Leftbook is disingenuous, ineffective, and a byproduct of Obama-era politics

- Sincerely, a leftist who uses leftbook

For someone who tries to explore the left outside of the Democratic Party via social media for the first time, instead of finding a treasure trove of things that could help mainstream politics… they will instead find a very distilled version of a well-intentioned, but ineffective strategy that contributed to the Democrat’s sharp nationwide decline.

Plug the words, “leftist”, “communist”, “socialist”, etc into any social media site and you start finding the seemingly endless amount of groups collectively named: Leftbook (left-facebook), Left-Reddit, and Left-Twitter.

I have been in these communities for a long time. After first posting in these groups, I soon found a set of narratives that nearly every single left group cared about and cared about more or less to the same degree.

One of leftbook’s lies: trans MURDER

;Edit yes, this graph *is* adjusted for the population of each gender.

The first commandment of leftbook is: Trans people and trans issues are of utmost importance. Why, according to them? Because they will tell you there is a literal genocide of trans people going on in America. If there’s a genocide, then of course that’s all we should talk about! But of course, this narrative is a lie. In 2015, being trans actually lowered your chances of being murdered. Suicide among people with gender dysphoria is high, but trans murder is low. And placing the concerns of 0.6% of the population higher in priority to everyone else is not a particularly utilitarian worldview. A propaganda image that comes to mind shows a landscape of mountains, each labeled with an issue that people should, “care about more than they already do”. After the smaller mountains of poverty, homelessness, etc are shown, there is a much larger mountain labeled, “trans murders”.

After trans murders, the second most important subject is those who have been diagnosed through psychiatry with any number of, “illnesses”. Usually on leftbook, this is couched in the usual exploitative, ineffective, suburban, mainstream psychiatric and psychological terminology. “mentally ill”, “recovering from mental illness”, “self-coping skills”, etc. Surprisingly, many if not most left groups and leaders encourage their members to take antidepressants and other drugs as a method of, “taking care of oneself”. However, there is a smaller group of people on the left who recognize psychiatry’s long and cruel form of societal control, and prefer the term “neurodivergent”, for those who have mood or thought patterns outside the norm. Although they suggest most neurodivergents are oppressed.

Anti-Democracy and Literal Stalinism

Online Facebook groups don’t have democratically elected leaders. Leaders are self-appointed. Nepotism, being a minority, or being really good at creating visual propaganda are what it takes to make a moderator . Naturally, the people who have a fetish for bossing people around end up in leadership positions. There is a growing complaint in the leftbook space that almost every group starts or eventually ends up with extremely heavy-handed or literal Stalinist moderators. Given the undemocratic nature of these groups, this shouldn’t be surprising. The mods, often chasing the rhetoric of their fellow literal Stalinist mods, really like to joke about throwing people in labor camps. There was a period of 6–7 months where you couldn’t avoid seeing at least one “lol you go to gulag”, joke in the course of one discussion.

There are dozens of groups that advertise themselves as places to ostensibly learn about Marx (THE ultimate class-reductionist), to learn about socialism in general, or a number of philosophies centered around labor and a revolution of able-bodied workers and worker freedom. However, unlike right-wing economics groups, the online left labor groups almost never talk about economics and labor and are always talking about gender identities and who is the most dis-abeled.

Unfunny USSR jokes still persist, it’s just the Stalinist apologia is different now. Holodomor denial is now all the rage. The jokes bear too much similarity to how white nationalist forums tried (and still try) to mainstream humor aiming to downplay the existence or number of deaths associated with the holocaust.

Economic Fatalism Created an Overemphasis on Identity Politics

This is how a group of people who like to joke about throwing people in forced labor camps, vie for who is the most disabled, and whose main focus is identity co-opted the movements about labor freedom, championing able-bodied workers, and class as a main focus.

The birth of hyper-left-identity-politics spanned the 9 years sandwiched between the financial crash and when Sanders mainstreamed the word, “socialism”.

After the Bush administration sat back and let the world stock market fall on their watch, it was Obama’s turn to provide a sufficiently large enough fiscal adjustment to prevent the stock market crisis from bleeding completely into the real economy, and because of it’s scale: the worldwide economy. Obama failed at this. For 8 years he failed at this, and the world political climate is still adjusting in hyper-reactionary politics to his and his cabinet’s failure. There are two popular left reactions to this failure:

Obama’s fiscal adjustment wasn’t nearly large enough and he should have done something approximating a New Deal, and half the country still hasn’t come close to recovering The economy is too mysterious to control. The worse a stock market crisis is the harder it is to deal with rather than it being a wider opportunity for government provisioning of public resources. And hey, the stock market went up so things got sufficiently better during Obama’s administration.

