On "Left-Conservatism"

What I Mean by a "Conservative Left"

Clarifying Some Confusions

This is a short clarification to address some confusion that a few people had regarding my recent episode of the 1Dime Radio Podcast titled “Toward a Conservative Left,” Featuring Professor Michael Behrent, who helped translate the Towards a Conservative Left book, which contains the collected writings of French “conservative socialist” Jean-Claude Michéa.¹

In response to this episode, quite a few listeners, some of whom did listen to it and others who did not (and merely reacted to the provocative title), had some questions about where I am going with this “conservative left” thing.¹ For starters, you should first check that episode out if you want to get an idea as to what is meant by “conservative” in this case. But the bigger question that I want to address here in this article is how exactly I would want and expect this “conservative left” to manifest in reality.

The short answer is that I am not trying to cultivate a new “I’m very different“ political brand or ideological myth that I expect to be pushed on “the masses,” and I certainly do not expect most leftists to suddenly all take my advice and adopt what I believe to be the correct political synthesis. This would be falling into the exact same naive trap of “woke” thinking that I accuse leftists of (which I define and map out in The Genealogy of Wokeism essay). Core to this “woke” understanding of politics is basically the underlying assumption that enough people must first “wake up” to the politically correct form of consciousness and gain “cultural hegemony” for left politics and radical socio-economic change to “succeed.”

Rather, what I have been trying to do with this “conservative left” discourse is name, theorize, and concretize a political tendency already prevalent in the zeitgeist, particularly the “conservative majority” of working-class people who gravitate toward populism or don’t buy into the ideological gerrymandering of partisan politics. What I argue to open-minded leftists is that the Left should make room for it inside a broader economic coalition.

One reason I frame it this way is something I argue at length in an unpublished essay, “The Myth of the Movement.”² The mistake is imagining that people can suddenly come together and reach consensus on a political synthesis that makes everyone happy. In reality, politics is a coalition sport. As my friend and fellow political theorist Benjamin Studebaker puts it, we are living under deep pluralism: a polarized political climate marked by many intractable disagreements that are not going to be harmonized into one consensus. That means politics is less about converting everyone into the same cultural posture and more about building overlap across factions in which certain interests and shared priorities converge despite other intractable disagreements. It is a set of different movements and ideological factions that sometimes might converge on shared economic goals, and sometimes do not.

While “unity” or “consensus” of any kind in the age of deep pluralism is damn near impossible, what I believe is far more important to drive for is not political uniformity but class interests of people within the working majority (people who earn most of their living from the work they get paid for, which includes both blue and white collar wage workers and small business owners who earn most of their money via their labor). Through the dogmatic insistence on ideological policing when it comes to socio-cultural issues, the left has shut the door on millions of ordinary working people who might otherwise sympathize with economically left-wing ideas, but don’t buy into all of the doctrines that social progressivism tries to shove down their throat.

Full “Class unity” in any context is, of course, also a pipe dream, but it’s easier to form political coalitions on the basis of objective economic interests rather than strict ideological agreement. My point is that what should matter is not so much people with “leftist” political views winning, but rather the actualization of socio-economic changes that address the concerns of as many working people as possible. If you want particular reforms or types of political transformation to occur, build them by identifying where real overlaps exist, especially around material politics, not by demanding that everyone share the same worldview before anything can change. That is also why I think the familiar left-right labels have become less useful than people assume. The real question is whether different factions can converge on material reforms, even while disagreeing on culture.

In that sense, I do not think right-left binarism, and especially the fantasy of “the Left winning,” is a useful framework anymore in the age of deep pluralism. It’s team sports, but it’s not politics. Politics involves making descisions despite intractable disagreements. It is a constant, shifting struggle to assemble workable majorities around shared interests, even while people remain divided on religion, gender, identity, patriotism, and tradition.

This is also why, when I am trying to communicate with leftists, I often frame my argument in their own strategic language. If your goal is to counter the Right, and if you actually care about economic outcomes rather than symbolic self-display, then you should want to build a coalition that can win power. And that means making room for people who are economically left but not culturally progressive on every issue. I do not expect all of the existing Left to embrace this synthesis; those who are serious about “socialist” economic priorities need to confront the reality of the conservative zeitgeist and the objective realities constituting it. When right-wing populists are winning elections all across the world and pulling working-class voters toward them, it can’t be because ALL of those voters are “brainwashed.” There are objective material realities driving the zeitgeist, and the left can’t keep blaming only the neo-liberals, because what passes for “the left” hasn’t done any better, and in most cases, has struggled to expand its base outside of urban, university-educated voters. Even though I don’t like to think of things in terms of the left vs. the right “winning”, I do think that if the left wants to win any political victories, they should at least understand why they keep on failing while the populist right eats their lunch.

