Sami: Robert, every single counterpoint you make brings us back, full circle, to the ultimate question concerning what the Alt-Left is really about:
Does it aspire, truly, to become a genuine, mass-based political movement with a clearly-articulated platform, that can change this country for the better from the ground up? Or is it a mere, irrelevant intellectual exercise on a few blogs?
There were 18,000 members of Alt Left groups on Facebook recently. It has now dropped down to ~6,000.
Also the existing Alt Left seems to have been colonized by regular Democratic Party people pushing anti-Republican partisan politics along with typical SJW stuff. The best analysis of the Alt Left right now is that it has been co-opted by Democratic Party liberal entryists.
And then the movement itself died down for some unknown reason. We had a terrible problem with being swamped by rightwingers and Libertarians the whole time we were popular on Facebook. It was a never-ending nightmare keeping the rightwingers out.
The problem is that nowadays when you go anti-SJW, you get swamped by rightwingers. And everyone on the liberal-Left is pretty much automatically an SJW.
And there is an odd process whereby as leftwing people get more and more anti-SJW, they start moving more and more away from left economics towards more openly promoting capitalism. This makes no sense to me. Why on Earth would capitalism be opposed to anti-SJWism? Feminism is just a group of women to sell women-oriented products to. Capitalists would love to cater to Blacks to sell them stuff. Capitalists will fall over backwards to cater to and suck up to gay people if only to get them to buy stuff. Why should capitalists care about Muslims? Capitalists would love to cater to this group and sell products especially for them. There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever for capitalists to be anti-SJW. It makes no sense. And it makes a lot more sense for them to go full SJW if only to sell more stuff to new groups.
It makes somewhat more sense that left economics be tied in with SJWism, as both are about equality, but there’s no reason left economics should hate or oppose heterosexuals, Whites, or men. Why should it? None of those three groups have anything to do with economics. Also the Left has always been sexual liberationist, but now that feminism has taken over the Left, the Left has become as prudish, Victorian and sex-hating as the Christian Right. Puritanism has no logical connection with the left or left economics. Why do Left economics have to do with sex and fucking? Nothing.
The Alt Left was an attempt to sever this horrible intertwining of left economics with SJWism and rightwing economics with anti-SJWism, but we haven’t had much success at that. When liberal Left people go anti-SJW, they abandon Left economics too. And no one subscribing to Left economics wants to go against SJWism. So economics and the culture war are still horribly tied together, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to disentangle them. It’s so frustrating.
There are several online magazines which people are referring to as Alt Left. There are some folks on Youtube calling themselves Alt Left, and there are others who are being referred to as Alt Left. I would say that it’s a very small movement, but it definitely exists.
Part of the problem is that people like me are too lazy to promote it. I have my own Alt Left group on Facebook, and I encountered quite a bit of interest in the subject. I was also on some of the other Alt Left groups, and there were a lot of interested and curious folks. The problem is mostly just laziness. It’s incredibly hard work to grow these movements, and I for one am just too lazy to do the hard work. But there are others still working on this project.
There is also the Realist Left, another small project that definitely exists.
A political scientist in Poland got interested in us and wrote a couple of pieces about us in political journals. A couple of other political journals over there also wrote us up. Mostly no one has the faintest idea of who we are, so first of all, we need publicity more than anything else.
