Hi All,
To many people, I *should* be a lefty : Jewish, gay and female. Herein are my reasons for not being left wing and maybe reasons why I am actually centre-right in my world view. These are broad generalisations it is true, but nonetheless point to a broad general truth, but in no particular order here's why I departed with the left long ago:
1.The monopoly of virtue and goodness
The first thing that strikes me about leftwingers is that they believe themselves to be the sole holder & therefore gatekeeper of all virtue, goodness, kindness and compassion, whereas, by contrast, Conservatives are nothing other than people without pity, mercy, justice or compassion. The evil Tories (or GOP )are rich bastards who only want to benefit rich people and giant mega Corps, but will happily abolish benefits and allow Heathcare to be privatized, meaning poor people won't be able to afford healthcare like 'Amerika', we'll all be writing cheques as we collapse from heart attacks before we get to hospital. To top it all Conservatives are bigots, xenophobes and are sexists, racists and homophobic.
The problem with this approach is that the left fails to or simply can't see the agency with which Conservatives wish to address the ills of society. For the left and the right there is a certain degree of agency given to the state. For the right this is broadly speaking the (crude )idea of the monopoly of violence: that is only the state can have the power over an army or police force and therefore declare war or force justice over someone i.e. have the power to send someone to prison for a crime. As Hobbes puts it, this is necessary to stop anarchy and chaos or the state of nature where life would be 'nasty brutish and short'. Aside from this, Conservatives generally prefer a state as small as possible, knowing that the building blocks which cement the society and state are the naturally and organic organisation of familiar and family life, with the agency of tackling, say, unemployment or homelessness is best undertaken within these private boundaries. By contrast the left believe that - contra to what Marx said about the state 'withering away' under communism - the state is mother and father, the family, the supreme arbiter not just of justice and order, but also of welfare, societal organisation and progress, education and public good. Therefore the state's role in government and people's lives are paramount.
In practice what this means is that whenever the left see a conservative government cutting back on welfare, they see it as an attack on the poor and vulnerable, because only the state should be dealing with welfare. The right by contrast would deal with welfare via individual action and charitable donation. It is not therefore that Conservatives are wicked and evil, but that they way, the agency, of tackling society's ills is not to use the state, but to use individual responsibility. If I am 'my brothers keeper', then why do I need the state to tell me this and force me to be so?
A good example are food banks, wherein people donate food and this is distributed to those who need, well, food. The left are constantly up in arms about this : not because people giving to food to those that need it, which to my mind is a public good, but because the state has not mustered enough muscle to do so instead. That's what it is about, not about how to tackle the actually issue of people not being able to buy food for themselves nor underlying issue of creating a business environment where jobs are well paid and people can be productive, but that the state is no longer doling out enough cash to people.
I have mentioned the isms above, but not dwelt on them here- that's done below.
2.The Echo Chamber and the Bush approach
Everyone has echo chambers. We all do it and sometimes its nice just to be in a forum where everyone bashes a common target, for no-one really likes being targeted by a group of several posters all at once. However I do find that the left are more censorious and echo-chamber -esq than the right. This clearly happened during both the Brexit process and during the last election, when it came as a big shock that not everyone wants to go back to the 1970s and hard left politics. When the government recently 'won' the local elections, that came as a shock too- for surely they were personally or at least the Prime Minister, responsible for the 100,000 plus deaths of covid? That's what the echo chambers were saying and that's why it came as a shock. Likewise when it was discovered not everyone was 'woke' and not everyone wants to destroy statues or tear them down, it was a shock. So too taking the buttock cheek.
There is, though, a subset of this echo chamber which is even worse to my mind. I call it the Bush approach, after American President George Bush, whose foreign and defence policy could be summed up as 'you're for us or against us'. The left are as black and white when it comes to most issues and they can't compute, if people have different views. There's a checklist you have to tick off and a way of thinking that you must collectively follow. Thus, I cannot be a dog lover, but support kosher slaughter methods. I cannot love the natural environment and watch David Attenborough programs or think we shouldn't dump plastic bottles into the sea, but at the same time adopt a critical /sceptical approach over man made climate change and more importantly the policy responses to it. I cannot support Israel and say I'm an anti-racist. I cannot appreciate European culture and philosophy, but at the same time want the EU to disappear and at minimum make sure Britain never ever joins it again. Everyone who isn't left is a guilty phoe or ist until proven otherwise. How can I be a female Dr Who fan and think the 'first female doctor, played by Jodie Whitaker' is the worst and most disastrous think to have happened to the show to the extent they've killed it?
