How the Left Died: A Tragedy in Three Acts

When people ask me about the left these days, my reply goes like this. What left? Where exactly do you see a left? So far as I can see, the left stopped existing decades ago. So much so that what imagines itself to be the left today is, to put it kindly, a joke. It is a pale, pale shadow of the real thing, a left as it should be, or a left in any meaningful sense of the word whatsoever. What we have now is an alt left, maybe — which is what the right has, too, and has been just as, if not more, corrosive.)

I have to warn you, you won’t like this essay. It’s going to challenge quite a few prevailing myths, especially amongst a complacent class of Western self-described “leftists.” I don’t describe myself as a such a thing, partly because I don’t see anything resembling a left, really, at least in my societies. And we’ll come to whether Bernie et al quality.

That tale — how the left died — is a tragedy told in three acts: homicide, suicide, and fratricide.

Let me begin with when there was a left. Not so long ago, the left was an actual, real thing. It was a global movement. It had worldwide aspirations. At the highest levels of global politics and society and culture. It’s explicit goals included things like: world peace, an end to global poverty, a decent life for everyone on planet earth, an end to violence, particularly male violence, equality and dignity for everyone.

The funny thing is that if I mention a few of those very real grand aspirations to a self-described “leftist” today, I’ll be met with three responses. A blank look and a frown, like I’m crazy — “What? What are you talking about?” Cynical laughter and mockery: “LOL! Get real, dude!!” Or a bitter attack: “Don’t you tell me what leftism is” (the subtext is usually: you dirty. filthy brown dude.) Don’t you think all that’s bizarre? Funny? Pathetic? I do. Because it tells us that today’s leftists, many of them, have literally no idea what they stand for. They are, to put kindly, confused, or to put it unkindly, deluded. They are literally ignorant of their own history, its power, its resonance, what leftism is at the most basic and fundamental level. What the?

Note the universality and power and beauty of this message, this dream. That movement, in turn, was expressed through real organizations and institutions. Some of them were grand and august ones, like the World Bank, some were student unions, some were labour unions, some were community organizations. But these goals united them all. So none of this was some kind of abstraction, or some kind of theory. It was all very pragmatic and taken very, very seriously. It was the daily work of thousands of people. It was the stuff of treaties and accords and agreements and contracts. That left had real resonance. It ascended to the heights of power across the world, precisely because…it stood for something big and beautiful, universal and global, true and enduring, radical and momentous. When in human history had dreams so big — an end to war, an end to violence, peace and dignity for all lives — ever been dreamed?

So what happened?

The first step in the death of the left was extreme violence by the right: homicide. As a result of all this — this was the first time in history that the left was really gaining global prominence — what happened? Well, the right kicked off a campaign of ultraviolence against the left. It simply assassinated all it’s leaders. All of them. From MLK to Malcolm X to JFK. Right down to Lennon.

And then it began to wage an invisible world war against “communism.” That war was waged, of course, by America, but it had help from allies on the hard right across the globe. So nation after nation that simply wanted to be something like a social democracy was literally viciously attacked, destabilized, bombed. How many were there? The list is literally endless. Chile, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and so on.

The hard right’s campaign of extreme violence swept the left from top-to-bottom. It assassinated the left’s most promising leaders — every single one. And then it targeted every single organization the left had globally, from student unions, to global institutions, to community activists — and “disrupted” them. It’s easy to see how from the 60s through now you’d be “monitored” for being part of the “wrong” group. But we’re not exactly talking Hamas — we’re talking Friends of the Earth. What happened to the left as a result? It was left without leaders. And it was left without organizations and the bonds they create. As a result, it began to disintegrate. Soon enough, a process of forgetting set in — the left was developing the mindset of an abused personality.

Nobody much remembered the vision, the aspiration, of the old left. How beautiful and resonant and powerful it was. Peace on earth. An end to violence. Dignity for every life. My God! Nobody in human history had thought such things were possible before. And yet, where those vestiges of the old left remained — in the UN, at the World Bank — these things became partial realities, precisely because they were targeted. The Global Goals dramatically reduced poverty across the world, gave billions food and water, and so on.

But the left was forgetting, forgetting — even as all this noble and beautiful work was going on. In place of the firebrand revolutionaries of the old left — MLK, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Mandela, even a JFK — arose a new generation of the only leaders it was allowed to have. Since the right had shown it would assassinate politicians and activists and even artists…who was left? Only intellectuals. So intellectuals stepped into the mantle.

