Everyone has that uncle at Thanksgiving. Yes, him, the one whose mouth moves faster than his mind, whose every clause might represent the difference between a civil meal and a toxic blowout. As a result, others in the family steel themselves for the experience, promising one another that engagement is not on the table and that they’re just going to get through an annual rant, however unhinged and disconnected it might be. In most cases, this approach is perfectly reasonable; I, for one, am not prepared to prescribe how others should behave among their own family members. Navigating that dynamic is tough enough, without others giving unsolicited, poorly-informed and frequently impractical advice. But the institution of the family is unlike the outer world, which is to say that disengagement outside of the home has very different implications and should be considered much more carefully. This is especially consequential for leftists, who are often accused of pointless, self-destructive internal division, not to mention hostility and divisiveness in the face of those who have not yet been turned to the righteous cause of social emancipation. This criticism, legitimate in part, rests largely on an understanding of politics that ignores the significance of social questions, alongside the inescapable inconvenience that politics represent conflicting social interests, so long as a class structure and social inequality persist.
It is perfectly true that, in the various bubbles that constitute particular academic and digital slices of the left, “cancel culture” is too prominent. Consequently, people become separated and alienated from the movement according to trivial slights and interpersonal slip-ups. The less careful we are about moderating some of these self-erasing instincts, the more we resemble the construct of a circular firing squad.
This is hardly unique to the left; the right, and even the center, indulge regularly in such superficial diversions. Ultra-leftists demonize anyone who listens to Joe Rogan’s podcast, centrists pretend to be outraged at his less-than-woke record, and right-wingers castigate anyone who is not entirely loyal to the current President, the latest iteration of reactionary political correctness under the name of American patriotism.
No, the left is not unique in perpetuating toxicity and social disintegration. It is, however, unique in that its activities cannot be measured with the same moral yardstick as that held up to its less enlightened adversaries. There is no need here to mince words: the left has not only the most, but indeed the only, remotely defensible political project. This is not a question of how aggressively committed we should be; whatever must be done, must be done. By the same token, though, the most penetrating judgements of the left must come from within; we must take our objectives seriously enough to recognize that, in replicating dynamics of social isolation and political shunning, we are frequently in error.
The problem is not that the left is too militant; it is, in important ways, very much the opposite. Rather, the left sometimes directs its emotional, intellectual, and material energies inappropriately and destructively, undermining its liberation-oriented goals and descending into the bottomless muck of vacuous, but on occasion sharp-witted, liberal discourse. This tendency is exemplified in the triumph of performance, form and symbolism over the grounded content of substantive politics. For instance, debates about whether particular people can, as a function of their identities and backgrounds, actually be racists signals ideological sophistication and intellectual rigor. But such sociological wakefulness misses the point; racism, not unlike other manifestations of false consciousness, is not an immaterial set of ideas that someone buys into or not. Rather, it has a particular social history, significance, and function. Analysis of the relationship of the left to a concept such as race must go beyond identity-based quibbling and liberal moralism; beyond these, it is more so a question of revolutionary strategy and class solidarity. Compulsive privilege-checking, in leftist spaces, should be supplanted by a simultaneously more charitable and more disagreement-friendly appraisal of our political similarities and differences.
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