How Psychological Mechanisms Undermine Movements On The Left
Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash
Recently, there was a heated disagreement in leftist spaces over how to vote for the Speaker of the House. Some leftists wanted leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to threaten to withhold votes from incumbent Nancy Pelosi unless she promised to hold a vote on Medicare for All legislation during the 2021 calendar year.
AOC disagreed with this strategy for a variety of reasons we are not going to be going over here (read Paul Blest’s A Medicare for All Vote Isn’t Worth the Risk as well as Briahna Joy Gray’s The Case for Forcing a Floor Vote on Medicare for All to inform yourself on the pros and cons). She instead voted to affirm Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, and that earned her a lot of criticism. While some of that criticism was tame, other remarks were far more pointed. “AOC just voted 4 Pelosi as Speaker without getting anything in return… She is not our friend, just another corrupt politician,” tweeted one user. Leftist commenters felt so betrayed by AOC’s position on this issue that they were willing to label her an enemy.
There is a joke in leftist circles, told a million different ways, but the punchline basically comes down to this: there is nothing the Left hates more than itself. The joke is about how fractured some leftists can be when they actually come together to coordinate. Disagreements that seem small to some can spiral into large ordeals for others and vice versa.
Now, of course, not every leftist organization and group is this dysfunctional. It should be noted right from the onset that many leftist organizations have formed robust coalitions with countless different groups, which will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. The prevalence of this meme speaks more to a feeling than an absolute reality. The fact that so many leftists routinely complain about this “problem” highlights something that is far more psychological than ideological.
While some of these disagreements are genuinely political, many of them appear to be defense mechanisms against past and current trauma.
Leftists spend most of their time being an ideological “other.” The percentage of people who identify on the left in the United States is far less than self-identified moderates and people on the right. The same trend remains true in Western Europe. The further left of the political spectrum someone goes, the more likely they will be a minority even within the Left. When we talk about groups such as self-identified communists or anarchists, they are so small that in most countries, we don’t really have good data around how many of them there are.
We often hear rightists lament about being a persecuted minority in America, but the data doesn’t support that conclusion. Republicans still hold a disproportionate amount of power at every governmental level and continue to dominate the judiciary and state legislatures. We are in many ways still living under the Reagan alignment that came to fruition during the 1980s. It’s common for Republican and Democratic leaders alike to preach the value of market-based solutions and limited government intervention.
While people on the right occasionally get penalized for their opinions (via losing their jobs or platform), this isn’t because of some leftist conspiracy. The ability to fire someone for a political opinion is actually because of our political landscape's right-leaning nature. We have undermined workers' rights so much so that businesses can terminate their workers for trivial things such as hairstyles, clothing, and of course, political statements made outside of office hours.
In fact, many leftists have been consistently de-platformed over the last few years, and this trend has not garnered nearly as much attention as the de-platforming of right-wing actors. A recent study out of Harvard stated that social media increases social disparities, which is something that ultimately benefits online actors on the right. As sociologist Jen Schradie wrote for NBC:
“Platforms heavily favor conservatives, who not only have war chests of funding but also a swath of digital boots on the ground. And they will marshal their forces if they perceive a threat to that advantage”
On top of the material disparity, many leftists concepts are also viewed negatively by the larger population. For example, most Americans hold an unfavorable perception of the term socialism (although favorability is far higher among Millenials and Gen Zers). Democrat Joe Biden secured support during the 2020 presidential election, in part, by disavowing socialism. It’s common for many Democrats to hold that position as well. In the words of a concerned Democratic parent writing into the Madison newspaper the Isthmus about their son's leftist radicalism:
“I’ve tried to talk our son out of his extreme positions, but he has a well-thought-out argument justifying his new radicalism. It’s been impossible to make any headway, intellectually or emotionally. Did we create a monster by politicizing him at too young an age?”
