Have there been any studies done deconstructing the left-to-right ("Saul-to-Paul") political conversion narrative that the right-wing loves to throw around?
I'm talking about people like former CPUSA members who turned state like Whittaker Chambers, Bella Dodd, and Louis Budenz; neocons like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and David Horowitz (rest in piss); or contemporary "conversion" stories like those of Abby Johnson. I'm obviously talking about Americans here but I'm sure you can name plenty of examples from other countries. What psychological factors cause someone to abandon leftism and fully embrace the right, and even worse, turn on their former comrades?
Is it simply the case that they upheld leftism as a dogma, so when their "god" died they found another god? Is it because they were always authoritarian assholes and embraced the right when the right gave them a better outlet for being authoritarian assholes? Was it because they found that the left was moving in a direction they didn't approve of, so they gradually became rightist? Or, using the narrative they themselves most often parrot, they felt "betrayed" by the left so in turn they betrayed the left?
Also, why do we rarely see any prominent right-wingers turning to the left?
>>2649015>why do we rarely see any prominent right-wingers turning to the left?Most people who do "the 'left' the left" thing, are either grifters targeting a lucrative target audience of very stupid right wingers, or were always politically underdeveloped people, who don't read theory or history.
most famously musslini started out as a communist
also people become right wing because they feel the left becomes more left wing and that they didnt leave the left, the left left them.
>>2649015Leftism has a purity issue where former right wingers are often seen as not really being left wing, wheras the right doesn't give a shit, The Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitors
Money
>>2649076Socialists look for architects, thr right looks for pyromaniacs
>>2649015>former CPUSA members who turned state like Whittaker Chambers, Bella Dodd, and Louis Budenz;Bella Dodd and Louis Budenz were converted to Catholicism by Fulton Sheen, who participated in a network of Catholics which deliberately sought out to convert former communists to Catholicism and have them snitch on other CPUSA members.
Read this. It's eye-opening.
>>2649076>>2649094>>2649106I'd agree that the problem is that what constitutes "leftism" changes every single fucking year. Language and terminology that was acceptable six or seven years ago is now considered "oppressive" by leftists today, for instance. Also, which issues are prioritized change. Very few people cared about autistic idpol 10 years ago and now it's everywhere. 10 years ago queer and trans idpol was everywhere, now those issues are on the backburner. 15 years ago the political climate was all about finding DIY solutions to the capitalist crisis whereby everyone was championing unions, co-ops, credit unions, squatting abandoned buildings to turn into homes, that kind of thing. Now, those strategies are considered liberal and reformist. Five years from now, Palestine might not even be in the top 10 most important issues for a leftist. Who knows what the political climate will be like then?
>>2649015Leftists are perfectionists who want perfect revolutionaries showing up to the barricades.
Meanwhile, the right looks for imperfect people whom they can lure in. It's why Catholics and Evangelicals convert a lot of people in prison.
>>2649015I think it's probably some combination of those things yeah.
Following the French Revolution there was a trend of ex-Jacobins who flipped to the Holy Alliance against Napoleon. There were radicals who were so embittered by Napoleon that they joined in with the ancien regimes. That is contradictory but Napoleon ended the revolution and crowned himself emperor and created a new imperial nobility of counts and dukes although he preserved many of revolution's social results so it's complicated. And you're also talking about people who had a very strong attachment to the revolution and to se e it mutate into its opposite (at least in some respects) is horrifying.
The left itself is internally contradictory (like all things) and is also in a process of change (like everything else). It has inner tendencies that can lead it to mutate into a new form of conservatism down the line. Some of these people don't necessarily see what's going on as the left moving further to the left, rather it's seeing the left turn into its opposite, into a reactionary force. Not saying that is really what is happening, but that's how some of them have seen it. Or, like, regarding official communist parties in the 1950s. That played into the Sino-Soviet split. This was written in 1950:
>Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow. He no longer defends socialism from unscrupulous abuse; he now defends man-kind from the fallacy of socialism. He no longer throws out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.
>How far he departed from his starting-point, whether, as Silone says, he becomes a fascist or not, depends on his inclinations and tastes – and stupid Stalinist heresy-hunting often drives the ex-communist to extremes. But, whatever the shades of individual attitudes, as a rule the intellectual ex-communist ceases to oppose capitalism. Often he rallies to its defence, and he brings to this job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard for truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a communist he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-communist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted the party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the ‘greatest illusion’, he is now obsessed by the greatest disillusionment of our time.
>His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal. His disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore intellectually and politically barren. In this, too, he resembles the embittered ex-Jacobin of the Napoleonic era. Wordsworth and Coleridge were fatally obsessed with the ‘Jacobin danger’; their fear dimmed even their poetic genius. It was Coleridge who denounced in the House of Commons a Bill for the prevention of cruelty to animals as the ‘strongest instance of legislative Jacobinism’. The ex-Jacobin became the prompter of the anti-Jacobin reaction in England. Directly or indirectly, his influence was behind the Bills Against Seditious Writings and Traitorous Correspondence, the Treasonable Practices Bill, and Seditious Meetings Bill (1792-4), the defeats of parliamentary reform, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the postponement of the emancipation of England’s religious minorities for the lifetime of a generation. Since the conflict with revolutionary France was ‘not a time to make hazardous experiments’, the slave trade, too, obtained a lease on life – in the name of liberty.
>In quite the same way our ex-communist, for the best of reasons, does the most vicious things. He advances bravely in the front rank of every witch hunt. His blind hatred of his former ideal is leaven to contemporary conservatism. Not rarely he denounces even the mildest brand of the ‘welfare State’ as ‘legislative Bolshevism’.
>He contributes heavily to the moral climate in which a modern counterpart to the English anti-Jacobin reaction is hatched.
>His grotesque performance reflects the impasse in which he finds himself. The impasse is not merely his – it is part of a blind alley in which an entire generation leads an incoherent and absent-minded life.
>The historical parallel drawn here extends to the wider background of two epochs. The world is split between Stalinism and an anti-Stalinist alliance in much the same way as it was split between Napoleonic France and the Holy Alliance. It is a split between a ‘degenerated’ revolution exploited by a despot and a grouping of predominantly, although not exclusively, conservative interests. In terms of practical politics the choice seems to be now, as it was then, confined to these alternatives. Yet the rights and the wrongs of this controversy are so hopelessly confused that whichever the choice, and whatever its practical motives, it is almost certain to be wrong in the long run and in the broadest historical sense.
