For the extremely online political junkies who remember it, the “post-left” moment that blazed brightest during the pandemic was supposed to mark a departure from the usual script of American politics. Instead of repeating the hollow gestures of progressive moralizing or ceding class-based appeals to the culture-warring right, a tiny group of contrarian voices pledged to spotlight the real roots of inequality.
But the post-left’s short-lived promise of forging a class-driven populism ended up functioning more as a temporary holding pen, if not a funnel that emptied out into fire-the-bums Reaganite reaction. Most participants drifted right, a few folded themselves back into a chastened liberal left, and the rest receded from view. Practically speaking, the post-left turned out to be a convenient route for disgruntled leftists to move to the right, giving fed-up contrarians a chance to declare their opposition to “woke capital” before enlisting in right-wing cultural battles.
“Political rhetoric is easily co-opted.”
The term “post-left” did not emerge in a vacuum in the late 2010s; its roots reach back to internal critiques of the left spanning decades. In radical anarchist theory of the late 20th century, “post-left anarchism” arose as a rejection of leftist orthodoxy and organizational dogma. Anarchists like Bob Black (who helped coin the phrase) argued in his “Notes on ‘Post-Left Anarchism’” that “leftism is something to be surpassed” and urged a break from what he and other anarchists saw as the stifling ideological baggage of the traditional left. Influenced by the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, these thinkers championed an anti-authoritarian, anti-collectivist spirit that put personal liberation and spontaneity over party discipline.
A few decades later, the post-Cold War era produced a spate of anguished reflections by writers who felt the left had lost its way. A notable example is British journalist Nick Cohen’s 2007 book What’s Left?, a polemic accusing Cohen’s fellow liberals of a historic betrayal. The book charted how much of the left-wing intelligentsia had “surrendered to fascism,” in Cohen’s view, in its willingness to excuse Islamist extremists and tyrants so long as they opposed the Western powers. In Cohen’s telling, the left that “used to have a set of common values” and fundamentally “meant well” had by the 2000s abandoned those values entirely. Such critiques, echoed by figures like the late Christopher Hitchens and other “apostate” liberals, set the stage for the notion that one can and should move politically beyond the left on the basis of left-wing principles—out of disgust with its alleged moral and political failures.
The label “post-left” as it was used more recently coalesced in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 Democratic primaries, when a cluster of contrarian, class-first leftists broke from the progressive mainstream and began styling themselves as “post-left.” These were podcasters, writers, and online firebrands—often erstwhile Sanders supporters—who had grown contemptuous of what they derided as the liberal obsession with identity politics. By 2021, members of this subculture openly acknowledged that they “were no longer on the left at all,” as I said of myself when speaking to Kathryn Joyce for In These Times in 2023. The proximate triggers were the racial justice uprisings of 2020 and the pandemic lockdowns, both of which the post-left crowd saw as exemplifying left-liberal overreach and hypocrisy.
The core post-left critique of identity politics drew on older insights from Marxist academics such as Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., both of whom had long argued that the United States praises diversity to avoid addressing structural inequality. Michaels wrote in The Trouble with Diversity (2006) that Americans fixate on race because we do not want to confront class. As he put it, our “enthusiastic celebration of ‘difference’ masks and even contributes to our neglect of America’s vast and growing economic divide.” Reed’s Class Notes (2000) likewise denounced liberals for treating race as a stand-in for class, which he saw as a means of preserving inequalities behind a veneer of moral righteousness. These insights came to inform a new generation of internal critics of the left who insisted progressive talk about “inclusion” and “empowerment” was a smokescreen for elite interests. The embrace of racial justice at the highest levels of power during the 2020 “reckoning” gave further impetus to this critique.
The only publication that adopted the “post-left” label was The Bellows, which launched in 2020 after the failure of the second Sanders campaign. Its founders, Edwin Aponte and Ryan Zickgraf, promised on their Kickstarter that the site would put class front and center, while renouncing the stifling pieties of mainstream progressive culture and ignoring the censors of the liberal NGO-industrial complex. Initially, they pitched their political vision as “labor populism,” but the pair soon fell out over editorial and ideological differences. Aponte declared he was no longer on the left and replaced the slogan “long live the left” with “long live the post-left” atop the site.
