Virtually all of the most renowned philosophers, politicians, authors, and activists on the Left today (as in the past) lack a robust political analysis of disability and ableism, an absence reflected in their writing and public pronouncements, their political demands, and their actions. Sure, some of them occasionally make a rhetorical gesture in this regard but these gestures are usually transparent in their performativity.

Day after day, I have hoped to read something from Avi Lewis, candidate for the NDP leadership, about what he would do to address the situation of disabled people in Canada: that widespread inaccessibility to public spaces persists here; that most disabled Canadians live in poverty; that the previous Liberal federal government has legislated a state-sanctioned and -funded system of eugenics and the regime of truth that motivates it; that Canadian academia and its funding schemes systematically remove disabled people from its ranks; and the list goes on. So far, I have not read or heard Avi Lewis make any mention of these dire circumstances nor mention disabled people in Canada at all. But perhaps I missed something.

There were reportedly 5 sign-language interpreters at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration, interpreting in 5 distinct languages. Yet Mamdani’s inaugural speech closed with rather problematic remarks about “healthy” people, a construct whose eugenic legacy and role in the apparatus of disability must be relentlessly exposed. Mamdani has promised to make NYC transit “free and fast”. Will he make the NYC transit system accessible to disabled people? At present, roughly only 25% of NYC subway stations “comply” with the ADA, with ADA compliance a low bar.

On the other side, in the past week, I have seen disabled people pejoratively, figuratively, and metaphorically overrepresented on Facebook in ableist utterances about a Netflix movie (“deranged”) and of course about Donald Trump (“psychopath”, “moron”, “idiot”, “insane”). Curious, I asked Chat GPT to describe both the Netflix film in question and Trump. In the respective responses that I got, none of the aforementioned slurs was included.