My website’s category dropdown menu includes many social justice issues like racism, sexism, ableism, classism, privilege, feminism and men’s issues, gender and transgenderism, gay pride, culture, environment, polyamory, etc. And to understand why, the National Association of Social Workers has the best introductory explanation of what social justice is and why it’s important that I’ve yet found (see their Statement on Social Justice).
Following is a “starter kit” for getting acquainted with what social justice is and why it matters, one that isn’t poisoned with lies and mythologies but gives you the straight dope—evidence-based reasoning, critical thinking, full contact with reality. From each example here listed, you can abstract from it general principles for how to check any other subject, or further dive into any one of these subjects, finding what on either side (pro or con) is false or ill conceived, and thus zeroing in on the Aristotelian mean of what is true, finding where reality lands after you’ve trimmed away either side’s errors, exaggerations, and hyperbole.
This isn’t a complete list of all my articles here on any social justice issue. It’s just the best entry points into each, and together they’re a good 101 education in what sound and critical social justice thinking looks like.
For a general framework:
- How Far Left Is Too Left? (2024)
On systemic racism:
- Actually, Fryer Proved Systemic Racism in American Policing (2020)
- A Bayesian Analysis of the Winling-Michney Thesis on Redlining (2022)
- Yep. Criminalizing Pot Might Be a Subconscious Plot to Punish Liberals & Minorities. (2017)
- Atheist Dudebros Don’t Know What Cultural Appropriation Is (2015)
- You Might Be an Islamophobe If… (2015)
On feminism:
- A Primer on Fourth Wave Feminism (2015)
- Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed (2018)
- How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly (2013)
- The Manospheric Hooker Theory of History (2024)
- Sexual Objectification: An Atheist Perspective (2013)
On transgenderism:
- Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals! (2013)
- Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style (2020)
- Transracialism Is Either a Fraud or a Delusion [While] Transgenderism Is Not (2021)
There are many other social justice issues. Here is a solid sample:
- Poly Family, Poly World…and Poly Among the Poor (2016)
- Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion (2015)
- Peter Boghossian on Gay Pride and Hobnobbing with an Online Misogynist (2015)
- Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!) (2012)
- We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming (2022)
- That Luck Matters More Than Talent: A Strong Rationale for UBI (2020)
And finally, many find it of use to read accounts from those who escape anti-SJ delusions:
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I do think that your Islamophobia article is one of the best I have read on the subject and as for Peter Bhogossian, he’s perfectly willing to work for that Christian fascist Victor Orban (now happily booted out of office, if by a less than perfect candidate), who ironically has no views substantially different from conservative Muslims.
One thing that is true is that there is a lot of mischaracterisation of the left (or people who are to the left of Ghengis Khan anyway) by the right (and it’s nothing new). I’d say that true left wing extremists are a very small part of the population, unlike the extreme right. It’s shocking that even in a country as well developed as the Netherlands 23% of people voted for Geert Wilders, a guy who wanted to ban the Koran and close down every mosque in the Netherlands and even more shocking that his party was allowed a chance to participate in a government.
The extreme left in Europe, by contrast, is very small indeed. It’s by and large confined to a few eccentrics on university campuses. The existing “communist” parties in Europe, are basically very strong social democrats, most of them gave up on Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s after Prague and ideas like the dictatorship of the proletariat and don’t believe in the immediate abolition of markets etc. Plenty of major figures like Corbyn and Melenchon have been unfairly labled as extreme-left, when they’re for significant reforms, rather than revolution and ironically the actual extreme left (WSWS and the IMT) call Melenchon and Corbyn compromisers.
Likewise, I particularly hate the abuse of the term “open-borders” by the right. If you look at any opinion poll, virtually nobody favours open-borders with all nations, left or right. Most people of all persuasions think that some border checks are reasonable and there are good economic arguments for controlling the flow of people into the country.
It’s also a lie that the left as a whole isn’t aware that backwards attitudes towards women, do exist within Muslim countries, people like Ash Sakar, Aarong Bastani, Sami Chakrabati (all from British Asian backgrounds) are very aware of it indeed and many people on the ground are organised in promoting women’s education. It’s worth pointing out too that there are Muslim feminists and plenty of activisits within Muslim countries trying to improve things. Of course, On the whole,the right only pretends to care about womens’ rights as a stick to bash Muslims and don’t care at all about the work left to do in the West.
The thing is, if you want to actually improve things, it’s far better to try to educate people than caricature them as a bunch of mindless savages and shout “pull up the drawbridge”.
Holy. Shit.
When you said Boghossian was now with Orban, that was a total OwO-What’s-This!?
And sure damn well. I checked. And, wow. The web is flooded with articles about his Orban sycophancy and complete Goebbels’-scale obeissance to conservative fascism. If we wrote this in a novel people would say that was too on the nose to be plausible! But alas. Here we are.
And yes. That is a notable difference that gets elided under whataboutism and bothsidesism: left wing extremists are fringe freaks with almost no following and consequently never any real power; right wing extremists dominate entire nations, control many, and are so abundant in the rest as to muck up every society on Earth with their shit. Right wing extremism is in most places actually the norm for conservatives (compare proportions of Republicans who are never-Trumpers vs. MAGA); whereas left wing extremism is nowhere the norm. Left wing extremists are mere swattable flies. Right wing extremists are real existential threats to the survival of civilization. Anyone who thus buys their propaganda that the left is just like them is an ignorant or irrational fool. Or already a right wing extremist.
