How Political Correctness Failed Liberalism

A Politically Incorrect Account of a Troubled Age

Every day lately, it seems that the world is going a little bit crazier than the day before. So, like me, you might be forgiveably baffled by the fact that while the planet is melting down, democracy’s broken, the economy’s cratered, the young won’t enjoy careers, retirements, savings, homes, societies are anxious, fractured, angry, the left is furiously obsessed with, willing to battle endlessly over, consumed passionately not with any or all of the above, but by…what to call their love lives. Do you use the right gender pronouns? Are you on board with the latest approved-by-committee terminology? Did you know that according to the internet “romantic” and “sexual” attraction aren’t the same thing? Don’t you know that men can have periods? Hey, is this a safe space?

In this short series of essays, I want to advance a simple thesis: perhaps the central reason that liberalism is in historic decline globally is because the left is self-indulging itself into irrelevance.

To overdramatize it, the left is bickering over what to call what goes on between the sheets…while the world is starting to burn. Hence, when you think about it, the latest variant of Leftism isn’t really about politics very much at all. It’s about marketing. Safe spaces in which to have zealous contests for labels, which make up “identities”, that are ironically just…personal brands…that advertise…one’s narrow, shallow pursuit of pleasure, consumption, artifice. New Leftism is glittering narcissism concerned with the good life as lifestyle, not the difficult, joyous, humble work of living. Which leaves us here: as if shoppers at the mall began screaming at each other over their “lifestyle choices” while a giant hurricane ripped the roof from over their heads.

I am not a leftist. Nor am I a rightist. I am that rare fool who believes that it is a careful tension between both which yields the greatest good in the most desirable social order. But because it is in tension, that order is as fragile as it is improbable. By the end of this essay, I will try to explain why I believe so, and what that means. And if you wish to burn me at the stake, by all means do so.

To begin, let me explain what I mean by the irrelevance of the left. Let’s take a concrete example. What I will call the New Leftism has recently fought tooth and nail for the noble cause of…gender free bathrooms. But it has been notably ineffective at mobilizing towards a single goal which truly matters in broad political or economic terms (yes: that means to the average household). The harsh truth is this. While you might win gender-free bathrooms, without a government to invest in the sets of rights and obligations that underpin them (for example, the actual bathrooms, the roads, the electricity, the taxes, the courts, etc), such a victory is merely an exercise in vanity.

Hence, though some will surely question my thesis itself, I do not think that the idea that liberalism is in decline is a matter of much debate. While economies are stagnating, and interest rates are negative, governments still cannot muster the will to invest, which is what nearly a century of economics and almost every great economist in the world begs them to do. Hence: liberalism is indeed in deep decline, and it is precisely for that reason that we see the rise of nationalism, extremism, national socialism, to name just a few of the fringe politics (re)emerging.

The question is: why? What caused the decline? We may attribute it to many causes, and surely many have contributed. But one above all strikes me. Not merely competition from the right, nor a betrayal by the center — but the irrelevance of the left. Yet. “Left” and “right” aren’t poles on a fixed spectrum. Indeed, what I hope to demonstrate is that in many respects, left has become right, the center has vanished, and the right has become left. And so I will conclude this series of essays by proposing a new political typology altogether.

Maybe men can have periods. I don’t know, and it’s not something I wonder much about. So please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying: “gender free bathrooms are terrible, bro!!”. I’m not not for the voguish incantations of the New Left, from trigger warnings to safe spaces to gender-blah-blah, nor am I against them. The most I can say is that I’m not convinced by them, that they are worthy of high political values. And yet the danger of New Leftism is precisely dogmatic if-you’re-not-for-it-you-must-be-an-enemy-of-it-let’s-get-rid-of-you fundamentalism. So for clarity’s sake, here is what I am saying. Let’s get real. If the left is fighting for gender free bathrooms, that men can indeed have periods, etc, before (or instead of) any number of far more pressing, urgent, and fundamental issues — debt, income inequality, equal representation, to name just a few — then it has doomed itself to irrelevance.

