KP: What is “left”? You criticize “progressives” for what you see as an excessive focus on victimhood and identity politics, in which people are lumped together according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on, with massive assumptions made about what they want and need. You want universalist values. But isn’t a major feature of today’s left that people are demanding the right to speak up for themselves about their own issues and problems?
SN: Traditionally, the left was concerned with universal justice, which included the right to speak up about each group’s own problems but was never confined to it. Thanks to a combination of ideologies that took hold at the end of the 20th century, including neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, we have come to normalize the idea that self-interest is the only thing that motivates us to action. That’s actually a right-wing philosophical assumption.
KP: You support universalism over what you call tribalism, but where does that leave women and minorities? Universal programs, such as national health insurance, are important and help everybody, but it takes a lot more to give disadvantaged people equal access to good care. Countries that have universal programs, like the United Kingdom, still have big problems with racism and sexism in medical care. Doesn’t universalism use white men as the (unconscious) norm?