Twittering while Rome Burns: Fighting Back Against Online Cynicism

During 2016, when every leftist with an online presence weighed in on whether Hillary was suitable for president, whether the Democrats were a corrupt party, and whether true leftists should just sit the election out, I ended up muting a lot of people on Facebook and Twitter. Their cynical attitudes — the system sucks so let’s just burn the whole thing to the ground, but also nothing matters anyway because everything and everyone is corrupt — was just so mentally and emotionally exhausting that I found myself spending far too much of my free time rehearsing imaginary conversations with these people. Better, I thought, to just mute them and go on about my life, blissfully ignorance their cynical existence.

Fast-forward to this week, and I made the mistake of tuning into one of those people’s Facebook posts, only to see them assert that, should Mayor Pete win the nomination, they would sit out the election (they said they would do the same if Biden or Bloomberg were nominated). Not only that, but said person also proclaimed that they would actually be fine with another four years of Trump since, as they put it, African Americans were already suffering under the system that preceded Trump. What difference would it make, they asked, to have four more years of this man, when any of the other “B”s would be, in their flawed logic, just as…