The publication you are reading is also part of this story. After running The Bellows solo for roughly two years, Aponte became one of Compact’s founding editors in early 2022. But he departed after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, as he explained it, brought out his deep political differences with his anti-abortion colleagues. (On the other hand, Aponte’s old Bellows co-founder Zickgraf later became a regular Compact contributor.)
The difficulties of bringing together varied social and cultural views around a unifying labor-populist vision has recurred again and again in post-left spaces and played a major role in the short-lived formation’s demise. One can trace a similar arc across various post-left trajectories. Angela Nagle, who was briefly championed by many on the left for diagnosing in Kill All Normies how liberal moralism fueled alt-right resentment, found herself exiled from mainstream progressive circles after writing “The Left Case Against Open Borders” in the right-of-center journal American Affairs. Nagle made a strong but essentially moderate case for an across-the-aisle movement for class-based immigration reform. In response, she was bitterly attacked by leftists and wound up being invited onto more and more right-wing spaces, from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to the post-left-adjacent Good Ol Boyz podcast. (Nagle now writes a Substack and co-hosts a podcast with the leftist writer Sean P. McCarthy).
A parallel project in which I was directly involved was the podcast What’s Left?, which borrowed its name from the aforementioned book by Nick Cohen. In its first iteration, hosted by Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker, What’s Left? backed the Bernie Sanders campaign while critiquing left identitarianism and promoting class politics along the lines argued for by Reed and Michaels. In the later incarnation that I co-hosted beginning in 2020, it increasingly hosted right-wing voices including JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin for friendly interviews. In the process, the initial rhetorical posture of championing “the real working class” gave way to an increasing alignment with populist-right culture-war campaigns.
Critics of the post-left like Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet called that trajectory a predictable hazard. If you reject the mainline left’s approach to identity politics but have no anchor in organized labor, they argued, you will end up drifting toward right-wing media outlets. The right offered bigger audiences, less internal condemnation, and less competition among credentialed writers. In the opinion of Joyce and Sharlet, negative synergy took hold: Featuring ex-left or post-left figures allowed right-leaning outlets to claim the new right was forging a “multiracial working-class realignment” or an “anti-war, anti-woke” alliance.
Meanwhile, many of those ex-left contrarians found the right more hospitable to their brand of scorn, which in turn induced them to adopt more standard conservative policy views. This was a dynamic that Reed had also worried about in a more general sense years before: Absent robust labor institutions and genuine universalist demands, political rhetoric is easily co-opted by whatever larger forces can make use of it. The post-left attempted a rhetorical campaign to subvert that arrangement, but this was insufficient to break long-standing structural constraints.
Donald Trump’s first six months back in the White House have thrown the “post-left” experiment into sharp relief. Ever since he launched his first campaign, Trump’s flirtations with populist economic ideas—vowing to protect entitlements, curb drug prices, even spend on infrastructure—have created unexpected common ground between disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters and right-wing nationalists, producing an opening for some left-leaning skeptics of globalization to rationalize Trump as an imperfect vehicle for their grievances, and to imagine that his victory might pave the way for a broader cross-partisan populist coalition. He mostly disappointed these hopes during his first term in office, and this cycle is repeating itself.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump at least tried to co-opt some themes associated with the post-left, most notably in an emphasis on pro-worker optics, even if this was not accompanied by much in the way of policy proposals. In a bold move for a Republican, he actively courted organized labor in 2024, seeking the approval of unions that traditionally back Democrats. The gambit met with mixed success, but generated remarkable symbolism. The powerful Teamsters union pointedly declined to endorse the Democratic ticket headed by Kamala Harris against Trump, and its pugnacious leader Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention. The union cited a lack of consensus among its 1.3 million members—indeed, an internal poll showed 58 percent of Teamsters rank-and-file supported Trump, versus just 34 percent for Harris. Trump seized on the moment, touting the union’s non-endorsement and bragging that the “vast majority of rank-and-file” Teamsters wanted him back in the White House.
