The "No True Leftist" Fallacy
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Transcript:
A few years ago I had the idea to make a new series of videos explaining various logical fallacies. I made one, about ad hominems, and then realized I hated it and I never did it again. It wasn’t fun to make, and I didn’t want to encourage debate perverts who think that yelling logical fallacies automatically wins arguments, or that it’s necessarily even worth it to “win arguments” in every day life.
But here I am, all these years later, inspired to make another logical fallacy video. And it’s all thanks to an absolute metric shit ton of people who rushed to my video about leftists that supported Graham Platner to tell me that I was wrong, because the people mentioned in my video were NOT, in fact, leftists. Sam Seder and Emma Vigland of the Majority Report, Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, Cenk Uyger of the Young Turks, Medhi Hasan of Zeteo, and Ryan Grim of Breaking Points, are all “libs” at best. QED.
This is an appeal to purity, more commonly known as the “No True Scotsman” fallacy thanks to the philosopher Antony Flew, who described an argument in which someone asserts that “no Scotsmen put sugar on their porridge.” When their opponent says, “Well, I’M a Scotsman and I put sugar on my porridge,” the response is, “Ah, then you aren’t a TRUE Scotsman. No TRUE Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
This isn’t a formal logical fallacy, in which an argument is invalid because of its faulty structure. It’s an informal fallacy, because the problem lies in the initial premise itself. It’s a form of begging the question or circular reasoning. I saw it a lot back when there was an active skeptics’ community: they loved to argue over whether or not someone could be a skeptic if, for instance, they believed in a god, or Bigfoot, or psychic powers. Eventually they were forced to conclude that a True Skeptic doesn’t believe in anything at all. Not even themselves. That’s so sad.
The interesting thing about No True Scotsman is that it’s not wrong, per se. You’re allowed to define categories in any way you want. That’s just, like, your opinion. If someone came to me and said that they believe in god AND Bigfoot AND psychic powers, I really wouldn’t consider them a skeptic. If someone born and raised in Ohio spent a holiday weekend in Aberdeen, I really wouldn’t consider them a Scotsman.
So, when I point to the No True Scotsman Wikipedia page in response to people telling me that no leftists ever supported Graham Platner, I’m not saying that they’re wrong. This guy, for instance, went above and beyond, insisting that not only did no leftist ever support Graham Platner, but no leftist has ever supported or even voted for any Democrat, ever. I think most of us can agree that that’s completely unhinged: generally, “leftist” just means someone on the left, but most Americans understand it to mean people who are further left–more progressive–than the Democratic Party, and many of us who are further left than the Democratic Party see strategic value in voting for certain candidates.
But that doesn’t mean that that guy is wrong; he just defines “leftist” in a way that excludes, well, pretty much every American who calls themselves a leftist. And he’s not alone! I’ve received many sneering comments from people outside the US who insist that there is no left in this country at all. Okay! Cool! We have differing definitions of what these words mean. That’s fine. Goodbye, enjoy your life.
So if it isn’t necessarily wrong to No True Scotsman, why do I bother pointing it out in the first place? Honestly, with that guy on BlueSky I replied before I noticed that he was completely bonkers, but I do think it’s helpful for the more, um, normal people to understand why they shouldn’t do it: because it’s a pointless non sequitur at best, and a potentially damaging dismissal at worst.
Before I get into it, let me just say that I do not have any issue with people policing who “belongs” in their movement or community. The people I called out in that previous video were so misogynistic that they mocked and belittled a victim of abuse just because she’s Republican, and that is absolutely not a progressive ideal and it’s perfectly fine to tell them that, to stop listening to them because they simply are not leftist enough for you, and to roll your eyes when they continue to identify as being in the progressive left.
But it is not helpful for you to tell ME that these people are not leftists as though it is a fact, and not your opinion. First of all, it’s extremely annoying. Obviously, I already know that they are not being progressive allies. You don’t need to tell me. I even literally said “supposedly progressive leftist” when referring to them, but I know, watching and understanding a video before commenting is not for most people.
And obviously, while you are allowed to have your opinion of who is and isn’t a “leftist” but you do not need to be a smug asshole about it, pretending that you’re saying a fact instead of an opinion:
“The mistake you're making here is not a single one of these people are leftists. Those are liberals. Real leftists have been calling Platner out for the four tours and Blackwater. Anti Imperialism comes first.”