I cover that point in my article on How Far Left Is Too Left.
I also cover the point that feminists are well aware of antifeminism in Islamic countries in my primer on fourth wave feminism. Most right wing beliefs about feminists are false. They don’t actually consult or read mainstream feminists and thus don’t actually know what they say or think. They just cherry pick any crazy loon that fits their stereotype of a feminist and then claim “all feminists are like that,” which is the exact methodology of every right wing bigot.
It’s vital to remember this about supposed libertarians of any stripe. There are very few of them. And you can’t trust them to be libertarian just because they haven’t said any fash nonsense yet. Stefan Molyneux for some time only had little red flags like his extreme misogyny and his obsession with things like Rome and immigration before he came out as quite clearly white supremacist.
And, of course, the deflection to Islamic sexism is just whataboutism, with all the problems that entails. Aside from what you’ve correctly identified, that bombs and walls are no solution, there’s the additional issue that it can actually be very harmful for people who are not immersed within a culture and a community, especially if it comes from a different language heritage, to criticize it from the outside. Even if the criticisms are somewhat apt, they can create a rally around the flag effect. More importantly, if you don’t understand a communities’ actual needs, your prescriptions for them can harm them, and you won’t ever be aware of it because you don’t live there and have no skin in the game.
The kerfuffle around headscarves and burqinis is a great example, I think. Does it really serve Muslim women to be unable to comfortably go to the beach? No, it serves the prejudices of people with anti-clericalist and Catholic backgrounds. Discussing some of the inherent sexism and magical thinking behind headscarves in a respectful and useful way is totally fine and I’ve been able to do so with Muslim women and make useful inroads, increasing their awareness and their perceptions, but ultimately, if Muslim women had equal protections under the law and equal wages and good marriages and just happened to culturally want to wear something for modesty, that would not be a major concern.
Orban came from a Jewish background but his family hid in the 50’s when it became no longer suitable after the uprising. Lets be clear, there is no such thing as “Fascism”. A dialectical slang for storming the Fascil when Italian socialist’s stormed it in the early 20’s. The correct word is ” zionism”. All 3 of the Abrahamic faiths have the influence from it. Papist, nonpapist. Muslim, and of course jewish. They are cancers in nature. Enemies of the planet.
That’s linguistically bizarre bollocks.
In ordinary English, spoken worldwide, fascism does not mean Zionism, but generally “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control” focused on an increasing use of force in place of democracy or consensus, or in a more specific sense, “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual,” typically “associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
And to say no such thing exists is embarrassingly dumb. Both the general and particular varieties are quite common.
Meanwhile, Zionism may be or produce a kind of fascism, but not all fascism is Zionist. There are plenty of anti-Zionist fascisms, including OG fascism.
Likewise, not all Jews are Zionists; many are anti-Zionists, yet many still not fascists. The same can be said of many Christians and Muslims. Fascist and fascist-enabling religionists (like Jordan Peterson) are a blight on the planet. But the rest are just frustrating. See What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad.
And claiming Orban is “secretly” Jewish is a conspiracy theory, gleaming tinfoil hat. Maybe you are confusing the Hungarian Orbans with the Austrian Orbans. Who knows. But your judgment is clearly unsound, so maybe you just made it up or were told this on some nutjob antisemitic forum.
There was a party that ran a country that called themselves that. How the hell was it not a thing?
In any case, you do know that it doesn’t matter what you call a thing, right? Fascism is well-studied and has numerous coherent definitions.
And, no, “Zionism” and “fascism” are not fucking cognates. Non-Zionists can be fascists and Zionism doesn’t actually have to be fascist or even racist or colonialist. It worked out that way for historical reasons, but you can look up socialist and anarchist Zionists who were quite happy to not have a traditional statist solution and to live in solidarity with Palestinians. In any case, even if we pretend Zionism must inherently be colonialist and genocidal, that’s still not the same as fascism.
The only people who benefit from this bullshit are Nazis. Why do you care so little about your integrity?
It is funny in politics, how the definitions of words get changed all the time, sometimes in a deliberate Orwellian way, sometimes by accident. I guess the question is whether to just use the new words or not.
For me, the Republican party are not conservatives, they are out and out reactionaries and more and more fascistic. For me conservatives are people who want to preserve institutions and social structures and aren’t necessarily against reforms that bring people into them. The current GOP don’t even respect basic values of the US constitution like that there should be no official religion.
If you use conservative as a synonym of “right wing”, I think that’s common use these days in the US and it’s fair enough to use it to get the point across.
Likewise the word “Zionist” has so many different meanings it might be best just to do away with it. As you rightly say, for many it meant living side by side without even necessarily a Jewish state, however virtually nobody uses it that way these days.
“Libertarian” is another one which originally started out on the left, meaning anarcho-socialism, but in the US and UK now gets associated with anarcho-capitalism. I kind of think it doesn’t really help to use the term in the left way anymore. I think also the term “anarchism” confuses people more than it actually helps.
With socialism, as you well know, it’s been debated from day one, who actually counts. I tend to be pretty generous with what I’m willing to call socialist and I think the endless debates over this stuff tend to be unproductive at the end of the day, it turns into the People’s Republic of Judea all too easily.
Likewise, I think it’s pointless to debate hyper-specific definitions of fascism (while I acknowledge that there are serious debates in classification). I think Trump is similar enough to Mussolini that we can call him a fascist reasonably.
