The Left's War on the Disabled

It's not a conversation; it's a hate campaign, and it's been going on for years. Its origins run deep in leftist ideology.

On June 12, the online leftist news outlet Current Affairs openly mocked the request for more Covid coverage by Julia Doubleday, a journalist with Long Covid whose brilliant column covers the Covid pandemic. Doubleday has been sharply criticizing the organized left and left media for dropping the ball on the medically vulnerable and disregarding how Covid is a labor issue, as well as for its habits of Covid minimization. The Current Affairs twitter account, after some back and forth with Doubleday and others, finally tweeted this:

If you weren’t following the conversation, you might not have picked up on the sarcasm. The tweet makes it seem like demanding coverage of Covid is some kind of niche fringe obsession, the provenance of annoying people, when Covid is the fourth leading cause of death in the country, is disabling at least 10% of the population, and, worst of all, is airborne, making it hard to avoid. Low-wage workers, the alleged concern of news outlets like Current Affairs, have had among the highest rates of death from Covid.

Some of the organized left is planning protests with masks and testing, but the larger share of it has moved on from Covid. And some on the left have taken the view that those still concerned about Covid, especially disabled people, are either a joke or paranoid. In January 2023, a DSA activist named Mindy Isser with a popular account said in a since-deleted tweet that Covid cautious people were “fear-mongering.” She admitted to not always masking or seeing the point. A vast number of DSA members rushed to her defense vocally, laying bare their minimization of Covid. I, personally, faced days of attacks from DSA folks, with ableist terms like “crazy” and “illiterate,” for asking her local DSA leaders if they are okay with her minimizing Covid.

The conversation about the left and Covid is often framed as “abandonment”: the left, like the liberals and conservatives running the country, have abandoned the vulnerable, not fought for our protections. Really, though, there is something deeper and more sinister going on, and it was going on for years before Covid. There are key strains of leftism and socialism that have long been openly hostile to the disabled, in the same way that we can talk about the far right having obvious bigotries around race and gender. I want to talk about how this happens, why it happens, and what principles are at its root. I hope to not only show that this is a phenomenon but explain why the left is particularly like this, just in case it ever wants to change. (I would like it to change, as I am more sympathetic to leftism than the rest of the political spectrum.)

For people who engage in “disability Twitter,” as it were, it’s almost a monthly conversation. It often takes the form of leftists openly mocking claims of “ableism” and “disability activism” in ways that most of the left wouldn’t do so boldly about homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or racism. It also takes the form of exaggerating or misconstruing claims of ableism through straw man arguments, in order to makes any such claims seem absurd. “Oh, now they’re saying eating and talking are ableist.” It’s not coming from small accounts. It’s coming from popular leftist accounts who have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, status in leftist political organizations, and/or a media presence.

The Hate Campaigns

The Doordash/Instacart wars are the most common example of the left going after disabled people with vitriol. It’s a debate that preceded Covid but became even more common as more immune-compromised and other disabled people are avoiding public spaces or too sick to shop. People who acknowledge using food delivery apps are demonized as lazy, privileged, “leeches” on society, and anti-sustainability—a direct mimicry of Hitler’s “useless eaters” rhetoric about the disabled.

Disabled people will respond in careful detail as to 1) why we rely on food being delivered and how it’s a necessary accommodation; 2) the ways in which shopping for food and/or cooking is inaccessible; 3) how these apps are the only available means for delivering grocery or diet-appropriate meals for many disabled people in most of the country; and 4) how having to pay a fortune for food delivery on these apps is another “disability tax” that costs us—i.e., we would rather not and often go into debt to eat. We are accused, in return, of lying about: our physical accommodation needs, income status, dietary needs, support networks or lack thereof, what else is available in the community, and so on.

Popular leftist accounts drive these discussions, acting baffled that anyone could ever need food delivery apps and refusing to listen to disabled people. They love to litigate our personal lives, insisting that they would have figured out other choices. We are called “feds” and “ops” and blamed for trying to hold back the labor movement (even when we talk about good tipping). Or we are told that “real” disabled people work for Doordash while never using it. (In fact, many disabled people do both, as it’s one of few more accessible kinds of work for many conditions.) Doordash workers are called “slaves,” and disabled and other people who rely on their service are framed as privileged slave-owners.

