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If the right wing had set out to neuter the left in the US, they hardly could have done it better than by spreading impossible-standard purity-test bullshit among young progressives.
Right now, we desperately need progressive leaders to step up and help lead and motivate people to protest, resist, and organize a massive Get Out The Vote effort for 2018. But every time a leader steps up, someone finds out that there was this one time they smiled at a racist so they’re UNCLEAN PROBLEMATIC, and the significant part of the left brainwashed by this purity bullshit decides Not Good Enough and slides back into apathy.
Make no mistake, if Bernie had been the nominee in ‘16, many purity-test progressives would have stayed home once they heard about his perpetually locked and loaded support for Vermont’s gun industry and his inaction when a company that paid his wife dumped hazardous waste in a poor minority community.
That’s not a slam on Bernie. You cannot accomplish shit in this imperfect world without sometimes compromising– or even doing some harm to prevent worse harm down the line. (That’s what Nazi punching is: you do small harm to the Nazi to prevent them from doing worse harm to nonwhites. Wide swathes of the left can’t even agree on this in principle. WWII should have been a series of peaceful protests, apparently. In the choice between protecting nonwhite and LGBT people vs. giving up the moral high ground, the left seems to care more about the moral high ground.)
In an imperfect world, no one can act in the world (even to change that world) and stay perfect. But rather than engage with this basic reality of existence, a significant part of the progressive base has decided it’s better to preserve their purity by never doing anything at all. Or worse, never doing anything but throwing rocks at what’s ostensibly their own side.
Meanwhile the party of “family values” votes for Trump, an adulterous serial divorcee. The party of “law and order” votes for Trump, a man found guilty of fraud. The party of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” votes for Trump, a rich man’s son who ruined everything he ever touched but kept failing up because of his father’s connections and his own successful famewhoring. And don’t let Trump’s chaos and incompetence distract from this fact: the right wing is getting what they voted for. They got a Supreme Court justice (one that, by every law and norm in our government, was Obama’s to appoint). They’re getting tons of judicial appointments that will support regressive policies for decades to come. They got cover to continue to gerrymander districts so that they can keep power even if the actual number of GOP voters is in the minority. Not only did Clinton win the popular vote over Trump by millions, congressional Democrats received more votes than their GOP counterparts and yet many lost due to rigged redistricting. Not to mention all the underhanded shit the GOP routinely does during elections, and gets away with, like putting dozens of voting booths in traditionally GOP-supporting areas and far fewer voting booths in traditionally Democratic areas.
Meanwhile progressives waste monstrous amounts of time and energy perpetually vetting each other for right-think and Wokeness. When the left shoots themselves in the foot this many times, over and over and over again, you gotta wonder if Cointelpro ever ended. I’m not saying that conservative infiltrators spread purity-test standards and encourage progressives to turn on each other. I’m just saying that the outcome is the same as if they did: eternal self-sabotage for the left, permanent minority rule for the right.
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