We need to talk about the Left
Lest we find ourselves all talk and no action.
These are perilous times. Things are changing rapidly, old constants have become temporary fads, and everything that is solid has begun to liquefy. To state it as simply as possible: things are going to shit, and something needs to be done about it.
But these things can not be done by the Left.
The Left has a deep flaw, which brutally impedes it from being an effective force for change. This flaw cuts across all sectors of society, all classes, all genders, all ethnicities. It does not matter who, what or where — the Left cannot be there to make things better.
The problem with the Left is that it does not exist.
This might come as a surprise. Especially to those of you who are tuned in to contemporary political discussions, and try to stay up-to-date with the general state of going-to-shitness of things. Odds are that you will have read a thousand think pieces about the Left, both critical and supportive. Given the sheer volume of discussion about the Left, it might seem a safe bet to assume it actually exists.
It is not. Because it does not.
The problem with the Left is that it, as a word and as a category, encompasses almost everything. At one end of the Left, you find the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Literally Stalin. At the other end of the Left, you find Hillary Rodham Clinton. Between these two poles, there are a vast number of things that are, by virtue of grammatical inclusion, parts of the Left.
These many and disparate things are united by conventional grammar alone, though. Any attempt to find a common denominator is doomed to fail, and the grammatical construct of the Left falls apart faster than you can say “bipartisan consensus on foreign policy”. There simply is no logical frame within which all these disparate parts can be united into a single category and proclaimed all of a kind. That is not how non-Trump languages work.
Despite this, the words “the Left” are still used with ever replenishing vigor. It appears here, there, everywhere. The fact that the words can not refer to any one specific thing does not diminish their usefulness. To the contrary — this only means that the words can be used about everything and everyone. It is very convenient to be anti-Left when you can just point at something you do not like and declare it to be of the Left. You do not even need to know its proper name — the grammatical construct of “the Left” does all the heavy semantic lifting for you.
Indeed, all you need to do as an anti-leftist is to compare the opponent of the day to something else that also falls into the same overarching sinister category. A crude application of this technique is to compare something to Soviet Russia. The Big Bad. A more sophisticated version is to find something that is as close to the opposite of your opponent as you can get within the Left, and exploit the bejeezus out of the impossibility of reconciling the two. If both are on the Left, the argument goes, they should be in agreement, but look, they are not!
As rhetorical perpetual motion machines go, this is a big one.
Thing is. You are not allowed to fall into this grammatical pitfall. You are too intelligent for that, and your time is too valuable. There is too much to be done, and the world is falling apart way too fast to waste time arguing about whether we (for any given definition of “we”) are good Leftists or not. This is true when it comes to arguing with those who do not agree with us, and even more true when it comes to arguing with those who do. The former will exploit any opportunity to waste our time with inane discourse, and the latter would most likely rather get to work with getting shit done.
Forget the Left. It can not save us. It does not exist. Our friends, allies and organizations, on the other hand. That is where the action is. The more of them we can gather, the better for everyone.
Remember: the world is going to shit, and something needs to be done about it.
Let’s get to work.
[Shameless self-promotion: you can find most of my writings listed here.]