It’s not a conversation. It’s a loosely organized hate campaign against disabled people. As evidence, leftists almost always put far more energy into demonizing disabled people than talking about the corporate structures, laws, wages, and so on that make these jobs untenable and exploitative. Indeed, I recall a bunch of them getting very upset at the idea that some people can’t just microwave food instead of get meals delivered, not believing that some people lack certain dexterities and/or cannot consume frozen meals due to severe dietary restrictions. What was so absurd about that thread of the conversation was that even microwaved foods would have to be delivered to people who need delivery. So it wasn’t even about the labor exploitation anymore. It simply became leftists insisting that disabled people were lying about their needs, lazy, and privileged.

A lot of these battles emerge around protests and boycotts. At the beginning of the “free Palestine” protests, I regularly saw a person I know to be seriously immune-compromised being accused of not supporting Palestine and being a “fed” for demanding that protestors mask. This person was asking to feel safe to attend protests and was met with vitriol. (There has been more masking at protests since then.)

In 2021, there was a hate pile-on around Frosted Mini-Wheats. This was a great example of how a nuanced statement about a disabled person’s needs gets framed into making any claims of ableism sound ridiculous. A woman responded to a demand for a boycott on Kellogg. She didn’t say boycotting was bad. She said she supported the boycott. She responded, however, to someone who made it sound like everyone had to boycott Kellogg or they lacked some kind of virtue. She said that it was a kind of ableism to make demands of people like that, because not everyone can boycott. She, for instance, is only able to eat Frosted Mini-Wheats

This small account, with a disability, became a punching bag. It’s as if she was a gift for leftists to illustrate that all disability activism online is ridiculous and counter-progress. Large accounts picked on her for days. One DSA member who writes for Jacobin, Leonard Pierce, would not stop, for days, insisting that she had to be lying about only being able to eat that one thing and not a generic version. If I recall correctly, she’s autistic and food sensitive. She’s a vulnerable person; obviously her health cannot be great if that’s her only food source. Even if it were a mental illness that made her only eat one food, that’s a disability!

There was not anything even slightly odd about her diet to me. I’ve been there. I have a rare mast cell disease and most food makes me nauseous or worse. My food intolerances are proven by my blood and urine testing. I went through a period when I could only eat Clif Bars (not any other bars), rice or rice noodles, and steamed vegetables with butter, not oil. I have no idea why Clif Bars made the cut. It makes as much sense as Frosted Mini-Wheats—less sense, really. At least that product only has a few ingredients, and it’s understandable why someone on a very limited diet might need extra sugar. I’m medically advised to eat salty snacks with frequency due to POTS.

This woman represented no threat to any major boycott. She was implicitly asking people to consider adding language that should always be added to any public demand: “if you are able.” But she was being treated as if she were the president telling us to limit our diets and consume corporate food.

There was a similar scenario once on Twitter after someone suggested “anyone who is a writer and doesn’t read” lacks some kind of virtue. Someone let them know that that was ableist framing. Many people write and can’t read for a whole slew of possible reasons to do with disabilities. People shared the numerous visual, neurodivergent, and other conditions that made reading difficult but writing possible. Even the classism of that statement was brought up. (I taught adult GED and ESL students with very low levels of literacy. Many would write through recorded speech or my help, and they were often talented writers.) But this conversation got turned into “They’re saying ‘reading is ableist,’” something nobody ever said. The straw man became a way to mock ableism, to rob it of meaning.

There is a whole category of backlash against disabled people around environmentalism. It’s called “eco-ableism,” and there has been a lot written about it. People are mocked for using pre-cut fruits and vegetables; disabled people explain how they rely on those due to incapacity. People are demonized for relying on plastic straws and cars, even if the cars are retrofitted to accommodate them. People are ruthlessly mocked for asking that the “walkable cities” movement consider another term, like “accessible cities,” as if people that can’t walk should accept that they aren’t a first thought in any movement. Transit activists, meanwhile, have been effectively silent as mask mandates were first dropped on buses and trains and are now in danger of being banned. You see, it’s not that these activists want to do what is necessary so that more people can ride buses and trains. They want more people to be abled.

