The Self-Caging of the Left

Fr Alternator from Lamford, a political animal, has decided to isolate political-religious topics from his general LiberFaciorum feed for the sake of his friendships, and hive them off into a separate group for people he knows who are interested in such things. Many of us there seem to be progressive types frustrated by the way the Left behaves in dealing with its own, and members of the group have over the last few days shared articles complaining about the exclusivity of the Corbynite wing of Labour and journalists who say the wrong thing being hounded out of the Guardian. These pieces describe their frustrations and analyse the phenomena of their particular moment, but don’t draw the lessons together into any broader view of why this happens. So I thought I would try.

To be a conservative is to be more dissatisfied with the way things appear to be going than with where they are now, while if you have a progressive mindset you feel the other way around. It’s quite possible, depending on conditions, for people to move from one into the other category, but most of the time the differences is fairly stable. The factors that incline people to either point of view are probably very variable. The trouble for progressives who want things to change is that people with little power or influence on their circumstances – the majority – are compelled to work out a modus vivendi that allows them to make a living, to provide for their families and fulfil their most basic needs, and the fear that change will rob them even of the little security they have carved out is not irrational, because it happens: revolutions have often swept away the defences people have built up within unjust systems and left them open to new and worse forms of exploitation. Such people will only occasionally move onto the progressive side of the scale, and most of the time progressives will find it hard to motivate them: they stand to lose the little that makes life bearable. The habit of broadening one’s vision beyond the immediate in terms of time, locality and social relationships and the concerns they bring with them is quite a rare and tender plant which takes a lot of cultivating. Our evolution hasn’t bred us to it: we’re the only animal that does it, and it’s no surprise that we don’t do it that well, that we don’t do it all the time, and that some of us don’t do it at all. Most souls don’t have the bandwidth.

So the temptation for progressives is to create a reserve, a niche, an institution perhaps, where these frustrations can be put to one side and where you can relax mentally, where you don’t have to argue continually against people reluctant to be convinced by your point of view. It’s a psychological, or ideological, version of what most people do with the practical aspects of their lives: creating a space to be safe in. Actually making anything happen in the world outside the reserve becomes less urgent than maintaining the reserve itself; making yourself feel better about your marginal position becomes a higher priority than change. The way you maintain the reserve is by pushing out those who ask awkward questions and don’t fit in with the ideological template, and by cultivating a sense of superiority and martyrdom: your very marginalisation proves you are right, and being right is more important than being effective. You tell yourself the reserve is a necessary instrument in achieving your aims, when the truth is that the harder you work to preserve it, the more it gets in the way of them. You have locked yourself in your own cage.

Progressives would be much happier and almost certainly much more influential if they realised that their dissatisfaction is built into the very business of being human. They are only ever going to be intermittently successful, as each spasm of energy for reform and change wanes and the majority turn back to the work of getting by as best they can. Catching the tide when it turns again is a hard enough task without retreating to an emotional dugout and pretending things are other than they are.