Put another way: billionaires are bad — unless they hold the right progressive views.

Our Revolution’s Steyer endorsement is a betrayal of the old labor Left that sought to empower workers relative to employers. The endorsement is not, however, a betrayal of the kind of NGO-friendly technocratic progressivism that sums up Steyer’s campaign and increasingly drives the Democratic Party. Since he’s the sort of billionaire who funds technocratic, single-issue NGOs, his bid for governor amounts to the perfect fusion of progressive capital and what John Judis and Ruy Texeira call the NGO “shadow party” that continues to define how the Democratic Party operates and what it stands for — including a double standard for the progressive rich like Steyer.

Our Revolution isn’t the only progressive NGO to endorse Steyer. The billionaire also enjoys the backing of California Environmental Voters, the Climate Center Action Fund, Third Act, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, and Courage California, among many others. That last group explains: “He aligns with Courage California on multiple issues, including our top legislative priorities: single-payer health care, comprehensive health care for undocumented Californians, abolishing ICE, climate action that centers frontline Black and brown communities, progressive reform of our criminal-justice system, and corporate accountability.”

Why are these supposedly anti-oligarchic groups rallying around — ahem — an oligarch? Steyer amassed his estimated $2.4 billion fortune by founding one progressive nightmare, a hedge fund, Farallon Capital, which invested in other progressive nightmares including coal, oil, gas, and private prisons before reinventing himself as a Green crusader in the 2010s. 

Of course, in the past there have been rich presidents and governors, some of them reformers who were praised or denounced as traitors to their elite class. But the greatest of the rich individuals who made it to the White House or the governor’s mansion — unlike Steyer, or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to say nothing of Donald Trump — patiently rose to the highest office by serving in lower offices first. 

President George Washington, one of the wealthiest men at the Founding, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and was a delegate to the Continental Congress before becoming commander in chief of the Continental Army and presiding over the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Theodore Roosevelt rose through the political ranks as a New York state representative, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and US vice president. His relative Franklin D. Roosevelt followed a similar cursus honorum, as a New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York, before being elected president. John F. Kennedy was wealthy, as well, but he served his apprenticeship in the House of Representatives and then the US Senate before becoming president. Even Herbert Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer, ran the United States Food Administration during World War I, winning great admiration for his efficient management of postwar aid in Europe, and served as commerce secretary in the 1920s before he became president. 

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If you look in the annals of American history for a rich amateur who never served in public office before becoming president and yet became a great and successful president, you won’t find any. For confirmation, you need only look at the unpopular and incompetent billionaire amateur who currently occupies the Oval Office. 

Which brings us back to Steyer’s NGO backers. His amateurism should be a red flag for these groups. But, tellingly, it isn’t.

NGOs involved in politics are donor-funded “astroturf” organizations — fake grassroots outfits. To name one example, Third Act is fiscally sponsored by the Sustainable Markets Foundation, which, in turn, has received grants and donations in the last few years from the center-left Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sequoia Climate Foundation, and the Aspen Community Foundation — a roll call of nonprofit foundations endowed by billionaires and millionaires. For NGOs like these to denounce the existence of billionaires as a public-policy failure and a flaw in contemporary capitalism is thus to bite the hands that feed them. 

This kind of nonprofit advocacy by donor-funded astroturf groups by its nature is inimical to democracy, which depends upon debate among those who hold different views and compromise among groups with different interests. The technocratic strain of progressivism, which goes back more than a century in the United States, is particularly suspicious of legislatures in which debates and compromises take place.  

The idea that legislatures, controlled by “special interests,” are natural enemies of the “public interest” — as discerned by “experts,” of course — explains the enthusiasm among American progressives for institutions that weaken or circumvent legislative bodies: strong governors and presidents; technocratic city managers ruling on behalf of marginalized mayors and city councils; and ballot initiatives and referenda, which allows citizens to bypass legislatures and make laws directly.

Since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, technocrats to the Left of center have put their hopes in a succession of elites who, unlike corrupt, deal-making politicians, might be able to generate and administer enlightened public policies in the national and global interest. In the first half of the last century, the ideal was the altruistic career civil servant, guided by the latest teachings of social science. Contrary to conservatives who claim that the New Deal foisted all-powerful democracy on America, the actual New Deal system was based on interest-group corporatism and mass-membership organizations: labor unions, farmers’ associations, employer groups, religious organizations and their volunteering arms, and so on. The New Deal state saw its role as corporatist-style mediation between these groups and the massive social forces they represented.

Progressives and free-market libertarians alike denounced New Deal-style “interest-group liberalism” as the embodiment of squalid corruption. In response, in the 1960s and ’70s, Ralph Nader and his allies modeled a new kind of technocratic progressive champion: the public-interest lawyer. Rather than pursuing legal and regulatory reforms by the democratic means of electing reformers to public office, Naderite progressives sought an end-run around representative democracy and the need to generate voter support. Instead, they directly sued corporations and government agencies. In the realm of civil rights, issues like abortion and LGBT rights were similarly removed from the realm of elected politics and determined by federal courts with the help of legal briefs by contending attorneys.

The affinities between this tradition of technocratic progressivism and autocratic rule are as evident in the 21st century as they were in the twentieth. If public policy should be based on science — social science in the old days, climate science and gender science and woke pandemic science today — then debate is pointless and dissenters are either ignorant or corrupt. “The science is settled,” to use the motto of contemporary progressives.

In a regime based on science — rather than popular superstition or the icky wheeling-and-dealing of elected politicians — public policy should be made by scientifically trained experts. If there is any role for elected legislatures at all in the technocratic progressive utopia, it is merely to delegate sweeping powers to enlightened bureaucrats and to passively ratify the rules and regulations they issue.

And if strong executives are needed to impose top-down progressive reforms, over the objections of lobbyist-ridden legislatures, then what better executive than someone like a self-financed billionaire candidate who has never been corrupted by having held civilian public office before? That’s Tom Steyer.

Indeed, his candidacy was prophesied nearly two decades ago by none other than Nader. In 2009, the green crusader published a utopian fantasy titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! In the novel, a group of enlightened billionaires and celebrities — including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Yoko Ono — band together to save America from the greatest threat to top-down progressivism: normal democratic politics. On the assumption that ordinary elected officials of all parties are merely corrupt pawns of corporations, Nader’s fictional billionaires fund — what else? — nonprofit community groups with leaders untainted by electoral experience.

The dream goes back even further. More than a century ago, another leading progressive figure published a similar utopian novel. The Texan political operator Colonel Edward Mandell House (the “Colonel” was a political honorific), an important adviser to Woodrow Wilson, published his own work of fiction titled Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935. In House’s progressive fantasy, Philip Dru, an idealistic soldier and graduate of West Point, literally goes to war with corrupt capitalists, kills thousands of Americans in a second civil war, and becomes the dictatorial “Administrator of the United States.” Before he resigns, this benevolent American Caesar by executive decree promotes women’s suffrage and labor rights, breaks the power of corporations, and establishes a British-American alliance that rules the world. 

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Once you appreciate the influence of the technocratic-progressive fantasy on the American center Left, it is easy to understand the hostility of many in the NGO-industrial complex to Xavier Becerra, who has rapidly risen in the polls to be a rival of Steyer among Democratic candidates for governor. Becerra is the opposite of Tom Steyer: unlike the billionaire, he has worked his way up the ladder of California politics, from the state legislature to the US house to a Cabinet role in the Biden administration. It is precisely because Becerra is a conventional, pragmatic career politician, willing to compromise and eager to avoid doomed symbolic fights, that he is by definition a corrupt member of the establishment, according to the anti-political ideology of technocratic progressives.

Purists on the Left are attacking Becerra for not being zealous enough in advocating the unrealistic policy of single-payer health care at the national or state level; for not engaging in the publicity stunt of suing oil companies for causing climate change; and other litmus tests of the single-issue nonprofit advocacy groups on the Left. Rich amateurs like Steyer, having no record in office at all, have no history of compromises. They are free to share the most extreme positions of the most utopian activists. 

During the first Trump administration in 2017, when congressional Democrats hesitated to impeach the president for fear that the effort would backfire, Steyer founded and funded an outfit entitled “Need To Impeach.” Earlier, in 2013, when many Democratic politicians hesitated to alienate construction unions by blocking the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the United States, Steyer campaigned against it, eventually achieving his goal in the Biden years. Far from proving Steyer’s moral purity, stances like these merely demonstrate the ability of an arrogant rich man freed from constraints to strike dramatic poses to please single-issue zealots.

Like Meg Whitman — the former eBay and Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California who lost to Jerry Brown in 2010 after spending $144 million of her own money — Tom Steyer may yet go down to defeat. But in Illinois, progressive Democrats for the most part don’t object to Hyatt hotel heir JB Pritzker, who, before becoming governor, had never held public office. On the contrary, Pritzker supports most of the positions favored by the Left, from abortion to outlawing assault weapons and legalizing marijuana, so that the fact that he is not only a billionaire but also a super-rich nepo baby is not held against him. Similarly, when Michael Bloomberg won election as Democratic mayor of New York, the fact that he had never been elected to any office before was not held against him by most New York City Democrats. Indeed, this was an advantage in progressive technocracy’s fundamentally anti-political frame.

The elitist, technocratic variant of American progressivism has gathered strength as labor unions, local politics, and mass-membership groups have declined. Whatever happens in the California governor’s race, its adherents can be counted on to privilege rule by experts over political contestation, and to choose rich activists over the messiness of electoral democracy. And they will continue to hope for salvation by a deus ex machina, even if the untainted savior who descends from above is the kind of plutocrat that traditional labor leaders and social democrats viewed with suspicion and disdain.

Implicit in this alarmism is that there is something abnormal, even un-American about a socialist having the audacity to wind up popular. This sensibility has deep roots, from the 20th-century Red Scares, which led to Socialist party leader Eugene Debs being jailed for protesting World War I, to the darker influence of McCarthyism. It also has more rarefied intellectual dimensions. Throughout the Cold War, Right-wing heavyweights from F.A Hayek to Barry Goldwater defined the conflict in Manichean terms: the open society over the closed; individualism over collectivism; freedom rather than forced equality; God against the anti-Christ. In these tellings, America was supposed to be the land where socialism went to die.

But this is ahistorical nonsense. In reality, socialism has deep roots in the United States going back to the early republic. Socialists have even governed in the country, leaving behind a successful legacy that today’s Leftists can justly be proud of. It’s a legacy Mamdani should more openly embrace. 

American socialism burgeoned in the 19th century, and was often deeply intertwined with abolitionism and feminism. An iconic figure of the time was the leading social reformer Frances “Fanny” Wright. Born into a wealthy Scottish family in 1795, Wright was rapidly orphaned but lucky enough to inherit a substantial fortune. She was deeply inspired by the revolutionary republicanism of the era, and also the humanitarian reformism of early socialists like the industrialist Robert Owen.

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Wright traveled to America and was impressed by the country’s democratic institutions and comparative egalitarianism, praising the young republic in her 1821 book, Views of Society and Manners in America. Wright became the “first woman to edit an American journal of opinion and the first to regularly lecture before audiences of men and women,” writes the journalist John Nichols in his book The “S” Word. Over time, she became increasingly worried that the country wasn’t living up to its own ideals. In 1825, Wright published a fiery critique of slavery, becoming one of the country’s most acclaimed — or notorious, depending whom you asked — abolitionists.

Not all of Wright’s efforts succeeded. The same year that she published her tract against the Peculiar Institution, she poured much of her own fortune into establishing the proto-socialist commune of Nashoba in rural Tennessee. Plagued by infertile soil and malaria, it eventually folded. Wright lost a lot of money. But she carried on her activism with the new Working Men’s Party and delivered lectures across the country on women’s suffrage. 

The latter got Wright a lot of flack in the era’s conservative press, with many editors declaring her a “monster” for trying to upend the “natural” patriarchal order. But Wright was undeterred and won loyal admirers. This included America’s poet laureate, Walt Whitman (who himself held socialist sympathies). Whitman declared Wright “a woman of the noblest make up” and recalled that he often read The Free Inquirer, the radical newspaper she co-edited, and had been inspired by her lectures.    

Wright was part of a broader ferment of socialist thought and activism in mid-19th-century America. It swept up the most famous socialist of all time, Karl Marx, who was a longtime contributor to the New York Tribune. As the historian Ander Hartman notes, Marx’s articles for the Tribune constitute the single largest body of work he published in his lifetime. Even as he fiercely criticized America’s plantocracy and, especially, the slave-owning South, Marx saw America as a country at the forefront of progress. 

On behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx even wrote a flattering letter to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, in turn, was an avid reader of the Tribune and shared many of the economic views the progressive paper espoused. In 1861 Lincoln proclaimed that labor is “prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” 

American socialism really kicked into high gear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as labor disputes and Gilded Age inequality intensified in tandem. American class struggle could get very militant; in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, hundreds lost their lives as the state sent in armed forces to crush striking coal workers in West Virginia. Indeed, violent class struggle was a fixture of national life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The Socialist Party of America found a receptive audience during this time under the leadership of the charismatic Eugene Debs. Running for president five times, Debs won 6% of the vote in 1912 and increased his vote tally during a final run in 1920. The latter contest was notable for Debs campaigning from a jail cell. 

The party continued to wield influence under new leader Norman Thomas. An honorable but somewhat melancholy figure, Thomas had been a Presbyterian minister by trade, and his pacifistic socialism was deeply stamped by his religious training. This also fed into Thomas’s militant anti-Stalinism. Initially enthusiastic about the October Revolution, Thomas joined many democratic socialists in the West in repudiating Bolshevik violence and authoritarianism as contrary to socialist principle. This earned Thomas the ire of authoritarian communists, including Leon Trotsky, who described Thomas as a typically hypocritical American who defended imperialism and indulged in religious mysticism contrary to the scientific atheism of orthodox Marxism.

From 1928 to 1948, Thomas ran six presidential campaigns as the Socialist Party’s nominee. He was never able to restore the party to Debs’s levels of electoral success. This was partly because FDR, responding to the misery and unrest of the Great Depression, implemented reforms that took the wind out of the movement’s sails. Nevertheless, Thomas was well respected by the Roosevelt administration, especially the president’s wife, Eleanor. Many core socialist ideas made their way into the New Deal, most notably the Wagner Act of 1935 that legalized labor organizing at the federal level and made it the policy of the federal government to encourage collective bargaining, after years in which organizers were met with bullets and truncheons.

The Socialist Party’s struggle to remain relevant in a two party system was all too real. But this doesn’t mean American socialism didn’t manage to govern elsewhere — including in some unexpected places.

Perhaps the most famous example is in Red Milwaukee, which was governed by socialist mayors for decades. In 1910, Emil Seidel, a patternmaker by trade, won a landslide victory advocating for “sewer” or “municipal socialism.” Seidel pitched his campaign as giving workers not only sewers, but living wages, recreation, clean air, and good homes. It was a message that resonated with the public, and Seidel went on to win the big office. He would establish the first public works department, close down brothels, and launch a city park system. When he ran for re-election in 1912, he won more votes than in his first run, though a surprising Democratic-Republican unity ticket brought him down.

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In 1916, Milwaukeeans returned to socialism, electing Daniel Hoan mayor. He’d hold the position for almost a quarter of a century, until 1940. The city would then go on to elect a third iconic socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, in 1948. Zeidler would emulate Hoan’s long-term popularity, and was re-elected two more times between 1948 and 1960. “Sewer socialists” were municipal planners at heart, building on their philosophy that cooperation, rather than strict competition, would benefit everyone in the city. Their popularity owed much to a combination of strong support for workers’ movements and unions, expansive public works projects like city parks, and a deep dedication to caring for the least well off, not least African Americans. Zeidler drew a lot of fire advocating for desegregation and putting up billboards across the south encouraging sharecroppers to head north for plush jobs in Milwaukee.  

The legacy of sewer socialism continues down through Bernie Sanders, who made a mark as an often pragmatic mayor of Burlington, Vt. By most accounts, these municipal American socialists governed well. This bodes well for the prospect of a Mamdani victory. If he governs New York as well as his socialist forebears ran Milwaukee and Burlington, working-class New Yorkers will get the affordable city they deserve.

Contra the Right’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theorists, then, American socialism isn’t some foreign disease spread by the “Franklin School of Critical Theory,” as the Fox News shouter Mark Levin amusingly called the Frankfurt School in one of his books (repeatedly, so you know it wasn’t a typo). Indeed, American socialism has been around for nearly two centuries. Its sympathizers and proponents have included Walt Whitman, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and more. American socialism has defenders because it addresses real and longstanding dissatisfaction with oligarchy, imperial aggression, racialized social conflict and oppression, and the tyranny of private government in the workplace. 

Not everyone in New York or the country at large is willing to sign up to Mamdani’s cause today. But for the naysayers, it might be worth it to fix the problems socialists expose — rather than constantly trying to banish the red specter.

“I got a good friend where our entire relationship has been comprised of talking about athletes of the past,” El-Sayed tells me in a wide-ranging phone interview. “You just spitball: name an athlete from the past and their best moment, or whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT” (greatest of all time). He adds parenthetically: “It’s Jordan, by the way.”

ESPN used to be at the center of the friendship. But more recently, El-Sayed and his buddy can’t watch it, because the network “has become one gigantic billboard for sports betting, and he has problematic gambling. It’s was such an important of his identity, and it’s gone from him. We don’t talk about that.”

The $100 billion sports-betting “industry” raises bankruptcy rates by a third within four years of a state legalizing the practice, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s about 30,000 additional bankruptcies per year nationally. Yet for El-Sayed, the deeper crisis is how gambling firms, and other corporate peddlers of vice, “monetize men’s dopamine circuits.”

A gym rat and former star athlete, El-Sayed says he doesn’t know “any young man between the ages of 14 and 40 who doesn’t have some kind of problematic relationship with one of the following: sports betting, gaming, porn, cannabis.” Each “leaves people feeling small and kind of broken.” Meanwhile, elite discourse blames men “for this sort of ‘toxic masculinity,’ ” while the likes of Andrew Tate promote a misogynistic caricature of what it means to be a man. “All of these working together have led to this massive MAGA-pilling of young men.”

In response, El-Sayed thinks, Democrats should return to what their party was founded to do: empowering ordinary people relative to the market forces profiting off their misery. In this case, El-Sayed argues, that means regulating vice advertising that attempts to ensnare Americans at ever younger ages. His own daughter Emmalee (age 7), he says, has started to notice a marijuana dispensary called Cookies on the way to hockey practice in Ann Arbor, where the El-Sayeds live.

El-Sayed recalls, “I had to explain to her that they don’t sell cookies. How do I explain to [her] that they’re trying to market a product that isn’t meant for children, but [is] explicitly marketed to children?”

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Post-puberty young men are even worse off, in thrall to those who would addict them (Pornhub), and to those who farm online engagement by shifting the blame (Tate). As El-Sayed puts it, “When you’ve been sapped of all your energy because you’ve just looked at porn for the third time today, because it’s literally everywhere, and then somebody comes and tells you that ‘the reason you feel so bad is because of women,’ you’re talking about people in a very vulnerable place.”

The progressive alternative, El-Sayed contends, should be a combination of self-help and collective action: “You can tell young men, ‘OK, put on your pants, go to class, show up better in your life, hit the gym, all of it.’ But also: ‘Let’s talk about why you feel this way. It’s not about the women in your life. It’s about these huge corporations that have tried to separate you from your dollar in ways that make you feel bad.’ ”

It’s this relentless economic populism — combined with a blunt, here-I-am rhetorical style, especially on Gaza — that has made El-Sayed one of the most talked-about candidates amid the progressive ferment roiling the Democratic Party. Indeed, he comes closest to being the true heir to the aging Bernie Sanders progressives have spent years looking for.

The only question is whether El-Sayed is more like the 2016 Sanders (a heterodox rebel) or the 2020 Sanders (more conventional, more willing to play ball with the party mainstream). The shorter answer is: El-Sayed has elements of both. But on the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.

Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich., to Egyptian parents who’d moved to the area so his father could study engineering at Wayne State University. His parents later separated, and he grew up, as he told a radio interviewer in 2021, with a “Daughter of the American Revolution” stepmother and his immigrant father — the kind of only-in-America blended family that belies fantasies of racial purification animating the online Right.

He finished his undergraduate degree and the first two years of medical school at the University of Michigan before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a public-health doctorate. Back Stateside, he completed his medical degree at Columbia but skipped residency to pursue a career in public-health research. In 2015, at age 30, he returned to Detroit to serve as the city’s health director before running for governor three years later.

His gubernatorial bid failed, but along the way, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, he co-authored a book making the case for Medicare for All that doubled as a decent history of American health care and insurance.

Then came 2024. Michigan proved to be an especially challenging battleground for Democrats — in ways that touched on El-Sayed’s biography. Not only did the Biden-Harris campaign fail to motivate the state’s Muslim-American community, the country’s largest, but Donald Trump even won major endorsements from a number of imams and mayors. When the dust settled, Trump had clinched a majority of ballots in Dearborn, Mich., the country’s most heavily Muslim city.

How does El-Sayed explain the loss? In a word, Gaza. “Unfortunately,” he tells me, “President Biden was on the wrong side of that. His ‘hug-Bibi’ strategy put us in a situation where our values and our aims were not consistently applied as Democrats. . . . Folks got sick and tired of their tax dollars being spent to watch children being murdered who looked like their own children.”

While noting that he endorsed Kamala Harris, El-Sayed isn’t shy about where he thinks principle and politics should lead Democrats when it comes to the Middle East. For starters, he wants more Dems to get comfortable with the G-word: “I call this a ‘genocide’ in large part because that’s a technical term for a horror that’s being inflicted on people. I don’t know another word for killing 60,000-plus people, at least 18,500 of them children. Rendering their homes unlivable. Trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language.”

El-Sayed’s immediate solution to the Gaza crisis is to cut off all funding to the Israeli military (and, he quickly adds, to all foreign militaries): “I think we would do well to spend our money here to feed our children who are going without food, to build our kids’ schools, to empower our people to have health care, to build our infrastructure, rather than decimating and devastating people abroad.”

Unfavorable views of Israel are now overwhelming among Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a growing share of younger Republicans (though, as a whole, the GOP remains stalwartly pro-Israel). Yet the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party isn’t ready to follow its base, notwithstanding a recent vote in the Senate that saw an astonishing half of the Democratic caucus call for withholding offensive weapons from the Jewish state.

Case in point: Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a likely 2028 presidential aspirant, faced broad ridicule for a podcast appearance in which he pontificated at length on Gaza without taking any clear stances. (When I ask El-Sayed to comment on this —Buttigieg is from neighboring Indiana, after all — he demurs: “I’m not a pundit.”)

But besides cutting off arms to the IDF, what’s his long-term plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does he envision a two-state solution? “Every president before Donald Trump, since the founding of the State of Israel, has agreed that we want a two-state solution. That has been their stated aim. There is an Israel — there is not a Palestine. And yet our taxpayer dollars continue to be spent to aid, arm, and abet the very people who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine.”

Squint hard enough, and you might detect a grudging acknowledgment of official US policy there — two states for two peoples. Then again, El-Sayed’s cynicism is well-founded, in that leaders in Jerusalem increasingly reject Palestinian self-determination, most recently with an overwhelming vote in the Knesset in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Given the widening gap between Israel’s leaders and political culture, on one hand, and younger Americans of all political persuasions, on the other, even centrist Democrats are likely to shift in El-Sayed’s direction, even if not all the way. What makes him a potentially transformative leader for the party, however, isn’t his vociferousness on Israel per se, but his hospitals-here-not-bombs-there attitude. It echoes Sanders’s 2016 campaign — and could win back moderate or marginal GOP voters: not MAGA die-hards, but working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.

