Interesting conversation. I read the post-left through the concept of “post-materialist politics” that people have been bandying about in the wake of the election. What does it mean to be a left intellectual in a world where the working class seems more motivated by culture war grievance politics than materialist class interests? There’s the familiar argument, made famous by Thomas Frank, that they’re being duped into voting against their own interests. But I think a more compelling answer (which the post-left sometimes seem to be groping towards) may be that decades of economic growth and prosperity have created a society where most basic needs are easily met compared to, say, the 1930s, and it makes sense that politics and the issues people prioritize have shifted accordingly. Why not vote on values and cultural issues if your material needs are already met? In this framing, the traditional left is simply out of date and needs to adapt. You could counter though that this already happened in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left. Maybe the post-left should simply accept that being against cultural liberalism, wokeness, etc. in 2024 means you are functionally on the right, because these are the new dividing lines in politics. Certainly, despite their syncretic branding, I think of Compact as a right-leaning publication.
I've had a similar thought myself, that too many people are too well off to have a viable class based identity in the old sense. Sometimes I think that's right, but then sometimes it seems like economic anxiety is pervasive and intense, even if it's not quite anxiety about survival in the same sense it used to be. So I'm not sure.
Thanks for the reply. I think it’s fair to say that economic anxiety is both a meaningful force in political life and also one that doesn’t map neatly onto traditional models of class politics.
Great conversation. Books could be written about the reactions of academics and public intellectuals to the great awokening. You guys talked about those like Matt Taibbi who started off with some legitimate critiques of the left and sort of morphed into something less defensible. I’d put people like Bret Weinstein and James Lindsay in this category too.
The post left also includes those who’ve gone in the other direction and capitulated to critical social justice, here I think of someone like Neil de Grasse Tyson.
But there are those who’ve remained fairly consistent throughout, without losing the ability to criticize the right and without becoming anti-woke warriors. I think of Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, or Yascha Mounk. I’m not sure if it’s temperament or just the ability to follow one’s beliefs consistently, or some combination, but some people at least are capable of resisting the opposite poles of woke and anti-woke.
I’m also going to defend Wesley Yang against you again because I think he’s at least partly in this last category. It sounds like I’m a Yang fanboy or something and that’s really not the case, but I follow him enough to think I know when he’s being misunderstood.
I don’t think it’s fair to call him an activist. His whole thing is documenting the unfolding of the successor ideology (as he’s defined it). I don’t even think it’s fair to call him anti trans. He tweets about that topic a lot because he thinks it’s the most succinct and direct encapsulation of the successor ideology: activism over truth, application of critical theory principles, intimidation over persuasion, etc.
His criticism is of the ideology, not of actual trans people. We also have to remember that those on the left claiming to be defending trans people actually don’t give a shit about them at all. If they did, they’d be open to good faith criticism, debate, and scientific analysis in order to figure out how best to help them. The fact that they’re not and openly hostile to any of it is part of Wesley’s point.
As you’ve said before Yang deserves some criticism for not writing it all out clearly in a detailed post or book, and for not parsing certain concepts more deeply (like truth). That’s fair, but it doesn’t make him an activist.
I think it's temperament. It's also strength of character and comfort in one's core beliefs. I think it's also how much political experience you had when you went into the time of troubles. Some of the IDW people who turned pretty hard toward crazy were relative neophytes when they got politicized, and I think the tendency is to over extrapolate from one's immediate experience. You can't say that about Taibbi and Greenwald, certainly, but the Weinstein bros. and Jordan Peterson and a lot of the post-leftist people, it seems like it's a factor.
Re: Yang, I'm willing to accept that "activist' isn't quite the right word, but I don't think it's adequate to just say that he hasn't written it out but is basically doing the same thing. What was so remarkable about his earlier work is that he was able to contain all these tensions and nuance in the writing. I see very little nuance or tension is his recent work. It feels pretty one sided to me.
Maybe you could say he's like an editor of a platform with a clear ideological agenda, or maybe a thought leader. Different from activist, but also different from what he was before.
Extrapolating from one's experience is definitely part of it. Add to that the experience of going from an obscure academic to suddenly having hundreds of thousands of followers. In some ways these folks going crazy is overdetermined I suppose.
With Yang I agree there could sometimes be more nuance, but isn't one-sidedness kind of the point? He's not claiming that there aren't other problems in the world (like Trump) but his whole thing is documenting the unraveling of classical liberalism by the woke. In a way he reminds me of Nietzsche in that they both get criticism for making sometimes dense, sweeping claims - yet in both cases I would argue they occasionally have deep moments of genuine insight.
