In one sense, we’re winning this war. Militarily — Ukraine’s astonishing resistence and fierce determination has ground the might of the Russian army to a screeching halt. Goliath, meet David. But in another sense, on another front, we are losing this war very badly indeed.
That front is political — across the West, and the world, the far right, which is made of Putin’s buddies, continues to rise, and rise, and rise. Le Pen. Johnson. Australia’s PM might support Ukraine, but he doesn’t believe in climate change. Modi. Xi. I could go on and on until you and I both want to scream, punch somebody, call an Australian a bogan, or all three.
We are losing this war. It is a hybrid war for Russia, meaning that the political-cultural-social front counts as much as the military one. And while Ukraine’s winning the military front for the rest of us, we are losing the other front for ourselves.
The far right is in such ascendance that Putin’s big bet is that none of this matters. Sooner or later, in the West’s leading nations, a far right demagogue, backed, funded, trained by Putin, a marionette, rises…again…the first one was a certain orange coloured man who likes to be peed on…and then the West is done. It could be a Le Pen, pursuing a Frexit and an end to NATO. It could be a Johnson in extremis, and consider than Johnson rose to power by making Brits hate Europeans. It could be a Josh Hawley, who’s about as subtle in his white supremacy as Jimmy Savile was about his pedophilia. Sooner or later…Putin’s waiting, like a demon spider, for his web to catch a fly.
And that web isn’t being torn down. Why not?
Because the left. I know, I know. Jesus, guys. Grandpa’s going to lecture us about the left again! Run! Hold on while I grab you by the lapels, you snot-nosed litttle…no, really, we need to talk.
The centre left is failing incredibly badly. Joe Biden hasn’t even gotten a war bump for his relatively expert handling of this war. Social democratic parties in Europe are on their way to extinction. Even parts of wise and gentle Canada are governed by demagogues who bear a curious resemblance to burning garbage. And in France, well, there’s the scion of a neo-Nazi dynasty.
Why is the left failing? Imagine that before you was a road to paradise, and a dumpster. The left stepped into the dumpster, and it’s arguing about how to get itself out. It’s like the Oscars in there, except everyone’s Will Smith and Chris Rock, and everything’s made of garbage. What the *** am I talking about?
The left needs to present people with an answer to a failed economic paradigm: globalization. The answer it offers is…wokeness. The result of all this is that people run away screaming from the dumpster fire debating society that the left is now. Average people who the left needs to ever win an election again.
Am I saying that “wokeness killed the left”? No. I’m saying something a little more subtle. The left’s answer to the problems of this age is social justice. Not economic justice. And this position — whatever you or I might think of it — isn’t working.
This isn’t about my opinions or yours. Just facts. The left is not succeeding. My friends, if Baby Hitler is within the margin of error in winning in France, a nation that used to be so far left you couldn’t get a Metro in Paris on the weekends because everyone from doctors to teachers were protesting like it was the goddamned revolution…something is very, very wrong. This is the nation that taught the world what freedom really was. Even if it involved, uh, a guillotine or three. Baby Hitler should not be within a swastika’s distance of winning France.
To understand the failure of the left, we have to understand that our societies such as they are are made of multilayered paradigmatic failures. Imagine a whole goddamned paleontological history of failure. You’re digging in the dirt, and you keep on rummaging through sediment, and uncovering layer after layer of…failure. Here’s the KT boundary — that’s one failure. Ah man, see this band? Jesus, what the hell? Is it made of tears and pain? Black with hate? Don’t touch it, man, put on some gloves! It’s probably still poisonous!!
What do I mean by “our societies are made of a mulitlayered sedimentary history of failure?” Well, the left is correct to focus on the fact that our societies exist in the shadow of a long, long history of colonialism and slavery and supremacy. That’s not untrue. But above that — or maybe beside it — sits a long, long history of misogyny and bigotry, too. And beyond that, in the more modern strata, lies the vicious failure of globalization, which looks like ashes.
We have the complicated task of addressing all these failures. All of them. But leftism such as it’s become — wokeness, to put it too simply — only addresses one layer of these failures, maybe two.
