Sometimes I’ll be listening to one of my favorite very smart leftist podcasts, the kind where the hosts sound like the cool, enviable college professor you always wished you could be friends with, but never will be. I’ll find myself nodding along like, “Yes, absolutely, so true,” and then immediately thinking, “Wait, this is literally why everyone says the left is inaccessible and elitist.”
It’s not that the concepts are hard to grasp. It’s just that we do a really good job of making everything feel like an elevated academic lecture.
Because here’s the thing: the core ideas of leftist politics aren’t niche or obscure or only for poli-sci majors. The ideas are simple. They’re about fairness. They’re about decency. They’re about making sure regular people get to live good lives and that nobody hoards more than they could ever need while others are just scraping by.
You don’t need a graduate degree to believe in that. You don’t need to know the right terms or big words or theories. You just have to care.
I think part of the problem is that conservative media has done a really effective job branding the left as a smug group of coastal elites who look down on everyone else. And I guess that’s not entirely wrong. There’s a lot of “discourse around the discourse,” and I get why some people feel like they’re being talked at instead of talked to.
But the truth is, a whole lot of us on the left came to our political values from pretty regular places like church, public schools, growing up in poor communities, watching people we know get screwed over by the system. We didn’t need Marx to tell us something was off. We have eyes.
You don’t need to be fluent in “neoliberalism” to know your small town deserves a hospital. That your kid’s school should have a nurse. That the poor kids should get a hot lunch. That nobody should go bankrupt over a broken leg or a cancer diagnosis. That’s not radical. That’s just common sense.
I love listening to the smarty-pants philosophical political analysts out there. But let’s not get so caught up in how we talk about justice that we forget why we care about it in the first place. It’s not to win arguments or impress anyone with a book list. It’s because we just believe regular people should have good lives.
There’s nothing elitist about saying elderly folks deserve to age with dignity. Or that your neighbor should be able to buy groceries without skipping their meds. Or that every kid deserves joy, play, and protection, no matter what their parents earn.
So yeah, if you don’t feel like you can speak up because the words don’t come out just right, I say do it anyway. More plain talk. We’ve got enough think pieces. The ideas aren’t too complicated. They’re about human decency. And we can all talk about that just fine.
