Alan Sears: Putting Far-Left Rhetoric In Perspective

Sears reveals far-leftist mentality focused on the promotion of hatred of enemies

Writing -- where else? but -- on Rabble.ca, Ryerson University sociologist Alan Sears offers his conribution to a "reinventing democracy" series Rabble has been carrying ever since they beheld what they regard as the horror of a Stephen Harper majority government.

Sears goes on at length about his desire to build "infrastructure of dissent" that will entirely overturn the capitalist system, and usher in some kind of far-leftist utopia that people like Sears refuse to acknowledge that only they really want.

But beyond that, Sears makes it rather clear: far-left rhetoric is as much about promoting the hatred of those they deem to be their enemies:

"I have a dream about the end of Harper, in which he is driven from office, a reviled figure.

His will be a name invoked by parents to scare their little children. He will live on as a historical footnote in the style of RB Bennett and Calvin Coolidge, his ideological predecessors remembered for doing exactly the wrong thing in the face of a global slump, in Bennett's and Coolidge's cases the 1930s Depression."

Very few people who have been paying attention needed someone like Sears to put the rhetoric of the far-left in perspective. The full extent of the anti-Harper hatemongering has been crystal clear to those paying attention, especially during the 2011 federal election, when websites like ShitHarperDid often took to blatantly lying in order to promote hatred of the Prime Minister.

Sears writes of a fantasy in which the left -- as people like Sears imagine in -- forces its way into every facet of society and identifies its enemies. He quite literally uses the word "enemy".

"At one point, the Left had a real presence in neighbourhoods and workplaces, and was a serious reference point in union meetings, movement activism and broader political discussion. The perception that there was a socialist alternative meant that the persistence of capitalism was in question," Sears writes. "Now, it is taken for granted and, to be blunt, the Left is largely marginal and fragmentary; stuck in old modes of thinking and infected with a sectarian ethos that seeks out the enemies on our side rather than focussing on solidarity against the real enemy."

The "real enemy", of course, is anyone who doesn't share Sears' political beliefs.

Which is really everything one needs to know about people like Alan Sears. To him, conservatives are not merely fellow citizens who disagree with him. They are the enemy, and they are to be swept away in a mass political revolution that makes all of his utopian political dreams come true.

As the would-be guardian and would-be gatekeeper of the left, some would suggest Murray Dobbin -- the curator of the "reinventing democracy" dialogue -- should seek to contain and isolate such extreme and, quite frankly, fascist views.

He's chosen not to. And it's not shocking. If Dobbin made responsible editorial decisions, Rabble just wouldn't be Rabble.