>An honest and critically minded man could reconcile himself to Napoleon as little as he can now to Stalin. But despite Napoleon’s violence and frauds, the message of the French revolution survived to echo powerfully throughout the nineteenth century. The Holy Alliance freed Europe from Napoleon’s oppression; and for a moment its victory was hailed by most Europeans. Yet what Castlereagh and Metternich and Alexander I had to offer to ‘liberated’ Europe was merely the preservation of an old, decomposing order. Thus the abuses and the aggressiveness of an empire bred by the revolution gave a new lease on life to European feudalism. This was the ex-Jacobin’s most unexpected triumph. But the price he paid for it was that presently he himself, and his anti-Jacobin cause, looked like vicious, ridiculous anachronisms. In the year of Napoleon’s defeat, Shelley wrote to Wordsworth:
<In honoured poverty thy voice did weave<Songs consecrate to truth and liberty<Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,<Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
>If our ex-communist had any historical sense, he would ponder this lesson.https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/ex-communist.htm >>2649156>The left itself is internally contradictory (like all things) and is also in a process of change (like everything else). It has inner tendencies that can lead it to mutate into a new form of conservatism down the line. Some of these people don't necessarily see what's going on as the left moving further to the left, rather it's seeing the left turn into its opposite, into a reactionary force.What are some examples of those "inner tendencies" exactly?
>>2649162"Conservative brain structures?"
>>2649173Sounds like biological essentialism to me.
>>2649174Good. Spirits or souls dont exist.
You can make alot more money from being a right wing grifter. I think its pretty obvious. Imagine Parenti being rightwing, how much he could have made from donations from either big corporations or other wealthy families.
>>2649176I don't think that really applies to all of these stories. Plus, I have a hard time believing money alone is what would compel someone to turn their backs on their principles.
>>2649135More like, the right-wing wants sinners whom they can convert and "show the light" to. Marxists and anarchists seldom do that, possibly because (paradoxically) they want to keep their spaces inclusive and don't want someone who may still hold oppressive-ish views from making PoC, queer, and disabled folks uncomfortable.
>>2649158I think it's highly situational, historically contingent but a general contradiction might between various left-wing ethics like opposition to all forms of social privilege, non-domination (not being told what to do), and then becoming institutionalized whether that's a communist bureaucracy several decades after winning power or liberal NGOs in capitalist countries that absorb new social movements.
It's like "the reaction within the party." New privileges can grow out of historical development while the left degenerates, and then ideology gets turned around and redeployed to maintain those new privileges. In the communist case that really came to a head in 1968 in Prague, while in China there was a left-wing attack on rightists in the party. A certain core part of what makes the left what it is, as I see it, is a lack of sacred feelings towards any existing historical situation because social relations are flexible and it's possible to change them.
I'm not saying it's simply a case of the left coming to power is what causes this and so any left-wing party that does is bad. That's too simplistic.
>>2649015The American right is so heavily Christian that it makes sense the Saul-to-Paul myth would be heavily incorporated into their ideology.
>>2649177>I have a hard time believing money alone is what would compel someone to turn their backs on their principles.You’re a schmuck
>>2649015The typical convert path I've seen among contemporary internet leftists is disagreeing with the "consensus" on a particular issue (eg. COVID, Ukraine War, Trump, etc.), making increasingly bad-faith critiques of former comrades and then getting ostracized because of it. They then integrate into the rightoid sphere, either to have their opinions heard or because they need the money and the right will pay to publish them.
>>2649173Untrustworthy science, just as spooky as any liberal idealism.
>>2649216Sounds like Caleb Maupin and Jimmy Dore.
>>2649015They usually fall out with the left over sone disagreement and this leads to them dumping the left.
>>2649067He want a communist he was some sort of bourgeoise socialist
>>2650098Jimmy lost his mind over COVID.
Maupin is still pretty based. He just rejects western idpol
>>2649076>former right wingers are often seen as not really being left wingI mean in a lot cases that's actually true considering how many "former" right wingers turn around and try to launder their reactionary ideology as a hot new strain of leftism.
The Principles of Communism has a whole section where Engels shittalks different self-proclaimed socialist groups thus justifying the need for "communism" as a distinct ideology.
>>2649135From my experience, right-wingers who used to be leftists brag about how “radical” they were when they were on the left and make a big spectacle of their conversions whereas leftists who used to be right-wingers are often ashamed of the time they spent on the right.
>>2649182If I’m a Black Muslim autistic queer, I wouldn’t feel safe with a former Nazi in my space.
>>2649015Kristin Turner-Dorsey from OP’s video is a snitch:
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a69167837/charlotte-isenberg-anti-abortion-activist-story/So yes, she’s just like SNITCHaker Chambers and Bella Dodd in that regard.
>>2649076Agreed. But this is just because the left is outside the bounds of western discourse.
>fishhook theoryIs correct because the political center of each country is different. For example, in china, the fishhook is flipped around the y-axis. I am certain libertarian groups in china and russia face the same problems as leftists in the west (espcially in america) do.
>>2649076Right-wingers don’t care about perfection, they care about numbers.
>>2650744Really makes me question how people who don't feel "safe" around average working-class people plan on organizing them.
>>2649182>>2650744Maybe those leftists should grow a spine and deal with it.
>>2651435Least unhinged autistic.
>>2651435>As a middle aged and recently diagnosed autistic man, you would be surprised to know that my opinions on complex political and social issues are not only rigid, but also the result of my inherent essential naivety as per said diagnosis!A real babe in the /pol/ woods here
>>2651448The person who made that post said they're a woman.
>>2651452Whatever same thing. It just sucks when, amongst all the obvious sadistic people using these narratives as an excuse to commit system hate crimes, there are people like this who are actually sincerely gullible and take the bait.
I mean obviously this person is still kind of racist because they don't think to question how it's always "the jews" or some other minority doing the fraud, but still. It's pathetic.
>>2651455To be fair, there are some autistic/neurodiversity activists who will argue autistic people shouldn't be obligated to pay taxes because "the world wasn't made for autistics" or something. I can see why a late-diagnosed autistic who needs extra support because they never got it when they were a kid growing up would be resentful of communities (allegedly) taking lots of welfare money.
>>2649094>That's nonsense. Right wingers purity test all the time.The White Australia Party (which was trying to be launched by the defunct NSN neo-Nazi org) had at least two public-facing non-Whites, one being a brown El Salvadorian.
Hell, the NSDAP even had
known Jews, homosexuals and child abusers high in their ranks.
Reactionaries
proclaim to have standards, and purity test out anyone who they don't like. They would disintegrate if members were held to these standards.
>>2651458I mean I'm autistic too, but I still hold everyone to a certain political standard (unless they're like… an actual sped like Nick Shirley here)
I get the frustration, but also I dont? Like is OP saying they're becoming "right wing" in the sense that they don't want any more welfare? Or are they becoming right wing in the sense that they want to "reform" welfare away from certain communities for certain, let's say "based" reasons?
