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I'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.
When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.
It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.
As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).
Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.
I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?
I was talking to a friend yesterday about a book I had just read, How the Railways Will Fix the Future. She had recommended it to me because she knew I was a transit advocate, and besides that very much still my 5 year-old self with respect to thinking how cool trains are. It was a fairly quick read; the author (a former? railway engineer) does a good job of breaking down the technical aspects into easy to understand language, and the his engineering background allows him to make some interesting insights into transit that you don't get from your typical urbanism enthusiast.
Where the book utterly failed was in its persuasion. The author is so utterly trapped in his ideological bubble that he is either expecting no one who doesn't already agree with him to read it, or that no one actually disagrees with him (or if they do, are merely pretending to). Here's a tip for all you prospective authors: if you are trying to advocate for something, don't start by furiously denouncing the origins and history of what you want to advocate for. Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what? Imagine going about your life like this. Is this man capable of saying he enjoys a good sandwich without first clarifying that he unambiguously denounces the legacy of bread as a staple ration for armies of conquest?
There were various other weak elements; it should go without saying around here that claiming the US needs to build more transit to help LGBTQ+ people of low incomes move states is an argument worthy of only a wanking motion, but beyond that shackling your arguments to such narrow slivers of the population when you're arguing for a universal good is just moronic. And he does the classic leftist tactic of insisting upon "democratizing" progresses by increasing public involvement and decentralizing decision-making, assuming of course that everyone shares his incredible niche politics. (The kicker is he had spent a good chunk of the previous segment going into the exploding costs of High Speed 2, maybe one of the better arguments ever against these notions) Just again and again the arguments came off as so staggeringly lacking self-awareness. But then again I looked up a few reviews for it and those were generally positive; essentially all coming from other left-leaning urbanist progressives who share very similar politics.
But it frustrates me endlessly as someone who actually wants to get these projects built is that ostensibly their biggest supporters are just so fucking bad at making the case for them. So somehow it ends up (at least in Ontario where I live) that it's only the conservatives who end up getting new infrastructure projects done.
In Astralcodexten book review contests there was missing a good savage panning of a book.
What is his argument that this will help rail? I have the stereotype of projects being derailed (ha!) by decentralized and increased public involvement.
His argument in brief is that populations should have control over the services that effect them: so suburban services for a given city should be controlled by the local government, even though his ideal model sees a national, public-owned company owning the rail infrastructure, the rolling stock, hiring the employees, running the trains etc. So ownership should be centralised: planning and operation devolved. He sees this going hand in hand with extensive public consultation: not just at the planning phase but before that, starting at the proposal phase. He thinks (rather axiomatically) that direct education and involvement of the public of the benefits of a given infrastructure project will naturally engender far-reaching support for that project. The only hurdle he thinks that should be removed is any pondering of fiscal sense:
I think there is some merit to the notion of decentralisation; I think a decent chunk of the cost problems associated with modern transit construction, particularly in the Anglosphere, is the imbalance of revenue generation between municipal and higher levels of government that result in transit projects largely being designed by cities but paid for by higher levels of government; it invites buffet-style planning on the one end and political interference on the other. But I think in general his approach is just naïve beyond belief; the combination of the assumption that local interests will only work in everyone's best interests and abandoning any pretense of fiscal restraint obviously invites endless waste and graft.
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