Today you may read an open letter from disaffected members of “the left” about their mistreatment by, one assumes, other presumptive members of “the left.” It is branded We Are The Left, and it has its own attendant Twitter hashtag (#WeAreTheLeft) and Twitter account, because it is strictly a Twitter phenomenon, despite the attempts of the author to situate it as a salvo in real-life historical left activism.
The missive was written by Sady Doyle, formerly the lesser auteur behind the ‘culture blog’ (?) Tiger Beatdown, and now a woman with a book to promote and an axe to grind.
For the duration of the Democratic primary, Doyle’s complaint has been that people, usually identified as young white male Sanders supporters, have been mean to her on Twitter. She has written entire articles about this. There’s no doubt people have been mean to Doyle on Twitter: During the primary season, Sanders supporters have fought with Clinton supporters in general, with Sanders supporters typically accusing Clinton supporters of being further to the political right than themselves. Clinton supporters have responded by accusing Sanders supporters of sexism, a bit of turnabout meant to suggest that despite whatever socialist goals Sanders may have represented, his real allure is the opportunity to stomp on the dreams of a woman, i.e., Hillary Clinton.
You can make whatever you want out of that beef; maybe Sanders and Clinton supporters aren’t that politically distant from one another, maybe they are; maybe Sanders supporters are sexist, maybe that narrative is just a regulation entry in the Clinton electioneering playbook. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the stakes concern who gets a legitimate claim to leftism, and that the specific individuals who put this letter together are mostly Clinton fans who line up on the side that says today’s young socialists are too comfortable with sexism and racism and express that foul comfort on Twitter.
If you doubt this provenance, ask yourself: Who is this letter addressed to? It’s an open letter making a declaration, namely that the signatories are actually on the left. But who denied that? Who said they weren’t? Who stands to be convinced? We’re not dealing with any real political party here; there have been no membership cards revoked, no entries deleted from registries, nobody has been placed on a blacklist. Ask yourself in what physical locations this putative ejection from the left, which must be corrected by this letter, actually took place. There are none.
There are a lot of anecdotes, curiously stripped of names and dates, and some conflation of wholly different circumstances involving historical activists who aren’t around today and had nothing to do with this letter. There are a lot of general complaints, and there are demands. But demands must be placed upon somebody: in this case, whom?
The answer is that the letter is really addressed to about sixty left-leaning Twitter users who have been rude to Doyle and her friends, and in doing so have made them feel excluded from the cool, hip left. Doyle and her crew construe this rejection as evidence of sexism, racism, transphobia, any old bigotry you’ve got, and are pressing these Twitter users to accept them instead of rejecting them. Instead of laughing at and making fun of Clinton supporters for being alleged neoliberals, the letter demands, the asshole it-kids of the Twitter left should be nice and defer to them, because they, too, are “the left.”
You might wonder: If this is just an interpersonal Twitter beef between people who feel rejected by a cool in-group and that in-group, why are people with any sense entering into the conflict? I wonder that myself. But if this election has revealed anything, it’s that there’s no shortage of adults out there who live in their Twitter mentions and believe against all reason that the little boxes that pop up on their phone app reflect reality. They do not: If you ignore Twitter, it goes away. If you block or mute someone, their mean words — even extremely mean words, even words that make you feel rejected by people you wish respected you, even words that suggest you are not a part of a group you personally identify as a part of — cannot hurt you.
It is perhaps some kind of remark on the utter degeneracy of political punditry that actual articles can be successfully published about little more than pundits’ personal struggles to get the in-groups they want to like them to treat them as friends. These articles always present themselves as something grander, but just the basics of reporting — trying to detect the who, what, where, when, how, and why — of these pieces reveals that there is nothing to them.
To review: there is no unified left and there never has been. There is no formal left committee that has wrongly rejected these signatories from a genuine, funded, active party, and to which this open letter remonstrates. Nobody has actually been injured; no lives have been lost, nothing irreversible done. Some people have had a row on Twitter, and, following a few signal victories (namely Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton), have decided to press for their erstwhile peers to be nice to them online. That’s all.
APPENDIX:
Note: ‘But some of the names at the bottom are not those of Clinton supporters!’ you may observe. This is true (I guess), but most of the signatories had nothing to do with the composition of the letter; Doyle and a couple of others campaigned over email to pressure notables into signing this purportedly anti-sexism, anti-bullying letter. When presented in that light, without any honesty about the real origins of the conflict the letter addresses, you can imagine how a well-intentioned person might be taken in.
Sub-Note: And some of the people signed on apparently didn’t even sign.
Note II: Still doubt the letter was just a creative way to rope a bunch of other people into a few Twitter personalities’ personal grudges, junior high style? Check out how the letter’s author — supposedly against invidious personal assaults, sexually explicit attacks, and so on — spent her evening: personally assaulting some anti-letter bête noire on (you guessed it) Twitter. Observing Doyle’s behavior mere hours after her impassioned plea for tolerance and civility on the left would personally lead me to withdraw my signature if I had agreed to add it, but I’m a sucker for at least a pretense of seriousness.
