Political Discussion and Commentary

I feel like everyone else has covered the twin angles of what happened to MKL and Malcolm X, and the whole worry about having a defined leader. So let me talk about another few angles of this.

Let's face it. The Left is not unified. There are a metric fuckton worth of little factions that have their own goals and their own ideas, and they can't agree on anything except the Right is bad. If you're wanting to go back to the Obama or Clinton years, and not recreate a socialist ideal in the USA, you're panned as a liberal and not sufficiently radicalised by the socialists. If you would rather have a functioning government with government-subsidised healthcare and education, the liberals scream at you for being too radical, while the anarchists scream at you that any organised government is evil and shit. And everyone has their very specific, very defined vision, at least about this one thing they care about, and zero willingness to compromise or trade horses to any of the other factions with their limited view.

This makes leadership at best complicated, if not outright impossible. How can we find someone who will equally represent all factions in our coalition, when the only thing we really agree on is Trump Bad (tm)?

And how can leadership stop the failure path you have identified above? People think that we're not being listened to (they're right, also!). They think the only answer they have is to break shit until people listen to us. We've got plenty of people, from the main movers and shakers down to the rank and file, saying 'hey, we break shit, that just makes Trump and his goons hit us harder, and now with apparent justification.' Those people scream back at us that peaceful protests and electoralism don't work, and that the only way we'll be taken seriously is by breaking shit and making people feel the pain. Do you think a defined leader will make that failure chain go away? I don't. I think that Trump is banking on that failure chain because the real goal is an American gestapo that goes around beating the shit out of people who don't toe the line and what better way to form that gestapo than in response to Leftist 'violence'. And I am not above this. I think that it's far more effective to just tell people that driving a Tesla means supporting a fascist oligarch, but any time I try to make this point to the kinds of people who want to burn Teslas, we get back into the arguments I allude to in my first paragraph. AND this is before we get into agent provocateurs and COINTELPRO and other stuff.

Finally, any real societal change that is going to stick from the egalitarian side of the fence will come from a grass-roots movement. We don't want a charismatic leader who can stand up in front of the crowd and shake their fist. We want crowds of people who show up for the silly notion that human beings need respect and that this is not America. Leave the authoritarian charismatic leader for the Right. Egalitarianism is about society, not any one charismatic jerk with a bone to pick.

JMNSHO.

You are all getting it all wrong. It's not that the right wing has more charismatic leaders, or even better leaders. It's that the right wing allows their politicians to lie with impunity. Their voters will turn a blind eye to the most egregious of falsehoods, as long as those voters are told what they want to hear.

Their opposition doesn't have that luxury. Their charismatic leaders must also speak truth. MLK was not only charismatic but he was able to relate the truth about the situation of the time that resonated with people of all races.

Those charismatic people who can also stay true to reality are few and far between. It is very possible that in today's political environment which is flush with cash, super-PACs, and self-dealing, all those people are simply not in politics. Leaving only the liars, and those are tolerated better on the Right.

Pop quiz: what happened to MLK jr and Malcolm X? And Fred Hampton and other leftist leaders, for that matter?

Answer that and you'll understand not only why it's hard to find and keep such leaders, but why movements like OWS deliberately tried to eschew them entirely.

What we need is a spokesman, who can navigate and sell the situation to the public.

you're close, but the problem isn't finding a spokesman, it's finding a platform that can reach the people they need to reach. idk if you've noticed but the general public is not hanging out on lemmy, and the vast vast majority of the public's attention is owned by corporations and therefore by the billionaire class.

The left doesn't like authoritarianism which is why single spokesmen are relatively rare - additionally the Trump administration (see Khalil) (and the feds of the past see MLK, Malcom X) has a habit of beheading organizations.

Being headless means it's more difficult to launch ad hominem attacks based on oppo research and also means the organization is more resilient to being driven off course.

The problem is that the right has a vested interest in demonizing any spokesman, and enough people live in an alternate reality that they'll go along with it regardless of facts.

Similar feelings, although for different reasons.

One of the struggles left-wing movements have been having lately is that they struggle to coordinate between different sub-groups, many of whom are often in general agreement but slightly misaligned. When you look back at a lot of historical left-wing movements, there was strong coordination between people who didn't necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything, but agreed that there are some very important things which they ought to be addressing now.

Modern left-wing movements seem to really struggle with that. Not only do we not have the unifying drive of a single leader, but this ends up leaving the various sub-groups to promote their own leaders - who, because they are originating from representing that narrower sub-interest, also tend towards more exaggerated positions which put them out of alignment with the other movements. This effectively self-sabotages any effort to get a broader consensus going.

I am honestly rather jealous of right wing movements' ability to get groups which aren't totally aligned - sometimes even at odds on issues - to nonetheless coalesce around a broader vision.

I've been bitching about this for a few months now. I think that someone will step up to the plate at some point but as of right now I don't know who that is...

As for the other movements - I don't think it's just the right-leaning media that paints these left leaning protests in a bad light, the more "middle of the road" media does the same. I think that most of the agitators are plants by law enforcement, with the purpose of giving them a valid argument to use overwhelming force to shut the protest down.

The media eats up this violent protestors narrative for the ratings and for their ability to convince people to not engage or become a part of what is going on.

If there isn't enough violence to report on the on the street journalists will interview the dumbest person they can find to show the viewers that it's just a bunch of idiots out here that don't really know how the "real world" works.

If neither one of those tactics work then the politicians will get involved and try to take over the movement so they can get more exposure and then start to water down the message of the protestors.

If that doesn't work then the politicians will "negotiate" with the leaders but do it in a way that puts the protestors in a bad light. Like doing a full media blitz where the dirty looking, young protest leaders are walked into a large well appointed room with a bunch of well groomed politicians and using this lopsided power dynamic of the media and the environment start to pick apart the arguments of the protestors making them look weak and ineffective.

I'm sure there are many other tactics that are used to keep the plebeians at bay.

I write all of this to say that if there isn't a well spoken, intelligent, charismatic, strong leader to this movement, it will get shut down.