Misconceptions of the Left (and What to Do About Them)

 

Months out from the 2024 elections, the punditocracy is still nattering about why the Harris-Walz campaign lost. Most of this consternation relies on the following misconceptions, which have become holy writ on the left, and none of which are true.

There is such a thing as natural solidarity.

Not all Latin-Americans will naturally see their struggles as akin to those of Black Americans, or, especially, those of LGBTQI folks. Likewise for any other minority group, no matter their history of being oppressed. It's not just that the American public is decimated; it's that we're alienated from everyone else individually and between the groups with which we identify. For some, traditional ways of life or systems of belief pose further barriers: a Catholic of Mexican origin is likely to see herself as more aligned with other Catholics than with the queer Colombian kid down the street.

If the left wants to create a movement, build solidarity, raise consciousness, public education must commence.

Oppressed people cannot themselves hold discriminatory attitudes or practice discrimination.

This is a popular misconception on the right as well. Consider, though, that the same Puritans who, deposed from power in England, freely persecuted Quakers in the Massachusetts colony. Latinx folks can hate Black folks who can hate Asian folks. Remember the situation in Koreatown in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating? Seems like nobody on the left does anymore.

If the left wants to create a movement, reconciliation efforts need to happen and trust needs to be actively developed between potential coalition members.

Self-hatred/the acceptance of one's own oppression is impossible.

We woke ones may despise the Uncle Toms of the world or, at least, pity them, but recall that one of them has served on the Supreme Court for over 30 years. One way to get ahead in the world is to work hard; another is to buddy up to those who oppress you, telling them what they want to hear. One of the strongest advocates of bringing back feudalism in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Firs, was formerly enslaved by it.

Bucking the system can be heroic, and it may lead to progress, maybe even revolution. It also leads to trouble.

A hopeful sign that progress is possible is Cory Booker's historic 25 hour speech on the Senate floor, invoking John Lewis's idea of "good trouble." But we must build the groundwork for it by raising people's awareness of their own self worth and making the movement's goals and means safe, hopeful, and full of opportunity.

Established immigrants will naturally have fellow-feelings for recent immigrants.

The history of the US shows precisely the opposite. Even first-generation immigrants, once they have "made it" here, are notoriously disdainful of those "fresh off the boat." So familiar is this idea that there was even a mainstream sitcom with that title, yet we on the left somehow forget it as soon as the election cycle heats up. It took decades for colonial Englishmen to accept the Germans, for these newly minted "Americans to accept the Irish, for them to accept the Italians, and so on.

If we want to win, we need to revisit and celebrate the immigrant experience, yes, and to remind people of the hardships that brought people here to begin with and the hardships they faced building new lives. Why do you think the rightwing downplays, ignores, or, now, purges these stories from the public discourse?

We need to restore the public image of immigration as heroic, not as scurrilous.

The working class, farmers, and those lower on the income scale automatically understand their situation better than the "educated elites."

You'd have to be stupid or misinformed or both to believe that Donald Trump could magically lower grocery prices or instantly bring American manufacturing jobs back through tariffs or stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet millions of voting Americans believed exactly that. (Many still do, contrary to the clear evidence before them.) Working class people and farmers live in the same toxic media environment the rest of us live in, and they believe or reject misinformation based on a variety of factors, but because of generations of media programming, the one thing they believe about themselves is the "salt of the Earth" myth, that their judgments are more pure and more accurate because of, not despite, their lack of sophistication. The programming they receive, from AM talk radio, from Fox"News," from the pulpits of their churches and in their Facebook groups, though, is the sophisticated communication of educated people, people who don't have their best interests in mind. Their "commonsense" has been ginned up for them by the rightwing message machine.

It's dead wrong, but when it's all you know, and when it reinforces your own self-image, it starts to seem like the eternal truth.

And so, last of all, the left, if it wants to win, needs to play the long game, just as the right has done, thinking not one or two election cycles out, but decades, centuries, through, as we like to say about the environment, the seventh generation.

We love to hate on Project 2025, but, notably, we on the left don't have one, no playbook that articulates our aims, no "bible" to manifest our vision.

Given all this, it's no surprise that, despite most people agreeing with us on the issues, we continue to lose. But to win, we need to abandon these misconceptions and work hard to build the coalitions necessary for real progress to take place.

Duality, Purity, and the Conservative Mind

by EW Wilder

Part of what most liberals can't conceptualize about conservatives is the degree to which ideas of purity, success, goodness, “winning,” and so forth are deeply informed in the conservative mind by their opposites. For example, we can't have success for everyone because success can only exist with the presence of failure. Failure defines success. It's not just OK to have losers in society; it's necessary so that success can exist. Because conservative definitions of success often depend upon concepts of goodness, holiness, hard work, and thrift, these concepts become meaningless without failure. To take away success, to denigrate it, or “punish” it in any way is not merely to change the material status of the top 400 or 400-thousand people; it is to attack the entire moral universe itself, the great chain of who deserves what.

So when conservatives appear to have hyperbolic or delusional responses to what liberals think are modest asks—higher taxes on the rich, moderate controls on guns, less draconian approaches to immigration—they're really responding out of a sense of existential crisis, crisis that moves beyond individual concerns and into the cosmic realm of the proper order of things as conservatives have come to understand it.

Because many conservatives see the world as a set of binary opposites, any philosophy that challenges those opposites is simply inconceivable, and any worldview that appears to reverse them—such as Marxism—is seen as fundamentally immoral. We cannot know good, goes this way of thinking, without distinctly contrasting it with evil—and the more striking the contrast, the better. The latter can be seen dramatically in the different reactions to two series of action movies: the Rambo films, in which there is a very clear delineation between good and evil, were lionized by not just conservatives, but just about all Americans, during the Reagan era. The Harry Potter series, on the other hand, in which knowing good and evil is the fundamental problem, and often fraught, has been accused by conservatives of everything from promoting homosexuality to teaching witchcraft. Another series in which an occult force, in fact The Force, is central to the story has not been so accused: the Star Wars series. For as much as the “Dark Side” is appealing to central characters in the series, its delineations are clear, and one's affiliations to it are traditionally conservative: you are tempted to its corrupting power and fall to it through a weakness of will, and you draw away from it via a conversion experience, often at the end of an otherwise evil life.

It's informative that the most common form of damnation conservatives have leveled over the past 50 years about worldviews they oppose is that they espouse “moral relativism.” Relativistic worldviews are seen to collapse dualities, but the conservative mind can't see that within relativistic worldviews, the dualities still exist; they're just no longer on firm conceptual ground and may shift or change. This creates a universe in which such ideas as good and evil, success and failure, purity and impurity, cannot necessarily be immediately known; the moral axes upon which the conservative mind relies for its operation in the world thereby become uncertain, and the self in comparison to them cannot be known. Thus we can define both Christian and atheistic reactions against Islam as fundamentally conservative: unable to see that violent and tolerant formulations of the faith are relative to one's relationship to the Koran, both conservative Christians and doctrinaire atheists condemn Islam itself.

Perhaps the most damaging way of thinking, then, from a conservative point of view is one that rejects even relativism as being inordinately dualistic and that collapses the cherished dichotomies into a single continuum of understanding and experience.