On the Far Left

A Crisis Dispatch

If you have been reading my writings for some time, you have probably gotten the impression that I know at least some basics of political philosophy and that I am reasonably dangerous with political-economic analysis. So I have been doing a lot of thinking about the term the far left in American political discourse.

The far left is the political category that names regimes and movements willing to subvert democracy, suppress political dissent, and impose an ideological maximum programme through extra-legal means. This is the mirror of what Trump is doing now. This is what Project 2025 is on the right. There is not a single elected Democratic politician in the United States who fits the category.

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not far left by this definition. By European, British, Australian, Japanese, or South Korean standards, they are relatively moderate politicians pushing popular policies — distributional programs focused on education, healthcare, housing. And yes, raising taxes to pay for those things. This is not far left. This is completely within the boundaries of normal liberal-democratic political discourse in every other rich country on earth. The Labour Party in Britain has been to the left of Mamdani in living memory. The German Social Democrats have been to the left of AOC in living memory. The Canadian NDP, the Australian Labor Party, the Japanese Constitutional Democratic Party, the South Korean Democratic Party — every one of these parties, in their normal operating range, has supported policy positions to the left of what the American Democratic Party’s most-attacked-as-far-left figures are actually proposing. The American discourse calls these figures far left because the American discourse has been calibrated by people who have specific reasons to want the calibration to land that way. It is not because the figures are actually far left.

Bernie Sanders is not far left. He has made his case in American public life for four decades. When he has lost the argument with the Democratic caucus, he has shown up. He has caucused with them. He has voted for legislation he considers half-measures and compromises with people he would rather not compromise with. He has operated inside the democratic procedural order across forty years of public service. The far-left category cannot survive contact with this conduct. The category is being applied to him anyway, by people who know better, because the application serves a function that has nothing to do with the substantive accuracy of the category. Sanders is the textbook example of a figure who has been called far left throughout his career and whose actual conduct demonstrates the opposite of what the designation is supposed to identify.

Sanders is also Jewish — the son of a Polish immigrant whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust. He has been the most prominent Jewish politician on the American left for forty years. He has endorsed Zohran Mamdani. He has campaigned with him. The species of commentator who has been suggesting Mamdani is Islamist or Islamist-adjacent has not had to account for this, and has not tried. A serious analyst making the charge would have to explain why a Jewish politician with every reason to be sensitive to actual antisemitic threat has chosen to publicly ally with the figure the commentariat is framing as the threat. The commentariat’s silence on Sanders’s choice is the diagnostic. The framing is being maintained against the evidence, not from it.

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JD Vance is far right. In a 2021 podcast appearance documented by James Pogue in the April 2022 Vanity Fair piece on the New Right, Vance laid out the operational architecture of a constitutional coup. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice, Vance said: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say — the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. Pogue, in the piece, called this what it was: This is a description, essentially, of a coup. Vance was, at the time, a candidate for United States Senator from Ohio. He is now Vice President of the United States.

Donald Trump is far right. He is engaged, right now, in extra-legal means towards his ends. The deportation operation is being conducted without due process. The prosecutorial apparatus is being deployed against political enemies. The Court has been captured and is rewriting constitutional law to ratify the consolidation. The executive-order regime is being issued in disregard of statutory authority. The administration is operating against the constitutional order it claims to be defending.

Zohran Mamdani has never outright plotted to operate outside the law in order to accomplish ideological goals. He has run for office. He has built a coalition. He has proposed policies. He has accepted electoral results. He has operated inside the democratic procedural order in every documented instance of his public conduct. AOC has done the same. Sanders has done the same for forty years.

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This is exactly what broad swaths of the American right are salivating to do in our fucking faces every day. And they are doing it. They have done it. They have committed treason against this country in the constitutional sense the word actually carries — January 6 alone meets the threshold under any honest reading of the levying-war clause, and the Vance constitutional-coup project meets the threshold under the adhering-to-enemies clause given the documented alignment of the broader donor-monarchical apparatus with hostile foreign powers.

And then people who claim to be center-right have the gall to call Mamdani far left.

The center-right commentariat that has been carrying the far left designation for Mamdani, AOC, Sanders, and the broader American left-of-center coalition has been doing so inside a discourse that has been calibrated by donor-network interests. The donor network has specific reasons to want normal liberal-democratic distributional policy to be coded as far left, because the coding is what licenses the broader political project of opposing the policy. Far left, as the designation operates in contemporary American commentary, is the rhetorical apparatus that converts mainstream center-left policy into a threat that justifies counter-measures the underlying conduct would not otherwise justify. The counter-measures include the actually-far-right project that is currently in power. The actually-far-right project requires the false-equivalence framing as its licensing condition.

The asymmetry is what the false equivalence requires the audience not to notice. The far-right project is operating in the open, by named figures, with documentary receipts, in real time, by their own description. The far-left project being identified by the same commentators is not being conducted at all. The receipts do not exist. The conduct has not been done. The category is being assembled out of policy positions that any other rich democracy treats as boring centrist administration. The category is being maintained by commentators who have the analytical apparatus to make the distinction and have chosen not to make it.

