One night in the tropics, I was riding in the back of a jeep with another American. The jeep was a public conveyance, and the driver was a taciturn local man we didn’t know. In those days, the country was in a state which some members of the American community likened to our own Wild West. Another faction likened it to Prohibition-era Chicago. Attitudes toward Americans ran the gamut, and a pottering but homicidal insurgency complicated things. In short, this was not the juncture of place and time that one would choose for hurtling through the night in a jeep with a stranger at the wheel. A taciturn one, too. I focused my mind as never before on wishing myself home in bed.
The other passenger was a man known to all his acquaintance (but not to the driver) for a perverse brand of humor. Placed in a position requiring tact and circumspection, he’d turn garrulous and insouciant. Now he genially declared that we were CIA agents. He claimed – genially, again – that he had a gun. I don’t remember what else he said; only that he said it all with mortifying plausibility. The man was glibness itself. I looked daggers at him in silence, unsure whether it would help or hurt to admit that we were not really CIA agents. As it turned out, silence at least did no harm. The driver delivered us to our destination without incident, never having let on how much of my companion’s prattle he believed.
Today, liberal-minded Americans are journeying through dark, dangerous historical territory with companions who seem bent on stacking the odds against safe arrival. Unlike my companion in the jeep, however, these have no sense of humor at all. Whereas he was an irrepressible menace, they are repressive ones. Whereas he waltzed across boundaries, they labor to carve intricate patterns of them in our minds. Their prattle is not impromptu nonsense, but scripted cant: the language of the radical left.
Before proceeding, it’s necessary to take a stand on two questions:
First, does the most leftist element in American politics lie outside the Democratic Party? No. It ought to. Illiberal people ought to do what they can with a party of their own, and not try to operate through the main liberal party. However, everything left of center as far as the eye can see has become the implicit responsibility of the Democrats. Voters tend to think so. Republicans help them think so. Many Democrats confirm it by striving to “sanewash” radical positions instead of rebutting or ridiculing them. Radical leftists are going to be seen as our companions (for I am a Democrat) as long as we don’t energetically dissociate ourselves from them. We need to care what trouble they court, because we’re going to be in it with them.
Second, are extreme progressives -- misandrous feminists, prejudiced “antiracists” – in fact Marxists? Leninists? Marxist-Leninists? Yes, that sort of thing if only in a generic way. They’ve imbibed red ideology, assimilated it, and adapted its forms to their own purposes. Old Bolsheviks may dislike the substitution of biological class for economic class within the red political strategy, but to these activists the strategy is the thing of value. They understand how credit accrues to people situated as members of an oppressed group and how one can discredit innocent others by submerging them in the notion of an oppressor group. Then there’s the value of the Marxian mise-en-scène with its conceptual scale and its True Left vocabulary. The extremists like it for itself, no doubt, but also for the way it sells them to insecure progressives. And they share Lenin’s appreciation of agitprop.
Race warriors of the left are using the word antiracism the way old-fashioned communists use peace: as a fossilized name for their own line of offerings, not as a living lexeme. They could bring their language within the bounds of honesty by using counterracism instead, but that would be hinting that their project is one of racist competition. As it is, they’re being called out as neoracists. That the label antiracism is common currency even among critics of the movement shows that it lacks the force of anything more than a brand.
Hard-left strategists have made other dubious investments in agitprop. In their determination to remake society so as to cut out formidable rivals for power or position, they’re dismissing more and more values, behaviors, and even intellectual resources as relics of an oppressive culture. Their most conspicuous flourish (so far), a push to rework mathematics instruction on sociopolitical principles, is part of a larger defeatist response to inequality in education: bringing claims against difficult subjects, schools, and tests instead of preparing children for achievement. Meanwhile, other countries continue to pursue global standards unfettered. Most American voters will grasp this picture in full, and many will penalize the Democratic Party for the perversity of its far-left cohort.
That was once a reasonable prediction. It then became an importunate specter. Now, within the past two months and with increasing frequency, The New York Times has run multiple items that, taken together, signal an institutional shift from a preponderance of sympathy with radical advocates to a preponderance of concern about Democrats’ keeping such company. Their unifying theme is the question, sometimes made roughly explicit, “Can the left wing face facts?” The principal facts are that demographic change does not look like delivering power to the left as expected; that hard-left activists’ recent signature issue, defunding the police, lacks a grassroots constituency; that people who make signature issues of such unpopular things pose an electoral liability to their party; and that winning elections is more conducive to progress than walking over hot coals.
