What are some Blind Spots of your political compatriots?
There's lot of academia out there that suggests that everyone has blindspots, topics and issues that we take with so much certainty that we would not even think to question them, people who so rarely enter into our concerns that we do not think to consider their needs or concerns, etc.
It's hard to know exactly what our own blindspots are because by their very nature as soon as they are identified they lose some of their power. This sort of self-awareness is difficult even on the best day, but it allows us to more reasonably address people who don't hold our views, so I think the exercise is justified.
This topic is intended to be introspective. Wherever you identify politically (left, right, moderate, anarchist, libertarian, the works), what are some topics and groups that your political people tend to struggle to focus on?
I think both parties have a hard time with poverty. Especially the uber wealthy. The further you are from poverty, the less you "get it". If you have never experienced poverty, that makes it even harder.
I continue to notice the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", mentality when physical hunger, an unsafe environment, poor or no health care are a few of the many things that keep the lower class poor.
I was born in poverty and am firmly in the middle class now, including all of the debt that comes with student loans and starting with nothing. I've also noticed people like me who come from poverty tend to be even less understanding - in an apparent cognitive effort to distance themselves from whence they come.
Even though I pay a large chunk of change in taxes, I would gladly pitch in a little more to at least assure healthy food and decent health care for everyone. I don't think being healthy should be a privilege in the USA.
This is definitely true, regardless of politics. My wife grew up in poverty while I was pretty squarely middle class. These days we are lucky enough to not even be truly concerned about money and I've realized that when you grow up poor you see the world differently, with a certain compassion and appreciation for things that (at least in her case) doesn't wear off and can be difficult for others to understand.
When I used to be a right-wing libertarian, I noticed that many of my fellow travelers had no trouble with accepting oppression and abuses of power as long as they happened in the private sector. Wage theft, workplace bullying, sexual harassment, massive amounts of unpaid overtime, and outright discrimination -- this was OK because the worker didn't have to stay at a bad job. They could "just get another job" if they weren't happy with the one they had.
And if the circumstances of their lives didn't permit workers in bad situations to leave? Tough shit. They "should have made better choices".
As a left-libertarian, I've noticed two things about other leftists:
While one might reasonably suggest that the class leftists should focus on class and the identity leftists should focus on identity, because our patriarchal capitalist society's tyranny is multifaceted and can be assailed from multiple angles simultaneously, the two camps insist on acting like blind people trying to describe an elephant based on the part they're touching. The class leftists are attacking their part of the elephant and wondering why the identity leftists can't aim, and vice versa. So, instead of attacking the elephant, they attack each other.
It gets worse. Within the class-struggle camp, you have people arguing over the sort of abstruse minutia that concerned theorists like Trotsky and Kropotkin, but didn't actually free workers from the tyranny of capital. And in the identity-politics camp, it often seems like that the only thing anybody can agree on is that cisgendered white heterosexual men are all assholes.
The elephant, in the meantime, goes, "Hur-hur-hur, dem libtards are at it again."
In Canada, it's probably blaming housing prices (in major cities) on immigrants and foreign ownership, and wishing for a major price adjustment. Depending on the stats you read (or believe), about 80-95% of homes are owned by fellow Canadians, which makes a major adjustment (some people are hoping for halving prices) detrimental to our economy.
I'm not sure yet whether there's a "my kind" of politics (internationalist Fabian democratic socialism with a bent towards maximizing human rights?), but everybody seems to forget the existence of mixed economies.
There is no such thing as a "free market", nor is there an example of perfect non-authoritarian socialism. To my knowledge; there's always a hierarchical organizing force tucked away somewhere.
I'm too sleepy to make anything but a hash of this, so fire away.
I think that people in general have trouble with this, but in a unique way due to their ideology, so I'll give examples from ancapism (though I'm a little less cap than I used to be).
I think people misinterpret politics as a game with a winner and a loser, or as a fight with a good guy and a bad guy. There is right and there is wrong--that's all that many of us know. Many of us seem to think that there really is a BEST way to run a country--and when you put it like that, a good portion of us will (to our credit) at the very least scratch out heads and say, "huh, that IS strange."
How many fields are there in which there is one single best way to do something? In medicine? It depends on the patient and their symptoms. In education? It depends on the child and even the teacher. In economics? It depends on dozens of factors. In science? Hell no, it depends on just what you are trying to accomplish.
There can be a best way, but it is a BEST way to do something very, very specific. There can be a best way to draw a circle, or to play a scale on a piano, or to tie a certain knot. There might be a best way to swim when you are tired or when you want to go really fast--but we look at politics like everyone wants to swim the same way. Like there is a best way to swim in general, and the other way is not only incorrect--it's immoral, maybe even evil. They want you to drown. They want you to lose the race.
So look. I'm an anarchist. And as an anarchist, I'm focused on certain principles--minimize hierarchy, maximize individual empowerment (focusing on people who are not currently powerful), focus on non-legislative and nonviolent methods of bettering the world/society, separate the charity functions of government from the violent functions, follow the NAP as an immensely powerful rule of thumb (if not a hard line), allow free trade and free conduct, and when possible, use distributed methods to democratize society and decrease hierarchy.
But in some cases, those principles run directly against good evidence that the democratic-socialist direction works, and works well--if it is not the right choice for industrializing countries, that's one thing, but for a wealthy state like America it ought to work.
But here's the thing. Mixing strategies does not work. The principles of anarchism do not function at maximum efficiency. without a full suite of policies enabling them. And democratic socialism does not work very well when you completely disband something like the EPA.
I believe there are multiple good ways to swim for general purposes. There are some other good ways to swim in odd cases--like if one hand is disabled, or when your country is in a recession, for example. But what we want to do is SWIM, damn it, and whether it's your way or my way, we need to get our asses to shore together. I will support whoever is able to do that.
So while ideologically I believe that anarchism is far and away the more moral system, I am choosing to have faith that the rest of the world will eventually come to that conclusion as it improves--as it learns to swim another way, it will eventually discover my way, and evaluate it. Perhaps while I am alive, perhaps while I am dead. And what matters most is that right now, we find a GOOD way to swim. It doesn't have to be perfect.
I will continue to let anarchism inform my politics--there are certain issues which I agree with leftists on, but which I feel anarchism has better explanations for or defenses of, there are issues that leftists never really consider on their own which must be brought to the table by someone with a different viewpoint, and there are anarchist policies which are fairly compatible with a more mainstream leftist system but which are, in my opinion, much better from a moral perspective. Examples would be drug legalization, FOSS/libre philosophy, and heavy reduction of copyright protection, particularly on software, in that order.
But in general, I am willing to accept a "liberal" framework, even though I am a staunch anarchist. It isn't me abandoning my principles or being a traitor--it's realizing that there is more than one way to do things, and that in general it's best not to have too many cooks. I still want to see more influence for anarchists and libertarians. I will still try to spread my ideas. But I don't need us to take over the god damn world--I don't need to be a crusader.
I just want us to swim.
I feel like a lot of the hard left try to have it both ways on the Soviet Union. And I'm not talking about tankies, who most definitely are not my political compatriots, I'm talking about people who will say things like 'The USSR wasn't socialist', then turn around ten minutes later and sing its praises in modernizing Russia, as though that were an accomplishment they could attribute to the socialism that they just said didn't exist in their country.
Another in-group tendency that irritates me deeply is accelerationism and the belief that both sides (Republicans and Democrats) are the same. Like, I am as left as left goes, but if it's a choice between liberals and reactionaries, I will vote for the liberals every time. Given the margins involved, accelerationists and both sides types are are responsible for every Republican presidency since 1988. Carrying out social and economic progress is a hard enough task when you don't have to spend years undoing the last administration's damage whenever you take power.
This is the other way around. I don't define the USSR as socialist, but there's no shortage of people who refuse to do anything but strawman all uses of the terms socialism, communism, and leftism as being "exactly what Karl Marx wrote about" and "the only true definition(s)". Which is pretty shitty, but alright, if you literally refuse to talk about anything except your USSR strawman, then I'll quote that the USSR had great growth once to refute your other empty rhetoric. It's a real yawner.
I can see that. If it comes to that though, I just drop out of the conversation, 'cause if someone refuses to actually engage with my points, they're not worth talking to, let alone engaging in Stalinist apologism for.
It sounds like you're talking about people who don't identify as socialists talking about how the USSR was The Example of the failed socialist state, right? I can definitely understand how people who don't identify themselves as socialist might use a strawman to talk about socialism, and you seem to be saying that the behavior that @spctrvl identified is primarily in response to talking points used against you. Can you identify any other blind spots a socialist might typically have then? If this have-your-cake behavior we're reading about here is a response to other arguments, it doesn't really seem like a blind spot so much as a reaction to other people's talking points.
I'm not American but I've a few friends and I'm often frustrated by their racist worldview, not in the sense that they discriminate against a race, but that they think in terms of race at all. They take the categories "black", "asian", "white", etc. to be bona fide, non-problematic categories and much of their thinking is based on them.
Going in the US and being asked your "race" on a formular is quite shocking, it's even illegal to ask that kind of questions in France.
That said I recognise that their are in a unseasy situation, because it's difficult to avoid using these categories without looking like you are trying to deny the very real problems and experiences of minorities in the US.
A lot of rhetoric in my political sphere surrounding the notion of having certain industries be state-run is alarmingly light on further explaining how that is actually going to function. State monopolies can be just as disastrous, if not more so, to the general populace as private oligarchy and the component of human error simply does not go away.