Re-Socializing Liberals and The Left
We Need a Design and Solutions Oriented Politics to Defeat Authoritarianism
Complaints about the supposed divisive and unnecessarily provocative behavior of the political left in the U.S. are everywhere among democracy promoters. As one who was introduced to grassroots politics and political theory by leftists, I find this, frankly, offensive. The left's alienation from mainstream politics isn't a choice or a character flaw - it's a rational response to systematic exclusion, violence, and repression from which we can learn a great deal that may be relevant to us at a time when a much broader swath of of us may come under extreme repression. Any strategy for moving forward must acknowledge this history and honor the courage of those who've resisted despite extraordinary costs.
The Historical Reality: Why the Left Was Driven to the Margins
Labor Movement Repression
From the 1870s through today, labor organizers have faced:
Mass violence: The Ludlow Massacre (1914), the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), countless strikes broken by police and military force
State surveillance: FBI infiltration of unions, COINTELPRO operations targeting labor leaders
Legal warfare: Taft-Hartley Act (1947) gutted union power, right-to-work laws designed to destroy collective bargaining
Economic retaliation: Blacklisting, plant closures to prevent unionization, decades of anti-union corporate strategy
Civil Rights and Black Power Movements
Assassination campaigns: Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and dozens of other leaders killed by state and vigilante violence
COINTELPRO operations: FBI's systematic campaign to "neutralize" Black liberation movements through infiltration, psychological warfare, and violence
Mass incarceration: The drug war and tough-on-crime policies specifically designed to target Black communities and activists
Economic exclusion: Redlining, discriminatory lending, urban disinvestment designed to prevent Black economic power
Environmental and Indigenous Movements
Resource extraction violence: Corporate-backed violence against environmental defenders, including murders of activists
Cultural genocide: Boarding schools, forced sterilization, land theft, religious persecution designed to eliminate Indigenous resistance
State surveillance: FBI monitoring of environmental groups as "eco-terrorists" while ignoring actual corporate crimes
Legal persecution: Activists facing decades in prison for property damage while corporate executives face no consequences for environmental destruction
LGBTQ+ Movement
State-sanctioned violence: Police raids on gay bars, entrapment operations, psychiatric imprisonment
Legal persecution: Sodomy laws, employment discrimination, custody battles designed to terrorize LGBTQ+ people
Medical violence: Forced conversion therapy, pathologizing homosexuality, AIDS crisis abandonment
Cultural warfare: Religious right mobilization specifically to prevent LGBTQ+ political participation
Anti-War and International Solidarity Movements
Political trials: Chicago 7, Seattle 7, countless activists imprisoned for opposing U.S. wars
Deportation campaigns: Palmer Raids, McCarthy era deportations, ICE targeting of activist immigrants
Surveillance and infiltration: Massive FBI operations against anti-war movements, peace activists treated as national security threats
Understanding the Response: Heroism Under Fire
The left's general tendency toward alienation from mainstream politics isn't pathology - it's adaptation. When democratic participation is met with violence, when organizing is met with imprisonment, when leadership is met with assassination, movements learn to operate outside mainstream channels not from choice but from necessity.
This history produced genuine heroes: People who continued organizing despite knowing they might be killed, imprisoned, or destroyed economically. Leaders who chose collective liberation over personal safety. Communities that maintained solidarity despite systematic efforts to divide them.
The alienation is strategic and protective: Distrust of institutions that have repeatedly betrayed and attacked leftists. Reluctance to engage in electoral politics that has historically been used to co-opt and neutralize left movements. Preference for autonomous organizing that can't be easily infiltrated or destroyed.
Leftist analysis is often correct: Many mainstream institutions really are captured by corporate interests. Electoral politics really is rigged against transformative change. Many politicians really will betray progressive values for career advancement or donor dollars.
The capture of mainstream institutions by corporate interests in particular should have been of greater concern to more of us. We understand that now, as elite corporate interests are adapting to authoritarianism in order to protect wealth and power from social movements at a time of rapid, unpredictable change, resource depletion, and waves of automation that threaten to displace massive numbers of workers.
The Compassionate Case for Strategic Engagement
Honoring the Legacy While Adapting Strategy
Our ancestors' courage created the opening we have today. The civil rights movement, labor movement, feminist movement, LGBTQ+ movement, environmental movement - all paid enormous costs to create whatever democratic space we currently have. That sacrifice demands we use it strategically.
