Is there a Left in the 21st century?

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Presented at the closing plenary panel discussion of the Platypus Affiliated Society 17th annual international convention at the University of Chicago, with Andrew Hartman (historian, author of Karl Marx in America, 2025), Branko Marcetic (Jacobin Magazine),and Alex Higgins (Prometheus Journal).

Ironically, it might only be now that the 21st century is really beginning. But this comes after the death of the Millennial Left, which strived but failed to be true to what was new and different about the 21st century, instead falling back on rehearsing and repeating the 20th century, to which it remained beholden. But the demand of 20th century history was to overcome it. Capitalism is already doing so. 

Meanwhile, what the Millennial Left abandoned as its task has been taken up by Trump. Trump, as the last 20th century political figure, is finally ushering in the 21st. 

Trump began his political ambitions in the 1980s Reaganite neoliberal boom era of optimism that gave birth to the Millennial generation. — Unfortunately, they entered adulthood just when first the War on Terror and then the Great Recession hit, robbing them of their life-chances. The first political response to these twin crises was Obama’s election in 2008. But Obama’s failure led to the Republican Tea Party revolt and Occupy Wall Street. When Obama was reelected in 2012, both Bernie Sanders and Trump decided to run in 2016: Bernie to represent the dashed hopes of the Millennials; Trump to finally, after several election cycles of hesitation and frustration, throw his hat in the ring. But where Trump was determined to win election in 2016, Bernie aspired only to shape the Democrats’ program and message, winning back the young voters who elected Obama in 2008 but were disaffected by 2016. Both Trump and Bernie offered to fulfill the Millennial promise betrayed by Obama. 

But this betrayal began long before, at the very beginning of the new Millennium and indeed earlier. Trump first floated his Presidential ambition in 1987, towards the end of Reagan’s 2nd term and in response to the dawning end of the Soviet Union, Iran-Contra debacle, Reagan’s illegal immigration amnesty, and the Black Monday stock market crash. 

Trump believed the promise of American renewal signaled by Reagan was being squandered. He was attracted to the political campaign of Texan computer systems engineer and entrepreneur billionaire Ross Perot, whose run in 1992 cost Reagan’s Vice President Bush Sr. reelection and allowed Bill Clinton to win with a minority of the votes. But in 2000 Trump left the Reform Party Perot had started when it was taken over by Reagan’s speech-writer Pat Buchanan, whom Trump called a “fascist,” decrying him as too Right-wing – too nationalist, too culturally conservative. 

So what was potentially squandered by the U.S. after the Cold War? It was called the “peace dividend” at the time. What was this based on? First, as I have written about Milton Friedman, it must be understood that neoliberalism was not anti- but post-Fordism, an attempt to realize the potential of Fordism. This is why Trump and his following can appear as harking back both to the 1950s and the 1990s – bookending the long New Left era. The post-Cold War New World Order announced by Bush Sr. at the time of the Gulf War in 1991 suggested not a peace dividend but the continuing of supposed “military Keynesianism” of the “permanent arms economy” in the “military-industrial complex” – which Eisenhower warned of in 1960. So we are haunted not only by the problems of neoliberalism but mid-20^th century Fordism as well. The past Trump recalled was uncomfortable – to say nothing of his newfound fondness for William McKinley and embrace of the 19th century Gilded Age era of tariff industrial protectionism. It recalls a pre-Progressivism capitalism.

Trump had been somewhat assuaged by Clinton’s victory in 1992, but soon felt betrayed, specifically by Clinton’s embracing NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that had been negotiated by the prior Bush  Administration and Clinton had denounced in his 1992 campaign — and had been Perot’s central target, famously warning of the “giant sucking sound” in the American economy and society it portended. 

Trump was a dissident to 1990s neoliberal globalization – also the target of the “Left” at the time, as seen in 1999’s Battle of Seattle, at which labor unions demonstrably dumped foreign goods, in a call-back of sorts to the Boston Tea Party of the American Revolution and War of Independence.

In 2000, at the end of the Clinton Presidency, and after Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in Congress, giving rise not to the “vast Right-wing conspiracy” Hillary saw in the Monica Lewinsky affair but rather “Bipartisan Bill,” Trump was with Jesse Ventura in the Reform Party bolting from Buchanan’s American nationalist conservatism that abandoned Ross Perot’s original Reform Party’s common-sense Centrism. Soon afterwards, Trump supported Hillary Clinton’s run for Senate and invited the Clintons to his wedding to Melania.

