Left Behind.
What is the Left in 21st Century America?
In a recent conversation with an old friend about the dangers of Trump, he mentioned in passing that he knows I’m left wing.
It surprised me to realize I’m not so sure I am anymore. I don’t think I understand what being left wing means. And if I can’t tell you what being left wing is in 2025, I imagine others are wondering, too. Liberal donors are fleeing the party. I suspect membership is down. Leadership, if you mean Schumer and Jefferies, or the progressive social media stars or centrist governors, is nowhere to be found.
What does being on the left mean?
Who are the leaders?
What do they want?
I’m troubled that I can only come up with answers like “racial and gender identities are the most important factors in American life, and rearranging them in a more just order is the necessary focus of policy,” or, “outside of addressing racial and gender inequities, incremental economic reforms are most needed.”
Let’s look at the last clear leader of the left. President Biden constantly talked about broadening the middle class. After four years, the middle class seemed to decline slightly less quickly than its previous descending velocity, but the trend still points down. Education, housing and healthcare haven’t become more affordable.
Biden also talked about, and passed, enormous legislation to invest in infrastructure, but the most famous Amtrak rider in American history didn’t improve the trains. Outside of perhaps some bridges and a handful of important chip and electric vehicle factories, where’s the infrastructure approved in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022? And what about that title, what’s the track record of inflation reduction? It could have been way worse, I know, but relative to its vertiginous heights by February 2025, telling people prices are “less bad” isn’t a recipe for success.
I don’t mean to sound glib, but I’m not hearing anything from the left about any of these items beyond alarms about Trump’s authoritarianism, which is a reactive (and valid) criticism, not policy.
In some ways I’m wrong.
Left wing establishments are strong.
Democrats are, maybe, poised to retake a slim majority in the House. Flagship media, cultural, social and academic institutions like the New York Times, Hollywood studios, large museums and universities are thriving -- the Times added more subscribers than ever, streaming services flood us with new shows, Harvard University sits on the largest university endowment in the world. Columbia University hasn’t faced any meaningful sanction after becoming ground zero for anti-Jewish discrimination. No violent or discriminatory student protesters sit in prison or had their degrees revoked. These institutions and their members are doing well.
While I can’t dispute their wealth, I do question their relevance. Are these the institutions that are communicating narratives or developing leaders worth believing and following?
The left is in trouble yet it’s firmly established — it’s like the Sick Man of Europe, which is what people called the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire that kept teetering forward century after century until it finally collapsed in World War I.
Maybe to define the left it’s best to start with the right.
I think I know what the American right wing is. The shorthand is it went from 20th century Corporate Reagan to 21st century Teamster Trump. With the recent election, this transformation is complete.
You’ll note that despite this transformation there’s zero change to the elites. There’s no new infrastructure. I think it’s predictable that middle and working classes will continue their downward descent while facing rising housing, healthcare and education costs. Yet the right wing branding and vibes are totally different. Their intellectual underpinnings have changed. This results in their quantitatively-provable renewed popularity.
I don’t think the Republicans will be successful executors for most people, but they hold power over all three branches of government because most people put them there. That should be all a left wing person needs to read to spring to action.
But… they’re not.
Republicans used to be a socially conservative movement focused on subsidizing wealth and corporate power, while saying they were about letting hard working men prosper with little interference. Reaganomics led to concentrated corporate power (cf fewer airlines, fewer tech companies, fewer banks, fewer meat packing companies, et al), ever increasing consumer prices, zero investment in public infrastructure and a cowboy mythology that government was the problem, not health insurance companies or food polluting conglomerates like Monsanto.
It was a good story for the shareholders who benefitted from it or who chose to embrace the Marlboro Man myth.
That all ended with the George W Bush’s neocon debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and his failures with Hurricane Katrina. There’s also the grinding, bipartisan impacts of NAFTA over many decades.
That’s all been replaced with Trump’s authoritarianism and his personal savviness with the electorate. There's a lot to analyze about why and how this dramatic shift happened from one series of Republican overlords to the next, but for now, let’s acknowledge the shift is complete.
The Koch brothers, the Murdochs, JP Morgan and the law firms that support it continue to wield vast power, but new tech oligarchs are now at the table — the only difference from earlier generations is that their seats are now conditional on their subordination to one man, versus to an ideological belief in tax cuts and privatization. It’s bad right now, but it’s understandable and follows a pattern.
A lot of people on the left are alarmed by the new right. The right seems cultic and insularly tribal, but paradoxically, it’s also expansive and inclusive. The right wing has grown more racially diverse and spread across more income levels in more places. And this cultic tribalism of the right, I think, is as much about a slavishness to one man as it is about a reaction to the earlier tribalism of the left.
Now that I’ve been (self?) ejected from the left for the sin of identifying as a Jew who cares about Israel, which I argue is the norm for the vast majority of Jews since 1948, I can see the left’s ironically insular and exclusive tribalism.
I think the right has reacted to this and found an unlikely avatar in a New York real estate grifter who’s almost 80. Life is weird like that.
What’s the left tribalism most Americans don't want? It started with PC thinking in the late 1980s and has deepened into a more profound enforcement of ideological and linguistic mandatories backed by enormous funding sources, which, perhaps long overdue, now seem to be trailing off.
