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Nov 14, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

So I have this very half-baked theory that links the current left-of-lib "why don't the democrats enact socialist policies that are transparently and perpetually contrary to their stated goals?" crowd with the ongoing - for lack of a better term - self-infantilization thing. By the "self-infantilization thing," I mean precisely the endless accommodation demanding you've written about in the past - the way it has become ever more empowering to insist one has no power. It extends far beyond disability/mental health spaces (where it is consistently most visible and most innovated) - and dovetails with the "you can never be a good man/white person/straight person/whatever so why try?" issue you've also touched on. The modern progressive or progressive-adjacent position is one of insistent helplessness. The disabled and mentally ill need the world constantly adjusted to their needs, including when those needs conflict with other people's needs - the most loudly helpless wins. Violence and political action and artistic movements and everything else that is committed by or mostly by people of color is actually the long arm of white supremacy. The European imperialists somehow taught the Japanese; without whitey, there was only ever helplessness. Trans people stage die-ins over books they don't like. I say this as a disabled (legally anyways - I'm really chronically ill) lesbian - these are communities that have my sympathy, but they are currently invested beyond measure in their despair. There is no action to be taken, only complaints to be filed. Somebody else must fix it, post-haste.

It's LAZY! I think it's truly lazy. I want to be more clever and interesting, but I truly think an intense and abiding laziness grips the current progressive twitter intelligentsia. What other explanation is there for insisting that things like being nice to your friends or washing your daughter's hair is "[emotional] labor"? What other explanation is there for the waves of people who come out to say that they HAVE to cross the picket lines when Uber/Lyft/InstaCart/Amazon etc. strikes, because they're disabled and bedbound and helpless and alone and weak? What other explanation is there for the scores of grown adults insisting things like replying to emails or doing the dishes drains them to nothing due to ADHD? (This particular mutation of ADHD, of course, never strikes the working poor.) I think it's the failure of Occupy - its lack of central organizing, goals, or ACTION beyond public sitting - writ large (which was certainly borne out by the 2020 "uprisings"). It's baffling and of course only doomed to fail.

Of COURSE such people are entranced by semi-radical sounding promises from democrats on the campaign trail. They don't WANT a leftist coalition to accomplish their goals, they want the democrats to do it for them. Of COURSE they insist Kamala Harris, fighting forest fires with slave labor, is a symbol of imperialism toppled - they don't want to do the work! I know I sound like a whiny old man but I'm 29 and have occupied progressive spaces since 2011 - I went to an extremely liberal artsy liberal arts college in New York, I attended graduate school in a very liberal field (education) in NYC, I'm a teacher in the same city.

I think it's bizarre. But there's a prevailing sense that endless self-infantilization will somehow work in the end, and it stresses me out. I know this is disorganized and more than a little mean - I'm supposed to be grading and haven't slept much. But I think there's a total paralysis of actual ACTION in the modern progressive semi-left (and left!!). It's all about reaction - defend her, get her fired, etc. - without a plan, without a goal, without a sense that if we want something done we might just have to actually do it.

IDK where I'm going with this. Hopefully it's semi-coherent.

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author

The "Will Pencil" mistake in the email sent out was a vestige of an earlier draft did not get corrected somehow. Sorry about that.

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I went to college at the same time as Freddie, was heavily involved the anti-war movement, and want to (somewhat) challenge his assertion that the campus radicals were correct about Iraq. Yes, in the binary yes-no choice, the radicals were 100% right to be against it. Much of center-left establishment disgraced itself by supporting an insane, ruinous misadventure.

But the arguments from the radicals were unfocused, ideological, conspiracy-laden, and ultimately unpersuasive even to many who were hostile or skeptical re: the war. What should have been an easy anti war argument always devolved into crushing capitalism, Palestine, Halliburton, and freeing Mumia (I lived in Philly). I wish I were exaggerating, but this happened at literally every rally. And unsurprisingly, it put off a lot of normie liberals who disliked the war, but didn’t think its most visible, vocal opponents were making a lot of sense.

So yes, the war was unequivocally wrong. But the radicals weren’t right, and it cost us all.

