I actually disagree in this portrayal of leftist politics. A lot of these labels are people embracing themselves and actually acknowledging who they are and who others are and that’s fine. Being gay, trans, a person of color, disabled, etc. is acknowledged and embraced in leftist politics. I rarely see this sort of acknowledgement and celebration outside of a leftist worldview or a leftist pandering.
Choosing some innate quality you can't change as a focus of your politics is inherently divisive, the fact that it is empowering to some sub groups misses the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white#Reacti...
White lives don’t matter. As white lives: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/25/abolish-wh...
The basic idea of modern leftism is that strongest, base distinction in society is class, but that there are other existing divisions that need to be bridged before class itself can be fixed.
If it is not readily apparent to you, the US is already divided based on gender, class, and race, and the right party (really both of them) promote policies that would actually increase these gaps. They would ignore them in their rhetoric, but augment them in practice. Whereas the left augments them in their rhetoric, but seeks to minimize them in practice.
I'm going out on a limb I suppose, but that isn't how political parties work. Outing myself as an engineer, if I wanted to increase/minimise something in practice I would start with a survey of the academic literature on times where the thing changed radically. Then I would attempt to replicate those conditions. Then I would assess the outcomes using pre-defined measures of success.
No political party works that way. Both wings of policies work near-exclusively with sounds-good-to-people-who-vote strategies. In particular, speaking cheerfully from the right, I've never seen a leftist "minimise [divides] in practice" strategy that looks like it started from a historic survey of what worked. I expect there are similar complaints about the right. I've never seen a political solution assessed for effectiveness, and most of them aren't effective.
That being said, there are a lot of ineffective tactics in the left, because there is a lot of infighting (see the XKCD article on standards, as another commenter suggested), and very loose organization.
(And "literature" is a pretty poor way to try to refute the claim, which is what leftists do "in practice".)
If you want to know what any politician will do in power, the process is to see what they are proposing, and to see what others with the same ideology do in practice in other places. If you want to know what the left would do, I suggest doing this.
As right-biased as the two parties are economically, someone wanting to reduce immigration still has no-one to vote for. Even Trump gave nothing but rhetoric and unpopular, ineffective clampdowns on statistically negligible immigration sources, as any graph of US yearly immigration numbers will show.
Not any more. The left used to be about what different people have in common. Now it's about what different people have different than others.
The first had healing. The second keeps the wounds open and festering.
The left has always talked about existing divisions, ever since the late 1800s. Is making the distinction between owner and worker known not highlighting differences?
And of course, once those differences are well known, the left pushes to fix them.
Republicans are officially against racism, pro black etc. So look at what people do, not what they say.
Though, the wave of Justice Democrats coming from working class background such as nurses and so on is encouraging
Perhaps a better way to look at that particular note is while that's how the right views the left (depending on the camp) the issue within the left is the rampant infighting. Sort of like https://xkcd.com/1095/ . None of these are hard rules obviously but there are a lot of cliques within just LGBT where bi people are hated/excluded from lesbian/gay circles, trans people are excluded from all of the above. Stuff like vegans vs vegetarians, environmentalists vs those focused on social issues, and on and on.
I think the saying "the left fights while the right falls in line" is something that needs to be really driven home.
If you have a better idea of how to fix it, I'm all ears. But fixing a problem without recognizing it exists is, well, not typically accepted as solid practice.
I don't know what the answer is, but that wasn't it. All that did was tell people that they're dealing with flaming zealots with ridiculously out-there ideas. And it told whites that the author had selected them as being part of the bad guys, without actually knowing anything about them - and therefore that there was no point in engaging with people like the author, since all they were going to get was condemnation, regardless of what the reality was.
Here are criticisms of "White Fragility" from a leftist perspective :
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/racism-george-floyd-racial-ju...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/08/divers...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dig-read-this-not-whit...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0kFTtR34cek
As you can see, there are a lot of them. I definitely agree with your criticism of White Fragility , and so do the vast majority of leftists. I'd attribute the stunningly deficient thinking behind it to trying to explain why we still have the divide starting with the assumption that our economic and political structures are fundamental good, which they aren't, but a less charitable and a bit more cooky explanation would be that it's a classic case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Thanks for the links.
I would guess, though, that the author of "White Fragility" at least thinks she's on the left, maybe even the radical left. And I don't think that book helped to reduce the divides we were talking about. (I still don't have any answers for what to actually do. What do you do with people who think they're with you, and who are both theoretically and practically against you? And who label themselves with your group?)