El-Sayed is open about trying to reach disaffected Trumpians. “The fundamental divide,” he says, “is between people who have felt locked out of our system for a very long time and people who’ve been trying to lock them out. I want to work for the people who’ve been locked out. . . . How they’ve voted in the past, where they stand on social issues — I’ve got my opinions about those things, but I think we’re better as a society when people who’ve been locked out get a fair shake.”

If El-Sayed is indeed the closest thing progressives have to Bernie 2.0, his success will turn on his ability to navigate the tension between class-based economic populism and the identity-and-grievance jockeying that has shaped the party since the mid-2010s.

In 2015-16, Sanders denounced “open borders” and ran an unabashedly class-first message. In response, the party’s neoliberal center derided his followers as “bros” and often accused them (preposterously) of racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton asked: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Four years later, amid “peak woke,” Sanders fell in line on immigration and lost his edge.

Where is El-Sayed on all this in 2025? At first, he bristles at the question and its left-right, class-versus-identity framing: “I’m a little bit too much of a scientist to take on premise a lot of the implied lenses that you’re using to make sense out of our political moment.” Yeah, OK. Obama, too, had wearied of red and blue, right and left by the time he gave his career-defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

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On immigration — an issue that massively contributed to Trump’s re-election last year, and which has dramatically altered politics across the developed world — El-Sayed sounds more conventionally progressive notes. While disavowing “open borders,” he mostly fumes against the cruelty of the newly supercharged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Masked, anonymous ICE agents, he says, “are literally tearing mothers from babies and babies away from mothers. Tell me how this is something that benefits all of us. I just don’t see it, I’m sorry.”

Fair enough. But this doesn’t overcome the deeper economic argument against the free movement of labor: that it allows capital to engage in wage arbitrage, especially at the lower rungs of the labor market. It was just this that impelled the labor movement, and many trade-union and civil-rights icons, to back restrictionism until relatively recently. And it’s why the Bernie of old denounced porous national frontiers as a “Koch Brothers policy.”

El-Sayed disagrees: “The answer to going after the DoorDash economy, is to go after fucking DoorDash.” Meaning: pro-worker and pro-consumer legislation and regulation. So would that include national E-Verify, holding employers responsible for the immigration status of employees? Not quite. His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.

Immigration aside, El-Sayed’s vision resembles Bernie 2016 to a great extent. Class and economic power are at the heart of it: “I’m interested in trying to achieve an America where everyone has their best shot at a dignified life,” he says, “and I understand that the central challenge to doing that has been the power of extremely wealthy people to corrupt our politics, to shape an economy that funnels more and more money to the very top, against and despite everybody else who does all the work.”

He goes on to call for Medicare for All, higher union density in the private economy, robust antitrust enforcement, and the removal of corporate influence from politics. Add his communitarian concern about widespread male addiction and alienation, and his agenda could prove extremely popular in years to come. Doubly so if the Trumpians continue to deliver a George W. Bush program — Medicaid cuts, Mideast war — under the banner of America First.

Thanks to the rise of Mamdani and other DSA-adjacent progressive insurgents running for local office across the land, the group is once more being taken seriously as a political force (a sinister one among conservatives). But it shouldn’t be. In truth, the largest socialist organization in America is a paper tiger. The convention that wrapped up in Chicago over the weekend didn’t showcase an ascendant and aggressive Left. Rather, it offered more proof that Leftists remain hopelessly weak and are mostly content to eat each other, rather than the rich.

There’s little scary about DSA conventions on the ground. (These days, it’s the Right’s CPAC gabfests that look more like a freak show, what with Elon Musk prancing around the stage while brandishing a chainsaw.) When I attended a Chicago DSA convention in 2017 — full disclosure: I was a dues-paying member back then — it confirmed Oscar Wilde’s famous quip: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.”

It’s a lot of meetings with squabbling over arcane rules and procedures broken up by panel discussions and parties, like a mix of an academic conference, a parent-teacher association meeting, and a pep rally. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what DSA didn’t do this time that’s the problem.

For one, the DSA still can’t seem to control its weirdos. There was fighting over the fact that Covid masks were “strongly encouraged,” rather than required like in 2023. For the Left’s Covid dead-enders, the change in policy was tantamount to “eugenics for the disabled.” A few weeks earlier, the DSA-adjacent Socialism 2025 convention hosted a discussion on abolishing marriage and the family, with one panelist saying, “the only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.” Why not keep such cringe locked up in the basement of a hipster bookstore in Portland?

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Mamdani’s victory offered a sane blueprint to the DSA: he largely backed away from his maximalist Abolish Everything! stances from the peak-woke era and ran unapologetically on practical economic issues. Since winning the Democratic mayoral primary in the Big Apple, he has remained focused on New Yorkers’ struggle to make ends meet, while taking aim at the the party’s gerontocracy.

A credible DSA would take the hint and rally against President Trump’s attacks on organized labor and his dismantling of parts of the safety net, thus building a counterweight to mainstream Democrats’ do-nothingness. The convention offered some of that, to be sure. But it was overshadowed by grandiose internationalist moralism, especially over Gaza. The delegates voted almost 9-to-1 in favor of “a movement that will be able to fight against genocide and war across the globe.” But how do you fight war when half your members can’t change a tire?

Meanwhile, matters got ugly over a rancorous vote on declaring DSA an explicitly anti-Zionist organization. Online, there was debate over whether to purge the 40% of members who voted against it. “I couldn’t live with myself if I were funding and mingling with so many genocidal Nazi halfwits,” one agitated person tweeted. “You’re living amongst monsters. You do realize that?”

This is not to say the Palestinian cause lacks moral urgency. The situation in Gaza is, to put it mildly, a horror show. But the convention’s treatment of it as the overriding priority in Trump’s America — at a time when the Left has a genuine shot at expanding its small footprint — attested to a deeper pathology. It’s the politics of powerlessness: the belief that if you can’t change an outcome in material terms, you can compensate by making your rhetoric more extreme and obsessing about the topic that you have the least control over.

The organizer Bayard Rustin, reflecting on similar Left foolishness in Harper’s in 1970, observed: “Since real victories are thought to be unattainable, issues become important in so far as they can provide symbolic victories. Dramatic confrontations are staged which serve as outlets for radical energy but which in no way further the achievement of radical social goals.” Rustin saw no value in symbolic victories. He called such symbolic achievements a “politics of escape rooted in hopelessness.”

Yet the post-Oct. 7 period has only deepened this instinct on the Left. After the collapse of US Left-populism with Bernie Sanders’s loss in 2020 and the drift of The Squad, the DSA suffered. In early 2024, Maria Svart, the organization’s national director, stepped down with a grim parting shot: the DSA was $1 million in the hole and had no realistic plan to climb out. Paid membership cratered by nearly 30 percent nationally, down to just over 52,000, and most chapter meetings drew fewer than 15 people — hardly the socialist mass movement of Sean Hannity’s nightmares.

The Western Left got its groove back by simplifying yet expanding its moral framework to make everything about Gaza. Today, Palestinians aren’t just engaged in a struggle with Israel. They’ve been recast as the tip of the spear in a global war against “the West,” “the Global North,” or “the colonizers” — pick your villain. “The Global South” has displaced the working classes of old as the imagined revolutionary subject, and the antifada has become the new class struggle. It’s as if the messy prism of intersectionality that defined the Left of a few years ago was replaced with something more elemental, almost biblical: a moral universe of pure good and pure evil, where every battle anywhere slots neatly into the same epic. Which is why one panel at the DSA convention was titled — for some reason — “From Mexico to Gaza.”

It’s a seductive framework, because it makes the Left feel powerful in its own mind, as if tweeting about a student protest in London is part of the same chain of resistance as a worker’s strike in Argentina or a Gazan family’s struggle to survive the next eight hours. In the US context, this posture is a political cul-de-sac. It makes the difficult work of coalition building, labor organizing, and contesting elections take a back seat to a permanent foreign-policy morality play.

Inside the DSA, factionalism magnifies the problems. The group is split into what amount to three informal “wings”: the Right (old-school social democrats focused on winning elections); the Left (revolutionary, anarchist, and anti-state types who view electoral politics as a sellout); and the center, which borrows from both but mistrusts compromise. All are far to the left of the median American voter. Yet instead of finding proper common ground, they launch miniature cold wars within the organization. Energy that could go into making more Mamdanis gets burned in procedural fights over who’s “truly” socialist. Fox News and the like may love to bash socialists, but you won’t find many people who despise DSA more than its own members and other Leftists.

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Last year, Eric Blanc, a labor-studies scholar at Rutgers University, posted that “DSA is at a crossroads. It can become another marginal far-Left group with a narrow program, rigid formulas, and tight discipline — or it can remain a big tent, flexible, and welcoming organization oriented to mass working-class politics.” Spoiler alert: the group chose the former. Now the DSA can’t organize a Valentine’s Day dating event without it imploding into a brouhaha over whether trance is a Zionist genre of music (no, really, this happened).

All this is tragic from an authentically socialist perspective. The United States remains a country in decline: its public infrastructure is crumbling; its for-profit health system plunges more than half of Americans into medical debt; working-class life expectancy is declining; and real wages remain stagnant for the bottom half. Yet the activist energy that once might have gone toward reviving the labor movement or Medicare for All is now absorbed by an abstracted, performative global struggle; the battlefield is always somewhere else, even as the home front decays.

Meanwhile, just to the south, Mexico shows what disciplined Left-populism can achieve. President Claudia Sheinbaum, the successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO), won the presidency with nearly 60% of the vote and delivered her party, Morena, a congressional supermajority. She and AMLO did it by combining populist anti-elite messaging with concrete policy delivery: raising the minimum wage, making it easier to organize workers, expanding social welfare, and investing in neglected regions.

Morena translates slogans into legislation and legislation into tangible improvements in ordinary people’s lives. The party, to be sure, isn’t without its share of problems, internal contradictions, and ideological disputes. But these finally don’t eclipse Morena’s core mission. The Mexican Left treats electoral power as something to be built and wielded; the American DSA treats it as a side hustle to its internal culture wars and moral theater.

Mamdani’s win could have been the start of a similarly successful revamp: proof of concept that disciplined, class-based campaigning still works in America. Instead, the DSA has shown it’s still more comfortable as a subculture than a political force. That makes the conservative scaremongering about the DSA all the more farcical. These are liberal-arts grads who can’t free their faces from Covid masks, much less free America from capitalism.

Correction: An earlier version of this essay incorrectly suggested that a family-abolition discussion took place at the DSA convention.

Progressives arguing over whether we should only be talking about democracy and “kings” or the oligarchic power of the super-rich — that’s a stark reminder that our century is growing to resemble the 19th: a world of hyper-exploitation and overweening tycoons; trade protectionism and blatant imperial land grabs; constitutional instability and simmering class conflict. There is no better guide to such a juncture than the 19th century’s greatest dissident thinker, Karl Marx.

Marx’s value as a Virgil-like guide to the darker depths of our condition is highlighted by a pair of recent books: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold, which explores the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s thought, and Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean, which seeks to update Marx for a world that Dean thinks is starting to look less like the classical industrial capitalism he wrote about than a kind of high-tech feudalism. Though varying wildly in both style and substance, both books remind us that 19th-century debates about economic inequality remain all too relevant to 2025.

Polls suggest that Slotkin is, in fact, wrong about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. But the issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.

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Putting aside Slotkin’s concerns, the deeper problem with “oligarchy,” popularized by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, is that the term isn’t terribly specific. After all, most societies since the agricultural revolution have been “oligarchies,” in the sense of being dominated by one kind of elite or another. If we want to be precise, the better term hovering just offstage of most popular discourse is capitalism.

At the most basic level, capitalism is a system in which most economic enterprises are owned by private individuals (“capitalists”). The rest of the working-age population, in order to survive and reproduce themselves, are forced to sell their labor power like any other commodity in exchange for a price — wages. Nearly 160 years since it was first published, the most historically important analysis of what’s distinctive about this system remains Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital.

In it, Marx argued that capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism, ancient slave societies, and so on in that “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or wage-laborers) have to perform “surplus labor” in addition to “necessary labor.” Necessary labor is the labor you do to meet your own needs and those of your dependents. Surplus labor is the time you spend laboring to enrich a ruling class, whether it’s made up of slave-owners, feudal lords, or modern capitalists.

Capitalism is dissimilar to these other systems in two ways, however. First, unlike feudal nobles who were just trying to extract enough for themselves and their families and retainers to live in luxury, capitalists are engaged in market competition with one another, giving them a bottomless incentive to squeeze every possible drop of labor from their workers. Marx memorably called this capital’s “vampire-like thirst” for surplus labor.

Second, unlike slaves or serfs who are legally bound to their masters, modern wage-laborers are “doubly free,” as Marx taught. They are free in the sense that they’re able to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them; they’re also “free” from any alternative means of supporting themselves.

As Marx documented in the last part of Capital, the British working class came to be “free” in this second sense through a long and brutal process of enclosures, whereby peasants were driven from their ancestral lands and forced into urban labor markets — a passage described in much greater detail by the Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi in his magisterial The Great Transformation, first published in 1944.

Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).

Nineteenth-century radical republicans were far from indifferent to the “social question.” But they worried that collective ownership by workers would turn into the subordination of workers by a tyrannical state. The experience of the deeply flawed and authoritarian experiments in state socialism that played out in the following century shows that this was indeed a valid concern, even if some of us continue to believe that better forms of socialism are possible.

Non-socialist republicans’ preferred alternative was to use various mechanisms, including leasing state-owned land to small farmers and establishing grants for artisans, to turn back the clock and restore small-scale production. Here, Marx’s side of the argument has been vindicated by subsequent economic history.

Factory and network effects involve increasing returns to scale, rendering mom-and-pop production simply irrational, not to say impossible, in the age of the machine. Rather, high-tech modern production involves the collaboration of vast numbers of people (often spread over a vast swaths of territory). There is no way to turn back that clock without a staggering reduction in the standard of living of working-class citizens of developed societies, and it’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.

Even so, by the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.

Today, parts of this analysis are directly applicable to us. Other parts of Capital, though, can give a contemporary readers the same feeling they might have reading Charles Dickens novels: that they’re getting a lurid glance at an alien world that has, quite fortunately, receded into the past: only think of his harrowing accounts of child workers chained and flogged to keep them going into the 13th and 14th hour of labor, and other horrors of the kind.

The historical successes of the labor movement and the regulatory state in curbing such abuses are so enormous, in fact, that when we see a return of labor practices without these protections, we temporal natives of the 21st century are tempted to take up far older reference points. Discussing proposals for labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.”

Rendon is no economic historian, and he may have been simply reaching for a vivid way of evoking unjust forms of power and domination. But Jodi Dean takes the analogy seriously in her new book, Capital’s Grave: Neo-Feudalism and the New Class Struggle. In it, she argues that capitalism is in the process of giving way not to the collective ownership and workplace democracy Marx envisioned, but to a high-tech form of “neo-feudalism.”

Dean, a political theorist at Hobart and Smith Colleges, doesn’t go as far as to claim that our society today is already neo-feudal. But she does think that’s the direction in which we’re transitioning, and that the capitalist or semi-capitalist order around us already has many neo-feudal elements.

Feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of class society involved a whole lot more direct, non-economic coercion than capitalism: witness the fate of the Hebrews under the Egyptian yoke. Although early capitalism did involve some brutalities of this kind, capitalism for the most part relied on what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of hunger to goad workers into the factory. This was progress, of a kind. Meanwhile, the imperatives of competition at least forced the exploiters to constantly innovate and make production more efficient.

Today, Dean sees the dialectic of history going into reverse. Rather than doing productive labor, the workforce of the 21st century is increasingly concentrated in the service sector, and capitalists are increasingly turning toward “accumulation strategies” that rely not on out-competing other capitalists through greater efficiency, but hoarding wealth through political corruption, rent-seeking, and predation. She sees an analogy to medieval kings enriching themselves through conquest, for example, in the process of “blitzscaling,” whereby wealthy investors pour money into companies like Uber with the understanding that they’ll be unprofitable for years as they undersell and obliterate the competition.

One problem with all of this is that, in seeking to update Marx’s analysis, Dean shows that she misunderstood it. Marx emphatically doesn’t exclude “service workers” in toto from the commodity-producing working class. In explaining the distinction between productive proletarians and unproductive servants, for example, Marx uses the examples of a cook in a hotel and a cook in a private home. The former is helping to generate the revenues out of which his capitalist is paying him. It’s hard to imagine that Marx could have picked an example closer to a Starbucks barista (the archetypal “service worker” in our time) without access to a time machine.

And a deeper problem is that so many of the trends Dean is talking about are reversions not to the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, but to the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s. What is Uber if not a high-tech application to the transportation sector of exactly the kind of casual and insecure labor practices previously tamed by organized labor and the regulatory state?

Nor did the monopolistic robber barons of the 19th century restrict themselves to accumulation strategies that would meet the approval of libertarian economics professors. Andrew Carnegie had no more scruples than Elon Musk about calling in political favors.

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Dean sees “parcellated sovereignty” as loosely analogous to medieval practices of vassalage in everything from the rise of private security contractors to national sovereignty being limited by international treaties. But the Pinkertons that robber barons like Carnegie would bring in to crush strikes were far less hesitant about spilling blood than contemporary security contractors (at least in developed nations); and the most salient shift in recent geopolitics has been the collapse of the postwar system and the re-emergence of the kind of spheres of influence and land-grabs that defined the military and diplomatic histories of the 19th century. We even have a land war where one of the most hotly contested issues is the status of Crimea.

Finally, the 21st century increasingly resembles the 19th in the role of antitrust politics as a popular solution to the problem of economic oligarchy. Witness the enthusiasm of the mainstream American Left (and even portions of the populist Right) for the Biden administration’s crusading antitrust czar Lina Khan. In conditions where the logistics of production have made a quantum leap from those of 19th-century capitalism, though, the limits of this approach are more obvious than ever.

Antitrust may well deliver enough benefits to ordinary people as consumers to be worth the candle. But it can’t do much about the conditions in which the vast majority of the population spend their working lives. We can make firms as small as they can be consistent with the conditions of modern production, and it would still be mathematically impossible for most adults to make their living as owners, rather than workers. If the republic of labor Marx wanted can feel impossibly utopian given the current state of the Overton Window, a republic of small farmers and small artisans has long since become a technological impossibility as a matter of cold fact.

Whether a powerful workers’ movement of the kind that emerged around the world in the 19th century will coalesce in 21st-century conditions is an open question. The future isn’t settled. What’s certain is that, if labor doesn’t find new ways to assert itself, whatever comes next is going to be bleak.

On the one hand, it’s a marvel to behold the indefatigable Vermont socialist getting the band back together for his barnstorming “Stop Oligarchy” tour — one that first drew sizable crowds in the Midwest and is now drawing tens of thousands on the second leg across the Mountain West, co-headlined with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Sanders has been decrying the evils of oligarchy for decades, and now, with Elon Musk all but co-presidenting with Trump, he looks like a prophet.

On the other hand, there is very little that Sanders (even with AOC by his side) can accomplish. The Democrats are the minority party and act afraid of their own shadow, while Sanders is a not-so-spry 83 years old and stooping more by the year. The experience of seeing Sanders rail against capitalism and the One Percent doesn’t quite hit like it did a decade ago, It’s akin to catching a Rolling Stones show in 2025 — it’s great to hear the timeless hits and all — but the thrills are fleeting. You ask yourself: Are you still Feeling the Bern, or is that just actual heartburn?

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That’s a legitimate question, because it isn’t just Bernie who is getting long in the tooth — so are his supporters and those currently raging against the Trump machine. A decade ago, I described the Sanders run as a “punk-rock presidential campaign,” a middle finger to the political establishment that was far and away most popular with bright-eyed but downwardly mobile college students and 20-somethings. That dynamic played out in the 2016 Democratic primary, in which Sanders thumped Hillary Clinton among under-30 voters, including 83% of young people in New Hampshire.

Not anymore. Today, those packing into high-school auditoriums to cheer Bernie or busy marching in the streets aren’t quite replicating Lollapalooza; it’s more like a particularly raucous school-board meeting. The same Millennials who helped make Left populism cool in the 2010s and marched for a racial reckoning five years ago are now slouching towards middle age. Meanwhile, white-haired dissidents at Tesla protests in 2025 outnumber those too young to rent a car. It’s a changing of the guard — but, ironically, back to the old guard.

The youth have been missing for so long, it’s a wonder that progressives don’t print their faces on milk cartons. College campuses have been quiet, noted Inside Higher Ed, even among institutions where activism is practically an intramural sport. “I haven’t seen a whole lot, which is kind of uncharacteristic of our campus”, observed a student at American University in Washington, DC.

In online forums, political organizers are also making noise about the missing youth. “The last two Tesla protests I went to — the majority were elderly, and I appreciate their support, but why no young people?”, reads a viral post in the subreddit for the 50501 movement, the online group coordinating the anti-Trump capital city protests and others. “If at age 30, I’m the youngest showing up, there’s a problem”. Another post suggested that there were more elderly Trump voters opposing the president’s overreach than young liberals.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the most significant impact made by the Resistance thus far has been a consumer boycott by older Democrats refusing to buy Teslas — it’s not as if many 20-year-old baristas and other members of the precariat are the ones withholding their Cybertruck purchases. Otherwise, with young people gone, the Big Dad Energy at 2025 rallies isn’t enough to make a major impact. The size of the Sanders rallies are impressive, but other protests have largely been a fraction of the size they were during Trump’s first term.

Where did the kids go? The best answer is that most of them didn’t vote at all. The peak of the hyperpolitics era is behind us, and election turnout in November trended downward for young adults. They’re growing more disillusioned with all institutions — the courts, the media, and politicians — no matter which party they’re affiliated with. A new analysis of Gallup data found that less than a third of under-30s trust the government, a new low. In my reporting, I have spoken to many young people who view all politics as toxic, a form of entertainment that didn’t change the world, but ruined a lot of personal relationships. Why doom-march in public when you can doomscroll from the comfort of your home or, better yet, soothe your crippling anxiety with ASMR videos. 

When the youth did vote, they leaned Republican. According to data whiz kid David Shor, Trump won a majority of those under the age of 26 except women of color — a massive change from both 2016 and 2020. They voted for a political revolution over the status quo but from the right, much like the children of Sixties hippies who became Reaganite yuppies. As it turns out, Gen-Z loves Eighties nostalgia of all kinds, whether it’s bubblegum synth-pop, Stranger Things, or the market-friendly politics of Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character from the sitcom Family Ties. 

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But there has been a reluctance to demonstrate even among young Leftists. Some of that is undoubtedly a result of the chilling effect of the campus crackdowns on those protesting America’s role in the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration’s disturbing persecution of demonstrators accused of “un-American activity”, such as Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student activist student detained by ICE and facing a revocation of his green card.  

Yet there has also been an ideological drift among activists who now reject the Sanders coalition as sellouts who supported “Genocide Joe”. Many under-30s Leftists are delusional anarchists who barely mention Medicare for All, minimum-wage hikes, or the universal programs popular in Bernie World. They view Gaza as the Mother of All Causes, the most important battleground in the intifada against Western “colonizers”. All other causes are somehow related, from trans justice to Long COVID to fat shaming. Are you autistic? “Learn how police abolition and neurodivergence advocacy are connected”, reads a flyer from a recent Stop Cop City event. No wonder most normies aren’t grabbing their keffiyehs and joining up.

