Why the American Left is Full of Shit
And that includes me, and you, the reader of this article.
After around a year of posting useless YouTube videos I finally stepped back and realized the error of my ways. Joining the ‘YouTube’ left, has been one of the craziest - yet most enlightening experiences in my life - particularly with regard to why the American left never gets anywhere, it has been truly enlightening to learn about some of the root causes of why that is.
If any of this information is already obvious to you, then it was not all obvious to me. Particularly when I started.
1-Why the Debate-Me Bros are Full of Shit
American leftism - or whatever people consider leftism is not leftism at all - particularly when channeled through media channels that feed off of drama and ‘debates’ - debates which have mostly become a dick-measuring contest. As such, there is nothing leftist about these channels at all - rather they are in exercise in chauvinism and an intellectual exercise that has its root in American universities. If you’ll notice, such ‘debates’ are basically based on the aesthetics and dialectical expectations of those that participated in their college debate club - but with less politeness or propriety.
It is not at all surprising that American ‘leftism’ which cannot seem to get rid of its pseudo-intellectual origins at private universities, also cannot seem to let go of this ‘debate club’ mentality. Our generation has more college graduates without technical experience than ever - and the ever-rising number of people that actually know how to DO nothing with an ever-rising number of generalized degrees leads to an over-abundance of generalists. In other words - the ‘debate-me’ left loves to talk, analyze, discuss, debate, consider, consult and ponder. They love to do everything - but actually DO.
It is not out of the ordinary to have an instinct to talk a bigger game than what one actually does - or to not even know what to do. However, when these debate-me tendencies are REWARDED instead of DERIDED on an open ‘marketplace’ for ideas like YouTube, with monetary rewards for the most dramatic debates - it is no surprise that the debate-me left has become utterly and completely full of shit.
2-Capitalism & the Scheduling Trap - Why ‘Busy’ Americans are Full of Shit
While it remains a reality that both capitalism in its most brutal form is an endless and vicious cycle that keeps people without enough free time, vacation time, or the energy to do anything - it also remains a fact that Americans are not more ‘busy’ than people in countries that are under even greater forms of pressure.
This is not a new phenomenon - ‘busy-ness’ is a large part of the cartoonish part of the prototypical American personality. Today’s Americans are busy. Busy working, busy using technology, busy watching YouYube videos, busy commuting to and from work, busy raising families. Yet we are completely unwilling to stop being ‘busy’ and face the original problem of our ‘busy-ness’. We are incapable of taking control of our lives or our government because we are so ‘busy’ with mundane and unnecessary tasks which we will invoke as absolutely ‘necessary’ for our survival should anyone to dare suggest we are not as busy as we claim. In other words:
Americans are not ‘busy’. They are mostly - full of shit.
331.45 million Americans, including many unemployed are not possibly so busy that they are unable to do anything about anything. Those that are busy working should be able to throw a few bucks to those busy organizing. If people actually wanted to do something about the government that is at our necks (and on the necks of the entire world) they would.
Americans are not too busy. They have simply adopted a form of learned helplessness that is more of a psychological hurdle than an actual busy-ness problem.
3-The Culture Warriors are Full of Shit
To go further - if Americans were actually as extremely busy as they claim, they would not have time to sit online endlessly engaging in the culture wars. The culture wars have become an absolutely toxic bane of the left, to the point where the ‘culture warrior left’ has infected nearly every activist movement throughout the country, with the exception of hyper-localized small-scale activism located in homogeneous areas - things like community gardens.
But whenever activists try to come together in online, inter-state or national movements, the culture warriors cannot help but divide people into an unlimited number of smaller and smaller categories - until no-one has all the necessary credentials to speak. This also - is taken from academia. If you’ll notice most employment and census forms, nearly everything is targeted at taking in as much ‘data’ about each individual person as necessary: whether it’s your race, veteran experience, immigration status or disability - Americans have learned to provide ‘data’ about themselves to members of the ‘culture warrior’ left and neo-liberal institutions - never once doubting whether this data should be provided at all.
We are so conditioned into trying to ‘prove’ ourselves with data that we sometimes unknowingly give ourselves away. This data is then accumulated as part of an ‘unbiased’ evaluation process where non-profit leaders, professional activists and even independent concerned citizens use in their ‘tool-kit’ to judge whether or not someone is worthy to speak on a particular topic or worthy of being included in ever-small activist circles.
The results have been disastrous. Limiting participation in activism through a deranged level of screening makes movements smaller, not larger. The tragic effects of historical classism, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, imperialism, and every other ‘ism’ are historical tendencies that have resulted in real material problems and real suffering for the people experiencing massive disenfranchisement. But the way these activists are treating these broad-based social ills is akin to means-testing: ‘Fill out this form. If you belong to one or multiple of the historically wronged groups, we might let you speak’.
