Thread by @deontologistics

@worgztheowl @Casmilus I'm not trying to claim that he was popular amongst anyone but a base of boomer socialists, urban millennials, and younger people who clearly see the disconnect between extant politics and the problems that will define the rest of their lives. I'm willing to own that much.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus But what you call an 'outlier' was in fact an opportunity. It was an opportunity that depended on the fact that his opponents misread the situation, and didn't see the danger posed not by his popularity (which was poor) but by the way his (old school) politics fit the context.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus This opportunity was to some extent squandered by him and his team, by means of a number of bad decisions made with the aim of squaring the electoral demographic circle that is Brexit. But his opponents never criticised him in these terms, but reached for literally anything else.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus I, and many like me, are utterly, incandescently, and intellectually furious at those who are now somehow able to talk about the Corbyn moment in terms that would've been constructive when it was happening, but who instead did everything they could to make sure it was squandered.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus Precisely because these people are now complaining about what *they're* losing now that they've done everything they can to ensure the Brexit outcome they vocally denounced was achieved by means of their own bloodyminded refusal to compromise or think strategically in any way.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus I know many of these people, and I generally like them, but I have to bite my metaphorical tongue so hard when these topics come up that it draws blood I can only spit out on platforms like this, safely out of earshot (for the most part).

@worgztheowl @Casmilus Some of them may read this, and well, if you think I'm talking about you, I probably am, so prepare to get some blood in your face.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus I'm so sorry for your loss. But if I have to keep hearing about what *you* lost in the entirely preventable catastrophe that you helped catalyse I will eventually snap and drown you in a torrent of rage fuelled thoughts on political economy in which I suspect you might drown.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus What *you* lost? What you *fucking* lost? Just because your personal nostalgia is for a red passport not a blue one does not make it any more politically interesting or any less strategically myopic. You lost a comfortable present. We lost the first future we had dared to dream.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus There's a frankly insulting lack of solidarity with Corbynites (and there are many), caused by a simple inability or unwillingness to understand our sheer desperation for any fleeting glimpse of an exit from this everpresent nightmare: the slow motion collapse of liberalism.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus And this is why when we are confronted with sudden and stomach-churningly hypocritical calls to party unity, we are asking ourselves whether we can show solidarity to those who refuse solidarity to us, those who we cannot but see as complicit in the cancellation of the future.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus To add one final thought here, on generational dynamics, I'm generally less frustrated by boomers than most. They are who they are and they've been pandered to in various ways that have disenfranchise others, but there are plenty of politically aware boomers with good politics.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus I tend to reserve my special ire mainly for generation X. Many have secured professional positions on the edge of the post-war boomer compromise, something less common amongst millennials and zoomers, and it infuses every facet of their benighted politics.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus Those who grew up during the end of history, and cannot fail to reproduce the systems that perpetuate it(Capitalist Realism) despite themselves. For all its problems, nostalgia for the postwar boom can at least inform a critique of the neoliberal compromise that followed.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus Obviously, this resentment is something I have to work on, personally, not least because the great thinker of this juncture (Mark Fisher) was so immersed in the working class culture of generation X that it suffuses every single one of his analyses. Mark would tell me as much.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus But there's a scarily hot twitch reflex buried somewhere in my miserably monkey brain that's been trained up by regular exposure to flagrant gen X liberal bullshit that can only be found and brought to heal by cold rationalism.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus If I don't do this, and simply wallow in my resentment, negative solidarity will take hold of me and draw me into a web of complicity with the generations before me in further immiserating the generations after me, all in the name of these monkey feelings, as Mark might put it.

@worgztheowl @Casmilus To let my internal mental model of him generate some words: "Don't get caught up in the turbulent flows of affective reaction, but don't let your desire to extricate yourself from them prevent you from acting."

Turn off, tune out, but drop in.