I’ve been extremely bad about making time to post these for a while now. (In general, time-juggling has gotten dramatically worse since I started working on the Matt Christman book. But I am excited to be able to share that one with you guys in the not-too-distant future!) In any case, I really am trying to get into better habits, and resume my previous practice of posting a short note like this every Friday highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend.

In the opening lines of Branko Marcetic’s Jacobin article The Left Is Rising, So Centrist Dems Are Cynically Woke Again, he asks you to stretch your memory all the way back to November 2024:

Remember when establishment Democrats were saying with a straight face that they had been forced to adopt the grating, alienating brand of wokeness and identity politics that made them toxic to working-class voters? You should: it wasn’t even two years ago.

After handing the White House to Donald Trump a second time and scrambling to dump the blame on someone else, Democrats did what they usually do when they royally screw up: they blamed the Left, pretending that this deeply unpopular and cynical political style — whose hallmarks include shallow appeals to racial and gender identity, questionable insinuations of bigotry against their political opponents, and a fixation on bashing men, a demographic the party is desperate to win back — was something that had been forced on them by progressives and socialists.

As this magazine pointed out at the time, this was pretty rich. There are certainly forces on the progressive left, rooted in college campuses and nonprofit groups, that stoked and continue to stoke the worst of wokeness. But it was Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him that had been saying the way forward was a politics that put people’s bread-and-butter concerns front and center and divisive identity politics and finger-wagging to the side.

For their troubles, establishment Democrats lined up to declare them a bunch of racist, sexist “Bernie Bros,” even secret right-wingers who, being white guys, were out of touch with a voting public that wanted to only talk about race and gender, and that they should move out of the way entirely. (Why is the Democratic brand in the toilet with working-class men? We’ll never know.)

So the idea that Democratic elites had had this political style forced on them, and forced on them by the Left no less, is laughable. But what’s extra comical is that they couldn’t even keep this pretense up for two years before going back to doing the thing they claimed they had never wanted to do in the first place.

As he goes on to chronicle, the moment the Left put some points on the board once again, with the Dem establishment being spooked by the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the prospect of AOC as a serious contender for the 2028 presidential nominations, and the recent spate of DSA victories in Congressional primaries, the rhetorical tools of 2016 are being dusted off as if nothing had changed.

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In my home state of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed’s history of making harsh political judgments about his political opponents (Gretchen Whitmer in his 2018 run for Governor and the lavishly AIPAC-funded Haley Stevens in his current race) are reinterpreted as expressions of deep-seated misogyny. At the DNC, the Left’s opposition to making South Carolina the first state to vote in 2028 (a fairly transparent attempt to let one of the most conservative states in the Union nip a possible AOC nomination in the bud) is being branded as anti-black racism, never mind that SC is “significantly whiter than Nevada and, especially, the purple Georgia — both of which, unlike the Palmetto State, Democrats have actually won in the last fifty years…”

None of it makes much sense. But it doesn’t have to. Every minute that people spend navel-gazing and self-flagellating about identity and subconscious bigotry is a minute that’s not spent on talking about the chasm separating the Democratic establishment from Democratic voters on what kind of society we’re going to have in concrete material terms. The obvious fact that a democratic socialist “minimum program” of universalist economic reforms would disproportionately help members of marginalized groups is, as always, carefully ignored in favor of focusing on an endless inventory of individual souls.

Read the full article here.

Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in recent weeks, check out the last few articles I wrote for Jacobin:

The Democratic Socialists of America Want to Expand Democracy

Yes, We Really Should Abolish the Senate

Mamdani Is Right. Netanyahu Belongs Behind Bars.

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