according to @Custoslibera’s post
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
Catch-phrases like "all cops are bastards", "defund the police", "~~math is racist~~", "black lives matter", "trans-women are women" etc., do not help to promote ~~liberal~~ progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away.
For the record, I'm not saying that the ideas behind the words are bad*, but the phrases themselves act as a litmus test; If anyone questions the phrases, the divide has occurred, and they're a fascist (another word which is used far too often).
Many of these are so easy to correct for, "Reform the Police", "Black Lives Matter Too" are the most obvious and easy changes.
There are those who'll say that conservatives are going to complain about it anyway, and many of them are set in stone, but there are far too many people going to the right, as a result of the left making fools of ourselves.
The strength of the right is that they'll accept anyone who isn't left. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazi's, and KKK are tolerated by the right because their strength is in numbers, not ideas.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
EDIT: The conversations about liberal and liberalism have been draining. There is one definition which is practically synonymous with progressivism - this is what I meant, not Liberalism.
Not a single person on the left has ever said math is raciat. That was something Tucker Carlson wholesale made up after we started asking why black kids did worse in school. As for "black lives matter" I'd say that's pretty self-evident, and the only possible rebuttal ("don't white lives matter too?") has a one sentence counter ("obviously. but white lives aren't under threat right now.")
More to the point, respectability politics in general is a trap. We could have better slogans, that's true, especially in the "getting people on our side" phase, but compromising what we believe in to be more palatable to moderates, even in the slightest, is unacceptable. "Sure, I'm cool with trans people (maybe I'm even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line" is their in. Once conservatives see that we admit some point is too far to our side, once they see the bubble of people we protect can shrink, they won't stop until it's shrunk all the way.
I wouldn't go so far as calling those people leftists (same as tankies aren't leftists) but "math is racist" is definitely a thing that happens. People were suing in Canada that the tests to become accredited as teacher includes maths tests, and because some statistic somewhere showed that black folks score statistically lower on maths, they claimed that the requirement to pass it is racist. That completely ignored that they could re-take the test as often as they pleased and that plenty of education was given to prospective teachers that enabled them to pass those tests. A lower court agreed with the claim of racial discrimination, the constitutional court then struck it down pretty much saying "lulwut" in legalese.
No, maths is not racist. The people claiming it is racist were the racists here, thinking that being black makes you somehow inherently incapable of passing those tests, so much that you can't even pass them with studying. Also I bet the disparity in maths scores by skin colour vanishes if you control for socio-economic status but the complainants would've needed maths to understand that so they didn't.
OTOH, optically those kinds of fucks are associated with leftism and I'd say it's important to openly respond to that kind of silliness with "lulwut" before the courts get around to doing it.
As to black lives matter: I think it was a strategic mistake to oppose "all lives matter". The slogan, that is, not the racist fucks. Instead, it should've immediately been appropriated by the movement precisely to define it and to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that you don't mean "non-black lives don't matter", which is understandably a reading lots of people had because they're projecting their own racism, or just racist realism.
Neopronouns are an enby thing, not trans and yes I'm completely fine with calling you they/them and have no issues with your ingroup using as many different pronouns as there are members, but I'm not going to fucking remember all of them. I very much draw a hard, red, line at "difficult on purpose" as that would validate people's vulnerable narcissism, "prove that you don't hate me by jumping over random hoops I come up with". Leftism is not the defence of maladaptive personality traits.
Just to shoot myself in the foot, the meaning behind "math is racist" is a nuanced discussion, but it wasn't the left who distilled the idea down to "math is racist", it was Fucker.
My problem is with phrases which fail to capture the meaning behind the words, phrases which are vague or easy to strawman, and phrases which are needlessly imflammatory.
There are many more which bother me but I'm drawing a blank. Thanks metacognition
I stand corrected, though it says a lot that I believed that there would be a group from the left making that claim.
Yes, says a lot about where you source your information and that you don't fact check enough.
Nobody fact checks enough. I'm sure you're wrong about things every day. There's no shame in admitting I was wrong, so cool your jets.
Case and point: your claim liberal ≠ leftist.
You're wrong about that. I'm not going to hang shit on you for being wrong, but it is hypocritical.
The left gets massacred for prosaic slogans like "Black lives matter" and "Trans rights are human rights" while the right straight up chants "Jews will not replace us" and nobody bats an eye. So I don't think the left's tone is the problem here.
And yes, for the record, black lives matter and trans women (note, no hyphen) are women.
The Left are the adults in the room. We need to speak clearly so the children do not think we are taking them to the dentist (we totally are but there's no need to trigger them).
The Right cannot change, it's in their nature. It's practically pointless to try. The best we can do is be tactical, and avoid scaring them.
And how well has being the adults in the room worked for us? In the US, it's done nothing but marginalize the left time after time. Our choices for leadership boil down to a contest between center-right and fascist, and fascist is winning.