The system that oppressed the left is weakening even as authoritarianism is advancing. The same economic forces that created their opposition - racial capitalism, empire, extractive industry - are now creating broader instability that makes more people receptive to transformative change. The contradictions the left has identified are becoming impossible to ignore.
Isolation serves the left’s oppressors' interests. The forces that assassinated Fred Hampton and infiltrated the Black Panthers want the left to remain marginal, pure, and, in a context of extreme, toxic polarization, out of position to engage in broad based coalition building. Self-imposed isolation completes the work that state repression began.
True Democracy Requires the Left
Democracy without radicals isn't democracy at all. A system that can only tolerate centrist voices isn't pluralistic - it's managed consensus that excludes the most affected by systemic oppression. Real democracy means including the voices that challenge fundamental assumptions about power and wealth as concentrated power and wealth is always a threat to people-centered democracy.
The left provides essential functions in healthy democracy:
Vision expansion: Imagining alternatives beyond current constraints
System critique: Identifying root causes rather than just symptoms
Moral clarity: Refusing to accept "pragmatic" compromises that abandon the most vulnerable
Historical memory: Remembering lessons that others want forgotten
Excluding radicals enables fascism. When democratic institutions can't incorporate left-wing challenges to concentrated power, people become susceptible to right-wing alternatives that scapegoat the powerless while protecting the powerful.
The Strategic Opening
The conditions that created left-wing isolation are changing:
Economic crisis is radicalizing people who previously accepted the system
Climate emergency is making transformative change obviously necessary
Generational change means more people are open to systemic alternatives
Elite legitimacy crisis creates openings for genuine democratic participation
Overall political systems obsolescence and failure opens the door to transformative change
This creates unprecedented opportunity for the left to lead rather than just resist. But only if movements can scale beyond their defensive postures and build coalitions capable of governing.
What This Means Practically
For the left: Your resistance was heroic, and your values are needed now more than ever. The question is how to honor that legacy by building power sufficient to implement your vision rather than just maintaining it.
To win that power, the left will need to recognize two critical points of strategy: 1) that civil resistance movements are most effective when they are broad based and ideologically diverse, and 2) that while it is widely believed that as little as 3.5% of the population engaging in strategic, nonviolent civil resistance can topple a dictator, that 3.5% must be able to inspire the loyalties of many millions more across an extremely diverse array of interests.
This means that the left must recognize the difference between consolidation and persuasion. To simply consolidate the existing base for a truly equitable democracy will polarize the public with too few on our side.
For mainstream progressives: The left's critiques aren't extremism - they're advanced warning systems about system breakdown. Including radical voices isn't dangerous - excluding them is what enables fascist alternatives.
For coalition building: The test isn't whether everyone agrees on everything. The test is whether we can build democratic systems robust enough to include fierce disagreement about fundamental questions while maintaining shared commitment to collective self-governance.
The Invitation
This isn't about the left abandoning its principles or "moving to the center." It's about the left leading a transformation of the center toward justice, an effort that will require meeting people where they are at in terms of their diverse interests. It's about using the opening created by our ancestors' sacrifice to build the world they died fighting for.
This isn't about forgetting the violence or trusting institutions that haven't earned trust. It's about building new institutions worthy of trust while transforming existing ones through organized power.
This isn't about choosing between purity and effectiveness. It's about understanding that in this moment, the most effective thing the left can do is lead the majority of people who are also suffering under current systems toward transformative alternatives, not just through analysis, but through pragmatic, design and solutions-oriented strategies and tactics.
The ultimate honor to those who were assassinated, imprisoned, and exiled is not to remain forever in opposition, but to build the world they gave their lives envisioning. They didn't sacrifice themselves for eternal resistance - they sacrificed themselves for liberation. That requires not just critique, but the power to implement alternatives.
The system tried to marginalize the left because it feared our vision becoming reality. The greatest revenge against that repression is making that fear come true - not through violence or exclusion, but through building democratic coalitions powerful enough to choose people over profits, community over capital, and liberation over oppression.
That's the work worthy of our shared legacy. That's the democracy worthy of their sacrifice.
Wowzer! So on point.