Why the Left is so Irritating

Jamie Paul wrote an illuminating piece about why Leftists are annoying, and how this makes supporting Democrats a real turnoff for voters. I think Paul makes a good case and will accept this thesis as the starting point for this essay about how this state of affairs may have come about.

Background
I have previously argued that the left and progressives had become unmoored from the real material issues with which their movements had historically been identified. The modern left grew out of the old labor-left, who were concerned with how workers were not benefitting equally from economic growth under capitalism. This left began during what is known as Engel’s Pause, the 1790-1840 period in England when workers real wages failed to keep up with economic growth. This period saw outbursts of disorder in 1816-19 and 1829-32, culminating in the General Strike of 1842, during which crime and disorder reached highs for the century (see Figure 7 in Alexander 2016). It was this era that saw the development of British Socialism and Marxism, which form the bedrock on which the left as we know it developed.

I use wages adjusted for rising per-capita GDP as a measure of worker status over time. In America Engel’s Pause corresponds to the 1820-65 period of decline in this measure. It was during this time that the American Labor movement got its start. Like in Britain the beginnings of worker class consciousness were accompanied by a conflict between capitalist and agrarian elites. The nature of these were different in the two countries.

In Britian the rising capitalist class contended with the established agrarian elites for the right to representation, which was achieved in 1832 with the Reform Act. After this time the British capitalist class, in the guise of the Whigs and later, the Liberal Party, held power for the majority of the next ninety years. Additional reform acts followed the first, gradually expanding suffrage to the lower classes, leading to the displacement of the Liberals by the Labor party and the capitalists mostly moving to the conservative party who they had opposed in 1832.

In America, universal (white) male suffrage had been established before industrialization had proceeded to any great extent. Hence the conflict between agrarian and capitalist elites was along geographical (South vs. North) and cultural (Slavery vs. Abolition) lines. This conflict was settled by the Civil War and was followed by an almost complete political domination by the pro-capitalist Republican party, the American version of the Liberal Party.

This period of capitalist domination saw a second Engel’s Pause over 1875-1915 as shown by the falling trend in wage relative to GDPpc. This period saw the rise of large-scale labor unions, the appearance of a number of socialist parties and rise of progressives as a political category. The end of this Pause occurred during the Wilson Administration which is when a positive relation between growth in labor power (assessed by strike frequency) and Democratic administrations began (see Table 1).

Table 1. Democratic administrations from Wilson to Johnson favored Labor

This association was greatly enhanced by the New Deal era policies that produced SC capitalism and the highly favorable economic environment it created for working Americans. Democrats continued to act like a labor party until the 1970’s. A third Engel’s pause began in the late 1970’s that has continued to this day. By the late 1980’s the declining wage trend had unwound all the gains made as a result of the New Deal and working-class voters were abandoning the Democratic party.

Share

The shift in Leftism
Given this background, we can see how the decline in workers’ status, with which the old Left was concerned, was not really reversed until the New Deal policies of the FDR dispensation. However, once this happened, the labor leaders who had previously comprised the moderate faction of the labor-left movement became part of the Democratic establishment, leaving the radical members with no concrete program. The goal of recovering worker dignity in a capitalist world had seemingly been achieved. Theoretical leftists moved on from a purely economic class-based conception of Marxian class warfare to other interpretations involving sociocultural classes or different classes of nation states in the international system.

Progressivism also evolved. The New Dealers accomplished much of what the first generation of progressives had sought and they too joined with the New Deal coalition to become liberals. Liberals found new progressive issues to support in the African American civil rights movements of the fifties and sixties and the women’s and gay liberation movements that followed. In time they reappropriated the progressive label and today identify as such while liberal now refers to centrist Democrats.

The civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies were largely successful. Mid-20th century progressives and leftists saw the “real” aspects of their increasingly merged movements achieved as many of them became establishment Democratic activists. This deprived non-establishment leftists with real-life issues on which to apply their theoretical lens, focusing on increasingly abstract issues. Empirically-identifiable harms faced by marginalized groups that were addressed by their predecessors were replaced with more abstract harms, such a systemic racism or the patriarchy. Another approach was to create new categories of marginalized people such as transgender and neurodivergent people requiring special treatment.