Benito:
The problem is that “fascist” is a definition that is so charged that it can only be used at all if it is used in a specific way, not just as a general-purpose insult. So whether one uses “palingenetic ultranationalism”, or “authoritarian state control that extends to substantial direct control of the economy”, or whatever else”, or my preferred “palingenetic ultranationalist authoritarianism”, it’s essential to have a good definition that captures the essence of the canonical fascist movements so that no one can object that one is just using the term as a general point of abuse.
“Libertarian” I agree is one that can be allowed to be contested a bit more, though I actually think it’s very helpful to identify oneself as a “libertarian leftist” in many contexts precisely because it helps to indicate where one is on the political compass… and exactly because the political compass popularized that two-axis description, which, for all its faults, is a good succinct way of describing one’s positions on a lot of scores. I don’t allow right-wing libertarians to just have that term for free, and it actually helps make inroads even with them, because in my experience many sincere right-wing libertarians will pay attention to someone who is sincerely anti-statist.
Trump is very obviously fascist. That’s exactly why I’m not arguing for any one hyper-specific definition, as Trump will fall under almost any remotely honestly-chosen one. And that’s also exactly why I am not just going to let someone claim fascism is and only is Zionism. It’s historical revisionism. Even if no anti-Semitic intent was meant, it muddies the waters so badly as to be useless.
We need to be able to identify people who are merely somewhat authoritarian, or somewhat violent in their political tactics or goals, or merely racist or nationalist, as distinct from fascists. Not because those people are benign, but because fascism is precisely such a toxic confluence.
Oh I agree with you that the guy who posted has very confused ideas indeed, sorry I wasn’t intending to defend his views in any way shape or form.
R.e fascism, I’m more referring to these debates as to whether Imperial Japan should be classified as fascist, or whether Franco’s Spain should be classified as fascist. That wasn’t clear from what I said at all.
R.e Libertarian socialism, I totally get your point, my view is that say the kind of society that someone like Tony Benn in the UK wanted, is the sort that will give us the most freedom over all and I think it’s definitely important that people see socialism as fundamentally an ideology of liberation.
My concern with a definition that tries to exclude Japan and Spain, though there is an argument for it because they are sort of the clear outliers, is that the whole point of analyzing the phenomenon is to get at what really happened in the 20s-40s and why that Axis emerged. And while Japan in particular dilutes the clarity of the phenomenon a little, I actually think it’s so helpful to realize that an existing imperial structure can fail and fall into a nationalist death cult exactly the same way that a novel regime or new democracy can that it’s useful to include them. Once you get past that, the important stuff, in particular the palingenetic ultranationalist authoritarianism and the doorstepping of leftist concepts to maintain rightist control of the economy (which even Japan had with their “co-prosperity” and purported anti-colonialism) is all in common.
The point is that I think that a definition that not only puts even the most authoritarian Zionism as fascist but also pretends it is literally emblematic of fascism is so clearly dishonest and confused as to be rejected. As you obviously agree.
And yes, I emphasize that point too. I think it’s such an own goal for Marxists to deemphasize the humanity and the libertarianism that is inherent even to a lot of their ideas, especially in the American context. Anyone who’s not stupidly trying to actually literally advocate for Leninist/Stalinist authoritarianism who is authentically socialist is advocating for a vastly freer society.
In the Spanish case, I would say that you have “fascism from above” for sure and the vast majority of the Spanish right were very influenced by the Italian fascists, Primo de Rivera (the father who was dictator in the 20s) was quite an admirer of Mussolini, though it’s argued that his regime wasn’t totalitarian in the same way, but definitely nationalist etc. The Spanish Monarchists were also adopting fascist ideas, quite a lot of the Carlista leaders in the 30s (who ended up joining the Nationalist coup) were big fans of Mussolini.
I think one thing Franco did that kind of characterised his regime was that he basically managed to combine reactionary monarchism and Francoism. Once Primo De Rivera II (the son and leader of the Falange) died, he effectively merged the Falange and the monarchist organisations together, and merged a lot of their symbology and ideology. It was definitely an ultra-nationalist regime, very strongly influenced by Italian fascism in particular and had institutions very similar to the Italian corporatist ones.
There was kind of an acceptable range of opinion under the Franco regime that went from reactionary monarchism to fascism (the Monarchist ABC newspaper was allowed to operate as was the Falangist one). It’s often said the regime had different “families”, i.e the Monarchists, the Falangists, and Opus Dei “technocrats” later on. It’s often said that the Franco regime became more like a reactionary monarchist one later on, though I think that’s because he knew that restoring the monarchy was the only chance for his regime to outlaw him (and in the end, Juan Carlos had no interest in being an absolute monarch).
I suspect that Franco was an influence on Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who quite often spoke of Franco positively and did manage to unite what was a very diverse far right, of Catholic reactionaries, fascists, Legitimistes (none of these categories being mutually exclusive), colonial Algeria nostalgics.
Thanks for posting this! I’ve already read most of it, but it is useful to be able to send someone this, especially since you are a useful corrective to right-wing secularists.
I would love for you to do one of your book recommendation blogs on a cross-section of social justice issues, or even issue by issue: Best feminist text, best social justice philosophy texts, etc.
I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve been thinking about it lately. Some suggestions come up in my new books due later this year or early next. And one of my recommendations before is in that area (it just doesn’t use those words).
But to be honest: I am more in need of others’ recommendations. So if you have some, let me know. What I need are items that hit all of my criteria, not just some of them; there are hundreds, probably thousands, of good books in this subject, so to narrow to a start-list, I need the top scoring ones, hence a clean-sweep of the criteria. Which are:
(1) Recent. I already have selections of yore (like Rawls). What I need is more up to date stuff.
