[MMS21]

"Leftist communities on Reddit often implore the company to ban The_Donald. So far, Huffman has demurred. “There are arguments on both sides,” he said, “but, ultimately, my view is that their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice.” He thought of something else to say, but decided against it. Then he took a swig of beer and said it anyway. “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.” That’s a terrifying thought. It’s also almost certainly true."

- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman source https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...

[cwkoss]

I think that's a misuse of the term Leftist - I remember the most outspoken voices calling for banning The_Donald coming from centrist liberals. These types are die-hard liberal supporters who "vote blue no matter who" and celebrate partisanship like a team sports event. Leftists viewed the rise of Trump as more of a denouncement of HRC's neoliberal politics and lack of integrity rather than based on the rise of a bigoted irredeemable white working class. Liberals want to silence Trump supporters and shame them into submission, while leftists mostly want to convert them via class consciousness to fight for lower- and middle-class empowerment.

Leftism is about socialism, worker empowerment, anti-corporate power. Subreddits around Bernie, socialism, stupidpol, etc. They didn't like Trump, but were mostly critical of the lack of focus and results from democrats. We (I count myself in this group) thought Trump was a dangerous idiot, but ineffective democrats who paid lip service to noble goals while stifling progress were the main topic of discussion.

Liberals, who were most vocally pushing for deplatforming trump supporters, were more the types who lurk (and mod) /r/politics and /r/liberal. They viewed everything Trump did as evil, while absolving democrats who had done the same things for the 4 years previous.

Hardcore ride-or-die liberals != leftists - these are two groups with distinct ideologies. In particular to this context, leftists are much more apprehensive about censorship because they don't have deep institutional power.

[mkr-hn]

This is pretty much it. Liberation means liberation of all the people I don't like, too, and it doesn't happen by going full Blue Team and further alienating them with useless slogans.

I've been dragged on Twitter by the same kind of Blue Team ideologue I've been accused of being by people who don't have enough resolution on me to see the difference, so I can at least empathize with them. If I were someone like that, I'd call me a useless twit too.

Joe Rogan might be a human weather vane, but there's a reason millions of people who otherwise consider themselves apolitical listen to him. Treating them as dismissible is why most of half the country doesn't vote. All the most effective voter suppression efforts of the Republican party, which barely gets half of the voting half in a good year for them, wouldn't mean anything if the other half weren't so alienating. The few points the Comey letter cost Clinton wouldn't have meant anything if the party wasn't run by smug fools.

[amanaplanacanal]

Most of the time now I see the left used as a term for the woke, or race and gender aware folks. It's unfortunate, because race and gender are divisive topics, and class based discussions could potentially pull a lot of white people back into the leftist fold.

Which is not to say poc and lgbtq folks haven't gotten fucked historically, they totally have, but we could all be allies if we focused our messaging differently.

A lot of this is probably due to the urban rural divide. Urban folks can see poc and lgbtq people around them every day, but they don't see the lower class white people living outside urban areas.