Every year or so, one of our media neopopulists rediscovers Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition between the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots Organization. And every time, they say the same thing: “The Black Panthers were willing to work with the Young Patriots — so why won’t today’s left work with the hard right?” A few years ago it was RT warhawk Fiorella Isabel; last year it was aging hippie comedian Jimmy Dore; and today, it’s Populist Voice’s Jay Compton.

It’s a profoundly ridiculous comparison. First for the same reason that populist calls for the left to work with the right are always ridiculous: “working with” can mean anything from voting for the same bill to abandoning any and all criticism and opposition, so justifying a left-right coalition is always going to depend on what “working with” specifically means.

But more to the point, there’s some hilarious irony here. Populists love to tell leftists to get over their superficial cultural hangups over things like political labels and accents and try to really understand the politics of our rivals. When it comes to the Young Patriots, however, these populists are constantly just seeing the word “patriot”, their use of the Confederate Flag, and their Southern accents, and reflexively concluding that their politics must be analogous to the contemporary right.

Nothing could be further from the truth! All you have to do is just look at the 11-point platform of the Young Patriots to see what kind of group this really is. It’s a little verbose so I’ll just paraphrase, but you can read it in full here:

1. CLASS - Redistribution of all wealth and worker control of the means of production.

2. WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE - A right to food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, day care. Basic income for mothers. The decommodification of all necessities.

3. PIGS AND PIG POWER STRUCTURE - Cops are pigs. An end to police violence. Absolute civilian control of the police. Police must come from local communities.

4. SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION - Education must shift away from its vocation focus, which impedes class mobility and trains poor people to accept their lot in the capitalist system.

5. DRAFT - No war. If rich people want to fight they should do it themselves.

6. UNIONS - End identity-based discrimination in the workplace. Equal pay. Independent unions. But unionization is no substitute for communism.

7. EXPLOITATION OF THE COMMUNITY - Rich people have to provide goods and services to their communities rather than hoard their profits.

8. RACISM - Unconditional opposition to racism and sexism.

9. DECARCERATION - The release of all political prisoners. And this includes prisoners who simply couldn’t defend themselves because they’re too poor.

10. CULTURAL NATIONALISM - Cultural chauvinism and parochialism is racist and at odds with class struggle.

11. REVOLUTIONARY SOLIDARITY - Support for all struggles for independence against nationalist imperialism, whether from capitalist or faux-socialist nations.

Three key takeaways from this list. First, the Young Patriots are not making the vague reformist points about capitalism that today’s right will occasionally indulge in; they’re calling for a specifically communist program, with absolute redistribution, decommodification, and worker control of the means of production. Second, much of this list — the hostility towards police, the concern for workplace discrimination and equal pay, the specific opposition to bigotry, decarceration, and the focus on nationalism and cultural parochialism — would obviously be decried as “woke” by the right today. And third, this platform makes no mention whatsoever of free speech, of media balance, of coercive regulation, of left-right tribalism; it’s completely disinterested in the concerns that animate our neopopulists.

The Young Patriots, in other words, look nothing like the contemporary right that neopopulists want the left to “work with”. This is even true literally: the poor Appalachian Southerners who made up the Young Patriots just don’t bear any resemblance to the Dimes Square scenesters, DC think tank fellows, rich Substackers / streamers, and West Coast crypto-centrist dissidents who make up the neopopulist faction of the American right. If anything, the contemporary faction that probably bears the strongest resemblance to the Young Patriots of the late 60s is today’s rank-and-file dirtbag left: middle-to-upper-lower working class, rough around the edges, occasionally problematic, committed to egalitarian politics and specifically socialist economics, and reviled by liberals and conservatives alike.