So when I say “conservative left,” I do not mean: everyone must become culturally conservative, or progressives must abandon their positions, or the Left needs a single new ideological story that everyone must repeat. I also do not mean that every person who wants universal health care and stronger labor rights must agree with me about immigration, religion, abortion, gender, or anything else.

I will also be clear about what I am hoping for, and what I am not expecting. I do think a culturally moderate, economically socialist politics, democratic socialism in particular, is often the most correct and most workable position. But I do not expect the existing progressive Left to suddenly adopt it. People arrive at strong cultural liberalism for reasons that are real, and usually rooted in socialization, institutions, and class position. So the ask is smaller, and more realistic: stop treating cultural moderation as disqualifying, and make room for a separate lane of people who are economically left but culturally moderate or conservative on some issues, so they can join an economic coalition without having to sign up for every other symbolic commitment.

What I mean is simpler. There is a large pool of people who are economically populist, often strongly so, but who are culturally moderate, culturally cautious, or culturally conservative on at least some hot-button issues. They often get treated as illegitimate or morally suspect by parts of the activist Left, even when they support the economic program. My argument is that this is strategically suicidal. You cannot build majorities, pass laws, or reshape institutions without a working coalition that includes people like that.

This is not just theory. The basic pattern shows up again and again in polling: many voters perceive mainstream Democrats and leading Democratic figures as “too liberal,” while also supporting a surprising amount of left-of-center economic policy. Part of the story is that the cultural tone of party politics is disproportionately shaped by credentialed institutions, and those institutions have moved faster on cultural symbolism than the country as a whole, which I return to below.^{3 4}

On the cultural side, immigration is a good example. Whether you think the public is right or wrong, immigration has been one of the defining issues in recent elections, and it is an issue where large parts of the electorate believe left parties are out of step. I also do not treat immigration as a simple left-right totem. It is economic and cultural at the same time. From a class-first perspective, there are serious reasons to favor lower immigration: wages, housing, and state capacity are constraints, even if different factions arrive at similar conclusions for different reasons. In late 2024, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found immigration and the economy among the issues voters trusted Trump more on than Harris.⁵ Gallup and Pew also found that the economy was the top issue for voters, but that a wide range of issues, including immigration, were rated as very important by large shares of the electorate.^{6 25} And some surveys even placed immigration as the single top issue at particular moments of the 2024 cycle.²⁴

The left has failed to build a “big tent” partly because to be “on The Left” one is expected to be “leftist”, left on everything. Whereas on the right, there is no single clear picture of what a “rightist” is, and far less is expected of you to be on the political right. Many “thought leaders” and gatekeepers of trademark “leftism” aren’t concerned with winning political victories for working people and creating a better world, so much as with self-righteousness and using it to accumulate social capital and/or make a career out of it. On the Right, you can find libertarians, evangelicals, business conservatives, nationalist populists, and more, all under one electoral roof. They do not agree on everything, but they tolerate each other because they share enough priorities to coordinate. If conservatives demanded that every right-leaning voter share the same religious beliefs or the same cultural posture, the coalition would collapse.

Another way to put the same point is that a tolerant coalition does not just help the Left grow; it helps the Left disarm the Right of its best talking points. Politically, one of the most effective ways to beat an opponent is to strip them of their best talking points. The Right’s strongest move in recent years has been its ability to co-opt populist economic language, whether it is sincere or not, and then fuse it to a cultural narrative that makes the Left look deranged, elitist, and contemptuous of ordinary people.

Immigration is the clearest example. I do not treat immigration as a mere culture-war totem. For many working-class people, it is experienced as a material question: wages, housing, public services, state capacity, and bargaining power. So even if white-collar professionals do not feel the pressure directly, it often reads to working people as a basic populist economic position. The Right has been extremely effective at weaponizing the Left’s evasions and contradictions here, precisely because it contains a kernel of truth.

The same dynamic applies to identity politics and the Left’s internal language policing. A lot of left identitarian discourse still talks as if “women” are a straightforwardly oppressed category, while simultaneously insisting that the category itself is indefinable, and demanding gender-inclusive language that most people experience as artificial. It also tries to shame “white male privilege” in a cultural moment where many ordinary people look around and see women outperforming men in education and in a lot of professional ladders, even while plenty of women still face real problems and constraints. If you want to persuade normal people, you cannot talk to them like they are insane for noticing social reality. You have to be able to say, yes, there are injustices, but also yes, parts of our discourse have become incoherent and self-defeating.

