What is the “Post-Left”?

The liberal media and political classes dragging Biden to the nomination predictably destroyed whatever cohesion there was of the broad coalition of Bernie Sanders supporters. One dominant and seemingly new tendency to emerge from this shattering of Sandersism into a thousand pieces has been something that has been called the post-left, or sometimes the anti-left. This refers to self-described Marxists who are basically hopeless about the future of the left, and disgusted with all its current, failed forms, but who still are concerned enough about the future of the left to sloganize themselves in relation to it. Their main self-definition is being opposed to what they call radical liberals, or radlibs—types of leftists who value identity politics, social justice, and the like, above material politics. This is a good goal, but in lots of ways, their materialism and critical thinking skills malfunction when it comes to evaluating the faux-populism of National Conservatism, which they are all too eager to become cheerleaders for.

Post-leftists evidently care so much about the left (or at least that is probably what they tell themselves) that they have started to wander in search of any new horizons they can find, which has led to cozying up to conservative think tanks and magazines. The Bellows, a “labor left” online magazine that began in May and which I have contributed to, was explained to me as existing basically because it seemed absurd that someone like Amber Frost, for example, would have to even consider being published somewhere like American Affairs, since no woke-adjacent publications would publish her. The idea was that there should be some non-woke but still leftist option, so people like her wouldn’t have to resort to weird, lame right-wing outlets. Unfortunately, the Bellows quickly became indistinguishable from that. Indeed, Amber herself, from what I’ve heard, refuses to write for it now because she disapproves of the way the co-founder was cut out of the publication shortly after it launched. 

My understanding was that the Bellows, and the general online community around it, would be a place for people who are of the left, but not liberals, to develop their ideas among themselves and challenge each other—but that was not the case. Instead, the most conservative line on every issue and every event became the only option. Dunk on libs first, ask questions later. The idea, I guess, is that one wouldn’t want to alienate American Affairs, or the American Mind, another right-wing publication that shares a lot of editors and readership with American Affairs, and is funded by the conservative Claremont Institute. The point is—the people with the money and the prepackaged message don’t want any of the “fuck the police” type of leftism, they want more of a “cops are workers” leftism. Fuck the police? No! Hire the police, and give them good benefits, right, comrades? 

Wealthy conservative institutions have made inroads into “populist” discourse through the much more valid and undeniable left economic populism associated with Bernie Sanders, through bogus right-wing “populists” like Saagar Enjeti, for example, who is a tool of right-wing think tanks. On the show he does with Krystal Ball, he only is able to pretend to be pro-labor and anti-capital because of this idea that the economic leftist populism of Krystal Ball (such as it is!) needs to be counterbalanced with an equally valid and representative alternative view—the populist right for the populist left. It’s the kind of false equivalency that counterinsurgent, opportunist, and reactionary forces love to make. And the populist right that Enjeti represents is largely fake, astroturfed, trying to stretch Trumpism into something more than it is. 

After launching in May of this year, the Bellows quickly turned into something scarcely distinguishable from American Affairs or the American Mind. There has been a fairly consistent and clear goal there in recent months—to try to unite left populism and right populism (i.e., Trumpism, which is not populist in any material sense) around their shared hatred of the professional managerial class (PMC). This is a smart goal, since the liberal media and political class, career journalists, party operatives, and other lowlifes, were the ones who successfully screwed Bernie not just once, but twice. Working class people and poor people are not stupid—they saw this happen over two election cycles. They know that the journalists and pundits and Democratic Party operatives who pay lip service to progressive values but worked tirelessly to undermine the one guy who would actually do something to improve life for the mass of people are not to be trusted, ever again. It’s easy to just label all those forces that opposed Bernie as one thing, and PMC is as good a choice as any.

