1mo ago

Brood Parasitism in Leftist Politics

I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

Claiming to be leftists
Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

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From Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerrin

From Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
- In re the first excerpt:
  This, to me, sounds totally backwards.
  The KPD had tried to overthrow the government through violent force with guns, and the establishment government including the SPD had violently fought back. A generation later, the KPD was still so incensed that the SPD had not gone along with getting shot and overthrown that they refused to get things together with the social-democrat + center-party coalition, ran their own spoiler candidate, fought the SPD in the streets, and basically treated the "not left enough" party as the main enemy all the way up until they all went into the camps. Whereas the SPD was still giving speeches against Hitler and trying to muster resistance to him in government even when parliament was half-empty because of all the disappeared opposition.
  I have no idea how the groups you're talking about here map onto the groups I am talking about. But, to me, the problem of splintered opposition to Hitler was 100% a far-left-created problem, which would be an incredibly apt comparison as regards the most recent US election if the election had happened on Lemmy or if the US as a whole had any kind of far-left representation that went above low single digits.
  In re the second excerpt:
  Yes, it is mathematically certain that in any FPTP election system, things will coalesce into two parties which are both a few inches to one side or another from the center. That is a good argument to me for not doing FPTP. I don't think you can blame the left-er of the parties if they don't want to wander away from the center and start losing elections.
  If we're going to apply that to the US, I think the "center" in the US being so far to the right that it's off the edge of the table is a whole separate problem, largely corporate-media-created, but I think asking the center-right party we call "Democrats" to start losing elections from now on so that everyone on the left can feel better about the Democratic party positions is probably not the answer to that.
  (Actually, there is one caveat: They could have just not fucked over Bernie and let him win the election which he 100% would have. That would have been nice. If you want to try to help talk them into doing something like that in the future, that would be grand, but I think (a) hoping for a candidate as good as Bernie to come along every election is a tough ask (b) some campaign finance reform will need to go along with it and maybe putting some people in prison for accepting bribes just to send the point home. If we're still trying to operate within normal politics. All of this is a little academic now since Trump is aiming to run the elections going forward.)
  
  I have no idea how the groups you’re talking about here map onto the groups I am talking about. But, to me, the problem of splintered opposition to Hitler was 100% a far-left-created problem, which would be an incredibly apt comparison as regards the most recent US election if the election had happened on Lemmy or if the US as a whole had any kind of far-left representation that went above low single digits.
  Sure, but this assumes that the KPD and NSDAP weren't both reacting to a popular sentiment that the SPD wasn't. I think a good analogy for this is to consider fight or flight in mammal behavior as two extremes of a political spectrum, and an absence of stimulus response representative of 'status quo' centrism. A nervous system that is inadequately responding to threatening stimuli risks being eaten/killed by the threat, but a NS that's too sensitive is prone to overreaction.
  There are a lot of ways to flesh out that analogy, but I think the popularity of the NSDAP and the momentum of the KPD (as small as you'd like to see it as) is a missed hormone signal by the SPD that some kind of movement was needed to address the underlying current of populism. Assuming that the KPD ought to have joined the SPD against the Nazis simply because they were the smaller party (without addressing their concerns) completely disregards the political context of the moment.
  I think a similar critique of Democrats applies to 2024 (and to an extent 2016 and 2020, with con-founders). Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause, but I think there's more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling. I think dems miscalculated because they assumed they could meet more voters in the middle like they always had, but didn't realize that all those people aren't there anymore. Instead of meeting people in the middle, they were yelling at people on the ends to meet them in the middle, like over-administering an SSRI to someone reacting appropriately to a life-and-death situation.
  Any response to fascism is going to need a mixed response to address it - you can't simply plant yourself in the middle and cross your fingers people will meet you there. Even as a way just to buy time, by not offering any solutions to the issues that created the popular fascist sentiment you'll end up loosing those voters who can very clearly see them while they grow hopeless/disillusioned that democracy can solve the problems at all.
  We can wring our hands all day about far-left and far-right movements being too extreme and demanding perfection all we want, but the truth is that there were simply not enough people in the middle for democrats to overcome the populist motion on the right, and choosing to steer to the middle (and throw a tantrum when people didn't follow) is a clear cut miscalculation on their part. Especially when it seems pretty clear that most democrats agree on the basic grievances of the left-of-center part of the party.
  
