The End of the Left. The Rise of...?
The right has evolved while the left navel gazes
Who are we politically? I used to be a Liberal, a Leftist, for years I called myself a Progressive because I liked their economic populism, especially after Obama's mishandling of the 2008 crisis that left him incredibly wealthy and the working and middle classes howling in pain. Spoiler: they’re still howling.
I don’t feel like a Democrat anymore, it seems embarrassing to identify with a party whose policies I can’t identify.
After decades of economic stagnation, shocking lack of housing in every blue state, with the rise of more and more extreme sectarian ideologies within the party and its adjacent supporters: the mainstream press and universities, it’s hard to say that it’s in your best advantage to be a Democrat unless you’re already very wealthy and hopefully not vulnerable to their antisemitism and gender policies, where crossdressing men can appear in your daughter’s bathroom. If you’re OK with that and already have an appreciating real estate portfolio, then by all means vote Democrat. That’s about 5% of Americans. Call it 10% to be nice.
There's also little sense in being a Republican if they proceed with their current economic crash course, lack of housing and foreign policy decisions that empower adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But, for people in blue states, voting Republican locally makes sense because it induces competition.
The toilet bowl drain of Democratic policy seems clear as day to most voters, witness the party's miserable polling, but when I read the New York Times and talk to dyed-in-the-wool liberals in New York, they mostly refuse to discuss it. To them, the stagnation and extremism of the left is either not true or temporary blips. They’re not signs of systemic rot, but they will spend hours telling you about signs of systemic racism, colonialism and other unquantifiable “isms.” They won’t have it both ways. Systemic problems are never on their side, always on the right. It’s a convenient exculpation.
The lack of self awareness is shocking, but it’s also telling: you can’t improve until you admit you need improvement. Ergo, the Dems aren’t improving.
Even reading the Times, the paper of record for the hardcore left, you sense the confusion in the Democratic Party. They have tactical arguments - do they fight the Republicans? Do they coordinate with them in commonsense areas and resist in others? No matter what you read, you'll never get a policy position. JB Pritzker, a billionaire, had a big speech where he said “fight” a lot! Loudly! Chuck Schumer has a more accommodationist approach. That’s what passes for policy discourse.
What the left stood for in the last century was clear. It was early 20th century labor politics from the New Deal that merged with the various rights movements and a skepticism of post Vietnam foreign entanglements.
The Vietnam War ended in 1975.
The contemporary left has long lost the working class votes by morphing once noble rights movements into strange theories of victimhood and niche, invented identities that, electorally at least, alienate more people than they attract. It's weird they don't get this, but there you have it.
I was at a concert the other night for a band with a large lesbian following. The music was great. Before they went on, the PA system told us a way to send money via text to support trans kids. I honestly don’t think trans kids is a thing outside of a tiny, tiny percentage of children born with anatomical abnormalities, but that’s not what they’re talking about. I think a child being trans is about a accurate as a gay person being mentally ill, which a psychiatrist up until 1973 would insist they are. Things change for the better, things change for the worse. The decision to prioritize a charity for what they insist are trans kids versus, say, feeding hungry kids, is telling.
When it comes to economics, the Democratic Party was once a big tent with various factions and regional identities. It’s now narrow and coastal. There are two groups: older centrist technocrats who represent the status quo and until Harris, have tightly controlled the party, or younger extremist leftists who want to socialize industries, like housing, food, healthcare and more in an inadvertently hilarious bid to be populist.
The younger wing, which is ascendant, seems to think people are going to vote for more housing projects where residents live under their watchful eyes like in a dystopian sci-fi novel. The most popular far left NYC mayoral candidates wants to bring frozen food aisles to the DMV. Forget about trans, race and Palestine, just look at socialist housing projects and groceries stores if you need a laugh.
I'll give them socialized healthcare, anything is better than private insurance, and I’ll agree that having a socialized military seems better than outsourcing, but not much more than that. Public education in blue states is deplorable for students in low income areas. Blue state transportation is terrible — high speed train from SF to LA anyone? Want to get dinner at Port Authority or take a one-stop train to JFK? No thanks and you can’t.
More government control is the progressive plan to expand the economy. I think the back half of that sentence is great, and weirdly the centrists don’t agree, but once voters realize the first part of the sentence is their big idea, be careful you don’t get crushed by voters stampeding in the opposite direction.
My sense is that both the centrist status quoists and the progressive socialists will lose more elections than they win. Again, this is what passes for policy discourse in the left. Socialize or stay the course. Those are your options.
I'm not alone in these observations, we're in a profound era of political change, and many people see what I'm talking about which is why they’ve turned from traditional media to substacks, podcasts and social feeds. They’re hungry for acknowledgement, and they know where they can’t and can find it.
What's puzzling to me is that this sense of transition isn't shared by pretty much anyone on the dwindling left, from whence I came: liberal, highly educated upper-middle class strivers who instilled in me once important values of dignity and equality, but are now perverted by bizarre ideologies that offend or openly attack Jews and many women, and who won’t prioritize lowering crime or rising incomes.
FDR’s New Deal has long since become mainstream, our country is now a giant insurance company (social security and medicare) with an army. He won that debate.
More potently to the left, it’s hard to imagine MLKjr supporting DEI bureaucracies, especially if he asked: “do they work?”
