The Left Isn't Kind
The Left's association with tolerance and compassion is an accident of history
Idea: The Left’s association with tolerance and compassion is an accident of history. Because progressives seek novel social change, they were simply the first to accept overdue social progress.
The left of the political spectrum is concerned with promoting diversity, compassion, and tolerance, etc. That’s the narrative, isn’t it? But is it true?
Political psychology has a couple of insights that may help answer this question. Firstly, it hasn’t found a clear difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of how much empathy and compassion they experience; if anything, it seems it may be just a difference in who these emotions are directed towards, with conservatives favouring people within their own group (friends, family, local community, etc). Secondly, traditional conservatism is wary of “change, uncertainty, and novelty” as the political scientist Karen Stenner describes at about 4min into this podcast, and by extension liberals are more comfortable with those things.
It occurred to me while considering these two findings that it may go part of the way to explaining why there’s often this contradiction between the narrative about the Left being kind and tolerant and the reality that modern progressives are frequently neither of these things.
In the post-war period, there’s been significant progress in removing inequalities based on sex, race, and sexuality. Each of these battles was socially novel at the time, but, and this is shown by the success of each campaign, clearly worthy of engaging empathy and compassion regardless of political orientation. These social changes were overdue and ready for broad acceptance, but liberals, with their preference for novel social change, simply got their first. And as a consequence, a narrative emerged that liberals are more empathic because this emotion was leveraged as part of each campaign.
This idea can help to explain why the behaviour of modern progressives can in fact seem so regressive. Rather than being motivated by a higher moral standard they’re simply elevating social novelty as a goal above all else. For example, progressives in recent years have aggressively pushed the idea that gender non-conforming children should be treated as having a pseudo-medical condition that requires pathologizing their healthy bodies so they can ‘transition’ to the opposite sex. Here’s the thing. Genuinely intelligent and compassionate people simply have no need for this new idea. They don’t need to collapse human individuality and diversity into redundant labels and old stereotypes, especially when this leads to medical interventions on healthy children.
Who and what the ‘Left’ is has become loose and ill-defined in recent years. In the podcast linked above Karen Stenner states that about a third of society has a tendency towards authoritarianism, roughly equal between left and right versions. I suspect there’s some overlap between left-wing authoritarians and those liberals that are at the extreme end for pushing novel social change – ie, modern progressives. Stenner describes how authoritarians, in contrast to traditional conservatives, are OK with large social change as long as it results in ‘oneness and sameness’. I think novel social change has become a fulcrum around which progressive authoritarians can identify comrades, people that will submit, and enemies. This combination of authoritarianism and an obsession with social novelty may help to understand modern progressives. Traditional left-wing ideas and language, or a narrative about what these are, are just cover for needs and motives that are much darker and toxic.