https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-left-needs-ideas/
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The profound malaise in the United States cannot be addressed, much less solved, by clever campaign strategies and appealing policy ideas alone.
How might American leftists convince our fellow citizens that we understand what has gone wrong in our country and have practical and appealing ideas for how to fix it? Answering this question should be at the heart of our politics, 250 years after the pursuit of happiness was declared a universal right no government could take away.
Academics and journalists on our side do offer some elements of a sound response. They write deft critiques of oligarchy, state bigotry, and corporate exploitation, and expose the depredations of neoliberalism and the blatant self-dealing of President Donald Trump and his cronies in the United States and abroad. Meanwhile, politicians like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamie Raskin earn acclaim, at least in blue states and cities, with proposals that aspire to fulfill and transcend the promise of the New Deal and Great Society—as well as what social democrats accomplished during their heyday in Western and Northern Europe. The vision of an environmentally sustainable economy that would redistribute wealth, a Green New Deal, is particularly compelling.
There are other subjects, however, where working people encounter a relative absence of practical ideas. Many fret that smartphone addiction hollows out the public sphere and leads countless children to view school as an irritating interruption from their online lives. The unrelenting advance of artificial intelligence threatens to reduce professional and technical workers to mere tenders of machines and to wipe out many jobs in the manufacturing sector and gig economy altogether. And a number of native-born residents have anxieties about new immigrants, with or without legal status, that are interwoven with worries about broader changes they believe will leave them without economic security. Angry divisions that have grown steadily over the course of the twenty-first century—and hardened into concrete since Trump’s election in 2016—make the idea that Americans either should or could find a common purpose seem archaic, if not absurd.
The lack of a moral center to public life overshadows the best efforts of leftists to diagnose the crisis that has been growing for years, one that Trump and his MAGA disciples, inside and outside the state apparatus, have made a lot worse. For many years now, a majority of Americans have told pollsters the country is on the wrong track. That sentiment speaks to a profound malaise and a sense of gradual decline that cannot be satisfactorily addressed, much less solved, by clever campaign strategies and appealing policy ideas alone. Calls to tax the rich to pay for new programs are a necessary tool in political combat. But they are quite unlikely to be enacted unless movements emerge to frame them in persuasive terms. And those movements will have to bond with politicians who recognize the rot within and can win over cynics with both empathetic rhetoric and efficient governance. We need big ideas that go beyond the populist bashing of billionaires, justified as it is, and programs that would produce an egalitarian green economy. We need to express a worldview that appeals to the millions of working-class Americans who feel they get no relief from politics, whether practiced by intellectuals, activists, or officeholders.
How can one generate an order that guarantees economic security, offers moral leadership, and produces a meaningful reduction in class inequality? Leading intellectuals on the Trumpian right answer that question by offering a theory about the makings of “a postliberal future.” That is part of the subtitle of Regime Change, the 2023 book by Patrick J. Deneen, who may be the most influential thinker among a cohort that includes strident nativists like Tucker Carlson, unabashed monarchists like Curtis Yarvin, the “common good constitutionalist” Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari, a harsh critic of both corporate “tyranny” and secular culture. Vermeule and Ahmari wrote glowing blurbs for Regime Change, as did Vice President J.D. Vance, the current frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
Deneen, a devout Catholic, believes only a nation governed by Christian principles can become a homeland of contented citizens leading virtuous lives in communities organized for that purpose. A political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, Deneen taught at Georgetown, where I teach in the history department, for seven years; during that period, we talked from time to time about ideas and history. One day over lunch, I asked him why he was leaving the progressive D.C. institution founded by Jesuits for an Indiana university run by the Congregation of Holy Cross. “I want to teach at a real Catholic school,” he replied, emphatically.
What plagues the United States, Deneen maintains, is the hegemony of liberalism, in both its progressive and conservative modes. His attack on the former aims at familiar targets: a “ruling class” of entitled meritocrats, critical race theorists, and universities that “are today in the forefront of advancing new principles of despotism.” He contends that all “progressive liberals” disdain white working people and mock their values. But Deneen also heaps scorn on those “classical” liberals who laud entrepreneurs who amass billions by selling technologies that degrade family life and pursue labor policies that created a “pitiless economic order.” Despite their differences, each group of liberals, he argues, has done its worst to produce a society of atomized individuals who desperately need to recover a tradition of “continuity, balance, order, and stability, grounded in the unchanging truths knowable through human reason and also present in the Christian inheritance of the West.”