For the simple reason that fundamental issues come first. It is all well and good to fight for the rights of marginalized groups. But winning language games about naming rights is secondary (tertiary, etc) to actually winning the rights. As a simple example, unless a group of people actually has rights to equal pay, changing the name of the currency from “Dollars” to “Gender-neutral Historically-Unbaggaged Units of Account” surely makes little difference to the quality of their lives.

The second fight is cultural. But the first fight is political.

And that is precisely where the left failed. It chose culture over politics as its battleground. For that very reason, New Leftism is a deeply conservative project. That is why it failed liberalism. Let us then try to see a little further into the heart of New Leftism, and it’s perverse conservatism. What is it trying to conserve?

New Leftism is certainly inimical to liberty (whatever the eff that word means these days, anyways. I don’t know. Frat-parties?). But the real point is that New Leftism stands against human potential. How can one reach one’s potential when great books, art, and films must be censored, edited, redacted, for correctness? Does the theory of relativity, too, require a heteronormative critique? This is all, of course, nonsensical — but not just nonsensical.

Old Leftism asked us to sacrifice our individualism for the collective. Yawn. New Leftism offers us something far more tempting: sacrificing our potential for our identities. That is its central sleight of hand, and what is so alluring about it, especially to the youngs. Here is a long, long list of all possible identities, it says. They are approved, validated, acceptable. You can be a non-conformist — as long as you conform to them. You know the jargon already, perhaps: pansexual alloromantic sex-neutral male person. This is what, in the jargon, you “identify as” — not what (heaven forbid) you may become. For the New Left, the development of the self, life’s greatest, most uncertain adventure, is a…dull exercise in box-ticking. For identity has already been bureaucratically categorized, divided, subdivided, mapped out— and all you have to do is choose one! Instantly, your life will have a little more meaning, purpose, happiness. It can’t, after all, if you don’t fit in a box to begin with. If you don’t fit in any of the pre-approved boxes, well then, you must truly be a non-conformist…therefore, New Leftism prioritizes identity over possibility. Thus, identity chosen, label affixed, conformity assured, danger erased, the great complications of life will begin to grind themselves away.

But life is never so simple. There is no growth without uncertainty, and little fulfillment in conformity…even to, or perhaps especially to, a pre-approved bureaucratic matrix of pseudo-non-conformity. A label is not a self, for the reason that struggling to become yourself is the defining challenge of life, which should rightly take many long years, learnings, changes, difficulties, heartbreaks, miracles, realizations, loves, dreams. And yet. By instantly, zap!, choosing identity over possibility, we have limited ourselves to stasis — and so we are unable to change.

Did you see, there, what New Leftism aims to conserve? It’s hard to see it, so let me try and make the idea simple. Power over the same institutions and standards that already exist. And the most fundamental of these is identity. Just as religious fundamentalists want control over the cultural institution of an identity, so do New Leftists: they’re fighting over the same thing, one side merely calls it “Christian/Muslim/Wahhabi”, and the other calls it “Demi-romantic antiheteronormative greysexual gender rebel”. Thus, neither of these two sides is asserting, for example, that identity doesn’t matter very much, is largely a social fiction, which changes radically over time, or further, that there is a common human bond before and above identity.

Let’s extend that tiny thought experiment. What do religious fundamentalists, gated-community dwelling wannabe oligarchs, and New Leftists have in common? A lot more than you might think at first: all want to approve the books their neighbours read, the films they watch, the words they say, the signs in their backyards. All want safe spaces, where threats cannot intrude. All want control over culture as it is — not to reorder society with a new set of institutions entirely (i.e., basic income, debt-free education, open universities, whatever). Surveillance states want “protest free zones”, and Political Correctness wants “safe spaces”. Evangelicals want warning labels on everything, New Leftists want “trigger warnings”.

Thus, New Leftism wants to conserve cultural institutions and standards as they exist — just to make them perhaps a little more inclusive, accessible, ubiquitous (though even that’s debatable). Let’s take beauty, truth, goodness, justice, as a short list. To make that point clear, let’s narrow in on the idea of beauty. At one extreme, imagine a world where even the Elephant Man is considered beautiful. New Leftism’s different: it wants a world where everyone’s free to conform to this (ie the supermodel) standard of beauty, whatever their gender, race, biology, etc. Hence, Kaitlyn Jenner’s recent claim that “the hardest part of being a woman is putting on makeup”. WTF? But it makes sense: if your cultural goal is to being “beautiful”, then for a woman, or a man, or a giant space alien with fourteen caterpillar legs, it is merely a matter of putting on a mask.

