On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get home to Cheddar Bunnies and apple juice; instead, she was watching me fumble with a series of locked doors outside a local high school in Brooklyn. As it started to rain, I realized that my problem was acute: I had to explain to the hungry four-year-old on my shoulders why I had taken a precious chunk of her afternoon in order to cast an empty ballot.
She realized it, too, with a ring of triumph in her voice: “But if you’re not voting for anybody, Daddy, why do you have to vote?” I was doing this to register dissent from President Biden’s military support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which had already killed more than 32,000 Palestinians. Still, these were not promising circumstances for geopolitical education. I muttered something about how it would take only five minutes, found the right door, and ducked inside.
In New York, there was no entry for “uncommitted”; instead, protest organizers urged voters to leave their ballots entirely blank. This suggested an opportunity to enact one’s fundamental contempt for the political system: you could take a ballot from the check-in table and, without bothering to look at it, dramatically thrust the unmarked sheet into the scanner. But with Irving Howe’s words about “radicalism of gesture” in my head, I decided against such a flourish, however instructive it may have been for the eight-odd poll workers in the Park Slope gymnasium. Instead, much less ridiculously, I took my daughter with me to a booth, pretended to deliberate for about thirty seconds, furrowed my brow at the names of Biden’s delegates, and handed in the blank ballot.
There was a grim clarity about these proceedings that was, somehow, not at all relieved by their absurdity. It felt like a parable of the left’s melancholy journey over the past half century. From “be realistic, demand the impossible,” we have arrived at “be principled, elect the nonexistent.” In New York State, the nonexistent polled at 11.5 percent.
How different it all was four years ago. On March 1, 2020, with the sun bright in the sky and the Nevada caucuses fresh in memory, I’d strapped my baby daughter to my chest and joined a group canvassing for Bernie Sanders in Somerville, Massachusetts. Though badly beaten in South Carolina the day before, Sanders still led the overall delegate race. In a jumbled field, hopes were high for Super Tuesday victories that would put his campaign—and the social-democratic platform it stood for—in pole position for the Democratic nomination.
Of course, that is not what happened. Just hours after the last door was knocked on in Somerville, Pete Buttigieg abruptly ended his campaign. The next day, he joined Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Harry Reid, and a host of other luminaries endorsing Joe Biden in a triumphant celebration of Democratic unity. With new momentum and around $100 million of free media at his back, Biden vaulted upward in the polls, won a crushing victory on Super Tuesday, and cruised to the nomination.
In retrospect, March 2020 marked not only the end of the Sanders campaign, but also the closing act of a long decade of international struggle. On both sides of the Atlantic, the 2008 recession unleashed fitful waves of discontent that eventually cohered into left-wing movements of a recognizably populist stripe: in Greece, where Syriza led the fight against European Union austerity; in Spain, where Podemos, led by an improbably ponytailed political scientist, surged to the top of the polls; in France, where Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s brand-new movement emerged as the strongest force on the left; and in Britain, where the lifelong backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, flanked by a brigade of young socialists, suddenly took the helm of the Labour Party.
As Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger argue in The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, the Sanders campaigns followed the same essential trajectory as these European struggles. After waxing larger than anyone could have foreseen—with more popular support and influence than left-wing movements had had in over a generation—they found themselves neutralized, normalized, reordered, splintered, or in the case of Corbynism, forcibly liquidated.
And if we cast a wider lens, the picture does not get much brighter. Between 2010 and 2020, per the journalist Vincent Bevins, more people took part in political protests than at any other time in human history: in Egypt, Chile, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, millions of ordinary citizens took to the streets to demand fundamental change. Yet by the close of “the mass protest decade,” few of these street movements had achieved anything close to what they had sought. In some places, like Syria, they led to savage repression and state violence; in others, like Brazil, decentralized protests inadvertently smoothed the path for right-wing reaction.
