This spring the NDP, Canada’s left-wing federal political party, fumbled the election so badly that they lost official party status. Amidst an atmosphere of widespread economic discontent and populist rage, the ostensibly pro-worker NDP ran such a miserable campaign that they ended up with just 2% of the seats in Parliament, their worst showing in history. Their leader, Jagmeet Singh, stepped down, leaving the party to reorganize and recoup.
At a recent press conference, Heather McPherson, one of the NDP’s seven remaining MPs, announced her candidacy for the party’s vacant leadership position. Attempting to address the party’s disastrous showing in the election, she said that the NDP needed to widen its appeal significantly. “We need to stop shrinking into some sort of purity test,” she said. “We need to stop pushing people away, and we need to invite people in.”
McPherson’s colleague Leah Gazan, another NDP MP, reacted to her speech by immediately calling her words appalling, disappointing and racist. McPherson’s use of the phrase ‘purity test’ is deeply problematic, Gazan explains, because the term is “used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities — especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, and immigrant workers”. Criticizing purity tests becomes a “justification for white supremacy culture,” she continues, in a Twitter post that looks alarmingly like it was written by ChatGPT1, because, quote:
•It centers comfort over justice — suggesting that confronting racism, colonialism, or misogyny is “divisive” or “too pure,” rather than essential for liberation.
•It protects the status quo, which has historically privileged white, male, and able-bodied workers as the default voice of the working class.
•It erases the realities of a diverse workforce by pretending that the fight for good jobs can be separated from the fight against racism, sexism, and colonialism.
•It delegitimizes leadership from racialized and marginalized people by framing their calls for justice as “ideological purity” instead of principled resistance.
A few days later, Reclaim Canada’s NDP, a grassroots caucus within the NDP, also put out an infographic in response to McPherson. It was titled ‘No Politics Without Identity’. ‘The NDP cannot blame its shortcomings on marginalized communities,’ reads the text, which continues:
There is a narrative being pushed that “identity politics” is too prevalent or divisive, implying that considerations being made for marginalized communities’ experiences is something to blame today’s problems onto [sic], including the NDP’s electoral shortcomings.
I should say here that I’m not terribly familiar with McPherson’s stances, though I know she’s widely seen as an establishment figure and I know I have disagreements with her on some important issues. But she’s obviously right about this, and the reactions from Gazan and Reclaim are themselves a case study in exactly the kind of thing that she was talking about. This mode of politics – where you seize on innocuous turns of phrase like ‘purity test’ and use them to openly accuse your peers of being misogynist, ableist, homophobic white supremacists, while completely ignoring the substantive content of any critiques – peaked around five years ago and is still popular in the more annoying circles of libworld, but is almost universally despised and mistrusted outside of quite small circles of progressive activist types with close ties to NGOs or academia. It makes normal people feel scolded and surveilled, not hopeful or uplifted, and is alien to how most people interact with one another. It certainly doesn’t win elections, and overall, it has been immensely detrimental to the left.
Mercifully its iron grip over left-wing scenes and movements has lessened considerably in the past couple years, but there are still true believers trying to keep it normalized. And while many people on the left have finally gotten over it and are more comfortable ignoring it than was the case a few years ago, a lot of people still don’t really understand how to respond to it. There has definitely been a vibe shift, I think mainly because of how many people were eventually burned by this type of thing, but the vibe shift has taken place without a corresponding shift in understanding. It’s important for us to understand what is actually going on when things like this are happening; to be able to look underneath the hood, so to speak, and understand the rhetorical tricks and ideological underpinnings of this mode of politics.
As so many have noted over the years, a bizarre aspect of the mode of politics we’re discussing here is that it almost never names itself. It has no central text or clear founding figure. Its opponents have tended to call it ‘woke’, I’ve sometimes called it ‘the nexus’, and some people call it ‘social justice’ politics, but in general it declines identification, preferring to use eye-watering euphemisms such as ‘good politics’. I think the most accurate way to describe it is as a variety of leftish identitarianism — identitarianism being the obsessive political focus on identity at the expense of nearly everything else —married to the widespread use of cancel culture tactics as a means of disciplining adherents and maintaining internal cohesion. Regardless of what we call it, its refusal to name itself or to really even acknowledge its own existence allows it to perform a couple of very interesting rhetorical tricks.
