In Defense of Punching Left (2024)

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I’m a liberal. I’ve always been a liberal. When I began my career in the mid-1990s, I very rarely criticized the left because there wasn’t much of a left to speak of. Left-wing ideas (by which I mean left of liberal) are now in wider circulation and have significantly more influence in politics and intellectual life than they did.

I think this change is mostly for the better. The asymmetrical relationship between the moderation of the Democratic Party and the fanaticism of the Republican Party has been a source of dysfunction in American politics, and is also the dominant theme of my writing.

But as left-wing ideas have gained more purchase, I’ve found more reason to critique them. To me, this is a perfectly natural function of my job — I write opinion columns, and this means arguing against people and ideas with which I disagree. Arguments against the left now compose a significant minority of my work.

One paradox of this changing environment is that as the left has gotten stronger, it has become less socially acceptable to critique it. That people disagree with my opinions is to be expected. What is notable is that disagreement per se has become controversial. There is a growing, if not yet universal, norm of movement discipline often summarized as “Don’t punch left.”

“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”

Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left. And since the basis of my refusal to take this advice is no longer self-evident to all my readers and colleagues, and appears increasingly deviant to some, their book provides a useful occasion for me to lay out my reasons why liberals should feel free to express criticisms of the left.

Solidarity synthesizes left-wing economic and social thought into a unified credo. The left can win by forming “passionate in-group bonds” among the component elements of its constituency based on the forms of oppression each element is experiencing: “Workers unite against bosses and owners who depress wages and degrade labor; feminists call out misogynists and patriarchal structures that disempower people on the basis of sex and gender; environmentalists name and shame special interests invested in destroying our planet; movements for racial justice protest the individuals and systems that perpetuate bigotry and xenophobia.” Solidarity is the magic ingredient that holds all these strands together in opposition to their shared enemy on the right.

This conceptualization of politics is not a radical new strategy, nor is it presented as such; it’s the progressive movement’s general operating theory. The progressive movement emerged over the past two decades out of a series of component groups representing causes like civil rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, and labor. Over the past two decades, these groups, sometimes called “The Groups,” have evolved from a patchwork of atomized single-issue organizations into a relatively unified movement. Each component part now habitually supports the projects of the others: Abortion-rights groups endorse defunding the police, civil-rights groups demand student-debt relief, and so on. Solidarity is creating a historical and theoretical basis for what is already the movement’s ethos.

The authors of Solidarity both come out of the more left-wing edge of the movement. Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune, has decided to give a large share of it to groups like the Sunrise Movement and Black Lives Matter and has become an influential figure in the movement. A flattering New Yorker profile last year depicted her at the center of a network of progressive intellectuals, elected officials and activists, all of whom place a high value on her donations but an even higher value on her counsel.

Since their goals are both to move the Democratic Party leftward and to hold together the progressive coalition, it follows that criticism from liberals poses a significant strategic threat. “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right,” they write, urging liberals to instead accept “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements.”

Liberal criticism of the left corrodes solidarity among the oppressed, albeit in a weaker fashion than do conservative attacks. “If conservatives wield a scythe, demonizing different groups with sinister and destabilizing abandon,” they write at another point, “their liberal counterparts prefer to use garden shears, perpetually trimming solidarity back to manageable, and certainly not transformative, proportions.”

Notably, while they urge liberals not to criticize the left, they do not make any similar demand that leftists withhold criticism of liberalism. The requirements of factional quietude run one way. There’s a reason why the catchprase is “don’t punch left,” rather than “don’t punch anybody left of center.” Hunt-Hendrix’s radical activists frequently make scathing critiques of mainstream liberals and Democratic politicians, and she seems to have no intention of stopping pouring money into these efforts even as she implores her critics to stand down.

This reflects a common assumption among leftists, conservatives, and even many liberals that liberalism is simply a more pallid, fearful version of leftism. Left-wing critique makes liberals better, by this reasoning, because leftists are braver, more authentic and advanced in their thinking, than liberals. Their criticism drags us to where we must (and, in most cases, eventually will) go. Our criticism is divisive and reactionary.

Liberals don’t have to endorse every left-wing premise to be a good coalition member. We are welcome to focus on attacking the right while politely ignoring aspects of left-wing thought we find excessive. But when disagreement arises within the progressive family, the liberal’s role is to accept critique from the left without returning it.

