Tackling disorder and making streets welcoming for families should be a no-brainer — the very foundation of good government at the local level. Yet over the past decade, many blue jurisdictions abandoned these basics in the name of racial justice and “equity.” This had the predictable result of associating such places, in the public mind, with open drug use, needle-strewn sidewalks, tent cities, and rampant antisocial behavior. 

Conservatives made political hay of these failures, and who could blame them? Now, however, Mamdani — one of the most popular Democratic politicians in America — is reclaiming social order for the Left and implicitly questioning the ultra-libertarian social ethos that earlier captured the movement. If he succeeds, it could mark a sea change in progressive thinking. But where is Mamdani getting these ideas?

The answer is, in part, a person: Bhaskar Sunkara. The founder of Jacobin magazine, the president of The Nation, and a contributor to these pages, Sunkara counts Mamdani as a friend and ally. Sunkara has also been quietly but steadily injecting a healthy dose of social realism — some might even say conservatism — into a progressive movement that has been besotted with ideas like defunding the police, legalizing all drugs, and abolishing the family.

“It’s about making sure that these citizens, regularly using hard drugs, living in tents, who are even gambling on their phones, are able to reach their potential and contribute to society,” Sunkara tells me recently, as we sit down for an interview at Jacobin’s downtown-Brooklyn offices.

Sunkara, who rails against vices from porn to sports betting to even alcohol, strenuously avoids coming across as a Right-wing culture warrior. One senses in his tone that he doesn’t want his more culturally conservative positions to come across too strongly or, as he puts it, in “authoritarian” fashion: “As a society, [we] should have a normative vision of a good life, but also leave room for minority preferences.” 

But even that is an astonishing statement for a figure who used to be the vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and who remains arguably the single biggest intellectual force behind it. As the DSA makes dramatic gains among young voters nationwide, it’s notable that one of its most important theorists believes that we “should have a normative vision of a good life.”

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On the core economic issues, he’s in broad alignment with many of his DSA comrades: Medicare for All and, on a grander scale, a “constitutional socialism” that would work within America’s existing framework to infuse socialism into the republic and its market economy. Crucially, Sunkara’s vision of socialism wouldn’t get rid of the market, but rely on market mechanisms to price and allocate goods efficiently. (He lays out this vision in his new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-authored with fellow Leftist intellectuals Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs.)

When it comes to culture, though, Sunkara in some ways easily meets the definition of “conservative” as it’s understood by most in 21st-century America. This, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for his being a “man of the Right.” There is a long tradition of Leftists — George Orwell, Dorothy Day, and Christopher Lasch among them — who opposed the excesses of capitalism not only when it came to market activity, but also in the social and private realms. Moreover, “actually existing socialism” from China to Cuba has often been socially conservative in many respects — and in the “authoritarian” fashion from which, to be clear, Sunkara shrinks.

But ask your average DSAer today on an American college campus about how, or even whether, to address crises like porn addiction or cannabis-use disorder, and you will be mistaken for a Republican and simply brushed aside. I would know. I attend the uber-activistic Columbia University, and this has happened to me too many times to count. Sunkara acknowledges this, as well, but he doesn’t place the blame on socialism or Leftism. Instead, per Sunkara, this way of thinking is “more common just among young people in general,” whereas you’ll find less of it among the Bernie bros and old-school socialists.

In acknowledging this reality, Sunkara puts it charitably: “I think the common response on the Left is, like, ‘Let’s just focus on Medicare for All’” and put the cultural debates to the side. There is also, he suggests, a class dimension to Left tolerance for social vice and disorder. “I think you often find this thing — upper-middle-class people will have lifestyles for their own children and themselves that are quite conventional, low tech, etc., but kind of not want it for other kids.” 

He doesn’t see why socialism should necessarily equate to American-style socially liberal policy prescriptions. Though he warns of the dangers of going too far in the other direction. He tells me he would have “probably” supported gay marriage back when that debate was happening, as opposed to civil unions, but he explains that “even in socialist countries, on the gay and lesbian question, it was considered kind of a bourgeois decadence in places like Cuba, until Cuba opened up, I guess, really, in the ’90s on this issue.”

