Punching Left Again
They gave us a break for a while but now we're back to touching grass
A little after I moved to New York and before I started my job, I had a dust up on Bluesky with the managing editor of a notable progressive magazine about Cornel West’s presidential campaign and West's comments on the war in Ukraine. The details of the debate are somewhat less important here than my motive for defending West, which is that despite all his faults and having said thousands of things I disagree with, I do believe that he is a pretty important figure in American leftism, especially where public intellectuals are concerned.
To me he is up there with Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky in the leftist space and in the Black commentator space he is a peer with Ta-Nehesi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson. Having read a lot of writing by all 4 of these guys I don’t agree with all of what they said but on another level I recognize that they did the work of elevating a lot of important critical ideas in the public sphere in ways that made a big impact. That West was able to move between the two registers especially during the Obama administration is pretty significant, especially his willingness to criticize Obama’s choices in ways that a lot of his peers weren’t. To me it is impossible not to give him credit for that.
Thus, when I saw some of the extremely nasty and dismissive comments people in the progressive media were making about him when he announced his presidential run, I thought it was really out of line. Of course anybody is subject to criticism and people can make choices that others are within their rights to comment on, but really I figured that most people with my politics and media diet wouldn’t go too far in roasting Brother West, he was in the Matrix!
And yet, a small army of commentators and posters from the Nation, the New York Times, the Guardian, Vox, etc came out of nowhere to bring up a bunch of shit about his taxes and how he had an affair supposedly, call him arrogant and self absorbed, a narcissist etc. I didn’t understand it at first, why people felt like they could do that with no pushback. Isn’t it obviously out of bounds to perform a character assassination on a prominent Black public intellectual? My debate with the editor dude and my subsequent reflections led me to the conclusion that actually it wasn’t out of bounds, and in fact the boundaries themselves of what you can and can’t say have a lot more to do with whether somebody can be roasted in the Nation than who that person is. Moreover, the people doing the roasting aren’t actually out of line, they’re doing their jobs. Thus, I present to you: the Professional Left Punchers. (Sadly they will have to share an acronym with the Progressive Labor Party).
I was throwing a bit of spice on it when I spoke to the editor guy I’ll admit, but his response to me was sort of shocking. He was basically going on about what an idiot Cornel West was for suggesting that NATO aggression was one of the primary factors in the Ukraine war and that some kind of negotiated ceasefire was the best way forward. I know very little about that issue but it seemed obvious to me that this was, even if incorrect, a fairly standard leftist position.
As in, suspicion about America’s foreign policy motives and opposition to our involvement in wars in general is what any leftist public intellectual is going to say in almost all circumstances. The guy I was talking to made zero effort to engage that point in good faith and when I argued that tearing down leftist public intellectuals because they talk out of turn about US foreign policy is actively harmful to American leftism I was informed that actually I am harmful to American leftism because I am a “dunce”. I was then swarmed by reply guys who informed me that I am actually right wing for being suspicious of US involvement in the war in Ukraine because it’s “isolationist” and that me and Cornel West are MAGAs.
Bear with me because I know I am talking about an internet fight from 2 years ago. What I learned from this is that actually it makes sense for a person with a platform in a developed media outlet to be totally dismissive of a standard leftist position on an issue and treat it as fundamentally unserious. In fact that’s about 40-50% of what the progressive media ecosystem does at any given point.
You’ll notice that over and over again you see academics and writers for the big progressive magazines pointing out that the people they are debating are “extremely online”, “posting too much”, “only exist on Twitter” etc. This is always weird to me because they are, by definition, also online all the time and I primarily see their content online. A hypothetical Jacobin author’s audience probably consists 90% of people reading their articles, tweets, etc on the internet and then a tiny fraction of it is made up of people who read Jacobin in print or go see them speaking on panels in person.
What’s the difference? Well obviously some people are simply posting on social media platforms or streaming on Twitch (using web 2.0 tools that focus on user generated content) and some people are writing articles for magazines and appearing on Democracy Now and giving lectures. Despite the fact that all of this stuff is primarily posted and consumed online by people like myself who sit on the computer all day (when boxing comes on I switch to the TV and I usually stand up for dramatic effect).
The implication of calling somebody “extremely online” is therefore that they are unserious and probably wrong simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t have a platform in the online version of the traditional media and that their viewpoints are beyond the scope of legitimate consideration. Like we always point out, the range of viewpoints that can be expressed in social media posts is hypothetically infinite. The range of what you can say in the traditional media, conversely, is limited at the very least by evidentiary and argumentative standards and a set of cultural taboos around certain topics and questions, as well as the limits of the law in some cases. I don’t mean to imply anything by this (yet), but rather simply state it as a fact. You can say a lot of stuff in a post that you can’t say in Jacobin. That’s simply true.
Thus, when the Professional Left Puncher gets on and tells somebody else that they are “online” rather than engaging the substance of their argument (as happens hundreds of times a day especially about Palestine, defund the police, settler colonialism, etc), their rhetorical function is not actually to dismiss their interlocutor or tell them to shut up. If you want to silence somebody or demonstrate that they are not worth responding to at all, that’s easy: Ignore them. Anybody who understands all this well enough to get bylines in magazines definitely understands this and especially knows the agony of being ignored because they have had the experience of pitching, which is 90% being ignored. So what are they actually doing?
