Answer To A Question

What would I do to promote the real left?

Well, the first thing is to avoid conceited, insulting alienating dicks of the kind who have done more damage to the left than just about anything else.  Quite often the biggest of those are the ones who have achieved or aspired to power in any of the various totally failed, totally rotten old-lefts of the past hundred-fifty years.  A reading of the late James Weinstein's "The Long Detour" will provide a partial list.  I would avoid the old habit of leaning on academics and, heaven preserve us "theorists" especially those in the social-so-called-sciences like the plague they have been since Compte and before.   I would especially suggest the sections in Weinstein's book on how the old Socialist party, which achieved electoral successes on an unprecedented scale, was destroyed from the left as those who had done something, people like Victor Berger, were derided as "conservatives" "traitors" and "sewer socialists" by the more ideologically pure and totally ineffective "real left".

I would recommend reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson, especially Mother Country and those in When I Was a Child I Read Books, and then into the truly radical left, the writings of  Walter Brueggemann, James Cone, Dorothy Day and many others.   All of those writers are entirely more radical than the secular radicals. radical especially when they deal with real action in real life and not in the pudding-headed theory that those who never intend to do anything that will be like work love so much.   A look at the social justice teachings of the Abrahamic religions and such things as the Engaged Buddhism movement are good, too.

I would avoid, like the plague they are, communists, many who go by the name "socialist" many of whom are not, the Fabians on the right and the many Marxists on the alleged left.  I would avoid the insanity of anarchism as it's generally conceived of.  I would make it a general rule that any alleged "party" which has never elected a single member to an actual office or has never achieved having an actual caucus of a tenth of any legislature is a total waste of time and, far worse, counterproductive.  All such parties end up damaging real progress towards the left, the Greens in the United States are only one of those.  You can say the same for groups that have been in existence for decades and longer whose achievements, generally extremely modest, are outweighed by the dead weight they have been on progress.    For the love of Mike, there are still people who retain romantic notions about the I.W.W. these days.   I mean, I loved Studs Turkel but when he went on about the Wobblies it was like he was suffering from senile dementia.  The Wobblies were a total and complete disaster and screw up who ended up betraying even many of those they organized.  There is a reason that the membership of the group during some decades achieved the stunning record of having more than 100% of its members leaving it.  I assume that means that some of the dopes tried it more than once before leaving it for good.

It's insane to look to those who did nothing but blow smoke when there are actual examples to learn from.  From Marilynne Robinson there is the point that nothing the myriad of more radical radicals promoted that were of more material and spiritual good to more people than the establishment of free, public education, including land grant universities, public libraries, Social Security, the G. I. Bill of Rights, Medicare and Medicaid and other such sweepingly radical changes that we've allowed to be damaged and weakened.   As Robinson pointed out, few if any of the programs imagined by the British radicals we are supposed to revere approached the radicalism of those programs which the United States under far more officially conservative governance made law and into effective programs.  Americans have got to get over the largely Anglophile, less often Francophile notion that their thinking on those things is superior to what happened here.  You can learn some things from other places but it is far more likely that in the United States, what has, in fact, been achieved here has more to tell us about what might be achieved here in the future.

Of course it all falls apart when that history is lied about through the magnification effect of the media.  It isn't satire that destroys bad things, it is lies that destroy the good things.

The libertarian-liberals, the phony leftists who enabled the campaign against those by allowing the media to lie have been the greatest help to the effort to destroy that radical program of actual improvement in lives, whatever the ACLU might have achieved in other cases is obliterated in their enablement of the oligarchic, Republican lie campaign against democratic government to improve lives, to produce real good for real people.  The free-press, the electronic media has been the most effective weapon against whatever good is possible.

Another rule for a real left is that any political group whose history contains an exponentially larger account of their pitiful, self-pitying suppression and victimization than their achievements is a dead end.   There is one useful thing to consider about that, though.  The endless whine of the anarchists, the Marxists, etc. about the massive lies that prevented them from doing anything reinforces my point of the total stupidity of the "more speech" line of the free-speech industry.

If lies told by the plutocrats and oligarchs through their newspapers, radio programs and other media are the excuse we allow the communists, anarchists and others to give for why they produced nothing, then to pretend that lies aren't the reason that the left that achieved something are not also damaged by those lies is absurd.  The claim that such lies aren't powerful enough to, not only prevent future progress but to destroy what has been achieved is, literally, psychotic in the face of the history of the left being entirely disempowered under the regime of free press absolutism when that "press" is hate talk radio and right-wing cabloid and network TV.   The disempowerment of the left is also a result of their freedom to lie.  The left has to give up some of its most cherished slogans and notions because they are nuts.