I get where you’re coming from and it’s probably one of the biggest things that alienates me from the left.
Don’t get me wrong, I still vote for and support leftist policies, but I personally find many of the people who also vote for leftist policies to just be generally terrible people when you put them into a group.
For some reason they tend to go crabs in a bucket and start hating on and shitting on everything and only really rejoicing when people on the right suffer, And while I can comprehend why that happens, I can’t ally myself with that portion of the left.
For me, the most annoying thing is when something gets a little bit better.
Inevitably, a leftist will pop out and complain how it’s not perfect, how it’s not good enough, and how stupid it is. It’s the most annoying thing on the planet.
When things got better, and things are on the mend, like, celebrate the successes, fuck.
I’ve wanted to do an effort post on this but I’m both unsure of where to put it and not sure I have enough coherent thoughts to justify it. But to me it comes off like a lot of the people you’re describing are either young (grew up under the prosperity and social acceptance of the Obama admin) or have never lived in a conservative area. They have no real metric for what trying to get the vote out and get people registered is actually like in an area where you’re up against a Good Ol’ Boy network that goes back over a century and hamstrung at every corner by gerrymandering, regressive laws, and sometimes the actual state government just straight up overturning whatever you voted into law.
I can only hope it’s that they are deeply ignorant of the realities of it, because the alternative is that they swallow the just world fallacy hook, line, and sinker; ‘my state isn’t Republican because we’re morally superior, their state is Republican because they’re inferior and deserve what happens to them.’
And because of having never had to confront or fight the way these Republicans are now operating at the national level, they have no idea how to deal with it. They have never had to, on a social and political level, hunker down and endure. They have no idea how to deal with despair and grief or to find joy and calm when everything sucks. And if you stay like that for too long, it will kill you.
Exactly: Things got worse slowly, then quickly. Why can’t they get better that way too?
They do.
Look at the rise of gay rights. It happened very slowly, then suddenly. Now most Republicans accept gay people’s existence.
The thing is, there’s never not something to progress on. We can always improve society. And the people trying to hold that back will always fight back. So it sometimes feels like we don’t make progress.
But we absolutely make progress. It isn’t always smooth, it isn’t always consistent, but lots of hard data shows human existence getting better. Millions fewer children died in 2024 than in 1984. A smaller percentage of humans starved to death. A smaller percentage of humans died of treatable diseases.
Don’t let despair take you. Keep fighting, and society marches on.
Because a lot of people do not share the same criteria for what counts as “getting better”.
The state apparatus making concessions to the working class while failing to restructure ownership over the means of production, essentially keeping them reliant to the system that is exploiting them and thus complacent to the demands of the owning class less they risk losing what little they have, is not what a leftist would call “progress”
If you know what I’m talking about then the specific (left/liberal/whatever) label isn’t as important. It’s that group of people who have a general idea that things should be fair and equal for everyone but have clearly defined groups of people that are more equal than others.
Its those people who treat middle aged and older white guys like shit online and cheer when bad things happen to them as soon as they find out they are wealthy or republican. They laugh when a person gets deported because their spouse voted for trump. They dogpile on the shitty comments and hateful rhetoric as soon as someone says something that identifies that person as not being in line with the current politic and cheer when well intentioned potential allies who made an oopsie get destroyed.
I get it, it’s revenge, its personal outrage with a good reason leaking out of people who have been hurt, but it’s too indiscriminate and unable to attempt communication before condemnation.
Like the outrage over Hilary Clinton calling trump supporters a basket of deplorables. They are, and I hate them, each and every one of them, with a passion. I would gladly watch them all drown knowing that I am in arms reach to save them like a Phil Collins song.
But… Hillary did not have the communication skills, the charisma, the charm, or the backing of the people to pull that off in a meaningful way. She hit a hornets nest with a stick when she should have left it alone. Now, 10 years later they still proudly call themselves deplorable and intentionally do deplorable things in part because they have accepted the moniker.
Hillary didn’t cause the problem, but she gave it a name and a banner and a rallying cry from a position of untouchable smugness with a personal feeling of superiority and we have been paying for that one sentence for a decade now with no sign of it stopping.
It does a bit? I havent seen a lib who doesnt do it, tankies are pretty divided. Trots are overwhelmingly not into it, anarchists and democratic socialista will someti-
Oh i thought you were talking about hating on innocent people because of where they live, not the guilty or their intimates. Like celebrating a maggot’s wife behing deported, even if you’re sad for the lady who got disappeared to a federal rape dungeon.
hilary clinton
Okay i need to read further to know if I’m gonna laugh or be outraged, but those are the only reasonable responses to her. Looks like cringe. My fault; forgot about cringe.
I get where you’re coming from and it’s probably one of the biggest things that alienates me from the left.