And then there is the other contradiction that the Right loves: the Left often presents itself as radically pluralist and tolerant in the abstract, while defending mass immigration and anti-imperial alliances that involve communities and movements with socially conservative norms, including from highly religious societies, while treating domestic cultural traditionalism as morally beyond the pale. To most people, that does not read as principled pluralism. It reads as selective tolerance based on ideological fashion. Every time the Left performs hysterical anti-patriotism or treats tradition as automatically oppressive, it hands the Right yet another cheap but effective weapon.

The rare exceptions in which left-wing political parties have won in Western democracies prove my point. Denmark is often cited because its center-left has paired a social-democratic welfare agenda with a restrictive and assimilation-focused immigration posture, and Danish politics has developed a broad consensus around migration in recent years.²² Ultra leftists will critique the Danish strategy as the Danish left merely “becoming the right,” but this simply isn’t true. The Danish social democrats are part of the “red block” coalition, which aims to preserve and expand progressive social democratic programs and policies that promote greater equality and higher living standards for the working class. The Danish left would have lost to the “blue block” coalition of the right, who want to reduce immigration, but support neoliberal cuts on the welfare state, and do not take the environment as a serious issue. Furthermore, more broadly, political scientists studying “New Left” versus “Old Left” mixes find that a platform combining traditional redistribution with more socially conservative cultural positions is not only electorally viable but, in some settings, can be much more popular among the overall electorate than a progressive cultural platform.²³

At the same time, many economic ideas associated with the Sanders wing of politics poll well. Majorities support the principle that government should ensure health coverage, and majorities support raising taxes on corporations and high-income households.^{8 9} Medicare for All routinely polls competitively in issue questions¹⁰, and Americans’ approval of labor unions has remained relatively high in recent years.¹¹ Support for a higher federal minimum wage has also remained broad. ¹²

So why does it often feel, especially online and inside professional class institutions, like “the Left” is synonymous with the most culturally radical positions? One reason is simply visibility: the most intense culture-war flashpoints, pronoun discourse, gender ideology, and the moralized etiquette around them, often become shorthand for the whole project. But another reason is that the institutions that create and amplify culture, universities, media, and NGOs, skew heavily toward the college-educated. Pew has tracked a widening ideological gap between more and less educated adults, and has documented how education has become one of the sharpest dividing lines in American politics.^{16 17} A related argument, developed by Musa al-Gharbi, is that a “new elite” consolidated after 2010, and that it became a major carrier of the Great Awokening.¹⁸ I interviewed him about his book We Have Never Been Woke on 1Dime Radio, which you should check out if you haven’t already.¹⁹ Al-Gharbi goes into detail on the role of Elite overproduction, as described by Peter Turchin, which provides a useful structural explanation: when societies produce more elite aspirants than available elite jobs and status positions, intra-elite competition and status conflict can fuel moralized political zeal.²⁰ Turchin has argued for versions of this structural dynamic in American history, and it is at least a plausible backdrop for why parts of the professional class have moved sharply left on cultural symbolism even as the broader public has not.²¹

I don’t expect progressive lefties to completely rethink all that they know and to go against many of the dogmas they have been socialized into having, or are incentivized to cater to, due to their structural position in urban Professional Managerial Class spaces. I would prefer it if they could at least open their mind to the wisdom of many “conservative” ideas outside of the progressive panopticon, but I don’t expect them to all change their minds and “wake up” to the limits of woke politics. What I ask of my progressive friends is something more modest and more realistic: accept that the Left will always be plural, and that an economically left coalition has to be culturally plural too. The price of building power is tolerance for internal disagreement, so long as the coalition can still fight for concrete material reforms. The alternative is moral perfectionism, endless purification, and permanent political impotence.

This is where the intolerance problem becomes decisive. In today’s climate, simply questioning the newest orthodoxy on gender, language, or identity can get you branded as a reactionary. Roger Scruton once captured the asymmetry perfectly: “Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”²⁶

That posture, treating dissent as moral contamination, is precisely what gives the Right so much oxygen. If the Left allowed real space for people who are economically left but culturally moderate or conservative on some issues, it would strip the Right of a huge portion of its argument. Instead, anyone with even 90s-liberal views on certain cultural questions often gets pressured into silence, or pushed out of Left institutions entirely, which simply strengthens the Right by default.

Meanwhile the liberal center tries to adapt to the conservative wind, but usually too late, and always in a half-hearted way. It takes on a few right-leaning tics, without offering a coherent vision of its own. That is why it fails. A Left that can actually tolerate internal cultural diversity could counter the Right with a real alternative grounded in economic power and working-class interests, rather than chasing the Right’s cultural energy while offering nothing but managerial emptiness in return.

