A breakup letter to the Left
It's time to stop wasting my time with an movement infatuated with performative politics and which has lost all semblance of empathy and self-reflection.
Alright, this has been a while coming but it’s time to say it outright: I’m done with the left. Nay, let me rephrase that, I’m fucking done with the left. Particularly the online left. Goodbye. Adiós. Adieu. You lost me.
This is not a “why I left the left” moment in which I declare hitherto repressed sympathies for the right. I’m not going the Dave Rubin or Tulsi Gabbard route, far from it. I’m still a proud and convinced socialist and that is not likely to change anytime soon. I still hate conservatives and centrists with a passion. When I mean I’m done with the left, I mean I’m done being part of any leftist ecosystem, especially its online English-speaking one. I am basically done with any organizational left insofar as it does not have as its direct objective the obtaining of political or economic power. Everything else is just a waste of my time and energy, and no longer brings me any joy, just frustration, disappointment and increasingly, rage.
This is also a sentiment that has been a while coming, though a couple of recent incidents has made me convinced that this is the right thing to do and the right moment to do it. These incidents have also made me realize that it’s not just a few bad apples spoiling it for everyone else but rather a very widespread and entirely normalized absence of basic empathy, as well as a toxic infatuation with performative politics and virtue signaling. To the extent in which I have attempted to break into this space, I now realize it was a fruitless endeavor that probably has carried some professional consequences in terms of the opportunity costs I have had to bear: opportunity costs of sharing my ideas and opinions to perhaps a less receptive but more serious audience and making a career out of it. This includes my native Mexico where I now reside and which I want to increasingly orient my professional efforts toward rather than the English-speaking world.
So what were the drivers of this disenchantment? Specifically, there are three, which I will explain in detail and in chronological order.
1) The Cult of AMLO
The first is disappointment I have felt over my own country’s left. In June 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO as he is well known) became the first democratically elected left-wing president that Mexico has had in nearly a century. This seemed like the time had come to break down my country’s neoliberal ancien regime and work towards a more socially-oriented way of doing politics in a country marred by inequality and injustice. His electoral slogan, after all, was “the poor come first”, a far cry from the foreign investors-come-first mentality that has been the hallmark of Mexico’s neoliberal governments for decades.
Truth be told, I have never liked AMLO on a personal level: there have been considerable red flags about his personality and his competence ever since he became a public figure in the 2000s. Yet nothing could prepare me for the disaster that his government has become. One that showed no interest in building democratic institutions, only perpetuating personalistic and partisan control of the state. One that threw Mexicans under the bus during the coronavirus pandemic rather than offer a social safety net (to say nothing of him minimizing the virus altogether). One that decided that the epitome of leftist politics was to bring in fiscal austerity that would make Britain’s George Osbourne proud, and not a single additional tax or tax increase levied against Mexico’s rich which have only gotten richer since. One who has consistently disdained the environment and women’s rights too, issues central to a real leftist agenda, while instead promoting a pernicious intrusion of the military many aspects of political and economic life.
Making matters worse is the cult-like tribalism that has been evident around AMLO’s supporters. Mexican society was already quite polarized before he became president, but AMLO has succeeded in transforming what for many years before had been intelligent, passionate leftists and activists into little more than partisan sycophants, incapable of ever admitting that the president or his policies are wrong. It is ironic that much of the right-wing criticism of AMLO even before becoming president was his messianic attitude, driven by his insistence that only he could transform Mexico. They turned out to be entirely right. Quite simply put, there is barely any left-wing critique of AMLO in Mexico whatsoever, which I find stunning given that the vast majority of his policies would be considered right-wing and even neoliberal if you didn’t know on the face of it who was promoting them. And of course, the English-speaking Western left fell for it, as evidenced by the propagandist coverage of Mexico you see from publications like Jacobin, which paints him as some leftist champion of the Global South, when nothing could be further from the truth.
In short, over the last few years I have felt politically orphaned at home, with the prospect of AMLO’s ideologically vacuous, faux-leftist party remaining in power possibly until the 2040s while at the same time not wanting our disgraced neoliberal opposition to come back to power either. All of this becomes more infuriating considering I have made considerable personal sacrifices (financial and relationship-wise) to put myself in a position of coming back home to work in politics in some way. For the first time, and with my country having the leftist government I had wanted for so long, I see so little hope for Mexico and its future and wonder whether I should have planned my life thinking about myself first.