It’s easy to see how the new right manifests. It's an electorally successful mix of America First isolationism, an appetite for ignoring the rule of law when expedient, it's politically hyperactive versus the Democrats "slowly turn the battleship, let me get back to you next year" approach, it embraces both economic and cultural populism, and, funnily enough, the conservatives now enjoy the electoral fruits of being post-racial and therefore truly inclusive, while the left doubles-down on skin color and ideological rigidity.
It may have taken an outsized personality like Trump to change the Republicans ten years ago as their elite kept pushing Bush family members on primary voters, but it may have happened regardless, like what we're seeing in other countries or how much of a cake walk it was for one man to change a whole party. They were primed for change.
The left ignores this by deriding the right as a cult of personality. In part that’s true, Donald Trump, like John F Kennedy and Barack Obama, has a personality that motivates voters on an almost mystical level. Beyond that, cult talk doesn’t get you very far analytically. What I think is more relevant is that it took an outsider, a person who never held office and had been a Democrat, with incredible instincts and media savvy on literally every platform, to transform a party.
There is no one remotely close to this on the left. There are some bigger personalities with great social media chops, but no one seems to have Trump's ability to connect while forging a new path.
Why? Because they have no sense of direction.
Where does that leave Democrats and the liberal/left movement? Let’s start with: What do they believe in?
Harris believed in nothing, nor did Hillary Clinton. I think you can project this question backwards in time and ask the same of Obama. What did he really believe in? He wasn’t antiwar, he wasn’t about expanding the working and middle classes — ACA helped the very poor and his lack of response to 2008 helped the very rich. He had a heck of a personality and pathos that won him huge elections, but with no coattails. Remember, he was immediately followed by Trump. Remember, he threw Biden under the bus when Biden was capable of governing, and anointed Hillary. Who believed in nothing.
Looking back, it’s fair to say that what Obama and HRC did believe in was accumulating wealth and, funnily enough, preserving the status quo. These people aren’t fabulously wealthy by accident, like JB Pritzker or SF mayor Daniel Lurie. They did it on their own.
What about today? What does the left believe in today?
Skin color. Trans. Bureaucracy. Anti-Trump. That’s it. Ok, throw in antisemitism too.
The New York Times tell me that an elite liberal arts college, Amherst, is no longer "diverse" because of the changing skin color composition of their student body. The journalist isn't allowed or refuses to mention economics, geography, viewpoint, heritage, culture or any other factor that can mean diversity. It's a small example of locked-in left wing perspective, it’s all about skin color irrespective of economics.
As I mentioned above about my concert experience, the left couples this with a fiercely held, almost religious belief that crossdressing men are a protected class deserving 100% access to private women's spaces and athletic teams. That’s weird. It almost seems like a joke, but tell that to the girls who lose scholarships or want to feel safe in a bathroom.
And then of course, they bemoan DOGE and the fall of DEI, by which they mean, they want bloated, unaccountable governmental and academic bureaucracies, just because.
Sounds like I'm being mean, but I honestly can't tell what else they hold dear. I’ve written enough for now about how the ascendent, younger, progressive wing of the Democratic Party is now the institutional support system of antisemitism. I guess you can throw in “ineffective responses to climate change unless you manufacture Xanax then it’s awesome” as a last policy point.
This is an opportunity for us as Americans, the world's leading country, to transcend long solved divisions about segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, and what was very right about the New Deal, to embrace new policies and dialectics to spur prosperity. Right now.
Will that happen? So far I see zero evidence of a reciprocal evolution on the left as we've seen on the right. We only have a two party system, we need competition on both sides to improve. But it’s not, so it won’t.
Complain about Trump all you want, but couldn’t he be a signal and inspiration for the Democrats to improve their product?
Nope. Instead they make offensive comparisons to Hitler and watch alternative media outlets replace a hopelessly biased mainstream that, by the next election, will be in the Smithsonian, not on my phone.
The fact that observing and writing that it’s wise to analyze Republican successes is intolerable for the left to consider proves my point: the left isn’t doing very well. What they lack in introspection, they make up for in grievance and policy guesswork: expand government? encourage DEI? alienate certain constituencies to win over others?
None of this means Democrats won't have decent but I think not very decisive midterms. Trump is a great campaigner but not a good executive. Damaging our economy to make a policy point and exert control is objectively stupid politics.
My whole problem with the Democrats, in a nutshell, is they prioritize sectarian ideology over economic success. If Trump falls into the same trap, which he seems to be doing, then people won't vote for his party—especially because his coattails are only effective when he’s on the ballot.
That doesn't mean the Democrats are winning or safe, it just means they may be the least bad option to recession. We know they'll leave the country worse off, not better, because we've seen the middle class dwindle under decades of Democratic leadership—Clinton with NAFTA killed manufacturing, then Obama and Biden watched the ship keep sinking.
The answer is the Democrats need transformation to deal with the 21st century that same way Republicans have transformed themselves to respond to working class economic and cultural needs. That's an easy, high level observation.
How they get there, and what that will look like, is unknown. To me that spells disaster and stagnation. One glimmer of insight could be Mark Carney's win in Canada. A centrist, wealthy technocrat -- the Mike Bloomberg of Canada -- eked out a plurality while the Conservatives scored better than in past years. It's an insight, but also, cold comfort to Democrats who need executive and legislative majorities to govern.