The Myth of "The Movement"

A Proposal For A New Political Strategy

The Illusion That Misleads Many Leftists (and Anti-Leftists)

I have been known for being quite critical of the many hyper-sectarian tendencies within the left, but in this piece, I critique the “big tent” leftist worldview and a wider set of ideological presuppositions that implicitly guide the thinking of many people who consider themselves to be part of “the left” more broadly. This is especially the case for those who have made being a “leftist” a big part of their identity, invested a lot of time following leftist politics, and have the habit of using terms like “we” or “us” versus “them” and “the masses” when speaking in left-wing spaces.

Many people on the contemporary left operate under a common delusion: that someday “the movement” (which they imagine to be a “leftist” movement with different internal leftist factions) needs to “win” and defeat “the other side” in order to deliver the social-political changes they believe are necessary for society. Beneath this vague notion of “the left” somehow “winning” lies some deeper implicit presumptions. 1) The assumption that all social and political change worth wanting can come only from the left, and 2) that only those guided by a set of principles loosely associated with “leftism” are capable of holding the morally correct positions. This worldview imagines politics as a grand contest between “the left” and “the right,” between “us” and “them,” with some vaguely defined “we” destined to win if only the forces of progress can be properly assembled. But this way of speaking, while useful enough as colloquial shorthand for communicating with left-wing-minded people, easily becomes a simulacrum of politics. It treats ideological abstractions as if they were concrete political subjects. “The left” is not a class, a party, a people, or a coherent historical agent. It is a loose and unstable ideological category containing factions with different class positions, moral intuitions, strategic interests, and visions of the good.

Even those who concede that the left is internally divided tend to fall back on a similar popular-frontist conception of co-allition building. They often call for temporary left-unity, and speak as though there were a broadly defined constellation of tendencies loosely categorized as “the left” that must be assembled against an enemy before anything can change. Even if they have many heated disagreements with other leftists, the underlying assumption is still that change must come from the left, and that “leftists” (and the groups they claim to speak for) are the central agents of historical progress.

Most leftists will readily grant that there is not one struggle but many struggles over class, over race, over gender, and the rest. Yet they imagine these many struggles “intersecting” and converging into one broader formation, a left-wing tide of sorts, usually conceived as a popular front arrayed against the right and the center, and at times as the center-left arrayed against a so-called far right. What defines this intersectional unity, aside from a shared claim to oppression and marginality, is a subject that I have already discussed at length. The thing worth focusing on here is what gets left out of this “leftist” conception of progressive change. Movements that fall outside the boundaries of what these leftists are willing to recognize as the left are automatically excluded when it comes to determining who is an ally and who is an enemy. On this view, only the tendencies already admitted into that diverse yet carefully policed thing they call the left are deemed capable of advancing change worth having. This conception of the movement, let alone a specifically leftist one, is dangerously misleading, and it hands activists a distorted picture of how political change actually happens.

This is why the myth of “the movement” should be read alongside my essay deconstructing the concepts of Left and Right, my essays on the Genealogy of Wokeism, and my essay On Left Conservatism. The point is not merely that the left is internally divided. It is that the very habit of imagining politics as “the left” winning against “the right” obscures the real terrain of class, institutions, culture, and power. It replaces class analysis with ideological team sports.

Throughout my works, I have articulated the kind of political synthesis that characterizes my own political philosophy: economically left, culturally conservative in certain respects, but politically realist enough not to demand that progressive socialists conform to my own sensibilities. I do not take the woke position I criticize, namely, the refusal to work with anyone who has different views on cultural or moral questions. The question, then, is not how this imagined leftist subject can finally become unified enough to win. The question is what strategy makes sense once we admit that “the movement” is a myth.

The condition that makes this myth untenable could best be described by what the political theorist Benjamin Studebaker calls deep pluralism. In The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy, Studebaker describes deep pluralism as the spread, into ever more areas of life, of intractable disagreements that cannot be reconciled merely through dialogue, education, or consciousness-raising. These are not superficial differences of opinion. They are disagreements rooted in divergent life experiences, class positions, and the different environments in which people were socialized, disagreements that resist resolution through persuasion alone. I will say more shortly about what makes them intractable rather than simply permanent. For now the point is that any serious socialist strategy has to begin by accepting this condition rather than wishing it away.

The “If Only More People Thought Like Me” Fallacy

The contemporary left has adopted an inverted theory of political change. Rather than organizing people around shared material interests despite their differences, it insists on transforming consciousness first. Before political change is possible, enough of the masses must be elevated and educated through enlightened counter-propaganda against the cultural hegemony of the dominant order, so that they will finally be capable of receiving the liberatory message the left is selling them, rather than the left actually meeting people where they are and adapting to the cultural sensibilities of the common majority. Before any coalition can form, everyone must embrace the proper cultural positions.