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But if there’s someone that can relate to dropping out of politics — it’s Democrats writ large. Outside of Sanders and a handful of others, party leaders have been MIA during the first wave of the Trump administration’s decimation of the federal government, perhaps to some undisclosed White Lotus hotel to mourn the false promise that they could slowly coast to permanent victory against conservatives by simply letting them die off. Since the George W. Bush years, liberals clung to the arguments made by John Judis and Roy Teixeira in their polemic The Emerging Democratic Majority, that America’s changing demographics — more college-educated professionals and young single women and minorities — would lead to Dem dominance.

Judis and Teixeira have now recanted — and so should the Democrats. They will have to figure out how not to be a party everyone hates more than the horrid Millie Bobbie Brown robot movie. If the Democrats want to get there — and, let’s be honest, no one’s quite sure where “there” even is anymore — then short of sending Bernie Sanders through a time machine to a decade when his brand of righteous fury felt less like a nostalgia act, they may have to craft an appealing majoritarian agenda and a credible leader this side of a nursing home to champion it.

Like other braceros, my grandfather was sprayed with DDT, a toxic pesticide, upon entering the United States — a ritual humiliation born of American paranoia about Mexican “disease”. Wages were low and often stolen, while housing and transportation conditions were inadequate or downright dangerous. The program also helped depress wages for local workers, and to undermine their organizing efforts. Among the braceros themselves, organizing was extremely difficult; it was easy to deport any ringleaders back to Mexico.

The experience of men like my grandfather impelled the old Left, Mexican-American civil-rights groups, and the labor movement to oppose guest-worker programs. That opposition should extend to modern-day equivalents, such as the H1B visa, which allows tech firms to import what amount to white-collar braceros — and which has become the subject of an ongoing civil war on the American Right.

It’s no surprise, then, that Right-wing opponents of the H1 scheme found an unlikely ally in Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in 2007, Sanders’s skepticism of guest-worker visas led the Vermont socialist to vote against a Bush-era immigration-reform bill that would have expanded such programs. Neoliberal Democrats would weaponize that record against Sanders in his subsequent runs for the party’s presidential nomination.

Today, as the Democratic Party reckons with its dramatic failure in the November election, Left populists have the chance to take the lead in forging a pro-labor approach to immigration — and, perhaps, a grand bargain with the populist Right that imposes order at the border and ends exploitative visas, while extending citizenship to the immigrant workers who have toiled and lived in the United States for years and sometimes decades.

The history of US agricultural labor underscores the need for a more worker-focused approach than the one progressives in recent years have adopted. Agriculture is the largest economic sector that remains excluded from basic New Deal-era labor protections. While workers in most other sectors have a federally protected right to form unions to defend their mutual interests, agricultural laborers do not.

Crucially, Mexicans were exempted from the 1924 Immigration Act that ended the Ellis Island era of mass immigration — often cited by a number of immigration skeptics as their ideal law — precisely because agricultural employers in western states wanted to continue exploiting Mexican workers. The easy deportability of these migrants was a significant selling factor for agricultural employers, continuing a long tradition of employers preferring labor that is easier to exploit and get rid of.

This is the same pattern — do what the boss says or get deported — promoted by modern guest-worker programs. That pattern goes back to their bracero origins, which proved so popular among employers that it continued to grow long after the war had ended, and even as demobilized vets — such as a young Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, where I work — came home and went looking for work in the fields. It was only after a horrific accident involving an overcrowded employer-owned vehicle that killed more than 40 bracero farm workers in 1963 that the program came to an end.

Notably, within a year of its termination, the first successful effort to unionize US agricultural workers began with the UFW’s historic 1965 grape strike in Delano, California. The confidence that striking workers could no longer be easily replaced by braceros was indispensable.

This history echoes today in the H2A agricultural guest-worker program, which is also rife with abuse. Federal investigations have repeatedly uncovered everything from forced labor to employers stealing worker wages to make political contributions. Unlike the H1B visa, which nominally gives recipients a chance at becoming Americans, the non-immigrant H2A visa explicitly excludes agricultural guest workers from future citizenship.

Even worse, workers’ visas are entirely dependent on their employers, effectively allowing bosses to deport a worker at will, or to simply not renew the visa for the next harvesting season — the most convenient way to ensure any potential troublemaker asking about wages or workplace safety will never again set foot in America. Needless to say, the H2A scheme has exploded in size over the past decade, severely undercutting the wages and jobs of the US-citizen workers who still make up a significant share of our agricultural labor force.

Could populist conservatives end such abuse on their own? The short answer is no.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for the incoming Trump II administration, explicitly called for a “cap and phase-down” of H2A guest-worker visas with the aim of “increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector”. Yet Big Agriculture, a much more powerful Republican constituency, wants to see H2A expanded and made cheaper by lowering wages.

As it is, the H2A visa program is already uncapped, meaning there is no legal limit to how many workers it can bring in. The only limits are the costs it imposes on employers required to provide housing, food, and transportation, with growers frequently cutting corners to keep costs down and ignoring the requirement to first offer jobs to local workers.

Still, employers are bent on expanding the H2A program to year-round industries, and worst of all, they want to reduce the federally mandated wages they must pay these workers. In a bitter irony, the prospect of mass deportations is now being used by some industry lobbyists as just the latest excuse to expand the H2A program, saying, in effect: If you get rid of one cheap foreign workforce, we’ll need another one to replace it.

Shockingly, the agricultural lobby, with help from several Republican attorneys general, has even opposed a Biden administration rule requiring seat belts on company vehicles transporting H2A workers. This includes the attorneys general of Idaho and Washington state, where deadly bus crashes involving seatbelt-less company vehicles have left dozens of H2A workers dead.

Unbelievable as it may seem to many conservatives, it was the Biden administration that sought to protect jobs of American workers against displacement by H2A workers. In sharp contrast, it was the first Trump administration that accommodated Big Ag’s priorities on H2A, cutting their wages and thus making it cheaper to displace American workers. Donald Trump even granted H2A workers a special exemption to his Title 42 executive order closing down the border, making sure H2A workers could continue to enter the country during the pandemic.

Put another way: the populist Right, on its own, doesn’t have the influence within the Republican coalition to restrict programs like H1B and H2A in the face of powerful corporate constituencies like Big Tech and Big Ag. The populist Right’s arguments against mass migration may have helped the GOP make historic gains among working-class voters, including with many Latinos who compete in the same economic sectors with new arrivals. But that doesn’t change the fact that Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences on H1B or Big Ag’s preferences on H2A. The nonstop pilgrimages of tech barons such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago will see to that.

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The progressive case against immigration

By Lee Fang

Thus, any serious effort to reform the legal immigration system will need to attract progressives like Sanders who understand the negative impact of guest-worker programs on American workers of all races. Trade unions would be critical in forging such a bipartisan coalition. However, labor has one major demand from any immigration reform effort: an amnesty for existing undocumented workers.

This demand is born out of the most basic duty of any union: loyalty to members. Every union has a legal duty to represent every member of a bargaining unit, regardless of immigration status. The threat of deportation isn’t theoretical to labor. Organizers know from bitter experience that workers who are afraid of getting deported are harder to organize. Many have seen first-hand how the immigration status of outspoken worker leaders is used to silence or even deport them.

Expanding union density in the 21st century, then, requires taking into account the interests of undocumented workers. While employers may be happy to exploit these workers indefinitely without ever extending citizenship rights, the labor movement is locked in as a powerful constituency in favor of a pathway to citizenship. This disposition unavoidably complicates the populist Right’s efforts to consolidate into a coherent pro-worker project.

Despite this, there remains the outline of a deal here for those paying attention: legislation that restricts exploitative guest-worker programs such as H1B, H2B, and H2A, while extending a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented workers who are already here. Such a compromise could be combined with E-Verify provisions to effectively ensure a closed labor market going forward and assuage concerns on the Right about spurring further migration.

This would be an immigration platform designed to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street, and one which the emerging populist center of American politics can rally behind. Call it the American Workers First Act, with four major provisions: restrictions on guest-worker programs; amnesty for undocumented workers without criminal records; mandatory E-verify going forward; and substantial investments in US workforce development.

This is admittedly a long shot in the current political climate. Any deal would need to include a sizable enough amnesty for Democrats to turn on powerful constituencies that would oppose any restriction to guest-worker programs, such as Silicon Valley. In turn, any deal that includes the dreaded A-word, would have to overcome significant skepticism on the Right, and likely necessitate other significant concessions to restrictionist priorities.

But despite the obvious challenges, it’s easy to see what both the populist Right and the labor Left have to gain from such a bargain. For the Right, America would keep the predominantly Latino (and mostly socially conservative) longtime residents already living here, while compelling them to learn English and pay taxes. In exchange, restrictionists would get to slash the number of migrants coming legally for the first time since 1924.

For the labor Left, such a deal is first and foremost a pathway to citizenship for very deserving and hard-working people. Extending full citizenship and labor rights to the undocumented workers who make up a large share of the workforce in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, caregiving, and construction also creates new organizing opportunities. Many Democrats would no doubt still strongly oppose a compromise that went against the interests of major corporations. But the political pressure to seize the long-awaited opportunity for a pathway to citizenship would be unavoidable.

Could any Democratic senator really tell her constituents that she voted to keep the Mexican grandmothers undocumented in order for Elon Musk to continue bringing in tech workers on demand from India?

This is the conversation we should be having. The days of relying on business interests to deliver Republican votes for immigration reform are clearly gone, and have been since at least 2013. For a labor Left looking to protect and empower our undocumented members, it is the populist Right we should be negotiating with.

An immigration policy truly concerned with the interests of American workers would recognize a highly exploitable permanent immigrant underclass as a threat to American jobs and wages — one best eliminated by extending the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not by the cruel and unworkable fantasy of removal. American workers would be the biggest winners of a compromise which would leave them able to compete on a fair and level playing field.

The Vermont Senator has, to observers’ surprise, expressed approval of both Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory body (DOGE) and RFK Jr’s vociferous criticisms of the food industry. What’s more, Sanders, who co-chairs the Senate Health Committee, says he still hasn’t decided on how to vote when it comes time to confirm Kennedy’s nomination for health secretary.

Moving beyond the tired “Resistance” tropes of the first Trump term, Sanders appears to be trying out a different kind of response to Trump’s renewed ascendancy: that of a cautious and qualified engagement with aspects of MAGA-ism that align with the Left’s own populist instincts. But are there really any genuine shared political convictions to sustain a Right-Left populist convergence?

Take Bernie’s positive comments on Musk — “a very smart guy” — and DOGE. One would think that there would be zero ideological overlap between a radical redistributionist and the world’s richest man. Yet Sanders tweeted: “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row.” He went on to lambast the “Military Industrial Complex and a defence budget full of waste and fraud”. Lex Friedman, stalwart of the now “red-pilled” or Right-coded podcast world, replied “Happy to see this,” while an incredulous “Antifascist” account exclaimed: “Have you lost your fucking mind? Elon Musk is a Nazi oligarch who is in the process of taking our country apart. He’s the enemy.”

Such reactions are to be expected from the progressive base. But it must be remembered that Bernie was shaped by a Sixties Leftism heavily infused by the spirit of the anti-war movement, with its deep animus toward the defence establishment. Until recently this had been an almost exclusively Left-wing position. But as insiders in that establishment have increasingly cosied up to Democrats in response to the rise of Trump, the result has been a set of awkward alliances. For instance, while Bernie praised ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney for endorsing Kamala Harris, it can’t have been easy for a lifelong peacenik to be on the same team as a politician whose last name is synonymous with neoconservative bluster and military adventurism.

In embracing at least this plank in the DOGE plan, Sanders is merely returning to form as a tried and true Leftist. And herein may be a useful strategy for progressives. Sanders can partially restrain the GOP’s mounting drive toward austerity by working to ensure bipartisan legitimacy for elements of DOGE that would be popular with voters: he could try to redirect Musk’s cost-cutting impulses away from, say entitlements or infrastructure, and toward clearing the coffers of the deep state, or at least opting for more efficient spending choices.

Bernie’s positive remarks about RFK Jr illustrate a similar resonance between these strains of Leftism and MAGA’s anti-elite sensibilities. In an interview with CBS last week, the Senator was clear in voicing disagreement with Kennedy’s “extremely dangerous” stances on fluoridation and vaccines but nonetheless conceded: “I think what he’s saying about the food industry is exactly correct. I think you have a food industry concerned about their profits, could care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.” Indeed, it is a testament to the extent of ideological shifting in the Trump era that such anti-corporate stances, at least with the large sector of the economy, now belong more to the Right than to the Left.

Kennedy, who has hitherto only even been known as a hard-edged environmentalist progressive and health nut, seems now to be integrating seamlessly into the Right’s coalition, as evidence by his plum cabinet nomination. His many eccentric takes on public health issues have long struck a chord among the MAGA base, especially in the post-Covid era of heightened hostility to experts. And just as Right-populism has turned against the Pentagon brass, it has also, under Kennedy’s guidance, begun to take aim at the nexus of corporate interests in the foods and pharma industries. Like the President-elect’s promise to drain the swamp of Washington, his prospective HHS Secretary threatens to do the same with the Food and Drug Administration.

For an unreconstructed Leftist like Sanders, this is more than enough reason to sympathise with the “MAHA” agenda. But for the progressive rank-and-file, including the many educated and expertise-abiding Democrats who see nothing but crankery in Kennedy, it may be a tougher pill to swallow. The challenge for Bernie will be in navigating these tensions, finding a way of reckoning with Kennedy’s systemic critique, which is still broadly relatable to liberal elites, while coming up with more nuanced and constructive fixes than just slashing and burning through the federal bureaucracy. This would mean acting as a moderating and refining influence on a future Secretary Kennedy, something he will be well positioned to do from his Senate perch.

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MAGA must be reborn

By Michael Cuenco

So, as it turns out, the idea of a Right-Left populist front has more substance to it than a surface-level reading of the situation may suggest. The question now is: how much farther can it go? Well, Sanders and Trump, entering the national stage at around the same time in 2015, once offered remarkably complimentary critiques of the political and economic status quo.

In fact, at a conference in February 2017, President Trump got the audience of Right-wing activists to cheer the socialist for being “right about trade”, a portent of the shift toward all-out protectionism within the GOP. He could have added that Bernie was right on immigration as well, for in those years he was still able to speak readily about open borders as a “Koch brothers policy” that depressed wages and living standards, an old-school labour view that’s since been called out as heresy by the current ultra-globalist incarnation of the Left.

But given talk of impending mass deportations, could the vintage restrictionist Sanders make a comeback? As with his qualified endorsements of Musk and Kennedy, he could accept the basic premise of Trump’s case and help re-legitimise the once uncontroversial view that uncontrolled migration hurts American workers. He could propose smart policies to secure the labour market (like mandatory national E-Verify) while calling for more humane approaches to resolving the status of the undocumented population. Such an outcome, though admittedly fanciful, would amount to a productive fusion of the best instincts of Trumpism and Leftism.

Rather than a novel aberration, Bernie’s conciliatory gestures may herald a reversion to an earlier convergence between the populist edges of the ideological spectrum. It would seem to confirm the old “horseshoe theory” of politics. Yet as he eyes his exit from elected office, it remains to be seen whether his successors can maintain the course. A favourite for the presidential nomination in 2028, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not only “dropped her pronouns” but also started to seek out and listen to her own district’s AOC-Trump split voters (and without also denouncing them as having racist inclinations). If she is in fact trending in a similar direction to Bernie, it may suggest that the Left have more than a passing interest in holding up an olive branch to MAGA.

But they must. In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion. Only by accepting this, and making the case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking, can the Left reconnect with its blue-collar roots.

And perhaps it isn’t such a heretical thought. Across the world, Left-leaning political parties have fared best when they have adopted restrictive policies on migration. The reigning Social Democratic Party of Denmark has won successive elections over the last decade with no fear from the populist Right, in large part because of its refusal to take in new asylum seekers and in its efforts to reduce any net migration.

For centre-left Danes, this position isn’t so much an aberration, but an extension of the fight against neoliberalism. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” Mette Frederiksen, the SDP leader and Danish Prime Minister wrote in her autobiography.

The same can be said of the United States. It is no coincidence that the era of lowest immigration to this country, between the Thirties and Sixties, coincided with the greatest expansion of labour unions, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Reduced migration meant less infighting and greater focus on the broad public interest among the working and middle class. It was these decades that gave us the federal minimum wage as well as Medicare and Social Security, our most durable and most generous entitlement programmes.

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By Lee Fang

Contemporary trends also strongly correlate. Democrats this century have won the White House only in years of decreasing migration. In 2008 and 2012, the years Barack Obama won two successive bids, immigration was down sharply. Four years ago, the Covid pandemic led to the closure of the US-Mexico border and the suspension of most visa programmes, measures that led to the fastest decline in migration on record. Of course, these weren’t the only factors, but the absence of a migration crisis sucked the wind out of the sails of Trump’s reelection that year.

More recently, the Democrat Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, who represent two of the three districts that the Democrats held onto in Trump country, bucked their party by voting for hardline immigration enforcement and never missed an opportunity to remind voters that they disagreed with their party leaders on this issue. That’s not to say they abandoned the Left. Golden is a torchbearer of labour unions and Perez has been outspoken on breaking up corporate monopolies. But they show how the Democrats can once again become a big tent party, bringing back independent voters.

Many progressives disagree, pointing to the racist quota systems behind 20th-century limitations on migration. And it’s true that the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slashed migration by more than 80%, had bigoted justifications in line with the more intolerant views of the day. But racist beliefs of the past should not be weaponised to dishonestly argue against race-neutral immigration laws of the present. Migration levels can be cut across the board and a merit-based system need not have any ethnic component. Border security should not take race or ethnicity into account.

It is this dangerous conflation of laissez-faire migration policy and anti-racist activism that has wreaked havoc among the Left. In the reaction to the first Trump Administration, many liberals unthinkingly embraced unlimited migration as a progressive value. Such views only widened the distance between the Left and the working class.

The Left seems to have all but forgotten who is pushing, behind the scenes, for fewer immigration barriers. The fast food giants, industrial agribusiness interests, slaughterhouses, and other business groups lobby to import new workers on a strictly economic basis. Corporate executives leaned on the Biden Administration to increase the flow of migration over the last four years to reduce what they euphemistically called “wage inflation” — business-speak for higher wages won by tight labour markets. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has championed its own immigration lobbying bonanza in a bid to bring lower wage computer programmers to American shores.

Most mainstream Democrats, including Joe Biden, once sang a different tune and recognised the connection between business and mass migration. Back in 2006, Biden previously campaigned on building a new border fence and enacting new laws to “punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when they hire illegals”.

But the shift away from their traditionally tough stance has coincided with the changing demographics of the party base, especially its core of urban, educated professionals — who tend to benefit economically from mass migration. If you’re an educated white-collar worker, it’s unlikely you will face direct economic competition with a migrant hailing from Venezuela or Afghanistan. In most cases, you benefit from the lower wages of immigrant Uber drivers, maids, and kitchen staff in the form of cheaper goods and services. And there’s a small chance that you will be competing with migrants for limited spots at a homeless shelter or in line at the food bank.

This shift was only accelerated by Trump’s arrival. In 2017, Left-leaning politicians reflexively began opposing anything Trump supported, even if these ideas were in line with traditional Democratic policy priorities. For instance, they began dismantling routine immigration enforcement mechanisms, such as the 287(g) local law enforcement program, put into place by previous Democratic presidents, tying the hands of the Biden administration.

In those years, activists and politicians alike embraced slogans like “Abolish ICE” and competed to show deference to illegal aliens. It was in the midst of this dynamic that Kamala Harris took her most unpopular stances, such as her pledge to provide undocumented aliens in detention centres with taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.

More to the point, the highly educated activist Left created cultural parameters that made open discussion of these issues impossible. Recall the treatment of Bernie Sanders who went viral for retorting: “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers idea.” Invoking the arch-Republican billionaires, Sanders was expressing concern that mass migration lowers wages to the benefit of corporate interests. But many liberal media outlets decried Sanders as a racist bigot, an “ugly” xenophobic dinosaur of the highest order. An idea that once formed the bedrock of the labour movement has been transformed into an example of Leftist heresy.

But take it from the Cato Institute, the gem of the Koch foundation-backed libertarian research centres. Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president of the institute, previously commented on the benefits of mass immigration from the perspective of the pro-business elite.

“A diverse population,” Nowrasteh observed wryly on a thread debating mass migration, “reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.”

In other words, waves of immigrants are favoured by this Koch-backed pundit not only for macro-economic reasons. He sees the cultural and political disruption it fuels as an essential benefit. The less societal cohesion, the less likely welfare state policies will advance.

I view the issue from the opposite direction from the Koch foundation world. The need for new social programmes is already fast approaching. Americans are living longer than ever, exacerbating the financial outlook of retirees and care facilities. And the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and other automation technology may soon replace tens of millions of workers. But if society is so consumed with backlash over immigration, how will the Left ever propose a workable solution to any of these challenges?

Borders pose an existential challenge for Democrats, one that forces them to reckon with the drift on class. Will American remain perpetually in conflict over new arrivals, constantly divided and competing with lower wage workers and pondering questions of shifting cultural identity, or will we end this cycle and fix the problems that plague our most struggling citizens. The future of progressive policy depends on solving it.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

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The march of Kamala's brides

By David Samuels

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

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Donald Trump: new media king

By Sam Kahn

It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

Welcome to Rutland, a small city in one of Vermont’s beautiful mountain valleys. Here in so-called “Old Vermont”, the people are poorer and more conservative than in the liberal and wealthy city of Burlington. Rutland is a world apart from the pampered lands of “New Vermont”, with its affluent college towns, weed dispensaries, ski resorts and lakeside houses. Rural people here have been left behind, and their politics are growing more radical by the year.

For a long time, Vermont’s golden boy, US Senator Bernie Sanders, kept the peace between the state’s rural working class and liberal transplants from the coast. Despite a raging “Take Back Vermont” movement in the early 2000s, Sanders’s Left-wing populist policies settled tensions between the “woodchucks” and “flatlanders”. Sanders was and still is a contradictory figure, which suited his constituency perfectly. He is hesitantly pro-gun rights, but against the billboards that market them; fiercely libertarian while also supporting “big state” welfare policy; vocally pro-LGBT and veterans’ rights.

Yet the Sanders compact between Old and New Vermont is growing increasingly fragile. The gap between the poorest Vermonters and wealthy new arrivals is widening, as inflation, deindustrialisation, farming constraints and high property prices squeeze rural populations. Though the Green Mountain State is often considered a bastion of liberalism, it is no longer immune from the political fury poisoning the rest of America.

To get a sense of Vermont’s delicate political situation, I travelled to Burlington: the birthplace of New Vermont. In the late Sixties, refugees from the hippy movement, including Sanders, pitched up here and refashioned themselves as socialists. These hippy exiles — along with the expansion of college education — are credited with transforming Vermont from a Protestant Republican stronghold into a liberal Democratic one.

“This used to be a very Republican state up until the Sixties” says Janet Metz, Chair of Chittenden County Republicans. “You had a lot of people coming to study at the University of Vermont and staying here. A lot of the hippy generation came up here too — not going to school, but living on communes.”

