Why Leftists Can't Enjoy Anything

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Sure, if a left-winger thinks of nothing else but the political situation in our free-market society, that'll amount to a lot of depressing thoughts. There may indeed be people like that but the lefties I know don't seem as obsessional as that and they don't seem any unhappier than anybody else. They grow flowers and vegetables in their gardens and allotments, they play music together (often at folk clubs), they cook wholefood, drink green tea instead of coca-cola, mess about with herbal remedies, ride bicycles, share experiences and skills in fighting back against the system, run benefit gigs in aid of right-on causes, find alternative ways of doing things that don't so much hook them into the power of the capitalist system, such as the Woodcraft Folk instead of the Boy Scouts.

I did know a depressed Marxist once, who never looked beyond his Marxist glasses, and the other lefties who knew him tended to see him as a pain in the butt, because he was so down on everything they tried to do, frequently saying they were wasting their time and losing patience with anybody expressing an idea that was even slightly naive. I both felt sorry for him and admired him for his intelligence. He was a good father to his son, and for all his faults, he was sincere, and physically harmless.

So all in all I think the video is just taking an extreme example and maybe trying to insinuate that all lefties are like that. You could probably do the same thing about right-wingers, though of course they're getting their way a bit more often. Alf Garnett was a fictional right-wing working class stereotype like that, back in the 1960s when left-wing ideology was at its peak in popularity. Real people are rarely that far gone.

For what it's worth, it's an internal critique, not an externally imposed stereotype.

Well then, all credit to its author's ability to laugh at himself, his comrades, or the wild stereotype he uses to represent "leftists." But I'm not too concerned with the political persuasion of its author, only with what they said, which seems a gross exaggeration. I suppose the video's only plausible take-home message is that lefties shouldn't get too hung-up and depressed about how sh***y and right-wing the world seems to be. But I suspect most people already knew that.

In the UK we've had a right wing government for 13 years and during that time it has become even more right wing, we also had Brexit which was a massive right wing movement. Weirdly, right wingers don't seem particularly happy despite having had everything their own way for so long.

A free-market society should never even have a “political situation.”

!	Cornflake wrote:
	As requested, some off-topic posts have been removed.

I don't see what that has to do with the meaning of what I said, or with the topic I was contributing to. I feel pretty sure that free markets (i.e. markets without rules) are a large part of the essence of a right-wing society, but for the purpose of this thread it hardly matters, though it might make a good topic for a new thread if anybody's interested in debating it. The point I was making was that, as the video suggests, if a left-winger focusses exclusively on the fact that society is rather more right-wing than they want it to be, then of course they're likely to feel negative.

Just that if a lefty CAN be happy, they probably aren't really very far left. You feel SOME freedom to trade in value. That doesn't make you a liberal. That makes you a libertarian.

Most every left-winger I've ever met infuses a "political situation" into the idea of a free-market society which, important to note, doesn't exist in America. The problem is that the political situation is created by government intrusion as demanded by lefties. There elected leaders create the problem only to complain that the problem is the non-existent free-market society. Yeah, lefties are unhappy. They don't follow an ideology in which they can be otherwise.

I mean...honestly, I don't consider myself a lefty. I'm more right-leaning, but I'm not sure I like identifying as a conservative, either. The function of our two-party system has become a way for one group of people to react negatively to ideas of the other group. Meaningful discussion is important in solving problems, but both extremes have hit a polarized equilibrium within America such that there can't be any more progress made. What's really happening is that they are career politicians who depend on each other, their opposing views, and scripted narratives to entice voters to maintain the status quo.

Once one side or the other becomes happy with things, politicians start to lose elections. So they work to create problems in order to create solutions and work the PR angle.

Thus it is necessary for politicians to have a "political situation" in a free-market society. Then they can dream up some problem that requires government regulation while the other side cries about how regulation is government interference and threatens jobs. Boo-hoo. Reelect me if you wanna save your job. Blah-blah-blah, rinse and repeat. Happy politicians don't win elections, happy voters don't elect anyone.