I think it's really easy for people to get frustrated with the theater and strategy of politics when they don't realize it's theater and strategy.

Politicans aren't stupid. Politicans, Republicans in particular, have a ridiculous amount of resources at their disposal for taking the pulse of Americans and shaping their language to get the maximum amount of effect. Leftists are often very stubborn about adopting this kind of strategies, but the leftist groups that get the most done are people who debate for a decade, can concede certain victories if it's in the best interests of the long run, and who are getting shit done at the interpersonal, grassroots level.

I would say this frustrates me when I see Democrats act the way they do, but it actually honestly doesn't enrage me most of time time. At this point, I can look at what I perceive as incompetence, label it as theater, and go back to something more grassroots. The fuckery of geopolitics is easier to deal with when you have an issue in your backyard that you can invest time and energy in.

That said, adopting conservative *buzzwords* is NOT a good idea, because that often reinforces the meaning of those words on a psychological level. It might be REALLY tempting to whip out a smug "facts don't care about your feelings," but it's not a great idea.

Another added nuance - being strategic doesn't mean being giving into politeness, purity politics, or being an assimilationist. Rage, aggression, and shock all have their place in activism.

But here's what I would have most leftists ask themselves: Am I acting this way because I want to feel smart, because I'm frustrated, or because I think I am actually making a good point?

I had to learn this, but talking about how much you hate America and think it should fall is not going to land well with most people. It does not mean "most people" are dumb, unenlightened, or incapable of understanding what you say. But using aggressive language requires some flair and strategy.

Ah, thought of something else:

There's a subset of leftists who are REALLY obsessed with language, and a subset of leftists who call what the other group does "PC" and "Identity politics."

Now, the other group does tend to focus on the morality and correctness of the language they use, but do you know how much time politicans and their advisors and speechwriters spend on the specific words they use? It's not a futile pursuit to analyze the impacts of language we use.

That said, while we spend a lot of time arguing about words, we don't spend a lot of time on when and where and why certain words might be strategic, or not.

Are we meeting people where they're at, or where we think they should be?

Here's an example:

In this channel, and when I talk to other environmentalists and/or leftists, I might talk about the false dichotomy of "natural" and "artificial." This is something I can discuss and explain at great length because I am working under the assumption that the people I am speaking to have a greater understanding of "natural" to begin with, even of they are using the language I am criticizing. Their scope of how the word "natural" might have historical, cultural, and social influences is much larger. It becomes more important in discourse about the "naturalness" of national parks, gardens, products, and so on and so forth.

But let's say I'm talking to an average person who might not understand why their monoculture lawn is a problem, and wants to know why. I am not doing them any favors by parsing the nuances of "artificial" and "natural," it is sufficient to communicate the benefits of a "natural landscape" because they probably have an idea of what that means in the context of the lawn they have - and I don't need to assume they think their lawn is "natural."

Now, if I do this, I DO run the risk of another environmentalist calling me a hypocrite for using a word I have actively criticized. I can explain that its neccessary strategically, but this is also just an acceptable risk in politics. I genuinely think that a lot of Democrats and "liberal" personalities are probably a lot further left than they let on, but they HAVE to meet the American public where they're at, and they know leftists are going to criticize what they say and what they do.

Which is a good thing, we should never stop criticizing democrats, but it's worth thinking about why Democrats don't really take leftist critique seriously, and it probably speaks to our lack of strategy and organization.

“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”

—Aaron Bushnell

“The act of an American soldier sacrificing himself for Palestine is the highest sacrifice […] a poignant message to the American administration to stop its involvement in the aggression.”

—PFLP Central Media Dept.

Love that lore is a common word now

The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire's Castle

Interesting read.