This is the woke conception of politics: convince everyone to think like you, then change becomes possible. This might sound like a straw man of a position no one on the left actually holds. It is not. It is an extremely common tendency, implicit in the thinking of the PMC leftists who dominate the institutions and the voices of the so-called left, even when it is rarely stated this baldly. Pierre Bourdieu identified this very tendency and gave it a name: the scholastic fallacy. In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu took aim at the entire tradition, Marxist and otherwise, that frames resistance to domination in the language of consciousness and expects political liberation to follow from the raising of consciousness alone, as though the extraordinary inertia of social structures inscribed in bodies and in the material conditions of everyday life could be dissolved simply by getting enough people to think correctly. The woke left has inherited this fallacy wholesale.

The problem should be obvious. Politics is not a seminar. It is not a consciousness-raising session. Politics is the art of making decisions and mobilizing people despite disagreement, not achieving total consensus before acting. When you make ideological transformation the prerequisite for political action, you guarantee perpetual impotence. Politics operates on a different logic entirely: you build coalitions from people who already agree with you on some things, not people who agree with you on everything.

Politics in the Age of Deep Pluralism

Deep pluralism is not a problem that can be solved at this stage. It is a condition to be navigated. It is important to distinguish intractability from incompatibility. These disagreements do not necessarily make people incapable of coexistence, nor are they permanent in some metaphysical sense. They are intractable in a specific way: for the foreseeable future, there is no realistic prospect of achieving consensus through dialogue. These are simply disagreements. Consider abortion. The divide between pro-life and pro-choice positions is one of the most deeply felt contradictions in American political life. It is extraordinarily difficult to change minds on this question through argument. Yet people who disagree on abortion live and work alongside one another every day. The disagreement is intractable, but coexistence is not only possible; it is the norm.

What this means for the left is that an intractable disagreement on any given cultural question, whether abortion, immigration, or family structure, might make one’s politics incompatible with a left that insists on a rigid set of culturally progressive views. But it does not make one incompatible with socialism as such. The question is whether the left can tolerate disagreement on these issues while cooperating on economic goals. The answer should be obvious, but the contemporary left has made it anything but.

The college-educated urban professional and the non-college rural worker inhabit different social worlds with different status systems, different modes of cultural capital, and different relationships to institutions. You cannot educate away these differences because they are not cognitive errors; they are structural positions. This reality makes the fantasy of “the movement” especially absurd. Any coalition broad enough to win power will necessarily include people with fundamental disagreements.

Deep pluralism cannot be overcome through consensus or communicative action. It is not the sort of condition that dissolves once enough people are talked into agreement. It may be ameliorated, but in the present age it cannot be overcome, because intractable disagreement is now driven not only by an increasingly diverse and complex society but also by social-media algorithms and by the collapse of the grand narratives and consensus politics that held earlier eras together. In an age of deep pluralism, we cannot expect ideological consensus on the left or the right. The most we can realistically hope for is temporary convergence on particular issues and particular interests, at particular moments.

The left’s response has been to deny this reality through two complementary strategies. First, it tries to build a purely progressive coalition: essentially, the college-educated professional-managerial class plus those minorities who can be mobilized through identity politics. Second, it treats anyone outside this coalition as either enemies to be defeated or dupes to be enlightened. Both strategies fail. The purely progressive coalition is too narrow to win durable power, and treating the non-college majority as backwards ensures they will never join you.

The Multi-Faction Strategy

Not only is it an illusion to imagine political change today as the left winning and the right losing; even the very idea of uniting the left is limited by the narrow way in which the left is defined. One need only compare the degree of factional diversity tolerated on the right with what is permitted on the left. Within the conservative coalition, you find libertarians, neoconservatives, traditional Republicans, evangelicals, and populist nationalists. These factions have deep disagreements: libertarians and neoconservatives clash on foreign policy, evangelicals and libertarians disagree on the role of state power. Yet they coexist within the same broad coalition because they accept factional pluralism as normal.

The left, by contrast, demands conformity. To be part of the left, you must be progressive on every cultural issue. You must affirm the latest LGBT positions, embrace specific immigration views, and adopt the full progressive catechism. Deviation on any point makes you suspect. This is strategically insane; it means the left can only draw from the minority of Americans who are culturally progressive, alienating the working-class majority.

The alternative: accept that there will be progressive socialists, liberal socialists, and conservative socialists. These are not cynical labels but genuine political identities reflecting real constituencies.

