13. I cannot even.
Every time I read Yet Another Online Take from someone who hates <insert Democratic politician name here> because they’ve betrayed <population segment> or “thrown <vulnerable population> under the bus” I have to suppress howls of frustration and endanger my tooth enamel with all the jaw-clenching I do.
These earnest, angry, dedicated lefies demand their heroes be pure and match their personal profile for perfection, and that just isn’t a thing. NEVER HAS BEEN. Passionate folks like those are (among the many reasons) why Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and again in 1984. I’ve been angry about purity politics ever since.
Reagan was not where it all went wrong. Nixon is where it all went wrong. But Reagan built the bones of the current fascist regime on the foundation of Nixon’s racist, misogynist legacy. If I ever develop a Time Machine, Reagan’s one of the 11 people I put on a plane to crash.
But I digress. These perfectionist lefties—they’re all young and passionate, and they all seem determined to repeat the really bloody awful parts of history.
Guillotines are not funny. The French Revolution failed. Why do people not remember that part? Eat The Rich is a fail strategy. Just look at Animal Farm or Soviet Russia for a lesson on why. All the people who want to abolish capitalism because capitalism enforces evil power hierarchies are forgetting one simple fact: HUMANS ARE HIERARCHICAL ANIMALS. We need power structures at a level far more fundamental than rational thought. I
Watch a day care playground for five minutes. Read the history of ever failed communal American Utopia. Listen to some freaking primate scientists.
When power hierarchies are removed, new ones emerge. All the mutual aid societies, communes, and other non-hierarchical societies that have ever existed had power hierarchies. They just weren’t always overt or legislated ones. Which presents its own accountability/fairness issues and power imbalances. When structures are only implicit, it’s just hard to root out abuses as in an explicitly hierarchical system. “Cult of Personality” is a thing that happens more often than people like to admit.
Communism works. Up to a point. At which point, people start to crave structure. Socialism works at scale because it’s basically representational communism with built-in hierarchical structures designed to minimize power consolidation in the hands of too few individuals.
Anyway. I hate purity perfectionists who want a world that works the way they want it and who believe that’s EVER going to happen. They fuck things up and then stand around all bewildered and self-righteous wondering how they got to be the baddies.
Doomed, the bunch of ‘em, and all of us with them.