Eventually these starry-eyed bohemians would grow up, start businesses and buy houses. Politics became pragmatic as the Progressive Party replaced New Left radical movements such as the Liberty Union. Sanders’s former comrades in the Liberty Union would go on to disavow him in 1999 as a “bomber”, “imperialist” and “sell-out” over his supposed support of Nato’s intervention in Yugoslavia. At one point, they even occupied his Burlington congressional office. But it wasn’t enough to stop the rise of Vermont’s new Progressive nobility.

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From Burlington I head to the small farming town of Hinesburg. When I arrive, Vermont’s Progressive Lieutenant Governor, David Zuckerman, picks me up in a rundown car he uses for farming organic chickens, pigs and CBD. Zuckerman has known Sanders since the Nineties, and the two are cut from the same cloth: like Sanders, Zuckerman is a Vermont expat hailing from the Boston suburbs; a progressive, but also a pragmatic, straight-talking social democrat. You can see glimmers of Vermont’s old New Left libertarian ethos in his opposition to mandatory government vaccination among other things. And there is talk that he might one day succeed Sanders as a Vermont senator.

For now, Zuckerman believes Vermont’s communities haven’t yet been ruined by polarisation. “People are respectful to their neighbours,” he tells me. “It’s still a value, because you might go off the road in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. Everyone’s going to help — it doesn’t matter what bumper stickers are on your car. Compared to the rest of the country, it’s a strong ethic.” Yet, Zuckerman admits that this compact between Vermonters is less strong than it was decades ago.

Perhaps the state of local politics in New England explains this relative harmony. Where national politics divides the state, respect for local democracy unites it. I’ve arrived on Town Meeting Day, an annual event where townsfolk come together to debate and vote on local issues. It’s a New England tradition dating to the colonial era: for 24 hours, ordinary voters turn into legislators and scrutinise the town budget. These small, rural community meetings have “empowered us to demand authenticity in our relationship with leaders”, says Susan Clark, a writer on Vermont politics and co-author of Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home.

The stubbornness and eccentricity of Vermonters is on full display at the meeting. Citizens vote on everything from fire trucks to pavements. One woman stands up several times and asks: “Why do we need four snow ploughs and seven cops? We can do with two ploughs and five cops.” The officials chairing the debate provide justifications for the numbers, and the woman blankly refuses to concede her point. Between votes, the chair of the meeting mills around and chats with residents about Donald Trump and the dangers of the next presidential election.

The gap between politicians and the citizenry feels smaller here than elsewhere, with retirees and young police officers stopping to chat with, or lambast, Zuckerman about small-town and global issues alike. Here, political conversation is often infused with wider American anxieties about class, power and economics. The culture war is never far away.

By contrast, Town Meeting Day in Burlington is a lethargic affair. There is the odd road sign and a dozen picketers huddled against the rain. The people I stop in the street are apathetic, shrugging me off while muttering “they’re all the same, aren’t they?” The political energy of Hinesburg appears to have dissipated in the city. All the Progressive Party activists I talk to seem quietly dispirited: it was only four years ago that their candidate was poised to take the White House.

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The Republican chair, Metz, is similarly disillusioned. “If you look at who’s in the Vermont house and legislature as Democrats and Progressives, it’s trust-fund babies, people with spouses who make a lot of money.” Moreover, Metz points out that, increasingly, it is not the Progressives who are threatening her base, but widespread apathy and distrust of party politics. “I’m competitive in the northwest part of my county, in Milton, but it’s changing,” she says. “If you look, district by district, people identified as independents often now outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined.”

Metz explains that a lot of the “Old Vermont” crowd, those who traditionally made up her Republican base, are leaving. “What’s really driving populism in Vermont are the people who have lived here for generations and can’t pay their property taxes anymore… A lot of our people are leaving the state — they’re just up and leaving. They’re moving to New Hampshire, Florida and the Carolinas because they can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Their exodus is symbolic of the wider breakdown of the Bernie Sanders compact. His vision of an affordable, independent and proudly democratic Vermont, in which Old and New coexisted peacefully, now appears a fruitless daydream. In its place is anger and resentment. The home of radical Left-wing populism has finally succumbed to the now-familiar American rot of polarisation.

The former are happy to have a set of cartoon cut-out villains to rail against: incels and misogynists who openly talk about their hatred of women; racists who unabashedly use racial slurs and claim that black people are genetically inferior; anonymous trolls who openly invoke Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as examples to be emulated. These online villains, for their part, are more than happy to be given attention, and want nothing more than to be known as consummate outsiders; scary barbarians just waiting for a chance to pillage all the norms that liberal society holds dear.

As it happens, though, this sort of thing is mostly theatre. Far from being outsiders and outcasts, these dissidents are not so much enemies of liberal society as its products. Like the “Dirtbag Left” that once gathered around Bernie Sanders and had notions of upending capitalism only to meekly be reabsorbed into the machine they purported to fight, the average edgy Hitler worshipper on Twitter is far less scary than he tries to appear. If John Steinbeck said that the US would never be fertile grounds for socialism because every American worker considered himself merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, then one can add today that our online world mostly consists of temporarily embarrassed middle-class liberals.

A recent storm of drama and division within the online “vitalist” movement illustrates this well, and in a humorous fashion to boot. Vitalism, for the uninitiated, refers to an extremely heterogeneous collection of tendencies and idiosyncratic personalities, loosely affiliated with the Right and Donald Trump. This affiliation with the 46th president, however, is strictly one-way: while many vitalists would like to attach themselves to the “Trump movement” in some fashion, it seems very doubtful that Trump actually wants them or even knows that they exist.

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The intellectual tendencies that make up the vitalist movement are broad —in some cases openly nonsensical — and it is probably fair to say that they have very little broad electoral appeal. What they do say runs the gamut from various oddball interpretations of Nietzschean philosophy and a veneration of scantily clad male underwear models to talking about black criminality and how we live in a “longhouse gynocracy”. In general, this is mostly a subculture concerned with edginess and self-referential jargon. Some people are only there to shitpost; others hope to market their own personal “brand” to make money from the sale of protein powders or podcast subscriptions. And finally, a few truly foolish souls clearly hope to use their online notoriety as a springboard into legitimate politics.

One of the leading voices within this subculture — a person going by the non-de plume of Bronze Age Pervert — recently had details about his real identity posted online by a rival within these online spaces. BAP, it turned out, was actually a Yale academic from a fairly well-to-do background, with many connections inside what Donald Trump would probably deride as “the swamp”. Unfortunately for his online stans, however, he was also Jewish.

Normally, a person being Jewish is hardly cause for scandal or even concern, and certainly not an online civil war. In an online environment where people openly praise Hitler, however, that sort of factual reveal is pretty awkward. Indeed, BAP himself clearly had a habit of playing with fire here, posting tweets such as “I’m an Aryan supremacist and believe in the extermination of hundreds of millions”, all to loud cheering from his many fans.

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To the shock of absolutely nobody, however, it turns out that the Nazi Germany fandom still has something of an antisemitism problem, even in 2023. The result is that many of his former fans feeling legitimately betrayed, while other, more loyal fans have been fighting a bitter battle to try to explain why the online racist movement can’t afford to judge people merely based on their ethnic background, because groups of people are really just made up of individuals that can be good or bad. Imagine that.

Now, this all might reasonably lead someone to how this could all happen. What sort of appeal would an online space obsessed with “naming the Jew” — a forum that is often genuinely distrustful of and disgusted by Jewish people — even have for a Yale-educated Jewish man from a well-to-do and academically successful family? The answer to this question is quite simple: there is very little new in the contradictions surfacing on the online Right, because all of them have happened before — on the Left.

For the Left, the 2010s saw a massive cohort of “overproduced elites” turn towards the ideologies of socialism, communism, and social democracy in huge numbers. People graduated from first and second-tier universities only to find no jobs waiting for them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In response, they turned toward Left-wing organisations and forcibly colonised them. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was an incredibly sleepy fossil of an organisation until Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the victory of Donald Trump, when it was inundated by tens of thousands of young, almost entirely college-educated radicals. In the UK, Labour was flooded by the same sort of people through Momentum, and they catapulted Jeremy Corbyn from the sidelines to party leadership, much to his own surprise.

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Of course, this would end in disaster. Bernie Sanders was reabsorbed into the Democratic party machine, and the DSA mostly devolved into infighting, as the ambitious simply saw it as a convenient ladder by which they could secure a sinecure inside the Democratic party. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, presided over a massive loss of working-class support, leaving the “real actual communists” furious with the racist “gammon” workers they had spent the last few years pretending to care about. This was a movement driven by the insecurities, needs and demands of people with academic backgrounds whose promised place inside the economy had suddenly disappeared, and they latched onto communism and socialism as their lifeline back into the middle class.

The ongoing drama surrounding Bronze Age Pervert and his cohort is, in this sense, just a slightly absurd rethread of this story. Bernie Sanders lost in 2016 and Donald Trump won, but the middle-class jobs for the scions of academia did not return. And so, many of them flocked to “racism” as the new frontier as “socialism” collapsed in on itself; in certain cases, such as that of occasional art critic Anna Khachiyan and part-time actress Dasha Nekrasova from the popular podcast Red Scare, the transition from vaguely scary Left-wing aesthetics to vaguely “based” Right-wing aesthetics has essentially been seamless — a slick brand update that kept the Patreon payments flowing.

To put this controversy in exceedingly simple terms: where once the workers of Britain and America felt that their cause and movement was being shamelessly usurped by people who weren’t workers and didn’t care about them, today racists and antisemites in both Britain and America are mad that their own racist and antisemitic spaces are being usurped by self-interested outsiders, some of whom are quite literally Jews. And they’re not actually wrong. Like a horde of hermit crabs in search of new shells, Western society’s inability to absorb the huge amount of surplus “leaders” and middle-class “elites” it has produced has led to them looking wherever they can for flags, causes and movements to usurp, all in the hope of the pay cheque (and social status) they felt that they were owed.

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Should we sympathise with legitimate fans of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler who feel as if they’ve been robbed of their own movement, their own “safe space” away from the ever-present threat of Jewish domination? Maybe not. But to borrow from that famous line in The Big Lebowski, one can say what one will about the tenets of National Socialism — to them it’s an ethos. To the overproduced scions of a disappearing Western middle class, by contrast, racism is mostly just a branding device, an angle for a podcast, a lunch ticket, a mask. The cause itself, the ideology, worker’s rights, naming the Jews — none of it really matters in the end.

These people have worn many masks before, and they will wear more masks in the future, until liberal society recognises them for who they are and finally gives them the only thing they really care about: a white-collar email job, ideally one that carries a little prestige and can be performed remotely.

Ten years on, the West is undergoing a furious period of labour militancy. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in France. Rail workers are threatening the US economy with shutdowns over pay increases and a lack of paid sick leave. In Canada, truckers shut down several border crossings and occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month. British nurses and Canadian teachers are on the verge of mass walk-outs. In France, nuclear industry workers threaten strike action, while a strike among refinery workers earlier this year led to acute fuel shortages, with hour-long queues and rationing at petrol stations.

This wave of militancy displays no signs of cresting soon. If anything, given the general economic situation, things are likely to get worse: inflation is exploding, energy is in short supply, and the cost of living is rising. Workers will get angrier, and they have the ability to make their anger felt in painful ways.

Intriguingly, this revival of labour militancy has done nothing to alter the fortunes of the radical or populist Left. It has only revealed that the rift between them and the working class across the West has become more or less permanent. Six years after Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn saw their stock soar, legitimate worker anger often finds itself being dismissed as a tool of the “far-Right”, and labour militancy is feared and despised.

It’s easy to laugh at the Left in this situation — but its arc from enthusiasm to horror in the face of actual protests and labour struggles out in the street is fairly rational. The Left’s fear speaks to one of our era’s central political conflicts: a growing consciousness among working people that the biggest dividing line runs between the people employed in the “real” economy and those working in the “virtual” one.

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Over the last decade, a number of terms have been invented to describe this divide, from “Professional Managerial Class” to “the email caste”. None of these labels are perfect, but their growing popularity speaks to the fact that more and more people can now see that there really is a conflict at play here. The man driving a truck or a tractor and the revolutionary working for a billionaire-backed NGO are not only not natural allies, but their different roles in the economy increasingly make them real enemies.

It is no surprise that farmers end up on this struggle’s frontline. One absurd illustration of the deep contradictions in our debt-laden, de-industrialised Western economies can be seen — where else? — on Twitter and TikTok, where you can watch clips of young, radical climate protesters who want to “abolish farming”. Farming, as it turns out, is so very damaging to the planet in terms of CO2 pollution that we must do away with the industry altogether.

Put aside the ludicrousness of this wish, which if implemented would doom us all to starvation. Rather, consider the fact that we live in a society where having this position — fighting against farming for the sake of climate change — is not only possible but also admired. For young people in college towns, the question of where the food comes from is completely abstract; and as they plod along their chosen life path, from university radicalism to an NGO to government service and then back again, they need not encounter anything to make them change their opinion of the world. Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops, and from the truckers who make sure the food shows up on the shelves — is nearly complete. Student climate protestors do not seem to realise that food does not grow inside the supermarket.

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More perniciously, a growing crisis of over-regulation created, then driven, by “the email caste” is also taking shape. This ever-growing body of ordinances only creates frustration and anger among the material workers who have to live by them. It is not that these rules are necessarily malicious. To take one example, the idea that we should make the internal combustion engine redundant by the mid-2030s is probably motivated by genuine concerns for the environment. The problem is that these laws are completely disconnected from reality.

Last year, the Canadian trucker Gord Magill asked a simple, radical question: “How essential are the ’email job’ caste?” Magill’s essay was one early example of a new class consciousness, slowly brewing in the West. It was an open acknowledgement that there is an “us vs them” divide that refuses to fit into the Left’s conception of the “99% vs the 1%”. For Magill, it is the farmers, the truckers, and the aeroplane mechanics who comprise the “us”. And it is the NGO employees, the activist regulators, and the managers who make up the more immediate foe.

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Whether you’re watching a farmer protest in the Netherlands or a trucker occupation in Canada, or even a wildcat airline pilot strike in Florida, there are growing echoes of this analysis everywhere. The figure of the enemy today is increasingly no longer the capitalist in the top hat. It is Klaus Schwab; it is the manager and the regulator. They hope to close down your farm, digitise your currency, and abolish private ownership. At one point during the 20th century, the figure of the “social engineer” was popular inside the worker-dominated social democratic parties of the West. In 2022, that same social engineer has now become a hated enemy. He is no longer seen as having any good intentions towards ordinary working people, nor can he even be trusted to understand how the real world works.

The 2020s, then, promise to be a decade filled with discontent and increasingly dramatic shows of worker militancy. Beyond inflation, beyond anger at the rising cost of fuel, heating and food, there is now a simmering political rage motivating people to take to the streets and the pickets. Like Gord Magill, workers are deciding that they’ve had enough of being ruled by an “email caste”. If email workers no longer care about the real economy they’ve left behind, why should workers care about them?

Next week, Danes will go to the polls — and the country is showing tiny signs of fatigue. To the casual observer it’s not at all obvious. On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, Copenhagen is a picture of harmony: cyclists glide home along supersized bike paths after their short work days; jolly pensioners sip beer on the banks of one of the inner city lakes as fit millennials pass by on their after-work jog. A pint costs an arm and a leg, partially thanks to the country’s 25% VAT rate, the third highest in the world, but, according to the surveys at least, the Danes are happy to part with a significant portion of their income for comprehensive healthcare, low-cost daycare and world-beating welfare benefits. The caring state is largely responsible for their reputation as the “happiest people in the world”, even if the Finns pushed them down to second place in the World Happiness Report this year.

Thanks to those stellar rankings, Denmark has attracted the awe of progressives overseas, most notably during the 2016 US presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders, to his own detriment, banged on about “democratic socialism” — you know, like in Denmark. What he meant was free healthcare and free university, traditional policies of European social democracy.

Denmark is not particularly socialist. Its economy is highly capitalist. In fact, it’s the easiest country in the world to do business. Taxes might be high, but capitalists also seem happy with the pragmatic “flexicurity model” pioneered by Social Democrats in the Nineties while the rest of the Western world was going all out neoliberal: Denmark weds a super-flexible (it’s easy to hire and fire) labour market with comprehensive retraining and generous financial support for the unemployed. The system works: in September, the unemployment rate was a minuscule 2.7%.

So where are the signs of fatigue? Quite simple: as in the rest of the world, Denmark’s resilience has been stretched by the after-effects of Covid and now the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis.

The Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, steered the country through the pandemic with a steady hand. Showing a decisiveness that was praised at the time, she sent Denmark into lockdown before other European countries, but then was one of the first leaders to lift Covid restrictions. Denmark’s vaccination programme was extremely well organised — something I can attest to, having moved here in the middle of the pandemic from Germany, where the response was muddled and inefficient. At the time I thought: this is the well-ordered country Germany wants to be.

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But Frederiksen made one fatal mistake: a rushed decision in 2020 to slaughter 17 million farmed mink after 12 Covid infections in humans were traced to infected animals. Hundreds of mink farmers were stripped of their livelihoods. The affair took a macabre turn when “zombie minks” resurfaced from mass graves, pushed up by gases released by their decomposition.

The cull was illegal, it turned out. Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the leader of the Danish Social Liberal Party, one of the “red bloc” parties supporting Frederiksen’s minority government, threatened earlier this month to stage a no-confidence vote over the mink scandal, forcing the prime minister to announce an election on 1 November, seven months before the end of her term.

How will she fare at the polls? In the 2019 election, Frederiksen came up with a new winning formula to grab power from the conservatives: get harsh on immigration. This meant, to the horror of other European social democrats, ramping up anti-refugee rhetoric, supporting the former government’s strict cap on refugees and continuing the internationally condemned “ghetto deal” — repackaged as a programme to fight “parallel societies” — to prevent a concentration of “non-Western” people in certain neighbourhoods.

Many Danes liked the message. In the 2019 election, the Right-wing populist Danish People’s Party was decimated, its support falling from 21.1% in 2015 to 8.6% in 2019. After Frederiksen took power, her government kept up the pressure on refugees and immigrants. Hundreds of Syrians, even well-integrated young adults in employment or higher education, continue to face deportation. Meanwhile, Ukrainians have been exempted from the “ghetto” policy and have been allowed to move into social housing emptied of “non-Westerners”, prompting accusations of racism.

Some measures seem particularly absurd, even sadistic, such as the “Jewellery Law”, implemented by the conservatives in 2016, but unchanged by Frederiksen. It allows police to confiscate cash and valuables from refugees to pay for their stay in Denmark. Here, again, Ukrainians have been officially exempted. The thing is: since the law was enacted, very few confiscations have actually taken place. The real purpose was to scare refugees away, it seems, not unlike ads Denmark ran in Arab media during the Syrian refugee crisis with the message: “Don’t even think about coming here. You’re not welcome.” Psychological pressure is also put on non-Western immigrants who have lived in Denmark for years to “repatriate”, as shown in a documentary by exiled Zimbabwean writer Tendai Frank Tagarira.

For Frederiksen, all this is consistent with her idea of social democracy. Recently she said: “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration, and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.”

In spite of her hardline stance, three Right-wing populist parties are still vying for the anti-immigration vote: the Danish People’s Party, the New Bourgeois, and the wet-behind-the-ears Danish Democrats, led by former immigration minister Inger Støjberg, who once gained notoriety by baking a cake to celebrate 50 ways she had made life tougher for immigrants. Even by Danish standards, Støjberg’s fanatical style was seen as too radical when she ordered the separation of couples in asylum centres where one partner was under 18. Parliament stripped her of her job and she was sentenced to 60 days in prison. Now her face adorns lampposts across the country. Her messaging, which includes rants against liberal, out-of-touch Copenhagen urbanites — a classic from the populist playbook — is landing the Danish Democrats around 9% in surveys.

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Immigration, however, probably won’t be the big vote-winner in this election. After all, the Social Democrats’ approach doesn’t differ substantially from the Right’s policies. So what issues are resonating with voters? The sense of urgency over climate change present in 2019 has made way for fears about rising energy costs and inflation. Frederiksen is promising new programmes to dampen the economic impact on ordinary people.

Another battlefield is the growing crisis in health and social services. Thanks to poor working conditions during and after the pandemic, around 2,400 nurses are lacking in public hospitals. In an open letter, Danish surgeons expressed their fears that they are unable to operate on patients fast enough. There is also a severe shortage of workers in daycare. And other dark clouds are gathering, too: Antidepressant use is sky-high; the cancer rate is the world’s highest; young Danes are unhappier than ever; life expectancy is lower than in Germany.

After this election, unlike any Danish social democrat before her, Mette Frederiksen hopes for an alliance with the centre-Right rather than with traditional Left-wing and green allies. She says this is the best way to tackle the country’s looming problems. At 27%, her party leads the polls, but the “blue bloc” leads by Venestre (literally “Left” but actually conservative) has a good chance of governing with its Right-wing allies.

In the final scene of Lars von Trier’s 2011 apocalyptic masterpiece Melancholia, sisters Claire and Justine sit with Claire’s son Leo in a “magic cave”, a transparent teepee made of branches. The three hold hands as a giant planet engulfs the Earth. A burst of flame, a roar and then nothing. When I rewatch this scene I can’t help but think of Denmark and its anxieties. Danes still believe in their protective magic cave — no matter what the contemporary world of pandemics, globalisation, and immigration may throw at them. But change is coming, whether they like it or not.

But will this strategy work? To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.

In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year.

In some states this transformation was particularly astonishing. In Virginia, for instance, counties where the MHI is under $60,000/year accounted for 32% of the vote in 2010, while counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year accounted for 34.4%. Ten years later, the state’s poorest counties contributed just 25.3% of the presidential primary vote, while the richest counties contributed 41.4%. During the same period in South Carolina, the electorate shifted away from poor and working-class counties and toward middle-class counties by 20%. In North Carolina, the shift was 11%; in Florida, it was 9%.

These changes have occurred not only because the party is growing in prosperous areas, but because it’s also collapsing in struggling ones — a trend that has been most dramatic in the South. Middle-class counties in Tennessee, for instance, grew as a share of the Democratic electorate from 30% to 37.3%, and their raw vote shot up by more than 50,000. But at the same time, poorer counties went from representing 65.9% of the electorate to 56.3%, and their raw vote plunged by over 120,000.

What accounts for such profound changes to the Democratic coalition? Some argue the cultural aesthetic of liberal professionals has become toxic among voters without a college degree. Others believe the party has squandered its credibility with working-class voters by failing to pursue a robust economic agenda. The former perspective counsels Democrats to move to the centre on culture; the latter urges them to move Left on economics. Ideally, Democrats should do both. But the truth is that these problems have been brewing for decades, and it’s unclear if they can be reversed.

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It was during the mid-Sixties that the Democratic Party’s traditional base in the white working class started defecting to Republicans, kicking off the slow-motion collapse of the New Deal coalition. Over the next decade, senior Democrats began contemplating how to attract new constituencies that could replace these voters. In December 1976, Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism.

This ideology emerged victorious from the internecine battles that roiled the party in the Eighties, culminating with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Though the Clinton years saw new milestones in the country’s partisan realignment, Democrats still enjoyed enough support from the white working class that it remained an important constituency, if no longer a dominant one. As a result, the Clinton administration was often riven by contradictions — particularly in the realm of social policy — as it sought to satisfy different members of its coalition at different times.