The fact is, people want anger. People understand anger. People are angry, and for good reason. Our society is completely, utterly fucked, and everyone knows it, even if they don't quite know how or why. And it's precisely that sentiment that fascists like the MAGA movement prey upon. They give people something to blame for everything being fucked, while what laughingly passes for the left continues pretending everything is fine. And so people go to the right, over and over and over again, because at least the right acknowledges their anger.
There's a reason that the last time the left had a real moment in this country was when there were massive protests all over the nation, screaming at the top of their lungs, "BLACK LIVES MATTER!" and "DEFUND THE POLICE!" We finally let our anger show, and guess what? This country stood with us, over and over, and mobilized like hell to get Trump out of office. And then the Biden administration abandoned us and called for "civility" and "reaching across the aisle" like we all knew they would, and now the fascists are back.
We are not going to get anywhere as long as we keep trying to be the "adults in the room" and try to be "civil". We need to get fucking mad, and stay fucking mad, and do the work to make real change whether the other guys want it or not.
We can offer hope instead of fear. The right is steeped in fear, it fuels their entire ideology. If we are able to offer hope, hope is more powerful than fear.
But being the adults in the room we must remember who we are speaking to. We have to converse with them, not at them. If you converse at them, they will simply retreat into the fear bubble because it is familiar, comfortable, and makes them feel safe.
I'm not saying we don't offer hope. But hope and anger are not incompatible.
You can't offer hope for a better tomorrow unless you are willing to point out and fix the problems of today. And as long as we are avoiding scaring the right, we cannot do this.
The Right cannot change, it’s in their nature.
The right will change, and we'll figure out how. That or their immutability will figure into the great filter of the human species.
Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?
Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.
Common misunderstanding is we're playing the same game. The game they're playing is "own the lib-tards". At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it's fucking embarrassing.
And as aforementioned, it's the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.
The game the left is playing is "who has the best idea", which doesn't matter to the right, because they're either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.
The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.
Well then you shouldn't use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.
Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don't play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.
Do what is right. Simple.
Yes, the game is rigged in their favour, absolutely. The problem is that their ideas will not change, they are conservative, they conserve their ideas.
It's the responsibility of the ones who can change, to be smarter about it. If we sink to their level, we are no better than them.
Progressives are smarter, but we're not acting like it. That's why I'm saying we need to be better at policing our own, it's all about mitigating needless stupidity.
Also, outside of America, liberal and leftist are essentially synonymous, so that's why I used it. But it's my fault for not remembering America makes a very different distinction.
European here. They are absolutely not synonymous. Where I grew up liberals are the right wing, with socialists on the left and religious party on the center.
That's the liberal party, same in Australia.
However, when I say liberal I mean it as an ideology, which is very much leftist:
How are we not acting smart by saying "black lives matter" and "trans women are women"? These are great, simple and to the point slogans.
The only way they can be seen as controversial is of you don't agree with these statements because you believe that black lives dont matter and that trans women aren't "real women". So that would make you a right-winger.
You hit the nail on the head.
Black Lives Matter invoked a response which was "All Lives Matter" - it drowned out the sound of the cause to those who aren't initiated.
"Trans-women are women" naturally begs the question of what a real woman is and implies trans-women are real-women. Those on the left don't have a problem with this, but those on the right smell something deceptive happening.
The whole point of what I'm getting at is that there are moderate right-wingers who have been convinced by those more malicious right-wingers that the left is stupid because they say stupid things.
This is a war of optics, it's why the right is parroting the same crimes to Biden, what Trump was accused of.
I really don't think there's anything controversial about saying the progressives need to continue to make progress.
Liberals are right-wingers all around the world, not only in america.
I know you probably mean well, but guess what? I do not care about how right-winger feels and I will not water down my opinions to please them.
I don't want to get into an argument about semantics, but liberal does not mean right wing.
It isn't about pleasing them or playing by their rules. It's about not giving them ammo to shoot your comrades.
Liberalism is a pro-free market Capitalist idea centered on the ideas of individual liberty. This is right wing. It isn't fascism, but it's also not leftist.
The divide between left and right is who you think should own and control the Means of Production: the Workers, or Capitalists.
I'm honestly shocked at how many times I've needed to explain this, it's quite a bother.
In America, liberal = Liberalism. I get it.
I never said Liberalism*, I said liberal. Outside of America, liberal colloquially means those pertaining to the liberal ideology (not the liberalism ideology). Refer to the dictionary definition above for what the liberal ideology is.
*(Nevermind I did say liberalism in a parallel post. Again, I'm not from America, but in context with the screenshot of the definition it's pretty clear I'm referring to liberal ideology)
No, liberalism means liberal, even outside America.
