On October 6, 2017, “centrist” James Damore, creator of the Google Memo, tweeted a picture of a bird, accompanied by the aphorism “Like a bird, society needs a functional left and right wing.” Damore’s quote is basic and seemingly useless, as usual, but his “observation” accidentally reveals an important insight into American politics. Taking Damore’s assertion at face value, he provokes a question about the nature of our discourse: do we have a thriving left-wing to match the very obviously vibrant right-wing? For some who would consider themselves on “the left,” the answer would be a defiant Yes!
Unfortunately, as many others on the left would be quick to remind us, leftists do not set the rules for debate, nor really have any input on them. James Damore probably wouldn’t like you to know it, but it is the left-wing, not the right, that is lacking in the American eagle, and our society’s dysfunction can at least partly be blamed on that.
Before discussion of the left’s lack of power, however, it would be prudent to define “the left.” It is, in fact, a good barometer of the left’s status that this is necessary, as a vast majority of Americans do not understand what the left is at all. The defining characteristics of being a leftist have been obfuscated by a Democratic Party loyal more to business than worker, but the small, weakened movements that struggle on have not forgotten. The classic definition, no more out of date now than those of “conservative” and “fascist,” is simple: to be left, one must oppose oppression where ever it may arise.
Naturally, nothing is ever that simple. With a definition as simple as this, there are never-ending ways to either shoehorn yourself into qualifying as left or as disqualifying some ideological opposition as not left enough, or even not left at all. This leads to most of the Democratic Party being able to—without meaningful opposition—call themselves left-wing, just because they support gay rights, aren’t flamingly racist, and maybe support some stimulus spending. This framing is incredibly damaging to the actual core of left-wing politics, which is tangentially related to some of this, but has a fundamentally different core. The real basis of left politics is the working class, labor politics.
The usage of the term “left” to describe a political position came from the French Revolution, when the more radical factions in the National Assembly would sit on the left side, across from the more conservative factions on the right. The French Revolution was a specific reaction to the treatment of the lower classes in France—upset by Louis XVI’s economic policy and the increasingly poor state of the country—and the grievances of the left have not been too significantly altered in the last two centuries.
centuries. Today, the world is still home to economic inequality not unlike what France experienced in the end of the 18th century. Unlike in France, the contrast is less visible to us. The ravages of imperialist capitalism and the extractivist policies of our contemporary economic order have been exacted on countries far outside our normal consideration. India, for example, lost tens of trillions of dollars of value to the British Empire and its occupation, which still leaves its mark today in the exacerbated caste system among other lasting effects. The Congo faces massive projects which exploit natural resources like coltan, which are essential to Western multinationals’ new gadgets. Meanwhile, many Westerners never consider the people, let alone the natural resources, of these nations even once in their lives, while the vast majority are not reminded nearly often enough to leave a lasting impression. Just like pre-revolutionary France’s Ancien Regime, the governments of the Western world—and too often their counterparts in the Global South, their hands forced by the IMF and World Bank—ignore the well-being of their populace in favor of companies and the wealthy, allowing gross exploitation at home to pair with their neo-imperialist practice. Really, I could choose any modern Western state, not just pre-revolutionary France, to make this point. The problem the left must tackle is not just small incidents of oppression or even the systematic disadvantaging of one group or another. The enemy is nameable, and any respectable left must name it: the enemy is capitalism.
The sad reality of the matter is, the left does not really exist in this country. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) may have some degree of cultural relevance, especially online, but their members don’t even number in the hundreds of thousands. Outside of DSA, there do exist various, more explicitly anti-capitalist organizations, but the usual disagreements on the left (Anarchists vs Marxist-Leninists for example) have prevented any unified left movement from coalescing.
In the interest of fairness, it is not only petty disagreements that have been obstacles for the left. It is a very real issue that the US government has shut down any serious left activity in the past all of its existence, from nascent movements to once-strong ones like the labor unions. Most of this was accomplished in two fell swoops in the 1910s/20s and 1940s/50s with the dual Red Scares, but the process has been gradual as well as punctuated by dramatic action. A former FBI official recently let slip that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embodies the kind of person the FBI tried to keep out of government when he first got into the organization. While this admission was certainly surprising, the content he revealed should shock no one on the left. The suppression of generations of left movements and figures, coupled with mass hysteria and propaganda against leftist governments, successful or not, have carefully built an America where the left is not a real presence in any discourse.
Recognizing that the left is not present, we must ask what the left brings to the table that is missing in American mainstream discourse. In reality, all of the left’s focuses are represented in discussion today, from environmental concerns to housing to mental health. The difference comes in how they are addressed, and how they are incorporated into a narrative, or if they are. If you went out on the street in America today, it would be difficult to find someone who believed everything was completely fine. Grievances run from the existential to the absurd, but they are near-ubiquitous. The way normalized discourse tackles them, however, reveals the left’s place in our politics. Nearly always, these issues, especially the environment and mental health, are treated as a result of the tragic flaws of humanity, a simple folly that we must resist within ourselves. The left offers a much more coherent alternative: analysis grounded within a critique of the institutions themselves that not only allow these issues but cause them. Global climate catastrophe is not a result of human nature, a drive to destroy, but a direct consequence of overproduction driven by capitalism. To stop it, the left argues, we need to fight global capital along with fighting our more destructive vices. The mental health problems that are so common among young people today, with huge numbers suffering from depression or anxiety, are not just problems with brain chemistry. The problem is much deeper, caused by a capitalist system where labor is not valued and the future is not invested in. These analyses are incorporated in a coherent metanarrative, where many of the world’s problems can be traced back to capitalism and the exploitation of the worker.
This is not to say that all these problems are so easily solved, but politically, having something that can be tangibly changed with material benefits makes for an excellent goal. Here, we come across a problem, as there is another political philosophy that almost fits the same description. Fascism did in fact arise as a reaction to the left, and as a result co-opts a lot of its rhetoric in an attempt at harnessing the raw power of the angry masses. However, fascism is a movement that does not originate in the working classes, but instead preys on them, turning them against a minority in their midst. The left does the opposite—it has the potential of uniting the working class, by far the largest political force in any country, both against their mistreatment at the hands of the capitalist class and for a vision of the world where they are centered. This is where the core appeal of the left lies—in the hope for a better world, one where we can work together on saving us all.