There is definitly a lot of cognitive dissonance amongst people such as the author of White Fragility. The best solution for them is figures such as Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff, Cornell West, and Bernie Sanders. I think ultimately the issue with this lies upon the media - the views of the left are constantly misrepresented, and leftists such as Chris Hedges are outright banned from the media - he was fired from the NYT for opposing the Iraq War. Ultimately what you have to do is to build local organizations, vote very heavily in local primaries to get people such as AOC elected, start unions. It's a very difficult fight. You'll notice too that people such as DiAngelo in the mainstream media will generally attack leftists on aesthetics and ignore their points, like what happened with Sanders.
Additionally, people politically have tried to label themselves as leftists (including the Nazis - they called themselves National Socialists as they were signing deals with Krupp to make unions illegal and preparing to execute members of the Socialist and Communist parties). When those people have hegemony, it's a difficult fight.
Ultimately I think the basic distinction between leftists and people that pretend to be leftists is always economic. If you get the platform, the best attack vector is to focus on how useless their ideology is to fix economic issues, and how these economic issues are the engine of racism. If you manage to get them to admit that their economic policies do nothing to help the poor and the common man, it becomes very easy to call them out as not a leftist. But getting that platform is exceedingly difficult, even when you're a professor in economics at MIT, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, the most popular politician in the US (see : Bernie Blackout), or an acclaimed doctor in Philosophy and influential critic of Obama (such as Cornell West - if he was a Republican he'd get twenty times more airtime).
However – and I say this as someone who identifies as a progressive – I agree with the sentiment that we have a problem on the left with both the over-application of purity tests and with lack of discipline, both of which I think are alienating, but neither of which are inherent to liberalism.
Telling all of a group that they're treating other groups badly is, I argue, divisive, in two ways. First, it defines the accused group as being a unity which is against the other group, which is also defined as a unity. That's dividing people into those groups.
Second, it's peeling off allies from the other group. People react by thinking "If you're going to lump me in with the oppressors, without knowing a thing about me, then screw you. I'm out. I don't want anything to do with your crusade."
I agree with your second paragraph.
So we agree then.
I think this paragraph is spot on.
I often like to ask people how they would feel if the “other” side had done/said the same thing “their” side is doing/saying now. Most often it seems people get mad at who does or says something and no matter what it really is. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs and will harm the country more and more. They are already setting up the groundwork for half the population not believing the outcome of the next election which will erode things even further.
I'm not so sure that immigrant detention camps are specifically a "right" issue. Mandatory detention was initially authorized by Bill Clinton in 1996.
It's certainly gotten a lot more media attention (and executive Trumpeting) under the current administration, but the roots are by no means new nor exclusively right, recent media and meme focus aside.
The truly wise group were the conservatives who were repulsed by both sides but willing to work with the fascists.
> French Revolution,
How did that turn out?
> American Revolution
There is no definition of leftism that would include the American independence movement. The conception of leftism didn't even exist!. My head is about ready to explode.
> Mexican Revolution
See French revolution.
>And the all time greatest threat to the world has been a right wing populist revolution; the rise of Nazi Germany.
Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!
> Right wing revolutions tend to curtail rights like the Iranian Revolution
'Tend to'
I have been repeatedly informed that the Iranian revolution was a liberation from the Western Imperialists & therefore left-wing (yes, seriously).
Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?
Frankly, I'm shocked the mods let this topic survive on the front-page for this long. It's a honeypot for every kind of crank to show up and start arguing (myself included) In summary, you guys need to put down the IDEs & start reading actual history books (not wikipedia & and half-assed bastardized regurgitations of Chomsky)
Left is progressive, right is conservative. These terms can and are applied to historical events retroactively.
> Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!
How is this a refute?
> Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?
Neither Russia nor China are considered the West. But why don't you tell us. I can only guess your argument is that left wing revolutions are totally worse than Nazis.
The Nazis got elected, they didn't start a revolution. The Russian Revolution is missing.
The American Revolution was absolutely leftist in the traditional sense right as "support of the monarchy" or conservative and left as "royal abolitionists" or progressive.
Of course, this maps a little awkwardly onto modern American politics. For example, the Americans of the 1800's were progressive in a lot ways, but they kept supporting the system of kidnapping Africans for slaves (and chattel slavery in general) for a lot longer because they benefited so greatly from it.
But that wasn't it at all. They didn't revolt "because kings are shit", they revolted because they believed the British parliament (where the anti-royalists had won against the royalists in the English civil war) didn't give them adequate representation. It was motivated by an unbalanced relationship between economic ability and political participation, not because of ideology.
Neo Nazis want to change things too. Does that make them progressive leftists?
Most people understand this to be the case, _unless_ the revolution is _reactionary_ which is traditionally conservative.
> reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
Nazi's killed their political opposition, especially Communists.
The Nazis went wild with murdering everyone they didn't like after they got elected (not that they weren't into violence before, but Hitler's attempt at a revolution failed in '23, Hitler was convicted and went to prison). They got elected on a populist vote, but that's not a revolution. Revolution != getting elected by normal proceedings.