Progressive socialists would work primarily within the Democratic Party and urban institutions. They would maintain the cultural progressivism that motivates college-educated activists and provides institutional support through media, academia, and non-profits. Their base is the professional-managerial class.

Liberal socialists would occupy a middle ground, economically left but culturally moderate. They would avoid taking strong positions on culture war issues, focusing instead on material politics. Their base would include working-class minorities and moderate professionals uncomfortable with both conservative cultural politics and progressive excesses.

Conservative socialists would work within the Republican Party and rural areas. They would be economically populist but culturally traditional. Their base would be the non-college working class, particularly in areas the left has abandoned.

This is not a call for socialists to cynically adopt conservative positions they do not believe; it is a call to let people who already hold conservative views organize as conservative socialists rather than forcing them to either abandon their cultural convictions or leave the left entirely. I have argued for exactly this kind of arrangement before, in On Left Conservatism, and on my podcast 1Dime Radio, in conversation with Benjamin Studebaker, where I suggested that organizations like the DSA, or others better equipped for the task, ought to run economically populist candidates inside both the Democratic and the Republican parties. The reaction from the left is by now predictable. It takes the form of a refusal to compromise with anyone on the other side, an insistence that certain people are simply irredeemable and beyond the reach of cooperation. My answer is that the criteria by which people are purity-tested are remarkably narrow, and that this narrowness is itself revealing of how superficial and how first-world the priorities of many activists have become.

What I am describing is not the familiar picture of intersectionality, in which a single movement is imagined as a cluster of ideologically adjacent sub-movements, all of them already broadly progressive, intersecting and reinforcing one another. That picture is naive. A genuinely intersectional politics would draw on a far wider range of movements, movements that diverge sharply at the level of ideology yet share concrete class interests, and that therefore converge, every now and then, on a particular piece of legislation or a particular political priority. Not a coalition of the already-likeminded, but an overlap among the genuinely different. Convergence on a bill is not agreement on a worldview, and it has never required one.

A Multi-Faction Strategy vs the Moderate Conservative-Left Synthesis

To show why the multi-faction pluralist approach is necessary for this context, lets look at the potentials and limitations of another political strategy I have considered for socialists and social democrats. I have previously stated that I believe the broader Zeitgeist of Western societies is simultaneously moving in a culturally conservative and economically left-wing direction. This seems to be the consistent trajectory of the past 10 years, and its due to objective material conditions and changing socio-economic realities around the world. You see it increasingly in the everyday sentiments of regular people and the media people have been consuming, and its reflected in electoral results too, not just by the fact of the Global Right-Wing shift, but by the fact that even liberal or left wing parties who defeat right-wing populists have had to shift dramatically on certain issues (immigration, cultural moderation, etc). However, this is the overall broader zeitgeist embodied by the changing attitudes of the average person, not necessarily the political class. Within the politically active parts of the population, there are deep divisions in both culture and economics. Partisan ideologues on either side will often find a socially conservative, economically left synthesis to be incomprehensible, yet this is how I would describe the most prevalent sentiments I see among the average person who is not super politically active or ideological. After all, we had previously become perfectly accustomed to the prevailing neo-liberal ideology of being “fiscally conservative, but socially liberal,” so why can’t one be socially conservative and fiscally liberal? As I have described before, I think this is actually the more ideologically consistent position anyway (See why in my Christian Case Against Capitalism essay). In theory, one could try to assemble a single synthesis designed to appeal to as many people as possible from a left-of-center, socialist, or social-democratic standpoint. It would likely marry an economic populism radical enough to matter but not so radical that it stops being workable, to a common sense cultural conservatism. At a large enough scale, something like this would probably be the most popular settlement on offer for the average median voter.

A political ideology should not rely on a charismatic leader, but that is, of course, very pivotal to how successfully a political vision is communicated at a mass scale. To get an idea of what I am talking about, at the level of a federal election, a figure who would embody this synthesis could perhaps be a figure like Bernie Sanders if he were somewhat more culturally moderate, a little bolder and more masculine in style, something close to a hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan. Or a fiery, bold figure like Georgia Meloni, but with the compassion and economic policies of Olof Palme, suited for our current context, of course. I’m talking about a culturally conservative and economically left figure with a powerful labor movement behind them that pressures the government to actually deliver on its economically left promises, not merely a pseudo-populist demagogue who pays vague lip service to “people vs the elites” rhetoric. Such a synthesis could, in my estimation, be the most electable political agenda at the presidential level. I’m not the first to propose ideas like this, even though it sounds like idiosyncratic heresy to one-dimensional ideologues. There are a few people who have proposed more or less moderate versions of this strategy, such as Ruy Teixeira on Substack, E.J Dionne in his book Why People Hate Politics, and Jim Wallis in God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

