wild, cause this describes pretty much every lib that i run into on here.
I never understood why “libs” are so broadly hated within the leftist spheres. Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism, sure, but at least in terms of human rights, equality, rule of law and such, it feels like we should have more common ground with them than this animosity implies.
the common ground assumption only holds if you think human rights and equality are achievable within capitalism. from my perspective this is the core disagreement.
liberals believe the system can be reformed to deliver those things, leftists generally think the system structurally prevents it. that’s a fundamental disagreement about what the problem is.
Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism
pro-capitalist isn’t a strain of liberalism, it’s the foundation. liberalism as a political philosophy emerged to defend private property and individual rights against feudal authority.
you can’t separate the human rights framework from the property rights framework it was built on.
‘rule of law’ under capitalism is the law of property. it protects the existing distribution of wealth and power. leftists who want to upend that distribution are not going to see that as ‘common ground’
Maybe we’re working with different understanding of liberals then, but to my mind, ideals like equality before the law and freedom of association certainly put them closer to us than conservatives or fascists. Social liberal policies like worker protections, universal healthcare and social security measures shouldn’t be needed, but they are at least attempts to counteract the worst tendencies of unbridled capitalism.
Out of the dominant political movements, liberalism presents the best environment to work towards replacing the system. At least they won’t lock us up in labour camps for being black, being gay or being a little too critical of the regime. As allies go, I think we could do far worse, so I’d rather save my vitriol for the shared enemy until we’re in a position to fix this shit.
‘at least they won’t lock us up’ is a selective reading of history. liberals have done exactly that if threatened. the liberal state locked people up for being black and being too critical of the regime before trump. it was democrats that were raiding gay bars and opposing gay rights until the movement got big enough that they rebranded and wrapped themselves in the flag.
the ‘best environment to work in’ assumption only holds if the goal is incremental reform within the system rather than replacing it, which goes back to the core disagreement.
a system that presents the best environment for working toward its own replacement is a contradiction in terms. it presents that environment precisely until you get close enough to actually threaten it.
also all of the things you credit the social liberals for were concessions extracted by organized labor through strike, occupations and political pressure that the liberals were actively resisting until they had no choice.
crediting liberalism for them is like crediting the landlord for not raising rent after a rent strike.
Okay, we’re definitely working with different definitions then. I don’t see much of a point arguing about the history of the term and associated policies.
Today’s liberals are certainly better than conservatives or fascists when it comes to human rights and shit, and that’s the people we’re working with right now. We can labour over the sins of their ancestors, or we can attempt to influence their policies to our benefit until we’re in a position where we no longer need their cooperation.
a system that presents the best environment for working toward its own replacement is a contradiction in terms.
Counterpoint: wouldn’t a system that doesn’t even permit these conversations be a worse environment? If there are worse environments, doesn’t that make the others better by comparison? Isn’t the “least bad” equivalent to “the best”?
Alternatively, what would you posit as the best conditions for working towards toppling the system?
the ‘least bad is best by comparison’ logic is a race to the bottom with no floor. it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
the ‘influence their policies’ approach has a +50 year track record of the left getting played. what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system. i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
I suppose that depends on your definition of “supporting”. Whether the system persists doesn’t depend on my vote, if there is no realistic option to abolish it by voting, nor does not voting seem to have much of an effect. But for some people, that margin makes a world of a difference, sometimes even between life and death. Whether trans people get to piss in peace (and generally exist) or whether the ICE gets to ramp up its operations does depend on votes.
That doesn’t mean I support the system, just that I acknowledge its nuances and that I’m not throwing marginalised people under the bus just because it doesn’t fix the root cause.
what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
Dunno, all the labour protections and antitrust measures the fascists are rolling back? They wouldn’t need to gut them if they didn’t work anyway; they could just keep up pretenses and work on other things.
The civil rights that, by your own description, the liberals only supported to once they realised it was more popular? Again, they’re not great, but you’ll have to admit that they’re loads better than the alternative we’re seeing now.
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system.
Agreed. Building structures that show how things could be done better challenges the value of performative social measures. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also vote; these things aren’t exclusive.
i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
The simple fact is that liberals have also enacted a lot of progressive measures over the last two centuries, whether due to their own ideals or due to leftist pressure. It’s not enough, but for many people, it’s a significant improvement anyway. To call that “their preferred hitler” is an incredibly reductive and arrogant take that reeks of privilege. It’s easy to call the election a “sideshow” if your life isn’t impacted, but that overlooks the people whose lives are.
Those people are the common ground I’m talking about. Dismissing them and anyone who cares about them as “libs” doesn’t make you a better leftist, it just makes you a worse ally.
i’m a trans woman, i have plenty of skin in this, and from where i’m standing the democrats have been actively complying with anti-trans legislation rather than fighting it. Pretty much every day there’s a new democrat ad about how they’re going to protect women’s sports.
those labour protections were concessions extracted by organized pressure, not liberal goodwill. they’re being rolled back precisely because that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
ice is what it is today because of liberals like obama and his enablers, do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties and from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.
that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
Yeah, the idea that elections alone can fix anything is bullshit and I’ll admit I took long to understand that lesson. It only really sank in after 2021, I think.
