In this week’s Beyond Gender, I spoke with Lionel Shriver and Dr Bret Alderman about Lionel’s latest novel A Better Life. We explored the issue of immigration and discussed its impact in different countries. I wondered whether America, the land of immigrants, was different. Didn’t the old joke say that the Statue of Liberty told us to give America “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”, and so we did?!
Lionel pointed out that this is an over-simplification, and that from 1924 to 1965, the United States sharply restricted immigration through quota laws that favoured certain European countries, allowing only limited and highly selective entry rather than fully closing its doors. This seems a very important and under-acknowledged point. Arguably, what is known as American culture, as shaped in the 1950s and 1960s, is a direct result of this policy?
The conversation moved to something more fundamental. What has happened to the left? Why does it feel so different when all three of us once felt at home there? Did the left leave us, or did we leave the left? This shift in left wing politics is best illustrated by Colin Wright’s (Reality’s Last Stand) famous illustration.
Weirdly, political positions no longer stand alone. Now it’s all package-deal politics, where if you buy one, you get the rest thrown in. If you believe that the medicalisation of identities is inappropriate, it is immediately assumed that you also hold certain positions on vastly different issues such as immigration, surrogacy, and climate change. And, in a swerve that seems very far from Karl Marx’s manifesto, all of these issues now belong to the left.
But the new left in the twenty-first century has little in common with the old left of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So much so that it should be called something else - perhaps the identitarian or postmodern left?
The twentieth century left centred on reality – work, pay, support for the vulnerable, social cohesion and solidarity. Class politics were debated in terms of labour and responsibility. Immigration only became a clear left versus right issue from the 1980s onwards. Before that, both sides often supported restrictions, but for different reasons. Back then, there was room for disagreement and there was room for trade-offs.
Now the twenty-first century left has swapped class for identity, and everything has changed. The focus is centred around that newly sacred word, identity, and everything is subjective – our personal sense of self trumps everything else.
These days tribalism, collective agreement, belonging, and signalling that you are one of the good guys are more important than equality and fairness. Being seen as progressive and practising extreme tolerance, where anything goes, is what matters most.
Of course, any discussion of left-wing politics today soon turns to cancel culture. According to Lionel, there is a nastiness underlying cancel culture that should be addressed:
The emotions that they espouse and the emotions that they express are perfectly opposite because they pretend to be so compassionate and caring… Whereas the truth is what they exude is hostility, aggression, loathing… The whole cancel culture thing, it’s about going for people. It’s about destroying people. It is a kind of hunting ethos. It is predatory.
While the ultra-left present themselves as compassionate, they often behave in a cruel and punitive manner. The language of care has been weaponised and paired with a determination to create an out-group to contrast with the in-group. Group behaviour is managed with shaming tactics reminiscent of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the bad old days.
A direct consequence is the death of the concept of civilised disagreement. Today, disagreement is viewed as a personal attack on the person you are disagreeing with and a signal to the world that the person you disagree with is somehow immoral. It is all very medieval. The idea that you might be a perfectly good person offering a completely different perspective is dismissed as naivety.
This being Beyond Gender, of course we also spoke about the trans issue. Lionel described how she had noticed that young people on the cusp of adulthood seem to turn toward a trans identity at precisely the moment they are about to step into adult life. “It serves as sort of an excuse for not stepping into their adulthood,” she said.
Transition pretends to offer something that looks like progress but functions as a kind of arrest, a way of pausing development rather than moving through it. Instead of moving forward into work, relationships, and responsibility, attention shifts to a project that looks like achievement but is, in her words, “a false version of achievement.” It is compelling because it is measurable and culturally affirmed. The trans identity is elevated and admired. Trans people are presumed to be brave.
Lionel pointed out parallels with immigrants. The current framing, she suggested, flattens reality. “In the progressive mind they are flawless. They never commit crimes. They yearn to pay taxes.” Immigrants are no longer understood as people in all their complexity, with the full range of human behaviour that implies, but as symbols of purity. They are idealised as pure beings. Yet the truth is that people are more complicated, more contradictory, and often more difficult.
Our conversation with Lionel tried to confront the truth of 21st-century politics with courage and sensitivity. Now that there have now been actual killings in the US, we can no longer allow ourselves to yield to the dreadful polarisation that has befallen American politics, and increasingly the wider Western world.
We hope that our willingness to ask questions without already knowing the acceptable answer will be thought-provoking. It might feel very 1990s to think something through without immediately locating yourself within a tribe, yet it feels important to defend the right to be unsure, complex, contradictory, and everything else that makes us flawed and fallible human beings.
Watch the episode here:
