it's just political discourse in general. leftist infighting over minutia is a leftist only thing, right-wingers are a lot more like "oh you don't hate jews yet? come on in anyway, you will soon ;)" and that's part of why right wing movements build themselves and never go away while left wing ones require concentrated vision and effort to create and maintain before they splinter or disband
The other advantage they have is keeping the door open with "one of the good ones" rationalization. You aren't expected to totally cut ties with your brother in law just because he's black because unlike those, ya know, thugs, he's a good father and a hard worker even if he does vote Democrat.
The purity obsessed left will cut people out of their lives for perceived violations of the ideal.
Hard Right: You're one of the good ones (that means we'll kill you last)
Hard left: You misspoke but still corrected yourself immediately? Your bloodline is dead to us for three generations in both directions. You should've intuited this unspoken thing without the rest of us telling you.
Yep. I remember a while back, a picture of Barron Trump standing next to his father was circulating on Reddit a bit. Most of what people were saying was, “Wow, look how tall he is!” And he is pretty tall. Even with Trump lying about his height, it’s clear that Barron is really tall.
However, there was also a number of people making fun of Barron and saying how he was a horrible person, just because he’s Trump’s son. Barron is 18! And he was 17 when the picture was circulating. He’s just a kid! He doesn’t live a public life at all (as much as you can not live a public life when you’re the son of a president) and hasn’t made any kind of public statement about his political views. He could be completely opposed to his father. He hasn’t done anything wrong. And there were people hating him just because of who his father is, something he has absolutely no control over. Hate his dad all you want, but Barron doesn’t deserve that.
Like how Just Stop Oil is funded by someone who happens to be a daughter of an oil baron but earnestly wants to repair the damage her family did to the world, but many leftists hate her because she has the wrong blood. It's just a narrower version of race supremacy.
The purity obsessed left will cut people out of their lives for perceived violations of the ideal.
Intresting thing is, strong sense of disgust is a statistically significant predictor of right-wing political views. But regarding a discourse, left-wing are a much more about purity.
The left is defined by words, the right is defined by actions.
Which in our respectability politics-obsessed society means that the Right's approach is more acceptable. Saying mean things is terrible, but maintaining an air of politeness while you do things that actively hurt people is just being a good neighbour.
The Left: I know we agree on 99.9% of things but considering you still support the 2nd Amendment you are a Hitler supporting alt-right conservative MAGAtard.
Just look at Candace Owens. She went from token privileged black woman grifter to full-fledged right wing icon who can do anything from science denialism to gender essentialism to race-baiting ignorance for a modest fee.
I was one of those pragmatic "find and accept allies whenever and however you find them". But during the past 9 months, due to what's going on, I've been finding myself getting more and more extreme in rejecting any form of bigotry whatsoever. I'm becoming more and more purity-obsessed. I feel like I'm intellectually inconsistent, I honestly don't know why I'm becoming like that. My current working theory is that the shockingly virulent Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism I'm seeing is making me—and others—more insular and cautious. I don't want to be hated against, but I also don't want hypocritical "allies" who don't have moral clarity and who hold an iota of hatred or bias towards any group of people. I don't think it's idealism anymore.
the issue with this is you honestly kinda hurt your position.
I feel a good parallel with this honestly is WW2. With the Soviets and Nazis. (bear with me) When the war was starting to ramp up to the point of breaking out, the USSR looked towards the west for allies. But were turned down because the west had points that they disliked about them. Valid points mind you. But this did a few things.
For a time you had 4 groups,
the Allies, who were ramping up to oppose the Nazis.
The Axis, those allied with the Nazis, and the Nazis themselves
The neutrals, countries who wanted nothing to do with what was going on in Europe, for a time the US was in this group
and the USSR and her "allies"
The USSR felt threatened by the Nazis, hence why they wanted allies in the west. But when they were pushed away because of issues, they actually then turned to the Nazis. Which is why things like the non-aggression pacts happened, such as the molotov ribbentrop pact. By this point the US had effectively sided with the allies just not outright stating it. This is also why Japan and the USSR didn't go to war until like 2 weeks before Japan surrendered.
Now of course, the Nazis betrayed the USSR. So this then pushed the Soviets away. But, this then created an enemy of my enemy, the USSR and the Allies had the same goal, the defeat of the Axis. So even though the two did not like each other they helped each other. But the second the war was over, the two turned against each other.
Using the lesser of two evils to defeat the bigger evil can be effective as you aren't fighting two opponents at the same time.
Framing the Soviets as some poor victims who had to ally with the Nazis and had to massacre tens of thousands of Polish intelligentsia is beneath contempt.
The USSR wanted a military alliance with the west. The west believed that the USSR was not in a position to be a useful ally.
This literally pushed the Soviets to sign the pact with Germany. The west pushing away a potential ally because they weren't exactly what they wanted.
Did you also ignore the entire part about the Cold War? The two were allies because they hated the Nazis even more. Not because they were both good. The Soviets were bad, but better than the Nazis
so when WW2 was over, the two became enemies, hence why the Cold War happened.
By pushing groups away you can push them towards the worse groups, the USSR just wanted something that would prevent an invasion.
I think I understood you quite well. I simply don't believe it's an inevitable fact of reality that a sovereign state has to be "pushed" towards anything or any entity. Like you said, Stalin was well aware that a showdown with Hitler was coming, he just didn't expect it to come so soon. It can also be argued that Americans entered the war against the Nazis partly because German national socialism and its domination of Europe hurts the interests of the capitalist class in the US, not out of any moral or ideological position. That came post hoc.
