The Case for Social Democracy: Part 4

On the Cycle of Misunderstanding and Forgone Opportunities for Mutual Allyship

In the summer of 2020, the progressive movement in the United States underwent a moment of profound historical significance. The Covid pandemic had ravaged the country for two months, deliberately allowed to do so by the Trump administration, and the state-sponsored lynching of George Floyd pushed many people over the edge of uncontainable rage. And they had every right to be as angry as they were—in fact, it would have been weird if people weren’t livid over the things they had seen. But while they were in this state, many of them lost the ability to engage in the kind of rational thoughtfulness that can actually convince people that the progressive movement wants to make the world a better place; further, some saw the fact that they had lost this ability as a badge of pride serving as an indicator of the veracity of their virtue. They came to see their anger as something like the holy water in which the guilt for having been complicit in any form of harm would be washed away in the baptism of their activist personae. Suddenly, there was no room to be anything less than the perfect opponent to every way in which the timeless demon of racism made its influence felt. On June 2, 2020, millions of citizens expressed their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, either out of genuine sympathy or out of a sense of obligation, by posting a black square onto their Instagram accounts. This collective action was initiated by two prominent Black women in the music industry, Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas, and widely promoted in the handful of days leading up to it. But what did those who lent their support in this way get in return? They got lambasted by frustrated organizers who found that it became impossible on that day to share organizing information using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag without being drowned out, and they got accused of having participated in a white-supremacist plot to disrupt the movement’s organizing ability. In the years since, “having posted a black square” became synonymous with performatively engaging in less than the bare minimum of activism at no cost or inconvenience to oneself; in other words, people were reprimanded for the exact behavior that they had felt was expected of them. If you were white or white-passing, you were simultaneously told that “your silence is deafening” and to “shut up and listen.” All interactions between individual people became re-analyzed as microcosms of wider societal trends, meaning that if you said or did anything that reinforced a person of color’s sense of feeling oppressed (for instance, anything falling under the umbrella of “tone-policing”), it did not matter what your intent had been; you would be seen as akin to the personal embodiment of evil, to such a degree that even the act of apologizing, let alone providing an explanation, carried the risk of being accused of centering yourself. Anyone who wanted to be seen as an ally essentially had to sign up to serve as an emotional punching bag, relinquishing any attachment to being treated with mutual respect on a human-to-human basis. And this was justified by arguing that oppressed people’s need for emotional punching bags (induced by the same trauma that made them support progressive ideals in the first place) morally outweighed the need of people perceived as privileged to not be used as an emotional punching bag.

That’s not to defend people who said things along the lines of “I don’t see color” or “all lives matter,” which were genuinely insensitive of the experiences of oppression that only some subsets of the population primarily go through. There also were a handful of people able to take the perspective that the theoretical beneficiaries of white supremacy, i.e. white people, are ultimately negatively impacted by it as well in other ways, just in the same way that women, men and non-binary people are all hurt by patriarchy in their own ways. They were relatively few and far between (or at least it appeared that way within the algorithm-driven rage-fueled social media landscape), but they were onto something important. In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote,

It was during those long and lonely years [in prison] that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.

There are many reasons why this is not necessarily an intuitive perspective. One of them is that, unfortunately, when a person from a privileged class (i.e. a white person, a man, etc.) speaks up on issues that may not primarily affect them, it is not uncommon to suspect them of harboring ulterior motives or engaging in a coverup to distract from potentially disreputable conduct. Additionally, if a man were to draw attention to the ways in which he’s been hurt by patriarchy, many would see him as perpetuating that same system of oppression by taking space away from women to express their own stories. People then sometimes find themselves confused about why there is not a mainstream movement of men advocating for doing away with patriarchal customs and institutions, and draw the conclusion that the reason is because men are not inclined to do away with a system that benefits them, when really, the reason is because the men who would make up such a movement have been told by a vocal subset of progressives that the best thing they can do is nothing, and they listened. They listened because they do not want to be oppressors, and they recognize that any actions that they might take to oppose patriarchy may instead be interpreted as the actions of an oppressor. Asking them to take action and simply endure any misunderstanding from other progressives would be asking them to consciously disregard the norm that was set and enforced in 2020, according to which the perspective of an oppressed person who is taking issue with your behavior must be treated as authoritative.

If you’ve read from the beginning of the first part up to this point, you’ve seen that I am saying all of this as a staunch progressive. Now imagine how this culture, within which certain demographics have no recourse (including inaction) to not be seen as fundamentally irredeemable, looks to people who consume a media diet consisting solely of far-right conservative ragebait. Sure, they themselves may hold a worldview within which certain other demographics are irredeemable, but if we as progressives have decided that it’s okay for us to be like them, then we have profoundly lost our way, and put ourselves at further risk of abandoning political democracy. Although much of these phenomena receded from the mainstream between 2021 and 2023, they roared back with a new intensity with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, and also after Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election, both of which contributed to the spread of a mindset explicitly in favor of collective punishment. It became acceptable among leftists to essentially treat all Israelis as representatives of the Israeli government, when in reality many of them staunchly oppose it, and to uniformly treat men as representatives of the Trumpist patriarchy, when in reality, 45% of men that voted supported Kamala Harris (exactly mirroring the 45% of women who voted helping Donald Trump over the finish line).

People who become progressive generally become so because they feel that it’s wrong when people’s needs aren’t met, so when their own needs are unmet, that serves to reinforce their beliefs. People also generally have a need to feel seen and understood by those around them. So when that particular need is perceived as going unmet, many progressives (and non-progressives alike) develop a strong sense of attachment to that status of being misunderstood. They become adamant that people who haven’t been through what they’ve been through are entirely incapable of understanding them, even as they resent those same people for not understanding them, essentially committing themselves to remaining resentful, as discussed above. They don’t want to relinquish this status of being misunderstood, because it’s that which is serving to convince and remind them that they’re a good person whose worldview is morally correct. The moment when a perceived enemy understands them, they face doubts as to whether they were right all along or not, so if it does happen, maybe they’ll refer to the person who understood them against the odds as “one of the good ones,” to reassure themselves that such a thing is unlikely. This is all despite the fact that in the ideal society that they claim to be advocating for, we would not misunderstand each other in this way, but see that most of us in fact have more in common with one another than what we have different, but of course, it’s not uncommon for people who are profoundly invested in a cause to actually prefer an indefinitely continuing fight over achieving victory. This kind of epistemic isolationism is what is meant when people derisively use the term “identity politics.”

Ultimately, all the evidence we should need that a different approach would be better for progressive politics is the fact that this one hasn’t been working. Sure, it’s brought a perspective that’s allowed many people to make sense of the world around them, but it’s also inflicted real unhappiness onto both its adherents and those whom they’ve hurt. It claims to fight for the best of humanity, without actually giving us room to be human, to say nothing of what it does to people who are neurodivergent and experience greater-than-average difficulty navigating interpersonal situations. I obviously don’t expect to be able to single-handedly move the entire movement in a new direction, but I do feel that if and when it comes time for progressives to step up and lead our society through the kind of renaissance that we need, we have to be ready to not squander that opportunity. At this point, we have to explore what’s at stake for those who will inherit the world in whatever state we leave it.