The New (New) Left
An analysis of what the modern Left actually believes, the America we live in, and the prospect for political power.
When I wrote my article, What the Left Actually Wants (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying Start Writing Project 2029), I wrote it from the perspective of propagandizing the Left’s position in such a way that it could be embraced by at least a plurality of classes. It was less what the Left’s present position on certain items was, and more of what it could be (without compromising our core beliefs), to accomplish all that we want and more, and to do so in a way that could conceivably garner enough electoral support. But that’s the narrative of the forthcoming few years. To understand the present Left is to understand the past Left: that is how I was able to write so confidently about our future. I want to share the truths I know about the Left: where we came from and who we truly are. That should, I hope, make it clear where we are going.
First and foremost though: I don’t want to talk about “The Groups”. “The Groups” have no influence, have no power beyond the money they get from donors, ranging from corporate lobbyists to a meandering class of millions of $5 per month donors. They are somewhat effective in changing policy, but these aren’t mass groups beyond mailing lists: they just have millions of dollars to wag around. They don’t actually represent real people, their real emotions. Their policy positions don’t represent anyone but their wealthiest donors, and if they don’t have that, then the professional managerial nonprofit worker class. Bottom line: there’s no mass popular energy there, in the endless Climate and Equity and So-On Foundations. If they have any power at all it is in advertising around elections, a field so awash in billions of dollars that the effects largely cancel out.
So forget about The Groups. I want today, more than anything, to center my discussion on what the Left actually believes, and how we got here. Above all, understand that we are deeply moral. Yes, we are bleeding hearts. My heart bleeds every day, and I feel every pulse.
Anyone who doesn’t feel bad about the Israeli genocide of Gaza isn’t a Leftist. “I’m Left but for Gaza”—no, that person doesn’t exist, for they could not be Leftists. To be Leftist is to be social, to be engaged and involved in communities. And no self-respecting Leftist will ever allow a genocide supporter in their club. Anyone who is not opposed to the genocide is a grifter, a liar, a thief, a genocidaire. Some may rationalize that being opposed to genocide is the smart political and geopolitical position (it is), but more than that, it is a decision based entirely on moral concerns of right versus wrong. And Israel is so clearly in the wrong that the only possible choice is opposition. But that’s been the immutable truth of Left ever since there has been a ‘Left’.
Karl Marx supported the Indians during the 1857 failed revolution in India. Jane Fonda supported the Viet Cong, and these days practically everyone supports Nelson Mandela and the fall of Apartheid. We find ourselves, on the Left: constantly on the correct moral axes, on the moral axes that are forming before our very eyes as history edges on as it ever does. These days, of course everyone says British colonialism was wrong. Of course the Indians had a right to resist. Same for the Vietnamese, same for the South Africans. But to live in those times, in those days, to have those opinions, was to be branded a traitor and terrorist sympathizer by the ruling elite. But we don’t care about the slander. Our hearts bleed too strong.
There is a moral clarity in viewing the world like this, between right and wrong. The wrong of course being: domination, oppression, genocide, slavery, and the like. And we are the antithesis of that, supporting liberty, freedom, equality, solidarity, and fraternity. If there is a core to being a Leftist, more than anything: it is the Golden Rule as laid out most famously by Confucius (and by every other society in human history): that one should treat others as they themselves feel they ought to be treated. I don’t want to be enslaved, don’t want to be tortured, don’t want to be genocided, so why would I want that on others? It’s an intoxicating notion, this idea of universal reciprocity, and it is the true core pillar at the heart of the modern Leftists. It’s why our hearts bleed so much. Every death shower a B-52 bombers rains down on a village: we think about our own villages, our own homes, torn asunder by barely visible blips in the night sky. We see the girl covered in napalm burns running naked down the street from the brutality, and we think it could be our sisters, our mothers, our own selves.
This more than anything is what the Left is about. It’s not about being a radical, being a revolutionary (those are stratagems and tactics, not core foundational beliefs). It’s about compassion, it’s about love triumphing over hate. It’s about making the right moral calls, all the time, every time. And it’s about knowing that all we’re missing is the political power to fashion society into something better. And indeed: this modern Left’s values are perfectly in line with what a broad electoral majority want; we want the same things!
It’s important to define the Left first though, before we compare our values with the American Majority, We must of course return to the source, to the time of mass labor unions, communist parties, national and international revolutions. It’s time to go back to 1900.