The constant attacks against disabled people from the left reached a tipping point with the exercise discourse earlier this year. Another popular leftist claimed (in a since-deleted tweet) that there is “no excuse” for real leftists not to go to the gym and get their bodies in shape for the imagined revolution in the future. Even many leftist who aren’t disability conscious thought that one was a joke, but others supported it. Some self-proclaimed socialists insisted that disabled people can at least “do exercises from bed,” and the like. It’s frankly creepy the extent to which leftists want to adjudicate lifestyle. Some of them brought up the Black Panthers as a model for physically fit leftism, a group that fought to make the IEP a reality for disabled children and delivered food to disabled community members.

What happened to “from each according to his abilities to each according to his means”?

I’ve been mostly focused on physical disability here, but the ease with which these leftists accused me (regarding my Mindy Isser tweets) and the mini-wheats lady of being mentally unwell—and that being a reason to discount and mock us—shows how commonly the left assumes that mental illness is a joke and worthy of scorn. The same is true of how the left talks about cognitive disabilities, as in this conversation I had with writer Matt Bruenig, who compared adults with intellectual disabilities to children.

“Real” Leftists

There are two responses from leftists, who are less ableist, to what I’m laying out. First, they say that online discourse isn’t real life. As someone who has worked for and participated in progressive and leftist organizations for my entire adult life, it’s worse in the real world. And you will find other disabled people say the same. At least online there is a mass of disabled people to provide allyship and counter-points. In real life, disabled people are usually alone.

The second response is that these ableist folks aren’t “real” leftists if they will abandon the marginalized. DSA, in particular, is characterized as being too cozy with Democratic party liberalism. But it’s not just DSA or just the socialists or just the people’s party of whatever folks. Ableism cuts across all segments of the left.

What is more, if you think these aren’t real and true leftists, you should be speaking up frequently. I follow a lot of leftist accounts, from my days supporting Bernie Sanders. When there is obvious ableism, of the sort described above, I pretty much only see disabled people speaking up. When there is obvious racism, classism, transphobia, etc., I see much more engagement from the left.

So here’s my argument: ableism is a feature and not a bug of the Western left, and there are a few reasons why. Most generally, bigotry and punching down have always been problems among leftists, especially those with privilege, like whiteness or maleness, and those people tend to run organizations. A lot of them are “class reductionist” in their thinking and speak against what they consider “identity politics.” This is usually a cover for own interests, which explains why so many leftists who gain a foothold in politics become less radical. They are threatened by the needs and interests of people who are further marginalized than them. So they frame those interests as not important to "the cause” of economic equality, which they feel entitled to define (and which almost always leaves out disabled people who aren’t in the workforce). There are all kinds of bigotry among the group of more privileged leftists, but ableism is the last bigotry they are permitted to speak aloud, so they go wild for it.

This is part of it, but it doesn’t explain why ableism has such a strong foothold among even non-cis white male leftists. It runs deeper than the usual bigotry. There are aesthetics and ideologies that undergird a lot of leftism that are bound up in ableism. For one, collectivism is a principle that asks for sacrifice to greater goods. It calls for giving up comforts like food delivery, cars, and the like in the hope of a better world, with less exploitation of people and resources and less harm overall. Collectivism also assumes that we are all able to sacrifice such things. Disability justice is predicated on radical acceptance and accommodation for individual needs, which do not always align with the collective. When collectivists can’t force individuals to adapt to their ideas of the collective good, they assume that these individuals must not be honest about their needs.

Early socialism was profoundly ableist in ways that predicted this moment. Two of Marx’s closest relatives killed themselves when they could no longer physically perform. Mao would force disabled people to claim to be cured by communism. Smart and savvy socialists will say, “Basing worth on performance is capitalism, not socialism.” Sounds good, but it’s always been there in socialism too and most political order. Socialism emerged from capitalism, after all; even Marx would have acknowledged that all ideology has an historical basis and historical antecedents.

