It’s a bit of a wild read, but the relevant part, I feel, are the last six paragraphs of the article, which are basically perfect in summarizing everything wrong with socialism in America, and captures it far more eloquently than I could.
>But one thing feels similar, and that’s the absolutism required to be “down for the cause.” The righteousness of the collective pursuit serves as justification for all kinds of callousness. Dissent, or even nuance, is unwelcome. And nothing is too precious to sacrifice to the cause.
>I grew out of my rebellious politics a long time ago. On most issues, my mother and I are aligned. I’m a member of two unions, including the Writers Guild of America, and I supported our strike last year. But life imbued me with a journalist’s skepticism of all brands of certainty. I’ve seen too much of movements to trust them. Protests give me claustrophobia. Rallies cause heart palpitations. Honestly, even stadium concerts make me uncomfortable. Collective power moves me; collective thought freaks me out.
>The Socialist Workers Party still exists, but its ranks have dwindled, though my father is still a supporter. Some of its positions—for example, its staunch support of Israel (the party argues that Iran, not Israel, is the main aggressor in the Middle East)—have left it out of step with many on the left. The most influential socialist party in the U.S. now is probably the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It’s running two Latina candidates for president and vice president this year, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. They agreed to an interview with me. They are passionate and eloquent and—not that it matters—beautiful. I thought I detected some mild disdain from one of the women over having to engage with such a centrist mainstream-media hack as myself. (My politics are far more Elizabeth Warren than Trotsky.) I was not offended; I was relieved. This woman knew that my struggle was not the home attendant’s struggle or the minimum-wage worker’s struggle. When I asked what their goals were, they said: Burn it all down. Start from scratch.
>I agreed with many things that they said: Our democracy was structured to protect capitalism and disenfranchise labor. The two-party system is broken, and we are absolutely living under the whims of a billionaire class. **But when they talked—with radiant clarity—about the need to sublimate the individual to the collective in order to create true change, I bristled.**
>When my mother told me she hadn’t ever considered how I felt about growing up without her, my first reaction was that her wiring was off. But speaking with those two Socialist candidates, I came to view it differently. All around my mother, people were being told to give up one life here and start another there. And they did, no questions asked. She must have seen me as just another comrade being relocated for the movement. She had not considered my feelings because, I suspect, she had not considered her own.
>The happiest my mother sounded during our calls was when she was talking about the successful organized-labor actions that took place last year—strikes by health-care workers, United Auto Workers, the Screen Actors Guild. “I love that guy!” my mother said about Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader from Staten Island. “I love him, right, where he wore his leather jacket and his cap. I thought: This is what union organizing should look like. Everyday people.”
*Emphasis mine.
What I highlighted is the one sentence that utterly terrifies me every time without fail.
This is the *anti-*liberalism. To sublimate the individual in service of “The Cause” ™, whether you worship God, Socialism, or AGI, is cult-like behaviour, and abuses of power flows endlessly from it.
LtCdrHipster on
>*colonialism*, *collective bargaining*, *fascism*. Concepts that seeped into my consciousness before I had any context for understanding them. These were my mother’s things. These were the reasons she’d left me. And therefore they must be very important.
2 Comments
It’s a bit of a wild read, but the relevant part, I feel, are the last six paragraphs of the article, which are basically perfect in summarizing everything wrong with socialism in America, and captures it far more eloquently than I could.
>But one thing feels similar, and that’s the absolutism required to be “down for the cause.” The righteousness of the collective pursuit serves as justification for all kinds of callousness. Dissent, or even nuance, is unwelcome. And nothing is too precious to sacrifice to the cause.
>I grew out of my rebellious politics a long time ago. On most issues, my mother and I are aligned. I’m a member of two unions, including the Writers Guild of America, and I supported our strike last year. But life imbued me with a journalist’s skepticism of all brands of certainty. I’ve seen too much of movements to trust them. Protests give me claustrophobia. Rallies cause heart palpitations. Honestly, even stadium concerts make me uncomfortable. Collective power moves me; collective thought freaks me out.
>The Socialist Workers Party still exists, but its ranks have dwindled, though my father is still a supporter. Some of its positions—for example, its staunch support of Israel (the party argues that Iran, not Israel, is the main aggressor in the Middle East)—have left it out of step with many on the left. The most influential socialist party in the U.S. now is probably the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It’s running two Latina candidates for president and vice president this year, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. They agreed to an interview with me. They are passionate and eloquent and—not that it matters—beautiful. I thought I detected some mild disdain from one of the women over having to engage with such a centrist mainstream-media hack as myself. (My politics are far more Elizabeth Warren than Trotsky.) I was not offended; I was relieved. This woman knew that my struggle was not the home attendant’s struggle or the minimum-wage worker’s struggle. When I asked what their goals were, they said: Burn it all down. Start from scratch.
>I agreed with many things that they said: Our democracy was structured to protect capitalism and disenfranchise labor. The two-party system is broken, and we are absolutely living under the whims of a billionaire class. **But when they talked—with radiant clarity—about the need to sublimate the individual to the collective in order to create true change, I bristled.**
>When my mother told me she hadn’t ever considered how I felt about growing up without her, my first reaction was that her wiring was off. But speaking with those two Socialist candidates, I came to view it differently. All around my mother, people were being told to give up one life here and start another there. And they did, no questions asked. She must have seen me as just another comrade being relocated for the movement. She had not considered my feelings because, I suspect, she had not considered her own.
>The happiest my mother sounded during our calls was when she was talking about the successful organized-labor actions that took place last year—strikes by health-care workers, United Auto Workers, the Screen Actors Guild. “I love that guy!” my mother said about Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader from Staten Island. “I love him, right, where he wore his leather jacket and his cap. I thought: This is what union organizing should look like. Everyday people.”
*Emphasis mine.
What I highlighted is the one sentence that utterly terrifies me every time without fail.
This is the *anti-*liberalism. To sublimate the individual in service of “The Cause” ™, whether you worship God, Socialism, or AGI, is cult-like behaviour, and abuses of power flows endlessly from it.
>*colonialism*, *collective bargaining*, *fascism*. Concepts that seeped into my consciousness before I had any context for understanding them. These were my mother’s things. These were the reasons she’d left me. And therefore they must be very important.
This poor kid.