Man, if only they had said “true” instead of “real,” it would have been perfect. Ah well.
“NONE of the people you mentioned are leftists. The Young Turks and Hasan Piker ARE NOT LEFTISTS. STOP CALLING DEMS LEFTISTS. They are not leftists, and they never will be.”
Hasan Piker has truly done something remarkable in that I’ve never made a video about him, and I didn’t mention him in that video at all, but his haters just cannot stop themselves.
“What is a leftist to you?? Having ever worked for the worst most violent imperialist force currently operating automatically disqualifies you from being a leftist. That's why no one trusts American "leftists". That usually just means "I want health care and treats like Europeans (who are also imperialists)"”
(I guess this person is referring to Graham Platner, who I never…actually…called…a “leftist.”)
“...my only complaint with this video is hearing all those names being referred to as "leftists"... nah, they migh be further left than the average "Liberal", but.... one can find better examples of leftism.”
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to find great examples of leftism. That’s…not what the video was about. It was about people who are widely considered “leftists” who are not demonstrating leftist ideals. That was the whole point.
So, yeah, it’s annoying. But more than that, as I said, it’s damaging: these people have misdirected the focus from criticizing leftists for promoting an abusive warmonger to criticizing me for not using their own personal definition of who counts as a “leftist.”
It’s a convenient distraction and it lets all those people I was criticizing off the hook: of course they adopted misogynist tactics. What do you expect of LIBS? Why are you even paying attention to them? Why expect them to be better?
And the worst thing that the No True Leftist fallacy does is spread the completely false idea that the left does not have a problem with topics like misogyny and racism and homophobia. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but we do. Yes, even outside of the United States. These bigotries are baked into all of us, and we don’t get to pretend as though we’ve transcended them because we have categorized ourselves into an identity that rejects those bigotries. Doing so results in exactly what happened with Graham Platner: like it or not, a LOT of people consider The Majority Report to be “progressive,” as they describe themselves. A lot of people think that because progressive ideals reject misogyny, progressives cannot be misogynist. Therefore, when the progressive hosts of The Majority Report demean a woman who says Graham Platner abused her, that logically cannot be misogyny. Therefore, they must be correct and the woman must be lying.
See? If No True Leftist can be racist, and I consider Politician X to be a leftist, then I will be less likely to believe a minority who says she called him a slur. If No True Leftist would support child abuse, and I consider Public Intellectual Y to be a leftist, then I will be less likely to believe that he participated in activities with a notorious pedophile.
It benefits no one to pretend that such a large and diverse group is 100% pure, and it actively hurts those who will ultimately be victimized by some individuals within that group. By all means, push out those who cause harm, but stop acting like bad actors are some other community’s problem. Stop acting like bigotry, and greed, and dishonesty is some other community’s problem. They’re our problem and we need to deal with them, and in my opinion, no true leftist would disagree with that.
Comments (18)
No True Leftist would disagree with you as evidenced by anyone who disagrees with you is no True Leftist.
Was that a low key Big Lebowski reference? "That's just like your opinion" at 2:33
I followed you after you were mentioned in Shaun's video, but I just happened to see this video in my feed and I had to become a paid supporter. Your voice is so needed in our community ❤️
FWIW I do think it’s fair to say that the *organized* left in the US is mostly dead, but it’s also fair to say that it’s not dead yet, and in fact it’s starting to feel better. (By the organized left I mean, like, the DSA and unionization campaigns. There were a bad few decades in there! A lot of people in the 70s and 80s really just did not give a shit!)
Along these lines, I think it’s fair to say that Twitch and YouTube are not effective organizing platforms, and people like Hasan Piker are not for the most part doing organizing. Contrast, of course, the DSA, which uses ActBlue, which is an organizing platform. (The fact that ActBlue is primarily focused on fundraising is reflective of the still somewhat dire state of political organizing left-of-center.) EDIT: I joined the DSA a while back but got immediately overwhelmed by the amount of email they wanted to send me, so I set it up to forward to a separate email inbox and forgot about it.
The one big exception to this is Neo-Stalinists, AKA “tankies”, who will happily tell you that they are not leftists, because leftists are degenerate Trotskyites and revisionists who actually deserved to get purged in the 1930s. This would be a non-sequitur except that tankies also tend to fawn over aestheticized white “working class” men like Graham Platner.
