To get a sense for this, consider the fates of Taylor Lorenz, Boots Riley, and Zohran Mamdani: three figures with large footprints on the Left who’ve recently come to realize that hell is other Leftists, to adapt the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

Lorenz, a journalist-influencer hybrid — a kind of reverse Joe Rogan for people who never took their masks off — championed extreme Covid lockdowns; fangirled after Luigi Mangione, the alleged insurance-boss assassin; and left The Washington Post after the paper investigated her for sharing an Instagram post calling then-President Joe Biden a war criminal. Filmmaker and musician Riley’s latest movie, I Love Boosters, is such a work of agitprop that even an outlet called Communist Revolution described as “communist propaganda” — and “weak sauce” at that. Mamdani, of course, is the self-avowed democratic socialist governing America’s largest city. None of the three, in short, could plausibly be mistaken for a centrist.

Yet all three have been hauled before the People’s Court of Posting: a stateless, leaderless online tribunal whose function is to prosecute everyone — no matter how radical — for insufficient radicalism, invariably ruling that lo, the accused comes up short. It’s more proof that whatever Stephen Miller is currently cooking up to do to “radical-Left terrorism” from inside the Trump administration, it isn’t, right now, the most effective force degrading the American Left. The Left is doing that to itself.

In July, Lorenz claimed that “33,000 people are canceling me” after she criticized Minnesota’s AI nudification law, which prohibits the use of technology for faking sexual images of people. This week, she drew more backlash after discussing how she uses generative AI to work more productively. Reasonable people can debate whether journalists should use such tools, but posters in a Left-leaning subreddit called her “deeply unwell mentally” or claimed, “either she’s in a psychosis, or she’s been bought.” Lorenz then complained that the online Left spends its time “dog-piling everyone who doesn’t comport with their extremely narrow social media-driven worldview,” calling the culture “absolutely deranged” and its practitioners guilty of “no moral consistency on any level” and a willingness to “lie all day about anyone they don’t like.”

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Her realization has impeccable comic timing. It was only last year, when Mamdani rode the subway without a mask during his mayoral campaign, that she accused “a lot of DSA leftists” of hating disabled people, women and LGBTQ people — an extraordinary moral indictment to build out of one politician’s naked face, especially years after universal masking had ceased to be a remotely plausible public policy. Now she has discovered the downside of ruthless purity testing: administer it often enough and, eventually, somebody administers it to you.

Just ask Boots Riley, who has been an outspoken communist since before many of his ultra-Left online trolls were born. He fronted the radical hip-hop group The Coup through the Clinton years and spent a memorable evening on Politically Incorrect a quarter-century ago patiently explaining Marxism to a smirking Bill Maher. When a clip of that appearance resurfaced this week, Riley observed that the old Right-wing gotcha — if you make money under capitalism while opposing capitalism, you are a hypocrite — was now being repeated by “supposed Left online people.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In one discussion of Riley’s films, a critic argued that he “does not have to make a movie that costs 20 million dollars” — a reference to I Love Boosters — if he really opposes capitalism, dismissed his work as a “million-dollar vanity project funded by the billionaires [Riley] claim[s] to hate,” and concluded that anyone who repeatedly makes choices that perpetuate capitalism is, whatever he calls himself, a capitalist.

This is a wonderfully efficient definition of capitalism, because it makes every person currently alive guilty of it. If Riley proves that longevity confers no immunity from such intramural attacks, Mamdani demonstrates that neither does victory. Conservatives regularly roast the New York City mayor, but some of the heaviest fire still comes from socialists for whom gaining power represents less a triumph than a dangerous ideological compromise.

A recent feature essay in The Drift on New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is a nuanced account of a socialist organization’s growing pains in power. But it also doubles as a field guide to how the ultra-Left cannibalizes its own successes.

NYC-DSA boasts 15,000 members and genuine victories: a Big Apple mayor elected from among their own ranks, a rent freeze instituted, and a near-sweep by DSA candidates in the June Democratic primaries. Even so, as French documents, much of the chapter’s energy still gets consumed by warfare waged “in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X.”

A leadership reshuffle got branded, seriously, a “coup.” A dispute over home-health policy occasioned comparisons to slavery. A national leader of the dominant Groundwork caucus dismissed his internal critics with a line that deserves to be engraved somewhere, describing “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt-out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable” — arguably the most accurate description of Left Twitter ever.

DSA’s own Liberation Caucus, a — sigh — Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction operating inside the very organization that helped elect him, published one member’s description of Mamdani as “ZIOhran”; another called him “a traitor and an opportunist” over his perceived moderation on policing and Israel. The Trotskyist paper Workers Vanguard ran a piece headlined, with admirable bluntness, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani!,” accusing the mayor of backing “scabherder” Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent nurses’ strike, and closing with: “Expel Mamdani! Socialists stand with the workers and oppressed, not scabherders and pigs!”

