[Solar19]

As a brown person and hopefully a champion of reason, I would like to encourage you white folks to be a bit less obedient and compliant with this madness. It is long past time that this ideology was firmly and squarely rejected, contested, questioned. Leftist ideology is extremely troubling and has devolved into a cult.

It should never have been possible for an ideology of this quality to co-opt all these orthogonal communities and organizations and workplaces. This climate of fear, intimidation, and dog-whistle-whistling is unacceptable if we're going to have a decent civilization. I think those of you who disagree with leftist ideology need to be a lot more vocal about it. When your employer, of all things, tries to shove this ideology down your throat, say No. Hard no. Make it clear that you're no more interested in such indoctrination than you would be in a Scientology brown bag or a mandatory prayer break. You need to surface your ethical and substantive disagreement with this political ideology, and to make it crystal clear that it is in fact a partisan political ideology that is being "taught".

This has gone on long enough. It's time to push leftists into the normal cult boundaries that any civilization must have. I think we need to take civilization a bit more seriously than we have – I wouldn't assume that civilization can survive arbitrary ideological assaults. And the stress that leftists are causing everyone, including themselves, is a non-trivial harm and ethically relevant.

[honestdevthrow3]

Here's the problem though, and for the record I fully agree with you;

It's enough of a third-rail-topic that I can't even respond to this with my normal account; we're already seeing enough attempts at crime-by-association (SSC and the latest accusations) that combined with an apparently welcome tendency to examine all past actions for transgression, even if I thought I had something to say that was currently within the overton window I'd be hesitant to put it on the internet because of how the winds seem to be blowing.

I _certainly_ would not speak negatively of any of these programs at work, that would be an excellent way to end my career (putting this bluntly, you have more leeway than a white man does in speaking up about these things at this juncture; but even that has limits, look at the diversity chief of Apple who was let go.)

I worry this becomes a vicious cycle. We're already past the point that many reasonable voices disengage out of fear, so there is very little pushback until this has gone far enough to become untenable. (And this shouldn't be taken as some right wing dogwhistle, there have been HN articles lately detailing papers showing that this fear is present across the spectrum; and it's somewhat emblemic that I need to clarify this point.)

We're watching the iron law of oligarchy played out in an ideology.

[rayiner]

The dynamic where white people feel scared to say what they think is right ultimately silences people of color. Because white people are the majority, what society at large understands about what people of color actually think and want is filtered through white people. In the current environment, white people are in an awkward position where it's socially acceptable to agree with far-out progressive views, but not moderate views that are closer to what people of color themselves actually think and believe.

I don't want a society where white people are told at work they need to "be less white," or are forced to admit they are "gatekeepers of white supremacy." It's morally wrong--it's racism. But it's also contrary to my self interest as a brown guy with a beard living in a majority-white society. My mom, an immigrant from a Muslim country, texted me Trump's ban on critical-race theory training when it came out, apropos nothing. She thought it was a good idea, because it was "evil." My dad, who almost became a professor, is a bit more blasé--he thinks "this is just a weird academic idea and it's fine as long as it stays in academia."

But at the end of the day, white progressives who control the newsrooms of places like the New York Times decide what people of color to platform and amplify, and they don't pick people like my parents to speak for people of color. They pick people like Ilhan Omar, who has extreme views. (My dad noted the other day, again apropos nothing, that he was upset the media had turned Omar into the "face of Muslims in America.")

If white people feel free to agree that we should tell white people to "be less white," but not to disagree, if they feel free to agree with Ilhan Omar, but not express views like my parents, then people of color who agree with the common-sense view are effectively silenced.

[thu2111]

Identifying leftism as a harmful ideology is certainly a critical step, however it's very difficult to gain traction with that because the term "leftism" is very, very close to "left wing politics", which is strongly normalised as being entirely acceptable in civilised society and always has been since the start of modern democracy itself.

Indeed if you try and figure out where the line is between leftism and left wing politics, it rapidly becomes very difficult. Left wing political parties at least in the Anglosphere are all fully on board with this new leftism of racism, hatred of Anglo culture and history, and all that comes with it. To take a stand in e.g. the workplace against leftism by arguing it is an intolerant and hateful ideology is equivalent to arguing that all left wing voters are supporters of intolerant and hateful ideology. But many of them are not fully on board with all that stuff, even though their chosen representatives are, so to make progress here requires a way to distinguish between people who vote left because they want a higher minimum wage or something like that (reasonable, not the enemy), and people who vote left because they want statues to all be abolished, conservatives to be driven underground and white people turned into second class citizens in their own countries.

That in turn would require consensus around a term that describes the former, socially acceptable state of left wing politics: back when it was a sort of pro-big-government, pro-regulation, primarily economic belief system. Debates about economics and the role of government are far less fraught and far more intellectual than debates about the intrinsic worth of people based on gender or race, so splitting the left cleanly into the parts that want such debate and the parts that want ideological attacks and no-platforming seems like a necessary first step.

Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics. Thus the traditional wings get pulled along by the new strains, as they lack the intellectual and linguistic framework to push back or separate themselves from the parasitical takeover of their institutions.

Interestingly, Europe seems to have less of a problem with that. In Europe it's still common to describe the more classical centrist positions as "social democracy". This phrase is is widely understood to mean classical left wing politics focused on economics, welfare, higher taxes etc, but without the overt focus on race and gender.

[dragonwriter]

> Identifying leftism as a harmful ideology is certainly a critical step, however it's very difficult to gain traction with that because the term "leftism" is very, very close to "left wing politics"

They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.

> Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics

Yes, there are. You even used one of them with a “neo-” in front of it to describe new left-wing politics.

Also, many of your “new left wing" labels are inaccurate; “identity politics”, particularly, isn't specifically left-wing; there are progressive identity politics, center-right neoliberal identity politics (the dominant ones in the Democratic Party, which serve as a capitalist distraction from left-wing economic justice issues), and right-wing identity politics (in the US, various strands of White and/or Christian supremacism/nationalism are prominent here.)