The Brokenists Did Not Move Right

People haven't moved politically. It’s a different fight. It’s also transitional. This isn't the final form of the Republican or Democratic Parties.

Among the strangest developments of the last decade has been the migration of so many prominent people from the political left to the right.

I’m thinking about crusading lefty journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. Former Democratic Congresswoman and DNC Vice Chair Tulsi Gabbard, who rose to fame supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Lefty academics like Bret Weinstein, who taught at the proudly activist Evergreen State College. Entertainment industry stalwarts like Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Theo Von. Former environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—an honest-to-goodness Kennedy from the Democratic Party’s royal family.

This odd coalition includes many of the people Oliver Wiseman in The Free Press recently called Brokenists (riffing on a concept first coined by Alana Newhouse). What’s important about these figures is they didn’t really “move right.” In fact, the thing we’re now calling “left” and “right” has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism.

It simply isn’t true that these people ever had views putting them on the right. There’s no more stereotypical Hollywood liberal than mid-2000s Russell Brand. Greenwald wrote scores of columns establishing his lefty bona fides, defended Edward Snowden, and then founded the lefty media site The Intercept. Gabbard was an elected Democrat and rising party star selected to be Vice Chair of the DNC. Taibbi, during the 2008 financial crisis, wrote in Rolling Stone the most famous line attacking Wall Street, that Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” RFK, Jr. is a freaking Kennedy.

It also makes no sense to call these people “grifters.” What in the world could they possibly be grifting? All of them had fame, status, money, and position when they were associated with the left. What could they possibly gain throwing that all away to become hangers-on in the ecosystem of the right? It would be easier, and more profitable, to stay with the one who brought you to the dance.

Nor can I believe all these people suddenly “went crazy.” One person might experience a trauma and go crazy. Many people similarly positioned don’t suddenly go insane in exactly the same way. Such insanity, anyway, tends to come with anti-social behavior like shouting at children and running around in your underpants, none of which these people evidence.

The reality is these people didn’t “move” right because they haven’t moved anywhere. The labels left and right are up for grabs, and these people are the stubborn and independent-minded coal-mine canaries willing to play ball with the other coalition first. What this additionally means is these emerging coalitions are not permanent. This era of Brokenists and Denialists is a transitional phase in a larger transformation. This isn’t the final form of the Republicans or Democrats.

THE ORIGIN OF THE POLITICAL LEFT AND RIGHT

To say someone has “moved left” or “moved right,” you need a coherent definition of what makes something “left” or “right” in the first place. Good luck with that. Many scholars have attempted to come up with one and all of them have failed. No explanation ever devised is philosophically consistent, or even makes much sense.

Some like to claim what separates the left and right is whether you embrace change or cling to tradition—the problem is both liberals and conservatives advocate for changes that push things in a more “liberal” or “conservative” direction, and fight ones that move things the opposite way. Sometimes, Democrats sound like hierarchical establishment traditionalists. Sometimes, Republicans are the radicals looking to tear the world down to start again. Perhaps it has to do with support for working people? Sometimes the left has supported workers, but sometimes it’s the populists on the right. Perhaps it has to do with equality? That depends on who you want to make equal, and how. Perhaps it has to do with free markets? Liberals invented market economics, and then conservatives in the modern age embraced them, and today many professional-class liberals support markets far more than any traditionalist conservative.

No one has ever come up with a consistent definition of the left and right other than it’s the sort of thing the people we’re currently calling left and right happen to believe.

The idea of the existence of a political left and right isn’t even an ancient idea, but a relatively recent invention that has already transformed many times. We first invented the concept during the French Revolution to describe the ad hoc seating arrangements in the hall—people who wanted a constitutional monarchy sat together on the right, and those who wanted a republic sat together on the left. Then we started using them as shorthand for whatever the two coalitions in a democracy happened to believe, which has changed repeatedly with time.

In America, our first political parties of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans philosophically were both radical liberals under the original definition (after all they championed a revolution against a king to found the first modern republic). People still, for some reason, label the Federalists “conservatives” because they attracted support from some urban rich like bankers and lawyers, while the Democratic-Republicans attracted different rich people like plantation barons. The Federalists also supported a stronger federal government (sounds pretty liberal) while the Democratic-Republicans were populist. People also call the Whigs conservative because they were pro-business, even though they championed aggressive federal spending on infrastructure, wanted to expand education, and supported crusading social reforms. Their opponents, Jackson’s Democrats, were populists who hated elites, hated banks, hated federal spending, and wanted a powerful imperial president. Which of these parties again were the conservatives?

