The Future of the Left in the 21st Century (Part Three)

Merit, biology, and patriotic realism.

This is the final part of a three-part series on the future of the left in the 21^st century (the first part is here and the second part is here). My basic thesis is that the left’s project in the first quarter of the 21^st century has failed and that a left project for the second quarter of this century must be based on core principles that break with the failures of the last 25 years.

Those principles must be based on the fundamental fact that the left has lost touch with baseline realities of how to reach ordinary working-class voters, what policies could actually deliver what these voters want and what kind of politics accords with these voters’ common sense rather than the biases of their professional-class base. They should provide a drastic course-correction toward realism to give the left a serious chance of decisively defeating right populism and achieving the good society they claim they are committed to.

In the first part of this series, I discussed two such principles: energy realism and growth realism. In the second part, I discussed two more principles, governance realism and immigration realism. In this concluding installment of this series, I will discuss three final principles: merit, biology, and patriotic realism.

Merit realism. The quintessential moral commitment of the 20^th century left was to make American society truly colorblind. It was unfair and egregious that racial discrimination could truncate the life chances of black people and visit misery upon them. Therefore, the left advocated and marched for ending discrimination and unequal opportunity. They won the argument, in the process pulling the entire Democratic Party in their direction. Not only was legislation passed to make such discrimination illegal but anti-discrimination and equal opportunity became as close to consensual beliefs as you can get in America.

Americans today believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2022 University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” That view elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public.

Similarly, a 2023 Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what Americans deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, it should be noted, equal outcomes.

This is what the left used to believe in—indeed, mounted the barricades for. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21^st century. Instead of treating the colorblind society as a noble ideal that should be striven for even if its perfect attainment is impossible, the left lost faith in the ideal because racial disparities did not immediately disappear. Instead, they began to favor color-conscious remedies like affirmative action that went far beyond anti-discrimination and equal opportunity and to oppose colorblind policies if they did not produce desired outcomes by race.

This inversion of the traditional and noble ideal is still with us today as the left tenaciously defends affirmative action and DEI programs despite their lack of connection to consensual values of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity. Indeed, the very use of the term “colorblind” has become right-coded, evidence of supporting racism rather than opposing it. This is very strange indeed. To grasp how strange this is, we must dig a little deeper to the revolutionary concept of merit.

The left’s traditional theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Rewards—job opportunities, promotions, commissions, appointments, publications, school slots, and much else—would then be allocated on the basis of which person or persons deserved these rewards on the basis of merit. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be. No more would people be rewarded because of who they were or their position in some hierarchy instead of what they accomplished.

This is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history. It simultaneously liberated individuals to achieve regardless of their position in the social structure and powered overall social advance because it allowed for the replacement of the incompetent and unimaginative with the competent and creative. This was a great thing!

But shockingly, 21^st century progressives have lost interest in this last part of their case, which undermines their whole theory of social organization. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards, positions, etc. should be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to “social justice.” Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in parlance of our times.

This is nuts. Arguments can be made in defense of the anti-merit approach—consult your local postmodern or critical theorist—but they are all specious and egregiously so. You’re either good at something or you’re not. You either know things or you don’t. You’re either competent or you’re not. These things can be assessed with a reasonable degree of objectivity and those assessments typically reveal differentials in skills, achievements, capabilities, knowledge, and so on—in short, merit. This is what should plug into the allocation of positions, promotions and rewards in a fair system.

And this is what ordinary people—ordinary voters—believe in. They believe in the idea of merit and they believe in their individual ability to acquire merit and attendant rewards if given the opportunity to do so. To believe otherwise is insulting to them and contravenes their common sense about the central role of merit in fair decisions. As George Orwell put it, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

It is difficult to overestimate the damage that has been done to the left and their party, the Democrats, by their radical downgrading of the importance of merit. The left’s original idea was to remove barriers so that people could accomplish what they are capable of, not to disregard the importance of accomplishment. That original idea was fully realistic and accorded with how societies function best and what ordinary voters believe is fair and facilitates their upward mobility. Departing from this beautiful idea has been a tragic mistake of the 21^st century left.

Biology realism. Perhaps nothing would surprise a time traveler from the 20^th century left as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the left’s 21^st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, left parties in Europe and very much here in the United States have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc.

