Are you a champagne socialist?
A champagne socialist is a left-winger whose lifestyle doesn’t match up to what he preaches. He preaches solidarity with the poor, but drives a BMW and never gives to charity. He says capitalism is evil, but works for a large corporation himself.
It’s easy to level this critique against any leftist (did you know Bernie Sanders owns three houses?!), so it’s important to dismantle it. Otherwise we’ll be forced to walk around in rags if we want to call ourselves leftists.
The accusation can come from the Right, the Centre, and the (hard) Left. Each has a different reasoning, but they’re all connected.
To a right-winger it seems that the Left wants to elevate certain particular character traits, like empathy, solidarity, charity, into regulating principles of society. By calling out the hypocrisy of a champagne socialist, the right-winger wants to show how this is just empty moralising, nobody actually wants to give away half their wealth to lazy people who don’t work. What’s more, using the State to force people to be empathic impinges on their freedom, that sacred universal principle the Right holds dear.
The centrist, a.k.a. the liberal, doesn’t so much disagree with the content of your convictions, but the form. The liberal wants to reduce all politics to lifestyle choices. Do you care about animal rights? Become a vegetarian! Worried about climate change? Take the train instead of flying! Concerned about huge corporations poisoning us with pesticides to slightly increase profit margins? Buy organic! Similarly it’s not productive to arrogantly preach socialism; instead be the change you want to see.
The accusation of champagne socialist can also come from the hard Left, which is a kind of old-fashioned Marxist Left. According to them, Leftism is all about a class war between the working class and the bourgeoisie. You have to pick a side, you can’t have it both ways, you can’t pretend to fight for the working class while enjoying the privileges of the bourgeoisie.
The answer to all three criticisms is the same: the Left doesn’t fight for particular values (empathy, solidarity), nor does it want to be reduced to a particular lifestyle, nor does it represent the interests of a particular class; the Left fights for the universal principle of freedom.
But doesn’t that make the Left the same as the Right? No, because while the Right stands for abstract freedom, the Left aims to show how in real life this freedom turns into its opposite: exploitation. So the Left fights for concrete freedom. Are you really free when every day you’re forced to go to a job you hate? When you’re forced to choose between paying for insulin or paying for your car repair? When your original vision for your company is blocked by your shareholders?
Freedom only becomes concrete when you ask the question: freedom for whom, to do what? And that is what the Left does.