The Modern Left now sees traditional —or conservative — values on social issues as an embarrassment. Credit: Leon Neal / Getty
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Three decades ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of the Left’s identity crisis. As communism ended, the central pillars of socialist economics were discredited and the Left was left asking: what should a socialist society look like? What does it stand for? Who does it represent?
It’s still asking itself the same questions. Or it has swept them under the carpet while the ‘hobbyist Left’ — which has captured the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn — preoccupies itself with language-policing and virtue-signalling, rather than purpose.
That, at least, is the contention of A Left for Itself, the new book by historian David Swift. Swift argues — persuasively — that contemporary Left-wing politics “is better understood as less of a political movement and more as a form of identity or enjoyable past time”. It has become more a “consumption activity” than a way to improve people’s lives, as the political scientist Eitan Hersh has noted.
Many of us have been sounding the alarm about identity politics for a while, not least because it is too often class blind; as Swift writes, it “places the poorest and most vulnerable of white men as fundamentally more exalted than the richest and most privileged women or people of colour”.
But it is also inherently a movement of anti-intellectualism, which prioritises lived experience over objective truth. Lived experience is clearly important, but it is not everything — as most middle-class Lefties are apt to remember when they encounter a white British person who doesn’t like immigration because of the social effects it has had on their hometown. That experience is treated with such reverence is why politics today is less about what you think and what talents you possess, than about what you are, how you feel and how you can successfully turn that into a performative online brand.
As the historian Thomas Frank has argued, Left-wing politics has become “a matter of shallow appearances, or fatuous self-righteousness… a politics in which the beautiful and wellborn tell the unwashed and the beaten-down and the funny-looking how they ought to behave”.
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