Origins: Class War’s Endsieg and Half-Resurrection
The original Left (discounting anything pre-1900 for the Left’s history is as long and tiring as human history) we can say existed until the end of World War 2, and it focused primarily on building some better world. I say ‘some’ because the Left of those days was far more factional. Everyone felt they had the right answer. You had anarchists bombing banks and shooting CEOs, you had Bolsheviks trying to do the Soviet thing here, Trotskyists opposed to the Bolsheviks, populist socialists opposed to both, labor unions who just wanted better wages and working conditions, and you had New Deal Democrats loyal to party and country before international revolution.
But these were all, to their core, part of the same Left tradition. These people all believed that a rough class of expropriators and profiteers made them, the masses, poorer through exploitation. And indeed they were right! They would still be! So, what happened? For all these groups were vanquished and abolished, relegated to the history books. After 1945, national and local politics dialed in on anti-mass-politics managerial liberalism, a far cry from New Deal Democrats and lacking most importantly unions and socialist parties to back them up. What changed? The war.
World War 2 had one major side effect to the Left in America: it abolished them. I don’t mean state repressions (though that did happen, see the Red Scare 1 and 2), I mean plain abolition of the Left as a mass political movement. The mass base of the Left had been labor unions. But labor unions found themselves the victims of globalization, like so many other things. World War 2 unleashed America as the global hegemon, our dollar becoming the currency of trade (replacing the pound sterling), and thus our people became the richest people on Earth. The imperial superprofits could thus flow into labor markets without unions, made possible only because every other developed country in the world was a bombed-out, depopulated husk. Working, living, and wage conditions then improved, and they combined with the techno-supremacy the US had built for itself in WW2 to unleash a pandora’s box of consumer goods.
The latter half of the 20th century is a story told in antibiotics, in refrigeration. It is a story of more than just abundance, but rather the abolition of scarcity. It’s a story of televisions and radio sets, of cars as far as the eye could see on roads stretching for tens of thousands of miles. It’s the story of the suburbs, racial white majority enclaves set up as private fiefs opposed to racial integration. This story, which greeted veterans as they descended their boats returning from Asia or Europe made a mass popular Left movement untenable. Combined with the devastation of the base camp of labor the Old Left died, and the New Left was born.
The New Left would grow up in the heightened contradictions left in the wake of the defeat of the Old Left. The Left’s entire modus operandi had always been since Marx to improve society and at a maximum, to abolish private property and creating a society that gives all each according to their ability, and to all each according to their need. But what if the society has everything? What if everyone living in that society, outside the repressed minorities, had access to the succor of unlimited superprofits? Then most people will rather turn on I Love Lucy and watch the Superbowl than join a protest movement.
And, it’s not the irrational thing to do. The apple cart of world society has given America, thanks to our distance from other large nations, thanks to our geography, thanks to our command and capture of global financial markets, an individual bounty fit for a king. And we are all kings. Why would any king upset the apple cart, overturn it? Does anyone, save the martyrs, want to be poorer, to live more miserably, to risk everything and everyone for a Marxist (or whatever) dream? Yes: we could try to to make the US the USSR but safely ensconced in their suburban home, such a concept seems insane inanity. You’d have better luck convincing the common person to become warlords in a colonial project in the global south.
This is why, after the war, even when China and the USSR was supporting socialists in America, the best they could do was fund a couple of people’s’ salaries to print newspapers nobody cared about enough to read.
Yet of course the Left didn’t die. Return to empathy, to the golden rule. Yes: there was infinity but finite access to that neverending pool. No Blacks, no Indigenous people, no women, no Hispanics; nobody who wasn’t a white anglo saxon protestant got anything, especially respect.
This contradiction, of having both unlimited resources and yet also restricting access to those resources to a growing and diversifying body politic is what birthed the New Left. Parts of it indeed were a countercultural counterrevolution, an individualistic dream of liberty and anarchy, powered by love and a copious amount of drugs. But it was also the story of MLK and Malcolm X and the fight for Black equality. It was the story of feminism, of women demanding equal rights at the workplace and at home. It was the story of renewed Indigenous resistance, of Hispanic farm workers unionizing against slave-driving bosses. All these people understood that World Communism was not coming, that yes America had plenty of prosperity and that perhaps the engines that drove superprofits should not be turned off, merely just shared with the rest of the non-white, non-male society.
Vietnam of course broke the New Left as a political force. To support a better society and to be effective at it meant voting with the Great Society Democrats, yet those same Democrats then went on to escalate a genocide in Southeast Asia. The center could not hold, and the New Left died a slow death over the latter 60s and 70s. Under a fractured electoral coalition, with every charismatic leader shot dead by the government or paramilitaries, all we were left with was chaos. Riots, panic in the streets, endless assassinations and bombings. It never derailed the material conditions that made the average American a regime supporter so it all amounted to were temper tantrums.
