Though I tend to avoid using the term “Liberal” because the term has so many different meanings, I agree with your categories and analysis.
My one disagreement is that I think that you underestimate the extent to which the Center-Left is adopting authoritarian methods, such as censorship and harassing the opposition. This is not coming from the Utopian Left, but the Center-Left in North America and Europe. And the practice is decidedly illiberal.
I don't actually disagree that professionals in the center left are driving a lot of the problems. The question is whether this is ideologically their own idea, due to adopting left utopian ideas out of solidarity, or cowardice. I think it's a bit of all of the above. But I also think the solution has to start with knocking the professionals out of their bubble and making them see themselves again as sensible ideological center liberals.
I am actually writing a series of articles on that very topic.
I think that it is rooted in the unachievable goal of Equality which is central to all ideologies of the Left, how the Left makes that goal central to a person’s moral identity, and their unwillingness to confront this fundamental contradiction. This leaves the Center-Left vulnerable to manipulations by Utopians who refuse to compromise with reality.
If the Left focused on achievable goals that actually helped the disadvantaged, they could make a real difference, but that means giving up their claim to a higher morality:
Can't wait to read it! The other part I think is a disagreement over whether people are fundamentally good or disappointing. If you think people are inherently good, you think policies will work that don't work if many people are in fact disappointing.
The author writes: "This is the New Deal coalition first established under Franklin Roosevelt. Demographically, it was an alliance of working people, professionals, the middle-class, Black voters, and marginalized groups."
The New Deal coalition did *not* contain professionals, nor did it include women.
I find this analysis confusing. It is gloss over gloss about sub- and subsubideologies. And you freely make and break categories to fit the points you want to make. Even though there is very little continuity between the political coalitions of the French Revolution, or the groups at the fall of the Russian monarchy, you throw around liberal and progressive to describe them... The information you provide is backed up by little context: what nameable person actually represents the viewpoints you are identifying, who else agrees with these classifications? How do we know how many people identify with these views? Just because a movement can be vaguely aligned with enlightenment views or technocratic views does not mean that there is continuity of political purpose (causes, methods, aims) between them.
I read a series of vague complaints about vague aspects of views that you accuse democrats (or random subsets of them) of believing. Even your opening premise - "It took a lot of positions America found off-putting, if not crazy." But Trump won the election 49% to slightly less than that - so who exactly found which opinions off-putting, if a small derogation from half the voters of this country ultimately supported them. Many of the positions that we like to identify on this 'off-putting, if not crazy' spectrum (trans rights for example, critiques of Israel for example) are not particularly surprising positions and they come with respectable support, both in terms of rational argument and in terms of number of voters in agreement; perhaps the democratic party pushed off-putting ideas, but we also had was a concerted effort to /portray/ the democratic party platform as crazy, an effort that played out through open gamification and brute force exploitation of our social media bubbles.
The idea of utopians that you identify, I think, is unfortunately post hoc. It's an easy argument to make when hindsight is 20/20 and you have the authorial prerogative to define the utopians in a way that aligns with the complaints you are leveling against them. However, if we try to situate ourselves within the history of any of the movements you identify, I am left skeptical that we can actually identify a utopian tendency that can be extrapolated to the conduct of political parties generally, across time.
Yes Tulsi gafford. Look at her voting record as ranked by the American heritage action for America the sister organization of the Heritage foundation a very conservative think tank: 7%.
On the other hand her voting record as given by the more liberal Voteview.com was solidly in the Democratic liberal side.
She is truly a perfect example of what the article was talking about - drummed out of the party despite her solidly left liberal leanings for being insufficiently pure as defined by the Left Utopians.
Perfect. You well articulate the “horseshoe” electorate. The middle is fused while the authoritarian edges bend to be (and act) quite close together.
What’s fascinating to me is - why. Both the Left Utopians (the forever group-struggling Marxists) and the Right Utopians (the Christian nationalists) are in ascendency. Their energy/passion levels dwarf the technocratic center.