The flaws in this critique should be obvious to anyone who does not view history through rose-tinted glasses with frames shaped like Gothic cathedrals. Deneen completely ignores the poor and brutal existence led by the great majority of people in the traditional, religious societies that are his ideal. The reason most immigrants came to the industrializing United States was to take advantage of its economic opportunities. But most of their children immersed themselves in a dynamic culture that encouraged remaking oneself and adopted an ambivalence toward their ancestral communities, which stifled as well as nurtured their inhabitants. Deneen sees the conservative “populism” of working-class Americans as the ideological bedrock on which a righteous regime can be constructed. But he fails to understand that many of those citizens embrace the right to live as they choose—a right that he believes has led the nation toward the edge of an abyss.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Deneen as simply a nostalgic reactionary. David Brooks calls Deneen “the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy.” His main ideas match those of most prominent postliberals and represent a worldview that, sadly, is more coherent and comprehensive than that set forth by any cohort of thinkers on the left.
While Deneen’s diagnosis of the problem stems from his notion of a past that never existed, politicians who endorse some of his solutions might well have a chance to attract a majority of voters, particularly if espoused by a party no longer led by the narcissist-in-chief. Deneen defines his populist conservatism as “pro-worker, favoring policies that protect jobs and industries within nations, urging more controlled immigration policies, supporting private-sector unions, and calling upon the power of the state to secure social safety nets targeted at supporting middle-class security.” This appeal to what we might call the common good—an anodyne locution—expresses a longing for a cessation of ideological combat in which only a minority of Americans wish to engage. He neglects to explain whether the traditional Catholic faith that animates this program for him might divide that putative majority, as the issue of abortion certainly has.
Deneen’s answers to the crises of our day would not produce the moral order he craves and would likely embolden authoritarians even crueler than Trump in an attempt to force compliance. But unlike most contemporary intellectuals with progressive views, he thinks boldly about mass discontent and what policies “natural leaders” might implement to address it.
A half-century ago, such big thinking was fairly common on the U.S. left as well. Figures like Michael Harrington saw class exploitation as the root of most evils and vowed to replace it with a democratic form of socialism that would bring happiness to the greatest number. The sociologist C. Wright Mills indicted “power elites” in both the United States and the Soviet Union for running the world in their own interest and viewed mass movements led by the young as capable of imagining and helping to create decent societies to replace them. Herbert Marcuse argued that the New Left could challenge the “repressive tolerance” of consumer society by building intentional communities whose inhabitants would free themselves from the fetishism of commodities. Shulamith Firestone thought technology could unshackle women from the burden of pregnancy and advance the feminist dream of a society free of gendered oppression. Radical environmentalists saw the ecological crisis as an unparalleled opportunity to bring humanity in harmony with the natural world and vice versa.
To their credit, all these writers, as one Mills scholar has put it, “had a little to say about a great many subjects and a lot to say about a few subjects of great importance.” But none of their efforts caught on among more than rather small minorities of mostly college-educated white people. While these radicals discarded definitions of class yoked to an industrial order that was in decline, their negations of the status quo did not address or explain the disenchantment of many Americans from working-class backgrounds.
A welcome exception to this rule was a little book of sociology first published in 1972, The Hidden Injuries of Class, which has been reissued several times since then. The authors, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, spent four years interviewing men and women in the Boston area, all of whom were white and either held blue-collar jobs or had left them for middle-class employment at somewhat higher pay. What they discovered, and wrote about with admirable sensitivity, was a quiet resentment of better-educated Americans whose higher status had less to do with what they earned than with the control and dignity lacking in their jobs and careers. “A pipe fitter . . . who lives next door to a middle-aged schoolteacher,” Sennett and Cobb reported, “makes twice the salary of his neighbor; yet when they meet, the pipe fitter calls the schoolteacher ‘Mister’ and is called in turn by his first name.”
At the root of that discontent, the authors argued, was an absence of dignity and mutual respect in daily life. “Class is a system for limiting freedom,” they wrote. “It limits the freedom of the powerful in dealing with other people, because the strong are constricted within the circle of action that maintains their power; class constricts the weak more obviously in that they must obey commands.” The book came out near the end of the Great Compression, the quarter-century following the Second World War when the gap between economic classes was narrower than ever before. The injuries were “hidden,” because no movement and few politicians gave voice to them.
Today, widespread material grievances about inflation and job security have added to psychic ones to create an anxious, sometimes angry population of working people that leftists struggle to analyze and organize. Broadly speaking, they have responded in one of two ways. Some essentially preach the same Marxist gospel of class struggle that was holy writ for socialist and communist parties in the twentieth century. Others, sometimes under the banner of intersectionality, seek to cobble together the identitarian causes that emerged from the New Left—Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian, feminist, LGBTQ—into a loose coalition bound by mutual respect and loathing for the cultural right.
