Kuttner on TAP: The Far Left and the Possible Left

Why do onetime progressives, such as Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf, Robert Kennedy Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and the comedian Russell Brand, among others, sometimes gravitate to the right? New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently offered some musings on that question, which was in turn inspired by a longer essay in the magazine In These Times.

For Goldberg, one reason is a reaction to a public humiliation or cancellation. Many of these defectors are wrestling with personal demons. Settling scores gets muddled with wild ideological swings.

The authors of the excellent In These Times piece, Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, tell a longer and more complex story, adding the fact that the right has far more money than the left to lure defectors and offer them fortune as well as fame. The far right is also welcoming of former lefties licking their wounds and looking for new friends.

Another reason, Goldberg argues, is “a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress.” I am a huge Goldberg fan, but she is uncharacteristically wrong when she contends that “liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future.”

This claim is doubly off the mark. It falls into the trap of conflating the possible left with the far left—and the possible left has been doing well lately.

Our magazine, for instance, is all about articulating a plausible vision of the future, one that is plausible both as policy and as majority politics. We have influenced the policies of the Biden administration in several areas, including a Day One Agenda of executive orders, as well as on trade policy, labor policy, constraints on Big Tech and Big Pharma, and general revision of the mistaken conceits of neoliberalism.

“The possibility of progress” is the whole point. Mainstream progressives who are clear about first principles are not among the defectors to the right. Could you imagine, say, Elizabeth Warren switching sides just because the battles she fights are hard? Or anti-monopoly crusaders like Lina Khan or Matt Stoller? Or our friends at the Economic Policy Institute?

David Horowitz, one of the earliest defectors, migrated from far left to hard right. The conspiratorial mentality is similar. But the so-called horseshoe theory—the idea that the left and right almost meet at the extremes—is true only of the very far left.

One piece of mischief that both opportunistic centrists and careless commentators indulge is false symmetry. A fundraising piece from No Labels contends that young people need “someone to restore their faith in the promise of America, after so many years of partisan fighting that’s left them pessimistic about their futures.” You’d never know that all the partisan blockage is on one side.

One way to be clear about first principles is to keep political economy paramount and never forget the role of raw power in denying democratic preferences. Most Americans, if given the choice, would support the kind of social democracy that this magazine has always stood for—decent wages and job prospects, affordable housing, reliable health coverage, college without crushing debt, taxation of billionaires to give everyone else a shot.

Here are some first principles of mine:

Get political economy right, remind the bottom 95 percent of what unites us, and divisive cultural and racial schisms are less fearsome.

Don’t let the cultural far left define the possible left. One can support radical reform of policing and carceral abuses without embracing the politically lethal slogan “Defund the police.”

Watch out for the temptation of facile contrarianism. In an obituary appreciation of Charles Peters, who died last month at 96, I saluted him as a lovely man and a fine editor who was mostly wrong in his calls for neoliberalism.

Foundations, weirdly, tend to have a blind spot when it comes to magazines like ours. They spend billions to promote policy ideas and hire public relations firms to get the message out. But when we go hat in hand to foundations, too many tell us: Sorry, but we don’t have a media program.

Excuse me? Our entire purpose is to change narratives and translate policy ideas into compelling journalism coupled with a political analysis of what it takes to get them taken seriously. In the more than 30 years that I’ve been at this, getting foundations to appreciate the role of progressive media has been a never-ending challenge: Fire the PR people and fund us.

So in the meantime, we rely on our readers. And—here comes the pitch—we are having a year-end fundraising telethon today. If you value what the Prospect does, please click here and send us a gift.

There is zero risk that we will defect to the far right, but some risk that we will not maximize a much-needed voice absent your support.

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