That is why it is a conservative project. Thus, because it wants to conserve cultural institutions as they exist — merely to hold power over them, not eliminate, transform, or create them — so it is a marginal cultural project, not a grand political one.

By choosing the cultural battleground, to compete for conservatism of it, so the New Left also ceded the political battleground. Why is it that college organizers can organize no-platforms (i.e., ban) speakers they find threatening…for crimes against the people like using the wrong language, terms, phrases…but not organize actual large-scale political demonstrations against serious issues that matter? Can you remember the last time there was a series of huge marches on Washington for a single issue solely concerning youngs…who are borked like no generation in modern history? I can’t.

And that’s not just troubling — it’s bizarre. For the last wave of Political Correctness, in the 90s, was explicitly political — not just cultural. Political activity was its regular, and perhaps defining, feature. That is why it won significant political battles. Take, for example, gay rights and AIDS — both issues pushed to the forefront by the last wave of PC activism. What is curious is that they do not happen with the same intensity today. So let me say it again. The New Left is a project of cultural reform. But it is not a project of political engagement.

That is why its goals appear so often to be bafflingly childish, when they are visible at all. New Leftism does not appear to be concerned much with actual political impact impact — but merely with attention, and endlessly defining it, in the form of new phrases and buzzwords (“Sapiosexual”? FFS dude. Take off the fedora). Hence, endless online mobs shaming people for telling jokes, using the wrong words, and the like — these aren’t battles for political relevance, but to wrest attention from and to the next buzzword, the next personal brand, the next identity as lifestyle choice, which is to say: marketing. That is success to the New Left. But in that very success lies revealed the magnitude of its failure: its triumph vanishes the instant the tweet-mob disperses. It does not inhere and last, like, say, a right enshrined in a bill does, which is precisely why political battles are more fundamental than cultural ones.

Perhaps, you say, why should the New Left be politically engaged? After all, politics is corrupt, venal, and broken. I agree. Yet the simple fact is that a movement which places cultural attention over political impact is destined for irrelevance. It might change language here and there. But it is not likely to change lives. And for that very reason, people will lose faith in it.

And so if you look closely, very little has actually changed. The fundamental composition and structure of society is not impacted at all by New Leftism. It has not done anything to reverse inequality, debt, climate change, inopportunity, immobility, stagnation — that much is in the numbers, for they continue to grow while New Leftism has, too, grown. It cannot do anything about them. How can a movement concerned with language games affect record levels of student debt? By renaming it “socially unjust heteronormative financial obligations”? #LOL. Thus, more concerned with language than reality, fashion than economics, culture than politics, New Leftism has placed style over substance. And it would be foolish to expect much different. New Leftism is conservative, remember.

All of which brings me back to my central thesis: that the left’s irrelevance is fuelling the failure of liberalism.

I am not a leftist, nor am I a rightist. I am that rare fool who believes in moderation. That the most desirable social order emerges when both these animal spirits are in carefully calibrated tension. When the left’s dignity, idealism, creativity, balances the right’s praxis, caution, efficiency. For there is a kind of alchemy in that recominbation: together, they yield not merely the sum of the parts — but a new set of elements altogether: peace, prosperity, optimism, wisdom. When forged, we call this alloy “liberal democracy”, and it is perhaps humanity’s single greatest creation.

But its calibration, must be careful, with little room for error. The hands of the smith may move it — but not by very much, and not very fast. And yet, somehow, it has been thrown off, the mechanism disturbed. The left does not restrain the right in its worst excesses, from war, to torture, to surveillance— yet, nor does the right restrain the left at its worst excesses, from sentimentalism, to absolutism, to idealism.

And so perhaps both sides have failed one another. While that may be true, it is truer to say simply that the left, irrelevant to an age orphaned by modernity, in desperate search of a purpose for being, failed liberalism.

Umair
London
November 2015