Here’s a more fundamental question: Can the Democratic Party stop fearing its left wing? When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib won primary elections in 2018, the US news media — hungry as always for sensations and in some cases for progressive energy — began treating them as rising stars of the Democratic Party. That treatment not only tended strongly to self-fulfilling prophecy, but also ignored the fact that radicals can rise within a party and thereby make the party less relevant to the country. Though American public opinion had been growing more liberal for years, it didn’t follow that democratic-socialist firebrands represented the future.
None of the four newcomers contributed to the Democrats’ net congressional gain that year. All took over safe seats. Ocasio-Cortez ran her primary race against a complacent, long-sitting white male incumbent, attributes that were salient liabilities in a progressive New York City district in 2018. The candidates who flipped seats for the Democrats were — of necessity — more moderate, pragmatic ones capable of appealing to people who might vote either Democratic or Republican. There was no cause to mistake the Blue Wave of 2018 for a progressive wave, other than intra-progressive boosterism aggravated by faith in a deus ex machina: the mobilization of new voters on an epic scale.
The media-made stars of 2018 grew so big in the imagination that within two years even the dean of progressives, Bernie Sanders, coveted their support. Ocasio-Cortez, particularly, was accorded the status of kingmaker to those in need of young, leftist new voters. Sanders’s need was great. When Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him, his joy was almost palpable. However, as the campaign wore on he lamented the difficulty of getting those young leftists, who undoubtedly liked him, to become voters. Unable to do so sufficiently, he was up against a divergence reported by Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy in the Times in April of 2020: that while progressive Democrats predominated on social media, most Democratic voters were more moderate. Sanders’s army was too much like the one Shakespeare provided to Henry V: a mighty host of “youth on fire” somewhere offstage.
Americans now in their youth may get to be dependable voters. They may at the same time remain markedly more progressive than past generations. However, it’s probably a safe bet that the majority will apply themselves to promising ends and means more than to ideological affirmation. No doubt they are the future; but the nature of their future politics remains to be seen. At any rate, they are not now entitled to deference within the Democratic Party. It’s not as if they’d done somebody a favor by supporting Joe Biden against the abominable Donald Trump.
But it’s not progressive youth that makes bad company for the Democratic Party. It’s the class of ideology merchants, the competitively avant-garde academics and activists for whom progressives of all ages comprise a market. No major American political party should be guided by dogma, much less by fashions in dogma. It should be guided by noble instincts that find their way forward through sound political transactions. The Republican Party has dropped all pretense of being such a party, and yet it can successfully appeal to moderate voters when abetted by a Democratic Party that allows itself to be associated with dumbfounding slogans or with a dark vision of the national character. Despite appearances to the contrary, jovial politicians are mentally superior to saturnine activists.
Politically competent Democrats must break up the ideology merchants’ game without further delay. The mid-term elections of 2022 could isolate President Biden in the seat of executive authority, which is not an adequate position from which to consolidate the public’s trust in Democratic stewardship. The presidential election of 2024 could then bring anything.
Earnestly sanewashing crackpot rhetoric and making excuses for campaigns against intellectual freedom is not the answer. The response that we Democrats must make to our odious companions is the one we were often urged to make to Donald Trump: ridicule. Open contempt. If we are genuine progressives, we should take a back seat to nobody in mocking the ham-handed revolutionism of the ideology merchants. Let us do all we can to differentiate them from the Democratic Party in the public consciousness. Republicans may be in thrall to Trump and Trumpists, but we needn’t accept thralldom to radical leftists. Trumpists have got the votes to ruin most of their co-partisans. Radical leftists have not. They’re merely messing with progressive minds.
Democrats needn’t worry whether they can in good conscience break with people who portray themselves as struggling for social justice. The things for which the ideology merchants are struggling include, on the one hand, individual advancement in careers as academics or activists and, on the other, the suppression of individual agency in the rest of us. (Anti-cognitivism has long been integral to Marxist-Leninist work with the intelligentsia.) The merchants’ stock in trade includes neoracism and other forms of biological bigotry. The effect of their spiel on the electorate is to hinder the establishment of a sustainable liberal regime. They’re always throwing a lifeline to the Republicans, as Lindsey Graham puts it in Bob Woodward’s Rage. Democrats owe them nothing.
Imagine, instead, a political scene in which the Republican Party remains as thoroughly outlandish as it is now and the Democratic Party has precipitated its outlandish element into a crank faction without influence. The legitimate Democratic Party will be a hospitable environment, and the only one, for all those voters, donors, and operatives who can live with some degree of compromise. For purposes of actual progress, that kind of company will do.
