Leaving left wing tribe
My name is Daniel Salt and I am a recovering leftie.
I am 38 years old and have always identified as being left-wing since I was old enough to be interested in politics. I would love to say that I myself made the decision but really, I was following my parents who were members of the Labour Party before joining the SDP.
In my youth I attended demonstrations in London over Iraq, Afghanistan and even a few on free Palestine. I will be honest and say I attended many because of a far more fervent friend who had gone all out and joined the Socialist Workers Party.
I think though I have always had an inkling that I didn’t fit in completely. That my views and tribalism were not quite hardened enough. I found it awkward to sit and debate with people as they were always so sure that they were right, and so confident that everyone else was wrong.
The world just doesn’t work like that.
Have my political views changed or has my willingness to put up with the bullshit declined as middle age has approached? It’s a good question and one that I am asking myself now. I don’t think that I have changed drastically. I still believe in higher taxes, nationalised infrastructure, I’m pretty anti-free trade and largely want to stay out of other countries’ business. Is that right-wing?– I don’t think so.
I am just fed up with the virtue signaling, moralising and condescension the modern left wallows in. It is not possible to discuss anything without it being positioned as pseudo good or evil. The saddest part is that the lefties are getting worse.
I am largely embarrassed by them now. They have long since given up on economic or political equality. I suppose this is a function of the left becoming mainly middle class like me. Stacked with people who are comfortably off, who frankly don’t need to worry about putting focaccia on the table and whom the system works pretty well for.
With little to say to the country on important things, they have descended into the nine circles of identity politics hell. An endless effort to atomise society into smaller and smaller subgroups of people, all which supposedly have different needs and demands based on their race, religion, sexuality, gender or nationality.
Barely hidden in this disaster of their making is an intolerance towards the majority in the country. A belief that the masses must be penalised for their privilege of being white or Christian or male or anything comes with the territory. If you are not unique enough then you are clearly part of the problem. For a group of people who are supposedly struggling for a fairer, more tolerant society, they are doing a bang up job of achieving the opposite.
Sooner or later the left’s virtue signalling and identity politics were always going to come flying back at them like a boomerang. The problem with playing favourites is that these groups will eventually come into conflict. The events in Birmingham, the protests over teaching gay relations to Muslim children, is a case in point. It has been fun watching different Labour MPs cluck around the issue, trying to span that gap whilst the central party stays silent.
Beautiful; one of so many more to come.
This intolerance and moralising is visible about the EU. If you voted leave, you have been marked with a metaphorical scarlet letter. How dare you think that perhaps laws for this country should be made in this country? Or exercise that opinion, or others, at the ballot box? The attacks have been thick and fast whilst continuously loaded with condescension that apparently people didn’t know what they voted for. That no one voted to be poorer.
I hate to say it, but if you have nothing to begin with then you have nothing to lose. Why wouldn’t people vote to be poorer if they felt strongly enough? When you consider the matter, a middle-class person voting for higher taxes is voting for economic self-harm. Ah, but that is virtuous as it fits in the modern left’s worldview.
Middle class good, working class bad.
It’s impressive that we are now in a position where left wing parties are stacked full of the middle class who loathe the working class. They literally and demonstrably despise them. To paraphrase David Steel: “Go back to your constituencies and shut the fuck up”. The idea that they would have a voice and it should be heard is largely lost on these people.
The EU referendum has demonstrated that thin veneer of acceptance that is smeared over the left’s class elitism. They don’t want to empower the working class; they want to parent them.
MP after MP effectively said ‘We are listening to you. We understand your frustrations. Now if we can just reverse Brexit and get you back into your box….’. They have totally missed that the best way to help anyone is to start listening and make their vote count for something.
No, instead we have seen the increasing efforts to simply destroy debate using the left’s favourite trick: If in doubt, call someone a Nazi, fascist, racist or hard right. We wouldn’t want to reserve those terms for actual horrible people. No, let’s debauch them into irrelevance.
You literally can’t say anything in this country without someone on the left shouting it. It would be funny if its effects on free speech were not so pernicious. People are now self-censoring rather than taking the diatribe of abuse that comes with even trying to raise certain subjects.
It’s twice as bad and twice as sad as even the Tories have started clutching at pearls if people look at them weirdly. Even that supposed far right demagogue Farage can’t take a joke. Still, we can take solace in the fact that the left is now attacking itself. Their effective use of language to attack their enemies is now being turned against them and used to attack the left. It would be funny if the insults weren’t supposed to be reserved for some of the worst human beings in history.
I have lost count of the amount of senior Labour people who are allegedly educated, intelligent, but do their utmost to eschew this reputation.
Lammy - on paper - should be reasonable: He is educated and clearly a clever man. But after sucking on the teat of modern left wing politics and driven mad by Brexit, he has turned completely loopy. You can barely turn on TV or Twitter without him screaming fascist or threatening people. This is perhaps an inevitability of demonising the majority - you are driven mad by the (white) devils you see everywhere. If the rot has gone this deep then perhaps the modern left is a write off.
We now have three left wing parties that offer the same shoddy, half-arsed, elitist message to the same middle class, champagne socialist hand wringers. There is little difference between them. Same crap identity politics, pseudo environmentalism, virtue signaling and utter ignorance of class identity or wish to actually empower the people who need the most help.
I try not to call myself left wing now; it’s too embarrassing. Like capitalism, our democracy is supposed to be dynamic and self renewing. Perhaps all the current parties need to die and something truly representative to emerge from the ashes.
