“So it’s crucial to distinguish the left from the toxic and silly and irrational ‘internet left’—that’s a basic and profound and major distinction.”
“So you should—whether you’re interacting with people who are on the ‘crazy left’ or whether you’re interacting with anyone else in the world—try to reason with people and try to find common ground with people and try to work together with people.”
“So people just need to figure out (1) whether what they’re doing makes sense and (2) whether what they’re doing is ethical and (3) whether what they’re doing is delighting and empowering and benefiting the right wing.”
“So there’s always been a struggle to keep an even keel. But it’s possible to do it—there have been successes over time.”
Progressive political forces are—in the US and Canada—extremely weak and emaciated and marginalized. Progressive political forces are way stronger in Europe and in Latin America—my friend told me that I should translate my pieces into Spanish and that my pieces would get a warm reception in Latin America.
We live in dark and potentially terminal times—it’s essential for survival that progressive political forces break through in Canada and in the US. And yet things often seem bleak—I’ve written about my own sense of a tiny left that exists only out in the wilderness.
I want to use this piece to discuss the left’s internal issues—I hope to interview people on the left and ask them what they think about this piece. There’s always been irrationality and insanity and suicidality on the left—that’s nothing new. The left has always had to face threats from within and from without—the threats from without are enormous in a society of concentrated and self-conscious and unrelenting power, so it’s tragic to behold the threats from within.
The “Internet Left”
There’s something called the “internet left”—it’s an extremely toxic development. I asked my friend why nobody on the left is challenging the hawkish propaganda about the war in Ukraine and I took notes based on my friend’s response:
the “internet left” consists mostly of people glued to social media and websites that cater to them—they’re the ones who receive attention and they’re the ones who are called “the left”
the culture has declined to the point where in many circles—including the “internet left”—a phrase questioning in any way the rigid Party Line elicits a torrent of abuse, demonization, lies, utter irrationality
no thought or discussion is possible—this is perhaps understandable in the case of young people whose understanding of the world is restricted to shrieks in social-media bubbles and on Twitter
so the left—like Nuclear Age Peace Foundation—is challenging the hawkish propaganda loud and clear and is doing whatever it can, but what’s called “the left” is young people prattling on social media
So it’s crucial to distinguish the left from the toxic and silly and irrational “internet left”—that’s a basic and profound and major distinction. I’m not sure exactly how much harm the “internet left” actually does, but it definitely isn’t a good thing and it definitely does some damage.
The “Crazy Left”
There’s always been the “crazy left” and the “non-crazy left”—regarding the “crazy left”, you had fights in the 1930s over which version of Trotskyism was right and you had fights 50 years ago over whether the best way to advance “the revolution” was to carry out bombings or to hand out copies of the “Little Red Book” at factory entrances.
So you should—whether you’re interacting with people who are on the “crazy left” or whether you’re interacting with anyone else in the world—try to reason with people and try to find common ground with people and try to work together with people.
The right wing loves to seize on and capitalize on and benefit from the various silly things that people do—the right wing loves the “crazy left”. So people just need to figure out (1) whether what they’re doing makes sense and (2) whether what they’re doing is ethical and (3) whether what they’re doing is delighting and empowering and benefiting the right wing.
Consider the issue of what term you should use to refer to Latin American people—AOC does a lot of fantastic stuff, but just imagine how gleeful the right wing must be about AOC’s recent comments on this front.
There’s an interesting video in which Lawrence Krauss asks Noam Chomsky about whether the left—not the right—now poses the biggest threat to free speech on campus. I took the following notes on Chomsky’s response to Krauss:
the threat from the left “competes with the standard problem” of right-wing cancel culture
the threat from the left is a bigger problem—than the traditional threat—when it comes to the way that faculty and students have to walk on eggshells in their personal activities
much of the problem isn’t to do with the left and is instead to do with privileged young kids—mostly teenagers—who develop a concern about race and gender and oppression and who “often go overboard” and who engage in “hopelessly mistaken” efforts to show solidarity with those less privileged
the term “Latinx” is “very offensive to Latinos”—Latinos “hate it” and the term very much upsets Latinos, but “people who want to be super solidaristic insist on using” the offensive term “even though it’s demeaning to the people they think they’re helping”
So there’s definitely a need for education and learning and thought that will prevent people from engaging in “hopelessly mistaken” efforts to help those less privileged.
And just in general people have to always be careful not to play right into the right-wing playbook—you can always tune into right-wing media and see how right-wing media operates and get a sense of which behaviors are a wonderful gift to the right wing.
Keeping an Even Keel
There’s an interesting 13 June 2022 piece from Ryan Grim—here’s an excerpt:
Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.
“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family—it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”
People will read Grim’s piece and will—if they’ve been involved in progressive activism for decades and decades—say that Grim is a newcomer to an old phenomenon.
There’s always been a problem on the left with internal struggles and with the need to balance conflicting and passionate priorities. It’s not healthy to suppress internal divisions—you have to find a balance even though it’s not always easy to do that.
So there’s always been a struggle to keep an even keel. But it’s possible to do it—there have been successes over time.
There does seem to be a growing awareness of the “crazy left” phenomenon. This isn’t just a political problem, it seems largely a personal one: a lot of these people just aren’t doing very well, psychologically speaking.
One worthwhile thing to note: I recently read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and it included a lengthy section about how socialism would never take root in Britain so long as socialists remained so singularly unappealing as people. That makes me wonder whether this is in fact a new problem or not, or if there really is all that much of a difference between the “online left” and “the left” as such.
In any event, while it’s been encouraging to see a bit more self-awareness within the left about the toxicity of its culture, I’m really most curious about what the response is, beyond simply lamenting it. That doesn’t seem to have clearly materialized yet, and it seems like it could go in several directions.
Thanks for Chomsky's wise comments on the current situation in the universities.