The Problem With The Modern Left: They're Too Weird
Contrary to what some people would have you believe in online circles recently, Trump and Vance aren't the only ones with views offputing to the median voter. The Left suffers from image problems too.
Speak to anyone with an intimate grasp of politics and they’ll tell you one thing: politics is more about optics than it is about concrete policy.
The median voter isn’t interested in reading highly-detailed, 400-page manifestos, which outline every specific policy niche adored by the online intelligentsia. They’re not willing to sacrifice hours of their day sifting through endless pages and documents to decipher someone’s views on nuclear energy or social housing or electoral reform. No, at the end of the day, voters will gravitate to who they find the most attractive or appealing, who snags them with a catchy slogan or a clean, immaculate leaflet. To put it simply: it’s a vibes-based economy.
Perhaps, it signals the superficial dynamic each of us engages in when looking for a date; people are less interested in hobbies or a person’s wealth or employment status but in what they look like, their conventional attractiveness. No matter how often we may try and downplay this, it’s a universal human trait, one that reverberates through the political system.
That’s why first impressions are so important, no more so than for politicians and activists. Look or behave any differently from what is socially acceptable and you risk alienating large swathes of people from not only your group but also your ideology itself. This is a lesson the mainstream Left in Western countries fails to understand or accept. There is something presumptuous lurking in the very phrase, “the Left”. Under a show of cosmopolitan inclusion, the term hides a reality of unconscious parochialism. Instead of coalition building, they’re content with perpetuating group-think, never moving beyond their unyielding dogma.
Granted, the far-right is just as bad, something we’ve seen pointed out ad nauseam during the American election campaign as their outdated views on women or gay rights are unearthed and scrutinised by the media but their ideology is often so entrenched in views and traditions that are familiar to all of us that it’s not as jarring. When a Groyper talks about depriving women of the right to vote or making them all into handmaidens, it’s disgusting but it’s not surprising. As a society, we have struggled with this discourse for decades. Every normal person accepts it as uncouth but they also become numb to it. Dismissing it is a muscular response.
The Left, on the other hand, propagates views many will find asinine or extremist, often because it means rejecting everything we have taken for granted. They advocate for defunding the police at a time when most voters feel safer with police patrolling their neighbourhoods. They advocate for abolishing borders and striving for a truly globalised world, at a time when most voters prefer their homogenous communities. Their views on gender and sexuality contradict the very social structure we have all chosen to rely on.
That disconnect partially explains why the modern Left is so paralysed, socially and electorally, across Western countries. At a time of economic upheaval, as millions of workers struggle with systematically low pay, high housing costs and increasing fears over climate change, the grounds have never been more fertile for a left-wing resurgence. Yet, that has not materialised, mostly because of the Left’s self-destructive tendencies. Working constructively with people from across the political aisle is deemed counter-revolutionary, a stain on the supposed ideological purity of their movement. So, they keep to their echo chambers and refuse to grow or evolve.
While the Left, like any other set of political attitudes, is parochial, its commitments are inevitably partisan. Although the rhetoric is outwardly universalist, the orientation is nearly always sectarian. In fact, the determination to capture and purify the Left is a symptom of this narrow partisanship. On average, Left particularism assumes that virtue resides in just half of the population. This refers to that portion which votes in the preferred way. In certain constituencies, for example in universities, that cohort shrinks to less than 20%: only this faction is “truly” Left. Since this proportion can never constitute a real electoral force, it must make up for its lack of power with the intensity of its beliefs.
It’s a phenomenon observed on university campuses. Strangely, despite their hard-won independence and their enjoyment of intellectual freedom, academics are often moved to mimic the attitudes of politicians. This is perhaps especially the case in more recent years. Over the last century, the politicisation of the academy has come and gone in waves. Over the past decade, signalling ideological preferences has become a sort of fashion. As a result, it is astonishing, but true, that most lecturers are afraid of saying something that their peers might arbitrarily identify as “Right” wing. By “Right”, they mean wrong. They mean it’s morally bad, at least in the eyes of the dominant peer group.
Their justification for this relies on the assumption that no one should feel “offended” or “uncomfortable”. What was once disliked as an opposing view is now abhorred as a kind of evil, a perverse rejection of all things holy. Left-wing activists almost become zealous religious acolytes, trained to distrust and confront anything deemed blasphemous. Disadvantage is mostly conceived within the bounds of middle-class privilege. Consequently, the approach tends to verge on narcissism. The main casualty in all this is a sense of proportion and coherent social policy.
But while the Left in the educational sector lacks immediate political power, it enjoys significant influence. Members of the teaching profession, the publishing and heritage industries as well as the print and broadcast media are products of a broadly conceived university culture.
It doesn’t help that left-wing organisers enjoy speaking with each other in highly-intellectual jargon, referencing esoteric issues only one well-versed in that dialectical materialism can parse and this can be alienating for ordinary people. Mass rallies, instead of acting as a chance to amplify and propel ideas to the wider public, are corrupted to become mass therapy sessions for the organisers to vent their underlying mental issues.
When people imagine leaders of men, the image they craft for themselves is a suave, clean, sociable and approachable person who can speak clearly and eloquently, so it’s no surprise that they recoil in disgust as these unwashed philistines sporting provocative tattoos and dyed hair begin speaking about abstract concepts, such as systematic racism or gender ideology, that do not relate to their lived experiences. That’s the modern Left, a hybrid of weird foreign cultures that most people find discomforting or repulsive.
Even when the public agrees with the Left on certain issues, their proclivity for public disorder and an inherent desire for social ostracisation extinguishes any goodwill mustered. Take, for instance, the issue of climate change. Most voters believe it exists, that it presents an existential threat to human society and, subsequently, want to take measures to combat it. But when middle-class protestors went out of their way to inconvenience working-class people as they commuted to work, it became abundantly clear that these people were so immune from the daily struggles most workers endure. If they live in these different worlds, how can they possibly relate to their plight, as they so often claim?
If the Left wants to regain any relevancy, this is the reality it must confront. As it presently stands, the Left is not fighting an age-old struggle or advancing the cause of international fraternity. It is waging a provincial campaign in a struggle with forces slightly further to the Left and with various opponents on the Right, all while engaging in intellectual masturbation. They can admit no wrongs because, to them, they are infallible. Any issues inflicting them are the byproduct of external factors - oppressive capitalist governments intent on marginalising them, the CIA, fascists, etc. Introspection is dead.
Until the Left rejects this dogmatic approach to politics and looks inward and confronts the issues plaguing it and does a monumental PR revamp, it seems likely they’ll remain on the outskirts of society for the foreseeable future, shouting and marching about issues salient to most voters, but not taken seriously, forced to spend their years as an irritating pest everyone hopes will go extinct.