Groucho Marxism

In a previous blog post I proposed an explanation as to why some people seem to have a vehement dislike for those of us on the left. According to the conception put forward there, these people, who I referred to as ‘bourgeois centrists’, hate us leftists because of the damage our well-thought-out, evidence-based arguments inflict on their fragile egos. (They really should read Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday – see another blog post of mine for more details on this). Re-reading my old blog post, however, I realized that I had not provided a complete explanation. There is another reason people hate the left which holds independently of how well-thought-out (or not) our arguments are. To explain this, I will start with a personal anecdote.

I lived in London for many years and like most Londoners I used to commute to work on the tube, which I absolutely despised. Not that I have any problem with the London Underground; on the contrary, I think it is a brilliant piece of public infrastructure. The problem I had was specifically with commuting on the tube and the air of misery that hung over it. So one day I decided I’d had enough and bought myself a bike for commuting. This had a transformational impact on my quality of life, but it came at a cost: to my surprise, I found myself regularly coming into conflict with drivers. Now a bit of conflict is inevitable when sharing a road with people, but this went way beyond that, with many drivers seeming to be annoyed simply by my existence on the road.

This baffled me for a long time. After all, I reasoned, wasn’t I doing everyone a favour? By cycling to work I was reducing congestion both on the roads and on public transport, as well as reducing pollution. But after a while the explanation dawned on me. The reason I was coming into conflict with drivers was that they disliked me precisely because of the reasons I just described. They understood perfectly well that by cycling to work I was reducing congestion on the roads and on public transport, reducing pollution, and giving myself a good workout at the same time – and they hated me for it! In their minds I was effectively saying to them: ‘Look, you could be like me, free as a bird cycling to work, realizing all these benefits, but instead you choose to be trapped in a car getting stuck in traffic. You fool!’

Of course, I wasn’t saying that at all, I was just cycling to work. But that didn’t matter; what mattered was drivers’ perceptions. Not only did they perceive me to be taking the moral high ground, but by cycling I was forcing them to reckon with the fact that by driving a car they were doing something which is actually extremely dangerous. Cars have become so normalized in our society that we tend to forget just how dangerous they are. We would do well to remember that when driving a car, we are manoeuvring a hunk of metal weighing over a ton travelling at speed where one false move could result in accidentally killing someone. Coming across a cyclist travelling on a spindly metal frame with zero protection immediately makes us aware of this, and some people don’t like that.

I think that some people hate leftists for similar reasons that some people hate cyclists (we are probably talking largely about the same people here). In the same way that people hate cyclists because they perceive them to be taking the moral high ground (even though they aren’t really), people on the centre or right of the political spectrum hate us leftists because they perceive us to be taking the moral high ground (again, even though we usually aren’t). Similarly, in the same way that people hate cyclists because it forces them to face the fact that they are doing something dangerous, people on the centre or right of the political spectrum hate us leftists because we force them to face up to the fact that their political beliefs are fundamentally selfish and immoral.

As leftists we need to understand that by taking a left-wing position, we inadvertently hold a mirror up to those who take opposing positions, and they often don’t like what they see. This, I think, is the main reason why there is so much hatred and vitriol for those of us on the left of the political spectrum. It is important that we understand this as we then can start to see these overreactions for what they really are: the lashing out of someone who hasn’t yet fully come to terms with what their political beliefs actually entail. This, in turn, should enable us to react calmly in face of provocation, and even feel some compassion and empathy for our political opponents. It is only by doing this that we can hope to win our opponents over and convince them that the left is right.