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Leftists Leaving the Left
A fresh raft of intellectual refugees is turning from the Left. Maybe they’re not washing up on the shores of conservatism or even Republicanism, but what’s clear is the Left they knew has left them. They are calling it “The Turn,” this experience of waking up to the new reality that the institutions and ideas they believed in, to which they committed their lives, have become utterly corrupted.
Walter Kirn was a huge deal in the rather small, insular, elite New York magazine and publishing world. He strode Manhattan like a colossus. Time Magazine. Vanity Fair. New York Magazine. New York Review of Books. New York Times Sunday Magazine. Hollywood made two of his novels into movies. I have no doubt he had his own table at Elaine’s. Maybe he sat at Woody’s.
Kirn’s essay at Substack last July was called “The Bull****.” Kirn remembered the time when Time Magazine “grounded the American mind in a moderate shared reality.” He said there was a time when “it was still possible to regard our product as unifying and, in its way, definitive.” All that has changed. He says, now, “every morning, there it is waiting for me on my phone. The bull****.”
Kirn’s complaint is the same as yours. Journalists are no longer journalists. Instead, they are propagandists for a political point of view. They have become cozy courtiers and chroniclers of the powerful. They are lap dogs happily kept on a short chain, eager to peddle their master’s lies—like Hunter’s laptop was a Russian plot.
Kirn has lost most of his income and all his old friends. He is unrepentant.
Liel Leibovitz was a fully credentialed denizen of the Upper West Side. Doctorate from Columbia. Professorship at NYU. Mainstream book contracts. Bylines in the smart magazines. Invitations to parties where one might sit next to Susan Sontag or Salman Rushdie.
He published “The Turn” last December at Tablet Magazine. He says “The Turn” is not a Damascene moment but starts as a twitch, then a few more twitches, “stretching into a gnawing discomfort and then, eventually, a sense of panic.” It is what happens when your world turns sideways. The Turn is when you cannot admit to your friends that even bigots ought to have free speech. The Turn is realizing you can’t express your doubts about lockdowns and school closures. The Turn is fearing the label “white supremacist” because you think burning cities is not necessarily “social justice.”
Leibovitz says, “You don’t get to be ‘against the rich’ if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not a ‘supporter of free speech’ if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not ‘for the people’ if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin or force them out of jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies.” He says the Left has become the party of the wealthy and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens, and for the U.S. Constitution. He has taken The Turn away from all that.
Alana Newhouse went to Barnard College on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and then took a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. She worked for legendary Democrat political consultant David Garth. She founded Tablet Magazine. In 2014, she gave birth to a baby boy, and she swore this boy lived in pain from the moment he was born. No one in the medical profession believed her. Finally, she came across a brain scientist named Norman Doidge, who helped her understand her son’s injury and how to proceed.
She asked Doidge why it took her and her husband “years to figure this out.” After all, both were children of doctors. And she and her husband were writers and researchers, with loads of health insurance. Doidge bluntly told her that the “medical system is broken.” Specifically, Doidge mentioned quotas for admission from emergency rooms, unnecessary operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, peer review run by Big Pharma, and many more maladies that have corrupted the system.
And then Doidge dropped the bomb on Newhouse. He asked, “How come so much of journalism I read seems like garbage?” At that moment, Newhouse realized Doidge was right. Journalism was broken. It had become garbage. And then she had the vertiginous realization that everything is broken.
She says, “For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc.” She says they are all broken. The cohort running these institutions now insist on sameness and purity. They have become “a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other.”
Leaving the Left is an old story.
The great novelist John Dos Passos turned on the Left when he realized the Soviets had murdered Spanish poet José Robles and that Fellow Travelers, including his close friend Ernest Hemingway, lied about it.
Arthur Koestler left the Communist Party over his disillusionment with Stalin. His book Darkness at Noon is one of the important books of this oeuvre.
Closer to our own time is the story of the neocons—Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and others—who moved Right after they were “mugged by reality.”
David Horowitz and his friends had “second thoughts” about their Stalinist youth. They produced “second thoughts” books and hosted “second thoughts” conferences. They still do.
Overreach always opens eyes. Pro-abortion advocate Frances Kissling, former head of Catholics for a Free Choice, said her movement lost “moderate pro-choice Catholics” over the radicalism of partial-birth abortion.