Though the Democratic Party’s neoliberal wing was willing to ban same-sex marriage and execute the disabled from time to time in order to mollify conservative white workers, it resisted any concessions to them on economic grounds. What it wanted more than anything was the chance to move further in the direction of social liberalism and economic conservatism. When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, politicians such as Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Clinton pollster Mark Penn argued that Gore’s mistake was in adopting populist economic rhetoric that alienated the white professional class.

As John Judis and Ruy Teixera noted in The Emerging Democratic Majority: “The DLC and Penn blamed Gore’s loss on his adoption of a populist appeal in the last months of the campaign.” Published in 2002, the book is mostly remembered for its prediction that changes in racial demography would lead to Democratic dominance over American politics. But Judis and Teixeira argued almost the exact opposite.

Like many of their contemporaries, they agreed that college-educated professionals should be the party’s new base. But they also emphasised that Democrats must supplement their support from the professional class with support from various other constituencies. “The key for Democrats,” they wrote, “will be… in discovering a strategy that retains support among the white working class, but also builds support among college-educated professionals and others in America’s burgeoning ideopolises.”

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To strike this balance, Judis and Teixeira recommended a policy agenda that they called “progressive centrism”. Instead of pacifying the white working class with Sister Souljah moments while shipping their jobs to Mexico, they advised Democrats to just take their foot off the gas when it came to neoliberalism. As long as they avoided spooking liberal professionals on economics and alienating non-college whites on culture, the party could safely pursue a more conventional centre-Left agenda.

In 2008, Barack Obama captured the presidency with exactly the coalition that Judis and Teixeira described: young people, racial minorities, college-educated whites in the Sun Belt, and non-college whites in the Rust Belt. In 2012, he successfully reassembled that coalition, becoming the first Democratic president to win consecutive popular vote majorities since Lyndon Johnson. He governed along the same lines that they recommended, roughly halfway between Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. By November 7, 2016, almost everyone in politics believed that an enduring Democratic majority had finally emerged. The next day, it was gone.

When I interviewed Teixeira in February, he told me that the reason for the collapse of the emerging Democratic majority was twofold. First, liberal professionals grew contemptuous of anyone who didn’t share their cultural politics, alienating the white working-class segment of the Obama coalition. Second, their dismissal of these voters’ economic pain as an excuse for racism allowed Donald Trump to push his advantage with non-college whites to blockbuster margins. To make matters worse, liberal professionals have only grown more insular and censorious over the past six years. Partly as a result, even non-college non-whites — Asian and Hispanic voters in particular — have started to drift to the Right.

No argument here, I told him. But what else did he expect from the professional class? They always prefer to push the envelope on culture rather than pay a nickel more in taxes. It’s no coincidence that the most explosive theatre of the Critical Race Theory war has been Loudoun County, Virginia (median household income: $152,000). If the party wanted its base to be the multiracial working class, shouldn’t it have made them a better offer than “progressive centrism”?

If only it were that simple, Teixeira answered. He told me that not only do many working-class voters not support a Left-wing economic agenda, but for those who do, economics is not always the issue that most informs their vote. A candidate who can’t satisfy their demands on higher salience issues won’t even get a hearing on economics.

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He’s got me there. In 2020, a socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, had a better shot at the Democratic presidential nomination than at any other time in the party’s history. Post-mortems on the Sanders campaign have reached all sorts of conclusions about what went wrong, and some have even cited the party’s professional-class takeover as a big reason for his defeat. But that just isn’t the case. In the 21 states that held Democratic presidential primary elections before the declaration of a national emergency concerning the coronavirus pandemic on March 13, 2020, Biden beat Sanders across all income categories, and Biden’s margin was greatest among the poorest voters.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the political revolution. West of the Rocky Mountains, Sanders beat Biden across all income categories in multiple states. In fact, he often notched up his best performances in poor and working-class counties, including in California. Sanders’s popularity among Hispanic voters was also critical to his success in this area of the country. Chuck Rocha, the architect of the campaign’s Hispanic outreach program, credits its success to the decision to eschew social justice rhetoric and appeals to identity in favour of bread-and-butter economic themes that resonate with immigrant families.

One more little ray of sunshine for the Left is that the economic profile of Sanders’s coalition in this cohort of 21 states closely tracked the economic profile of the overall electorate in them. In other words, his support wasn’t disproportionately concentrated in any one income category. All of which means that in 2020, Sanders really did build a movement of the “multiracial working class”, even if Joe Biden built a bigger one.

Perhaps in the future, another socialist candidate will succeed in this endeavour. But the window to do so closes a little more each year. Sanders’s coalition mirrored the Democratic electorate of 2020, not 2008: significantly wealthier and more middle class than a decade before. For years, the Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the working class — is it any wonder they’ve finally started to notice?

Adapted from Matthew Thomas’s Substack, Vulgar Marxism.

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration passed a piece of legislation it hoped would accelerate the end of the First World War. The new law didn’t directly concern the military — nor was it a revolutionary act of foreign policy. Rather, its target was ordinary American citizens.

Passed shortly after the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act made it a crime to “wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”. In other words, it was intended to stifle dissent. And by all accounts, it was immensely effective: it was used to convict 877 people between 1919 and 1920.

In the century since it was passed (and swiftly revoked), the Sedition Act has largely been viewed as a legislative artefact, an embarrassing quirk that’s best forgotten. In recent weeks, however, its spirit appears to have been rekindled by another Democrat President — one who may not be at war, but nonetheless finds himself under siege. Late last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a sinister-sounding new unit called the Disinformation Governance Board. When asked to justify its formation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities, and I am not sure who opposes that effort.”

And so the mask slips. As became clear in the following days, the Board has been established to legislate fake news and mistruths out of existence, as if they were draughts of toxic air, wafting out of laptops and cell phones into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. It’s hardly surprising that the Board was swiftly condemned as the ill-disguised attempt at state censorship it is.

The main clue to its true mission was the person chosen to lead the unit: Nina Jankowicz, a government specialist in “disinformation” who has an unhealthy record of disseminating disinformation for the Left and then singing about it, Mary Poppins-style, on TikTok. In 2020, for instance, she dismissed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and a “Trump campaign product”. In October last year, she claimed that parental concerns about the teaching of critical race theory in schools were merely “one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit… have seized on”.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Given her past comments, it’s hard not to view her appointment by Joe Biden — indeed, the creation of the Board itself — as anything other than a cry of desperation. The midterm elections, when congressional seats are contested, are fast-approaching. For weeks now, most commentators have been predicting calamity for the Democrats. And it’s not hard to see why: America’s post-pandemic economic recovery has stalled; gas prices have soared; inflation is above 8%; violent crime, especially homicide, remains at a disturbingly elevated level; and America’s Southern border is seeing record illegal crossings.

Faced with such a crisis, the rational thing for Democrat leaders to do would be to review their policies on these kitchen-table issues and change course. They could, for instance, invite their former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back to advise the President on the economy. They could reassess ill-considered climate policies, such as the closure of the Keystone Pipeline and the regulatory war on fracking. They could even re-examine their naive programmes on crime and punishment, from defunding the police to putting felons back onto the streets. As for who could lead this course-correcting effort, there are ready-made centrist Democrats, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, waiting in the wings.

But this is not where the party is today. The most influential voices are still on the far-Left, in the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corner of the tent. And the Democratic Socialists want to double down on their madcap agenda — party and voters alike be damned. How they achieve this is where Jankowicz comes in. The Democrat’s progressive wing knows it will never win over the American public by relying on the mundane methods of political campaigning. Its only hope is to frighten, censor and indoctrinate voters into accepting their agenda.

This explains the ill-judged idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. It also explains the hysterical Left-wing response to Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. Having established such a stranglehold on social media in recent years, to the point that the last Republican President was effectively cancelled from the Internet while still in office, the Democrats are appalled by the thought that free speech might be restored to one of the major platforms.

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This isn't a war between good and evil

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yet the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board marks a clear turning point, signalling the consolidation of state-sanctioned censorship. Once “disinformation” has been identified, we are told, “DHS then shares factual information related to its mission to potentially impacted people and organisations”. DHS has insisted that the Board does “not have any operational authority or capability”, while Psaki stated that “the mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise”. But how else is it to identify disinformation and combat it with “factual information”?

This is, of course, a facsimile of the playbook adopted by media companies during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember when Twitter started warning us not to pay attention to such “disinformation” as the hypothesis that the Covid coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Or when highly qualified medical scientists were threatened with cancellation for arguing that lockdowns were doing more harm than good? With every passing day, these arguments look more convincing. Yet for more than a year they were regularly denounced as “disinformation”. And for more than a year, they were effectively silenced. Given the option of deploying such an effective political weapon, is it any wonder that the Democrats are now drawn to its use?

Of course, not everyone in the Democratic Party supports what is being attempted here. As Jim Himes, the Democratic Congressman for Connecticut’s 4th District, has observed, “the government has no business saying that this is disinformation and this is information”. Even President Wilson himself quickly recognised that for all its practical, short-term benefits, the Sedition Act was having a poisonous impact on American democracy. It was swiftly repealed in 1920; a year later, Wilson offered clemency to the vast majority of those convicted under the act.

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Is Obama sabotaging Biden?

By Kat Rosenfield

Of those who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, most belonged to the pacifist Left. Yet the Democrat advocates of the Disinformation Governance Board appear to have forgotten this, along with the age-old problem of censorship’s use as a political tool: it’s incredibly helpful at crushing dissent — until you find yourself on the receiving end.

Could the Democrats be about to learn this the hard way? It’s looking increasingly likely that, come 2024, a Republican will be returned to the White House — with that Republican likely to be Donald Trump. Forget angry parents tweeting about Critical Race Theory. If Trump wins a second term and takes control of the Disinformation Government Board, then the Democrats really will have something to worry about. And if that does happen, they will only have themselves to blame.

Despite appearences, Cryptofash — his pseudonym mocks the tendency of online leftists to accuse their critics of “cryptofascism” — is not your typical Right-wing internet troll. He’s a Marxist who regards “leftism” as the ideology of bourgeois supremacy, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the classical liberalism that Karl Marx spent his mature years attempting to demolish. “My critique focuses on the Left,” Cryptofash writes in one of his periodic straight tweets, “not because they are worse than the Right, but because they are better than the right at precluding proletarian class consciousness.”

Cryptofash is one of the more visible members of a political tendency known as the “post-Left”, the latest in the endless stream of new and strange ideologies thrown up by social media. Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent.

Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What’s Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers.

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

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Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?

By Angela Nagle

Effectively incapable of governing outside the bounds set by the Democrats and Democrat-aligned media, corporations, NGOs and government bureaucracies, the GOP’s real function is to serve as a sort of ideological bogeyman. By positioning itself as the last line of defence against phantasmic threats of “fascism” and “white nationalism” coming from the Right, the ruling class is able to legitimise its own power and conceal the domination on which that power rests.

Leftists, in this telling — whether Ivy League professors or Antifa militants on the streets of Portland — are thus little more than the unwitting dupes of the ruling class. However much they profess to hate the Democratic Party, they are, in practice, its running-dog lackeys. They support the party electorally, harass and cancel its designated enemies and enforce pro-Democrat ideology in the media, academia and the workplace. Crucially, they also help maintain the permanent state of moral emergency that serves as a pretext for the expansion of ruling class power, whether in the form of the increasingly direct control that tech monopolies wield over political discourse or the pursuit of Covid policies that transfer wealth upward and subject workers to a dystopian regime of medical surveillance.

At the core of this diagnosis is the idea that “identity politics”, “antiracism”, “intersectionality” and other pillars of the progressive culture war are mystifications whose function is to demoralise and divide the proletariat.

Similar criticisms have been made by Left-wing writers such as Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels, but whereas these “class-first” leftists tend to regard “identitarianism” as a liberal deviation from authentic leftism, the post-leftists regard the idea that there still is a radical Left meaningfully distinct from the Democrats as meaningless. And because post-leftists see the Democrats, and by extension the Left, as their primary enemy, they have no problem engaging and even entering into provisional alliances with the populist Right, especially on cultural issues. Hence the right-wing memes.

Of course, the post-leftists operate at varying levels of coherence and theoretical sophistication, and most of them have produced far more in the way of podcasts and tweets than sustained considerations of political theory. (Cynically, one might say they are less of a “tendency” than a Twitter clique centered around Aimee Terese.) But it would be a mistake to dismiss it altogether on those grounds — the Dirtbag Left’s Chapo Trap House podcast, after all, has played an outsized role in the revival of millennial socialism, and it is always difficult to predict which of today’s shitposters will be setting the tone of the culture five years from now.

For one thing, the post-Left channels powerful currents of Marxist and post-Marxist critique that have been downplayed or forgotten during the “Great Awokening” and the recent socialist renaissance: from Amadeo Bordiga’s communist hostility to “anti-fascist” collaboration with the bourgeoisie to Christopher Lasch’s early writings about the medical-therapeutic state as a tool of class domination.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

But perhaps the most obvious spiritual predecessor to the post-Left is the Italian-American philosopher Paul Piccone, the founder and long-time editor of the critical theory journal Telos and another Marxist who eventually left the Left only to find himself in a strange alliance with the Right.

Piccone began his career as a disciple of Herbert Marcuse and proponent of his theory of “one-dimensionality”, which held that capitalism had advanced to such a degree in the West as to effectively abolish all opposition to itself. With the proletariat co-opted by consumerism, radicals, in Marcuse’s view, should instead look for resistance from racial minorities and other outcasts who had yet to be integrated into the system.

But by the late 1970s, Piccone, reacting to the failures of the New Left, had broken with Marcuse. He began to argue that the new social movements that Marcuse had perceived as expressions of anti-system negativity had in fact been forms of what Piccone dubbed “artificial negativity” — pseudo-radical protest movements generated by the system itself.

Piccone agreed with Marcuse that by the mid-20^th century, capitalism had triumphed over all internal resistance. But he believed that because the system required such resistance in order to periodically restructure itself and avoid stagnation, it had begun to manufacture its own controlled opposition. He interpreted the initial Civil Rights movement, for instance, as a product of the system’s need to “rationalise” the segregated labour market of the South, after which it seamlessly transitioned to promoting black nationalism in an “attempt to artificially reconstitute an otherness which had long since been effectively destroyed”. The allegedly radical protest movement against the Vietnam War had, similarly, merely allowed an evolving US capitalist class to abandon an imperial quagmire that had become obsolete.

Indeed, Piccone grew so pessimistic about the “artificial” nature of Western leftism that he spent much of the rest of his career seeking out extant pockets of, and resources for cultivating, “organic negativity” — his term for social practices and political formations that genuinely stood outside the logic of the system. Some of these he found on the far-Right, in the regionalism of the Italian Lega Nord, the anti-liberal political theory of Carl Schmitt, the paleoconservatism of Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, and the right-wing “identitarianism” of Alain de Benoist. Such explorations, or flirtations, were justifiable because, in Piccone’s view, nearly all of what passed for radicalism in the mature societies of the West was pseudo-radicalism that ultimately served capitalist interests. 

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In defence of the Woke Left

By Mary Harrington

Although Piccone could be more than a bit conspiratorial, it is not hard to see how his “artificial negativity” thesis could be applied to a great deal of the officially sanctioned cultural radicalism of today, which may help to explain why ideas similar to his are beginning to resurface. One can also point to the experience of leftists during the Trump years who found themselves corralled into an anti-Trump popular front that had them allying with not only centrist Democrats but also Never-Trump Republicans, including many of the architects of the Iraq War.

Bordiga had famously argued against this sort of broad-based “anti-fascism”, which he warned would “breathe life into that great poisonous monster, a great bloc comprising every form of capitalist exploitation, along with all of its beneficiaries”, and this is indeed what happened — socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, initially popular for their opposition to the “corporate” establishment of the Democrats, ultimately fell in line behind the party’s leadership and urged their followers to do the same.

The Trump years also revealed something about the nature of power in the United States that, once seen, is difficult to unsee. For all the warnings that Trump would turn out to be Hitler, he in practice turned out to be more like Berlusconi — a vulgar entertainer with a sordid personal life who in most respects ended up governing like a normal politician.

What happened on the other side of the aisle was more subtle but also, in the long run, more sinister. We saw the national media collaborating with shadowy intelligence agents and researchers to launder a conspiracy theory about Russian collusion and, later, employ the same playbook to block Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. We saw constant media-generated and wealthy NGO-funded campaigns against racism and sexism welded to the electoral priorities of the Democrats. We saw “Critical Race Theory”, a crude ideological rationalisation of the Democrats’ coalitional logic, elevated to the level of quasi-official religion. We saw Twitter suspending The New York Post for publishing embarrassing information about Joe Biden’s son in the run-up to the election and payments processors such as PayPal partnering with progressive NGOs to monitor their customers and report “extremists” to law enforcement.

In short, we saw the consolidation of a near-unified ruling class bloc explicitly aligned with the Democratic Party against the potential disruption of Trump. This development has already created a host of strange new political alliances. If it holds, we should not be surprised if more than a few anti-capitalist radicals begin to reassess who their real enemies are.

Orphaned chicks never survive. They go from one penguin to the next, begging for food and shelter, but are cast away. Eventually, they weaken and die from starvation or exposure to the harsh cold.

The radical Left in the West, especially after the decisive defeat of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, has a great deal in common with these unfortunate penguins. The collapse of Left populism is today final and irrevocable; the rejection and abandonment not only coming from the working-class that these Leftists claimed to speak for, but also from the Left-of-centre parties that the they tried to sell their services to as electorally useful “tribunes of the people.”

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The Left's obsession with subjectivity

By David Goodhart

But not every penguin is born equal. The true nature of the modern Left should be understood as a sort of composite being, made up of heterogeneous parts. In theory, the Left wants to be, or at least thinks it wants to be, a political alliance between various stripes of “professionals” — college-educated, urban, progressive — and a broader base of  “ordinary people.”

But in truth, the radical Left is a cross-section of the lower half of the managerial class — graduates who work in jobs that, according to Michael Lind, “pay modestly but provide both status and a degree of personal autonomy that the frequently better-paid managerial functionaries in more hierarchical occupations (e.g. within large, traditional corporations) do not possess.” Over time, the interests of this group have increasingly aligned with those of the urban, cosmopolitan elites in the Democratic Party.

For those looking to reach the upper parts of that cross-section, radical (an adjective usually followed by “student”) politics is a smart career move for ambitious young professionals. The now infamous video from the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention, in which attendees objected to clapping and language they found offensive, is often mocked as representing the uselessness and confusion of the American Left, but this characterisation is only half the story.

In reality, even something as silly as a rule against clapping — because it threatens the disabled working-class comrades who are poised to flock to the red banner — is a useful career training tool. Animals play in order to learn how to hunt, and mobilising the “lack of privilege” along with concerns about “safety” among “marginalised groups” is actually how one wields power in a rapidly increasing number of our society’s institutions today.

On top of that, the dour European social democrats of yesterday who warmly ushered in the post-Soviet end of history were at one point — nearly to a man — radical revolutionaries in their youth, such as the young Trotskyist and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, erstwhile Left-wing militant turned mid-2000s German Green Party vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer, and long-serving former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

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The American Left is looking increasingly extreme

By Justin Webb

And while Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a boutique object to be put back on the shelf when you grow up and join the machine you once raged against, the corporate HR-speak and identity politics of the Left is a useful skill that can be utilised in full once you make the transition from Communism to K Street.

These penguins have already spent their time learning how to hunt for lucrative jobs and move up in the world. Some of them have one foot in the proletarian vanguard and another in the liberal NGO world. Others have one foot in a class-first Marxist seminar, and the other in an anti-racist lecture hall, with former US President Barack Obama, who studied the works of Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks to flirt with girls he found attractive, being the latest example.

But not everyone is this lucky. For other parts of the radical Left, the problem is not so much career advancement as it is forestalling a precipitous slide down into the working-class. These are the people who went to college and “did everything right,” but for whom no doors have opened, no jobs seem available, and no succour is offered anywhere.

But for all their rejection of  “bourgeois” politics, the political programmes of these people tend to begin and end with reforms aimed at rescuing struggling college graduates from the horror of having to join the working-class at the workplace. The hope, according to some debt-forgiveness activists, is to create a near-universal class united by “debt” rather than by job or income. What this means in reality, however, is partial student debt forgiveness; payday loan debt forgiveness, the usurious micro-lending targeting the least among us, is not even on the radar.

This makes sense when you consider the backgrounds of some of the people trying to advance such policies: Meagan Day, one of the co-authors of the recently-published socialist manifesto Bigger Than Bernie, can attribute her family’s considerable wealth to success in the rent-to-own furniture industry, another line of business predicated on extracting high rates of interest from poor people. 

Alas, for the majority of orphaned penguins, rejection and abandonment proves devastating. Unable to advocate for anyone or anything, they are compelled to cloak their interests in universalising language about “the people” or “the working-class.” But when those same idealised groups reject them, the radical suddenly finds he or she has no remaining leg on which to stand.

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Jeremy Corbyn is nothing without Labour

By Giles Fraser

The Labour defeat of 2019, and the subsequent purge of Momentum and Corbyn loyalists from positions of power within the party, must be understood in this context. The purge of Momentum is not the same as a purge of the working-class, because the political wave that swept Jeremy Corbyn into the Labour leadership came from the university towns of Britain. It was a middle-class movement to the bone, and while the new leadership of Keir Starmer’s party may reject Corbyn, they certainly have no plans to turn the party away from its new middle-class and urban base. So with the “true radicals” side-lined, why even bother to humour them?

The same post-election purge can be seen inside the Democratic Party today; although Joe Biden won, the widely predicted landslide did not come to fruition, and talk of socialism and “defunding the police” was seen as a political albatross by grey eminences such as South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn. Days after the election, the House majority whip argued that the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter movement “destroyed headway” made by the party. Which begs the question: if these young revolutionaries can’t actually deliver votes, and if many of the workers actually detest them, then what use do they have for the party leadership?

The project of Left populism, properly understood, was not a revolution of the working-class that ended in ignominious defeat. Rather, it was akin to a conflict within the nobility; a fight between “true” radicals on the one hand, and those savvier operators who used the Left to regain access to the mainstream of the party on the other. The latter, though they might have flirted with “radical socialism” from time to time, could always move on to greener pastures. Thus, the collapse of Left populism and its replacement by something else was never a threat to their fortunes.

Whither these unfortunate penguin chicks that once flocked to “Birdie” Sanders? Their likely destination is probably a continued unwavering course towards utopia — a “uo topos,” no place, nowhere. As they wander in the cold and the dark, like those poor penguins, their political ambitions will shrivel away.

Some of them will reconcile to serving as junior partners in the “woke,” liberal coalition that occupies a liminal space between progressive capitalism and the traditional Left-of-centre parties, where they will be paid little and listened to even less. Others will be forced, by dint of inexorable downward social mobility, to study the working-class up close, day in and day out. In politics, just as in nature, the strong do what they will, while the weak do what they must.

Maybe there is some hypothetical revolutionary Left-wing candidate out there who could theoretically seek to carry out such a frightening agenda. But the candidate fielded by the Democratic Party in 2020 is not some wild-eyed Robespierre reincarnate. It’s Joe Biden. And the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by Republicans about a potential Biden presidency can only be seen as comical in the context of his actually-existing political record.

Unlike in 2016, when the personage of Hillary Clinton provided a boundless source of intense consternation, Donald Trump and the Republicans seem far less inclined to run against Biden as such. Instead, they’ve taken to portraying him as a walking corpse with severely limited cognition — and therefore it won’t be him pulling the strings once he’s wheeled into office, they contend, but a variety of other nefarious radical forces working behind the scenes. Fliers that declare “The Radical Left Has Taken Over Joe Biden” have been hitting mailboxes across the country, featuring grim images of Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez interposed domineeringly over a confused and oblivious Biden.

