I keep hearing people say that the far-left is significantly less organised, more fragmented than the far-right. Why is that? (And to be clear: I’m asking about the far-left, not just the left in general (though they may be linked)

Organization takes time and money. Two things the far left are generally not conducive to concentrating to the point where they can build effective political and economic campaigns.

It will take moments of political and economic crisis to mobilize against this current. If and when it does, no one will be happy about it regardless of the direction chosen.

The far right only have to organise around a handful of simplistic ideas. They talk in tabloid headlines. Smear shit and hope the millionaire fash send money your way. It’s as easy as flipping hamburgers.

The left have to deal with the complexities of reality. They need to talk with stakeholders and learn from specialists in a given subject at a given time. They are limited by language that can express the complexity of our societies and what makes them run well.

I’m not saying that’s the full explanation, but it’s inherently harder to organise something more complex and creative. It’s easier to organise a dirty protest.

$$$. Resources are the ultimate form of power. They have something you want. You do what they say to get it. Far-left doesn't have resources, they just want to take resources. That is why communism only worked in weak states. When you have a stable and well-equipped army, you quash rebellion before it even starts.

There was a major effort by the government to dismantle functional far left political groups. The vacuum has been filled by a lot of people who are suspiciously unable to build a big tent and craft messages like they are designed to split communities rather than engage in effective change.

The DSA and Working Families Party seem to be building an effective political strategy to get shit done, but a lot of other groups seem to just want to argue and protest.

Is it really more disorganized? Ive seen and heard of far right groups tearing each other apart over minor differences of values or infidelity. Maybe its simply a matter of complexity of goals. The left is trying to build a new and fair world, all while preserving as much of humanity and the planet as possible. The far right on the other hand seems to concern itself almost entirely with destroying progress the left makes, they seem to not care at all about the what comes after or the harm that is caused by their changes. So they only need to agree on what needs to go, and don't need to agree on what comes next because they haven't thought about it and don't care who has to live in the squalor they leave behind.

The far right is funded by deep pockets and is not attacked by the establishment Republicans.

If the Democratic Party establishment would see the left as an asset rather than a threat then things might change.

The far right on the other hand seems to concern itself almost entirely with destroying progress the left makes

And it's far far easier to destroy than it is to create.

At least in the states every time the Left organizes the Feds start executing people, Chairman Fred, MLK Jr, the MOVE bombings…

A century of COINTELPRO and NSPM-7 style tactics. The left stands to change the world, the right stands to entrench it.

There are many reasons given here. Many are not new though. These discussions existed in 1800s about the left having a hard time unifying.

Well, that’s the thing about the Democratic Party. They actually aren’t left of center. They are performatively left on a few social issues when it’s convenient.

I agree with this, and it's why movements like OWS and BLM have more or less done nothing. Those are complex concepts with lists of things that need to be done. The right has "Lower taxes" and "Let us be racist". The left though has nuanced concepts and new things that people have never heard of. People hear "Lower taxes" and know what that means. Universal healthcare is new and complex, and so the right reduces it to something they understand, "higher taxes" and other fearmongering. Meanwhile we're trying to show amortization rates of providing care to everyone and the right has simple phrases.

Rinse and repeat for everything. We tried "Defund police" but the right only heard "No more police" because there is a lot of nuance to "defund police", like demilitarizing and focusing on sending in people who can actually help. "Climate change" is a complex nuanced subject that takes a long time to understand, but the right reduces it to "They want to take away your truck".

Gay marriage I think worked because it was a very simple message, allow gays to marry. They tried to reduce it however they could but in that case their arguments were the harder ones to follow. I think we need to think about how we describe things, and try to avoid from the beginning needing to explain concept subjects to (I'm sorry but) simple people. Universal healthcare should simply mean "We run a government level insurance program, like all of the other countries, so no one gets denied coverage". Or something like that.

