I cannot stress enough that I regularly interact with leftists who are just as confused, obtuse, and badly defended as the theoretical leftist here. This is a parody; it is not an exaggeration.
I cannot stress enough that I regularly interact with leftists who are just as confused, obtuse, and badly defended as the theoretical leftist here. This is a parody; it is not an exaggeration.
This is pretty much the owl meme in political form. Yes, in your fantasy world of glorious revolution, impossible things would become possible and the world would be reborn. Tug tug tug.
I don't think a gotcha is the point of the piece. The payoff is at the end and that isn't really an attack on a position (because positions are completely superfluous now)--it's a (to my mind) acute bit of insight into the socio-economic class that puts up "In this house we believe in blah blah blah" signs.
Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic just had a similar epiphany when he wrote about the inherent contradiction in PMC households that claim to support refugees but live in neighborhoods that said refugees are completely priced out of. Of course action doesn't follow "principle" because principle was never the point.
I don't think it's particularly rhetorically beautiful to say F = ma. But it's just true.
EDIT: although the conciseness of that formulation given the tremendous abstract concepts behind it is admittedly what makes physics beautiful to a lot of people. Where's Mark S these days?
I think a simple statement of fact should be enough to convince--if convincing is the goal--regardless of whether or not the rhetoric delivering it is "persuasive".
Swift said something like "Reason will never convince someone if they didn't arrive at their position by reason in the first place."
Personally I do conceptualize a neutral, open minded reader looking over what I write. But what would that hypothetical neutral, open minded individual think of this woke stuff? They would have turned against it years ago. At this point there's no need to convince, just to observe and examine.
I don't feel any particular need to cape for our host, but I do find this confusing. This is not his standard piece, but he writes in fairly wide variety of subjects and styles. I don't have any particular problem with saying that something didn't work for you, but you seem to be saying that he shouldn't write like this because he's too 'somber' which I think is just a self-reinforcing problem if that's not what he wants to be?
I just came to say that I've never encountered such a person, that it's such an exaggeration that it didn't resonate. But I clearly don't get out enough, or am stunted by not using Twitter.
I don't get the "but they're mentally ill!" objection, honestly. So they're mentally ill--if they bash you over the head with something heavy, you're still grievously injured and possibly dead. Why should their putative mental condition exempt them from consequences?
This piece works for me precisely because of Freddie's familiarity with these spaces. I trust him. For those accusing him of not showing the nuances of the social justice set, that's because he isn't trying to represent those with nuanced beliefs.
This is about a specific type of person who espouses certain ideologies without waver because they realize the currency that accrues to them and powers them to elite status. Its value is in how well it articulates the psychology driving their statements and symbols of activism. But I'm not beyond hoping that someone of that set could read this, recognize themselves, and maybe work to be less of a moralizing pill and more of someone who's willing to see their neighbors as worthy of political dialogue and take the occasional half win for what they deeply believe in.
It's frightening to me that this is more than caricature, that this ignorant, cynical POV is the ascendant approach to... everything, and especially gaining power. There's even less of a clear road back to empirical reality for these people than for the know-nothings of the right.
I consider myself a green version of a Red Tory, and I never expected to miss the old social democrats so much. Their beliefs were sufficiently logically consistent to consider as plausible and defensible without cynicism, even if I didn't find their preferences preferable to me. Now, words don't even have moderately durable meaning, beliefs require neither logic nor empirical data, emotion is all.
I interacted with these kinds of people for years until I fled the scene with what felt like my few remaining brain cells. This is one of the reasons I value reading Freddie's work. He expresses so well what is going on out there.
The final paragraph from A in which they describe their process of (for want of a better term) political development touches on something that has exercised my mind in recent months, in the Australian context. In various forums I encounter people aligned with the contemporary Left who do not seem to have developed their politics by thinking them through from first principles into an articulated political framework, and have also clearly not been encouraged/helped/educated to do so in whatever Left space they have joined. The impression I have is that they have joined a particular political group (say, our Greens party) on the basis of concern about a particular issue, and while the group does provide training of various kinds (for example, in activist and campaigning skills), it does not provide spaces for wider discussions about analyses of society, theories of how social change occurs, strategies for achieving social change, how to resolve contradictions between prima facie legitimate social justice or human rights claims of different oppressed groups, etc. I have to say that spaces on the Australian Left are also not immune from the obscurantism that Freddie has identified in his critique, from a couple of years back, of "social justice movement" politics. The result is a lot of activists who don't seem to have developed beyond a single interest/single identity level of political consciousness, and who are prone to the sort of contradictions exhibited by A in the post.