2) Putin’s useful idiots
By far the aspect of the left which I have found the most repulsive and deranged has been the widespread support and apologia for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the things that to me solidifies our moral superiority over the right is that we have always sided with nations and peoples who have been oppressed by the powerful, be it Palestine by Israel or Iraq by the United States. We have done this regardless of who governs these countries because the principle of non-aggression and non-interference stands above any other foreign policy consideration: save in a few extreme cases like the prevention of genocide, there is simply no justification for any country intervening militarily in another. Violating this principle upends the entire fabric of how a world order based on self-determination should look like.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ticks all the boxes of the kind of conflict in which a leftist should unrepentantly side with the defender. It was an invasion with the explicit purpose of regime change (which leftists ostensibly hate) and cultural genocide. The ultimate objective of Russia was to eliminate the concept of a Ukrainian nation and culture separate to its own. Had they been successful, it would have likely resulted in large swathes of Ukraine being annexed the remaining rump of a country turned into little more than a puppet state like Belarus. This is even before we consider the unimaginable horrors that Russia had planned for subjugating Ukraine’s people, which we have gotten glimpses of in the areas of the country that did end up under occupation. Only the heroic resistance and bravery of the Ukrainian people, along with the Western weapons and supplies their armed forces have been provided, have prevented this nightmarish scenario from unfolding.
The left could have offered solidarity to Ukraine, and supported its right to defend itself against an fascist, oligarchical capitalist empire that represents everything that the left opposes. Instead what it offered were rambling diatribes about NATO being responsible for the war for violating Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” (a benefit that leftists have never offered the US or Israel); about Ukraine being full of neo-Nazis and its government coddling them (Saddam Hussein’s more abhorrent dictatorship did not receive such condemnation in 2003); of the government being illegitimate as a result of the 2014 Euromaidan “coup” and therefore the country’s sovereignty too (Zelenskyy or his party had nothing to do with Euromaidan); dishonest hysterics of nuclear war triggered by the US and the West’s arming of Ukraine (an objection that never applied to the Soviet Union arming North Vietnam in the 1960s); or that arming Ukraine only helps the military-industrial complex (Raytheon and Lockheed profited from World War II, that does not mean the US should have stayed out). There was the knee-jerk whattaboutism of pointing out something bad the US or the West did when discussing Russia actions. And when that became indefensible, to justify whattaboutism as one Current Affairs piece did.
Whatever segment of the left one looked at, you would find this repulsive apologia. One prominent online leftist, Ben Burgis (author of the above mentioned whattaboutism piece), claimed early on that these voices were merely the “fringe of the fringe” yet every Twitter discussion on the war gets swamped by idiots with sickle and hammers or North Korean flags in their bio regurgitating Putin’s propaganda lines ad verbatim. Sadly, this is not limited to teenage Twitter tankies or blatantly propagandistic outlets like The Grayzone. The rot has spread everywhere. It was Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic swearing that Russia threatening to invade Ukraine was US propaganda, and when it did, that the US was to blame. It was Jeremy Corbyn flying to New York City to attend forums discussing “the real path to peace in Ukraine” without a single Ukrainian among the panel to talk about their country’s future. It was 93-year old Noam Chomsky somehow having the energy to appear on every podcast known to man arguing that the West provoked Russia. It was Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson bending over to defend Chomsky at every turn with a degree of sycophancy as ridiculous as his antebellum plantation owner wardrobe. And it was Vijay Prashad finally saying the quiet part out loud by tweeting a picture of himself dog-whistling support for the Chinese government’s Covid lockdown crackdowns with a heavily bolded “Z”, a very obvious nod to what has become symbol of Russia’s war effort and the closest thing to a modern swastika.
No single event in my lifetime has caused me to lose the entirety of my respect toward so many people. People who I felt had made incredibly valuable contributions to the left in recent years, like Prof. Richard Wolff whose writings on worker rights have influenced my own but who now tweets that Ukraine would not be pleading for Western weapons if it was winning. Or The Majority Report, which was the show that got me sucked into the online left in the first place but which has remained uncomfortably silent about Ukraine, clearly oblivious to the overlap of far right radicalization that exists between Putin’s “anti-imperialist” sympathizers on the left and those that fall for the faux-left grifters like Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald that they dedicate hours after hours debunking on their show (all of which, unsurprisingly, happen to be pro-Russia as well). One could be tempted to say that these people should not be cancelled outright just for one bad position on one issue, but this is an issue which is really a moral bellwether for everything else. You can’t simply look at someone the same way, any more than you can a beloved celebrity, artist, or sportsperson who you later find out is a racist or a sexual abuser. I have lost real life friends out of this as well, which makes me curse even more the way this campist nonsense has taken hold of so many leftist brains, even many ostensibly intelligent and rational ones who I was ideologically compatible with.
But if you really cannot conceive of a foreign policy principle more sophisticated than “If the US is for it, I’m against it; if the US is against it, I’m for it” then your opinion on these matters are, frankly, rubbish. You are not a principled “anti-war” or “anti-imperialist” leftist if you are indifferent to Ukraine’s struggle, or worse, if you sympathize with its aggressor because you think it’s the lesser evil on the route to an multipolar world order. What you are is a morally depraved apologist for Russian fascism and you should be ashamed for ever considering yourself a leftist. And your kind will be remembered and ridiculed for this, just as the leftists who whitewashed Hitler’s aggression in World War II in the name of “peace”.
