Nappy, rash

A final post of the year

And so we arrive at my final post of 2022. It seems to have come around so quickly, yet at the same time it feels like I set up my Robstack an age ago.

It’s been a real pleasure writing this year. In my previous blogging incarnation I tended to focus on the Labour Party’s endless internecine strife, and I wrote a lot about the dangers of Corbyn’s leadership and politics. Leaving the Labour Party has meant I’ve been able to touch on new topics and I wanted to challenge myself to broaden my range a bit this year; so I’ve written about men’s mental health, the existential dread of turning forty, absurdism, Gareth Southgate, my favourite horror film, football, conspiracism, and the problem with journalist-activists, amongst other things. It’s been really enjoyable to kick some new ideas around and the response has been really positive, so thank you for that, and I’m really happy to have you on board.

Despite the varied content, skimming across my 2022 output a definite theme emerges. If you had to boil Robstack thought down into a single paragraph, it would probably read something like:

What passes for the contemporary progressive left has abandoned thinking in terms of structural and collective approaches to politics, and has instead turned to highly individualistic modes of political engagement and solutions to issues.

If I were to expand on that a bit, I’d say that a lot of online political discourse is extremely shallow and performative, less interested in making any meaningful change than it is in playing status games. And I might add that a lot of British progressives seem hellbent on looking to the US for inspiration, wanting to lift and drop American discourse into a society with an entirely different history and political culture.

This is the way with the cultural hegemon, I suppose; to tweak Metternich, when America sneezes, British progressives catch a cold. It just seems bizarre to me that anyone in the UK should look across the Atlantic for any sort of political steer, when, even after twelve years of Conservative governments, things still look much better for progressives on this side of the pond, and so much of what passes for American ‘liberalism’ looks to me like such a dead end.

I was thinking about this earlier in the week, when, with impeccable timing, I saw a tweet by American feminist and writer Jessica Valenti which perfectly illustrated my point. Valenti wandered in to her local pharmacy and found that the diapers in store were locked up:

So far, nothing too weird; I mean, I don’t think the people trying to ban abortions and the people selling nappies are necessarily the same, but there’s maybe a point here about how in America women are forced into childbirth and then life is made difficult for them once they’ve done so.

It’s worth noting that parents aren’t being prevented from purchasing diapers - they’re locked behind glass to prevent them being shoplifted, but customers can still have some if they ask the staff.

But then the thread went off the rails entirely.

It just seemed amazing to me that a fairly prominent liberal journalist would suggest, as an opening gambit, that if people need diapers they should simply fucking steal them. This is the sort of thing I mean when I accuse contemporary American progressivism of being individualistic and performative.

It’s performative because Valenti won’t be stealing anything herself, of course, and it feels rather wrong of her to encourage other parents to turn to robbery, particularly in such a judicially punitive country; taking Valenti at her word presumably ends with lots more poor mothers in prison. It’s performative because the tweet frames the only two options as “permit crime” and “sit babies in filth”. It’s performative because it is an answer which means the author doesn’t have to do anything. It’s performative because there is cachet in radicalism and actual solutions require hard work and effort.

It is individualistic because Valenti’s advice considers nothing beyond one parent stealing one diaper; there is no thought given to any wider consequences here. If shops started turning a blind eye to nappy theft, it’s more than likely that the store would quickly find itself out of diapers entirely, meaning some parents who were able to pay would no longer be able to get hold of any. Perhaps enterprising people would simply swipe the nappies from the shop and then sell them to desperate parents out in the car park. What reason would any store have to stock diapers at all? In Valenti-World, shops stop selling nappies altogether, or at the very least, hike their prices dramatically, hitting other parents in the pocket. It might work out for the individual who steals the pack of diapers in the short-term, but the wider community impacts are fairly evidently extremely negative. If the problem is a societal one (parents cannot afford diapers), you cannot fix it with individual solutions.

Do not steal these

It seems incredible that an American progressive’s first thought would be to advocate for theft when there are so many other options which are preferable in every way. Maybe the lack of welfare and state support in the US has led to a failure of the progressive imagination in terms of what government can provide; surely some sort of subsidy would be a better thing to campaign for, if this is an issue you are passionate about? Diaper vouchers for the poorest families, perhaps. Failing that, there are charities which currently work on this exact problem, and Valenti could offer her support to one of those; here is one in New York State.

I’m convinced the reason Valenti argued for crime here is because it is an individualised and performative solution which sounds radical and edgy; an approach to political engagement of a piece with other nonsensical things thrown up by American liberals in recent years (defund the police, really?). My thesis is that many progressives are losing the ability to think in terms of collective politics, and seem to lack the patience for doing the little things in communities which make a genuine difference.

The reason I tend to labour this point is because I am a social democrat. I believe in a strong welfare state and high-quality public services paid for by progressive taxation, and that in the UK we are capable of so much better than the shambolic state of things. The reliance on food banks, the poverty and homelessness, the state of our schools and hospitals, the number of people struggling with the cost of living; it’s hard to think of any part of the public realm which does not need significant improvement.

Britain has been brought to its knees by Conservative rule; it feels like nothing works as well as it should, and things are getting worse. So it is a problem for me that the left has driven down a lot of ideological dead-ends right at the time that we need it to be electorally appealing and politically responsible. I write in the hope that it can find its way back, and as a starting point I think we can probably do better than advocating for burglary.

Thank you to my subscribers; I appreciate you following, and your thoughts are always welcome in the comments (including suggestions for what to write about in 2023!). A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.