In the last few years, the right-wing has gained ground across America and Europe,
but despite that I think there's a fundamental ideological reason why the left will win.
Part One: Love
In her book The Capacity Contract, scholar Stacy Clifford Simplican
makes this beautiful distinction between two different kinds of political communities.
The first is common to liberalism and all positions to the right of that and has been the dominant one throughout most of human history.
We'll call them communities of strength.
It's when you say to somebody, "You're in my political team because you can do something
because you're strong, because you're fast, intelligent, because you speak the same language as me,
because you have the potential for greatness in you, because of your heritage or your genes or whatever.
That's why we're together, because we're strong in the same way and if people want to be a part of our community,
then they have to also be strong in that way."
Think about the way that a lot of the discourse surrounding immigration turns on what immigrants can do for the country.
Can they pay taxes? Can they work hard?
Do they have the right skills and so on. That portrays society as a community of strength.
In contrast, the left has the potential, though we don't always use it,
to create a fundamentally different and entirely incompatible kind of political family:
a community of vulnerability.
Where we say to somebody, "You're on our team, not because of what you can do or because you can work hard
or speak English or anything like that, but because we both need something.
We both need health care, shelter,
justice, time off from work,
to fall in love with someone without being afraid that we'll be
discriminated against because of who it is that sweeps us off our feet."
But okay, there are these two different kinds of communities, communities of strength and communities of vulnerability,
Why do I think communities of vulnerability are ultimately going to win out?
Because of the power of shame.
In his book On Escape, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas discusses the shame of vulnerability.
Shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget our basic nudity.
It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up.
This preoccupation with dressing to hide ourselves concerns every manifestation of our lives, our acts, and our thoughts.
We are so ashamed of our vulnerabilities.
As an example, a few years ago, I had to have surgery on my left leg
and for a while afterwards, I had to walk with a walking stick and I was totally humiliated by it.
I was really ashamed that I was, you know, 20 and I couldn't walk properly.
I felt like an old man, you know, and actually I pushed myself too hard before I really recovered and the surgical wound became infected.
And rather than go to the hospital and have someone to sort it out,
I pulled out the infected stitches in the bathtub with my teeth
And that was that was really painful and pointless, and so so daft
I should have just asked someone to help me.
But I was so ashamed of that vulnerability that at the time, being a very angry young man,
that was actually less painful than asking for help.
But it's not just other people from whom we seek to hide our vulnerabilities.
One seeks to hide from the others, but also from oneself.
We see in shame its social aspect;
we forget that its deepest manifestations are an eminently personal matter.
The necessity of fleeing, in order to hide oneself, is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself.
And the thing is, human beings are always gonna be vulnerable. We're always gonna get old,
we're always gonna get sick, always eventually you're gonna die, we're gonna grieve
We're gonna hurt the people we love without really meaning to.
We're gonna get anxious and we're gonna get afraid.
And so a political family that brings people together by saying,
"Hey, it's okay. We're all vulnerable and you don't need to be ashamed of it," is always, always, always gonna have some kind of appeal.
Vulnerability is the beginning of true solidarity.
"Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
Even in the most starry-eyed white supremacist's dream future,
where everyone has three white children and traditional housewives chug gin to suppress the knowledge that they're complicit in their own dehumanization,
people are still gonna be vulnerable and they're still gonna be drawn to ideologies that say, "Hey, that's okay."
That's actually why punching Nazis, whatever you think of it morally and practically as a tactic,
is ideologically quite a clever move, because nothing exposes the lie of somebody crowing
about how they're the super strong master race faster than getting their ass handed to them.
It's a community of strength that builds up its strength so much that it can't take a hit.
Even a trade union, right, organized labor, a hallmark of the left,
which is arguably a kind of community of strength, begins with the workers realizing that they have shared vulnerabilities that their bosses don't have
and working together to support each other through that.
It's slightly cliche to bring up 1984 in a political chat but I've got a bit of a different take on the bleakest bit of the book.
In George Orwell's famous novel about fascism, the villainous O'Brien says to the hero, Winston,
"If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever."
That's a disturbing image, but I think that there is hope even in that,
because by O'Brien's own admission, the oppression of the party will have to continue being done forever.
It will never stop. The party can never ultimately win. It can just keep fighting.
The oppression has to be continuously forced which means it isn't naturally occurring, it's not inevitable. It could in theory be changed.
And although the bad guys do win at the end of the novel, it's notable that Winston only begins resisting
when he makes himself vulnerable to Julia by falling in love with her.
Part Two: Victimhood
Now if you're a liberal or you're further right-wing than that, you might be saying, "Hang on a minute.