Change needs to be cemented with popular support to stick, but the pressure to change things in the first place will need to come from outside.
do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
No. That’s why their traditionalist leadership is so incensed at the “insurgency” of progressive candidates gaining visibility and influence in primaries: they don’t want those structures challenged, but the fact that people are electing reformers at all is a threat to their democratic legitimacy for preserving the structures. Their efforts might fail, but for now, they’re a problem to the leadership.
By contrast, the Republicans have made an explicit point of suppressing all dissent. There are no (visible) challengers, because no freedom of expression is allowed in the first place. Whatever charge of building and maintaining such structures we may bring against the Democrats, the Republicans have made things much worse. Any semi-progressive measures the Obama administration might have undertaken were rolled back, while any restrictive ones were accelerated.
The notion that both sides are equal just smudges over a lot of these distinctions. Obama wasn’t great, but this is significantly worse.
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties
The idea to vote left in primaries, but vote anti-right in general elections where actual leftist chances are slim for all the reasons you’ve brought up. When one option is objectively worse in some aspects and better in none, standing on the moral high ground does nothing for the people in the valley being overrun. All they hear from the right is the propaganda “They want to take away all your shit” and all they see from us is hostility and condescension.
Don’t get me wrong, voting left is better than not voting at all, and if it’s a deeply one-sided election, it may even be more prudent. But the message “I won’t vote for the people that’ll hurt you less” sounds a lot like “I won’t protect you”. I don’t think that’s your intention, but from the conversations I’ve head, that’s the impression many get.
That’s really the core of my argument: many liberal voters don’t really want this, but don’t (yet) see the restrictions of the system and how it preserves this shit. We don’t yet have the leverage to topple the system, and with each step the fascists get to take, it’ll become harder to build that leverage.
Hence, I believe that we should adapt our messaging (not our ideals, just the way we present them) to be less hostile to the closest thing we get in terms of like-minded people. It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.
If we can emphasise that we (mostly) want the same goals - life, liberty, happiness - it will be easier to talk about the reasons that’s impossible right now and the measures we suggest to make it possible.
(As an aside, that’s the problem at the heart of leftist infighting: we tend to forget that we ultimately want the same thing and get hung up on fights about how to achieve it until we accuse each other of being the enemy.)
from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Point taken. Your talking points sounded a lot like the ones I’ve heard others complain about; chalking that up to privilege instead of a different perspective is my mistake. Diminishing your struggles wasn’t my intention.
I never understood why “libs” are so broadly hated within the leftist spheres. Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism, sure, but at least in terms of human rights, equality, rule of law and such, it feels like we should have more common ground with them than this animosity implies.
the common ground assumption only holds if you think human rights and equality are achievable within capitalism. from my perspective this is the core disagreement.
liberals believe the system can be reformed to deliver those things, leftists generally think the system structurally prevents it. that’s a fundamental disagreement about what the problem is.
pro-capitalist isn’t a strain of liberalism, it’s the foundation. liberalism as a political philosophy emerged to defend private property and individual rights against feudal authority.
you can’t separate the human rights framework from the property rights framework it was built on.
‘rule of law’ under capitalism is the law of property. it protects the existing distribution of wealth and power. leftists who want to upend that distribution are not going to see that as ‘common ground’
Maybe we’re working with different understanding of liberals then, but to my mind, ideals like equality before the law and freedom of association certainly put them closer to us than conservatives or fascists. Social liberal policies like worker protections, universal healthcare and social security measures shouldn’t be needed, but they are at least attempts to counteract the worst tendencies of unbridled capitalism.
Out of the dominant political movements, liberalism presents the best environment to work towards replacing the system. At least they won’t lock us up in labour camps for being black, being gay or being a little too critical of the regime. As allies go, I think we could do far worse, so I’d rather save my vitriol for the shared enemy until we’re in a position to fix this shit.
‘at least they won’t lock us up’ is a selective reading of history. liberals have done exactly that if threatened. the liberal state locked people up for being black and being too critical of the regime before trump. it was democrats that were raiding gay bars and opposing gay rights until the movement got big enough that they rebranded and wrapped themselves in the flag.
the ‘best environment to work in’ assumption only holds if the goal is incremental reform within the system rather than replacing it, which goes back to the core disagreement.
a system that presents the best environment for working toward its own replacement is a contradiction in terms. it presents that environment precisely until you get close enough to actually threaten it.
also all of the things you credit the social liberals for were concessions extracted by organized labor through strike, occupations and political pressure that the liberals were actively resisting until they had no choice.
crediting liberalism for them is like crediting the landlord for not raising rent after a rent strike.
Okay, we’re definitely working with different definitions then. I don’t see much of a point arguing about the history of the term and associated policies.
Today’s liberals are certainly better than conservatives or fascists when it comes to human rights and shit, and that’s the people we’re working with right now. We can labour over the sins of their ancestors, or we can attempt to influence their policies to our benefit until we’re in a position where we no longer need their cooperation.
