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About a decade ago, maybe more, I asked the war correspondent Anand Gopal what attracted so many regular people in majority-Muslim countries to Islamic jihad. Gopal, who lived in and reported from Afghanistan and who has covered the wars in Syria and Iraq, described the history of systematic annihilation of the political left in those nations throughout the twentieth century, stretching back to the plots against Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Once the left, he explained, along with civil society at large, was destroyed, people had no alternative to the secular authoritarian governments propped up throughout the Muslim world. When violent religious extremists stepped into the breach as the only social force willing to confront these tyrants, people gravitated to them in spite of their misgivings.
Something similar, though subtler, is happening in the United States. Over the course of generations, the American left has eroded into dust. A fundamentally conservative political establishment has replaced it, which claims the legacy and adopts the aesthetics of popular revolt, but that fights to defend the prevailing order. This charade has upended everything about American politics. A half century ago, those who were denied the benefits and privileges of the status quo aligned themselves with the left. Today, they have no such option, as the only ostensibly “left-wing” movement that remains is an imposter. There is, in its place, a vibrant force of anti-establishment jihad, but one that is explicitly aligned with the political right.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. My point isn’t that we need a rebirth of the left to save America. Leftists aren’t the “good guys”; there are plenty of obvious examples of left-wing governments that, like their far-right counterparts, demolished their countries’ civil societies and installed dictatorships. Nor am I arguing that the populist right are our new saviors, or that Trump will take on the billionaires and the corporate CEOs instead of giving them all more tax breaks. My point is that the entire lexicon of left versus right, which originated in debates over monarchism in revolutionary France and which by the twentieth century was already an anachronism of the pre-industrial age, is utterly useless now. Worse than that, it confuses and muddies the debate and obscures our view of what’s actually happening in our politics.
The American left took its last breath with the collapse of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential primary campaign. It was already in a terminal condition, after decades of suffocation by the ascendant corporate wing of the Democratic Party, dating back to the 1970s. The final blow, however, came not from the self-proclaimed centrists of the party, but from a new vanguard of crusading activists who perceived themselves as radicals.
This was the “woke left.” It was a cultural movement that spoke in the language of social revolution, but that had been gestated in the country’s most elite academic institutions and blossomed at the very top of the American power structure: the C-suites, the billionaire family foundations, the flagship media brands and the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. It explicitly sought to suppress the language of class politics in the Democratic Party and replace it with identity and the fetishization of racial and sexual representation. Recognizing its obvious political utility, the neoliberal leadership of the party machine embraced it. “Not everything is about an economic theory, right?” said Hillary Clinton in 2016. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
After the global financial collapse, the traditional left experienced something of a renaissance. The neoliberal consensus was discredited. The bankers and the free market economists were exposed. The hegemony of the “New Democrats” was shattered. People were angry and desperate, and they lined up behind new populist movements that arose in response to the bank bailouts. On the right, the Tea Party hitched right-wing libertarianism to an anti-establishment, anti-Wall Street agenda. On the left, the Occupy Movement cleared the path for the resurrection of a vibrant democratic socialist movement in America, and then for the Bernie presidential campaign.
These new populists on the left and the right excoriated not just economic and social inequality and the exploitative agenda of the financial services industry, but the arrogance of the expert class that had promised workers that the sacrifices of their industries, their jobs, and in many cases, their families and communities, would lead to broad national prosperity — “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The Great Recession exposed these ideologues as liars and pretenders. An uprising was brewing throughout the electorate.
On the right, this uprising coalesced around a charismatic hero, Donald Trump. On the left, it launched the political insurgency behind Bernie Sanders. Both party establishments tried to crush their respective insurgencies. But only the Democrats had a new cultural weapon of mass destruction at their disposal: wokeness.
The totality of Sanders’ evisceration by the Clinton campaign and its identity-powered counterrevolution was reflected in the pathetic spectacle of Bernie’s 2020 bid, which tip-toed around the minefield of woke politics, diluting its class-based message with entirely unpersuasive and transparently craven prostrations before the cult of “anti-racism” and the diversity industry. Meanwhile, Trump swaggered across the national stage, grinning and sneering at his Democratic opponents’ servility to the new ideology.
The Democrats won in 2020, but only because the auto-immune disorder that is wokeness killed the campaign of every candidate who tried to harness it, starting with Kamala Harris. Only Joe Biden was left, who, in his age, his straight white maleness, his decades of proud centrism, and his avuncular cluelessness was like a living and breathing rejection of the new identity politics, was the only candidate inoculated against the disease. He defeated Trump because Americans were tired of the clown show and Biden was blandly acceptable enough to suffice as an alternative.
In the meantime, we were subjected to the next global cataclysm, throughout which Democrats completed their metamorphosis into the party of lip-curling contempt for even the slightest hint of populism. The state of exception that emerged from the pandemic empowered the professional managerial class, the new base of the party, to impose their dubious vision of a well-ordered society upon vast swathes of the country without meaningful political opposition. The worship of experts, the suppression of dissent, the disdain for anyone who presumed to question the authority of the credentialed class, and the lust for punishing those who stepped out of line, were plain for the public to see. The Democrats proudly held themselves up as the defenders of the prevailing social order, and the enemies of anyone who dared to question its orthodoxies.
Whatever the substance of Biden’s policies, this was the brand of the Democratic Party he led. And he deliberately chose for his Vice President a politician who had made herself into the very embodiment of that brand in her slavishly woke failed presidential primary campaign. Then, as fortune would have it, she replaced him as the nominee.
By 2024, wokeness had largely spent itself as a political force. It had accomplished its task of neutering the populist left. So Kamala quickly reinvented herself as a Clinton-style centrist, hoping that voters would somehow forget that her primary campaign had ever happened. This only made her look even more inauthentic. Now she found herself carrying the baggage of her woke past at the same time as she presented herself as just another status quo-defending, neoliberal Democrat. A truly gifted politician could have navigated those rough waters, but a talentless stand-in like Kamala Harris never had a chance.
At almost every opportunity, the Democrats allowed the Republicans to play the part of the rabble-rousing rebels rallying the people against an arrogant and stagnant aristocracy, the party of Thomas Paine versus the haughty authority of the English crown. We’ll probably spend the next four years as we’ve spent the last eight — arguing over whether or not that posture is pure artifice. But it doesn’t really matter. Politics is about symbols and folk mythology, and in his mastery of both, Trump has no equal. The Democrats lost because they allowed themselves to become the guardians of the castle, as the Republicans transformed themselves into barbarians bearing down on the walls of the kingdom. They thought the voters would side with the nobility. But they were still in a mood to revolt.
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Politics, media and social theory
This article is brilliant. Thank you for writing it.
Best post-mortem I've read yet. I'm too old to hope for a resurgence of a real left in my lifetime, but knowing how woke politics killed it is a start on rebuilding something for the grandkids.