The same logic is applied to children who exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior and profess discomfort with their biological bodies. Their revealed “gender identity” is taken to be a determinative indicator that they were “born in the wrong body” and that therefore they should be encouraged to “transition.” This is done first socially and then through medical procedures (puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) to align their bodies with their “true” sex (their gender identity).

Notoriously, the rise of gender ideology and “gender-affirming care” has also led to an explosion of new language and pronoun use to paper over the obvious contradiction between biological sex and the dictates of gender identity. This has been enforced informally and through formal regulations in many institutional settings.

This is a far cry from the left’s original conception of women’s rights and sexual equality. The idea was that women and men should have equal rights and that there is no “right” way to be a man or woman—gender non-conforming behavior is just a different way of being a man or woman. Therefore, no one is born in the wrong body whatever their behavior or affect.

This was a realistic approach to the problems of both discrimination against women and the stereotyping of gender roles that limited men’s and women’s life choices. It required no heroic assumptions about human biology, unobservable internal sex or the need for medical interventions.

But on today’s left and in almost all of the Democratic Party, it is de rigueur to believe that being born in the wrong body happens all the time and that such individuals should seek to change their body to match their internal gender identity. Biological sex is merely a technicality that can be overridden by self-identification and medical treatment to turn men into women and women into men (and back again!)

In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has until very recently been met with little resistance on the left, including in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, the left’s identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?

It’s a reasonable question, which can only be effectively answered by a course correction toward biology realism. There is no other way.

Patriotic realism. The left in the 21^st century somehow became enamored of the idea that America is a horrible country that we should all be thoroughly ashamed of. They talked themselves into believing that a mighty coalition could be developed by making people feel bad about the country they live in. Sounds crazy, but they did!

This was particularly true around the issue of race. The left enthusiastically embraced the view that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism, and remains a white supremacist society to this day, as in the 1619 Project cartoon version of American history. This stance has ironically seemed to have won over some affluent whites but alienated working-class voters of all colors.

As the political observer Brink Lindsey put it in an essay on the loss of faith in America:

The most flamboyantly anti-American rhetoric of ’60s radicals is now more or less conventional wisdom among many progressives: America, the land of white supremacy and structural racism and patriarchy, the perpetrator of indigenous displacement and genocide, the world’s biggest polluter, and so on.

That conventional wisdom is a problem. Ordinary Americans just do not share this animus toward their own country. This includes immigrants, who tend to be particularly enthusiastic about their adopted country, and racial minorities. In fact, the only people who express profound disappointment in America as a group are left-wing activists.

That left-wing conventional wisdom is why “progressive activists”—eight percent of the population as categorized by the More in Common group, who are “deeply concerned with issues concerning equity, fairness, and America’s direction today”—are so unenthusiastic about their country. Just 34 percent of progressive activists say they are “proud to be American” compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks, and 76 percent of Hispanics, the very groups whose interests these activists claim to represent. Similarly, in an Echelon Insights survey, 66 percent of “strong progressives” (about 10 percent of voters) said America is not the greatest country in the world, compared to just 28 percent who said it is. But the multiracial working class (noncollege voters, white and nonwhite) had exactly the reverse view: by 69-23, they said America is the greatest country in the world.

The uncomfortable fact is that these sentiments, and the view of America they represent, are now heavily associated with the Democratic Party as a whole by dint of the very significant weight these activists carry within the party, which far transcends their actual numbers. Their voice is further amplified by their strong and frequently dominant influence in associated institutions that lean toward the Democrats: nonprofits, foundations, advocacy groups, academia, legacy media, the arts—the commanding heights of cultural production, as it were. It’s just not cool in these circles to be patriotic.

These attitudes have seeped into the larger Democratic world view. In Gallup’s latest reading on pride in being an American, barely over a third (36 percent) of Democrats said they were extremely or very proud of being American, compared to 53 percent of independents and 92 percent of Republicans who felt that way. Just 20 percent of Democrats would characterize themselves as “extremely proud,” down 34 points since the beginning of this century.

And most shockingly, in a 2022 poll Quinnipiac found that a majority of Democrats (52 percent) said they would leave the country rather than stay and fight (40 percent), should the United States be invaded as Ukraine was by Russia.

That’s not to say that Democratic politicians don’t still wear American flag pins on their lapels. But Democrats and especially the left just don’t seem very enthusiastic about the actually existing country of America.

