The woke wheel is not the only one that the left has been asleep at (With the left asleep at the wheel, the right has surged ahead with its cynical anti-woke narrative, 18 May). During the pandemic, progressives made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer alternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that have been picked up in the policing, crime, sentencing and courts bill now belatedly opposed by progressives, and prevented us from being with family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.
As a result, the word “libertarian” has been appropriated by small-state liberals. At one time, the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.
“It’s time for progressives to bite the bullet and start telling a story of our own,” Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes. Absolutely. “What’s life without liberty?” is a question that the left has forgotten how to ask. It needs to do so quickly before the freedom train runs away for good.
Andrew Dobson
Valencia, Spain
• Ellie Mae O’Hagan is correct that the left is asleep at the wheel, but her account is one-sided. The backlash of the anti-woke mob was entirely predictable; many people are likely to be less receptive to progressive ideas or to addressing injustices if they have been on the receiving end of current “correct” ideology – for example, that they are inherently racist by virtue of their skin colour or transphobic if they insist on some acknowledgment of biological reality.
All this is exploited by unpleasant sections of the rightwing media and the social media corporations that make their money by highlighting divisions and pitting people against each other. The rabbit hole of identity politics down which the modern left has disappeared is inherently divisive and therefore a gift to the right.
Amaryllis Roy
Taunton, Somerset
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.