The degree to which such speech is wholly verboten on the Left — including among the somewhat-less-woke new crop of DSA politicians — can’t be overstated. And yet Sunkara doesn’t blink in saying so, speaking to me in a calm and elevated cadence, matter-of-factly. He may well be one of the minds behind Zohran Mamdani, but one could simply not imagine the same sentence issuing from the mouth of the New York mayor. 

I ask Sunkara about Taylor Lorenz, the Leftist tech blogger, who mocks “‘Leftists’ arguing that porn addiction and social media addiction is real.” Sunkara would be one such Leftist. Indeed, one of a very few. “You get the dopamine hits. It just seems fairly obvious,” Sunkara replies. “I’m one of the few people [who] doesn’t have a beef with Taylor in part because I just have muted her.” 

“Prohibition [of alcohol] was, in fact, a success,” he adds later, unprompted by me. “Prohibition actually led to a decrease in crime, a decrease in domestic violence, a decrease in certain fights and other sorts of public disturbances. Yes, there was an increase in organized crime. That increase, I think, pales in comparison to other advantages.” Though “it’s too late now” to have Prohibition policies reinstated, he laments, Sunkara has previously spoken in support of Utah liquor laws, which limit the sale of high alcohol-by-volume drinks to state stores, impose drink limits at bars, deploy state-mandated devices for measuring the volume of alcohol in a single drink, and proscribe happy hour. 

What, then, does Sunkara have in mind when he urges resistance against the “authoritarian” impulse in fortifying restraints against vice? 

He wouldn’t jail people for marijuana use but would get rid of omnipresent dispensaries (there’s one right outside the Jacobin office). While “porn is very difficult to regulate,” he concedes, he maintains that age-verification is a good “barrier to entry,” particularly for those most vulnerable to its dark and addictive side: “You’re just creating a little bit more friction for like a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old. But by the time someone’s 16 or 17, they can navigate around it and access porn if they want, which I don’t think is a huge problem.” Sunkara believes it’s possible for a man who regularly consumes porn to have positive relationships with women, but that it’s just “common sense” that younger exposure will lead to “pathological outcomes.” We “really need to hold the line” on things like sports betting and, in general, “see how we could regulate and roll back elsewhere.”

Put another way: Sunkara may not be rushing to absolutely prevent everyone from consuming booze, ingesting marijuana, watching porn, and gambling. Yet he sees all of these things as inherently bad — stuff we would be much better off without — and instead seeks maximum moderation within our current societal constraints. That, needless to say, is a far cry from the “porn-good” and “marijuana-good” libertarian orthodoxy on much of the Left. 

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Make Sports Sacred Again

By Bhaskar Sunkara

Unlike many DSA comrades, Sunkara is also unapologetically patriotic. “America was the most racist country in the history of the world, and I think the Left actually does a great discredit to its own history when it pretends like it still is,” he said, to much subsequent internet virality, on what would turn out to be one of Ross Douthat’s last podcast episodes for The New York Times. Sunkara elaborates this point in our interview: “We live in communities, and we have to draw where the level of fellowship [is]. I’m a New Yorker. I’m an American. I also am broadly a man of the Northeast, so I feel fellowship with Ontario, a greater fellowship than I do with Alberta.” This, he cautions me, does not take away from his universalism, but is the reality of how our political organization works. 

It’s an outlook in stark opposition to the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, the pro-Palestine hard-liner who delivered a June upset to the five-term, establishment incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District. Chevalier’s X history includes tweets such as: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On the case of Chevalier, Sunkara says, “I think Darializa came out of a campus radical background,” and that we should wait and “see what she does in office,” because “you could find equal examples of people coming out of the religious Right and having certain rhetoric before they’re in public office.” 

His comfort with patriotism also allows him to reach audiences that would otherwise never hear a socialist message. “I would speak to anyone as long as they also have an audience that’s worth my time,” he says. “So Fox News, you know, three out of four times that Fox News reaches out to me, I’ll say yes.” The only exceptions are when outlets are “openly fascist, openly nativist in the sense that they don’t respect my right to be a part of the American polity, even though I was born here.” 