But these intellectuals — who’d later come to be notorious for “political correctness” and so forth — were not very good ones. They were ones who had not really experienced much in their lives. They were not MLKs and Malcolm X’s or Mandelas and Gandhis — who’d experienced the brutal realities of the oppressions they fought. They were — as you might expect — the kind of people the right would tolerate: upper middle class whites.

They read a few books by French men. Foucault seemed to appeal to them most. And soon enough, they’d come up with a new idea of leftism — a threadbare, laughable, bizarre one. Leftism was about identity. It was about sexuality. It was about bodily pleasure. And that was more or less where it ended. My right to bodily pleasure superseded and transcended all other rights for anything or anyone else. If I was to win whatever gender pronoun I liked, or dress as whomever I liked, or wear this disguise or that one — after all, what was gender but a “performance” — all that was going to free you.

My sexual pleasure was going to liberate you. From capitalism, brutality, exploitation, racism, bigotry, cruelty, poverty, misery, hatred, genocide, repression. Wait — what? What the? How could someone in the rich world having sex on fine cotton sheets….liberate the world’s poor…who still slept on concrete and reeds…from living in crushing poverty? How was a rich Westerner’s gender pronoun ever going to give a starving world food or sanitation? What on earth? This was the politics you might have expected to emerge from a college campus. After all, what we do in college, mostly, is have sex. Overthink it. Or at least it’s one of the things we do.

The right laughed at all this, quite openly — they didn’t even have to assassinate this generation of “leftists”. That is because they knew represented no threat whatsoever. They were laughable, pathetic, worthy, mostly of mocking — because above all, this leftism was impotent. Sure, have your gender pronouns and all the sex you want — meanwhile, we’ll take over what’s left of government, society, politics, the economy, institutions.

A rich Western kid’s orgasm…was going to set the world’s poor and oppressed free…from centuries, of capitalism, patriarchy, supremacy, from brutality, exploitation, great systems of organized violence. LOL. You can see why the right found this idea frankly hilarious. It…is.

The left had by this point become the alt-left, and it had fallen down the rabbit hole of narcissism. You see, this kind of thinking only mattered to the students and professors who preached it. Sure, your gender pronoun and what was in your pants and whether all that added up to a satisfying orgasm might be a burning issue for you. But what about the billions of people who didn’t have enough money, food, medicine, water, shelter? Apparently, they didn’t matter much at all. What difference did your gender pronoun make to the one in decline in Omaha or Yorkshire or the Ruhr? Maybe they’d be kind enough to support you in your quest— but who were you supporting in theirs? Anyone? By this point, though, the 2010s, the answer was: no one. The orgasm, the politically correct turn of phrase, its own pleasure, had come to be the only thing that mattered to the alt left.

Do you think I exaggerate? Excellent. Then let’s do a little quiz,.

Today, if I ask the average self-described “leftist” — maybe even you — whether they support gender free bathrooms, they’ll predictably say yes. If I ask them how many people in the world still lack decent sanitation, they’ll give me a blank look. The answer, by the way, is four billion. If I ask them if they support whatever pronouns, they’ll shout yes. If I ask them how many people still starve across the globe, they’ll literally have no clue. The answer is one billion. Can you eat a pronoun? If I ask them if they support the idea that “gender is a performance”, they’ll say yes. If I ask them how many people don’t have drinking water, they’ll have literally no clue. The answer, by the way, is two billion.

Did you know any of those facts? I bet: you didn’t know a single one. That’s not a condemnation. It’s an observation. Yet I bet you can recite all the jargon of gender politics down to the fine details. What the? Do you see the problem? The situation’s gotten so absurd that self-described leftists don’t know basic facts about the world. That’s because they don’t care about it. That’s because, mostly, the alt-left is absolutely and totally obsessed, like a college student, with sex.

I want you to think about this carefully with me. I’m not saying that gender pronouns and sexual politics are bad. But I am saying they are a poor choice of priority for the left. If you say to me that the suffering of being called the wrong gender pronoun outranks the suffering of a war orphan, women who’ve been mass raped in war, of genocide, of ethnic cleansing…my friend, I can only call you a narcissist, a fool, or a child. Maybe all three. If you say to me that your lack of an orgasm in the gender of your choosing is a greater suffering than being a war orphan who’s seen your entire family get murdered and raped and your entire home burned down…my friend, you have a lot of growing up to do. It’s not just me who can’t agree with you — neither can anyone much who’s a sane adult, really. And so droves have simply walked away from the left. The left’s complete misprioritization of human suffering led it into a dead end.