So we have this new coalition of bipartisan populism, and a new enemy—the PMC. Already we can see how this benefits the right—it’s pushing this idea that there is a mass movement of working class right wingers ready for some kind of redistributive policies, and that the real enemy is a shadowy coalition of people who manage things. Again, we have two lies—nothing about the right will ever favor redistribution, and so isn’t really populist, and the real enemy is the capitalist class who own and control the means of production, like always—not a shadowy, shifting cabal of managers. Jeff Bezos is much more your enemy than the people he hires to manage things on his behalf, which should be obvious, but the propaganda effort underway by Claremont and American Affairs is meant to conceal that, and redirect populist anger at the class of people who manage things on behalf of his class of people. 

So the Claremont story that’s being sold is that the populist right and populist left can join forces to vanquish the real enemy, the PMC. This has appeal to the populist left because the populist left is essentially all united by their support of the economic message of Bernie Sanders, which was opposed by neoliberal forces that can quickly and cheaply be described as professional managers. The Democratic Party managers are literally professional managers, the liberal pundits are professionals who manage opinion and try to manage the images of the rotten politicians that they force on a voter base who just wanted Bernie. So there is a lot of justified hostility, and it was just waiting to be directed towards an enemy, and that enemy has been found. It is especially useful because anyone with an academic or journalistic background, that is to say, anyone with the time or inclination to question this Claremont story, can immediately be labeled as a PMC, and then effectively cancelled. I have been called a PMC by many in the Bellows orbit for daring to question their dogma—it seems like that is part of the point of all of this PMC hysteria, to create an easy way to discredit and dismiss criticism. Kind of like what radical liberals do to their critics who offer a more class-focused idea of leftism than they do. In this way, as in so many others, the post-leftists have basically become indistinguishable from the radlibs they so despise—just as their politics has in another way become indistinguishable from Claremont conservatism. 

The so-called populist right has been all too eager and prepared to help promote this message of bipartisan populist revolt against the elites, and of the PMC as the worst of the elites. As we will see, shifting focus away from old-money interests, the billionaire class, and traditional sources of capitalist power and control and towards the PMC has been a priority of this recent populist messaging. The PMC is such a useful enemy because it is ill-defined, it can be everything and nothing—anyone can be a PMC, but the people advancing this prepackaged anti-PMC message are themselves generally PMC, scholars, journalists, and academics, but that doesn’t really come up. But since the PMCs screwed Bernie, and the right wing, both popular and elite, do not like Bernie Sanders’ style democratic socialism (right-wingers of any type, popular or elite, will never go for the kind of taxes that Bernie was calling for, since being right-wing essentially means “keep my taxes down”) why would right-wing forces be helping left populists to recognize and defeat the PMC, the mortal enemy standing between them and socialism?

Why would right-wingers help the left populist insurgency to name and overcome the one thing that prevented socialism from winning and conservative wealth being redistributed? The answer is—they wouldn’t, and they are only orchestrating and promoting this anti-PMC tendency precisely because it is a misdirection away from the actual class of people who own capital, the means of production, and control generational wealth. In a word, the forces orchestrating the anti-PMC tendency are themselves elite, and they have sensed a good opportunity to direct hostility away from them, and towards a justly despised but also usefully amorphous and all-encompassing “class.” The PMC is not really a class—the people who fund the Claremont Institute, however, are a class, the capitalist class, and the less we think about that, and the more we think about a free-floating class of professional managers who are undermining generic populism, the better it will be for the capitalist class. 

This whole Claremont-friendly “leftist” line has been consistent, and we can understand it by looking at two recent articles: “On ‘Strasserism’ and the Decay of the Left” by Sweden’s Malcolm Kyeyune and “The Double Horseshoe Theory of Politics” by the right-wing nationalist writer Michael Lind. Kyeyune’s article originally appeared on his own blog in summer 2019, in response to a wave of accusations that class-first, anti-woke leftists were secret Nazis—the term Strasserism in the title refers to a type of Nazism associated with the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, who promoted a type of Nazism focused on economic issues only. They were killed by Hitler in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, and their vision of Nazism collapsed. A few unhinged anarchists and radical liberals on the Internet took to calling various other writers and Internet personalities “Strasserists” because of their downplaying of social and identity issues in politics, in favor of economic issues. Kyeyune’s article was a response to that, and it gained traction mostly by responding to the absurdity of people labeling a loose association of Internet tendencies as an obscure sub-type of Nazism that almost nobody remembers. But what was the real message of his article?