The West, collectively, allowed too few to gather too much wealth, status, and influence. The outsiders rebel and attack the fat, corrupt, moderate center (those who run our institutions). This happens to societies in clockwork like accuracy every 80-100 years. It’s the foundation of social cycle theory popularized by The Fourth Turning. We saw it last in the 1930s. And 1850s. And 1770s. All revolutionary, civil war, or outright war eras. This is what our Utopians bring us. Maximalist policies at the barrel of a gun. And that is exactly where we are now.
The center cannot hold. We go through these crucibles every century as a cleansing. As a reboot of our social WiFi router that froze up and simply stopped working.
The author writes "The Democrats’ great accomplishment was to successfully combine into one coalition groups that previously stood on opposite sides of the aisle."
This is true, but not mentioned is HOW they did this. These two groups were traditionally on opposite sides (and are again today) for a reason. They don't have much in common. The same thing is true of the current Republican working-class coalition. Working class people have nothing in common with the business and investor elites who have formed the core of the Republican party since its beginning.
The New Deal coalition was created in 1933 by implementation of a policy that directly benefitted millions of working class people in a tangible way. FDR went on the radio and spelled out what he was doing as it was happening to them, creating an understanding in the minds of working people that their government was acting to help them because FDR and the Democrats were in charge. As a result of this, in the 1934 election, they gave a great victory to the Democrats instead of the usual defeat the president's party gets in non-presidential elections.
What sustained the New Deal coalition going forward was continued delivery of an economy that worked for ordinary people. That is, one that operated under stakeholder capitalism. When Democrats failed to do what was necessary to maintain this economy, they eventually lost the working class.
Democrats did not abandon electorally powerful working-class voters in favor of electorally weaker progressives. That would be idiotic and flies in the face of a party that just two decades earlier had been quite adroit about coalition building/maintaining. It was only 12 years since the Truman's victory as defender of the New Deal and Kennedy's victory as destroyer of the New Deal. I rather doubt that Kennedy saw himself as an enemy of the New Deal. He and other 1960's Democrats appear not to have understood that the postwar economy was a fragile thing that required care, not a platform to be used to launch bold new exploits. The Republican Nixon may have been a better steward for the New Deal, just as Gore might have been a better steward for Reaganomics.
I think part of the answer is that liberal technocracy failed to achieve certain goals that left liberals assumed as part of their worldview was possible. For instance, education reform didn’t actually teach everyone to learn to code nor close all the racial gaps. Shoving more people into college just left them with worthless degrees and student loans.
In addition, let liberal social norms led to lower and later family formation amongst professionals, and to be very blunt young single professional ladies are an inherently unstable group.
Right liberals had their own failure in the housing crash of 2008 and the failure of the war on terror. Romney also failed to win Hispanics over.
Now, I’ve got my own thoughts why these things happened (the bell curve, subsidization of single life). But the failure of liberals basically discredited them around the time social media came along. And Obama second term leaned into early woke in order to win re-election. Hillary then did again because she just goes with the flow.
I think there's an aspect here that's on the money. When liberal ideas didn't lead to the expected results, some people doubled down on bad ideas to force through the results they didn't get without realizing their theory of how things worked was actually the problem.
Most people don't have a "theory of how things work" or if they do its based on assumptions they haven't really questioned much and simply inherited. They have "vibes" which is a mix of ideas and feelings that isn't totally logical or consistent.
Democratic feedback loops are less "people figure out better working model of how the world works" and more "I touched that hot stove and it's HOT! I won't touch that again."
That's why we go through cyclical patterns on things like crime. If you asked people how many unarmed black men are killed by the police every year I doubt that you would get an answer more accurate today then in 2020. Nor would they know much about criminal justice statistics and practices. They didn't learn a bunch of new facts and come up with a new worldview.
But in 2020 there was this vibe of "we've got to do something about this" and in 2024 there is a vibe of "we did something and it was a fucking disaster". In 2040 people will have forgotten (and a new generation of young people will grow up without experiencing) that touch the stove moment on crime. And so we will likely make all the same mistakes again.
Of course there is value in this. Its better to take your hand off the stove then keep it there because you've got a complicated intellectual theory about how what your smelling isn't really burning flesh, that's all just misinformation! It's an improvement to be partly right part of the time versus stubbornly wrong in a disastrous way.
