people ask "what happened to Matt Taibbi" because he used to write about the material things that you say are what should be foremost in any left wing conversation. He does not do that now. Just go to his substack and look for the materialism! It's not there. He's gone from writing about Goldman Sachs' political influence to writing about fucking Ivermectin being a free speech issue. It's pathetic and it has very little to do with the left (is Taibbi even on the left?). It has to do with a guy getting old and rich and slightly canceled himself for some dumb things he wrote twenty years ago. It's not about ideology, it's just about Matt.
All your criticisms are fair, I just don't see the point in lumping this all under the umbrella of "left". It's true that a DSA Twitter account will never tweet "we should support poor white people", but that's because it's needlessly provocative. It doesn't mean it's not something lots of people believe, including almost everyone that was working to get Bernie elected last year. The people that don't believe that just aren't leftists, and putting a hammer and sickle in their bio on twitter doesn't make them one. Anyone can be anything on social media, it doesn't make it true.
I want to note the more controversial element of moral absolutism that the Left no longer embraces (but should): cross-cultural absolutism. There ARE cultural practices (like whaling) that should not exist. Something being apart of somebody's culture in zero ways makes it worth perserving or defending.
"But I have been organizing and protesting in radical left spaces since I was a teenager, I have diligently done the reading that was considered an essential part of socialist practice for most of our history, and I have written and thought through the left’s issues my entire adult life."
Apologies if you've listed this elsewhere but, could you tell me some of the essential reading? Where should one start? Thank you.
I think the abandonment of mass politics is the most depressing aspect. It ties in with the previous points, of course, but people don't even attempt to build coalitions.
I seem to use Minneapolis as examples often on here, but I'm very annoyed with my City Council election happening here. The Council Member representing my Ward is the far left of the Council and the only leftist on the Council. He's facing other leftist challengers and at least one moderate. Why this bothers me is that these other leftist candidates are going after his seat rather than a more moderate Council Member. Even if one of these new leftists succeeds in getting elected, the Council will still be 8 liberals with one leftist.
If one of these new leftists get elected it will do nothing to allow a left agenda to progress. Probably it'll set it back, since they have no experience and seem unable to even envision the tactics and strategy required to move the Council left.
Hard to come up with a coherent response to all of this because I find myself in almost complete agreement.
I will say the pathologies of the "modern left" boil down to basic human nature I think - they are what happens in the absence of enough social organization. We evolved our social skills to be part of small bands where we knew everyone. We seem to be incapable of managing social relationships with more than 150 or so people. Our persuasion skills were meant to convince a small group of people that maybe we should go east instead of west to look for food, and our "political" skills to attempt to ingratiate ourselves with enough of the band that if push came to shove, they would have our back.
To move past this as societies evolved and became more complicated and interconnected, we needed something more. We needed bureaucracy. We couldn't manage social relationships with thousands of other people on an ad-hoc basis (sorry anarchists) but we could have people siloed away in areas of specialty, dealing with their comrades on a daily basis, and then interfacing with the broader world through a more established system of law and custom. Unfortunately, hierarchy came hand in hand with this, because it was one of the easiest ways to structure a large society. After all, you can't manage a project with 10,000 people directly, but you can have 100 supervisors all responsible for 100 people under them. And once hierarchy was established, it was easy for those at the top (or even in the middle) to extract surplus value and to create ideologies which promulgated the rightness of said action.
Due to how hierarchy has been used by capitalism (and other authoritarian nasties) it tends to be dismissed by many on the left, along with bureaucracy. But in the absence of an actual structure/order, humans just fall back into what comes naturally to us regarding politics - which means we cannot enact effective political change. Effective politics is hard work - and very unpleasant - because it bucks human nature to put yourself out there repeatedly for rejection, and to repeatedly reach out to people who disagree with you. This is why things like socialist reading groups have been historically very effective - you take someone who is new to the politics and place them into an entirely new social circle where people are discussing the ideas of socialism all the time. So not only are they getting personally educated in socialism, they on a subconscious level internalize the idea that socialist politics are right-thinking given they are now surrounded by people who take these things as axiomatic. But this is also part of why the left often falls to factionalism, because it's really, really easy to lapse back into human nature and care more about what your peers think of you (and your internal standing within the social group) and lose sight of the actual politics supposedly animating your cause.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I've learned from experience that your comment threads tend to go fast and be over within 24 hours, so perhaps brevity is better if there is going to be any kind of discussion.
I feel that in the future, there will be more of a "left" to speak of, but that it will largely comprise of people who haven't participated in the last 7 years of debating what the left "is" and who should be excluded. This is a positive thought, but it's also a negative thought, because I think it will really put into relief how much time was wasted.
