Progressive Asceticism Will Never Win Elections
The movement has spiraled into a vortex of guilt and shame.
Alicia Kennedy, one of the most celebrated food writers of her generation, sometimes seems to approach food as a series of moral dilemmas waiting to be untangled. In her new memoir, On Eating—a useful starting point to consider progressive culture as a whole—she writes that alcohol “is one of the most wasteful things one can consume, producing twelve times the wastewater for the amount of spirit created.” Climate change may make wheat scarce, she worries. Sugar, meanwhile, conjures up a litany of horrors—it was originally harvested by slaves, and the present-day sugar industry is often accused of mistreating workers. “Most of us only know the sweetness of it because of the brutality of colonialism and slavery,” Kennedy writes. “There’s no way to have its specific sweetness without exploitation, is there?”
Kennedy is both a champion and a product of the long-running movement to push consumers to pay attention to what they are eating—where it comes from, what damage it might do to the earth, and who might suffer as a result of its production. These days, conscious, progressive-minded foodies tend to seek out local produce and meat (if they still eat meat) at a farmer’s market; they are aware of the carbon costs of transporting exotic delicacies long distances and the environmental consequences of factory farms. Consumption, in this worldview, is an unavoidably political act. “We can change our desires, reconsider our luxuries,” Kennedy writes. And many have been doing just that.
What this movement is gesturing toward is a conception that the lifestyles enjoyed by citizens of wealthy nations are, if not outright unsustainable, then at least deeply unfair. For at least a decade, left-of-center, educated, middle-class-and-above Westerners have become inflamed with guilt for the way we live. In a roundabout way, the left has reinvented the idea of sin.
Electorally speaking, this couldn’t come at a worse time. The Christian conception of sin at least contains a pathway to redemption, through some combination of prayer and faith and good works. Progressivism is less concerned with forgiveness; contemporary left-of-center discourse has instead mired itself in negativity, and in particular on notions of collective guilt for colonialism, racism, and exploitation. Political candidates subscribing to this worldview can win elections in left-leaning enclaves, but it is hard to imagine that tendency as being anything other than profoundly alienating for consumerist-minded mainstream America.
This negativity manifested, for instance, in the since-deleted tweets of Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won a primary for a New York City congressional seat even though she wrote in 2020 that “this country [the U.S.] is a fucking disgrace” and in 2019 that “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” What Chevalier was expressing is not a political critique, but a view of the country as being irredeemably fallen—and that’s of course catnip to conservatives who attempt to paint all liberals and progressives with the same brush.
It’s not easy to say why exactly progressivism became so wrapped up in personal consumer choices—it’s a hard turn away from traditional leftist thought, which largely focuses on transforming systems on a broad level. The simplest explanation is that it’s a consequence of political gerrymandering. Progressives who live in blue cities in blue states have little ability to influence our polarized national politics, since all of the viable candidates in those places are progressive Democrats. Thanks to a gridlocked political system and a divided country, actual large-scale change seems borderline impossible. So maybe it’s no wonder so many frustrated progressives have turned to small-scale, personal change, spurred on by a social media environment where negativity and extremism spreads like wildfire, and where there’s a tendency to tell people that everything they do, no matter what it is, is wrong.
If you buy organic foods because you’ve been told that that’s better for the planet, you’ll find plenty of sources that tell you this is not good enough. If you buy carbon offsets to lessen your emissions impact, you’ll quickly be informed this is a scam. A few years ago, there was a push among some on the left to explain why philanthropy was bad, actually. Progressive thought can be so focused on what we are doing “wrong”—personally and collectively—that it lends itself to a kind of nihilism. On a much-lampooned New York Times podcast episode from earlier this year, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino said that “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup” is “a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action” that she nevertheless partakes in regularly. On the same podcast, she endorsed shoplifting from Whole Foods, stealing from the Louvre, and (jokingly?) blowing up pipelines. If everything you do is suffused with sin, why have moral standards at all? If you truly believe there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but find yourself living under capitalism, maybe you should just give in to your most selfish impulses.
