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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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This sounds like a straw man argument. The lefties I know are analytical and critical to a fault; unlike the righties they don't blindly wave the party flag, and that criticism reduces their support of party policies and presents itself as a lack of unity.
Being a member of a leftwing party in my own country, I can tell you that most members aren't analytical and critical when it comes to words uttered by celebrities "from their side".
In fact that was exactly my great dissapointment with that party as I became more and more familiar with it and the way it works: having come in thinking as you seem to do and expecting to find a Thinking Left, I ended up finding yet another bunch of mindless parrots who even lack self-awareness (I was pretty shocked in a National Party Conference when maybe 9 in 10 of party member interventions were of the "we the need/want/should-have ...", or in other words Personal Greed disguised as "for the group", the kind of shit that is rotting from the inside the genuine fight for Equality).
There are many "lefts" in the Left and a lot of them either interiorized greed as ok and practice an "as long as it helps me and doesn't affect my priviledges" type of being "left" (lots of high middle class Feminist around who strangelly focus entirelly or almost so on the "oppression" of high middle class women whose income is above 90% of people, rather than on that of, say, working class cleaning ladies who get up at 5 AM every day to go clean toilets for minimum wage), people so beholden to an old script that they lost sight of the principles why and from were that script was born, and people whose relation to the leftwing is akin to their relation with a sports club: of the heart, unthinking, unchallenging and always applauding whatever the club's stars say - perfect useful idiots being fed pap by people in leadership positions who either are manipulators rather than leftwing or are profoundly incompetent, with no vision and no strategy, hence are totally unable to advance leftwing principles (quite the contrary, judging by the way politics is going towards the far-right nowadays).
We do need more Genuinelly Thinking Left, not people consciously or unconsciously accepting accepting the "greed is good" of neolibs, or flag waving parrots with not even the awareness of how lost their party is without an actual vision or strategy and always reacting moment by moment to political events (making them oh-so-easy to manipulate by the mainstream political parties).
I am pretty fortunate to live in a quite progressive city in a fairly progressive state. I'm sure some of that goes on here as well, but the people I surround myself with seem to be genuinely interested in the greater good.
Well, I was born in Portugal and lived there until my 20s, at a time when the country was profoundly backwards in social issues, and then became an immigrant in The Netherlands, which I was for almost a decade during my young adult years, so I ended up wholehearthedly adopting the dutch version of Tolerance.
Now, remember that The Netherlands was maybe the first country to, for example, legalized gay marriage (in fact some of my colleagues there were British "refugees" who had move there so that they could get married with their partners) and even for a while had as leader of their far-right party (I kid you not!) an openly gay guy, and this kind of thing applies to a lot of other areas: for example, 20 years ago they already had 18% of "housemen" - stay at home fathers - and their tolerance on drug consumption is well known.
And their whole Tolerance practice is based on "it's all normal", "we're really all the same in what matters" and "it's not up to me to pass judgment on others", a view were for example discrimination on sexual orientation or religion is as ridiculous as descrimination on eye color or hair color: only a nutter would treat people differently because of any such things.
So for me the present day Anglo-Saxon format of Identity Politics were people are still classified on who they love or the genes they were born with and then measures are proposed and judgments made based on those group-membership classifications, is actually not progressive at all but rather regressive, and not just by years but by decades - it's like going back into some half-way between that Portugal of 3 decades ago (fortunatelly a lot better now) and The Netherlands.
I absolutelly can understand how in an environment where there is massive descrimination people of those groups discriminated against have to get together in order to fight against it (after all, "there is strength in numbers"), correct the injustices that have been done and change the system were such injustices are repeatedly done impunity (sometimes by the very State which should protect all citizens).
However the objective should be to, as such systemic injustices are eliminated, eventually end up with the dutch mindset (we're all the same, this is all normal, who am I to judge others) in the minds of everybody, and that's not at all possible if you keep on classifying people and effectivelly saying "these people are different", "this characteristic people have been discriminated by is extra important" (rather than normal), and practice "we should judge others", because you really can't have a natural fair and equal treatment on something if keep on dividing people on those things and keep emphasising those human characteristics as huge differences, and without fair and equal treatment becoming natural in the minds of most people, the fight will never be over and you'll constanty have pushback.
As I said, the intentions are good, but the methods are not and they are way too easy to subvert by those who care only about their personal upsides, even those on completelly opposite sides of the political spectrum who want to manipulate the masses via induced rage.