The Death of the Authentic Left

The political left died in stages and then all at once:

• It died when communist workers’ parties went nationalist at the start of World War I and thus killed each other rather than saying no to bankers’ wars.

• It died during the Moscow Show Trials from 1936 to 1938 that showed the grotesque extremes of Stalin’s Russia.

• It died in 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, thus revealing that the “reforms” of Khrushchev and Brezhnev were an illusion. 

• The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people in the Soviet satellite countries overthrew their rulers soon thereafter, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991. 

• Formerly left political parties across the developed world pivoted away from their founding principles. The Labor Party in Australia implemented neoliberalism in 1983. In 1992, Bill Clinton made neoliberalism the central ideology of the Democratic Party in the US Tony Blair then copied this strategy in the UK from 1997 through 2007. 

• By the early 2000s, the actually existing political left was mostly an artifact in history textbooks, not a viable political movement anywhere in the world. 

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Witnessing the death of the left up close 

I spent 30 years looking for the political left. Like Winston Smith in 1984, I was driven by the idealistic notion that surely a revolutionary alternative must exist. 

For undergrad (1988 to 1992) I attended the most left college I could find, Swarthmore. When George H.W. Bush launched his war in Iraq there were about twenty of us who came together to oppose it. Out of that group, only about five were committed to actual political organizing to stop the war. There were no openly Marxian professors. 

In 1990, I traveled to Central America where the left had been devastated by decades of authoritarian rule and outright genocide. I worked on a Sandinista cattle cooperative in the one left success story in the region, Nicaragua. I mostly encountered machismo, not some transcendent grassroots political theory. Now Nicaragua under the Sandinistas has regressed into the brutal authoritarianism it once sought to overthrow. 

In the 2000s, I wanted to go to law school to study Critical Legal Theory but there were only two professors left in the country still doing work in that area and they were nearing retirement. The annual conference on Critical Legal Theory in the US had stopped meeting and there were no journals producing good work on the topic. I wrote about this a while back on my Substack. 

I did a master of public policy degree at UC Berkeley from 2010 to 2012 and discovered that the revolutionary spirit left that place back in the 1960s. My public policy classes were filled with professors drawing graphs on the chalkboard showing how the minimum wage and labor unions were inefficient. The few lefty faculty still remaining at UC Berkeley were in the Geography department and they all spoke a coded language that is impossible to understand from the outside (so, no revolution from them). 

I did my Ph.D. from 2014 to 2019 at the most radical political economy department I could find. There were a few Marxian faculty remaining but they mostly focused on historical projects. The newer faculty were writing postmodern meditations on time and space (so, no revolution from them) and endless critiques of neoliberalism (which functions as a sort of make-work permanent employment plan for the left that never actually threatens existing power structures). 

My three-decade search for the political left revealed a series of ghost towns. Like Winston Smith, I discovered that The Brotherhood only exists as an idea, not as an actually existing political movement. 

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The curious resurrection of a movement that does not exist

It is more than a little curious then that the left agenda is back, given that the actually existing political left contains almost no members. Everywhere one looks the left agenda is ascendant:

• climate change; 
• corporations being brought into alignment with leftist values via the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) scores; 
• 15 minute cities; 
• green energy; 
• Black Lives Matter; 
• Pride clothes, parades, marches, month, politicians… 

Everywhere one looks, it’s all leftism all the time — again with little actual popular political support to drive these changes. 

So what is going on?

Almost all of the supposed “leftism” that one sees today is being driven from above by capital. The people driving this agenda are:

• the big investment managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street); 
• the World Economic Forum; 
• the CIA; and 
• Big Philanthropy (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc.). 

The billionaires, the oligarchs, the holders of capital, the richest people in the world, are driving the “left” agenda. They write about it in their annual letters to shareholders and they talk about it nonstop in public speeches — this is their vision for how they want to remake the world. 