Even when people do not decry their leftist children as “monsters,” the language can get quite nasty. “You, Mr. Greiner, are the scum of the earth and a part of the reason that there will be a civil war in this country in your lifetime,” reads the line of an email sent to writer Michael Greiner, ultimately inspiring them to write the article On Being Unapologetically Liberal. Rude and demeaning language is by no means the worst outcome either. Leftists have been the victims of doxxing, harassment, and physical violence for expressing their opinions publically.
This unpopularity means that many on the Left have had to defend this provocative identity all of their lives against both outward detractors and alleged allies. It’s not easy being hated by the political majority, and that can take its toll. You inevitability develop defense mechanisms for dealing with that intense rejection.
Those trauma responses are understandable, but when you spend your entire life trying to prove that your political identity is valid against practically everyone, sometimes it becomes hard to sort out your critics from your enemies.
A popular meme about trauma is that it gives you “thicker skin,” or that it lets you not get “offended” by language and actions that bother you. This line of thinking can be partially true. Some people develop “mature defense mechanisms” (i.e., ones that don’t distort your feelings or reality) to deal with triggers. For example, they learn to sublimate the stress into an action that is considered “constructive” by society or use humor to de-escalate a situation.
The sad reality ignored by people using the “thicker skin” meme is that trauma often translates into defense mechanisms that are “neurotic” (i.e., they distort your emotions) or “immature” (i.e., they distort your perception of reality). Just as many people are as likely to repress their feelings or dissociate entirely when exposed to stressful situations. For example, “The Sunken Place” — the otherworldly realm Black people sink into in Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) — was such a powerful metaphor because it tapped into a real feeling. Many Black people have described using dissociation as a tool to deal with the ongoing white supremacy in America.
Although the trauma is not the same, leftism brings with it its own sort of baggage. As we have already established, many leftists experience stigmatization and other penalties for expressing their views, leading to the same neurotic and immature defense mechanisms. It’s normal to hear how leftists repress the way they feel on a day-to-day basis. “I don’t even want to open the box,” describes someone referred to as Dev in Psychology Today on why they don’t speak politics with their parents. “It’s more than normal, totally off-limits. In 2012, we did have some conversation, and I don’t want to go there again.” Dev reportedly had been kicked out of his parents' house at 18 years old because of these political differences and now refuses to bring the subject up.
There are many ways people react to this kind of trauma. Some people don’t develop “thicker skin,” but rather a greater sensitivity to the perceived threats around them. Trauma gives them “thinner skin.” They are on high alert all the time, which can create a tendency to pounce on even the smallest of threats.
This “thin skin” happens with many different types of groups, especially those exposed to a lot of trauma. For example, it’s been written about how many queer people are cruel to one another because trauma has given them defense mechanisms that flatten interactions into either all good or all bad, referred to in Psychology as splitting. When someone in their community does something “bad,” they are swift to roast that person as awful. As author Kai Cheng Thom writes for Daily Extra in their brilliant piece Why are queer people so mean to each other?:
“This, I believe, is why traumatized communities struggle so profoundly with loving one another. We have been hard-wired for suspicion and terror of betrayal, which in turn feeds into the logics of disposability and incarceration: we come to believe that making a mistake — any mistake, whether big or small — makes someone bad and dangerous.”
You see this same dynamic play out again and again in leftist spaces, especially anonymous spaces online. Spend a couple of hours persuing Twitter or Instagram, and you will see two users with roses in their bios tearing each other down over a disagreement an outside viewer can hardly understand. Eventually, someone blocks the other person, and they brag about how they have happily burned a bridge with someone more ideologically aligned to them than 90% of the country.
An infamous example of this comes from a series of minor snafus YouTuber Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) made in 2020. She Tweeted something mildly insensitive about nonbinary people. She also gave an eight-second voice-over clip to a transgender person named Buck Angel, considered by some to be enbyphobic (i.e., discriminatory towards trans people outside the male-female binary). These decisions upset many people and caused a scandal she attempted to address in a video entitled Canceling.
