LEFT-WING OR?
The other day I asked a question in a thread. Not to catch anyone out, but because I genuinely wanted to know -
What are you actually measuring when you call yourself left-wing today - and what do you imagine you're voting for?
I asked because I've been seeing the contours of a pattern for quite some time, one I think very many people are woven into - and precisely because of that cannot see clearly. You don't see the net you're standing in yourself.
So this isn't about one man in one comment thread. He's just the clearest example I've encountered in a long time of something far broader.
And let me say it clearly before we begin. I'm not out to move anyone politically. Politics doesn't really interest me. Everyone should vote as their conscience tells them - that way, and only that way.
But conscience can only tell you something if it can see what it's choosing between. And that's what this is about. Not about changing anyone's mark - but about letting the mark and the conscience speak to each other again.
So back to the thread. A man answered me. Honestly, generously, in good faith. As the question was asked. He wrote seven points about what socialism and being left-wing meant to him. And his answer was so genuine and so well-articulated that it deserves to be taken seriously in the only way you can take an honest answer seriously - by reading it slowly.
Because when you do that, something remarkable happens.
His first point was that all people are equally valuable. The stupid and the clever, the industrious and the lazy, the sick and the healthy. It's a beautiful sentence, and he's right that our democracy rests on it. But it's not socialist. It's much older. It comes from the idea that Man is created in God's image, and that value therefore sits in the very fact of being - not in usefulness, not in abilities, not in contribution to production. No Greek philosopher believed it. No Roman jurist believed it. And Marx didn't believe it either - in class struggle, people are precisely NOT equally valuable, they're bearers of class interests, and some of them must expropriate the others. The idea of unconditional human worth entered the world from one place - Jerusalem.
His second point was that everyone should have a chance to create the life they dream of, and that education provides the tools. Equal opportunity. But equal opportunity isn't socialism either - equal opportunity is the classical liberal idea, which socialism has historically fought against as a bourgeois illusion. Socialism wanted equal outcomes. He's describing the opposite.
His third point was that the talent pool is unevenly distributed, and that our strength therefore lies in differences working together. Paul wrote almost exactly that two thousand years ago - the body with many members, where the eye cannot say to the hand that it doesn't need it. "Organic community thinking" they call it. It traditionally belongs with the Conservatives. So not socialism either.
From here it got truly interesting. He wrote that over the years he'd become skeptical of groups - their power-seeking, their brainwashing, their murky motives - and that he wanted to cut public support for many of them. So a form of anti-collectivism. That's the bourgeois critique of precisely the herd dynamic socialism as a movement is built on.
And then finally he wrote that you best help the poor, the fallen, the weak and the elderly by supporting entrepreneurs who create jobs - and by celebrating those who succeed…
And I write this with warmth in my voice - but… there is NO socialist tradition in the world that celebrates those who succeed. NONE. What he described was market economy with a warm heart. You know where that belongs.
So.
Seven points.
And basically no socialism in any of them.
But he still votes left - and perceives himself as a socialist. How? Why?
Here's what I think he actually described, if I pull it apart.
He described - The Old Denmark.
Grundtvig and the cooperative movement, associational life and the community hall, "something we can do together" - a popular community built on Christian-humanist ground, with mutual obligation, industriousness, and clear red lines for those who don't want to participate. What he called socialism was in reality folkhood.
The word socialism didn't function as a program in his answer. But it functioned as homeland. That was where his heart's vocabulary was formed, back when the labour movement and the Christian community ethos were still woven into each other - and he's kept the label while the content has quietly been swapped out beneath it.
And this is where it stops being about one man in a comment thread - and starts being about many more of us.
Because notice what wasn't in his seven points.
There was no class struggle. No collective property rights. But also no identity politics. No decolonisation. Nothing about how the West has lost the right to its own borders, its own culture, its own norms. Nothing about how the nation is an oppression structure, that upbringing is exercise of power, that gender is a construction to be dissolved, that unconditional human worth should be graded according to skin colour and victim status. Everything the new left actually works for - in universities, in NGOs, in administrations, in school curricula - was completely absent from his answer.
He doesn't share their ideas. He barely knows them. And yet it's them his vote finances, lifts and strengthens.
That's the mechanism I want to bring into the Light, because it doesn't just apply to him. It applies to hundreds of thousands.
You vote for a word. The word points to a banner. And under the banner today stand some completely different people with a completely different project than when the word got its resonance inside you. I've been through this journey myself. The vote is cast to memories - and used by the movement. It's the most effective form of linguistic capture that exists - you don't need to persuade anyone if you can just take over the word they've already given their loyalty to.
And there's a deeper point beneath that again.
Everything best in his seven points - human worth, neighbourly love, obligation to the weak, community as gift - is Christian capital living on under other names. That capital was saved up over a thousand years, and it can be drawn on long after you've stopped making deposits. Which we have.
But it's not inexhaustible.
And the movement that today controls his vote isn't working to steward the inheritance. It's working to deconstruct, dissolve, destroy and tear down the house that the inheritance is built into.
So that's my question, not as accusation but as mirror, to everyone who still puts their mark where they always have.
Read your own values SLOWLY.
Find out where they come from. And then investigate, honestly, whether the party you give them to still shares them - or whether it's just kept the name.
Because your values are faultless. But because language and therefore reality has changed under our feet, without many noticing, there's reasonable probability they come from an older banner than the one they stand under.
And a banner that's changed its content - well, it has no claim on your inheritance. Or your vote.
❤️🔥🪽🇩🇰
..
And as a final note.
I'm curious whether others can recognise the pattern from the inside. Have you yourself been through that separation - from where you thought you stood, to the day you discovered that what you voted for was no longer what you thought you were giving your vote to?
Feel free to share. Don't care about party names and abuse - but the movement itself.
When did you see it?
And what was it that opened your eyes?
Remember everyone wins when one shares.
Just you. ❤️