This isn’t an argument against criticizing politicians, artists, or journalists merely because they belong to the same broad political family. A movement that can’t criticize its leaders soon becomes a fan club. The problem is what happens when every honest disagreement over tactics, language, art, or policy becomes a referendum on personal character. The defendant is never merely mistaken but corrupt; never simply compromised but bought; never insufficiently radical but secretly reactionary. The overriding impulse is the avoidance of contamination.

I have experienced the smaller, less glamorous version of this as someone who writes occasionally for Jacobin, a premier Left outlet. Of course, no journalist is above criticism, but nothing matches the venom my own occasional writing generates from my fellow progressives. I’ve been called fascist, racist, Zionist, reactionary, and, most damningly of all in certain corners of the internet, a Jacobin writer. The abuse rarely engages with anything I have actually written, and it rarely tries to persuade anyone; it’s ambient, repetitive and exhausting. It’s a kind of ideological carbon monoxide that doesn’t kill anyone but saps and smothers energy and genuine critical thought.

It’s the kind of noxious atmosphere that helps explain why Bluesky is dying. Conceived as the progressive rescue boat from Elon Musk’s X, it increasingly resembles a lifeboat whose passengers spend their days deciding whom they will cannibalize first. Slate conceded that “the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.” By June, the platform’s mobile application commanded 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide, a 27% tumble from its previous year, even as the total number of active participants has withered by over 50% since the high-water mark following the election.

The platform did not invent the Left’s appetite for schism, but it has distilled it into something close to its purest form: a politics conducted almost entirely through denunciation, in which the easiest way to demonstrate your virtue is to expose someone else’s insufficient supply. That may provide a brief dopamine hit, but it cannot build a durable coalition. Any movement large enough to matter will necessarily contain hypocrites, eccentrics, sell-outs, moderates and people who sometimes say stupid things online. It will also contain people who disagree.

Nor is this an exclusively American disease. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched Your Party last year amid hundreds of thousands of expressions of interest from voters desperate for an alternative to Labour. A year later, thanks to vicious infighting, Your Party became No One’s Party. The Greens initially appeared to be the beneficiaries, but they, too, have already demonstrated the Left’s remarkable capacity to turn political momentum into an internal disciplinary hearing.

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To be fair, the far Right suffers from a nearly identical affliction. MAGA’s online fringe hunts RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), fantasizes about Maoist-style purges of liberal institutions, and insists that Nazi jokes remain jokes even as the jokers enter Republican politics and win jobs in the administration. Extremely online politics, Left and Right alike, increasingly resembles two rival cults, each certain the other represents the real existential threat, while both spend the overwhelming majority of their energy excommunicating their own. The American far-Right influencer Laura Loomer is now claiming credit for Friday’s ICE deportation of the British far-Right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos — which is taking intra-party cancel culture to a wild new level.

None of which means Stephen Miller’s threats to progressives are empty theater. The White House consigliere really did vow, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “vast domestic terror movement.” It is worth remembering, too, as that grim anniversary approaches, that eight Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison after an anti-ICE protest turned violent. An actual crackdown is afoot, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cherishes civil liberties.

But if the Trumpians were smart, they would turn their detention centers into a convention of likeminded radicals with free Wi-Fi. What would ensue would be not unlike Sartre in No Exit, in which three sinners are put in a locked room waiting for the instruments of torture, only to realize none was coming; they themselves were each other’s affliction. So it goes for the likes of Lorenz, Riley, and Mamdani.

“Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East,” wrote Stephen Miller on X, adding in a different post: “Kamala’s closing pitch: INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST!” And again: “Trump will end and prevent war in the Middle East.” Laura Loomer — the 9/11 truther and Mar-a-Lago regular — warned that a Harris presidency would not only saturate the White House with the scent of curry, but risk triggering “WORLD WAR III.”

Yet MAGA today is arguably the most hawkish faction on the American scene. Its ideologues — not least Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer — braid a run of unrelated conflicts, foreign and domestic, into a single struggle against what the administration calls “Third Worldism”: a nebulous enemy category encompassing Iran and the Eurasian great powers, Latin American Leftists and drug-traffickers, Somali migrants, and the Zohran Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party.

The bitter truth, especially for those of us who once saw promise in conservative populism, is that the movement was always structurally vulnerable to this turn.

Eighteen months in office, the second Trump administration has waged a full-on war with Iran, while largely abandoning the diplomatic track on Ukraine. Team Trump, moreover, has racked up various “smaller” interventions: regime change in Venezuela (and, perhaps soon, Cuba); bombings in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Ecuador; and a lawless campaign of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that has killed more than 200. 

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How did we get here?

