On the “Progressive Problem”…
So Chelsea Clinton is running for office.
Maybe.
Possibly.
At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.
Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).
See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.
But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.
And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.
That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!
It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.
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