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.
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