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After 15+ years of being involved in far left/rad left/woke left/whatever you want to call it left organizing and activism, I walked away from basically my entire social circle and 90% of my friends over this issue. I don’t think I’m particularly valuable as an activist (I was only ever the person who took the notes and made the coffee, and I was happy being that person), but I do think that my story isn’t crazy unusual, and I think that maybe the people engaging in this sort of craziness should think a little more about how many more of the note-takers and coffee-makers of the world the left really can afford to lose.

When I try to tell this story I get two common reactions. One is the motte and bailey: “no one” is making the crazy arguments I cite to, and I must be either stupid or deluded to think that they are.

The other is a No True Scotsman argument: I must not have really been committed to any of it in the first place. I was secretly conservative all along!

What actually happened was that the craziness of much of the rhetoric started me off with questioning my entire belief structure.

Much like a fundamentalist Christian might start asking themselves whether Noah *really* took two of every kind of animal onto a literal ark that floated on the face of the earth for however many days (and if so where did they store all the food???), and find that one question leads to another and suddenly the entire edifice of their faith has been lost, I found myself asking whether it was *really* my internalized privilege and white fragility that made me want to cry when I was called out in front of 300 people for mixing up the words systemic and systematic, and from there I found the entire structure of belief collapsing.

Some of my beliefs have been retained to be sure, since I did in fact sincerely believe much of it: I would like to see higher caps on immigration from Central America, as a random example.

But I can’t imagine ever being able to actually work on the issue with lefty activists ever again because the degree of purity testing is so high. Everyone is an activist for everything and wants to test everyone else on the subject, so I doubt I could attend an organizational meeting on immigration policy without being required to nod along with all sorts of opinions I no longer hold.

I confine my volunteering to soup kitchens etc these days, which is fine, and again it’s not like I think I am some terrible loss to activism; I just took the notes and made the coffee.

But it seems significant to me that I was driven out, first because it happened to me and I lost a lot of friends and I’m not over it yet, but also because if you can drive out a fifteen year note-taking veteran, who else are you driving out, or never bringing in? Is this really the way to change the world?

And because I do still care about a lot of the concrete goals, I possess a fury born of heartbreak that the only responses I typically get are either pretending that nothing untoward is happening, or suggesting I must have been a cuckoo in the nest all along.

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founding

“Abolish the family” might sound like something that will never happen (because it won’t happen) but some activists on the left are increasingly hostile to parents / parenting in a way that voters notice and loathe. I’ve been thinking about what happened in the Virginia election, especially after reading Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Loudon County – parents were shut out and demonized by school officials, and they were pissed and voted for Republicans.

I’ve also been troubled by the story of 2 teachers in California who bragged about the tactics they used for their LGBTQ club at their middle school (and have since been suspended from the club pending an investigation). The short version is that people are angry because they stalked the kids’ online activity to recruit members, and because of their efforts to conceal kids’ participation from parents. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Two-California-teachers-were-secretly-recorded-16732562.php

As a gay person, I’m obviously sympathetic to adolescents who are afraid to tell their parents they might be queer. Supportive teachers meant a lot to me and my queer friends. So I’m generally supportive of teachers providing a safe environment and not tattling to parents.

But what bothers me is how these teachers seemed to relish building a secret community that shut parents out. They didn’t encourage any kids to talk to their parents (surely not every single one was abusive?) They sound like they’re enjoying the fact that kids confide in them instead of Mom and Dad, because they get to feel morally superior and they don’t have to worry about anyone challenging their amateur diagnoses of troubled children.

Parents aren’t wrong to think some on the left are actively working to undermine them. When the family is perceived as a problem (parents aren’t woke) some activists are happy to sideline them in favor of their politics. “Abolish the family” won’t happen like “abolish the police” won’t happen, but the slogan reminds voters of real things going on that they hate.

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Much of the sturm and drang over popularism (and many other issues) seems to stem from a desire in parts of the woke left to hold the following three ideas simultaneously:

1. The only legitimate governance is democratic governance, informed by the voice of a majority of the people.

2. A majority (or at least a very large, significant minority) of the voting populace is racist.

3. Racists are inherently illegitimate and don't deserve a voice.

This leads to an implicit assumption that the racists can and should be exiled, and once this happens, finally a majority will support the right policies. Popularism provokes anger by basically pointing out that this is not actually an option

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Abolish the family (no matter what it “actually means” or whatever) is one of those catchphrases that to me says “you need therapy, not a political platform.”

If “all” it means is being able to choose your own family whether related by blood or not, well people already do that all the time. If it means creating your own domestic unit and having a non-traditional support structure, well people do that too. If it means providing a strong social safety net through policy, well just say that (and people already are saying that, so why even use “abolish the family” as a slogan if that’s not what is literally meant).

Family is hard. As Kathleen McCook said in another comment, everything changes after you have a baby. Family is hard but family is vital; that’s why when one falls apart through death or addiction or abuse, it’s so devastating.