> ...got elected on a populist vote...
To my mind, a violent populist movement is a revolution.
It's not contentious term for me.
You are just saying you fall left of the equilibrium point of the democratic party.
US democratic party is not a flock of angels... but they're certainly not idiots.
The democrats are roughly center-right when you look at it in comparison to major countries across the world. See e.g. https://qz.com/1748903/how-2020-us-democratic-candidates-com...
The only one that you can make, based on the data, is that US politics trend much further right than many other places, and that talking about "Democrats" and "the left" in the same breath doesn't make any sense in a global context. They just aren't.
And I think that is very relevant when you want to talk about US politics. It defines the available spectrum.
Why would there be? These are ridiculous goals. North Korea has open doors if you want to defect. I've heard it's pretty nice over there.
That's a pretty loose definition of 'major'.
Parliamentary systems sound pretty shitty then - keep in mind the Golden Dawn, UKIP, and any one of the perennial "let's deport all the Roma" parties also counts as a major political party under your definition.
The generally accepted definition of a leftist is someone that opposes capitalism. There is no real political force in the US that opposes capitalism, so the US doesn't have a left. It has a center, and a right-to-far-right,
Read up a bit about fascism. You'll find that's it's not just the Nazis in 1942.
This is a very broken and poor working definition. You can be leftist without being anti capitalist. Leftists don't believe in the "free market fixes things" or trickle down rhetorics. Speaking as a left leaning Canadian.
Leftist capitalism would see government regulation over industry which is of vital societal importance. America has bodies regulating food, medicine, construction, and others. Leftist capitalism often seeks to extend regulations to the benefit of the average citizen.
One example is Canada recently forcing telecoms to unlock phones. Another might be provincial transportation services being either government owned or privately owned with a high degree of government oversight. Their prices then remain low with moderate levels of profitability instead of high prices seeking higher levels of profit.
I'd say the majority of leftists believe capitalism needs to be carefully kept in check, with only more extreme believing it should be abolished. Though many do believe certain industries require far more government oversight than they currently have, or that certain things like health care or education should be made into a social service.
If so, I'd say you are a left-leaning liberal, not a leftist. Economically, you are firmly in the center.
Europe has a much greater variety of politicians (right and left) than America. The center/left/right paradigm doesn't make much sense here (as much as compressing all possible political positions into a 1-dimensional spectrum makes sense anyway.)
As requested, as provided. Anyone who preaches the supremacy of the white race I think can be fairly characterized as fascist.
The majority of Republicans are indeed neoliberals, but there are and have been avowed white supremacists and fascists. Various republican-aligned groups in the US actually cooperated with the NSDAP.
> Various republican-aligned groups in the US actually cooperated with the NSDAP.
If we're bringing up stuff from the 1930s, you're not going to like what the Democrats were doing from then until 70s.
When AOC shows support to a Marxist-Leninist State and party, and when she loudly claims for the seizure of the means of production, you'll have a point. So far, the most extreme thing she's advocating for is Nationalized Healthcare and investment in infrastructure. I don't really think you can equate that with complaining about the white genocide. Her policies and rhetoric are at the very most that of a left-leaning liberal anywhere else in the world.
So no, your argument doesn't really hold up.
If you're going to claim that the Democrats were collaborating with the Soviets, I'd like to remind you that Mccarthy was a Democrat.
goes slightly beyond investment into infrastructure
The "you don't work - you don't eat" idea is not "rightists". It's just a basic law of nature.
Do you think that the Republicans are quite far on the left side of the spectrum? Because last I've heard they haven't repealed food stamps yet.
The left wants to include all of the traditionally divided groups on the surface but want's to divide those groups on new terms, gender, class, politics themselves(if you aren't with us you are against us)
The right wants interpersonal solidarity (we can accept people individually as long as they let me be) but still likes the nationalistic and anti immigrant rhetoric.
They both would end up back at some kind highly restrictive, facist like end point if left unchecked in my opinion.
The right causes more damage in the short term in my opinion, things like immigrant detention camps, civil liberties abuses through the police courts and prisons.
The left scares me more in the long run because unlike the right, they believe that they hold the correct pure set of ideas(many subgroups in the left think this although the left as a whole can't agree on what the pure set of ideas is) and are much more willing to claim the ends justify the means for any given topic and claim the rules don't apply to them (look at things like the CHOP as an example). Most of my slightly left of democrat friends if really pressed to define what they support end up supporting the violent seizure of assets from groups they feel like have to much (IE an armed populist revolution, the irony being it's the other side who has all the guns)
I know this isn't the place for any of this but this stuff bothers me recently and I hate how if you don't pick a side you are always the bad guy.