Today, the global electoral left barely registers a pulse. In 2024, billed as the biggest election year in history, about half of the world’s population has headed or will head to the polls, from Algeria and Britain to Pakistan and Indonesia. “Can democracy survive 2024?” asks the Financial Times. If it does, it will have to do so without popular left-wing politics. Apart from Claudia Sheinbaum, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s successor in Mexico, one may scan this global election cycle and struggle to find a major candidate or party meaningfully to the left of Joe Biden. La non-existence, c’est nous.
What are the prospects for the left in America? Despite decades of much lamented, much celebrated decline, the United States plainly remains, in the words of Joe Biden quoting Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation.” That is, it continues to be the nerve center of global capitalism, the political headquarters of liberal democracy, and from Kyiv to Jerusalem, the backbone and arsenal of the rich world’s alliance system. An underlying premise of the Sanders campaigns, after all, had been that a left-wing victory in the United States would mean real change for the rest of the world, too.
After Sanders lost in 2020, disappointment soon gave way to guarded optimism. Electing a cranky Vermont socialist to be president of the United States had always been a moon shot, anyway. And even in defeat, Sanders had revealed a huge base for social democracy that, just five years before, few knew existed. More than two thirds of Americans supported Medicare for All; almost as many favored free public-college tuition. A breathless New York Times proclaimed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 the largest movement in u.s. history. And in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Biden and other world leaders taking unprecedented measures to prop up the economy, a crop of commentators hailed the end of the neoliberal era.
More concretely, within the modest but invigorated American left, the stage seemed set for a period of institution building and winnable local struggles. The successful teachers’ strikes of 2018–19, largely led by left-wing organizers, had seemed to open a new front for the labor movement. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, on the rise since 2016, continued to grow; the print circulation of Jacobin surpassed that of The New Republic. Proudly socialist candidates won elections to city councils and state legislatures, and in Congress, the Progressive Caucus now claimed close to a hundred representatives. As recently as 2014, Adolph Reed Jr. pronounced the death of the left on the cover of this magazine. Just seven years later, the nearly one hundred thousand dues-paying members of a revitalized DSA seemed to prove him wrong.
Perhaps that future still beckons. The most promising development in U.S. politics is the emergence of a more forceful labor movement. Boosted in part by a sympathetic National Labor Relations Board, roughly half a million American workers went on strike last year, the second-largest number since 1986. The United Auto Workers, SAG-AFTRA, and health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente all emerged victorious after a series of work stoppages, while the Teamsters, under militant new leadership, won a major contract with UPS. This growing unrest did not seem to rattle public support for trade unions, which, according to AFL-CIO data, now tops 70 percent.
Yet it remains unclear if this burst of action, and the rather hazy good vibes around it, will help build larger unions. Graphs showing the declining share of American workers who are union members since the Eighties resemble the gradient of Park Slope: gentle enough for a four-year-old to sled down, but very likely, in the end, to land you in the Gowanus Canal. Last year, despite all the ruckus, the number dipped to a record low of 10 percent. In the private sector—the heartbeat of any real struggle against capital—the figure has declined to just 6 percent. The UAW’s campaign to organize autoworkers in the South, sometimes portrayed as an offensive thrust into new territory, is perhaps no more than a desperate struggle to stay alive.
Elsewhere, the forward march of the Sanders left has been halted. DSA membership peaked in 2021 and has dropped off since. A socialist organization with sixty thousand active participants is no doubt better than one with six thousand, but hopes for true mass membership now seem fanciful.
As class dealignment transforms the broader Democratic Party—with blue-collar workers leaving and professionals joining the fold—it is also churning its way through progressive politics. The result is an electoral left that wins seats in certain well-educated urban neighborhoods but struggles to reach beyond them. The 2016 Sanders campaign, which swamped Hillary Clinton’s in places like downstate Illinois and central Pennsylvania, pointed in another direction. Even in 2020, when his rural support shrank, Sanders still reached a wider base: in Massachusetts, he lost Somerville and Cambridge (to Elizabeth Warren, naturally) but won working-class Lowell and Holyoke. Today, though, the left appears stranded in something like Greater Somerville, which speckles the map from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to Denver but has little relationship with the vast country beyond.