In general, I think the best we can do is set up good feedback loops. This is why I tend to favor less government intervention in things, it's harder to iterate and change government policy compared to private decision making. So for instance private schools adapted to COVID way faster than public schools, and this is one reason I favor school vouchers as a way to improve feedback loops.
It's also why we shouldn't ask too much of government, because when it sets a bad or impossible goal it's got the ability to basically force everyone down that path even as you get new data showing its wrong.
I think this is because most people think knowledge is just copying what other people tell them. There are only a few who actually understand the situation and have the judgement to figure out what's going on. This leads to the vibe loops you mentioned. The great mass of "experts" are just repeating what other people told them is true, so they jerk from one conventional wisdom to another. Every once in a while an actual expert looks at the situation and figures out what we really need to do.
Looking at this article again after the Republicans' actions on the Big, Beautiful, Bill, I tend to think the GOP is also under the control of utopians (or dystopians) on the right. I think that protective barrier that kept them at bay is gone. The old establishment either tried to co-opt the utopians, ending up being held hostage by them or they just refused and left the party.
The question for all of us is, what do we do when both parties are under the control of uptopians who are illiberal? How do the left and right liberals find their voice?
I agree that’s the real problem. The walls of the old system have crumbled letting the most passionate to storm the gate and the normies are standing around bewildered. But I remain hopeful. These things always turn around. It’s just things can stay bad for a long time before that happens!
Well done! I hope more actual progressives heed your advice.
Thank you for distinguishing between Progressives and Utopians. This is language I have been missing that helps frame what I saw and experienced and, unfortunately, why I am no longer a Democrat.
Yes, I realized several years ago what the Woke Progressives who thought Western Enlightenment was white supremacy wanted: a Left-wing authoritarianism that canceled people who said the wrong thing. Freedom of speech for me but not for thee!
Thanks for posting this insightful essay. Why insightful? Because it loosely describes the coalitions that form the Republican and Democratic Parties, and it explains why the Democratic Party coalition broke down. The essay also explains the liberalism that Americans of both parties have in common. The Elitist theorists like Carl Schmitt and James Burnham wouldn’t be surprised by the divisiveness that characterizes American politics. Politics is war by other means, and the goal is power. The leftwing utopians in the Democratic Party won out because they are more organized and more ruthless than their progressive comrades, and, now that they’re in charge, they’re remaking the party to reflect their beliefs/priorities. The lesson in all of this is that politics is a blood sport, and nice guys finish last.
I was in a heated debate about how the democrats are unpopular for supporting far left policies. The person I was debating with said she’s not a democrat but a socialist. I realize now she’s not just a socialist but a utopian leftist and that’s why she doesn’t care if the democrats go down. The utopian people want failure.
Bologna. Terrible analysis. Very few people who cheered for Hamas would operate in the Democratic coalition. “Left utopians” are a non-factor in the party. Democratic Socialists of America operates outside the party and has near-negligible influence within it. The Democratic Party’s problems lie squarely with the party establishment’s embrace or defense of things most of the public doesn’t understand: trans women in female sports, hormone treatment for trans youths, etc. Was it a “left utopian” who stupidly issued an executive directive that people should get to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify in the middle of the party’s first competition with Trump in 2016? No, that was Obama, squarely in the liberal progressive camp. Talk about horrible timing, to say the least. Obama opened up a can of worms, and Hillary just made it worse with all her entitled “I’m with her” identity politics crap. None of those debacles are the result of “left utopians” in the party. They’re the result of pandering to tiny, unrepresentative groups of liberal activists and the self-destructive embrace of the language of identity politics by run-of-the-mill progressive liberals.
Don't really disagree with anything here, just think you maybe overstate the role of radicals and utopians on the left while understating the role of reactionary extremism on the modern right. To my eyes, the Democrats are constantly trying to tack to the center, while the GOP has now embraced its extremists with open arms.
Great analysis, spot on!
Excellent analysis. You earned a sub!
Though I tend to avoid using the term “Liberal” because the term has so many different meanings, I agree with your categories and analysis.