On the one hand, party coalitions are always going to have a role in setting the president’s agenda; Trump, for one, more-or-less outsourced his own legislative priorities to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for the first half of his tenure. And to the extent that Omar, Sanders, and “AOC” constitute a coherent ideological faction, certainly they would jockey for influence under a Biden administration.

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How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests

By Michael Tracey

But the casual castigation of Biden as a mere Trojan Horse for the “radical left” totally disregards the significance of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, which if nothing else were a direct repudiation of the “radical left” — insofar as such a thing exists within the constraints of US electoral politics. Biden’s victory resoundingly blunted the ascendance of left-wing activists who tried and failed to seize the reins of the Democratic Party, mainly by way of the five-year Bernie Sanders campaign. As Biden reminded an interviewer in Wisconsin this week: “I beat the socialist… That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”

It’s impossible to ever know what exactly a general election featuring Democratic nominee Sanders would have looked like, but a few things seem plausible. First, it wouldn’t have been necessary to “tie” Sanders to the activist Left, as they would have been the proud, unhidden core of his campaign operation. Figures like Shaun King, whom the Sanders campaign elevated as a top surrogate (King was even selected to introduce Sanders at his 2020 kickoff event) doubtless would have been the gift that kept on giving for Republicans. (Google him if you must.) And a fair number of the most ideologically adventurous twentysomething protesters who have run rampant for the past several months surely would also have been active Sanders supporters. Perhaps it’s possible that Sanders could have animated new segments of the general electorate and won against Trump regardless. But the project of “tying” him to the more excitable elements of the activist Left would not have been complicated. It just would have been a fact.

To use the same playbook with Biden as might have been used with Sanders, however, suggests a lack of imagination on the part of Trump and Republicans.

Even Sanders, despite being a professed socialist, never advocated for the mass appropriation of private property or full-scale nationalisation of industry. As president, he likely would have pursued relatively modest redistributive policies — modest compared with the welfare state policies that characterise other modern-day left of centre governments. But at least the inevitable “socialist” attack would have had the benefit of reflecting a term with which Sanders actually describes himself. Over nearly five decades in government, Biden has never touched “socialism” with a ten-foot pole.

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What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin Webb

Nothing about the mad rush to saddle Biden with socialist baggage is particularly new. In the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of conniving to implement socialism, with the charge having stemmed from an incident that in hindsight seems remarkably quaint. At a campaign stop in Ohio, Obama expressed his belief to a man dubbed “Joe the Plumber” that “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain, whose electoral fortunes had crashed that autumn alongside the global financial system, saw this as a last-ditch opportunity to warn American voters about the possibly Mao-like designs that Obama had in store.

But with eight years of an Obama/Biden presidency in the bank, to call what was enacted during that period any kind of triumph for “socialism” would be laughable. And if the idea with Biden is that he’s so cognitively inept that he’d inevitably capitulate to the forces of radicalism which surround him — well, few would doubt that Biden’s sharpness has conspicuously diminished in his latter years. But he did exhibit the mental acuity required to get himself through a historically large Democratic primary field, and then go on to successfully “unite” the Democratic Party to a greater extent than was the case at this time in 2016.

Where the “Radical Left on the march” argument does have something at least approaching a point, is that the Democratic Party’s professional class has evolved sharply on questions of race and identity in the past several years — and especially since the onset of the nationwide protest movement this summer — with emphasis on diversity and representation now having reached a dogmatic fixation. However, it would be inaccurate to characterise this professional class shift as an embrace of “socialism” or even “radicalism”. More accurately, it’s a re-orientation of elite attitudes and signalling patterns, without any attendant shift in underlying power dynamics.

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Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

One pronounced feature of the Trump era is that those who have adopted the most histrionic rhetorical postures are just the same old banal careerists resorting to emotional theatrics. A recent example is professional left-wing activist Max Berger, who declared on Twitter that a fascist coup was underway. Berger previously worked on the campaign of Elizabeth Warren. It will be these types who gain additional institutional power in the context of a Biden presidency, and they will no doubt be inordinately fixated on matters of race, gender and sexual orientation. But are they “radicals”? Not really. They’ve just adopted the patina of rhetorical radicalism to justify their remarkably conventional life choices.

Even for avowed “democratic socialists” like AOC, the Republican PR strategy depends on exaggerating their influence within the overall Democratic party coalition. However much the party’s Congressional delegation has inched marginally leftward, for instance, the most powerful and catered-to faction are still members representing affluent suburban districts whose victories in 2018 enabled the Democrats to secure a majority. Names like Elissa Slotkin, Dean Phillips, and Cindy Axne aren’t nearly as well known as those who loudly place themselves at the centre of social media attention such as “AOC”, but the electoral formula which propelled them to oust Republican incumbents in states critical to the Electoral College (Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa respectively) is the formula now being most closely followed by Biden on a national scale.

And if Biden wins in November, it will owe heavily to these very kinds of voters — his most significant polling advantage is currently among white women with a college degree — not leftist radicals. Will Biden at least give Bernie & co a nominal “seat at the table”? Sure, that’s likely. Biden is running more as a traditional coalition-manager than any kind of insurgent seeking to overturn the consensus of the party he leads. But the Republican histrionics intentionally misportray which forces within that coalition would wield the leverage in the event of a Biden presidency. (“AOC” once suggested that in a more sensibly-apportioned parliamentary system, she and Biden would not even belong to the same party.)

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Those who predict a revolutionary socialist upheaval under Biden might want to spend some time asking actual socialists what they think about Biden. Because the mood they exhibit isn’t particularly celebratory. A group of erstwhile Sanders activists have contented themselves with declaring “Not Him, Us” in their attempt to hector any remaining left-wing holdouts to suck it up and vote for Biden. These as-yet-anonymous manifesto writers decree that “Defeating fascism is priority #1” and as such, mobilising a ‘popular front’ against Trump is of urgent necessity. “The 1930s taught us one lesson we can never forget: we must unite — even with neoliberal opponents — to defeat fascism,” the group concludes.

Leaving aside the analytical accuracy of drawing a parallel between the present-day United States and 1930s Germany — let’s say the comparison seems a tad off — the increasing prevalence of this logic within left-wing activist circles means Biden has less need to appeal to them directly. It’s already been deemed morally obligatory for these activist types to join with the dreaded “neoliberals” in order to blunt the rise of global fascism, as personified domestically by Trump. And so whatever leverage they might have wielded in a Biden term has been forfeited from the outset.

In an alternate timeline, Republicans might take solace in Biden as a buffer against an invigorated activist Left which — it’s true — has made strides in recent years, both organisationally and within the popular culture. And the professional class Dems will probably agitate for bizarre racial and gender identity policies if given entry-points into the Executive Branch. But most of it will be superficial posturing — a speciality of those kinds of operators. And Biden himself is most eagerly courting endorsements from people like John McCain’s widow Cindy for a reason. He’s had going on 78 years to display the radicalism now being attributed to him, and there’s little sign of it yet.

Another assumption widely held just two months ago was that Bernie Sanders was set to win the Democratic nomination. As I wrote at the time, following the Nevada caucus in which Sanders triumphed, the campaign of his nearest rival Joe Biden appeared to be “visibly flailing”. Indeed, a Democratic Party voter had made headlines by asking Biden bluntly during an event in Nevada “What the hell is going on with your campaign?” This seemed to capture the prevailing mood.

The answer was, in fact: quite a lot, it just hadn’t fed through into the results yet. Once the nomination process became a one-on-one contest after Super Tuesday, Biden thrashed the Vermont senator, leaving Bernie trailing by 311 delegates. There was no coming back after that and Sanders consequently dropped out of the race for the nomination. In the space of just two months the contest was turned upside down, so that it is Joe Biden who will now take on Donald Trump in November’s election.

So how did Sanders sink so rapidly from the favourite to dropping out of the race altogether?

First, it is worth highlighting where commentators went wrong. We put too much stock in the results coming out of states such as Iowa and Nevada while underestimating just how poorly Sanders would do in delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like Texas and Virginia. Of course, I was not alone in getting it wrong before Joe Bidden “shocked the world” on 3 March.

Leading statician Nate Silver had predicted that Sanders “has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president”; the Guardian’s Richard Wolffe had predicted that “Bernie Sanders is cruising towards the Democratic nomination; while ITV’s Robert Moore had suggested that Bernie “is already the clear favourite to win the Democratic nomination and within ten days he may become unstoppable”.

There were more concrete reasons why the Sanders campaign tanked after winning Nevada, however. For one thing, Sanders provoked unnecessary headlines for the wrong reasons after praising literacy campaigns in Cuba under the dictatorship of Fidel Castro. “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know?” Sanders said in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?” Sanders added, rather unhelpfully.

When criticised for the remarks, the senator doubled down, telling a town hall audience in South Carolina that “truth is truth”.

Predictably this went down badly with the Democratic establishment, and not without cause. Many of Cuba’s schools were built using prison labour and the dictatorship’s literacy programme is rather less impressive in a context where the state decides what a person can and cannot read. This isn’t Cold War propaganda: outside the fringes of the far-Left the argument about the Cuban regime — good or bad — was settled half a century ago. Sanders looked like a political dinosaur.

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Covid-19: do the shires even care?

By James Bloodworth

Moreover, Sanders’ comments about Cuba were foolish from a purely pragmatic point of view, spooking moderate Democrats as well as Latino voters in states such as Florida, where a third are of Cuban origin. Sanders relied upon Latinos for early campaign wins in states such as Nevada, but following his — albeit tempered — praise for Castro there was little hope of Latino voters coming to the rescue in Florida. Rather unsurpisingly, polling showed that Sanders fared worse among Cubans than among other Latinos.

Sanders is not an apologist for dictatorship — his Cuba comments were prefaced by a rejection of the island’s authoritarian system. But his poorly calibrated statements reflected the politics of many of the people he surrounded himself with. To nominate a candidate with this weakness when the cost of failure was another four years of Trump would have been a huge gamble for more centrist Democrats. Ultimately, it was a gamble they weren’t willing to take.

The real problems with the Sanders campaign were largely of a more domestic aspect, however. In 2016 Sanders did well with white voters without a college degree, but this time around he did far less well, with Biden having a comfortable lead over Sanders among this section of the electorate in Michigan. In hindsight, it looks as if many of the 2016 white non-college educated voters who flocked to Sanders were motivated more by animosity toward Hillary Clinton than genuine enthusiasm for the Vermont senator.

Much like the Corbyn campaign in the recent UK General Election, the Sanders team was banking on a surge in the non-voter and youth turnout. Presented with a genuine alternative, those who would normally stay at home during the election cycle would be enthused enough by the radicalism on offer to actually get out and vote. Or so the theory went.

Unfortunately for Sanders and his team this failed to transpire. Indeed, the failure on the part of Sanders to expand the Democratic base was apparent even while Sanders was romping home in New Hampshire and Nevada. Young voters made up a smaller share of the primary electorate than they did in 2016 in every primary state apart from Iowa.

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By James Bloodworth

Much of the fallout from Sanders’s campaign defeat has focused on his failure to win over African-American Democrats. The argument goes that Sanders’s emphasis on class politics has little appeal to those for whom identity is a bigger driver in terms of voter loyalty than social class.

There is some truth to this. In South Carolina black voters backed Biden over Sanders by 61% to 17% according to network exit polls, and this gap — or something close to it — was replicated in other primary states. Because the first three states in the nomination race did not have many black voters, so this consequently created a false impression of how Sanders would perform as the contest progressed.

That Sander’s poor performance among black voters was due to his “class reductionism” is probably exaggerated, however. Indeed, this is a convenient criticism for affluent liberals who feel more comfortable with a form of identity politics that seeks to push what the black American scholar Adolph Reed has termed “a particularist, elite-driven politics”. As Reed puts it:

“Class reductionism, again, is a myth. But like other myths, it reveals a great deal about our deeper systems of belief. Even if it tells us nothing about the people who are accused of it, it tells us a great deal about the accusers — the professional-managerial guardians of elite discourse.”

Sanders’s more significant mistake was arguably to continue to run on an independent ticket and rally against the Democratic establishment. Sanders’s outsider status had served him well — until it didn’t. This was especially true in terms of Sanders’s offering to black voters. As Zack Beauchamp has written for Vox, affiliation to the Democratic Party is “understood among African-Americans as a vital part of being committed to racial progress and in-group solidarity”.

In other words, Sanders’s positioning as an outsider may have been his undoing not only among more centrist Democrats, but also among black voters.

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By Daniel Kalder

His failed campaign holds lessons for progressives of all stripes. Both Corbyn and Sanders have placed their hopes in a forlorn belief that disenfranchised non-voters would break the habit of a lifetime and turn out to vote when presented with a “genuine alternative” (as their supporters are fond of saying).

It is an assumption built on a hackneyed and romantic view of the working class: once a politician emerges who represents their real interests, they will invariably slough off apathy and dash to their nearest polling station. This theory has been found wanting in both the United Kingdom and the United States in recent times. Non-voters tend — as you’d expect — not to vote.

Nor are young ethnic minorities all wildly left-wing, which seems to be a prevailing assumption among the Left on social media platforms. Material interests matter to voters, but they are one factor among many. Group identity is important too.

The fondness among supporters of both Corbyn and Sanders for authoritarian “anti-imperialist” movements is also extremely off-putting for moderates. Corbyn was viewed as a terrorist sympathiser on the doorstep last December, while Bernie’s comments about Castro, albeit more forgivable than many of Corbyn’s dalliances, will have spooked many potential voters. And for what gain? If the Left is to move forward it needs to drop such illusions and rid itself of this Achilles’ heel.

Following the stalemate in Iowa, it was hoped that Sanders would reach out to the Democratic mainstream, to return to the fold, and adopt a more conciliatory tone. Instead he gave his usual stump speech, positioned himself as the consummate outsider who would take on the ‘Establishment’ (read: the Democratic establishment) and ‘the 1%’. But by this point that strategy had outlived its usefulness.

And like Corbyn here in Britain, Bernie Sanders discovered that there is only so much traction to be had in running against the mainstream — at some point you must join it.

Politically, the Swedes have long served as pin-ups for both the Left and Right. Bernie Sanders makes constant reference to Sweden as a model for his brand of ‘democratic socialism’, while David Cameron used to regularly seek inspiration from his Swedish counterparts on ideas as diverse as free schools, the Big Society and doing away with inheritance tax. More recently, the Right has invoked Swedish concerns about mass immigration as proof that it’s not only baddies who worry about that issue. Whatever your politics, if the Swedes are doing it, it must be OK.

Suddenly, in its response to the Coronavirus, the behaviour of my mother country is not meeting with the usual chorus of approval. By taking a radically different approach, have the Swedes finally lost their famed good sense… or should the rest of the world once again be looking to their example?

The coronavirus epidemic in Sweden — with 10 million population — is already relatively advanced: 3,500 certified infected and over 100 dead. But the Government refuses to ‘lock down’ the country as a response to the virus. They are following something closer to the ‘mitigation’ strategy that Boris Johnson’s government initially seemed to favour, before the sudden pivot to ‘suppression’.

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Today, Sweden stands alone in Europe. Schools remain open (except for over 16s and universities, which are judged to function well remotely and don’t take key workers out of circulation) restaurants and bars are open (although only for table service to avoid throngs gathering at the bar). Gatherings of up to 50 people are still allowed, and there is much discussion over whether families all over Sweden should travel North for their annual Easter skiing trips at resorts in the mountains — all open for business as usual.

In theory, the difference in approach is a technical one: the Swedish scientists simply take a different view. The Swedish strategy is being led by ‘State Epidemiologist’ Anders Tegnell, who rather like Messrs Whitty and Vallance in the UK, has become something of a national leader and is on the television every day. The public health authority which he represents has released detailed modelling on a region-by-region basis that comes to much less pessimistic conclusions in terms of hospitalisations and deaths per thousand infections than the infamous study by Imperial College, about which Tegnell is vocally sceptical. “It’s not a peer-reviewed paper,” he has said. “It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

Sweden’s number of hospital beds per thousand is the lowest in Europe (the UK is the second lowest), but despite this, Tegnell has identified a number of factors that he thinks make Sweden well placed for the coming epidemic. The number of multi-generational households is very low, compared to say Italy, slowing transmission to the more vulnerable older generation; there is a large geographical spread of the population; and there is an observable tendency for Swedish people to follow advice, rather than need legal imperatives to do so. Families have been advised to avoid visiting older relatives where possible and urged to work from home if they can. It’s roughly Boris Johnson, circa three weeks ago.

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Tegnell doesn’t like to describe his strategy as ‘herd immunity’ but he talks openly about the inevitability of the disease passing through a large chunk of the population, and even says that containing the disease like South Korea is doing would not even be desirable, since it will surely only come back. His stated goal is to slow the spread of the infection to a manageable pace, and he doesn’t believe a mandated lockdown is necessary to achieve that.

So far, so technical. But look more closely and the difference between the UK and Swedish approaches is as much about politics as science.

I spent much of the weekend on the telephone to friends, family and journalists from both Left and Right in Sweden and it felt like I’d fallen through the looking glass into an upside-down world. It almost could be the UK, just with a few political factors flipped over.

First, the fact that they are standing apart is a point of pride as much as concern. There is a note of Swedish exceptionalism, particularly when contrasted with longstanding competitors Denmark and Norway (both of whom have opted for a very thorough lockdown). I heard multiple theories as to why their Scandinavian neighbours were different, ranging from Denmark and Norway’s occupation during the Second World War having given them have a residual mistrust of authority, to the Danish government’s political desire to look strong. It couldn’t be further from the UK instinct, which is to take any differences with other countries as proof of our own sluggishness and inadequacy.

Second, the Government is a centre-Left coalition, which changes everything. Alongside a deep-seated Swedish respect for technical experts, this means that support for the more moderate strategy is considered the enlightened left-liberal position; unlike the UK or the US, the knowledge class are fully on-side. Anders Tegnell himself has a left-of-centre feel about him, making regular reference to the importance of equality in the government’s chosen course. This means, although he continues to meet with criticism, there are no online hoards of political activists demanding a lockdown.

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The political critics, such as they are, are more likely to come from the Right, such as populist anti-immigration MP Hanif Bali (an occasional guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News programme), controversial Dagens Nyheter editor-in-chief Peter Wolodarski and Quillette’s Paulina Neuding. But they are few and far between: even the populist Swedish Democrats have largely kept quiet. One 30-year-old Stockholmer I spoke to said that the only advocates of a lockdown she had noticed in her social media feeds were “a few far-Right guys and the climate deniers”.

It’s the opposite of the political landscape in the UK, where deep mistrust from the long Brexit battle meant that whatever the Cummings-Johnson government initially proposed was instinctively suspected as bad and wrong by its political opponents; so the virtuous Left-liberal position quickly came to be calling for a more draconian shutdown. Rival experts were found, a campaign developed, and the Government ultimately changed course against a background of huge political pressure.

It is possible — perhaps likely — that as the death toll increases in Sweden in coming weeks they will also fall into line and impose a stricter lockdown. But if they don’t, the experience of that country will offer a vital way of knowing whether or not the unprecedented cancellation of life, population-wide house arrest and destruction of the economy that the UK and so many other world powers have chosen will have been the correct response to this threat.

If, at the end of this grisly period, the deaths per capita in Sweden are much higher than neighbouring Denmark and Norway, the more draconian approach will seem to have been worth it; but if the Swedish experience remains roughly in line with those countries, justifying the enforced lockdown will be much harder, and questions with profound consequences will rightly be asked about the decisions of the UK and the wider world.

If it looks screwy — I owe how much to HMRC? — it’s often worth searching for a misplaced zero.

But what if the sums and your feeling of what is ‘roughly right’ coincide perfectly because you are not only a dimwit when it comes to calculation but a you have no idea about wider truths either: you cannot do a ballpark calculation sensibly because you don’t know what a ballpark looks like?

This horrifying coincidence of mathematical and spatial myopias did great damage last week to the reputation of one of America’s best-know broadcasters and to MSNBC, the Left-wing Fox News equivalent that plays an important role in geeing up Democrats for the presidential fight.

I will get to why it matters so much in a moment but first the fun of the broadcast. It was a live interview between square-jawed Brian Williams (in 2007, one of Time magazine’s Top 100 most influential people in the world, though a bit of a lion in winter these days) and a woman called Mara Gay, who is a member of the New York Times editorial board, a former Wall St Journal reporter and a graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, one of the top academic institutions in the United States.

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They were doing what people do on cable news: discussing a tweet.

The tweet had said that Michael Bloomberg had spent $500 million on his presidential campaign. That bit was true. Then, noting that there are 327 million Americans — also true — the tweeter suggested that Bloomberg could have given each American a million dollars “and still had lunch money left over”.

Brian Williams went full Ron Burgundy.

“When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear,” he said.

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,”

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” agreed Ms Gay. She added: “It’s true. It’s disturbing.”

Cue massive hilarity and embarrassment and piling-on. Numerate America pointed out that 500 million divided by 327 million is roughly 1.5. Not a million. Just one dollar and fifty cents could have been the gift Bloomberg made to everyone in the nation.

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Now, wait a moment. Highly educated people are often innumerate — UnHerd’s Tom Chivers frequently, if gently, points this out. It’s awful but it’s true. Effortlessly numerate commentators stand out because there are so few of them. One of the reasons why Evan Davis is such a wonderful asset to the BBC is that he can count: he can see numbers.

So let’s give Brian Williams and Mara Gay a pass on the maths. Let’s assume we are all of us (except Tom) in the same glasshouse here and we are eyeing the stones but deciding not to throw. No: let us concentrate instead on the context, the ballpark.

This is the real horror story. These two people, whose entire jobs can be described as knowing things about society, seriously believed (“It all became clear.” “True.” “Disturbing.”) that it might be possible for Michael Bloomberg to give every American a million dollars without it making any impact on his wealth. Every American. Folk in small-town diners. College kids. Donald Trump. My own daughter Clara (as a citizen, I assume she’d qualify — yippee!)

How could that feel right? How could it feel true? Why would he not have done it already and asked if they might consider voting for him when they cashed the cheque?

The answer is that for a certain group of Americans who want to see change but not pay for it, the idea has taken hold that all that needs to happen for everyone in the nation to be wealthy is for a few billionaires to give away part of their wealth: note ‘part of,’ not even much of it.

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By Tanya Gold

The idea has skewed the debate about healthcare that seems likely to be the ground zero of the presidential campaign in the autumn.

Plenty of Sanders supporters seem to genuinely believe that American healthcare could become free at the point of delivery — entirely government funded — if a few wealthy people paid more tax. Perhaps they think Mike Bloomberg could fund it.

It’s barmy. And to be fair to Senator Sanders, he makes no such claims. Yes, he points out that according to the think tank the Institute for Policy Studies three people — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos — own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population.

True. Disturbing, even.

But Sanders does not pretend that going after them and them alone is not enough to change America.

As well as “getting rid of billionaires” (he has a car bumper sticker promising this so it must be true) he acknowledges the need for the much less wealthy to chip in: employees would pay a 4% premium on all income above $29,000 to fund Medicare for All, he says. So once you earn serious money you would be paying a decent whack.

