- One might think that the radical, anti-liberal left is just bitter that they have been pushed off the edge of the spectrum of political discourse and relegated to ever-shrinking university departments and a handful of sympathetic periodicals. The story, however, is more complicated than that—and its complications have profound relevance to the frustrations and peculiarities of the current Western political landscape. The burgeoning anti-oppression movement is concerned primarily with manifestations of false consciousness, and their diagnoses consequently center not on the overtly reactionary forces of society, but on those claiming to be liberal and progressive. Yet what does it mean to be focused on “racism without racists” when racists are hardly an extinct breed? What led to this focus, and what does it mean to the future of leftism? Classifying leftist ideology in a framework of agency and trust, I find a buried contradiction at the heart of anti-oppressive activism, one in which practitioners pathologically self-position themselves in a space of chronic moral jeopardy.
I completely skipped the Pit of Despair and Suspicious Return to Ethics sections, which is about the halfway point. The main simple idea I personally gathered from the article is: Almost everyone can say they agree with each other about an issue(s). They should also be able to agree to work together because more needs to be done, but generally there's a divide instead. The divide is when "activists / moralists" want to take a quotidian / ethical approach, while "critics" want to take a structural approach. An example of the problem this causes is a critic vocalising that the "time" of they as an audience is being disrespected by "online surveys." Some of the activists handle this by attacking the character of the critics, because they see it as problems with the current status quo again being ignored. Imho eventually the divide balances out enough that a social change starts to happen. So the solution is to try not be too dismissive of others, even if they're currently saying the "workers revolution" is the solution ;)