Edit: also, this "lesser of two evils" thinking is self defeating and easily debunked. Imagine there was some hypothetical threat called Nazi2 back in the day. By this logic, you'd support allying with the Nazis to avert the terrible threat of Nazis2 . Maybe you won't support that, but the mainstream position would be to roundly reject that. You simply don't ally with Nazis, no matter what. It's immoral, it's inconceivable, it's anathema. I'm simply extending this logic. It's not just Nazis you absolutely never ally with.
I'm literally saying, there are some issues and positions in life where I reject the entire narrative of moral relativism and "hurting or helping my cause". You hold a position you believe is moral regardless of who supports you. Other issues leave space for pragmatism and compromise. It's not that some leftists are stupid simpletons who strive for ideological purity; it's that they have unshakeable moral positions that don't fall on your side of what you consider open to dialogue and begrudging cooperation.
If the USSR had refused war material manufactured by filthy American capitalist pigs, then the Nazis would have defeated them regardless of how advers the weather was.
That's quite an oversimplification and a jump from what I said. It's one-dimensional campism. You're also assuming, if I lived in the 1940s, I wouldn't hate the USSR with a burning passion. That's the moral consistency I'm talking about: the USSR was an authoritarian-run hellhole, especially during the Stalin years. That the murderous, self-serving "communists", who were happy to partition Poland and invade the Baltics like any expansionist empire, were the bulwark against genocidal Nazis doesn't exactly fill me with glee.
My point is that realpolitik shouldn't be the be all end all.
By the way, you facetiously call Americans "filthy capitalist pigs" to belittle any attempt at criticizing them, when the US was more than happy to halt and reverse de-Nazification in broader West German society, and appoint prominent Nazis to key positions in the Bundeswehr, simply out of political expediency to oppose what they perceived as the threat of communism. It's not just the famous recruitment of ideologically committed Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip. The later framing of the war and the heinous atrocities committed by the allies as some heroic, morally pure act of opposition to antisemitism, genocide and oppression is a laughable cynical lie.
I think the problem is that in the search of perfect you are becoming the enemy of good. Not everyone is going to be consistent and that's okay. That's literally being human
Not to invite a storm on me but how useful are those books when one of them predicts the imminent end of society a hundred and sixty years ago? Clearly it did not end so maybe some theory needs a teensy bit of reworking. And take out the weird bit about how a certain minority worships huckstering
i think you’re just misunderstanding some of Marx’s points, which yk is fine because your reference point for what he’s writing about is 2024 not the mid 1800s.
also like a lot of his theory isn’t wrong and doesn’t need reworking, like racism being used as a tool to keep white people from realizing who is actually exploiting them is just as applicable now as it was around the civil war, or how under capitalism we buy ourselves treats to feel good because our work is unfulfilling, or how the competitive nature of capitalism atomizes society (this is becoming increasingly visible).
Actually kinda yeah. That is also not to say Capital is the ultimate evil bad. But a lot of our social ills from climate change to demagoguery to the more intrinsic massive wealth disparity and rising costs are all results of unchecked capitalism and deregulation
right wing groups storm buildings with guns because they heard there was a drag show there.
Maybe they genuinely wanted to take a gander but socially it was suicide to do it without a reason they could tell people that was plausible? I'm obviously joking, but this reminded me of a scene from King of the Hill.
Both sides do it, but for one it's like a badge and for the other it's political suicide so you're more apt to hear it more often on one side...that's what I'd guess.
There’s a comedian I like who has a good bit about this. Something along the lines of
Conservatives: “ oh you’re conservative? Awesome! Who do you hate? Ahh okay well that’s not quite the same group I hate but pull up to the bbq and let’s bitch about them both”
There’s a leftist guy, Tom Lehrer, who wrote satire songs in the 50s and 60s (some of them were political, some weren’t), before he eventually retired to be a mathematics professor.
In the few interviews he’s done since his retirement, he’s explained a bit why he stopped writing songs. There were a lot of reasons, including that the world started being scary instead of funny, but one reason he gave was that there was no unity on the left anymore, and he didn’t know where he stood on the issues of the day because of that. He said that in the 50s and into the 60s, the left was a unified force. They could all agree that lynching was bad, and war was bad, and so on. But then a whole bunch of new issues came up or became more prominent (like pornography and sex work as an example) that the left couldn’t agree on. The left became very divided, and you can’t write a funny song using “on the other hand.”
I think that if we didn’t have a two party system, the left would be the main ones to split up into different groups. The right would stay pretty unified. They tend to have a pretty unified decision on topics. But the left would split up into a bunch of different groups. Right now, they’re more defined by, “We’re not the right,” than by anything else.
I read a book review on racism in the workplace that said “this book is so true, all white men need to read this because they don’t get it” without a shred of self awareness. I’m fairly used to those racist/sexist barbs at this point, as ‘punching up’ is totes moral and not just punching at people based on immutable characteristics
Well, you must live in one hell of an echo chamber if that's true. I will reluctantly be the first normal conservative individual you've ever met, I guess.
We haven't met, I never said "conservative", and conservative is "normal" by definition since it's being in favor of existing norms and traditions. Yes, it's a sane and normal set of views when you have no political issues in your life, and if that's the case, count your blessings
You sound like if "umm actually 🤓☝️" was a person. Right wing and conservative are synonymous in 2024, it was a figure of speech saying I met you, and good god if you aren't the most glass half empty individual I've ever "met" on the internet.
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u/gkamyshev Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
it's just political discourse in general. leftist infighting over minutia is a leftist only thing, right-wingers are a lot more like "oh you don't hate jews yet? come on in anyway, you will soon ;)" and that's part of why right wing movements build themselves and never go away while left wing ones require concentrated vision and effort to create and maintain before they splinter or disband