In the process of doing this the progressive Left is no longer asking normal people not to make a moral judgement about an empirical reality, but to acknowledge a reality that may not even exist. For example, denying the vote to black Americans is obviously racist, the issue disputed by the Civil Rights movement was whether the racism was justified. In 1957, prominent conservative writer William Buckley argued that it was:

…is the White community in the South entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro.

By the late 1960’s, Buckley had changed his mind. With conservative racists abjuring racism, that racism was wrong came to be held almost universally. In a similar way, sexism and homophobia came to be seen as wrong. Yet the differential outcomes for African Americans have persisted. To explain this, theorists introduced new kinds of racism that operate in a more subtle fashion. The new racism seems defined as “that which is inferred to exist in order to explain differential racial outcomes.” For example, average SAT scores for whites in 2023 were 1082 compared to 908 for blacks, which implies anti-black racism in favor of whites under these new conceptions. This has led to a patronizing approach towards groups seen as historically marginalized.

I note that the average SAT score for Asians in 2023 was 1219, well above the white level, implying anti-white racism in favor of Asians. This stands the essence of racism on its head, showing the new racism to be incoherent. Modern progressive ideology implies one is racist simply by being white, or sexist by being male. Such views are obviously a turnoff for voters who are either white or male, who are a solid majority.

So why did Progressives and Leftists pursue this line?
So far, I have discussed the history of the evolution of left-progressivism from a sometimes-strident movement demanding rational changes to an irrational movement demanding pointless change. Whereas the earlier progressives generated a lot of heat, they derived work (progress) from that heat and so contributed to the arrow of progress. But modern progressives have largely generated waste heat over the entire Great Awokening CPP. The question is why have progressives and the Left chosen to spin their wheels on abstruse concepts of social justice and pie-in-the-sky socialism, while ignoring the rise of a new Gilded Age?

I believe an answer involves the general success of FDR dispensation in resolving the issues being contended by the first wave of progressives and leftists during the 1913-27 CPP and those faced by the second generation during the 1963-1977 CPP. Seeing these problems as “solved” progressives went on to new (and increasingly fanciful) issues, while the left collapsed into farce. The core problem was neither the left nor progressives opted to explore how the solutions achieved by the New Dealers worked and why they had stopped working.

Growing up, I learned that the New Deal was essentially an earlier version of the Great Society. That both of these involved the creation of a safety net of government programs such a Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. These things had then created the relatively egalitarian America in which I grew up. In addition to this there was the Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation and Gay Rights movements that secured equality under the law for African Americans, women, and LBGT people.

Additional progress, it seemed, would come from more of the same. Ignored was the fact the programs created by the New Deal and Great Society have continued to operate and have done nothing to prevent the new Gilded Age. Civil rights have been established for various historically oppressed groups yet large disparities have continued. To explain the lack of black economic progress, new “critical” definitions of racism were introduced as discussed above rather than more plausible structural reasons.

Meanwhile, a new generation of “race realists” have arisen promoting the idea that oppressed groups are genetically inferior and society should reflect this fact. This challenge to left-liberal narratives has largely been shouted down rather than addressed directly. Progressives could, for example, acknowledge the IQ differences between races exist and that environmental explanations are not very plausible, but note that race realists have ignored cultural evolution in favor of an incoherent notion of different paths of biological evolution taken by different races.

But they have not, instead pursuing the annoying behavior of left-progressives that Paul decries, who offer nothing in response to what is surely the largest threat to human flourishing for Americans, the conversion of a republic of citizens into a land of fintech lords and neo-serfs. Left-progressives offer no diagnosis of our ills, much less potential solutions, seemingly accepting conservative gaslighting on the issue.

I have proposed a diagnosis using Turchin’s metaphor of the wealth pump to describe how the rise of the SP economy has led to a worsening of economic prospects for ordinary people, and spectacular gains for investors, through a process of cultural evolution. From this mechanism the recipe for breaking the trend towards “neofeudalism” is straightforward. It begins with a handful of economic policies: restore the ban on stock buybacks, increase top tax rates on ordinary and investment income, and enact monetary policy in order to balance the budget. More policy would be necessary, but what these are depends on how the reform process unfolds.

My point here is to assert that there are empirically-sound responses to the current gilded age that are in accordance with what self-described leftists or progressives once stood for, yet left-progressives have not made them. The absence of such responses is perhaps an equally important reason for why the progressive left is disliked. Once having left or progressive politics stood for improving the lot of the working people, while now it seems to stand for annoying behavior by elites.