This affirmative action approach to broad-based activism and who gets to participate in it is not only a strategy that is directly drawn from neo-liberalism - they are literally means-testing who is allowed to be in activist circles. And who is the judge of who is allowed to speak? Generally it is someone that is no more aggrieved than the next person. This outrageous means-testing has also resulted in a number of buffonish personalities - with members of a majority group (ex: Rachel Dolezal, Shaun King, Elizabeth Warren) and several others ‘exaggerating’ their minority status in an effort to ‘fit into’ an aggrieved category. Even more obscene has been the inclusion of ‘pansexual’ as a legitimate minority identification in the clownish universe called Twitter.
And while there is value in allowing people to speak about their own communities - the obsessive need for identity-based credentials has become the ‘culture warrior activist’ version of government means-testing.
In other words - the culture warrior left - is full of shit.
4-The Patriotic Socialists are Full of Shit
And if the culture warriors were not giving us enough problems - we now have the Patriotic Socialists - who are the opposite side of the same coin. Except rather than reducing everyone to their minoritarian identity - Patriotic Socialists want to absorb every identity under the banner of ‘American Patriotism’.
They claim that they are finding common ground - but underneath the hood - and at its most benevolent these are people that are obsessed with American Statism to an almost religious degree. Their religion is their country, the flag, and the constitution - and God forbid anyone not have particular fondness for any of the above.
Their apparent ‘tolerance’ goes away quickly when anyone of a dissenting opinion - no matter if left or right - whether it’s due to adherence to God or to Karl Marx - dares to question the Founders or the original founding documents of this country. They are so obsessive about American statism and adherence to ‘things that unite us’ according to them - such as the Constitution - that they frequently resemble the religious zealots they mock. In many cases their religion [American Statism] is held under the banner of atheism - so when they are unable to connect to others under this banner - their knee-jerk reaction is to blame the lack of logic of ethnic minorities, immigrants, unpatriotic Americans or apostates rather than the failures of the State itself and their blind adherence to their pseudo-religion.
When pressed upon the logic of trying to wrap everyone in the American flag by ethnic minorities or nationalities that are warding off the pressures of the empire, Patriotic Socialists resort to vague statements and repeat verses from the Constitution. “One Nation, Under God, with Liberty, and Justice for All”. Their fanaticism and repetition of phrases…in nearly every way resembles the trappings of most religions - with the exception that most religious folk do not attempt to ‘force’ their religion on others - while American Statists will never stop doing just that.
At their best - Patriotic Socialists fumble to find a point of unity - sometimes even exaggerating the degree to which they are actually patriotic in order to superficially appease ‘patriots’. Most patriots will see through this superficial flag worship and notice they are not nearly as patriotic as they claim…and this in turns comes across as not very honest. It would be more transparent not to pretend to speak to ‘patriots’ because we are all ‘patriots’ - but to speak to them simply because they are our neighbors.
At their worst - the Patriotic Socialists are National Socialists in sheep’s clothing. Dismissing the concerns of ethnic minorities and minority nationalities and trying to subsume them under a specific flag is not in fact, just a ‘superficial pitch’ to appease patriotic elements - it is a nationalist statement that not everyone has agreed to. The ‘language of patriotism’ and of the flag has been frequently used - not just in this country but in countries such as Bolivia that tried to ‘displace’ the wiphala (the multi-cultural flag representing multiple indigenous nations) with the official national flag - as a symbol of chauvinism and nationalist superiority. Prioritizing that small group of patriots compared to other groups shows continuous dismissal of some of our most deep-seated problems. And a person that does not want to face our colonial history cannot possibly fix our colonial-era problems.
5-The People at Home Bitchin’ and Clicking are Also Full of Shit
Finally - we get to the meat of the problem - and that starts with the person at home, watching this online cartoon of a left. For the majority of us, who are neither communists nor patriotic socialists nor culture warriors, our hope is to actually come together in a way that makes a meaningful difference.
Yet we are subject to our lower instincts, instinctively clicking on every dramatic YouTube video, engaging in clickbait capitalism, and encouraging the worst of human tendencies to rise to the top. In the next few years, we will have many more cartoonish media characters - for the simple reason that rage and hate watching generates more clicks than anything else, and that it is easier to complain than do anything useful about it.
And so, we get to the source of the problem - any kind of constructive action starts with us. And if we’re going to get anywhere, we have to stop rewarding the behaviors above - either through an incredible amount of discipline or a shift in our attention. It is not easy to realize that we have all been a part of the PROBLEM, but we can still acknowledge that and try to be part of the SOLUTION.
Absolutely spot on. Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to accept mindless sloganeering, empty platitudes, and the meandering rantings of vacuous charlatans of every stripe, as a modality of “involvement” or action, in and on the pressing issues of our times. Anything except, as the author correctly points out, actually doing something or heaven forfend, learning something. It is a sad commentary on not only the benighted intellectual state of the American body politic, but also the splendidly self-satisfied nature of their rank ignorance.