The Three Factions of the American Left
Understanding what it means when we talk about "the left" in America
by Ross Barkan
There is theory undergirding modern politics—political scientists still publish papers and argue over arcana online—but most of it, in the public domain, exists without a hard glossary, an ur-text that explains what’s going on. Activists, journalists, political operatives, and various politically-aware people debate topics with a shifting terminology that can gain different meanings in different contexts. A moderate, a socialist, a social democrat, a progressive, a leftist, or a liberal can connote something very different depending on what forum you’re on, where you’re headed, or who you are arguing with.
I am guilty of this as much as anyone. These terms, even in my own writing, can be elusive.
The Democratic and Republican Parties are fundamentally different in 2021 because one is factionalized and one is not. There are no competing blocs of the Republican Party any longer. All of it, as I warned repeatedly, now belongs to Donald Trump. Trump is the former president, but those who wish to survive in the party must pledge total fealty to him. The Republicans who voted to impeach him over January 6th will probably lose re-election or come close enough.
Meanwhile, a Republican Senate primary in Ohio will basically come down to who can grovel the hardest for Trump’s approval at his Florida golf club. Such is the state of affairs. There may be the vaguest of “wings” in the modern GOP—here is Marco Rubio making weak noise about the Republicans going populist, here is someone like Ben Sasse whining for a return to free-market fundamentals—but all of it must come back to the Republican’s self-appointed messiah, Donald J. Trump, who, as of now, can have the 2024 nomination if he wants it. This could all change one day. But that one day, at this rate, will be when Trump is dead.
The Democratic Party is nothing like this. There is a degree of personality worship in the base, with fans berating reporters who dare to question the wisdom of Joe Biden or Barack Obama, but no single man has such a hold on the popular imagination. Trump can rewrite reality for a significant chunk of the Republican electorate. Obama, as vaunted as he is, cannot. Within the Democratic Party, luckily, there is room for dissent and debate. Obama is not looming to destroy the career of anyone who criticizes the Affordable Care Act or the 2009 stimulus bill.
Anti-Trump Republicans don’t go very far, but anti-establishment socialists—or socialist-lite—politicians can do plenty. Just ask Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, or Jamaal Bowman. All have very large social media followings and manage to be, despite the controversy they may attract, Democrats in good standing. They vote with the party, support the speaker, and remain loyal caucus members. They are not causing the disruption the hard right did, back when the Republican Party still had factions. Remember the collision of establishment Republicans and the Tea Party? It’s all Trump now, from the country club to the hunting lodge.
When we speak of the “left” in America, ultimately, we speak of the wings of the Democratic Party. There are anti-electoralists among the socialists, but most members of the Democratic Socialists of America have embraced the Bernie Sanders program: elect socialists on the Democratic Party line and capture the party from within. In the first wave of socialist organizing, more than a century ago, this idea was rejected wholesale, as socialists sought office and won on third party lines. They rightfully perceived the Democrats and Republicans of their era as wholly captured by capitalistic interests. But sustaining power on third party lines in America is virtually impossible. DSA, learning from the mistakes of their forbearers, is not interested in forming a third party movement. They will last long because of that.
Within the three factions of the left is plenty of overlap. Left liberals and socialists share policy goals and upbringings. Moderates can embrace socialist ideas. Identity, at times, is prized greatly among all three. None of these terms, ultimately, amount to religion—you may disagree with them, or say one should be another. Through my own reporting, this is what I’ve broadly found. I hope, above all else, this exploration will be helpful.
Missing here will be a real discussion of organized labor. Far diminished from their midcentury peak, labor unions no longer control the fate of Democratic politics nationally. In New York and a few large Democratic states, they have tremendous clout, but this is not the case in most places. Many in labor, at this point, are probably most firmly situated in the moderate wing of the party, though the socialist left earnestly embraces labor power and liberal leftists, in white collar professions like media, are attempting to form unions of their own.
The Socialist Left
Today there is no writing about the socialist left in America without writing about DSA. If I were writing this essay before 2016, there would be no need to address the socialists at all. They were too small and inconsequential to be considered a faction of the party, with less than 10,000 members nationwide. That changed with Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign in 2016. Sanders, almost single-handedly, was responsible for the revival of socialism in America, calling himself a democratic socialist while arguing for a more robust version of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This made Sanders, in actuality, more of a social democrat than a socialist, since he rarely talked about the public ownership of large companies and utilities and generally shied away from speaking about the full-scale dismantling of capitalism. Sanders was a presidential candidate, after all—he would only go so far.
Not all of the socialist left is in DSA, but plenty of it is. Today, DSA claims at least 85,000 members nationwide and will probably surpass 100,000 soon, matching the strength of the Communist Party USA in its Depression-era heyday. They’ve elected more than 100 members to office, including famous lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez, and now have at least six members in the New York State Legislature.
