They aren’t any less sincere than anyone else who claims any given set of values. There will always be pretenders looking for socal validation, hypocrites and posers, but most of them believe what they say. I’m more skeptical of, say, major corporations, which rarely put their money where their mouth is. But the average Twitter user? Totally sincere.
It’s like any other kind of religious fervor. In fact I used to be extremely Christian and there are some parallels. Recognizing white (or other) privilege is accepting liberal Jesus as your personal savior, utterly necessary if you don’t want to live in the hell of bigotry. You need people in your church to keep you in line and you must always repent of your sins, no matter how “minor” as we all fall short of the glory of God. And there will always be sanctimonious prophets persecuting the sinful. And all of this is completely sincere, with the doubters keeping their mouths shut.
Some years back I became so fed up with it that I cut myself off from my leftist friends by deleting my Facebook account. I created a new one a couple years later that consists almost entirely of writer friends, which through some fluke has resulted in a weird social network of neurodiverse Christian libertarian writers. Yet it’s a much more sane environment. I do have a lot of progressive friends through work, but they aren’t fanatical people. They’re professionals. I have no idea what they’re like online.
I’m not saying white privelege doesn’t exist, because it does. White supremacy is a problem and I think we’re responsible for correcting injustice. I agree with the aims of many of these people. But they couldn’t be more ineffective in how they try to achieve those aims, and I am really disturbed by the tactics and emotional immaturity. (I am a deeply emotional person with clinically significant difficulties in emotion regulation, but I feel strongly that’s my own shit to work out, not on anyone else to accommodate me.) These people need therapy.
To bring it back to the OP, what’s happening on the extreme left is driving away moderates. Hell, it’s driving away other liberals. And I don’t know what to do about it. The only activist I know of who is doing anything concrete is Francis Lee, and they don’t have a huge audience. It is a very difficult time to start a conversation about anything that doesn’t support one, rigid narrative.
Thanks for explaining. I only know what I’ve researched, and of course I wanted to know how someone like Trump could win the presidency (and there are parallels to the Brexit vote in the UK), but I don’t know much about US state politics.
An interesting point that I would not have thought of.
This ties into what we were talking about earlier: the other groups in the Democratic coalition may be in it for the social policies, or at least be satisfied by them. But the white working class were in it for the economic policies - and seeing them deprioritized, have largely ceased to be in it at all.
In my experience, there has been little of the extreme nuts from the left that you are talking about here, even on Facebook. By contrast, some family members from the right on Facebook spewed the most unhinged conspiracies and stupid arguments to support Trump.
OMG, did you actually read this thing! Because it reads to me like he’s reminding the court that if Lincoln had been nicer to the South he wouldn’t have gotten shot, and I have no idea while he’s blathering about the post Civil War era at all in a 2021 sentencing memorandum.
This is a big heaping boatload of crazy and certainly doesn’t fit in with the whole “remorse” narrative. This isn’t helping, dude.
ETA- on second reading it’s sounding like he’s saying that Lincoln would’ve pardoned someone like him if he hadn’t gotten shot, but still, talking about assassins and Civil War ain’t helping, dude.
Absolutely, but this is a conversation about whether the right is winning, and I think nutty liberals factor into the analysis of that subject. The critiques that Republicans make about leftists aren’t entirely without merit. They’re making up our motives and beliefs out of whole cloth, but they aren’t making up our tactics. Now I don’t know whether it would make a difference if more reasonable voices prevailed on the left because Republicans lie and cheat and demonize us no matter what we do. But it’s worth considering that if we are losing, left-wing extremism is a factor.
Yes, but as I pointed to another moderate poster that is missing a lot of what the right is doing to drive some moderates to what you think is the moderate position: We are now dealing with a leftist molehill, that was turned into a mountain by the right wing media and politicians. While there is still a bigger Republican mountain to deal with.
