.………..The Real Left vs. The Alt-Left…………
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by Alexander Zubatov
In President’s Trump controversial August 15, 2017 news conference at Trump Tower in which he shared his unscripted thoughts on the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in response to a reporter’s question about the attacks of the “alt-right,” President Trump had this to say:
What about the alt-left that came charging at — excuse me — what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: what about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
This left many talking heads on the left (including in the alt-left) concerned that Trump’s use of the term “alt-left” would popularize this label for the aggressive identitarian wing of the left. They promptly rushed to claim that no such thing exists. Relying on the opinions of two people — an advocate from the Anti-Defamation League and an assistant professor from the University of Alabama, a prominent CNN headline claimed that “experts” didn’t acknowledge the existence of the alt-left.
Other arms of the mainstream-media-machine quickly followed suit.
So, I thought, let’s bring some clarity to this issue. What is the alt-left, and what distinguishes it from the regular left, i.e., the real left? Here’s your answer, in a handy chart:
Personally, I don’t subscribe to every aspect of every single one of the belief in the column on the left. I have a mix of views, some more liberal, some more conservative, some neither. But I’ll say this: I can at least accord respect to someone who holds each and every one of those beliefs on the left, the real left. As for the beliefs in the column on the right, the beliefs of the alt-left, well … that’s a very different story. In my humble opinion, those divisive, polarizing and hypocritical beliefs and others like them, beliefs which completely dominate Medium, with a helping hand from its hopelessly biased staff, are — day by day, month by month, year by year — tearing this country apart.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