Back in the day, if a person was motivated to apply to join the (now disbanded) Communist Party of Australia, it wasn't an option for them to become a party member while remaining at a single issue/single identity level of political development. Upon applying for membership, they would be issued by an organiser or Branch Secretary with copies of the Party Program, Constitution and current policy documents, asked to take those documents away and study them, then come back for a further discussion with the organiser/secretary, and then a branch, about their understanding of the Party Program, etc, their views on it, and how they saw themselves contributing as a party member. After this process the Branch would vote on whether to admit them as a member. Then there would be various educational activities, discussion opportunities, etc, for members to further develop their political understanding.
I don't wish to suggest that the model described in the previous paragraph (which is outlined in the CPA Constitution as it was 40 years ago) can or should be simply replicated in Left spaces in 2023, but there need to be processes of some sort for empowering activists to move towards a more holistic and universalistic political consciousness, to be able to develop well-reasoned positions on issues and to be able to argue for and defend those positions in the face of the loudest and most emotive voices.
I'm in the Queensland branch of the Greens, which over the last few years has deliberately adopted a strategy of putting aside all the online lefty bullshit and speaking to normal people about their immediate material interests. Less defund the police, more dental into Medicare. The result is that we've gotten way better at winning elections.
Part of the strategy is that we train our volunteers to have normal conversations with normal people about normal things, and make sure they spend a lot of time doing it. The effect of this, hopefully, is to make everyone less online and force people to develop a more coherent populist politics. Ideally I'd also like to get more people to read Marx and think in a more structured materialist way about how the world works - and there have been some efforts to develop a program of political education along these lines.
(Important to mention here that you don't have to agree with Marx, we're not trying to brainwash people into Communist secret agents - it's just important to read him.)
But one of the issues is that you get a lot of pushback when you tell activists they're wrong, or that they haven't thought about the issues in a sufficiently developed way. There's a moment of confrontation where people's instincts to engage in smug online memeing come into conflict with what is practically useful, i.e. talking to construction workers and single mums about how free dental care would improve their lives.
If you're actually trying to be good at politics and win elections, you are eventually forced to have this argument with yourself, recognise that your original position was wrong and move past it. But it's difficult to admit this and to let go of your superiority. For a lot of people it's easier just to give up on trying to win elections and decide the whole program was doomed from the beginning.
It's been very frustrating to me to watch the rest of the global left just give up. My experience of socialist organisation has been that you follow a relatively simple procedure, you knock on a bunch of doors, you put the voters' interests ahead of your own, you win every time and it rules. The basic left-populist strategy. It seems like e.g. the American left has simply decided not to try because it would rob them of the simple pleasure of sneering at people on Twitter.
The American left is in constant tension between the practical necessity of outreach and organizing, and the social norm within left spaces to privilege the preferences and claims of people based on their identity and feelings, where a personтАЩs moral authority is tied to their social position. This allows activists who don't want to tolerate problematic views to claim that doing so is incompatible with creating a left movement that puts the safety and prerogatives of the marginalized people within it, first.
Unfortunately this is in direct conflict with the tried-and-true practices of effective persuasion of people who donтАЩt already agree with you, who may be problematic when you encounter them. In the hierarchy of moral priorities of left culture, deference to the marginalized will always rank higher than any argument to sacrifice that in the interests of practical goal attainment.
This is how the most aggrieved, emotionally sensitive people, and not coincidentally the most online, wind up dictating the norms for everyone - their perspective, and sensibilities, will always take precedence as a matter of axiomatic principle.
Ironically the constant conflict necessary to enforce this idea of "safety" makes those groups feel a lot more hazardous.
There's this notion that everyone should be an activist, that it's somehow equivalent to being a good person, but I think actually most of us are crap at it and should stay on the periphery. That would include anyone who is so sensitive that they can't be exposed to disagreement. There are a lot of ways to make the world better besides political activism.
It is also in direct conflict with what people from many of the marginalized communities in question would ask for, if you genuinely let them speak for themselves.
As a lefty-sympathetic but non-joiner living in Stephen Bates' Brisbane electorate, can I just say I'm impressed with what you guys have been doing here? I hope to see this model succeed.
I cannot stress enough that I regularly interact with leftists who are just as confused, obtuse, and badly defended as the theoretical leftist here. This is a parody; it is not an exaggeration.
