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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class.

I've heard a somewhat different version of this, in that it was deliberate, it was done to "gatekeep" out portions of the working class, and that it was done knowing it could prevent the movement from attaining its goals, but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists. Because anyone whose position on the economic political axis would put them on board with Occupy Wall Street's goals, but whose position on the social/cultural political axis would cause them to oppose things like the "Progressive Stack" enough to be "turned away" (as opposed to at least holding their nose and putting up with it) is thus in the Fascist Quadrant of said political plane.

but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists.

It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.

I left the united states for years, plural, because I believed Bush was going to declare himself dictator for life. I acquired that belief from a steady diet of blue-tribe media.

Neutral question: Has it occurred to you that, with the sides changed, you are still overreacting now as you were back then?

The thought does occur. On the other hand, I can go back and read my posts back to 2015, when I was quite the reasonable moderate, and observe a process, not simply a straight swing from one extreme to the other.

Damn... I was as permanently online back then as I'm now, and as blue-tribe as I am anti-blue now, and somehow never got the impression this sort of talk was anything beyond run of the mill bitching at politicians.

It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.

I remember left wing folks going on about the threat of "fascists" in America when I was attending college in Southern California in 2000-2005. The person who described this theory to me was a left-winger who did so approvingly, arguing that the failure of OWS due to the Progressive Stack was a good thing for the left, as compared to the alternative.

I remember left wing folks going on about the threat of "fascists" in America when I was attending college in Southern California in 2000-2005.

I suppose these people didn't show up out of nowhere...

The person who described this theory to me was a left-winger who did so approvingly, arguing that the failure of OWS due to the Progressive Stack was a good thing for the left, as compared to the alternative.

But did they do so post- or pre-Trump?

Pre-Trump — IIRC, in 2014. This same person held that Bush II's "compassionate conservatism" made him a Fascist, because it too is "economically 'left-wing' but socially 'right-wing.'"

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