Lucas Koerner’s recent piece for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, “How Western Left Media Helped Legitimate US Regime Change in Venezuela,” is a leading exemplar of a genre of leftist thought which might be termed “shotgun leftism,” due to its self-professed “uncompromising” commitment to revolutionary movements and states, and harsh “shoot-‘em-up” stance toward anyone deemed to lack such a commitment. This stance is evident in this and other pieces, in which Koerner takes aim at leftist publications such as NACLA and Jacobin, and a growing list of writers, including myself. This style of leftism contains a mix of admirable, questionable, and highly untenable features.

The admirable features are a commitment to grassroots movements and to establishing a participatory and egalitarian socialist society, and a relentless critique of imperialism.

More questionably, shotgun leftists offer “unequivocal” support to governments identified as leftist, revolutionary, and/or anti-imperialist, e.g., Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia under Evo Morales, and Nicaragua, and, in some versions of the genre, any state opposed by the United States. What is questionable is not supporting left/revolutionary states but doing so unequivocally. This can and often does lead to willingness to turn a blind eye to these states’ objectionable, even appalling, actions, including widespread extra-judicial killings and suppression of political liberties that leftists around the world have fought and died for.