For much of the 2010s, the Left and its associated groupings stalked the political terrain, wielding a nail-studded club labelled ironically, ‘safety’, smiting its enemies. Safe spaces, cultural safety, hate speech, trigger warnings, and the rest. The notion of a social space of fairly robust speech was reversed, and the conditions of subjectivity—the possibility of disabling psychological hurt and trauma—were given rule over the public sphere. Because the framework was asymmetrical—‘patriots’ could not claim trauma when Anglo-Australia was being attacked—it could not be enforced as a universal principle; it depended on holding cultural-institutional power.
In the 2020s, one might say that the ‘cultural’ Left got that club snatched from them by the Right, and is now being beaten with it. The Trump administration’s kulturkampf and the post-October 7 Australian state assault on basic freedoms are being conducted substantially in terms of ‘safety’. The cultural Left have no principled comeback to it, causing a political collapse, a vast reversal.
Safety politics arises from a ‘first-order’ reflexive criticism of our world by intellectuals and the intellectually trained—that society is materially oppressive to certain social categories, and individualist liberalism is an error. But it does not, and must, go beyond that to a ‘second-order’ reflection on what constitutes the necessary conditions of intellectual and public life that make possible the continued questioning of such oppression.
From such a reflection comes the only possibility for a critical Left, which is a pluralism: tolerating the most vociferously argued attacks of one’s foes, without seeking the agency of the state to discipline or control them. How can left or culturally insurgent groups base their politics on any other principle when the core of their attack is on inherited legitimacy, claimed by states and other institutions? An attack that must reserve to itself the right to insult, vituperation, trashing of the dearly held beliefs of others, and to advocate civil disobedience, illegality, and insurrection? Their leaders must reflect deeply on the disaster they have led their movement into by ignoring this necessity. Without such a change, these movements are merely consenting to their eventual evisceration. In the name of safety. Which is a big club.