Maybe the real problem with 2020 is that today's left just sucks?
An honest postmortem cannot romanticize a movement that probably didn't deserve to win
Freddie DeBoer and Vincient Bevins have both recently published books that purport to examine the manner in which the left-seeming energy of 2020 dissipated. I have purchased each but not been able to bring myself to read either. Not because I dislike the authors; quite the opposite, I admire them greatly and read their debuts. The problem is that I really, really don’t want to admit to myself how much the events of 2020 broke my hope and spirit.
What was your favorite lefty moment of that horrible year?
Was it the time an Hispanic business owner defended his storefront against anti-police protestors with a chainsaw, which caused said anti-police protestors to squeal that they were calling the police?
Was it when Chris Martin Palmer, an NBA reporter for ESPN, first tweeted “Burn that shit down. Burn it all down” along with a screenshot of a large arson in a dilapidated American city while his avatar was a cartoon portrait of George Floyd. And then, the very next day–same account, same avatar–he tweeted
“They just attacked our sister community down the street. It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates. They had to beat them back. Then destroyed a Starbucks and are now in front my building. Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.”
(Screenshot below. It has to be seen to be believed):
Or, saving the worst for last, perhaps your fondest memory was of Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone,” typically referred to as CHOP or CHAZ. Autonomous Zones were first theorized by “anarcho-immediatist” poet Hakim Bey, who envisioned them as lawless areas within larger communities that provided “radical safety” to their inhabitants. No laws, sure, but a helluva lot of rules. You can shoot up on the sidewalk or light a car on fire no problem, but if you dare misgender someone, express a forbidden thought, or otherwise just look funny, you are liable to get murdered by one of the self-annointed CHAZ “security personnel,” hormone-guzzling freaks armed with assault rifles.
You can guess how this played out. They had their tents, their drum circles, their needle exchanges, and their woefully pathetic community garden. They also executed at least one black child who was joyriding a stolen car within their supposedly law-free utopia. We know this happened because one of their brain dead community members posted a joyful tweet about the “beautiful shot placement” of said hormone-guzzling freaks (although a video of the incident, since scrubbed from the internet, confirmed the murder occurred after the vehicle was disabled).
What was the explanation for this? Not just for the murder itself, but for the celebration afterward? Well, they were scared and also the black kids were doing a minor crime. Literally, without exaggeration, within just a couple weeks of establishing their ideal, radical community, the left had become an even worse version of the murder cops they were supposedly protesting.
And so… I dunno. Maybe the spirit of 2020 wasn’t coopted by powerful forces or anything so much as it just sucked? Like, maybe these people are just violent shitheads whose differentiation from the far right is much more a matter of style than of substance?