(2) Science-based. Less armchair. More data-driven or data-backed arguments. Historical data counts.
(3) One-stop-shop. Not too narrow (e.g. redlining) but enough to be thorough (e.g. modern racism).
(4) Engaged. Authors not siloed but who listened to real-world pushback and address it well.
(5) Mainstream. Not pushing fringes or hyperbole, but conveying critical, well-established SJ thought.
Ooof, those are a tough set of criteria. Some of the best books I’ve read don’t meet those criteria. For example, both Nickel and Dimed and White Like Me are masterpieces precisely because they are so accessible, but they’re not really data-driven. Ditto Chomsky’s Understanding Power, because while it does have tons of citations, it is a Q&A book, and so I recommend it for people who want to get a good idea of libertarian leftist thought and how we frame issues. Also, these days I’m more finding individual chapters than entire books for purposes of discussion online.
Tim Wise’s Affirmative Action is a masterpiece of carefully argued points for it. While I think there’s some framing that I would put differently than he does, really getting into the point that no one has a right to be judged by a particular set of criteria (especially when those criteria are flawed and do not measure merit), the book is one of the strongest cases imaginable for it, and it lays out the objections incredibly well.
Paul Street’s Segregated Schools is similarly stellar work, laying out a really accessible case on that topic, and discussing it in broad systemic terms. I don’t recall the length of the bibliography and it’s less meaty than Wise’s book if I recall correctly, but you can tell it’s his area of expertise.
Every single thing Steinberg wrote is utterly brilliant. Turning Back is an incredible railing against failures of liberal academia, so it’s more polemical, but Steinberg is always very careful and measured even as he finds his targets. And The Ethnic Myth is one of those books that completely reframes how you think about American history. Every one of these I am recommending are also really accessible, well-written books that show you all of their working and reasoning. (For all of my love for Chomsky’s work, he can be really dense and tough to get through in some cases, not helped by his tendency to use bitter irony).
Obviously there’s Oliver and Shapiro’s Black Wealth, White Wealth. Older editions are even available for free online, but from what I can see the newest version is the 2012. The book has critics, but as far as just laying out a coherent picture of the actual wealth accumulation picture of black and white folks (and in terms of pushing the field to talk about wealth and not just income precisely because income can be so misleading when comparing across identity lines), it’s massively useful, and I doubt that its general picture is hugely inaccurate today.
Winner Take All by Hacker and Pierson is similar in that, while it’s also older (I’m trying to find some newer ones in here), it does what a lot of the best books I’ve read do: Take a complex topic and put it through a single illustrative framing, then tie in relevant issues. Hacker and Pierson are discussing what led to Washington maintaining wealth gaps, and they point out the way that the Reagan years totally warped inequality in general, leading to the 90-10 split instead of an 80-20 split for wealth that we had then which has just gotten worse and worse over time.
A lot of the feminist books I’m seeing from the 2020s are memoirs, and I am sure are very valuable but aren’t really the niche here. I’ve heard great things about The Cost of Being a Girl, which again takes a really good look at the gender wage gap by focusing on how it can be seen even with teenage girls versus teenage boys, which eliminates so many of the blithe sexist excuses, but I haven’t been able to vet it carefully.
Obviously Blau and Kahn, the AAUW and AmpToons all cover the general failure of the anti-wage gap position quite well, but that’s in articles and think tank pieces and blogs. But Blau does co-author The Economics of Women, Men, and Work, and also has Gender, Inequality and Wages which collects her singular and co-authored work. But I don’t see her doing a public-facing work, which is tragic because she would absolutely wreck a lot of terrible arguments.
I can’t recommend Biology as Ideology highly enough in general, but it’s old and by now the useful parts of Lewontin’s approach to thinking about biology have been incorporated into most folks who aren’t just parroting Dawkins-esque right-wing ideology.
Ditto The Mismeasure of Man, which is just an incredible read and still holds up. (Even the Nazis can only whine that he supposedly misrepresented Morton’s skulls… except the paper they cite to make that claim uses Morton’s flawed methodology and just gainsay Gould’s entire point that the methodology sucks, and even they found that Gould was still right and Morton had fundamental bias in his analysis that actually still massively altered his results. That’s the best they have, because, of course, the history of racist pseudoscience is a massive albatross around their necks because they have to explain why the same shit being done now is somehow not a crisis). But, again, probably too old for some folks, though one of those classics I think that are worth a read.
Megan McLaughlin’s What Today Withholds looks incredibly promising as an analysis of human rights and autism but the sample chapter I read at some point doesn’t seem to available anymore. It’s self-published and her background is in medieval history, but it has really good reviews. It’s taking a historical and public-facing approach so I think her credentials are probably sufficient.
Breadline USA was a really incredible work on American hunger back in 2009 which was just great journalism, but I don’t think Abramsky has done a new edition. Storming Caesar’s Palace has a reissue, and Big Hunger, White Poverty, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, Evicted (by Desmond) and Simmons’ On Hunger all have very good recommendations but I’ve only been able to read sample chapters for Storming.
Merchants of Doubt is just massively well-researched and incredibly entertaining, but, again, 2010. The rest of Oreskes’ bibliography is largely more straightforward history of science.
On trans issues, heard great things about Shon Faye (to the point that trans activists say that it’s better than Serano’s Whipping Girl as it doesn’t have the same excessive focus on transfem folks), Susan Stryker and C. Riley’s books.