Would he go on Tucker Carlson? “I could never beat Tucker Carlson in a debate,” he says, “and I don’t necessarily want to agree with him because I do think there [are] undertones to his work that are not only nativist, but I also think that his criticism of Israel is something we should be very wary of.” He adds: “I don’t think a Leftist should necessarily go on Tucker because also then you’re blurring the line between your critique of Israel as a Leftist and his critique of Israel, or your critique of Trump and his critique of Trump.” 

Some of Sunkara’s social prescriptions may seem excessive, and not only to socialists. But he’s trending in the right direction at a time when America is racked by deleterious forms of antisociality that line corporate pockets, whether Big Weed’s or Big Porn’s. To be sure, it’s hard to imagine the DSA embracing Sunkara’s practical, socially moderate, pro-American model of democratic socialism. Then again, a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Zohran Mamdani, a onetime champion of defunding the NYPD, urging the Left to stop coddling disorder.

But the woke Left apparently hasn’t received the memo. Witness the social-media mobbing of Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the socialist journal Catalyst, after he dared to historically analyze wokeness as an illiberal, authoritarian tendency.

Chibber made his comments last week on a Jacobin magazine podcast titled Confronting Capitalism: The End of Wokeness. It triggered a firestorm of angry “X” comments that ranged from mischaracterizing him as a Right-wing goon to outright obscenity. Ajay Singh Chaudhary, the director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, dismissed Chibber’s critique of wokeness as “tripe” and a “carbon copy” of the Right’s.

Laleh Khalili, a Mideast scholar at the University of Exeter, denounced Chibber as a “brownshirt waving a red flag.” William Clare Roberts, an assistant professor of politics at McGill University, suggested that Chibber is “no different” from liberal writers like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait: “I am weary of having to treat him like he’s a serious thinker on the socialist left, much less a Marxist”. Many other commenters didn’t even bother with full sentences. Instead, they simply called Chibber a “pedophile” and the like.

So much for the vibe shift. But what did Chibber actually say that so incensed the professional Left? Perhaps it was because he dared to point out that wokeness is not popular. Or perhaps it was his definition of wokeness that rankled its acolytes: Chibber defined wokeness as a professional-class movement for social justice that excludes socialism from its political project and that is highly intolerant to boot.

A pile-up on X when a Leftist like Chibber criticizes wokeness is politically significant, because it demonstrates that for much of the Left, there is no difference between the neoliberal micromanagement of diversity in the ranks of the professional class, on one hand, and the struggle to empower the American working class relative to capital, on the other. Progressives in states like California have successfully transformed the language of human resources, while neglecting problems like skyrocketing housing costs and working-class wage stagnation.

If Democrats had been successful on both the language and the wage fronts, there might be less explosive hostility to the party’s politics of hypocrisy. November’s massive shift to the GOP in the Golden State and similar blue areas reflected a silent protest against one-party rule: it is the combination of Democratic identity politics and liberal compliance with the demands of the party’s wealthiest donors that has bred resentment and nihilism among downscale Americans.

Unable and unwilling to contemplate the limits of wokeness in building mass politics, identitarian Leftists have taken out their rage against Chibber. In Chinese, there is a saying that reflects the tyrant’s wisdom when controlling a crowd: “kill a chicken to scare the monkey”. You do a symbolic murder of a critic of woke dogma in order to silence anyone else with doubts in their mind about the priorities of Left politics. The X mob can live off the pleasure of group psychology, following an imaginary woke leader by mobbing an enemy online. It is a disgusting spectacle and bodes ill for the evolution of Left liberalism.

It is critical to attack the authoritarianism at the heart of contemporary liberal politics from the Left: if the Left fails to sound its own alarm about the professional-class takeover of identity and diversity, then the Right will continue to draw upon the rage that animates working-class, non-college-educated people of all races, genders, and sexualities. They have seen liberalism deliver nothing but empty promises of inclusion when they hunger for an actual change in the political field itself. Trump sees the hypocrisy of woke elites and acts as a vehicle for catharsis.

If anything, Chibber didn’t go far enough in his critique. At a key point in the podcast, he dared to ask a question most of us don’t pose any longer: why couldn’t ethnic and gender studies be integrated into existing departments of history, sociology, English, American Studies, and the like when they first emerged in the 1960s? Why did they have to be carved out as separate disciplines? Chibber argued that this owed to “grassroots” demand for separate identity-based departments.