Because anything left of center is a different group. Liberal Democrats, Social Democrats, Maoists, Stalinists, other Communists, and even Leftist Anarchists. I’m positive there’s more. Of those you can group them between fascists and anti fascists, pro-government or anti-government. The world is far from being black and white.

"Kreegyr's a Separatist. Maya Pei's a neo-Republican. The Ghorman Front, the Partisan Alliance? Sectorists! Human cultists! Galaxy partitionists! They're lost! All of them, lost! Lost!"

Probably more motivated to address local problems than get dragged into stupid politics. Who has time to be a smarmy asshole on TV? I have shit to do.

Purity tests.

There's enough holier-than-thou in most leftist groups to power the Catholic church for millennia.

The problem with the left isn't that anarchists and tankies get into internet arguments sometimes. That shit doesn't matter, none of this matters.

The lack of organization that matters is at the top. The root of the problem is that the far right likes the GOP, but the far left does not like the DNC. And first-past-the-post elections ensure that the far left can't hope to organize any kind of competition to challenge the DNC.

well in the us the far right is a major political party while the far left at best influences the other party. Right priniciples if you want to call them that tend toward greed so even if there is something that someone does not agree with they kinda don't care as long as they see it not hurting them. left is based on morality so someone can have a variety of things but not agree with others.

there's a lot more far right billionaires than far left billionaires

Decades of dedicated and zealous sabotage by alphabet agencies and corporate interests, mainly.

"No more police" is a pretty simple idea that seems to have slipped by you so idk

The right is effectively a monolith: half a country rallying around rich white Christian men, to the detriment of everyone else. The left is the "everyone else". Rather than one central idea, the political left is a patchwork coalition of various identities and ideologies. Women's rights, black rights, gay rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, Muslims, pacifists, climate realists, anarchists, unionists, as well as a huge chunk that's also rich white Christian men who just happen to not be Republican. Everyone is trying to fly their own flag, but the one mostly-unifying ideal they all share is that Republicans are the enemy.

I think it's a pretty big misconception of the far right is organized. They like to sell you on that notion. But if you look at it not really. They're full of in fighting and backstabbing and competition as much as anybody.

That actually makes sense tbf

Highly organized movements usually have a strong leader/organizer with clear decision trees. Right wing politics like that approach. Left wingers tend to prefer concensus decision making, inclusion, open debate, and flinch from anyone who tries to assert total control. As a result, in spite of having wider coalitions and really great ideas, leftist movements often lack that command and control infrastructure we tend to associate with the term "well organized".

To begin to analyze this we have to have clear, simple definitions of the left and right. I think it very easily maps on to authoritarianism vs. freedom. You could take "being racist" as a right-wing position and say "but they want to be free to do that", but freedom only extends until you're compromising someone else's freedom, then it's power. Whether it's about being racist, controlling trans people or queer people, or whatever it is, the right worships one thing and that is power.

When you do that, by the very nature, it's more easy to be organized and disciplined. There's no one to push back on orders from above no matter how dumb because that's the goal. If we try to strive for their level of organization and discipline, we become like them. We have to stop, every moment, and make sure that what we're doing is something being consented to by the wider community. That's just the nature of the fight.

And I don't think it will ever end. There will always be this tension between permissiveness and discipline. We've just been stuck in the disciplined, authoritarian mode, since the authoritarians gained the upper hand by stealing the Americas.

If you're looking for more reading along these lines I believe Graeber and Wengrow talk about this in The Dawn of Everything. But I'm also drawing from my own experience and understanding.

"No more police" is an idealistic concept that would never make it out of committee and is routinely used by the right to "prove" to themselves that we can't be taken seriously. "Demilitarized police" instead is a concept that could be actually implemented, and could get support from both the people and politicians and could actually be implemented.

If you seriously believe that we could pivot next year to "no more police" then you're deluding yourself, there's no politician in this entire country who would stake their career on that. Nice to dream, but no way in reality it would ever happen, and using it only fuels the right.