Thanks. Great recommendations. Although I kind of don’t trust Chomsky anymore. So I’m avoiding that.
But…
Nickel and Dimed would be very good to recommend if paired with a data-driven book that covered many of the same issues statistically. So what to pair it with? Ideas below…
And Wise’s study might be too old now. But also, like Segregated Schools and the others, it is too narrow for a starter list. Although maybe it/they could fit into an “examples” category, it’s just, there are hundreds that do, so picking a few is then back to the criteria list to figure the best examples. That’s what I am struggling with right now.
What works well is Winner-Take-All. That’s not too old; 3rd ed. is 2010, and its structural argument hasn’t changed since, i.e. any changes since are simply more reflections of their same point rather than counter-examples or game changers. I’m going to include that one. And I think this might be a good pair to Dimed. Especially combined with The Economics of Women, Men, and Work which I hadn’t heard of before. That looks stellar and on point. And it’s up to date (9th ed.).
And Merchants of Doubt I agree is essential reading. It’s not outdated for the same reason. What’s happened since is more of the same, and not some rethink or game change.
Finally, Faye and Stryker were on my draft list already, so good call there!
Blau is of course one of the leading experts on the wage gap and her work is always very data driven and nuanced.
Wise’s bibliography hasn’t included much post-2020, his site is not in a usable condition for archives though he has been podcasting. But Colorblind is one of the best general arguments against color-blindness and it’s from 2010, and it has pretty good general citations. Under the Affluence has a really good general point but it’s lighter on the really detailed stuff. But that generally should have a lot of good recs to check!
Oh, those Wise books do look to hit all the criteria.
I’m going to recommend three by the same author. I am obsessed with Spanish history, so forgive me if it’s a bit too narrow for you:
Paul Preston’s biography of Franco is an excellent book and as well as a personal biography has plenty of excellent info of how the Franco regime came to power and how it morphed over time.
The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (also by Paul Preston) is a great book about how the Spanish transition occurred and is a great study of how a fascist regime came to end, through a negotiated transition, that was by and large successful and made Spain a much better society.
The Destruction of Democracy in Spain is also a great book about how democracy collapsed rather quickly after the revolution that created the Second Republic. There are lots of lessons to be learned from it, especially when it comes to the right being more united and less concerned about ideological divisions and inter-left bickering being a big problem (as it is now).
Thank you. Worth having here.
I’ve heard great things about Triumph.
Anything by Paul Preston is very good, he’s kind of to studies of the Franco regime what Ian Kershaw is to Nazi Germany.
Triumph is indeed an excellent book, I personally like his Franco biography the best, but all are good.
I started following you because of the incredible books you have written on Christianity NOT social justice or LGBTQIA+ issues. For what it’s worth, I’m part of the growing demographic of CIS white males that once identified as a liberal democrat but is now without a party because both the right and the left have become so extreme.
Maybe I no longer fit into your target audience but for what it’s worth anecdotally, I suspect the growing demographic if disenfranchised voters will have a significant impact on elections that the Democrats are completely unaware of.
Most likely you are just misled by the extreme right about the “extreme left”. The left doesn’t actually exist in the US, and what is called left here (e.g. Bernie Sanders) is right-of-center by world standards.
Lol. We just elected an actual democratic socialist well left of Sanders. The left is not the DNC. If you had been following the actual situation in the US, most of the left here is well Euroleft. The DNC is centrist. And this is creating conflict due to Duverger’s Law, preventing third party rebellions against the two party loggerhead. The DSA revolt is finally starting to open cracks. It will be slow because it will be resisted (as it is now) by the DNC probably for years. But the drift is inevitable.
So, in reality, leftist politics is huge in the US. Its adherents just don’t have any seats in Congress because of the suppressive system we have that prevents the actual will of the people to be represented. That’s a systemic problem. But it should not be confused with “the left doesn’t even exist here.” Well over half of our voters are for universal healthcare, the restoration of labor unions, aggressive policies to address global warming, doubling the minimum wage, paid maternity leave, free college educations, and increased taxation on the rich to pay for it all. A majority want more government regulation of businesses and corporations.
And after that, a whole 35% support the premise that “the state should guarantee no one is in need.” Comparable percentages want military spending slashed, universal basic income established, etc. Pick any “left wing” policy actually implemented in any European nation, and sizable percentages of Americans want it. That’s the opposite of the left “not existing.” It’s the left being suppressed by a techno-oligarchy, the Family, and currently, the Epstein class. None of their policies have a majority American support. But a majority of Americans doesn’t control access to policy anymore.
I think also, it’s an interesting question whether the left-right spectrum is ultimately one determined by concrete positions, or more mentalities.
If you compared most people in the UK, Spain and France to people in the Victorian era, most of us would be pretty far left. I.e most people now believe in universal suffrage, some sort of universal healthcare, universal secondary education, etc.
One argument you often see on the right is that “the Tories and Farage are not right wing because they still believe in free primary schools”. Well, let’s suppose that’s true, the fact that they want to take us back to about 1870, as opposed to 1800, doesn’t mean they aren’t ultra-reactionaries.
Likewise, I do think in European countries it is reasonable to call people who want to repeal gay marriage, gay adoption laws (like Meloni) and want to reinstate the death penalty “far right”. True, they may not have been far right in the 1940s, but they certainly are now.
