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.
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.