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The center-right commentariat has options. The commentariat could engage with the policy substance Mamdani and AOC and Sanders are proposing on its merits. The commentariat could ask whether the policies have produced good outcomes in the comparable democracies that have implemented them. The commentariat could acknowledge that the American center-left coalition has been operating inside the democratic procedural order across decades, has accepted electoral losses, has caucused with the broader Democratic coalition, has supported legislation it considered insufficient — has done all the things that constitute democratic political conduct rather than far-left ideological maximalism. The commentariat could do this honest work.

The commentariat is not doing the honest work. The commentariat is doing the work the donor network needs it to do. The work is the production of the false-equivalence vocabulary that licenses the actual far-right project. The vocabulary requires the audience to believe that the threat from the American left is comparable in scale and character to the threat from the American right. The belief requires the audience not to notice that the receipts run almost entirely in one direction. Paid commentary produces the belief. The belief produces the political conditions under which the donor network’s preferred project can be conducted without resistance.

The far left designation, applied to Mamdani, is not a description. It is a transaction. The transaction is between the donor network and the commentariat the network has been funding directly or indirectly across decades. The transaction’s product is the discourse calibration that allows the actually-far-right project to operate under cover of opposing a symmetric far-left threat. The threat does not exist at the register the discourse asserts.

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Universal healthcare is, in the contemporary American discourse, radical. The policy is the standard arrangement in every other rich democracy on earth. Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan — every comparable society has some version and has had some version for decades. The policy is the boring centrist administration of the wealthy world. In the United States the same policy is coded as the dangerous extreme. And the latter coding plays a substantial role in managing the worldview of the American audience that would otherwise notice the former. The coding produces the worldview. The American who hears Britain has universal healthcare and concludes that is a different country with different traditions rather than the entire wealthy democratic world has organized this differently and we should ask why has been managed by the operation. The management is the operation.

Meanwhile a conservative legal project, spanning decades, designed to gut over a century of civil-service reform on the argument that Congress exceeded its Article I authority — from the Pendleton Act of 1883 to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — by impinging on Article II executive-removal power, is not coded radical. The parallel arguments — that independent agencies are unconstitutional, that the SEC and FTC and Federal Reserve operate without legitimate authority, that environmental protection laws exceed federal power, that the entire regulatory architecture of the modern American state is a usurpation that must be unwound — are not coded radical either. These arguments are coded originalism. They are coded returning to the original intent of the Founders.

The mythology is what these arguments require to function. The Founders did not hold a laissez-faire political-philosophical worldview. The historical record is unambiguous on this. Among the first major undertakings of the early American Republic was the regulation of private corporations — at the state level through corporate charters that imposed extensive public-purpose obligations, at the federal level through the early commercial-regulatory infrastructure Congress built under the Commerce Clause. The Charles River Bridge case in 1837, decided by Taney’s Court against the Marshall-era precedent, established that corporate charters did not protect private interests against legislative regulation in the public interest. The Founders who were still alive — Madison lived until 1836, Adams and Jefferson until 1826 — did not denounce these developments as betrayals. They had built the constitutional order that produced them.

The contemporary conservative legal project requires the audience to believe the Founders held a political-philosophical worldview that no honest reading of the documentary record supports. The project’s defenders call this originalism. The word does work the substance does not earn. The substance is a late-twentieth-century legal-political construction, funded across fifty years by the donor network whose interests align with the dismantling of the administrative state, ratified incrementally by a captured Court the same network pipelined into power through the Federalist Society infrastructure. This is the most radical contemporary American legal undertaking — unprecedented in scale, without analogue in any other rich democracy, reshaping the constitutional order through judicial fiat that neither the elected branches nor the polity has authorized.

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I am tired of pretending that the people running this discourse do not know what they are doing. Some of them are operating inside a sincere fantasy about being the meritocratic moral center of American politics, and the sincerity of the fantasy is what makes the discourse calibration land for audiences who would resist a more cynical operation. Some of them know exactly what they are doing and are paid well to do it. The mix of sincerity and cynicism is what makes the discourse robust against the kind of analytical correction this Dispatch is offering.

I am offering it anyway, because the People of these United States are entitled to the analytical apparatus that would let them see what is being done to their political discourse. The far left category, applied to the contemporary American Democratic Party’s most-attacked figures, is a category error, and the error is maintained because it licenses the actually-far-right project that is operating against the constitutional order.

Mamdani is not far left. AOC is not far left. Sanders is not far left. They are normal liberal-democratic politicians operating inside the normal range of policy positions that any rich democracy considers within the boundaries of legitimate political discourse. The American discourse that has been telling you otherwise has been telling you something that does not survive contact with any comparative analysis or any examination of the conduct the designation is supposed to identify.

Vance is far right. Trump is far right. The Project 2025 apparatus is far right. The Vance-Thiel monarchical project is far right. The captured-Court infrastructure is far right. The donor-network operation that has been funding the discourse calibration that calls Mamdani far left is itself far right, because the project the funding serves is the project the far right designation is supposed to identify.

Look at where the receipts run. Look at who has done the conduct the category names. Look at who has not. The discourse that has told you otherwise has been telling you something the conduct does not support. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, the rest of the discourse becomes legible for what it is.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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