I think the message board mode of communication doesn’t lend itself well towards complex understandings of a particular person’s political philosophy and ideology. I’m not that interested in trying to communicate it via this method either.
At least part of this has been because of poor communication on my part, but I think there is also a segment of posters who assume things about me because of the labels I use. Weirdly, it tends to be liberals who don’t give me the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve criticized Sanders on this message board for his use of democratic socialist. He ran an unserious campaign in 2016 in part because he thought he’d just be a message candidate. He’s idealistic, like me, and put his commitment to his ideology over political practice in praising Ortega and Castro.
Again, it’s hard to discuss this on this medium for me. Loosely, my politics derive from my belief in universal human rights. This is a belief borne out of liberalism. I came to socialism through this belief in liberalism, which confuses a lot of liberals due to the longtime association of socialism with Stalinism and Maoism.
I don’t take Marxism as some kind of orthodoxy than we can’t stray from or some kind of religious text. I especially don’t believe this when it comes to the politics of Western democracies. Nor do I think that culture is irrelevant. The mistake you make is in having not examined the evolution of Marxist thought, which has incorporated the cultural turn and can exist alongside the revelations there.
Hope that helps position my thought more clearly, though I doubt it will.
1. I must have missed the part where you have characterized Bernie as unserious. I'm not saying it's not there. I've just not seen it. I have seen you laud Bernie's messaging skills and talk about how he would have won in 2016 (which is weird given your characterization of that campaign as unserious, but you might mean 2020, not 2016). If you agree that no Dem should ever speak well of Castro or any other "scary leftist" (a category that includes some real scary leftists, like Maduro, and some not-so-scary leftists that will get lumped into that category by a population that has trouble identifying any countries on a map), that's good. I'm not sure where to draw the "scary leftist" line. I think Lula is on the right side of that line.
2. Yes, it is a bit weird to see someone attracted to socialism or Marxism as a result of commitment to human rights, but I have to be fair: it's 2025, not 1975. Being "marxist" today is not to be Stalinist or Maoist. There's a separate question as to whether Marxism can actually get you where you want to go, but that's not for this thread.
3. Trust me, I've examined the evolution of Marxist thought. I've been reading Frankfurt School since before you were born. Gramsci is old hat. I lived through the Marxist culture wars of the 1990s.
In assessing your views, I have been drawing on statements you made about yourself. If those statements haven't been perfectly accurate, or if I read too much into them, OK. I rarely hold one's past disavowed positions against a person for several reasons. First, who cares what they believed if they don't any more (this isn't always true, but usually). Second, it leads to useless fights about what that person did believe, and/or who is responsible for the miscommunication or misunderstanding. Third, it quickly becomes self-parody, like Life of Brian.
So if I've been misunderstanding your position on culture and politics, thank you for clarifying. I don't care if I misunderstood or you miscommunicated or both or neither. Please keep in mind that I'm twice your age, which means I don't remember stuff quite as well as I used to, especially given how many posters there are here. It's hard for me to keep everyone straight. I know, it will shock you, but I've never been a people person. A people-caring person, 100%. But my brain is more organized around ideas than sociality.
Point is, if in the future, I've misstated your views, just say that. "Didn't we have this discussion before." And then try not to be too judgmental or impart to me allegations of bad faith. I do my best. Of all the things one might accuse me of, bad faith fits least. And I should also note that I'm probably the most frequently mischaracterized or misunderstood poster here.
4. Liberals don't give always leftists the benefit of the doubt, because we've been scarred. We see them as unreliable allies, which frequently they are. See, e.g., Rashida Tlaib and "uncommitted." You don't have to answer for the Naderites, given that you were an infant. But I would hope young people could at least respect that old-timers have PTSD about lefitsts wrecking what we've been trying to do, which is pretty much defeating the ignorance and hate machine that has been the GOP for some time.
5. Also recognize that the financial crisis of 2008 was a defining event for many older people. When I started teaching, the financial crisis was front and center in everyone's minds. When I was finishing teaching, most of my students generally had an idea of what it was and why it was bad (and typically wanted to know more about it), but it wasn't formative for them. It's been almost 20 years now. The average law student was maybe 10 when it went down.
And there was a LOT of scarring there, because the left fucking went berserk about TARP. Yes, it sucked. Dems followed it up with Dodd-Frank, which was supposed to make future TARP's unnecessary. But TARP was needed to prevent the world from spiraling into a Great Depression. (Technically TARP was a Bush production but Dems voted for it in Congress and Obama continued the approach). And the housing crisis was not actually Dems' fault. It actually had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Liberals were trying to save the world, while leftists were singing songs in tents near Wall Street.
Then the left spiraled into the "TPP is TERRIBLE even though none of us can tell you anything about it" mode, and that hurt HRC in 2016, and it was all so frustrating because the young leftists were barely more informed on the issue than the MAGAs.
You don't have to answer for any of that, but we lived it and to some extent still are. And we're going to view the world according to our experiences. We don't trust the left. That's a reality and it's incumbent upon the left to at least participate in bridge-building, which they have not been doing so well. There are exceptions (e.g. AOC) but there's still too much antagonism on our left flank.