Don’t get me wrong, I still vote for and support leftist policies, but I personally find many of the people who also vote for leftist policies to just be generally terrible people when you put them into a group.
For some reason they tend to go crabs in a bucket and start hating on and shitting on everything and only really rejoicing when people on the right suffer, And while I can comprehend why that happens, I can’t ally myself with that portion of the left.
For me, the most annoying thing is when something gets a little bit better.
Inevitably, a leftist will pop out and complain how it’s not perfect, how it’s not good enough, and how stupid it is. It’s the most annoying thing on the planet.
When things got better, and things are on the mend, like, celebrate the successes, fuck.
I’ve wanted to do an effort post on this but I’m both unsure of where to put it and not sure I have enough coherent thoughts to justify it. But to me it comes off like a lot of the people you’re describing are either young (grew up under the prosperity and social acceptance of the Obama admin) or have never lived in a conservative area. They have no real metric for what trying to get the vote out and get people registered is actually like in an area where you’re up against a Good Ol’ Boy network that goes back over a century and hamstrung at every corner by gerrymandering, regressive laws, and sometimes the actual state government just straight up overturning whatever you voted into law.
I can only hope it’s that they are deeply ignorant of the realities of it, because the alternative is that they swallow the just world fallacy hook, line, and sinker; ‘my state isn’t Republican because we’re morally superior, their state is Republican because they’re inferior and deserve what happens to them.’
And because of having never had to confront or fight the way these Republicans are now operating at the national level, they have no idea how to deal with it. They have never had to, on a social and political level, hunker down and endure. They have no idea how to deal with despair and grief or to find joy and calm when everything sucks. And if you stay like that for too long, it will kill you.
Exactly: Things got worse slowly, then quickly. Why can’t they get better that way too?
They do.
Look at the rise of gay rights. It happened very slowly, then suddenly. Now most Republicans accept gay people’s existence.
The thing is, there’s never not something to progress on. We can always improve society. And the people trying to hold that back will always fight back. So it sometimes feels like we don’t make progress.
But we absolutely make progress. It isn’t always smooth, it isn’t always consistent, but lots of hard data shows human existence getting better. Millions fewer children died in 2024 than in 1984. A smaller percentage of humans starved to death. A smaller percentage of humans died of treatable diseases.
Don’t let despair take you. Keep fighting, and society marches on.
Because a lot of people do not share the same criteria for what counts as “getting better”.
The state apparatus making concessions to the working class while failing to restructure ownership over the means of production, essentially keeping them reliant to the system that is exploiting them and thus complacent to the demands of the owning class less they risk losing what little they have, is not what a leftist would call “progress”
A slave is still a slave even in a gilded cage.
Because nobody’s killing the bastards making them worse.
Edit: and they can’t/won’t be negotiated with.
I won’t say the left doesnt, but that’s more a lib thing.
If you know what I’m talking about then the specific (left/liberal/whatever) label isn’t as important. It’s that group of people who have a general idea that things should be fair and equal for everyone but have clearly defined groups of people that are more equal than others.
Its those people who treat middle aged and older white guys like shit online and cheer when bad things happen to them as soon as they find out they are wealthy or republican. They laugh when a person gets deported because their spouse voted for trump. They dogpile on the shitty comments and hateful rhetoric as soon as someone says something that identifies that person as not being in line with the current politic and cheer when well intentioned potential allies who made an oopsie get destroyed.
I get it, it’s revenge, its personal outrage with a good reason leaking out of people who have been hurt, but it’s too indiscriminate and unable to attempt communication before condemnation.
Like the outrage over Hilary Clinton calling trump supporters a basket of deplorables. They are, and I hate them, each and every one of them, with a passion. I would gladly watch them all drown knowing that I am in arms reach to save them like a Phil Collins song.
But… Hillary did not have the communication skills, the charisma, the charm, or the backing of the people to pull that off in a meaningful way. She hit a hornets nest with a stick when she should have left it alone. Now, 10 years later they still proudly call themselves deplorable and intentionally do deplorable things in part because they have accepted the moniker.
Hillary didn’t cause the problem, but she gave it a name and a banner and a rallying cry from a position of untouchable smugness with a personal feeling of superiority and we have been paying for that one sentence for a decade now with no sign of it stopping.
This is beside your very well made point, but: I avoid using the word “deplorable” specifically because of the connotation Hillary gave it.
It does a bit? I havent seen a lib who doesnt do it, tankies are pretty divided. Trots are overwhelmingly not into it, anarchists and democratic socialista will someti-
Oh i thought you were talking about hating on innocent people because of where they live, not the guilty or their intimates. Like celebrating a maggot’s wife behing deported, even if you’re sad for the lady who got disappeared to a federal rape dungeon.
Okay i need to read further to know if I’m gonna laugh or be outraged, but those are the only reasonable responses to her. Looks like cringe. My fault; forgot about cringe.