Hate Mail - We Need A Real Left Which Is Ready To Leave The Stuff That Never Works Behind

I first went online, I think, sometime in the late 90s.   I really don't remember when it happened.  I do know that my time online increased quite a bit around 2001 and I began, almost immediately, to encounter "the left" online, to a large extent the same "left" I'd read in the lefty magazines  - I used to subscribe to five, if you count the defunct Maine Times  you can get it up to six and I was quite familiar with the formal, edited form of that "left".

Encountering it self-published, unedited and unmoderated on websites and their comment threads, was quite a shock for me.   Somehow, in reading the "left" on paper, it seemed to be far freer, far more contingent in its judgement, far less rigid than I found it to be translated into the assertions of a large percentage of those I read online where peer pressure seemed to dictate the allowable boundaries.  That is remarkable, in itself, because the universe of those lefties available online is certainly many times  larger than those I read from the 1960s through the 90s and beyond.  It was as if the larger the sample was, the more rigidly conformist it seemed to me.  It was, perhaps, that what I'd assumed was the presentation of ideas you were free to adopt or reject was presented as a required normative point of view, allowing for no forgiveness of dissent.   While that wouldn't have surprised me on righty sites, it took me a while to get used to it on the "left".

I had encountered that in some of the flakier Marxists I'd met before. some of whom volunteered to serve as the basis of the stereotype of those who insisted on following the party-line of "political correctness" before that term came to mean that racists and sexists and gay-bashers got to spout their hate publicly.  What the Trump fascists are so worked up about.  I even met some Maoists who insisted on the world being as according to what The Chairman said.  But, both off and online I encountered people who didn't buy that stuff anymore than I did but the number of those who bought and sold it was quite a shock.  I would say that it accounts for most of the alleged, online, left.

Count me as among those who refuse to go along with some prescribed normative POV, kow-towing to someone getting pissy about it is more likely to provide just another reason to refuse to go along, so I didn't.  And I am naturally rather ornery in such circumstances.

In viewing that unexpected level of conformity I started to suspect it was a lot more dangerous to the left than to the right, and I started to become convinced that the required POV of many of them wasn't really particularly liberal.  But I've been over the real nature of the atheist-materialist-scientistic "left" many times.  Academic materialism of the putative "left" and the vulgar materialism of the admitted right are really just two slightly different flavors of the same poison.    And the vulgar materialism of the right is, by far, the more popular brand, far more easily swallowed by so many more, though those who buy the academic brand like to think of themselves as the more discerning connoisseurs.   Assumptions of snob-privilege and quality, in the sense that a Brit aristocrat would use the word in identifying one of their own, figures heavily in the attraction to it.  Its association with very expensive, elite universities and the graduates of those and, at lesser institutions, those who aspire to join that class is surely no accident.   That the academic lefties have been a burden and a disaster for any real left doesn't overcome the habits of thought so ingrained in both the culture and literature of it, the promised pleasure it provides the lefty.   Its long-term impotence in politics is a dead giveaway that the unchanging features of it are not, in the end, really about the poor, the destitute, the dispossessed, the stranger, they're of, by and for the elite who maintain the ballot box poison and will not change.

A good clue as to what any real left that can work is found in the part of the old left that worked, the civil rights movement of the 1950s- mid-60s is the last great period of that working.  The unions, while they worked - discounting those which were taken over by organized criminals, Marxist idiots and, worst of all corporatist leadership, are another example.  I strongly suspect that materialism is incapable of generating a real left that can work, which I've also been over before.  The "science" that such materialism has inflicted on politics is pseudo-science, including much of what passes itself off as biology these days.

If you want more, read my archives, though I suspect you don't really want more, you're just upset that I'm refusing to go along with your attempt to assert the totally failed academic lefty limits of expression.   Well, I'm not going to observe them.  I've seen through them.  That isn't going to change. Get used to it.