The Left-Right Binary is Obsolete

What Even Is "Leftism" Today?

What Does It Mean to Be a “Leftist” Today?

I have always found it strange that in our time, being a “leftist” is treated as a coherent political identity that you either are or are not, yet almost nobody proudly calls themselves a “rightist.” You will find people who call themselves conservatives, nationalists, libertarians, traditionalists, neo-conservatives, right-wing populists, Christian nationalists, and white nationalists. These people may see themselves as being to “the right” of people on what they see as the left and the center; however, the notion of being a “rightist” shows up mostly as an accusation from people on the left. What unites people on the right is a shared sense that they take issue with the politics that they see on the left and in the middle. Likewise, people who see themselves as being on “the left” are united only on the basis of what they oppose on the right. Left and right are defined loosely in opposition to each other, yet for some reason, it is common to believe that there exists a thing called “leftism” that leftists self-identify with, yet no equivalent ideological identity called “rightism” exists. That asymmetry already tells us something about how the language of Left and Right functions today. In this essay, I will demonstrate why the concepts of left and right should not be regarded as rival “sides” or two big tents with a bunch of “teams” under them. Rather, left and right should be regarded as relational terms that are historically contingent and subject to the scope of debate in the Overton window on particular issues at a certain time and place.

It’s a Small Club, and You Think You Are in it

Spend enough time online, or even just in vaguely political spaces, and you will notice a strange ritual. People accuse each other of “shifting to the right.” They warn that some commentators are “selling out.” They patrol the borders of who is or is not a “real leftist.” Entire friendships, careers, and reputations can rise or fall on the answer to that question. Yet if you ask these same people to give you a clear definition of what “the Left” actually is, they often freeze. They can list vibes, subcultural markers, and Twitter accounts, but not a coherent meaning.

We live in a time where political identity has become a kind of brand, a lifestyle, and an entertainment career for those who sell it. “Leftist” has become a label you can attach to personalities, aesthetics, and vibes. There is an entire leftist industrial complex selling this simulacrum of leftism. While this brand of leftism comes in various flavors, there are some common ingredients that they all share and some unspoken rules that very few people in the leftist industrial complex deviate far from or challenge. Especially on issues like immigration, social issues, and culture more broadly, in which career leftists must go along with all of the latest progressive-liberal dogmas or take the agnostic position on culture by regarding it as a “distraction” that only helps “the other team,” called the right. If any professional career leftists ever deviate from the prevalent leftist thought taboos on these issues, the gatekeepers of this imagined thing called “leftism” come in to “hold them accountable” for wrongthink.

This sets an example for others in the left-wing ecosystem, making them afraid to step foot in these red zones. So, as a result, most of the time, leftists end up avoiding thinking about any of these sorts of grey issues at all, and if they do, they master the art of being prudent to avoid persecution and being a pariah in the swamp that they had to swim in. Their career as a professional leftist in the leftist industrial complex wouldn’t last very long, unless they had already carved out a space outside of this imaginary team of “the left.” Sometimes they come at you even if you never bought into this imaginary team called “the left” in the first place. However, if you are slightly “lefty coded,” talk to leftists, and are sympathetic to many causes that tend to be associated with leftist politics, then you are expected to hold “a leftist position” on most things, if not everything. Diversity of thought is allowed on the left, and there is plenty of vicious infighting over it. Still, diversity is tolerated by the leftist industrial complex only as long as it is not seen as “right-wing.” They draw a line when it comes to conservatism, tradition, or anything that the dominant voices on the left have decided is bad because it is associated with the so-called right. Whatever issues people on the right are concerned about must be false “moral panics” concocted by the sheer sorcery of propagandists.

If voices on the right ever agree with people on the left on particular issues like foreign policy, they must be being dishonest, or it must be due to some nefarious motive. If the market never branded you as a leftist ™ to begin with, and you come to the left as a sympathetic outsider, then maybe you can get away with being seen as “one of the good ones” who is outside the left. But if you strip away the self-branding and ask what the terms “left” and “right” actually mean as political categories, in a contemporary and historical sense, then the notion of “leftism” and “the right” gets blurry very quickly. People gesture at “being on the right side of history,” or “defending progress,” but even those clichés collapse as soon as you look at how capitalism actually organizes change and how contemporary movements behave.

When “Left” and “Right” Stop Making Sense

This confusion is not a small problem. It feeds an entire culture of paranoia and moral policing. Because “Left” and “Right” are treated as fixed moral camps, any deviation from a subcultural orthodoxy is framed as betrayal. If you question a particular slogan, a specific policy, or a fashionable theory, you are accused of “going right,” of “platforming reactionaries,” or of secretly sympathizing with fascism. The accusation does not need to be precise. It just needs to cast you outside the camp. The word “Leftist” becomes less a description of a position and more a kind of spiritual citizenship.

Part of what makes this situation so absurd is that, historically, “Left” and “Right” were never meant to be spiritual identities at all. They emerged as relational terms, ways of mapping conflicts within specific political institutions. One was left of another position, or right of another position, on a concrete question. The terms were rooted in real struggles over who should rule, who should vote, and how far to push egalitarian change. They were not psychological types or internet tribes. Somewhere along the way, especially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, these relational descriptors hardened into brands. People stopped saying “I take the left position on this issue” and started saying “I am a Leftist,” as if that told you everything you needed to know about their soul.

At the same time, the material landscape underneath these words has shifted. Capitalism has become a global system that thrives on constant disruption, perpetual innovation, and the breakdown of older ways of life. Change itself, which once seemed like a natural banner for the Left, now has a different meaning. Not all change is emancipatory. Not all “progress” is progress for ordinary people. You can have a politics that loudly celebrates transformation, fluidity, and transgression, while quietly entrenching market dependence, precarity, and social fragmentation. You can also have a populist Right that calls for dramatic change from a reactionary angle. So the old picture, where the Left is simply the party of change and the Right the party of conservation, no longer fits our reality very well.