My one disagreement is that I think that you underestimate the extent to which the Center-Left is adopting authoritarian methods, such as censorship and harassing the opposition. This is not coming from the Utopian Left, but the Center-Left in North America and Europe. And the practice is decidedly illiberal.
I say more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
Thanks, Michael!
I don't actually disagree that professionals in the center left are driving a lot of the problems. The question is whether this is ideologically their own idea, due to adopting left utopian ideas out of solidarity, or cowardice. I think it's a bit of all of the above. But I also think the solution has to start with knocking the professionals out of their bubble and making them see themselves again as sensible ideological center liberals.
I am actually writing a series of articles on that very topic.
I think that it is rooted in the unachievable goal of Equality which is central to all ideologies of the Left, how the Left makes that goal central to a person’s moral identity, and their unwillingness to confront this fundamental contradiction. This leaves the Center-Left vulnerable to manipulations by Utopians who refuse to compromise with reality.
If the Left focused on achievable goals that actually helped the disadvantaged, they could make a real difference, but that means giving up their claim to a higher morality:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
In other words, it is a lack of Honesty and Moral Courage.
Can't wait to read it! The other part I think is a disagreement over whether people are fundamentally good or disappointing. If you think people are inherently good, you think policies will work that don't work if many people are in fact disappointing.
The author writes: "This is the New Deal coalition first established under Franklin Roosevelt. Demographically, it was an alliance of working people, professionals, the middle-class, Black voters, and marginalized groups."
The New Deal coalition did *not* contain professionals, nor did it include women.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a31cf92-e1da-478b-b134-79f6e8af3e61_615x255.gif
I find this analysis confusing. It is gloss over gloss about sub- and subsubideologies. And you freely make and break categories to fit the points you want to make. Even though there is very little continuity between the political coalitions of the French Revolution, or the groups at the fall of the Russian monarchy, you throw around liberal and progressive to describe them... The information you provide is backed up by little context: what nameable person actually represents the viewpoints you are identifying, who else agrees with these classifications? How do we know how many people identify with these views? Just because a movement can be vaguely aligned with enlightenment views or technocratic views does not mean that there is continuity of political purpose (causes, methods, aims) between them.
I read a series of vague complaints about vague aspects of views that you accuse democrats (or random subsets of them) of believing. Even your opening premise - "It took a lot of positions America found off-putting, if not crazy." But Trump won the election 49% to slightly less than that - so who exactly found which opinions off-putting, if a small derogation from half the voters of this country ultimately supported them. Many of the positions that we like to identify on this 'off-putting, if not crazy' spectrum (trans rights for example, critiques of Israel for example) are not particularly surprising positions and they come with respectable support, both in terms of rational argument and in terms of number of voters in agreement; perhaps the democratic party pushed off-putting ideas, but we also had was a concerted effort to /portray/ the democratic party platform as crazy, an effort that played out through open gamification and brute force exploitation of our social media bubbles.
The idea of utopians that you identify, I think, is unfortunately post hoc. It's an easy argument to make when hindsight is 20/20 and you have the authorial prerogative to define the utopians in a way that aligns with the complaints you are leveling against them. However, if we try to situate ourselves within the history of any of the movements you identify, I am left skeptical that we can actually identify a utopian tendency that can be extrapolated to the conduct of political parties generally, across time.
Tulsi Gabbard? Are you serious?
Yes Tulsi gafford. Look at her voting record as ranked by the American heritage action for America the sister organization of the Heritage foundation a very conservative think tank: 7%.
On the other hand her voting record as given by the more liberal Voteview.com was solidly in the Democratic liberal side.
She is truly a perfect example of what the article was talking about - drummed out of the party despite her solidly left liberal leanings for being insufficiently pure as defined by the Left Utopians.
Perfect. You well articulate the “horseshoe” electorate. The middle is fused while the authoritarian edges bend to be (and act) quite close together.
What’s fascinating to me is - why. Both the Left Utopians (the forever group-struggling Marxists) and the Right Utopians (the Christian nationalists) are in ascendency. Their energy/passion levels dwarf the technocratic center.