It is quite remarkable news that Kirn, Leibovitz, and Newhouse have opened their eyes. We can expect many more of them, as we are living through desperate times where the Left has the whip hand and are happily using it. Though a longtime man of the Right, even I have taken a bit of a Turn in recent years. The people and institutions I once respected—military leaders, the FBI, even the CIA—I now fear. In some ways, The Turn is liberating.
The good news is that in twenty or thirty years, there will be a plethora of books and articles from Millennials. These former nonbinary-commie-BLM-loving Millennials will have made The Turn.
Published in General
Me, too. /:
I have seen a lot of comments on Twitter made by people leaving the left. Mugged by reality indeed, reasons being the disastrous and evil Covid response and rising crime.
I’ve been there – left the left decades ago. But I always want to warn these people – yes, leaving the left is the correct thing to do. But the Republican Party will break your heart
Maybe it is overreach, but they have pulled the Overton window way Left. I suspect some of this “Turn” is just lefties embarrassed at how fast they are ruining the last best hope on earth.
Excellent post, AR.
I’m coming around to the idea that, within any population of human beings, there will always be a small number of sociopaths driven to impose their will over the lives others. The way I see it, these sociopaths found a home in American Progressive movement starting about 100 years ago and they have been operating within the ranks of America’s well meaning liberals ever since then. I see the “leaving the left” phenomenon as being prompted by the well meaning liberal’s realization that he is in company of these sociopaths.
They haven’t left the Left – they still hold all the terrible ideas that made them a danger to life, liberty and the republic. It’s just that the noisiest part of the Left has left them, and has even worse ideas. The enemy of my enemy may be my friend, but only for the purposes of destroying my enemy.
This is why truly turning the people back to the country’s founding principles is so difficult. The Republican Party as it has operated for the last few decades does not do that and the Left, including those experiencing the Turn, have been indoctrinated well in distrust of Republicans and for good reasons. Thankfully those experiencing the Turn have also seen how much worse the Left’s cause is.
Amen.
If you want to be really demoralized go on YouTube and get the briefing from S2 underground.
Austin, this is another terrific post — and, I think, spot-on.
I can remember a couple of conspicuous instances like the ones you describe, of men of the left shifting their views. One was Christopher Hitchens, another David Mamet. Each case is a little different, but they overlap in their response to the left’s overreach, which I think is the thing that will save us.
Again, great post.
But are any Millennials shifting? Thats what I worry about.
Most of the people who shifted are what I would regard as well educated and have the ability to think clearly about things.
Millennials are not well educated and do not (in general) have the ability to think clearly about things.
When Pete Buttigieg makes the turn, then there might be something to it. Otherwise just watch his 60 Minutes interview.
Many thanks.
Granted in that it’s a “select” group, but I am delighted by the dozens of millennials I interact with regularly. For one thing, the millennials as a group were always more pro-life than their mothers and fathers.
And they’ve been an eye-witness to the disastrous Covid response and don’t need much convincing that Big Government is bad. Even if in theory they think Big Government should handle Big problems, they’ve learned that the bigger the government, the more corrupt and the more unqualified.
As my brother used to say to my mother: where are you going to find all those angels you need to staff all those positions.
That said, I have a few millennials in my extended family who qualify as what I call the “laptop class”; happily working at home for the past two years and making $100K plus. Also childless. They are oblivious. I don’t waste me time on them.
You mentioned John Dos Passos. Attending a demonstration in 1926 in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, he was appalled by what he saw among his fellow demonstrators…even though he was on their side as far as substantive issue went.
From sometime during this spring of 1926 of from the winter before a recollection keeps rising to the surface. The protest meeting is over and I’m standing on a set of steps looking into the faces of the people coming out of the hall. I’m frightened by the tense righteousness of the faces. Eyes like a row of rifles aimed by a firing squad. Chins thrust forward into the icy night. It’s almost in marching step that they stride out into the street. It’s the women I remember most, their eyes searching out evil through narrowed lids. There’s something threatening about this unanimity of protest. They are so sure they are right.
I agree with their protest: I too was horrified by this outrage. I’m not one either to stand by and see injustice done. But do I agree enough? A chill goes down by spine..Whenever I remember the little scene I tend to turn it over in my mind. Why did my hackles rise at the sight of the faces of these good people coming out of the hall?
Was it a glimpse of the forming of a new class conformity that like all class conformities was bent on riding the rest of us?
Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism
Perhaps we can talk. I really don’t understand how to use this site!
Agreed. It’s all talk.
Individuals such as these haven’t changed their ideas in the slightest, they see no connection between the current insanity and what they have brought about with their support for it. What they will do is refuse to openly support their lunatic colleagues but those people are still their colleagues.
So when someone demands they acknowledge their “pronouns” they will do it. So when someone demands they destroy a young girl’s dreams of competing in sport they will do it. When rapists demand to be put in women’s prison because that is how they “identify” they will do it.
These people are merely cowards trying to make excuses for previous actions but who will do absolutely nothing to reverse them. David Horowitz is real, these are clowns.
[repeat]
That wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. I’ve spent the past two years increasingly mourning the loss of the America I knew.
Now I’m just waiting. For what I don’t know.
As people get older and more mature they abandon childish notions, and that includes basic political leanings, but now the left isn’t just a less mature view of the world. It’s totalitarian and its leaders know what they’re doing and are confident enough to have started shutting it all down. We’re watching and wondering and expressing concern and even getting nervous, but we’re still just watching and waiting to vote. These folks don’t believe in things like voting, free choice, and we better start organizing for the loss of the 50 state Republic.
I’m almost ready for the Lone Star Republic to assert itself.
Excellent commentary! There are many more who could be added to this list, including Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, and possibly Matt Taibbi.
And with no children, they have limited ability to influence the future.
I don’t think it’s just the left. Many of us on the right have seen the right’s failure to conserve really anything. And certain things we used to believe in such as the unfettered marketplace, low taxes, and small government just to name a few have taken massive hits. Corporations are largely bad actors. They use massive tax cuts to game the economic system through political lobbying and also to corrupt the culture.
The elites whether they be economic or political have largely been incompetent and haven’t been good stewards of the government, the economy, and the country at large. I’m more interested in effective government and government and economic power being taken out of the hands of venal and incompetent people who use massive wealth or other advantages to game things in their favor. And it being put in the hands of people who care about the interests of average folks and who can run things well.
On both sides there are people who are massively disillusioned by this battle between two stupid sides who have both failed and done great harm. Something that transcends the politics of the last 60 years is taking shape. And it can’t come fast enough.
Another reason why they’re not worth wasting time on.
We can let the left have whoever they want, including, Washington DC and whatever parts of New York and California want to remain with Washington. The rest can form a Republic with states and pieces of states that recognize what is otherwise likely to happen. To prevent the next election from being stolen we have to win real votes by 15 or 20 percent. We have to begin the process before the next election or it will just be stolen. A majority seem to think the last election was won almost fairly even though Democrats collected millions of votes in every state and voted them without proof of identity. Good lord, we just speak of fraud in a few states. Not to underestimate the amount of folks who voted for that silly old man because he wasn’t Trump, and we’ll never know the amount of fraud, but it had to have been massive but not as extensive as it will be with democrats running matters. Folks are waking up and we can win but the fraud will be massive.
Have you noticed how many of these folks wind up taking positions that directly impact the lives, minds, and hearts of children. Schools, libraries, “service” agencies, politics, and the like. The percentage with careers such as construction is quite small. [Simply compare the person repairing the asphalt road outside my house with the rainbow propogandist in the kindergarten down the street.] That’s how they influence the future. They don’t need to have their own kids. They have our kids and grandkids.
What a fantastic post. Thank you.
There may be a complementary aspect to that expressed in the title of this post and that is an awakening of working class individuals, whether leaning left or right. I suspect there may be large numbers of individuals who, like me, may be slow to recognize and understand the pervasiveness within the ruling elite class of dedicated Marxists and otherwise grifters who seek only power and wealth.
I did recognize the Clinton Administration as not serving the interests of the American people in terms of traditional individual liberty but I was not wary of the Bush family ascendance following that. I knew Obama was not a traditional American President but I could understand how he could be elected even without having anything approaching a true American minority life experience. I even voted for McCain and Romney.
But when Trump was elected we got a revealing of the Left and the extent of its evil. We saw during this period how the federal bureaucracy has been corrupted and has worked to corrupt all other American institutions.
I would not label it a turn like the post describes but I am far from the person I was twenty years ago.
Edited to add: I should not fail to point out that Republican elected and appointed officials have been complicit and have participated in this corrupt process.
Thats hopeful. I think you are right about the Covid awakening.