And from a professional perspective, any desire to work with these people or share a platform with them has entirely disappeared. In many ways, writing my book (which was published by a well-known UK leftist print) and starting a YouTube channel were geared towards this end. While I certainly do not regret writing a book (trust me, if it has ever crossed your mind, do it!), I really wonder whether the hours spent on the channel could have been better spent elsewhere, or whether it should have taken a different focus than on the issues that overlap with the leftist online media. (P.S. This is also a not-so-subtle way of saying my channel as it exists now will probably either end its run with dignity or be reimagined and reoriented towards other more intellectually serious topics that I have expertise in).
3) Found the Incel
And finally, we get to the straw that broke the camel’s back. A few weeks ago I found myself embroiled in a series of Twitter spats over an issue which seems so harmless and uncontroversial that it beggars belief why it became the latest major online intra-leftist drama (because a month cannot pass without one). The issue stemmed from the recent arrest of Andrew Tate and the suggestion that the left should perhaps take a more pro-active role in attempting to prevent young men from falling down the “incel” rabbit hole. The reasoning is obvious: any young man feeling socially alienated and failing at relationships would be welcomed by an entire ecosystem of misogynistic, reactionary grifters, pickup artists, and dating coaches amid the complete absence of voices on the left dealing with men’s issues in a direct and systematic way. This was the tweet that started it all:
The reaction to this suggestion by the women of the online left was thermonuclear.
The above tweet was almost instantly shared and commented on by dozen if not hundreds of leftist women, almost all of them accusing anyone sympathetic to this position of “coddling incels”, that it was not their role to “fix men”, that men don’t have issues really. Often just a retweet with the words “found the incel”, which is a common clapback in these spaces. Incels, according to the women of the online left, are unique among social phenomena in having no underlying structural causation, emerging entirely by choice and with the sole objective of perpetuating male privilege under patriarchy. Nevermind the actual research which shows that incels in fact, suffer the same mental health issues and economic anxieties as people driven to other far right spaces, something that should be obvious given the near perfect overlap in political beliefs between the two groups. What was particularly toxic about this discourse isn’t just that these has become the only social issue in which the left should not be engaged with in any way, but that nobody even asked women to get involved. But it is impossible for leftist men to fix other men in a space in which half of its members feel this is akin to sympathizing with rapists.
This absolutely deranged response ultimately reflects a degree of obnoxious self-righteousness that I have observed ever more frequently among leftist and liberal women in recent years, and particularly after the advent of social media and online dating both of which share the common characteristic of depersonalizing social interaction. I say this with the risk that any feminist credentials I have will go up in flames (hopefully the women reading this who know me in person or have dated me will vouch otherwise), but as a Diogenesian cynic before anything else, nobody is above my criticism. To be fair, men have in many ways contributed to this, especially those who believe they are entitled to relationships or sex, and particularly those who resort to harassment or violence when they fail at it. But its still hard to imagine that gender equality is achieved by normalizing women behaving badly, rather than helping men behave better by rejecting toxic masculinity.
I will give an example of this. A few years back I had a rather heated dinner conversation with two liberal, millennial women (neither of which I had previously met). Both were on dating apps and for some reason that I do not recall, the topic of heightism was brought up. It should be patently obvious that discrimination based on height is no better than any other form of body shaming, and that men are subject to it constantly on dating apps (and in real life from other men). I do not know how many times I have seem dating profiles specifically say that that anyone under 6 feet or 1.80 meters should swipe left. This is done unabashedly, often being the only thing written on the profile, and often despite the fact that many apps let you specify height elsewhere which means there’s no need to write it out out.
I was stunned that neither of these two women ever admitted that heightism was bad. When asked whether it would be fine if a man specified minimum waist size on their profiles they were appalled and said that would be horribly sexist. But somehow heightism was merely “a preference”. When told that short men would likely feel shamed at seeing so many profiles rule them out due to a physical characteristic they had no control over, they were unmoved. Both of them simply refused to accept that heightism was a form of body shaming while at the same time insisting that the forms of body shaming that women faced were entirely unacceptable. Think I’m making this story up? These views have been well documented elsewhere.
Online, where people are reduced to avatars made of pixels, it is worse. When men lament their online dating woes they are told that it is always their fault for being creepy, or horrible conversationalists, for waiting too long to reply, or for expecting women to reply too soon. ‘Ghosting’ is normalized, and any suggestion that it is actually bad behavior meets the response that men are not entitled to their attention (easy to saw when studies show women match with over a third of their likes, whereas men match with less than 2%, ensuring most women will never run out of dating options). When leftist women complain about their issues, however petty, there is immediate empathy and support by other members of the community, including men. When leftist men do the same, even when it’s obvious that they are not incels or radicalized into the far right in any way, they are treated like garbage as these two interactions which I am linking to here and here demonstrate.