The first thing to notice about it is how much it is focused on Kyeyune’s own personal narrative and journey in the wild world of leftism. This is ironic, of course, because the whole critique of progressive neoliberalism that people like him make is that it is too focused on personal issues and ignores larger structural and material concerns. But to read this article, which is one of the major pieces underlying this post-left, anti-left, bipartisan anti-PMC populist moment, is to find oneself neck deep in identity and personal narrative.

The piece starts out by lamenting the rise of new terms in the last decade to describe class-focused left politics, such as “red-brownism” “nazbolism” and “Angela Nagle Leftism.” This is funny for a few reasons. First, nobody has ever actually said “Angela Nagle Leftism.” That phrase is just an attempt to make her seem more relevant, and more leftist, than she is. Second, the article, and the whole Claremont incursion that it is part and parcel of, is all about introducing weird new terms, like post-left, and anti-left, so the problem isn’t weird new terms, it’s that they are the wrong weird new terms. He says that “Strasserite,” before it reemerged to some modest popularity in summer 2019, was used “exclusively by online neo-Nazis in their petty, internecine conflicts.” This is probably true, but the interesting thing to note is his use of “petty, internecine conflicts” to describe online Nazi behavior—this, of course, is how just about everyone describes radical liberal, SJW, idpol activity, as petty and internecine. So we can see the equivalence between radical liberals and neo-Nazis being set up already, which is a recurring tactic these people like to use. It’s basically the same thing that Tucker Carlson does when he describes Antifa and cancel culture and associated tendencies as “fascist.” 

The article continues with his lamenting of the “long winter years” of the ’90s and early ’00s, where the main project of the Left was sort of given up on, and “new boutique causes” were found to replace the broader Leftist causes that had failed. “To take my native Sweden as an example,” he says, “two of the more significant new causes were opposing neo-Nazis and opposing globalization.” This is a significant move, because once again it sets up an equivalency—that Nazis and globalists are essentially equal but opposite forces that good, orthodox Leftists like Kyeyune need to oppose. Is globalism bad? Sure. Is it the same as Nazism? Probably not. But in order for Claremont & Co. to fully bourgeoisify the Left from the Right, they need to act like it is. The Left was bourgeoisified by the neoliberal class, the donor class, and all the other forces that reared their ugly heads to destroy Sandersism. Now the bourgeoisifcation of the Left is happening from the Right—and we are rushing headlong into it because we were so traumatized and betrayed by the bourgeoisifcation of the Left by liberals. 

After a bit more background about his own personal (and boring) entrance into Leftism (whatever that is), he gets to his real point—“Left populism” as a political model has failed. He cites the Corbyn and Sanders defeats as proof of the “terminal and irreversible” decline of the left, and says that “the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate” as things go on. The point here is to abandon the project of left populism, because it is hopelessly dead (he’d like that wouldn’t he?)—and to focus, instead, on the much more viable popular movement on the right. The fact that none of this reflects reality is no concern of Kyeyune’s. 

Then he moves on to talking about Strasserism, and it gets kind of funny. “Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers…” which is of course true—nobody cares, it doesn’t exist, and it isn’t real. Yet here he is writing this self-pitying essay about how people calling you a Strasserist is a huge, real problem. See the contradiction? 

