The paradox of emancipation for the left is that the more victories it wins the less relevant it becomes. In theory, it should bank the victories and move on to the serious business it said it always wanted to concentrate on once it had swept aside irrational prejudices. In practice, it unwittingly shows that prejudice can flourish as easily on the left as the right.
The presence of so many politicians of south Asian heritage in the front rank of Conservative politics, for instance, is a victory for anti-racism: proof that the party of Enoch Powell has changed beyond measure. You should be able to hold that thought in your head while acknowledging that Rishi Sunak is Boris Johnson’s useful idiot, and Priti Patel has more allegations stacking up against her than the top 10 on the FBI’s most wanted list.
As with ethnicity, so with sexuality. “The aim of the LGBT+ movement is to abolish the need for an LGBT+ movement,” says the veteran activist Peter Tatchell. In other words, if it succeeds in minimising homophobia, there is no need for it. In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government passed homophobic laws, a gay man or lesbian could be conservative in their views on the economy, and in their respect for tradition and fear of socialism, but unable to vote for a party that seemed to hate them. Remove the hatred, as Tatchell had a hand in doing, turn the Conservatives into the party that legislated for gay marriage, and they should be free to regard their sexuality as politically irrelevant. That was the point.
Except it has turned out not to be the point. Once caught in a cause championed by the left, you can never be free. That Pete Buttigieg could run as the first openly gay major candidate for the US presidency was not an advance if you believe the organisers of Queers against Pete. He was married and had had a conventionally successful career and conventionally establishment politics. This made him “an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body”, according to the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen. The only way he could be truly gay and, I guess, truly young was by fighting police violence, incarceration, unaffordable healthcare, homelessness, deportations and economic inequality.
Freedom from homophobia turns out to be a demand that you commit yourself to a leftwing programme. Far from abolishing itself when its necessarily limited aims are met, an emancipatory movement acquires the permanence of a religion, and excommunication awaits those who fail to adhere to its dogmas. Asian Conservative politicians, meanwhile, are experiencing what liberal Muslims fighting Islamists have experienced for years. They’re “coconuts” – brown on the outside, white on the inside, in case the point of the slur escaped you – “native informants” working for the white colonial authorities when their racial destiny was to uphold the party line that all Tories are racists. Once again, freedom from prejudice comes with a hefty bill. The struggle against racism does not leave you free to be a Tory, if you choose. It confines you.
Allow me to be generous. Political commitments are as much emotional as rational. The sight of people embracing their former enemies or alleged enemies is shocking because it is so rare. Jews and others haunted by the legacy of fascism will not forget that it was in Labour rather than in the Conservative or British National parties that antisemitism flourished in the 2010s. Whatever Labour does, however much a Labour government might rationally suit their interests, supporting Labour again will be unthinkable for some. Equally, the most recent analysis of ethnic minority voting from the Runnymede Trust showed that, with the exception of British Indians and Jews, the ethnic minority vote remained solidly Labour. Even voters who ran their own businesses and stuck by traditional moralities and religions could not bring themselves to align themselves with the Conservative party’s history of racism.
Nor is there anything new in the outraged cries of “after all I have done for you”. Arguments that the working class betrayed itself are as old as the socialist movement. “They were the enemy,” the hero of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists cried at apathetic working men in 1914. They not only “submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it”. In the mid-20th century, leftish feminists had to come to terms with the fact that Labour would have won more elections if women had not been given the vote. But when all the excuses have been made the consequences remain repellent.
Movements no more own their supporters than husbands own wives. Once made, accusations of betrayal make reconciliation impossible. No one damned as a coconut or a straight man in a gay man’s body forgives the presumption of the insult, not least because it echoes the hatreds of reactionaries. The rightwing US shock jock Rush Limbaugh said a gay man could not be a presidential contender because “America’s still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband”. Buttigieg’s leftwing opponents said he should not be the Democratic candidate because he was the wrong type of gay.
The attacks on the Tory descendants of east African Asians echo the attacks of white racists. Their ancestry remains their curse. They are no longer from refugee families, who were robbed of everything they owned by Idi Amin and the other African dictators of the 1970s but the tainted descendants of the British empire’s “subcolonial agents” in Africa. Who could be surprised that their bad blood turned them Tory?
Across the west, the centre- and radical left are suffering endless defeats. I wait for the moment when their supporters ask what they are doing wrong. One item on a long list would be the notion that the left owns minorities. As morality, it is an affront to individual liberty. As strategy, it is worse than useless.
• This article was amended on 9 March 2020 to correct a misspelling of the surname of Masha Gessen.
• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
