Left movements police their own borders and shrink their ranks

Evidence

Speaking of the movements I know something about, I can say this: On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Bannon’s courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren’t already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 410

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Klein’s self-critical inversion — inclusive values with exclusionary practice — is the core diagnostic she uses to explain right-wing gains from within the left’s own failures.
• XREF: connects to: The left’s defeat may have been a slow disintegration rather than a battle — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 276; Intellectual movements police themselves through veiled threats of exit — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 348; Fear of organizational abuse paralyzed the left into ceding power to enemies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 905