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The Anti-Anti-Left
Critics of the Trumpist right must not excuse left-wing illiberalism and extremism
In recent years, those of us who have criticized leftist excesses — be it “cancel mobs” on campus or online, Antifa violence, morally troubling iconography, or assorted episodes of identity politics gone mad — have often been chided for a misplaced sense of priorities in the age of Donald Trump and the Trumpist threat to democracy.
Today, as the Trump era limps to a close, variations on this theme continue: liberal and centrist attacks on the left and on “wokeness,” we are told, not only serve as a distraction from malfeasance on the right but also play into the hands of the “right-wing propaganda machine,” as Laura K. Field puts it in a well-received recent piece in The Bulwark.
There is no question that Trumpism is a preeminent danger; Trump’s post-election assault on democracy proves it in abundance. But there are also real dangers in ignoring or downplaying illiberalism and extremism on the left.
Field has a valid point when she argues that some analysis of the left’s negative impact on the Democrats’ performance at the ballot box (evident not only in their relatively poor results in the congressional and Senate elections but in Biden’s closer-than-expected win) has relied on iffy data —…
