I think Maupin is a very import figure right now for the North American left, but I don’t quite understand why he calls himself an “American Patriot” and that “he loves his country” even though positions seem to contradict that.

My fascist family uses the same lines when they run for office to convince old timer democrats to vote republican. This is an example of someone trying to manipulate colonial discourse into their favor.

Maupin’s error is assuming that all class consciousness is good, that it all leads to proletarian revolutionary consciousness. He is incorrect.

If you tell people whoes livlihood depends on maintaining the wealth they recieved during the Homestead Act of 1862, or from super profits that are recycled into super wages for the Global North’s working class, that they have nothing to lose but their chains and that America deserves better, they will not hear the same thing a Haitian, or otherwise imperialized/colonized person hears. They will hear a call for fascism, for another round of colonial conquest and extraction, so they can get theirs once again.

I think Maupin is a very import figure right now for the North American left, but I don’t quite understand why he calls himself an “American Patriot” and that “he loves his country” even though positions seem to contradict that.

I think Maupin is confident in the effectiveness of Marxism-Leninism and the analytical power of dialectical materialism, and I think he is likely being honest when he expresses over and over again that he cares about human rights and anti-imperialism. However, good intentions are not enough to produce structurally-sound policies, caring about “human rights” is not enough to understand what that would really entail, and I think he has unfortunately grown accustomed to automatically tuning out the kind of criticisms that would help him improve in this regard, which is going to lead him and his organization further and further away from what he says he wants (solidarity of the U.S. population with each other and with the global south).

He does receive a lot of unprincipled criticism as well as outright threats, so I get why he tends to tune it out now. It is a normal human psychological reaction to do so. Instead of listening to criticisms, he flattens his platform into “human rights” and feels that most people who press him further on this is doing so in bad-faith. This causes him to look stubborn and out-of-touch at best, foolish and inept in some cases, and makes him appear to be a disingenuous, closeted bigot at worst. It is only natural that vulnerable people would avoid a person who displays such qualities. Meanwhile, Maupin’s own confirmation bias feedback loop causes him to see the people who avoid him as misunderstanding his intentions or maligning him purposely. Because he sees his own views as reasonable and uncontroversial he has trouble understanding certain criticisms and I think it’s going to cause more and more huge gaps in his knowledge and that is going to lead to a more and more faulty analysis and practice on his part.

In short, I think his approach is flawed, and is ultimately going to fail him and the people in his organization who emulate his style and adopt his analysis, as it encourages a lack of investigation into many particularities of various contradictions and cultivates a simplistic view that flattens all issues as “human rights” and moves on from them without further analysis, entreating people to have “solidarity” and reach across the aisle to those with different social values, putting aside differences for the greater good of all, etc., while not understanding why this simple message seems so off-putting to so many people.

Now, with that out of the way, I will say why I think he goes with the “patriotism” angle.

As I said above, I think Maupin really trusts in the power of Marxism-Leninism/socialism as the way forward for humanity. Because of this, he has no fear about engaging with people and ideas from all over the place (minus what I said above about when he receives criticism from the left, which I think is a fatal oversight of his). What he sees is that there is a huge segment of U.S. society being duped into right-wing beliefs. He, as a Christian, sees this happening to tons of his fellow Christians as well. As a white person, he sees the white population being sucked into bourgeois and racist beliefs. As a Christian and as a white person, I think he is inclined to see the good side of these groups as well: to look into the wholesome values that draw people to Christianity, to see the humanity in white people and their desire to live a nice life and minimize suffering in the world.

So, he is looking at a situation: there is a huge chunk of Americans who are being drawn to reactionary beliefs that is being intertwined with their Christianity and whiteness and conservatism and patriotism. If you ask someone why they are Christian, their answer is not going to be “because I’m secretly a huge racist” they’re going to give you an answer based in morals that they supposedly hold. If you ask a conservative if they love their fellow Americans, a lot of them are going to tell you yes, and they’re even going to insist that they aren’t racist and they just want everyone to get along, and the majority of them really believe that. If you ask them if they love humanity and want world peace they are going to tell you yes, and a lot of them really believe it.

