Unpacking the Post-Left Phenomenon

My guest on the show today is Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor of Compact magazine and host of their Blame Theory podcast.

Geoff emailed me a few months back, after a post of mine that touched on the the risks of hitching one’s identity too thoroughly to hating on the left. What do I think, he asked, about the “post-left.”

To which my answer was, “What’s that?”

That’s the topic of much of this episode of the podcast. One answer comes from a piece on the phenomenon that Park MacDougald wrote a few years ago for Unherd. In it, he wrote:

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

… Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent.

Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What’s Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers.

To put it another way, this was not the class-first, anti-woke internal critique that I think is more familiar to many us. It shares some DNA with that critique. Like that crew, the post-lefties thought identitarian politics were a fraud, a way for already elite actors to make themselves out to be tribunes of the people, to claim oppressed status in order to advance themselves. But unlike that class firsters, the post-lefties also thought the class first critique was a fraud too. It’s all fraud all the way down, wholly disconnected from the vulnerable people it claims to represent, all a project of the elite for the elite.

Geoff and I talk about the origins of this group, his own adjacency to it for a little while, the distinctions between the post-left and other post-something groups, including his own crew at Compact, the dangers of finding your identity in pure critique, and just in general the challenges of staying thoughtful in a politically chaotic time.