DSA does electoral and non-electoral work. Within the socialist left, there are inevitably factions, and a minority have argued the Democratic Party is not a vehicle for tangible change. These tend to be orthodox Marxists who once made up a sizable portion of the socialist left when it was far smaller. But they no longer call the shots—the socialist left wants to win elections, and do it on the Democratic Party line.
Among socialists, the theory of organization and change differs from that in the other left factions. Most socialists would like to see, in the long-term, the end of capitalism and the rise of a socialist state, with cooperative workplaces, strong unions, public ownership of industries, universal healthcare, and a right to comfortable housing. A socialist left wants workers in the private sector owning the means of production—corporations, conglomerates, and factories, with wealth radically redistributed downward. Socialists will differ on how these goals might be achieved, whether there should be a state takeover of industries or workers directly owning their own enterprises.
The socialist left is proudly anti-imperialist. A DSA member seeks the dismantling of the military-industrial complex and the retreat of American troops overseas. They are deeply critical of traditional American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and skeptical of international Cold War-era alliances venerated by the liberal left, including NATO. Many in DSA support the concept of open borders and international solidarity, though older leftists, Sanders included, are wary of lax immigration policy, citing fears that a flood of undocumented immigration could undercut American wages and strain the social safety net.
Even the most electorally-minded socialists do not view winning elections or building power in the Democratic Party as the only mechanism for achieving their aims. Mass protest—violent and non-violent alike—and strike actions are tools to be deployed. There is a faction of DSA that has a favorable view of gun ownership, unlike most on the liberal left.
Many in the socialist left would argue the working class should build power independent of the major two parties, while still, by necessity, working within them. DSA is focused on erecting its own electoral infrastructure: its own staff, campaign apps, and approach to organizing. This is why DSA is so insistent that their elected officials endorse each other, run as slates on a shared platform, and work together while in office. By running on a shared platform in the same organization, DSA hopes to keep their politicians accountable to a theoretical mass movement that can discipline them if need be. In New York, this is seen in the state legislature, where DSA members will issue joint statements, usually support the same bills, and meet together in their own caucus.
Identity is important to both the socialist left and the liberal left. For socialists, there is the constant invoking of the multiracial working class, and the need to foreground racial identity and gender identity with class. For socialists, these work in tandem: racism, sexism, and capitalism must be combated together. Most socialists, if not all, would argue racism is a function or a logical outcome of capitalism. DSA members have been deeply involved in various Black Lives Matter and anti-racist protests and general organizing. Defunding the police dramatically is a goal of DSA; the liberal left, these days, shares this rhetoric, with most mainstream liberal organizations, as of 2020, embracing the defund movement.
Since DSA is a large organization and American socialists are not always so doctrinaire, there is disagreement over how much identity must be emphasized in tandem, or at the expense of, class. Many in DSA embrace, for example, critical race theory. Others socialists reject it as performative, too often burdening the individual at the expense of the wealthy and powerful, and neglecting the critiques of capitalism and economic exploitation that are central to a socialistic understanding of America. The liberal left, as a rule, is more enthusiastic about critical race theory.
The socialist left, of course, shares characteristics with the liberal left. Each faction wants to see the American social welfare state grow. Both can support Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation, are skeptical or outright hostile to corporate power, and would like to see taxes raised aggressively on the wealthy. Each would agree income inequality is a major threat to the future of American democracy. Both reject a neoliberal consensus that is, in both the Republican and Democratic parties, fading rapidly into history, as both Trump and Biden have demonstrated they will spend trillions to rescue the American economy.
The two factions, at times, share a similar constituency. College-educated, wealthier Americans belong to DSA and the liberal left, and make up the vocal majorities of each faction. Both tend to be concentrated in cities, though DSA is organizing elsewhere. The young left—those under 35 in particular—have flocked to DSA, and Sanders dominated this age group in each of his presidential runs. Sanders’ coalition was young and diverse, with Latinos voting for him in large numbers in his second campaign. But it wasn’t large enough because older voters largely rejected Sanders: middle-aged African-Americans and whites especially. There is no winning a presidential primary without the backing of voters over the age of 50.
The socialist left and liberal left, ultimately, have different theories of change, different organizations they exist under and embrace, and demand different outcomes from their governments. Socialists, through DSA, have an organization committed to organizing in the most classic sense of the word—knocking on doors and talking to people about socialism. In New York City, where I live, DSA has the most active members of any group or umbrella organization beyond a few enormous labor unions. They canvass aggressively for their candidates and that’s why every DSA-endorsed campaign, since 2018 at least, has either won outright or been highly competitive.
But neither the socialist left nor the liberal left can claim to command the vast, unorganized working classes of America. In different ways, both factions remain alien to millions of people.
The Liberal Left
What made the 2020 Democratic primary for president so intriguing was how it distilled, for one of the first times ever, these three distinct factions of the Democratic Party. In 2016, Sanders battled Hillary Clinton, pitting a progressive and anti-establishment coalition against a candidate backed overwhelmingly by elected officials, labor unions, and various Democratic Party institutions. Sanders was conjuring the socialist left to life in real-time; his coalition was large and somewhat unwieldy, joining starry-eyed socialists with Democratic and independent voters who were skeptical of Clinton and party elites. Allegations of sexism, leveled by Clinton supporters, dogged the Sanders coalition throughout the campaign.