However, there are many obstacles that would make it very difficult for this strategy to work, especially in a diverse country like America. The biggest issue is that the presidency is the last step, not the first. Before any of it, one has to survive the internecine wars inside each side: the Democratic primaries, the Republican primaries, and the wildly different social climates of different cities and regions. To govern, one also needs senators and members of Congress, and assembling them means contesting many local landscapes at once. In a country as large and as geographically divided as the United States, no single formula travels intact across all of that terrain. In a more culturally homogeneous country like Denmark, it is much easier, which is precisely why the social democratic “red bloc” alliance has been able to consistently win elections with something close to a more moderate version of the synthesis I have been talking about. It demands pluralism and adaptation, which is exactly why I argue for a multi-faction approach rather than one national synthesis.

I should be clear about my own position, if only to head off the obvious objection. As I have articulated in a few prior essays, I do hold a certain conservative-liberal socialist worldview of my own, which I tentatively have called “limitarianism.” It includes a certain kind of distributionist/market socialist vision rooted in a mix of Christian and radical republican values. But I do not imagine that this formula can be copied and pasted across every district, or every country, nor that it could win everywhere. I do not expect everyone to convert to it. I advocate the multi-faction approach precisely because I do not expect everyone to share my political worldview, and a strategy that demanded universal agreement with me would reproduce the very error I have been criticizing.

Each faction targets different constituencies and operates in different institutional spaces. A conservative socialist working in a Republican primary faces entirely different dynamics than a progressive socialist in a Democratic one. The conservative socialist can appeal to working-class cultural sensibilities while pushing economic populism. The progressive socialist can mobilize institutional resources and educated activists while maintaining economic radicalism. By creating distinct factions, you prevent any single faction from imposing its priorities on everyone else.

Most importantly, this approach prevents the progressive faction from hijacking the entire left project and imposing a monopoly on what are “leftist principles,” which are not up for debate. But the striking inconsistency in how these principles are applied exposes the lie that is trademark “leftism,” and it reveals what the priorities of some leftists are.

The Left Already Compromises on Everything, Except Culture

A predictable objection I have consistently seen in response to the very idea of a conservative left faction, or merely a more culturally moderate turn, is that the left should not compromise on so-called leftist principles. The grave hypocrisy of this arrangement deserves closer examination. Currently, the culturally progressive wing that dominates the voices of the contemporary left treats its cultural positions as non-negotiable while remaining flexible on just about everything else. Leftist intolerance, as it currently operates, is applied with striking inconsistency and in a manner that does not prioritize the most important left-wing goals. People are canceled for insufficient progressivism on trans issues, never for insufficient radicalism on wealth redistribution. The same selective rigor extends even to a cause as urgent and as morally clear as opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza: a great many professional-managerial leftists will not work across the aisle with right-wing populist Republicans who share that opposition, even as they treat the smallest deviation on trans issues as a line that must never be crossed.

Conformity is enforced most aggressively on what are, in the larger scheme of things, first-world cultural concerns. Meanwhile, people are rarely if ever singled out for disagreeing on far more consequential questions: how to address poverty and income inequality, how to create jobs, how to end corporate influence on democracy, or how to dismantle the structures that keep working people economically trapped. And disagreements that reveal far deeper and more fundamental incompatibilities between left factions, such as what regime type one ultimately supports, whether democracy, anarchism, or a one-party state, are quietly tolerated under the same left umbrella. But those who hold a different view on a cultural question affecting a small fraction of the population face immediate backlash and expulsion.

There is something misleading in the very language of compromising on trans people. The phrase smuggles in a premise, namely that declining to endorse every plank of the current trans agenda, whether on sports, or on the medicalization of minors, or on the spread of so-called LGBTQ-friendly curricula in public schools, amounts to abandoning the rights of trans people as such. It does not. Compromising on a set of contested trans issues is not the same thing as compromising on trans people. Notice that no one reasons this way about any other constituency. No one claims that opposing reparations on pragmatic grounds, out of a fear that they would inflame racial conflict rather than remedy injustice, is somehow tantamount to throwing black people under the bus or betraying black people as such. The slippage from issues to persons is reserved for one narrow set of questions, and that selectivity is itself the thing worth examining.

The enforcers of call-out culture will call out any progressive politician, activist, or influencer for echoing a take that diverges from progressive left dogmas. Bernie Sanders was recently chastised for taking a hard position on the border. Gavin Newsom was attacked for questioning the lunacy of the transgender sports debate. It is common for people who are left of center to be called out for such positions. Yet it is completely normalized, even tacitly accepted, whenever politicians and activists compromise on what should be the left’s most important goals: economic radicalism.