Now maybe Wynn does have some mild internalized transphobia —a lot of trans people do (raises hand awkwardly). This article aims not to claim who is right or wrong but rather to highlight how quickly the situation escalated. There were a lot of people who not only criticized her actions but labeled her trans or enbyphobic. As one trans user put it:
“weird how im 30 and trans and managed not to be a truscum. maybe im just some kind of anomaly. or maybe contrapoints is a conniving ratfucking kapo who could do with a fully wound backhand to the mouth idk lol.”
Those are are some intense words for an indiscretion that is ultimately minor, and truthfully they are remarks that sound very similar to the comments leftists have received from people on the Right. While Wynn definitely deserved to be held accountable for saying something problematic (we all do), there is a world of difference between someone who says something problematic (i.e., everyone) and someone such as the author J. K. Rowling who has made transphobia an active part of her identity. The first one requires accountability while the latter needs to be defended against.
Yet this escalation makes perfect sense when you look at it from the lens of trauma. These posters are not necessarily invested in Wynn as much as they are interested in defending their in-group from perceived threats. They are treating a minor indiscretion as an existential threat because they are conflating conflict with betrayal.
Most people are protective of their identities, and leftists are no exception. A quick Google search will reveal thousands of semantic arguments about whether someone is a “true” leftist. Many commenters will take pains to distinguish between a liberal and a leftist, and the disdain between these two groups is palatable. “…when push comes to shove,” writes Ted Rall in Rasmussen Reports, “liberals will ultimately sell out their radical allies to the powers that be. And they will run away at the first sign of state oppression.”
This visceral reaction to preserve one’s identity from outside threats exists with any in-group, but something that needs to be acknowledged is that much of leftist anger is valid. There has historically been a lot of effort to squash leftist discourse in a way that doesn’t exist for conservative and centrist movements. The FBI has targeted a wide range of entities, from civil rights leaders to the communist party to independent black-owned bookstores. The CIA has infamously tried to suppress leftist movements both in the United States and abroad. Even now, there is compelling evidence that the US government is spying on the latest wave of activists, especially Black rights activists. This history has translated into an ironic and sometimes not so ironic paranoia as leftist posters joke about “CIA psyops” and other government infiltration.
Furthermore, while the Left is large enough to help the Democrats swing elections, they are typically not so large a voting bloc to dictate policy. This state of affairs will lead to situations where many US politicians will use progressive rhetoric, only for them to refuse to back progressive policies. For example, during the 2020 campaign trail, Senator Jon Ossoff would tweet statements critical of insurance companies, but in an interview with Axios, he affirmed that he was against policies such as the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. He had a digital persona of a progressive, but the moment you dove a little deeper, it was apparent that he was more politically moderate.
Many leftists feel that a minority of politicians actively mislead them to gain clout in progressive spaces, which has fostered genuine distrust. It’s not uncommon for a public figure to claim to be progressive, only for them to try to paternalistically undermine that position once they are in power. For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated that she believes healthcare is a right for all Americans. Whenever advocates try to push for more expansive coverage through Medicare for All, however, she typically warns caution instead. As she told the Washington Post:
“Show me how you think you can get there. We all share the value of health care for all Americans — quality, affordable health care for all Americans. What is the path to that? I think it’s the Affordable Care Act, and if that leads to Medicare for All, that may be the path.”
Yet reporting from the Intercept shows that Pelosi worked behind the scenes to reassure healthcare executives that Medicare for All or single-payer would not make it to the floor. The problem is not that she disagrees with this position but that she pretends that these disagreements are merely political (i.e., what legislation can pass) when it’s evident that she is personally against such policy for either material or ideological reasons. It’s disagreement masquerading as concern. Many leftists consequently have a low bar for what they perceive to be “pretenders” because they have had to sniff them out their entire lives. As user barberwarren13 tweets:
“the reason i’m more critical of typical democrats than republicans is coz dems act like they’re the party of the ~compassionate guys~ but they don’t even believe in socialized healthcare lmao”
You might think that these defense mechanisms wouldn’t fire within more inclusive leftist spaces, but the Left is a paradoxical place of both acceptance and rejection. The Right’s reverence of hierarchy and tradition causes it to reject anyone who doesn’t adhere to mainstream norms. This tension means it’s common to see many Leftists hold various marginalized identities because the Left offers the bare minimum of tolerance.