Another principle and/or aesthetic quietly undergirding modern leftism is naturalism, the (false) idea that there is a more natural way to live that involves less technology, pharmaceuticals, etc. A lot of ableist leftists are seemingly disgusted by bodies not capable of what they consider basic tasks (waiting for a bus, chopping vegetables) and so default to describing accessibility needs as privileges or “treats” (in the Doordash wars lexicon). There is also a lot of mockery of not gathering in person with others, of doing activism online, with the assumption that gathering is more natural and virtuous. Many leftist groups stopped holding virtual meetings based only on this principle. “Touch grass,” they say.

Roland Barthes wrote about how advertising and propaganda seeks to naturalize what is not based in nature. Of course, all of these leftists rely on exploitative industries and accommodations. Most will cop to eating out in restaurants, where workers don’t have living wages or protections and have suffered the worst of the Covid pandemic. These are aesthetics in the guise of values. Yet, even if it is more arguably natural to bike, prepare your own food, and be around other people, these leftists are relying on the false assumptions both that natural is more virtuous and that anyone could adapt to a more natural lifestyle and survive.

“What did people do for food before Doordash?” they often ask, to discredit the claim. And we explain: people had food delivered from restaurants, and many were malnourished or died if they couldn’t.

There is another dominant ethos driving a lot of leftism, and it’s ironically a fetishization of hard labor, especially in the U.S. A better leftism would push back against jobs being taxing to the body, mind, and resources. Leftism here is centered around a fantasy of a worker who doesn’t need Covid protections and works thankless multiple jobs. It’s good that the left rallies around strong unions for these workers. What’s not good is that if you are not capable of that lifestyle, you are regarded as privileged. I’ve seen conversations frequently in which left would rather disabled people die for their jobs than have any support when bedridden by injury or illness. Nobody who is totally unable to earn a living has privilege, unless they are already independently wealthy. And being disabled is a full-time job by itself. Try managing life when everyday tasks are nearly impossible and you have no outside support.

It’s truly such a reactionary stance, and it explains why the left has absolute done nothing to organize around an improved disability safety net. These leftists believe in good disabled people, who at least try to not be so disabled. They are okay, in other words, with less disabled people.

The fetishization of labor and suffering is apparent in the word “treats” being used to demonize any consumption that isn’t deemed necessary. Again, there’s no consistency here, as these people eat in restaurants. It’s an anti-pleasure stance, and it sounds an awful lot like conservatives criticizing “welfare moms” for buying a steak with an EBT card.

Finally, there is an ideology and aesthetic on the left of perceived rationality. As indicated above, this makes many leftists feel entitled to use “mentally ill” and “dumb” as slurs against people they regard as less rational than them. There’s nothing wrong with well-reasoned critical thought. The problem is that, for many leftists, it’s just the appearance of rationality that matters, not the praxis. There’s nothing rational about insisting that everyone can shop for food and cook, after all.

Is “be less ableist” enough?

So what is the answer for the left? It’s easy enough to say “educate yourselves” and “be less ableist,” but that doesn’t get to the underlying ideologies that drive ableism in leftism. I would also recommend a shift from a collectivist, naturalist, labor-celebrating, rationalistic ethos.

The solution has been laid out by the environmental justice movement, which sets itself apart from “Big Green” environmentalism by focusing on “worst and first affected.” Disabled people are the first and worst affected by every social harm. Disabled Black people are the worst and first affected by policing in the U.S. Disabled and sick people have been the worst affected by Covid and Israel’s war in Gaza. Disabled people are also the worst and first affected by pollution, so when a disabled person tells you that they need to drive to survive, you’re harming the movement by attacking them. All of these harms also disable people.

What leftism lacks generally is praxis when it comes to marginalized groups. Letting a diverse range of disabled people have a seat at the table, help define your group’s priorities, and share in its gains will make a big difference. Solutions will be harder and more nuanced, but at least they will be grounded in the most vulnerable.

But that would take believing people when they describe their disabilities. So, for now, maybe just be less ableist.

ADDED:

I came across this tweet two days after publishing, from a pro-Palestine, worker’s rights, abortion rights activist. She was addressing someone who mentioned that you can kill people from not wearing a mask. It reminded me of something I forgot to include: leftists love to equate disabled people to the far right. Eg, any Covid caution makes you as bad as the anti-vaxxers because you’re essentially saying vaccines don’t work. (They don’t work great!)