>>2650710Yep. Good point.
Case study: vidrel
>>2649063The only correct answer with an element of this
>>2649069Add the money grift incentive and you got your "converted leftist."
I have yet to see a communist in our age that reverted to being a reactionary. The people who "convert" have never fully abandoned their liberal tendencies to begin with, which is procisely why they switch back. Destroying your liberalism which you have been conditioned into all your life is a difficult but necessary step, hence some give up at that stage.
>>2651469I'm still not sure if the money is the sole and primary reason why they jump ship from the left and become conservatives. There has to be other material reasons going on that would cause someone to abandon their values that quickly.
>>2651475There is probably the impulse for self-preservation or wanting to be on the winning side after seeing how disorganized and weak the current left is.
>>2649015Did some psychoanalyst write a book on Whittaker Chambers which demonstrated he was a sociopath?
>>2651435Voting blocks are the problem in both Minnesota and NY. That's why politicians allow this crap to happen.
>>2651463Nick Shirley clearly has autism himself.
>>2651557I wouldn't even say that, I would say that he's uh… touched by an angel…
>>2649015>I'm talking about people like former CPUSA members who turned state like Whittaker Chambers, Bella Dodd, and Louis Budenz; neocons like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and David Horowitz (rest in piss); or contemporary "conversion" stories like those of Abby Johnson. I'm obviously talking about Americans here but I'm sure you can name plenty of examples from other countries. What psychological factors cause someone to abandon leftism and fully embrace the right, and even worse, turn on their former comrades?These are all entirely different cases and stories.
Whittaker Chambers was clearly a trauma-drama junkie who felt like he always had to be in a state of crisis. He put himself in a "dangerous" position in CPUSA (being a "spy" when he was simply running papers), then after he left the party he became a rat thinking he'd have a target placed on his back.
Bella Dodd was a validation junkie, not unlike most of those insecure girls on Tumblr. She was an Italian immigrant who always felt out-of-place, joined CPUSA because she thought communism would help America, and became a successful labour organizer in the party doing legal work for unions. Then, after she got purged for Browderism, she became a born-again Catholic thanks to Fulton Sheen and started snitching on everyone in CPUSA thinking she'd be loved as an "American hero" if she did so.
Don't know anything about Budenz except Fulton Sheen converted him and his wife to Catholicism and got them to rat people out too.
There's a huge amount of literature on why the Neocons flipped the way they did. Basically, they started believing "Eastern/Soviet imperialism" was worse than Western imperialism.
Funny story, I know an old boomber comrade who used to work with David Horowitz back when he was at Ramparts. This comrade said Horowitz was always a nasty, angry guy even when he was a Marxist. Was an arrogant jackass who treated everyone around him like shit. I think his situation is one where being a conservative gave him a better outlet to be an arrogant jackass than being a Marxist did.
Abby Johnson just wants money. If you read her autobiography Unplanned you'll notice how she plays up how "innocent" she was while working at Planned Parenthood and how reluctant she was to perform abortions. She claims she left after witnessing a 13-week ultrasound abortion take place but all of her coworkers dispute that and insist she (like Horowitz) was always an arrogant asshole and her move to the anti-abortion side was simply one of her being ultra-combatitive combined with the fact the anti-abortion movement began paying her to tell her story. The way she tells her story now is very different from how she portrays it in her memoir, no doubt because she converted to Catholicism and now injects a lot more philosophical stuff in it, as you can tell from the film. I also get the impression she wants to style herself as a sort of "Xennial Whittaker Chambers" because she now uses many of the same tropes Chambers used in Witness regarding conspiracy narratives and Manichaean thinking and such.
>>2651557I mean, it’s pretty damn obvious?
It’s called money and grifting.
>>2649015There's actually a lot to say about how while people's politics may change, their psychology usually doesn't. For example, a lot of detransitioners who end up falling into the right and become mouthpieces for transphobia (or queerphobia more generally) almost always came out of highly toxic queer spaces that were extremely morally obsessive. I've been in those types of spaces myself, and you encounter plenty of queer folks who demand you act like a perfect angel 24/7 and fly into rage if you do anything that makes them the least bit uncomfortable. Like if you fuck up and get someone's pronouns wrong they will break down and scream at you or something along those lines. It makes sense, then, that someone who was once a part of those highly authoritarian leftist spaces would end up falling into the authoritarian right and start palling around with right-wingers who also demand an extreme amount of behavioural/identity policing.
>>2649015They look for a sense of belonging and when they no longer find it on the left they search for it on the right.
>>2649216this happened a lot to anarchists who did not simply wanted to mask for covid and protected their discomfort w "the right to choose" and "stopping social terror". theyre still vaguely anarchist but theyve associated more and more with right wingers
>>2653959I’m an anarchist opposed to the mask mandates and I’ve never experienced this. A lot of leftists opposed the covid mandates without becoming right-wing.
>>2653995Most anarchists are not ideologically consistent left wingers but "anti-authoritarians." You can sway them to do just about anything by simply commanding them to do the opposite lol
>>2654271Sounds like PDA autism.
>>2653948TL:DR of this book?
>>2653948>>2654835Description of the book:
"The God That Failed is a classic work and crucial document of the Cold War that brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism. In describing their own experiences, the authors illustrate the fate of leftism around the world. André Gide (France), Richard Wright (the United States), Ignazio Silone (Italy), Stephen Spender (England), Arthur Koestler (Germany), and Louis Fischer, an American foreign correspondent, all tell how their search for the betterment of humanity led them to communism, and the personal agony and revulsion which then caused them to reject it. David Engerman's new foreword to this central work of our time recounts the tumultuous events of the era, providing essential background. It also describes the book's origins and impact, the influence of communism in American intellectual life, and how the events described in The God That Failed provide important lessons today."
Anon who brought up the book can correct me, but based on the synopsis it almost seems like a good amount of these people tried to use communism as a substitute for religion.
I wonder how many of those that "left the left" didn't really care about communism's stated material goals, and instead were looking to fill something missing in their personal lives.
>>2654916>I wonder how many of those that "left the left" didn't really care about communism's stated material goals, and instead were looking to fill something missing in their personal lives.This is a pretty common pattern I see too.
>>2649108>>2649113I think it’s pretty funny how Bella Dodd snitched on Einstein.
>>2656106She snitched on Franz Boas too IIRC.
>>2649015FFS I hate these fucking Catholic convert shitheads.
>>2656106>>2656285Most of the people who got snitched on during McCarthyism were Jews, specifically Jewish PMC. Interesting how many Jewish PMC were CPUSA members.
>>2649076>The Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitorsI cannot understand how this is a good thing if the left is struggling as much as it currently is.
