Activism and leftist ressentiment

The Intercept, which was once a rather important investigative journalist outfit and has for the last few years become a salivating lapdog of American imperialism, just published an extremely tepid yet nevertheless important piece regarding the effects of ressentiment on the left.

Of course it’s not actually narrated that way. If you read the piece (you probably have much better things to do with your time unless studying the self-destruction of the American left is something important to you), you’ll instead see a meandering long-form essay that sounds like it’s been edited by multiple cultural sensitivity committees. Entitled “Elephant in the Zoom: How Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History,” it details the utter internal chaos at several large American left-aligned non-profit groups due to “cancel culture.” Keeping in mind that the American left isn’t really what we’d call left in the rest of the world, and that many of the groups mentioned are hardly anti-capitalist, the situations it cites regardless are typical also for more radical groups there as well:

So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”

“My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife.”

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

As I said, the article itself is quite tepid, and the framing by the reporter is maddeningly incoherent. Whenever he begins to draw more than scant attention to the ideological formations fueling the internal strife, the reporter then quickly assures the reader that all those concerns (patriarchy, white supremacy, gender inequality) are deeply valid and must be addressed, even going so far as to write that he probably doesn’t even have the right to write the essay:

For a number of obvious and intersecting reasons — my race, gender, and generation — I am not the perfect messenger.

Again, The Intercept piece reads as if edited by committee, which of course might just mean the committees in the reporter’s head, each telling him that he is not doing enough to elevate marginalized voices and interrogate his white privilege. He’s attempting to write about how cancel culture and call outs paralyze radical movements while being paralyzed himself by every potential fault in his writing that might lead he himself to fall victim to the very same thing.

Of course, that’s exactly how you’d have to write about it for a news organization which itself has been essentially captured by the same ideology he’s writing about. The Intercept for years has spent more digital ink writing from that very framework than they have doing the explosive investigative journalism they once did. Unsurprisingly, there’s even a recent essay defending Chesa Boudin, explaining how criticism of him was baseless and anyway organized by conservatives.

What happened to The Intercept is the same thing that happened to the other organizations the reporter cites in the article: in the years after Trump’s election, they all abandoned their core values because they believed there was a rising fascist threat in the United States that must be stopped at all costs. The situation at the ACLU is probably the best known one: an organization which for decades fought for the principle of free speech suddenly found themselves arguing against free speech when it was employed by people they didn’t like.

The problem of course is that a universal principle of free speech can only exist if it is applied and extended universally. That’s an intolerable idea now, due to the renewed popularity of Karl Popper’s justification for intolerance of intolerance (the so-called “Paradox of Tolerance.”) Basically stated, in order to have a truly tolerant society, that society cannot extend tolerance to those who argue for intolerance. That’s how Antifa justifies deplatforming anyone they identify as fascist and can then claim to be defenders of tolerance. That’s also how “cancellations” and smear campaigns against leftists are justified: their ideas supposedly would lead to intolerance, so we should all therefore silence them.

It’s of course re-narrated in the heads of those who apply these tactics. They’re “defending” marginalized peoples and “fighting” for justice and “combating” white supremacy. In martial, militaristic language, they style themselves white knights in a holy crusade against an enemy so pernicious and so powerful that its ideology can manifest in your co-workers, your roommates, your family members, your closest friends, and even—without relentless vigilance—in yourself.

As I put it in my essay, Here Be Monsters:

Not only do we conjure a world as backdrop to sustain these fantasies, we must also create a mythic, powerful enemy against which we struggle. The evil lichlord, the spreading darkness, the mundane forces that wish to imprison us, steal our essence, or control reality itself. That, more than anywhere else, is where the in-game and out-of-game worlds lose their boundaries. Faceless, amorphous, undefinable yet all-powerful forces threaten our everyday lives; though we are the heroes in the timeless, epic struggle against them we are always losing.

We didn’t get that job or cannot pay our rent or our relationship ended because of the omnipotent gaze and high damage-reduction of the chimeric monster Oppression, and as well as all its summoned minions. Of course, in our everyday fantasies, those minions are everyone not in our party, the global majority of “non-player” characters with evil alignments who enact, uphold, and reproduce the will of Oppression in every social interaction. They can cast “micro-agression” at will and have the inherent feat “privilege” at character creation, which grants them an automatic advantage in all interactions. They can be of any class, but can easily be detected without recourse to magical means, only surface observation.

We are always the heroes, of course, which also means always the victims. We cannot ever truly win, but it’s not clear to me we ever really want to. We need the game to go on, because if it ever ends we might have to confront the terrifying existence of the world outside our minds.

Those who would hold such a view of the world of course must constantly struggle, must constantly fight, must constantly call-out injustice wherever they see it. If that means destroying an organization, then that organization must be destroyed. If that means sabotaging and crippling a movement, then you must sabotage and cripple it. And especially, if that means never engaging in any real transformative action and never for a moment allowing the possibility that you might not fully understand the situation you are fighting, then that is how it must be.

I’ve mentioned before and discuss extensively in my manuscript that this behavior and this framework precisely follows the psychological, emotional, and spiritual state that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Deleuze identified as ressentiment. Ressentiment is a sense of past hurt turned outward, a self-hostage situation in which, because you decline to participate fully in life yourself and to embrace your own agency in the world, you then refuse to allow others to do the same too. Worse, you begin to see the jouissance of others—their agency, their apparent success, their “excessive” enjoyment of life—as the cause of your own suffering, since you cannot allow yourself such a mode of living. Their lives remind you of a felt trauma, the “trace” of suffering real or imagined, and you unconsciously try to punish them for your own pain.

The example cited in the article—of one employee of an organization who was fired for not showing up to work for months and who then said it was because of white supremacy—is exactly how this works in radical movements. Why that person never went to work (and why that organization kept him on the payroll for so long anyway) isn’t discussed, but we’ve all seen situations like this especially in leftist groups. Several years ago I once had a contract worker who did this very same thing, being months late on a project and then sending me multiple articles from Everyday Feminism to explain how the large amount of money our organization lost because of her uncompleted work was the fault of the patriarchy and white supremacy (this person was of course white) and not her failure to do the work she was paid in advance for.

Until a leftist movement can admit the problem of ressentiment and develop a strategy for countering it, the left will continue to fail miserably. I doubt this article in The Intercept will help, but at the very least it cites one piece of advice any group should take seriously: “stop hiring activists, and start hiring people who want to do the work.” That directive, incidentally, came from Bernie Sanders, whose campaign towards the end became crippled not just by external sabotage from the Democratic National Committee but by internal sabotage from ressentiment-soaked activists who demanded he first fully sign on to Woke Ideology before doing what they were being paid to do.

Another way of putting this, and one that is relevant to any group, not just left-aligned ones, is to stop trying to work with ideologues—even the ones you agree with. A person who has given themself over to ideology has already abdicated their agency, and once the temporary passion of true belief wears off, they’ll start looking for something to replace it. Destroying projects feels good for a little while and satiates the trace of trauma for a little bit, and that’s usually the next place they’ll look for their fix. Like addicts, however, they’ll never be able to stop, and they’ll keep going until there’s nothing left to mollify their pain.