What the Left Gets Right (about the Right)

Listening to a couple of recent podcast conversations confirmed some important suspicions

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (L) in the Oval Office of the White House on November 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up on Thursday, this will be my only post of the week. I wish all of you a joyous celebration with family and friends. I’ll be back with something new early next week.

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I devote most of my writing at Substack to analyzing and seeking to understand the right, especially in its present-day populist-nationalist iteration. When I turn my gaze to the left, I typically focus on the internal politics of the Democratic Party and its tactical efforts and struggles to improve its electoral prospects.

But this is a post in which I do something a little different—which is to acknowledge one big thing the left gets right about the right. I don’t often write posts like this because I don’t actually think the left gets all that much right. I am a centrist liberal with some philosophically conservative assumptions and commitments. That means the left, with its utopian energies and extravagant moral hopes and expectations, holds limited intellectual or temperamental appeal to me.

Yet I also think it’s undeniable that the left sees something in the right that many on the right don’t clearly see in themselves. This has come out in a pair of podcasts I’ve listened to over the past week or so. The first was John Ganz’s very illuminating conversation with Ezra Klein about the groypers, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and related topics. The second was an episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast in which hosts Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman talked to Peter Beinart about the intertwined topics of Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race, how right-wing Jews and Jewish organizations resorted to outright Islamophobic messaging in the campaign’s final weeks, and the rise of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.

Listening to those podcasts back to back, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the extent to which the smartest people on the left understand the moral logic of universalism and particularism much more fully and honestly than the right typically does.

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