From personal experience, I think that the way I began savvily tweeting about the left was identical to the way I began savvily tweeting about liberal stuff when I was a liberal. Savvily tweeting is a major part of being a liberal, in a way that is subconscious. Not just because of the smugness that liberalism tends to encourage but because, when you're on social media, it is incredibly easy to feel like the smartest person on the forum. Not just because you maybe are but because everyone is so silo'd off that it's easy to feel like the one page you've read on a topic is more than anyone else you're talking to has ever read (again, this isn't helped by the fact that maybe 80% of people have read even less than you; it's just that you can't help but assume 100% of people have read even less than you).
So, I was experienced with being a liberal online, and when it comes to liberalism, it mostly is just a cultural expression these days, so it doesn't occur to you that there is more to it. Easy to internalize that mindset. I think it's inevitable that many people start from that and you only grow out of that from education or a way longer-term process of years of reflection... needless to say, education is better if the goal is to build a movement.
I agree with Freddie about most things but I think he misses one point sometimes, which is that there isn't really a substantial "old left" in the way that he thinks there is. I agree with him about the old left values that are contiguous with leftists of the past, but I think he overestimates the extent to which anybody can reliably find a "real" leftist to learn from. I think that is a far bigger problem than not listening.
If you're a leftist trying to plug into the real stuff that's going on, it's just always a roll of the dice. You can just as easily get educated about the real left as you can get told "it's not my job to educate you" by people insecurely convincing themselves that they know stuff, and that teaches you to mimic their defensiveness, and then they start treating you like one of the crowd, and then you feel as if you've been educated on how to be a leftist.
Basically I agree with Freddie, but I think it's a case of needing to build something new that happens to resemble something old... I think it gets confusing to talk about continuity with the old left because I don't think there really is much continuity to plug into. The plethora of people saying "leftism means saying you're better than liberals while trying to call out every leftist for not being enough of a liberal" are, in a way, a symptom of the harsh absence of a real left to plug into right now.
Well...per the Megan Markle investigation that discovered that what appeared to be a mass campaign of hate actually amounted to a few dozen folks on Twitter - how sure are we that any of this is actually a thing vs. something the Twitter, Facebook etc. algorithm is creating?
Re: antifa, and debates as to who belongs in a movement. It seems to me that adopting a "you are what you do" attitude avoids a lot of the inevitable semantic bickering here. Many people in antifa will claim that they're out there fighting for the "marginalized" or what have you. But if you're on week 15 of smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire and nothing more, does it matter what you *say* you want? Same goes for the identitarians on the left. They *say* that they want to fight racism, but many of their actions involve making race the sole relevant factor in judging a person's moral character.
People can say all sorts of things, but who cares? What do they actually *do*?
Maybe less for you, given your background, but for me what I've noticed most in the past decade is what I'd like to call radicalism/extremism inflation. It's important to note that this took place on both sides of the political spectrum, which makes me want to put on my Marshall McLuhan cap and say "the medium is the message." That for reason I can't concretely state this is all a product of the shift from traditional to social media.
A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible. This constant one upmanship leads to an unending pissing contest to see who can be the wokest, the most extreme tankie, the most based neorractionary, etc.
This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception. Debates, if you could even call them that, are all about who has the most based, hottest take. The actual problems and how to resolve them never enter into it. The liberals (it's weird even calling them this) saying we should censor the shit out everything are basically just the hall monitors, the teacher's pets, the snitches tell the teachers that someone said a dirty word. This is probably how most of them have always solved their problems, and FB and Twitter are just another principal to sick on one's enemies.
I think part of it is that the American left has been so weak for so long that now that there's been a mini-renaissance over the last decade, the newcomers can't help but overwhelm the old guard. As a result a lot of newly minted leftists are bringing liberal or Democratic party sensibilities to their new home. So it's less the left changing its mind on these values and more that the left is mostly made up of different people now, with different beliefs.
You can sort of see this play out as well in the Democratic party too. I believe one of the reasons Bernie struggled in 2020 was that the primary base consisted of many more ex-Republicans compared to 2016, and those voters brought their attitudes towards redistributive politics with them.
I think many people have given up on the idea of something actually changing, so they use politics as a badge of identity. Yelling "abolish the police" makes you look cool. The fact that it doesn't accomplish anything isn't relevant to these people, because they don't think anything can be accomplished.
people ask "what happened to Matt Taibbi" because he used to write about the material things that you say are what should be foremost in any left wing conversation. He does not do that now. Just go to his substack and look for the materialism! It's not there. He's gone from writing about Goldman Sachs' political influence to writing about fucking Ivermectin being a free speech issue. It's pathetic and it has very little to do with the left (is Taibbi even on the left?). It has to do with a guy getting old and rich and slightly canceled himself for some dumb things he wrote twenty years ago. It's not about ideology, it's just about Matt.