But I don't know, I think our disagreement may come down to what you mean by an "ideological agenda." What's Yang's ideological agenda?
If you asked what I thought was so great about, say, his Meme Wars columns for Tablet, part of it would be that he was exceptionally good at articulating both the perspective of, say, people who think microaggressions are a big problem, and the political dangers inherent in the project of trying to eliminate not just microaggressions but the unconscious thoughts that produce them. "charged with authoritarian potential" is a phrase I think he used that has stuck with me ever since.
So there was exquisite back and forth in his writing, which I thought captured better than anything anyone else was writing the complexity of the dynamic between wokeness and liebralism. There were the good intentions, the reality of the distress of being certain kinds of minorities in our society, the admirable desire to reduce harm and discrimination, but then also the ways in which leaning too far into those experiences and the policies they implied could produce negative political outcomes.
What's the project now? You say "documenting the unraveling of classical liberalism by the woke." I'm less invested in putting that into a different category of activity (ideology, activism, thought leadership, etc.) than I am in just saying that it doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling project, as he's executing it. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to adequately or interestingly depict what's going on in the world. Maybe he's doing exactly the same kind of thing, but just doing it far more poorly.
If you go to his X feed, e.g, it mostly doesn't feel different to me than Libs of TikTok or whatever. I suspect he gets into more complexity in his audio interviews, but he's not a great podcaster, and he's not interviewing people who disagree with him in a constructive way. So again it's just him not doing interesting work anymore. Do we need him to document the ascendance of woke? Isn't that half of what X is already doing? Aren't there a million books on that?
I agree with a lot your criticisms - especially him not being a good podcaster and not debating those who disagree enough - but I think it's pretty uncharitable to compare him to Libs of Tiktok. The difference is that Yang (every several tweets or so) connects the ridiculous examples of leftists gone crazy to the broader themes surrounding the successor ideology.
And actually a lot of it connects back to the more sophisticated arguments he made in those Tablet pieces, like the Title 9 one for example.
Regarding whether we need more people documenting woke craziness, I would say with any new cultural movement there's going to be lots of commentary, some good some bad. In other words the fact that there's a lot of people engaging in an intellectual project doesn't mean others shouldn't do it too if they can contribute well (obviously I think he is and you think he isn't).
But I guess maybe some of it is about interest. It DOES interest me in the sense that other critics of the left (from McWhorter to Mounk) are less willing to, say, go as hard at trans activists. And obviously Yang isn't, but unlike others who after those activists (like Chris Rufo maybe) Yang isn't an idiot and isn't doing it frivolously. And in my view (we may differ on this) I think these activists have done unique harm to our discourse, to science, and even to philosophy - so they need to be raked through the coals.
Great conversation! I'm particularly struck by GS comment that the will to suppress speech is present in the US, as it is on the center left elsewhere*, but here at least the would-be censors face probably insurmountable obstacles.
Two other thoughts:
1. It's not so surprising that the people speaking up for 'heritage Americans' are not themselves from that group, the polite-society taboo against this kind of thing is so powerful that maybe you need to have had parents from another culture to resist the urge to conform. Like, it's not an accident that 100% of people I know who skipped the Covid vax were born in the Soviet Union.
2. Whatever the official Democratic and GOP policies about unions may be, and whichever side has more billionaires, as long as the Democrats embrace mass immigration, and the GOP opposes it, there's a strong case to be made that it's the GOP that's the pro-labor party.
I just don't think you can attribute that level of significance to the immigration question, given the decades and decades, and what is surely billions and billions of dollars, the right has spent methodically working to destroy labor.
They've consistently appointed anti-labor reps to the NLRB. They've appointed judges at every level who are anti-labor. They've passed all the state based right to work laws. They've blocked every legislative effort to make it easier to organize and win. They've made it easier to offshore. And on and on.
I'm happy to accept that there have been Democratic policies that have hurt labor, but I just think there's no comparison. The major interests on the right pretty much hate labor more than anything else, and they've been very committed and very effective in destroying it.
I think there's a few questions here. Which side is more to blame, retrospectively, for the decline in the labor, to the degree that it was policy rather than massive macroeconomic forces that are responsible? It sounds like you're saying the right is more to blame, historically, but that leads to the next question:
How much of the overall decline in labor in America since the New Deal is attributable to policies that explicitly pro- or anti-labor and how much of it is attributable to policies on immigration and trade that aren't explicitly about labor (and then I guess how much of it is big macro things are in some sense outside of policy)?
