Progressives appeal to base emotions

In public events, I’ve sometimes given an unexpectedly appreciative nod to the hard left. It’s laudable, I allow, to stick up for the disadvantaged. Young people naturally hope to revamp the creaky, hypocritical institutions they inherit, just as my generation did in the 1960s. Fairness – a more complex concept than it first appears – is inherently appealing. Thus the initial impulse to embrace identity politics is often benign.

This concession is calculated. Being charitable carves out space for me to rip this odious ideology to shreds thereafter. Yet given that when younger I was a fervent liberal American Democrat, my token peace offering has always been sincere.

I take it back. After all the identitarian left’s defence of peoples historically wronged, all their horror of the ‘violence’ in silence or biologically correct pronouns, all their advancement of ‘diversity and inclusion’ – which you would suppose would encompass all religions and all minorities, especially the persecuted ones – ghoulish celebrations of Hamas’s throat-slitting melee in southern Israel last month among some western ‘progressives’ were incomprehensible at first. But on reflection, the BLM brigade joining the ghastly Muslim chant of ‘Glory to our martyrs’ makes perfect sense.

Let’s put aside the numbing jargon of this movement, and let’s put aside its dogma.   I’m a novelist, and literary writers do deal in language and ideas, but most of all we deal in feelings. So never mind what they say or what they claim to believe. What emotions emanate from Hamas’s ‘useful idiots’? Does this clamorous crowd seem happy? Are they enraptured by visions of a better world? Given that the hard left’s rhetoric gestures (if condescendingly) towards the uplifting of the downtrodden, do its activists exude kindness, tenderness and compassion? Are they visibly bursting with love for their fellow man? Do we see the gleam of a radiant future glinting in their puppy-wide eyes?

Like many Speccie readers, I’ve followed the ‘culture wars’ closely for years, so to cheerfully overgeneralise – or simply to generalise – let’s itemise the emotions that overwhelmingly preponderate identitarians’ marches, oratory and screeds.