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I was a senior in college during the 1992 Clinton Bush election. Among the big group of people I ran around with, I was the only person that paid attention to politics and that was passing at best. Literally, we never talked about politics. 80% of the people were lucky if they could explain the difference between a republican and a democrat let alone what side they came down on. Nerds and policy wonks watched CNN. I met a guy at a bar that was a hard core lefty (I was conservative leaning) and we totally hit it off because I came across somebody who at least paid attention.

Fast forward to today and my fifth grader gets in political arguments at the lunch table. I think in America, we just put too much faith in people that are far too ordinary to compel the change we would like to see, whatever that might be.

It's funny to read this column because it reads just like complaints on the right. Complaints about "establishment" "RINO" etc. Both sides of the argument are completely convinced that the other side is far better at outfoxing their side. The reality is that the only thing that really ever changes in this country is the rhetoric and your tax rate.

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I was one of those Hillary democrats who hated the "Bernie bros." I left the party in 2020. Here's the thing: I'd be all in on everything people like AOC are doing. Or even Bernie. But my problem is that it always has to be on a national level. The problems for people in this country are different per states. The Democrats don't seem to care about the problems of the Black community in, say, St. Louis but they're all up in Yale University's grill about antiracism. That I don't get. I'd be all in if they focused their efforts in places that really need the help IMO like Georgia or Chicago. Or even New York. Or hell, here in California. If you drive down Laurel Canyon into the valley it doesn't look like the blue state it's supposed to be. I'm not even talking about homelessness, which is everywhere, but the working class poor who live in crap neighborhoods. It's not that different from the divide in New Orleans between the Garden District and across town. So in red states, you figure, you'd expect that. But what about blue states? Why doesn't Gavin Newsom care about poverty in this very rich state? That is the part I find frustrating about the Democrats.

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I think your essays are way more important than your vote. For example my views on mental illness have been expanded greatly because of you. If you think of our system as bottom-up, not top-down, than your observations of the differences between radicals and Dems makes complete sense. The Democrats are a political party, they are constricted to winning elections, they do not, and can not act as a force for change. They are not leaders, and I really don't want them to be. They are lead by, well, us. Change our minds and you'll change the actions of the D's and the R's.

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Well said and in my view correct on all points.

I loved this exhortation, to: "Take your own perspective seriously." It's a discordance I cannot get past in many movements - in most Christian-political fusion movements I grew up around, and more recently in BLM and various other "Great Awokening" movements.

If you actually believed in our corruption and the supremacy and implacability of the forces of evil/greed/lust/racism, you'd not adopt the strategy you're devoted yourself to - of insisting you can prevail by electoral means, with establishment support and righteous contempt for those who doubt or question you.

It's not an unattractive or even necessarily wrong approach. But it is a triumphantalist one, and inconsistent with what the activists and preachers claimed to believe and to have based their theory on

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While I agree with the central point of this post (social media proximity breeds conflict and close losses breed disappointment), I think the following is ungenerous:

"What I find so strange about the left-of-liberals of the world is that they constantly say, “The Democrats are so feckless and corrupt! Why won’t they support my radical agenda?” And the obvious answer is because they’re feckless and corrupt, dummy!"

I mean...maybe a lot of establishment Democrats sincerely believe France-levels of taxation and government interference lead to France-like outcomes. Maybe it's not fecklessness and corruption, but actual belief that pre-Thatcher/Reagan policies had swung too far to be globally competitive and a return to them is a mistake, hence the focus on more symbolic/shambolic change and hot button cultural issues.

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I think the 2008 election was a factor in this, too. For one thing, I think a lot of actual leftists were genuinely excited about Barack Obama for a minute there, so just as social media was bringing us all together in the same room, we briefly seemed to all be on the same side...which made the inevitable falling-out all the worse when (if you were radical) Obama turned out to be just another useless establishment Democrat, or (if you were establishment) the far leftists turned out to be whiny purists more interested in being right than winning. But I suspect the old-school leftists who were briefly in on Obama aren't the real problem here.