Can’t speak for the Old and New Left of the past century, but the contemporary left offers nothing. All of these calls to get ex-Evangelicals and Jews raised in Zionist households to “DECONSTRUCT” the ideologies they were raised with in order to become intersectional feminists and socialists are nonsense, because the existing left can’t offer them a solid alternative. The American left officially died in 2020 and it’s only now with the anti-ICE protests that it’s starting to recover, yet it has no real momentum outside of said protests. The Palestine protests from the past two years did nothing to revive the left. Come midterms and the Dems will sweep and all the liberals protesting now will go back to sleep. Also, sucking Mamdani’s cook doesn’t make you a leftist.
>>2658961Covid fallout is what killed the American left. Instead of launching a campaign to make the rich pay for covid-19, the American left decided it was going to tail the Democrats by telling everyone to stay at home, mask up, get vaxxed, and basically worship Fauci. If you questioned or opposed any of these policies, you were denounced as a “eugenicist” who wanted to kill all disabled people. In a sense, the US left was treating covid the exact way the right treats poverty: blame everything on the individual and force the individual to take responsibility instead of forcing the SYSTEM to clean up its own mess. The US left proved they cared more about behavioural policing than a chance to implement leftist policies. It still hasn’t recovered.
>>2659020It's an 18 year old's vlog about their latest lifestyle update
To take the last first, the main reason you don't see that is because the left is constitutionally set up to lose. The aim of the left is to capture the state, after which they immediately about face and become as tyrannical as the people they overthrew. The left comes in knowing that what they did can easily be done to them, and so their first task is preventing counter-revolution. You do not see a conversion to "the left" until the capture of the state is underway.
This doesn't actually happen in the past century because politics was "solved". The revolution of our time is the coup of the institutions and the sudden subversion of reality, and that creates a different revolutionary type than those that were imagined by the communists or liberals. The way this system works is that the left is a rotating door used to entrap the gullible, and the leaders of the left invariably "sell out" because they never believed in anything in the first place and were always imperial stooges. This is less viable if you have to fight an actual war to win the revolution or your state needs to actually do things, but the system set up in the 1930s consciously did everything possible to ensure the revolutionary moment is owned from start to finish by the "right people". What you would see in a "revolution" today are ghoulish figures suddenly promoted as "change", and you'd see something like Secretary-General Hillary Clinton suddenly declare she's an ardent communist after a lifetime of being a capitalist, and you'd shrug and accept it. For proof that anything can be anything, look at how quickly leftists assumed Barack Obama was whatever they needed him to be, despite the well known facts that Barack Obama was descended from the same WASP ascendancy that has always run the country and Obama was the best thing to entrench the system, doing exactly what was needed to ensure nothing went against plan. Obama was somewhat more complicated in that he was a very skilled crisis manager when it came to public relations and he had an operation dedicated to that goal at any cost. The left, being feckless as they have been, did everything they were programmed to do, and stumbled over themselves when supplicating to Bullshit Barry. You have to admire the guy for being that brazen in pulling it off, and you have to look at the left and ask how these people were ever taken seriously.
You do have rank and file conservative / rightist supporters turn to socialism, but they do so mostly because this is opportunistic and there is nothing binding them to the conservative lizard-brain since they are no longer beneficiaries of the mindless barking conservative requires. Plus, old people like their Social Security payments when that's the only money they're going to get. You'd be amazed how many people are purely driven by their short-term interests, and this is what they should do. You could speak to people who were not too long ago conservatives by simply saying "we are going to give you your stuff back", which is a common bourgeois socialist talking point. That's what the Nazis were invented to co-opt, to make way for the new world order where no one would own anything "and you will be happy". None of that directly involves "the left", but if left parties give the goodies, they will get support. In practice, all elections are rigged and the real motives for voting are hashed out in secret societies, who relay what "should" win and what "should" happen. I had reliable warning beforehand that Biden would drop out in 2024, and Biden dropped out at precisely the time he would have if the goal was to not run a primary and make sure the game goes ahead as planned. You won't ever see the left win because they are assigned the role of permanent abject failures, and the leadership of left parties go out of their way to be as aggressively disgusting and unlikable as possible. They kept doing it despite it being completely nonsensical if their parties were legitimate, because their parties aren't legitimate. They all think about cashing out and getting some sinecure, one way or another. That's what the left was designed to do. In the past, the left's chief program was to establish those sinecures and make themselves indispensible, since there wasn't a strong state that would pay out those sinecures. That's really all it is about, and that also explains the common left-to-right conversions. A brief period of naivete is corrected when the leftist is pulled aside and given an opportunity to enter the real club in some capacity. None of these people are blind ideologues and if you believe the narrative theory uncritically, you're a fucking idiot and should not say anything about politics.
If you really understand politics, politics is personal and every politician looks out for #1: me. That is so basic that if you think otherwise, you do not survive. They do not want people who think differently or have ideas of selflessness, because such people will if they look far enough ahead conclude that all hitherto known concepts of rule are unacceptable. A ruler who really wanted to end this individual struggle would resort to very drastic measures that would appear as if they depoliticized society, but really would be about stripping away individualism and that would be a transformation humans aren't ready for. This wouldn't be done for petty or emotional reasons, but because in the final analysis, individualism cannot survive. It either reverts to despotism or it has to become some situation that was never allowed to exist. The chief aim of the ruling ideas of the past century is to make sure that "other thing" is completely inconceivable and inadmissible, even though we have some hints and expectations of what might have been possible if it were allowed. So, we have despotism, and it's just a matter of when we make it official and stop lying about it.
>>2658961The entire premise of getting people raised in right-wing religious households to deconstruct ideology is so that they become Democrats. That's literally it.
>>2653948The Deutscher article I linked earlier itt is a review of that book. Something that he points out is that Silone was the only one who was really in the thick of the communist movement (he was a politician and one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party). The others tended to be writers who moved on the literary and journalistic fringes of their respective parties. Arthur Koestler was journalist who also wrote novels. Richard Wright and Andre Gide were novelists. Silone has more in common with Milovan Djilas.
>>2654916Well the suggestion that a lot of these guys were writers and journalists and so on is interesting. Djilas (who had hung out with Stalin and drank with him on multiple occasions, was a partisan leader) also broke with communism but his writings were very analytical, unemotional, rationalist. The novelists seemed to have a harder time separating their own emotions from the drama they were involved with. Deutscher wrote: "Their notions of communist doctrine and ideology usually spring from their own literary intuition, which is sometimes acute but often misleading."
>>2649015>Whittaker Chambers,Can't believe American conservatives still love this guy and prop him up as some kind of prophet-figure. Reagan said Witness is what made him leave the Democrats and become Republican, because it made communism out to be this ungodly evil that the Dems were too soft on.
