Skip Navigation
Remote View
Chat @beehaw.org
millie @beehaw.org

Brood Parasitism in Leftist Politics

I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

  • Claiming to be leftists
  • Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
  • Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
  • Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
  • Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
  • Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
  • Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

Show Context
236 comments

  • Claiming that someone said something when they actually said something else, blatantly ignoring a direct question and instead going off and just talking about some different thing, repeating yourself forever without substantively responding to anything the other person says. That kind of thing.

    Lmao, I cannot believe that i'm getting back into it with you, but I can't not address this

    I have a strong feeling you think I fit into this bucket, and - for the record - I think the reason you get into these types of exchanges is because you use pretty lose language when describing your perspective, and people pick up on the possibility you may be alluding to a specific meaning they take issue with.

    That's what happened with our conversation that got me engaged, and it turned out at the end that I had correctly identified our disagreement while you were explicitly trying to pass it off as agreement. You should consider yourself lucky that so many people seem to be addressing these politispeak comments with long and charitable explanations and not outright scorn. "I didn't say that" or "why are you yelling, i agree with you" sounds innocuous enough but quickly becomes gaslighting behavior when it turns out you were in disagreement.

    • I said:

      the center-right party we call “Democrats”

      the Democrats are a bunch of corporate whores who don’t really “deserve” support

      I mostly agree with you about the shittiness of the Democratic establishment and particularly as pertains to kneecapping Bernie, who would have addressed your (extremely valid) complaints and also would have won the election

      The Democrats are ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform

      I completely agree with you about the despair people feel about the system, Biden being part of that whole broken system regardless of the good that he did, and that being a key reason why people aren’t excited to vote for anyone, and pretty much 100% of the rest of it.

      And you think it is "loose language" and you kept accusing me of things like "Insisting that ‘it should have been enough that she wasn’t trump’ while also insisting that the base doesn’t have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation." Yes. That is precisely the kind of behavior I was calling out in my message. You have that part correct, you are in that bucket.

      I agree with one part of what you said (that the Democrats are mostly shitty), but disagree with another part (that 100% of the "blame" attaches to them because they are shitty, and there is no other factor at all above 0% in the previous election that influenced the election, and in particular I have some specific things that I think influenced the election). I have no idea why you are so persistent in sending messages while also being so persistent about not understanding that. I tried, man, I really did. Do you want a diagram? I can send a diagram maybe and go back to each of my previous messages and show with color-coding how the different elements of the argument line up within certain messages and how it works to say "A and not B" and how that's allowed, to send that to someone who thinks "A and B." Should I do that?

      • I wasn't sure if that was what you were saying, I wanted to allow you the option to clarify, but every time you did you just made it less-clear what you were saying.

        I said:

        Liberals insist that the democrats lost because of 3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause, but I think there’s more evidence that the Democrats failed themselves by not reacting to the clear signs of distress that both the far-right and far-left populists were signaling.

        You responded with:

        You can reform Democrats without a bunch of immigrants going to El Salvador or worse because you didn’t feel like holding your nose and you’re privileged enough to be able to not have to.

        • Notice I was framing their failure around the national distress and their dismissal of it as a reality, and explicitly said I didn't think their loss was attributable with "3rd party spoilers and far-left activists deflating the cause". You turned around and re-framed the issue around some group (I can only really assume you mean those same people) trying to "reform democrats" (no mention of the core of my issue, which is them not addressing the national distress i was describing), and placing the cause-effect emphasis on those people.

        and then you said:

        I think the election took place almost entirely in fantasy-land. The far left (tiny in American politics) thought that Kamala Harris was responsible for 100% of Biden’s Israel policy, but also more mainstream people thought that Biden had accomplished nothing of value on climate change or for working people in the US, other people thought Trump was a genius at business who would bring inflation back down, and so on. It was propagandized to the point that it almost doesn’t matter that the Democrats’ messaging was bad.

        • Again, my point was that I didn't think democrats were addressing the distress I was pointing to, and they lost because those mainstream people didn't think their agenda was addressing it. You didn't seem to pick up on that point, so I restated it again in clearer language

        I said:

        It’s also possible that those accomplishments, as much as we’d like to celebrate them, weren’t addressing the core popular discontent of the voters. It could be a matter of messaging or propaganda, true, but it would be irresponsible to have this conversation and not point out that the current popular messaging in the democratic base isn’t related to infrastructure spending, inflation, or climate initiatives - it’s an expression of frustration about a system that’s rendered ineffective against oligarchs who use their immense wealth to undermine and frustrate all attempts at democratic reform.

        • Notice that I addressed your complaint about lack of celebration and credit for Biden's accomplishments, and then again restated the core of my point against that. I even addressed what I thought of your claim of propaganda, which is apparently what you kept wanting me to address, unbeknownst to me.

        I can go down the whole conversation if you want, but pretty much every comment has some degree of intentional(?) obfuscation. Edit: just so we're clear, that first quote from me is in my very-first comment. That was basically my entire point, but you kept pointing to other things I was using to support that argument and saying 'yea, i agree' but never addressing the thing I was trying to communicate

        This is the loose language i'm talking about. Yes, you kept saying "i agree" to a vague sentiment within my comment, and then you'd turn around and disagree with the main thing. I don't even really know if you're doing this on purpose, but when I see you in another conversation that people keep having this kind of exchange with you I have to assume that this is why.

        I'm sorry if this truly is unintentional, because this must be incredibly frustrating, but this is why I think you keep running into this. To those who don't know what your intention actually is, it feels a hell of a lot like gaslighting. Just state the thing you're disagreeing with explicitly, don't bury it behind a whole bunch of statements of agreement.

236 comments