You leftists can't claim to have a monopoly on vulnerability and you certainly can't claim to have a monopoly on love."
Let's take an extreme example just to prove the point. Okay, the loyal white Knights of the KKK.
Very, very right-wing but they say on their website how they love the white race and how we are vulnerable
to society being attacked by homosexuals and drug addicts and Jews.
And I bet that in their private lives, They probably love their moms as well.
Even Hitler had a mother even Adolf had a Ma, wait!
But in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion scholar Sarah Ahmed dissects the kind of love that hate groups claim to have
and says that to say we love our people and mean only white people is to say,
"I love you as long as you're strong in the same ways as I think of strong,"
so white, probably Christian, probably not LGBT, certainly not too poor. It's "I love you so long as you reflect me."
It's the love of the self, narcissism, really, projected outwards.
It's not the kind of love that says,"I love you, vulnerabilities and all."
The idea that those on the right are under some kind of attack from minorities or diversity or feminism or whatever has been around for millennia, literally.
In her book Backlash, scholar Susan Faludi gives a history not of feminist progress but of all the times progress has been undone by a backlash.
And she reveals that the arguments the right-wing have made have scarcely changed in thousands of years.
There's this great bit where she talks about Roman lawmakers getting really angry when women were allowed to drive chariots for the first time
And they said women are taking over men's spaces. This, in a society where women weren't even allowed to vote.
And people still make that same women-taking-over-men's-spaces argument today, about everything from politics to video games.
What Ahmed and Faludi illustrate is that communities of strength sometimes attempt a version of vulnerability,
but it comes out wrong because true vulnerability is just ideologically incompatible.
So it emerges is this kind of false victimhood with no real basis in material distributions of money and power.
The classic example is white supremacy, which says that white people are naturally superior,
but that on its own isn't going to draw a lot of people in, because a lot of white people are still miserable because of capitalism.
So the white supremacist has to posit this additional ridiculous conspiracy theory
about the world secretly being run by Jews in an attempt to keep white people down.
I've talked about these myths before in detail if you're curious.
That isn't community of vulnerability, that's community of strength trying to explain why it isn't even stronger.
Another example might be certain right-wing pundits, like for instance Tucker Carlson.
I'm not trying to preach too much here. Whether you're a fan of his or not, whatever you think of Tucker Carson,
he says things like, "The elites and the ruling class of America, they don't care about the Average Joes,"
but, factually, like literally, Tucker Carlson is a millionaire and he has his own TV show and he comes from a very, very wealthy family.
He is the elite. He is the ruling class.
For all those saying that conservativism is the new counterculture and the new punk rock, it's just not on the money,
because counterculture has always been about resisting or avoiding domination, not being part of domination's backlash.
I mean, sometimes when leftists get together, there is a certain amount of domination going on, but that's - that's a totally different thing.
And also, in fairness, victimhood and self-pity and making bigger conversations about ourselves aren't exclusive to the right.
We can all do it. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Martinez cautions us against the oppression Olympics,
where we take a conversation about politics and something that's bigger than ourselves
and we make it about our own oppression and say, "Oh, I'm oppressed in this way,
and that counts for more," or, "This is the most fundamental axis of oppression," or whatever.
We don't need more competition among different social groups for the gold medal of "Most Oppressed."
We don't need more comparisons of suffering between women and Blacks, the disabled and the gay, Latino teenagers and white seniors, or whatever.
Pursuing some hierarchy of oppression leads us down dead-end streets where we will never find the linkage between different oppressions and how to overcome them."
Vanity is a very pernicious sin. We're all susceptible to it sometimes. I mean, I'm a Youtuber and an actor, I'm as susceptible to vanity as anyone else, more so probably.
The idea of the Oppression Olympics reminds me of a great phrase that I learned in drama school, which is a little bit of a personal mantra.
"Curiosity not ambition."
But, even as some truly dark things happen in the world, the left is always holding on
and we're starting to gain ground, especially here on YouTube.
LeftTube! We're in our ascendancy and not just LiberalTube, LeftTube.
Capitalism-Needs-To-Go-Tube. We-Need-A-Whole-New-Philosophy-Tube.
Some people say this is because of trends or algorithms or right wing creators losing their touch,
but I think there's this deeper ideological reason.
More and more people are vulnerable, so communities of strength just don't cut it. They never will.
The place you want to be is the place where you can be you, unashamedly,
because it's our vulnerabilities that make us beautiful.
There's plenty you can do and you are strong
Plenty that the right does which is wrong
Plenty you can say, but now we're playing another game, It's easy!
There's nothing that we have, we'll never lose
Nothing that we know we won't confuse
There's nothing I can be that would be better with you and me,
it's easy!
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need