And then finally: where are we now in terms of which party is objectively more pro-labor?
Is that roughly right?
Also, I'm now realizing I'm out of my depth, but happy to have the dialogue anyway. :)
I agree about the efforts of the right to destroy labor over many decades, but for a lot of that time the right was also pro-immigration, with the Buchananites in the wilderness. And I think the right's war on labor wouldn't have been nearly as successful if we hadn't opened the border in the sixties.
Likewise, can you imagine a New Deal without the Immigration Act of 1924? If not, then the nativist Republicans of the twenties played an important part in creating the conditions for the midcentury era of strong labor and low income inequality.
Obviously that wasn't their goal, but if you compare the chart of gini coefficient to immigration rate, there's a lag of about a decade but they track pretty neatly.
Fascinating convo. Particularly interesting was the dissection of various figures in the cultural landscape…also the critique of the way the first amendment has been weaponized by oligarchs to serve their private interests.
Yes, I think that’s accurate. Reading that UnHeard article about Piccone’s complaints of Capitalism “generating” discontent via the Civil Rights movement and others, only to change and “subsume” them, I thought “sounds like democracy, actually”
A synthesis, I think, can be found from Michael Gerber at The American Bystander’s Substack: He wrote in 2023 (all now behind a paywall) a few pieces on Lenny Bruce and “sick humor” that retrospectively question its ability to revolutionize society. I can’t read it now due to my being a cheap bastard with too many paid subscriptions already, but I think the gist was that you can either live outside of the mainstream (object to Capitalism) or not (and merely “generate discontent”).
I often have a similar reaction when people on various sides of things describe what they clearly think are nefarious systems of co-optation and power. I want to say "sounds like democracy" or "right, it's called politics."
Interesting conversation. I read the post-left through the concept of “post-materialist politics” that people have been bandying about in the wake of the election. What does it mean to be a left intellectual in a world where the working class seems more motivated by culture war grievance politics than materialist class interests? There’s the familiar argument, made famous by Thomas Frank, that they’re being duped into voting against their own interests. But I think a more compelling answer (which the post-left sometimes seem to be groping towards) may be that decades of economic growth and prosperity have created a society where most basic needs are easily met compared to, say, the 1930s, and it makes sense that politics and the issues people prioritize have shifted accordingly. Why not vote on values and cultural issues if your material needs are already met? In this framing, the traditional left is simply out of date and needs to adapt. You could counter though that this already happened in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left. Maybe the post-left should simply accept that being against cultural liberalism, wokeness, etc. in 2024 means you are functionally on the right, because these are the new dividing lines in politics. Certainly, despite their syncretic branding, I think of Compact as a right-leaning publication.
I've had a similar thought myself, that too many people are too well off to have a viable class based identity in the old sense. Sometimes I think that's right, but then sometimes it seems like economic anxiety is pervasive and intense, even if it's not quite anxiety about survival in the same sense it used to be. So I'm not sure.
Thanks for the reply. I think it’s fair to say that economic anxiety is both a meaningful force in political life and also one that doesn’t map neatly onto traditional models of class politics.
Great conversation. Books could be written about the reactions of academics and public intellectuals to the great awokening. You guys talked about those like Matt Taibbi who started off with some legitimate critiques of the left and sort of morphed into something less defensible. I’d put people like Bret Weinstein and James Lindsay in this category too.
The post left also includes those who’ve gone in the other direction and capitulated to critical social justice, here I think of someone like Neil de Grasse Tyson.
But there are those who’ve remained fairly consistent throughout, without losing the ability to criticize the right and without becoming anti-woke warriors. I think of Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, or Yascha Mounk. I’m not sure if it’s temperament or just the ability to follow one’s beliefs consistently, or some combination, but some people at least are capable of resisting the opposite poles of woke and anti-woke.
I’m also going to defend Wesley Yang against you again because I think he’s at least partly in this last category. It sounds like I’m a Yang fanboy or something and that’s really not the case, but I follow him enough to think I know when he’s being misunderstood.
I don’t think it’s fair to call him an activist. His whole thing is documenting the unfolding of the successor ideology (as he’s defined it). I don’t even think it’s fair to call him anti trans. He tweets about that topic a lot because he thinks it’s the most succinct and direct encapsulation of the successor ideology: activism over truth, application of critical theory principles, intimidation over persuasion, etc.