Correct. This is in one part called the Overton Window. What counts as liberal or conservative is relative to the position of the Window. And in another part it’s a Homeostatic Cluster: you don’t get knocked out of a category by one deviation; your category is the net sum of your positions. So a conservative can still adopt one or another liberal position, but if the bulk of their positions are conservative, they’re a conservative.
While there could be some common fundamentals (conservatives want to stop or reverse change; liberals want to change things; conservatives want to police individuals, liberals want to police institutions; etc.), I suspect right-wing left-wing is just a horsehoe of who is served by the resulting policies and government. Conservatives lean toward state, corporations, and the plutocracy, while liberals lean towards the people, and how much you actually in net do one over the other is where you are on the spectrum. Which is why in How Far Left Is Too Left I note how the extreme ends on both sides are generally fascist-authoritarian systems, and the middle is generally apathetic and thus just empowering the majority that is left over, leaving the question of which middle-of-arm is better, the conservative side or the liberal. All evidence says liberal; which is why conservative beliefs and policies have to be based on mythologies. It’s not that no liberal ones are too, but that far fewer are, and even once the mythologies are removed, some attenuated liberal policy remains, whereas when you remove the mythologies undergirding conservative ideas, there’s nothing left; and then evidence swings you left.
One simple metric is, “Who is protecting the rich and mollifying the poor?” If it’s both parties in power, then they are both just different degrees of conservative and one is only called liberal because of where that concentration put the Overton Window. This is why there is a growing conflict in US party politics on the left, with increasing numbers of voters (indeed, a majority even of the population, but certainly of registered democrats) moving father left than the party itself, while on the right there simply never was a centrist movement at all. Anyone who would be a center right person is an elected Democrat now. So there pretty much is no voter base left for the GOP except right wing extremists (e.g. never-Trump GOP voters are a small single digit percentage), while for the DNC it’s moving the opposite way (socialist DNC voters are predominating in double digits now), only not to extremism, but to just mainstream (e.g. Eurostyle) liberalism, and they just haven’t gotten the party there yet because our political system makes elite capture easy and thus actual representation of the people nearly impossible. This setup will break eventually.
The Overton Window can get stretched too, rather than just moved, it’s exactly what happened in the 1930s.
Horseshoe theory is an interesting one too. I think there are two horseshoes on both kinds of “far left” and “far right”.That is to say there are similarities both between Fascism and Stalinism and between anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-socialism.
I think there are material and cultural circumstances that lead to Stalinism, I think it’s no surprise really that it happened in Russia, a very very conflictive country in 1917-1918, which didn’t have much of a democratic tradition to build on and had very low literacy rates, actually a pretty small urban working class and middle class.
It’s vital to bear in mind context and dishonesty of fascists here.
Farage et al would destroy primary schools, or at least their descendants would. The mentality is exactly there. In reality, they’ll start by privatizing it to uselessness and pricing it out of the hands of all but the elite. They would only maintain enough to guarantee a technologically-advanced militia and workforce.
And that’s the other part, the context. The reason why fascists can accept universal schooling now in a way reactionaries wouldn’t in, say, 1830, is because the same goals and intents now have to be applied to a new reality. You cannot have the world-conquest army they want without near-universal literacy, for example.
But give them enough time, and enough need to cut services to maintain their corruption and graft that is essential to far-right politics, and they’ll turn the educational system into something useless, and not just from indoctrination and authoritarian teaching styles in the classrooms.
We’ve seen the fact that modern far-righters and Nazis have basically no limit as to how far they want to stretch the Overton window time and time again. They do not deserve the intellectual charity of assuming that they mean what they say when they insist they only want to go so far.
Oh I’m just taking them at their word for argument’s sake here. I wouldn’t trust Farage to leave even the barest bones of democracy or social services intact.
My point here is really: Reform say they aren’t far right, but even if you take their word for it, they want to take us back to a later 19th century society at best.
As for what you say about education, you’re 100% correct, in fact, they’re reasonably open about it, like the RN are in France.
Yeah, and I understand arguing a fortiori against the comparably moderate but still laughably extreme position they are feigning, but it’s also vital to never just let them get away with stating things that we know are almost certainly lies, and to educate folks on exactly why they are not, at present, saying things that are utter batshit lunacy.
That having been said, Farage himself would probably happily keep primary school around… if it won him a single vote on net. Because he’s clearly a grifter. But eventually, these grifters will be replaced by true believing lunatics.
Well, he’s a grifter for sure, but I think a grifter who happens to believe a lot of his own propaganda.
There’s plenty of stuff that has come out about him at school singing Nazi songs etc.
“A lot”, yes, but I don’t think he has the fervor of the true believer. I think he would quite happily live in a very un-Nazi society if he had power in it.
“The left” are only becoming “extreme” (that is, bothering to actually realize that our institutions keep failing us and need fundamental change, whether reform or revolution) because a fascist insurgency tainted liberalism.
Don’t like that? Fix democracy. Step the fuck up. Stop whining.
If you can’t deliver on the basic idea of the American dream for women, trans people, disabled folks, the poor and people of color, maybe admit it was a fucking lie.
(And the “disenfranchised voters” have been people pissed off at the system and seeing it not work for them for a long time. Centrist fake-ass libs are not the bulk of those folks).
Social Justice isn’t left wing at all. Its actually centrist in Hegelian terms. A real leftist despises the individual. The war then becomes between egalitarian vs natural aristocracy. Respecting someone because they say they are a women when nature says different is bourgeoisie.
That’s fake news.