Of course, the managerial liberals that replaced the best leaders that the sixties had wrought (from the Kennedys to Malcolm X), Nixon and Reagan, understood that riots and chaos were bad optics. And so, despite being uncouth white supremacists, they understood that in a diversifying population, it was smarter politics to enshrine some more basic protections and equalities under the law. Better that than the continued mass riots, assassinations, and bombings that had terrorized everyone, including the ruling elite. And it worked, for a time. The protests died down. Women got to hold property and divorce their men, spousal rape started becoming a crime. All across the repressed dregs of society, there was some beginning to be some light at the end of the tunnel. It wasn’t all they wanted (where was the free healthcare? free childcare? and so on?), but it was enough to keep them quiet.
Then the Old Left, those Deserters who had remained at their outposts despite the death of the mass base, died either out of old age, or because the Wall fell, Yeltsin became President, and Deng toured the Southern provinces. Communism, as a motivating political economy, was dead. We are all capitalists now. This is the reality the New (New) Left finds ourselves in. There are no communists of the old Soviet style left, anywhere. Not in Burkina Faso, not in China, not even in North Korea. It’s over. Global capitalism had declared, and won, a total victory. Doctrinaire socialism (being a Leninist versus being a Hoxhaist versus being a Maoist versus being an endless list of blah blah blah) all that is irrelevant.
Yet here’s a contradiction: to be a capitalist is to be engaged in exploitation. In a capitalist economic model, some people will have to be repressed in order for other people to be made wealthy. It is impossible to build a working capitalist economic model without this exploitation. In order for you to enjoy your iPhones, some poor kid in Africa has to slave away in a mine for no pay and only the imminent promise of death by disease, malnutrition, or outright execution. This ugly contradiction is what makes the anti-globalist protests of the 90s into the present so powerful. That while yes most people still don’t want to upset the apple cart, they are also disgusted that the process of the apple carts’ creation is built on the blood and bones of literally millions of dead and dying children. And even here at home, the fruits of the apple cart have become far less savory over time. To this day: we still have not adequately redistributed our national wealth. In fact, we’ve done such a horrible job of it that the rich are richer than ever before.
Yet political power still runs through an electorate that is more or less happy with the economic status quo. Trump’s economic chaos may change that but broadly speaking, despite knowing the moral cost, most voting people do not care about abolishing capitalism. And so we find ourselves with two choices: to be rebels with (dead-on-arrival) causes or to somehow work within the system to achieve political power. It’s a similar choice to what the New Left made, a deal with the devil that always ends with the devil committing genocide (first in Vietnam, and now in Gaza).
Yet there is a third way, I believe, a way to combine our politics, our views, and convince the American electorate to give us that which we want the most (power to enable a better world to exist), without playing second fiddle to a genocidal party and without waiting for material conditions to change such that a revolution becomes tenable. It would mean not focusing on abolishing the superprofits as the first or immediate goal, in fact, it would involve not even talking about it. It would be the Dengist play, a most-assuredly nationalist one, focused entirely and insularly on benefitting the lives of Americans first and foremost, and once that is done, then going about and fixing the world through win-win trade deals. It means not abolishing the petty or big bourgeoisie and instead co-opting them, turning them into assets who support us as better stewards of world capitalism than managerial liberals (who keep screwing the pooch).
It is itself a contradiction yet with a similar strong party as China possesses, I am sure we are equally capable of working through these contradictions as a political movement and coming up with a satisfactory resolution that over the course of decades, get us and the entire rest of the human population, far closer to communism than our forbearers in the preceding century ever got.
Nationalism and the Left
Nationalism is a slur. It is an accusation, a condemnation, one to be taken extremely seriously. Yet just as we are all capitalists, so too are we all nationalists. We live in America, in a society, and we have an idea of what America should look like and how it should treat us. Our day-to-day concerns are about the daily political struggles of our internal polity. After all, people who care about international concerns are either nerds or if they aren’t, it’s because those concerns touch upon American interests. There’s a reason few know about the atrocities in Sudan, and that’s because our hands are (mostly, though not totally) clean, and why everyone knows about Gaza (our hands dyed red in the blood and brains of children). We care about our daily struggles in our local communities. And that while yes, we have empathy and compassion for other nations and states and the people living in them, our lived experience is America. Even internationalists are not innocent in this.