So basically, you have one hell of a domino effect with: Chambers' wife refusing to get an abortion —-→ genocide in El Salvador and Nicaragua at the hands of Reagan's goons
I’m less upset by people like Chambers and Horowitz and more upset by leftists who become “centrists”. Most pretentious assholes out there.
Along the same lines, I can’t help but notice how the Black community is seemingly becoming more right-wing, specifically because they’re suffering from a sort of leftist fatigue. One major complaint a lot of them have is that white leftists and white liberals try to drag them into every single leftist issue, regardless as to how affected the Black community is by those issues, just so those issues gain credibility. Black folks are getting sick and tired of having to sacrifice loads of labour and energy for issues that barely affect them all while those same white leftists do nothing for Black folks.
You saw this during Occupy. There was a huge push to get Black people from the hood to join the movement and all this talk about how Occupy was “too white”. Yet Black people dudbt want to join because they saw the protests as being too littered with white university students and knew they’d stick out. The Palestine protests are another one. Black-Palestinian solidarity was so fucking forced. Black folks realized they were being used pretty quickly and held that Palestine has nothing to do with them. Palestinians largely don’t care about Black people, and if Israel becomes Palestine again it will do very little to nothing to improve Black folks’ conditions. Yeah, the IDF trains police but pig brutality existed in America long before. Israel isn’t the reason Black folks are marginalized, so why do Blacks need Palestinian saviours?
Now the Somali thing is interesting. Blacks in Minneapolis are being told by white leftists that they need to join the anti-ICE protests to protect Somalis because Somalis are black too. But Somalis largely don’t see themselves as Black. Black Minnesotans have also said that Somalis treat them just as poorly as whites do. Plus, Black folks have complained that the Minnesotan government gives Somalis huge amounts in handouts all while Black Minnesotans still have to jump through a billion hoops to start their own businesses and daycares, etc. They ask why should they risk being attacked by ICE in order to save Somalis when the Somalis don’t reciprocate that same solidarity?
So yes, I could easily see a lot of Black people in the US becoming staunch conservatives in the next decade or so.
>>2660419Black women do an exceptional amount of labour in leftist slaves. I don’t agree with leaving the left, but their anger is certainly warranted.
>>2660419Those people are paid Democratic Party shills, idiot.
My two cents is that it’s simply too difficult for them to become educated. That’s it.
Americans know their country is horribly corrupt, but if you’re working 40+ hours a week just to pay your rent and put food on the table, you don’t have the energy to even think about the big picture, you only have enough energy to keep yourself alive. Even when times are good, you have to work hard, and when times get bad, you have to work even harder. Our education system, if you can even call that, is nothing more than a factory designed to prepare you for wage slavery, to become a center left liberal so that you can support all of the policies that make life easy for the bourgeoisie, all while thinking it’s the “moral” position to take, and that you made this decision yourself. There is sometimes a mention of the phrase “critical thinking”, but it’s nothing but a prop to make you feel intelligent. Those who actually practice critical thinking are laughed at, ostracized for not fitting in. Reading for fun or engaging with the subject matter makes you a loser with no friends.
This makes you into a perfect slave. You don’t have the capacity to do anything unless someone on a screen tells you to do it, making you a perfect victim of propaganda. You don’t have the energy to do anything but nod and agree anyway.
So the few people who go from center left to leftist will mostly give it up because they cannot bridge this gap. They cannot comprehend even reading secondary sources of texts written over 20 years ago, because they can probably only read at an eighth grade level. Without theory, leftism appears to be simply utopianism.
Then crisis comes. The economy crashes again, people lose their homes, their jobs, their families, and their lives. We know action must be taken, but we can do nothing except wait for orders from our masters, who console us and tell us that it is now time to “return” to a better place, a harsher place where we “actually had a functioning country”. You wake up from your utopian stupor and join the crowds of people calling for the death of the foreigners who are coming to destroy your country. You are happy, your purpose fulfilled.
>>2660419>Black-Palestinian solidarity was so fucking forced.Black Panthers visited Gaza and had strong relations with the PLO, idiot.
>>2660419Ever consider Black Americans aren't nearly as left-wing as people think they are?
>>2660419guys what if political alignment is not a function of identity
>>2660634The IRA does not represent the Irish people and the Black Panthers don't represent African Americans.
>>2660419Blacks are fully aware that white liberals only use them as a vessel and don't really care about them. How many black people do you think wanted to defund the police? They knew many of them would die.
>You saw this during Occupy. There was a huge push to get Black people from the hood to join the movement and all this talk about how Occupy was “too white”. This was done by the people who were paid to destroy OWS.
IDpol was made to derail the entire left form a class warfare to an anything else warfare. Race, gender, sexuality, it don't matter as long as wall street can make more profit.
>>2660634I thought this was well-known?
>>2660419>so why do Blacks need Palestinian saviours? The Palestinian people have provided the blueprint on how to resist.
>>2649015>Also, why do we rarely see any prominent right-wingers turning to the left?We do. It’s just called “deprogramming”.
>>2661997The right will capture any territory we fail to claim. While the left has been banning SW from their spaces, and promoting purity politics, the right has been appealing to them, despite the absolute contradictions that creates.
>>2664761Wrong. The right has money. All whores care about is money. Whores will always be rightist forces because whores are abolished in Communism
>>2649015I get the impression many of these Dodd and Horowitz types are the same people that engage in Sealioning at every function they appear at and were basically the Leninhats of there org until interpersonal drama causes them to denounce the entire movement for not glazing them enough. This is also why they go straight to the right wing instead of just being a burnt out apathetic centrist since American Rightoid thought is predicated on that concept that your literally the john galt main character who the dumb poors hate for being oh so special. Also why many right wing talking heads are "failed creatives" who think the reason they're not famous is somesort of liberal conspiracy and not that fact that there art/performance is fucking buns.
>>2660553I also think some of the theory itself might weed some people out or at least anecdotally speaking(so feel free to disregard) they're plenty of people who are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that they're just one upon millions if not billions of proles or that history is shaped by material circumstances and not some fucking movie controlled by epic struggle between great men and ideas. Some mfers just don't like material analysis since it doesn't offer the same mental comforts as religion or idealism does. An extreme example would be every flat earther/creationist I have ever met- they don't like Science, heliocentrism, materialism or really anything after the enlightenment since that implies the universe isn't geocentric and doesn't literally revolve around them and that they don't have an all powerful imaginary friend who will grant them immortality in paradise when they die. I think some people are just too "weak-minded" per se for theory, not because they're stupid but because they can't handle the alternative without being overwhelmed with existential dread
tldr: egotistical mfers don't like theory since being a member of the proletariat implies they're just another schmuck like the rest of us
>>2649015>Or, using the narrative they themselves most often parrot, they felt "betrayed" by the left so in turn they betrayed the left?I vaguely recall David Horowitz using this exact phrase. “They betrayed me so I betrayed them.”