It’s amusing to see what delusions conservatives have about liberals.
I will never understand how people like you can be so insufferable when you’re offering such trite bullshit. Why does it not shame you that you didn’t think for one second when you wrote that nonsense?
Who gives a shit about “Hegelian” terms? Hegel was a shit political theorist and in any case we’re centuries past his context.
I’m “a real leftist”. I love the individual. I love groups too. Solidarity and love can be both individualistic and collectivist. Stop sucking up Marxist slop and maybe try reading anarchists and intersectionalists for once.
(And, no, caring about identity politics doesn’t mean that one despises the actual fully-fledged individual. I love my left-handed and my right-handed friends equally. I also know my left-handed friends face inconveniences my right-handed friends don’t. Not one bit of that is about ignoring the individual. It is about actually understanding the individual and not doing an ostrich impression).
And trans women are women. They are women for exactly the same reason a cis woman is a woman. No one cares about your biology, not in reality. Assholes pretend to when it’s convenient, but the same jackasses shrieking about “MEN IN WOMEN’S SPACES” will so frequently talk about how a “real man” will do some behavior or a “real woman” will avoid something. Because the only people who have any actual reason to care about our biological sexes are people with an actual scientific agenda, such as physicians and forensic anthropologists, and they only care about the specific measure of biological sex they need to investigate for a particular function.
You do know that workers change nature, right? That’s, like, the very essence of work. Both Marx and Bookchin recognized that. So what the hell is bourgeoisie about taking the social constructions that liberate the human spirit over base biology? Right, not a fucking thing. But, again, Marxist brainrot gives you an excuse to be a transphobic ass, so fuck actually being a good person.
Why on Earth would you think leftists despise individuals, that’s a very curious conclusion. I think that’s full on Pol Pot/Kim Jong Un Stuff.
I would say that’s certainly not mainstream Marxism, or various other Marx-influenced people and there’s never any reason to be dogmatic about a theory.
As I’ve written on Richard’s blog before, Marx can be taken seriously as a thinker whilst realising his weaknesses and work done since his time (as well as how society has changed in ways Marx couldn’t have predicted).
It’s also a bizarre notion that social justice is some new aberration when it’s always in one way or another been a core part of the left. If you think about it, being left wing means in some sense you think the actual social and economic structures are unjust and need to be changed to make them fairer.
Class issues, absolutely are a social justice issue, I think it’s fundamentally unfair that people are oppressed and discriminated against because of their social status and social origins. And I’m sure you would agree with that, as would leftists from the very beginning.
Religious discrimination is one of the first social justice issues picked up by the left too. In the 19th century, people were heavily discriminated against in the UK for not being Anglicans, i.e you couldn’t work as a lecturer in Cambridge or Oxford without being an ordained Anglican priest and the Victorian era left (liberals and early socialists) fought against it and it was one of their great victories that made the UK a much better country.
The Victorian left were also the first people in the West to pick up women’s rights in any significant way. Generally, the socialist parties and the more left wing liberals (i.e John Stewart Mill) were among the first to call for women having the right to vote and the right to inherit and they were absolutely right to do so. Still, there were many forms of discrimination that they didn’t understand or realise existed and the fight continues today.
The same with gay rights, it was largely the Western left that took that up in the 1960s and 70s and largely left-led governments that legalised homosexuality. Not to mention the civil rights agenda, where Jim Crow laws were finally ended and it was a big victory (again, there’s still so much left to do).
I don’t see why we need to stop there. Transpeople are grotesquely mistreated and falsely portrayed as perverts and I think it’s time that ended. The worst part is there is a stubborn refusal to even try to understand it. I’m a bit less radical on my views on gender than Frederic and Richard (but well on the left of the public at large) and I think that your gender ID is none of your boss’s business, conversion therapy is abusive and what really irks me is after all they’ve received how some gays and lesbians have no sympathy for transpeople at all. It’s really appalling.
Another one I would add is people who are neurodivergent. The way autistic people are treated by society is horrendous and frankly, even with some pretty cheap, easy to implement measures, we could make things a lot better. The only reasons to oppose them is if 1) you’re a total ignorant arsehole 2) you are the worst kind of greedy capitalist who can’t even spare the few extra pennies to make minor accommodations at work. Not to mention, autistic people’s strengths aren’t talked up nearly enough.
Now, more sensible Marxists (and other leftists) know perfectly well that these types of oppression have a strong class aspect. Marx wrote himself on the origins of sexism linking it to the development of private property in neolithic and bronze age society and I think he has quite a strong case there (even if he missed other aspects)
Religious oppression certainly does, there’s no doubt that Anglicanism and Catholicism were used by the upper classes to keep the lower classes in check and to indoctrinate people into inaction and into worshipping the people in charge of the state.
I think too that it’s clear that there are class oppression aspects when it comes to LGBT issues. In part, because of the need to keep ideologies like the state religion going and to punish any kind of “deviants” and also that people who go against existing norms might encourage people to demolish or reform more institutions (it might not be true, but the fear is definitely real). Like any prejudice, LGBT phobias are also an easy way to distract people from their own oppression, Thatcher used this tactic a lot in the 80s, when she banned “gay propaganda” in schools.
Of course, there’s the argument too of wanting to preserve nuclear families, so that instead of taking collective responsibility for things like childrearing (by that I mean funding daycare, maternity leave etc) you have a system where women are seen as babymakers and raisers, whether they want to be or not and you can see how acceptability of gay relationships might be perceived historically as a threat to that model.