George W. Bush won the 2000 election promising to abandon what he called the “arrogance” of Clintonian globalism, attacking Clinton and his VP Al Gore’s “nation-building” foreign policy. Of course 9/11 reversed this ironically and turned Bush’s Presidency into the neoliberal global crusade of the Project for a New American Century that had been hatched previously by Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Trump was an early critic of the War on Terror and rode discontents with the “forever wars” into the White House, becoming the peace President Obama only promised but failed to be: the clearest indicator of counties voting for Trump was military family density, bearing the brunt of the traumatic wars that became the longest in U.S. history. And military families are predominantly, overwhelmingly working-class, as the “poverty draft” had manned the U.S. military after the Vietnam era.

In 2016, Trump said he wanted the Republican Party to represent the working class and warned against it being the conservative party — he said American politics unlike other countries didn’t need a conservative party. He has often said that because he ran as a Republican he had to tailor his message to win Republican voters, but that it would have been different if he had run as a Democrat. He sought in his first term to craft a new bipartisan consensus, and even welcomed the new Democrat Congressional majority in the midterm election as an opportunity to ally with Democrats and break Republican resistance to his policies, for instance on infrastructure spending. 

I narrate Trump’s political career in order, as myself a Gen X Leftist, to show how it parallels discontents of the Left throughout these preceding decades: opposition to NAFTA and neoliberal globalization more generally; disaffection with the two Presidencies of the post-Reagan neoliberal era Clinton and Obama; and rejection of the cultural conservatism of the Reagan Revolution. While Trump was never a progressive, he was always a middle-of-the-road moderate — as has been and will always be the preponderant majority of the working class. Trump was and remains a “Reagan Democrat” — meaning someone who could represent the working-class “swing voters” that decide elections in capitalist politics, but who never agree with the self-conceptions of policymakers or campaign marketers, to whom both appealing to the working class appears as chimerical folly and Trump ultimately makes no sense. 

But a real socialist Left would have to make — better — sense of Trump’s appeal, while also sharing the frustration with capitalist politics and policy that he represents politically. Socialists would have to represent such discontents better than Trump does. Ever since Reagan or perhaps Nixon, the Republicans have represented dissent against the dominant Democratic Party progressive liberal political order — which the “Left” is oriented around.

I have spent the last 20 years accompanying the Millennial and now Zoomer Left as a teacher — I spent the prior 20 years, 40 in total now, as a Leftist, going back to my high school activism and reading from Marxism. The Millennial Left is now as old biologically as I am as a self-conscious Leftist and Marxist. I can say that the problems have remained the same throughout that time. And “nothing new” means precisely that something different must be done now on the Left. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about 40 years — an entire Biblical generation — in the desert. I can attest to that being my time. Is something possible now, in the new century and millennium, that wasn’t previously? If the older generations had to go under so that a new one could enter the Promised Land — or at least embark on the road to it — that time is now. Perhaps the Millennials were not the first of the 21st but the last of the 20th.

There was a time, a long time ago, namely more than a century now, when the socialist Left could and did make sense of working class discontents and aspirations to overcome the manifest problems of capitalism, and were able to build out of this a mass base for socialist politics, independently of capitalist politics. This was before socialism liquidated itself into capitalist progressivism starting in the 1920s and ‘30s and growing ever more desperate and implausible through the 1960s and ‘70s New Left, up through the recent failure of the Millennial Left. 

The Democrats have long been called the “graveyard of the Left” — more specifically, the “graveyard of movements” — but that means it’s where they go after they die, not what killed them. They committed suicide, as Leftist movements, and this is how they ended up in the Democratic Party, actually giving it new life. 

How did they kill themselves, politically? By abandoning their ambition. Why did they do so? Because they could see no way forward. This is where we are now: a sense of profound impasse. 

But Trump is moving forward. Does the Left hope only for Trump to be mired in their own inability to change: their “resistance”? 

At the outset of the Millennial Left, by contrast, it was capitalist politics that seemed resistant to change, and the Left that wanted to move things forward. 

This is where progressivism manifested its problem: Was socialism progressive, or did it seek to return to a lost past? Did the Millennials seek to undo neoliberalism, or to move beyond it? The socialist impulse gave way to progressivism, because socialism was embraced according to its neoliberal definition: welfare statism contra private property and civil social freedom. The freedom of the capitalists was disgusting; and the freedom of the workers was scary. 

