How the Left Loses its People
They have always had a cancellation problem. That needs to be fixed.
On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he wrote, “I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿”
This caught my attention because I’m a student of “Goodbye to All That” letters to the political left. These letters—or essays or books—were some of the key texts for my book Exit Right, which was a study of six prominent Americans who abandoned the left at various points in the 20th century. They were fascinating for what they revealed about their authors at a moment of peak intellectual and psychological stress, when their old identities were being sloughed off and new ones were taking shape.
The letters were fascinating, too, in their similarities across time. The communism and socialism of the 1920s and 1930s that alienated figures like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham were not precisely the movements of the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in Norman Podhoretz and David Horowitz. The “woke mind virus” that drove away Musk is a different thing yet again. But there is a clear pattern. The shaming and cancelling. The puritanical moralism. The persistent influence of Marx. The metastasizing of noble goals of liberation and equality into destructively utopian theories of human nature and society.
To observe this isn’t to discount the left forever and always. The right has its characteristic flaws and excesses too. All human movements and ideologies do. It is to suggest, however, that we would do well to attend to the pattern, and to be vigilant not just about the endemic flaws of the left but also the dangers of the counter reactions it tends to produce.
James Burnham, who traveled from Trotskyism in the 1930s all the way to editor of the National Review in the 1950s, wrote two farewells. One was to Leon Trotsky, whose writing and charisma had brought Burnham into socialist politics in the first place. The other was to the Workers’ Party, the American Trotskyist group he’d helped found after a bitter schism in its predecessor party, the Socialist Workers Party, which was itself a product of an earlier split between Stalin and Trotsky. Both letters were reflective, but also ruthless. He rejected the whole Marxist project, root to branch.
“Believing as I do, I cannot wish success to the Workers Party; but I can and do wish its members well. To the extent that each of us, in his own way and arena, preserves the values and truth and freedom, I hope that we shall continue to regard ourselves as comrades, whatever names we use and whatever labels may be tied around our necks.”
When 1960s radical David Horowitz published his own “Goodbye to All That,” in The Nation in 1979, he was depressed and defeated rather than indignant. The great liberatory potential of the 1960s hadn’t just exhausted itself, it had soured into a host of toxic left-wing factions, each of which did damage both on its own terms—banks bombed, cops killed, activist organizations rent asunder—and to whatever remained of the tattered credibility of the left. Not only was the left spinning off these sad reboots of its formerly glorious self, it was unable to see or say clearly what was wrong with them. Horowitz now saw this failure to account for itself as a fundamental blind spot of the left. He wrote, “You are in fact in league with the darkest and most reactionary forces of the modern world, whose legacies—as the record attests—are atrocities and oppression on a scale unknown in the human past.” Horowitz now saw this failure to account for itself as a fundamental blind spot of the left, whose “revolutionary god remains largely unexamined and unquestioned.”
In his “Goodbye to All That,” published in The Nation in November 2002, the British iconoclast writer Christopher Hitchens was inhabiting the mood of reckless self-righteousness that captured so much of the American populace (present author included) in the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War. He wrote:
It may now seem trite to say that September 11 and other confrontations “changed everything.” For me, it didn’t so much change everything as reinforce something. I am against aggressive totalitarian states and I am resolutely opposed to religious fanaticism. I am also sickened by any attempt to call these hideous things by other names.
In its brevity and immaturity, Musk’s goodbye to all that tweet is distinct from those of his predecessors, but what has driven Musk around the bend in the last few years seems to rhyme with what drove people out of the left in the 1930s, the 1960s, and beyond.
We on the left have been here before, in other words, and we’ve screwed things up this way before, and it feels like it shouldn’t have to be this way. The secret fantasy of my book was that it would help the left process its past more thoroughly and honestly than it had done to that point, and that in so doing it would help us avoid making the same kinds of mistakes that had cost our movement, and America, so dearly before.
I was particularly attuned to the damage that could be done to the national fabric by the kinds of people who tended to abandon the left with the most intense resentment. Not the Burnham types, who changed their minds about key principles and conclusions but were able to do so with some degree of humility, but someone like Horowitz, who, after a few years of political sobriety, came to see his former comrades as the vessels of all evil in the world. These people, if they also happened to possess talent or power, did immense damage. Contemporary versions of them might do so again, if we weren’t able to respond to their critiques with compassion and wisdom when they were still internal to the left. If only we were able to be wiser this time around, I thought, maybe these brilliant but volatile talents would stay on our side of the fence, and lend their capacities and energies to reforming the left rather than destroying it. Elon Musk was never going to be a great vessel for compassion in the world, but perhaps he could have remained what he was before his turn—an immensely effective entrepreneur whose projects, like the expansion of the electric car market, had clear benefits for humanity, and whose politics were median Silicon Valley center-left techno-futurist.
I finished the book in 2014, just as the social justice tide of the last decade began rising. I was as steeped as anyone could be in the history of previous periods of left-wing excess, and would like to say that it gave me the gift of foresight. It didn’t. I didn’t predict the “great awokening,” nor how intense it would be. I certainly didn’t predict Trump, or Trump again.