I think there’s two answers to this. On a tactics level, the problem is that Democrats tend to not do enough at the grassroots level. There needs to be someone like Stacey Abrams in every state, not just in Georgia.
On a strategic level, moderate Democrats need to stop playing nice. Sure, there is always attack ads against individual candidates leading up to Election Day. What’s lacking is a systemic strategy to attack conservatism the way Republicans attack liberalism. The far left understands this, they just don’t use the correct individual tactics. The moderate left, for whatever reason, has never taken up the war against conservatism in general, instead sticking to attacking individual candidates during the general election season.
It can be. It is, to some perhaps small extent at the root of the seemingly unbridgeable divide between liberal American and the old mostly white working class.
It goes back to maybe 1960, when the beginnings of the New Left decided that, unlike any left-wing movement ever before, they did not need or even want to ally themselves with the working classes. Their thinking was that the American working class was already a well-established class, and had in essence become the bourgeoisie that earlier left-wing movements despised.
Now, there may or may not be some truth to that (although it’s worth pointing out that at that point, working-class America was solidly Democratic), but this divide grew and festered (with flare-ups like the NYC hard-hat riot of 1970, which, although I was only ten, I remember all too well – it was a huge big deal in my family) until liberalism became neo-liberalism, affluent liberals fell in love with Bill Clinton and their burgeoning 401ks, and the divide became permanent.
And often very racist. Hence the Republican southern strategy that completely flipped the solidly Democratic south into the solidly Republican south. There were reasons left-leaning intellectuals often had issues with white working-class voters.
Who cares? Her statement showed no prejudice. It was entirely mundane. You haven’t demonstrated or even asserted prejudice - you’ve only parroted a dumb thing some other Democrats said. Newsflash - sometimes some Democrats say something incorrect.
Okay, I can believe activists on Twitter are sincere, but not so much tandom people who just want to save their jobs, or university/corporate spokespeople.
That’s exactly how it seems to me, too. Complete with whiteness or any other ‘privileged’ identity as original sin. Glad you got away from it and that your work friends aren’t like that.
What we need to do is bring back the idea that no one can control other people, but we do have control over our own reactions. Bring back the idea that intent is important, and that we have a duty to be polite to our fellow citizens, but no one has the right not to be offended. Maybe promoting an alternative, positive philosophy would be more effective than simply criticising the bad things?
Go back to pre-Trump and think about the nutty religious wing of the Republican party, and whether that put you off from ever voting for them. Even though they didn’t necessarily have much power in the party.
I think leftists underestimate how much people on the right are afraid of the Democratic party. And some of that is definitely due to unreasonable, made up shit from the media or other talking heads. But some is based on real things the left is doing, things that are also alarming many centrists and even liberals. It is possible for the party leadership to oppose those things, like the candidates who disclaimed the unpopular Defund the Police.
It’s who you’re prejudiced against. Prejudice against the US or Israel or men or white people is allowed. They deserve to suffer, their feelings are not to be protected. Prejudice against other groups is bigotry.
Nope. I understand how it could be read as such by those who don’t understand the concept of whiteness as it is used here (and there have been many discussions on this board about the system of whiteness and how it harms so many people, both non white and white alike).
Anti-whiteness is entirely different from anti-white. Whiteness harms white people - that is the fundamental thrust of that abstract you linked. This is true, and the system of whiteness should be fought and dismantled, to aid non white people and also to aid white people.
If Biden advocated this it would probably hurt him politically. That doesn’t mean it’s not accurate - there are lots of true and accurate things Biden could say that would be politically very unwise, and this is just another one of those things.
(As an aside, I’ve suggested that, tactically speaking, “whiteness” should be called “whiteness/blackness”, since the concept is just as much about how society identifies and treats Black people as it is about how society identifies and treats white people, and perhaps this would defuse some of the attacks from ignorance against the concept).
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has —a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.
Substitute ‘Jewish’ for ‘white’ in that passage and it reads like Mein Kampf.