When it comes to my own work, the simplest answer I have for Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix is that they misunderstand my job description. Opinion journalists are not political activists. Our role is not to produce outcomes but to use argument and analysis to explain the world as we see it. Most of my criticism is aimed at the right because the right poses the greatest threat to liberal values, but it’s impossible to clarify your beliefs without defining limits on both ideological ends. I am not objective, but I do have to write honestly, which means sometimes conceding the faults of people or parties I support or the merits of those I generally oppose. Journalists don’t, or shouldn’t, have teams.

Yet while that explains my position, there is also a broader question of how liberals who aren’t working journalists should behave. I believe even aside from their confusion about professional categories, the cause of liberalism requires understanding and maintaining distinctions within the left. There’s an obvious exception for elections, when political activists need to put aside their differences and support their allies. But the logic of election coalitions can’t apply to all of intellectual life. Liberals have serious differences with leftists over both strategy and first principles, and those distinctions shouldn’t be subsumed into a popular front.

The main reason Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix believe liberals should pipe down is that they have no apparent sense of what liberals believe. Take their description of the Democratic Party’s factional differences: “Democrats are torn between a growing progressive flank pushing to redistribute wealth, tackle climate change, and further racial and gender justice and a corporate wing clinging to the increasingly unequal and failing status quo.” It would surprise any liberal to learn we have no desire to redistribute wealth, tackle climate change, or advance social justice and care only about corporations and the status quo.

I don’t want to bore you by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism, so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective. (As an example, in dealing with the problem of inflation, state-enacted price controls or restrictions on profiteering are a popular option on the left, while liberals prefer using interest rates and fiscal measures.) On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed. The debate over speech norms within the left over the past decade has divided political liberals from our more radical critics.

On both economics and politics, the distinction between liberalism and leftism is a spectrum, wherein the differences tend to blend in around the margins without clear-cut borders between them.

One important distinction between the two tendencies is that liberals tend to understand policy as a search for truth and politics as a struggle to bring a majority around to their position, while leftists understand politics as a conflict to mobilize the political willpower to implement the objective interests of the oppressed. “Some see politics as a game of persuasion, not a power struggle,” Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix write critically. “This optimistic view ignores the fact that those with power and motivated by self-interest, including the vast majority of Republican Party operatives and their private sector allies, have little interest in dialogue, let alone compromise.”

Of course, a liberal would respond that the goal is not persuading “Republican party operatives,” but instead voters with moderate or cross-pressured beliefs. Persuasion, though, plays little role in their understanding of politics. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor see politics instead as a contest of willpower.

The role of protest is another division between liberals and leftists. While both see protest as legitimate, liberals tend to think of protest as a tool for use on extraordinary occasions. For leftists, it is the primary form of political activity. “History has shown time and again that even a proportionally small number of people, if they are well organized, can have an outsized effect,” they write. Their liberal counterparts naïvely cling to the belief that they can enact policy change merely by winning elections and passing laws: “Despite all that is at stake, too many liberals hold on to the false hope that we can fact-check or vote our way out of these problems.”

One problem created by this reliance on protest is democratic legitimacy. What happens if the demands of the well-organized minority conflict with the beliefs of the disorganized majority? Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix imply that the organized minority is entitled to prevail. They lavish praise on movements calling for police defunding and complain that, “despite the largest protests in U.S. history, many police departments grew” after 2020. But polls showed overwhelming opposition to defunding the police, including among Black Americans, and Joe Biden specifically opposed this policy in 2020.

When conservatives use well-organized factions to steamroll over the preferences of a majority, we call that “minority rule.” Electoral politics, for all its shortcomings, is a more democratic method for resolving differences than bringing bodies into the streets. But this is easy to ignore if you’ve convinced yourself that protest movements represent a more authentic expression of true political justice than the verdict at the ballot box. (It’s all the easier if you’re personally funding the protesters in question.)

The reliance on protest can create legitimacy problems even within the progressive movement itself. When every cause is framed as a matter of absolute moral urgency, which is the lingua franca of protest politics, then no compromise can be brooked. Anti-Zionism is the left-wing cause du jour, but since Solidarity was written before October, the movements whose moral urgency it elevates are those focused on racial justice, climate, and student-debt relief.

