Hi @hexcrystals! You’ve received a lovely letter. 💌

correct. sitting in your room jerking it to fantasies of a revolution that has no leaders, no organizational infrastructure, and no strategy is not more historically progressive than participating in electoral politics. revolutions don’t spontaneously self-organize. the revolutionary left in the United States is fragmentary and riven with internecine feuds, and uses abstentionism as an excuse for its irrelevance. anytime somebody suggests that milieu might not be a tenable vehicle for large-scale political change, somebody leans back in their chair, sneers, and offers some cutting remark with zero substance that functions solely to indicate that cool kids don’t vote, cool kids don’t team up with liberals, cool kids don’t care about large-scale effectiveness, they only care about the incestuous world of far-left politics.

they have no substantive defense of their behavior, of course. if they did, they would be able to offer a defense besides repeating Democratic campaign slogans in increasingly mocking tones to indicate their disapproval. the “far left” in american politics these days really is just an unpleasant, cliquish social club on the internet. and once you notice how their model for politics is Mean Girls, how they have no style of communication that isn’t dripping with irony so they don’t actually have to make a positive claim that they might have to defend, how they have zero ambitions beyond their extremely insular world, it becomes impossible to ignore.