I am heavily involved with local politics and governance, and today's "activists" alienation from everyday reality is a fact of life for my colleagues and me.
There's no upside to it at all on a local level; it just wastes an extraordinary amount of time and energy that could create tremendous change on the ground if it was directed to the issues that need attention.
But those issues are 1) very unexciting, 2) tend to involve a bit of graft and 3) require you to be actually plugged into your local community and constituents -- you've got to actually talk to real people, instead of just assuming you know what they want.
And this is the problem: these activists don't actually know what people actually think. They assume twitter is the democratic voice.
@Packingsoapandwater student politics was like this. Most of us eyerolled and ignored it, but it was galling because these brats were the ones who represented us, and controlled the student budgets. A couple of reasonable people tried to get involved, but mostly it was extremists and careerists (who wanted jobs in Parliament or major think tanks, and saw student politics as a stepping stone). They never did anything for their peers. They were always earnestly debating world and national events, and 'what message we are sending'. The suggestion that there were actual women, BAME and disabled students whose lives they could tangibly improve if they lost some of the narcissism bemused them.
Those people are now directing the progressive parties instead, as in the past, of growing up and recognising that effective politics is dull and incremental and needs to serve the will, as well as the best interests, of the public. I'm not sure why, or how, that's happened. The refusal to accept that good people can disagree with you is new, in my lifetime at least.
The arrogance is especially breathtaking. Behind the cries to, "educate yourself" is the snobbish determination that these young middle-class twits know best. So much for their urgent insistence that lived experience is all. Only the right kind of lived experience, it seems. Working class northerners just need to accept what they're told. Duffield's, of being a VAWG survivor, doesn't count. And I've seen so many sneers aimed at Carrie Symonds - a survivor of John Warboys, who put him behind bars at the age of 20 and has helped ensure he stayed there when the probation service fucked up and were about to free him. What the hell have these Twitterati done to protect other women, let alone suffered themselves, equivalent to her? But natch she votes the wrong way, and thinks the wrong way. So her lived experience can't count.
Their arrogance is making both left leaning parties genuinely unelectable. I can't vote for parties that honestly seem to hate women, even as they insist they are feminist, and to despise working class people, even as they insist they are socialists. Anti-terrorist activity focusing on Muslim communities was calmly ccepted - whereas investigating paedophile gangs preying on working class girls? Beyond the pale. Couldn't be because the former affected the middle classes in airports and city streets, whereas the latter affected poor girls in Northern communities at all, could it? Surely not. And the unthinking implicit racism towards BAME people who disagree is just eyewatering - there's a fairly clear note of anger at the ingratitude that screams of a white saviour entitlement, isn't there, when Priti Patel or Sajid Javid or Terry Crews are under attack.
The collapse of the NHS, and state education, and the probation service, and working class pay and conditions alongside the gig economy - those are what affect most people. The rising tide of misogyny affects half the population. Funding elder care is going to be a massive issue as the Boomers reach extreme old age, and that's pretty well ignored - boring, as an issue. The SEN crisis has left thousands of disabled children out of school - in many cases, no suitable schools exist and parents are told as much, so the state is failing in the most basic legal responsibility. And most people don't even know it is happening. And looming over all of this, the climate emergency is threatening to make the very world we all share genuinely uninhabitable before the turn of the century. Meanwhile, the two parties positioning themselves as being for the many, not the few, are arguing about the linguistics of identity politics, and how best to display blind tribal loyalty to the fallen Great Leader. It's extraordinary.
I admire you for staying and fighting, and for the sake of our democracy I hope you succeed, but I wouldn't personally have either stomach or energy for dealing with them.