The Left’s Radical Problem

By Simon C.

April 22, 2022

“Cancel culture” has gone by different names in the past and so is not a particularly new social phenomenon—take McCarthy in the Cold War era, for example. It’s taken the name especially recently, coinciding with the popularity of the internet and mass media. In recent internet history, both the left and right have engaged in forms of canceling. In 2017, for example, the alt-right, declining from the height of their popularity after the Charlottesville rally, canceled a YouTube creator called Kraut and Tea for making videos criticizing various members of the alt-right for their pseudo-scientific claims about the connection between the race of a person and their IQ score.

The online left-wing has seen a rise in recent years in popularity on the internet since around 2019. Leftist (e.g., socialists, communists) video essayists had been around since at least 2017 or earlier, but were smaller spaces on platforms like YouTube before the declining of the mid-2010s “skeptic” and alt-right era of dominant internet political thought. Today, they have a large political foothold on YouTube and extreme representation in Twitter communities and in Twitch politics. When social power online shifted in favor of the left, members representing the previous era of the internet were banished from YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter. Stefan Molyneux, Gavin McInnes, and Nick Fuentes are among a few of the names of the right-wing who fell from their online grace in the 2010s.

And these bans might even be consistent with the paradox of tolerance—the idea that we ought to reserve the right to suppress ideologies whose conclusion is to suppress the speech of others, but not to do so while they can be countered by popular opinion. Karl Popper is the name often referenced in visual summaries of his paradox from The Open Society and Its Enemies in plain English. However, these summaries are often incomplete and therefore misrepresent Popper's true argument. The online left (leftists specifically) seems so zealous in removing people they mislabel (though sometimes they are correct) as fascists that they forget the passage about “counter[ing] them by rational argument and keep[ing] them in check by public opinion.”

If they were to follow the tolerance paradox completely, it could have a couple benefits. First, they would not appear so radical to liberals and moderates who are to their left but are also often dismissed as fascist-adjacent for not being radical enough. Second, they would gain a more honest engagement with discourse and with finding an ever-improving truth.

Here is a thought experiment emphasizing the importance of disagreement: what is the feeling of being wrong? The statements people typically give describe the feeling of realizing they're wrong, so what being wrong feels like is being correct, because who would believe something they know to be false? Even in the conflict-rich internet, having substantial opposing factions can force all sides to have a minimum quality of arguments attached within reality. In more rigorous contexts, disagreement is valuable to discover where you’re wrong and don’t realize it and to strengthen your arguments.

Yet the online left does not seem interested in truly corresponding to this principle, evidenced by online leftist political influencers’ comments on Twitch panels and Twitter. Most recently and absurdly, much of the online left on Twitter has been interested in attacking Alex Walker, a gay and moderate Democrat running in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district against Republican Lauren Boebert, one of the most right-wing members in the House of Representatives (the newly redistricted CO-3 has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+15). Hasan Piker, a leftist and the largest political pundit who streams on Twitch, liked a quote-Retweet calling Walker a “smarmy annoying [fag].” Other quote tweets and replies to Walker’s Tweet also attacked him for his identity. It’s one thing for online leftists to attack the far right; it’s another for them to discriminate against moderates on the basis of their sexuality, sex, or race (who are, by the way, seeking to make more of a real-life impact than they ever could). 

This is anti-truth and hypocrisy of the highest order. If the left wants to be more reasonable in the online space, they must rethink their engagement with their political opponents. This means less often mindlessly dismissing others who are just as human and impressionable as us and more often sitting down with them for a friendly talk.