The laughs continue as Kyeyune disapprovingly notes that “Making fun of the left is pretty much the only real ‘political activity’ that a majority of contemporary leftists partake in.” This is funny because, as anyone familiar with the podcast that Kyeyune is basically a third mic on, “What’s Left?” with Aimee Terese, all that Kyeyune and Aimee do is dunk on libs. They point out the foibles of zany characters like Nathan J. Robinson, and endlessly try to own left-liberals for being cringe and so on. So if this is a bad tendency of the modern left, they have contributed to it as much as anyone. 

Kyeyune eventually gets around to defining his PMC enemy. It is a group of political actors who “blend political liberalism and cultural progressivism.” This is bad because they aren’t privileging economics—but the critique effectively becomes that, to be anti-PMC, you have to be anti-liberal and anti-cultural progressivism. That is why they insist on appealing to right-wingers, who are all about being anti-liberal and anti-culturally progressive. But just doing anti-liberal, anti-progressive performances with and for right-wingers isn’t an economic project. It isn’t the materialism they so profess, but rather just a new form of idealism.

He lists some of the main goals of the PMCs, one of which is demanding that the state should forgive student debt. Evidently this is a bad thing in his view, because only PMCs go to college, and colleges produce PMCs. So college debt shouldn’t be forgiven—if you are dumb enough to go into debt for college, then you should be burdened with that debt forever. That is essentially his thinking. And this couldn’t be a more common right-wing, take responsibility for your own actions, pull yourself up by your bootstraps idea. The idea is to demonize education and to normalize punishing people for making individual choices that they have little choice to avoid–if you wanted to get a job in the last few decades, going to college was what people did. It isn’t fair to blame people for going to college–only a right-winger would think that was fair, because it goes along with their anti-intellectualism, and their blame the individual ethos, which are two things that shouldn’t be anywhere near the left.

Then he gets to the main attraction—his defense of Tucker Carlson. He criticizes the left’s tendency to call Tucker “insincere” or a “rich grifter” (obviously because those things can, and should, be said about him and his podcast cronies). Next he makes the hilarious point that the fact that Tucker is rich (net worth $20 million) actually makes him a better ally than the PMCs “in the eyes of the working class.” This is not just some offhand comment—it is the line of American Affairs and the new wave of National Conservatism. The idea is that our current liberal elites are bad, but if the “underclass” (as a leading faux-populist National Conservative writer Michael Lind calls the proletariat) make an alliance with better, enlightened elites, like Tucker, Peter Thiel, and the billionaire Trump himself, then that will be a better form of politics. Post-leftists claim to be materialists and critical thinkers, but their main political programme is simply to credulously trust that National Conservative elites are to be trusted, simply because they aren’t liberal elites.

This is laughable on its face, especially for people who claim to care so much about economics and material issues to ignore actual wealth like this. is daring to say what the working class think. Post-leftists claim to be the true allies of the working class mass of people, yet their politics boils down to making an alliance between populists and multimillionaires like Tucker Carlson and people in his socioeconomic class. Just like Karl Marx would want, right? Kyeyune calls this elite-underclass alliance “palace politics,” because that sounds better than what it really is—class collaborationism.

Kyeyune has also been making the rounds on right-wing interviews. On the Chris Buskirk podcast, he described himself as a “non-denominational populist.” Buskirk is the editor and publisher of American Greatness, a “movement conservative” website producing writing and podcasts, and affiliated with the Claremont Institute. Their manifesto calls for American Conservatism, i.e. National Conservatism. (They just need some Socialism to go with that Nationalism and then they’ll really be cooking with gas!) They define their mission thus: “When it comes to explaining what a “Greatness Agenda” might look like, we at American Greatness accept the definition of terms as laid out by our predecessors at JAG (Journal of American Greatness).” They also say “Although American Greatness owes an intellectual debt and its inspiration to the JAG and to some of its contributors, we are not the re-emergence of that much-admired effort.” The fact that most of the writers and editors at American Greatness are Claremont Institute products shouldn’t be a surprise. It should also be noted that another major right-wing publication, The American Conservative, describes American Affairs, which The Bellows is essentially a propaganda arm of, as “the principal successor to JAG.” 