Because the other, maybe bigger, thing is that 2008 gave us a different kind of left-of-liberal. My theory goes like this: Barack Obama was so much cooler and more exciting than the politicians people were used to, and politics quickly became a lot more hip (I distinctly remember feeling like a weird nerd for being a young person who was into politics in 2006...and then just a few years later that was the norm). So now that it was cool to be “into politics,” we had a huge influx of people who were INTO politics, but who weren't necessarily INVOLVED in politics (because the actual business of knocking on doors and making phone calls and spending long hours at city hall or the state capitol really sucks most of the time). They cared a lot and they posted a lot, but they didn’t have any grounding in the history and mechanics of how politics actually happens. They were political hobbyists. So, when Obama won the presidency and then did not achieve universal healthcare and an end to all wars, the hobbyists were left disappointed in the outcome without really understanding how we got there. Boring old electoral politics and legislative wrangling had failed to produce the results they incorrectly believed were within reach, so the hobbyists thought, “Well then, the solution must be something more radical.” So they started talking like the old-school leftists, but they were never the real deal. Their political education began in 2008 and has been conducted mostly on social media. Most of them have no actual skin in the game in terms of devoting their careers or spare time to political organizing, but they do get rewarded on social media for performing their political values… to the point that yelling at the Democratic Party for not being better is probably an end in itself for a lot of them. It’s no wonder their politics are incoherent.

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"We’re a 50-50 Democrat/Republican nation among consistent voters, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the third of Americans who don’t vote are some sort of radical bloc, and the Republican party is much more uniformly conservative than the Democratic party is uniformly progressive."

Holy buried lede, Batman!

The reason mainstream Democrats don't support a radical leftist agenda is not that they're feckless and corrupt; it's that the first job of a politician is to get him/herself elected, just as the first job of any organism is to survive long enough to reproduce. And outside of a few far-left districts, a radical "let's burn the whole evil system to the ground" agenda DOES NOT WIN ELECTIONS. There is a meaningful difference between "I'm unhappy with the status quo" and "I'm willing to burn the system to the ground and trust that something better will emerge from the ashes," and the former is much, much more common than the latter. Want radical change? Convince the average voter that radical change will improve their life.

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I think Sasha Stone's comment from a few minutes ago has an important idea. I would phrase it as "The progressives keep wanting to elect a monarch who will be enlightened and lead us to the Promised Land." That doesn't work. It never works. Social change comes from the streets and has to be implemented IN SPITE of a corrupt system. Even if you were able to elect the enlightened monarch, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So leaders with enough power to change the corrupt system would become corrupt quite quickly.

As Sasha states, and Freddie has stated in other posts as well, progressives seem to be all fired up about getting change on the national level, but ignore poverty and injustice in their own locale's. Or they live in communities that have no connection with poor communities.

I recall Howard Dean emphasizing the need for local action. Get involved in your community, or nearby communities. Run for school board, or city council. I tel people to find ways to help other people locally and then take action. Or to find other people who are doing good in their community and support them.

I think a metaphor might be. All we can do is light our candle. If we all do that then we will shed a lot of light. However, progressive are all ignoring their candles and trying to start a bonfire. It won't work. The wood is either too wet, or the bonfire will just cause a conflagration.

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Nov 14, 2022·edited Nov 14, 2022

I think there are two related dynamics you don't touch on that are important.

The first is that the online leftists you identify practice a sort of anti-politics. They want want (and in some cases seem to *expect* power. But of course in a democratic system, power is attained by winning elections, which in turn is done via coalition building and compromise and persuasion and all the grimy day-to-day work of politics that this set almost completely eschews.

The second is that this set almost completely eschews politics at the sub-national level. If you trace the rise of conservative hegemony in the Republican party it's striking the degree to which it was a decades-long project that worked at the grassroots level. It wasn't grassroots in the sense that it was a from-the-bottom project, but rather in the sense that conservatives sought to win elections at the state and local level and then leverage those wins upward. You simply do not see this happening (for the most part) with the Very Online left; they get excited and activated for the quadrennial Bernie campaign and then maybe a handful of high-profile midterm Senate campaigns and... that's it. In the intervening years it's just endless complaining about the party not just handing them power.

