You must pay attention to a very different Left than I do if you think they have "abandoned" class as a dimension of marginalization. It sounds like you're mad at a lot of Internet progressives who never identified as Leftists, and a handful of Twitter assholes. I don't think the balance has been correct (Freddie's theses seem correct to…
You must pay attention to a very different Left than I do if you think they have "abandoned" class as a dimension of marginalization. It sounds like you're mad at a lot of Internet progressives who never identified as Leftists, and a handful of Twitter assholes. I don't think the balance has been correct (Freddie's theses seem correct to me) but The Left is far larger than the one noisy Twitter group that is finding itself less and less powerful as that platform dies
"You must pay attention to a very different Left than I do if you think they have 'abandoned' class as a dimension of marginalization."
Probably. There are certainly many left-wing oriented groups. In fact, the whole Left-Right discourse can fairly be characterized in 2024 as FUBAR. (I'm confident this is by design, but I don't see a need to talk about that here.)
I would rather just go all the way back to origins, where, risking oversimplification, Left = equality (I think better expressed as 'fairness', but that's another philosophical discussion), and Right = freedom. These two components of a democracy that, with a little open-mindedness, one should see are *both necessary* for healthy societies. Which one is dominant at a point of time, and which one an individual will decide to promote as a participant in democracy, would, and should, vary over time, depending on how the structure of the society evolves. In Leftism's case, as it was, originally, about promoting equality among people, democracy, then, is at the very heart and/or foundation of Leftism.
So, what concerns me the most is the "Leftists" who find ways to grab power, nearly always *without* clear democratic support. In which case, of course, they defeat the entire purpose right out of the gate. I called them the "so-called 'Left' ", because they wear the current-majority mantels -- of the Democratic Party, of the academy, of the government bureaucracies, of the courts, etc. -- and have no interest whatsoever in the *necessarily-perpetual discovery and respect* of democratic will. Instead, they have ossified "answers" -- and they'll move heaven and earth to impose them. Hence the current madness, Wokism.
That's why I started with the complaint about Marx and followers, over more than a century and a half, who epitomize these pretenses with their claims to demand communism/socialism (to pull the mid-20th century civil rights phrase) "by any means necessary". This is the same movement applying in the US for decades, increasingly in more extreme and lawless fashion, yet with very little need for civil disobedience except at the beginnings of civil rights in 1950s-60s. Civil rights reform *was* majority-accepted by the mid-1960s after media coverage, unlike the extremes of Wokism today (which actually tried to emerge in mass media c.1990 but was beaten back for a time).
And, yes, it is this same population, the ones now wholly *in power*, who have abandoned class as a relevant dimension, while their "thought-leaders" try give it lip service now and then when pushed against a wall. Ordinarily, though, they happily play three-card monte with the words "race" and "class". Before launching into any even more long-winded exposition on that, I wanted first to clarify what I mean at first here by quote-Leftist-unquote.
There is too much to disagree with in your post to make discussion worthwhile I think. You seem to wholly conflate the entire band of ideologies left of, idk, George Bush as "the left" though that group of people has never broadly agreed on anything (and then seem to expand that group to include everyone "in power" and it's not clear if you just mean people on "the left" with power or literally everyone with power). The idea that equality and freedom are left and right domains, the idea that they are in some kind of inherent conflict, not really things I can agree with but certainly don't want to argue about. The idea that things are substantially different now than they were 50 years ago in regards to how politicians campaigned (I can't remember any politician in my lifetime who didn't "have all the answers" and that weren't just promising to make those things happen). The idea that "Civil rights reform *was* majority-accepted by the mid-1960s after media coverage" seems hand-wavy and ahistorical, the idea that the Civil Rights reform movement had "very little need for civil disobedience"... all in service of complaining about Wokism, undefined. Americans really like imaging politics as a balance between two extremes, and are eager to believe that simply being in between two extremes is prima-facie proof of the goodness or the rightness of the idea. That "moderation in all things" can apply just as easily to our politics as to eating chocolate or drinking alcohol. Seems silly to me, but is often asserted as so obvious as to be undebate-able.
