ALBA - Unofficial Forum

I am engaged in a correspondence – a reader who thinks that my core critique of ‘liberal elites’ and identity politics is correct but who can’t understand why I’m not therefore giving Trump and Musk the benefit of the doubt while they ‘sort all this out’.

But I could pick any one of dozens of conversations – the local plasterer who thinks that Nigel Farage is on a mission to radically reign in and disempower the City of London’s financiers, my barber who just asked me if the Jews really run America, the 50-something woman who believes Trump is the world’s biggest champion of women’s rights.

I can engage with each of these one at a time (no, Reform supports no such thing, no it is corporations who run America but Israel has probably the strongest non-corporate lobbying operation in the country, Trump may have chanced upon a coinciding interests of yours over gender ID but he’s still the anti-abortion guy…).

And then I go away and people find their way back to believing what they already did and I have no answer when they come at you in volleys of illogic. No-one on the left seems to know how to deal with this. In fact, a lot of people I know don’t even understand what is happening never mind why.

So let me offer a way to think of this. A term I recently heard in relation to all this is ‘bundling’ and it is very helpful to map the problems. Bundling here means taking a whole range of issues of varying merits and lumping them together as a take-it-or-leave-it package, whether there is any coherence of logic across the ‘bundle’ or not.

I keep hearing that ‘the left’ bundle issues the most, but I keep coming back to the same argument that this isn’t the left because poverty and economic reform is very rarely part of the bundle and any political stance which doesn’t make economic reform a central plank just can’t be described as left. It is a liberal position, deriving not from Marx or the Chartists or the trade union movement but from 1960s narcissistic hippy counterculture.

And the liberals really do ‘bundle’ issues, but in a very specific way. The issues liberals bundle are those that derive from personal responsibility, things you can do yourself that don’t require structural change, issues which don’t really impact on economic power relations. Why? Because liberals are very much on the winning side in the class wars and are the only group without serious money which is.

So as I phrased it, this is the ‘moral elite’, a group who benefit from great social injustice but have found a way to launder their consciences via ‘checking their privilege’ and specifying their pronouns and going away and ‘doing the work’ and all the rest of the bollocks which means ‘performative morality that doesn’t change anything’.

This has created two of the strands of our big social failure that I write about continually on this site – identity politics and elite capture of the systems of government. The liberal elite love identity politics because they dictate the terms and the terms are specifically designed to split and divide their ‘opponents’ (basically poor people without a university degree whose interests clash with theirs).

Simultaneously this liberal elite identified more and more with the genuine economic elite in the corporate and finance world – and they wanted their share. A perfect symptom of this is the bonus culture in the public sector – since when does someone at the top need an extra perk to do their job properly?

They don’t, but they can just take it, so they do. They are unaccountable and run everything, so they can approve each other’s bonuses because they want to. This has created the morass of pocket-stuffing mediocrity which sadly runs so much of Scotland (and the western world). And the public can see it.

Thus we have been running around fighting over rules about who gets to use whose toilet so that we don’t pay attention to the ways this group of people have enriched themselves and entrenched their power at the expense of the public. The liberals have ‘bundled’ a load of disparate issues into a big, messy ball to make sure the fight remains ‘over there’ and doesn’t come for them.

But whatever you think about the gender ID debate, it is wrong to see same-sex attraction and the ability to self-identify as directly comparable issues. They’re not. They involve fundamentally different arguments. They can only be considered in isolation from each other, not bundled.

Yet that is how, for example, Nicola Sturgeon was able to call those who oppose gender ID basically racists and fascists, not for any other reason than ‘smearing by association’ through bundling issues together (she was including anti-immigrant sentiment) which don’t belong together. For a liberal you literally can’t be pro-immigration and anti-self ID. Except that is a perfectly rational position you could arrive at.