Trump also ratcheted up his rhetoric against corporate villains in terms that would work at a Sanders rally. He has lambasted pharmaceutical companies—“Big Pharma”—and has promised aggressive action to lower medicine costs, although his record is mixed (he has criticized the high price of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, but also allowed the FDA to continue with a Biden-era plan to halt the compounding of cheaper versions by domestic laboratories).
But throughout his time in office, in both first and second terms, Trump has ended up showing himself amenable to orthodox Republican priorities. His big achievement during his first term was a 2017 tax overhaul supported by supply-side hardliners like the Club for Growth. A Fox News survey conducted around the time of Trump’s inauguration this January found only 1 percent of voters (and few working-class Republicans) wanted taxes to be the president’s first order of business, but he made the extension of the 2017 tax cuts his main legislative priority, an effort that paid off with the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Nor was cutting government spending a rallying point for the voters who propelled Trump to victory last year—but in office, he gave new life to the old GOP government-shrinking agenda by way of Elon Musk’s DOGE as well as the Medicaid and SNAP cuts used to offset the extension of his tax cuts.
Beyond Trump’s continued promise to protect Medicare and Social Security, the main holdover from his populist campaign rhetoric is his economic nationalism, manifested in the sweeping package of tariffs announced in April. Trump has increased the effective tariff rate from 2.5 to 16.6 percent, but this potential step toward a working-class economic agenda only highlights the larger retreat. Immigration enforcement, too, is framed by some as a means of protecting working-class wages—a view supported by research showing that immigration depresses native workers’ earnings, though economists remain divided on this question. While Trump’s high-profile deportation efforts continue, they remain roughly in line with those during previous administrations, even as border crossings have dropped significantly.
Though Trump campaigned on exempting tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits from taxes, the legislation that passed Congress recently limited his working-class tax breaks to temporary measures—a $12,500 deduction for overtime pay and $25,000 for tips through 2028, both phasing out for higher earners. More broadly, the Big Beautiful Bill prioritized making corporate tax cuts permanent and extending the 2017 tax cuts, which have disproportionately benefited the wealthy, with the top 1 percent receiving an average cut of $70,000 while those making $30,000 get only about $130.
“The post-left’s contrarian energy became an identity of its own.”
All of this has effectively shut the door on the left-right populist crossover that animated the brief post-left moment. The fate of this small online coalition illustrates the obstacles facing any attempt at political realignment. The post-left had valid structural critiques, but was unable to transform these into stable institutions or alliances, as the two-party system gave it no path to power. Instead, we got a dynamic of polarization. The left-liberal establishment dubbed anything outside mainstream identity talk as bigotry, fueling resentment that found a home on the right. The post-left’s contrarian energy became an identity of its own, but most of its members drifted steadily rightward under the gravitational pull of higher-profile conservative media. The resulting reconfiguration has left pre-existing partisan divides intact, give or take a few details. The system triumphed; the post-left lost.
The larger barrier to the sort of realignment post-leftists envisioned is global capital mobility, which makes governments reluctant or perhaps simply unable to adopt redistributive policies. Rather than delivering economic change, politicians promote partisanship and scapegoating. Hence the “chronic crisis” capably analyzed by Benjamin Studebaker in his 2023 book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy—arguably the only true post-left monograph, though the author would reject the label. Studebaker, who was the motive intellectual force in the early days of the What’s Left? podcast and also among the first to dissociate himself from the contrarian excesses of the post-left, portrays a political system locked in negative partisanship, where each side sees the other as an existential threat, leaving no room for institutional breakthroughs on a class basis.
“The post-left had neither a robust institutional framework nor a labor base.”
The basic logic driving the post-left was that if mainstream Democrats refused to champion the working class, then a new cross-ideological realignment might. Yet real power typically belongs to whichever big coalition can outspend and out-polarize the other, leading again and again to cultural battles that overshadow wage or job discussions. Studebaker’s verdict is sobering: If you want to fix the underlying crisis, you need an agenda that is nigh-impossible to implement in a capital-friendly environment. Because the post-left had neither a robust institutional framework nor a labor base—it was, as Park MacDougald noted at the time, a “Twitter clique [that] produced far more in the way of podcasts and tweets than sustained considerations of political theory”—it remained mired in an oppositional style that was easily integrated into the right’s existing culture-war ecosystem.