I am 38 years old and have always identified as being left-wing since I was old enough to be interested in politics. I would love to say that I myself made the decision but really, I was following my parents who were members of the Labour Party before joining the SDP.
In my youth I attended demonstrations in London over Iraq, Afghanistan and even a few on free Palestine. I will be honest and say I attended many because of a far more fervent friend who had gone all out and joined the Socialist Workers Party.
I think though I have always had an inkling that I didn’t fit in completely. That my views and tribalism were not quite hardened enough. I found it awkward to sit and debate with people as they were always so sure that they were right, and so confident that everyone else was wrong.
The world just doesn’t work like that.
Have my political views changed or has my willingness to put up with the bullshit declined as middle age has approached? It’s a good question and one that I am asking myself now. I don’t think that I have changed drastically. I still believe in higher taxes, nationalised infrastructure, I’m pretty anti-free trade and largely want to stay out of other countries’ business. Is that right-wing?– I don’t think so.
I am just fed up with the virtue signaling, moralising and condescension the modern left wallows in. It is not possible to discuss anything without it being positioned as pseudo good or evil. The saddest part is that the lefties are getting worse.
I am largely embarrassed by them now. They have long since given up on economic or political equality. I suppose this is a function of the left becoming mainly middle class like me. Stacked with people who are comfortably off, who frankly don’t need to worry about putting focaccia on the table and whom the system works pretty well for.
With little to say to the country on important things, they have descended into the nine circles of identity politics hell. An endless effort to atomise society into smaller and smaller subgroups of people, all which supposedly have different needs and demands based on their race, religion, sexuality, gender or nationality.
Barely hidden in this disaster of their making is an intolerance towards the majority in the country. A belief that the masses must be penalised for their privilege of being white or Christian or male or anything comes with the territory. If you are not unique enough then you are clearly part of the problem. For a group of people who are supposedly struggling for a fairer, more tolerant society, they are doing a bang up job of achieving the opposite.
Sooner or later the left’s virtue signalling and identity politics were always going to come flying back at them like a boomerang. The problem with playing favourites is that these groups will eventually come into conflict. The events in Birmingham, the protests over teaching gay relations to Muslim children, is a case in point. It has been fun watching different Labour MPs cluck around the issue, trying to span that gap whilst the central party stays silent.
Beautiful; one of so many more to come.
This intolerance and moralising is visible about the EU. If you voted leave, you have been marked with a metaphorical scarlet letter. How dare you think that perhaps laws for this country should be made in this country? Or exercise that opinion, or others, at the ballot box? The attacks have been thick and fast whilst continuously loaded with condescension that apparently people didn’t know what they voted for. That no one voted to be poorer.
I hate to say it, but if you have nothing to begin with then you have nothing to lose. Why wouldn’t people vote to be poorer if they felt strongly enough? When you consider the matter, a middle-class person voting for higher taxes is voting for economic self-harm. Ah, but that is virtuous as it fits in the modern left’s worldview.
Middle class good, working class bad.
It’s impressive that we are now in a position where left wing parties are stacked full of the middle class who loathe the working class. They literally and demonstrably despise them. To paraphrase David Steel: “Go back to your constituencies and shut the fuck up”. The idea that they would have a voice and it should be heard is largely lost on these people.
The EU referendum has demonstrated that thin veneer of acceptance that is smeared over the left’s class elitism. They don’t want to empower the working class; they want to parent them.
MP after MP effectively said ‘We are listening to you. We understand your frustrations. Now if we can just reverse Brexit and get you back into your box….’. They have totally missed that the best way to help anyone is to start listening and make their vote count for something.
No, instead we have seen the increasing efforts to simply destroy debate using the left’s favourite trick: If in doubt, call someone a Nazi, fascist, racist or hard right. We wouldn’t want to reserve those terms for actual horrible people. No, let’s debauch them into irrelevance.
You literally can’t say anything in this country without someone on the left shouting it. It would be funny if its effects on free speech were not so pernicious. People are now self-censoring rather than taking the diatribe of abuse that comes with even trying to raise certain subjects.
It’s twice as bad and twice as sad as even the Tories have started clutching at pearls if people look at them weirdly. Even that supposed far right demagogue Farage can’t take a joke. Still, we can take solace in the fact that the left is now attacking itself. Their effective use of language to attack their enemies is now being turned against them and used to attack the left. It would be funny if the insults weren’t supposed to be reserved for some of the worst human beings in history.
I have lost count of the amount of senior Labour people who are allegedly educated, intelligent, but do their utmost to eschew this reputation.
Lammy - on paper - should be reasonable: He is educated and clearly a clever man. But after sucking on the teat of modern left wing politics and driven mad by Brexit, he has turned completely loopy. You can barely turn on TV or Twitter without him screaming fascist or threatening people. This is perhaps an inevitability of demonising the majority - you are driven mad by the (white) devils you see everywhere. If the rot has gone this deep then perhaps the modern left is a write off.
We now have three left wing parties that offer the same shoddy, half-arsed, elitist message to the same middle class, champagne socialist hand wringers. There is little difference between them. Same crap identity politics, pseudo environmentalism, virtue signaling and utter ignorance of class identity or wish to actually empower the people who need the most help.
I try not to call myself left wing now; it’s too embarrassing. Like capitalism, our democracy is supposed to be dynamic and self renewing. Perhaps all the current parties need to die and something truly representative to emerge from the ashes.
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