Introduction
I want to set out some thoughts on what happened to the left over the past decade or so. Specifically, what happened among a subset of generally younger liberals and leftists, first at universities and then spreading outward across many more institutions and cultural practices.
There are some parallels to the radicalization concentrated among student activists in the 1960s, especially the radicalizing turn from the late 1960s-early 1970s. This is admittedly impressionistic and involves some generalizations. But more than the surprising ways in which history rhymes, I think there are genuine insights to be had comparing the similarities and hopefully learning where well-intentioned people went wrong in both cases.
So the parallels between the late 1960s and today. First, the surprising rhymes of history. Compare 1968 and 2024. Each year is preceded by about a decade of protest, each year features a Presidential election in which an unpopular President steps down, their relatively unpopular VP then runs a surprisingly close race but still loses, and earlier heroic mass protests against tremendous injustice (in the 1960s it was Jim Crow and the Vietnam War, in the 2010s it was police violence, sexism, and economic inequality), combined with admirable demands for more participatory democracy, turn to unproductive, intolerant, and at times violent, student radicalization.
Consider the parallels again. Protests in the early 2010s against police killings of unarmed black men, Occupy Wall Street protests against economic inequality, eventually congeal into unproductive and harmful collective efforts to fire professors for offensive or “harmful” statements (around 200 have been fired between 2014-2024, the same number of professors who lost their jobs to McCarthyism in the 1950s).
To be clear, attempts to cancel professors, journalists, and other public figures come from the right as well, not to mention efforts by state governments to infringe on the free speech of university students and faculty. But here I am focusing the critique internally on where the left went wrong. And there really are useful parallels to the student radicalization of the late 1960s-early 1970s beyond some of the surface similarities. Hopefully these comments and comparisons can lend some insight today.
Identity radicalization
People embrace, respond to, and radicalize based on the ideas, practices, and examples available to them.
In the 1960s-1970s, leftist student groups like SDS drew on the various radical Marxist ideas and currents available and eventually splintered into tiny, delusional factions, some forming violent groups like the Weathermen. Civil Rights groups like SNCC saw at least some participants turn to black nationalism and then calls for violent urban rebellion against the state (a truly deranged idea whose only consequence would have been the mass killing of urban blacks).
We are in a different time now. When a new set of unhelpful ideas took hold among students on the left, it had little to do with Marxism. After decades of postmodernist thought spread through the academy—a wide range of thought that tends to break down and treat all identity as a fictional, often harmful construct—it is no surprise that student radicalization would go down an identity-based rabbit hole of radicalization. Contrary to what many conservatives claim, this identity radicalization has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism or other concerns of the old left.
This leads, in short, to a youthful left obsessed with the proliferation of identities, pronouns, and adjectives, as if the ever-evolving construction of non-hetero, non-cis, increasingly fluid individual identities were the height of human liberation.
What is so wrong with this? Nothing, in so far as any society claiming to be free should allow space for this kind of experimentation. But in so far as these ideas and practices become more prominent within academia, Hollywood, and the broader corporate world, they turn into an elite imposition on the general populace. An imposition that involves a massive disconnect from the lived reality of about 99% of people.
This path of identity radicalization, claiming all identity is purely a construct, refusing to acknowledge the fact that we are embodied mammals, which places some limiting constraints on what we can be, is a path to permanent political life in the wilderness.
(This is not a denial that trans people exist. They do. Gender dysphoria is real. But it is a real thing that happens to people in real bodies, bodies that do not match their minds).
So here is a question from the left: What does any of this identity proliferation have to do with the leftist dream of greater economic equality, participatory democracy, and an end to empire and war?
As for identity radicalization, it is a mundane fact that most Americans, including most gay and trans Americans, desire the bland-seeming, heteronormative(ish) life of finding a monogamous relationship with a loving partner and raising one or several children together. Even among current college students a majority report that they want to find, but have not yet found, a committed long-term relationship. The fact that younger people are having a harder time finding such relationships only underscores how much they are missed. Again, most single people in their 20s and 30s say they are looking for this fairly conventional monogamous lifestyle.
