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Related h/t @ymeskhout
This guy is talking about "leftism" as a shibboleth for what I would call radical progressive. People who call themselves "leftists" and hate "libs". Literally abolish the police, end capitalism, Portland / Seattle Black Bloc.
In the above essay, the author is a former leftist examining the pathology that leads to minimizing Hamas atrocities. The latent desire in American leftism to Fuck Shit Up needs a dastardly target to excuse its behavior.
I don't think there is much difference between leftists and libs. The online leftists who hate libs more or less agree with them on almost everything. They pretend to take edgy positions because they aren't actually trying to get elected or affect change, but if they actually ran for office they would be pretty much the same. Look at people on /r/stupidpol who call communists who support trans stuff and identity politics liberals. It's just leftists shit flinging like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front scene in Life of Brian.
I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.
The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.
The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.
This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.
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I’m a liberal and a centrist, and I’ve heard the exact same argument from leftists, but reversed, in that I’m basically a fascist because I support capitalism, am against identity politics, quotas, unrestricted immigration, and am geopolitically pro-Western.
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I'm saying the opposite and that most "communists" in the USA (and socialists too like the DSA) are essentially just liberals
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There are obviously major ideological differences between DEI capitalists who vote Biden and actual Leninists or Black Bloc anarchists who want to guillotine rich people (including many of the previously mentioned group) ASAP. That’s like saying both sides in the Cold War had the same ideology. Both may have been descended from the same kind of Hegelian narrative, and ultimately from enlightenment ideas about progress, but they weren’t the same.
Stupidpol is just white male leftists who prioritize their interests in the leftist coalition over those of the queer leftists, radfems, third worldists, ethnic minorities and other groups on the far left.
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It looks like inconsequential infighting to you because you're distant from it.
Your own disagreements with other people to the right of Mao look like inconsequential infighting to them.
Indeed it's a well documented fact that fascists, liberals and communists all think the other two are basically identical.
The truth is that politics is a great deal more complicated than a discrete amount of ideological groups vying for power.
Differences though there may be, I think there's something to be said of the fact that, for whatever reason, liberals seem to hold that the person saying "liberals get the bullet too"/"Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is their dear friend, and they seem quick to circle the wagons to defend radical leftists who hate their guts.
Liberals seem to be under the impression that the radical leftist is a strawman, that these people are just the same as them, save for maybe being a bit more energized, and that they are having their words distorted. This phenomenon is probably why conservatives say they're the same people. Liberals are all too eager to see anyone anti-right as an ideological ally. See: sanewashing, as with "defund the police." "These fellows seem to agree with me, being upstanding anti-rightists. Surely their words and movement are being unfairly mischaracterized." clueless.png
From what I see, liberals don't think communists are fascists, they either think they're fellow liberals, or flat out don't believe they exist, that they're just an exaggeration used to malign regular old liberals. (Which, to be fair, does happen, and might be their primary exposure to these radical ideas.)
I'm reminded of the Muslim suicide bomber's parents who said that they didn't know their son had become so religious as though that were the inevitable consequence. There is a sense in which leftists are just liberals that take the liberal's ideology seriously, and so liberals have no real textual defence against leftists. When a leftist takes them to task on an issue, they might have pragmatic objections but they can't argue the principle.
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I’d say most liberals would argue that there’s no imminent risk of capitalism being abolished or overthrown in the modern west and that the actual far left is a vanishingly small and powerless group of irrelevant people who occasionally smash Starbucks or Chase Bank windows during G20 protests or whatever. It’s not like the denizens of CHAZ were going to take over Amazon or assassinate Bill Gates.
When liberals are actually threatened by the far left it tends to be more of a mixed result.
That's not relevant. You can take a cultural issue, and the same dynamics will appear - "no one is performing gender surgeries on minors", "CRT is just a continuation of the Civil Rights movement", "feminism is just about equality between men and women". I suppose they try to deploy they same sort of dismissive "there's no imminent risk of X being abolished" argument here too, but it's a bit of a harder sell, when all the top institutions are pushing the radical messages that are supposedly strawmen.
Well no, because beyond deciding who gets into Harvard the far left does have a central, overriding goal, larger than all else, which is a revolutionary abolition of the “capitalist mode of production” ie private property. And again they don’t seem close to this in practice. You can’t have Marxism without Marxian eschatology. CRT while extreme wealth inequality and billionaires exist isn’t the ultimate goal for them, or even a good stopgap measure.
I don't think so. If it was an overriding goal, we'd already have an economic-left + cultural-right coalition. As it stands even the "class reductionist" stupidpol leftists have to signal their disgust with "rightoids".
Their economic goals are at best secondary, and in the worst case opposite of what they publically claim.
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From years of reading fact checking sites for my job, this seems true. Snopes liberals fend off right wing accusations implicating and sullying Antifa with incredible regularity. Meanwhile something like smiling Covington kid, Damore and other stores that take off on the right isn't really their beat.
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