Reframing the Radical Left

Last week I wrote a blog in which I took the political Right to task for, among other things, a gross lack of foresight and a shameless penchant for hypocrisy.  Today I figured I’d follow that up with a rant on what I view as the unthinking and inadvertently hypocritical faction of the Left.

Although I unambiguously self-identify as a man of the left, I’ve long had issues with the so-called “radical” left and I’ve blogged about it on a few occasions.  I enclose the term “radical” in quotation marks because I feel it’s a misnomer.  Far from being radical, what unites the “radical left” is instead conformity, orthodoxy, and reflexiveness.  For this reason, I’ll henceforth refer to them as the formulaic left in light of these observations.

I find these occasions of disaccord arising more frequently as I get older, more well-read and, dare I say, more cynical.  I imagine I would find it fairly disconcerting to one day realize that I no longer fit, even peripherally, into a recognized ideological camp.  But I fear that this is the direction in which I seem to be heading.

My disillusionment began almost a decade ago, when, at my summer job, I was teamed up with two women from the formulaic left, who I’m sure had yet to encounter a leftist party-line they couldn’t toe.  I recall that once one of them commented that justice and equity demand that everyone in Canada should earn at least 80k a year, a number which she no doubt pulled directly out of her ass.  Later in the summer I got into a contentious debate with them when they argued against funding stem cell research because it was based on the “medical model” of disability and therefore perpetuated the notion that disabled people need to be “fixed”.

Their argument was indicative of a larger trend that tends to plague the formulaic left, and that is their hyperchondrial suspicion of science.  I predict that this, along with their general preference for political correctness over truth, and moral relativism over human decency, will continue to hamper the efforts of the more free-thinking left to advance our movement into the future.

By and large, members of the formulaic left are a confused bunch.  They fight for the rights of archaic religious sects to oppress, abuse, disenfranchise, subjugate, and sometimes murder women and gays.  They back striking public transit workers no matter how unreasonable their demands are, apparently oblivious to the fact that the middle class transit workers already make 60k a year and live comfortably in the suburbs, and the working class riders who rely on public transit to get to their comparatively low-paying jobs are the ones being held hostage, while the upper class are largely unaffected since most don’t ride the bus anyhow.

These are the same leftists, who turned a blind eye to Soviet imperialism while railing against American incursions into Latin America.  The same people who defend the murderous dictator Fidel Castro and his island dungeon, where AIDS patients are denied life-saving drugs unless they agree to live 24 hours a day in quarantine, and where writing or speaking critically of the regime can still land you in prison (ironic how that regime is still referred to nostagically as “The Revolution”).  The same people who responded to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence of Salman Rushdie by blaming Rushdie for insulting Muslim sensibilities, rather than blaming the deranged cleric for sanctioning civilian murder while delivering a staggering blow to free-speech and dissent all in one fell swoop.  The same people who repeated this betrayal 20 years later when totalitarian fascists called for the death of a Danish cartoonist.

But I guess that’s to be expected from people who choose their position on any given issue based on a formula.