Part of it has to do with the nature of the Republican Party and its mighty donor class. The “restraint” faction — conservatives who advocate a lighter footprint abroad, or who insist that Washington conserve scarce resources for the rivalry with China — locked down many national-security jobs in the new administration. But assistant secretaries of this-and-that don’t write checks, and they can’t get the commander in chief on the phone the way, say, Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress and pro-Israel mega-donor, can.

Then there is GOP coalitional politics. The South has been a party stronghold since the 1960s at the presidential level and, since the ’90s, down the ballot. As blue states and cities have declined, the region has drawn people, capital, dynamism, and, with them, political power. As the writer Michael Lind has noted, the South is also home to a more martial culture than much of the country (the late Sen. Lindsey Graham was no aberration).

Florida, especially, exerts an immense gravitational pull. It is no accident that Loomer — who has recently emerged as a champion of Ukraine after years of disparaging the country and its cause — is Florida-based. So are a host of other hawkish voices: The Babylon Bee, the satirical-ish evangelical magazine; the podcaster Dave Rubin; and many smaller stars in the pro-war constellation. And that’s not to mention Florida’s Cuban-exile population, whose omni-hawkish worldview the GOP must serve to win in the Sunshine State. For many of these figures, the “war” is one long front stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, and from thence to the Caribbean. 

But the deepest factor is ideological. Populism, almost by definition, needs an enemy — a “hegemonic formation,” as the Left theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, against which to organize mass political energy. During his first presidential bid, Trump aimed his followers’ oppositional energy mostly against the bipartisan elites who had plunged America into pointless forever wars in the Middle East, while abandoning the working class to the vagaries of corporate globalization.

All along, though, there was another side to Trump and MAGA — the one whose critique of porous borders, a perfectly legitimate populist issue, veered into talk of immigrants as “rapists.” Beginning in the first term, as Trumpism was translated into governance, the economic populism mostly fell by the wayside. His sole legislative achievement back then was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. This partly owed to Trump’s own plutocratic instincts, and partly to the familiar personnel and sheer inertia of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Right’s best-organized institutions set about healing these ruptures — refitting populism to the old agenda of oligarchic economics and pro-Israel hawkery. The National Conservatism conferences, Project 2025, and the like: in retrospect, all served this purpose.

An example is MAGA’s treatment of Big Tech. The populist problem with Big Tech had once been its overweening market power and lack of accountability; but slowly that objection morphed into decrying the use to which the firms put that domination: namely, promoting “wokeness.” Once Elon Musk owned Twitter, renamed X, the lopsided power he exercised over the platform ceased to be a problem at all. And where the MAGA Right had once faulted the “pro-war uniparty” of the Bushes and the Clintons for diving head-first into Mideast quagmires, the rhetoric shifted beginning in the second Trump administration: the sin now isn’t the breaking of nations, but bothering to rebuild afterward or pretending to care about democracy in Muslim lands.

I encountered a version of the latter firsthand, while profiling Pete Hegseth, the then-newly confirmed secretary of defense, aboard his plane on a visit to migrant-processing operations at Gitmo. He and his closest aides were keen to have me know that Hegseth is a former soldier who had learned the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. At the time, I took this to mean opposition to ill-defined missions and overreach abroad. In fact, it meant no longer bothering with even the pretense to moral universalism that had guided the earlier conflicts. Now we just blow stuff up — this, it turns out, is the “new” in the “New Right.”

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If this newly reconstituted Right isn’t in the business of doing real populism — if it indeed enjoys the backing of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Musk — then against whom can it organize its energies? Already, in the early 2020s, one could see the pseudo-populist elements of the Right road-testing “woke communism”: a category that framed the assistant professor scraping by on $30,000 a year as a subversive “elite” (while Musk came across as a subaltern hero).

More recently, the Right has settled on “Third Worldism” — a term that appears no fewer than 40 times in a new State Department document on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” which elevates the puny and faltering Havana regime into a powerful enemy state that could endanger the American way of life at any minute.

The Third Worldist menace is vaguely brown, vaguely communistic, and much easier to “do” something about than confronting the internal contradictions that wrack working- and lower-middle-class America. To deal with Third Worldism abroad, you don’t have to marshal bills through Congress and strike careful compromises with Democrats. You can just fire off missiles — foreign and defense policy being the area in which the president and the executive branch enjoy a near-unchecked latitude, at least as the Constitution has been interpreted for the better part of a century. 

And it can justify a lot: brutalizing migrants almost as enemy combatants, calls to denaturalize the likes of Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, a grinding, aimless new war in the Persian Gulf — all while covering over the failure to shift the immigration system to a skills-based one, say, or to renew the industrial base.

There is only one problem. Taken to its logical terminus, this ideological agenda will bring the United States much closer to a total conflict — World War III, if we must use Trumpy language — than anything contemplated by even old-school hawkish strategists like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Max Boot. Let alone that warmonger of Miller’s and Loomer’s 2024-era nightmares — Kamala Harris.