>>2665365Reagan said that shit too, but about the Democrats.
>>2664792Yeah, I know Horowitz definitely fits this description. He was always a nasty, combative guy even when he was a communist. He claims in his autobiography that he “knew” the Panthers were thugs and (allegedly) saw them engage in thuggery all the time, but brushed it off because he believed their intentions were good. The last straw was when the white woman bookkeeper he had introduced to the Panthers went missing and turned up dead in the SF Bay. He claimed the Panthers were behind it despite zero evidence (he said she had found some dirty business in the Panthers’ finances but who the fuck really knows?). It’s pretty clear Horo-shits was already in a contentious relationship with his comrades, the murder incident was what cemented it all.
>>2649015I think it amounts to the right basically love bombing anyone who comes over to their side and the left being a circular firing squad that, at times, harms its members with little to show for it. I’m talking stuff like those Maoists in Japan that killed each other because they were convinced that everyone else was an informant, or the Weather Underground psychologically torturing its members in struggle sessions. You go from that to the Right where they’ll parade you around and elevate you just for having a pulse and agreeing with them and it’s a shocking turn that hardens what might otherwise be a cynical ideological move.
Like Eldridge Cleaver went from “raping white women is a revolutionary act” to being a Mormon (I believe at the time the Church still legitimately thought being Black meant you had “the curse of Cain” that justified being enslaved) that would talk at the RNC about how Reagan was so great. One of the RAF became a neo-Nazi. Bella Dodd was toured around the country by a Catholic Bishop. Even in ᴉuᴉlossnW’s day Fascists would make propaganda about how much they loved “converting” leftists. They’d often give them ministerial positions or some other kind of bribe. National Rally parades around former French Communists and delights in having them claim that it’s only the Fascists that care about the French Working Class.
Additionally, the Left sabotages any felt sense of victory. If some SocDem like Zohran wins then people will look for evidence to prove he’s a sellout. If a neocon who says “based” things wins, then the Right does a victory lap. It must be psychically exhausting to constantly believe you’re a loser that doesn’t have any victories to speak of, the Right showboats when it wins and declares that they were robbed if they lose, but they never willingly exclaim they’ve been defeated.
So yeah, think of it in those terms: you’re told you’ve never won, your teammates when they aren’t talking about how much they suck are willing to pounce on any perceived fault to declare that you’re an enemy, and then the Right is openly proclaiming they’re gonna win and keep on winning while essentially hoisting “former leftists” up on their shoulders then for cynical reasons at the very least you’ve got a reason, and if you go from the emotional whiplash of struggle sessions where you’re told you’re an evil traitor to an audience cheering that you’re “one of them” then you could feel even more contempt for the Left than before—you went through whatever amount of psychic anguish for “nothing” essentially.
There was some Twitter post that made the rounds online about some guy doing a “before and after I went right wing” thing, and he was bragging that he got a girlfriend and a dog, basically. The response libs rallied around was “Yeah well you just stopped caring!” And it’s like… okay? So he stopped caring and then he got himself a girl and a dog, what did “caring” get him? It’s basically sacrificing some supposed sense of moral clarity or “peace of mind” for material benefits, but if they never felt some psychic nutrition from “caring” in some vague sense what are they losing, really?
The point is I think there’s a psychological component to it, a major one, that straddles the line between cynicism and genuine belief.
>>2665611Once I think about it, when was the last time anyone in your org or activist circle looked you in the eye with a smile and said, "I'm so glad you're here. I appreciate you and everything you do."?
Conservatives are disingenuous as fuck, but leftists are almost detached.
>>2665611>There was some Twitter post that made the rounds online about some guy doing a “before and after I went right wing” thing, and he was bragging that he got a girlfriend and a dog, basically. The response libs rallied around was “Yeah well you just stopped caring!” And it’s like… okay? So he stopped caring and then he got himself a girl and a dog, what did “caring” get him? It’s basically sacrificing some supposed sense of moral clarity or “peace of mind” for material benefits, but if they never felt some psychic nutrition from “caring” in some vague sense what are they losing, really?The basic crux of mutual aid and "having empathy" is that you're not supposed to serve for a reward. You make sacrifices for others because "that's what you do," not because you expect to be fully reciprocated for your efforts. You know who also tells me that? My boss.
>>2665782ye
>you have to do your moral duty even if it left you broken with no rewardis literally brahminical mentality. something you'd find in le rochelle. funny how things work with libs. I think it has to do with their class position; many libs are basically labour aristocrats, and much like the petty aristocrats of the medieval world these guys genuinely believed in the chivalric ideals about self sacrifice and whatnot
>>2665831The PMC tends to be big on self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Academic elites love the idea of the noble death. Meanwhile, working-class people do whatever they can to survive.
>>2665611>If some SocDem like Zohran wins then people will look for evidence to prove he’s a sellout"Accepting new evidence is false consciousness" communism is about books written 100 years ago I guess
>some guy doing a “before and after I went right wing” thing, and he was bragging that he got a girlfriend and a dog, basically. "I don't care about anyone except me and mine" - small soul neoliberal NPC dialogL
<Margaret Thatcher famously stated, "There is no such thing as society," emphasizing individual responsibility over collective welfare, which aligns with neoliberal principles that prioritize free markets and personal accountability. This perspective contributed to significant changes in the welfare state and economic policies during her time as Prime Minister.<Neoliberal Ideology: Thatcher's approach is closely associated with neoliberalism, which advocates for free markets, deregulation, and reduced government spending. This ideology posits that economic freedom leads to greater prosperity.<Economic Policies: Under her leadership from 1979 to 1990, Thatcher implemented significant economic reforms, including privatization of state-owned industries and cuts to welfare programs. These changes aimed to reduce the role of the state in the economy.<Welfare State: Thatcher's government sought to diminish the welfare state, arguing that it created dependency. She believed that benefits should be a last resort for the truly needy, not a way of life.<Cultural Shift: Her policies contributed to a cultural shift towards individualism in British society, often criticized for fostering materialism and a lack of community spirit.being "right wing" is apparently just checking out and being a consumer of pure ideology, moving to the suburbs and losing your face and your fingerprints
>if they never felt some psychic nutrition from “caring” in some vague sense what are they losing, really?Liberalism began 500 years ago, its been a long series of dismantling human society, like slowly cutting off an arm until the very last tendon of meat is left hanging. That's what atomization means, you have one finger and one button, that's it
>>2651435>welfare fraud scandals made me right wingyeah after 50 years of neoliberal brainwashing psyops from every post-Carter austerity scold president from Reagan to Biden. These neoliberal subjects are like that joke about monkeys attacking each other to stop them from taking a banana:
>If you’ve worked in an office setting, have a general interest in psychology, or been on LinkedIn in the past few years you may have seen or heard about the “Monkey Ladder Experiment” sometimes called the “5 Monkeys Experiment”.>A group of scientists/researchers place five monkeys in a room that contains a ladder in the center and a banana atop the ladder. It isn’t long before one of the monkeys attempts to go for the banana but as soon as that happens, a scientist comes in and sprays all the monkeys with ice-cold water from a hose.>If any other monkey attempts to go for the banana the same thing happens and continues to happen until all the monkeys refuse to go for the banana. >At this point, a scientist switches out a wet monkey with a dry monkey who has no idea what’s been going on in the room and is probably wondering why everyone is so wet and angry.>This new naïve monkey spots the banana and attempts to go for it but instead of being hosed down by a scientist, the other 4 wet monkeys hit him, preventing him from touching the ladder.>One by one the rest of the wet monkeys are replaced with dry monkeys and each one attempts to go for the banana only to be violently stopped by the other monkeys. It eventually gets to the point where no wet monkey is left and only dry monkeys are in the room. Yet, they still won’t attempt to grab the banana thinking something bad will happen if they do.ideology is like water that fish swim in, or ideology is like water that makes you cold and frozen in abjection as a punishment from fascist prison wardens
>>2665831It's funny, because a lot of Black women on the left in particular are talking about how sick and tired they are of doing unpaid labour for other leftists and not getting anything back.