And here’s the rub. Williams seems to think — along with so many on the American Left — that it is not about him. The billionaires will foot the bill for fairness. But it’s nonsense. The brilliant English think-tanker Richard Reeves pointed out years ago — in his book Dream Hoarders — that the top 20% of the USA should be where the finger is pointed and the redistribution might begin. These, Reeves says, are the comfortably off who have used their wealth and their cultural power to cream off the best of American life for themselves.

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“It would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle-class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,” Reeves wrote. “But it would be just that — an exaggeration, not a fiction.”

This is where the debate about American inequality should perhaps be focused: where it could make a real difference. It’s not (just) about the billionaires; it’s about the glass floor that separates the upper-middle-class of America from the rest.

It’s about persuading the gluten-free joggers to have respect for people who live in communities in which gender roles are still marked. In which family ties still matter more than any other. In which you run in the street only to get away from a mugger or the police.

Many of these folks rather like billionaires. They admire their energy. They envy them their yachts. Suggesting to them that life could be dandy if the billionaires coughed up is insulting to their intelligence, and avoids, according to those who study these matters seriously, the real problem.

In sleek studios in New York, it is easier to discuss tweets about billionaires and mangle maths than to focus on what would drive real change. That would require a talk about class. Where do millions of people like Brian Williams spend their holidays? Where do their kids go to university? And are they willing to give up their privilege? As a fellow broadcaster I suspect he’d employ one of our favourite get-out clauses — always true on the Today programme of course — “I’m so sorry, we’re out of time…”

I believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite. I also believe that the Tories, who don’t care about immigrants, exploited this. It is gruesome to watch the campaigning video of Boris Johnson in the Grodzinski Bakery in Golders Green, selling doughnuts and calming Orthodox Jews, and then to read that the Dubs amendment to offer sanctuary to refugee children was rejected by his government. Simply put, they used us. Why wouldn’t they?

If Corbyn’s racism was exploitable by the Right, it is awful to watch this strategy crossing the Atlantic to fell Bernie Sanders. He is called the Jewish Corbyn. He isn’t. He is called an anti-Semite. He isn’t. The charge is absurd. Even so, it has begun.

Bernie Sanders’s father, Elias ben Yehuda Sanders, left Galicia, Poland at 17, in 1921. He was fleeing pogroms; later, most of Galician Jewry was murdered at Auschwitz. “The threat of anti-Semitism is not some abstract idea to me,” he has said. “It is very personal. It destroyed a large part of my family.”

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Jewish birth doesn’t exempt you from being anti-Semitic — read the blogs of the Tony Greenstein, the son of a rabbi, now expelled from the Labour Party for his “noxious behaviour” if you disagree — but Sanders calls himself “a proud American Jew” and I believe him; he is a proud Jew in the Socialist tradition. Two things made his politics, he says: growing up in poverty in New York and the murder of his extended family in Poland.

There are two charges aimed at Sanders. The first is that he is not supportive enough of Israel. What kind of Israel is he not supportive enough of? A Greater Israel with ever-expanding settlements, with all hope of peace extinguished, in which any violence is forgivable as long as it is not towards a Jew? I would hope not; that is Trump’s kind of support and it is not, for me, support. It is, rather, enabling of the very worst elements in Israel; a summoning of something awful.

Sanders is a garden variety liberal Zionist. He supports a two-state solution, and credibly. Corbyn could never manage this, even if it was his party’s official policy. Sanders, though, wrote this in an essay for Jewish Currents: “The founding of Israel is understood by another people in the land of Palestine as the cause of their painful displacement. And just as Palestinians should recognise the just claims of Israeli Jews, supporters of Israel must understand why Palestinians view Israel’s creation as they do. Acknowledging these realities does not ‘delegitimise’ Israel any more than acknowledging the sober facts of America’s own founding delegitimises the United States.”

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It is hard to disagree with this analysis; rather, it is comforting to read such sense and empathy. Even so, he is embroiled in a fight with American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). He refuses to attend their conference this year, although he did offer to give a speech in 2016 (and was rejected). “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security,” he says. “So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform Aipac provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason, I will not attend their conference”. Aipac called the remarks “odious” and “shameful” and invited Mike Pence to speak instead. Please suppress your laughter.

The second charge against him is the company he keeps, and it is true that some of his associates — the congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — do not share his support for a two-state solution and have sometimes fallen into anti-Semitic tropes. In 2012 Omar tweeted that Israel has “hypnotised” the world (she apologised) and Tlaib has falsely blamed Israel for the death of a Palestinian child (she retracted).

What do you say to these unpleasant associates? You could say that Sanders has other associates anti-Zionists would despise, such as the kibbutzniks he stayed with in Haifa in 1963. He later wrote: “It was there that I saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which Israel was founded. I think it is very important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution.” Sanders needs to build a progressive coalition to defeat Trump; and we must accept, the Left being what it is, that many are anti-Zionists. But they — and this is the crucial difference with Jeremy Corbyn’s situation — are following a Jewish liberal Zionist now and I read that as victory.

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This is not enough for Sanders’s Jewish enemies. They say he doesn’t practise religious Judaism — why should he? A Jewish acquaintance who stayed with Sanders on the Haifa kibbutz made a ludicrous intervention in print, saying that Sanders refused invitations to his children’s bar mitzvahs. He also complained that, when they stayed on the kibbutz, Sanders sat under a tree reading Karl Marx with his “rootless Jewish soul”.

These squabbles are normal within the Jewish community, where competitive Judaism is a sport, like chess, and the ancient debate about whether Jews should be particularists — in this case, unquestioning Zionists — or universalists — in this case, avid Socialists — rages on; how best, is the unanswerable question, do we remain safe?  Sanders’s politics, I fear, is the real cause of the hostility, and this angers me; the claims of his “anti-Semitism” are spurious and cruel. Mike Bloomberg, the non-practising Jewish capitalist, has escaped such claims of “non-Jewish Jewishness”.

I have spent too much time trying to explain what anti-Semitism is, and what it isn’t. Seeking peace in the Middle East and having the integrity — and the charisma — to attract anti-Zionists when you are a liberal Zionist, and always have been, isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s good politics and cause for hope. Do American Jews really trust that the racism that Donald Trump summons — for cynicism — will not overwhelm them too? If they do, they are mad.

Nearly 75,000 people have already voted for a Democratic candidate in Nevada — an extraordinarily high number: the overall turn out four years ago was 84,000. There are 36 delegates in play. Heading into the Paris Theatre for the final match-up before tomorrow’s caucuses, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders looked the favourite to take the state.

The debate did little to change that. Instead, the Democratic frontrunners honed their fire on Bloomberg, with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts particularly fierce in her attacks on the former New York Mayor. Warren talked of a “billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians”:

“No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

The Sanders campaign received a big boost ahead of the caucus debate when it won the backing of Mijente, a grass-roots Latino group. The group has a 300,000-person email list of supporters whom it will now mobilise to canvas for the Vermont senator. Sanders has already raised four times as much money from Latino contributors as any other Democratic candidate.

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A victory for Sanders in Nevada would stand him in good stead for the Democratic nomination, after victories in the popular vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign of his biggest challenger, Joe Biden, is visibly flailing. Indeed, a voter asked Biden bluntly during an event in Nevada “What the hell is going on with your campaign?”

Eric Lee, a joint coordinator of the Sanders 2020 campaign in the UK, told me that Sanders will win the Nevada caucuses “because he understands better than any other Democrat the two things that have changed in American politics in this century”.

“The first is that the economic crisis of 2008 dealt a death blow to the ‘American dream’, with rising inequality, poverty wages and a trade union movement in terminal decline. The second is that with the collapse of Communism, democratic socialism — which was never a dirty word here in Europe — is no longer a dirty word in America either, especially among young people.”

For some, it may be comforting to put the rise of Bernie Sanders (and Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter) down to youthful irresponsibility and even historical amnesia when it comes to socialism. But there is a real material base for disillusionment with contemporary capitalism.

As Sanders pointed out during a speech at George Washington University in the summer, “the average wage of the American worker in real dollars is no higher than it was forty-six years ago”. He also noted that “life expectancy is declining for the first time in modern American history”.

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Nevada — and specifically Las Vegas — is often associated with the vulgar trappings of the free market. Vegas is home to giant casinos, bottle service clubs, prostitution, pawnshops and ostentatious wealth. Yet trade unionism remains strong — built into the sprawling casinos, hotels and restaurants. Nearly a quarter of North America’s powerful UNITE HERE union members are based in Nevada, forming a branch known as the Culinary Workers Union; the northwestern city of Reno, like Vegas, is a union stronghold.

The Las Vegas skyline is dominated by the giant, gold-coloured hotels belonging to the Wynn group — of Steve Wynn, the long-time Vegas hotelier who opened the first big hotel on the Strip, the Mirage, back in 1989. It was Wynn who struck the first big neutrality agreement with The Culinary (as the Culinary Workers Union is known), ensuring that the union would not be persecuted by management during attempts to sign up members. Other hoteliers soon fell into line.

Today, virtually every hotel on the Las Vegas strip is organised. This bodes well for the Sanders campaign, with much of the Vermont Senator’s rhetoric focusing on issues of class and economic justice.

Yet The Culinary — which is the most powerful union in the state — dislikes Sanders’ Medicare for all bill, which it fears will eliminate the private insurance it won for members. As it did in 2016, the Culinary has declined to endorse any of the candidates (in 2008, it backed Obama). After the announcement on Friday, two leading Culinary officials received threats by phone and online from Sanders’ supporters.

Michael González, a 45-year-old housekeeper who works for MGM resorts and has already voted, told me over the phone that he hadn’t voted for Sanders because of specific concerns he has over the Senator’s healthcare plans. “The plan I [currently] have through the union works for me,” González said.

“I see why the people with no healthcare at all are liking Bernie and what he’s saying, but when you’ve already got a good … plan you’re not gonna necessarily take a gamble on this Medicare for all. My plan could get worse [under Sanders’ vision] and it’s hard for me to vote for something like that.”

The row highlights a friction between ‘fortress unionism’ and the universalist, social democratic message of the Sanders campaign. But he nevertheless remains on course: a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released on Tuesday gave Sanders a double-digit lead over the rest of his competitors in the Nevada primary.

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Still, it was Warren who undoubtedly ‘won’ Wednesday’s debate. It is probably too late for her to take the primary, however (though she did reportedly raise $425,000 in just 30 minutes). Meanwhile, Sanders didn’t slip up: he did a good job of deflecting attacks on him, and so finished the debate as he started it — as the frontrunner.

And so the Nevada caucus probably won’t be the game-changer hoped for by the underdogs. We’ll find out for sure when the post-debate polls start coming in. An improved showing for Warren seems likely, with Bloomberg faltering as the attacks on the billionaire business tycoon gain traction (many younger Democrats will not have known that Bloomberg supported George W. Bush in 2004 until Sanders raised the point in Wednesday’s debate). In the background, Biden continued to flail, and Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old politician from Indiana, failed to set the stage alight as some hoped he would.

Following the vote-counting debacle in Iowa earlier this month, the Nevada Democratic Party will mainly be hoping that the vote-counting process runs smoothly after tomorrow’s caucus. As things stand, the nomination looks increasingly like Sanders’ to lose.

Impersonating these rubes in a mock southern accent the contributor carries on, “Donald Trump is the smart one and y’all elitists are dumb!”

Mr Lemon bangs his head on the desk. He is laughing so hard he cannot ask a question.

Un-noticed when it was first broadcast, this segment is now an internet sensation and a free advert for Trump’s re-election bid.

Laughing at Mr Trump — in particular laughing at his supporters — is cathartic for the American Left, but it’s a vice best practised at home, with the curtains drawn. Nothing annoys us all more than being mocked. Rubes — mocked all their lives — are probably even less likely than the rest of us to take it lying down.

It’s little wonder that the more people laugh, the more intensely focused the Trump campaign gets on its base and their concerns.

Take kitchen appliances.

Just before Christmas, The Donald gave a speech widely regarded as one of his oddest ever.  “Remember the dishwasher? You’d press it… Boom! There’d be like an explosion,” Trump said.  “Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out….Now, you press it 12 times. Women tell me …”

“You know, they give you four drops of water.”

And on and on and on. The thinkers of the liberal Left cringed. How could the holder of the office graced by JFK and Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt be standing in a hanger in Michigan wittering on about dishwashers? What is wrong with the man? And how extra-cringeworthy to add that women were telling him about them. Didn’t men stack dishwashers now?

The Washington Post sniffed that it was a “weird obsession“. Another Left-wing website called it “a bizarre sexist rant”. Surely the nation would soon rise as one and rid itself of this joker?

Not so fast.  As the American Institute for Economic Research puts it:

“He is 100% correct about this whole topic. It’s a big and important one too.  American dishwashers used to work. They were wonderful labor-saving devices. They kept our kitchens cleaner. They sanitized the dishes, helping to stop cross-contamination and generally improving health over the iffy process of handwashing.” 

Then one day they just stopped doing the work. The reason: regulations on water use.  To quote the AIER:

“These regulations have caused an infuriating and devastating degradation of the quality of appliances and the quality of life in our homes. Trump is a smart politician. He specializes in finding issues that no one else is talking about how they directly affect the quality of life.”

A smart politician. Tell that to CNN. But here’s a thought that might convince them, or at the very least cause Don Lemon to laugh less. One of the central dividing lines between Donald Trump and, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, is that those two Democrats have grand plans to use the power of the Federal government to challenge what they see as the grotesque inequality of modern America, to change lives for many Americans. Mr Trump has no grand plans. He prefers to talk about immigrants and crime. And what the government has done to your dishwasher.

This matters. It is widely understood that Americans are suspicious about ‘big government’.  The truth is more complex: they are often rather keen on government schemes. From Eisenhower’s Interstate highways, through to George W Bush’s expansion of free prescriptions for elderly people, government can work in America. It can be popular. But for these schemes to catch on, trust in government has to be there first.

And here is the accidental brilliance of Trump. By trashing everything and talking only of the small stuff — stuff that seems close to people’s lives but doesn’t affect them in a grand way — Trump is damping down (destroying, even) the faith in government that has to be there for the grand schemes of his opponents to be feasible. And by focusing on federal government regulations that reduce the efficacy of kitchen appliances, Mr Trump is doing proper damage to many not-hugely-political-Americans’ sense that government can help them and improve their lives.

A fascinating piece of writing by a doctoral student in US politics seems to bear this out.

“Low trust in government,” says David McDonald of Florida State University, “means that people are less supportive of government doing ‘big things’ such as enacting national health insurance or raising taxes to fund large-scale social welfare programs. In other words, low trust in government means that Americans are less likely to support ‘more government’ even though they are dissatisfied with high, and rising income inequality. Low trust in government is preventing Americans from supporting more redistribution, even though they dislike high income inequality and know that it has been rising.”

By trashing everything. By reducing trust; by talking about dishwashers; by driving the media demented, and through the whole impeachment imbroglio, Donald Trump is reducing the ability of his Democratic challengers to convince people that they should support their grand thinking — people just will not accept that big subjects can be tackled convincingly by Washington DC.

Even those who have no liking for Trump are not in the mood to be voting for more power to the Brahmins who complain about Trump’s sexism, but actually employ Hispanic maids to fill their dishwashers.

The implications of David McDonald’s work are quite profound for the Democrats it seems to me: they need to get power first, with a modest small set of programmes. A call for civility and reasonableness above all else. And then, as the mood of the nation changes, come up with the radical stuff. It’s an argument for Biden or Bloomberg.  It is not going to thrill the Left of the party.

The alternative might be to go on giggling at the foolishness of the rubes. And see Donald Trump’s second term reduce American trust in government to lows from which it takes decades to recover. Dishwashers are no laughing matter.

The answer might surprise you. It’s California.

A strange and rather depressing madness has gripped the United States in recent months, and there has been an almost universal effort to denigrate one of the sunniest, wealthiest, happiest places on earth. In the past, California’s critics (of whom there have been plenty) have been driven by envy or puritanism or both. Now they are motivated by a self-destructive politics that uses the Golden State as a warning rather than an inspiration.  From the Left Californians are assailed as airheads fiddling while their state burns, and from the Right as welfare queens with an over-fondness to government spending.

Poor California. The political extremes are belting out a chorus of scorn for a place that used to be renowned the world over for being, well: California.

The state has always been the very incarnation of the American Dream. Ideas are born there. Myths are created. Space is given to people who have made the journey west, in body and in spirit. It is a vital part of the enterprise we call America.

Now all are conspiring, conservatives and liberals alike, to murder their muse.

Let’s take their attacks one by one, beginning with the party in power in DC and its supporters around the nation. The Republicans are upset because California is a bit of a one-party operation these days: the fact that the Democrats are in charge and loudly oppose president Trump has made the state the enemy of the entire Republican party, at least for the time being.

Suggested reading

The toxic self-hatred of white Democrats

By Justin Webb

In a video, much shared recently on social media, Donald Trump’s so called spiritual adviser, the TV evangelist Paula White, can be seen praising the President, God, money and herself.

About half way through the edited highlights of the Paula White assault on our senses comes the following claim.

Southern California has passed a law saying the Bible is hate speech and the sale of the book has been banned.

For the avoidance of doubt:  this is not true. But I suspect quite a number of conservative Americans would quite like to think it were true, or could soon be true.

That’s because California, political birthplace of Ronald Reagan, powerhouse of economic successes past and present, future-focused, can-do California, is regarded increasingly by the American Right as a cess-pit, a lost cause, a failed state. They point out – with some justification – that life for many Californians who are not part of the Obama/Clinton/Hollywood set has not been great in recent years. Folk can still read the Bible in San Diego but the rest of the nation is tired of being looked down on by a California that seems so dysfunctional.

Victor Davis Hanson, a California academic and Trump supporter, asks the question, “Is California becoming pre-modern?”

For Mr Hanson – and many on the Right of US politics including many perfectly reasonable people — think the place is falling apart because of the composition of its population.

Suggested reading

Are the Democrats ready for revolution?

By Justin Webb

“Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers,” Mr Hanson says, “have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services.”

Many of those poor newcomers, it is worth pointing out, are Hispanic. California is now majority minority and it’s beginning to rattle some people.

But to cry racism –  justified perhaps in some cases – cannot wish away the sense that something is wrong with the way the state is run. In particular, a law (designed to reduce the strain on prisons) that decriminalised thefts where less than a thousand dollars was taken, seems to have led to an upsurge in petty (ish) crime that has made life more unpleasant  for many people of all races and income levels, in particular those who work in shops.

California’s Proposition 47, which was approved by nearly 60% of voters in 2014, reclassified small scale drug and property crimes as misdemeanours. Shoplifters have had a field day. This impression of lawlessness does not improve the nerves of people still trying to live decent Californian lives.

But California is still home to so much commercial innovation, so much private wealth creation.

It seems inconceivable that the Republican party can turn its back permanently on California and Californians. There is a list of post-Trump moves the party is going to have to make if it wants to stay in touch with the wider nation. It has to learn once again to respect faiths other than Christianity. It has to go back to respecting science. And I would add one more: someone sunny and western (a modern Reagan perhaps) needs to address Republicanism’s rampant Californiphobia.

Suggested reading

Down and out in the Golden State

By Peter Franklin

And what of the Left, who, as I say, are nominally in charge? Well they seem to have fallen even further out of love with the state they run. Followers of the Left-wing potential Democratic nominee, Bernie Sanders, and particularly of fellow Leftie Elizabeth Warren, are so over the tech world of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The inequality that the tech crowd seem happy with does not sit well with the younger Democratic crowd.

In particular, the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area, fuelled by mega-salaries in tech companies, has come back to haunt them. They are pouring money into housing schemes now — but it’s too late to rescue their reputation for careless breaking of social contracts, and something has undoubtedly broken in the bond between woke tech and the party it previously energised and funded.

How telling it was earlier in this year, when Amazon announced it was abandoning plans to build a much heralded  headquarters in New York City. The Left-wing New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led a chorus of cheers: the tax breaks that would have gone to Amazon would be better spent on local schools she said. California style tech-dependence? No thanks!

This feeling that California is not a model of how life should be lived has been accentuated by news that’s made national headlines in recent weeks. A particularly bad season of wildfires have served to whip up a frenzy among environmentally sensitive liberal Americans with a penchant for morality tales.

So: California is burning because it has been so careless with its wealth. The rich who live along the coast have not thought about the poor who live further inland. Addicted to their fast cars and private jets, they are less keen on paying their taxes and as a result public transport and public housing have suffered from lack of investment. And worst of all, the rich who have starved California of tax cash and opposed public transport plans and got on with their multi car lives as if nothing has changed, have failed to think about climate change.

Suggested reading

The traitors and thieves of Silicon Valley

By Jonathan Tepper

As one New York Times columnist put it, “California, as it is currently designed, will not survive the coming climate. Either we alter how we live here or many of us won’t live here anymore.”

The Atlantic agreed that the wildfire crisis was “raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest most optimistic state is fast becoming unliveable”.

It would be hard for anyone to deny that California is in trouble. Homelessness blights its cities. Transport is inadequate. And farmers, starved of water from the sky, have been pumping groundwater at such a rate that towns in the central belt have been sinking into the earth. The huge farms that still produce around a quarter of all America’s food cannot carry on like this.

Meanwhile, politicians of every stripe conspire to talk it down, rather than talk of rescue. And by doing so they risk talking down the enterprise upon which they all depend: America’s foundational sense of optimism.

And Lord knows generations of Californians have needed that optimism to survive. The reality of life in this state has been as brutal – perhaps more so – than in any other. San Francisco was destroyed by fire over and over again in its early years, and devastated completely in the 1906 earthquake. The city flag depicts a phoenix.

Go to the ghost town of Bodie — on the border with Nevada — and you can still see what life was like for generations of gold-rush Californians. Bodie saw boom times and an eventual bust as mining ceased. The bust was so complete that the townspeople just left. Doors still swing in the wind. The cold dry climate has preserved the buildings where the hookers and chancers once mingled. You can close your eyes and feel their struggle for survival.

Struggling and overcoming adversity. It’s what Californians are. Yes, there’s the Beach Boys California Dreamin malarky, but the real California is an earthier kind of dreamin’. It’s about the foundational myths of America. It needs to live, or the idea of the whole nation could die.

Whether dream or nightmare, it’s nonsense – not least because Singapore isn’t the laissez-faire haven it’s cracked up to be. Admittedly, it does possess some of the qualities that free marketeers hold dear – like comparatively low tax rates, but in other respects the Singaporean state is more interventionist than anything the UK is used to.

Suggested reading

Singapore shows there’s more than one way of doing capitalism

By Peter Franklin

A good example is the island’s housing policy. It’s the subject of a thought-provoking piece by John Bryson for CityMetric:

“Singapore had its own ‘Brexit’ in 1965 when it separated from Malaysia. In 1960 the Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) was formed to provide affordable and high-quality housing for residents of this tiny city-state nation. Today, more than 80 per cent of Singapore’s 5.4m residents live in housing provided by the development board.

“These are issued by the state on 99-year leaseholds, and the value of the home depends on the inherent utility value of the property (size, type, location)…”

So Singaporeans own their homes – or at least the leasehold on their homes – but the state retains ultimate control over most of the housing stock. It uses that control to stop the island’s limited living space from being cornered by private landlords and speculators:

” … the development board prohibits Singaporeans from owning more than two residential units at any time. In the case of an inherited flat, ownership is only allowed if the inheritor disposes of their existing private or public residential property within six months of inheriting it.”

Singapore’s system doesn’t really fit into the categories we’re familiar with in Britain – it’s certainly very different from our open market in freehold and leasehold property, but it’s also nothing like the rented social housing as provided by councils and housing associations. It both encourages home ownership (the state even provides leasehold buyers with financing options), but discourages the exploitation of property as a financial asset.

