The #1 Problem With the Left

I'm pretty much a leftie when it comes to politics. I support higher taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, the welfare state, drug legalisation, access to abortion, a carbox tax, and so on.

However, I still try my best to be impartial, and try and judge issues on their merits, rather than based on who's arguing for who.

Tribalism is rampant in politics. I'm guessing it was probably worse in the past, but you can still see it everywhere. For anyone who doesn't know, 'tribalism' could be defined as judging people not based on what they say, but simply on who they are. Despite their lofty promises, I notice the left does this just as much as the right.

Please, lets not even try and deny this. Conservative politicians, from Margaret Thatcher to George Bush to Tony Abbott, are constantly (and often unfairly) ridiculed by various figures on the left. If Tony Abbott came out tomorrow and declared that 'the sky is blue' there'd immediately be a flood of posts in my Facebook newsfeed saying 'OMG! Doesn't Tony Abbott know that the sky is red or orange at sunset? WTF? Tony is sooo stupid!'

But even this hypocrisy is not the biggest problem with the left side of politics. No, here's the real biggest problem.

They're not FOR anything.

Now the left is against plenty of things, sure. They're against racism, sexism, big business, corruption, pseudoscience, war, poverty, pollution and a whole lot of other bad things, yes.

But what are they actually for?

Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson highlighted this recently when he said he'd challenged the Greens to name one place in Australia where they would support the building of a mine.

Apparently, he's yet to get a response.

Now the right, there's no denying, is actually for plenty of things. They're for building factories and mines and smelters and digging stuff out of the ground. They're for fracking, for drilling in the ground everywhere between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay. They're for waging wars in the Middle East, be it in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other country full of brown people.

They're for plenty of things - often stupid, twisted, evil, moronic things - but at least they're for things.

When you think responsible governance, when you think of statesmenship, of tough, dedicated people of integrity who rationally argue for a cause, I tend to think of people on the right rather than the left. Tony Abbott and his government may be seen as callous by a lot of people in Australia, but arguably they're preferable to the incoherent joke that was the Rudd-Gillard government.

Labor, it seems, would rather hundreds of people die at sea than implement something as 'cruel' as offshore processing, even if it turns out the latter probably harms fewer people. Even now they won't admit they were wrong, for fear their base would tear them to shreds for a lack of sufficient idealism.

So to the left, I say this.

Grow a backbone. Come up with a vision for the future, one based on logic and fairness, and stick to it. Stop just dogmatically opposing everything the right comes out with. Stop with the childish name-calling and start coming up with serious arguments. Pretend you're arguing in a court perhaps, in front of a judge, who will call you out on your bullshit if you stray too far off-topic.

The left needs to stop being so reactionary. Righteous hysteria will only take you so far.