Counterpoint: wouldn’t a system that doesn’t even permit these conversations be a worse environment? If there are worse environments, doesn’t that make the others better by comparison? Isn’t the “least bad” equivalent to “the best”?
Alternatively, what would you posit as the best conditions for working towards toppling the system?
the ‘least bad is best by comparison’ logic is a race to the bottom with no floor. it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
the ‘influence their policies’ approach has a +50 year track record of the left getting played. what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system. i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
I suppose that depends on your definition of “supporting”. Whether the system persists doesn’t depend on my vote, if there is no realistic option to abolish it by voting, nor does not voting seem to have much of an effect. But for some people, that margin makes a world of a difference, sometimes even between life and death. Whether trans people get to piss in peace (and generally exist) or whether the ICE gets to ramp up its operations does depend on votes.
That doesn’t mean I support the system, just that I acknowledge its nuances and that I’m not throwing marginalised people under the bus just because it doesn’t fix the root cause.
Dunno, all the labour protections and antitrust measures the fascists are rolling back? They wouldn’t need to gut them if they didn’t work anyway; they could just keep up pretenses and work on other things.
The civil rights that, by your own description, the liberals only supported to once they realised it was more popular? Again, they’re not great, but you’ll have to admit that they’re loads better than the alternative we’re seeing now.
Agreed. Building structures that show how things could be done better challenges the value of performative social measures. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also vote; these things aren’t exclusive.
The simple fact is that liberals have also enacted a lot of progressive measures over the last two centuries, whether due to their own ideals or due to leftist pressure. It’s not enough, but for many people, it’s a significant improvement anyway. To call that “their preferred hitler” is an incredibly reductive and arrogant take that reeks of privilege. It’s easy to call the election a “sideshow” if your life isn’t impacted, but that overlooks the people whose lives are.
Those people are the common ground I’m talking about. Dismissing them and anyone who cares about them as “libs” doesn’t make you a better leftist, it just makes you a worse ally.
i’m a trans woman, i have plenty of skin in this, and from where i’m standing the democrats have been actively complying with anti-trans legislation rather than fighting it. Pretty much every day there’s a new democrat ad about how they’re going to protect women’s sports.
those labour protections were concessions extracted by organized pressure, not liberal goodwill. they’re being rolled back precisely because that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
ice is what it is today because of liberals like obama and his enablers, do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties and from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.
Yeah, the idea that elections alone can fix anything is bullshit and I’ll admit I took long to understand that lesson. It only really sank in after 2021, I think.
Change needs to be cemented with popular support to stick, but the pressure to change things in the first place will need to come from outside.
No. That’s why their traditionalist leadership is so incensed at the “insurgency” of progressive candidates gaining visibility and influence in primaries: they don’t want those structures challenged, but the fact that people are electing reformers at all is a threat to their democratic legitimacy for preserving the structures. Their efforts might fail, but for now, they’re a problem to the leadership.
By contrast, the Republicans have made an explicit point of suppressing all dissent. There are no (visible) challengers, because no freedom of expression is allowed in the first place. Whatever charge of building and maintaining such structures we may bring against the Democrats, the Republicans have made things much worse. Any semi-progressive measures the Obama administration might have undertaken were rolled back, while any restrictive ones were accelerated.
The notion that both sides are equal just smudges over a lot of these distinctions. Obama wasn’t great, but this is significantly worse.
The idea to vote left in primaries, but vote anti-right in general elections where actual leftist chances are slim for all the reasons you’ve brought up. When one option is objectively worse in some aspects and better in none, standing on the moral high ground does nothing for the people in the valley being overrun. All they hear from the right is the propaganda “They want to take away all your shit” and all they see from us is hostility and condescension.
Don’t get me wrong, voting left is better than not voting at all, and if it’s a deeply one-sided election, it may even be more prudent. But the message “I won’t vote for the people that’ll hurt you less” sounds a lot like “I won’t protect you”. I don’t think that’s your intention, but from the conversations I’ve head, that’s the impression many get.
That’s really the core of my argument: many liberal voters don’t really want this, but don’t (yet) see the restrictions of the system and how it preserves this shit. We don’t yet have the leverage to topple the system, and with each step the fascists get to take, it’ll become harder to build that leverage.
Hence, I believe that we should adapt our messaging (not our ideals, just the way we present them) to be less hostile to the closest thing we get in terms of like-minded people. It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.
If we can emphasise that we (mostly) want the same goals - life, liberty, happiness - it will be easier to talk about the reasons that’s impossible right now and the measures we suggest to make it possible.
(As an aside, that’s the problem at the heart of leftist infighting: we tend to forget that we ultimately want the same thing and get hung up on fights about how to achieve it until we accuse each other of being the enemy.)
Point taken. Your talking points sounded a lot like the ones I’ve heard others complain about; chalking that up to privilege instead of a different perspective is my mistake. Diminishing your struggles wasn’t my intention.