As someone who sees myself as an ideological ally the disdain toward actual politics is incredibly frustrating to me.

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"The Democrats" is doing a lot of work here. I've had this discussion a lot within DSA, and it's worth being explicit about what you mean by the term. If you're writing off the 81 million who voted for Biden, you should give up on any hope off a mass movement. If you're talking about Democratic officeholders (or the kinds of people who get elected as Democrats), there's clear evidence that can be changed as dramatic realignments have occurred after major changes like the New Deal or the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of US thought writing off the Democratic Party as irredeemable is dominated by Chicago 1968 which operated under completely different rules that we've dealt with since Citizens United in 2010.

Any national political movement is in danger of either being "in thrall to moneyed interests", crushed by them, or both. Both BLM and the environmental movement have obvious examples of each - people who ended up in mansions and people who ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Avoiding the Democratic Party doesn't protect you from that except to the extent that you remain too small to ever be a threat.

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My position is that any political party with a serious interest in building a self-sustaining popular movement outside of the Democrat-GOP duopoly has to make ranked-choice voting its top priority.

In order to achieve this single-issue goal, the construction of a coalition of the disaffected across ideological lines is practically required. The coalition can (and almost certainly will) disband once the policy goal is achieved. But so what. What the disparate outsider parties and their candidates will gain in common is increased recognition as an alternative, and the prospect of increased leverage over (at least one of) the two established parties. Leverage from the outside. The hope of effective leverage from within the two parties is an illusion. Under a Duopoly, the only standard required to be competitive is to be slightly less unappealing than the opposition party. Given that low bar of requirement for success, entire categories of policy can be ruled off the table of discussion by the two permanent party establishments. There are public policy challenges that don't even receive cursory notice. (To say nothing of action. Literally.)

Without ranked-choice voting, outsider political parties are stuck with a ceiling of perhaps 2% appeal in national elections. There are exceptions, but they're so exceptional that their impact is minimal. The only avenue toward breaching that ceiling has been a personalist, candidate-centered movement. That isn't to be confused with a coherent, broad-based popular movement. Personalist politics are chiefly reliant on the Charisma of one ordained leader-hero. In the modern era, as a rule self-funded, to boot. I mean, fuck that. I have no interest in the ascendancy of a political candidate on that basis.

I know there's skepticism of ranked-choice, but practically all of the outright opposition I've observed has been poorly informed (or disingenuous.) Americans are used to viewing third parties as Spoilers, of course- so consequently most of them don't quite get that one of the merits of ranked-choice voting is that it gets rid of Spoilers, ensuring a true majoritarian outcome. The record of past history also depicts outsider parties as flashes in the pan that occasionally put up numbers as single-election outliers, more about a given candidate than about a policy platform. That's because the status quo structure of the ballot practically mandates that role. What ranked-choice voting provides is the opportunity for outside parties to build an enduring movement that encourages the possibility of charting increases in its voter appeal over time, on the basis of results showing up over a series of elections. That in turn encourages the outsiders to craft their policy appeal on a basis that elevates practical measures over rigid fealty to ideology. A shift holding the promise that both the Greens and the Libertarians would be encouraged to get rid of the Batshit policy planks that have always undercut the more sensible aspects of the platforms of both parties. You know, the Batshit parts? the magic-wand recommendations that bear no relationship to real-world constraints, and instead work as a litmus test for membership in an ideological cult.

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I think politically, we would disagree greatly, but on the fundamentals, you are incredibly spot on.

This however--"the best thing would be if the Democrats worked as hard to placate the hard left as the Republicans work to placate the hard right"--if you actually think the Republicans are "placating" the hard right, you need to go read more conservatives. The Republicans "placate" their donor class just like the Democrats do. (Why do you suppose no one ever really does anything about immigration or why the party that was home to general isolationist feeling ended up being the party of wars starting with Bush?) In other words, those of us on the fringes of the parties and outside the parties have far more in common than you think. We all feel wildly disaffected yet we go on trying anyway.

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As a libertarian, I share your sentiments about the choices we're forced to make. I vote in every election, have since 1976, and its a rare event where I actually vote "for" somebody.

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