First of all, a sincere thank you to all of
my readers on Medium. (Yes, I'm aware the official term is 'followers' but as
I've said that really makes me sound like a leader of a cult and society is
tribal enough as it is.) When I began writing here nearly ten years ago never
in my wildest dreams did I believe that I would have this many readers, almost
none of whom are among my immediately family and friends.
Now to the purpose of this article and the
ones that follow. I address this series ostensibly to all my readers but far
more to those who I've spent much of the last two to three years subscribing to
because I consider them part of what I'm only consider half in jest 'the
coalition of the sane'. I would mention those of you who I mean by name but I
should let you know I expect this series to be greeted with hostility by quite
a bit of the readers at this site. While by this point in my life I am perfectly
capable of handling them, I don't wish to unduly burden you with their rhetoric
by association. I suspect many of you have already been attacked by those same
people and are more than capable of handling them but as this series is not
directed to them, why allow them to take up any more space in our heads?
Here's a warning to those who are new
readers. I'm going to be saying some things that certain people on this site
and elsewhere absolutely need to hear but have made it painfully clear
they have no interest in hearing it or anything that dares penetrate the echo
chamber they occupy with a slightly different perspective. If this doesn't
interest you, get out now and find another column. Some of you might actually
want to block me right now if the thought of reasonable dissent is considering giving aid and comfort
to the enemy. I'll be doing my TV and other forms of criticism soon enough but
for now I'm going to get political and not in the way the overwhelming majority
of writers on this site like.
You gone? Well, for now let's just assume
they are. I'll find out soon enough. Let's proceed.
Let's start with some information about me
personally. Most of my readers know this because I've said as much in the
comments section of many, many articles on this site but it's worth restating.
I'm a centrist Democrat which means, to
quote the immortal Chris Rock "I got shit I'm liberal about and shit I'm
conservative about." That being said I'm in accord with somewhere between
75 to 90 percent of the values argued by the various identity groups that make
up the majority of what is discussed in political articles in this site, which
we all know is majority left-wing. (It's officially ranked 'center-left' by
sites who do so.) Like them, I am basically appalled by the those on the far
right and much of the Republican base that follows them as to how elected
officials from that party across the country and elsewhere are doing much to
suppress their basic rights. It doesn't matter whether they are
African-American, LatinX, female or part of the LGBTQ+ community: at my core I
completely support their rights and like I would believe most rational people
are, want them protected. I am fully aware how much of the extremists are not
rational in any sense of the word as well.
And even coming from my position as a cis,
white male which I know causes many in all of these identity group to view me
as suspect before they even meet me, I feel for them because I am a human being
and have empathy.
I also agree that many of the systems in
America, including capitalism, the criminal justice system and even our
democracy are broken. I may differ with them as to how irreparable the system
is (I'll get to that) but I won't dispute it needs serious repairs. And I can
understand why so many in this country and the world feel this sense of despair
and impending doom about our society and feel the need to share that
hopelessness on this site and others to express their feelings. Its either this
or go mad and I don't judge them for that.
So for years on this site when I saw many
of these columnists express their rage or despair about the world, I asked
them: "What can we do to fix it?" Because I do believe that if there
are ills in our society it is our duty as a society to find a way to repair
them. And that's where its clear I differ from the overwhelming majority of
those writers.
Because for more than a year and a half I
asked them over and over, how do we fix it? What would you do if you had the
power? I asked them first in pragmatic fashion and eventually I was willing to
give them king-like if not god-like powers to ask. And over and over, I got the
same response.
Silence.
None of the most blatant abusers of these
themes (none of you are among them, I want to assure you) ever came up with a
plan, logical or even fantastic, as to solve the problems of today. What they
did, over and over, was restate how badly broken society was and how there was
no motivation to fix it. Eventually I
became more sarcastic though even then I tried to keep it in the boundaries of
constructive criticism because I did and do still feel empathy and sympathy for
their causes.
I never got as much as a clap for my
responses.
It was only when I started to express the
ideas that I didn't think were that radical: that people in red states were
human beings and should be treated with respect, that free speech has to apply
to everybody, even the people you disagree with and the very real fact that
Republican voters were not going to magically disappear by ignoring them. Then
I started getting responses – all of which basically called be either a
MAGA or a DINO, sometimes in the same comment. (That's a neat trick, honestly.)
All of this I should be clear took place
during Biden's administration and it was by the midterms that I realize
what really should have been obvious: many of these people were incapable of
seeing reason. Now I didn't expect his election to make all of these people
swear eternal loyalty to the Democratic Party but at the very least I figured
they'd finally admit that there was a difference between the two parties.
That never happened. And the closer we got
to the 2024 election and the more so many of them refused to commit to first
Biden's reelection or Harris becoming the President, I genuinely doubted both
their sanity and mine. Did they not live through the first Trump
administration? Did they not remember just how horrible it had been and all the
causes they claimed to fight for? I understood, reluctantly, why the
Republicans were willing to go off a cliff with Trump in 2024; I couldn't
comprehend why so many seemingly intelligent people really seemed to think that
there wouldn't be a difference no matter who won that November?
And I have to be clear I didn't just see it
here but in so many other left-wing magazines. I saw in The Nation,
Harper's, The Atlantic and especially Daily Kos which is supposedly in
favor of electing Democrats across the nation. Its striking how,
even now, there are many left-wing writers who still seem unwilling to commit
to the idea that the Democratic Party is at least an improvement over one
that they will spend pages is destroying everything America ever was. But
by and large, many will rarely go that far, and its half-hearted at best.
