not a perfect analysis, since Mickey is only human, but some worthwhile thoughts from a queer ND leftist therapist
edit: the stuff about how this behavior can echo that of the evangelical church made me realize how much of my experience the past few months had awakened religious trauma for me and was a huge catalyst for lessening my activity on this site.
purity politics is a problem i don't know how to escape. where do i draw the line?
how can i not call in someone who aligns with me socially and culturally, but then actively engages politically and economically in the very things which reproduce our collective misery (because they're 'being realistic', and it's 'just the way it is')? how can i not call them an asshole when they turn around and throw out a friendship because i'm 'just a hater' and 'they don't need this negativity in their life' and say i need to 'learn to respect other peoples' opinions / ways of life'?
i have been extremely worn out and worn down by infiltrators, entryists and wreckers. how do i not have a kneejerk reaction at someone trying to reäctivate individualist brainworms and spreading solipsistic ideas in leftist spaces? even if they have good praxis or ideologically align with our goals: they're advocating for ideas which would undermine our work in the longterm.
at what point does gatekeeping turn into purity politics? i am skeptical of people who complain about 'purity politics' and 'echo chambers' because i mainly hear it from the types of realpolitik liberals in paragraph one, or the types of incoherent wreckerkind in paragraph two. is it not right to call out people for being unserious, incoherent and solipsistic? why should i entertain hateful, misinformed people on the assertion that not doing so is somehow epistemically irresponsible of me? i can do opposition research on my own time; i'm in leftist spaces to discuss anticapitalism, antiïmperialism, and antixenophobia, not to discuss the possible merits of commodification, empires and racist statistics.
i'm sick of treatlords pathologising my compassion and then claiming i and other leftists are 'alienating potential allies' for calling out their lack of imagination and for not respecting their appeals to the status quo.
my brain is tired.
I understood her argument as advocating for opting first for calling-in with other leftists and well-intentioned others, not as advocating for never calling-out anyone ever.
I understood her to mean that calling-in can reinforce community behavioral expectations in an educational and edifying way, while calling out is often exclusionary and punitive and can accidentally reinforce oppressive systems, so we should call-in within our communities.
if this interpretation is incorrect, or if it is correct but the thesis is problematic in some way, please lmk. I will delete the post.
i think it's a good discussion, and i agree with your interpretation and the message of her video. i don't think either you or she did anything wrong.
i was venting frustrations about recent events in my life related to the subject, because i and others in my org have been accused of being too 'rigid' or 'unrealistic' on principles like anticapitalism, and that we're 'driving away' potential membership by not being more 'moderate' in our politics.
this isn't a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check. i don't know where healthy gatekeeping ends and purity politics begins, but OrionsMasks's comment gave me something to think about.
This is too vague to really offer any meaningful advice about, but:
Say this person wasn't in the picture, are you on track to building socialism/communism/a better world in X number of years? If the answer is yes, great, carry on, you're doing brilliantly. If the answer is no, perhaps it's worth considering where time and effort might be better spent than chasing away someone who you've decided has a slight chance to undermine the goals that you aren't actually in any position to achieve.
Sorry if it's blunt, but this mentality is why I struggle to hold onto hope for the western left. Everything reeks of online brainworms but the vast majority of online discourse is completely irrelevant to the outside world. We only try to embrace the most terminally online thinking among us, despite those people being the least capable of actually making any lasting change in the world. We pretend we're building the future and this person with the wrong views on outdoor cats is going to spoil it all if we don't drive them out, but we aren't building anything and we just lost a potential comrade.
i appreciate your bluntness, and sorry for the vaguepost — i was venting, and i had few spoons. you did give some meaningful insight.
in the main case i had in mind: it was an internal discussion to drop principles like anticapitalism to 'concede' to the right in 'good faith', both to appeal to a larger audience of radlibs and with the idea that if the right doesn't concede on something then they'll look mean and extremist. i and others pushed back, and we were told our 'uncompromising attitude is toxic'. this isn't a new experience for me, and so i was looking for a sanity check.
but i take away from your comment that it's probably not worth the struggle session if there's no potential in the organisation anyway, or if the issue doesn't need a (satisfactory) resolution to still achieve something. everyone might benefit more from an amicable split rather than an argument that leaves everyone bitter.
Kinda pains me to see other leftists see “things happening” in an extremely sanitized filter bubble and actually believing it’s representative of real world happenings.
I’ve seen this pattern of “Wow things are finally happening!” followed by nothing happening because the “thing” falls out of the news cycle and everyone (but online leftists) loses interest. Godamn I fucking hate algorithms. They fundamentally change our understanding of reality in an almost trance-inducing way