Maupin is trying to appeal to these people. And I think he does have some success with doing that. I think in his view, it’s either get on their level, stop scaring them away with liberal identity politics nitpicking, or let them get sucked into the whirlwind of bigotry, right-wing politics and right-wing conspiracy theories, and used for whatever purpose the bourgeoisie wants to use them for. I think he wants to prevent that from happening and I think that it makes total sense for him to attempt to prevent that by trying to unite them under the egalitarian and peaceful values and brotherly love that can be found in Christianity and in generic “patriotism”.

I think Maupin himself would deny that he is in favor of the status quo. Instead I think he would explain that he is adopting a pragmatic stance to attract the bulk of the American population to oppose the status quo. He would say that he supports diversity of opinion on social issues. He believes it is necessary for people to fight together to establish socialist production relations, and that we don’t need to have the same ideas about various cultural/moral issues in order to be allies in doing that. In a recent video about the abortion ruling, he invites one of the people in his organization to stand up: a Christian guy who personally opposes abortion, but who has joined Maupin’s organization; Maupin contrasts this with his own pro-abortion stance. He explains that this guy was kicked out of DSA meetings when they found out through social media that he was anti-abortion. In other words, the guy wasn’t causing trouble in meetings, but he was kicked out anyway for this moral stance. Maupin views this as an error on the part of the DSA, and basically Maupin favors an approach that brings more people to the cause of Marxism-Leninism and he says he supports ideological struggle within Marxism-Leninism. Again, I think Maupin’s reason for this is because what he sees is a gaping black hole of bourgeois propaganda that is constantly sucking white people and Christians into it, so in his view, kicking this guy out of the DSA instead of forming an alliance with him or engaging him ideologically is like funneling him straight into the right-wing anti-communist pipeline. I can see why he takes this stance and in some regards I can even endorse aspects of it, but I think Maupin’s approach to ideological difference is over-simplified and he doesn’t understand why reaching across the aisle to conservative white Christians is going to cause a sense of mortal threat to certain other groups, whose criticisms he brushes off as unreasonable and basically as poisoned by liberal identity politics and even by CIA ops (again, I can see why he would end up thinking this–but I think he is incorrect).

I think Maupin is going to continue to grow his following and organization, who carries the admirable intention of bridging ideological and cultural divides, but I think many who follow Maupin’s style are going to see a lot of failures in doing that, because I think they are attracted to Maupin because they do not understand the particulars of certain U.S. minority groups and he does not push them to, feeling that it’s sufficient to care about their human rights, and not taking time to listen to more details than that. Some may have an aversion to investigating those details, and this is going to lead to cases of them being shut out from some minority communities because they do not know how to make themselves distinct enough from the people who pose an actual threat to those communities. “I care about your human rights” is a bland statement that comes across as a blatant opportunistic lie to many of the Americans that Maupin wishes to unite, who have heard that 1000 times before from people who, insisting they really meant it, didn’t mean it, and wreaked havoc in those communities. I expect that this will hamper his organization’s progress and cause people to view it with suspicion, as many view Maupin himself.

I’m going to stop here for now because this has grown way longer than I intended it to. I’ll just add that the Land Back/decolonization issue discussed extensively in this thread is an example of one of the major things that Maupin and people who emulate his organizing are going to have to confront eventually and yet are seemingly making no preparations for and are not seriously considering. I don’t see how they can achieve the liberation of all people while side-stepping and deprioritizing something like that, no matter how well-intentioned they are. They are failing to make a scientific study of achieving liberation by not engaging with this issue and various other issues further than “human rights” and “solidarity”.

Edit: I also want to note that I personally have more criticisms, reservations, and speculations about Maupin than what I wrote here, but I think some of them lack sufficient evidence to include here. I tried to keep this post somewhat neutral and take Maupin at his word, for the purpose of providing general information about his stated positions and what I find flawed about those positions, rather than get into various other concerns and speculations I have about him but don’t feel confident I could provide evidence for at this time.