But this is mistaken, and any serious Left critique of the rise of identity studies — a key vector of what came to be known as woke ideas — must reckon with the granular history. In fact, the establishment of the first-ever ethnic studies departments, at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, was engineered by a lifetime FBI informant named Richard Aoki.

This is notable, because the upshot of Aoki’s work, and that of the wider movement he helped incept, was to defuse campus radicalism and turn would-be revolutionaries into credentialed race professionals of the kind who would soon become familiar to anyone who has faced the business end of a university diversity office or corporate HR department.

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In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

In his 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power, the journalist Seth Rosenfeld used the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from the FBI about its activities against California militant groups during the Sixties and early Seventies. In the course of his research, he discovered that Aoki, the first Asian member of the Black Panther Party, was recruited by the FBI when he was in the Army during the Fifties to inform on student radicals. Aoki, as it happens, also midwifed the Asian American Studies section of Berkeley’s ethnic-studies department, the first of its kind in the United States.

This origin story sheds a cold light on identity- and grievance-based disciplines, which were designed to emphasize “visibility” and “representation” over critically analyzing and attacking capitalism itself. Other American universities would soon follow Berkeley’s path and create ethnic-studies departments to signal their commitment to progressive causes.

Thanks to identity politics, militancy and activism became institutionalized within the academy and, later, the corporation and the security apparatus. Is it possible that Aoki abandoned his early commitment to anti-Communism and had a genuine conversion to the sort of identity politics he would espouse as a chief promoter of ethnic studies? Certainly. And I am not suggesting that identity politics was solely a product of the American security establishment; life is much too complex and contingent to permit such single-cause explanations. Still, there is no denying that university-based ethnic studies came to supply a new “dialect of power”: a way for the likes of the FBI or Goldman Sachs to deflect questions about their decisions by showcasing the “diversity” of the people who make those decisions.

The point is that those of us on the Left need more discussion of the origins of identity politics, the role it has played in creating nominally progressive liberal institutions, and its complicity with defanging actual radicalism. Chibber’s intervention in this debate wasn’t inflammatory. It was conversational, accessible, and reasonable. Chibber’s work is the answer to the millions of Americans who crave a critique of Democratic identity politics but have only found it on the Right. The viciousness of his critics only vindicates his arguments.

Still, study of the French Revolution is endlessly instructive, for the radical temptation in politics exhibits consistent patterns, and the French Revolution displays them in crystalline form. Here are a few historical works on the period that are beautifully written, and may prove helpful for understanding the present.

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978) and The Passing of an Illusion (1995)

François Furet rescued the academic study of the French Revolution from an entanglement with Marxism that had grown debilitating in the decades after World War II. French historiographers of that period tended to project backwards onto Robespierre all the romance of 1917, and likewise to view the Soviet Union as the successor state chosen by History to advance the cause. What made this no longer tenable was the publication, in 1973, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The very parallels insisted upon by Marxist historians were now damning to their enthusiasms. Just as Solzhenitsyn showed that the gulag was no mere accessory to the revolutionary state, but rather its central manifestation and meaning, so it now became necessary to ask whether the Terror was not just a regrettable episode to be excused by extenuating circumstances, but the most revealing expression of revolution as a political culture.

This question had implications for how one was to understand the revolutionary passions of the youth movement of the 1960s, and Furet did not shy from drawing the relevant lessons. A member of the French Communist party in his youth, he came to see things in rather a different light. The opening essay in Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution  offers many riches. For example, he explains the paranoid style of revolutionary politics, and its tendency to exercise power through contrived moral emergencies.

Furet’s final book, The Passing of an Illusion , traced the revolutionary passion in its career through 20^th-century intellectual life in the West. Writing in the early Nineties, when Communism had just collapsed, the choice of title must have seemed apt to book buyers. But Furet knew that “the revolution” is infinitely elastic, so boundless is its promise and so limitless is its “capacity to survive experience”. It has a birth date (1789) but no end; it provides “the matrix of universal history”. That history is understood as a struggle of human emancipation, its polestar a vision of equality. Whatever stands in its way appears not as mere obstacle, but as hateful enemy.

Further reading

Did the French Revolution cause Nazism?

