Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 1 of ???

In my "manifesto post" I started a couple years back, I keep a running list of insights that feel to be a) somewhat unique and b) somewhat valuable.  One insight that feels relevant to the ongoing Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict is this:

"Many Americans hold essentially Manichean views of the world, but those views are mostly a direct consequence of our hegemony and our political system.  Our two party system leads to a red team/blue team mentality where people who identify with one team view anyone who doesn't adhere to all perceived tenets of that team with suspicion.  Similarly, people who view American hegemony to be "good" tend to be suspicious of those who voice concerns to the contrary (and vice versa)."

Both of these Manichean tendencies have become more explicit as the United States' informal alliance with Ukraine has turned the conflict into a proxy battle between competing world powers.  The most common demonstration of such a worldview has been to label folks on the left as "tankies" or "traitors" for making relatively milquetoast statements that echo consensus opinion from not that long ago.  But this line of attack is mostly just reflective of the knee-jerk anti-leftism that's been bashed into American's skulls for decades, so I don't think it's worth mentioning beyond this acknowledgment.

What is worth mentioning are the ways people justify this knee-jerk anti-leftism to themselves and to others.  This sort of rhetoric and logic is much more insidious than simple name-calling, and has effectively become the prevailing ideology that assists capital in marginalizing the socialist/communist/collectivist impulses that arise naturally from the deleterious effects of capitalism.  I'm not going to try to write something comprehensive about this because I value my time (ha ha), but I did want to remark on one series of tweets as I find it particularly illustrative of the larger phenomenon.

The original tweet in question is the one below (in case you're not aware, Chapo Trap House is a leftist podcast and the QT is a tweet from one of the hosts): 

First off, "contrarian-fascist" isn't a thing, so this person is effectively just saying "fascist" in his 2019 post.  This means that his argument is that a single post expressing distaste with blind worship of a politician is effectively "fascism."  Aside from the patent absurdity of calling someone "fascist" for a tweet, this completely misunderstands what fascism is.  Fascism relies on dutiful adherence to authority, which the post he cites is in direct opposition to.  Because of this fundamental incongruity this is a perfect demonstration of the second type of suspicion I mention above.  It's also a textbook example of horseshoe theory, in which various liberals, centrists, and even leftists smear others as secret right-wingers based on some superficial perception.  Of course, this is bullshit and it's important to understand this and fight back against this internalized delusion. 

The replies feature a variety of flavors of this pathology.  This one builds its own horseshoe theory on shared resentment of liberals.  The superficiality of the argument belies the posters' apparent incuriosity.  Leftists can't possible have a more considered position on this matter, it has to be this simple rubric I have in my mind! 

There's also this slightly more advanced strain of the same theory, in which it's assumed that leftists can't possibly believe the things they profess, and are only drawn to simple aesthetics:

Finally, there's an attempt to do a material analysis of the situation, which is at least a little more honest than the rest of this.  The problem is...how does this make any sense?  The money in question is not for posts but for the deeper discussions on the matter hand.  That's what a podcast is after all!  Are Chapo patrons paying Matt Christman for his posts?  I am certainly not as the website is free.

Moments like this are revealing.  A subset of the population that likely considers themselves anti-war (and perhaps even anti-imperialist) will often revert to this fundamental suspicion of others when faced with arguments that stem from well-considered positions on those very same anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments.  In doing so, they effectively do imperialists' work for them, seemingly unconsciously foreclosing the possibility of a future free from imperialist aggression.  If you're on the left it's important to fight back against this.  And if you find yourself fighting with the left it's important to ask yourself whose interests your suspicion of others truly serves.

ADDENDUM: A fun thing to do when someone subtweets "the left" about not showing proper condemnation of Russia is to ask for examples because you will almost never actually receive any such examples.