The American Greatness manifesto continues: “But our real object is more comprehensive and our methods aim to be more expansive in their reach. We believe that American conservatism has lost its way and, as a result, it has lost much of its original appeal. The once-vibrant political movement that nominated Barry Goldwater, elected Ronald Reagan, and defeated global communism has become ossified and unthinking…” Other than how hilarious it is that they are apparently unironically calling Barry Goldwater “vibrant,” (which, seriously, have you ever seen Barry Goldwater?) this shows how moribund the whole “new right-wing populism” thing is. They are admitting it—just like Trump reanimated the zombie evangelical and libertarian conservative blocs, they need ideas to stimulate and propel their crusty Goldwater conservatism into the 21st century. Check what they said again—they are bragging about Goldwater and Reagan and pals defeating global communism. That’s the legacy they are proud of and that they want to bring to bear on 21st century politics. They are saying that they want to be able to defeat global communism again, like their heroes Goldwater and Reagan did. These are the people that the post-left are trying to do epic socialism with. Once again, we see their idealism where materialism should be, and credulousness where critical thinking should be.

Anyway, Kyeyune’s use of non-denominational in his interview with Chris Buskirk is his way of saying that he is not necessarily left or right—that’s what non-denominational means. So he isn’t a leftist, just a “populist,” which really just means anti-elite. And it doesn’t mean real anti-elite, it means anti-PMC. If he was actually anti-elite, he wouldn’t be promoting “palace politics.” The anti-capitalist message of the post-left has been dumbed down into just vague opposition to a class of middle managers, and a total whitewashing of the actual ownership class, which plays right into the hands of National Conservatism: their big money backers don’t get threatened, they get some populist cred that they don’t deserve, and they can use the anti-intellectual rhetoric inherent in this anti-PMC hysteria for the purposes that reactionary forces usually put it to, and then we’re off to the races. 

The right-wing nationalist writer and think tank founder Michael Lind’s Bellows article “The Double Horseshoe Theory of Class Politics” appeared in July, as a sort of summary/commercial for his book, “The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite,” which came out in January. Lind’s book is one of many on the National Conservatism of Yoram Hazony, the ultraright Zionist. Lind’s basic idea is that the class war is not happening where you think it is—namely, between proletarians and bourgeoisie. Rather, it is happening between the professional managerial class (PMC) and the underclass, Lind’s unhelpful catch-all term for basically anyone who isn’t a PMC. At one point in his article he literally says “Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls modern societies from behind the scenes. I will not pay further attention to old money in this essay.” This is absurd because generational, inherited wealth absolutely shapes politics and economy in fundamental ways–the richest family in Florence, Italy in the 1500s is the richest family now, for example. Lind also says, “Old money types should be distinguished from tycoons like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, who tend to be products of upper-middle-class or modestly rich families who happened to become incredibly rich.” So he is writing off Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as products of upper middle class families who just happened to get world historical fortunes. They just happened to. It’s not that they exploited labor like every capitalist billionaire tyrant ever has, no of course not—they just happened to get rich. No need to look at the dynamics of that process in more depth, let’s move on to the important Marxist work of creating a byzantine new taxonomy of socioeconomic class, with special focus on the true villains of capitalism, the PMC class, and pay no attention to people like Bezos, Gates, and Buffet, who between the three of them control more wealth than the bottom half of the American people. 

In all of this, we can see that the “post-left” is a coordinated political project by right-wing institutions, like Claremont and others, to filter anti-elite sentiment on the left into directions that are in line with right-wing capitalist interests. The ostensibly leftist commentators, writers, and personalities promoting post-left content are just useful idiots, capital’s court jesters, doing the PR for ruling class nonsense that would never otherwise be taken seriously for a minute by any leftist whatsoever.