If you want the longer version of this argument, listen to the episode first, then come back to this post as a map of what I am trying to do with the phrase “toward a conservative left.”

Sources Cited:

1. Jean-Claude Michéa, *Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa*, edited and translated by Michael C. Behrent (Blowing Rock, NC: Vauban Books, 2025).

2. Tony (1Dime), “The Myth of the Movement, Politics in the Age of Deep Division” (essay, forthcoming on Substack, 1Dime Review).

3. Ian Schwartz, “Enten: 58% Of Voters Say Democrats Are Too Liberal; 42% Of Dems Under 35 Are Democratic Socialists,” RealClearPolitics, February 12, 2026, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/02/12/enten_58_of_voters_say_democrats_are_too_liberal_42_of_dems_under_35_are_democratic_socialists.html (accessed February 22, 2026).

4. Ed Kilgore, “Believe It or Not, Many Voters Think Trump Is a Moderate,” New York Magazine (Intelligencer), September 9, 2024, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/presidential-polls-trump-moderate.html (accessed February 22, 2026).

5. Jason Lange, “Harris holds 46%-43% lead over Trump amid voter gloom, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds,” Reuters, October 22, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-holds-46-43-lead-over-trump-amid-voter-gloom-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2024-10-22/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

6. Gallup, “Economy Most Important Issue to 2024 Presidential Vote,” October 9, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx (accessed February 22, 2026).

7. Pew Research Center, “Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election,” June 6, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/cultural-issues-and-the-2024-election/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

8. Pew Research Center, “Most Americans say government should ensure all have health care coverage,” December 10, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-americans-say-government-should-ensure-all-have-health-care-coverage/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

9. Pew Research Center, “Majorities favor raising taxes on corporations and higher-income households,” March 19, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/majorities-favor-raising-taxes-on-corporations-and-higher-income-households/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

10. Data for Progress, “Medicare for All is popular, even when put up against attacks,” November 18, 2025, https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/18/medicare-for-all-is-popular-even-when-put-up-against-attacks (accessed February 22, 2026).

11. Gallup, “Labor Union Approval Relatively Steady at 68% in U.S.,” August 28, 2025, https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx (accessed February 22, 2026).

12. Pew Research Center, “Most Americans support a $15 federal minimum wage,” April 22, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/22/most-americans-support-a-15-federal-minimum-wage/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

13. Gallup, “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents,” January 12, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx (accessed February 22, 2026).

14. Gallup, “U.S. Political Ideology Steady; Conservatives, Moderates Tie,” January 17, 2022 (reporting 2021 averages), https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx (accessed February 22, 2026).

15. Gallup, “Increase in Liberal Views Brings Ideological Parity on Social Issues,” June 10, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/645776/increase-liberal-views-brings-ideological-parity-social-issues.aspx (accessed February 22, 2026).

16. Pew Research Center, “A Wider Ideological Gap Between More and Less Educated Adults,” April 26, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

17. Pew Research Center, “In Changing U.S. Electorate, Race and Education Remain Stark Dividing Lines,” June 2, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/in-changing-u-s-electorate-race-and-education-remain-stark-dividing-lines/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

18. Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232606/we-have-never-been-woke (accessed February 22, 2026).

19. My Interview with Musa Al-Gharbi on 1Dime Radio is available on Spotify, YouTube and all Podcast Platforms

20. Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (Berwick, ME: Beresta Books, 2016).

21. Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

22. Denmark section: Jon Henley, “Denmark’s centre-left set to win election with anti-immigration shift,” The Guardian, June 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/04/denmark-centre-left-predicted-win-election-social-democrats-anti-immigration-policies (accessed February 22, 2026); and “There’s a broad consensus in Denmark around migration,” IPS Journal, July 9, 2024, https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/theres-a-broad-consensus-in-denmark-around-migration-7635/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

23. Sveinung Arnesen, Dag Arne Christensen, and Henning Finseraas, “Look to Denmark or not? An experimental study of the Social Democrats’ strategic choices,” Electoral Studies 84 (August 2023): 102629, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379423000513 (accessed February 22, 2026).

24. Rachel Wolfe, “Why Immigration Is Now the No. 1 Issue for Voters,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/election-2024-immigration-issue-voters-84916a17 (accessed February 22, 2026).

25. Pew Research Center, “Issues and the 2024 Election,” September 9, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/ (accessed February 22, 2026).

26. The New Criterion, “Roger Scruton, 1944–2020,” February 2020, https://newcriterion.com/article/roger-scruton-19442020/ (accessed February 24, 2026).