Examined historically, the post-left’s move to the right is not shocking. New York intellectuals such as Norman Podhoretz turned neoconservative after the New Left excesses of the 1960s, and Christopher Hitchens staunchly supported the invasion of Iraq. Once the left-liberal mainstream pushes you out or you push yourself out, the right beckons with its own media platforms and big donors. The post-left rebranding was simply an attempt to do it at scale. Because no serious left-labor institution stood by them, or because they rejected the day-to-day alliances needed to maintain a real left, they had nowhere else to go.
This is why the pathway from “canceled left contrarian” to “dissident-right influencer” became a well-worn one, replete with Substack money, commissions from magazines, and the promise of a bigger, friendlier audience. That process calls to mind the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s late-career discussion in Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy about the illusions of ephemeral realignments. Lamenting the Clinton administration’s successful attempts to dismantle aspects of the New Deal social safety net he viewed as sacrosanct, Moynihan—who had worked with both right- and left-wing politicians, including serving in the Nixon administration, throughout his long career—recognized that re-centering the working class couldn’t be done by rhetorical gambits alone.
When writing in Miles to Go about the welfare-reform debates that saw the demise of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program—the New Deal program he considered absolutely essential to poverty eradication measures—Moynihan observed with dismay: “Why do we not see the endless parade of petitioners, as when health care reform was before us in the last Congress—the lobbyists, the pretend citizen groups, the real citizen groups? None are here.” The absence of organized constituencies for a program of simple direct payments (always his preferred form of government benefit) without elaborate prerequisites aside from a very low income revealed what Moynihan had warned about in a 1993 letter: “The great strength of political conservatives at this time (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this ... If this is so, the current revival of liberalism will be brief and inconsequential.” Unfortunately for those of us conditioned to instant gratification, it requires the slow, unglamorous work of building a large constituency that, as Studebaker noted, may not be able to be willed into existence.
The post-left pipeline for rightward migrations dried up almost as quickly as it opened, culminating with most post-leftists adopting more right-populist frameworks while still paying a bit of lip service to some vague worker-friendly ideas. A few of those ideas have made their way onto the right in proposals like Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent draft legislation to speed up union contracts. But overall, concrete policy ideas that might anchor a realignment like what the post-left envisioned have rarely been fleshed out, and when they have, they were overshadowed by other priorities.
Yet despite the post-left-flavored overtures of his campaign, Trump’s platform mostly has swung back toward conventional conservative doctrine, prioritizing a familiar Republican wish list of upper-tier tax cuts, deregulation, and shrinking government bureaucracy. Even his selection of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, after an endorsement from the Teamsters’ O’Brien, may simply put a pro-labor face on a policy agenda that is in substance aligned with long-standing GOP orthodoxy. In her confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer testified that states should retain the right to enact “Right to Work” laws and demurred on raising the federal minimum wage. The contradiction between post-left style and old-right substance underscores the ultimate fragility of the post-left project. When the chips are down, Trumpism has reverted to Reagan-era Republican type, leaving erstwhile post-left MAGA fellow travelers politically homeless—yet again.
Looking back at the failure of the post-left, are there any lessons that can be learned? One is that rhetorical class radicalism is easy, but organizing around it is hard. Another is that the left-liberal moral mainstream pushes out certain potential allies by labeling them bigots at the slightest heterodoxy, but capital also punishes them if they attempt any serious anti-corporate activism. The post-left confronted the first phenomenon, but not the second. The structural impediments remain, and the chronic crisis persists.
The twilight of the post-left underscores the extent to which American politics is stuck. The high hopes I shared with others turned out to be in vain. Critiques of left-wing hypocrisy ended up being a distraction from more intractable facts about the economic order. What once seemed like a path forward turned out to be nothing more than another ideological stop on the long day’s journey into night.