The Left Can’t Dance If It Keeps Tripping Over Its Own Moral Shoelaces
by Don Hall
(republished from The Attention of Fools Substack)
It’s my fault. I own and openly admit it. For reasons only Freud could ascertain, I am hardwired to poke the ideological bears in my path. I’m allergic to orthodoxy from wherever it comes from. Simply put, the more a group of people attempt to shame me into falling in line, the harder I push back. Why? Hard to say but skewering that which others want to pedestal as sacred is just fun.
Breaking down those things I believe in my gut, I am wholeheartedly on the Left side of the political spectrum yet cannot, will not, abide by the freaking onslaught of culturally propped up moral values any more than I adhere to the sacrosanct tentpoles of the Old Testament—I’ll eat bacon, cut my hair, and will absolutely covet my neighbors wife.
Imagine a movement that has all the tools to throw the best damn party in human history—music, art, dancing, food that doesn’t clog your arteries unless it’s supposed to—and yet, instead of letting people in, they spend the whole night standing at the door with a moral tape measure, determining whether each guest’s joy is appropriately intersectional. That’s the progressive wet blanket problem, and it’s a beast that’s learned to dress itself in the sheep’s clothing of “just doing the right thing.”
We’ve seen this movie before: it’s the high school gym in 1984, with Prince pumping and Aqua Net in the air, only this time someone’s replaced the DJ with a person in Birkenstocks explaining that dancing perpetuates heteronormative power structures. Cut to the 90’s, and it’s the same damn vibe: you’ve got the Friends gang at Central Perk, except Ross won’t shut up about how coffee beans are harvested under neo-colonial trade agreements and Chandler’s sarcasm is now considered “tone-deaf” without a trigger warning. Joey’s still oblivious, but now he’s oblivious with guilt because his leather jacket wasn’t thrifted.
The core tragedy is that progressive spaces start with such promise. They have the same kind of moral high ground you saw in The West Wing—smart, articulate, trying to save the world between pithy walk-and-talks. But unlike Aaron Sorkin’s fantasyland, real life doesn’t have a John Williams score to make sanctimony go down smooth. In reality, if you lecture someone about the problematic history of cupcakes, they just eat the damn cupcake somewhere else, probably in the back of a Chevy Blazer blasting Third Eye Blind. What’s infuriating is how much of this is about timing. Imagine you’re at an actual wedding in 1997, “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba hits, the dance floor is pure drunken catharsis, and right as the “I get knocked down” part swells, someone grabs the mic to remind everyone that Chumbawamba once took questionable money from an ethically ambiguous record label. It’s not even that they’re wrong—it’s that they’ve mistaken the middle of the conga line for a graduate seminar.
The 90’s were the last time joy still had plausible deniability. Progressives now seem trapped in the Fight Club basement scene where Tyler Durden lectures about consumerism, except nobody throws a punch and everyone takes notes to make sure their anti-capitalism rhetoric is up to date. Meanwhile, the right is out there throwing house parties, where the only ideological test is whether you can shotgun a beer without throwing up on the host’s mom’s ficus plant. People gravitate to the fun, even when it’s stupid, even when it’s wrong, because fun is the emotional crack cocaine of human existence.
It’s not like progressives don’t know how to be fun—they do! Look at any pride parade, look at a street protest that breaks into spontaneous dance. But somewhere between the parade and the policy meeting, someone puts a velvet rope around the joy and starts charging admission in ideological compliance points. By the time you’re inside, you’re too afraid to dance in case your moves are interpreted as an act of cultural appropriation. And maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but who’s going to find out if nobody moves? It’s like inviting people to a rave and then handing out pamphlets about the dangers of strobe lights to underrepresented epileptic communities before the beat drops. Again, not wrong—just exquisitely, fatally mistimed.
The absurdity is that joy could be the ultimate progressive recruiting tool. Imagine using joy the way Bill Clinton used a saxophone on Arsenio Hall—a little disarming charm, a little cultural resonance, and suddenly you’ve got people leaning in instead of tuning out. Instead, too often, it’s like watching Seinfeld if every episode ended with the characters apologizing to the audience for not sufficiently exploring the racial politics of their diner booth seating arrangements. That’s not a comedy—it’s a hostage situation with punchlines.
And yet, the killjoy persists because in the microclimate of progressive circles, it feels like courage. You’re not just having fun—you’re vetting fun for toxins. You’re making sure joy is lead-free and cruelty-free and sourced from joy artisans paid a living wage. Noble, yes, but also exhausting, and exhaustion is the number one reason people ghost a movement. It’s the Y2K problem of activism: if you treat every clock tick as an existential threat, eventually no one sticks around to see midnight. Remember that moment in The Matrix when Neo sees the world as cascading green code? Imagine living like that, but the code is a constant stream of possible offenses and microaggressions. You’d want to go back to eating the blue pill steak just to enjoy dinner again.
I’m not saying dump the ethics—hell no, keep the ethics. But deploy them strategically, with timing, so the impact hits when it’s supposed to. You don’t start Pulp Fiction with Marvin getting his head blown off—you build to it. Likewise, you don’t open the party by shaming the DJ for playing Livin’ La Vida Loca without citing Ricky Martin’s complicated place in Latinx pop history. You let the song hit, you let the people dance, and then maybe—maybe—over pancakes at 3:00 a.m., you unpack the sociopolitical implications.
The 90’s also taught us what happens when you lean too hard into cynicism without the counterweight of joy—you get My So-Called Life. And while it was a masterpiece of adolescent angst, you can’t run a social movement on Angela Chase sighing into her diary. You need some Fresh Prince energy, some “getting in one little fight and your mom got scared” energy. Hell, you need some Mortal Kombat “Finish Him!” energy for the real fights, but also a healthy amount of Wayne’s World “Party on, Garth” to keep the troops from defecting to nihilism.
Progressives could be the cultural force of the 21st century if we figured this out. We have the brains, the vision, the moral arc—but without joy, the arc bends toward burnout. Without joy, the rallies feel endless, humorless, rules-lawyering until no one wants to log in. Without joy, the revolution is just a syllabus with fat-free popcorn and water-hoarding almond milk. And rice cakes alone, my friends, will not save us. You can keep your vegan cupcakes and your organic trail mix, but if you can’t make the people dance, the people will eventually wander off to the nearest kegger.
The world’s on fire—literally. The president has threatened military occupation in Chicago and has troops on the ground in other American cities. There are issues at play far more pressing than the policing of misgendering. Which is why progressives have to decide: are they going to be the bucket brigade or the funeral directors? Because one of those keeps the music going while they fight the flames, and the other sells tickets to watch the ashes fall. And if the goal is to win hearts as well as minds, to get people to believe in a future worth clawing toward, then you have to show them that future, and that future has to look a hell of a lot more like the last five minutes of Can’t Hardly Wait than the cold open of Schindler’s List. Not because the latter isn’t important, but because the former makes people want to show up.
Progressives have the better party. They just have to stop being the ones who turn down the music because it’s “problematic.” And maybe, just maybe, they need to remember that even in The Matrix, the rebels went to a sweaty underground rave between battles—because joy isn’t a distraction from the fight. It’s the reason you fight at all.
