You Cannot Compromise with Everyone
You Cannot Act Like the Liberal Elite
You Cannot Be Amoral
You Cannot Forget Who You Are
You cannot be a leftist and act like a liberal.
You Cannot Compromise with Everyone
You cannot compromise with mass culture on tepidity, phlegmatism, and mediocrity. You cannot compromise with corporations on hedonism, materialism, and consumerism. You cannot compromise with the church on religious fanaticism or anti-scientific beliefs. You cannot compromise with the military on militarism and war. You cannot make any of those compromises and live in a left wing society... for long.
You Cannot Act Like the Liberal Elite
You cannot meet the right in the middle and call yourself a leftist. You cannot pat yourself on the back fro your petty victories on diversifying a sick society—where multiculturalism has become an end in itself and we should be happy that women and minorities now have access to the predatory machinations of corporations, the pretentious elitism of the American academy, or the self-absorbed pursuit of social status through material accumulation. You cannot resist right wing culture—the culture of predation—and embrace the leisure class lifestyle, use the language of sexual violence, or sit idly by and allow your fellow man and woman to suffer.
You cannot talk policy and expect a comprehensive theory of leftism to metastasize or for what being a leftist means to be understood by the public. You have to tell a coherent narrative that makes sense. A narrative about how our present social problems, which are causing the working and middle classes to suffer, have a common cause: the concentration of wealth, status, knowledge, and political power in the hands of wealthy predators.
You Cannot Be Amoral
You cannot be seduced by the myth of objectivity. You cannot be afraid to moralize. Conservatives insist that personal responsibility is moral. You must insist that social responsibility is moral. It is not okay to just look after yourself and your family. You must also look after the community that you are a part of and the ecosystem you take from in order to survive. You are not an island. You cannot get by on self-interest along and no one else can. Hedonism is not a healthy lifestyle. Using other people for your pleasure, even if it is under mutual agreement, is an immoral way to interact. You must connect with other people in a way that respects their dignity and their autonomy and acknowledge that their feelings and experiences matter.
You Cannot Forget Who You Are
Why are we on the left? Because we want equality. Not the impossible equality of some Utopian dream, but more equality than we have now. Life is short. Much too short for so many of our fellow citizens to suffer as they do. We believe there is enough to go around. Life is not but a dream. It is a brief spark of consciousness in which to care and be cared about.