I do like a lot of left-wing policies. I think there are a lot of problems with dignity and distributive fairness under capitalism. And so on. But at the same time, I notice that a lot of online left politics make people worse at thinking. This is, of course, true of any online political culture. People in debate subreddits, for example, get inculcated in norms that make them think of things in a rather silly way. Where to even begin with the ridiculous litany of neurotic quirks and conspiratorial thinking that right-wing online culture gives people?
But as someone who primarily inhabits left-wing social spaces, there are some discursive problems that are distinctive to these niches. This is not so much the result of a coherent online left culture, but rather a patchwork of different left-wing "cultures" that create templates of identification for people. These templates both resonate with and articulate individuals, while providing a not quite conscious inferential framework. They are roughly sorts of patterns of theoretical and practical habituation, and make discursive and explanatory moves more or less automatic. I say these are the results of "cultures" rather than some kind of left monoculture, because it is rather unlikely that someone adopts all of what I take the defective intellectual and practical habits to be, but that fragments of them can be found quite regularly throughout left-wing spaces.
The Totalizing Effect of Politics over Ethics. We recognize, on some level, that the personal is generative of the political, and that the political is the means of redress for some elements of interpersonal conflict. The classic examples of this are just sorts of feminist ordinary cases. From this, we get the birth of the expression "the personal is political." At this step we get an inferential leap from "there are some interpersonal conflicts that demand political resources" to a general skepticism of any distinction made between public and private life. It is not merely that the personal is political, but that the political is the only normative domain. Interpersonal conflict is then brought to political analysis, which is then treated as something structural rather than particular. Habitually moving to this level causes us to neglect our toolkit for engaging with and dealing with interpersonal conflict, and acts of wrongdoing that are not appropriate to legal codification — which are actually most of the day-to-day conflicts that we both deliberate about and have agency over.
Art Criticism as Analysis of Political Implication. This is another aspect of normative narrowing. There is skepticism about the (procedural or robust) reality of the moral that is minimized by the faith in the reality or pertinence of the political. Similarly, there is skepticism about the (procedural or robust) reality of the objects of aesthetic judgment, which includes judgment of artistic quality, beauty, ugliness, the sublime, as well as a plethora of thicker aesthetic predicates that philosophers and art theorists have gone to task on. As such, a sort of relativism goes into place that does not treat art discussion as such as worth having, because there is no space of reasons to enter into; the aesthetic is sub-rational and non-assertoric. In order to fill in that gap that art discussion fills in our social life, we move to "deep readings" of the "text" that are more or less paraphrases of the work into its political content. The quality of some piece of media, then, becomes entirely determined by the correctness of the political content.
The Ambiguity of "Power." The idea of "power" does a lot of the conceptual and normative heavy lifting in the left folk morality. We see this more or less everywhere. Power, in this sense, becomes less a concrete analysis of the particular circumstances at hand, or how it is being exerted or might come to be exerted, but rather a vague look at a small class of social predicates that we're used to seeing in political analysis which can be ascribed to the involved parties. These predicates become reified beyond the actual social dynamics that are supposed to constitute them as something immutable and eternal. Their contingent social embedding becomes universal and transhistorical. Power, in this more vague sense, can be applied anywhere merely in virtue of these predicates applying to everyone in some generic sense. As such, they take on ambiguity, which becomes less a tool for lucid analysis and more an invocation that can be brought forward to vindicate our pre-reflective feelings of moral disgust.