The West, collectively, allowed too few to gather too much wealth, status, and influence. The outsiders rebel and attack the fat, corrupt, moderate center (those who run our institutions). This happens to societies in clockwork like accuracy every 80-100 years. It’s the foundation of social cycle theory popularized by The Fourth Turning. We saw it last in the 1930s. And 1850s. And 1770s. All revolutionary, civil war, or outright war eras. This is what our Utopians bring us. Maximalist policies at the barrel of a gun. And that is exactly where we are now.
The center cannot hold. We go through these crucibles every century as a cleansing. As a reboot of our social WiFi router that froze up and simply stopped working.
The author writes "The Democrats’ great accomplishment was to successfully combine into one coalition groups that previously stood on opposite sides of the aisle."
This is true, but not mentioned is HOW they did this. These two groups were traditionally on opposite sides (and are again today) for a reason. They don't have much in common. The same thing is true of the current Republican working-class coalition. Working class people have nothing in common with the business and investor elites who have formed the core of the Republican party since its beginning.
The New Deal coalition was created in 1933 by implementation of a policy that directly benefitted millions of working class people in a tangible way. FDR went on the radio and spelled out what he was doing as it was happening to them, creating an understanding in the minds of working people that their government was acting to help them because FDR and the Democrats were in charge. As a result of this, in the 1934 election, they gave a great victory to the Democrats instead of the usual defeat the president's party gets in non-presidential elections.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-dealers-gained-the-ability
What sustained the New Deal coalition going forward was continued delivery of an economy that worked for ordinary people. That is, one that operated under stakeholder capitalism. When Democrats failed to do what was necessary to maintain this economy, they eventually lost the working class.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Democrats did not abandon electorally powerful working-class voters in favor of electorally weaker progressives. That would be idiotic and flies in the face of a party that just two decades earlier had been quite adroit about coalition building/maintaining. It was only 12 years since the Truman's victory as defender of the New Deal and Kennedy's victory as destroyer of the New Deal. I rather doubt that Kennedy saw himself as an enemy of the New Deal. He and other 1960's Democrats appear not to have understood that the postwar economy was a fragile thing that required care, not a platform to be used to launch bold new exploits. The Republican Nixon may have been a better steward for the New Deal, just as Gore might have been a better steward for Reaganomics.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/nixon-gore-the-paths-not-taken
I think part of the answer is that liberal technocracy failed to achieve certain goals that left liberals assumed as part of their worldview was possible. For instance, education reform didn’t actually teach everyone to learn to code nor close all the racial gaps. Shoving more people into college just left them with worthless degrees and student loans.
In addition, let liberal social norms led to lower and later family formation amongst professionals, and to be very blunt young single professional ladies are an inherently unstable group.
Right liberals had their own failure in the housing crash of 2008 and the failure of the war on terror. Romney also failed to win Hispanics over.
Now, I’ve got my own thoughts why these things happened (the bell curve, subsidization of single life). But the failure of liberals basically discredited them around the time social media came along. And Obama second term leaned into early woke in order to win re-election. Hillary then did again because she just goes with the flow.
I think there's an aspect here that's on the money. When liberal ideas didn't lead to the expected results, some people doubled down on bad ideas to force through the results they didn't get without realizing their theory of how things worked was actually the problem.
+1
Most people don't have a "theory of how things work" or if they do its based on assumptions they haven't really questioned much and simply inherited. They have "vibes" which is a mix of ideas and feelings that isn't totally logical or consistent.
Democratic feedback loops are less "people figure out better working model of how the world works" and more "I touched that hot stove and it's HOT! I won't touch that again."
That's why we go through cyclical patterns on things like crime. If you asked people how many unarmed black men are killed by the police every year I doubt that you would get an answer more accurate today then in 2020. Nor would they know much about criminal justice statistics and practices. They didn't learn a bunch of new facts and come up with a new worldview.
But in 2020 there was this vibe of "we've got to do something about this" and in 2024 there is a vibe of "we did something and it was a fucking disaster". In 2040 people will have forgotten (and a new generation of young people will grow up without experiencing) that touch the stove moment on crime. And so we will likely make all the same mistakes again.
