Answering the Right’s Charges Against the Left

And how to begin breaking out of the political and epistemological mess of our present moment

Posters distributed around the New York University campus of people kidnapped by Hamas on the October 7 raid of Israel are vandalized and covered with pro Palestinian graffiti, October 25, 2023 in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Among the least surprising (but still frustrating) responses to my recent New York Times essay about the intellectual catastrophists of the American right is one that goes like this:

You say the right is terribly dangerous, but it’s the left that is totalitarian. It controls just about every cultural institution and uses that power to impose its woke, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-Semitic, anti-Western ideology on all of us. Just look at what’s in your Twitter/X feed! All the teachers, all the professors, all the students, all the protesters, all the politicians, all the journalists—all of them parroting the left’s radical, hateful agenda. The right is our only hope for self-defense!

I’ve heard variations of this line of argument—But what about the left?!—many times over the past several years, pretty much anytime I write something critical about the right.

My initial response is usually to say something like: Come back when a Democratic president refuses to concede his loss after falling short in a national election, incites a riot against Congress to keep himself in power, and then spends the next three years repeating lies about election fraud and promising to use the powers of the presidency to exact vengeance if he wins the White House again.

But responding that way fails to engage fully with the right’s underlying premises, which hold that politics is downstream from culture, and when it comes to culture the left controls everything. And that’s bad because the left is uniformly radical and anti-liberal in its assumptions and aims. Before long, political power will follow from the left’s exercise of cultural power.

How might we make headway against that kind of objection to my op-ed and, more broadly, to the assumptions of my work here at this Substack? This post will attempt an answer.

The Comparatively Marginal Far Left

I think the harder-edged activist left—also known as social-justice progressivism or the so-called “woke” left—gets a lot of things wrong. It’s wrong on race and American history. It’s wrong on sex and gender. It’s wrong on Israel and the Palestinians. It’s wrong on crime, and the border, and urban zoning, and homelessness. I could go on.

But here’s the thing: This faction of the left is just one among many, and it is outnumbered. Rashida Tlaib isn’t the head of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden is. On October 25, the House passed a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel in its war against Hamas. The vote was 412-10. Nine of the ten voting against the resolution were Democrats. But with 194 Democrats voting in favor, they were outvoted more than 21-1.

That is not a picture of a party dominated by the radical left. It’s a picture of a party with a marginalized radical-left fringe. Now, is it true that on some issues this radical-left fringe punches above its weight, using simplistic but emotively effective moral appeals to exercise greater influence on the party and the president, and through them the country as a whole, than one might expect by focusing on numbers alone? Absolutely.

But that points to the fact that the Democratic Party’s ideological commitments are unsettled, fluid, capable of moving this way and that as a result of shifts in public opinion and the shape of coalitional positioning within the party.

The contrast with the Republican Party is instructive.