In this essay, I want to do three things. First, I want to reconstruct what Left and Right actually meant when these terms emerged, and show that they were always relational coordinates tied to concrete conflicts about equality, hierarchy, and political participation. Second, I want to show how, in our present, this framework breaks down. The economic system that governs our lives is so oriented toward constant change that “being pro change” tells you almost nothing about whether you are resisting domination or rationalizing it. Meanwhile, treating “Leftist” as a stable identity, and imagining an equivalent “Right” essence, becomes not only confusing, but actively misleading.

Third, and most controversially, I will argue that what calls itself “the Left” today, especially in the rich capitalist democracies, has become something quite different from the egalitarian currents that originally animated the term. It has fused with the outlook of a particular class fraction, what some call the professional managerial class. It speaks in the name of the oppressed, but its practical function is often to give moral cover to the most disruptive and pathological developments in advanced capitalism, to uncritically accept symptoms of social decay as “progress,” and to police anyone who questions the socially sanctioned talking points without debating them. In other words, “the Left” has, in many cases, become the progressive vanguard of a system it claims to oppose. I am not making this argument as a gotcha from the outside. I am making it as someone who has spent years inside left wing spaces, who still cares about equality, solidarity, and the possibility of a humane society. My claim is that we cannot understand our current situation by clinging to these words as if they were timeless moral tribes. We need to see them as historical tools that may no longer map the terrain.

So the path of the essay will be simple. I will start by tracing the genealogy of Left and Right, from their emergence in early modern and revolutionary struggles to the way political theory has understood them as axes of equality versus hierarchy and change versus conservation. Then I will show why this matrix has become unstable in a capitalist order that thrives on disruption, and why the very idea of a coherent “Left” has become a kind of comforting fantasy. From there, I will turn to the sociology of contemporary “Leftism,” the role of the professional managerial class, and the way “progressive” politics can end up rationalizing social decay. Finally, I will ask what, if anything, can be salvaged from the wreckage of these old labels, and what a more honest language of interests and coalitions might look like.

If we want to build something saner than the current culture war, we may need to start with a simple but unsettling move, to stop treating “Left” and “Right” as teams to join, and start treating them as questions to interrogate.

The Genealogy of Left and Right

Before we can say that “Left” and “Right” are breaking down, we have to look back on the origin of the right-left distinction and trace the genealogy of how they evolved throughout history. The standard story begins in revolutionary France. Inside the National Assembly, during the French Revolution, the more radical supporters of popular sovereignty, constitutional limits on the monarch, and deeper reforms clustered on one side of the chamber. The defenders of monarchy, clerical privilege, and the traditional order clustered on the other. Over time, the left side became associated with those who wanted to push equality and change further, and the right side with those who wanted to hold the line or reverse course.

That origin matters. It shows that Left and Right began as positional, almost literal, descriptions. You were on the left of the hall because you took a certain stance on a concrete set of questions. You were left of or right of someone else on those questions. There was no cosmic essence of Leftness floating above the room. It also ties the early Left to a specific historical project. The first Left is not just “nice people who like change.” It is the camp that wanted to weaken or dismantle inherited hierarchies of birth and status, undermine feudal or aristocratic privilege, and expand some notion of popular sovereignty.

Some historians push the genealogy back even further. For example, Shlomo Sand, in his 2024 book A Brief Global History of the Left, identifies the English Civil War and its aftermath as the birth of the modern Left-Right distinction. There, you already see a conflict between those who wanted to broaden political participation (The Levellers and the Diggers), including men without substantial property, and those who insisted that only property owners should rule (The Grandees). The vocabulary of “Left” and “Right” is not yet fixed, but the basic fault line is similar. One side pushes for a more inclusive and egalitarian political order. The other defends a more exclusive and hierarchical one.

Strip away the different costumes and institutions, and the pattern is recognizable. On one side, you have movements that say more people should count, more people should have a voice, and inherited hierarchies should be questioned. On the other side, you have movements that say order comes from hierarchy, property, and rank matter, rapid change is dangerous. This is the soil in which the language of Left and Right takes root.

It is also telling that Marx and Engels themselves never framed their scientific socialist political project in left-right terms. They rarely ever spoke of the “left” and “the right” at all unless they were critiquing parties and tendencies on the political right or left. Their basic map was not a spiritual Left camp and a spiritual Right camp, but a conflict between classes, between workers and capitalists, between those who owned the means of production and those who had only their labor to sell. In that sense, the whole Left/Right schema is already one step removed from the original Marxist way of thinking. It is a secondary language that grew up inside parliamentary struggles and ideological branding, not the primary way of naming the antagonism at the heart of capitalism.

From these concrete struggles, political thinkers built a more abstract map. They noticed that quarrels that looked very different on the surface often involved the same underlying tensions. Two of those tensions became central. One is the tension between equality and hierarchy. On this axis, the Left is associated with pushing for greater equality, equal legal status, broader suffrage, more equal access to education, income, and power. The Right is associated with defending hierarchy, arguing that order, excellence, or even freedom require some people to have more authority, status, or property than others.

The second is the tension between change and conservation. On this axis, the Left is associated with change, with reform, transformation, sometimes revolution. The Left wants to alter institutions, customs, and laws in the name of justice. The Right is associated with conservation and, at its more extreme, reaction. The Right says that inherited institutions, traditions, and ways of life carry forms of wisdom and that tearing them down leads to chaos. Put together, you get the familiar picture of the Left as egalitarian and pro change and the Right as hierarchical and pro conservation.

This was always a simplification. There were aristocratic reformers and egalitarian moral conservatives. There were people who wanted more equality in one sphere and less in another. But as a working map of modern political conflicts, these axes made sense for a long time. Crucially, even in this abstract form, Left and Right are still relational. You are more egalitarian than your opponents, or more hierarchical than them. You are more in favor of change than your opponents, or more committed to conservation than they are. The words describe positions in a spectrum of conflict, not fixed tribes that exist outside of history.

The Right, in this story, often appears as a response to the Left. The very idea of a Right, as a self conscious political disposition, emerges when previously dominant groups suddenly find themselves on the defensive against egalitarian movements. Before that, there is just “the order of things.” After the revolutionary period, there is an explicit Right that says it stands against the leveling tendencies of modernity and defends hierarchy, tradition, and authority.