Neither option manages to speak to the felt concerns of most Americans of any race or gender. Homecare aides, paralegals with BAs, and autoworkers may all belong, by one definition, to the working class; all have employers who pay them for their labor. But even workers who belong to unions often don’t embrace that identity, and how one earns a living remains as poor a guide to what one believes and how one votes as it has been through most of U.S. history. On the other hand, the idea of a politics rooted in antiracists making common cause with those who champion gender diversity is a hope grounded more in the desires of activists who speak in such terms than in the lives of most people who may fall into one or more of those identity categories.
Beyond these incomplete efforts to envision a winning coalition is another problem: too many on the left spend their time denouncing the damage the right has done and defending achievements made in the days when liberals and radicals wielded power in the state or larger culture. “Hands Off!,” reads a popular, multicolored lawn sign in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood. It goes on to list Medicare and Social Security, fair elections and cancer sesearch, LGBTQ+ rights and public lands, libraries and immigrants, free speech, and clean air.
These are all things worth protecting. But their legitimacy did not prevent millions of Americans from souring on both Democratic politicians and left activists before. We have to think in fresh ways about how to win the trust of Americans who have good reasons to be cynical and angry about the current state of the nation. Repeating the same rhetoric while demanding the preservation of past reforms is not an adequate response to the popular distemper, nor will it build a coalition that might create a new era of progressive change.
So leftists lack powerful responses of their own to the key questions Deneen answers, albeit in intolerant and historically obtuse ways: What are the main causes of popular discontent roiling politics in the present and future? How can they be addressed in ways that have a chance of winning approval from the discontented? How can we move, gradually but with confidence, toward a more secure, egalitarian, and democratic society that provides a sense of usefulness and meaning for the average person?
I am a narrative historian, not a theorist or policy maven. But if the left hopes to build a politics that can appeal to most working Americans, I would argue that its thinkers might start by grappling with two critical matters that cry out for understanding and plausible solutions: migration and the future of work in the age of AI. The left has to oppose the Trump administration’s brutal treatment of noncitizens and the Republican Party’s efforts to allow AI firms to develop free of regulation. But opposition to bad policies alone never leads to better ones. Both of these issues are connected to class discontents, but in ways that require creative and heterodox thinking. It will not be easy for the broad left to convincingly speak to these concerns or to design paths forward, but it is essential to make a commitment to doing so.
Little that Trump and the nasty nativists who serve him are doing to shut out the world is likely to limit migration to the United States over the next few decades. A number of factors are pushing people to migrate from poorer to richer countries, including climate change, which will force millions of people to flee their homes—and private employers in wealthy countries, eager to pay lower wages, will lobby to let more of them in.
To embrace immigrants, legal and undocumented, and defend what has always been a multiethnic nation are certainly humane choices. But they are quite unlikely to persuade citizens not already on the left that a steady influx of poor foreigners will produce more economic security and a less contentious politics. A better solution would acknowledge the legitimacy of borders and the need for an orderly immigration system while also providing more pathways to citizenship.
To gain acceptance of this sort of framework, leftists will have to develop a progressive version of Americanism that can bind diverse groups of working- and middle-class people together around shared ideals and interests. In a world plagued by interstate conflict, the role of nation-states will only become larger. Those conditions could actually embolden those who desire a social democratic order, but only if the people running the American state are committed to sharing the fruits of economic growth more equitably.
No theory of how to accomplish that objective will be credible unless it is linked to a theory of how AI can promote such a future, instead of bringing about a dystopia in which machines designed by the few dictate to everyone else.
Since the nineteenth century, public demands have mobilized the political will to regulate, however imperfectly, each big technological leap forward—from railroads and radio to nuclear energy and the internet. The justifiable fear that AI will destroy many jobs is stirring debate on the broad left, as it is everywhere on the political spectrum. Gene Sperling, an advisor to the last three Democratic presidents, proposes that progressives respond to the spread of AI by seeking to construct a “basic floor of economic dignity for all Americans,” including those whose occupations may soon be obsolete, that features adequate wages, universal and affordable healthcare coverage, and an opportunity to earn a living serving the needs of the ill and aged.
Whatever the speed and nature of the changes AI brings, left intellectuals must be ready to offer a perspective grounded in the wisest hopes of the radical tradition. In an automated, post-capitalist world, “the true problem of socialism,” wrote the original editors of this magazine back in 1954, would “be to determine the nature, quality, and variety of leisure. Men . . . would face the full and terrifying burden of human freedom, but they would be more prepared to shoulder it than ever before.” To define what that freedom might mean and how it would enhance the lives of most Americans is both a necessary and urgent task. A winning politics requires ideas that can both enlighten and inspire.
Michael Kazin is a co-editor emeritus of Dissent. His most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.
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