And oppression of autistic people is very clearly linked to class issues imo. Partly, because they aren’t socially conformist and people who threaten social norms (often put in place by the upper classes) are often punished. It’s also because many (if not all) autistic people don’t exactly conform to the way companies measure productivity (better at deep focus), they’re not so good at dealing with constant demands for task switching. I think the intersection of being autistic and poor is an important one, autistic people are often victims of bullying and it’s harder to stand up for yourself if you don’t have resources, it’s one reason why some trade unions are now taking neurodivergent bullying much more seriously.
Even if they weren’t class based (and they aren’t entirely class based, but it is an important factor), oppressing people is still wrong, whatever the cause. There will always be debate about these questions, but I think there is no rational case against ending oppression. The main question is how we do that and there are real debates to be had, but that it should be an eventual goal to end them is beyond dispute in my opinion.
All excellent insight.
In that vein, I really recommend checking out Liberating Theory by Albert et al. It’s a great framework to think about intersecting forms of oppression as various forcefields that are conceptually distinct but in actual practice are always wildly interwined.
I may just do that, I am always willing to listen to Albert and Chomsky.
I think that it’s always a great shame when people like the poor soul we’re responding to have very confused views about what it means to be a leftist and are very narrow-minded in their approach. I think generally when you find transphobia on the left, it tends to be either older leftists (i.e people like Germaine Greer), paleoleftists like George Galloway (which is a great shame as he used to be much more sensible about these things and was an early gay rights supporter, I think after he went pro-Brexit he went down some nasty pipelines) and Stalinists. You of course find it elsewhere, there are TERFs who are left on everything else.
It’s also a great shame when people get very obsessed with one particular variety of left wing politics and bickering with each other, when I think the focus should be on the fact that left wing ideas are broadly correct. I think dogmatists are always quite irritating and left wing politics is hardly without them and the left tends to do best when it’s not led by such people. I think the Labour 45 government in the UK achieved a lot because it was well balanced between “left” and “right” factions and both had very capable people.
Agreed down the line. Albert’s “stickiness problem” is something that we on the left have to be addressing, and a big part of it is not making it so that internal discussions with folks who are really part of the community become so unpleasant that people just naturally need to spend less time in the movement rather than more. That challenge has to be balanced with protecting the needs of marginalized folks, of course, so it’s not an easy challenge, but it’s one we need to get better at.
The only tiny defense I have to offer for a few TERFs who are not basically just Nazis in feminist drag (and they are a tiny minority) is that, when they are not just overt misandrists (yes, there are a few feminists who really do have misandrist bias, even as they are dishonestly misrepesented by the misogynists – e.g. Julie Bindel’s “camp” comment being a joke but also clearly based in really misogynistic reasoning), they are reasoning badly from broadly reasonable philosophy and broadly understandable tactical positions they’ve had to hold.
The idea that we should abandon fixed ideas of gender is reasonable, but straight up gender abolition is silly. It’d be like reasoning from the ugliness of a capitalist economy to then saying we shouldn’t have any economy at all: no work, no allocation, no consumption. People do gender, and they also don’t do gender. Without any particular institutional pressure toward any one gender presentation or even a set of gender presentations, there is absolutely nothing oppressive about a world where some people have bright lipstick and nails and some people have robotic non-sexualized affects. People can just do their own thing. (I repeatedly find that just having a libertarian, anarchist, “leave each other’s shit alone unless you really have a pressing and immediate need based on fundamental human respect and dignity to intervene” ethos helps so much in these conversations).
And the “women’s spaces” thing is a reasonable thing to enforce in the immediate term to some degree. It really does make some sense to have a domestic violence shelter where women are the only clients. The problem is a) the bigotry (trans women materially have the same needs as cis women, so any denial of this is just based on delusional bigotry) and b) the failure to recognize that this norm has to be balanced against the long-term goals of a liberated society free from patriarchy.
Since you have varied interests, it would be okay for me to ask the following. What do you think of the book “The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order” by Philip Pilkington? Can we have a review from you?
I’m not familiar with it. But grandiose titles are a red flag for unreliable armchair whingeing. So I checked. And…
I see he has no actual qualifications (a PhD in nothing) other than seemingly being an elite shill (“investment professional” is often just a fancy word for “grifter”; he might as well be pushing crypto and booby NFTs). So that’s also not encouraging. Oh, and he’s a fucking Orban courtier. (Rolls eyes.)
And even some conservatives have panned the book as awful. So I am even less encouraged. There are millions of dumb screeds like this. I could not justify bothering to read this one unless I was paid to. But I would give it a serious, charitable fact-check and evaluation for $500.
From what I’ve seen of Pilkington, he is at least willing to be critical of free market orthodoxy in ways that are helpful. That’s not as obvious as it can seem: you can read a lot of takes by economists that include cogent insights that then pretend the underlying economic thinking they are using is mostly correct rather than being wildly inaccurate when applied to real humans.
That’s noted in the linked review. It’s similar to the neofeudalist trend, where something equivalent to divine-right hierarchical tyranny is somehow better than free markets all of a sudden. The full retrograde of the fascist conservative.
The folly is the black or white fallacy, “either neoliberalism or neofeudalism; and neoliberalism is stupid, therefore neoeudalism is smart.” Violating the Law of Excluded Middle they miss all the options in between. Which have already been empirically tested well and perform way better than both.
Oh yeah, and it’s even worse, because neofeudalism is even more stupid than neoliberalism, so even under his two options he’s an idiot.