This is not a remotely realistic approach to building a dominant majority coalition. Most obviously, it puts the left and their party, the Democrats, on the wrong side of something that’s quite popular: patriotism and love of country. As Noah Smith has correctly observed: “People want to like their country. They can be disappointed in it or mad at it or frustrated with it, but ultimately they want to think that they’re part of something good.” Making people feel bad about the country they live in is a recipe for failure.

But the problem goes deeper than simple unpopularity, though that is not insignificant. Lack of patriotism undercuts Democrats’ ability to mobilize a coalition behind what they say they want: a robust and far-reaching program of economic renewal. One of the only effective ways—really, the most effective way—to mobilize Americans behind big projects is to appeal to patriotism, to Americans as part of a nation. Indeed much of what America accomplished in the 20th century was under the banner of liberal nationalism. But many in the Democratic Party blanche at any hint of this approach because of its association with darker impulses and political trends. Yet as John Judis has pointed out, nationalism has its positive side as well in that it allows citizens to identify on a collective level and support projects that serve the common good rather than their immediate interests.

Democrats have tried uniting the country around the need to dismantle “systemic racism” and promote “equity”…and failed. Democrats have tried uniting the country around the need to save the planet through a rapid green transition…and failed. It’s time for Democrats to try something that really could unite the country: patriotism and liberal nationalism.

This approach has a rich heritage. As Peter Juul and I noted in our American Affairs article on “The Case for a New Liberal Nationalism”:

When labor and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin put forward their ambitious Freedom Budget for All Americans in 1966, they couched their political argument in the powerful idiom of liberal nationalism. “For better or worse,” Randolph avowed in his introduction, “We are one nation and one people.” The Freedom Budget, he went on, constituted “a challenge to the best traditions and possibilities of America” and “a call to all those who have grown weary of slogans and gestures to rededicate themselves to the cause of social reconstruction.” It was also, he added, “a plea to men of good will to give tangible substance to long-proclaimed ideals.'“

And it wasn’t just Randolph and Rustin, it was John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal politics he promulgated. In our recent book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, John Judis and I put it this way:

[T]he New Deal Democrats were moderate and even small-c conservative in their social outlook. They extolled “the American way of life” (a term popularized in the 1930s); they used patriotic symbols like the “Blue Eagle” to promote their programs. In 1940, Roosevelt’s official campaign song was Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Under Roosevelt, Thanksgiving, Veterans’ Day, and Columbus Day were made into federal holidays. Roosevelt turned the annual Christmas Tree lighting into a national event. Roosevelt’s politics were those of “the people” (a term summed up in Carl Sandburg’s 1936 poem, “The People, Yes”) and of the “forgotten American.” There wasn’t a hint of multiculturalism or tribalism. The Democrats need to follow this example.

If liberal nationalism was good enough for A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, for FDR and JFK and MLK, it should be good enough for today’s Democratic Party. Democrats should proudly proclaim that their party is a patriotic party that believes America as a nation has accomplished great things and been a force for good in the world, a record that can be carried forth into the future.

Funny that the left should lose track of this. As David Leonhardt pointed out in a podcast I did with him:

[J]ust look at history—the civil rights movement carried American flags while marching for civil rights…think about what an incredible favor it was to them when their counter protesters held up confederate flags, the flag of of treason…the labor unions of the early 20th century brought enormous American flags to their rallies…

That is patriotism…It worked.

That’s right: it worked. And it can work again.

Leonhardt concluded by quoting labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein:

All of America’s great reform movements from the crusade against slavery onward have defined themselves as champions of a moral and patriotic nationalism which they counterpoised to the parochial and selfish elites who stood athwart their vision of a virtuous society. So the connection really between patriotism and progressivism is long and proud and progressivism will be much more successful if it is willing to embrace patriotism.

Indeed, without patriotism—enthusiastic patriotism that promotes national unity, not national garment-rending—there is no realistic path for the left in the 21^st century. None. It’s that simple.

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In this series, I have discussed how the future of the left depends on embracing seven principles that have been notably lacking in the first quarter of the 21^st century:

• Energy realism

• Growth realism

• Governance realism

• Immigration realism

• Merit realism

• Biology realism

• Patriotic realism

A fair reading of the current situation suggests that the left is still quite far away from adopting these principles as the second quarter of the 21^st century begins. There are some tentative moves in the right direction but mostly deep reluctance to challenge the professional class biases and priorities that have led to the left’s failures in this century’s first quarter.

A good time to start doing so would be now. The hour is getting late and unfortunately failure is an option.