So far, this picture is not crazy. You can still look at many political arguments and see these axes at work. But something changes once you place this model inside a fully developed capitalist system.

Even so, it would be too easy to say that the Left/Right language is now pure nonsense. There is a grain of truth that keeps the whole thing alive. If you ask who tends to push for more equality in formal rights, who fights for wider suffrage, civil rights, anti discrimination law, and who tends to defend existing hierarchies as natural or deserved, you still see a rough clustering that resembles what we call the left and the right. If you ask who is more willing to overturn inherited norms around gender, sexuality, or family, and who is more inclined to treat those norms as fragile achievements that should be guarded, you also see a familiar pattern. That resemblance to the past is part of what makes the Left/Right schema feel meaningful.

The problem is that this sense of continuity is also an illusion. The words equality and progress have not kept the same content. For the classical workers’ movement, equality meant dragging material conditions closer together, limiting the power of employers, curbing concentrations of wealth, and extending political voice to people who had been ruled over. For much of today’s self identified Left, equality often means something far narrower and more symbolic, diversifying elite institutions, redistributing honor and stigma, policing language, and expanding formal recognition. Those goals are not meaningless, but they can easily come into tension with older egalitarian aims. A politics that fights for more diverse billionaires on television while doing very little about the existence of billionaires is not pursuing equality in the same sense as a movement for land reform, union power, or socialized housing.

Something similar has happened to the idea of progress. When Left and Right first took shape, progress usually meant replacing fixed hierarchies with more democratic and solidaristic arrangements. Under contemporary capitalism, progress mostly means opening new markets, dissolving old attachments, speeding up life, and turning more aspects of existence into sources of profit. A Left that defines itself as “the party of progress” risks simply baptizing whatever direction capitalism is already moving in, even when that direction undermines the very conditions of solidarity and common life that it claims to prize. The fact that many progressive milieus now greet collapsing birth rates, mass migration, the dissolution of family structures, the disappearance of religious rituals and traditions, the trivialization of relationships, or the mass medicalization of gender dysphoria and adolescent distress more broadly as victories for autonomy and social progress is a symptom of this drift.

These half-truth continuities are part of what holds “the Left” together as a moral identity. People call themselves Leftists in the belief that they are lining up with equality and progress in the noble, historical sense, even when their actual politics may prioritize symbolic leveling over material redistribution, or celebrate forms of change that corrode the habitats ordinary people need. The illusion is not that equality or change have vanished, but that they still mean what they meant in the moments that gave the Left its original moral glamour.

Capitalism does not simply live inside whatever social order it finds. It remakes it. It uproots peasants and turns them into wage workers. It dissolves old communities and binds people together through markets and contracts. It invents new technologies, reorganizes time and space, and constantly opens new domains of life to commodification. In other words, capitalism is a machine of permanent change. Competition forces firms to innovate or die. New markets must constantly be found or created. Any sphere of life that has not yet been commodified, from attention to intimacy, is treated as an opportunity.

In that world, change is no longer the special banner of the Left. It is the default setting of the system. Being “pro change” by itself tells you almost nothing. You can be enthusiastic about change because you want to liberate people from oppressive structures. You can also be enthusiastic about change because you are invested in the next wave of commodification and market expansion. You can support change that tears down genuine injustices, and you can support change that tears apart any remaining structures of solidarity or stability that ordinary people rely on.

At the same time, the populist right begins to embrace a certain kind of change as well. It calls for sharp breaks with the status quo, tearing up trade agreements, shutting borders, purging institutions, waging cultural counter offensives. This is not cautious conservatism, nervous about any disruption. It is a melodramatic, sometimes pseudo revolutionary reaction against the last few decades of liberal and left coded transformations. It wants change, but in a backward looking direction.

So you end up in a strange situation. Capitalist modernity itself is the main engine of change. Parts of the Left cheer on that change in the name of progress, diversity, liberation. Parts of the Right demand a different kind of change, framed as restoration or revolt. The simple identification of Left with change and Right with conservation starts to fall apart.

If you care about socialism or any serious egalitarian project, this matters. The original Left wanted to use change to build a more equal and democratic order. But not every change serves that goal. A society in which every relationship, every institution, and every identity is market mediated and fragile might be the most dynamic on paper. It might also be the least capable of sustaining solidarity, family life, or any stable sense of citizenship. A policy that pushes everyone into full time work earlier, with minimal support, might look progressive because it normalizes a certain lifestyle and keeps the labor market humming. A policy that slows down the churn, that lets people trade some GDP for more time with their children, might be painted as backward. From the standpoint of egalitarian social reproduction, the second may be far more genuinely “left.”

Once capitalism has colonized the meaning of change, and once both Left branded and Right branded movements are calling for different versions of change, the old grid no longer works. If Left and Right were born as context dependent descriptors in specific conflicts, and if their traditional axes now sit on top of a very different system, then treating them as timeless moral identities is not only lazy, it is historically illiterate. When someone says “I am a Leftist” as if that exhausts their politics, or when we talk as if there were an equivalent, stable “Right” identity on the other side, we are doing something quite different from the actors in the French Revolution or the English Civil War.

In a world where you can support radical social change that mostly benefits markets and professional elites, where you can call for drastic reactionary change that appeals to downwardly mobile workers, and where most people hold a mix of positions, egalitarian on some questions and conservative on others, the Left versus Right identity begins to obscure more than it reveals. It makes more sense to say, “I take a more egalitarian stance on this question, and a more conservative stance on that one, for these reasons,” than to treat “Leftist” as a kind of moral blood type, or to imagine some mirror image “Right” essence, that decides everything for you.

This is why the concept of a unified “Left” or a stable “Leftist” identity becomes especially misleading today. It freezes a fluid, historically contingent set of coordinates into a fantasy team and then demands that everyone pick a jersey. It invites people to moralize about fidelity to the team instead of thinking concretely about which kinds of equality they support, which hierarchies they oppose, which changes they welcome, and which changes they fear.

The next step is to ask who are the people most invested in this fantasy team called “the Left,” what social positions they actually occupy, and what work the identity “Leftist” performs for them. Once you look at that, the picture starts to shift from historical concepts to class sociology, and the comforting myth of a coherent Left begins to crack.