Well, the said liberals have defunded schools, hospitals, trains, retirement and anyknd of welfare here in the name of "being opened to new ideas", so it's a bit more than semantics. Sorry, I don't want to be associated with liberalism.
Liberal bourgeois are a significant political force since the French revolution - and always opposed people. It is and always was about the freedom of industry barrons and nothing else.
That's liberal as an adjective, not liberalism in its political definition. As a socialist I don't have a liberal party in my country that I can support. They think capitalism will be fixed if there are no disparities in how people are distributed within it. It's like thinking equal black and white slave owners in the Antebellum south would have fixed the economic arrangement of slavery.
I don't think liberal approaches are just unfavorable, I see how they perpetuate the problems they're invoked to address. We've seen nothing but wealth inequality rise as the latest liberal economic consensus came in to effect in the 70s. That economic stratification is what creates these problems, because you have ascriptive taxonomical hierarchies like race that develop out of economic relations like that.
The neoliberal movement in the US is totally right wing, more so than the US or EU populations generally.
Conservatives would not change their minds. They listen to whatever their talking heads tell them, and they would turn that around and make a counter protest. That's all conservativism is.
There are no "sensible" right-wingers, they've had their values thoroughly corrupted by a media-machine designed to split the worming class against itself. Changing optics would do nothing, so instead the left should focus on continuing grassroots efforts.
Also, liberals are not leftists, liberalism is pro-capitalism.
I'm feeling like you're deliberately misunderstanding me.
The people I'm appealing to are centrists. The last thing we need are more votes for Trump. It was too close last time, and it'll be too close this time too.
Liberals are centrists, and they voted for Biden. Fascists are voting for Trump, not moderate right-wingers. What democrats need to appeal to is leftists, who they have largely scorned.
American Liberals are a different thing from those who subscribe to (non-American) liberal ideology.
Democrats have a really low bar to score. "Not Trump" is shockingly low. Leftists are in agreement, "not Trump" is better than "Trump".
I really don't think the democrats need to do much at all to convince the left, besides remind everyone how fucked it was four years ago.
I think it's more important to prevent people migrating to the right (as we see with GenZ Andrew Tate fans), and pull in as many moderate right-wingers as possible.
It seems impossible at first glace, but I've seen viseos of republicans openly trying to convince their peers that Trump deceived them. It gives me a sliver of hope.
Liberals are liberals, no matter the country. Liberalism refers to a Capitalist ideology centered around individual freedom and private property rights, and it originated in the Enlightenment.
Gen Z is more leftist than it is fascist. There's a reactionary rise in fascism as fascism is really just a response to the decay of Capitalism and the rise in Socialism, as the bourgeoisie protects itself violently.
American liberals are not a different thing.
I'm just tired of discussing semantics at this point so I just don't care enough to argue about what Liberal means.
I learned my lesson, I cannot use that word online to express what the definition of Liberal means to me based on the contexts of how it was used academically/philosophically.
GenZ is generally more progressive, but there has been a worrying rise in anti-feminism within GenZ men. The amount may be small in relation, but the fact that it is rising at all is concerning.
Liberal, as it was and always has been used academically and philosophically, refers to Liberalism, an ideology centered around private property rights and individual liberty as core values.
You are using it as a synonym for open-minded and forward thinking, which are certainly good traits, but not exclusive to nor expressive of leftism. Leftism is about worker ownership of the Means of Production, plain and simple.
As for Gen Z, yes, there is a rising reactionary movement just as there is a rising Leftist movement. Socialism is more popular than ever among Gen Z. The fact that fascism is also rising, albeit at a slower pace, among Gen Z is just a symptom of the rising Socialist sympathies. Fascism has always been expressed as a defense against rising Socialist sympathies as the bourgeoisie violently protects itself. People don't just decide to become fascist, nor do they just decide to become Socialist.
History is driven by material conditions, not by people and ideals. Look for root causes.
Only someone operating in bad faith would claim this isn't what "Black Lives Matter" means.
That's the entire Right. You cannot win them on the grounds of good-faith, truthfulness, or humanity because their politics is solely about power. Conservative politics are the politics of abusers—litterally everything they wish to "conserve" within society includimg "tradition" is their freedom and ability to abuse. That's it:
Family values is not about creating healthy families, it is about patriarchy and the right of the parents to abuse their children.
Defending the sanctity of marriage is about defining LGBTQ people out of legal rights and entitlements.
School choice is about controlling what ideas not just their children are exposed to but their neighbors as well.
Etc. Etc.
Every conservative position is a bad faith push to further their ability to control the lives others and their ideas deserve neither respect nor a platform.
Please tell me, as a trans nonbinary person, what the respectable version of "trans women are women" is?
Here the far right is constantly bickering and their political parties are steadily fissioning. There's pro Putin and anti Putin far right, vax and antivax far right, ethnonationalistic and moderate far right... sometimes it just isn't possible to agree what you hate.