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It is the job of the left to make life better, to care about improving people’s conditions in tangible ways. This means helping people achieve decent wages. Making sure they have good schools. Making sure they’re not tangled up in red tape as they try to get healthcare. Making sure that they’re not lonely, or depressed, that they have a sense of community and purpose. Our job is to bring everybody the good life, to make sure they are able to eat good food, have great healthcare, have fulfilling and rewarding work, and maximize their potential. We don’t want people stuck in dead-end tasks that they hate, we don’t want them having to worry about whether they’ll be able to pay for their children’s medical needs, we don’t want them blown to pieces in a needless war.
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Yet consider how people on the left frequently talk: in abstractions, generalities, and theories, in ways that don’t put our principles in intelligible terms. Partly because so much left-wing thinking originates in the academy, the language of the left frequently doesn’t lend itself to mass appeal. Instead of talking about suffering, cruelty, and deprivation, the left now frequently talks about “marginalization” and “exclusion.”
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we need terms that make clear to everybody what the problem is and what it would look like if the problem were solved. We should be careful about using language that is unclear or vague, because this makes our goals fuzzy.
It’s important to believe in things that are real. Left-wing principles are often stated in abstractions. For example, “fighting oppression” or “creating equality.”
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The more one uses shorthand terms (like “systemic injustice”) rather than descriptors of the actual problems in people’s lives that this shorthand term refers to (like “women being fired for becoming pregnant” or “factories closing and leaving hundreds of dads unable to pay for their children to visit the doctor” or “black men on the way home from their jobs being thrown against police cars and frisked” or “transgender people being bullied and beaten up and then crying all night believing they are totally hated and alone in the world”), the less we help people who are not leftists understand what we are actually concerned with.
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Utopian thinking is often seen as the height of uselessness, because it necessarily speculates on worlds that don’t exist rather than dealing pragmatically with the world that does exist. But this misses a crucial purpose of these dreams: They help us understand what the end goal is, what the underlying vision is toward which we want to keep moving. By envisioning the promised land, you can chart a path toward it. You may not get there. But you will at least be heading in the right direction. (This is one reason why Martin Luther King’s dream was such an effective image; it offered a vision of a seemingly impossible world and gave people something to look forward to and begin to build together.) [...]
But you still need an answer to the obvious follow-up question “Well, if you’re not Donald Trump, then what are you?” Progressives therefore need a meaningful vision. Why should people want a left-wing world? What does the left actually stand for? And what would it actually look like to have a world in which the things the left wants are implemented? If nobody gives people a clear answer to these questions, then we cannot expect people to sign on to our program.