  Assuming that the KPD ought to have joined the SPD against the Nazis simply because they were the smaller party (without addressing their concerns) completely disregards the political context of the moment.
  No it doesn't. Insisting that we need to go to the smaller party's positions on everything because the center blah blah blah missed opportunity let's fight about our favorite pet issues that's what's really important right now disregards the political context of the moment. Keeping Hitler from coming to power was what was truly important, and the KPD fucked that up completely by not seeing the bigger picture and clinging to their pet issues and they pretty much all died when the horrors started as a result. Whatever sins you want to accuse the SPD of in their positions, it hardly matters. "I'm not planning to kill you and the other guy is and I can win" should be a winning electoral platform whatever else is in it.
  I think a similar critique of Democrats applies to 2024 (and to an extent 2016 and 2020, with con-founders). Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause, but I think there’s more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling. I think dems miscalculated because they assumed they could meet more voters in the middle like they always had, but didn’t realize that all those people aren’t there anymore.
  Well... for one thing, two things can be true. It can be true both that the far left got itself distracted and the Democrats are a bunch of corporate whores who don't really "deserve" support. Not all of them but I would say the overwhelming majority are. I get why people aren't that excited about voting for them, in the same way I am not excited about paying taxes or working a job I hate to get to the one I actually want. However, failing to do those things in this election was a catastrophic tactical blunder which has already produced massive human suffering and promises much more to come. I hope we come out of it stronger, but the whole fucking thing didn't need to happen. You can reform Democrats without a bunch of immigrants going to El Salvador or worse because you didn't feel like holding your nose and you're privileged enough to be able to not have to.
  And then, for another thing, I actually don't think the far-left lost the Democrats this election, although their lack of support was one more drop in the rainstorm. I think the election took place almost entirely in fantasy-land. The far left (tiny in American politics) thought that Kamala Harris was responsible for 100% of Biden's Israel policy, Biden had accomplished nothing of value on climate change or for working people in the US, Trump was a genius at business who would bring inflation back down, and so on. It was propagandized to the point that it almost doesn't matter that the Democrats' messaging was bad.
  Harris was the better candidate. People in overwhelming numbers thought various imaginary things about her which made her "bad," although the question of what was up with Trump didn't really factor into it except among the very deeply confused. I think that's the result of really incredibly powerful propaganda being deployed at a massive scale, and the media being too apathetic to try to do its jobs even when people were listening to them. I don't think it's fair to say that Biden's performance, Harris's platform, or the far-left's organic reaction to anything, was responsible in any way for what happened. It was mostly just based on fantasies and misdirection. What we do about that, I have no idea.
  
  “I’m not planning to kill you and the other guy is and I can win” should be a winning electoral platform whatever else is in it.
  "Should be", maybe, but it wasn't. Maybe a hyperbolic example: people are driven to suicide everyday, but debating the calculus of what's worthy of ending your life over doesn't help those people who are in crisis. It's a failure of understanding to demand that people ignore their own suffering, or accept their own injustice, because you've made the calculus for them that some alternative is worse. If you refuse to ask yourself what motivates those people to abandon hope in democracy then you've shut yourself off from learning from historical atrocity. It's insufficient to use hindsight to say 'they should have chosen the lesser evil', because then you'll never be able to recognize the crisis until it's already happening.
  I get why people aren’t that excited about voting for them, in the same way I am not excited about paying taxes or working a job I hate to get to the one I actually want
  Then you understand why the democrats failed their own cause, because unless democrats can waive a magic wand and force people to choose an evil (lesser or greater), those people will not be showing up for them. Call it a tactical error of the voter if you want, I don't care. No liberation or civil rights movement has ever been judged on the merits of their cause - if it were simply a matter of lesser or greater morals there would be no need for struggle - the effectiveness of any fight for liberation can only ever be judged by its ability to stir action against injustice from the un-moving.
  It was propagandized to the point that it almost doesn’t matter that the Democrats’ messaging was bad.
  It's also possible that those accomplishments, as much as we'd like to celebrate them, weren't addressing the core popular discontent of the voters. It could be a matter of messaging or propaganda, true, but it would be irresponsible to have this conversation and not point out that the current popular messaging in the democratic base isn't related to infrastructure spending, inflation, or climate initiatives - it's an expression of frustration about a system that's rendered ineffective against oligarchs who use their immense wealth to undermine and frustrate all attempts at democratic reform. There's an implicit assumption from moderates that our capitalist system can be managed with incremental reforms, but there's no allowance for the possibility that we may eventually cross a threshold of inequality that cannot be managed with incremental progress anymore, especially when that inequality is being allowed to express itself in the democratic process itself. Even if we're not yet at that point, dismissing those concerns as "fantasies and misdirection" is a surefire way of losing those voters to apathy, spoiler candidates, or violent resistance.
  People in overwhelming numbers thought various imaginary things about her which made her “bad,” although the question of what was up with Trump didn’t really factor into it except among the very deeply confused.
  Because Harris didn't have a message to deliver for herself, except that she wasn't Trump. It's entirely possible (if not 100% certain) that people are reacting to an extreme level of distress and confusion that exists completely separate from Trump, and by not giving them a clear theory about what is causing it and what to do about it, it created a vacuum for people to pick whatever issue they were feeling the most in that moment and accuse/notice a lack of platform to address it. Democrats desperately want to occupy a middle ground of 'nothing fundamental will change', while seemingly not noticing that voters are increasingly desperate for fundamental change. Yes, Trump is a fascist, but at least he's acknowledging the alarm his base is feeling and offering them an explanation and all the reactionary change they could ever want. That's why his base showed up, and the ours didn't. The people the democrats are losing aren't the people who don't see the danger in Trump, they're loosing the people who might think Trump is a bit radical but think the democrats are actively protecting a status quo that they're completely miserable with. I cannot stress enough how much democrats are fucking themselves next cycle by blaming those people who are already pissed off about a lack of meaningful action for their suffering, past and present. That's how you turn apathetic non-voters into violent reactionaries.
  
