Obvious and important questions: "who", and "where"? Who are the people being driven away from the left? Where are they being driven to?
These are the questions that would be expected from someone who didn't finish reading my post. I gave an example, and the example was myself.
It assumes the person being labelled is utterly incapable of distinguishing the individual from the group
That's so wrong it seems to be what drives the rest of what you're saying here, so I bumped it up in the order. The left-wing hate-speech doesn't come from just a few individuals. Whenever I listened to or read lefties for years, I was inundated in SJWism before it got that name. It's so much of the left that any exceptions, who will actually present a rational case rationally, are so few & far between that they're hard to find and I didn't even have any direct evidence available that they existed at all. This forum was one of the first two places where I finally discovered that there even are any sound arguments at all for anything on the left, and even here, the next post I have in mind to respond to in another thread is yet another accusation of "obvious" bigotry in stuff someone said that wasn't even on the subject that the allegedly bigotry would be about.
Because what I infer from your statement, in the context of the article, is that you believe that being unfairly labelled a racist...
...among other things...
...somehow drives people who would otherwise consider themselves left-leaning toward the right side of the political spectrum.
Not necessarily those "who would otherwise consider themselves left-leaning", but at least those who would listen and consider a reasonable argument if they could find one, and then could be convinced by that, like me.
On the "somehow" part, I figure that at least two distinct kinds of mechanisms are at work, although I also must point out that not knowing how something happens doesn't mean it doesn't happen so it doesn't counter observations that it happens; it just means we don't know how.
Anyway, first, there's apparently a subconscious psychological component. Nobody responds positively to a constantly overflooded stream of false accusations. There are few or no other methods more efficient at setting people against you than to attack them, and, of all possible verbal forms of attack, false accusations might be the worst, and even worse than some physical types. It self-labels the accuser as The Enemy and obviously not worth dealing with in any other mode but that.
Second, that kind of behavior walks right into a couple of apparent principles of rational thinking that would seem to go against whatever such people are arguing for, even while ignoring or trying to ignore the emotional aspect of the situation. One is that, since the accusations are clearly lies and that's practically all they ever do, that means most of what they say is lies, which categorizes the accusers as dishonest sources, so even if they ever occasionally say something else, that's probably just more lies too, because it comes from known perennial liars. And the other, and more important, one is that most people generally would present their best argument for whatever they're arguing for, not the most transparently hopelessly invalid, so if all they offer is inane blithering nonsense, then they must not have any available arguments that are any good, because if they did then they'd use those instead.
Of course, neither of these apparent principles is completely reliable; it's
possible for a habitual/compulsive liar to say things that aren't lies, especially on other subjects if only certain subjects trigger their lying, (and it might even be
possible that some of the false accusations are honest mistakes rather than lies), and it's also
possible for people to insist on using their own worst arguments instead of good ones even if the latter really do exist and are available to them. But these general rules seem sound enough to use until exceptions are observed (in this case, sound logical fact-based arguments for lefty positions, which are mysteriously going unused by most lefties). And if none are observed year after year, the conclusion starts to look relatively sound. (And even when exceptions are found, it still remains pretty bizarre and baffling; why
do they still keep going back to the utter crap they spout, when the other stuff they could use instead is so much better? It just doesn't make sense.)
