I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever consider that those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
These two things drive me fucking crazy, and you are absolutely spot on with all of this. Obviously, the Democrats aren’t perfect. But the argument that X makes them complicit in Y issue is a null point when the alternative is unbridled, unchecked fascism.
WHATEVER POINT YOU WERE TRYING TO MAKE, IT WILL NOT BE SOLVED BY ELECTING FASCISTS. It doesn’t matter if it’s corruption, wars, homophobia, trade, the economy, taxes, it could even be people shitting in litter boxes.
Whatever it is, having the entire country taken down to the studs is not going to help your issue, in fact, it’s probably going to make your problem significantly worse. The economy? Look up the tariff war that caused the great depression. Homophobia? Read up on the lavender scare and how it tanked our astronomy and weapons research, notably ICBM research. Wars? Need I say anything more? We’ve had insane wars due to Republican war hawks for decades. Whoever you were trying to protect, they are 100% B O N E D now. And now we are sending innocent people off to literal concentration camps, so don’t give me any of that “the Dems don’t respect human rights” crap. It’s beyond the pale now and all this was warned of in advance by those morons who published P2025 before the election. And yet, people still fell for it. It’s absolutely infuriating that we are gonna have to dig the country (and the economy) out of a massive pit once again, if it’s even possible at this point. We will be extremely lucky to prize it back out of the hands of dictators before they run it into the ground like they did with Venezuela.