The left doesn’t need a revolution and, deep down, doesn’t really want one. So why do they spend so much time telling you how awful everything is?

Partly, it’s what gets them paid. I’m not saying they’re money grubbers. Most of them could make more money on Wall Street, in medicine, in the private sector somewhere, or some such. Of course, then they wouldn’t own and operate their own businesses, and it’s nicer to work for yourself than to work for someone else.

But when you run a business, you need money. You need customers. And you don’t get customers by telling people things they don’t want to hear. If you want to make money, you have to tell people what they want to hear. People like hearing how bad everything is, because there’s no personal challenge in that.

Everybody agrees the world sucks. If you try to propose solutions, everything will just devolve into big fights because no one can agree on anything. It’s more lucrative to just say over and over that global warming is killing the planet, that corporations screw people, that the United States is a purveyor of death — whatever.

But the people who own and run the left, and the people whom the left attracts, are in agreement about what kind of world they would most like to live in, if they had the power to bring it about: They want to overthrow the capitalists.

The number one priority of everyone on the left is the preservation and enhancement of their class privileges. This is true of the right as well, but the difference is that the right is honest about it. I don’t mean the left is lying to you. I mean the right is honest with themselves about what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish.

But the left tells you how much they love the working class, and deep down they really believe it. They’re not lying to you: They really do think they love the working class. If God himself were to administer a lie-detector test to everyone on the left and ask them if they really cared about ordinary working slobs, they would pass easily because in their heart of hearts they really do love the people who take out their trash.

But that love stops as soon as it causes the slightest inconvenience to their persons. They might “love” the working class, but as soon as there’s the barest suggestion that everyone should pitch in and do their fair share of grunt work, the “worker-loving” left bares its teeth.

The left has no interest whatsoever in any kind of world where it might have to get its hands dirty. The left has no interest in a world where everyone does their fair share of picking the cotton. And if you press the left on this, they will destroy you.

The left doesn’t want a revolution because what it really wants, deep down, is a Soviet-style economy where workplaces are owned by the state (that is, where the capitalists are gone as a class) and where it (the left) runs the society. However, the left knows it wouldn’t do to say this out loud, because this would be deeply unpopular with the working people the left keeps trying unsuccessfully to organize.

The left will fight to the death to resist any revolution where it cannot control the terms of the debate. Since this is an impossibility, the left instead refuses to discuss or consider revolution at all.

Basically, whenever you encounter a lefty, just ask them if they’re willing to do their fair share of shit work. Ask them: If cotton must be picked, shouldn’t we all do our fair share of picking it?

The left is not trying to liberate the field slaves, nor does it have any interest in doing so. The left wants to liberate itself, but it is incapable of being honest with itself about this fundamental fact about itself. That’s what separates it from the right: The right embraces its classism, racism, and sexism; the left pretends (and in fact really believes) it has transcended all these things.

It’s not that the function of a left isn’t needed. It’s that the left as it presently exists (and has always existed) will never accomplish any of the things that it suggests to people it’s trying to accomplish. The left will never stop global warming, win Medicare for all, eliminate sexism and racism, or whatever. The left will never do any of these things because it’s priority isn’t any of these things.

The left’s only priority is itself, no matter how much it tries to pretend otherwise.