Some call this implementing DEI practices or developing social equity guidelines or promoting antiracism pedagogy, some call it being progressive, critics say it’s woke.
Either way, to be on the left in 2025, you must adhere to these series of evolving ideas and terms that have grown more byzantine and alienating over time, perhaps finding their apogee with terms like BIPOC or LGBTQIAAPK or in seeing left wing activists align with Islamic terrorist groups and calling for “intifada everywhere” which means kill Jews.
I think, culturally, we ended peak woke with the movie American Fiction in 2023, which satirized white authors promoting black authors only as long as they wrote about ghetto life, and Trump is pounding nails in the DEI coffin, but while the terms might be slowing down and the bureaucracies may be shrinking, you still hear the left use terms like “people of color,” “privilege” and “nonbinary” as organizing concepts. I can’t tell you what any of them mean, but they seem vital.
Ideas like “safety,” “affordability” and “infrastructure” are more important, but alas, I’m just a cranky writer and podcaster.
I think the right has reacted to the ideological narrowing/increasing irrelevance of the left, and noted it’s many hypocrisies, to great effect.
To name a few flaws with left wing beliefs: diversity should only measured by melanin concentration, alternative gender concepts and possibly mental or physical health, but not by economics, geography, intellectual beliefs or harder to identity traits in the secular West, like being Jewish or living a more religious lifestyle.
Inclusion is likewise only inclusive of certain groups but not others, which are helpfully ranked by their levels of marginalization. That seems very well intentioned, but can you tell me the correct privilege ranking of a poor white straight man over, or under, a wealthy black lesbian? I know I’m being reductive, but I honestly don’t know how to score or rank marginalization in a way that doesn’t come across as laughable or something far more evil.
My conclusion after observing the left’s focus on margins, gender and skin color is that there’s no possible way of ranking people ethically, and creating policies to adjust those rankings as you feel is best.
You’ll note this was tried 100 years ago with eugenics. They also had scientific, data-driven methods for ranking people according to the tastes of the times.
Didn’t end well.
Reagan’s cowboy is gone. It’s been replaced by Trump’s masculine avatar who works with his hands and strives but, as well all know, will get nowhere laboring for Republicans. Trump and Musk will take the gains. Workers will be worse off.
What about the left? I know what they were in the post New Deal, post World War II era: it was nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement combined with anti war sentiments with a classic rock soundtrack. The left was about broadening the franchise to end segregation and expand voting access. I think it was about not getting tangled in unwinnable wars and it paid lip service to organized labor as a way to expand the middle class before it embraced NAFTA. It was about perfecting the union while glossing over the fact that the middle class was bottoming out and the arbiters of culture made more and more money.
The struggles that defined the left in the 20th century are no longer in play, or if they are, they’re less acute. Legal segregation is over. Profoundly, gay marriage is legal. (That took until 2015 but the effort was a holdover from many decades of activism that establishment liberals resisted for too long.) Those are impressive wins. The left fought for and earned them and they have enhanced our nation.
But now, what was once noble and vital about fighting Jim Crow or the brutal oppression of gay people has been replaced with a hard-to-define ideology about... I'm not sure. Even writing the words "antiracism" seems kind of silly. Yes, there are bad people on the right who helpfully tell you that they’re indeed racist, but let me take you to a college campus, labor union meeting, academic conference or teachers federation to discover the joys of anti-Jewish discrimination.
The left lost its policy high ground with the economic strangulation of the middle and working classes in the bluest of blue states in blue administrations with a blue congress, and, for me personally, it lost its moral high ground with its response to 10/7. I’m fired up for the Pride parade in Ramallah! It’ll be any day now.
My point is that many of the justifiably scary bogeymen from 1950s are no longer relevant in 2020s. Abortion rights being a key exception. But, sadly, that issue on its own isn’t enough to make up for the intellectual, ethical and political deficiencies of the left.
The movement is rotted. It’s teetering. It’s irrelevant — it’s the Ottoman Empire of the American Academy.
Don’t believe me?
Where’s the high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco?
How can I find affordable housing in New York?
Do you like your health insurance from the Affordable Care Act marketplace?
Why does it take over 4 hours on a train using 1960s technology to get from New York to Boston or Washington?
Except Obama’s reforms to support private health insurance companies, these failures are in blue states with enormous tax revenues and reliable constituents.
Put another way, would you stake your vote on a Progressive to add high quality jobs, make you feel more safe and build more apartment buildings?
If that makes you chuckle, then you get it.
And if you say, hey, wait a second, what about centrist Democrats? I’m not a wild-eyed progressive with crazy ideas about colonies or complicated acronyms!
Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and Kamala Harris all fit that profile and have exactly zilch to show for their efforts. Perhaps Josh Shapiro is an exception with his lighting fast rebuilding of the I-95 highway in Philadelphia in 12 days. But being Jewish, he didn’t get national left wing support in the elections when we were told the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Something seems, um, wrong maybe?
For the first time in my life, and I’m ashamed to admit this, I feel like there’s no one to vote for. That doesn’t bode well for anyone.