The ruling class uses a whole host of bougiecrats to implement the plan including:

• the management consultants (McKinsey, PWC, Booz Allen); 
• the PR Firms (Edelman, Weber Shandwick, Hill+Knowlton, Ogilvy); and 
• the thoroughly corporate Democratic Party. 

No actual leftists are involved in this process at all. 

At first this makes no sense. The political left and the billionaires should be mortal enemies. But somehow the billionaires are playing dress-up, pretend, cosplay leftism while the actual left base does not exist. 

Okay, so let’s think through why this might be the case. Let’s look at this from the perspective of the ruling class that is implementing this agenda:

If one wants to take over the world, it helps to have a movement or at least the appearance of a movement. 

The political right is bad at movement politics. For conservatives, the fundamental unit of society is the individual, not the collective. Social movements make conservatives cringe. So if one wants to take over the world, one needs to embrace the aesthetics and rhetoric of the left (while excluding any actual leftists who might get in the way). The appearance of a movement gives legitimacy to this ruling class project for world domination. 

The trillion dollar grifts of the ruling class require massive government spending.

So again, one cannot run that through the political right; they are too busy trying to shrink government (they often fail at that, but that’s their stated goal). The trillion dollar vaccine grift, the trillion dollar health insurance grift, and endless multi-trillion dollar wars all around the world require a political party that believes in Big Government. So the ruling class has to run these grifts through the Democratic Party. 

The corporate embrace of astroturf leftism actually makes sense from a marketing perspective.

• Women make up half the population, so including women doubles the size of the market. 
• The spending power of dual income gay and lesbian couples (who are often childless) is massive, so they are a coveted market as well. 
• People of color, of course, a huge market (most of the world). 
• Regardless of one’s theory of what’s driving this phenomenon, people who identify as trans are the fastest growing segment of the population (upwards of 5% of young people identify as non-binary or trans according to the latest Pew survey). So any corporation that wants to grow its profits has to figure out how to tap into the trans market (without alienating their other customers too). Lots of these corporate executives and PR executives have trans kids too, so of course they want to include them as well. 

It should be noted that none of these corporations are being forced to do anything —they are eagerly embracing the instructions from above as if they were their own ideas. 

It’s a lot easier to oppress and enslave people if they do not realize that they are being oppressed and enslaved.

• ‘No sweetie, you’re not being poisoned, made a debt slave, and drained of all income and wealth — you are being saved from deadly diseases through Safe & Effective Vaccines™️!’
• ‘No sweetie, you’re not being chained to Central Bank Digital Currency, imprisoned in 15-minute cities, and forced to eat synthetic food — you’re saving the planet and yourself from Catastrophic Climate Change™️!’
• ‘No sweetie, you’re not being sterilized and castrated in order to reduce the population and enrich the ruling class — you’re being empowered to be your True Authentic Self™️!’

So the left political project now is just kitsch, a toxic mimic of its former self, deployed by the ruling class to enslave and depopulate the world. 

The question is, why are so few people on the left able to see this? Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore, to name a few, should have been able to spot the Covid psyop in about 5 minutes. Instead they became rabid cheerleaders for fascism. 

I have a few attempts at an answer:

1. I think the left identifies with the ruling class at this point; 
2. After losing for 150 years straight it must have felt nice to finally start winning, albeit in service of everything they once opposed; and 
3. The modern left took to fascism like a duck to water so the authoritarian tendencies must have been there all along. 

But there is no reason the rest of us have to go along with this sick and twisted charade. We must speak simple truths out loud every day:

• There is no political left. 
• The current scheme (of endless pandemics, vaccines, lucrative treatments for vaccine harms, CBDC, fake food, 15-minute cities, 5G, internet of bodies, 24/7/365 surveillance, social credit scores, digital vaccine passports, etc.) is being run from above by the ruling class. 
• The ruling class seeks to enslave and depopulate the world. 
• They must be stopped by any means necessary. 
• When we expose the architects of the iatrogenocide, our life expectancy and standard of living will soar. 
• Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, free markets, and free people produce the best outcomes for people on this planet. Let’s return to that. 

Republished from the author’s Substack