15/9/20
Angela Nagle: I kind of had always had this problem with the left. I always felt that a lot of its economic projects were absolutely necessary and I still do, but I simply couldn't accept much of its cultural projects, and I did think that 2016 kind of opened up the possibility for a realignment that would be something closer to what I had always wanted it to be. But then it just went wildly off in the wrong direction and it became this, you know the cultural politics kind of came to dominate to a point where I had to think this is just so profoundly socially destructive, and anti-social and almost anti-civilisational, at a certain point.
One thing that has always kind of been a problem for me with the thing that we call the left is that you can kind of broadly define it as a, it always has some kind of egalitarian economic project, and either a liberationist cultural project, or one that you might say is trying to liberate people from the shackles of tradition in some way. So that would be true of even the Soviet Union which obviously you couldn't describe it as libertarian or something, culturally libertarian, like you can the post Cold War American left. But they all kind of have those two things in common I think, that's like the common thread. But in fact those two things don't have any necessary connection whatsoever really. There's no reason why a person has to have libertarian or liberationist cultural politics to believe in economic justice or equality.