The title is a lie, I’m not going to tell you the big problem with the left- not exactly, or at least not in a particularly useful way. Wishing people would change en masse is a mostly futile gesture. Thus identifying a common personal characteristic of the big problem of a group is misleading. It’s a bit like saying “if the left were able to fly faster than a speeding bullet we would win very easily”- it might be true, but if wishes were horses…
Nonetheless, the problem I’m going to identify here is a personal characteristic and I am going to make a useless wish that we would all change en masse not to have that characteristic. Whether the fault is just within us or within our stars seems academic.
Ado aside, the problem with the left is that we’re not strategic actors. Instead, we act out roles. Let me give an example:
Someone has put forward a complaint about the left that it is not welcoming enough. the quote tweeter responds by saying that, given the stakes left politics is addressing, demanding people be nicer to you is petulant. He is acting out the role of someone who is taking this Very Seriously.
I sympathize with the quote tweeter and I see where he’s coming from- “people’s lives are at stake, suck it up sweetheart” it’s something I’ve often thought myself. The problem is that he’s failed to apply his logic to himself. The natural continuation of what he is saying is that if the stakes are so high, and if there are so many people out there who won’t do the right thing unless you’re nice to them, then you better suck it up, put a smile on your face and be nice to them rather than following the “very serious situation script” and getting mad at them for not already being on the right side of history.
I think that the thing people don’t understand about radical politics is that it is still politics. Politics is the continuation of war by other means, especially the bit before the war starts in earnest where you try to gather together as many friends as possible. Do you know how politicians go around shaking babies and kissing hands kissing babies and shaking hands? There’s no need to do that exactly, but we should be thinking along those lines.
To put it differently, the thinking in the above tweet is ought thinking- other people ought to be doing this rather than means-end thinking how to get other people to do this. There’s no thinking through the logical interrelationships between the psychology of others, your goals, their goals, and the arrangements of things in the world.
A lot of discourse reminds me of a frustrating conversation I had with an old boss once. My boss complained that my coworkers were constantly getting a particular process wrong, he asked me what could be done about it. I suggested he remove the process or alter the process in some way so that particular mistake became impossible. His response? “No, they ought not to be making the mistake, how can we stop them from making the mistake”. He cared more about the mistake not being his fault than he cared about preventing the mistake. It’s very, very like a leftist who cares more about the fact that people should already be on the left, than working out a strategy to move them there.
If you’re on the left, I urge think more like a chess player, like someone who has resources, has a goal, and deploys their resources to achieve that goal. Now it’s true that going too far down this route, and not thinking about other people in terms of their agency and moral obligations at all, can fuck you up. I grant that.
But it’s a spectrum, and I’m 99% sure that, at present, this is the direction we need to move along it. Most important act on your objectives, not on the basis of a prewritten mental script of what you are supposed to do or feel. Be a goal directed agent in the world.
But then isn’t this essay just another instance of the very thing I’m complaining about? Maybe, not exactly, kinda, I dunno, aww shucks.
Nice thoughts
People who want to win will be driven to think "what do I need to do in order to win?" and then do it.
But many people care more about the internal reality in their own mind than the external reality of the outside world. For these people, their politics are a fantasy world where they get back at all the people who wronged them in real life.