By John-Lewis Stempel

Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

In the 1780s, the highest reaches of French society, as well as the broader reading public, was infatuated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Far more influential than his works of political philosophy were his works of sentimental education, Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse. As Simon Schama wrote, “Rousseau’s works dealing with personal virtue and the morality of social relations sharpened distaste for the status quo and defined a new allegiance. He created, in fact, a community of young believers.” Rousseau gave no roadmap to revolution, but he did invent “the idiom in which its discontents would be voiced and its goals articulated.”

What distinguished the moral elect was possession of un coeur sensible, a feeling heart. Visible expression of inner sentiments became acceptable, and indeed to be overcome with passion was a sign of noble character. Weeping was a sign, not of weakness, but of sincerity. Schama writes that tears “were cherished precisely because (it was assumed) they were unstoppable: the soul directly irrigating the countenance. Tears were the enemy of cosmetics and the saboteur of polite disguise. Most important, a good fit of crying indicated that the child had been miraculously preserved within the man or woman.” Note the role of self-exposure in creating a moral typology of citizens. Soon, sincerity would become the virtue claimed by axe-wielding sans-culottes.

Reading Schama’s account of weeping French men and women before the Revolution, one cannot help but think of today’s emotivism, in which feeling replaces intellectual coherence as the index of truth. That is, of one’s own truth, which others must acknowledge and acquiesce to – or else wound one deeply. On Twitter, of course, tears are not visible. “I’m literally shaking” is a verbal embellishment that seems to serve the same purpose. It conveys intensity of feeling, hence the moral credibility of one’s response.

Further reading

Why the rich are revolting

By Ed West

Mona Ozouf, “Revolutionary Religion”, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989)

In 2020, shrines to George Floyd sprang up in cities across America, with candles set before garlanded pictures of the man (as in a Hindu temple). An enormous holographic effigy of Floyd went on tour through the southern states. We have all seen the videos of white people washing the feet of black people, in emulation of Christ’s servanthood, and prostrating themselves in various postures of abasement while chanting self-denunciations.

In Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being, explicitly religious props, recitations and images were used to imbue revolutionary ideology with sacred feeling in a deliberate caricature of Catholic ceremonies. “Here there were not spectators but celebrants, not an audience but a people,” as the historian Mona Ozouf wrote. The Festival was preceded by the destruction of France’s statues by “iconoclastic commandos from the revolutionary army”. The heart of Marat (one of the bloodier Jacobins, himself stabbed to death in his bathtub by a provincial woman) was placed in a vessel and hung from the roof of the Cordeliers as the crowd was encouraged to recite new psalms (“O cor Marat, O cor Jesus”). The Festival coincided with a busy period for the guillotine, as intended by Robespierre.

Was the revolutionary cult a strategic ruse, then, meant to reconcile the Revolution with Catholic habits through a superficial continuity? Perhaps it was an effort to bring the Revolution to a conclusion by establishing a state religion, in the hope that this would help to secure social cohesion? Historians disagree on these questions, and Ozouf guides us through the controversies.

By the same author

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Contemporary America is about as far from Catholic France as it is possible to get. Religious longings, apparently a permanent part of our human makeup, have long been frustrated in our secularised society. But for just that reason, revolutionary piety may hold special appeal. This bears on a question that has long hovered over the phenomenon of “political correctness”: how sincere is it? And is the quotient of sincerity changing?

Writing in The Atlantic in 2018, which now seems a long time ago, Reihan Salam parsed the utility of “white bashing” as part of the verbal repertoire of success in elite institutions. In this setting it was generally ironic, even while doing important work to signal that one is competent in the codes of the ruling class. “The people I’ve heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile people who’ve proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces.” Salam, a child of Bangladeshi Muslims and Harvard student, came to view white-bashing as a form of “intra-white status jockeying,” a device by which the demarcation between “upper whites” and “lower whites” is made clear.

It would be hard to fix a date, but at some point this parlor game slipped the bounds of its intended audience. In the hands of the vulgar, it became literal-minded rather than playful, moralistic rather than urbane, a way of mobilising resentments and putting them to use. Again, one thinks of the trickle-down radicalism in France of the 1780s, as depicted by Simon Schama. The elite’s fashions of sentiment, its internecine dramas that seemed to be playing out in a safely “cultural” register, would become the seed of something more ominous. Something unintended and uncontrollable.