Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the Millennial Left

Part I: Actual vs. Perceived Positions

This dialogue took place over the past six weeks in response to a series of Substack posts looking back at left intellectual life in the late 2010s. It has been divided into three separate posts for the sake of readability. The first is below. Click for the second installment, on the millennial left’s response to wokeness, and the third, on the left-intellectual project in America.

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Jon Baskin

This exchange was inspired by a note you wrote responding to a post by

Gnocchic Apocryphon

and a podcast conversation between

Daniel Oppenheimer

and

Geoff Shullenberger

. Both the post and the podcast were about parts of the late 2010s millennial left that had either broken off and moved to the right or, in the case of the “post-left,” had sought to distinguish themselves from the “professional-managerial class” within the left. You present your note as an attempt to work “toward a better sociology of the current intellectual configuration,” and it is written from the perspective of an insider, someone who was at the center of what critics call the “PMC left” or what you have called, in previous writing, the “new socialist activist-intelligentsia.” I’m most interested in two defenses or “clarifications” that you make from that perspective. One has to do with the way that the socialist intellectuals thought about their relationship with the “traditional working class,” and the other with how they related to identity politics (later “wokeness”).

Having been an editor at The Point during the late 2010s, these parts of the note hit on topics that I’ve long been curious about. The Point, I would say, had a kind of insider / outsider relationship with this neo-socialist intelligentsia, which was much more closely associated with magazines like n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, the post-Wieseltier New Republic, and the Nation. We knew people and published writers who were part of it, but as the 2010s wore on it became increasingly clear that our projects were quite different, and at times we became antagonists—at least within the small world (though it seemed to be growing, at that time) at the crossroads of academia and intellectual publishing. My goal in revisiting that moment in this conversation is partly to help advance your sociology of the present, though in addition I was hoping to get a clearer picture of the discussions and strategy of that neo-socialist left, much of which still seems relevant to our intellectual life today. You say in your note that it’s easier to “play a self-righteous blame game” than to admit that “we tried something and it failed,” which I agree with. And I am not writing this at all from the perspective of someone who thinks they knew what the right way forward would have been politically—for the left or for any of us—at that moment. At the same time, I’m wary of how quickly a narrative seems to be hardening—for instance it is assumed in this post-election piece by Gabe Winant—that the millennial left in those years was mostly a victim of forces outside of its control, and bears no responsibility whatsoever for the course that political life has taken in the time since. Of course there is a grain of truth to this analysis. But I think it risks obscuring the field of options that were available to left intellectuals at a moment when they / you had built a pretty strong activist movement, and where there might have been room to act or speak differently.

We’ll get to the role of identitarianism or wokeness later on, but I want to start with your response to the charge that the neo-socialist left was a fundamentally fraudulent or hypocritical project, on the grounds that it was led by elites who never truly cared about the plight of the working class. This is a central part of the “post-left” critique, as it is of many who ultimately drifted toward the new right. You respond in your note that, in fact, those at the center of the intellectual left at that time were “very aware of the issue of their education and perceived (if not actual) insider status,” and were engaged in a self-conscious experiment whose goal was to create a coalition between themselves and the “more traditional working class.” That’s mainly to say, they were not cynical or self-deluded about what they were trying to do, something that strikes me as both accurate and important to say. I always think “bad faith” is a poor and lazy frame for thinking about political movements (in part because every movement has its share of it), and it seems especially inapt for millennial socialism, which was notable in no small part for its extremely high—sometimes annoyingly high!—level of sincerity.

That said, I am interested to hear more about how you all, having acknowledged the challenge of bridging the gap between yourselves and a class of people with very different educations, work experiences, and (in most cases) class backgrounds, thought this experiment was supposed to work. Especially given that you espoused a heavily materialist view of political interest and struggle. In your note, you suggest a gap between the “perceived” and the “actual” status of the neo-socialist intellectuals, and I felt in that distinction the echo of an argument I remember being made often in those years. I first encountered it in a 2013 n+1 editorial about “the proletarianization of intellectuals,” which suggested that graduate students, assistant professors, and some magazine editors were, far from being part of an elite, on their way to becoming part of a downwardly mobile segment of the middle class (or PMC) and therefore increasingly in class alignment with the traditional working class—in other words, not really insiders at all. If you believed this, then it followed that writers for magazines like n+1 could be what you, quoting Gramsci in an article for the New Republic four years later, called “organic intellectuals,” who were licensed to speak for the broader working class by the fact that they were dealing with similar economic conditions.

Insofar as I understood it, I always found this argument dubious. For one thing, I knew enough about at least some of these grad students and magazine editors to know they were not living economically precarious lives, and certainly not lives that had anything in common with, say, Amazon warehouse workers. Secondly, and more importantly from my perspective, the argument seemed to elide the significant cultural differences between the intellectual left and the majority of the people this left often claimed to speak for—differences that, I believed at the time and believe even more strongly now, cannot simply be subsumed into some solidaristic economic project, even if such a project could be agreed upon. Unlike the post-left, I never attributed the weaknesses of this argument to bad faith; it seems to me rather to spring from a genuine attempt to address a perennial challenge for intellectuals on the left. From an intellectual perspective, though, the argument I described above always struck me as a species of wish fulfillment. It sure would be convenient if student debt and declining job prospects meant that a Yale graduate student was no longer an elite! Whereas if this was not really tenable, then something else was required, which was for the neo-socialist intellectuals to grapple honestly with their position as elites both within their political coalition and, culturally speaking, in society at large. In the years since, as you well know, the notion of the millennial left having been a fundamentally “elitist” or establishment project has hardened, which I don’t think is entirely fair. But I suspect that the refusal to forthrightly acknowledge that it was led by some kind of “elite”—even if it was not the same elite who worked at Goldman Sachs—contributed to a decline in its credibility, especially as this broader criticism became more common.

