This article by Carter Moon originally appeared in his Substack, and is republished here with his permission. 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the struggle between cranks and sickos.

Not really, but I do find it a funny way to think about politics. I believe a war rages beneath the surface of political life that is almost entirely divorced from any purported ideology. If you spend much time engaging in politics, you will inevitably encounter some truly difficult personalities whose behavior comes across as alienating or downright anti-social to the average person who doesn’t have this disease. The personality types of the crank and the sicko can be mapped onto any type of political orientation, from Maoism to enlightened liberalism to Neo-Nazism. In any political arena under any circumstance, cranks and sickos endure.

What distinguishes a crank and a sicko? In many ways they are two sides of the same coin, but it’s their distinctions that make them fascinating. I believe the cranks and sickos of the left need to learn to set aside their differences and learn from each other’s strengths.

Defining the Crank

A crank can be understood as a person who looks at every issue from every conceivable angle, and is always finding a new way to critique or be unhappy with the reforms or progress that has been won so far. A crank doesn’t believe in compromising their values even if it means making significant gains towards their purported political mission. There is always some element or combination of factors that other political organizers have failed to consider that’s keeping a proposed project from living up to its promise. Cranks tend to have a wide breadth of knowledge on many subjects, but that knowledge can sometimes lack depth. They are exhausting to talk to in almost any social situation, even if you are similarly crippled by crankery.

I personally love cranks. I love intractable individuals who refuse to budge because everyone else isn’t willing to be as militant and stringent as them. Mike Davis is one of my favorite writers and he might be one of the greatest cranks who ever lived. Even as a socialist, his books are ruthlessly critical of the American Communist Party, the labor movement, the environmental movement, and the broader left. His magnum opus, City of Quartz, is a kaleidoscopic, galaxy-brained view of the power dynamics of Los Angeles through every conceivable lens. He was referred to as “the prophet of doom,” but many of his prophecies from the ‘90s and ‘00s have come true.

Oftentimes the crank and the conspiracy theorist overlap, for good reason. Cranks are constantly zooming out and considering the bigger picture and making connections that aren’t obvious at first blush. When talking to a crank, it’s easy to feel like you’re watching someone make infinite connections that can feel tenuous until you dig deeper yourself. Eventually you do enough reading and realize that they’re right — everything does eventually come back to capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. There’s a reason that many times conspiracy cranks eventually get proven right, whether it’s the Black Panthers being correct about COINTELPRO or anti-Vietnam war activists being right about the Gulf of Tonkin.

It should be noted that cranks tend to not build expansive coalitions or meaningfully contest for power in favor of maintaining their clarity of purpose. They generally work alone or in insular groups because they don’t want to dilute their all-encompassing analysis and ideals.

One thing that really concerns me is that the right currently has more effective cranks than the left does. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes are all cranks; all of them are critical of the Trump administration for not sufficiently advancing their political goals. This gives them a lot of leeway compared to their media counterparts on the left; the best part of crankery is refusing to be satisfied until total victory is achieved. There’s a reason Bannon unironically calls himself a Leninist: There’s hardly a bigger crank in history than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

Defining the Sicko

In contrast, sickos are people who are adamant about achieving their narrow goals by any means. They generally focus on a single issue, working themselves into a blind fury that everyone else doesn’t understand that their cause is the missing piece to magically resolving all of society’s ills. The thing that might unite all sickos is their belief that they’ve unlocked the One Neat Trick to fix everything. What distinguishes them from the cranks is their belief that if everyone, or at least a majority, took up their cause, the world would be fundamentally, structurally better. There are infinite forms sickos can take: public transit sickos, renewable energy sickos, vegan sickos, labor union sickos, Palestinian liberation sickos, Zionist sickos, antisemite sickos, anti-vax sickos, QAnon sickos. The spectrum of sicko transcends the traditional left-right framework; a sicko is any die-hard activist committed to a discrete cause.