>>2651435assuming this isn't just /pol/yp creative writing this is just a scratched lib who prolly shills autism speaks lol
>I got screwed over so everyone else has to as well !!!!!>>2651455>shouldn't be obligated to pay taxes because "the world wasn't made for autistics"ok so who is the world "made" for then? People in general regardless of tism levels should learn in school to internalize the concept of social construction and the fact that society didn't just fall out the fucking sky or get beamed directly into some prophets head who then wrote it all down. All societies are "made" by social relations and class struggle, maybe I'm misunderstanding the activists here but its just seems like a very idealistic view of society and history where they never once considered the fact that you could just change society to be more accommodating.
>>2666489The person who made the post said they’re autistic themselves, idiot.
>>2661997>make money working>make money taking your clothes off for internet weirdos>make money not taking your clothes off for internet weirdosall capitalism is the extraction of surplus value. in this case it is somewhat ironic that OF strippers are bragging about their fans paying them to stay dressed.
>>2666635I can't believe an actual autistic woman arrived at a place where teenagers call themselves autistic because they can't stop quoting hitler.
>>2649113>>2651578>>2656106>>2664792>>2665611Wanna know something funny? Bella Dodd’s great-grandniece (the great-granddaughter of her brother) is a well-known bookfluencer (Brielle Persun, formerly Brielle Colby). Her mother Teri Colby (Teri Marsilio) is a hardcore Trumper who participated in the January 6th riots. Fucking Kek.
>>2666489I’ve always hated statements like: “the world wasn’t made FOR ME!!!” because they always come off as intellectually immature. No one consciously “made” the world the way it is; the world we have now is the result of centuries of historical forces. There isn’t some grand conspiracy against autistic people, and quite frankly there’s zero element of capitalism’s “anti-autistic” nature that doesn’t apply to any other disability or chronic illness such as lupus or whatever.
>>2666790You should ask her about her aunt Bella. See if she knows about the Catholic Church infiltration conspiracy and if she’s ever spoken to Paul Kengor.
>>2665772>Conservatives are disingenuous as fuck, but leftists are almost detached.From personal experience it seems almost generational. Like most of the older comrades I've met have been encouraging and really friendly, helps that a lot of them have families and are grandparents. Younger ones it definitely feels like they're waiting for a slip up to berate you or just completely indifferent to whatever work you do.
>>2665782Isn't the premise behind mutual aid that it's… well, mutual?
Okay, enough snark, allow me to explain a little more. No one is saying everything should be "transactional" including empathy, but the difference is that when it comes to things like charitable giving, there's usually at least something to keep you going: someone saying thank you, someone letting you know you made their day, so on. Say you decide to shovel snow for your neighbors one day, just to help them out: if they don't so much as say "thank you" then you'll feel less of a reason, I imagine, to do it in the future. If you decide that you aren't going to shovel snow for them and they're pounding on your door the next day saying "Excuse me but WHY aren't you shoveling snow out of my driveway?" You'll likely think they're entitled.
So yeah, in that particular example the dude "stopped caring" and got rewarded for it, but if that prior sense of "caring" was just individualized and he's doesn't see even an acknowledgement of that "caring" then there's a chance he'll just say "well they only actually give a fuck when I stop doing shit for them".
There's also, I think, a profound lack of grace in some left wing spaces. I said before that younger leftists often feel like they're waiting for you to slip up just to rake you over the coals for it, an example that comes to mind is one of my old coworkers was involved in some left wing orgs like the SRA and the like. Around COVID he became a kind of Vaccine Skeptic, yes I personally think that's a silly position but I didn't hold it against him. The other people in the org, though? People he knew for years and worked with? It was just instant "Well you're a piece of shit, don't talk to me ever again." He wasn't pushing it, I told him straight up I could respect his decision while getting vaccinated myself, but as soon as he bought into Vaccine Skepticism he was basically persona-non-grata among his former comrades, and I could tell it really hurt him.
>>2666849I'm surprised to see the "Catholic Church Infiltration" shtick get mentioned on here as often as it does but speaking
as a Catholic I can say it almost certainly never happened and is more or less a John Birch style mental illness. There were Catholic clergy that skirted right up to the edge of Communism, with a few wholeheartedly embracing it: Camilo Torres Restrepo for example was a Revolutionary Guerilla and a Catholic Priest who was later laicized (at his own request, mind you) but continued preaching a doctrinal fusion of radical socialism and Catholicism (one of his quotes was, to paraphrase, "Jesus would be a guerilla") and stuff like liberation theology, but there's very little evidence that the church was "infiltrated" with Communists going through seminary and becoming Priests.
It partly, I think, has to do with Fulton Sheen and the culture of The Church at the time. If I remember right he was something of Bella Dodd's sponsor (and also helped convert her) and he was a committed anti-communist. Though to be fair the Catholic Church's position on Communism at the time was in part motivated by repression against Priests during the Spanish Civil War (this is what got Tolkien to support the Nationalists' as well, IIRC) and internal struggles within the Church. Sheen himself had a quiet struggle with a cardinal over the appropriation of charitable funds (to Sheen's credit it seems he was in the right here) and both the reform process of Vatican II and the discussions leading up to it likely caused some psychic distress in conservative elements of the Catholic world.
