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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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I wish you were correct, but you aren't. The left is famous for its identity politics, which is precisely an in-group/out-group game. Also, the left is just as bad as the right when it comes to lacking nuance and brigading people who express ideas that the hive mind doesn't like.
I would say that a very vocal, but hopefully tiny, minority on the left are very much caught up in that. Not all of us are. Unfortunately, in some venues/platforms they have utterly captured the mods, and in some cases, have completely destroyed any reasonable discussion (an example I've mentioned before is Boing Boing's comment section - it's reached cartoonish levels, and I've mostly stopped reading Boing Boing in recent years as a result. It's almost a self-parody, not even joking.). I think the impression is that there are many more of these types of leftists than there really are.
You're getting hate but you're absolutely right
I love the left and I don't want Trump to put us all in concentration camps more than anyone else does. But even that being the case, I've been yelled at much more by people on the left for having an "incorrect" opinion than I have from the right.
Thanks, you summed it up nicely. I'm very committed, both personally and professionally, to the left in terms of social policy, but I recognize our tendency towards tribalism, doctrinaire language policing, and groupthink.
Also, you nailed it when you said that one of main differences between left and right is their degree of earnestness. Anyone who has watched the development of identity politics since the 1990s can recognize that the right is now just doing a bad imitation of the left's rhetorical tactics. That's why they seem disingenuous: because most of them are acting out their impression of the so-called "radical left", but from the other side.
Whether you agreed with them or not, the right used to pride themselves on being the sober, fiscally conservative, "responsible", establishment people, while the left were the loud, obnoxious ones screaming about identity and shaming normal people for their supposed "privilege".
The rise of the Tea Party marks the beginning of the right-wing adoption of these left-wing identity politics tactics. The right has now become a radical reactionary movement rather than the small-c fiscal conservatives of the past. Watching the nuttiness on the right makes me think that the transformation happened largely because many middle- and working-class whites now see themselves as victims of the same race-based persecution that the left correctly complained about for decades, so they've just leaned into it.
All of this reminds me of Foucault's assertion that ideologies are not about right and wrong, but rather about power. That's why we are in the middle of a culture war. Of course, we can't let the oligarchs, the fascists, or the Christian Nationalists win, but the left is not entirely innocent either in the sense that we have demonized and alienated a very large segment of Western society. I don't absolve myself, either. I have railed against the right, especially the religious right, in the past just as hard as anyone.