This is the danger of focusing so much on the idea that our consumption is immoral and that our pleasures originate from some nexus of colonialism and misery. If absolution from sin is impossible, what’s the point of taking any of this stuff seriously?
In the late 2010s peak woke era, “antiracist” gurus advocated sometimes bizarre methods of fighting prejudice—all of it with the hint of the hairshirt and almost medieval prescriptions for wallowing in sin. Robin DiAngelo’s website advises white people to undergo a process of “continual education” that involves forming “affinity groups” with other whites and befriending black or indigenous people to “talk through issues and challenges.” These relationships should be “authentic,” DiAngelo warns, but we should also pay the BIPOC people we talk about race with. In the same spirit, a couple of women of color had, for a while, a good business going charging liberal white women $2,500 to be berated for being racist. This is the parodic endpoint of much of 21st-century progressivism—instead of working toward a more just world for everyone, flagellate yourself endlessly for making the world worse.
Some well-meaning people, faced with these problems of guilt and culpability, have created a version of moral accounting that is basically just accounting. In Strangers Drowning, a 2015 book by Larissa MacFarquhar that profiles individuals whose sense of ethics leads them to extremes, she writes about Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman, early adopters of what would become known as the Effective Altruism movement. For more than a decade, they gave away more than 50 percent of their combined income to nonprofits that worked in the developing world, in their personal attempt to address global inequality. This is an extreme version of tithing that the couple settled on thanks to Julia’s rigid, quantitative moral code. MacFarquhar writes that early in their relationship, Wise asks Kaufman to buy her a candy apple at an event, then immediately regrets it:
With her selfish, ridiculous desire for a candy apple, she might have deprived a family of an anti-malarial bed net or deworming medicine that might have saved the life of one of its children. The more she thought about this, the more horrific and unbearable it seemed to her, and she started to cry.
Few would be willing to donate the majority of their earnings to charity in order to absolve their guilt; few, for that matter, feel guilt as intensely as Kaufman. But at least Effective Altruism considers how one might go about fixing the world, rather than dwelling on its brokenness.
Much of progressivism, though, seems to go further. Joy was the missing ingredient from so much of progressive discourse in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Left-leaning media figures told the public that our way of life was destroying the earth, that we were racist, that our favorite shows and books and works of art were “problematic” and should be discarded. And nothing really was offered in its place—just atonement and penitence and the self-lacerations of collective guilt.
For an example of what progressive joy can look like, look to the left’s current champion, Zohran Mamdani. For all of the controversy stirred up by the New York City mayor (for instance, he endorsed Chevalier), he won election in large part because it was fun to support him. His smiling, sunny social media presence was a far cry from the dour stereotypes of socialists—and for that matter, a far cry from his more centrist opponent Andrew Cuomo, who did not seem fun at all. In one of Mamdani’s more famous campaign videos, he decries the high cost of operating a food cart while interviewing cart operators and eating their food. Was their lettuce and rice organic? Are their styrofoam boxes clogging up some horrific landfill? Maybe—but the point was that these people had problems, and Mamdani was talking to them in hopes of solving them. The progressivism that can endure doesn’t tell people what they’re doing wrong, but instead asks what help they need.
That seems to be what’s missing in the current discourse. The last decade has convinced a lot of people that progressives are nothing but humorless scolds. Who wants to join a club like that? Until the left can convince everyone that it’s fun to be a member of the movement, that movement will struggle. But first, maybe some leftists need to convince themselves it’s okay to have fun.
Harry Cheadle is a freelance writer and editor living in Seattle.
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I recently discovered there is actually a legitimate psychological term for what I think this kind of behavior represents: moral scrupulosity. A subtype of OCD. The idea being that a person becomes fixated on the idea of personal moral purity, and terrified of being a bad person. If OCD is, at base, about anxiety management, this becomes a strategy to manage and control the anxiety surrounding the feeling of structural impotence you mentioned. Throw in a constantly shifting and sometimes wildly contradictory set of pre/proscriptions of what exactly one should/n't do about any given topic via social media and larger cultural discourse, and this is a recipe for meltdown and burnout. Looking at my mental state over the past 10 years, I think I came dangerously close to this, and I fear so did many of my progressive comrades.