How Covert Narcissism Is Destroying The Left

Putting the I in collective

I remember going to a writers’ meetup at Zeitgeist - a punk bar with a great patio on the northern-most edge of the Mission District when I met her. She was a violently suburban single mom who was still being financially supported by her religious parents. She was also a gender-fluid, bisexual, self-described Satanist who suffered from undiagnosed autism. None of this bothered me. There’s nothing wrong with being gender-fluid or fucking all the fish in the sea. I’m the type of person who just wants people to be happy. If you need to create 7 different marginalized identities to help you grapple with the fact that you’re white, who am I to stop you?

I remember at one point in the conversation, the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement was mentioned. She then said “If I had a babysitter, I’d be out in front, shielding the people of color from the police.”

Unfortunately for the all people of color, she didn’t have a babysitter. So she stayed home in Walnut Creek. She also called Concord, a working class suburb with a large Hispanic population “ghetto.” The USS Allyship was sinking fast.

This archetype of person isn’t unique in the slightest. Although, I find them endlessly annoying, I also find them inherently fascinating. The only problem that I truly have with them is that their presence is destroying the integrity and legitimacy of leftist critique within the U.S. empire. And, even though they may not be aware of it, their commodification and accentuation of identity in an attempt for acceptance is similar to a corporation attempting to rebrand after their product has fallen out of favor.

I grew up with many people who were regularly “problematic.” I’m no better. I’ve said horrible things to friends growing up. I’ve made racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive jokes. I’d be a liar if I said otherwise. We all said crazy shit to each other on a constant basis. The millennial generation was influenced by South Park, Hip Hop and Rock before mainstream America abandoned the bands. I’m part of that generation. For better or worse, it shaped me.

But ideologically, I was always on the side of the oppressed and I never felt insecure about my stance, so I never had to police my expression to prove it. I knew who I was. What I didn’t realize was that many people didn’t know who they were and instead of looking at life as something to be lived, they looked at life as a series of stages for them to perform on. Their stances are constantly shifting and suffer innumerable inconsistencies because they base their beliefs on the reaction of the audience and not by their own intuition and experiences.

The crowd-sourcing of acceptability is exactly what leads to catastrophe. Going against the crowd, or critically thinking about their motivations isn’t easy. It’s hard, and it takes a certain amount of courage. Bravery is the the scarcest of all natural resources.

The modern, and in a sense, post-modern left suffers from this group think, but it also suffers from something unique unto itself: the entire group wants to be the leader, yet there’s nothing to differentiate them because they are all saying the same things. The crowd-sourced social causes are just conduits to supplement their own personal ambitions, and the height of that ambition appears to be attention. It’s like if MLK was trying to do the “I Have a Dream” speech, but entire audience continued to interrupt him because because the speech wasn’t tailor-made to fit their personal brand of victimhood. And instead of being pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement, it was reduced to infighting.

I’ve always felt that life is easy to figure out based on a relatively simple observational question: Who are the ‘powers that be’ elevating and who are they assassinating? Martin Luther King is probably the greatest persuasive essayist to have ever lived. I remember reading Letters from Birmingham Jail, and early on in the letter, King describes the pain of explaining to his daughter that she couldn’t go to an amusement park because she wasn’t white. “when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky”

Letters from Birmingham Jail wasn’t an attack for a perceived lack of understanding, but an invitation to understand that went beyond just words on a piece of paper. They were aspirational on a legislative level. They screamed for change. It was a metaphorical call to arms, and it was successful because it made white people and black people understand that they’re not different. The pain of exclusion is as universal as wanting to shield a child from the pains of pride and stupidity that plague the adult world.

If you’re a fascist, this is terrifying. So naturally, they shot him in the fuckin’ face.

But before they shot him in the face, they tried to discredit him. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI at the time, called MLK the “most notorious liar in the country.” But MLK wasn’t lying. America was, and still is racist. But racism isn’t something that can be foundational. No form of exclusion can exist without classism. Every type of negative ‘ism’ is built on a foundation of classism. Racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, and transphobia cannot effectively exist without material exclusion.

Martin Luther King knew this, and it was precisely why he had to die. When MLK was assassinated, he was working on something that was truly revolutionary in the context of life in the United States: the Poor People’s Campaign. This campaign was, typical of King, aspirational on a legislative level. It was a multi-racial march that demanded the passing of an Economic Bill of Rights.

When Washington D.C. learned of the possibility of a unified, multiracial campaign for economic justice, they panicked. The first thing they did was authorize 20,000 armed troops to guard the Capital in the event of the march.

King never got to see what would, in my view, be his greatest achievement. Because it didn’t happen. The Economic Bill of Rights died with King…

What Jesus Christ was to the Roman Empire, Martin Luther King is to the American Empire - a beautiful revolutionary who was murdered only to have his likeness bastardized to sell enough shit to fill a million landfills.

But enough with the assassination stuff, who gets elevated in mainstream contemporarily? Anyone divisive enough. Fox News and other right wing media organizations tell white people to be scared of minorities because they’re criminals with varying levels of sophistication. MSNBC and other “left wing” media organizations tell you should be scared of white people because they’re all racist. Except for Joe Biden, of course…

What’s worse than a guy who’s funding a genocide? A guy who’s funding a genocide AND isn’t polite about it on Twitter (or X… shut the fuck up) apparently.

Those who describe themselves as leftists aren’t getting assassinated anymore because they’re not a threat to anything. They’ve mostly abandoned economic justice for identity politics. And the problem with identity politics is that it is primarily focused on tearing people down based upon where they sit on an arbitrary sliding scale of oppression. This leads to self obsession, virtue signaling and narcissism. It makes people forget you don’t have to be marginalized to care about other people, you just need to be a person. It doesn’t lead to change because identity politics are designed to highlight all the things that make you part of a problem, but it doesn’t help you become part of a solution.

It’s not all about I, it’s all about us. Us being everyone. But we can’t reach everyone when we’re hyper-focused on either real or feigned (if you’re not diagnosed, don’t say it) reasons to legitimize the right to speak. Hair-dye, hella piercings, tattoos, alternative sexualities and gender identities is fine and natural. But wearing those things as a uniform doesn’t make you an authority on anything.

When the virtue is fake, but the hate is real, the hate will win every single time. And that’s why we are where we are.

And I want where we are to ACTUALLY change.

Here’s a song that sums it up pretty well.