A culture on the left where political criticism and debate are substituted for telling absolutely wild, obscene lies about your opponents is nothing new; see Stalinists’ claims during WW2 that “Trotskyists are agents of Hitler”.
That sort of culture is utterly toxic. It’s a form of cultishness that is utterly inimical to any attempt to build a mass movement. It’s ideologically equivalent to a religious sect claiming members of other religions are devil worshippers.
If you allow that culture to go unchallenged because you find it incidentally factionally convenient, rest assured that it’ll turn on you eventually.
Related to this is the culture that demands someone be deplatformed or ostracised for one shit take, rather than being engaged with and persuaded. That’s very much a consequence of the fact that so much of “discourse” is conducted via social media...
...a form encouraging immediate denunciation rather than considered deliberation. If your reaction to a view you disagree with from someone else on the left is “this person is scum who needs to die”, rather than “this person is wrong on this issue”, you’re part of the problem.
“People who disagree with me on any issue are scum who need to be driven out” isn’t an operable attitude in your workplace, it’s not an operable attitude in your union, and it’s not an operable attitude on the left.
This doesn’t mean we all have to hold hands round the campfire and sing Kumbaya, or pretend we don’t have extremely sharp disagreements within the left. In fact it means being *sharper* and *clearer* about *actual political disagreements*, rather than just slandering and lying.