The left died, became the alt-left. And the alt-left is made of surreal narcissism, obsessed with its own pleasure…completely indifferent the totality of human suffering in the world. And so it has little to do with the greater possibilities of leftism. Let me be clear again. I’m not saying that supporting the gender politics that have become so fashionable is a bad thing. It’s not. But to imagine sex and gender are the only thing, or the most important thing — which is what today’s self-described leftists do obviously and self-evidently think, remember my quiz above — on a planet where billions still live without basic food, water, medicine, or sanitation — is somewhere between absurdity and stupidity. It tells us that the left has lost it’s way completely, absolutely, totally. It has stopped caring about the world. So why would the world care about it?

Hence, people stopped voting for it, backing it, caring about it, even being interested in it, en masse. The left’s priorities had become those of an 18 year old fringe campus radical. Sex, pleasure, extra special names for what’s in whose pants and why. But those priorities mattered little to the average prole exploited and brutalized by capitalism, the woman brutalized by patriarchy and male violence, the orphan whose life had been devastated by war. The left gave up on the world — and in return, the world gave up on the left.

That’s the suicide chapter, by the way. Great global aspirations like world peace, an end to violence, dignity for every life on planet earth — these were replaced by the juvenile, shatteringly narrow, deafeningly impotent priorities that are fashionable now. Call me my own special name! Mommy! I get to wear whatever I want! Yay!! And so on. Childish politics that matter most on a college campus and maybe in a nightclub replaced mature, adult aspirations to actually radically transform the world politically, socially, economically, culturally, in the way of great leaps in human progress.

That brings me to the final chapter, fratricide. We’re living through this one today. To illustrate it, let me give you an example.

When I write the above, I’m sure to be attacked by a kind of fringe leftist. Say the much maligned “Bernie Bro.” Now, the Bernie Bro thinks he’s waging a great and noble class war. But what does he really know of leftism? Again, does he want world peace? An end to violence? Will he strike in solidarity with, say, miners in the Congo? Does he even know how — remember my little quiz above — many billions still live in poverty and despair and degradation today? The answer to those things is: nope. The limits of his so-called leftism are the rage of class war against his own billionaires.

But merely wanting a better deal for yourself is not leftism. It has nothing to do with leftism, in fact. It is just self-interest, the defining value of the right. The fundamental values of the left are these: solidarity, shared interest, self-transcendence, dignity, beauty, truth. But these don’t matter much — self-evidently — to today’s so-called leftists, at least in my societies. They are interested in getting their own back from plutocrats and billionaires. That’s fine and well — but it’s just a flavor of nationalist populism, what it isn’t, emphatically, is leftism. Leftism is in some sense a struggle for a better world — all of it — or it is nothing at all. Neither class war between the world’s rich and the super rich nor their sexual politics really count for much, at least on a planet where billions live lives of indignity and inhumanity and brutal repression.

Yet the Bernie Bro will lecture me endlessly on why I’m wrong, stupid, an idiot, a terrible person, etcetera. But there is a very great difference between the Bernie Bro and me. I know what the hell I’m talking about. Sorry, but. I know it not just intellectually — but intimately. I’ve seen what it is for a nation to beg for bread. I’ve seen the limits of human degradation, like genocide and poverty and abuse and war. I’ve lived among the billions begging for bread, water, and sanitation. That is why I studied how societies rise and fall. Not just by reading a few books by American authors, but by rallying studying the subject.

When I speak to you about “leftism” being a thing that doesn’t exist anymore, it comes from a place of deeply lived experience. There are many of us like that. What business does the Bernie Bro — who, at the end of the day, is still an American, living in relative comfort and security — have lecturing those of us who’ve literally survived war and genocide and authoritarianism, who’ve resisted those things, who’ve seen loved ones jailed and die for them…on leftism? LOL. It’s not just funny and sad — most of all, it’s stupid.

Because the ones who’ve lived through all this, and there are many of us, not just me, can teach you about how these battles are really fought, won, waged, why they matter, what they mean. Do you want to hear about what happens when authoritarians jail and torture people for dissent? I can tell you. It happened to the head of the very first newspaper I ever wrote for, when I was about fourteen years old.