The Myth of “The Left” and the Leftist Super Ego

Once you see that Left and Right were never metaphysical camps, but relational positions in specific conflicts, the next illusion is easier to spot. It is the illusion that there is such a thing as “the Left” in the singular. Not left currents, not left tendencies, but a unified moral subject called The Left. People talk about it as if it were one person with one mind. “The Left thinks this.” “The Left failed to do that.” “The Left must unite.”

In reality, what we call “the Left” is a pile of mutually incompatible projects that have been shoved into the same basket. Social democrats who want a nicer capitalism, Marxists who want to overcome capitalism, anarchists who want to dissolve the state, progressive liberals who want a more diverse managerial elite, eco radicals who want to degrowth the entire system, and various identity based currents that want recognition and protection inside the existing order, all get wrapped in the same label. These groups can cooperate for a time when their interests overlap, but they do not share a coherent end goal. Put them in one room and ask them to write a serious constitution for a future society and they will accuse each other of betrayal within an hour.

Part of the confusion comes from the way “Left” is used as shorthand for whoever is currently challenging some status quo. The civil rights movement was “the Left” in relation to Jim Crow. Social democratic welfare states were “the Left” in relation to laissez faire capitalism. Anti colonial struggles, labor unions, queer liberation, radical environmentalists, all get retroactively baptized as Left because they challenged a dominant hierarchy. But zoom in and their visions of a just society often clash. Trade unionists who want stable, well paid jobs in large industries do not necessarily share the goals of anarchists who want to abolish most large scale institutions. Social democrats who want to stabilize the nuclear family with wages and welfare do not necessarily share the views of queer theorists who see the family itself as a normative prison. Marxist revolutionaries who want to seize the state do not share the suspicions of anti statist currents that see any state as inherently oppressive.

These differences are not minor. They go to the core of what society should look like, how power should be organized, what counts as progress, and how conflicts should be handled. You can call all of them “Left” only if you use “Left” in such a vague way that it becomes little more than “not the current Right.” When people then turn around and talk as if “the Left” is one thing that can betray itself, or sell out, or unite, they are smuggling in a false image of unity. There is no single actor called The Left. There are many actors with different theories of justice, different class bases, and different relationships to the system.

This would be less of a problem if Left and Right were used modestly, as shorthand descriptors. “On this question, I take the left position.” “On that question, I am closer to the conservative side.” But in the contemporary political subculture, “Leftist” has hardened into a self description, almost a personality type. People say “I am a Leftist” in the same way they might say “I am a gamer” or “I am into punk.” It signals not just a view on redistribution or democracy, but a whole bundle of aesthetic cues, online habits, and expected opinions. You are supposed to consume certain media, use certain words, and react with automatic disgust to certain figures.

The strangest part is that this “Leftist” identity exists despite the internal contradictions. A Stalinist and a left liberal can both call themselves Leftists, even though their visions of political freedom, class struggle, and state power are completely different. A campus activist whose politics is basically a moralized extension of HR, and a syndicalist who wants to overthrow most management structures, can both claim the same label. “Leftist” becomes a kind of umbrella mood more than a clear position. You almost never see the same thing on the other side. Very few people call themselves “Rightists.” They might say conservative, nationalist, libertarian, traditionalist, or patriot, but “Rightist” as a proud self description is rare. The fact that only one side leans into this abstract identity already tells you something. It suggests that part of what is being defended is not a concrete program, but the feeling of belonging to the morally enlightened side of history.

Once “Leftist” becomes a moral identity, it brings a super ego with it. A super ego is that internalized voice that judges you, that tells you whether you are living up to an ideal or betraying it. In a lot of contemporary left milieus, this super ego is not simply “are you helping the oppressed” in any meaningful material sense. It is “are you in line with the current micro orthodoxy of the subculture.” You can see this in how lightly people throw around accusations. Question a particular slogan or strategy and someone will say you are platforming fascists, doing liberalism, sliding into reaction. Express discomfort with a new ideological fashion and you are told you are “on a pipeline,” that you are already halfway to the Right. Criticize a tactic that is obviously self-destructive and you are accused of tone policing or centering yourself.

Very often, none of these accusations are tied to actual behavior that helps oppressive structures in any concrete way. They are about symbolic alignment. Are you saying the right phrases? Are you liking and retweeting the right accounts? Are you keeping up with the latest theoretical trend? It is “are you loyal to the team.”

This is where Carl Schmitt’s idea of friend and enemy politics becomes useful, even though Schmitt himself was a German jurist who later became a legal theorist for the Nazi regime. But Schmitt’s concept applies here in a twisted way. Schmitt said that the essence of the political is distinguishing friend from enemy. In a context of a real, serious political conflict in which the stakes are zero-sum, that would mean identifying actual opponents, people whose interests and projects really clash with yours, and recognizing the seriousness of that conflict. In a lot of Left subcultures, the friend–enemy distinction is turned inward. The main question becomes not “what is our strategy against capital, the state, or reactionary forces,” but “who inside our own space is pure and who is suspect.” The super ego is always scanning for hidden enemies.

Someone uses a clumsy phrase, or has the wrong guests on their podcast, or is not emotionally aligned with the dominant current, and suddenly they are not just wrong on an issue, they are morally contaminated. This is one reason why internal critics, or people who change their mind on a specific question, are treated with more hostility than open enemies. A right wing figure is a known opponent. A former comrade who drifts off script is seen as a traitor, a heretic, someone whose existence threatens the fantasy of unity.

One way to understand this is to see contemporary Left subculture as a kind of role playing game. People assemble a party. In games you have your tank, your healer, your mage. In politics you have your theory guy, your organizer, your based poster, your journalist, your YouTuber, your academic. The party is imagined as a coherent team, even if in reality everyone is operating under different incentives and with different goals. Online, this gamification becomes explicit. People draft imaginary alliances of influencers and politicians the way sports fans draft fantasy teams. They speculate about who is “in the camp” and who is “out of the camp.” They attach grand historical meanings to relatively trivial moves, as if retweeting someone were the equivalent of signing a non aggression pact between states.

