General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This is the fallacy, and disingenuous nature of Michael Moore's prognostications. If we lose in [View all]JHan
(10,173 posts)there's no specific point where the left wing and right wing converge. The impetus for political activism is just different on the hard left compared to the hard right.
What Moore doesn't understand is power, real political power. The GOP understands that, and he's conflating their lust for power with moral conviction.
But our conversation makes me think of how someone can become a useful idiot or how a worldview can make you susceptible to ideas which lead to worse outcomes.
Ideologies are complex, beliefs vacillate depending on changing circumstances but the consequences of elections in a political system where the filibuster dominates, means elections become a zero-sum game. Right after the 2016 election, I saw leftists take aim at Identity Politics, feeding conservative narratives about diverse representation in politics. The same people in the crosshairs of the Trump administration were admonished for demanding political action on the issues which impacted them the most: These people also happen to make up the base of the Democratic party. To make the concerns of the WWC the epicenter of Politics, or characterizing their concerns as the real "bread and butter" issues, dovetailed with Trump's rhetoric. So worldviews converged even though they came from different points.
Historically, we've seen this phenomenon result in disastrous consequences, particularly with anti-semitism. A worldview, even one rooted in "justice for all", can end up punishing the vulnerable. For Polish Communists, for example, it was too easy to buy into Anti-Zionist rhetoric. "Zionism" - which is a call for self-determination among Jewish people - was twisted into conspiratorial theorizing which claimed that Jews were only interested in consolidating economic wealth to the disadvantage of everyone else- a very old tired trope going back centuries. Just 2 decades after the Holocaust, in a country which saw the greatest crimes of the Holocaust, antisemitism reared its head again, with Polish Communists demanding the exile of Jews from public life or demanding Jews denounce Zionism - Which didn't guarantee that Jews weren't exiled anyway, because at the end of it all, even for Communists, a Jew remained someone to be distrusted. To this day, this conspiratorial view of Zionism persists among the left. We're too familiar with how Goldman-Sachs is talked about more than J.P Morgan (it's my belief that Goldman-Sachs gets more attention than J.P Morgan because of the name), and memes like the "Zionist Capitalist Agenda" , "Zionist Banks" etc.
This isn't to say that hard lefties and hard righties are the same, but ideology and politics can make strange bedfellows when you don't correctly identify who the real enemy is.