Globalisation has failed everyone. And a modern politics needs to offer a vision and solution for its failures. Its only winners, really, are oligarchs and the warlords who need them. They shop at Harrods and buy trillion dollars penthouses in London and Manhattan — but the average person is struggling. Whether they’re in Calais or California or London’s gritty suburbs. Life has gone downhill for them since globalisation really bit. Their jobs vanished, their communities dried up, their futures became uncertain and unstable. And along came demagogues, and scapegoated immigrants and minorities for it all.
Now let’s think about what the modern left offers as a solution for all this. Social justice. Not economic justice. But how can social justice solve the problems of globaliation? It can’t. So the left tells the average person in the West — who’s life is in decline, looking for a job as prosperous as their grandpa’s, a community, stability, security, a sense of meaning, purpose, identity — that they’re a bad guy. Historically, they’re the inheritors of privilege descended from centuries of violence and slavery and so forth. And the average person, at the losing end of globalization — very much a victim of it — looks at left and says: “What are you smoking? I’m not the bad guy here, I’ve been wronged!”
The average person is correct. It’s true that in the West the average person is the inheritor of privilege, yada yadda, call a woke friend and have them write a grad-school level screed about it — but it’s truer, at least in the immediate sense of their lives, that they’re the losers of globalization. Their lives are more unstable and poorer and the whole nine yards.
Now. You can begin to see why the left is failing so badly. It is offering a badly incomplete solution for a set of failed paradigms. It isn’t really addressing the most immediate failure of all at all — globalization. It keeps insisting that the only paradigmatic failures which matters are those which the average person isn’t affected by.
So while the average person might be kind enough to even agree with the left — yes, I’ve inherited some level of privilege — the moment the left doesn’t also see them as victims of globalization, as its pawns, the people who got ripped off and hurt by it, and insists that they’re only bad guys…it loses them…they roll their eyes, at this childish nonsense, and never return.
Let me give you an example. If I wanted to sum up why the left is failing in two words, those words would be “pregnant people.” I read those two words in newspapers now — they’re becoming de rigueur. This is being forced on people. But should it be? If I actually ask women how they feel about this, every single woman I know — from Britain to France to America to Germany and beyond…rolls their eyes. They go along with it, because well, if they don’t, the same ten thousand people on Twitter will call them Nazis. “Jesus! I’ll say it! Just don’t send me a pic of your…OK? Goddamn!!” Meanwhile, actual Nazis are raping women — women, am I still allowed to say that word — in Ukraine.
And if you dare to point out, hey, uh, anyone asked women what they think of all this, the word “woman” becoming a fraught one…guess what, you get called a Nazi or a bigot or a fascist again, with exactly zero self-awareness that there actual crimes against humanity being committed against the people we’re not allowed to call women.
What planet are we even on? You begin to see what I mean by a “debating society in a dumpster fire.” All of this is bonkers.
Maybe you see my point. Or maybe you want to pillory me. Go right ahead. The ten thousand people on Twitter — maybe it’s a hundred thousand, who knows? — that insist that anyone who disagrees with their semantics, and that their semantics are the most important thing in the world…don’t matter. Really. They don’t. The only purpose they serve right about now is being friends of the far right. By bullying average people, like the women I know, into silence, they only alienate the average person from ever being part of the left. And the average person is quite right not to want to be part of a left that has forgotten about something very crucial: consent.
It’s not my opinion that “pregnant people” is an absurd turn of phrase. That’s not what I’m saying at all, and it’s not about my opinion. I’m saying that every single woman I know thinks so, and probably, that’s a social current that can’t be ignored. And yet nobody has asked them for consent. Instead, these semantics are just forced down their throats. And yet these semantics are about them.
So we have two problems. The left is so wrapped up in these semantics games, one, that it has no concrete vision of an economic or social paradigm to address the catastrophic failure of globalization for the average person. What kind of society does it want? Economy? Beyond telling me it wants semantics, and I’m a Nazi if I don’t agree — while in Ukraine, kids are being raped by actual Nazis — there’s nothing there, and that’s the second problem. Semantics and a lack of substance.
The situation is frankly abysmal and horrific. If I ask the average modern leftist what Marx said about, I don’t know, primitive accumulation, or how that was connected to Aristotle’s notion of the good life, they wouldn’t be able to tell me. If I ask them why gender pronouns matter, I’ll get a long, long lecture — and then I’ll get this weird totalitarian look, searching for any hint of dissent, because, like I said, I’m a bigot if I disagree.