This fantasy has two functions. It gives people who feel powerless a sense of belonging to a meaningful drama. Instead of confronting the fact that their actual leverage over institutions is very limited, they can treat their posting or their niche factional fights as if they were decisive battles in a world historical struggle. And it covers over class contradictions among the players. If everyone is “on the Left,” then the gap between, say, a tenured professor in an elite university, a nonprofit professional in a big coastal city, and a precarious service worker in a small town can be flattened. They all wear the same jersey, so it feels like they are on the same side, even when their interests diverge sharply.

In that context, the Leftist superego functions to protect the fantasy. Anyone who calls attention to the contradictions or who refuses to play their assigned role in the party becomes a threat. They are not just wrong, they are ruining the game. So they must be shamed, exiled, or rebranded as right wing. The irony is that this whole scene takes place on top of the historical insight we covered earlier. Left and Right were supposed to be analytic coordinates, not cosplay identities. Instead, a significant part of contemporary Left culture uses them exactly as that, identities to cosplay, parties to LARP in, and teams to role-play as.

At this point, it might sound like the problem is purely psychological, wounded egos, moral grandstanding, people LARPing as revolutionaries. But there is a deeper logic. The persistence of the “Leftist” identity, and the intensity with which it is policed, makes more sense once you look at who is actually most invested in it. If you ask who tends to adopt this identity strongly and live inside these subcultures, you do not find a random cross section of society. You find a particular class fraction.

Elite Overproduction & Leftism as a PMC Brand

You understand the strange religious quality of contemporary Leftism much better once you see it as the ideology of a particular class fraction. Not “the working class.” Not “the poor.” Not “the oppressed” in general. It is the brand politics of what people sometimes call the professional managerial class, or more bluntly, the class of fallen professionals and elite aspirants who live by manipulating symbols rather than producing goods.

If you close your eyes and picture the archetypal “Leftist” in the rich capitalist democracies today, you do not picture a miner or a dock worker or a nurse coming off a night shift. Those people exist, and some of them hold left wing views, but they are not the core of the milieu that loudly calls itself “the Left.” You picture something closer to this. Someone with at least some higher education, often in the humanities or social sciences. Someone who has spent a lot of time in universities, cultural institutions, NGOs, media, or adjacent online worlds. Someone whose main asset is the ability to write, analyze, design, manage people, or do cultural and informational work. Someone who is extremely online, who is chronically in discourse, and whose job or aspirations are deeply tied to the world of screens, content, and institutions that trade in symbols.

Their parents might have been middle class or upper middle class. They were probably told that if they did well in school, got into the right program, acquired the right credentials, they would be part of the secure, respected layer of society, tenured academics, stable journalists, permanent staffers at big nonprofits, museum curators, policy researchers, mid level civil servants, or at least some kind of solid professional. Instead, many of them graduate into a world of adjunct contracts, unpaid internships, freelance gigs, precarious media jobs, Patreon hustles, creative “self employment,” and HR dominated workplaces. The promise of stable professional status is broken or postponed. They still live in elite cultural spaces, but their material lives are fragile, and their class position feels deeply ambiguous.

This is the soil where contemporary Leftist identity grows. It is not that only this kind of person can be left wing. It is that this figure is overrepresented among those who build, police, and live inside Left subcultures. They are the ones writing the think pieces, moderating the Discords, staffing the NGOs, producing the podcasts, organizing the conferences, teaching the theory classes. They are also the ones who keep the flame of the “Leftist” identity alive as a badge of moral distinction.

There is a useful concept that helps explain their mood, elite overproduction. A society creates more people with elite style education and aspirations than it can absorb into genuinely elite positions. You end up with a surplus of credentialed people who feel entitled to influence and status, but who find themselves stuck in precarious, low paid, or marginal roles. You can see this clearly in academia, where universities crank out PhDs who then compete for a handful of tenure track jobs. Most end up in adjunct positions that pay less per hour than retail, while still living in expensive cities and being expected to perform the identity of “intellectual” or “expert.” You see it in journalism, where there are more would be writers and commentators than there are stable jobs, and in the nonprofit and NGO sector, where a huge pool of idealistic graduates fights for limited grant funded roles.

These people are not the traditional proletariat. They are not the classic bourgeoisie either. They live in small apartments, have student debt, and often experience real economic anxiety. At the same time, they possess high levels of cultural capital, insider knowledge of institutions, and a sense that they should be part of the group that runs things. They are both privileged and blocked, both “above” the average worker in education and taste, and “below” the winners of their own class fraction.

That combination is combustible. It produces resentment, not from the bottom looking up at all elites, but from the frustrated middle looking up at the successful top. It also produces a strong need for moral justification. If you are not actually in control of institutions, but you still imagine yourself as part of the enlightened layer that ought to be, it is very tempting to adopt a politics that says, “We are the conscience of society. We speak for the oppressed. We are the ones who know what justice requires.” Contemporary Leftism, in its subcultural sense, is a perfect ideology for this stratum.

If you look at how this politics actually functions, you see that it often reinforces the position of the professional managerial class rather than undermines it. Much of what passes for “left” politics in this layer focuses on expanding the scope of institutions that employ them. Diversity offices, compliance departments, HR trainings, sensitivity workshops, grant funded projects, consultancy roles, awareness campaigns, educational programs, therapeutic services. Each new social problem is not only a site of suffering. It is also a potential market for professional management, counseling, and expertise. When a university creates a new office for some form of inclusion or safety, when a corporation launches an internal anti bias initiative, when the state sets up a new ombudsman or advisory body, who benefits first? Not the poorest people. The first beneficiaries are professionals who get jobs administering and interpreting the new norm.

The moral language of this Left tends to frame problems in a way that foregrounds symbolic recognition and individual attitudes over deep institutional conflicts. The main villains are “ignorant people,” “bigots,” “Karens,” “boomers,” “reactionaries.” The solution becomes educating or shaming those people, changing representations in media, correcting language, reforming norms inside existing institutions, rather than confronting those institutions themselves. This perfectly fits the comparative advantage of the PMC. They are good at managing discourse, crafting narratives, designing trainings, and tweaking rules. They are not well placed to lead mass workplace disruption or to build counter power in sites of production.