I did, however, see what was happening with pretty clear eyes from the start. It was a kind of repetition of the past but with less strategy, wisdom, organization, and hard-earned political clarity. The liberal institutions were familiar with exerting power but they lacked all conviction, and their memories of past intra-left struggle were faint. As a result, they were extremely vulnerable to ideological takeover. The left institutions barely existed, and the ones that did had little to no muscle memory of exerting power in a strategic and responsible way.
So we made all the same mistakes we had before, but faster and with less to show for it. We alienated all the same kinds of people, while accomplishing few if any of our ostensible goals, and we inspired a whole new generation of resentful apostates who would go on to do great damage to the country and the world.
For the first few years of this sad repetition of the past, I was pretty disheartened. We hadn’t learned the lessons of the past. And yet—and I realize this is a strange thing to write in the midst of Donald Trump’s staggeringly destructive presidency—I’m finding myself increasingly heartened over the past year or two by the capacity of liberals and their institutions to learn from their mistakes and adapt. It’s not, I’ve come to conclude, that we never learn. We do learn. It’s just that we eventually forget again. But there’s a big difference between those two things!
Reflection and revision is happening across the liberal establishment. NPR sounds different. The New York Times is clearly different. CNN has shifted. The New Yorker, The Atlantic. A whole raft of new center-left and centrist publications (e.g. Persuasion) have come into existence that define themselves in opposition to orthodoxies of both the right and the left. The most compelling university president of the moment, Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, has both stood up against the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom and made deliberate programmatic choices to bring conservative faculty into the university. 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls like Gavin Newsom are making clear anti-woke moves, and though AOC is still huge, the newer young guns of the party are more idiosyncratic moderates like Ritchie Torres and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
The evolution of New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who is a thoughtful person but also a cautious tribune of the progressive conventional wisdom, has been particularly instructive. During the years when certain left-wing orthodoxies were most ascendant, Klein was a soft enabler, which could make him very frustrating to listen to and read. Even then, however, he was always struggling with some of the internal contradictions of the movement. Since the election, he has been reckoning in his columns and on his podcast much more explicitly with its flaws and mistakes and what they have cost us. His big new book, Abundance, is less a repudiation of left excess than it is a deft slalom around it. That’s not where the action is anymore.
Many of the energies that were unleashed from, say, 2014-2022 will take years or decades to play out, but the awokening is over. We’re too close to it all to assess what the long-term impact will be. But I think it’s reasonable to say that liberalism, as a spirit and method and set of practices, has re-asserted itself as a more dominant force on—or maybe over—the left. And the left itself is doing some introspecting. Books like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture and Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke have made a visible dent in what we might call the two foundational premises of left-wing politics of the last decade, which were that the diversification of elite spaces, and the purification of elite discourses, were meaningfully aligned with the interests of our most vulnerable and suffering people.
There’s no iron law of history and politics that periods of left-wing enthusiasm and excess will be followed by a re-assertion of liberal practices, norms, and power. But it has happened before, and is likely to happen again. Liberalism runs deep in this country. Deeper than leftism, and deeper too than the authoritarian populism of MAGA. This isn’t always an inspiring truth about our country, but at this particular moment it’s a rather reassuring one.
Daniel Oppenheimer’s Substack is Eminent Americans, a newsletter and podcast about the contemporary American intellectual scene. He is the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century.
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I'm not sure how I've been a Daniel Oppenheimer reader this long without being aware of your Exit Right book, that sounds fascinating and is going right into my Amazon shopping cart. If I have one quibble with your most excellent piece, it's that I'm not sure how much "reflection and revision" are actually going on across the liberal establishment and to what extent the "awokening" is *OVER* rather than temporarily hibernating for a few years. It seems to me that the left establishment is in triage and circling the wagons, but still fundamentally from a sensibility of getting over this temporary trying time so they can get back to "normal," with "normal" still essentially consisting of overbearing managerialism enforcing "equity" across all conceivable demographic categories being the polite conventional wisdom. There's little evidence that the left coalition has truly been chastened or learned anything at all, as the ominous momentum behind Zohrab Mamdani's should-be-laughable candidacy demonstrates. The next Democratic president may talk like John Fetterman, but there's no reason to believe they won't govern exactly as Kamala Harris would have. It will take more than one term in the political wilderness for the Democratic Party to reconsider its kamikaze ways.
As someone who works in a public library where "woke" DEI stuff is still very much part of the culture (I might even say they've doubled down on it since the election last year) and whose 14-YO nephew just stated that he is reading The Communist Manifesto because it's "required reading" and "necessary for life", I remain worried that the wackier and more dangerous side of the left will prevail over the more centrist liberal elements. But your piece was reassuring, and it's reinforced my mindset that, for now, I don't need to panic about the horrors of the current administration and its right-wing pushers OR what will happen if the fanatics on the other side supplant them in three years.