And even in the ways that it is vulnerable to those things, those are also discredited disinformation that would be moderated, eg, anti-vax horseshit.
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I’m specifically using “Civic Religion” in the sense of Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, and it is mostly a phenomena of the left.
The Q/MAGA weirdness is not typical of the phenomenon because it is so tightly coupled to traditional religious [power] structures, and that is also most likely why it’s so much more overtly malignant.
Most of the modern examples are people picking up pet causes (…or even pettier things like commercially repackaged hippie woo or entertainment products) and forming weird little cults around them then then build purity structures like a religion because it tickles their tribal instincts. It’s not the same threat as the persistent monolithic evil empire problem the US has with Dominionists, but it sure has been a good way to generate dumb moral panics for various hustlers to exploit for power and to lop off areas of discourse.
Such as? What? What’s a “pet cause” that “leftists” embrace that leads to cultists behavior?
You’re using leftists as a very broad term here. Most of the Democratic party are not “leftists” they are neoliberal centrists, for example. Buying into the whole GOOP stuff has nothing to do with political beliefs, just like being religious has nothing to do with politics. Plenty of people across the political spectrum are religious and plenty are atheists.
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Terrible things like the preservation of liberal democracy, economic equity, promotion of diversity, making sure everyone is housed and fed, etc. Such irrational and cult-like goals.
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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.
European far right parties have adopted a lot of left wing positions and picked up votes from socially conservative leftists who don’t like left wing parties supporting immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc.
They advocate economic protectionism and equate neoliberal economic globalisation and free trade with left wing internationalism and anti-racism, which are all subsumed under “globalism”.
They believe that the welfare state (including universal healthcare) is a good thing but is only sustainable in a homogeneous society where everyone shares the same “values”, which in turn means either a racially pure society or one where immigrants assimilate into the majority culture.
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I’m sure it has nothing to do with 40 years of conservatives and Libertarians shifting the Overton Window rightward to the point where very little remains of what the rest of the world regards as “the Left” in America. It’s all the fault of an intolerant Left addicted to baseless outrage /s.
Again, it has nothing to do with 40 years of conservatives and Libertarians (perhaps there’s a trend here) systematically disempowering and destroying union organising in the U.S. No, it’s all the fault of all those PC elitists on “the Left” who have such disdain for hard-working white blue-collar workers. /s
Yes, leftist violence in self-defense and the fascist violence to which it’s reacting are both equally bad in both quality and quantity, as helpful conservatives and the MSM are fond of reminding us. Why does the Left twist itself into pretzels over this? /s
I don’t yet know exactly what you’re trying to sell, but as to the points above you won’t find many buyers here.
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What threats of violence from the left wing? What violence at all from the left wing? As far as we can tell, the number of people killed by left wing extremists in the last 50 years can be counted on one hand.
In contrast to right wing extremists who have killed quite a number of people in just the last few years and have given threats of violence so often that mainstream political figures do not oppose them.
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Well, say 40 years as the 1970s still saw lots of left-wing violence in Europe from the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, and so on. I don’t think the IRA counts as left-wing, and most Arab terrorist attacks were state-sponsored rather than left-wing.
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I am a bit concerned that might not be what they are suggesting. They mentioned Bakuninists, and while Bakunin had good ideas, his association with Sergey Nechayev and the Russian nihilists was not one of them.
Insurrectionist anarchism is not wanted by most of the current anarchist movements, as all it does is make people scared, angry and more likely to side with their oppressors.
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In the US, it pretty much ends with the Weather Underground accidentally blowing themselves up in an apartment in Greenwich Village or perhaps the police taking down the SLA.
The PLO originally considered itself leftist (Secular and supported by the USSR) but that went by the wayside with the end of the Cold War.
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Yep. And really, the Oklahoma City bombing tips the scales so much that any comparison is moot. Left-wing terrorists went more for the scare, targeting a single CEO or banker, but mostly as a way to make demands. Right wing terror seems to be all about the killing in and of itself, attempting to be the next assassination of Franz Ferdinand but really just serial murder dressed up as politics.
