Forget the 2028 Election, Leftist Infighting is Going to Cost Us the Midterms and More

Last week, the Boston Globe published a story on The Last Ditch, a lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts that recently eased masking restrictions for financial reasons. The bar’s decision to go mask optional one day a week prompted a mediator-officiated Zoom call between the community—who wielded accusations of ableism and racism—and the owner, who talked of the business’s dire straits by citing their four jobs and a $50,000 loan on the business.

This community is well outside of my jurisdiction. I do not live in Western Massachusetts, and I had never heard of this bar before. But it platformed something about left-leaning Americans that I think is worth remembering: We hate ourselves.

For some reason, the left is entirely incapable of understanding intersectionality without using it as a weapon. Yes, we must stand with our fellow marginalized Americans, whether they are discriminated against on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability status, etc. But playing Oppression Olympics has a cost beyond being irritating. Every hour spent ranking who among us has it worst is an hour not spent fighting the people doing the oppressing, and the more time we spend litigating each other, the fewer people are willing to stay in the room with us. People notice that this is how we treat each other, and they decide they would rather not participate. We lose them, we lose the seats that depend on them, and we end up letting President Trump win a third term. 

The story of The Last Ditch isn’t isolated. Even more recently, Taylor Swift’s release of “Patient Zero” prompted backlash from those who objected to the title’s roots in queer history. Once again, by focusing on the smallest of the small issues, we lose sight of the larger picture of what we care about. Queer history does matter, but when we see many LGBTQ people today experiencing discrimination, harassment, and struggles with mental health, we must ask ourselves: to what extent should we be nitpicking Taylor Swift’s song titles?

Many leftists believe that these types of “gotcha!” comments signal a concern for marginalized people. However, unnecessary remarks, whether made online or in real life, create an environment in which people are reluctant to have difficult conversations because they do not want to be constantly insulted for saying the wrong thing. When we treat every issue with the same degree of severity, everything gets labeled as racist and homophobic, making people less willing to confront their ideas of what racism and homophobia actually are and eventually blunting action.

You cannot hate and shame someone into changing their fundamental ideals. With the rise of identity politics, it has become easier over the years to conflate politics with morals. And in certain cases, that conflation has its merit. But more often than not, it is used as a litmus test to see whether or not someone belongs, a cheap way of passing judgement onto others.

I believe in many of the same things as the people who act this way do. However, I can recognize that this method of framing arguments is incredibly pedantic. A politics organized around who is good has to keep producing evidence of who is bad. If your standing in a movement comes from your capacity to identify harm, the harm has to keep being available, and when the supply of villains runs low, the search turns inward. We have effectively built a political culture in which the fastest route to being seen as serious is to find the flaw in whatever your own side just did, but most of the time it’s just the lowest-effort way to look like the smartest person in the room. We are fluent in the language of victims and close to illiterate in the language of survivors. Thus, a movement that has only ever trusted the powerless will come to distrust anyone inside it who acquires even a small amount of power. Every exercise of power looks like betrayal if the only thing you’ve trained yourself to recognize is purity. 

And it scales. It’s the same instinct that makes us denounce a mayor over one action, or a union contract that won most of what it asked for, or a piece of legislation that got seventy percent of the way there. Progress is still progress, but we are bent on treating compromise as a scandal rather than as evidence that somebody showed up with enough leverage to be able to compromise at all. Power is not something we are waiting to be handed. It is something we periodically get and then punish each other for holding. What makes this particularly frustrating is that we are not consistent with it. A standard you set is supposed to be applied to yourself first and to everyone else last. Somehow, we’ve managed the exact inversion, grading generously in the mirror and mercilessly in the room. Cancel culture does not produce better people, it produces quieter ones. If an accusation for saying the wrong thing a few years ago is permanent, and nobody is willing to recognize that you’ve since changed, the rational response is not to become more thoughtful, it’s to become less audible. 

Almost everything I see right now is about 2028. Who will run, whether the Democratic Party will finally move left, whether some governor is charismatic enough to carry a swing state. It is a comfortable thing to argue about, because it does not feel like there is anything at stake yet. Meanwhile there is an election in a month.

Presidential years have weather patterns of their own. People vote because most others around them are. Midterms don’t work that way. They are decided by whoever can be bothered to show up, and in the handful of districts that actually determine control of Congress, that means a few thousand people who either made the trip to the polls or did not. We are not losing those people to the Republicans. We’re losing them to the conclusion that voting isn’t for them either because the leftist purity politics of others puts them off, or, because in a severely ironic twist, their leftist purity politics make them incapable of voting for any politicians.

Every cycle we are told that the midterms are the most important election of our lifetimes, and every cycle a portion of us decides that voting for a Democrat we find slightly insufficient is a compromise we are not willing to make. I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to do it again and it will cost us every seat that matters. 

The coalition that has any chance in November has to include people who are wrong about one of your nonnegotiables. It has to include the person who still uses the outdated word, the person whose understanding of Gaza is shallower than yours, and the person who voted for Trump once, regrets it, and would rather not be asked about it again. That is not a betrayal of your beliefs, that is what a coalition is. Nobody has ever won anything without building one out of people who can’t tolerate each other.

I am not saying we must all pretend to agree with things that we don’t. I am simply saying that we must consider these things with a sense of proportion, and a willingness to sit on a criticism for a few weeks. Conversations about accountability are important until they become unnecessarily pretentious. We can either keep sorting out who among us is the most correct, or we can hold Congress.

Shloka Bhattacharyya is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at sbhattachary@wesleyan.edu.