This is pretty much the owl meme in political form. Yes, in your fantasy world of glorious revolution, impossible things would become possible and the world would be reborn. Tug tug tug.
I don't think a gotcha is the point of the piece. The payoff is at the end and that isn't really an attack on a position (because positions are completely superfluous now)--it's a (to my mind) acute bit of insight into the socio-economic class that puts up "In this house we believe in blah blah blah" signs.
Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic just had a similar epiphany when he wrote about the inherent contradiction in PMC households that claim to support refugees but live in neighborhoods that said refugees are completely priced out of. Of course action doesn't follow "principle" because principle was never the point.
I don't think it's particularly rhetorically beautiful to say F = ma. But it's just true.
EDIT: although the conciseness of that formulation given the tremendous abstract concepts behind it is admittedly what makes physics beautiful to a lot of people. Where's Mark S these days?
No way, he decamped to his own stack?
How did you find it?
I think a simple statement of fact should be enough to convince--if convincing is the goal--regardless of whether or not the rhetoric delivering it is "persuasive".
Swift said something like "Reason will never convince someone if they didn't arrive at their position by reason in the first place."
Personally I do conceptualize a neutral, open minded reader looking over what I write. But what would that hypothetical neutral, open minded individual think of this woke stuff? They would have turned against it years ago. At this point there's no need to convince, just to observe and examine.
There's a reason "A Modest Proposal" is widely taught, regardless of how many were actually convinced.
I don't feel any particular need to cape for our host, but I do find this confusing. This is not his standard piece, but he writes in fairly wide variety of subjects and styles. I don't have any particular problem with saying that something didn't work for you, but you seem to be saying that he shouldn't write like this because he's too 'somber' which I think is just a self-reinforcing problem if that's not what he wants to be?
I don't think the tone of this piece is ironic or detached, or 'nothing matters' it's scathingly mocking, which strikes me as a different thing.
I just came to say that I've never encountered such a person, that it's such an exaggeration that it didn't resonate. But I clearly don't get out enough, or am stunted by not using Twitter.
I don't get the "but they're mentally ill!" objection, honestly. So they're mentally ill--if they bash you over the head with something heavy, you're still grievously injured and possibly dead. Why should their putative mental condition exempt them from consequences?
I've been working in New York City activist spaces for the last six years
This piece works for me precisely because of Freddie's familiarity with these spaces. I trust him. For those accusing him of not showing the nuances of the social justice set, that's because he isn't trying to represent those with nuanced beliefs.
This is about a specific type of person who espouses certain ideologies without waver because they realize the currency that accrues to them and powers them to elite status. Its value is in how well it articulates the psychology driving their statements and symbols of activism. But I'm not beyond hoping that someone of that set could read this, recognize themselves, and maybe work to be less of a moralizing pill and more of someone who's willing to see their neighbors as worthy of political dialogue and take the occasional half win for what they deeply believe in.
Lord, I'm so sorry. The therapy bills must be eating you alive.
It's frightening to me that this is more than caricature, that this ignorant, cynical POV is the ascendant approach to... everything, and especially gaining power. There's even less of a clear road back to empirical reality for these people than for the know-nothings of the right.
I consider myself a green version of a Red Tory, and I never expected to miss the old social democrats so much. Their beliefs were sufficiently logically consistent to consider as plausible and defensible without cynicism, even if I didn't find their preferences preferable to me. Now, words don't even have moderately durable meaning, beliefs require neither logic nor empirical data, emotion is all.
You could definitely have this conversation in Oakland
Yes, and this conversation made me think immediately of Pamela Price and her apologists.
I interacted with these kinds of people for years until I fled the scene with what felt like my few remaining brain cells. This is one of the reasons I value reading Freddie's work. He expresses so well what is going on out there.
The final paragraph from A in which they describe their process of (for want of a better term) political development touches on something that has exercised my mind in recent months, in the Australian context. In various forums I encounter people aligned with the contemporary Left who do not seem to have developed their politics by thinking them through from first principles into an articulated political framework, and have also clearly not been encouraged/helped/educated to do so in whatever Left space they have joined. The impression I have is that they have joined a particular political group (say, our Greens party) on the basis of concern about a particular issue, and while the group does provide training of various kinds (for example, in activist and campaigning skills), it does not provide spaces for wider discussions about analyses of society, theories of how social change occurs, strategies for achieving social change, how to resolve contradictions between prima facie legitimate social justice or human rights claims of different oppressed groups, etc. I have to say that spaces on the Australian Left are also not immune from the obscurantism that Freddie has identified in his critique, from a couple of years back, of "social justice movement" politics. The result is a lot of activists who don't seem to have developed beyond a single interest/single identity level of political consciousness, and who are prone to the sort of contradictions exhibited by A in the post.
Back in the day, if a person was motivated to apply to join the (now disbanded) Communist Party of Australia, it wasn't an option for them to become a party member while remaining at a single issue/single identity level of political development. Upon applying for membership, they would be issued by an organiser or Branch Secretary with copies of the Party Program, Constitution and current policy documents, asked to take those documents away and study them, then come back for a further discussion with the organiser/secretary, and then a branch, about their understanding of the Party Program, etc, their views on it, and how they saw themselves contributing as a party member. After this process the Branch would vote on whether to admit them as a member. Then there would be various educational activities, discussion opportunities, etc, for members to further develop their political understanding.
I don't wish to suggest that the model described in the previous paragraph (which is outlined in the CPA Constitution as it was 40 years ago) can or should be simply replicated in Left spaces in 2023, but there need to be processes of some sort for empowering activists to move towards a more holistic and universalistic political consciousness, to be able to develop well-reasoned positions on issues and to be able to argue for and defend those positions in the face of the loudest and most emotive voices.
I'm in the Queensland branch of the Greens, which over the last few years has deliberately adopted a strategy of putting aside all the online lefty bullshit and speaking to normal people about their immediate material interests. Less defund the police, more dental into Medicare. The result is that we've gotten way better at winning elections.
Part of the strategy is that we train our volunteers to have normal conversations with normal people about normal things, and make sure they spend a lot of time doing it. The effect of this, hopefully, is to make everyone less online and force people to develop a more coherent populist politics. Ideally I'd also like to get more people to read Marx and think in a more structured materialist way about how the world works - and there have been some efforts to develop a program of political education along these lines.
(Important to mention here that you don't have to agree with Marx, we're not trying to brainwash people into Communist secret agents - it's just important to read him.)
But one of the issues is that you get a lot of pushback when you tell activists they're wrong, or that they haven't thought about the issues in a sufficiently developed way. There's a moment of confrontation where people's instincts to engage in smug online memeing come into conflict with what is practically useful, i.e. talking to construction workers and single mums about how free dental care would improve their lives.
If you're actually trying to be good at politics and win elections, you are eventually forced to have this argument with yourself, recognise that your original position was wrong and move past it. But it's difficult to admit this and to let go of your superiority. For a lot of people it's easier just to give up on trying to win elections and decide the whole program was doomed from the beginning.
It's been very frustrating to me to watch the rest of the global left just give up. My experience of socialist organisation has been that you follow a relatively simple procedure, you knock on a bunch of doors, you put the voters' interests ahead of your own, you win every time and it rules. The basic left-populist strategy. It seems like e.g. the American left has simply decided not to try because it would rob them of the simple pleasure of sneering at people on Twitter.
The American left is in constant tension between the practical necessity of outreach and organizing, and the social norm within left spaces to privilege the preferences and claims of people based on their identity and feelings, where a personтАЩs moral authority is tied to their social position. This allows activists who don't want to tolerate problematic views to claim that doing so is incompatible with creating a left movement that puts the safety and prerogatives of the marginalized people within it, first.
Unfortunately this is in direct conflict with the tried-and-true practices of effective persuasion of people who donтАЩt already agree with you, who may be problematic when you encounter them. In the hierarchy of moral priorities of left culture, deference to the marginalized will always rank higher than any argument to sacrifice that in the interests of practical goal attainment.
This is how the most aggrieved, emotionally sensitive people, and not coincidentally the most online, wind up dictating the norms for everyone - their perspective, and sensibilities, will always take precedence as a matter of axiomatic principle.
Ironically the constant conflict necessary to enforce this idea of "safety" makes those groups feel a lot more hazardous.
There's this notion that everyone should be an activist, that it's somehow equivalent to being a good person, but I think actually most of us are crap at it and should stay on the periphery. That would include anyone who is so sensitive that they can't be exposed to disagreement. There are a lot of ways to make the world better besides political activism.
It is also in direct conflict with what people from many of the marginalized communities in question would ask for, if you genuinely let them speak for themselves.
As a lefty-sympathetic but non-joiner living in Stephen Bates' Brisbane electorate, can I just say I'm impressed with what you guys have been doing here? I hope to see this model succeed.
Thanks man. It fucking rules, you should come out for a door knock sometime