AIBU that the political left is hamstrung by it's obsession with purity of thought?

[Echobelly]

To be clear - I think intersectionality is vital, I think awareness of privilege and balances of power when talking about the needs of different people is massively important. These things have value.

But it also seems to me that one reason the Left is struggling against the populist Right is that this expectation that everyone who doesn't get everything about the things I mentioned above exactly 'right' the very first time they encounter them or every time they mention them in company is a total pariah, a 'bigot', is 'erasing' or 'silencing' another group with what they do or say etc. When they're trying to the right thing but have maybe got it wrong, they're basically treated link c*nts.

People are well intentioned, but not everyone has a degree in sociology or whatever and not everyone, especially if they haven't had a privileged education, has a nuanced understanding of every political and social issue. Often one encounters people who are quick to label anyone who they see as less left-wing than them as 'fascist' (I was called this for discussing exactly the issue I am raising here on a LW group, though TBF, the guy was a bit of a out-there weirdo and was called out by lots of other people for saying it!)

I imagine one doesn't often see people chucked out of right wing groups for being 'not right wing enough' or 'not intersectional'. These groups, while lacking in self-awareness usually, are at least welcoming to all parties that want to join on the whole and won't chuck them out for 'saying the wrong thing'. Basically, it's easy to be part of the Right. It's hard to be part of the Left.

And that in part is because there is more self-awareness and care about it on the Left and that is valuable, but God, can't people sometimes cut people a bit of a slack?! It just seems that the Left spends its time tearing itself apart to prove who is the most pure and virtuous, and while it does this RW is making all sorts of gains in the popular consciousness and screwing up the world.

Exactly. The tendency of the current Left is to tell the electorate what is good for it. In case they hadn’t noticed, people have largely stopped going to Church and hate a sermon.

It’s really sad.

Ordinary working class people built the Labour Party, and it has been ripped down and replaced by a bunch of nonsense.

It is a huge betrayal.

What’s your point? It’s what people voted for.

@sst1234

What’s your point? It’s what people voted for.

In response to @BoredZelda

It’s what people voted for.

What do you mean? The electorate? Not enough of them voted for it.

Sorry, get you now

Difficult Women by Helen Lewis has a good analysis of this, looking at women who made huge strides for women who would've been seen as "problematic" nowadays.

You're absolutely right and I can't see how they're ever going to get into government again. They should be able to win an election with no problem, but all they ever do is fight amongst themselves and insult potential voters. I've even seen them saying they literally don't want the votes of people who aren't "pure" enough.

They need to encourage the floating voters because the party members are generally going to vote for them anyway, and not scream that everyone else is racist/stupid/uneducated/too old/gammon/homophobic/transphobic if they don't 100% follow the party line. I just don't get how they can't see it.

I'd love to be able to vote for them but there's not a chance in hell of that any time soon.

I always find it interesting that the right wing is more able to be a broad church and tolerate differences and diversity

Well that might have been the case under the One Nation conservative school of thought but most Tory moderates have been removed from the cabinet and exiled to the back benches. Basically the party has morphed into UKIP.

What do they say? put to two lefties in a room and they come out having formed 3 political parties. The left likes to virtue signal. They like to talk, talk, talk and talk some more.
The virtue signalling spills into hypocrisy all too often. Like lecturing people on the evils of private education and sending our kids to private schools. Like flying first class or on a private jet to turn up to a protest or concert to lecture people on cutting their carbon footprint. Like saying ‘be kind’ when trying to shut people up. Like calling for higher taxes to pay for everything as long as it’s others paying the tax. Like calling people misogynists and not being able to admit that a biological woman is a woman. I could go on.

@NewMutiny

Isn't there some commentary from a women's group in Deptford or somewhere about running small scale projects for poor/socially excluded/abused women, mostly women of colour, which were all extremely practical (food to eat, safe place to sleep wtc) and then having students from a local university (mostly white middle class men IIRC) come and lecture them on the language they were using while doing it?

No intention of rolling their sleeves up and actually doing anything. Just purity policing

www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/

@NewMutiny from about half way down the page

The right has been splintered a lot in recent years, too. Illusion to think otherwise.

English Democrats, No2EU, UKIP, BNP, National Front, Brexit party etc.

I don't understand all OP is saying but I got frustrated when people argued Labour wasn't left wing enough, how much they hated Tony Blair for not being very Socialist... might as well have real Tories in power was their logic. Shooting selves in foot with socialist puritanism.

I agree with @ShrillSiren I think. The purity spiral stuff is bad, but the fundamental problem is that so many people on the left think people who vote Conservative are evil or stupid. They absolutely cannot conceive of the possibility that these people are just normal humans who made a different choice on polling day.

