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.
This one is a really key tell. The people who spend most of their message emphasizing what it is that their opponents believe, and only in passing deal with what they believe (which tends to be along the lines of "well they all want to kill Palestinian babies but I don't want that, so clearly you can see the difference"), and immediately start telling anyone who talks with them what they believe also... that's an important signal.
I think it is so popular because it is substantially lower-effort than engaging with anything the person is actually saying, and also it works on anything. You don't have to be on the right side of the argument, you can just assign your opponent some awful crazy shit, and then get to work disagreeing with that.
Edit: Just for some examples. Here are things people have told me today:
(Literally no idea what this is about)
(I, also, think that the police should be held to the expectation they're talking about, and said so repeatedly)
(I wasn't, I did bring BLM into a discussion about the police)
(I said the exact opposite of that)
(I wasn't explicitly included in this grouping, but this person was explicitly talking to and about me when they said this. Obviously none of this has anything to do with anything I think or want. This is a form of indirect strawman "You are group X and all group X people think Y and Z" that is particularly hopeless to ever have any kind of success in disagreeing with)
(I pointed out with alarm that there is literally 0 food in Gaza currently and people are likely to start to starve on a mass scale this month)
And so on