From the Alt Left Manifesto group on Facebook, a post by Ryan England.
If I personally had to decide upon one single definitive statement of what the Alt-Left is, I’d go with this entry in the Beyond Highbrow blog – Dealbreakers: What the Alternative Left Is Not. Firstly, I think this movement owes Robert Lindsay a hat tip for blazing this trail for us. Agree with him or not on any given issue, respect is owed the first (to my knowledge) blogger and online presence to use the Alt-Left label.
I don’t think we have to agree with every last qualification Lindsay lists in the post. But he does state with perfect succinctness what I think the overarching defining principle is:
The Alternative Left should be for people who are mostly liberal, Left or progressive in their characters, souls, politics and voting. However, we are disenchanted with some aspects of Left, especially the Cultural Left in the US. On those issues, we feel that the Left has gone too far. So while we are more conservative than the Cultural Left, we are not all the way to the social conservatism of the US Right, which mostly appalls us. So Alt Left types would be more centrist on cultural issues, not as leftwing as the Cultural Left but at the same time repulsed by the cultural reaction of the Right.
However, on economics, most Alt Left types would feel that the Western liberal/Left has not gone far enough. The Democratic Party in the US, Labor in the UK, the “Socialist” Party in France, and the “Social Democratic” PASOK in Greece have all sold the workers out badly for the rich, the corporations and capital in general. They claim to represent the working people, but instead they are traitors to the working class.
So the Alt Left would be for people who feel that the Western Liberal-Left in governments of the West is too rightwing on economic issues but too leftwing on social issues.