Thus cabined, cribbed, and confined, the left can hardly be surprised that its agenda has again dropped out of sight. When pundits like Jonathan Chait claim that “left-wing ideas” have gained “wider circulation” and “more influence in politics,” they betray a calculated obtuseness about what constitutes a left-wing idea in the first place. Yes, on certain contentious issues amenable to the Democrats’ new professional-class base—abortion, climate change, anti-racism—progressive organizations are more tightly woven into the Democratic Party than they used to be. But when it comes to economic reform, the yelps of activists are drowned out by the roar of what is no longer under discussion.
A grotesque inequality, in which the top 1 percent controls about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, has become entrenched and naturalized, with even modest efforts to limit CEOs’ pay dead on arrival in congressional committees. “Bidenomics” at its height could not even manage to repeal Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts. Nor did the supposed “most progressive president since FDR” seriously push to expand Medicare; the words “single-payer” have fallen out of our newspapers—and our consciousness.
The fate of Biden’s Build Back Better Plan—from a $6 trillion spending proposal floated by Sanders to the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers billions in green tax credits but not a single major new social program—provided another lesson in the real-world punching power of left-wing ideas. To be sure, in the past decade Democrats and Republicans have abandoned the fiscal straitjacket of the Nineties, drifting away from laissez-faire economics and toward more nationalist policies on trade, infrastructure, and immigration. But this “neopopulism,” to use David Leonhardt’s term, springs from bipartisan concerns about the rise of China; it owes far more to figures like Jake Sullivan and J. D. Vance than the 2010s populism of Sanders or Syriza. If it does offer an opening for creative politics, it is not at all clear that the existing American left is strong or savvy enough to seize it.
Nothing, ultimately, has dramatized left-wing impotence as vividly as the carnage in Gaza. There, Israel has leveled whole neighborhoods, displaced about two million civilians, and killed or injured roughly one out of every fifty children in Gaza with bombs handsomely supplied by the United States. Despite this devastation, the Biden Administration has maintained its “ironclad” support for Israel, backed by virtually the entire Democratic Party.
In April, Congress passed a bill sending $26.4 billion in further military aid to Israel—an act not merely of complicity but de facto participation in the war. (Israel’s military expenditure in 2023 was nearly $27.5 billion.) Left-wing dissent was loud but limited. In the House of Representatives, only thirty-seven Democrats objected. In the Senate, the number was just two, plus the independent Sanders. The nationwide protest movement against the war has won over few elected officials.
In this landscape, it makes sense to salute the courage of the tiny minority who have denounced U.S. aid to Israel. Yet it is no less crucial that the left ask why its own forces have become so feeble. “O look, look in the mirror,” Auden wrote, “O look in your distress.” The Gaza debate has shown that the Progressive Caucus is an empty shell, and that the Squad—appropriately named, alas—is no substitute for a regiment, much less an army. It is the expression of an American left that can only speak truth to power, even when the point, as the man said many years ago, is to change it.
At their best, the Sanders campaigns sought not merely to object to a rancid establishment but to construct a force that might one day overthrow it. That involved not just outrage or inspiration but disciplined attention to America’s existing political topography. With a focus that continually disappointed some left-wing critics, Sanders remained on terrain where he knew a working-class majority could stand behind him: the rapacity of the billionaire class and the rigged system that serves it.
That terrain always included a call for a more peaceful U.S. foreign policy, one less beholden to warlike right-wing regimes in Saudi Arabia and Israel. In the current conflict, the problem is not that this position is out of step with national opinion. (Little more than a third of all Americans, Gallup has found, approve of Israel’s war in Gaza; our intimate alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu is the work of the U.S. political class, not a popular mandate.) The problem is that the American left has failed to develop a politics capable of winning over the American public. The casualties of this failure now stretch all the way from Washington to Rafah.