The Left is not free of discrimination, though. Leftists can still express biases such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. There is an entire subset of people, referred to as class reductionists, who believe that “identity politics” are a distraction that undermine support in leftism from the working class. Leftists can be just as discriminatory as conservatives, but their hatred can sting more because they are supposed to be allies. In the words of Roqayah Chamseddine in her fantastic essay Who are you actually fighting for?:
“Our leftist communities are not immune to this brutality — there are even times in which the political associations of our comrades are used against us in a way that absolves them of their wrongdoings. We are told that they are pillars of the community, that they’re admired, they didn’t mean it, that we must have misunderstood, and on it goes. The excuses are as reactionary as those coming from any other space, and we are forced to combat them just as other women, to prove our humanity.”
This anger and hurt we see in leftist spaces come from a place of real trauma. It’s not wrong for people to want accountability and boundaries from those who have hurt them — those things are never wrong. Our sensitivities developed for a reason. The people who assert otherwise are engaging in emotional manipulation.
For many valid reasons, we are so used to sniffing out potential threats that our defense mechanisms are working on overdrive, and in the process, they can hinder our ability to move past disagreements. It’s an understandable hurdle, and one thankfully many people on the Left have been working on diligently for years.
Over a year ago now, I was at a political meeting where we decided which candidate our local chapter would endorse for city council. There were three major contenders, and conversations were heated. People had intense ideological disagreements over who to pick: some wanted the more established leftist contender; others wanted a promising up-and-comer; more still, campaigned for a middle-of-the-road candidate they claimed non-leftists might be more attracted to.
Surprisingly, however, the conversation never broke down. The moderators took steps to ensure everyone could talk, including weighting questions so more historically marginalized identities had the ability to speak first. People who took too much time were reminded swiftly that they were running over. We then voted for a candidate anonymously, giving plenty of opportunities for people to air grievances.
While ultimately not everyone was happy with the decision we ended up making, we grew to understand everyone’s perspective. It motivated us to address the concerns our members were saying about their preferred candidates. Working groups were established to address some of those gaps — and that work is still ongoing to this day. It is possible to become stronger from disagreements, not to be divided by them.
In political coalitions, disagreements are healthy. They indicate that your movement is large and robust enough to explore the multiple intersections of an issue. Calls for unity are ultimately signs of a movement in decline — one so anemic that it cannot handle everyone inside its tent. We should always want accountability when problems arise within a movement. The banner of free speech becomes problematic when it's used to shield hateful language and actions.
Still, someone disagreeing with your political plans is not in the same vein as someone wronging you personally. Natalie Wynn or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disagreeing with your opinions on strategy is not the same thing as Nancy Pelosi gaslighting you over single-payer or Donald Trump signing away protections for trans rights.
Many leftists have undergone a lot of trauma — too much for what is fair for one lifetime — but that trauma is not an excuse to dump out all our rage onto the people who activate our well-honed defenses.
I wish I could hold tightly onto everyone this broken society has hurt and shield them from the people seeking to do them harm. It would be nice to block out all the harmful people and only be surrounded by a flawless family of acceptance.
Sadly, no armor is strong enough to block out all that pain, and no family is so perfect.
We, instead, as an act of survival, are given the task of having to make a fairer society — and we will have to do things differently than the oppressors who ruled before us. If we want to build a world better than the one that hurt us, we need accountability over punishment, healing over retribution, and justice over vengeance.