The progressive and liberal Left has grown culturally distant from the people it claims to represent.

Naturally, this has created an opening for right-wing movements, now speaking in the abandoned language of class struggle, to ruthlessly exploit.

So far the Left's response to the existential threat, online at least, has been to double-down on the things it thinks it has going for it. One of those things is a form of identity politics which is increasingly finding its way into mainstream discourse, despite very few people knowing anything about it.

This new style of progressivism, imported from the States, has a few labels you may have heard of. One is "intersectionality", which describes how discrimination affects individuals and groups based on their gender, race and sexual orientation as well as their religion and other physical attributes, like disabilities.

Essentially, it attempts to account for the various deficits in the experiences of marginalised individuals and minority groups and attributes these inequalities to a wider culture of interdependent structural oppressions.

It's also notable for being very hard to explain.

Critics of intersectionality often refer to this family of ideas as "cultural Marxism" and its proponents, sneeringly, as "social justice warriors."

But despite its obvious merits, and the significant political traction intersectionality has gained since the 1980s, it is also becoming synonymous with a form of activism many people find increasingly illiberal and counter-productive.

A slew of terms, including "call-out culture" (the practise of publicly reprimanding someone, usually online) "no-platforming" (pressuring organisations to ban certain individuals from public speaking) have emerged to describe the various ways in which some activists attempt to expose or silence people they believe need to be made accountable - increasingly for something they have said or written.

Sometimes these "call-outs" are warranted and sometimes they are excessive. It all depends on your personal politics, but either way, the culture of debate that surrounds this phenomenon is increasingly difficult for the average person to engage with because the entry level is impractically high.

This makes ideas very difficult to discuss or challenge and its becoming a fundamental problem for the political Left; increasingly associated with a style of discourse many in its own ranks regard as exclusive and heavy-handed.

The central feature of this activism is that it relies primarily on victim and minority group narratives as a form of cultural propulsion; a Trojan horse to advance the political agenda. But parallel to this agenda runs an every-changing, often trend-ridden, theoretical terminology that one must understand before expressing an opinion. These theories attempt to explain how Western society oppresses individuals and minorities, by design, and how people who disagree with some (or all) of this analysis have internalised the cultural myths that perpetuate this oppression.

Furthermore, by challenging this orthodoxy of the activists, people run the risk of having their opinions re-framed as an attack - not on their ideas but on the minority groups or abuse victims the activists claim to represent.

This ideology asserts, with unequivocal moral certainty, that words are a form of violence because violence and oppression are symbolic. Yet activists afford themselves the privilege of engaging in whatever aggression they deem necessary in the pursuit of their objectives.

The ideas and theories they passionately promote, like privilege and gaslighting, are often useful in helping victims of abuse or oppression develop a language and self-confidence to articulate their personal experiences.

The issue is more about how these theories are interpreted, discussed and culturally advanced; competing ideas are not viewed as something to be considered, but rather, dangerously mistaken beliefs that must be silenced.

Furthermore, and this is crucial, there is very little space to think out loud or be wrong about these complicated concepts without being condemned as part of the problem. Worse still, there is little pity for those who may have the misfortune to misspeak out of ignorance.

For young activists, stumbling upon their first major ideological experience, this worldview is appealing because, despite the self-insistent language, it's a very simplistic lens through which to view all of life - where blame is always externalised. So, it follows that if you come to believe these theories are indisputable facts, then the stakes suddenly become very high and this is what gives intersectionality its political edge.

If you challenge an idea, you are not just expressing a viewpoint, but rather, you are placing minority groups in imminent danger and re-traumatising abuse victims. Victims, whose painful experiences - often channelled vicariously by the activists - become political battering rams that deter people from questioning anything.

But despite its intentions, which are undoubtedly rooted in noble idealism, this style of discourse alienates and disempowers as many people as it helps and very often, members of the vulnerable and marginalised communities the activists claim to represent, feel afraid to speak up or ask questions.

Despite the progressive assertion that oppression persists because privileged groups ignore how their language and behaviour reinforces social exclusion, they remain stubbornly aloof to where their culturally-gated discussion, characterised by high-status language and upward social mobility, intersects with ordinary working class people.

Which is precisely why the whole thing will crash and burn as soon as it hits working class communities - if it does at all - and people on the Left, acutely aware of its excesses, need to take their fingers out of their ears and challenge it like they challenge everything else.

At its worst, this activism is about punishing people for holding different points of view, or not knowing the approved language, whilst entertaining the delusion that such a culturally unsophisticated strategy will engender anything but resentment and bitter opposition.

Moreover, the activists claim the moral high-ground because they purport to place people's fear and oppression at the heart of everything they do. But this solidarity and empathy only extends as far as the in-group. If you find yourself on the outside, with an opinion they dislike then your fear and confusion is inconsequential and your experience as a victim of abuse becomes an afterthought.

This style of activism undermines the liberal principle of equality upon which it is based because it selectively elevates the human experiences that validate and perpetuate it while minimising - or monstering - the ones that don't.

Many working-class people, sick of the sanctimony, now use the blanket term "political correctness" as shorthand for how this progressive phenomenon is manifesting in their communities as a faceless, hectoring voice on the periphery, that says nothing about the struggles they face in their day-to-day lives.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise to people on the Left that hard-up communities aren't too keen to get cosy with them again. Because according to this family of impenetrable ideas, imported from Ivy League university campuses, pretty much everything working-class people think, say and do is a form of abuse.

In a time of gathering darkness, the Left is emitting a very dim light and exclusive conversations about inclusivity only further obscure our diminishing role in this confusing and dangerous world.

This is a way of thinking which, by design, does not take incoming calls. It needs to be distilled into something more universal and leaders on the Left must now consider how to compassionately challenge it when it gets out of hand - or risk the issue becoming yet another open-goal for the Right, emboldened by Bre xit and Trump, to decisively exploit.

Comment by Darren McGarvey. Darren is a writer and broadcaster and, under the name Loki, a rapper and hip hop artist. His music can be found here.