His criticism is of the ideology, not of actual trans people. We also have to remember that those on the left claiming to be defending trans people actually don’t give a shit about them at all. If they did, they’d be open to good faith criticism, debate, and scientific analysis in order to figure out how best to help them. The fact that they’re not and openly hostile to any of it is part of Wesley’s point.
As you’ve said before Yang deserves some criticism for not writing it all out clearly in a detailed post or book, and for not parsing certain concepts more deeply (like truth). That’s fair, but it doesn’t make him an activist.
I think it's temperament. It's also strength of character and comfort in one's core beliefs. I think it's also how much political experience you had when you went into the time of troubles. Some of the IDW people who turned pretty hard toward crazy were relative neophytes when they got politicized, and I think the tendency is to over extrapolate from one's immediate experience. You can't say that about Taibbi and Greenwald, certainly, but the Weinstein bros. and Jordan Peterson and a lot of the post-leftist people, it seems like it's a factor.
Re: Yang, I'm willing to accept that "activist' isn't quite the right word, but I don't think it's adequate to just say that he hasn't written it out but is basically doing the same thing. What was so remarkable about his earlier work is that he was able to contain all these tensions and nuance in the writing. I see very little nuance or tension is his recent work. It feels pretty one sided to me.
Maybe you could say he's like an editor of a platform with a clear ideological agenda, or maybe a thought leader. Different from activist, but also different from what he was before.
Extrapolating from one's experience is definitely part of it. Add to that the experience of going from an obscure academic to suddenly having hundreds of thousands of followers. In some ways these folks going crazy is overdetermined I suppose.
With Yang I agree there could sometimes be more nuance, but isn't one-sidedness kind of the point? He's not claiming that there aren't other problems in the world (like Trump) but his whole thing is documenting the unraveling of classical liberalism by the woke. In a way he reminds me of Nietzsche in that they both get criticism for making sometimes dense, sweeping claims - yet in both cases I would argue they occasionally have deep moments of genuine insight.
But I don't know, I think our disagreement may come down to what you mean by an "ideological agenda." What's Yang's ideological agenda?
You're really forcing me to be precise. WTF?! :)
If you asked what I thought was so great about, say, his Meme Wars columns for Tablet, part of it would be that he was exceptionally good at articulating both the perspective of, say, people who think microaggressions are a big problem, and the political dangers inherent in the project of trying to eliminate not just microaggressions but the unconscious thoughts that produce them. "charged with authoritarian potential" is a phrase I think he used that has stuck with me ever since.
So there was exquisite back and forth in his writing, which I thought captured better than anything anyone else was writing the complexity of the dynamic between wokeness and liebralism. There were the good intentions, the reality of the distress of being certain kinds of minorities in our society, the admirable desire to reduce harm and discrimination, but then also the ways in which leaning too far into those experiences and the policies they implied could produce negative political outcomes.
What's the project now? You say "documenting the unraveling of classical liberalism by the woke." I'm less invested in putting that into a different category of activity (ideology, activism, thought leadership, etc.) than I am in just saying that it doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling project, as he's executing it. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to adequately or interestingly depict what's going on in the world. Maybe he's doing exactly the same kind of thing, but just doing it far more poorly.
If you go to his X feed, e.g, it mostly doesn't feel different to me than Libs of TikTok or whatever. I suspect he gets into more complexity in his audio interviews, but he's not a great podcaster, and he's not interviewing people who disagree with him in a constructive way. So again it's just him not doing interesting work anymore. Do we need him to document the ascendance of woke? Isn't that half of what X is already doing? Aren't there a million books on that?
I agree with a lot your criticisms - especially him not being a good podcaster and not debating those who disagree enough - but I think it's pretty uncharitable to compare him to Libs of Tiktok. The difference is that Yang (every several tweets or so) connects the ridiculous examples of leftists gone crazy to the broader themes surrounding the successor ideology.
And actually a lot of it connects back to the more sophisticated arguments he made in those Tablet pieces, like the Title 9 one for example.
Regarding whether we need more people documenting woke craziness, I would say with any new cultural movement there's going to be lots of commentary, some good some bad. In other words the fact that there's a lot of people engaging in an intellectual project doesn't mean others shouldn't do it too if they can contribute well (obviously I think he is and you think he isn't).