  “I’m not planning to kill you and the other guy is and I can win” should be a winning electoral platform whatever else is in it.
  “Should be”, maybe, but it wasn’t.
  Correct. Which indicates to me that something other than the content of the platforms was the issue.
  Like I say, I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie, who would have addressed your (extremely valid) complaints and also would have won the election. Assuming no one shot him.
  I'm just saying two things can be true. The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and also the electorate can be so addled by propaganda that they missed noticing that Biden did absolutely historic things to help the working class, address climate change, basically all the core issues except for Israel and even his Israel atrocity didn't apply to Kamala Harris except in people's minds. And that addled understanding and confusion was what cost them the election. The DNC consultants have dogshit messaging, also, which certainly didn't help, but people were mostly convinced that Trump would bring inflation back down again and Kamala Harris was just as bad so why bother (depending on which side of the aisle they were on).
  Those two things can both be true. You seem like you're spending incredible words lecturing me on the first thing. Yes. I agree with you. Two things can be true.
  
  You seem like you’re spending incredible words lecturing me on the first thing. Yes. I agree with you. Two things can be true.
  It might seem like i'm lecturing you because I don't think you're grasping what I'm saying. There being an objective better choice in an election has no bearing on if that's a sufficient platform to get the votes you need. Insisting that 'it should have been enough that she wasn't trump' while also insisting that the base doesn't have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation to vote is nothing more than sticking your fingers in your ears. Claiming that, instead of having legitimate grievances with democratic governance, voters didn't turn out in enough numbers for Harris because they were too propagandized (i'm trying so hard not to use the word 'dumb') to know what was good for them is paternalistic bullshit.
  Anything to avoid having to consider the possibility that the moderate approach to governance is what created the populist radicalization we're now having to deal with.
  Like I say, I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie
  We are so far beyond the problems with the 2016 election, it's almost not even worth talking about it. The democrats have a far, far deeper problem with their organization that is clearly not limited to one or two high-ranking chairmen putting their fingers on the scale.
  