The Democrats were not always the “progressive” capitalist party but only became so with FDR, and in many respects fully only after LBJ. The socialist Eugene Debs ended his political life in the late 1920s supporting the “progressive” Republican La Follette. This augured the later Communist Party support for FDR and his New Deal in the Popular Front against war and fascism that prevented neither. Closing the 20th century now means breaking with that tradition of Democratic Party progressivism that defined it. It was always and remains permanently the terminus of socialism.

The opportunity for moving on today for a potentially socialist movement and politics is the crisis of neoliberalism and the changes in capitalism resulting from it. But not at the level of policy but society. Back in the 1980s-90s, the Reagan Revolution was used as an excuse to abandon socialism — by my mentors Adolph Reed and Moishe Postone, for instance — and the Trump Revolution is being used similarly now. The problem is that would-be socialists never rose to the occasion of the crisis of capitalism met back in the 1070s-80s  by neoliberalism — and the Millennials failed to do so in the crisis of neoliberalism of the 2000s-10s, defining themselves against Trumpian post-neoliberalism, and seeing only a chimerical mirage of somehow undoing neoliberalism and returning to pre-neoliberal capitalism of the 20th century.

Ironically, both Trump and the Millennial Left yearned for a return to the 1990s boom era that was the height of neoliberalism, before the War on Terror and Great Recession. But both dressed up this nostalgia as a desire for a more mythic past that never was: perhaps the post-WWII “Golden Age,” or an even deeper past of humanity and true grit, whether of the 1930s Great Depression New Deal and its heroic “anti-fascism,” or of Gilded Age Second Industrial Revolution and Second International socialism against the Robber Barrons: the time of McKinley and William Jennings Bryan Populism that led to the Progressive Era. 

But — bookending the other side of the 20th century — Bryan’s Populism as well as Roosevelt’s Progressivism failed, leading instead to Woodrow Wilson and WWI: the 20th century of war, revolution and catastrophe, in fascism and communism; an end to capitalism — and its apocalyptic continuation after the end of the world. 

The Millennials tried but failed to snap out of this nightmare weighing from the past century, but were shocked by the rude awakening provided by Trump. — Their “awokening” in response was just a depressed return to restless sleep, an insistence on staying bedridden in the 20th century, long after its convalescence was over, in an endemic PTSD response. 

The Millennials refused to read the poetry of the Trumpian future, insisting instead that capitalism could not survive — if not capitalism, then the human race or the Earth itself, consumed in the AI Singularity of capitalism’s black hole in fossil fuel carbon reduction of all organic matter to ash in global warming/cooling/nuclear winter. As Marx Weber said, capitalism will end only with the last ton of fossil fuel burning up — he didn’t reckon nuclear fission’s infinite hellfire and brimstone.

No: it will continue. Cold fusion will give capitalism endless life — in deep space if need be, without even the Sun. Energy needs will be reduced to the mere molecular movement of digits. Not an event horizon of gravitational collapse, but an ongoing purgatory: the haunted afterlife in suspended animation that has followed the failure of socialism in the 20th century. 

But, as Mao said to Nixon, what the Left proposed the Right pushes through. History moves on. Even its end is not the end.

The Left, for its part, refusing to accept its death, will remain stuck in the 20th century, long after capitalism has already moved on in the 21st — ushered in by Trump. Its restless ghosts of the dead will tap on the windows but stay trapped behind glass, looking on from the oblivion, to which it has been permanently consigned, outside of history: a mere idea. 

A socialist Left that could meet the tasks of the 21st century has yet to come into existence. Can we anticipate it now? I used to think — when I first started teaching academically and soon after on the Left in and through Platypus — that we had moved out from under the postmodernism that dominated the late 20th century. Now it seems we are stuck right back in it — at least the so-called “Left” remains stuck there, still in the thrall of “French Theory” and under the shadow of Stalinism. But it didn’t always appear so. It seemed in the earlier 21st century that something struggled to be born in the Millennial Left.

Now that moment has passed. What remains is the ghost of its unfulfilled potential. It is not undead because it never lived. The Millennial Left seems to have been the last gasp of the 20th century, strangled in the grip of its dead hand.

In 2017 I announced that the Millennial Left is dead. Now I will say: The Millennial Left was unborn. | P