Dear friends,

I write to you not as an enemy, nor adversary, but as a brother, a fellow anti-fascist, and progressive who shares your hope for a better, more humane world. And I trust fully you understand that hope must walk hand-in-hand with honesty, and such honesty obliges me to speak to you plainly.

Too often, your instinct, it seems, is to mock the stirrings of working-class solidarity. The awkward flags, terrace chants, and rawest assertions of belonging. It appears you look down on these brothers and sisters as vulgar, provincial, dangerous. Yet, let me be clear: the instinct to sneer is a betrayal of the traditions of solidarity you claim to uphold. It is to dig away the soil from which all progressive victories have ever grown.

It is easy to dismiss the symbols and rituals outside of the cultural left as crude or backwards. Yet behind them lies the deepest truth of politics: people long to stand together, to know they are not alone in life’s struggle. That longing is not by definition reactionary, but always the foundation of emancipation.

The patriot might not speak the polished language of the seminar room or literary salon. To you, they may stumble, contradict themselves, or offend polite sensibilities! But mock them, and you are guaranteed to make an enemy of the only force capable of confronting the hierarchies you say you oppose. Behind flags waved in defiance lies pain, a fear of being forgotten, and a cry for home. Mock that cry and you WILL deepen the wound. Listen to it and try to understand; it may yet heal.

So I ask you, friends: turn your contempt away from these people. Aim at those who profit from division. Do not assume patriotism is always bigotry. See instead the raw material of common life, waiting to be shaped into a higher order. For when solidarity itself is mocked or abandoned, fascism is always waiting to claim it. The task of the progressive is to translate. To take the grammar of belonging and weave it into new solidarities fit for today.

For without solidarity, however awkward its first expressions, there is no justice, belonging, and will most certainly be no progress.

With sincerity and without provocation,

Magnus