The Problem With the Online Left

I am not a fan of American imperialism.

It’s ridiculous that I have to say that as a Black woman carrying out a centuries’ old legacy of fighting for liberation, but these are the times we are living in. The Online Left has long been a hive of white-centered gatekeeping and “No True Scotsman” arguments dressed up in the rhetoric of liberation while deeply tethered to idealized ideology. With most of the new members being inspired to engage with the critical texts of leftist ideology through the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, I’ve never really connected with the movement, seeing it as a group of cosplay socialists LARPing marginalization. And while I’ve kept up with the rare Black and brown voices embedded within the space, trying to inform my perspective from a further left angle, I find myself not occasionally disappointed by the practical limitations of their ideas.

So it’s not really surprising to me that I have discovered a new disdain for the movement in the wake of the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the frankly absurd things that have been said by online socialists in defense of the action taken by authoritarian plutocrat Vladimir Putin. In the run up to the invasion, online leftists were happy to call the verifiable (and frankly obvious) intelligence propaganda, to minimize and deflect the deeply hostile actions Putin had already taken in Eastern Europe, to act as if the United States and her alliances are fundamentally wrong in every situation. And then the war crimes started.

I am not insensate to American war crimes, nor our responsibility for them. I am not ignorant of our wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq in this new century, and the countless imperialist efforts of ages past. I am not proud or defensive of these actions because they deserve shame and recompense, and we should etch them into our hearts as a nation so that we never forget the damage we can do.

But that all becomes an issue to be resolved later when fascists attack.

Fascists do not respond to anything but force. They cannot be negotiated with and they do not seek anything—not power, not territory, not a motherfucking breakfast pastry—in good faith. While politeness and kindness may forestall their ascent to power by putting flawed but decent people ahead of them, once a fascist has control of a situation, they will not let go unless it is wrenched out of their (cold, dead) hands.

The first and most important task when fascists act, then, is to fuck them up as early and often as possible with whatever we have at hand.

I’d prefer the tools to be conciliatory and focused and not, you know, war, but human society has not yet evolved to build an accountability system for fascists outside of violence, and I assure you that this invasion is not the time to start.

This, apparently, is a minority position among people who ostensibly exist to reject fascism and the systems it exploits—white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism. Somehow western socialists have it in their heads that fighting international fascism is actually the bad thing, if you do it with whatever tools you have at hand, and those tools have been used at some point by imperialists or they could have consequences beyond the exact list of actors that have been specially designated as deserving it.

Basically the Online Left’s reaction to the US doing anything at all

So rather than array every weapon we have at defeating a repressive oligarch swimming in environmentally destructive petro-wealth, the Online Left insists that we are too impulsive, too destructive, too dangerous, and too imperialist to confront this extremely terrible person and the cabal that supports him, and so maybe we should just not do anything. Efforts to supply defenses to Ukraine are cast as imperialist war-mongering; the agency of former Soviet states in seeking the shelter of NATO is erased to solidify a narrative of outside agitation; excuses are provided to deny the undeniable imperialism of the instigators, because it would otherwise complicate the idea that Russia is a perpetual victim instead of an equal imperialist power before, during, and after the Cold War paradigm.

I have no problem calling the United States out for its sins. That is a necessary and important part of holding this nation accountable and making it live up to the myth it insists on propagating. But there is something deeply sick in obsessing over those sins to the point where years of fascist, imperialist, oligarchical damage is waved away to make the US a villain.

The Online Left is too busy hating the country to make it better. And that puts everything they say they care about at risk, including the possibility of a world without war.