Nationalism is a dirty word because of course, the narrative of the white male majority has claimed that moniker for themselves. To be a nationalist, according to them is to say that America is white, majority, and proud of it. That this America is led by men, only men, who treat women and children like slaves, of whom they also seek to own. It’s a story of man versus beast, only the beast is man itself, and every man is against every other man in a brutal struggle for survival. When most people think of nationalism this what they imagine: with exclusivity dialed up to genocide with inclusivity notched down to ‘no whiter than marble’. But that’s just one story of America.
There is more than one way to define the world as it exists and nationalism is no different. The far right, the fascists in power, have their story of genocidal brutalism, of a vision of America that embraces the worst crimes in human history. But there’s more than one American story. Everyone else, all the Leftists, all the Liberals, and roughly half of the Centrists can be gathered into a broad tent of shared core cultural beliefs. To be clear: I am not advocating for this big tent to exist, I am saying it already does, every day, right now, and has for years and perhaps decades. It is the inverse of white supremacist Nationalism, a cascading series of generalizations, beliefs, and assumptions, with the golden rule at its core. If I argue for anything, it is that the Left is best in shape, with the best ideas and the best values, to lead the tent to victory. Because again: we all roughly want the same thing, and if the Left has anything, it is the conviction to see it through. We are not collaborators to an illegitimate regime.
What then are these core set of beliefs that the American people broadly speaking share with the Left? Here’s my proposed list, though I am sure it can be added upon and refined endlessly. We share a lot, after all.
We Demand a Multicultural, Pluralistic Society
What this means: Americans by and large do not hate other people based on skin color, gender, appearance, nationality, or religious beliefs. This toleration is legally enforced somewhat impotently but we still live in a society that is far less okay with racism, far far less okay with white supremacy than it has ever been. And it’s true: most people are fine with toleration of others who don’t look or sound like them. The golden rule holds true.
My Take: You’ve seen the signs, surely. The “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE…” signs. They are a meme by now, and it is very hypocritically held (no one is illegal except the unhoused, apparently). Still, other than chiding people we all agree that our society should be even more multicultural and pluralistic.
We Uphold Electoral Democracy
What this means: Americans believe that elections should be regularly and fairly held, with one person, one vote being the universal rule. Only individuals who have the consent of the electorate have the legitimacy to govern.
My Take: debates about electoralism will be the death of us. Let me be very blunt. I want to command the 101st Airborne Division to redeploy to some other city, say, St. Louis. Absent an election where my faction has the Presidency, how would the commander of the 101st obey my command? They wouldn’t, of course. But please: if there’s a way to get the commander of the division to follow my orders without an election, I am desperate to learn. Please, please tell me. I am begging you.
We Want LAW and ORDER
What this means: when people do harm or injustice, Americans want justice: not rehabilitation, but punishment. Punishment should include reparations, mercy should be given only very rarely, and being guilty of a crime in a court of law renders you forever (or until your sentence is complete), a bad person.
My Take: This is the most harm-producing belief that Americans hold, and it’s the one I think we all have the most disagreement with. Mass incarceration, besides evil, is also ineffective and extremely costly. We will never compromise on that. Yet I think there is opportunity here. The public demands justice, and we can give them the juiciest justice possible: Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. We will drag them into the courts, them and their entire criminal organizations, and render the justice that people have been screaming for since the stolen election of 2000, since the illegal invasion of Iraq, since Katrina, since the Great Recession, since the terror bombing of the Middle East, since January 6, and since the acts of genocide. My firmest belief is that a society that allows its elected leaders to do crimes is going to be a society awash in more crime. The only way to ensure order on the streets is not by going after the local thief but targeting the very heart, the very root of all society’s ill: the leadership of both Republican and Democratic parties. We can and should have a discussion for ending mass incarceration, and I do have a plan for that, but allowing obviously guilty criminals to ‘get away with it’ harms our social psyche so much that the creation of special courts and tribunals to handle all these arrests and prosecutions should take precedence over everything else when it comes to broader judicial reform. Besides, changing the way our legal system works comes after we seize power, after we have cleaned up Congress and the Courts (if our faction was in charge we would, in the first 100 days, find ourselves in command of a supermajority in both chambers of Congress, for having swept out all the liars, the cheats, the villains within, all that would be left would be people of good virtue and tireless conviction; then can we talk about building a better society).
