How to Create a More Inclusive Left

“Viewpoint diversity, when it treads on certain progressive articles of faith, is scorned, and the ideas considered within the bounds of respectable discourse on contentious issues are increasingly narrow.”

Most critiques of the progressive Left contend with its overzealous activism and moralizing approach to politics, which can resemble a secular religion. It has even become a staple of conservative media in recent years to highlight the voices of former progressives who have demurred from the excesses of social justice, as though it were tantamount to leaving a cult. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the all-encompassing gravitational pull of the culture war, critiques of the Left “from the Left” tend to swiftly turn into partisan potshots, betraying more opportunism and bad faith than sincere desire to improve the cultural discourse between opposing political tribes around complex and important issues.

In a series of articles published last year in Quillette, Uri Harris encouraged supporters of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web to engage with social justice ideas, particularly around issues of identity, privilege, and structural oppression. The real challenge for those of us concerned with the trajectory of modern progressivism, Harris argued, is to parse the efficacy of its ideas from the activists who apply them destructively, insisting the aim should be, “to figure out how to embrace this more nuanced view of society without descending into authoritarianism, bigotry, or anti-intellectualism.”

In an effort to do precisely that, I’d like to briefly outline some prevailing ideas of the cultural Left. In my own view, the problem with social justice is not that it’s inherently authoritarian, bigoted, or anti-intellectual—but that its premises are not followed to their natural conclusions, which reveals an underlying bias that works against its stated goals. Here are some examples:

Privilege

A good place to start is with the concept of privilege. Privilege theory argues that each individual is embedded in a matrix of categories and contexts that confers advantages to some and not others. According to Wikipedia, “social privilege” is an entitlement or unearned advantage that we are unaware of and that is employed to our benefit—and to the detriment of other people.

Examples from history abound: In the era of Jim Crow, a lack of awareness of the privileges of white society and their impact on the black community (such as the institutionalized practice of redlining that relegated blacks to dilapidated housing quarters to maintain the property value of white neighborhoods) undoubtedly expanded the lifespan of segregation. The idea that our relative privilege can blind us to the suffering of other people, who might not have those privileges, borders on the undeniable.