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Comment by clusterfish | Hacker News Reader

I think the extremes, both left and right, have realized that their greatest enemy is not the other extreme, but the masses in between.

A group that has the numbers, with mild views that can dilute your message with reasonable doubt, challenge certain aspects of your extreme yet be broadly acceptable to a much wider audience including those tending towards your side – that's poision for an extremist.

Therefore, their solution to that is tribalism, polarization, and shaming for any hint of non-compliance with the extreme's dogma.

End result is that the vast majority of moderate people do not participate in debates on sensitive topics, leaving the field open for polarizing demagoguery. All that's left is to make more topics sensitive to get an advantage there too, and that's progressing very well too.

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"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” - Dr. King, 1963

this might be false equivalence. People far on the left (except from some nas-bols; which I’ve never encountered in the wild) call them selfs anti-facists. It is clear who their greatest enemy is. In fact far left groups (like food not bombs, etc.) often engage in social programs called mutual aid where the goal is to spread propaganda through helping the masses.

At the risk of entertaining the no true Scotsman:

A leftist that doesn’t empathize with the masses, is not a true leftist.

Thats hard since sometimes the masses are fighting against being helped (because that would be socialism) while languishing in poverty.

Do they really have the right to commit suicide by policy, taking us with them via climate change?

It is realy hard to empathize with those.

> the masses are fighting against being helped

If you are looking for a clearler symptom that you don't empathize with them, there isn't any.

What is not a moral failing, by the way. But check your "Left" label, because it's probably wrong.

You can be Left without empathizing with people who want you dead. That's a pretty straightforward application of Paradox of Tolerance.

I know a certain Jesus Christ who would disagree with you. In seriousness though, visiting poor rural American during Trump is a really numbing experience. You see the people there flagging Trump signs everywhere while living in dirt poor conditions. It is hard not to emphasize with them even though they are calling for everything you are fighting against.

After all, the establishment has failed those people. The democratic party has severely failed them. Democracy it self has failed them. I know that really capitalism has failed them and they would find better answers under socialism then under Trump (after all Trump has failed them as well). But you must still understand where this is coming from. That is you must empathize with them, even though their views are wrong.

It's entirely your choice who you empathize with. If you don't act over your indifference, it doesn't harm anybody. It's impossible to empathize with everybody.

The criticism people are raising is about a kind of hypocrisy, even when lying is entirely to oneself.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to tell who empathizes with the masses and who is just pretending to in pursuit of power.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Power is simply the capacity to influence the behavior of others, and in a democracy, it is leveraged to get anything done.

In the US today, you're a real dumb dumb if you try to attain power via a left platform. A handful of people did it (AOC, Omar, Taleib) but by far if you want a successful career you take a mainstream R or D position and just try to outdo everyone else in culture war takes. I'll point out that "the squad" is social democratic in nature, they aren't as far left as you can go by far.

A left position calls for redistribution of wealth and transfer of control of the means of production, which gets you attacked from nearly all establishment sides.

The establishment isn't what it once was.

Obama turned out to be an establishment President (with bailouts, not prosecutions, for the architects of the housing bubble and crash) but he ran as an anti-establishment candidate.

Then, despite obviously being part of the establishment, Hillary tried to do the same, arguing that she as a woman she clearly wasn't part of the establishment ("Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.")

She lost to Trump, who - despite being a billionaire white male - constantly attacked and was attacked by the establishment, in particular as a "populist", someone chosen by the people, not the establishment.

And until the DNC united behind Biden, Bernie was giving him a serious challenge, and Biden was relying on his anti-establishment rep with his "black firewall".

Meanwhile, Bloomberg was painted as the clueless establishment candidate and laughed out of the race.

A young politician (left or right) studying recent events would be smart to run away from the establishment, just as so many elder politicians have (while perhaps seeking establishment support in secret, and hoping not to be caught).

This is strongly undercut by "the DNC (i.e. the establishment) united behind Biden" who is currently POTUS instead of Bernie or Trump.

But facing enormous pressure from a younger generation that seems to be far to the left of Biden and was not happy with either Biden or Harris, but voted against Trump rather than for Biden.

And even with all Trump's failings as a person, it was a close election between the unpopular populist and the likeable establishment compromise. Is that evidence of establishment strength?

There is no consistent conception of the masses to the left. Traditionally, there is the labor class and the capital class. In the modern left, oppressors and oppressed are typically determined by identity group, but the game is the same. To win the game of leftism, you better pray that you're in the "masses."

True. A Marxist will have a different conception of the masses from an anarchist (even though the intersection is usually pretty large). But I fail to see what that has to do with anything. There is no game of leftism. The goal is to free people from the tyranny of capitalism and fascism (marxists might emphasize the former while anarchists the latter).

Leftists generally accept rich folks sympathetic to the cause, even though they technically don’t belong to the masses. For example Marxists and anarchists alike generally accept Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy as leftists (even though the latter was born into great wealth), and leftists generally accept Dan Price (#DanPriceSeattle on twitter) even though he is a boss (i.e. not off the masses).

There is no game of leftism? The game is for the oppressed class to take power from the oppressor class. Who fits into which of those classes is a contentious issue, though as I said, more frequently predicated on identity than anything else.

Also, to be free of the "tyranny of capitalism and fascism," I hope that those are two different categories. Capitalism and fascism are near polar opposites.

It's also important to understand that leftism necessarily ushers in tyranny. It is impossible, not just in practice, but in theory, for leftism to be implemented without an authoritarian state. If you attempt to get around this constraint, it will only be by you failing to describe a state whose outcomes will fall within the objectives of leftism, or by describing an authoritarian state by any other name (syndicates, guilds, unions).

It is not to free people, it is to free the abstract idea of people. This is how leftists are as tyrannical as everyone. They have a romantic idea of the poor which is not tied to their actual existence or wants, and act on it. Too often, it is just a way to morally justify their own wants or desires. Any evil can be justified if it helps a faceless mass of people.

> romantic idea of the poor

It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.

That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).

Calling yourself anti-fascist does not make you immune to totalitarianism, tribalism and othering any more than, to borrow an analogy, writing "cool" on a box makes it a freezer.

edit: Oy! The downvote is not for disagreeing!

Downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN; always has been.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

What's not ok is going on about downvotes. It never does any good, and it makes for boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well alrighty then.

I feel like that works better for factual, technical claims than political ones though. As another website says, "No technology is discussed."

Im sure the foot soldiers of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had that exact same purity of thought, the exact same infallible self-belief and the exact same absolute certainty they were on the right side of history.

Maoists and National Bolsheviks are a really small minority inside leftist circles, you will have to look for a long time before you encounter one in the wild. And when you do, and if you are a leftist, you will most likely shun them. Racism is usually not tolerated by the left.

Varg is pretty much a textbook NazBol. Thing is people won't stop tripping over each other to label him far-right/Nazi before hearing anything he says. Pretty likely this is happening to most other of their ilk as well.

In the five years or so I spent hanging out with Socialist Party USA folks, I met loads of Maoists, including a former party chairman. There were a lot who were Trotskyists out in the open and Maoists if you got them drunk enough to talk freely.

> spread propaganda through helping the masses.

1%'er motorcycle clubs, mafia organizations and radical religious cults are notorious for doing this as well.

Again fails equivalence. Mutual aid is not causing anybody harm. In fact it is not mutual aid by definition if it does cause harm.

Funny, the Berlin Wall was called antifascist - Antifaschistischer Schutzwall

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