I often see mentions of the disunity in the left and it being a real show stopper for achieving anything meaningful. Whats your take on that and also do you have any reasons(experiences, arguments etc) for that?

  • satanmat@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The left … progressive… that is the problem, which direction forward? The right just want to go back or at least just stop. But progressives want all the things, equality; racial , sexual and social. But also economic too

    And often we snap at each other as they are getting more attention than we are.

    You can’t put the same effort into everything at once. Workers get upset that we’re providing for immigrants; but then the races get snippy that one group gets favored over another. Then you have the fact that some issues are just damn complicated

    Israel should have the right to defend itself. BUT Palestinians should too. And everyone gets bent out of shape … over all of it.

    The left tries but we’re by nature self destructive. The right just has to say GOD and everyone says amen.

    The left tears at left Christians as they get tainted by the crazy from the right

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Where’s my outrage? None of us can just be nice and try to accept that we don’t all have to get everything all at once; or even at the same time

    • dillekant@slrpnk.net
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      9 months ago

      I initially read this as a pretty benign comment but I’ve sat on it overnight and the more I think about it the more it makes me angry. Sorry satanmat.

      which direction forward?

      I don’t think this is true. There are huge swathes of progressivism which most if not all progressives agree upon. The problem is that the right has a deadlock. They can make incremental “improvements” to their goals because they’ve already “won” more or less. We’re at the “end of history” and picking up the pieces as losers, and a fractured movement. This necessarily means more work to bridge that gap, but this doesn’t mean no one agrees on the outcomes.

      Workers get upset that we’re providing for immigrants

      The right has effectively used globalisation + racism to kneecap unions. The “left” really has no answer. There are global unions but inequality is at such a scale that you couldn’t get some sort of global agreement to labor, or labor rights which operate across nations (this also goes back to the previous point: For the left to fix one problem, it needs to fix a lot of problems at the same time).

      Couple that with broadly progressive people having conservative ideas, and we can see that it’s conservative thinking (racism, sexism, etc) limits how we can co-operate. All of us are free or none of us are free.

      Israel should have the right to defend itself. BUT Palestinians should too.

      I’m just going to link the Shaun video here. It’s not Israel vs Palestine, it’s (right wing, in some ways fascist) Zionism vs not. This is an issue of Media which largely frames the debate in terms the right prefers, thinking of it as a wedge issue.

      The left tries but we’re by nature self destructive

      As I hope I’ve made clear, the right has a lot of connective tissue, mostly because they have most of the bargaining power, and the left have been slowly losing ground over centuries. It’s not destructive, it just has a much harder job.