There IS no major far left movement, that's why. It's not necessarily left vs right either. Anyone not far right AND also gobble Trump's tiny mushroom is branded as far left, but that doesn't make it true. So what you're seeing as opposition to the far right is:

• Far right people who are at least smart enough to see that Trump is not thr move or have been personally burned.
• Regular right wing people
• Regular center right people (traditional Democrats)
• Regular centrists
• Radical centrists
• Regular liberals
• Slacktivist liberal fear mongerers.
• People who are like "...am I actually socialist? We may as well try it"
• Special interest groups that are not united but need to be given the threat the far right poses, eg Latinos from various countries with varying political opinions.
• A tiny group of socialists
• And the absolute smallest group of all: actual far leftists.

On the far right you have:

• People who know exactly what is going on and are profiting from it
• Fear mongerers and shit stirrers that could be as far left as center right, but fear mongering and shit stirring is all they have to live for.
• People who are not paying attention at all, and voted Republican when they were almost a normal party, or thought "I dunno, shit sucks right now after covid, I guess give the ball to the other team"

This makes it seem like the opposition far outnumbers the far right voters, but let me assure you, it does not. People not paying attention are by far the biggest population.

Why do I say all of this? Because first, the opposition group is disjointed. On the far right side, the fear mongerers and shit stirrers just like what they're brainwashed to like or what makes others upset respectively. The people not paying attention are not paying attention. The masterminds are the ones writing the script for the fear mongerers.

Most of the opposition actually believes what they believe and have principles, which is at times diametrically opposed to what their fellow anti-Trumpers believe. Not always, there are fear mongerers there too. But mostly.

Unfortunately, being anti-Trump is not a rallying cry. People are much more motivated by what they're passionate about, if they're passionate about anything. Thus, the infighting.

The Democratic Party is at left as it can be without touching underlying capitalist structure, which is to say, it is not properly left at all.

Yeah people on the right are lot more likely to overlook their disagreements as long as they can agree on a few things

The far right is like ICE. Anybody is welcome. Far left is not like that.

Kind of ironic given the right are the ones always trying to close borders, etc.

Caring about things like "facts" and "not hurting people" is a real drag.

Probably because most of us are neurodivergent.

Lack of money; lack of charismatic central leadership.

Occupy Wallstreet tried to be cute with the mic check thing but needed an MLK like figure.

Doesn't help that large money from the right is willing to play dirty and continuously drive wedges and stoke division.

The right/left divide has a lot of definitions but the one it feels right to apply here is the oldest one. Right wants to maintain and reinforce existent hierachies. Left wants to change them. Now, notice that there is an extremely well defined goal for the right, to maintain and reinforce the thing we all can see right in front if us. The left on the other hand, doesn't have a defined, unified goal state. Someone can be 'left' and want to bring down their current government in favour of an entirely different, maybe even more powerful and centralised state, or they can be 'left' and want to eliminate the idea of any person or group having authority over any other person or group. To use more modern examples, 'tankies' and 'anarcho-primitivists' are both 'leftist' insofar as they both agree the systems of places in the global 'west' should end, despite how little they agree on what should happen after.

Gotta say, not that others explanations aren’t good too, but I think yours is, so far, the most clear cut explanation

I'm not looking for a politician to take anything seriously. I am looking for we the people to remake this godforsaken place, and that means implementing our goals directly, which includes dismantling every police station and sheriff's office.

Seriously the police are kidnapping people at random and you still don't get that the system is broken?

I'm not so unreasonable to assume that no one who is currently wearing a badge and gun can rehabilitate themselves into productive members of society, but the systems that they work as a part of need shut the fuck down.

Having done a lot of it myself, people become activists because they get off on it somehow. Abstract morality just isn't very motivating, and the work sucks. Quite often, they just like conflict, and are as likely to fight each other as capitalism/The Man/globalist woke Jews/whatever. There's things specific to the left, as well, but this is true across the board.

