Freddie de Boer on the Left:"Powerlessness is a comfortable place to hide; if you have no ability to effect change in the world, you cannot really fail. Your ideas never make contact with reality and so there is no chance that they will be put to the test" fredrikdeboer.com/2018/06/14/bet…
"Armed w/ powerlessness...practitioners of this brand of politics concentrate..their energies into the types of interpersonal politics that, for many, characterize left activism. You may not be able to slow global warming but you can ruin the reputation of someone..in your bloc"
"Left politics is about structures, not people, and we have developed a vocabulary to match – white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism. But we do not have a structural focus in our internal debates; we have the opposite."
"many on the left act as if they must treat any claim of offense as legitimate in order to believe that such claims are ever legitimate. ... this attitude treats all claims of a specific type of offense (whether racism, sexism, etc) as equally strong"
"precisely b/c the world is indeed full of bigotry, and b/c the left must oppose it, these claims take on remarkable destructive power when wielded carelessly or in the pursuit of organizational power. Such accusations will often be correct..considering the world we live in. ..."
"But ... the power of these accusations is often wielded cynically...The left cannot abandon its commitment to fighting...bigotries, or else it deserves to lose; it cannot entertain every cynical, exploitative accusation of these bigotries, or else it cannot win"