Still, if you want a big body count, go for adding religion to the mix. That nets you Jonestown, Waco and 9/11. Not to mention all the other suicide cults.
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It depends on the faction. The PIRA leant towards socialism, OIRA and INLA were Marxist-Leninists. The current Continuity IRA and Real/New IRA don’t have any obvious links to left wing politics though.
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Very little to do with new-age spiritualism, the premise is mostly that many people who are not religious (disclaim: I’m very much not religious) are engaging with other things - like political movements or self-improvement schemes - as though they are religions. With the kind of visceral, tribal identity threatening fights about dogma that brings.
Which leads to the enormous success of identity wedge strategies (see: Karl Rove and Lynton Crosby) at splitting opposition to the corpratist right. To the point of absolute rancor whenever anyone points out that the same old trick is being pulled again.
Exactly on the “what threats of violence from the left” point. We’ve written out the armed wings of the civil rights movement whose conspicuous presence (and notably rare actual employment of force) was important to the non-violent contingents’ success. We’ve written out a rich and fairly-successful history of union violence and threats thereof going back into the 1800s. I’m arguing that we need more conspicuously-armed leftists, and to own up that most politics is about the capacity for violence and the restraint thereof. (Note: I am very expressly not arguing for left-wing violence, and especially not the revolutionary sort. I picked those examples because they are about the capacity for violence more than violence. The right has retained and refined their model of power-and-violence, and honestly kind of embraced a scary Maoist kind of thinking, while the genteel NIMBY-leftists with their steady diet of corporate media pap have a cultivated selective amnesia about the relationship of power and capacity for violence, so they don’t engage it effectively).
Your “that’s not the left” no-true-scotsman is the premise I’m rejecting, the performative NIMBY leftists you describe, and their downstream consumers/enablers/participants, are the only major functioning political “left” (such as it is) in the United States. And that’s a problem. I am arguing that the majority of the Marxist-derived traditions are being excluded.
…man the crowd here has changed a lot in the last decade or so, I don’t pop into the comments very often anymore so I didn’t realize I was saying something super controversial.
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has the black lives matter movement escaped your notice? i can almost understand your regrets about the disappearance of the marxist left but there is an active and vibrant activist movement it seems you are ignoring. in what sense does blm represent a "genteel nimby’ point of view?
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I’ve been on BB for a long time, pre-dating the switch to the current Discourse BBS. “The crowd here” hasn’t changed all that much; it’s still the same collection of liberal- and progressive-leaning geeks. However, the events of the last four years have made us a lot less patient with straw-man arguments, false equivalencies, “it’s all about the class struggle, ma-a-a-an” brocialists, and the framing of humans as inherently selfish and violent creatures.
Maybe it was more tolerable to the 'Rationalists" on Slate Star Codex, who gave a fair hearing to such arguments.
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Ladder pulling is an interesting term. Normally it is something you do once people are up the ladder. People like black people, Hispanic people, indigenous people, and LGBTQ people very much are not right now. When you talk about things like banning hate speech, those are the people we are actually worried about, the people who are hurt by such things.
…and yet I notice they don’t show up in your analysis at all. So of course caring about people looks unreasonable if you forget those people exist, but the difference is that not everyone does. Leaving them out is very specious and very telling.
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And I argue that I have been excluded from those traditions, and the working class because I am transgender. I have been told by M-Ls that I am a petite-bourgeouis liberal because I have never identified with a gender that was forced on me and I fought back to express myself. I have also been called a lumpenprole for the same reasons. Am I really the one with a problem here?
The LibComs have been welcoming, along with any other group that recognises that everyone has to be liberated if you don’t want to end up with another class system.
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I am a fan of all these organizations. And note that they are generally regarded very suspiciously by their ideological neighbors.
I will certainly grant that the Marxist-type traditions tend to harmfully one-lens to their own detriment in the same way the race- and gender- activists tend to.
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I don’t think you’re the problem.
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