What's a Leftist?

The misuse of 'left' and 'right' is a perennial problem in American politics.

In their brilliant book, The Dawn of Everything​​: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow reference cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s description of politics as “the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another.” As such, political disputes are disagreements over how society should be structured. Socialism and capitalism, for example, are two different approaches to that challenge.

My focus here is not to argue for one particular belief system over another, but to try to bring some clarity to the incoherent use of the terms “left” and “leftism” in political discourse, drawing on the concept of politics as a debate over the reordering of society.

Broadly speaking: A leftist strives to eradicate existing systems of oppression, discrimination, and exploitation by fundamentally restructuring how humans coexist and cooperate.

Leftism is premised on systemic anti-capitalist change, which is a revolutionary approach to politics. These changes rarely occur at the ballot box. They require non-electoral measures such as direct action, mutual aid, strikes, protests, and so on. Because leftists threaten the hegemony of the capitalist duopoly, the system attempts to neutralize them by pretending they don’t exist or obscuring their views, and blaming them for everything that goes wrong in the country. But looking past the propaganda, we can distinguish leftism, the belief system, from left, the direction — away from the right and notably, toward the human heart.

Background: Left vs. Right

Left/right political classification began with the French Revolution, when members of the National Assembly who supported the king’s absolute veto sat to the right of the assembly president, and those who did not, to the left. Though frustratingly imprecise, it has proven durable. Nearly a quarter millennium later, it is the standard framework for American politics.

Anyone who has gone down the rabbit hole of trying to explain leftwing and rightwing ideologies knows how confounding the task can be. For every hundred individuals, there are a hundred belief systems, and a hundred definitions for each one.

Neoliberalism. Conservatism. Stalinism. Maoism. Leninism. Leftwing Nationalism. Eco-fascism. Capitalism. Communism. Socialism. Accelerationism. Progressivism. Democratic Socialism. Classical Liberalism. Constitutional Monarchism. Minarchism. Libertarianism. Liberal Conservatism. Liberalism. Transhumanism. Agrarianism. Trotskyism. Posadism. Collectivism. Marxism. Libertarian Socialism. Syndicalism. Nordic Liberalism. Anarchism. Anarcho-Capitalism. Anarcho-Communism. Liberal Corporatism. Technoliberalism. Feudalism. Neo-Nazism. Paleoconservatism.

These terms describe a spectrum of ideas and ideals about organizing society, economically, politically, culturally, and socially. Without getting mired in the definitional weeds, one point of clarification is essential: Unlike liberalism or progressivism, leftism isn’t about tweaking the established capitalist order for marginal improvements. It’s about believing in — and actively building — an entirely new structure, one that fosters justice, cooperation, dignity, and mutual respect, and that does away with coercion and violence. Which is why terms like “Democrat,” “liberal,” “progressive,” and “leftist” are not interchangeable.

Why do leftists and liberals fight?

When leftists say there’s no difference between the two ruling parties, it’s not to argue that every Republican and Democrat is identical, but that both are on the same side of the capitalist divide, partnering to uphold a cruel and rapacious system that must be dismantled and replaced. Simply put, leftists view the major parties as collaborators, protecting and preserving the ruling class.

The antipathy goes both ways. Democrats and Republicans alike see leftists as immature, insufferably idealistic, and dangerously extreme. If anything, leftists are loathed more by the Democratic establishment than by Republicans. The Democratic Party positions itself as the morally superior “defender of democracy” and portrays leftists as tantrum-throwing political juveniles whose “purism” endangers the democratic order.

An informative Current Affairs article does an excellent job of illustrating the liberal-leftist divide:

The liberal sees the conservative patriot wearing a flag pin and says: “A flag pin isn’t what makes you a patriot.” The leftist says: “Patriotism is an incoherent and chauvinistic notion.” The liberal says, “We’re the real ones who love America,” while the leftist says, “What is America?” or “I don’t see what it would mean to love or hate a meaningless conceptual entity.” The liberal says, “I’m standing up for what the Founding Fathers actually believed” while the leftist says, “The Founding Fathers endorsed the ownership of human beings. Some owned human beings themselves, and beat or raped these human beings. I will not measure the worth of something by what the Founding Fathers thought about it.”