The insistence on advancing as fast as possible on all fronts is useful in fostering solidarity among the groups, none of which is ever happy to accept back-burner status. But it immensely complicates the task of creating a governing agenda. The Biden administration nearly abandoned its domestic reform agenda because it couldn’t decide which programs to put aside (and hence which groups to alienate) and appeared to prefer doing nothing until Joe Manchin decided for it at the end of the process.

An additional problem is that each activist issue-group can itself be pulled left quickly by its most committed members. (The stakes for staying on good terms with the left on Israel have quickly escalated from opposing the occupation to opposing Israel’s existence in any form to, increasingly, refusing to condemn the murder of Israeli civilians). The dynamic is magnified when every component of the left is expected to endorse the demands of every other.

Moral clarity and fervor can be useful at times. But they invoke fundamentally unrealistic ideas of how politics and governing can be conducted, and they make it difficult to identify and correct errors on one’s own side. To ask a liberal to join a movement without critiquing its errors and excesses is to ask them to jump aboard a car with no brakes.

When Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix chide liberals for criticizing the left in order to “appear reasonable,” they seem unable to imagine any of these liberals is actually attempting to be reasonable. Who needs reason when the solutions are all so clear?

Here is an example, plucked from Solidarity, about how the impulse to close ranks can undermine progressive goals. In a chapter on philanthropy, the authors dismiss the Gates Foundation for having funded research into improving teacher effectiveness as a way to lift educational attainment, especially for low-income minority students. They insist the effort failed, quoting a report that found “the near-exclusive focus on TE [teacher effectiveness] might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes.” From this they conclude that “poverty is the real culprit in poor education results.”

They are repeating the standard left-wing position on education, dismissing reform as a neoliberal attack on public schools, and falling back on the notion that poverty makes the task of improving education futile. This is a comfortable position on the left in large part because it is the line promoted by teachers unions, which compose a vital part of the progressive coalition — providing both large source of funding and volunteers for political campaigns — and who generally oppose school reform.

I happen to know more about teacher effectiveness than most liberals because my wife has researched the topic (you can read one of her papers here; she now works at a nonprofit firm whose clients include both traditional and charter schools). The evidence suggests teacher effectiveness is an important factor in student achievement, and there are policies that that raise it, even if those policies are often controversial on the left.

Indeed, if you look closely at the claims Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix use to dismiss it, you can see how anemic their defense actually is. Reread the line they quote, paying attention to all the qualifiers it contains: “The near-exclusive focus on TE [teacher effectiveness] might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes.” It doesn’t say teacher-effectiveness programs don’t work. It merely warns that lifting teacher effectiveness cannot eliminate the achievement gap all by itself. So what? Few targeted policy interventions can single-handedly eliminate a social problem. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t implement reforms that can make things better.

Over the past decade, the evidence for education reform has grown stronger, but it has gotten harder for people to advocate for it in progressive spaces. Teachers unions have always opposed it, but they have gotten better at bringing allies along with them to attack heretics. And when I spoke with some of the experts who have gotten more hesitant to express support for reform, even though they continue to believe in it, they have explained that the social and professional costs of breaking ranks with the left have grown much higher.

Education is hardly the only issue on which “solidarity” means maintaining policies that impede progressive goals. The climate movement is still oriented around its 1970s-era goal of maintaining the existing built environment and preventing new construction — an agenda that has thwarted construction of the new green-energy infrastructure needed to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. Progressive groups have portrayed their defense of this ineffective status quo as a matter of “climate justice,” citing the alleged demands of BIPOC constituents (or at least the professional activist organizations purporting to speak for them). It is often easier for Democrats and activist groups to do nothing and let the problem fester than to open a divide within their ranks.

If your primary goal is to eliminate divisions within the left and the Democratic Party, this change is a good thing. But if your goal is to advance policies that advance social equality, then you might have a different perspective.

Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix obviously wouldn’t say they’d abandon poor children or climate-change mitigation for the sake of solidarity. They believe that the policy agenda that fosters unity within the left also advances social justice. But that is a premise liberals would challenge, which is why it is necessary to break ranks when we disagree.

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• remove interruptions
• politics
• the national interest
• one great story

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