If you look at the successful leftist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one thing they had in common was the ability to stay on message. Photos of rallies for the 8-hour day show placards calling for 8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation, and 8 hours of rest. They do not show people carrying signs for a bunch of other unrelated issues. Yet if you look at protests today, they’re somehow all about everything. Even the Women’s March (which in theory had the potential to focus on one issue: women) managed to also be about global warming, immigration, and trans rights. 

Fredrik DeBoer traces this messaging confusion back to Occupy Wall Street, where themes of “women’s rights, freeing Palestine, and veganism were somewhat awkwardly bolted onto the action.” How these issues are meant to relate to one another is never clear. (Is Hamas really at the vanguard of gay liberation?) But they serve as a purity test: you cannot support us on this cause, unless you also hold the correct view on a raft of other topics. 

This inability to stick with an issue is just one symptom of the disease DeBoer diagnoses in today’s left in his new book, How The Elites Ate The Social Justice Movement. He sees Zuccotti Park as patient zero in a line of activist groups and causes that have fallen victim to this syndrome. 

DeBoer has built a career as a writer of often-incisive essays addressing the culture wars. He skewers limousine liberals from the left, and regularly takes on other online posers. One example is his list of “Good White Men”: prominent online figures of the insufferable, smug, politically-correct variety. These are the kind of people who talk about how awful “white men” are but won’t shut up themselves. In this book, the Good White Men are one of the groups who have, as DeBoer sees it, hijacked the goals of the left. In his descriptions, one can hear a long howl of frustration from a man who has spent years doing grassroots activism, only to have his socialist goals pushed aside by identity politics and elitist posturing.

However, this is not in itself a new challenge for the left. Even during the greatest periods of strength for the labor movement, champagne socialists, middle-class do-gooders, student radicals, and other dilettantes have always been attempting to steer the boat.

But according to DeBoer, in the United States, this has reached epidemic level. He feels the real left has scant political representation, and in places where it does operate with any kind of force, such as the NGO and nonprofit spheres, it is overrun by the overeducated expressing luxury beliefs which often have little to do with actually improving the daily lives of their fellow man. (And why would they? The fundraising gravy train goes straight to the non-profit boardroom.)

In previous generations, blue-collar labor unions could throw their (considerable) weight around. Their endorsement could make or break a candidacy, and they could act as a counterbalance to the white-collar activists. Now they’re a hull of their former selves, and the elite left have no interest in hearing from the people they represent. It’s not so much that the left doesn’t support workers. It’s that some of the self-declared “socialists” of this new elitist left give the impression that they think being a blue-collar worker would be an appalling fate, deserved only by those who didn’t make the effort to go to college (and are probably straight white men anyway so who cares). 

At least the mid-century parlor pinks paid lip service to lionizing the steelworker or the miner as the backbone of society. Now those workers are more likely to get a sneering “learn to code” on X (formerly Twitter) from someone with #socialist in their bio. As DeBoer describes it, “There are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class—an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics—as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class.”

That’s gotta be a tough sell down at the UAW Hall. 

I found myself nodding along with much of DeBoer’s book. He’s right that the post-Floyd “racial reckoning” led to more symbolic change than actual, with activism focused on “representation” in niche fields that don’t include 99.99% of humanity, of any race (#oscarssowhite anyone?). Corporations fell over themselves to parade their diversity, but as he notes, “there is little connection between Netflix beating the bushes to find Black and Hispanic stand-up comics to give specials to, and the quality of day-to-day life in minority neighborhoods.” Elite whites all bought a copy of White Fragility, wrote a check to Black Lives Matter, and went back about their business. 

Currently, much of the visible left (online activists, authors of newspaper op-eds) concern themselves with making noise about things that are either irrelevant to most people (microaggressions, campus brouhahas), or actively alienating to many (defund the police, justifications for rioting). None of this gets people on board with voting for expanded government healthcare, or better transit, or a higher minimum wage. But it raises the activists’ profile among their own cohort, which is the point. 

Some of DeBoer’s main thesis is not new. Thomas Frank (among others) has highlighted the conscious decision of left parties over the past generation to focus on the educated elites rather than the labor movement. From the 1970s, they abandoned the old proletariat in search of new ones (women, immigrants). They’ve spent decades now encouraging a discourse of identity based on racial or gender lines, rather than on economics. 

There are deeper tensions here, however. While DeBoer sees the elites as having hijacked social justice, the modern concept of “social justice” is an elite project. It is specifically a rebuke to the old left’s class advocacy and historic focus on redistribution of resources. The elite invented “Social Justice.” It is not about equality (still less the rising of the worker). Its message is about distribution of equity (vaguely defined) along a hierarchy of identity-based deservingness. That it allows some of society’s most advantaged to declare themselves as members of this new deserving proletariat is a feature, not a bug. In highly competitive fields, being a “POC” is a card to play, and educated white people claiming a minority ethnic heritage to take advantage of this has become something of a cottage industry. 

People with graduate degrees in six-figure jobs self-defining as marginalized is ridiculous to anyone outside the movement, but to the po-faced within the Social Justice tent, these identity-based claims are scripture. Their hierarchies of power are as nuanced as the niceties of social rank in an Edith Wharton novel, and have little to do with the old Marxist economic order. 

DeBoer, whose ambition is old-school socialist redistribution, wants the left to return to an economic focus. They should look to improving everyone’s financial situation first, and get there by sending a message of working for the collective. Stop being “anti” everything, which focuses entirely on what you’re against rather than what you’re for. Ditch the -isms and the negativity. 

As he puts it, “You can’t build unity by fixating on difference; it’s nonsensical.”

He is right about that, and the fact is, you can’t get broad social programs without broad public buy-in. And people buy into things they think will benefit themselves and people like them. 

“This is for everyone!” is a strong message. “This is for [niche group you are not in]” is not going to resonate with most voters. And yet it is the rake on which the left continues to step. 

The more the left pushes division and difference, the further they seem to get from actual programs they claim to want. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example—a fundraising powerhouse on the left—devotes much of its time to labeling “extremists” which range from random weirdo websites to groups like Moms For Liberty. How exactly this relates to poverty law is unclear (their scattergun approach once put their “extremist” label on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is supposedly “anti-Muslim”). Is this really helping the disadvantaged? To put it more bluntly: do they want to run around accusing people of white supremacy, or do they want insulin to cost $5?

I don’t share DeBoer’s politics, but I do sympathize with some of his goals. We do need a society whose members see themselves as part of a larger whole. This is not just a message for the hard left. In his words, “As we busily undermine faith, national identity, and all other ways human beings create meaning, we risk standing for nothing and thus losing everything.”