What’s more, it’s Trotskyists who are infamous for “entryism”, though also Nazis want to turn everything into a Nazi bar. So it’s really weird to see basically accusations of entryism leveled at centrists, who, to be clear, already control the major left-of-center institutions and largely disdain the smaller institutions to their left.
Despite disagreeing with some of the characterizations, the effort is admirable and... what an ending!
Beware that the virulent division of left-leaning voters into Leftist, Liberals, Democrats et cetera might be a deliberate attempt to split votes for the Democratic Party. Yes, I _am_ paranoid, thank you very much 😜. Because the USA has a district based first-past-the-post election method, they are stuck with a two-party political system. One way to win elections in that system is to unify your own party and to split up the other party. Stoke up infighting, amplify a tribal mentality, and throw in some name calling. All this lathered with a nice thick "holier than thou" sauce. The "no true Leftist" quotes shown in this video represent both the cause and the effect of the split.
I've long thought that there's a popular fallacy of thinking of people as good or bad, with their actions resulting from that essence. In that fallacy, someone who commits a misogynistic action must necessarily have been a misogynist by nature; conversely, someone who is not a misogynist is literally incapable of misogyny. That's how I've explained the "but progressive people _can't_ be misogynist!" attitudes. Now I'm wondering if this isn't just the same thing as No True Scotsman after all. I always thought the NTS fallacy was about moving the goalposts. /ramble
On a recent livestream by Taylor Lorenz, she describes the American left as displaying the worst type of para social behavior.
You should get your Mastodon account back...🐘
So what's the difference between a fallacy which may be based on the truth or fallacy that is an outright lie. Fallacies relate to what we want to personally believe at a particular point in time as the amount and quality of information changes over time. Everybody has that "belief set" that is so core that they'd rather die than change their mind. Of the senior leaders and executives that I have worked for, the great ones have the ability to accept conflicting information without attribution. A lot of the people that we worship as champions of industry get that label because they make a lot of people a lot of money, but manage their businesses like a lemonade stand. Right now the hard-core Republican platform is anti-affirmative action, and telling them that a republican appointee named Art Fletcher is considered the father of affirmative action and was Assistant Secretary of Labor under Richard Nixon, who signed off on it, the jaws drop. That simply can't be true. Or the one that Clarence Thomas wore an Afro and was considered a leftist almost black nationalist, the "progressives" say that this can't be right. And then you pop up the pictures and the corroborating discussions and watch the jaws drop. Changing a worldview is harder than one thinks since social media makes its money on quick and easy nuggets of information, not necessarily a lie, but not enough to be fully informed. The Supreme Court did not outlaw affirmative-action, the media did. News outlets know that most of us are not going to plow through 30 pages of legal findings to discover what the Supreme Court had been saying since 1978. The front page stories about cat rescue in Amador City doesn't sell newspapers. There are evangelicals who believe that every word in the the Bible is absolutely true, but also believe in dinosaurs and tectonic plate movement. In a good old American wild West town with all of its macho, that gun control laws were more draconian than today; not surrendering your firearm to the local sheriff or collection point could get you killed. I'm still waiting on CNN or even the LA Times to go to that ranch or farm in Colorado or where ever, to determine if that stargate or dimension gate is actually there. Maybe they’re saving that story so that they don't have to run the cat rescue story.
I think these labels leftist, progressive, Democratic socialist being used interchangeably creates all these problems in communication. But those labels are not interchangeable imo. I differentiate them based on specific objective values such as justice, sustainability, equality., human rights, human dignity, inclusivity… etc To me people who feel compromising their principles to elect a terrible person just to win an election are not leftists. Yes it’s my opinion but it’s based on objective moral principles that imo are not negotiable.
But seriously: “These bigotries are baked into all of us, and we don’t get to pretend as though we’ve transcended them because we have categorized ourselves into an identity that rejects those bigotries.” This is key. We have only to look, for example, at the history of feminists arising out of supporting men in the anti-Vietnam War movement; they were fed up with being relegated to misogynistically-based support roles.
Those men truly believed they were « true leftists »; they couldn’t see their blind spot re their treatment of their female compatriots. We’d do well to refrain completely from identifying with a label that then presumes our good intentions are enough to define ourselves, and turn our critical gaze towards ourselves and our actual actions and their effects on others.
Bellismo👏🏽👏🏽
Didn’t you mean “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, *man*!”?