'Left-liberal': this hybrid pseudo-category gaining currency only through the mimetic zeal of those eager to participate in 'current debates' even at the expense of their own intellect, those unwillingly to suffer the ignominy of exclusion from the mediocracy and its ephemeral rewards. What is its function (for it has no intellecual content)?
Does not left-wing thought begin in antagonism to liberalism, as an interrogation of its assumptions, even as it promises to 'complete' it?. To yoke ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ together is a category error, but a politically motivated one. The hyphen anticipates their eventual conflation, the elision of the distinction between them. They are compressed into a false unity. It is as if 'the left' is now only those aspects of it continuous with Liberalism. The excremental remainder, which is to say, from our point of view, the very essence of the Left, is discarded, pushed off the spectrum altogether. 'Left-liberal' is a device whcih shrinks the political spectrum, illegitimately contracts the ‘left’ into an alliance with its historical adversary, and restricts political struggle to pragmatic positions within capitalism. Indeed, one’s stance with regard to this last (the very system within which we live) is henceforth off limits.
The conflation of left and liberal is found also in statements like: ‘historically, the left has stood for equality, rights etc whereas now it is supporting theocratic tyranny and siding with all sorts of nefarious anti-enlightenment forces'. The left has always been Liberal and is now being illiberal. ‘The Left’ has in fact often sided, strategically, with various anti-imperialist or anti-colonial liberation movements espousing non-enlightenment values. The obvious point being that they were not siding with them because of those values. And the even more obvious point being that the Right is no stranger to strategic alliances with groups whose ideology they in no way support.
But there is a further irony here. Multiculturalist tolerance, in its contemporary guise, is of course an eminently liberal ideology rather than a leftist one – the fight against racism, sexism and cultural discrimination, the insistence on understanding the Other and allowing the Other appropriate expression within society, these are all the historic concerns of Liberalism. For the Left, all of the above is fine, but the true lines of division are those of class. The idea that social conflict is primarily about cultural non-recognition is for the left an obfuscation of the reality of economic divisions, it is an abstraction.
The ‘over-tolerance’ towards various cultural particularisms (e.g. Islam) is surely an outgrowth of Liberalism. The left, by contrast, does not simply want to tolerate these particularisms as 'valid cultural expression', but to understand them in terms of the relations of power in which they are implicated. In this sense, the ‘left-liberal’ category serves to tar the left with the errors of liberal tolerance
Thus, on the one hand, the left are being tarred with the errors of liberal over-tolerance – understanding the Other rather than condemning their illiberality. On the other hand the Left is being condemned for not being liberal – i.e. universalist, fighting for equality, rights etc. Twin faces of Liberalism are criticized in lieu of the actual Left, which has been written out of the picture, and remains untouched but also forgotten.
Thus, the basic framework of thinking remains liberalism itself. And the noises of these polemics is that of Liberalism bumping its head against its own limits. The Left tradition alone has the true critique of this framework and its limits and contradictions, and it is precisely the tools of this critique which have been jettisoned by the facility of the ‘Liberal-Left’ conflation.
[n.b. I perhaps need to point up the difference between the pseudo-category 'left-liberal'- used as virtually synonymous with 'any left of centre thinking' and the older 'left liberal' used to refer to the left wing of Liberalism. I am of course talking about the former not the latter.
n.b. 2. A particularly hilarious and vacuous example of the use of 'left-liberal, ' and the typical ideological context in which it is embedded, can be found here]