Some white folks on the left are so into being edgy and outsider-ish for its own sake, that they will reflexively repel from whatever the dominant progressive discourse is at the time just to seem iconoclastic...(1)
So if the dominant strain of progressive/left movement activity is around racial justice, they'll attack it as identity politics. This isn't bc they're racists. I mean, some might be, but generally, that's a lazy explanation. The truth is worse (2)...
For instance, Glenn Greenwald, if he had been doing his thing in 1990 when David Duke was running for the US Senate and nearly winning, he'd have been that guy who was like "it's so easy to bash a Nazi. The REAL issue is his Dem opponent who's in bed with the oil industry!" (3)..
Would that be because Glenn supported Duke? Of course not. It would be because Glenn thinks being different and taking on other progressives is a politic in and of itself. He thinks that's radical praxis when really it's just "look at me" narcissism (4)...
Folk like this care more about securing their place as 'apart from the crowd,' for the sake of it, or clicks, or Substack subs ($$$) or whatever. Also, they assume (and this is common on the left) that if a movement is gaining broad support it MUST not be for real change (5)...
...after all ", they" would never let a movement get strong if it were really radical (whoever "they" is: neo-liberals, the corporate media, the millionaires, and the billionaires). So if BLM is gaining strength, it must be bc they're really sell-outs (6)...
It's part of this self-defeating tendency on the left to assume growing popularity for progressive ideas & movements means something's wrong. Either the ideas are too moderate, or the movement must be, to have gotten popular. This mindset of course means we can never win (7)...
...bc success requires more people to join the struggle over time. But some leftists think obscurity & struggle are ends in themselves: signs of authenticity. Like folks in the 80s who loved REM (but only Chronic Town, Murmur and Reckoning), then said they were sellouts (8)...
Now we do this w/folks like Chomsky. So, for decades leftists said the reason you never heard Noam Chomsky interviewed in media was bc he was too dangerous to let people hear. The blackout on his voice was proof he was "on to something" the establishment couldn't tolerate (9)...
But when Chomksy made clear his opinion that despite the Dems flaws, Trump and the Trumpified GOP were the most dangerous organization in human history, many of the same leftists turned on him. Now, even though he still doesn't get many interviews, he's not edgy enough (10)...
So he's been bought off, or maybe never was that radical, or maybe he's just getting old (and like all old people loses his bite). Anything not to admit that maybe being iconoclastic for its own sake (which was never Chomsky's goal) is ascetic bullshit (11)...
All of these tendencies, which have existed on the left for a long time, are only made worse in the social media age, where it's all about standing out from the crowd, saying something quicker, edgier, different, so as not to get lost in the crowd (12)...
And it's such a white left thing to do. Most Black & brown folk know we don't have the luxury of acting like the real enemy is Kamala Harris, or Obama, or MSNBC for being too pro-Dem Party. Critique of all those is fine, even necessary. But they are not the enemy (13)...
It would do us all good to remember this. Debate and disagree for sure, but this trying to out-radical each other, or kneecap a racial justice movement that is larger than anything any of these critics have ever been part of, is pathetic and vile...END
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