I’m reminded once again of NHJ (a bugbear of mine for many reasons I probably need to work out in the aforementioned therapy) who in a recent Vanity Fair bio admitted that people not knowing she’s actually biracial is “probably curated.” She went on to say she has a good relationship with her mother despite her white grandparents being conservative (who, she admits, were also good grandparents). I don’t understand why, if she’s biracial and she actually has a good relationship with her white family, she has curated an image of Blackness and being Black that is so antagonistic to people she could actually influence with less radical politics. She admits as much herself: it’s curated performance. So, why?

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I have two main ideas:

1) The left, left-liberal consensus, woke left, etc is first and foremost a subculture, not a political movement and more specifically wants to embrace a counter-cultural aesthetic. This is not coincidentally why it's like catnip to Brooklyn hipsters, because it's just the extension of cultural proclivities into the political sphere.

2) This leads to making asinine, purposefully obnoxious political statements to separate the ingroup from the outgroup. They function as a shibboleth, no different than a mohawk, goth clothing, or skinny jeans. This is, not coincidentally, why there is a very obvious and very specific aesthetic popular among radlibs (or whatever term you prefer for them).

As a corollary, they hate "population" because politics is a clique for them and the hate the idea that normies can get in. Then they are no longer special. They hate this idea and actually don't want to get popular. They want to lose and take specific and obvious actions to make sure they lose on purpose. They may not admit it but that is 100% the point and always has been.

Hence "abolish the family." We're so fucked.

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Oh god that Brooklyn Institute for Social Research passage was insufferable in so many different ways.

"Our slogan 'Destroy Everything You Love' actually means 'Create Utopia For Everyone.' How tedious for us to have to explain this to you squares."

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One particularly troubling development in the Left is that there has been a shift away from coalition building and having a broad base supportive of specific policy objectives.

I think that this has largely coincided with the evaporation of the labor movement in the private sector and to the degree that labor is still a force it is due to public sector unions who may broadly align with the PMC, government, and corporate press and are often in opposition to public interests (i.e. teachers' unions).

As a result of the waning influence of private unions, the Left now, by and large, favors administrative control to enact its policies and would prefer not to have to engage in retail politics and selling its ideas. That's why Trump's judicial appointments were such an existential crisis - I think the Left senses that its policies and rhetoric are primarily designed to move hearts and minds and policy WITHIN institutions and bureaucracies. But they are alienating externally and it would be better to bypass the public with judicial control, bureaucratic mechanisms, tech/corporate censorship, etc.

Shor is an anomaly in that he has some self awareness of the degree to which his social and economic class is unlikeable, divorced from the social and economic reality of most Americans, and fixated on status production masquerading as technocratic competence. This can be applied to a variety of pitfalls for progressives: Zero COVID hysteria, radicalization in grade school education disseminated from the Ed schools, global warming rent seeking, etc.

The net result is that one class after another of the 'ascendant coalition' is being alienated. Taibbi's reporting from Loudon illustrates what is happening with Asians. Anyone who has spent time in Florida, Texas, or the Southwest knew the Democrats were skating on thin ice with Hispanics.

So what can the Democratic Party and progressives do? Wait and hope for another bogeyman like Trump who will function as a huge fig leaf for their arrogance, corruption, and incompetence? Wait for the second coming of Bernie? I don't think they really know because, again, they run aon closed loop and are so arrogant that no improvement is possible until well after things are clear to everyone else and there is a huge liability. See for example, COVID policy where lockdowns imposed huge costs for less affluent in the pursuit of a zero COVID fantasy entertained only by a deranged elite.

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There was a strong "abolish the family" movement in the early 1970s, centered around the writings of R.D. Laing and his group. But ultimately the whole thing faded from mainstream left thinking.

We were refugees from Eastern Europe. As do many other immigrants, we distrusted government, being influenced by our experiences in our home countries. Families were safe havens against government tyranny. Yes, families could be abusive and could serve as strait-jackets. But at the end of the day, they would help you and take care of you when nobody else would.

To the degree we could, we took care of our own. For example, when my father had a major stroke, my mother took care of him at home for four years, until he died. To be sure, she had lots of help from social services, who sent people twice a day to move my father from his bed to his wheelchair and back. But she made sure that she was in charge and responsible. No paid outsider in some institution could be trusted to give a proper level of care to a family member.

Anecdotally, that attitude is widespread among immigrant communities. Yes, uts strength fades with the generations, and we come to accept North American norms. But even so, when we are in trouble, our first instinct is to call on a parent, sibling, or cousin. It's deeply ingrained.

How can anyone not see that?

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My experience is that people who object to point 4 are usually not doing so in good faith. "Why do you care what's happening in this college/this city/this subculture? You're just looking to be offended!" Well, no - what's happening in vanguard organizations is often a canary in the coalmine for the broader culture. Elite colleges have been at the bleeding edge of our current race and gender hysteria, for example. So to deny that we have a duty, much less a right, to keep an eye about what these influential bodies are doing is obscurantism, plain and simple.