When Zohran Mamdani waters down his political program and compromises with the Zionist lobby, that is rationalized as necessary for politics. However, if anyone advocates for a common-sense position on migration, they are labeled racists and bigots. When AOC declined to force a vote on Medicare for All, that was rationalized as political realism. Yet this same political realism is thrown out the window whenever cultural issues emerge. Nobody is permitted to be “realistic” about immigration or trans issues; on those questions, only maximalist progressive positions are tolerated.

This inconsistency is not accidental. It reveals the class character of the contemporary left, and the one division within it that actually matters: the division between the PMC symbolic capitalists who dominate today’s left institutions and the working majority that the left is supposed to represent. What a movement chooses to forgive, and what it refuses to forgive, is a confession of its real priorities and of the interests that have captured it. The priorities of call-out culture reflect the preoccupations of college-educated professionals, not the material concerns of the working class.

The pattern is clearest in who gets ruled out in advance. A great many leftists hold that progress can be pursued only in the company of other leftists, and not even all of those, but only the ones who satisfy their own particular definition of what a leftist is. Anyone they have decided to file under transphobe, racist, or reactionary is treated as beyond cooperation, on the strength of nothing more than the opinions that person happens to hold. It is worth recalling how unstable that last label has become. A great many people, on the left fully as much as on the right, would have been counted as reactionaries twenty years ago, or even less. The goal is not three separate movements that never coordinate. It is accepting pluralism as enduring while building coalitions around specific shared goals. Insisting on cultural unity before economic cooperation becomes possible ensures you will never achieve either.

The Left Is Most Unpopular on Cultural Matters, but it Has Many Other Popular Ideas

The culture war is the left’s weakest terrain; this is not an opinion but a structural fact. Culture is produced and disseminated by the professional-managerial class. Universities, media institutions, entertainment industries: these are dominated by college-educated progressives. In this sense, progressives do control culture. They set the terms of cultural discourse and mobilize institutional resources to enforce cultural norms.

But this cultural power is deeply unstable. It rests on institutional capture, not popular support. Progressive cultural positions are unpopular with the working-class majority. When elections force cultural questions into the realm of popular decision-making, progressives consistently lose. The right understands this asymmetry and exploits it relentlessly. By making every election about cultural issues, they force battles on terrain where they have popular support. Progressives keep taking the bait, making cultural battles the centerpiece of their politics, ensuring they fight on their weakest ground.

This creates a dilemma. Go fully progressive and lose working-class voters. Go culturally conservative and lose part of the urban college-educated professional-managerial class. The multi-faction approach offers a way out. By allowing different factions to take different positions, you avoid forcing a binary choice. Progressive socialists can retain the urban professional-managerial class, conservative socialists can appeal to working-class sensibilities, and liberal socialists can occupy the middle ground.

But this requires accepting that socialist factions will publicly disagree on cultural questions. A conservative socialist cannot be expected to affirm progressive positions on trans issues, immigration, or family structure. This will infuriate progressive activists, but it is the only way to build a working-class constituency.

Cultural conformity is not necessary for economic cooperation. It is already taken for granted that people on the left may agree to disagree about the degree of economic radicalism they want, some calling themselves social democrats, some socialists, and some communists outright. The same latitude extends to questions of regime type, with some favoring more democratic and others more authoritarian paths. Yet for reasons that are never quite spelled out, this range of disagreement becomes intolerable the moment the subject turns cultural, where nothing short of conformity to the latest progressive position will do. We ought to extend the same permission to cultural questions, allowing people to disagree on them, precisely so that we can concentrate on organizing around the demands that command the broadest public support and that bear most directly on the concerns of ordinary working people. People with fundamentally different views on gender, sexuality, immigration, and national identity can still agree that wealth inequality is obscene, healthcare should be universal, and imperial wars should end. These are material interests that cut across cultural divisions.

None of this means the culture war is a mere distraction to be set aside. As I argue in Part Four of The Genealogy of Wokeism, the culture war is the class war: it is not a neutral battlefield, nor is it easily separable from class conflict. But it is a war the left currently fights on terms dictated by the professional-managerial class, and that asymmetry is itself the problem.

Breaking the Left’s Glass Ceiling: A Mass Base Can’t Scare The Median Voter

The left has been bullied into accepting positions almost no one actually holds. Bernie Sanders was honest about immigration in 2016: open borders is incompatible with a nation-state. This is common sense. But today’s progressives call it “racist.” They have bullied leftists into affirming that any immigration restriction whatsoever is white supremacy. Many leftists secretly disagree but are afraid to say so.

