#intra left

Honestly, the history of the Republican Party since at least the Tea Party era proves the lie to leftists who say stuff like "well if we don't withhold our vote, the Democratic Party will never move left!" In fact, Republicans have shown that it is specifically voting for their candidates faithfully in every election that allows a "radical" faction within a party to have leverage. That you can do that and also criticize candidates for not conforming to your views enough - but you only get leverage to do that by voting for the party regardless, but utilizing primaries, the media and other tactics to try to make your voice heard as much as you can within that party. I know this doesn't make "logical" sense on first blush, and isn't how other forms of political pressure (like boycotts) work, but history has proven that that is how you get leverage within a political party in the United States. And the left has done the right thing on this a lot! But when we don't get our full wishlist (or even when we do, but checked-out people online lie about it - see the myth in the 2024 election that the Dems "weren't doing anything/were the same as Republicans" on trans rights, and then after the results where Dems lost big, a few of them wrongly concluded that they should back off on trans rights!) we pull away and that sends the message that we can't be relied upon. Republicans, though, know how to play the long game and that even if they don't have their preferred person this election cycle, faithfully turning out and then reminding those politicians that they did later will, little by little, over time, result in more of their preferred candidates. This is the story of how the far-right took over the Republican Party - and the left could learn from it, if we wanted to. (Well, I want to, a lot of us want to, but we are too often drowned-out by the ideological-purity, no-knowledge-of-history-from-before-a-couple-years-ago, would-rather-critique-power-than-have-power ignoramus segment of it.)

I think it's important for any movement to be led by people who have been members of it for more than five minutes, but in the contemporary left I particularly believe "people who learned how to be leftists somewhere other than the Internet and have been that way for decades, plural" because, for one, it gives you a sense of connection to history that makes it less likely you'll make the same cyclical mistakes the left makes on like a 20-50-year cycle throughout its history. But it also makes it easier to keep long-time standards in place that are important for having a bottom line, bare minimum, of what this ideology means, and it being meaningful is key to doing anything. For instance, I think some of you would be less likely to come up with excuses for Blackwater mercenaries or Lockheed Martin employees if you were talking to more people who were actually raised by leftists and not just trying to reinvent the wheel online. I think you might have a better understanding of how the systemic nature of capitalism and cliamte change does not mean that you shouldn't give a shit at all where your products come from or what those companies do with their money and keep buying Temu and Chik-fil-A and gleefully wasting water and electricity for no reason. I think more people who have knowledge of what anti-feminism looked like in the 2000s would make attempts to come up with new fauxgressive versions of it less popular, or attempts to recycle right-wing religious purity culture as "feminist" (the post I just warning people that no, having sex with someone doesn't automatically create a special eternal bond with them.... what! who needs reminding of something that in my teen years was exclusively said by anti-choice religious figures! and then I realize how much time has passed) It just feels like we're at a point where even the most basic tenets of "leftism" are things that people casually discard at will because they're doing a fanfiction version of it that is taken from other people who are brand-new to it and idk it's weird! But like, this is why leftists throughout all time have said annoying things like "read theory." Because the temptations to stray from basic bottom lines are myriad and some of you are just far too susceptible to them, especially when you're so new to this that you don't even recognize that that temptation is what is being thrown at you.