In other words, 1. real Keynesianism vs. 2. economic fatalism and/or denial

The economic fatalists and denialists won the narrative of Obama’s relation to the continually declining living standards of the lower class of America. After all you can’t blame something so large on the first African American president, and for the first two a years of his presidency, a virtual Democratic supermajority.

When the left turned to identity politics, the right mainstreamed their economic narrative. Occupy and the Sanders campaign came too late.

The right jumped at the chance to provide their own explanation of the crisis when the left didn’t want to. Again this starts in 2008–2009. Young, intelligent Republican men confused at why they couldn’t inherit their parent’s prosperity were fed a heavy online diet of hardcore and detailed Austrian (small government, austerity) economics on every corner of the internet. They became very good at arguing economics, and to this day an average internet savvy rightist can cream the average internet savvy leftist to a hardcore economic debate online. The left never tried to learn because it was mentally blocked. Naturally, the first and main political protests to the destruction of the economy came in the form of the right-populist Tea Party movement, which advocated among other things, curtailing government and removing the social safety net during a recession!

The sensible and honest economic left was constrained to extremely small organizations and third parties during these 9 years. They did advocate for a massive economic stimulus, and salvaged themselves from complete destruction by doing so. However these orgs accounted for maybe 0.1% of the left. During Obama’s first term, most of the left was still looking for something to do with an economic fatalist mindset and both the Obama administration and virtually the entire left found LGBT rights issues as their lifeline of something to stand for.

In 2010, Obama propped up the economy with a temporary bipartisan 2-year 2% payroll tax cut which kept the broader economy just barely above water. After the 2012 election, the tax cut expired without a fight despite it being the only legislation being enacted on a true bipartisan basis during Obama’s 8 years. The left marched on with it’s LGBT and identity focus, while Obama’s approval ratings fell below a public majority for almost the rest of his second term and the public blame for the economic conditions of the lower class sat on the left’s shoulders. While Obama is not, “left-wing”, his base, many of who turned out in droves to vote for him on an identity platform in 2012, were. This left wing base was rewarding Obama’s efforts on identity, but largely ignoring his economic ineffectiveness, at their peril. The anarchist left did provide an “investment banks are greedy” explanation of the events through the Occupy movement. It came four years too late and there was basically no effort to explain the government’s failure as well from the left in an equally aggressive way.

A Misallocation of Resources and Attention

The process of establishing rights for LGBT people in conservative life through marriage, school life, and discrimination laws in general was indeed hard-fought and noble. But it was almost the only thing the left felt it could do. It was the main thing those who grew up with left-of-center parents learning politics for 9 years knew as politics.

These LGBT achievements added up over the years. By 2016 businesses and government nationwide had massive amounts of accommodations and non-discrimination laws in place for the LGBT community. e.g. Jeff Sessions just sent out a high profile lawyer to deal with a trans murder case. Hell, I’m sure Macdonalds will come out with some new transsexual accommodation to get liberal media brownie points and attention.

In other words, the war for business and government recognition of LGBT rights, has for the most part, been won. If the left, and the online left, wants to continue with LGBT rights as it’s main focus, it’s going to have to lie to itself about the extent of the problems faced and it’s goals are going to be increasingly marginal or fictitious. It’s goals are going to be harder to verify as being accomplished empirically. When you can’t empirically verify an accomplishment, you can continue fighting for it indefinitely, in your own world. Living as a LARPer. One recent popular leftbook campaign phrase was recently, “trans insurrection now”.

A joke that was made recently made on SNL to notable online leftist chagrin this year went something along the lines of, “Tinder just came out with 12 new gender identities to choose from on sign up, in others words why the Democrats lost the election to Trump”. When the left hears stuff like this, they think, “that’s insulting, you are downplaying an achievement. And maybe it’s worth losing an election if mainstream America is that bigoted”. Clinton’s top media strategist had a similar reaction in a debate with Trump’s campaign team. She almost screamed at Trump’s team that she preferred to lose an election if it meant standing up for minorities. This is an understandable reaction, but it misses the point. Identity politics didn’t cause the Democrats decline, but the heavy-handed way and drawn out way identity politics is used signifies the Democrat’s failure to address large, empirically measurable catastrophes like the worldwide economic crisis that happened mostly under the watch of American’s political left. That joke signifies that the mainstream and far left was hyper-focusing on issues that were important, but piecemeal and cultural. The left’s preoccupation with identity politics during the economic crisis would be like if George W Bush focused on tax breaks for poor farmers during Hurricane Katrina. Not bad in and of itself, but a horrible missalocation of attention

Many of the, “brocialists”, and other people who have criticized the left’s hyperfocus on identity politics during the economic crisis did campaign for gay rights before and during the crisis. The, “before”, part is important, because many of us, “brocialists”, were there fighting for LGBT rights when there wasn’t a surplus of people working on the issue. Before the wars were won.

Both the Democrats and the far left made the same mistake. Both considered that appealing to gender issues as a primary focus was sufficient and strategically sound.