All your criticisms are fair, I just don't see the point in lumping this all under the umbrella of "left". It's true that a DSA Twitter account will never tweet "we should support poor white people", but that's because it's needlessly provocative. It doesn't mean it's not something lots of people believe, including almost everyone that was working to get Bernie elected last year. The people that don't believe that just aren't leftists, and putting a hammer and sickle in their bio on twitter doesn't make them one. Anyone can be anything on social media, it doesn't make it true.
It's exceedingly rare these days to read a longish opinion piece and agree with every word. But yes, every word. Thank you, and good morning!
I want to note the more controversial element of moral absolutism that the Left no longer embraces (but should): cross-cultural absolutism. There ARE cultural practices (like whaling) that should not exist. Something being apart of somebody's culture in zero ways makes it worth perserving or defending.
"But I have been organizing and protesting in radical left spaces since I was a teenager, I have diligently done the reading that was considered an essential part of socialist practice for most of our history, and I have written and thought through the left’s issues my entire adult life."
Apologies if you've listed this elsewhere but, could you tell me some of the essential reading? Where should one start? Thank you.
I think the abandonment of mass politics is the most depressing aspect. It ties in with the previous points, of course, but people don't even attempt to build coalitions.
I seem to use Minneapolis as examples often on here, but I'm very annoyed with my City Council election happening here. The Council Member representing my Ward is the far left of the Council and the only leftist on the Council. He's facing other leftist challengers and at least one moderate. Why this bothers me is that these other leftist candidates are going after his seat rather than a more moderate Council Member. Even if one of these new leftists succeeds in getting elected, the Council will still be 8 liberals with one leftist.
If one of these new leftists get elected it will do nothing to allow a left agenda to progress. Probably it'll set it back, since they have no experience and seem unable to even envision the tactics and strategy required to move the Council left.
Hard to come up with a coherent response to all of this because I find myself in almost complete agreement.
I will say the pathologies of the "modern left" boil down to basic human nature I think - they are what happens in the absence of enough social organization. We evolved our social skills to be part of small bands where we knew everyone. We seem to be incapable of managing social relationships with more than 150 or so people. Our persuasion skills were meant to convince a small group of people that maybe we should go east instead of west to look for food, and our "political" skills to attempt to ingratiate ourselves with enough of the band that if push came to shove, they would have our back.
To move past this as societies evolved and became more complicated and interconnected, we needed something more. We needed bureaucracy. We couldn't manage social relationships with thousands of other people on an ad-hoc basis (sorry anarchists) but we could have people siloed away in areas of specialty, dealing with their comrades on a daily basis, and then interfacing with the broader world through a more established system of law and custom. Unfortunately, hierarchy came hand in hand with this, because it was one of the easiest ways to structure a large society. After all, you can't manage a project with 10,000 people directly, but you can have 100 supervisors all responsible for 100 people under them. And once hierarchy was established, it was easy for those at the top (or even in the middle) to extract surplus value and to create ideologies which promulgated the rightness of said action.
Due to how hierarchy has been used by capitalism (and other authoritarian nasties) it tends to be dismissed by many on the left, along with bureaucracy. But in the absence of an actual structure/order, humans just fall back into what comes naturally to us regarding politics - which means we cannot enact effective political change. Effective politics is hard work - and very unpleasant - because it bucks human nature to put yourself out there repeatedly for rejection, and to repeatedly reach out to people who disagree with you. This is why things like socialist reading groups have been historically very effective - you take someone who is new to the politics and place them into an entirely new social circle where people are discussing the ideas of socialism all the time. So not only are they getting personally educated in socialism, they on a subconscious level internalize the idea that socialist politics are right-thinking given they are now surrounded by people who take these things as axiomatic. But this is also part of why the left often falls to factionalism, because it's really, really easy to lapse back into human nature and care more about what your peers think of you (and your internal standing within the social group) and lose sight of the actual politics supposedly animating your cause.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but I've learned from experience that your comment threads tend to go fast and be over within 24 hours, so perhaps brevity is better if there is going to be any kind of discussion.
I feel that in the future, there will be more of a "left" to speak of, but that it will largely comprise of people who haven't participated in the last 7 years of debating what the left "is" and who should be excluded. This is a positive thought, but it's also a negative thought, because I think it will really put into relief how much time was wasted.
From personal experience, I think that the way I began savvily tweeting about the left was identical to the way I began savvily tweeting about liberal stuff when I was a liberal. Savvily tweeting is a major part of being a liberal, in a way that is subconscious. Not just because of the smugness that liberalism tends to encourage but because, when you're on social media, it is incredibly easy to feel like the smartest person on the forum. Not just because you maybe are but because everyone is so silo'd off that it's easy to feel like the one page you've read on a topic is more than anyone else you're talking to has ever read (again, this isn't helped by the fact that maybe 80% of people have read even less than you; it's just that you can't help but assume 100% of people have read even less than you).