But the alt-left doesn’t want to learn from people like us — because of course there is an element of good ole American supremacism here. We are minorities — and they are white, if dispossessed. So it imagines it knows everything there is to know — having studied it in from the comfort of a desk in a liberal college somewhere. It is the great authority on leftism — not those who actually lived it. And according to it, only the class war and the orgasm and the pronoun matter. What the? To those of us who’ve actually survived horror and atrocity — that’s not just gruesomely absurd: it’s astonishingly foolish.

That arrogance and hubris, my friends, culminates in fratricide. What’s left of the left attacking itself. You can readily see the pattern. The fringe left attacks the moderate left for not being pure enough. So if I support, say public healthcare and education and retirement, but I have a an ever so slightly different view on who uses what bathroom when and where…I’m viciously savaged by Twitter mobs, attacked, derided, demeaned. I’m an enemy now. I’m the bad guy. You’ve seen this happen to celeb after celeb.

And the right laughs. Because when anything less than ideological purity is the enemy, do you know who’s not the enemy anymore? The enemy. Fascism, authoritarianism, theocracy, violence, greed, hate. That’s not a theory, by the way. It’s how Corbyn lost Britain’s most crucial election in a lifetime — by a landslide. It’s how the Democrats can’t reign in a fascist-authoritarian — whom most Americans are disgusted and repelled by, The left is so busy attacking itself, what can it unite against? But without being united — what can it win?

These things — Twitter mobs, mob justice, taunts, mockery, egotism, arrogance, narcissism — they express the fundamental values of the right: violence, brutality, tribalism. They have nothing whatsoever to do with a genuine left. And when we engage in them, we are committing fratricide. We are not just attacking our own friends and allies — we are surrendering ourselves. We have no hope of building a left again through anything — anything — but love, generosity, beauty, truth, wisdom, gentleness, grace. Otherwise we have become precisely what we condemn. And that is what the right has always wanted. It is why it abused us to begin with.

The left still lives in the shadow of the violence meted out to it by the right, all those decades ago. It has never really recovered. Not intellectually, not organizationally, not emotionally, not socioculturally, and certainly not politically. It has become an impotent a shadow of a global movement, where it used once to be one composed of real world institutions and organizations, with transformative, radical aims, to create a better world. It has developed the attitude of one who’s been bullied and abused so long, they settle meekly and timidly for what they can get without risking further punishment. World peace? An end to violence? Dignity for every life on planet earth? LOL! Give me a break! Get real, dude!! Are you crazy? So these goals are distant memories. The left died, and became the alt-left, which is happy with gender free bathrooms for rich Westerners, while remaining completely ignorant of — and indifferent to — how many people on earth live yet without decent sanitation. What on earth?

But a thing made of indifference and contempt is not a left, my friends. What is it, then? Well, the alt-left couldn’t care less about these things — world peace, an end to violence, particularly male violence, dignity for every life on earth, and so on. It will mock and taunt those of who say they matter — like we’re beauty pageant contestants or lunatics.

And so the left has become a kind of creature of the right — it’s pet, perhaps, or maybe it’s prisoner. It has internalized the values of its abuser. Who needs the right to be hostile, aggressive, cruel, to bully and intimidate and threaten — when the left is already doing it’s job? Who needs the right to do any violence to the left when the moment you discuss the issue of an end to violence or poverty or exploitation globally — the self-imagined leftist is the one who attacks you? What the?

Let me say it again. The left has internalized the values of its abusers. Hostility, aggression, rage, cruelty, bullying, intimidation, purity-seeking, tribalism, conformity, submission to authority. It is doing the right’s work for it. The dangerous, difficult work of building a better world? Nobody much cares about that anymore. Least of all, these days, the people who describe themselves as leftists. They’ve settled for pronouns and bathrooms and whose private parts are called what by whom for what — and they’ll launch a mob on anyone who “disagrees.” But those things, my friend, cannot solve the problems of violence, aggression, deprivation, poverty, inequality, hate. They have no bearing whatsoever on a world where billions live in abjection and dehumanization. The alt-left is not a left. It is something much more like a thing that’s been beaten and abused so long it’s forgotten what it once was.

And so here we are, my friends. Do you want to know what a world without a functioning left looks like? It looks like this. One where democracy is dying. One where the fascists, authoritarians, kleptocrats, and mafias are winning across the globe, and laughing in disbelieving glee. Why is nobody opposing them? How are they getting away with it? Ah, my friends. How strange are the tragedies we write with our lives.

(Umair Haque has been a Medium member since Jun 2018. He writes for Eudaimonia and Co … where this perspective was first posted.)

-cw