When the response to there mere suggestion that the left should help young men so they don’t fall pray to people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson is received the way that it has in these past few days, it’s hard not to come out of it thinking that this isn’t just obnoxious self-righteousness: it borders on misandry. And not the edgy, ironic kind that some feminists have engaged with. A type of “soft” misandry that while still far short of the “hard” misogyny that manifests in the institutionalized privilege and violence from men, still shares the generalized disdain and contempt of the opposite sex, and seemingly delights in its suffering. Discarding the structural factors behind the epidemic of loneliness and social alienation and minimizing this as merely loser men complaining of not getting laid is not just disgracefully unsympathetic but entirely self-defeating. Every single far right movement in history, from the Nazis to the Proud Boys has preyed on male anxiety as much as they have on economic anxiety. Why should lefitsts limit their concerns to the latter?
If women have no interest in men sharing leftist spaces and discussing men’s issues in these spaces then count me out. Not because I am particularly passionate about them (I have 99 problems but social alienation ain’t one) but out of the principle that the left should not leave anyone behind. And good luck making leftist men sympathetic to women’s issues with such repulsive, exclusionary attitudes towards their own. After all, nobody owes each other anything, right?
Deeply unserious people
The common denominator of all three drivers of my disenchantment is that the left, particularly its online ecosystem, is little more than a collection of deeply unserious people discussing deeply serious issues for purely performative reasons. There is little interest, much less any plan on how to translate ideological deliberation into viable political platforms, preferring instead to obsess on vacuous sloganeering rather than focus on persuading people outside their narrow Twitter mutuals and Twitch or Discord chats. The art of persuasion, necessary for any movement to grow beyond a devoted fringe (especially one that cannot count on being bankrolled by reactionary or libertarian billionaires), is totally lost on people who prefer instead to engage in a neverending circle-jerk of trying to “out-left” each other and preach to each other’s choirs rather than pull more people into their church.
To some extent this is the natural outcome of interaction on social media, and I must emphasize that a lot of my criticism is particularly focused on the online left. But this can’t be discounted as a separate community from that of the left as a whole. Both the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns relied on their online bases to mobilize levels of support that would have been impossible for openly socialist candidates in previous decades. If the online left deliberately makes itself as odious as possible, what hope that this success can be repeated now that the tried and tested formulas (“Breadtube” videos debunking the alt-right on YouTube, “dirtbag left” podcasts that brought hipster cool to socialist ideas, etc.) have lost their luster?
In retrospect I feel like an idiot for even wanting to be a part of this space and kind of glad that I failed at it. My desire to break into online leftist spaces was really driven by what ended up being a rather soul-destroying experience in the corporate world (that would be you, The Economist), which to this day I do not fancy returning to. That and the stiff, monotonic environment of the analyst/consultant world which I think my rather irreverent and intellectually combative personality is entirely unsuited for, to say nothing of its unsuitability for corporate advancement. And that’s even before they find out I’m a socialist! The online left seemed like a much better match for me, one which involved discussion and debate, often delightfully uncivil, over issues that I am much more passionate about than Mexico’s fourth quarter current account deficit. Sadly, the irreverence and iconoclasm may have been appealing, but the lack of direction and purpose (aside from making a small number of awful people fabulously rich) just gradually sucked the joy out of it all.
I am also consumed by a sense of hopelessness in that I see no current political climate for leftism to thrive in the countries that matter to me and where I have some options for engaging professionally. The left in Britain, where I lived for 15 years until 2022, is all but dead insofar as Blairite centrists remain in control of the Labour Party and with no option short of electoral embarrassment to get rid of them. Leftism in the US is not in much better shape given the unlikelihood that Bernie Sanders will run again for president, and that even if he does he could win. It was my hope that any future for the left as a global movement would have to necessarily start here, in countries with the soft power and economic clout capable of changing hearts and minds around the world. But this option is now gone, for at least a generation. Perhaps in Mexico there is some glimmer of hope that AMLO’s party remains in power and genuinely embraces leftism after his term ends in 2024, even if just a tame form of center-leftism with some semblance of social democracy.
But I’m not going to hold my breath. If the opportunity arises for me to contribute to the political advancement of a leftist movement serious about obtaining power, I will be a part of it without a moment’s hesitation. Until then, the advancement of society will take secondary consideration to the advancement of myself.
Goodbye and good riddance.
“Where must we go…
we who wonder this Wasteland, in search of our better selves?”