They’re projecting something like:
“Hey just so you guys know, this talking point isn’t within the range of acceptable viewpoints. I would know, because my online posts come in the form of magazine articles, which means that I am by definition an expert on what you can say in a magazine.”
Everyone reading the exchange then unconsciously understands “oh, you can’t say that if you wanna be serious”. Thus, the PLPs serve an important rhetorical function in that they go around enforcing the limits of what constitutes serious progressive discourse in the United States, condemning the rest of us to “very online poster who needs to touch grass” status.
Why is this necessary? Pretty simple, the Left has enjoyed a certain moral authority in the United States public culture since the 1960s, and whenever we have a national crisis of some kind the Left almost always has the most compelling answer and the most popular proposed solutions. This is especially the case now that leftists can just get online and go viral. The traditional media, on the other hand, cannot simply chase the kairotic moment like leftists can, due to the aforementioned evidentiary standards, taboos, and legal restrictions. Additionally at this point I will add what I didn’t add before, which is that the traditional media is also fundamentally shaped by power and interest and for people with power it is definitionally not in their interest for leftist political goals to succeed. This is very obvious when it comes to Compact and UnHerd (no matter what you guys wanna say) and in the past has been somewhat more opaque and hard to notice with outlets like the New York Times, although the mask has slipped there as well.
Thus, we have a very complex problem: the Left will always generate on their own interesting and compelling arguments and solutions to social problems, and the traditional media can’t wholesale dismiss them without coming off as total shills but can’t totally embrace them either. Therefore what you need in a commentator is somebody who can plausibly identify with the political left in some way and share some of their ideas but simultaneously reshape them into something that conforms to the evidentiary standards and limitations of the traditional media (this is not bad inherently) but also move the ideas in a direction that doesn’t threaten the underlying power dynamic which structures the reading environment.
Assuming that print media is less profitable than it was in the past because magazines have to compete with forms of content that we can all access for free, it would follow that a lot of these outlets are especially dependent on donor funding or other forms of revenue that are necessarily shaped by ideological decisions. Thus, the PLPs serve a vital role. On the one hand, they serve to deliver a palatable version of leftist ideas to a more moderate or liberal audience. On the other, they remind actual leftists on social media that their opinions are unserious and outside the range of what a reasonable person would engage in good faith. This doesn’t work on most online leftists, but it does have a certain moderating effect on tormented souls like yours truly who have a pathological fixation on gaining access to institutions like the traditional media. It would be pretty offensive if the donors themselves got online and told us to shut up and stop being so online, so naturally it makes the most sense to get a peer to do it.
Whether or not somebody like Cornel West can be attacked with no reservations therefore has much more to do with whether they’re going off script about an important issue (in this case the influence of the arms industry on US foreign policy) than anything relating to their credentials, decades of important work, age, etc. All that matters is how far out of bounds a given figure has been willing to go. When it comes to who can get instantly fired for going off script and refusing the role of ideological enforcer this is even more obvious.
I link to Velasco’s essay first because it is very good and secondly because of how he uses the specific example of the genocide in Gaza and its effects on the reading environment. For complex reasons, major institutions and the traditional media were almost entirely unable to platform anything resembling the truth about what was happening in Gaza, especially in the early stages. Generally speaking, the more imbricated an outlet was with donor funding and prestigious institutions the less likely you were to see accurate or even coherent or internally consistent coverage of what was going on. This was immediately obvious to anyone who had eyes. Open letters swirled, people were fired and suspended, grants were cancelled, students were suspended/expelled/seized for deportation, and United States civil society became a total nightmare. Unimaginable horrors in Gaza coincided with a massive crisis of legitimacy and basic moral clarity within institutions like the traditional media.
In this scenario, the Left was the only source of accurate information and coherent proposed solutions. Our political, financial, and cultural elites were not only obviously complicit with unspeakable evil, but totally unable to sell it or stick the landing no matter what they did. The complex system of checkpoints, gates, and thresholds between truth and power totally ceased to function, all that remained was truth and power.
Over time, things leveled out on this side as they remained dire in Gaza. Zohran Mamdani will be the mayor tomorrow, it’s not de facto illegal to talk about Palestine in the traditional media in the same way that it was, dozens of candidates are running on platforms that include an arms embargo against Israel, and scores of deals for books about Palestine are being inked. None of this is bad inherently, but as the contradiction between truth and power fades from view, the Professional Left Punchers are back on duty. The first glimmers of this phenomenon have been a series of fights about Mamdani’s public statements and administration appointments. As I argued earlier, this is really what’s at stake in the debate over Mamdani’s re-appointment of Jessica Tisch: not whether it is good or bad, but who gets to dictate the terms of the conversation about Mamdani between grassroots organizations and “online leftists” on the one hand, and Magazine Writers on the other.
There’s a lot of stuff worth reading on both sides of the divide, and a lot of people who play the role I’ve identified have interesting things to say and important insights. It wouldn’t work if they didn’t. Most importantly, a lot of them were on the right side over the last 2 years and took genuine risks in ways that I find admirable. I’m much more willing to consider their perspectives now that I was in the past as a result. In the end we are all caught up in the mix. With that being said, we should retain our cynicism of the intellect in 2025 if we are to reach for optimism of the will in 2026.