A nice piece on NJR and how to avoid Taibbi/Greenwald brain where you end up hating liberals so much you end up a useful idiot for the fash.

  • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The article is about how hating libs can one into a lazy thinker. It's focused on two writers who are slipping into conservative talking points, but parts of it could have been written about leftists slipping into dead-end ultraleft territory:

    excessive disgust for liberals can create deficiencies in one’s political analysis which in turn can give rise to a fuzzy understanding of the way the world works. (A bit more uncharitably, I might say it shows how Twitter turns smart people stupid.)...

    By... calling the Democratic Party the “epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody,” Greenwald has heavily implied that the Republican Party is actually the lesser of two evils. After all, if Democrats are the “epitome of fascism” and “completely repressive,” but on the other hand, “asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy” is a “preposterous farce,” and non-fascism remains preferable to fascism, then Trump’s politics are preferable to those of the contemporary Democratic Party...

    This story about American politics is short-sighted, delusional, and dangerous. It’s short-sighted because much of what is called “wokeness,” while limited in its transformational capacity and cynically manipulated at times, is still a critically important step toward achieving justice. It’s delusional because the Democratic Party, for all its flaws, hypocrisies, and capitalist inclinations, is still preferable to the racist and extremely capitalist Republican Party. And it’s dangerous because Republicans are going to try to use this story about liberal fascism in order to try to get back into power in 2022 and 2024, and people who short-sightedly use their large platforms to push a delusional right-wing narrative are actively helping the Republican Party achieve its incredibly destructive goals...

    The belief that Liberals and Democrats are irredeemable and unable to care about anything but power can lead one into downright wrong and sloppy analysis. For instance, Greenwald appears to have become convinced that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic party apparatchik whose job is to provide leftist support for centrist elites... AOC, like Bernie Sanders, often does deeply disappointing things. But it is excessively cynical—and frankly erroneous—to pre-emptively decide she is a careerist whose only goal is to bolster the Democratic Party... We should be highly skeptical of any politician, even the ones on “our side” and hold them to account. But it’s simply not correct to view her as solely invested in propping up the Democratic Party’s leaders, since she has shown herself willing to harshly criticize them.

    Dunking on libs is fun, and has some value, but we also need to maintain a broader perspective. Politics without the masses are adventurist politics. We can't write off every leftist who manages to get a platform as insufficiently left -- that's just ultraleft adventurism. Critical support is the name of the game, and that involves at least some support.