What Progressives Need to Do

“No, not everyone on the Left supported these tyrannies, yet what progressives cannot escape is that much of the Left lent political legitimacy to regimes that destroyed and damaged tens of millions of lives, leaving festering wounds that still bleed today.”

Ever since President Donald Trump’s re-election in November, autopsies of the Left have become every pundit’s pastime. Democrats lost because they ignored the working class. They forgot the kitchen-table issues. They ignored differences between men and women. They brushed aside fears about illegal immigration. They preached too much about race and ethnicity.

There is some merit to these diagnoses, but they leave the impression that the problem was simply about tweaking the message. If progressives had cared as much about working-class whites in factories as about trans women on soccer fields, then-Vice President Kamala Harris—as the logic goes—would have sailed to the White House, and Democrats would be controlling Congress right now. Of course, few believe this. In fact, leading up to the election, Democrats talked constantly about the working class and very little about trans women.

So, what went wrong? Let us return to an age-old concern of those on the Left. If a democratic system is worth having, this is largely because it allows citizens to expose past injustices. A worthwhile democracy takes history seriously, and progressives have rightly highlighted injustices going back centuries, including socio-economic disadvantage based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. To do this, they have connected politics to history through a two-step process I call “memory politics.” Step one consists of documenting atrocities committed by the West over several centuries. Step two consists of spreading this knowledge to the widest possible public.

We have seen this since the 1960s, when universities increasingly taught histories of Western wrongdoing—and swiftly became hotbeds of rebellion. In the following decades, workplaces implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and democracies across the globe embraced educational and social spending measures to even out past inequalities. More recently, these initiatives have been carpet-bombed from the Right, largely because they originally sprang from the Left.