But I guess maybe some of it is about interest. It DOES interest me in the sense that other critics of the left (from McWhorter to Mounk) are less willing to, say, go as hard at trans activists. And obviously Yang isn't, but unlike others who after those activists (like Chris Rufo maybe) Yang isn't an idiot and isn't doing it frivolously. And in my view (we may differ on this) I think these activists have done unique harm to our discourse, to science, and even to philosophy - so they need to be raked through the coals.
Great conversation! I'm particularly struck by GS comment that the will to suppress speech is present in the US, as it is on the center left elsewhere*, but here at least the would-be censors face probably insurmountable obstacles.
Two other thoughts:
1. It's not so surprising that the people speaking up for 'heritage Americans' are not themselves from that group, the polite-society taboo against this kind of thing is so powerful that maybe you need to have had parents from another culture to resist the urge to conform. Like, it's not an accident that 100% of people I know who skipped the Covid vax were born in the Soviet Union.
2. Whatever the official Democratic and GOP policies about unions may be, and whichever side has more billionaires, as long as the Democrats embrace mass immigration, and the GOP opposes it, there's a strong case to be made that it's the GOP that's the pro-labor party.
*this was fascinating: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/13/brazil-racism-prosecution-day-mccarthy/)
I just don't think you can attribute that level of significance to the immigration question, given the decades and decades, and what is surely billions and billions of dollars, the right has spent methodically working to destroy labor.
They've consistently appointed anti-labor reps to the NLRB. They've appointed judges at every level who are anti-labor. They've passed all the state based right to work laws. They've blocked every legislative effort to make it easier to organize and win. They've made it easier to offshore. And on and on.
I'm happy to accept that there have been Democratic policies that have hurt labor, but I just think there's no comparison. The major interests on the right pretty much hate labor more than anything else, and they've been very committed and very effective in destroying it.
Thing is though, as union density declined, NLRB policy and the like became less salient for the majority of voters, trade and immigration more so.
I think there's a few questions here. Which side is more to blame, retrospectively, for the decline in the labor, to the degree that it was policy rather than massive macroeconomic forces that are responsible? It sounds like you're saying the right is more to blame, historically, but that leads to the next question:
How much of the overall decline in labor in America since the New Deal is attributable to policies that explicitly pro- or anti-labor and how much of it is attributable to policies on immigration and trade that aren't explicitly about labor (and then I guess how much of it is big macro things are in some sense outside of policy)?
And then finally: where are we now in terms of which party is objectively more pro-labor?
Is that roughly right?
Also, I'm now realizing I'm out of my depth, but happy to have the dialogue anyway. :)
I agree about the efforts of the right to destroy labor over many decades, but for a lot of that time the right was also pro-immigration, with the Buchananites in the wilderness. And I think the right's war on labor wouldn't have been nearly as successful if we hadn't opened the border in the sixties.
Likewise, can you imagine a New Deal without the Immigration Act of 1924? If not, then the nativist Republicans of the twenties played an important part in creating the conditions for the midcentury era of strong labor and low income inequality.
Obviously that wasn't their goal, but if you compare the chart of gini coefficient to immigration rate, there's a lag of about a decade but they track pretty neatly.
Fascinating convo. Particularly interesting was the dissection of various figures in the cultural landscape…also the critique of the way the first amendment has been weaponized by oligarchs to serve their private interests.
Will give a listen soon. Wondering if the topic of getting some funding from fils Soros came up:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/progressive-mega-donor-funding-right-wing-ideas
I would guess this sort of thing is why Compact is not "post-left" in the way described above?
Also, the pearl-clutching from the article just shows how we are not anywhere near "post-woke".
I did bring it up a bit, though we didn't go too deep into it. (Geoff kind of evaded me a bit on it, if I remember correctly. :)
I do credit Geoff, though, with the courage of his convictions. He hasn't gone post-left because he thinks they've kind of lost their minds.
Yes, I think that’s accurate. Reading that UnHeard article about Piccone’s complaints of Capitalism “generating” discontent via the Civil Rights movement and others, only to change and “subsume” them, I thought “sounds like democracy, actually”
A synthesis, I think, can be found from Michael Gerber at The American Bystander’s Substack: He wrote in 2023 (all now behind a paywall) a few pieces on Lenny Bruce and “sick humor” that retrospectively question its ability to revolutionize society. I can’t read it now due to my being a cheap bastard with too many paid subscriptions already, but I think the gist was that you can either live outside of the mainstream (object to Capitalism) or not (and merely “generate discontent”).
I often have a similar reaction when people on various sides of things describe what they clearly think are nefarious systems of co-optation and power. I want to say "sounds like democracy" or "right, it's called politics."