Apostasy and Redrawn Maps

A brief response to Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

A few days ago, In These Times published an article called “Losing The Plot: The ‘Leftists’ Who Turned Right.”

Authored by Jeff Sharlet — a writer whose reporting on religion I’ve long admired — and Kathryn Joyce, it sounds a tired alarm: many leftists, who were probably never “real” leftists in the first place, appear to have suddenly gone over to the “right.”

Over the past seven years, they — the intellectuals, the comedians, their fans, the growing cohort of voters now leaning toward RFK Jr. (22% in one November poll) — have taken ​“red pills” a la The Matrix, tumbled down rabbit holes in the Wonderland sense. In moments of great flux — the 1960s from which Horowitz fled, the post-9/11 years, the current clusterfuck of crises so vast and interconnected that they might more simply be called our condition — such portals, from one reality to another, are plentiful. And currently they’re mostly riddling the Left as fascism gathers force, drawing together tendencies that didn’t previously align.

The authors list several easy examples (with particular focus on Matt Tabibi) and also journals to which these traitors have fled (Unherd, Compact — both places I’ve written), then go on to describe specific positions which are markers of this phenomenon: “Manichean” anti-imperialism, critique of new gender frameworks and of #metoo, class-first analysis that sees identity as a “distraction,” and a rejection of the racial essentialism which resulted in phrases like “white fragility.”

My longtime readers — and my faithfully-obsessive critics — might have noticed the same thing I did: I could easily fit into this category without even needing a shoehorn.

The authors note that some of these left-to-right intellectuals claim they never actually left the “left,” but rather found that one day that the “left” itself had changed. If you’ve read Here Be Monsters, you’ll know that’s the primary thrust of my book. The maps were redrawn around the ideological territory of leftism, ceding vast areas of critique to the right.

Suddenly, using a material analysis to understand economic disparity meant you were anti-black, anti-trans, and anti-disabled. Suddenly, thinking that the concerns of the working class mattered more than ever-changing academic theories meant you were a fascist. Just as sudden, criticizing the globalization of capitalism and the erosion of local democratic control meant you were antisemitic. Believing humans should be allowed to decide what they do with their bodies suddenly meant you’d fallen for far right conspiracy theories about micro-chipped vaccines. And practically (or perhaps truly) overnight, standing for the principles of free speech and due process meant being a white supremacist and a rape-apologist.

On the other hand, what being “leftist” meant no longer looked anything like what it used to. What passes for it now is indistinguishable from capitalist optimism: an embrace of technological disruption as the key to social progress, a focus on individualistic identity-markers rather than collective class struggle, an increasing vilification of manual labor and non-urban cultural and religious forms, and a fanatic belief that every natural limit to human consumption and behavior can be transcended.

The authors, of course, mention none of this. Instead, they focus on a hipster clique in Manhattan and the influence of Peter Thiel, asserting that the dissent mostly comes from a desire to appear “transgressive” and for a little more money. They then end with a rather tragic dirge to all the people the “left” has lost:

We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.

Again, this is hardly the first such alarm about what can be easily described as a “leftist brain drain.” Recall, for example, all the laments about Slavoj Zizek going “red-brown” a few years back, or the attacks on Glenn Greenwald for his rejection of the Trump-Putin conspiracy, or the smears against the black Marxist Adolph Reed as a “racist.” What’s happened in these cases — and in many more — is that the internet rabble have declared them apostate, which then pressured journals, publishers, and organizations to “no-platform” their ideas. Then, when the excommunicated regardless continue to write and speak anyway and continue to find an audience, their persistence is seen as just more proof they were apostates in the first place.

This will keep going, probably even accelerate. But to assume that those of us — yes, including me — who’ve had the maps redrawn around us actually went anywhere is truly “losing the plot.” Certainly, there have been some who, like the teenager who adopts Satanism to show his opposition to Christianity, have adopted right aesthetics and beliefs. I think many more of us, though, have realized the current conceptions of “left” and “right” are now just false shadows of each other, signifiers of loyalty to brands as meaningful as “Coke” and “Pepsi.”

The maps will continue to be redrawn, and then drawn again, gerrymandering political allegiances until every category becomes meaningless. That moment, though, is where I think our real ground for hope resides: a time when we can all be human again, gaze about at the ruins, and finally get to work.