In 2020, Clinton was gone, and Democratic institutional players were deeply divided. For much of the primary, they doubted Biden could win at all, and many fled to Michael Bloomberg in late 2019 and early 2020, hoping the ultra-billionaire could stop Sanders dead in his tracks. In 2016, the Clinton-skeptical liberals aligned with Sanders, but in 2020, they had options to choose from. There was the technocratic Pete Buttigieg, the pugnacious Amy Klobuchar, and the darling of the liberal left, the legal trailblazer Elizabeth Warren.
Before Sanders ran for president in 2016, much of the broad progressive left—the term socialist could not yet be credibly invoked—wanted Warren, a Massachusetts senator and celebrated law professor, to challenge Clinton. She demurred, deciding such a run against a vaunted standard bearer like Clinton would not be in her best interests. Sanders took the shot when Warren passed and captured a certain amount of grassroots left energy that would never dissipate. Warren ran in 2020, briefly polled at the top of the field, but failed to gain traction when votes were counted. She did not win a single state and finished a distant third in her home state of Massachusetts, trailing Biden and Sanders.
Not all people who voted for Sanders called themselves socialists and not all those who backed Warren called themselves liberals, let alone invoked the term “liberal left,” which is confined mostly to political and academic circles. But there is something these vote totals can tell us. Sanders and Biden won far more votes and delegates than Warren, demonstrating the strength of the socialist and moderate brands in national politics at the expense of what Warren offered. Sanders’ campaign, a weaker version of his 2016 effort, leaned even harder into his democratic socialist label, and took up many demands of left activists that may have been alienating to 2016 voters who chose him for less ideological reasons.
In short, the socialist left beat the liberal left at the ballot box. Yet the liberal left is winning in many of the institutions that dominate America.
The liberal left occupies a curious place in the firmament these days—it is dominant in the brain-trust of America, but it is does not command the organizing power of the socialists and cannot build the same mass coalitions as the moderates. Most newspapers and online media outlets, barring a few like the socialist Jacobin or the various leftist podcasts and YouTube shows, are liberal left in orientation.
But the liberal left does organize—sometimes in tandem with the socialists, other times against. New Yorkers know this especially well. It’s important to remember a subset of this coalition: the nonprofit and NGO left or, more plainly, the alphabet left.
The Alphabet Left
Permit me to coin a term here at Political Currents. There has never been a tidy way to describe the large, well-funded nonprofits and non-governmental organizations that do politics in America. Many of them are based out of large Democratic states like New York. Many are known by their acronyms—hence my use of the word alphabet. The kingpin, arguably, is the Working Families Party, founded in New York in 1998.
The WFP has many member nonprofits, including New York Communities for Change (NYCC), Citizens Action New York (CCNY), (Ed.: and NYPAN!) ,and the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE). For most of the 1990s, 2000s, and halfway into the 2010s, the WFP and its umbrella organizations were the left in New York. A visionary party founded at a nadir for left organizing in the state—Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York and another Republican, George Pataki, was governor—the WFP joined left-leaning activists in the state with large labor unions to push the Democratic Party leftward.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, a fiscal centrist who reviled the WFP, forced most of the labor unions out of the party, severely diminishing its ability to rally volunteers and employ the extensive get-out-the-vote operation that a formidable union can provide. Labor fleeing WFP did allow it to shed its moderate inclinations—labor leaders seek accommodations with powerful politicians, which forced WFP to endorse Cuomo and even back Republicans—and embrace the policies and lingo of the left to its fullest extent.
Yet the alphabet left is fundamentally different than the socialist left because it still relies on funding from politicians and Democratic donors to survive. The WFP, deprived of its labor support, had to turn to online fundraising for survival. Other nonprofits with campaign arms, like Make the Road New York, need to fundraise and receive government grants to maintain operations.
This sort of reality leads to different calculations. DSA decides which candidates to endorse and which politicians to oppose through a series of votes and debates that revolve, fundamentally, around two questions: is the candidate committed to our socialist values and do we have the capacity to endorse successfully? DSA is stingy with endorsements; WFP will endorse widely across the state and America, prioritizing some races while offering little more than a paper endorsement to others. The alphabet left can support radical policy, if it doesn’t invoke socialism, but it can only challenge so many hands that feed it. Cuomo stopped feeding a long time ago, and they have nothing to lose with going against him.
But other Democrats in “good standing”—conventional progressives or simply those who may control purse-strings down the road—are not confronted. The WFP rarely launched primary challenges of sitting State Assembly members, for example, and even in 2020, hesitated to challenge members who were closer to the powerful speaker, Carl Heastie. The DSA is mulling primary challenges of left-of-center state senators in 2022. The WFP probably won’t oblige.