I have explained in much more detail here how the politics of identity can only create tribal conflict. I’m almost 100 per cent certain that the correspondent I opened with is a while male, and I’m going to guess heterosexual. What tribe has he been forced into? All he hears is that every single problem in the world is the result not of powerful social and economic structures but because he hasn’t ‘done the work’ or ‘checked his privilege’.

Which leaves the hard right in a brilliant position, because it too can bundle issues. In their bundle is kicking back against trans rights (which many in the left also have sympathy with on women’s safety grounds) and banning abortion. Again, we can debate the merits of each of these issues individually, but they have nothing to do with each other.

Likewise, in their bundle is ‘stop a liberal elite ripping off your tax dollar’ and ‘remove all restrictions on reckless financial speculation’. I’m 100 per cent in agreement with the former (which I would call ‘frontline first’) and 100 per cent in disagreement with the latter.

You can call all of this whatever you want – liberals call it culture wars. But it is designed (in my view literally) to rip society apart so the super-wealthy can gorge themselves on the tattered remains. And it is making people crazy.

Again, my correspondent wants ‘corruption rooted out’ and so is cheering on two of the most fundamentally corrupt people on the planet whose corruption dwarfs the small-beer corruption of the liberal elite. Even more jarringly, he is cheering on the specific act of corruption by super-rich people who are about to make themselves much more powerful and even richer through their acts of corruption.

So he’s absolutely right to be angry at identity politics and absolutely right to be angry at liberal elite capture of the public realm, and he’s absolutely right to get pissed off at liberal issue-bundling, and it is perfectly reasonable that he’s sick to the back teeth of being called names simply because of the sex he was born and the skin he was born with.

It is perfectly reasonable that he does not like the fact that in the last 20 years (basically since the financial crisis of 2007/8) the corporate liberal elite have been delighted to feed the monster of identity politics deliberately to undermine the social solidarity that would otherwise have led to economic reform.

And as a result it is completely understandable that he feels bitter about the way the tribes he grew up in (which were generally geographically and economically based and so much more likely to include ‘everyone he knew’) have been broken down and replaced with aggressive, newly imposed tribes designed and policed by a liberal elite he doesn’t know which divide him from his old community.

So he’s right to look for change. It is also understandable that in his search for any remaining tribe that will have him, he is only really welcomed by ‘the manosphere’ (itself a deeply insulting term liberals invented to ridicule others). It does me no good pointing out that this is a space specifically created and curated by the hard right in the US using big corporate donations, it still welcomes him.

And once he is in he gets trapped in the bundle. ‘That lassie just had her gold medal taken away by some man pretending to be a woman – and what about those dirty fucking Mexicans?’ (not I stress anything he actually wrote to me). And the second he is trapped in that bundle he instantly becomes untouchable for the liberal elites who will blacklist him to within an inch of his life and call him a Nazi online.

People like me are then an endangered species, willing to disentangle each issue and address them one at a time and seek always to build alliances across divides where possible. I can do this because of my incredibly privileged position where I have the education to interrogate issues for myself and a career that gives me the time and the space to do it.

If the left doesn’t get its act together and repudiate the liberals and their identity politics, we’re finished. The only path out of this is to unite people who have been divided, shift analysis away from the wholly bogus idea that all our problems are about personal choice, create strong stories about what is actually causing these problems for real and get serious about sharing those stories, to invest in communications infrastructure that engages with people on their terms and creating meaningful, real change.

This is why I created Common Weal, to build a uniting agenda, create real solutions not soundbites, let people know they aren’t hated, be patient and willing to engage respectfully and point the finger of blame wherever it honestly belongs without fear or favour.

My correspondent told me that he’s a socialist who is totally pissed off with ‘the left’ (my scare quotes) but that he values what I and Common Weal do and so he sticks with us. I believe this is a small vindication of what I’ve spent the last decade of my life doing. Unless more people on the left take this seriously though, I will continue to feel like an isolated exception. And the world will keep heading towards that dark place we all see in front of us.