As someone on the left, I have to reiterate that there is nothing wrong with bohemian, non-conforming lifestyles and they don’t threaten me in the slightest. But they remain, as much as they did in the 1960s, an aspiration for only a tiny subset of people, even among the left. But when these ideas spread out and filter into the broader mediasphere, into academia, and eventually come to to be perceived as a key part of leftism, liberalism, and the Democratic Party, they turn people off.
A Party, or movement, infused with claims that all identities are a construction, and mostly harmful ones at that, is a party and a movement without a future. It is destined to remain within the confines of a tiny elite of cultural radicals. And the more the perception that identity radicalization infuses the broader spheres of liberal and left thought, the more it discredits them.
At the same time, and this leads into the next section, much of the identity-focused left also obsesses over inherited identity traits like race and gender, at times seeing them as immutable and definitive of who we are. Is this a contradiction?
Groupthink (and a culture of condescending scolding)
Here we come to the paradox at the heart of identity politics on the left: on the one hand, identity as a fictitious construction, where experimentation with and discovering or creating new identities is the pinnacle of liberation. On the other hand, the treatment of ascriptive characteristics that we are born with, particularly race and gender, as immutable traits that confer unqualified privilege or oppression depending on which traits one possesses.
It is here, with the inclination to dismiss the perspectives of anyone deemed privileged, and promote anyone deemed oppressed, that we get into the groupthink and look-down-your-nose scolding at those you disagree with that has come to characterize so many progressive spaces, especially among the young. At their most extreme, they lead to calls for people to be censored, removed from platforms, and fired.
Reviewing attempts to remove people from Twitter or Facebook, Lukianoff and Schlott note (drawing on multiple studies) that “censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse,” (p. 190). Or consider the simple, most tangible version of this. Trump is removed from Twitter, then wins the next election.
Examples of this censorious attitude among students on the left are now legion. What were once rightly derided as isolated instances have become much more common. Here is journalist Jill Filipovic discussing a case at Macalaster University where students demanded the removal of a “harmful” art exhibit that depicted some revealing images of women as part of a critique of religious fundamentalism in Iran.
“Nearly 80 students have signed a petition against the exhibition, on a campus of just over 2,000. And the petition is worth a read, because I think it tells us a lot about a troubling kind of intolerance and narcissism that seems pervasive among a particular set of self-identified young progressives. There’s an entitlement not just to an education, but to broad emotional safety and wide control over what happens on campus.” This quote is from a blog post of hers titled Fear of a Female Body.
Filipovic is cataloguing just one example but by now cases like these are quite common at America’s universities. As she says, “I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent…Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.”
And once we divide the world into various identity groups it becomes much easier to silence some people, for they are by definition oppressors, be they male, or white, or straight, or cis, or whatever. After all, if you are by definition privileged and oppressive, you can’t really be harmed, even if you lose your job.
This danger isn’t new to the left. Because we care about victims of oppression there is always a danger that we will celebrate and fetishize victimization, which can create a sort of victim olympics culture among the young where people compete regarding who can claim to be most oppressed. One reason this is so unappealing to most Americans is that such behavior is concentrated among the rich, educated young, especially at the Ivy leagues, places that with little exaggeration credential and connect the future ruling class while excluding the poor and middle classes.
There are two problems with the spread of this culture. First, it’s conceptually wrong. By moving toward these ascriptive identity traits and away from class, those on the left can no longer coherently analyze the injustices of neoliberal capitalism or ever hope to unite the working class majority, riven as it is (in their eyes) with immutable identity fissures. Second, it is deeply unpopular with the general public. A member of the professional class who has victim attributes can scold and lecture a white man who works at Dunkin Donuts on his “privilege.” And it leads to the use of misguided phrases like “white privilege,” which build on the fact that the median white family has more wealth than the median black family to the incorrect conclusion that every white person is a privileged oppressor. Such language rightly turns most people off. It doesn’t accurately describe social reality and it is ugly and dismissive.
As these practices and ideas filter out from the academy they come to take residence in broader sectors of American society. Museums adopt scolding language. Future psychologists and therapists are taught in graduate programs to address their patients’ privilege, (a truly horrifying thought for those who are supposed to help people with mental health challenges). Academic journals consider the supposed “impact” potential articles will have on whoever they deem oppressed, while in the commercial publishing world there are sensitivity readers combing through book manuscripts and book publishers and estates work together to retroactively change the language in old books (the language changes in Roald Dahl’s corpus are just one example among many). Meanwhile, universities compile “oppressive language” lists. Remember when the left opposed real injustices, like war and poverty? Now we compile lists of mean words.