This may appear to be more restrictive than, say, a pro-ownership policy like the UK’s Right to Buy, but it’s worth remembering that 40% of Right to Buy homes are now owned by private landlords – contributing to a serious decline in home ownership, especially among younger people. The Thatcherite dream of a deregulated economy and a property-owning democracy has been undone by its internal contradictions.

But could Singapore’s approach – a response to the city-state’s naturally limited land supply and hence the need for super-dense development – work in the UK?

London is a city-state, of a sort. The land supply is limited not so much by the size of the country, but by the planning system and by market demand for proximity to the city centre. Unlike Singapore, however, our capital city is full of private landlords extracting value from the productive economy.

Nevertheless, the state is still a major landowner in London – and controls large tracts of housing that could be redeveloped, densified and made available to the public along Singaporean lines. We just need a British version of the Housing and Development Board to make it happen.

Perhaps, we could ask the original version if they’d like to open a London branch. We have a Canadian Bank of England Governor, so why not pay for the services of Singapore’s world-renowned public administrators? I’m sure the British civil service, who tend to be liberal pro-immigration types, wouldn’t mind.

Suggested reading

More community land trusts could transform the housing debate

By Peter Franklin

Certainly, we won’t tackle the housing crisis unless government beefs up its capacity to get stuck-in directly: buying-up land, getting stuff built and enabling ownership while blocking speculation. However, there’s another barrier to progress – politics.

Our leaders extol the virtues of home ownership, but still seem to think that rising property prices are a good thing too. In fact, it’s a form of inflation – and a glaringly obvious barrier to opportunity for anyone who isn’t yet a home owner. Yes, there’s a feel good factor if you’re already on the property ladder – but, beyond that, the benefit of rising prices is either purely notional (it won’t make your home any bigger) or, if you sell, comes at the expense of the buyer (who, by the way, will be you when you buy your next home).

It’s such a ridiculous mindset – and a political sensitive one. When I worked in Government, we could use language about making home ownership ‘affordable’, but not if it suggested an ambition to see property prices fall. That’s because, unlike in Singapore, we continue to regard our homes as money-spinning financial assets.

In America, Bernie Sanders – a self-described socialist and candidate for the Democratic nomination – unveiled his housing policy last week. A lot of it is pretty radical, featuring national rent controls and curbs on speculation. However, as Emily Badger notes in the New York Times, the Sanders campaign seems to be OK with the notion of housing as a financial asset as long as it is ordinary Americans who benefit:

“Mr. Sanders’s campaign… [argues] that rich investors or landlords shouldn’t get to make so much, while ordinary American families should have a chance to make something.

“’We want to return to the notion that homeownership can be an asset builder for working people and average American families, and it is not just a vehicle to commodify to make the rich richer,’ said Josh Orton, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign and its national policy director.”

Are Sanders’ people suggesting that he wants to hold down property prices (with the rent controls etc ), but in other cases have them go up, so that non-wealthy homeowners can accumulate assets too? 

A less contradictory interpretation is that buying a home as an “asset builder” simply refers to the equity one builds up by paying off the mortgage. I hope that’s what Team Bernie means, because the alternative of profiting from property inflation is to the detriment of people who don’t yet own their homes and perhaps never will.

Suggested reading

Could Boris solve the housing crisis?

By Peter Franklin

In any case, it would be great if more politicians would stand up and state clearly that they don’t want our homes to appreciate in value. At the very least, they should aim for a future in which wages rise faster than property prices, not the other way round.

It had tried to shield the old and poor from the worst of it, but at the cost of taxing the middle class, the rich, and the country’s vital tourist trade. It met the targets of the European Central Bank, privatised the ports and airports, played an exemplary game in international politics, and spent more of its GDP on Nato commitments than any other member.

In the end, many of its supporters stayed at home, while the far-right vote switched back to the conservatives, and Syriza lost power – scoring 31.5%, compared with 40% for the centre-right New Democracy party.

For the some on the far Left, the fall of Syriza government is the termination of an embarrassment. Alexis Tsipras led the party to power in 2015 on a promise to resist austerity but after a few nail-biting months was forced into abject retreat, with the country’s banks closed, chaos on the streets and vital services only a few days away from failure.

Suggested reading

Time's up for Greece's populist demagogue

By David Patrikarakos

For me, however, there are positives to take away that have implications for the entire project of the global Left. First, Tsipras showed that with a clear narrative, a message of hope and some competent advisers, the far-Left’s project can work in government. The oligarchy, whose two-party system (Pasok and New Democracy) collapsed, expected Syriza to be amateurs: in fact they brought professionalism and openness to an endemically corrupt and chaotic state.

Second, by being radical in opposition, and refusing to give up radicalism even when forced into retreat, Syriza and the wider Greek Left defeated one of the most violent and open fascist threats in the European continent. Its conservative predecessors had tolerated Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the police, and murderous violence on the streets. Without a Left prepared to risk taking power, Greece would have degenerated into a battleground of populisms.

Third, Syriza supplanted the traditional Greek social democratic party Pasok as the “natural” party of Left government. Its spokespeople, pundits and aligned senior journalists now inhabit the Greek airwaves and cultural life.

Finally, the shock of seeing the Left in power has changed – for now – the behaviour of the Greek conservatives. They were forced to exchange ageing playboys and oligarchs for politicians who look cleaner and more restrained.

Suggested reading

How Europe smothered the radical Left

By Peter Franklin

On the downside, the experience of the 2015 “Greek Spring” proved beyond doubt that, within the Eurozone, the political space for a radical Left government will always be constrained. You can defy the Maastricht rules on public finance – as Italy’s Matteo Salvini is doing now – but if you do so in combination with a radical shift of power and wealth towards the people, the coercive force of the central bank will be used against you.

To understand where the radical Left goes next, you have to understand how modest its achievements have been outside Greece, and how its enemy has changed.

In Spain, the advance of Podemos-Unidos, an alliance of traditional communists with the new “horizontal” activist movement that sprung up in 2011, has stalled. After scoring 14% in April’s general election, its leader Pablo Iglesias is now forced to be a junior and inconsequential coalition partner in the socialist-led government. The same rough arrangement applies to the Left Bloc in Portugal – currently polling 9%. In Denmark, another electoral pact between the far-Left and social democrats has put the latter in power.

In Finland, a general shift to the Left has put the radical Left Alliance into a broad governing coalition with Greens, Social Democrats and Liberals. Germany’s Left Party, born out of the former ruling communist party, survives on around 9%, and plays a leading role in the “Red-Red-Green” government of the Berlin region.

Suggested reading

The heat is on for Greece

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

In general, overtly anti-capitalist Left parties have peaked below 20% as the memory of the financial crisis fades, while a shift to the Left by traditional social democrats has stemmed their own decline.

But the political forces emerging out of the 20^thcentury Left face two new challenges: the so-called Green Wave, which has swelled the electoral support of Green parties everywhere; and a growing electoral threat from far right or overtly racist parties, some of which are building support among the working class communities where the Left used to be strong.

Syriza, Podemos and the rest prospered after 2008 because their politics, and to an extent their style, resonated with the mood of anger as deep austerity followed the bailout of the banks. Faced with a crisis of consent for democracy, the rule of law and human rights, the whole Left – including both Marxists and social democrats – is being forced to make choices it wanted to avoid.

The first hard choice is between redistribution and saving the planet. Orthodox Left doctrine tells you this does not have to be a choice, and that the challenge of rapid decarbonisaton should be an opportunity for the Left to sell – indeed to converge around – its well-worn projects of state direction and intervention. But to capture the imagination of the young people involved in the US Sunrise Movement, or Fridays for Future in Europe and Extinction Rebellion here, the order of precedence has to be clear.

Suggested reading

Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

In future, Left-wing parties will need to look and sound like they care about the planet more than anything else – and the truth is, our tradition has not always done so. The closer you remain to the traditional working class communities which prospered during the carbon era, the harder it is to walk the walk when it comes to zero carbon.

When it comes to the far-right threat, the Left should be on firmer territory. The very prestige of parties such as Podemos, Syriza and Die Linke rests on the leading role their communist predecessors played in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s. But today’s far Left is reluctant to make the big tactical change their grandparents’ generation made when faced with Hitler and Franco.

In the 1930s, faced with the rise of fascism, Stalin ordered Western communist parties to form “Popular Front” coalitions with liberal and conservative parties. By 1936, those governments controlled both France and Spain. You could even argue that the spirit of the Popular Front animated Attlee’s decision to join Churchill’s wartime coalition in May 1940.

But leaders like Pablo Iglesias in Spain, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, have invested so much personal energy in fighting the liberal centrist parties that they cannot bring themselves to make the same kind of overt, strategic change of priorities. And there is no Stalin to bang their heads together.

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

As a result the strategic hopes of the global Left now lie with two veteran leaders who have chosen their own long march through the institutions: Jeremy Corbyn here and Bernie Sanders in the USA. Whereas Syriza had to destroy Greek social democracy in order to replace it, Corbyn and Sanders chose to take over their respective centre-Left parties.

But Corbyn and Sanders face effectively the same dilemma as the rest. To enact a radical programme they need power; to gain power they need a story of hope to energise the poor, competence enough to mobilise middle class voters and – for the youth – to look and sound like climate change is their number one priority. Like Tsipras, they need to jettison the most extreme “anti-imperialist” obsessions of some of their activists.

And as Tsipras discovered, doing all that only gets you into office. Once there, you have to take on the real power: the financial markets, hedge funds, oligarchs and organised criminals who believe they can make and destroy governments at whim.

The sheer scale of the climate crisis will, as the 20^th century recedes and the IPCC’s decarbonisation targets become pressing, change the priorities of the Left. The far-Left is now either in reluctant coalition with its social democrat and Green allies, or resisting even that. For me, the 21^stcentury equivalent of the Popular Front would be an alliance of all forces prepared to commit to spending the hundreds of billions we’ll need to combat climate change, plus the absolute defence of democracy and the rule of law, plus the reversal of austerity. The renationalisation of energy and transport infrastructure is implicit in any radical plan to halve net carbon over the next ten years.

Paradoxically, the most tactically adept Left politician on the planet remains Tsipras, though he is despised by Mélenchon and publicly avoided by Corbyn. Tsipras just survived a four-year crash course in the language of priorities and came out with 31.5% of the vote (with a further 8% actually going to parties to the Left of him). Above all he made a government of the far-Left thinkable, in one of the most polarised democracies in Europe. That’s what I think the minister meant by “losing nicely”.

Democrats contesting offices in areas where the party is not dominant (as it is in Ocasio-Cortez’ district) are running substantially more Left-wing campaigns than previous Democratic aspirants. And Abrahams and Gillum both put emphasis on mobilising the most Left-wing constituencies in their states—minorities and the young—with platforms to match on social and economic issues.

But how far Left is this surge? And what does it stand for? Can it really be compared with the hard Left radicalism seen elsewhere across the globe?

Rhetorically, this new Leftism rejects ‘business as usual’ and involves a sweeping indictment of the economic and political system for generating inequality and doing little to help ordinary people in the wake of the great financial crisis. Substantively, Democrats today – in particular aspirants for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination – are far more willing to entertain and endorse ‘big ideas’, such as going beyond the ACA, aka Obamacare (which is now vigorously defended) to ‘Medicare for all’, free college education, universal pre-kindergarten provision, vastly expanded infrastructure spending and even a guaranteed jobs programme. Taxing the rich is ‘in’ and worrying about the deficit is ‘out’.

Further reading

Could the Democrats' blue wave unseat Trump?

By Amanda Whiting

Democrats are also highly unified on core social issues such as opposing racism, defending immigrants, promoting LGBT and gender equality and criminal justice reform. In short, the centre of gravity of the Democratic party has decisively shifted from trying to assure voters of fiscal and social moderation, to forthrightly promising active government in a wide range of areas.

But this hardly means the Democrats are in any danger of becoming a radical party. Far from it. As Leftism goes, the current Democratic iteration is of a fairly modest variety, approaching, at most, mild European social democracy. Those who call themselves ‘socialist’ (as Ocasio-Cortez does) are few and far between.

Nor is it the case that incumbents and moderates are being thrown out wholesale and replaced with candidates much farther to their Left. Across the country, only two Democratic incumbents in the House lost primaries, and none in the Senate did. A Brookings study found that self-described “progressive Democrats” did well in primaries this election season but establishment Democrats actually did somewhat better. Thus, the change in the party is less a Leftward surge featuring new politicians (though this is happening to some extent) and more a steady party-wide movement to the Left.

Further reading

Here's what to read and watch if you want to understand the 'new left'

By James Bloodworth

So what caused the shift? This is, after all, a party that was dominated by aggressively moderate ‘New Democrats’ in the 1990s and, even under Barack Obama (after a spurt of major legislation early in his first term), shied away from big programmes and repeatedly tried to broker deals with Republicans to bring down the deficit and reform ‘entitlement programmes’ – Medicare and Social Security, America’s names for government-subsidised health care for the aged and pensions. Many, many Democrats were still scared of the ‘tax-and-spend’ label Republicans were only too happy to pin on them.

One thing that did happen is time. As Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary for Obama and Harvard economics professor, noted, the last 15 years of economic, social and political developments, with the fissures and unsolved problems they have revealed in American society, should have moved open-minded people to the Left. These challenges are simply too big to be solved by mild, ameliorative steps. This is a widely shared view within the Democratic party, including most fervently among some of its strongest supporters – minority and younger generation voters. But increased movement to the Left is not confined to these groups; Democrats as a whole, including leading intellectual lights like Summers, are simply becoming more, and more consistently, centre-Left.

Further reading

From Jeremy Corbyn to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren; what the Left is getting right

By Liam Halligan

Indeed, we even see former President Obama in a recent speech urging Democrats to go beyond “good old ideas like a higher minimum wage” and embrace “good new ideas like Medicare-for-all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate”.

And, from the heart of “Hillaryland”, as the cluster of operatives around Hillary Clinton is termed, comes this robust call from Jake Sullivan, her campaign’s senior policy advisor, for going big:

“Democrats should not blush too much, or pay too much heed, when political commentators arch their eyebrows about the party moving Left. The center of gravity itself is moving, and this is a good thing… We Democrats do need to embrace a big, bold policy agenda. We do need to heed the calls of Franklin Roosevelt, who asked us to save capitalism from its excesses, and Lyndon Johnson, who asked us to think ambitiously about how government – and yes, government programmes – can help do that.”

Strong words coming from a fully-paid-up member of the Democratic establishment! But of course the real progenitor of ‘big ideas’, Left-wing politics in the Democratic party was Bernie Sanders. His insurgent campaign, which featured multiple large-scale policy proposals and fierce denunciations of the “billionaire class”, took the 2016 Democratic primaries by storm, injecting this rhetorical and policy approach into the Democratic mainstream. He particularly captured the imaginations of young voters, who gave him gave outsized majorities in most states.

Given Sanders’ success, particularly with young voters, and his continuing influence within the party (even though he is not formally a member), it is fair to ask whether the Democrats’ future lies in continuing to move Left to the point where the Democrats really become his party – or, at any rate, a party dominated by his ‘democratic socialist’ politics. In other words, could there be a “Corbynisation” of the Democratic party?

Further reading

Is global momentum with the Left?

By Angus Robertson

I am sceptical. Leaving aside structural-political differences between the UK and US – the Democratic party is not a parliamentary party and does not elect a ‘leader’ in the manner of the British Labour party – the Democrats are likely to remain a big tent party, in which the preponderance of voters and elected officials subscribe to a more moderate brand of Leftism than that espoused by Sanders. Think Elizabeth Warren, who combines big proposals with savvy-bridge building within the party and forthright support for capitalism (albeit of a reformed variety).

If there is a wild card here, it is less likely Sanders than an increasing Leftism on ‘identity politics’ issues around race, gender, LGBT issues and so on. It is possible that the Democrats could embrace these issues so thoroughly that it would come to define the party to the exclusion of economic and policy issues, however big. My sense is that Democratic politicians are aware of this possibility and will strenuously seek to avoid it out of sheer electoral self-interest. But we shall see.

In the age of social media, though, rallies make sense. The audience for them is not primarily the diehard supporters who will turn out in the rain. It’s the hundreds of thousands of people who will see footage on regional news bulletins, and as ‘B-roll’ – the silent footage which is used as a backdrop to a voiceover – on Facebook videos. (Incidentally, if you want to tell whether a political party or candidate “gets” the internet, see if they have subtitles on their videos. If they don’t, it’s a red flag: many videos are watched on public transport or work computers, with the sound muted.)

Since Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, his team has placed huge importance on social media – which they see as the antidote to the right-wing domination of the newspapers, and the way they set the agenda for the “impartial” broadcasters. His tweet announcing his victory in September 2015 included an embedded video of his acceptance speech, and was retweeted more than 2,700 times. From the start, his team recognised the importance of the digital sphere. In 2015, the TSSA union’s head of digital operations, Ben Soffa, was seconded to the leadership campaign. (He has since married Corbynite MP Cat Smith; the Labour leader was at the wedding.) Soffa, who created a phone-banking tool called Canvassing App, is now Labour’s head of digital organising.

Labour has also benefited from a large activist base full of digital natives: the campaign group Momentum holds regular gatherings of software programmers for what are called “hackathons”. By way of example, these fast and creative sessions built a carpooling app called “My Nearest Marginal” in just a week when the snap election was announced. That allowed Labour to capitalise on its far larger membership (Labour now has 550,000 members; the Conservatives have just 150,000, while both the SNP and Lib Dems have around 100,000) by directing canvassers to the most useful seats.

Just as a previous generation looked to the Obama campaign for insights into the latest fundraising and contact database tools, Momentum has built links with Bernie Sanders supporters. American activists held training sessions in Britain before the election, and veterans of his tilt at the Democrat nomination came over to help code tools such as a version of Hustle, his texting service to motivate volunteers.

There is a recognition among insurgent campaigns across Europe that the digital space is a counterweight to the established channels: the team behind the leftist candidate for the French presidency, Jean-Luc Melenchon, created a videogame called Fiscal Combat, where he seizes money from bankers.

An Obama-influenced digital consultancy, Liegey Muller Pons, created volunteer training apps for Emmanuel Macron which recorded simple canvassing questions such as: “What works for France?” (Macron also employed a digital guru to lay traps for hackers.)

For Corbyn’s team, the two important lessons from Sanders were “hold big rallies, make great videos”. Facebook’s algorithm pushes videos into news feeds – the website believes the format is key to its continued expansion – and shareability is vital. These controlled messages also reduced the number of risk-laden interviews Corbyn needed to give to what his team saw as hostile media groups.

Online, the Tories leant heavily on attack adverts, often featuring Diane Abbott. By contrast, the left pursued a divided strategy. Momentum posted adverts about the cruelty and callousness of the Tories which fired up the base and got out their core vote. Some dwelled on generational conflicts — such as a group of well-heeled pensioners sneering at younger voters, which reached two million people — which mattered in an election where the biggest divide in voting intention was by age. The official Labour adverts, however, often had a soft-focus, optimistic feel: one featured Lily Allen singing Somewhere Only We Know, over photos of workers in various industries, finishing with the slogan: “For the many, not the few” (see below). On Facebook, positive messages are particularly shareable; “I love the NHS” is a more appealing badge to pin on yourself than “I hate the most senior black politician in the country”.

All this meant Labour benefited from organic reach alongside its paid adverts.

Facebook does not release data about how political adverts use its targeting capabilities, whether based on geography, identity or interests. But Sam Jeffers, the co-founder of ‘Who Targets Me’ – which tracked 7,000 political Facebook adverts during the campaign – noticed that the Conservatives’ online adverts focused on potential gains rather than defending their own marginals. Jeffers claims that in the final stages of the campaign, there were no Tory adverts shown in Hastings and Rye – which Amber Rudd held by just 346 votes. That matters beyond election night: the tiny majority is regularly cited by Conservative MPs as a reason not to back her in any future leadership contest.

Similarly, Labour’s greater strength online is a reflection of its bigger membership, and the demographics of that membership. The Conservatives “remain a declining party, with a shrinking membership of fewer than 150,000, stuck in the elite-driven, broadcast-era mode that they (and Labour) perfected a generation ago, bolting on digital media targeting without the engagement,” Professor Andrew Chadwick of Loughborough University wrote this summer.

Throughout her leadership, Theresa May has been reluctant to engage personally with social media – seeing it as unserious. Her official Twitter account follows zero people, and according to Tim Ross and Tom McTague’s new book Betting The House, her team refused to issue statements on social media following the Manchester terror attack because “reacting quickly on Twitter” was “what David Cameron did”. While Twitter’s user numbers may be tiny in comparison with Facebook, it is the watercooler for all political journalists and commentators. May’s decision to cut herself off from it might be high-minded, but it has repercussions for her ability to communicate. (May has 360,000 Twitter followers; Corbyn has 1.4 million; he also has double the number of Likes on Facebook.)

Labour’s greater digital clout is also a reflection of Jeremy Corbyn’s persona, which is more suited to the social media age. His Snapchat account, run by his staff, posted “candid” photos of him drinking tea and travelling by train; it also shared straight-to-camera endorsements by celebrities such as grime star JME. It spoke to younger voters in a register that felt natural and unforced. (This carries risks, however: could even Corbyn’s anointed heir inherit his support, or is built too strongly around his “personal brand”?)

By contrast, Mark Wallace of ConservativeHome reports that “CCHQ did have a Youth Outreach officer, Calum Neilson, of whom volunteers and candidates speak positively. But he had been ‘hamstrung’, I’m told, by a Party ‘freaked out’ about youth campaigning, and was effectively forbidden from social media engagement during the campaign – leaving the Tory operation even further behind in online engagement.” There were also complaints from Conservative candidates that constituency Facebook pages were centrally controlled, and focused too relentlessly on anti-Corbyn messages at the expense of local issues.

This presents a dilemma for future campaigns. How do you maintain message discipline, while also cultivating the relaxed style which looks like authenticity on social media? Several high-profile Conservative MPs have decided to embrace the looseness of Twitter: Nicholas Soames uses endless hashtags; James Cleverly is unafraid to be an attack dog; even Jacob Rees-Mogg has now opened an account, starting with a tweet in Latin. Still, the party is lagging behind Labour, which has many big personalities (such as Jess Phillips) on Twitter.

Quietly, senior Labour figures have also developed relationships with the “alternative media”, such as the aggressively pro-Corbyn Skwawkbox and Canary websites. These sites, along with independent campaigns run by trade unions and single-issue groups, amplified Labour’s key messages. One of the little-noticed stories which harmed the Tories was their decision to drop a proposed ban on ivory sales; although this got minimal coverage in the papers, it reverberated around petition sites and blogs. (The Tories should have seen this coming; any MP will tell you that they are bombarded by automated emails about animal rights.)

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the 2017 election, though, is that it no longer makes sense to talk about “digital strategy” as a discrete phenomenon, or as an added extra. The Tories pouring digital resources into the wrong areas is consistent with the broader picture of the election. Theresa May also visited solid Labour seats in the early days of the campaign, when it looked as though she could expect to make sweeping gains. The same bad information was used to decide both digital and real world campaigning.

The Corbyn team and Momentum, on the other hand, exceeded expectations by combining the latest tools – such as the My Nearest Marginal app – with old-fashioned legwork from their large activist base. If the Conservatives want to “win the internet”, they first need to find more activists who intuitively understand it.