The sickos I encounter the most in my own day-to-day organizing are transit sickos. They care a lot about the equity of how people move through our city, ultimately committed to making sure less people die due to car collisions through a variety of mechanisms. They hate car dependency and really want everyone to stop emitting so much carbon. I completely agree that cars are corrosive to every aspect of living in a just society; I’ve learned a lot from the War on Cars podcast and book. I just also find that transit sickos, like all sickos, don’t really care about who they’re making temporary alliances with or what values they’re compromising to achieve their ends. They’ll gladly take funding from a VP at Palintir if it means they can get a key bike lane installed. The strings attached to that money are irrelevant to them because they achieved their goal: less people will die on that specific stretch of roadway.

Another sicko I really admire is Ed Zitron, a maniacal man who has been effervescently angry at the obvious scam of AI for years. He has devoted his newsletter and his podcast to exposing the gargantuan financial fraud at the heart of AI funding, definitively showing that it is a bubble that will have to eventually pop. What makes him a sicko is the specificity of his obsession: He is not deconstructing AI through an interdisciplinary lens or expanding his critical analysis beyond his specific critiques of the tech industry, which is fine! Ed is also open to finding common cause with anyone who is willing to admit that what AI is doing to the rest of us is abhorrent. He’s a “big tent” organizer and his podcast guests reflect that.

Bridging the Crank-Sicko Divide

I never expect a Kumbaya moment, but I do think cranks and sickos should spend more time learning from each other. We are all fundamentally strange for thinking about this shit all the time. Cranks cling to pessimism as a shield against their deeper optimism that every injustice could be overcome one day. By contrast, sickos are ruthlessly sure they can achieve their narrow ends despite their nihilism about the broader system ever meaningfully changing. Even if cranks and sickos can’t make it through a meeting together without getting angry, I still think we should observe each other to learn how to sharpen ourselves. We should even study our opponents on the right and their respective cranks and sickos to understand what makes them effective and what their weaknesses are.

In my experience in LA left politics, cranks tend to be some form of radical: Marxists, anarchists, communists. As someone who identifies as a Marxist socialist, crankery is where my loyalties generally lie. Conversely, sickos are typically liberal progressives: They want to reform and improve the system as it currently exists rather than abolish it. Where I think cranks can show some humility and respect to the sickos is when they are truly dedicated to preserving life as best they can. I love the transit sickos because they care deeply about less people dying in car collisions. Vegan sickos are right to care so much about animal life. And sickos also often get things done! Devoting your life to a single tangible cause makes you an expert in that arena and makes you effective at figuring out how to measure tangible wins towards your goals. Rather than dismissing sickos for not seeing the bigger picture, us cranks could stand to learn from how sickos organize, build coalitions, and achieve material wins towards their political horizons. It’s fine to disagree about almost everything, from strategy to tactics to ideology, but the sickos who are committed to preventing premature death and preserving the dignity of living beings are our allies.

My related advice to the sickos is to listen to the criticisms of the cranks. We are people who also care profoundly about the better world we all deserve. We may present difficult complications for and contradictions of your projects, but we are not your enemies. The fascists who want to concentrate power in the hands of the few while the masses of the human species are left to die prematurely are our enemies. Criticism and conflict are not equivalent to fascists who want to destroy everything you hold dear. Being invited to expand the aperture of your compassion beyond the scope of your primary advocacy issue is an opportunity to get better at organizing in your lane; it doesn’t diminish your goals.

Transcending the Crank-Sicko Dichotomy

I’ll close by highlighting some thinkers and organizers I really admire who I believe embody an enlightened cranko-sickism.

Cory Doctorow is an incredibly knowledgeable writer covering a massive variety of tech issues, but also issues surrounding labor and government policy; he writes equally well in fiction and non-fiction, in blogs and books. He’s also an organizer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He takes all of his vast knowledge and expertise as a writer capable of ingesting a massive amount of information and translates it into tangible action that he takes himself.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is probably the premier abolitionist scholar in the world. Her book Golden Gulag is one of the most comprehensive studies of the prison industrial complex in California ever written. But she was a community organizer before she became a scholar; she gained the analytical skills she needed to become a crank from first being a doggedly dedicated sicko.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have written some of the most accessible, clear-eyed books for creating frameworks the left can use to understand the scale of the problems we’re up against. They’re both fantastic at weaving in economics, Marxist theory, history, scientific data, and reporting to do their writing. They are also both actively involved in politics in a number of realms. They have a new book coming out this week called End Times Fascism, easily my most anticipated book of the year.