Men Are Trash (or: Women Are Right)
What this means: The way many men treat women is gross and dehumanizing. Everyone honest knows there is not a male loneliness epidemic but rather a male sociopathic pandemic. To be a good man is to treat women like humans worthy of respect.
My Take: No, I am not including men who dehumanize women in my tent. They go out, with the genocidaires. Fellas: the Word is out. If you do not treat women honestly, truthfully, like actual fellow human beings, you WILL BE alone FOREVER, and NO ONE will weep for you when you DIE a sad, lonely life.
Hip To Be Queer
What this means: There is no one set way to live your life. As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, it is not the duty of the state or even yourself to care. This falls under the demand to be in a multicultural, pluralistic society.
My Take: yeah I am not going to yuck anyone’s yum, and respecting bodily autonomy is something we can all agree on. It’s those two words: consenting and adult, a combined Commandment that should be universally applied and made the universal standard.
My Body, My Choice, My Doctor
What this means: informed consent is the best model to collect consent for medical care and treatment, and that no one should get between a patient’s prescribed treatment from a doctor, provided said treatment is medically sound.
My Take: Yes, abortion should be legal. Yes, transitioning your gender medically should be legal. All treatments, all medical interventions should follow medical guidelines developed and codified over the millennia since the invention of the science. And yes, this includes allowing children to transition their genders medically. Again: that’s what the science says and it is what medical professionals agree is the best for all parties and thus, it is what we are going to allow. Because, and it must be stated loudly:
I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE
What this means: the scientific method is a good tool and should be used to explain the material world as it exists. Climate change, evolution, gravity, and more can all be explained using the scientific method. Further: we should fund with our tax dollars more science, to learn more about the world we inhabit, to see if we can make it better.
My Take: no, duh. We fucking love science. Even at its worst (OPPENHEIMER), the advancements in human understanding are the best part of the human experience, and definitely the most beautiful part. And think about it. Go back to the beginning. Our brains evolve and we can now communicate more effectively with others, can now use our thumbs more intelligently than ever before. And that’s it: go. Hundreds of thousands of years starting from scratch. The first people didn’t know anything about anything. They started with rocks fashioned into knives which they fastened on wood to make spears. And more, and more, and more: farming to watermills to steam engines. Biplanes to jet planes to spacecraft. Coal to oil to solar power. That is humanity, all of it starting from nothing, an often deadly climb, all a mad dash to something better before extinction catches up with us. Farming fixed the constant starvation problem but that led to inequality. Coal unlocked the ability to solve the equality problem but it also unleashed ruinous climate change. Splitting the atom should be a crime punishable by extermination but who knows? Nuclear power may be the only way we save our planet. It’s all excitingly dreadful! And thus, we fucking love it.
Anti Inherited Wealth, Anti-Nobility
What this means: everyone should be measured by their own contribution to society, not through chance of some lucky birth. Everyone should be given equal opportunity to succeed.
My Take: Who gets private jets? Who gets yachts? Who gets to live in a mansion without ever having to work a single day in their lives? In our world, the hyper-wealthy elite. Whatever you think about those who “earned” their wealth in their lifetime, their offspring certainly are not beholden to any awe or respect, and most assuredly not their billions and billions of dollars, just because they won a random game of chance, played only once, with damning consequences. It should be state policy, enforceable through the estate tax, to deny any snot-nosed, punk-nosed kid the ability to inherit their parents’ wealth and then blow it all on cocaine and parties in Miami. That money will be better spent on building a transcontinental canal and so much more. If you want that life for yourself, you have to get like everyone else: by grinding out some success in a career.
Not Luddites, not Technologists
What this means: Technology is a virtue yet we fear what it will do to the labor markets, as well as what will happen with copyright with AI, not to mention the carbon cost. We need to balance the scale between technological advances and their negative externalities.
My Take: Augustus said it best, and perhaps apocryphally: make haste, slowly. We need to accelerate. We need to go faster, ten times, one hundred thousand times FASTER. FASTER, FASTER, FASTER should be the hue and cry that answers the war drums. Yet, we shouldn’t do so in a way that poisons our rivers, that turns Greenland into an actual green land, that causes millions and millions of workers to starve clothesless on our streets. Let’s avoid that.
Anti-Corruption
What this means: If you steal from the public, either as a private actor or a state employee, the punishment should always be severe. Betraying the public trust like this is a form of treason, and ought to be punished as such. Bribery is a sin.