So the political practice that emerges is one where the Left appears everywhere at the level of discourse and symbolism, and almost nowhere at the level of hard power. There are statements, campaigns, hashtags, boycotts. There are fewer successful unionization drives, fewer durable institutions of worker power, fewer material confrontations with capital. Class struggle does not disappear. It simply moves elsewhere, outside the world that calls itself Left.

The identity “Leftist” becomes a kind of moral brand that distinguishes this class fraction from both the naked capitalist and the despised liberal. You can be personally quite similar to a high status liberal in lifestyle, taste, and institutional position, but by adopting a more radical vocabulary, you set yourself apart as someone who “sees through” liberal illusions. You can hate moderates, boomers, and centrist technocrats while still inhabiting the same institutions and often competing with them for the same positions. Leftism lets the professional managerial class fight its internal status battles using the language of justice. The most radical aesthetic wins the cultural capital game, even if, at the end of the day, the concrete policy horizon is not that far from the more progressive wing of neoliberalism.

This is why the continuity between liberalism and contemporary Leftism matters. On paper, they sound opposed. Liberals are mocked as incrementalist, centrist, obsessed with procedure, weak on structural critique. Leftists pride themselves on being “anti liberal,” on talking about class, imperialism, ideology, on wanting deeper transformations. But look beyond the rhetoric. Both liberalism and this kind of Leftism are rooted in the same class world, cosmopolitan, urban, professional, credentialed. Both see themselves as the natural interpreters of society to itself, the ones who should run institutions and set the terms of debate.

The difference is tonal and stylistic more than structural. Liberalism tends to be more openly managerial and optimistic about the system. It believes that smart people in the right institutions can tweak policies and steer capitalism in a humane direction. The subcultural Left tones down the optimism and tones up the moral intensity. It adds guilt, rage, systemic language. It talks more about capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, coloniality. But in practice, many of its concrete demands boil down to more representation, more inclusion, more services, more funding, more programs, all channeled through the same institutional apparatus.

If liberalism was the self confident ideology of a rising professional managerial class in the second half of the twentieth century, this Leftism is the self doubting, anxious, more hysterical ideology of a precarious professional managerial classin the twenty-first. The underlying social position is similar. The mood is different. The promise of secure status has frayed, so the moral volume is turned up. That does not mean there are no sincere egalitarians in these milieus, or that nothing good ever comes out of their struggles. It means that, as a pattern, we should not take the identity “Leftist” at face value as the politics of “the oppressed.” It is often the politics of a particular segment of the upper and upper middle strata, filtered through frustration and self consciousness.

Once you see Leftism as a brand for this class fraction, it becomes easier to understand why it fuses so readily with capitalist “progress,” even when that progress looks like social decay from the standpoint of ordinary people. The professional managerial class lives in the sectors most tightly bound to capitalist dynamism, tech, media, universities, urban service economies. Their livelihoods often depend on the churn of innovation, the expansion of markets, the constant creation of new problems to manage and new identities to interpret.

It is not a coincidence that they are comfortable treating every new social pathology as an opportunity for awareness, training, and representation, rather than asking whether the underlying system itself has become pathological. A more fragile, more anxious, more dislocated population is not only a tragedy. It is also a demand for more therapy, more counseling, more mediation, more expertise. In other words, more work for them.

In that world, what looks like decay from the standpoint of social reproduction can look like progress from the standpoint of the professional managerial class. The decline of stable family structures, the rise of mental illness, the proliferation of gender and identity struggles, the intensification of work, the colonization of leisure by screens, all create both suffering and markets. The Left, in its PMC branded form, positions itself as the one that names, represents, and manages that suffering in socially acceptable ways.

This is the bridge to the next part of the argument. If you combine the myth of a coherent Left, the Leftist super ego, and the PMC class base, you get a situation where “progressive” politics can easily become a way of rationalizing and dignifying the very trends that are tearing people apart. It is not just that the Left has lost touch with the working class. It is that a big part of what calls itself Left has begun to act as the moral vanguard of capitalism’s progressive decay, defending the churn as liberation.

Progressivism as Ideology of Capitalist Decay (and Capital’s Acceleration)

By this point we can see why the old Left–Right map does not quite work and why the identity “Leftist” functions as a kind of PMC brand. The next step is to say more clearly what, in my view, this brand is often defending. To put it bluntly, a lot of what passes for “progressive” politics today is about giving moral language to the decay of social life under advanced capitalism. It is about narrating fragmentation, instability, and deracination as liberation, and treating anyone who questions that narrative as reactionary. This is what I mean by progressivism as an ideology of decay.

Capitalism, especially in its current form, is corrosive. It does not just produce inequality and exploitation. It eats away at the basic structures that allow people to build stable, meaningful lives, family, community, religion, thick forms of association, intergenerational continuity. It pushes people to move for work, to delay forming families, to commodify their time and attention, to adapt to rapid technological change, to live more and more of their lives through screens. It makes work more precarious, schedules more unpredictable, friendships more scattered.

For a long time, the Left responded to this with ambivalence. On one hand, it welcomed the destruction of old oppressive structures, rigid hierarchies of caste and gender, suffocating small town moralism, religious authoritarianism. On the other hand, it worried about the uprooting of workers, the loss of community, the commodification of everything. Marx himself had this double vision. He praised capitalism for tearing down feudal bonds and unleashing productive forces, but he also saw how it turned relationships into cash transactions and made life feel weightless and alien.

In the postwar period, especially with the rise of the New Left, the balance shifted. More and more, the Left defined itself in opposition not just to economic exploitation, but to “authority” and “conformity” as such. The enemy became “the system” in the broadest sense, any stable structure that seemed to limit self expression. Family, church, nation, tradition, even unions and mass parties, all became suspect as potential sites of repression. The good life was imagined as continuous liberation from norms, roles, and obligations.

At the same time, capitalism was discovering that it could make money off this desire for liberation. You could sell people the feeling of transgression and rebellion as a lifestyle. You could market products as ways of escaping boredom, escaping roles, escaping limits. You could make flexibility and precarity feel like freedom, as long as you wrapped them in the rhetoric of choice and authenticity.

