What’s driving former progressives to the right?
In an essay in the progressive magazine In These Times, writers Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet grapple with the contemporary version of an old phenomenon: erstwhile leftists decamping to the right. There have been plenty of high-profile defectors from the left in recent years, among them comedian Russell Brand; environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and journalist Matt Taibbi, a onetime scourge of Wall Street, who was recently one of the winners of a $100,000 prize from the ultraconservative Young America’s Foundation.
What gives this migration political significance, however, are the ordinary people following them, casting off what they view as a censorious liberalism for a movement that doesn’t ask anyone to “do the work” or “check your privilege.” Joyce and Sharlet write, “We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.”
A key question for the left is why this is happening.
For some celebrity defectors, the impetus seems clear enough: They lurched right after a cancellation or public humiliation. Klein writes that a turning point for Wolf was widespread mockery after she was confronted, live on the radio, with evidence that the thesis of the book she was promoting was based on her misreading of archival documents. Brand’s rightwing turn, as Matt Flegenheimer wrote in The New York Times Magazine, coincided with the start of investigations into sexual assault accusations against him. But that doesn’t explain why there’s such an eager audience for born-again reactionaries and why, in much of the Western world, the right has been so much better than the left at harnessing hatred of the status quo.
Part of the answer is probably that the culture of the left is simply less welcoming, especially to the politically unsure, than the right.
But I think there’s a deeper problem, which stems from a crisis of faith in the possibility of progress. Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future. I sometimes hear leftists talk about “our collective liberation,” but outside a few specific contexts — the ongoing subjugation of the Palestinians comes to mind — I mostly have no idea what they’re talking about.
It’s easy to see what various parts of the left want to dismantle — capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy, the nuclear family — and much harder to find a realistic conception of what comes next. Some leftists who lose hope in the possibility of transformation become liberals like me, mostly resigned to working toward incremental improvements to a dysfunctional society. Others, looking beyond the politics of amelioration, seek new ways to shake up the system.
The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.
One interpretation of the sort of ideological journeys Joyce and Sharlet wrote about for In These Times is “horseshoe theory,” the idea that at the extremes, left and right bend toward each other. But plenty of the people who’ve followed a rightward trajectory were never particularly radical; Wolf was a fairly standard Democrat, as was Elon Musk, now king of the edgelords.
As Klein argues, a better framework is “diagonalism,” coined by scholars William Callison and Quinn Slobodian. Diagonalists, they write, tend to “contest conventional monikers of left and right. At the extreme, they write, “diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy. Public power cannot be legitimate, many believe, because the process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful and is de facto illegitimate.”
Such conspiratorial politics have rarely, if ever, led to anything but catastrophe, but that doesn’t lessen their emotional pull.
To compete with them, the left needs beautiful dreams of its own.