I mean it's hard to describe how revolutionary Vatican II was at the time, it completely changed centuries of dogma and led to a minor schism with the Sedevacantists. And in periods of immense turmoil, its common to blame some "secretive" group behind it all: Masons, Communists, Jews, what have you. Communists became the perfect scapegoat for why the Church stopped speaking Latin and changed so many elements of Mass. In much the same way that "modern audiences" has become a term of scorn among right wing media consumers, reform in the name of modernism similarly became the conspiratorial scheme of some secretive cabal of Communists rather than an attempt to survive into the coming centuries.
>>2666897>There's also, I think, a profound lack of grace in some left wing spaces. I said before that younger leftists often feel like they're waiting for you to slip up just to rake you over the coals for it,Keep in mind, a lot of younger people go into far-left spaces because they have a lot of trauma in their lives, like they’re queer and faded a lot of queerphobia growing up, or they’re autistic or whatever and faced a lot of harsh judgement from others including bullying. Having trauma causes you to develop a highly authoritarian personality. So, these types of people will claim to be triggered by every single little thing and berate the fuck out of anyone who isn’t morally perfect in their eyes. Plus, the culture of having a lot of marginalized identity groups in your space creates a lot of hidden tensions (walking ouyghshells) since you don’t always know when your words or behaviours will be interpreted as oppressive or exclusionary.
>>2666790>looks at her profile>is clearly exploiting her baby son for views and engagementI fucking hate momfluencers.
>>2666897think we need communist fiction aka fairy tales and myths. like we know theyre myths and anyone can contribute. idk.
>>2666897>If I remember right he was something of Bella Dodd's sponsor (and also helped convert her) and he was a committed anti-communist. This is exactly what happened. Sheen was part of a Catholic anti-communist network that specifically sought out former communists to convert them to Catholicism and get them to snitch.
>>2666979Gen Alphas and Gen Betas are going to have such a warped understanding of privacy.
>>2649015>neocons like Irving Kristol, Didn't Maupin claim the neocons were just Trotskyists on the payroll of the Congress for Cultural Freedom?
>>2666790>>2666849I might DM her and ask.
>>2649135>>2649076In Judaism, we say that one is not defined by their mistakes but but the way they rectify those mistakes. So, anyone who slips up should be given the chance to fix the problem, rather than outright ostracized.
I'm petty bourgeois but I became commie (anarcho-syndicalist / council communist, tankies will probably say that doesn't count tho). As for right wing grifters rarely becoming commie, well that's because that is their whole schtick, you generally don't have anything to gain by being commie as a PR stunt and if you're haute bourgeois you may as well be apolitical because it would be impossible to relate to the masses.
>>2664792One thing I will say about people in anarchist spaces is how many of them seem to have narcissistic mothers. Many times they’ll say they became anarchists largely because they were fed up at how many expectations their moms placed on them and how their anger towards their mothers were the first step in them questioning hierarchical authority. It makes sense then that their mothers’ narcissistic tendencies would rub off on them.
>>2670035The family dynamic is usually narc mother + socially inept father. No idea why so many socially inept douchebags are attracted to narcissists.
>>2649015Interesting how a lot of these people detected from the left after becoming Christian.
>>2670035its funny that you mention narcissistic parents since my father allegedly exhibited NPD characteristics(ofc this is just other family members with no medical knowledge making these allegations) and I was a self-identified AnCom throughout high school until getting some more life experience and reading some more theory. I could definitely see narcissistic helicopter parents causing Anarchism to have some more appeal to there kids but what really set me down the path of anarchism and marxism was being really into the environment and realizing a healthy ecosystem and "healthy" capitalist economy are incompatible with one another. That being said I haven't really organized in anarchist spaces so I can't really speak on them sharing traits with their Nmoms.
>>2664792>I get the impression many of these Dodd and Horowitz types are the same people that engage in Sealioning at every function they appear at and were basically the Leninhats of there org until interpersonal drama causes them to denounce the entire movement for not glazing them enough.Yes, they're usually the overly self-righteous ones who feel entitled to overstep/violate the boundaries of others on the basis of some "justice sensitivity" bullshit, then when comrades get sick of them they jump into another group.
>>2651578>Bella Dodd was a validation junkie, not unlike most of those insecure girls on Tumblr. She was an Italian immigrant who always felt out-of-place, joined CPUSA because she thought communism would help America, and became a successful labour organizer in the party doing legal work for unions. Then, after she got purged for Browderism, she became a born-again Catholic thanks to Fulton Sheen and started snitching on everyone in CPUSA thinking she'd be loved as an "American hero" if she did so.
>Don't know anything about Budenz except Fulton Sheen converted him and his wife to Catholicism and got them to rat people out too.why is catholicism so attractive to right wingers
>>2676688In the cases of Budenz and Dodd, they were brought into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen, who was connected to Catholic anti-communist groups.
>>2660419I disagree with your statement that opposing ICE has nothing to do with the interest of black people but this is largely correct. Libleft coalition politics want to pursue every single goal they have, forcing every single member to participate, and in the end accomplishing nothing. I've ppsted here about how there is a huge pushback from NY Muslims against trans activism in the left, and that is one; many black people don't vibes with Levantines since Arabs control a lot of the stores in the hood and they associate pro Palestinian activism with these Arab storeowners and that is two. Many such examples abound too, and while today they are papered over because Trump is a common threat the moment we get a Dem presidency its all gonna erupt
>>2660419>They ask why should they risk being attacked by ICE in order to save Somalis when the Somalis don’t reciprocate that same solidarity?Somalis in Minneapolis are highly insular. It's not like they came out en masse during the George Floyd protests.
>>2679339>many black people don't vibes with Levantines since Arabs control a lot of the stores in the hood and they associate pro Palestinian activism with these Arab storeowners and that is twoThis is actually a huge problem in Detroit as well that people don't talk about. Detroit has a lot of Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni immigrants who are notorious for running liquor stores and convenience stores in Black neighbourhoods (Detroit is 80% Black for what it's worth). A lot of Black Detroiters are saying these Arabs are stealing Black dollars and not doing anything for Blacks in return. It's identical to how Jews and Asians used to deliberately set up their businesses in Black areas back in the day, which was the main source of racial tensions between those groups. Kind of interesting how ethnic groups that are on the cusp of whiteness gain whiteness specifically through exploiting Blacks. Kind of like how the Irish in America became white once they all started becoming cops.
>>2668747Was she ever relevant in leftist circles?
>>2668747Is that the lady Maupin has the hate boner for?
>>2680301That’s Taryn Fivek
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