Come On Wildfires! We Need The PVs

Are we still doing this? Really?

Let’s start here. The fact that Zack Beauchamp can derisively refer to others as “center-left” - in fucking Vox! - shows you how weird the dictates of professionalism in media are. If you feed Midjourney the prompt “center-left,” it’ll give you a picture of Beauchamp humping the Vox logo. More to the point, we have this studied and intentional refusal to acknowledge that far-left critics of this discourse exist. In fact, socialists were the OG critics of identity politics; Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty, Adolph Reed - these guys were lobbing bombs at identity politics decades before the first conservative ever uttered the word “woke.” I know this is a lonely corner I’m on, at this point, but that antagonism is exactly what we should expect: identity politics and socialist politics are not incidentally at odds, but are rather inherently and existentially incompatible. The heart of left-wing practice is communitarianism, putting the group before the individual, and the fundamental complaint of identity politics is “hey, what about me?!?” People really don’t want to confront this incompatibility because it’s socially and professionally uncomfortable for them, and most self-identified socialists understand that if you were to force people to choose, you’d end up with an even smaller rump of American socialism than we have today. Perhaps the primary lesson the American left has learned since the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 is that calling people on the right racist is powerless and calling people on the left racist all-powerful.