  Insisting that ‘it should have been enough that she wasn’t trump’
  Yes. In an "objective" sense if we separate away the realities of what it takes to sell people and win elections, it should have been enough that she didn't want to kill immigrants, destroy the government, and seize power forever, and the other guy did. And you seem to agree with me on this, up above, so presumably you're using the definition of "should have been" that I use in the following paragraph.
  Clearly, in a "reality" sense instead of the objective sense, it wasn't enough to actually win, in this election. You are saying the American people are having an understandable reaction to both three decades (at least) of Democratic fuckery, and to bland corporate-friendly "status quo" messaging from a deeply flawed DNC campaign apparatus. Yes, I agree. As I keep saying. That's pretty sensible.
  (Edit: I adjusted some things in the preceding paragraph)
  I would also add to that that they suffered from an incredible amount of misleading propaganda that led them to believe absurd fantasies about the candidates. That's not paternalistic, that's reality. I don't think it is fair to ask them to look at corporate news, paid shills and total random idiots on social media, Russian-funded podcasters, and so on, and form an informed picture of reality. That's not saying they are dumb, it is saying that our systems of news and political information in this country are so shockingly bad that it would literally be better if people were throwing darts at a board to pick the president.
  insisting that the base doesn’t have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation to vote
  Claiming that, instead of having legitimate grievances with democratic governance
  Anything to avoid having to consider the possibility that the moderate approach to governance is what created the populist radicalization we’re now having to deal with.
  Okay, I'm just going to stop my reply here.
  Go back and read my message. It says 100% the opposite of that. You're spending time that you could have spent on your reply, telling me what I think on my side, and what you are telling me is 100% backwards. And then, in passing, you're lecturing me about how some things I already believe are true. I mean there's a little side issue of whether propaganda and voter miseducation was a factor in this election (and for some reason you are claiming that it was not), but you're barely even dealing with that. You're mostly just telling me what I think and arguing with me when I tell you I think different.
  Again, I think this is actually a pretty important issue. I actually think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say on the original discussion, and spending extensive time just repeating "No, I didn't say that, I actually said the opposite of that" seems like a screaming waste of time. We've gone back and forth about it for a couple of messages now and I'm not real into continuing for a bunch more.
  I think this is a such a big problem that it deserves a specific real solution, way beyond just you and me talking about this specific issue. I think actually I'll try to write something up about it (as I threatened to do below when talking about the issue of propaganda accounts), or maybe work on a more sustainable solution of some sort.
  
  Oh, fuck me this one is long. But I'm so worked up about this.
  You can insist that’s not true, but it is.
  I'm not denying that truth. I'm saying it literally does not matter.
  You are saying the American people are having an understandable reaction to three decades (at least) of Democratic fuckery when they fucked up this election so badly. Yes, I agree. As I keep saying. That’s pretty sensible.
  Nono, i'm not pointing to democrats. I'm pointing to almost 80 years of an american ecomonic ideology that has finally resulted in the failure of democracy (not hyperbole). Ask any non-voter why they decided not to vote, and probably 80% of them will tell you that their vote wouldn't matter, anyway. Not because both candidates cause the same amount of harm, or even that their vote is literally not counted, but because they have so little faith in the democratic system that they think voting is a fake steering wheel on a trolley with no lever. People don't suddenly turn into fascists and authoritarians out of thin-air, people resort to those when they feel there's no other way to change things, and that same (IRRATIONAL) feeling that drives people to vote for a fascist is also what drives people to chose not to vote at all out of hopelessness.
  Go back and read my message. It says 100% the opposite of that.
  No, it doesn't, you just misunderstood what I was saying. Look:
  The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and also the electorate can be so addled by propaganda that they missed noticing that Biden did absolutely historic things to help the working class, address climate change, basically all the core issues except for Israel and even his Israel atrocity didn’t apply to Kamala Harris except in people’s minds
  Ignoring the hand-waving about Israel as an issue (it doesn't matter to my point anyway). I'm not even trying to put everyone in a bucket and generalize about everyone who didn't vote (i know you're saying it's probably a MIX of things), but it's incredibly important to understand this sentiment because of what the implications are for how we rationalize our losses. The point is that even if the voters were completely in-tune with reality - hell, even if they were completely propagandized for the democratic message - that would still not change the feeling of despair about our democratic system. Just try to understand what I'm saying - it's not because Biden didn't deliver on incredibly valuable things, even popular things. It's not even because people didn't know about them or how impactful they were. It's because those things do not change the way they feel about how our democracy represents their interests. All the people I know who were passionately in favor of voting have said that, yea, those were great policies and amazing in our current climate, but the problem is so much bigger than a few trillion dollars of infrastructure improvements that it still feels depressing to even be excited about them. That, and Biden being a ardent capitalist (and zionist) robs us of even the fantasy of this being progress toward a democratic socialist economy, since most of those funds will likely still contribute to the accelerating accumulation of wealth.
  Biden passing MASSIVE climate and infrastructure initiatives does fuck all about wealth accumulating to such an extent that a single $50mil contribution to the next campaign can completely undo any progress made after years of dedicated grassroots organizing and fundraising. Biden presiding over the best-functioning economy in 20 years does nothing to improve the share of profit that goes to labor. Literally everything people feel desperate about only gets worse when the economy is doing well, because it accelerates a wealth disparity that makes it even less affordable to buy a house or groceries, let alone have time or money to contribute to a political project to make things better. The hole we feel we are in is so deep that leaps and bounds feel like tiny shuffling steps by comparison.
  Democrats are simply not acknowledging the severity of the crisis we were already in. THAT'S why it wasn't enough that Harris wasn't a fascist dictator - because people had already lost hope that she could do anything to change what they feel is already hopeless. Her not selling her own vision of progress really only served as confirmation of what people already felt, which is that even if she wanted to make fundamental change, too, it was clear she couldn't (or wouldn't, out of political expedience) walk out and say so because there's a mountain-sized pile of wealth and power poised to wash her and the democratic party away if she did. This is what a failure of democracy means - not that the totality of the votes resulted in something terrible happening, but the totality of the votes are no longer enough to fix what's broken.
  It could have been Christ incarnate vs Trump the antichrist - unless she gave people any hope of fixing a broken system, millions of people would still be in such despair and feel so jaded by past inadequacies that they likely would have stayed home anyway.
  And it was still the second-highest turnout of any election on record.
  