The same pattern repeats across issues. Progressives colonize the left and enforce conformity through cancelation. Someone canceled for insufficient economic radicalism? Never. Someone canceled for questioning any aspect of trans ideology? Constantly. The multi-faction approach breaks this dynamic. If conservative socialists are openly conservative, progressives cannot blackmail them into silence. Each faction maintains its own base and legitimacy, preventing any faction from imposing total conformity.

This is, to be sure, a pluralist and big-tent approach to coalition building. But pluralism has a structural limit: there is only so much one can do to tolerate those who will not tolerate others. The standard version of this problem involves fascism, the argument that fascists should not be tolerated because they themselves refuse to tolerate anyone else, and that argument holds, provided one is actually talking about fascists and not, as leftists routinely do, applying the term loosely to every right-winger or anyone deemed reactionary. The difficulty for the contemporary left is closer to home. The people who most consistently refuse to work across lines of disagreement, who treat any deviation as grounds for expulsion, are not fascists. They are the enforcers of woke orthodoxy.

I am not, for my part, opposed to working alongside people who are culturally far to my left on particular issues. I am not calling for them to be purged from organizations or movements. What I insist on is that they should no longer be permitted to dominate the left, to impose their worldview as the condition of entry, and to drive away the working-class majority in the process. The difference between tolerance and what the woke demand is worth stating plainly: tolerance means allowing disagreement to exist; what they demand is acceptance, full endorsement, on pain of cancelation.

It is worth distinguishing between two kinds of people who fall under the influence of woke politics. The first hold these positions sincerely and might, with patience, be cooperated with; the barrier is usually on their side, since they are the ones who choose name-calling and disciplinary measures over conversation. The second have a structural incentive to be woke. As I discuss in The Genealogy of Wokeism, symbolic capitalists in academia, media, art, and entertainment weaponize progressive orthodoxy as a form of status competition, fighting over ever-diminishing slices of social capital within their professional field. This is what explains why cancelation overwhelmingly punishes people on the left rather than the right: it is not principally about social justice but about intra-PMC rivalry. For both groups, what I ask is not conversion but tolerance, the willingness to allow culturally conservative or moderate leftists to exist and to organize. That this should be controversial is itself a measure of how far the left has drifted from ordinary democratic norms.

The woke faction is, in the end, the principal obstacle to the kind of pluralist politics this essay calls for. If they merely disagreed, I would welcome the argument and challenge them to win at the level of persuasion; they should be free to articulate and advocate their positions. The problem is that they are the obstacle to having the conversation in plurality in the first place. When I proposed running economically populist candidates inside both the Democratic and Republican parties, the people most fiercely opposed were not conservatives, not moderates, not anyone outside the left. They were the woke and the intolerant leftists. That, more than any structural barrier, is what holds up the kind of progress that ought to be within reach.

Convergence Without Consensus

The standard objection to all of this is that it would dilute the movement, that admitting conservative leftists into the fold would only fracture it and contaminate its principles. The objection falls apart the moment one remembers that the movement was never there to begin with. There is nothing to dilute. And the principles supposedly at risk are not what they are made out to be. The whole reason for dwelling on the hypocrisy of left-wing priorities, on who gets canceled and who is quietly forgiven, is to show that the celebrated refusal to compromise on principle was always a fiction. Most of what calls itself the left does not run on principle in the first place. It runs on the preferences of a particular class. Once that is admitted, the case for purity loses its ground.

If the left is going to embrace pragmatism, and a great deal of it already has, then it ought to embrace pragmatism honestly and follow the logic the whole way. A left that has already made its peace with a left-liberal alliance has no principled reason left to refuse a left-conservative one. The reasoning that licenses the first licenses the second. Convergence does not mean consensus. The distinction is the entire point. Alliance does not require agreement, and it does not require everyone to gather beneath a single party banner. It requires only an honest reckoning with what it would actually take to accomplish some of the things the left claims to want, which is a measure of overlap, here and there, between factions that otherwise share rather little.

The deepest potential in such an arrangement lies in movements that genuinely intersect on the basis of shared goals and common class interest. It is worth being exact about who matters here. Many of the figures capable of carrying these ideas are not themselves working-class; what counts is less their own position than who is listening to them and who turns out to be receptive to what they say. Consider figures like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their significance lies not in being working-class outsiders, which they plainly are not, but in the makeup of their audience, a great deal of which is. When I speak of a conservative leftist, I do not have someone like Tucker Carlson in mind. I have in mind someone capable of reaching that same audience, and that audience is a very large share of the country.