Of course there is value in this. Its better to take your hand off the stove then keep it there because you've got a complicated intellectual theory about how what your smelling isn't really burning flesh, that's all just misinformation! It's an improvement to be partly right part of the time versus stubbornly wrong in a disastrous way.
In general, I think the best we can do is set up good feedback loops. This is why I tend to favor less government intervention in things, it's harder to iterate and change government policy compared to private decision making. So for instance private schools adapted to COVID way faster than public schools, and this is one reason I favor school vouchers as a way to improve feedback loops.
It's also why we shouldn't ask too much of government, because when it sets a bad or impossible goal it's got the ability to basically force everyone down that path even as you get new data showing its wrong.
I think this is because most people think knowledge is just copying what other people tell them. There are only a few who actually understand the situation and have the judgement to figure out what's going on. This leads to the vibe loops you mentioned. The great mass of "experts" are just repeating what other people told them is true, so they jerk from one conventional wisdom to another. Every once in a while an actual expert looks at the situation and figures out what we really need to do.
Pro(re)gressives
Looking at this article again after the Republicans' actions on the Big, Beautiful, Bill, I tend to think the GOP is also under the control of utopians (or dystopians) on the right. I think that protective barrier that kept them at bay is gone. The old establishment either tried to co-opt the utopians, ending up being held hostage by them or they just refused and left the party.
The question for all of us is, what do we do when both parties are under the control of uptopians who are illiberal? How do the left and right liberals find their voice?
I agree that’s the real problem. The walls of the old system have crumbled letting the most passionate to storm the gate and the normies are standing around bewildered. But I remain hopeful. These things always turn around. It’s just things can stay bad for a long time before that happens!
Well done! I hope more actual progressives heed your advice.
Thank you for distinguishing between Progressives and Utopians. This is language I have been missing that helps frame what I saw and experienced and, unfortunately, why I am no longer a Democrat.
Yes, I realized several years ago what the Woke Progressives who thought Western Enlightenment was white supremacy wanted: a Left-wing authoritarianism that canceled people who said the wrong thing. Freedom of speech for me but not for thee!
And the Dems gave let it happen....
Thanks for posting this insightful essay. Why insightful? Because it loosely describes the coalitions that form the Republican and Democratic Parties, and it explains why the Democratic Party coalition broke down. The essay also explains the liberalism that Americans of both parties have in common. The Elitist theorists like Carl Schmitt and James Burnham wouldn’t be surprised by the divisiveness that characterizes American politics. Politics is war by other means, and the goal is power. The leftwing utopians in the Democratic Party won out because they are more organized and more ruthless than their progressive comrades, and, now that they’re in charge, they’re remaking the party to reflect their beliefs/priorities. The lesson in all of this is that politics is a blood sport, and nice guys finish last.
I was in a heated debate about how the democrats are unpopular for supporting far left policies. The person I was debating with said she’s not a democrat but a socialist. I realize now she’s not just a socialist but a utopian leftist and that’s why she doesn’t care if the democrats go down. The utopian people want failure.
Bologna. Terrible analysis. Very few people who cheered for Hamas would operate in the Democratic coalition. “Left utopians” are a non-factor in the party. Democratic Socialists of America operates outside the party and has near-negligible influence within it. The Democratic Party’s problems lie squarely with the party establishment’s embrace or defense of things most of the public doesn’t understand: trans women in female sports, hormone treatment for trans youths, etc. Was it a “left utopian” who stupidly issued an executive directive that people should get to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify in the middle of the party’s first competition with Trump in 2016? No, that was Obama, squarely in the liberal progressive camp. Talk about horrible timing, to say the least. Obama opened up a can of worms, and Hillary just made it worse with all her entitled “I’m with her” identity politics crap. None of those debacles are the result of “left utopians” in the party. They’re the result of pandering to tiny, unrepresentative groups of liberal activists and the self-destructive embrace of the language of identity politics by run-of-the-mill progressive liberals.
Don't really disagree with anything here, just think you maybe overstate the role of radicals and utopians on the left while understating the role of reactionary extremism on the modern right. To my eyes, the Democrats are constantly trying to tack to the center, while the GOP has now embraced its extremists with open arms.