Fringe activism, where there's nobody motivated by money and career instead, tends to be even worse.

This all says not-great things about humanity.

ICE is not the police, and I can't believe I have to state that.

From where I stand it seems that it's because those people have no mutual aspirations - just mutual enemies. The group is not held together by a shared common goal but a shared enemy.

I've tried to explain concepts to people. People don't kniw they are racist. People don't underatand why the shouldn't use Facebook or Google. People don't understand that trans people are not turning kids gay. I've tried to explain the horrors coming from privacy loss for 15 years.

Nobody listens. I'm tired boss.

And it spreads everywhere. Can't even partake in pride march because of my wrong cultural views. Simply being gay isn't enough anymore - need to sing up for the package deal.

Is this the "left infighting" that i hear about

The whole principle of right wing thought is strict vertical hierarchies. For their moral flaws, strict vertical hierarchies are a pretty efficient way to organize the average person. The whole principle of left wing thought is flattened, distributed hierarchies. For their moral virtues, decentralized flat hierarchies are pretty slow to organize. It's a lot simpler to fall in behind an authority figure than participate in never ending sub-sub-subcommittees.

It's hard to unify around a course of action when your whole thing is incorporating diverse perspectives and rejecting centralization. I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do, it is, but it presents inherent challenges.

As a right wing someone, the left is well much more organised than the right.
It s just at one point your circlejerk way too much for your own good.
At some point individuals push idea too far for the common people. They do that cauqenit serve personal interest to virtue signaling you are best than your peer, but they do that at the détriment of the cause.
Like trans ppl
The normal folks can agree it s not cool to be a dixk regarding that issue. Now let's see what came from ppl in your movement trying to one up each other to be the more virtuous of the movement. Anyone claiming to be transgendered should be treated as a biological women. Which give stuff like men in women space and something like 85% of ppl vehemently oppose. So you lost the plot and since your whole movement is based on the logic you are the majority which isn't the case on issue like thoses u just appear to be lunatics.
I can do that on so many subject.
But when your politics are be nice and some corporate shit u share with Hollywood and any big corpo in the world, to the average folks u juste are sheep. When u start to ressort to violence to defend your idea since they are so far gone u just are lunatics.

Another exemple we gonna do in real time.
How much immigration is too much immigration ?
U can't answer that simple question even if for 90% they can. Doesn't make any sens socially, economically and so on. But you aren't able to discuss thoses cause u either an ally or an ennemies.

Tldr u r too much radical for the normal ppl and trump seem more fair than you. Which should make you wake up

As others mentioned, ICE are not police.

On top of that again it's idealism vs realism. Yes idealism is what it could be, but the system isn't changing anytime soon. I'm sorry, but it's not. Unless the majority of people suddenly mobilize, but I've been waiting now 30 years and at multiple points thought maybe they finally would, but it's not happening. Once you realize that it's idealism, then you can move into realistic options.

The blind believe in 1 strong man at the top and a clear strict hierarchy are key ideas within far right ideology. It's easier to organise the right, but it's also easier for the right to en masse follow the crazy dumb ideas of that leader. Left organising from grassroots up is a lot harder, but in theory better.

extremist positions are disorganized, period.

the reason why they are is because extremism in general is an emotional reaction to the inability to see progress.

for example, far-left people are typically vegan out of an emotional sense of responsibility to animals. while far-right people are generally carnivorous out of an emotional sense of spite towards far-left vegans.

similar patterns begin to show up with other topics such as abortion rights, and socialist benefit programs.

this is why extremism of any kind is toxic. it hinders our ability to govern based on merit instead of frivolous emotional weights.

though, that's not to say that centrist views are any better since centrism is itself another form of extremism.

inflexibility is the death of all governments, that's why there are judges that provide perspective to law and how it is applied.

Because we are trying to make sense, not just to be convincing.

On the process divergences may appear.