Inference to the Most Cynical Explanation. Being aggressively cynical in response to public events gets you a lot of positive attention. People like to smugly feel like they know better than the people who are shuffled along with the news cycle. This is, after all, the pleasure of dramatic irony. You get two sets of addictive feelings from this: the pleasure of social validation and sense of "seeing through the bullshit" for one, and then the depressive feelings of an irredeemable world. This leads to treading a lot of the same explanatory patterns over and over again. This kind of habituation can lead you to apply the same structure of explanation to a lot of things that vaguely look like it, but for which much more salient explanations can easily be given. But because you're used to deploying the same argumentative strategy, you cannot see it. In particularly bad cases this leads to some rather conspiratorial thinking. Anything bad that happens suddenly becomes a result of our evil corporate overlords' hatred for all that is good and pure. But some things are better explained by rather concrete sociological and material factors, facts about specialization, efficiency, and so on. I have in mind the post about "ai art progress vs progress on automation of ship recycling." Improving people's welfare means taking these considerations seriously and not hand-waving to the malice of bad actors. This also motivates people to mine for the worst interpretation of what someone is saying, either semantically or in pragmatics, and this is a bad norm for facilitating communication and community. Both communication and community are generally important for people's flourishing, as well as being able to sustain any political organization.
Addiction to Despair. This is related to my previous point. Feelings of despair are addictive. Ask anyone who has dealt with a significant depressive episode. It is also very easy to fall into these feelings when you notice that there are a lot of problems in the world that you have relatively little power to solve. But these feelings are destructive to both your mental health and your sense of agency. Perhaps you think some major social upheaval is necessary to change society. Maybe it is. But if you fall into the despair trap, then organizational, popular, democratic means of transition give way to hopeless thinking that goes something like "the only way to achieve socialism is to let the system destroy itself, and allow everything to go to ruin." But institutional failure upheavals seem to generally end rather badly, and in the intermediary a couple of things happen when you opt for the "give up" approach. Conservatives and fascists get more of a say in the types of cultural, social, moral, etc values children get inculcated in at school, in media, in the general public and so on. You also sacrifice the concrete welfare of anyone who is vulnerable to social marginalization, including the poor, LGBTQ+, minority races, people with health conditions, and so on for a rather hazy and speculative benefit. Despair can also go down another path: a sort of eschatological feeling that we are the precipice of the destruction of capitalism and any moment now it will all fall apart. This is also just a disempowering feeling. The whole system is actually pretty robust in terms of ensuring its own survival.
Recognition of Epistemic Injustice to Deference Epistemology. There seems to be a growing tendency toward "just defer" approaches to epistemology, in which the oppressed act as a priestly class to think for people on issues. Certainly transgender people have a better idea of the issues that transgender people face than cisgender people. Certainly black people have a better idea of what issues black people face than white people do. Minorities are in general society testimonially discounted, and this is bad. But this does not mean that people who are part of minority groups cannot be criticized, or should be immediately deferred to when it comes to disagreement. There are at least two reasons for this. First, it is disrespectful of your own autonomy and capability to deliberate that feels a bit creepy and weirdly self-abnegating. Second, minority groups do not at all agree on what their problems are or how to solve them. Deferring to Blaire White or Candace Owens will not help you develop good politics. You have to listen to a variety of viewpoints from different people in different communities and decide for yourself. There is no purely procedural epistemology that is going to save you from having to evaluate for yourself.
Not Knowing What Liberalism and Neo-Liberalism Are. A lot of people on the left like to dunk on liberalism, sometimes to the point where they adopt demonstrably untrue positions like "conservatives have more radical potential than liberals." Liberalism and neo-liberalism have more or less become placeholders for people's complaints about the democratic party or things that middle aged non-conservatives think. And, in fairness, you might think there is a link between the procedural shape of 20th Century liberal ethics and political theory and the kinds of behaviors that generate grievances with the democratic party. People also criticize liberal ideological features like rights, the public/private distinction and so on, but immediately revert to liberal justifications for abortion protection, i.e. right to privacy and right to choice over your own body, as well as marriage equality and a litany of other issues. It is, to my mind, fine to use liberal justifications. But I think it is important to acknowledge these for what they are. Liberalism is an interesting, diverse, and dynamic intellectual tradition that it would be a mistake to be entirely dismissive of. The term "neo-liberalism" is perhaps a worse offender, but where even to begin with that?
There are probably more, but this is sufficient for what I am bothered by at the moment.
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