The Social Elitism of the Left

Both the Democrats and the far left also suffer a serious elitist problem. There’s been a very long migration of social elites to the left, and economic losers to the right among whites, a huge voting bloc. For some reason both the Clinton Democrats and the far left find it both moral and strategic to pour gasoline on this disaster. We are all now well aware of how the Clintonites gave 0 shits about white economic losers. But how has the far left treated white economic losers?

First there’s the fact that “white” is still a pejorative in far left communities. The degree to which “white” and “white male” is used as a pejorative is giving the racist right political capital with it’s complaint of white persecution. 51% of whites make less than 30k a year, and the percentage of whites in extreme poverty is similar to a few minorities with the exception of blacks, hispanics, and native Americans. Telling poor whites they are privileged oppressors isn’t a good strategy for anything. The far left doesn’t even have a language for white economic losers, or white people who don’t care about being professionals but just want to live a normal life with a family, a job, and shelter.

A Community of Aspiring Professionals

The far left only has an economic narrative for those whose really want to become part of the professional class, where the top 50% of America resides. It has a language for failed or aspiring elitists who desperately don’t want to be in the same social, nevermind economic, environment with those who do routine work. Aka, the elites. It has a language for people that have a lot of college debt basically. The far left has a language of oppression for those who are determined to make it into the top half of American society, where the professional class sits. As the political commentator Freddie Deboer said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘the same people who are in college campuses trying to amass radical points while elevating right wing personalities, these are the same people who are probably going to end up as paper pushers somewhere laughing at their radical youth. Or at least they are trying to do that.’

Back in the early 20th century, labor unions banned a large swath of college graduates from union membership for a reason. This extended from lawyers to medical professionals. They were derided by labor movements as shysters and class enemies. The professional class are workers, but they very often use their credentials to shirk off work and behave deceptively. Too many college graduates use degrees as, “permission to forget”, and, “permission to exploit”.

There are a lot more trans people in the professional class then there are white people who don’t have college degrees as a percentage of their respective makeup. Not surprisingly, the right fills in where the left fails. It pays more attention to the less credentialed. The Republicans had a serious primary challenger who never went to college, can you imagine that happening anywhere on the left? Chris Christie sang praises for apprenticeships instead of college on the debate stage. Alt-right comedian Sam Hyde has given almost an hour of Youtube video lecture trying to make people feel ok for not going to college. Peter Thiel literally started a foundation to pay people not to go to college.

Aggrieved Aspiring Professionals Don’t Want to Speak to Social Losers, They Prefer to Mock.

Which is obviously inneffective and anti-egalitarian. Simply trying to be the public mirror image of the far right’s public image isn’t a good strategy in and of itself. When the social media left imagines itself as a high school bully (which it does quite frequently, as an attempt to counterpart the far right), it will make fun of someone’s lack of social capital with no hesitation. The left won’t make fun of a loss of economic fortune, but they are very quick to make fun of someone for the reasons people don’t want to become economic failures: low social status. Socialism can be a call for increased social meritocracy, particularly it’s right wing variant, but the social elitism of the left is more a form of distancing from an approaching personal reality and a disgust of who might become lifelong neighbors in social status on the left and right.

The millennial online right is engaged in campfire huddles trying to find ways to deal with not being allowed into society and all that includes: having few or none long-term relationships, not having children, not having or barely having an apartment, and not having a sense of identity and stability. The young left then counter-reacts by viciously trying to distance themselves from these real world problems they are afraid they might share with the far-right (and quite frankly so much of the rest of their generation as well). They claim they aren’t reduced to economically unproductive hobbies in their parent’s place, or that they aren’t frequently romantically challenged, or that they also aren’t looking for virtual escape from the real world. By denying themselves association with these phenomena that transcend political boundaries, they also drastically limit themselves to what they can claim to fix and who they care about.

One of leftbook’s most active groups is a group that makes fun of art for not being sophisticated enough. It has at least two more groups claiming that frequent romantic failure is exclusively a right wing phenomena. It also has at least three large groups dedicated to making fun of those with technical obsessions, as if they are exclusively right wing too. It’s not the same liberal disgust for lower class families of blue collar workers, but it’s a similar distancing from those who are lower on a social hierarchy than preferred. It is no wonder the far right is gaining more recruits from Gen Z than them. Let’s hope that changes.

How can things change for the better?

The first step to changing things would be to stop awkwardly trying to be a mirror image of the alt-right out of emotion and instead try come up with a workable and detailed economic plan. And if the culture wars have to be fought, then fight them. Sharing stuff that disgusts you in your own Facebook groups isn’t fighting the ideas, nor is trying to silence your enemy. Fighting means engaging with the ideas head on, identifying the frustrations behind them, and offering, publicly, better alternatives for the underlying frustrations.