So, I was experienced with being a liberal online, and when it comes to liberalism, it mostly is just a cultural expression these days, so it doesn't occur to you that there is more to it. Easy to internalize that mindset. I think it's inevitable that many people start from that and you only grow out of that from education or a way longer-term process of years of reflection... needless to say, education is better if the goal is to build a movement.
I agree with Freddie about most things but I think he misses one point sometimes, which is that there isn't really a substantial "old left" in the way that he thinks there is. I agree with him about the old left values that are contiguous with leftists of the past, but I think he overestimates the extent to which anybody can reliably find a "real" leftist to learn from. I think that is a far bigger problem than not listening.
If you're a leftist trying to plug into the real stuff that's going on, it's just always a roll of the dice. You can just as easily get educated about the real left as you can get told "it's not my job to educate you" by people insecurely convincing themselves that they know stuff, and that teaches you to mimic their defensiveness, and then they start treating you like one of the crowd, and then you feel as if you've been educated on how to be a leftist.
Basically I agree with Freddie, but I think it's a case of needing to build something new that happens to resemble something old... I think it gets confusing to talk about continuity with the old left because I don't think there really is much continuity to plug into. The plethora of people saying "leftism means saying you're better than liberals while trying to call out every leftist for not being enough of a liberal" are, in a way, a symptom of the harsh absence of a real left to plug into right now.
I wish I was also confident that this will go out of fashion. What does that path look like?
These new ideas give power to those that hold them. Both at an individual level and to institutions. What will counteract that?
Anyone who enjoys politics is a sociopath? Do you really think so? You don't think MLK Jr. & Rosa Luxembourg enjoyed what they did?
Would you make a distinction between enjoyment and satisfaction, and say that you can find satisfaction in politics, but not enjoyment?
Well...per the Megan Markle investigation that discovered that what appeared to be a mass campaign of hate actually amounted to a few dozen folks on Twitter - how sure are we that any of this is actually a thing vs. something the Twitter, Facebook etc. algorithm is creating?
A righteous essay. Thank you for it.
Re: antifa, and debates as to who belongs in a movement. It seems to me that adopting a "you are what you do" attitude avoids a lot of the inevitable semantic bickering here. Many people in antifa will claim that they're out there fighting for the "marginalized" or what have you. But if you're on week 15 of smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire and nothing more, does it matter what you *say* you want? Same goes for the identitarians on the left. They *say* that they want to fight racism, but many of their actions involve making race the sole relevant factor in judging a person's moral character.
People can say all sorts of things, but who cares? What do they actually *do*?
Love the post.
I love the custom URL. Now I'm wondering if there were other fun URLs that I missed.
Maybe less for you, given your background, but for me what I've noticed most in the past decade is what I'd like to call radicalism/extremism inflation. It's important to note that this took place on both sides of the political spectrum, which makes me want to put on my Marshall McLuhan cap and say "the medium is the message." That for reason I can't concretely state this is all a product of the shift from traditional to social media.
A lot of it is that the incentives now run in that direction. Having a boring center left take won't earn you any likes of followers on Twitter, so it's rewarded to say the most over-the-top thing possible. This constant one upmanship leads to an unending pissing contest to see who can be the wokest, the most extreme tankie, the most based neorractionary, etc.
This new social media phase of the culture war has made everyone more myopic and dumber, without exception. Debates, if you could even call them that, are all about who has the most based, hottest take. The actual problems and how to resolve them never enter into it. The liberals (it's weird even calling them this) saying we should censor the shit out everything are basically just the hall monitors, the teacher's pets, the snitches tell the teachers that someone said a dirty word. This is probably how most of them have always solved their problems, and FB and Twitter are just another principal to sick on one's enemies.
I think part of it is that the American left has been so weak for so long that now that there's been a mini-renaissance over the last decade, the newcomers can't help but overwhelm the old guard. As a result a lot of newly minted leftists are bringing liberal or Democratic party sensibilities to their new home. So it's less the left changing its mind on these values and more that the left is mostly made up of different people now, with different beliefs.
You can sort of see this play out as well in the Democratic party too. I believe one of the reasons Bernie struggled in 2020 was that the primary base consisted of many more ex-Republicans compared to 2016, and those voters brought their attitudes towards redistributive politics with them.
I think many people have given up on the idea of something actually changing, so they use politics as a badge of identity. Yelling "abolish the police" makes you look cool. The fact that it doesn't accomplish anything isn't relevant to these people, because they don't think anything can be accomplished.