  Biden presiding over the best-functioning economy in 20 years does nothing to improve the share of profit that goes to labor. Literally everything people feel desperate about only gets worse when the economy is doing well, because it accelerates a wealth disparity that makes it even less affordable to buy a house or groceries, let alone have time or money to contribute to a political project to make things better.
  Biden improved the share of profit that goes to labor. He also raised corporate taxes by a huge amount to fund all this stuff he was doing. Houses and groceries both got more expensive, because of Covid, but also, wages went up by this pretty large amount (particularly for the working class you are concerned about here) so that they both got more affordable for the average person overall. They got way more affordable for the average poor person.
  I don't know whether you know that or not. Almost no one does. That's why I say that our systems of political education are extremely bad. Would it be better if he was Bernie Sanders? Abso fucking lutely. But he actually went to bat for the working class in a way that almost no one in America has for a long, long time.
  Outside of that one detail point, which is somewhat pertinent to my whole point that I'm making here, I completely agree with you about the despair people feel about the system, Biden being part of that whole broken system regardless of the good that he did, and that being a key reason why people aren't excited to vote for anyone, and pretty much 100% of the rest of it. I have no idea at all why you keep lecturing me on this and using bold and italics, as if somehow I'm not grasping the point.
  We could be talking about issues of political propaganda, having a factual discussion about whether my assertion about Biden reducing income inequality for the first time in decades in America is even true, that kind of thing. But you seem like you're absolutely committed to pretending I'm not grasping the point and just raising the volume of your messages until the speakers are rattling, pretending that I am not. Why are you doing that?
  
  I’m not grasping the point and just raising the volume of your messages until the speakers are rattling, pretending that I am not. Why are you doing that?
  I was obviously getting worked up, because i'm 90% sure you were saying something completely different, but I'm fine with leaving it at tentative agreement at this point. I do not think voters should take any blame for an electoral system that has completely failed them, and I was very passionately making that case. Maybe I misunderstood your first comment, but:
  
  This is what I was reacting to. The idea that the rise of the NSDAP is entirely the fault of the KPD for 'splitting the ticket' in a country boiling over with populist sentiment due to the long deteriorating economic conditions and rife with division for more than 20 years. To say that the German population was feeling desperate and angry is a massive understatement, and while it's fair to point out the clear miscalculation of the KPD in hindsight, it flies completely in the face of what the sentiment and conditions in the country were at the time, and where the sentiment is here right now.
  I only railed on this so hard because it's clear, to me at least, that democrats are losing -not due to an environment of propaganda- but because the political center is hollowing out due to a similar deterioration of economic conditions and a failing democratic system. I don't consider the core issues of that failure to be 'pet issues', and I think by addressing them as such is a big part of the reason democrats find themselves increasingly alone in the center right. Far from 'asking them to lose', begging them to come to the left is the only way I think they will be able to win without trying to capture the reactionary sentiment of the right. Addressing the economic and democratic crisis is the only way they could possibly win, and the only way to (maybe) fix some of the failures people are feeling.
  Biden improved the share of profit that goes to labor.
  A blip on a shear cliff, and pales in comparison to the immense growth of wealth in the form of capital. Musk didn't buy twitter with a pile of cash from years of profit.

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