What the left wants to talk about:

• How we change our societies to make them fairer, more transparent and more caring.
• How we tackle impending climate catastrophe through some kind of Green New Deal.
• How we conduct a truly ethical foreign policy that doesn’t give powerful western states the right to invade weaker states, or steal their resources.
• How we end the influence of the military-industrial complex in fuelling endless wars in which millions are killed or made homeless.

What the left ends up talking about:

• Whether the UK’s Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is a secret anti-semite.
• Whether Julian Assange of Wikileaks is a rapist or a bail fugitive.
• Whether Bernie Sanders is a misogynist.
• Whether Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro is an evil dictator trying to starve his people to keep himself in power.
• Whether Vladimir Putin of Russia is a fiendish puppet-master controlling the west.

That’s how power works.