Leaving the left-left to its own divisiveness

Ideological cleanliness is often messed up by misguided, muddle-headed voters

I used to be hard left, and now I am left-wing on most things and centre-left on others, with good wishes to all.

One reason I abandoned the left-left, so to speak, is that it abandoned me. When the NDP allowed gun rights to overshadow women’s rights, I was gone.

Another was the relentless extreme jargon. Here’s an example. As Star columnist Shree Paradkar has reported, Toronto councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam this week withdrew her motion for “Intersectional Awareness Week.” Rather than single out only one problem, this worthy event would teach people about the overlapping unfairness resulting from intersecting identities of “race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexuality, ability and age,” as Wong-Tam put it.

But Black activists including Black Lives Matter Toronto complained in an open letter that the timing was insensitive given current problems facing Blacks in Toronto — “multiple oppressions as we move from moment to moment and space to space” — and that the week would be “celebratory” rather than informational.

“The term, intersectionality,” said the letter, “which is one of the more radical Black feminist frameworks through which questions of differential oppression can be theorized and resisted, is being deployed by the City of Toronto in furthering the uncritical claims to being a city of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion.”

“Our thinking is quite straightforward,” the letter said.

I disagree. I found it incoherent.

Intersectionality is theoretical. But at a recent gathering at Interval House, Toronto’s first battered women’s shelter, I learned about the multiple employability barriers that survivors face, including education level, work experience, age, skin colour, physical pain, housing status, young children and confidence. They face all these barriers simultaneously.

Wong-Tam is a fine councillor who graciously backed down on her motion, though she shouldn’t have. As Paradkar wrote, she is an “immigrant woman of colour in the LGBTQ community.”

But maybe it should be “LGBTQ+,” the + referring to “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Transsexual Twospirited Queer Questioning Intersex Asexual Ally” or “LGBTTTQQIAA.”

Take note of the final A. It stands for Ally, which means someone who is a friend to the LGBTQ+ people. I am an ally, always have been.

The abbreviation (it’s not an acronym because each letter is sounded out) basically means “all good people.”

The great Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently said she was fed up with academic code words from the left, including “intersectionality.”

The other reason I gave up on hardliners is that they can be so exhausting. They have purges. They murder their darlings, they shun their own.

For example, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn keeps firing colleagues from his shadow cabinet for not liking him, for being what is known in Marxism as “splittist.” He’s running out of qualified MPs to promote.

The problem is that Corbyn is an acquired taste, and some have failed to acquire it. As well, some Labour MPs wish to reflect Remain voters who gave them a seat. Labour wants them, Corbyn’s Labour doesn’t.

Such MPs are periodically winnowed by Corbyn and his sinister deputy John McDonnell, as they are entitled to do but shouldn’t. This is Lenin’s “democratic centralism,” and I don’t like it.

When Corbyn went bolshie (Bolshevik) and said privately owned empty South Kensington flats should be seized to accommodate those displaced by the Grenfell fire in North Kensington — “Occupy it, compulsory purchase it, requisition it” — that was it for me.

But for hardliners, even a partial objection is Orwellian crimethink and it is doubleplusungood.

These men of the hard left — they have never welcomed women — have a worrying taste for purity, very similar to that of the extreme right, I notice. Ideological cleanliness is often messed up by misguided, muddle-headed voters who obviously don’t know what’s good for them.

Are you one of us, the extremists ask. I’m not. Disagreement is in my bloodstream.

Many of us are not sure we can learn the language of this exclusive club and follow its rigid heartless ban on occasional disagreement.