Politically active left-wingers are the equivalent of the tribal football fan

I recently overheard a pub conversation among a group of outraged football fans, whose team had just lost a match. They were fuming about how the other side had played dirty, and how the referee had been biased against their team. They proceeded to slag off the opposite team, and to perform a few chants in support of their own.

At this stage, I interjected: “Excuse me, sorry for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, and, having seen the match myself, I have to say that I disagree with major parts of your analysis.  

Firstly, I think you are not being objective here. The other team did not play particularly dirty – or at least no dirtier than yours – and the referee’s decisions were entirely defensible. So the game wasn’t unfair. The other team won, because they objectively played better.  

More generally, I think your “my team good, your team bad” attitude is primitive. Every team has better players and worse ones, and every player has strong and weak moments. We should judge each team and each player on their individual athletic merit during each individual match.” 

By now, you are probably thinking: “come on, this is obviously a made-up conversation, which never took place. Not even Niemietz would act in quite such a cringeworthy way. This is probably supposed to be some weird analogy to make some weird political point.”

And you would be entirely correct.

I know nothing about football, but even I understand that if you took the tribalism and the raw emotion out of it, reducing it to a mere display of athletic skill, you would destroy most of its appeal. Even I understand that football isn’t just about 22 people chasing after a ball. It’s about being part of a fan community; it’s about rallying around a team, and it’s about the social bonding that this creates.

This is why nobody would expect football fans to come up with an impartial, detached, and objective assessment of a match: that is not what they are trying to do. When football fans are raging about how their team has been cheated out of its rightful victory, they are not trying to analyse what really happened. They are signalling their loyalty to their team, and they want to take part in their community’s collective outrage.

In the case of football, this is obvious enough. We don’t normally put it in those words, but we get it.

However, a similar dynamic is often at work in political arguments, except that in this case, it is not so obvious what’s going on. People on my side of the ideological divide – by which I mean classical liberals, libertarians and “Thatcherite” conservatives – are often dismayed by what we could call the asymmetry of hatred in political arguments. I must have heard hundreds of variations of the statement “Our left-wing opponents think we are evil; we think they are well-meaning but misguided.”

Firstly, this asymmetry clearly exists. Take Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which is one of the most popular political books of this century so far. The purpose of that book was not to argue that free-market economics doesn’t work, (if you are a Klein reader, you will just take that as an obvious given). Rather, it was to portray the proponents of free-market economics as sadistic monsters.

Or take George Monbiot, who is one of Britain’s most successful political authors. Monbiot is obsessed with Westminster think tanks such as the IEA, to which he ascribes enormous powers (if only, George, if only!), but I have never seen him try to rebut a single argument made in a think tank publication. His whole shtick is accusing his opponents of nefarious motives – and his audience clearly loves it.

Danny Dorling, another prolific left-wing writer, also frequently portrays “neoliberals” as a crossover between Ebenezer Scrooge and Hannibal Lecter. And on Twitter, of course, nearly everyone does that. Even Owen Jones once criticised his own comrades’ eagerness to brand their opponents as “evil”.

It is also true that this tendency does not exist in reverse.

To be clear, I’m not saying that free-marketeers don’t have negative stereotypes about their political opponents: we definitely do. We often describe “the typical Leftie” as someone who is overly emotional, prone to knee-jerk reactions, intellectually lazy, shallow, conformist, easily swayed by fads and fashions, unable or unwilling to think things through properly, and above all, preachy and sanctimonious. (For the record, I believe all of the above). But these are the attributes of an annoying person, not the attributes of a villain. They are the attributes of someone you’d rather avoid, not the attributes of someone you hate with a passion. Thus, while plenty of her enemies celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher, I struggle to imagine something like this happening in reverse.

Hence the familiar complaint: why can’t they engage with our arguments in good faith, just like we do with theirs?

But this might just be like asking a group of football fans why they are not being more objective and analytical when discussing the match their team has just played in. In both cases, it might be a fundamental misunderstanding of what these groups are trying to achieve.

The simple truth is that politics is a lot more fun when you turn it into a battle of good vs. evil, as opposed to a comparative evaluation of different policies. Righteous rage is intoxicating and addictive, especially when experienced collectively, as part of a community. More, it is what builds that community in the first place. Why would you risk all that by allowing for the possibility that your opponents might be well-intentioned, or that there might be some value in engaging with them? Sure, you may gain a better understanding of the issues on hand. Which is great, if – big “if”! – that’s what you’re trying to achieve. But what if it isn’t? What if you’re more interested in preserving your self-image, and your sense of belonging to a moral community?

Left-wing politics is infinitely more geared towards community-building than free-market economics. Just look up political T-shirts or other fashion items on Amazon: there are literally thousands of items designed to signal left-wing credentials, but only about a dozen libertarian-leaning equivalents. (And even those are either semi-ironic, or tailored to the small fanbase of the US Libertarian Party, and therefore not easily transferable.)

Or take left-wing events. In 2019, I involuntarily “attended” lots of marches by Extinction Rebellion and the Greta movement, because Westminster was full of those people all the time, and I had to wade through them on my way to the office. Those marches were essentially folk festivals, with music, singing and dancing, with the politics being more like an add-on. Obviously, the fact that the attendees were having fun doesn’t mean that they’re not serious about their politics. But what it does mean is that if you join a movement like that, the community spirit comes first, and you articulate your politics later. You already know that you want to be part of the movement, and you then manipulate your own reasoning to reach the conclusions you want to reach. A few years before that, it was the same with Occupy and the People’s Assembly.

If you are interested in free-market ideas, you will not find anything remotely like that. (And it would not work if we tried to build it, because the sort of people who are drawn to free-market economics would find it cringeworthy). Sure, you can go to conferences and seminars, but there, the ideas take centre-stage, and the socialising at the pub comes later.

Free-marketeers are the equivalent of the football fan who really is primarily interested in the athletics, skill and strategy of the game. Such a fan may still have a favourite team, and they may still enjoy talking about football at the pub, but they do not strongly identify with any “fan community”. Most politically active left-wingers, on the other hand, are the equivalent of the tribal football fan, for whom the main attraction of football is the community spirit.

Asking such a person to be less tribal and more fair-minded means asking them to give up the bit which gets them all energised about politics in the first place. It would mean asking them to ruin the experience for themselves. That intoxicating righteous rage, and the social bonding it generates, is a major part of what makes being on the Left so attractive. But unfortunately, this is hard to combine that with a matter-of-factly “here are three reasons why I think you’re wrong” style of arguing.

And that’s why the asymmetrical hatred in politics is here to stay.