Liberalism and leftism are fundamentally incompatible, which is why leftists are typically more at odds with Democrats/liberals than with Republicans. A leftist begins with the assumption that the Republican Party is a morally bankrupt tool of the oligarchy and the war machine, and a nemesis of the working class. It often goes unsaid because it is assumed to be obvious on its face. Where leftists and liberals diverge is that liberals believe Democrats to be sincere guardians of democracy and decency, while leftists see Democrats as a softer packaging of the same authoritarianism and militarism of the GOP.

Few things better illustrate that divide as the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which has taken place under a Democratic administration. War crimes that would cause riots if perpetrated by a Republican president get a pass from liberals, because it is inconceivable to them that a Democrat could do something so terrible. Such extreme liberal cognitive dissonance and denialism infuriates leftists. And what’s most galling to leftists is that Republicans are so deeply conditioned to believe that Democrats are “the left” that leftists get lumped in with establishment Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who are no more leftists than Donald Trump is a radical feminist.

On a practical level, holding leftist views in America today is an exercise in exasperation. Leftists are attacked as “extremists” for wanting everyone to have health care and housing. They are labeled “radicals” for believing migrant children shouldn’t be caged and that America shouldn’t be bombing children in other countries. They are called “spoilers” for rejecting partisan framing and voting third party.

Meanwhile Democrats claim to be fighting Republicans, but in fact work to cement power for their big donors, while tossing a few crumbs to appease their voters. The betrayal brings to mind Martin Luther King, Jr.’s admonition that white moderates posed the greatest “stumbling block in the stride toward freedom.” King wrote of “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.”

Leftists treat Republicans as foes based on stark differences in their respective principles and policies. But Democrats pretend to share leftist values, while perpetuating the same injustices as Republicans, from fascist crackdowns on protesters to the dehumanization of migrants. Which explains why leftists see Democratic leaders as duplicitous backstabbers and focus so much ire on them.

As a defector from the top ranks of the Democratic Party, I’ve been on both sides of the liberal-leftist fight. When I was an adviser to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders, I sincerely believed my colleagues and I were the “good guys” opposing the Republican “bad guys” to the best of our ability, and that leftists were naive about what was politically possible. After a long period of self-reflection, I came to understand that the entire system is the problem and that accepting the tepid, incrementalist promises of Democrats is just another way of perpetuating unjust policies.

I left the Democratic Party and became an Independent because I recognized that it is not enough to provide “access” to health insurance for those who can afford it. Everyone should have free healthcare. It is not enough to pay lip service to climate action or be a signatory to symbolic agreements. The climate emergency is here.

When Democratic leaders claimed they cut child poverty in half (which, incidentally, they didn’t) liberals cheered what they saw as a noble achievement. Leftists, on the other hand, expressed revulsion that anyone would boast about leaving the other half in poverty. And sure enough, child poverty eventually soared under the same Democrats who claimed to have cut it. For leftists, the Democratic Party’s performative opposition and theatrics (ripped speeches, candles, Kente cloths) is only about masking the truth that just like the GOP, the Democratic Party’s job is to crush any real threats to the capitalist stranglehold.

As younger generations reject capitalism, the last resort of anti-leftist propagandists is try to force leftists to defend every moral transgression of long dead leftwing leaders, thinkers, and revolutionaries, or to answer for the economic problems of prior experiments in communism or socialism. But those are straw men. In the forward-looking view of leftism — which is to conceive and construct an entirely new political and social order — that’s a pointless distraction. Who cares? Leftism is not reactionary, it’s not about returning to some idealized past. It’s a vision for creating a more ethical future.

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UPDATED 11/9/24