The Left’s Identity (Politics) Crisis

Nobody said kindness was easy.

Steve QJ
4 min readDec 30, 2021
Photo by João Rafael on Unsplash

The holiday season is not for the faint of heart.

It requires strategic gift-buying and meticulously orchestrated seating plans. Mastery of the subtle interplay between hours-long cooking times and unusual dietary requirements. It takes fraught negotiations about Christmas movies and guest sleeping arrangements.

And then, if you get through all that, you need to figure out what to talk about.

For me, this last part used to be easy. In the company of my fellow liberals, no topic was off-limits. We could talk about “hot-button” issues, confident that our friendships would remain intact. We could express ideas imperfectly without being seen as “problematic”. We could disagree, even be flat-out wrong, without being characterised as evil.

But lately, things have been different.

Subjects that would have been safe territory just a few years ago have become ideological battlegrounds. Simply mentioning Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special led to furious, emotionally-charged debates. We relitigated the Kyle Rittenhouse case with more ferocity and passion than his entire legal team. We discussed the grammatical validity of singular they/them pronouns with such urgency you’d have thought lives were at stake.

--

--

Steve QJ

Race. Politics. Culture. Sometimes other things. Almost always polite. Find more at https://steveqj.substack.com