What's Happened with the Socialist Left

In 2016, it certainly seemed like the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split was defining a dynamic that would last for a long time: class-focused socialists bent on dramatic change opposed by centrists who weaponized identity politics to try and stop that change. It was very common for people to assume that this would be the battlefield for the American left-of-center moving forward. I did.

But that really hasn’t happened. The socialist left has almost entirely capitulated on its resistance to the dominance of identity politics in progressive spaces. Many of the identity-skeptical leftists I knew have adopted the identity language they once mocked. Some have simply gone quiet. And I think the reason is obvious: constantly being called racist for supporting Bernie really scarred them. It turned out that a lot of them really weren’t about that life. They were used to calling people racist, not to being called racist. And all of the bluster about how much they hated Clinton faded in a world where Trump was president. 2020 sealed the deal. People saw the great social and professional cost people were paying for even the most tepid criticism of the upheaval in the post-George Floyd moment and folded, fast. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the fact that most of the socialists that have been minted since Occupy Wall Street are very low-information, people with no backing in socialist history or theory. We were recruiting thousands of converts who were long on snark but who had no history of activism or grounding in leftist principles. So there wasn’t really anything for them to give up; they had no real socialism to abandon.

A very indicative example is the leftist magazine Current Affairs. I think people who just discovered the magazine recently would be quite surprised to learn that it was once a dissident, identity politics-skeptical publication. They used to publish the controversialist writer Michael Tracey, for example. A quintessential early article is titled “How Identity Became A Weapon Against The Left.” Now you can search the magazine’s recent archives high and low without finding a single article that does not treat identity politics with total reverence. They saw the price of doing business with identity-skepticism and got religion fast. So of course they fired employees over labor unrest; identity politics have no particular injunction to support people trying to organize in their workplace. Traditional socialist values do.

The fight now is over the attempt to mandate this pinched vision of what the left is, to make identity liberalism literally the only left-of-center position. The insistence is that there is only identity politics or conservatism. Of course, tension between identity politics and labor politics is centuries old, and the fight has been central in recent left history. But since left-of-Democrat politics has collapsed into a social culture rather than a political movement, the insistence that everyone must be on board with the identity-fixated program has gotten louder and louder. When you treat your political tendency like a cool party where people hang out, rather than as a vehicle to prompt change, you can’t tolerate anyone harshing the vibe. I have been an activist for my entire adult life and all of my political opinions are an expression of my peculiar form of Marxism, but since I’m identity-skeptical I must be called a conservative. There’s a kind of terror in the face of the idea of a within-coalition divide, these days. But the fundamental weaknesses of identity politics persist and cannot be dissolved by calling people bigots. My upcoming book is a record of the social movements of the past half-decade that is sympathetic to their goals but honest about their outcomes: they have all failed. And someday, the failures will pile up enough that people will be ready to try a new approach once again.

Update: Current Affairs founder Nathan Robinson objects to my characterization of their workplace issues, saying

The statement that employees were "fired over labor unrest" is a malicious falsehood. Yasmin (again, a socialist who had a sharp analysis of bourgeois inclusivity politics, as well as a strong background in pushing for the rights of workers in the publishing industry), has documented the actual facts at exhaustive length: https://yasminnair.com/march-what-really-happened-at.../ After independently reviewing documents, public statements, and contacting every single person involved, Yasmin concluded unequivocally that there was no labor unrest and that nobody was fired, facts that were obvious at the time to anyone who actually looked closely at the evidence rather than taking allegations at face value (you, as a defender of due process and opponent of cancelation, would surely agree that not every accusation printed in a newspaper should be repeated as fact). I would appreciate it if you would not spread damaging falsehoods about a small not for profit leftist magazine, and an honest person genuinely committed to presenting the truth would correct this. I am a firm supporter of labor rights. I have never opposed unionization, I'm all for it, at my workplace and every other one.