My Take: This is pretty universal human value in most societies. There is little more to add than yes, we agree. I’m sure everyone has seen all those bankers and provincial officials who have been sentenced to death in China for stealing millions of dollars. It’s an admirable policy. After all, a servant of the state should be treated the same as an army officer. Yes, it’s a hard-knock life but a completely voluntary one. No one is forcing you to be placed in a position of public trust. You chose that life. You wanted that life. You should accept the ultimate responsibility for that trust you seek to claim.
Anti (pointless) war
What this means: War is expensive and brings few benefits back home. Every single job that an F-35 makes would be better spent on far more profitable cash crops. We really should have fewer bases, perhaps none outside the Americas. Whatever we need to accomplish on the world stage can be done through trade and treaties, with our combined economic power as the tantamount leverage.
My Take: Realistically, we cannot abolish the army or navy. Let me speak very bluntly: Europeans still exist and still have navies and still have armies in this world. If we got rid of everything, and I mean everything, what’s to stop a couple of Europeans from getting on a couple of ships and repeating their shameless crime of settler-colonial genocide? I don’t trust them! So yes, I am anti-war. I don’t want to go to war. I don’t think we need to go to war with anyone. But we should still have a fleet-in-being, should still have a national defense force. We can of course massively reduce the overhead and material size of the defense budget (as I detail in Project 2029). But we cannot be a disarmed nation. To do so would invoke disaster.
This is what I mean by a different national idea: none of these ideas are supported by traditional, white supremacist nationalists but they are near-universally held by nearly everyone else. And I do mean everyone. These core set of values, if poll-tested, would be capable of winning 40-80% of the electorate (depending of course on the messenger and how the message was delivered) every single time. It’s certainly not a radical program though I admit without reservation it is certainly revolutionary, at least my take on things. Project 2029 is after all a response to Project 2025 and the 2001 AUMF, a reaction to the precedent of absolute Presidential power having been established. We will do what they did, resolve all heightened contradictions, and make the world a better place.
I am not saying let’s become nationalists, of course, nor even to embrace some sort of socialist nationalist branding (…) but rather to say: we in the Left are all in broad agreement with this combined national idea of America. We may not be proud of America (and indeed we shouldn’t, not until we are in power) or its history (we should never do that!) but we can say that America is a nation of people that deserve a better type of governance, a better set of leaders than the managerial liberals we’ve been doomed with. And then, maybe, just maybe: the people will give us political power, denied the Old and New Left, which we will use absolutely and totally to sweep away all the old tyrannies and usher in a better world.
We should be able to tell people confidently: we believe in an America that has these core national values, and list the list above. We can get more granular in the policy details (see Project 2029) but as a set of agreed-upon beliefs, I see no alternative for us, for me.
I do see three options, three futures, for everyone reading this article, for you. It’s now a personal choice, a personal question. Only you, dear reader, can answer what path is best. I will tell you where each path leads towards its final destination.
In the first path, you become a collaborationist with the Democratic Party. You help elect Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom or whomever, and over the course of a long ignominious career, maybe some things improve. Not because of what you did really, you were just a cog in the machine. And the machine just needed one component to function: dead babies made from American bombs and an immoral, incorrect foreign policy. If that’s you: get out. You’re not in the tent. I banish you from the histories.
In the second, you become a dedicated trained revolutionary cadre. You train in the mountains. You organize on the streets. The cops know your face thanks to AI spotting. If you act too violently you will martyr yourself. If you don’t you’ll eventually, through the aging process, have to settle down and stop your activities, and that’s if you’re not in prison or dead. The world material conditions you were waiting for, that Marx himself waited for his entire life, that all those Old Leftists and New Leftists waited for, never fundamentally change. You wait, you resist, and then you die: for this path ends in death. A lifetime only of personal hardship. I am hardly ever wrong about these things. And if material conditions do change, don’t get wrong, I will be on the barricades right beside you. But only when the Bastille is under siege, not before.
This was the choice the New Left had to make, to become either Tom Hayden or Bill Ayers, and it’s a choice that ended for both in tragic failure.
The third option is that we meet Americans where they are ideologically, that we incite their passions and their anger against the status quo, that we exploit tactical weaknesses in America’s political system (weak parties, lack of popular support for either party, corruption in the establishment elite, and unpopular positions held by both parties), that we embrace my Project 2029 and other further writings and use all of it to capture total and absolute power for ourselves and our better world. We will run as Democrats, we will run as Republicans. We will run for dog-catcher and sewage inspector. We will run in districts with no hope of success, we will run in the ditches and in the fields. We will be a tidal wave of history, sweeping away all known politics and conditions with a single blow. And at the end of it all: a majority of Americans will be begging us to take power.