The numbers are not on the left’s side here, and pretending otherwise accomplishes nothing. Much of the working class, and especially the part of it without a college degree, either does not vote at all or votes Republican. It has been drifting away from the left for years. A left that bolts the door against a conservative faction, or even against a merely culturally moderate one, is in effect deciding to give up on ever reaching working-class voters at any serious scale.It is choosing to remain what it has long been, a politics of students and aspiring professionals, concentrated in a handful of urban centers, having quietly ceded the rural country to the other side.

Revolution as Nihilist Cope

Many leftists on the more radical end cope with these contradictions by adopting a pseudo-revolutionary posture that spares them the trouble of thinking any of it through. If electoral politics is hopeless, if the art of compromise is itself corrupt, then one need not wrestle with the messy question of how to build coalitions across difference. One can simply declare that revolution is the way forward and treat any engagement with the existing political order as beneath contempt. This pseudo-radicalism is often less a political position than an escape from politics itself.

Those who insist that nothing short of revolution will do are engaged in a fantasy that is not merely impractical but historically illiterate. Revolution has never succeeded in an established Western democracy. Under present conditions, with deeper pluralism than ever before and vastly more powerful repressive state apparatuses armed with surveillance and military technologies that make any insurrection trivially containable, the prospect is more remote still. And even revolutions, when they do occur, are internally factional: the Russian Revolution produced Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries; the French produced Girondists, Jacobins, Sans-Culottes, and Thermidoreans. The American Revolution survived because its factions found a way to compromise peacefully, as Britain did after the Glorious Revolution through parliament. Pluralism does not disappear at the barricades. It is a permanent condition, and any serious politics must begin from that recognition.

My critique of the mainstream left on the question of reform is therefore not that it is too pragmatic. It is that it is not pragmatic enough, and not consistent in its pragmatism. A left that were truly pragmatic would not content itself with winning already-blue districts within the Democratic Party. It would compete in rural areas, in swing districts, in the Republican heartland, even the deep south bible belt, where the poorest working-class people are.

New Deal Democrats and Red Republicans

The multi-faction pluralsit strategy I am proposing would make room for the emergence of New Deal Democrats and Red Republicans/Labor Republicans. New Deal Democrats, who champion the legacy of FDR (which Bernie Sanders did in order to make his radical social democraric politics not seem like a scary communist agenda), and Red Republicans/Labor Republicans, who champion the free-soil/free labor legacy of the Republican Party under Lincoln (eg, the property redistribution policies that occurred from the slaveocracy to workers, freed slaves, & small farmers). The multi-faction approach I have laid out here is an attempt to think through what that would look like, and I intend to develop it further in future work.

The point of factional pluralism is not endless fragmentation. It enables cooperation across cultural differences toward shared economic goals, based in a commitment to the common good. However, what binds people together in such a coalition is not a shared ideology or identity, or even absolute agreement on particular policies. It is a shared class nature: the class character of the working majority. By the working majority, I mean those who earn most of their income through labor. This includes workers of all stripes, even those who own a little capital, as well as small business owners who depend primarily on their own labor to keep their businesses running, even when they employ others. This is not the proletariat in the narrow Marxian sense. It is the broad base of people whose material interests stand structurally opposed to those of the owning class. I develop this account in full in a forthcoming essay, Socialism and Class in the 21st Century, where I set out what I take to be the new class struggle, explaining what I mean by socialism, and clarify the sense in which I do and do not consider myself a socialist, embracing certain conceptions of socialism while rejecting others. That essay may well be in print by the time you are reading this.

The shared goals of this working majority include: addressing wealth inequality through redistribution, universal healthcare and social insurance, climate action that does not abandon workers, ending imperial wars and military adventurism, and rebuilding unions and worker power.

The openings for convergence are more numerous than the left typically admits. Working-class conservatives and progressives alike stand to benefit from pro-family policies, whether framed as social investment or as support for traditional households. Broad majorities, regardless of partisan identity, agree that American democracy is distorted by super PACs and foreign influence. These are not hypothetical overlaps. They are existing alignments waiting to be organized.

Shared goals like this could temporarily cut across people’s cultural divisions. A culturally conservative worker and a culturally progressive professional can agree that extreme wealth inequality is indefensible, that healthcare is a right, and that forever wars serve only the defense industry. The key is to prioritize these material issues over cultural battles.When conservative socialists focus on economic populism and progressive socialists focus on wealth redistribution, they can cooperate despite disagreeing on cultural questions. When both sides insist on total cultural agreement first, cooperation becomes impossible.