You must pay attention to a very different Left than I do if you think they have "abandoned" class as a dimension of marginalization. It sounds like you're mad at a lot of Internet progressives who never identified as Leftists, and a handful of Twitter assholes. I don't think the balance has been correct (Freddie's theses seem correct to me) but The Left is far larger than the one noisy Twitter group that is finding itself less and less powerful as that platform dies
"You must pay attention to a very different Left than I do if you think they have 'abandoned' class as a dimension of marginalization."
Probably. There are certainly many left-wing oriented groups. In fact, the whole Left-Right discourse can fairly be characterized in 2024 as FUBAR. (I'm confident this is by design, but I don't see a need to talk about that here.)
I would rather just go all the way back to origins, where, risking oversimplification, Left = equality (I think better expressed as 'fairness', but that's another philosophical discussion), and Right = freedom. These two components of a democracy that, with a little open-mindedness, one should see are *both necessary* for healthy societies. Which one is dominant at a point of time, and which one an individual will decide to promote as a participant in democracy, would, and should, vary over time, depending on how the structure of the society evolves. In Leftism's case, as it was, originally, about promoting equality among people, democracy, then, is at the very heart and/or foundation of Leftism.
So, what concerns me the most is the "Leftists" who find ways to grab power, nearly always *without* clear democratic support. In which case, of course, they defeat the entire purpose right out of the gate. I called them the "so-called 'Left' ", because they wear the current-majority mantels -- of the Democratic Party, of the academy, of the government bureaucracies, of the courts, etc. -- and have no interest whatsoever in the *necessarily-perpetual discovery and respect* of democratic will. Instead, they have ossified "answers" -- and they'll move heaven and earth to impose them. Hence the current madness, Wokism.
That's why I started with the complaint about Marx and followers, over more than a century and a half, who epitomize these pretenses with their claims to demand communism/socialism (to pull the mid-20th century civil rights phrase) "by any means necessary". This is the same movement applying in the US for decades, increasingly in more extreme and lawless fashion, yet with very little need for civil disobedience except at the beginnings of civil rights in 1950s-60s. Civil rights reform *was* majority-accepted by the mid-1960s after media coverage, unlike the extremes of Wokism today (which actually tried to emerge in mass media c.1990 but was beaten back for a time).
And, yes, it is this same population, the ones now wholly *in power*, who have abandoned class as a relevant dimension, while their "thought-leaders" try give it lip service now and then when pushed against a wall. Ordinarily, though, they happily play three-card monte with the words "race" and "class". Before launching into any even more long-winded exposition on that, I wanted first to clarify what I mean at first here by quote-Leftist-unquote.
There is too much to disagree with in your post to make discussion worthwhile I think. You seem to wholly conflate the entire band of ideologies left of, idk, George Bush as "the left" though that group of people has never broadly agreed on anything (and then seem to expand that group to include everyone "in power" and it's not clear if you just mean people on "the left" with power or literally everyone with power). The idea that equality and freedom are left and right domains, the idea that they are in some kind of inherent conflict, not really things I can agree with but certainly don't want to argue about. The idea that things are substantially different now than they were 50 years ago in regards to how politicians campaigned (I can't remember any politician in my lifetime who didn't "have all the answers" and that weren't just promising to make those things happen). The idea that "Civil rights reform *was* majority-accepted by the mid-1960s after media coverage" seems hand-wavy and ahistorical, the idea that the Civil Rights reform movement had "very little need for civil disobedience"... all in service of complaining about Wokism, undefined. Americans really like imaging politics as a balance between two extremes, and are eager to believe that simply being in between two extremes is prima-facie proof of the goodness or the rightness of the idea. That "moderation in all things" can apply just as easily to our politics as to eating chocolate or drinking alcohol. Seems silly to me, but is often asserted as so obvious as to be undebate-able.
May I suggest you find the truth you can, then, because, mistakes or not, you won't convince me it is not there.