The first is the way that it presents itself as being functionally identical with basic concepts such as justice and equality, treating all challenges to itself as challenges to those concepts. If you criticize this brand of identitarianism, or even just its more dysfunctional excesses, you are criticizing the basic pillars of what is considered good and ethical in modern Western political culture. You can see this unusually clearly in Gazan’s post. By drawing attention to something objectively dysfunctional and alienating – the endless purity spirals and circular firing squads of the turbolibs – McPherson is in fact ‘dismissing calls for justice’. She hates justice! And worse than that, she ‘justifies’ all the evils of the world and ‘erases’ all good things and all good kinds of people. This sets up a dichotomy between those who love justice and hate evil, on the one hand, and those who hate justice and love evil on the other; and the way you can tell who’s who is that if they criticize the good guys, they’re the bad guys.
The second rhetorical trick is the way that it presents itself as entirely coterminous2 with marginalized people themselves. This mode of politics is marginalized people and marginalized people are this mode of politics. Again, this sleight of hand is on display clearly in Gazan’s comments, and especially in the Reclaim infographic. To blame the NDP’s weak showing in the election on this brand of annoying, widely hated politics is actually somehow to blame it on ‘marginalized communities’, even though of course most members of ‘marginalized communities’ (a group of people consisting of a large majority of the Canadian population3) think this kind of thing is stupid and embarrassing and mostly just want cheaper rent and better healthcare. In effect, this mode of identitarian politics ventriloquizes vast numbers of people, purporting to not only speak with their voice, but to represent them morally, in the sense that an insult to the self-declared spokespersons is an insult to the people they claim to represent.
More and more people are able to roll their eyes and move on when they see this kind of grandiose bullying in the wild, but it’s also important for leftists grounded in reality to learn how to actively shut it down, clearly and courageously. We need to shed our fear of pointing out the obvious. First of all, identitarians using AI-generated screeds to libel their colleagues don’t have a monopoly on concepts like justice. But most importantly, their politics are not the natural, organic expression of the collective will of marginalized ‘folks’. Their politics are a specific, nameable strain of thought within the left wing of liberalism, and are not particularly popular among the people they are about. Not to put too fine a point on it, but how many Punjabi migrants working low-wage service jobs in Toronto are deeply invested in the right of transgender children to access puberty-blocking hormones? How many young black guys driving Ubers in Montreal think the NDP is too dominated by cis men? The fact is that anyone with a cursory familiarity with real people in the real world knows that just like anyone else, people from ‘marginalized communities’ are frequently quite socially conservative, often believe insane things about other marginalized groups, dislike thinking of themselves primarily as victims, and dislike being scolded by nerds using annoying language.
These ‘problematic’ beliefs aren’t just incidental or occasional, and they shouldn’t just be hand-waved away by muttering about false consciousness or internalized this or internalized that. These are real adult human beings, not children or props, and their beliefs should be taken seriously. Yesterday I struck up a conversation with a dude in the park who turned out to be a Turkish immigrant. Within five minutes he was ranting to me about how Syrians were ruining his country and how Canada should stop letting Arabs in because they are violent. When I worked at an Indigenous community centre in Montreal, multiple clients told me about their elaborate antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish world dominance. Caribbean guys I worked with at a warehouse in Lasalle were shockingly homophobic and I’ve met plenty of queer and trans people who harbour racist views ranging from dumb to alarming. And everyone who has had contact with working people in the real world has had these kinds of experiences.
This doesn’t mean people of colour, queer people, disabled people etc are more ‘problematic’ or dangerous or whatever than abledbodiedcisstraightwhitemen. It means that having a perfectly curated set of 2020-era progressive takes on every subject is very rare and cannot be the litmus test for inclusion in a political movement. The purity tests McPherson is talking about are alienating for everyone, not just for privileged people. In fact it is somewhat the opposite: relatively privileged people, that is, people who have graduate degrees, lots of well-heeled liberal peers, and the time to read a lot, are far more likely to be able to ‘pass’ these purity tests. That is because progressive purity tests are not primarily a measure of how committed someone is to upholding dignity for everyone; they are a measure of how well that person has assimilated the kind of rhetorical gobbledygook Gazan employed in her Twitter post.
When confronted with people who are still convinced that politics is primarily about competing to see how many identity groups you can list as you call your peers transphobic racists, the rest of us on the left need to start standing up a lot more often. We need to point out clearly that this type of shit is grating, slanderous and antisocial. We need to defend the idea that the left needs to be popular and relevant in order to win power and that winning power is the point. We need to get comfortable denying that identitarians have a monopoly on basic moral precepts. We need to refuse the idea that identitarianism is the only possible left-wing stance on identity, or that it is a natural or even popular stance among the people it concerns itself with. Correspondingly we need to offer an alternative vision of what it means to stand up for human dignity.