There is real evil in this world. It doesn’t do to call people who merely disagree with you about complex subjects fascists…while actual fascists are busy shredding towns and committing crimes against humanity of the like we haven’t seen for decades….against people that, thanks to you, we’re beginning not to have a word for, which, yes, might be a real problem. What am I supposed to fight the real Nazis with? Grad-school theories? Shall I throw a pronoun at them? Oh, wait, I forgot, I’m as bad as a Ukrainian soldier raping a person who used to be known as a woman for bringing all this up. Yeah, totally. Heil Hitler, guys, you got me. I’m the world’s only brown Nazi.
This kind of debating society in a dumpster fire that the left has turned into is idiotic. It doesn’t do at all to build a politics on bullying and abusiveness — and ignore the matter of consent. The left just doesn’t seem to grasp this. Like some kind of weird rapey guy, it keeps on trying to pull our jaws apart, and force stuff down our gullets, and meanwhile, we keep protesting, “no…no! Stop, man, stop! I don’t want this!”…and it doesn’t care.
Take my example of “pregnant people” again. The average leftist will be in a state of absolute rage at me for contesting this turn of phrase. Like serious rage! As if I came to their home and tortured their pet. Get him! Burn the witch!! But there is real evil in the world. Not calling someone a “pregnant person” surely cannot be on the same level as the war crimes of raping a woman as an act of war or executing a parent in front of their kid. And yet if anyone who disagrees with “pregnant person” is a fascist…what are the soldiers in Ukraine?
So the left barely distinguishes between these obvious levels of things — between evil in bad faith and well-meaning disagreement. It just grabs you by the throat, whether you consent or not, and tries to force-feed you this bizarre diet of semantics. Nobody wants to have their consent ignored. Is it really OK to disappear the word “woman” in these contexts? Shouldn’t we ask… women?
If we don’t…uh…I hate to tell you this…but aren’t we being kind of…welll…rapey? And the left is just ignoring that, too.
In the complex sediments of failure, it’s not just gender diverse people we’ve failed. It’s also women. They are badly, badly wounded too, to this day, systematically discriminated against. You can’t just ignore that, and call them the bad guys, and hope to ever really have women on your side, which is precisely why so many have fled to the far right.
You have to acknowledge the ways in which we’ve all been failed by this complex sediment of failure, in a palaeontology of violence and hate. It can’t just be about one kind of wronged party. Women, by misogyny. Ethnic and racial minorities, by hate. The LGTBQ, by homophobia and transphobia. The average person, by globalization. All of us have been failed, unless our last name are “Bezos” or “Putin” or “the Devil.”
But the modern left is increasingly unwilling to even acknowledge this reality. It is increasingly saying that there are a small number of truly oppressed parties, who are the real victims, and everyone else is at fault. That isn’t just a false reality — we’re all victims here, whether of misogyny or globalisation or racism or all three — it’s bad politics, too. Go ahead and tell women they’re the real oppressors. Women — who still make 30% less than men and get the kind of hate for just existing that a dude will never, ever understand. Go ahead and tell women they’re the bad guys here and LOL — good luck ever getting elected.
The left is so focused on a tiny number of “oppressions” that it has forgotten its point is to build a better world for all of us, and that means understanding that we have all been failed by history, power, and money, just different versions of it.
It has become hyper focused with correcting one or two sets of wrongs, to the exclusion of all others — the very ones which affect most people — and that is why it has no broad appeal whatsoever anymore. And it’s also why calling everyone else the bad person, which is most of society, because only a tiny number are the biggest victims, only serves to alienate most people, and hence, the hard right just keeps rising and rising, like Sauron’s goddamned tower. I mean, come on. You’d have to a complete political idiot to think that just repeatedly calling most of society bad and terrible people, for simply existing, in more and more frenzied ways, until you’re literally calling anyone who says “pregnant woman” a bigot…. is ever going to get you elected. And this is what the left actually does now.
The point, again, isn’t that I agree or disagree with wokeness. My personal opinions make no appearance in this essay whatsoever, but as someone who literally grew up at gay clubs, maybe you can imagine what they are. Still, it needs to be pointed out. You cannot offer people who’ve been failed by globalisation… pronouns and semantics…and then force them down their throats… and call that a working politics.
