The Far-Left May Well Help Trump Win This Year
Plus, Why The Left Doesn't Know How to Stop Fascism
By now, almost everyone is familiar with the 'MAGA vs Establishment' narrative on the Republican side. However, on the Democratic side, there is an even more interesting dynamic: the far-left trying to use any excuse they can to refuse to support Biden. Now, this has gotten the center-left really frustrated and scared, because they really don't want to see Trump in the White House again. In other words, the center-left and far-left are at odds right now….
Our role here is simple: we just need to highlight the differences between the mainstream center-left version of 'progressive', and the far-left accelerationist extremism posing as 'progressive', bringing what we learned from the 'anti-woke' movement to good use. After all, these differences are actually at the heart of the center-left's and far-left's vastly different approaches to this election (as well as 2020 and 2016 before this). Pointing out the fundamental differences here would therefore serve to provide important background information to the debate. And just doing this will be enough to break the lie that all 'progressives' are the same.
What is a Practical Progressive?
If we consider the word 'progressive' in a purely practical sense, then I guess any reform that improve people's lives can and should be considered progressive. This is also the most objective definition. From the practical progressive perspective, anything that can be objectively shown to improve people's lives is progressive, period. I think if 'progressive' is consistently defined this way, then most people would be able to get behind it. There would be far fewer people who consider themselves anti-progressive. This is why I often say that it is the hijacking of the word 'progressive' by theoretical progressives that has turned people towards being anti-progressive. This problem can be fixed simply by abandoning theoretical progressivism and fully embracing practical progressivism.
Why The Left Doesn't Know How to Stop Fascism
The problem with leftist analyses of fascism is that they are always biased in a certain way. The Western left has always had an anti-traditional, anarchistic streak to it, and this tendency was further enhanced during the post-war period. In the 1950s, the West was generally conservative, and workers generally didn't embrace the left. Looking to Eastern Europe, Western leftists also increasingly didn't like what they saw. Western leftists gradually saw both kinds of society as 'oppressive', and sought to create a new, 'non-oppressive' form of society, an ideal particularly seen in the works of Herbert Marcuse. This was how the Western left became highly anti-traditional and anarchistic in its sentiment.
Given that the trauma of World War II was still very recent, fear of the return of fascism very real, post-war Western leftists also theorized a lot about fascism. The trouble is, this theorizing was heavily colored by their aforementioned anti-traditional and anarchistic sentiment. In their minds, the cause of fascism had to be that people were too easily submitting to unreasonable authority, thus the focus on what was known as the 'authoritarian personality'. They had to be this way because they were conditioned by traditional society to be this way. Thus their solution to fascism was essentially to deconstruct traditional society so that the people could be liberated from its authoritarianism. I think this core idea actually explained a lot of the social radicalism found in Marcuse and other post-war leftist thinkers. Their ideas ultimately led to the social upheaval of the 1960s-70, but did not do anything to dent the appeal of fascism to future generations. It appears that dismantling tradition does not lead to any meaningful reduction in the ability of fascism to survive and spread, and might even have the opposite effect. It didn't work in the 1970s, and it is not working today either.
Given the failures of the post-war Western leftist model in accurately explaining the appeal of fascism, and hence effectively stopping its spread, I believe we need to put those false insights aside, and start from scratch.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).