Populism versus Popularism: The Trap of “Slopulism”

Politics is the art of making decisions despite disagreement, of mobilizing people who fundamentally disagree on some things to cooperate on others. When I set out to dismantle the myth of the movement, this is the conclusion I am driving toward. The barriers most in need of dismantling are the ideological ones, the barriers that keep socialist and social-democratic organizations from doing the very things that would allow them to accomplish anything at all, which is to work across the aisle and to speak to people well beyond their existing base. What that demands, among other things, is the presence and the acceptance of a conservative left, or at the least a culturally moderate one. This is not a demand that everyone who is culturally progressive turn culturally conservative. That is not the point. The point is that there must be room for such people to exist, room for a conservative leftist and a conservative socialist, in just the way the right has long had room for libertarians and Christian conservatives and others who quarrel among themselves about culture. Absent that space, the left guarantees its own permanent marginality.

One potential misunderstanding should be headed off. What I am proposing is not slopulism, a sloppy and loosely defined alliance between populists on the right and populists on the left. As I suggested earlier with the hypothetical of a Sanders-Reagan fusion, the egalitarianism and populist anti-elitism of Sanders married to the prudent, square conservatism and the sheer assertiveness of Reagan, even that synthesis, perhaps the most electable single formula available, would be extraordinarily difficult to sustain across the full landscape of American politics in an age of deep pluralism.

This points to a distinction worth making plainly, the distinction between populism and popularism. Slopulism rests on popularism, the assumption that something is good simply because it polls well, and that politics is little more than the chasing of whatever happens to be popular at the plebiscitary level. Populism in its genuine sense is something else. It is rooted in a democratic worldview: the conviction that if we are to have a democracy, it ought to be a system of and for the people, and that representatives are there to represent the actual interests of a society. Those interests are diverse, but they often converge on the questions that bear most directly on the working-class majority. A merely popularist politics stops at the most popular issues and builds lofty alliances on vague slogans, opposition to war, opposition to “the elites,” and little else. Genuine populism recognizes that the people are not one, and that a democratic politics of any kind, social-democratic or democratic-socialist, has to respect the people as they actually are rather than as it wishes them to be.

Consider the working-class voter in the South, or in any number of conservative regions, who is pro-life and will remain so. Do such lives not matter? Is that voter irredeemable, never to be appealed to, because of a single position? A great many working-class people vote on precisely this one issue, often because their faith demands it, and they treat the Republicans as the lesser evil on that basis alone. I am not asking progressives to change their minds on abortion. I am insisting that there be room for social-democratic candidates capable of reaching those voters, which means room for politicians who are at once pro-life and socialist, just as there must be room at the other end for candidates whose cultural views sit far to my left. I might disagree with the latter, and I might worry about their viability in a given race, but no one seriously expects the voters of New York or California to turn uniformly conservative. It is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan, a staunch conservative, signed the country’s first no-fault divorce law as governor of California, because that was the ground he was standing on. Politics is always the art of the concretely possible in a particular place. A durable politics, then, has to be driven not merely by rhetoric but by coalitions grounded in mutual interests and shared goals, and those mutual interests must have a class basis, something objective pulling people together beyond the slogans of any given campaign cycle. The current left alliance, organized along intersectional lines, is held together by little more than a loose ideological framework of the oppressed against the oppressors, as I have described at length elsewhere. That is not a class analysis. It is a moral posture dressed up as one. The multi-factional approach I have outlined here is an attempt to work through the reality of deep pluralism without pretending it can be superseded or that consensus is within reach. Being open to the coexistence of a conservative left, a genuinely moderate liberal left, and a progressive left, each with its own base and its own institutional home, is one step toward that kind of politics.

The alternative is perpetual marginalization. A left that demands cultural progressivism as the price of entry will remain a minority coalition of college-educated professionals. It will win cultural battles through institutional capture but lose political battles because it lacks popular support. The choice is stark: accept pluralism and build coalitions across difference, or insist on conformity and guarantee irrelevance. The left has been choosing irrelevance. It is time to try politics instead.

Sources

Benjamin Studebaker, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2

Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Tony Chamas, “The Genealogy of Wokeism (Part 1),” 1Dime Review, April 6, 2026. https://1dimereview.substack.com/p/the-genealogy-of-wokeism-part-1

Tony Chamas, “The Evangelical Origins of Wokeness” (Genealogy of Wokeism, Part 2), 1Dime Review, April 19, 2026. https://1dimereview.substack.com/p/the-evangelical-origins-of-wokeness-239

Tony Chamas, “On Left Conservatism,” 1Dime Review, February 24, 2026. https://1dimereview.substack.com/p/on-left-conservatism

Tony Chamas, “The Left-Right Binary is Obsolete,” 1Dime Review, March 8th, 2026.

Bernie Sanders, interview with Ezra Klein, Vox, July 28, 2015. https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation