Lately I am concerned with the insidiousness of liberalism and its corrosive effect that wears on leftist praxis and humanity in general. Liberalism is the lazy influence that eats away at true solidarity and our ability to make material changes. It prioritizes comfort and niceties over disciplined values and truth.

Liberalism is the left hand of fascism because it requires disassociation and numbness to the violence of the world. The liberal ideology is most concerned with appearances and “keeping the peace” (as it relates to one's own experience above all else).

When you find yourself being yelled at by a random hippie woman at your minimum wage job because the business you work for does not recycle, this is what I mean.

When you struggle to find a therapist to provide anything past blanket validation and coddling (smol bean pilled) this is what I mean.

When you find yourself in a relationship with others where it feels as if your connection is fully dependent on being exactly the same as one another OR in a neat identity box (no room for conflict, discomfort, nuance, or constructive argument) this is what I mean!

I am concerned with the sweeping damage that liberalism inflicts on leftist action and even just our ability to build true community. In processing this I *casually* wrote about some core aspects of liberalism as I have read/studied or encountered them in hopes to help define, reflect, foster awareness, and counter such undermining forces (within myself and in relationship to others.)

I was recently inspired by this short Mao Tse-tung text Combat Liberalism as well as Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici and of course The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

To be clear I am no political theorist. I spend most of my time outside of my day job working on art and thinking about art. I do however deeply care about class solidarity and the future of the world so I try to learn and improve in these areas where I can.

I find most effective political theory can be easily applied to relationships and regular daily life. Therefore struggling with these ideas is relevant to most of us, even if one does not think of themselves as extremely politically involved.

Liberalism moves under the surface in covert ways. I find those of us with leftist politics have varying degrees of awareness and ability to defend against such brain rot. Hopefully defining aspects of the problem is the first step in engaging meaningfully. Feel free to add, subtract, agree, disagree, struggle with or against these ideas. Please do reflect upon the effects of liberalism as it relates to yourself and your relationship to integrity and community in these times.

Let us look:

Conflict: There are just starting to be conversations in the culture acknowledging how deeply avoidant and unskilled most of us are in navigating conflict (even if it is constructive) and how this plays a huge role in why the left can be so fragile and brittle.

Conflict will occur whether we engage with it or not. When we run from conflict externally, internally the conflict intensifies. This unaddressed conflict will come to a boiling point one way or another. Often in the form of an intense eruption, resulting in severance from self or other.

Unwillingness to engage in conflict directly within relationships results in the withering and eventual death of intimacy and trust in relationships.

Willingness to engage in disciplined conflict is a prerequisite for defending against liberalism because without conflict there is no vehicle to follow through with truth, integrity, or solidarity.

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”― James Baldwin

**5 of Wands from Rider-Waite Smith Tarot, Sola Busca Tarot, and the Thoth Deck**

Gossip: So pervasive is gossip in our culture, yet I doubt that we fully grasp how harmful this pastime truly is. Gossip is the damaging trap door in the house of conflict avoidance. It allows us to air our grievances against others to those who will most likely agree, without having to suffer the discomfort of addressing the situation directly. Gossip provides a fleeting sense of intimacy because it allows us to engage with the truth of how we feel in an indirect way that involves no immediate risk.

Gossip is in fact the enemy of intimacy and community building, because the more desensitized we become to talking poorly about one another out of earshot, the more we rob ourselves of the opportunity to work through conflict and difference directly. Socializing and community building are not automatically the same thing.

It also seems important to question the line between mean spirited conflict avoidant gossip vs. processing a situation with a trusted friend for the sake of self reflection and direct communication. Certainly it is not black and white.

Values?: Realistically, the world we live in is full of contradictions and difficult decisions so many of us are not living in alignment with our values 100% of the time. However, I do think it's important to define one's core values in order to attempt to close the gap between “idea” and “practice” as much as possible. Or at least to cultivate awareness and honesty in assessing how wide that gap truly is.

Liberalism has a tendency to focus on appearances. What is the “right” way to identify outwardly and the “right” opinions to have in order to be perceived as a good person. Living in integrity with one's defined values hopefully has less to do with saving face and more to do with taking responsibility for the reality that you want to create, by doing the hard granular work to create it.

Narcissism (not pathologically speaking): Liberals often pride themselves on their “charity” and progressive politics in contrast to conservatives. Yet a common function of liberalism is to become impassioned about injustice only if it happens to cause them any inconvenience or discomfort. If one is only moved to act when they are personally affected, true solidarity will never be achieved. Solidarity is cultivated only as far as we can extend our empathy and care outside of our own personal sphere of experience.

By design, capitalism promotes and rewards narcissistic behavior. A select few people “benefit” from this set up, but most of us are harmed materially and spiritually from the individual driven world. The manufactured alienation that most disenfranchised people experience on a daily basis is staggering, especially knowing it is by design and does not have to be this way. We as a species must create and enforce systems of connection that actually meet people's needs, otherwise the alienation will continue to take root.

Violence: A fundamental difference between liberalism and leftism I notice is the ability to understand and oppose the multifaceted mechanisms of systemic violence. Liberals claim to want peace for all but condemn those who create any disruption in the violent workings of the status quo.

While of course most of us agree upon the desire to minimize violence as much as possible, leftist politics generally understands that violence is baked into the systems that we are subjected to. Therefore in order to oppose and reject systemic violence in a principled way we must be willing to collectively escalate the consequences when the best interests of the majority are being ignored and trampled upon. Otherwise protesting with no collective ultimatum or action plan is ineffective at best and functions as wind at the back of the oppressor at worst.

Historically liberalism has a tendency to condemn the efforts of people who take up arms against colonial superpowers in the spirit of self preservation because they choose not to see the greater context. Similar attitudes can be applied to victims of police violence in America. Liberals will say “why did they run? Why didn't they just do what they were told?” or even worse “must have been a bad cop” instead of understanding the victims position of being systemically targeted by the unfettered corruption and cowardice that is the institution of police. This way of seeing is poisoned and displays a serious lack of understanding and experience in how violence truly functions.

**detail from L’Oeil de la police (1908)**

Mediocrity: As someone who currently does manual labor for rich liberals as my day job, I feel substantiated in my observations that there is indeed something disturbing brewing when liberalism runs unchecked. The amalgamation of conflict avoidance, prioritization of personal comfort above all else, and lack of principled values creates a cloud of fragility and dullness that is so deeply uninspiring but more importantly, harmful!

***No offense but the pride flag is really ugly. No queer I know would be caught dead in these colors. What about a redesign? pirates had it going on.***

Of course I see the value in experiences of comfort, vulnerability, softness and forgiveness. We all deserve the presence of these things in our lives. There is however such a thing as too much and for me the sensibilities of liberalism have really permeated some cultures to the point that tender smol bean, pastel graphic design, identity politics to the extreme and weaponized therapy speak can feeling suffocating.

At risk of sounding like a boot straps republican (I'm not I promise, I am literally a snowflake in my own right), I DO crave a little more sharpness, precision, directness, principled action, truth telling, salt of the earth expressions, and bravery/ collective risk taking.

Is comfort seeking and fear avoiding one's primary compass?

Why are the outcomes of stupidity, negligence, and cruelty so often the same?

Can we at least strive to hold the truth of the narrative, if nothing else?

-Angry Villager

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