The left has become too intolerant and short-sighted and bullysome — is that a word?— for its own good. I come from a culture where multiple genders have existed for centuries. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, just that it is. And yet this debate becomes something the left is totally obsessed by. The hill it’s willing to die on.
Have you noticed this? The left doesn’t care about anything the way it cares about gender free bathrooms and pronouns and pregnant people.
Nothing else matters to this left. How should, for example, economies be organized? Should we, say, nationalise a few banks, and turn them into national development banks again? The modern left literally doesn’t care. Should we give people rights to income and property? A deafening silence. How about, at birth, maybe we give every kid a small investment fund, which matures at adulthood partly, and then again at retirement? Nothing. The left has no interest in these complex subjects at all. Ask it if statues should be torn down or if women need to be called something else — and you’ll drown in the painful outrage and abstruse theories of the responses.
It’s crazy, guys. It’s bananas. You can’t tell anyone that if a Ukrainian woman is raped in a war crime, what really matters is calling her a “pregnant person” — and be taken seriously. Anyone vaguely acquainted with reality or adulthood will walk away shaking their head at you. As well they should. Because your priorities are out of touch with reality. There is real evil in the world. The semantics of lesser evils are not what a working politics can be built on in a world pulsating and throbbing now with real, gargantuan scale evil.
Not just because I say so. Because what happens is this. Even if the average person is kind enough to be polite and agree with all this — “pregnant people” and pronouns matter as much as rape and war crimes and serious goddamned evil — because they don’t want to be bullied to high heaven by Twitter’s insane Woke Inquisition…they stop well short of voting for it. When it comes time to vote, the left has a big problem, which is that nobody turns out enough. That people are not turning out the way they used to — especially among the young — tells us something. This is a fad. A fashion. It’s not a functional politics.
If you can barely even get the Woke Police — you know, the people who’ll scream at you and call you a bigot for not saying “pregnant person” while women are raped in war crimes — to turn out, and they’re young, and this all alienates everyone else, then it can never win. It is a losing approach. It’s not a functional politics in that sense — it doesn’t even motivate its hardcore adherent to vote for it, not to mention turns everyone else off, and just aids the hard right in both those ways.
I’m on the side of everyone having equal rights. Everyone. But that does not mean that you can force your interpretation of them down people’s throats, and bully everyone into submission, just because you think you occupy the moral high ground.
There is a reason that people roll their eyes at wokery, and never vote for it. It doesn’t matter to them — and even if they’re polite enough to support it, they don’t turn out, because they are looking for answers to issues which hit them, not just 1% of the population. Those issues aren’t just about social justice and gender — they’re about economic injustice. They’re about the way that globalisation wrecked and shattered the middle and working classes, yet made billionaires into ultra billionaires, corrupted our polities, and left our societies utterly destablized and emptied out.
The left needs to have an answer to those questions. What is a modern economy in the 21st century? What jobs do people do? How do they not live lives of perpetual debt and misery? How do towns and cities left to abandon into rust regenerate? What do we do about climate change? How do we hold crimes against humanity trials? What do we do about the rise of the far right?
The answer to none of these questions is: “I’m going to force semantics down your throat, about an issue that doesn’t really affect you, and if you don’t just open your mouth and say yes please, more, sir, then I’m going to call you a Nazi, and never mind if there are real Nazis committing unspeakable right over there! You’re just as bad as them!”
That is not an answer. All it’s making people do is flee the left the way that a woman on a date would flee a rapey handsy guy. Because that’s what the left is doing. It’s trying to bully people into accepting a kind of totalist vision where semantics solve the world’s problems. If they did, my friends, women wouldn’t be being raped in Ukraine. Calling them “pregnant people” wouldn’t have stopped a single one of those crimes. Does the left get this? Their solutions hold too little resonance in the real world, which is now seeing a resurgence of true evil.
The Devil is looking at the left, and laughing. Evil stalks the globe again. The left, meanwhile, is busy calling everyone who doesn’t say the words “pregnant people” a Nazi, never mind the fact that actual crimes against humanity are a lot different and more than that. You can see why nobody much cares about the left anymore.