The left will never get back into power unless it persuades some of these people to vote for left parties - it needs people who voted Conservative in 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019. But so many on the left cannot stop themselves expressing utter contempt for these people and then they wonder why they're not getting enough swing voters in tight seats. It's because they know you hate them! Why would they vote for you?

Say what you like about Blair but swing voters who sometimes voted Conservative never got the feeling he thought they were contemptible.

(Left-ish myself, have never voted Conservative for whatever that's worth)

But on the Left that is this habit of treating anyone who hasn't swallowed a dictionary of social justice terminology as if they're in the EDL because they haven't got something quite right.

But what do you mean by not getting something quite right? Many on the left would call me a bigot because I don't believe people can change sex. This is an absolute biological truth. This isn't a case of me "not getting something quite right".

I got frustrated when people argued Labour wasn't left wing enough, how much they hated Tony Blair for not being very Socialist... might as well have real Tories in power was their logic

I know, right. It’s fucking ridiculous.

I teach university students and at the moment they all think of themselves as very left wing. You would think they would be very exercised by Brexit, the pandemic, climate change, the cost of housing, student fees, the plight of the poor or the homeless. Not a jot. It is all pronouns and trans rights and being non-binary and policing what everyone else is allowed to say.

I feel in despair at this. Left wing politics when I was young was not just about yourself but about social change and international issues - poverty, women’s rights, race, globalism, foreign aid, economic policy, minimum wage, housing, ecological crisis. It really depresses me to try to discuss foreign policy or economic questions and the students look at me in bemusement because they don’t know anything about it. The only game in town is virtue signalling about identity politics; and even trying to historicise that for them produces instant resistance. It also seems impossible for them to see that identity politics is paradoxically heavily inflected by a very profit-oriented, capitalist individualism. (Even as they buy up pronoun pins on Etsy and upload photos of them to Instagram.)

They aren’t even much interested in the climate crisis, which you’d think they would be.

I don’t have much hope for the future of leftist politics, to be honest.

but that still doesn't come with the degree of excoriation that seems to happen on the Left to someone who makes a mild error.

Oh, it absolutely does. It is usually paired somehow with snowflake, and is derisory and designed to shut down any debate.

What’s your point? It’s what people voted for.

Why is that relevant to whether or not the Conservatives are a “broad church” who just love diversity and tolerance? How many people voted for them doesn’t change what they are.

Thank you @Waitwhat23 that's the one. Bloody depressing reading. Especially the but about expecting them to give out a magazine with sex tips for sex work to women who were being pimped out and violently abused as teenagers.

YANBU - look at the Obama years. Massive community organising, being mature enough to compromise to actually get things done. African Americans in power rather than just some tokenistic virtue signalling shite on Twitter.

I despair that the Labour Party's message this week has been all about cervices. Imagine we had been told this in 2015, it would have been hard to believe.

I've been made homeless, had a severely disabled family member and needed to use a hospital that people begged not to be sent too under the last year's of a Labour gov. All were horrific situations and I had no help and was treated badly if anything the people I spoke too in the system we're more interested in jargon and buzz words and phrases.

I hadn't even read new mutiny comments and the op re the left students not caring about brexit corybn was a leaver they wanted to leave!!

The left are more concerned with being right than being a legitimate voting option. And are preoccupied with pointless trans crap rather than actual systematic change.

I worked with a young person recently who was a self proclaimed left leaning feminist but when I spoke about the structural sexism I faced as a mother she basically glazed over. It was clearly too unsexy to consider to be an important topic and she had to go back to crying ‘terf’ on Twitter and supporting men trying to occupy women only spaces. Not interested in dialogue or learning or even any other topics, just want to shut down discussion and decry impurity of thoughts.

@EishetChayil - I mean, for example, it could be something like some women try to set up a feminist group, but then gets ripped to shreds because they don't have any women of colour in the leader or the time and place of their meetings will make it hard for low-income women doing shift work to come or something.

Fine to critique it and maybe offer some tips 'I notice you don't have any BAME women, I can suggest some good contacts' or 'You need to bear in mind that those meetings will be hard to get to for people without cars/childcare' or whatever.

Not 'You're ERASING women of colour!' 'You're EXCLUDING working class women' 'Fuck off with your useless middle class white feminism!

And on things that are not an error, I think one should recognise the difference between someone saying 'All trans women are just male perverts with an agenda to destroy women's rights and get paedophiles access to children' (I know some people here probably do agree with that, but not me) and someone saying 'I fully respect trans women's right to be safe and live as they wish, but as a rape survivor I just can't feel comfortable with a trans woman in my survivor's therapy group'. Yet some people will react to the latter the same way they react to the first. I totally get that even the latter could feel profoundly upsetting to a trans woman, but it's coming from a totally different place and it's wrong to say to people who say something like that 'Oh, you're just a bigot who can't stand the existence of trans women and wants them to die', which is a reaction I've seen to that kind of thing.