TO THE EDITOR:
The Aug. 29 opinion piece "Not my liberals" shows a lack of empathy, hypocritical reasoning and a poor understanding of leftist thought.
The piece misrepresents the left as inherently violent and treats anyone left of the Sanders campaign as militant and politically undeveloped.
The phrase “[w]e should seek to distance ourselves from radical and potentially dangerous groups on either side of the spectrum” engages in the same “Both Sides” rhetoric used in response to Charlottesville.
The author also recommends placing faith in the police, ignoring the fact that those citizens most in need of protection, the people who work the hardest to guard their communities from violent far-right groups, are the same class of citizens who endure daily and systematic abuse by American police.
The author criticizes the use of straw man arguments to score political points, but does just that in the preceding paragraph.
He defends a centrist ideology by criticizing a violent offshoot of the political left instead of engaging with the anarchist, communist and anti-fascist thought he claims to knock down.
Additionally, dismissing anarchist and communist thought solely because they challenge our current institutions espouses a brand of centrist accommodation that fosters, rather than combats, racist and authoritarian violence.
The article concludes by discouraging empathy. Given the current socio-economic and political situation, one in which the nation’s most vulnerable groups are subject to state sanctioned violence and far-right ideology enjoys mainstream appeal, it is alarming that anyone’s ideal solution would involve eliminating anti-fascist organizers and curtailing empathy.
