Why the Left Needs America: A Response to Eli Zaretsky’s Why America Needs a Left: A Historical Argument

The American left has succeeded where it matters. Contrary to what most left-wing intellectuals in the West fervently believe, the Left hasn’t disappeared. It has instead infiltrated, even saturated, every level and every sphere of social life. The most cherished demographic among advertisers now thinks that socialism is kind of cool and that capitalism is kind of gross. Books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are both recreational reading and gospel truth for everybody under fifty.

The Left, in other words, is an extremely variegated social, intellectual, and political phenomenon. It’s not made of mere radicalism. So it comes and goes, it waxes and wanes, but it never expires. The fact that as of this moment we can’t point to a concrete instance of its organized political presence—a movement, a faction, a party, a cadre—doesn’t mean it’s over and done. In my view, that political invisibility might be the measure of its significance, simply because the nature of politics has changed. Where it was once a matter of state-centered campaigns, elections, and party platforms, it’s now a more diffuse cultural scene, where the Left has been winning the wars of ideological position since the 1970s.

When I presented this idea—the notion that the Left has largely succeeded in its aims—in a graduate course I taught at Rutgers on the history of capitalism, the students were astonished. They could see only a shift to the right of the political spectrum in their lifetimes. Like most left-wing intellectuals, including their academic advisers, they assumed that their cause has long since been lost—that their voices barely register in the politico-cultural wilderness that is America. And to believe otherwise, they insisted, to assume that the cause of the Left has become the mainstream, would be to relinquish any claim on their standing as intellectuals who can speak truth to power.

“If all humans are created equal, then justice for all becomes the condition of the liberty of each,” Livingston writes. “That is the legacy of the American Revolution.”

In response to a challenge issued by those graduate students, I published an essay in the left-wing journal Jacobin titled “How the Left Has Won.” In that essay, I tried to explain the Left’s plaintive will to powerlessness in historical terms.

Here I want to examine something more specific and perhaps more insidious in the Left’s case against itself: the “political unconscious” residing in the notion that the development of socialism, progressivism, or radical democracy requires a resolute cadre of leftists dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. In other words, either a dedicated, organized, anti-capitalist Left exists to answer Rosa Luxemburg’s question (socialism or barbarism?), or the cause of social and political progress toward democracy will be thwarted.

On merely historical grounds, I find this notion specious at best. Insisting that all is lost without an organized anti-capitalist Left is a way of congratulating the true believers and beautiful souls who won’t compromise with the world as it actually exists—it’s a way of avoiding this world in the name of the next. But it’s worse than that. It’s a residual form of Leninism because it posits an alliance between workers and intellectuals as the crucial condition of effective anti-capitalist movements and politics, just as Lenin did in “What Is To Be Done?”—his canonical polemic of 1902, the blueprint for every vanguard party of the last century. This Leninist idea has become part of the Left’s political unconscious, spreading the idea that only an alliance with the well-educated can liberate workers from their limited visions of the future, and thus create a passage beyond the embarrassments of late, naked, neoliberal capitalism.

Today’s leftist social movements all “began by imagining a community that lives up to the principles of liberty and equality on which the American nation was explicitly founded,” the...