dream of thinking this way, Fiasco does not – and more to the point, cannot – really hold this opinion.

Neither TYT host can acknowledge that Fiasco meant what he said, because this would require them to address what he said. And these people can’t do that. Even when Kasparian admits that, in some roundabout way, the U.S. may be responsible for some suffering somewhere in the world, she does not bring up the obvious examples, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, where atrocities are routinely committed by American troops with American weapons on American orders. Instead she brings up American aid to Israel, where the U.S. is at least one step removed from the killing, and narco-terrorism in Mexico, where the connection is even murkier. Kasparian must psychologically distance the U.S. from atrocities to keep intact her worldview intact.

To admit that the U.S. government commits terrorism would mean assigning moral blame. It would mean acknowledging that Obama and his ilk are responsible for the slaughter of innocent people – that they have committed unforgivable evil. There is, of course, no place for this in the liberal worldview voiced by Uygur and Kasparian, which holds the American system and its leaders to be fundamentally good. Likewise, such a worldview has no place for those who, like Fiasco, recognize an evil system for what it is and assign moral blame accordingly.

Uygur’s comments here paint his July departure from MSNBC in a rather different light. While management no doubt viewed him as hostile to the establishment, his defense of Obama and the electoral system in this clip indicate that their concerns were exaggerated, to say the least.