Why the Left Can’t Agree on Anything

“The irony is that this is in stark contrast to how our rivals on the political right often portray the Left.”

Introduction

These days people on the Left cannot agree on anything, if they ever could. The joke typically runs that if one wants to know what it is like to spend time with a group of activists or progressive intellectuals from different walks of life, imagine a bunch of well-meaning—if eccentrically dressed—people gathered in a circle. Everyone draws a gun, aims inwards, and fires. The irony is that this is in stark contrast to how our rivals on the political right often portray the Left. I have sometimes found myself wishing we resembled the united and powerful movement that haunts the dreams of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson: united in our quest to destroy Western civilization by assigning too much Derrida to undergraduate students and allowing trans women to use female-designated bathrooms. It might make us less interesting, but we would probably get more done.

Why Can’t the Left Agree on Anything?

As I write these words, I can already see some of my readers—sophisticated people that they are—rolling their eyes and saying, “Well, duh. That is because the whole left-right binary is kind of silly. It got its start in 1789 during the French Revolution when supporters of the King sat on the right in the National Assembly and supporters of the revolution sat on the left. These groupings were always fairly arbitrary, lumping together people who had little ideologically in common, even in the 18th century. Now, in our post-modern 21st century, why should we expect whatever the ‘Left’ is to be united on anything?”

Another objection might run that not being united is exactly what the “Left”—and let us deliberately leave that as an under-determined signifier—is all about. During the early years of the 20th century, there was a broad consensus that what progressives wanted to achieve was some iteration of socialism. This was either to be inspired by Marxism or, in the case of the Anglo-sphere, some iteration of consequentialism focused on achieving welfare for all. As the decades rolled on, socialism became discredited—fairly or otherwise—through its association with the crimes of the Soviet regime. This led to many economic leftists moderating their demands from public ownership of the means of production to calling for some form of social democracy ala the Western European states. (For the record, I still think this is a desirable and achievable goal.) At the same time, sharp critics began to observe the huge gaps in purely economic critique and what later came to be known as “class reductionism.” They claimed that the largely male and white thought leaders of the socialist movements were largely ignorant of—or even indifferent to—the particular marginalization of women, LGBTQ individuals, racialized minorities, and others. While most agreed that there was something to be said for universal liberation from economic depravity, it would likely be far less of an accomplishment to a gay black woman living in a racist, homophobic, and misogynistic society than to her counterparts.