There are similar dynamics at play on Twitter. Certainly as a platform it lends itself tremendously well to dogpiling and bullying. But I've seen cases where simply engaging with someone's argument, that they themselves have written and voluntarily put out into the world, is cast instead as some kind of unsporting attack. Again - obscurantism.

It's a strange tack in a democratic system to hide one's policies in such a way.

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We're a long way from the Popular Front and "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," that's for sure. I am no expert on the New Left, but I wonder if the shift began with the counter-culturalism of the 1960s. Before that, the most radical lefties went out of their way to show that their politics were true to American ideals. Read the Daily Worker and you'll get a sense of what I mean. And if you look at old photos of demonstrations -- from anarchists listening to Alexander Berkman in Union Square to Communists marching on May Day - you see people dressed in their best clothes. It was a tactic to counter the argument that working-class politics were the province of a lunatic fringe. My husband, who grew up in Italy and was an active member of the PCI for years, still wears dressy clothes when he demonstrates as a way to defy the conventional portrait of a leftist.

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Abolishing the family is not something that only exists in theory. Destruction of families has a long history as a tactic of enforcement for political, economic and cultural goals, from forcibly removing American Indian children from their families to incarcerating massive numbers of Black fathers to separating children from their parents at the border. People who want to abolish families are not the good guys and my own brand of politics could almost be defined solely as keeping anyone who would use such tactics out of power. The socialists advocating the abolishment of the family aren’t in power, and currently have zero likelihood to ever be, but I’m getting the message loud and clear from your image: We Want to be the Baddies. They don’t have any difference in their moral compass and what they would be willing to do. Only in their vision of the end goal society.

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Re the merits of "abolish the family," the United States has a long history of breaking up Black and Native American families under various bureaucratic guises. I'm sort of amazed that activists who are familiar with that history would advocate for the government replacing or abolishing the family.

Re the popularity of "abolish the family": like the current argument about how much control parents should have over their children's education, people find it insulting to be told they can't be trusted with their own children.

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Even the Communist Manifesto engages in that same "motte-bailey" Freddie refers to in this post. The relevant CM paragraph opens "abolish the family" (bailey) but hastens to specify they merely mean the "bourgeois family" or the "family based on private gain" (motte). This slipperiness in thinking, advocacy and praxis, which is usually not even conscious or "cynical", runs very, very deep on the left, all to the way back to its historical roots. Who could fail to notice the exact same motte-bailey in the left's rhetoric on borders, police, sex, the idea of "merit", and so forth?

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I have a pet theory that Trump in the US is just the domestic expression of a worldwide movement: Bolsanaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, The League in Italy, Brexit and Boris in the UK, etc. What is driving this I think is a widening gulf between the mass of voters and the elites that overwhelmingly make up the governing class. The specific parameters of the movement vary from country to country: in the Philippines and Brazil for example I think crime was central while in the US economic uncertainty was the driver. But the underlying phenomenon is the same. Elites in Brazil can live in gated communities and largely avoid street crime while elites in the US never worried about losing their factory job and facing years of part time employment. When the suffering is widespread enough all it needs is a sense that government/the elite ruling class are unresponsive and populist sentiments will erupt.

From that perspective I don't think the world is done with populism. Covid might have been a road bump in its rise in the US but the demographic factors are just too fundamental and massive to be derailed for long. (For a discussion of those demographics I would endorse reading David Shor, as well as Ruy Texeira.)

I should also mention that I don't want to minimize the contribution of social and cultural values to this conflict. Income inequality and economic factors are definitely huge factors but increasingly elite virtue signaling (trans activism, CRT, etc.) seems increasingly bizarre and alien to the bulk of the country.

Finally from the perspective of class conflict the disdain of elites for populism is understandable. It's the world view of the other 80% of the country.

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The points on race are telling. Leftists correctly criticize race as a made up construct that doesn't tell us much, yet they lump all people in minorities together. All Black people support BLM (which incidentally has an anti-family plank in its platform, last I checked), and all Latino people want to be called LatinX, etc. The whole browning of America concept is bankrupt because in reality race doesn't matter that much in the long run for who you vote for. Once you're well off financially and in the mainstream culturally (and older), you're just going to make your own decisions, and sometimes those choices won't be progressive ones. Lots of people of color voted for Trump despite both his policies and his egregious vileness as a person. Eventually people on the right are going to field a less grotesque candidate, and you can bet that POC will vote for them. So you really have to win on the field, not wait for the melting pot to save you.

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For some reason, I decided to watch some clips from the 2012 presidential debates. Obama's message was pretty clear: Romney is rich and therefore bad. He cruised to an electoral victory with that message despite high unemployment.

Now Obama isn't a socialist, he's barely even a liberal. But I would much rather our actual left-of-center focus on that sort of message rather than the race-centric one. I think most social policies would disproportionately benefit non-whites (e.g. medicare for all), but selling them that way will never work outside the media class

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