A Brief Statement on the Left
Why precisely does the contemporary Left persist despite its great unpopularity and political failures?
This essay is copied in full from the Damage website.
Damage’s position on the Left today is pretty straightforward: we are of the Left because we see in it a tradition of thinking and struggle that are necessary to understanding and overcoming the present impasse. We tend to be much closer to the democratic than the revolutionary road, and relatedly, we care much more politically about what is popular with working people today than what is au courant amongst a particularly odd and anti-social set that has firmly entrenched itself in the position where a proper Left should be.
Which gets to the other component of our thinking about the Left—that it is today essentially compromised by its class composition. We are thus internal critics of the Left. More often, when people get tired of the professional-class lunacy on the Left, they either drop out of politics altogether, find some niche where they can do work they like without engaging with the noise, or else flirt with the “post-liberal” Right. We haven’t found it possible to do any of these things, though critics whose consciousness has been overlaid by the incentives of Twitter constantly accuse us of the latter (despite persistent evidence to the contrary).
In one sense, the reason the Left is the way it is today is perfectly understandable: downwardly mobile but largely college-educated people aghast at both their own material prospects and global politics rushed into a space that was, by the early 2010s, thoroughly dominated by self-marginalizing movementisms and alienated from mass politics. With the influx of new people, there was some overcoming of the latter but also a retention of self-defeating ideological extremism, which paradoxically suited the professional “radicals” in the media, the academy, the arts, and the activist NGOs—what Alex Hochuli has termed the MANGOs. (Dustin Guastella’s article from our fourth print issue on MANGO politics is unpaywalled as of today.)
Almost a decade now after the first Bernie run and confronted with the intransigence of what many thought was a passing neoliberal order, we think it’s necessary to ask different questions about the Left as it exists today: not why it is what it is, but why it persists despite its great unpopularity and political failures. Now there’s always going to be the animating thought: if not for these damn mainstream Democrats preventing us from effectively fighting the fascism of the Republican Party…. That alone is cause for persistence, that feeling of being denied. And there’s a truth there, that the Democrats have been much more effective at fighting off entryism than the Republicans. But it’s also a thought that points away from the Left’s insufficiencies, and one that encourages a persistence without self-reflection or evolution.
There are more fundamental reasons for the Left’s persistence in dysfunctional form, having to do with the hollowing of civil society and the mediatization of politics. The Left in the United States does not really have an organizational base. It seems unlikely that DSA will ever get past 100,000 members, and it was undeserving of and unprepared for the great influx of 2016. It has been a great meeting place for like-minded people, and it’s got a pretty functional electoral machine in New York, but it seems to us far-fetched to think that DSA has been or could be the organizational base of an identifiable Left. Outside of DSA, there are collections of nonprofits—some bad, some okay, none even sniffing the traditional mass political form.
What the Left does have, however, is media. New magazines, podcasts, columns, shows, platforms, all of it promoted heavily through social media, and as eager for clicks as any of the other media out there. Damage participates in this realm, but it’s no secret that we’re not very good at any of it. As an internal critic rather than booster of the Left, but also one that’s not seeking to capitalize on the Left’s failures as some new publications on the Right do, we know that our subscriber base is limited (though we’re doing just fine, and even sold out of our latest issue). Plus we think the internet is made of demons, and we’re little engaged in the holy war online.
What does it mean that the “Left” in the United States is most identifiable by a collection of media figures and entities? Well, it means first that the positions held on the Left don’t need necessarily to reflect popular views, and they don’t even need to be that firmly held, as they are put forth and debated not as commitments in a platform but as fodder for internet debate. There is an evanescence and rootlessness to left discourse that makes it appear both unserious and irresponsible. (Our current issue, not uncoincidentally, is on the theme of “Responsibility.”)
At the same time, due to the class composition of the Left as well as its media figureheads, the range of opinions expressed tend to favor those of the professional classes, and indeed it would simply be unwise from a dollars and cents perspective for media organs of the Left to be pushing back too strongly on those positions that are taken to be commonsensical in the left-progressive NGO, academic, and media worlds.
We think this dynamic sets up a certain impasse: views that would have been almost obvious to Marxists of previous generations are now hotly contested in new and alienating language imported from academia, and ideas that polls continually show are anathema to working people are clung to as needing defense from both the reactionary Right and the anti-woke Left. Politically, this is a disastrous dynamic, but it’s a perfectly natural and salutary one if the point is to maintain the present left media niche. In it, the Left has a place—one that most people find pretty irritating, but which bears the material benefit of attracting attentive, well read (overly read?), and relatively well-to-do content consumers.
Unfortunately for us, we don’t think this dynamic can be upset from within: more articles are not going to offset the constant stream of articles undergirding the impasse just described. It is possible, however, that it will be shaken from the outside. If, for instance, labor can break out of the traditional institutional trappings, the effects on the ground would no doubt change the air war above.
In the meantime, at the insipid level of discourse, it’s worth keeping the door open. Maybe the current views expressed on the Left are a problem. Maybe the class composition of the Left expresses itself in self-defeating ways. Maybe the self-appointed scions of the socialist Left today will seem silly when the political coordinates on the ground change. “How did we take that seriously?” At Damage, we’ll try to keep that door propped open, in the hopes that we’ll all one day be asking that very question.
Left media is just CAPITALIST media. Left media companies start out claiming to be radical, but once they start to become mainstream they start grifting to the center and water down the message.