Which leads me nicely to ;
The identity of identity politics
Identity and identities . We all have them, markers of who we are and what shapes and makes us. In the older, less complicated days we had several identifications: nationality, religion, gender, our upbringing and background, finally our actual life experience and education which shaped us. These gave us a world outlook and even one's language and accents. For me this is my Jewishness and Judaism, specifically as a Mizrahi or Sephardi, a woman and being British and having being born in this Isle, absorbing its politics, history culture and traits. It is like all of these things go together and get tossed around to make you and continue to shape you until you die. Oh and I'm also a lesbian, which curiously I missed out. Hold that thought.
To the left identity is all important, but the thing is you don't get to choose your identity as the left gives you one for you. This is confusing, but the left give you an identity or a box to put you in and that's that. These identities are created based on an oppressor/oppressed model and can change in an instant depending on context, for example :
1) you are part of the majority, say you are British ,white, able boded, straight and a nominal Christian 'CofE' type and a man you are automatically identified as the oppressor : you are deemed to be a suspect (closit or sometimes openly) sexist, possibly racist and if you like England to win at football a xenophobe and as you are straight you (probably) hate gays and have fantasies about lesbian sex, especially if you don't like pride marches . That's you given identity as per the left: the wicked white male predatory oppressor sitting at the top of the pile of oppression .
2) If you are the same as above, but female, then you are the oppressed, by men, by the patriarchy by the glass ceiling and sexism, afraid to go out of your door because of being raped. However if we widen the net and note that the UK is 20% non-white and non-Christian, the context changes because you can become an oppressor yourself , you might be a suspect racist and a 'Karen' and therefore no where near as oppressed as ethnic minorities and sexual minorities.
3) If you are a racial or religious minority, person of colour or a sexual minority, you are almost certainly put into the category of oppressed identity. You automatically won't achieve anything in life because you are oppressed by a 'systematically and institutionally racist' country, which is the fabric of the British state/people. If you are a gay or lesbian then you are oppressed by a similar culture of homophobia, the same if you are Muslim, only this time Islamophobia is the thing which will get you. Of course even here we have categories of oppression, for people of colour are many different people indeed, for as stats will tell you people of Asian and Indian heritage do far better in education and career than black people, Hindus and Sikhs, do better than Muslims.
Then there's the tricky ones , us Jews. The oldest ethnic and religious minority in Britain, who 'look white' (as one left winger said to me once), who do achieve excellent educational and business status and are generally wealthy and a part of the middle classes, but at the same time still suffer from anti-Semitism from the hard left, hard core Islamic, free Palestine groups and the 'traditional' proto Nazism far right, although sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the propaganda of these different groups . But we only get that antisemitism , so the left says, because, by virtue of British- Jewish support for Israel , we're somehow collectively responsible for whatever the Israeli government does (heh, we actually pull the strings is what one person once said to me, as causally as he would have a conversation about the weather).
My issues with all of the above are put simply
1) I don't like people putting me in a box which isn't of my choosing.
2) People are more complex and society more complex than an oppressor/oppressed model
3) It pits every person against one another and so deconstructs society that there wouldn't be a civil society if taken to its full conclusion
4) It actually does nothing , nothing at all to address real instances of isms and phobes.
5) All it does is create or reinforce a situation wherein people will be under achievers -' because it's not their fault'- and actually keeps people where they are not where they could or ought to be via merit.
6) My sexual preference - that is finding women attractive and to date them etc- doesn't define me as a person, just as my sisters finding men attractive etc, doesn't really define them as people. What does define them is their personalities and character, which as noted above come from various sources such as upbringing and life experience.
I hope that helps....
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