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Brood Parasitism in Leftist Politics (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Leading up to the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass was conflicted about who to support. David W. Blight argues in "Frederick Douglass" that the activist saw Republicans not as true opponents to slavery but rather as just opposed to the power that enslavers could wield politically. Still, he saw supporting the Republicans as his only real option because they at least "humbled the slave power" and fought against it as an institution. Douglass expressed a willingness to work with the Republicans even though he was disappointed by their overall platform. He wrote an article a few months before the election that was positive toward Lincoln.

In the months leading up to the election, Douglass continued to stump for Abraham Lincoln by giving many speeches, and he was involved in other campaigns, like trying to abolish the racist $250 property requirement for Black voters in New York (per Blight). He also worked as a recruiter, getting Black soldiers to join the war effort. A month after the election, Douglass wrote an article in his newspaper, "Douglass' Monthly," in which he stated the nomination of Lincoln "demonstrated the possibility of electing ... an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the

https://www.grunge.com/853161/the-truth-behind-abraham-lincolns-relationship-with-frederick-douglass/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I had to go and pull out my copy of Blight's book on Douglass, because it had been a while but I remembered that section of the book differently.

The whole passage is expressing a sentiment very different from the one that 'Grunge' article is representing - without transcribing that whole section i'll just quote the last little bit that summarizes his summer leading up to the election:

spoiler

On July 2 [after his apparent June indication of support for the Republicans], he wrote in a confused tone to Gerrit Smith, who struggled with a mental breakdown in the wake of Harpers Ferry. “I cannot support Lincoln,” Douglass asserted, “but whether there is life enough in the Abolitionists [Radical Abolition Party] to name a candidate, I cannot say. I shall look to your letter for light on the pathway of duty.” Then in August Douglass wrote in the Monthly that the “vital element” of the Republican Party was its “antislavery sentiment.” “Nothing is plainer,” Douglass argued, “than that the Republican party has its source in the old Liberty party.” It would live or die, he contended, “as the abolition sentiment of the country flourishes or fades.” Vexed by his commitments to moral principle and political action, Douglass announced that he would vote for what historian Richard Sewell rightly called the remnant of Gerrit Smith’s “miniscule” radical party, while assiduously working for Lincoln’s election.

The comparison is not quite as clear as I think you'd like, since Douglass's tentative 'support' of Lincoln was motivated by a desire to bring the north and south closer to outright conflict, not as a way of picking a lesser evil or mitigating harm. I'd say Douglass's sentiment is more in-line with current-day pro-palestinian activists, who acknowledge the political calculus of a moderately-favorable party against an outright hostile one, but who publicly oppose voting for them themselves. He'd be in that same 'protest-vote' pool that most people here keep complaining about. I'm actually lightly amused by this apparent reversal, since today it's more common to find people who say 'i will vote for democrats' but then actively campaign against them, but again I think the comparison is strained.

Either way, trying to argue that Douglass 'worked for Lincoln' is still incredibly misleading at best, and clearly a liberal self-centeredness that he (and most other black civil rights activists in our history) actively loathed and berated:

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it. Douglass summed up his bitter complaint as “this terrible paradox of passing history” rooted in a distinctively American selfishness. “Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [two forms of Chinese tea], will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets.” If some foreign power tried to “impress a few Yankee sailors,” Americans would go “fight like heroes.” Douglass fashioned a withering chastisement of American self-centeredness that would match any modern complaint about the culture’s hyperindividualism. “Millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us,” he complained, “and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as ‘sucking doves.’ ” His “wickedly selfish” Americans loved to celebrate their “own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.” They lived by the “philosophy of Cain,” ready with their bluntly evil answer to the famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Douglass’s use of the Cain and Abel parable is all the more telling if we remember that, unlike the more sentimental ways the “brother’s keeper” language is often employed today, Cain had just killed his brother, and to God’s query as to Abel’s fate, Cain replies in effect, why should I care? Douglass wanted the indifferent Americans, with blood on their hands as well, to read on further in Genesis and know Cain’s fate as “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.”

Doubtless he wouldn't have seen as much in the way of redeeming qualities in Biden or Harris, since far from Lincoln's willingness to engage the south (for the wrong reasons in Douglass's mind), Biden repeatedly cowered away from confronting Israel's antagonism and actively sheltered them from consequence. But then again I think neither of us can do more than speculate as to what he'd think of us more than 170 years later.