None of this is anything new, by the way,
all of these writers are descendants of a left wing movement that pre-dates the
protestors in Vietnam, pre-dates those who think FDR didn't go far enough with
the New Deal and goes back, as you might expect, to the kind of people who will
tell you to this day that the Soviet Union was a failed experiment and that
socialism would work if it was implemented correctly. They're the kind of
people who have made it clear that the reason the Democrats have struggled to
win elections is because they embraced 'neoliberalism' - a term I need to be clear coined by a
Marxist scholar. They will tell you in
no uncertain terms that the Democratic Party can't win elections because they
haven't gone far enough to the left and therefore millions of people are
rejecting them. Why so many people would choose to embrace a party that these
same people have always equated as fascism as an alternative is a circle they
never seem fit to square. But they will tell you that if the Democrats embraced
'true liberalism' the voters would come.
To be clear, and I suspect many of you know
this, there is no statistical evidence that the average voters wants the positions
that are embraced by the so-called Justice Democrats and that are built in the
Bernie Sanders campaign. This was proven multiple times in the countless
elections the McGovern's and Mondale's lost in landslide to increasingly
conservative candidates; by the fact that so many of the policies that they
advocate for have never been passed in legislatures where they've been put on
the ballot as a referendum and when they have many have been repealed by the
states later on; by the fact that the Justice Democrats movement itself has
essentially been repudiated by the electorate ever since 2018 when they ran
their first slate. The voters have sent a very clear message that they don't
want what the left is selling and the Democrats have lost a lot of elections –
and in effect, given the Republicans carte blanche to put their agenda across
the country as a result – by trying to sell even a half-baked version of it to
their voters. This has done nothing to convince so many of these writers that
it’s the Democratic Party's moral duty to do so. It's an argument they make
with the same fervor communism would work if it were tried properly.
The people on this site who make arguments
like this have no real facts or figures to back up that the masses want what
they are selling or lacking that, how they intend to win hearts and minds to
convince them to endorse it. I've told them that multiple times, again under
the label of constructive criticism, and they have made it perfectly clear that
I am a white supremacist, manosphere troll, homophobe, et cetera, et
cetera. They seem proud by the
number of people they push away, even if its into the hands of the enemy. How
this is going to help them build this left-wing utopia they continuously insist
the people want is something they ignore; far too many would rather call
you the worst names possible then even concede for a moment you have a point.
When I tell them that this exact same kind of fanaticism I have seen on Fox
News and other right wing articles – and which they themselves argue is
repulsive and must be rejected by all rational people - they push it aside.
I'm unaware when it comes to many of the
people on this site whether their attitude is generational, identity based or
political. I suspect it is a combination of all three. What I have come to the
ultimate realization of is that they are not part of the solution but part of
the problem and unless they can be made to see reason (something I increasingly
doubt with too many of them) we can't count on them as useful in finding a way
to solve the problems of our society that they rage against.
None of this is new in America. As a
student of history one finds a direct link through every aspect of what the
left in this country has been like, stretching from the days of the
abolitionist writings and anger from those such as William Lloyd Garrison to
the No Kings Protests of today. With few exceptions it is led by loud,
belligerent rhetoric about the injustices of society combined with an utter
refusal to engage in any actions to bring about the changes needed to end these
injustices. This rage and anger has the overall effect of pushing potential
allies into the camp of the opposition which organizes based on society's
construct to maintain their political and economic power and maintain these
injustices.
What can be the most maddening, personally
as well as from a historical perspective, is so many times those involved know
what the other side is doing, knows what they need to do to bring about change
– and stubbornly will not engage in it anyway. Famously in 1964 Malcolm X said:
"Change is coming. Either by the ballot or by the bullet." This was
the kind of rhetoric that could and was easily used by the opposition to
mobilize its base to make sure that it could maintain its hold on the electorate.
But the bigger problem is even when they
were given these two very blunt, basic choices of how to realize change during
the sixty years that have followed almost every aspect of the left in any
identity group has been 'none of the above'.
They are just as stubbornly adamant about voting as a solution to their
problems and while their protests may move into violence every so often they
are basically unwilling to use that as a method of change. So they march every
so often, write their articles in publications like this, and post on social
media. And then they have the gall to be upset that somehow society has not
realized how horrible things are. That's the left's problem in a nutshell:
reform is too slow and they're too lazy to carry out a revolution. Based on the
times I've mentioned this to them on this site and others, they don't like me
reminded of this basic reality.
So to quote John Oliver in a context he
would never accept: "What can we do?" These articles will be an
attempt to figure it out. They will deal in a philosophical context to
illustrate flaws in the left's dogma, how it mirrors the extreme right and
where they've basically failed. I will use historic examples to why liberalism
historically worked and how its redefinition has led the Democratic party and
liberal causes essentially off a cliff in my lifetime. And eventually I will
attempt to make an argument as to how reform, slowly but surely, must be done
in order to bring about the changes that those on the far left advocate for but
have proven themselves incapable of bringing about.
These articles, I hope, will be part of a
larger conversation between myself, the writers who I have agreed to follow and
who have been kind enough to return the favor, and those who do agree about the
injustices in society and want to do something to bring about change. We must
accept it will not be easy but I believe it is not impossible. I have
never believed in the doomcrying of these writers at any point in my life and I
refuse to give into their despair or accept their rage. There is still a small
part of me that hopes some of them will read these articles, feel heard and
maybe, maybe be willing to walk
the walk instead of just talking and no action.
I believe in their causes, but not their attitude. And it is that part
that will give us a way forward in the years to come.
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