The result is the strange convergence we live in now. On the one side, a “progressive” culture that defines itself by its readiness to dismantle norms, identities, and institutions in the name of inclusion and self expression. On the other side, an economic system that requires constant disruption, constant mobility, constant reinvention. The two feed each other. Each new layer of social disintegration produces new forms of suffering, which can then be narrated as oppression, which then justifies new waves of awareness, representation, and professional management.

Question any of this and you are told you sound like the Right. Worry aloud about low birth rates, and someone will accuse you of echoing fascist “great replacement” rhetoric. Notice the explosion of loneliness and depression and suggest that people might need more stable roles, more rooted communities, and more traditional forms of mutual obligation, and you will be told you are nostalgic, patriarchal, or insufficiently sensitive to how oppressive those structures once were. Point out that people who try to live entirely as unencumbered individuals on the market, without family support, without community, without thick institutions, tend to burn out, and someone will say you are romanticizing the past.

None of this is to deny the real oppressions that older structures contained. It is to say that the alternative cannot simply be to let capitalism dissolve everything and call the result “freedom.” A politics that just blesses the churn, that treats every new form of disembedding as a victory against tradition, ends up cheering for conditions that make solidarity harder, not easier. It celebrates the very fragmentation that leaves individuals more dependent on impersonal systems and expert management.

You can see this in debates over work and family. In many progressive spaces, the ideal is an individual with a fulfilling career, maximum autonomy, and minimal constraints, equally for men and women. Children are a lifestyle choice to be fitted into the career arc if desired. You can see it in how subsidized childcare and early childhood programs are framed almost entirely as tools to get more adults, especially mothers, working longer hours in the market, rather than as ways of making it easier for families to spend more time together. Any suggestion that stable family formation, with some degree of role specialization and sacrifice, might be socially valuable is coded as conservative. Yet the reality is that, for most people, raising children is one of the main ways that meaning, continuity, and care are transmitted. A society that makes it extremely difficult to form and maintain families, that treats parenting as a private hobby to be squeezed in around work, is not obviously more emancipated than one that asks adults to take on stable roles as mothers and fathers.

The way progressive liberals and leftists tend to talk about mental health is a prime example. The explosion of anxiety, depression, and various diagnoses in the last few decades is simultaneously framed in mainstream liberal spaces as a sign of progress resulting from more open destigmatization and as a problem to be cured, but mostly at the level of individual psychology. Even when it is acknowledged that the system is making people sick, the response rarely goes beyond the surface level: more therapy, more medication, more awareness campaigns. Rarely do we step back and ask whether a life lived mostly through screens, in competitive educational and work environments, with weak community bonds and fragile families, might itself be structurally insane. Instead, the churn is accepted, and the suffering it produces is managed. Although they are more likely to voice “systemic” critiques and blame capitalism, Leftists aren’t much better on this issue either, and end up following similar assumptions as their liberal counterparts when it comes to social problems like this.

While mainstream conservatism tends to bemoan social decay without identifying its root cause in the logic of capital itself, liberal and progressive discourse performs a different trick. It spins the social decay engendered by capitalism as social progress, and at most seeks to accommodate it rather than identifying it as a problem at all. The result is that neither mainstream camp tells the truth. One laments the symptoms while protecting the disease. The other rebrands the disease as a cure.

You can see this pattern everywhere once you know what to look for. The rise of mental illness on a massive scale is treated not as evidence of deep social collapse, but as a welcome result of “destigmatization.” Population decline and stagnant economies are rebranded as positive “degrowth” developments that are good for the environment. The inability of people to afford a home gets repositioned as “downsizing” to fit the “small is beautiful” eco-liberal narrative, and renting with multiple roommates in small apartments is marketed as a “community” lifestyle. Meanwhile, the liberal-humanitarian veils of multiculturalism and promoting “diversity” get used to rationalize the mass immigration supported by capitalist governments, typically through foreign worker visa programs, to offset falling birthrates and allow capitalist employers to continue paying workers low wages with minimal bargaining power. In each case, the progressive frame does not challenge the conditions producing the misery. It gives those conditions a moral vocabulary and calls resistance to them reactionary.

Women are sent to the office to work longer hours in the name of feminist liberation, in which they are told that they are “escaping patriarchy” by not being stay-at-home mothers, and are instead becoming freer by doing wage labor for a boss. The obvious strain on motherhood that this poses gets “solved” by progressive policies like state-run childcare, in which taking care of children is partly outsourced to other women in the third world, while the kids grow up spending less time with both parents. Meanwhile problems pertaining to mental illness and adolescent distress get outsourced to the therapy industry, big pharma, and to healthcare professionals, while parents get sent to work for longer hours at jobs with less long-term social protections.

The fact that liberals and leftists tend to more or less offer some form of bureaucratic managerialism as the solution to symptoms of social collapse, exacerbated by the decline of family and community structures, is not accidental. It matches the interests and outlook of the professional managerial class that we talked about earlier. They are the ones who provide many of these therapeutic, educational, and managerial services. A world where more and more aspects of life are professionalized, from child rearing to conflict resolution to emotional processing, is a world with more opportunities for them. So long as the suffering can be narrated in the right progressive language, the deep structure of the system does not need to be questioned.

In that sense, contemporary “progressivism” often behaves like a chaplaincy of decay. It consoles people as their worlds fall apart. It offers them recognition and words and safer spaces. It teaches them how to live with, and perhaps even celebrate, forms of dislocation that previous generations would have recognized as pathological. It blesses capitalist transformations in the language of liberation. And because it still calls itself “the Left,” it disarms criticism from those who would otherwise resist, telling them that to oppose these trends is to side with reaction.

This is not the whole story. There are real left wing movements that fight for housing, for labor rights, for public services, for decommodification, that push back against the market in concrete ways. But the dominant cultural image of the Left in the global North today is much closer to the decayed, PMC-coded progressivism I have described. The more this image spreads, the harder it becomes to use the word “Left” to name a genuinely egalitarian, solidaristic project.