The fact that scolding and purity tests consistently destroy the left doesn’t mean we have to put up with virulent racism and homophobia. I don’t write about this a lot but I am a bisexual. I sleep with men, my voice and mannerisms often give me away as a queer person, I have been the target of homophobic violence on a number of occasions in my life, and I don’t like to be around crazy homophobes because it sucks. Now, if I was too precious about this element of my identity I literally would not be able to work with large numbers of ‘marginalized’ people, as people who live in reality understand. At the same time, if I allowed myself to be walked all over by idiots, it would be very bad for both my mental health and my fundamental dignity as a human being. So is there a middle ground between requiring everyone to tiptoe around me and allowing myself to be insulted and mistreated?
I believe that there absolutely is. In my life, confronted with situations in which the people I’m trying to work with are spouting stupid hurtful shit, I’ve made good use of the very popular sentiment ‘live and let live’. I’ve found that most people in Canada subscribe to this idea on a pretty deep level, and reminding them of that can go a long way toward getting them to get their shit together. Our new co-worker is trans, and you think of me as a bro, and you get me alone in the hallway to waggle your eyebrows at me and make incredulous noises about her appearance? I’m gonna tell you, in a friendly but pretty firm way, that it’s none of my business, it doesn’t affect me at all, and that I think people can do whatever they want. This is obviously true and so you settle down, and I’ve set a precedent wherein the cool, calm and collected thing to do is to just act normal.4
I think the movement-level version of this is to convey a fluency with identity politics without getting bogged down in identitarianism and grievance politics. Zohran Mamdani in New York has totally mastered this stance. He is able to talk to and about anyone in any identity group very convincingly, with an easy manner and a lot of familiarity with their circumstances and norms. Watching him do a sassy interview with a drag queen and then walk down the street with a Puerto Rican reggaeton bigshot handing out props to the boys was impressive as hell from this perspective, because he was able to do this with total comfort, without looking like he had a gun to his head or like he couldn’t wait to get away to wash his hands. Crucially, it communicates that the normal stance for a cool, modern guy in the city is that some of your friends and neighbours are freaky queers and others are construction workers who wake up at 5am and that isn’t weird to you.
This extends to his own identity as well; he is a progressive Muslim from a complex diaspora background, but he resists the temptation to position himself as a victim in constant need of special rules and protections. Instead he effortlessly conveys the sense that in 2025 in New York, having a problem with a guy eating rice with his hands is just kind of sad and cringe and a distraction from the issues at stake, which are relentlessly economic and therefore affect everyone. The guy can’t go fifteen seconds without explaining how he’s going to make things cheaper and better for all ordinary workers. This easy fluency with identity and simultaneous determined commitment to universalism, coupled with a refusal to identify with victimhood and instead positioning yourself and your movement as gunning straight for power on behalf of the working class, is the winning combination for the left.
One of the great things about being a socialist is that you can simply stop worrying about which working people are worthy enough to deserve good things: you just know that they all are, automatically. It doesn’t matter if some of them believe stupid things. Canadian workers deserve workers’ policies put in place by a workers’ government, not scolding and whining brought to them by the tiny, imploding party of queer landlords of colour. Identitarians are, in the end, far more interested in using their swiftly vanishing cultural clout to police each other’s words than they are in wielding political power. But political power is what leads to the ability to make policy, and making policy is the entire point of politics. Not one single working person, of any identity category, is helped by an NDP with no political power. As fascist clowns backed by supervillain billionaires seize power across the world, it’s more important than ever that the left has something to offer normal people beyond identity-slop so dismal and generic that it’s impossible to tell if it was even written by a human. Let’s give it to them.
The online AI detector GPTZero was 91% certain this text was generated by an AI, and when I gave ChatGPT prompts about the scenario and asked it to generate a Twitter post, it spat out a text almost identical to Gazan’s. Also, tellingly, the text uses the American spelling of the word ‘centres’.
Coterminous: having the same boundaries or extent in space, time, or meaning.
Only around a quarter of the Canadian population, maybe less, are able-bodied cis, straight, native-born white men above the poverty line (not that Gazan mentions the poverty line in her post of course).
A true story.