When we try to reverse engineer the issues of modern politics backwards, it never makes much sense. People tend to call the Republicans after Lincoln conservatives, even after they just ended slavery and supervised Reconstruction. The party did oppose government interference with business, but not because of free-market beliefs. Republicans, after winning a war to end slavery, believed controlling your own labor was a sacred value, so interfering with someone’s freedom to sell their work through private contract was in essence stealing it just like slavery. Is this conservative then, or very liberal?

It’s only during the middle of the twentieth century that our modern ideas of left and right consolidated, when Democrats coalesced around the New Deal and Great Society while Republicans coalesced around the ideas of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Conservative Movement. We’ve all lived our entire lives inside this tiny bubble of human history, so our definitions of left and right feel permanent to us, but they were always just temporary labels in a permanently shifting politics.

When we say certain political figures are moving from left to the right, then, what exactly do we mean? Do we mean they’re tossing off the ideas of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to adopt those of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich? Of course not. We just mean they’re supporting the current “right” alliance. They’re not changing their beliefs, but our definitions of the major alliances in our politics are changing once again.

BROKENISTS AND DENALISTS

As Wiseman and many others have recognized, the current Republican Party is a rebellion against the establishment. The only thing everyone in this coalition spanning Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK, has in common is they’re rebelling against a establishment they think is broken. It’s clearly no longer the ideas of Buckley’s Conservative Movement. What’s more, there are an awful lot of competing ideological agendas inside the party fighting for visibility, and many don’t agree. Despite the vast differences in what these groups believe, they’re all on the right now because, as Wiseman aptly labeled them, they’re “Brokenists.”

The left coalition of the Democrats has embraced the counter-role as the coalition of the establishment. Democrats no longer represent the liberal ideas of the New Deal and Great Society either. They represent the idea that nothing is fundamentally broken with America that a minor coat of paint can’t fix. As they see it, the only problem is messaging. Brokenists might have some points around the edges, and perhaps the left can toss them a few policy tweaks to make them go away, but what makes you part of the left now is the denial that the system fundamentally is broken. They’re “Denialists.”¹

We no longer have a left-right spectrum. We have a Brokenist-Denialist spectrum. Everyone who believes the system is broken—and there are a lot of them—is getting pulled into the Republican Party and the right. Everyone who thinks things are fine has become a Democrat on the left. If you were once on the left but started questioning whether the system is broken and needs significant reform, you’ll get pushed out into the coalition of the right. None of this has anything to do with what we classically called liberalism or conservatism, or the twentieth-century right and left.

This obviously isn’t sustainable, so it will not be sustained.

This won’t, and can’t, be the final form of either the Republican or Democratic Party. You can’t build a lasting politics around a Brokenist-Denialist spectrum. Eventually, Brokenists have to use their power to do something to actually fix the things they say are broken. Eventually you have to transform your rebellion into an alternative agenda to build something on which everyone inside your tent agrees. This is beginning to happen in some ways, but it’s going to create an epic internal fight. Everyone rushing into this tent to rebel against the establishment can’t get everything they want.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have backed themselves into defending the indefensible. The current system is, in fact, broken, and everyone knows it. It’s archaic, designed for a mid-twentieth century that no longer exists. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. It’s increasingly corrupted. The identitarian experiment the establishment adopted, and which professional elites seemed to love, proved deeply unpopular. Most important, Americans no longer trust the system. A party organized around defending all this without fundamental reform is a loser waiting for defeat.

This is why I’m increasingly convinced the future will belong to neither of these coalitions, but something else entirely. This moment is simply a transition point, our parties caterpillars burrowed inside cocoons. Republicans will soon have to decide exactly which of the many contested ideas of their various Brokenist factions they intend to adopt, which at best will get messy and at worse start a party civil war. Democrats must move past defending things they cannot possibly defend, and somehow build a new party coalition around an alternative vision for fixing the rot it oversaw. Doing that means alienating powerful party factions and breaking with ideas current Democratic leaders deeply believe. I’m not sure it can do that without breaking the party itself.

There’s a next act coming, to be sure. I would closely watch reformers working outside the system. They’re the ones with the greatest opportunity to build something compelling that restores America’s faith in a broken system. In an America of Brokenists and Denialists, eventually Renewalists will win.

What do you think of the debate between Brokenists and Denialists? Join the conversation in the comments.

1. Wiseman’s piece called such people Status-Quoists. I would say that’s not only too wordy of a title to ever catch on, they’re not really advocating for the status quo. They’re in denial.