Towards a Non-Binary Political Thinking

Many leftists tend to love non-binary stuff except when it comes to actual politics. What has always defined my project across all my media channels (1Dime, 1Dime Radio, 1Dime Review, etc.) is challenging one-dimensional thinking. That includes one-dimensional thinking on the left as well. Many leftists love it when I critique liberals, but throw a tantrum and call me reactionary when I call out some of the left’s dogmas. There are also many people who appreciate my critiques of the left, but regard it only as self-criticism and insist that these critiques must only “come from the left” in order to improve “the left.” While I do hope the left improves, insofar as I hope that people on all sides improve in general so that we can get closer to potentially solving civilizational problems, this thinking is still trapped in the left-right binary I am critiquing. This binary makes it harder for people to think, as it is still filtered through ideological goggles that conceal contradictions. This is why I would instead advocate that people get away from left-right binarism altogether, even if, on an issue-by-issue basis, we will all lean more left or right depending on the context. This is where my project overlaps with Theory Underground’s political project of “post-duopoly” and moving beyond obsolete binaries. This raises a natural question. If “Left” and “Right” as identities have become more confusing than helpful, if “Leftism” in its subcultural form often functions as a brand for a particular class fraction managing decay, what are we supposed to do instead? Do we just declare ourselves “post Left” and drift into vague contrarianism? Do we flip over to the Right because the Left annoys us?

I think the answer has to be more concrete and less melodramatic. The point is not to invent a new tribe with a cooler name. The point is to stop letting these old brand identities do our thinking for us. That means thinking more about mutual interests, institutions, and concrete political solutions to social problems, rather than vibes and team colors.

Instead of asking, “Is this policy left or right,” we can ask, “Who benefits from this. Who loses. What does it do to the distribution of power between capital and labor, between ordinary people and oligarchs, between families and markets, between local communities and centralized bureaucracies.” Instead of asking, “Is this person still on the Left,” we can ask, “Are they taking positions that, on balance, strengthen the bargaining power and stability of the non rich, or are they helping to rationalize arrangements that make ordinary life more precarious.”

That shift in questions already cuts through a lot of the nonsense. A banker who loudly supports progressive social causes but fights wealth taxes and unionization is not “on the Left” in any meaningful sense that should matter. A small town social conservative who backs strong public healthcare, labor rights, and limits on corporate power is not “on the Right” in any simple way either. Once you stop letting identity labels decide who your friends and enemies are in advance, you can build coalitions around actual shared interests, even when you deeply disagree on other axes.

Real politics is not a graduate seminar where everyone eventually converges on the same worldview. It is the messy work of making collective decisions despite deep and permanent disagreement. People come into a coalition with different cultures, different moral intuitions, and different metaphysical stories. If every disagreement is treated as a sign of bad consciousness or hidden reaction, then the only politics you can imagine is an endless struggle session aimed at purifying the in group, not a project that can actually hold different people together long enough to win anything in the world.

This does not mean becoming indifferent to culture, morality, or gender and race struggles. It means refusing to treat those struggles as detached from class and institutional power. If a certain movement around gender or race is used mainly to diversify the upper tiers of institutions while leaving their power intact, that is different from a movement that roots itself in working-class communities and fights for material improvements. The language might be similar. The alliances and outcomes will not be.

It also means accepting that sane politics will be mixed. A person can be egalitarian on economic questions and relatively conservative on questions of social reproduction, family, and community, without being a monster. In many real-world contexts, that combination might be the most stabilizing and humane. Likewise, someone might be relatively liberal on certain social freedoms while being more hawkish on crime or borders, without being reducible to a cartoon fascist. The task is to sort through these mixes with an eye to what improves human civilization, meaningfully helps the lives of the common working majority, and reins in the most destructive anti-civilizational tendencies in capitalism, not to enforce purity according to an abstract Left/Right schema.

On a personal level, dropping the Leftist super ego can also be psychologically liberating. You no longer have to worry about whether every deviation from the current line makes you a traitor. You can change your mind on a topic without feeling that your entire identity is at stake. You can admit when the people you thought were on your team are behaving pathologically, without having to immediately jump into the arms of the other team. You can be loyal to principles, and to actual people in your life, instead of to an imaginary Party that mostly lives in your head.

Yet the values that once animated the best of the Left, equality, solidarity, and democratic control over the conditions of life, do not have to die with it. They can be detached from the Left/Right tribal schema and pursued under other names. They can inform coalitions that cross old boundaries, bringing together people who share an interest in limiting oligarchic power, stabilizing social reproduction, and preserving the possibility of a common life that is not wholly dictated by markets and bureaucracies.

That being said, the objective material trends I have described (elite overproduction, social fragmentation, capitalist dynamism) are not going away anytime soon, and it is crucial to remember their role in shaping why leftists today are the way they are. These forces engender real pressures toward hysteria, moralism, and fantasy. But at minimum, we can refuse to add another layer of confusion by pretending that a word like “Left” still names a coherent subject we can entrust our hopes to. The map has changed. The old compass is spinning. It is time to look up, look around, and start navigating by the terrain itself, not by the tattered flags we inherited from revolutions long past.

What remains then is a harder, more adult kind of politics. One that starts not from “which team am I on,” but from “what kind of society can sustain human flourishing under these conditions, and who are my actual and potential allies in building it.” That question will not yield neat tribal answers. It will force us to live with ambiguity and mixed coalitions. It will sometimes make us feel homeless in the old ideological landscape. But that homelessness might be more honest than belonging to a house that is already collapsing.

Some Relevant Sources Reading

al-Gharbi, Musa. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Burnham, James. Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. New York: John Day, 1964.

Embery, Paul. Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. Cambridge: Polity, 2021.

Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Gethin, Amory, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty. “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 137, no. 1 (2022): 1–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab036.

Houtman, Dick, Peter Achterberg, and Anton Derks. Farewell to the Leftist Working Class. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Kołakowski, Leszek. “The Concept of the Left.” In Marxism and Beyond: On Historical Understanding and Individual Responsibility, translated by Jane Zielonko Peel, 87–104. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik von. Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974.

Lind, Michael. The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020.

Pew Research Center. “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education.” August 19, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education-2/.

Sand, Shlomo. A Brief Global History of the Left. Translated by Robin Mackay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2024.