I wonder if the folks on the farther side of the left understand that, while we may be winning some battles, we are slowly losing the war, in no small part because regressives fight dirty, but don't get dinged for it in the media.
Like, protest all you want, it's good, but unless you can turn that street pressure into political clout that codifies progress into legislation that can survive a right-wing government, there is no actual follow-through, just vented anger.
We are in the minority, pretty much everywhere. And not just the 'real’, radical left, which is in the low single digits, but left-of-center in general.
1/ 🧵
And yet, if the online discourse is any indication, our biggest enemy is ourselves, because we attack anyone and everyone who isn't sufficiently radical for our increasingly fundamentalist tastes.
Everyone who even so much HINTS at the compromises required to address real-world problems, compromises that are inevitable if you actually want to govern, and make meaningful, lasting change, gets marked as ‘centrist’, while the few political movements that make it to elected office collapse due to internal strife, get marked as having 'sold out’ when they do their actual job, or both.
Purity over practicality.
2/ 🧵
We're fighting for the world we want to see while refusing to adapt to the reality of the world we actually live in, which means that we basically have no path to get from here to there.
It's the condemnation of incremental improvements that make a much bigger difference in the lives of actual people than we like to admit, all because it's not the Revolution that we were promised.
This in turn leads to a narrative that posits that everyone who isn't on the barricades with us is a centrist, or a fascist.
It's straight-up misleading, and leads to outcomes that are actually worse in practice, because we don't build coalitions.
3/ 🧵
It is radical politics for the sake of itself. It is politics that is performative, because it is based on a fundamentalist notion of the world, one that is increasingly divorced from reality.
It is a 'fuck you, I want mine’ devoid of any sort of solidarity beyond me and mine, where we don't look beyond local or online networks that are increasingly unstable because of the continuous purity testing we subject those networks to.
And unlike for fascism, where this blunts their effectiveness but often still works in their favour because it dismantles, it's absolute murder if you want to actually build anything.
And that sucks.
4/ ⏹️
politics, leftism
@sindarina As someone who frequently *is* the one trying to build bridges and understanding, I think this gets a key thing wrong: it's not actually the radical leftists who are the source of left coalition failures.
Consider: pretty much every radical leftist you will run across, will have at some point in their life believed or been involved in 'institutional' leftist ideology, the kind that is espoused by nominally socialist political parties.
Yet the inverse is not true; institutional leftists rarely have much or any conception of what radical leftism actually looks like, and often repeat right-wing narratives about it. Why is that?
When actually *talking to* radical leftists, I pretty consistently hear the same story too; they tried to get things done through institutional leftism, but at some point they got backstabbed by their supposed fellow leftists; who made a compromise before it was necessary, refused to give up on their own ableist policies, and so on.
It's not that radical leftists have not given the institutional left a chance; it's that they *have* done so, and discovered that any 'broad leftist coalition' was always going to be on the terms of the adversary (right-wingers, generally), and no matter how much effort they put into the cause, they could never depend on receiving any support for their needs in return, and the only actual solidarity can be found with other radical leftists.
The institutional leftists would always be the first ones out the door when things heated up, both literally and metaphorically.
In that context, why would you expect radical leftists to *want* to build coalitions with an unreliable coalition partner that ultimately simply will not care about the people on the margins? Someone they cannot rely on to have an actual spine and push for change? A coalition partner that declares the job done once a weak compromise has been made?
Ultimately, the first step for this is going to have to come from the institutional left; acknowledging that radical leftists are also people with legitimate grievances and needs, that need to be accounted for in the process as well. Until that happens, institutional leftism simply *will not* yield the incremental movement towards progress that it professes to provide, merely a superficial appearance of it.
politics, leftism
@sindarina (Sidenote: even just numerically speaking... if the radical left really is so relatively small, which we both seem to agree on, then it does not make much sense to me to attribute coalition failures to the smallest party of the two, with the least negotiating power. If the institutional left cannot push for progressive policy without the active support of radical leftists, that seems to me like an indictment of the institutional left more than anything.)
politics, leftism
@sindarina I mean, if that is your response to a number of concrete points of disagreement with supporting reasoning, then it is definitely proving *a* point, yes...
politics, leftism
@joepie91 Your response can basically be summed up as “it's not us, it's them! THEY need to change first!”, as though an ‘institutional left' is somehow separate from the radical left, instead of having way more overlap than we'd like to admit.
It signals that I cannot express concern about or offer criticism to that radical left without attaching a fully sourced paper detailing all the ways in which the ‘institutional left’ has failed people over the years, along with a stirring account of my lived experience.
More than one thing can be true at the same time, and criticism of one does not absolve the other.
politics, leftism
@sindarina That would be a perfectly fine argument if this had been merely about ways to improve things within the radical left. Because there are certainly problems - like I said, I'm usually the one working on building bridges. I frequently *am* criticizing internal problems within radical movements, and finding ways to address them.
But when you set the stage by claiming "our biggest enemy is ourselves, because we attack anyone not sufficiently radical", without any introspection about what those "attacks" actually are or why those criticisms are levied, then you already *start out* by framing this as an "us vs. them" issue, and then I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect a response that pushes back on that framing - which is what my reply was.
By all means, express actionable criticism about the radical left. But you don't need to throw the radical left under the bus in the process, nor do you need to imply that this is *the* singular or even primary cause for the failure of leftism (because it most assuredly is not).
Blaming the radical left for a broader movement failure does not improve anything; all it does is contribute to the exact same thing you are decrying here, it's just purity culture by a different purity metric.
politics, leftism
@joepie91 Thank you for proving my point 😜