In Defence Of Usefulness

On The Left's Prioritizing Comfort Over Progress

In 2016, I was invited to attend Ottawa Pride as a member of the UOttawa Liberals, and somewhat politely declined. The reason this mundane interaction is memorable is the person who invited me then asked if I was no longer a Liberal – the notion of a gay person not wanting to go to Pride didn’t seem to cross their minds, so it must have been I didn’t want to go as a Liberal. The reason I didn’t want to go was simple – I don’t like Pride.

I don’t voice this opinion ever because it’s not a viewpoint that many fellow gay people agree with, but I find it completely ridiculous a concept at this point. Pride was at one point a protest, but it’s become a glorified party. For what that is, it’s fine. But at its best it’s a useless street party I have no interest in, and at its worst it reinforces stereotypes of the community that do more harm than good for those who have no interest in their sexuality being an active descriptor. (If you do not have a visceral understanding the difference between being the gay friend and the friend who happens to be gay, then I both envy you and do not care if you like Pride or not.)

Pride is a very low level version of what you might call the left’s addiction to uselessness – my contempt for it aside, it’s not particularly harmful, but it’s also useless. It’s a glorified party weekend that we treat with seriousness because at some point it was a protest movement. But it is another example of a certain kind of person’s happiness and comfort being prioritized over the good of the movement. Pride in its current form does not help the LGBTQ+ community in their two serious fights – for finishing the job on full legal equity, and for continuing to normalize the concept of queerness to the point where our presence in nominally airquotes “straight” spaces doesn’t even elicit a shrug.

I’m thinking about all of this for a lot of reasons, but I’m thinking about it specifically in the context of the pro-Palestinian protests that have shown up in recent months and their allies on the broader left who continue to do immeasurable damage to the Palestinian cause. The New York Times dropped a deeply disturbing, well reported, inarguable account of the way Hamas systemically raped their female victims on and after October 7^th, and I can’t stop thinking of the damage done to the Palestinian cause by those who seem convinced that their sycophantic nuttery is serving their cause.

So, let’s start 2024 with a seemingly simple notion; In Defence Of Usefulness.

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One of the most interesting divides on the broader left is not really on outcomes, as much as we all like to exaggerate the differences between, say, Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh on policy. Give both of them 10 years of full control on the economy, no need to get elected during it, and no jurisdictional concerns, where they’d end up would not likely be very far away. How they get there would be different, and the priorities would be wonky, but there is just not much different between the broad Canadian left these days in terms of preferred outcomes.

What separates New Democrats and Liberals is generally not preferred outcomes, but how to handle constraints, be it market forces, recalcitrant provinces, or public opinion. During the late summer’s flareup on parental rights, nobody who disagreed with me on approach disagreed me on our preferred outcome, because in an ideal world we would have told the right to fuck off. The argument was about how the left should handle it, not what they should do in an ideal world.

This fight matters, a lot! The history of reform movements is littered with decisions both correct and incorrect about how to fight their fight. The Civil Rights Movement down south chose Rosa Parks to start the fight because they decided she was the right person at the right time to go on. Look at Occupy Wall Street, a movement that failed because it completely lacked the structure to accomplish the sum of fuck and all. The reason one of those movements came as close as America will seemingly ever get to ending Jim Crow and the other folded on itself in a round of self indulgence is that one was focused on making change, and the other was about making its participants feel better about themselves.

Is there anything inherently wrong with a protest movement designed to make people feel better? No – the Women’s March in 2017 was pretty blatantly just an exercise in Democratic women feeling (genuinely) upset and blowing off some steam. Did some of those people end up donating to Democrats and therefore help to flip the House? Sure, but that was because smart people decided to take an incoherent and muddied movement and convert it into discernible, tangible actions. (In that case, lists of mostly-but-not-exclusively female candidates in competitive seats to donate to.)

What much of the left is content to do is just the first part, be mad about something. There is no forethought from anyone engaging in protest or reform movements these days. Step 1 is scream at people for being insufficiently pure, Step 2 is do nothing productive, and then Step 3 is to be mad that you didn’t help in any way. The way we know this is the Ontario NDP. Instead of trying to make a reasonable point in advocacy for the Palestinian people, Sarah Jama first put out a statement that refused to specifically condemn Hamas for October 7^th and then got caught on tape denying Hamas rapes and claiming that Jews … sorry, Zionists … “control an entire government apparatus” in Ontario, a blatantly antisemitic notion that a shady cabal of people control the Ontario Government.

How has Sarah Jama advanced the cause of Palestinian Liberation? How have the psychopaths who threatened children at malls before Christmas advanced the cause? They haven’t, because they have no measurable metric of success. All of these IDF screenings of the October 7^th tragedies, on the other hand, have been wildly successful, because they thought through how their action (screening these tapes for politicians and journalists) would help the cause. Getting hundreds of people at this point to have written about Hamas’ horrors has helped Israel keep a level of public support in the west. Of course the IDF did that for a reason beyond honest recordkeeping – they did it because it helps their cause. Those opposed to the Israeli action could take a lesson.

This isn’t a new thing – there are electoral reform dead enders and Bernie or Busters and any number of other causes that don’t have a strategy for their activism. The electoral reform dead enders are my favorite, because while I nominally agree with their priorities absolutely nobody involved in the movement has thought about how to advocate for their position for more than two seconds. I’m accordingly shocked they have yet to change the voting system anywhere in Canada.

At the end of the day, Canada is a Parliamentary democracy where elections have consequences. You can wish they didn’t all you want, and you can wish that “direct action” mattered, but it doesn’t. If the left wants to control power in this country they have to win in a democracy. They have to win voters who are not nearly as radical as the loudest voices. Lying to yourself that you’re in a majority you’re not isn’t the answer, nor is sanctimonious protests designed to make you feel better that will just repel the majority.

If the left is to turn 2024 into a year of progress, they need to prioritize useful actions over ones that make them feel better. Anything less, and they’ll leave more and more communities they claim to care about worse off for their efforts.