Why? This takes us to the Speech as Violence paradigm among many university administrators, younger faculty, students, as well as HR departments in the corporate world. We now inhabit, in many progressive spaces, a world where students can demand a visiting speaker be cancelled, a lesson plan be pulled, or even a teacher or administrator be fired, because what they said subjectively offended the student or students in question.
It’s behavior such as this that leads conservative pundits to claim that they are the ones on the side of reality while liberals and leftists wallow in their feelings. For example, Ben Shapiro’s bestselling book Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings is a conservative attempt to claim facts and evidence for the right. And when students engage in this coddled, I don’t like how it makes me feel behavior, they are playing right into Shapiro’s hands. It’s pretty rich for those on the right to claim such ground, given the growing role of election denial and vaccine skepticism within their ranks. At the same time, when those on the left turn against free speech, refuse to engage with ideas they disagree with, or insist that the our mammalian biology is purely a social construct, they are losing their claim to be the side that goes where the evidence leads. Not to mention how you appear to the public when you deny the decrepitude of an obviously ailing 82 year old President…
This leads directly into the idea, found among many on the left now, that free speech is a conservative value. This is truly a crazy inversion, since for most of American history absolute free speech protections were seen as a key position of the left. As Lukianoff and Schlott note, it used to be puritan conservatives demanding the silencing of “vulgar” comedians or “obscene” books. This still happens, of course. Just look at the number of books banned from schools in Texas and Florida. But it now has its complement on the left, where free speech is attacked as a value for the privileged and oppressive.
This is unjust. It is also self-defeating. All of this is a contributing factor to the declining trust in institutions of higher learning, medicine, and the media. It also disregards a truth known at least since John Stuart Mill articulated it so well in his essay On Liberty.
Mill’s basic point, in favor of free speech, is that the best way to approach the truth, and avoid groupthink, is for proponents of all ideas to offer their best arguments, evidence, and framing in the public sphere. Good ideas have the best chance of triumphing over bad ones in this manner. In addition, confronting alternatives, even bad ones, leads to improvements in the right ideas. Without challenge, ideas, even good ones, become dead letters, stultifying dogma that is closed off to challenges and new, potential improvements or alternatives. The fact that many on the right now lay claim to this legacy while many on the left would dismiss Mill, a liberal democratic proto-socialist, as some sort of paean to the privileged, shows how far off track we have come.
This in turn connects us to the radicalization of the late 1960s. As you become insular (a tiny elite at the Ivy Leagues guiding cultural conversation today, shrinking sects of radical leaders in groups like SDS in the previous generation), you get groupthink, a lack of alternative perspectives, and Millian debates don’t happen.
And I make this critique as someone on the left, it is coming from in-house, so to speak, along the likes of lefties like Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, Ben Burgis’ Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns, Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke, Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoaders, as well as more center-left works like Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap and Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’’s The Coddling of the American Mind.
Many on the left would point to and condemn attempts by conservative state governments to place limits on what can be said at public universities. I agree! It’s painfully hypocritical for those on the right to critique cancel culture and then attempt to place legal limits on what speech is allowed on campus. But similarly, if we on the left are correct to oppose such limitations from the right, we should also oppose those within our ranks who demand that speech they disagree with be silenced and such speakers removed or fired.
I want to conclude by saying that none of this should be taken as a claim that Democrats, or the left side of the political spectrum more broadly, should move to the center. As we’ve seen in many countries in Europe, center-left parties that choose to become the milquetoast defenders of the status-quo, obsessed with liberalizing identity and shepherding capital, are fast disappearing. They are pursuing a strategy that is unjust (marrying themselves to an unjust status quo) and politically self-defeating (nobody wants to vote for such a party).
Those of us on the democratic left should reiterate a belief in robust free speech, participatory democracy, workplace democracy, and our opposition to empire and war. We of course oppose racism and sexism but this doesn’t mean that the current prominent ways of addressing these issues on the left are healthy. Finally, we should embrace a politics that is fiery, anti-corporate, and embraces and advocates for the vast working class majority, not cast aspersions on them.