That’s kind of my point, the Left is neutered to a narrow, commercially-captured range of acceptability, and politics by performative outrage (which clearly, clearly doesn’t work if the people they imagine they’re appealing to aren’t outraged by whatever they are; see “non-overlapping range of acceptable discourse”).
It’s not a cult of big-picture extremists that are the problem for the left, it’s a cult of extremism in pettiness that comes with near-total abdication of engagement with larger issues. It’s real hard to engage in serious labor issues when you’re obsessively worried you might help “the wrong people” (in a grimly bemusing parallel of the strategy that monied interests were so successful in using to dismantle the social safety net). Especially when you’ve developed ideas about what kinds of violence “count” that are so weird you write out our own interest group’s successes with the [threat of] violence while simultaneously re-defining other inane behaviors as violent.
…I’m not either, but want some fuckin’ Trotskyists and Bakuninists in the mix.