I’ll close here by asking first what you think of this paraphrase of what I took to be the strategy in those years, and if you had something like that in mind when you made the distinction, in your note, about the perceived vs. actual status of the neo-socialist intellectuals. I’m sure there are elements I’m missing, or conversations you had with each other that did not make it into public-facing magazine articles, and I’m curious about those. But whatever you judge the main strategy to have been for bridging the gap between the intellectuals and the working class, I’d like to hear more about where you think it was most (and least) successful, and what you think of it looking back now.

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David Sessions

Your first question is about the education or, we might say, the cultural status of what I called the socialist “activist-intelligentsia” and their self-conscious project of forging a political coalition with the more traditional working class. I’ll elaborate a bit more on the thinking behind that, and then address your question of how to assess that in retrospect: Was there anything we could have done differently? Or, to state more precisely what I think is the core of your question: Did we ignore, or were we too optimistic about, the obstacle that our “elite” cultural status posed to our project?

You summarized a view we might call “the proletarianization of intellectuals” that suggests “graduate students, assistant professors, and some magazine editors were, far from being part of an elite, on their way to becoming part of a downwardly mobile segment of the middle class (or PMC) and therefore increasingly in class alignment with the traditional working class–in other words, not really insiders at all.” That is a basically accurate summary of our view of the material forces behind the moment we were acting in. It wasn’t just academia or “intellectuals”; there were indications that a significant swath of white-collar workers of all kinds were feeling squeezed and, as a result, were more open to political radicalism. I think that’s pretty clear in the past decade’s burst of white-collar unionization; unionization is difficult work that people don’t really bother with if they don’t have a material motivation. Student debt was probably a significant material factor: lots of people who should be comfortably middle-class based on their education and skills are not on its account.

You write that you found this argument “dubious,” that “at least some of these grad students and magazine editors […] were not living economically precarious lives, and certainly not lives that had anything in common with, say, Amazon warehouse workers.” There were certainly individuals for whom that’s true, but that’s not the whole picture. Not everyone on the socialist left was a writer or intellectual, and even the ones who were were not all at elite universities or had, say, parents who paid for their college or bought them an apartment. (The PhD students at my university who had those were not socialists and were, predictably, the hardest to convince to join the union!) Our PhD students made about $25,000 per year, sometimes with heavy teaching loads as instructors of record, not just teaching assistants. Some had families, and almost all did lots of outside gig work to make ends meet. By mid-PhD I had reached a point where I wasn’t economically precarious, but only because I had a partner with a regular job. We still both had student loans and credit card debt from the cost of living in expensive cities early in our careers (when we both had white-collar jobs).

Being a PhD student certainly isn’t the same as working at an Amazon warehouse, but when you’re organizing a union and interacting with other kinds of workers in that world—nurses, teachers, auto workers, custodial workers, etc.—you see that the core issues are basically the same. A lot of our work as organizers was getting PhD students to recognize the obvious: that, in fact, they were making less than someone who works full-time at Starbucks and white-collar prestige wasn’t paying their rent. To speak more specifically of the intellectuals within that cohort, its “organic intellectuals,” if you will, I think a lot of our optimism about crossing those cultural divides came from that concrete experience of political education and organizing. You see real people on the ground change their minds and embrace a different framing for their interests, so you know it is possible. You see that you can build collective power without everyone being exactly the same or participating for the same reasons. The institution—in this case, the union—creates common ground between people who are otherwise siloed in different occupational settings and have different cultures.

That optimism about creating solidarity came mostly from organizing our peers in academia, but it extended to other people that are too definitively assumed to be vastly culturally different from us. In your 2018 piece on these themes, you wrote that all left intellectuals have “emancipated themselves culturally” from the classes they claim to speak for. That’s true in a sense, but again is only part of the story. Just because you get into a PhD program at Harvard or freelance for a magazine doesn’t mean you don’t come from a rural town or aren’t still part of a community that includes your blue-collar or Trump-voting relatives. Personally, the fact that my Trumpist relatives instinctively agreed with so much of my socialist politics gave me hope that cultural divides were not insurmountable. People take potshots at Gabe Winant for being such an activist-intellectual when he went to Yale and had professor parents, but I’m not aware of many people in my academic socialist milieu who spent more time talking to workers outside our milieu. I hope he doesn’t mind me speaking in this familiar way, but I thought he could connect with people in trailer parks in New Hampshire in ways I couldn’t partly because he was a historian and knew everything about labor conflicts past and present—in other words, because of the “culture” that is supposed to put him on the other side of some unbridgeable chasm.

Now obviously none of that was enough to make our “solidaristic economic project” victorious in the past decade. I didn’t convince any of my Trumpist relatives to vote for Clinton or Biden, though I did convince the more centrist ones to vote for Bernie in the primaries. That was disappointing, but I don’t think anyone on the socialist left found it surprising. A lot of us realized that we were trying to rebuild institutional power bases in a couple of election cycles that had atrophied for half a century or more. (The revanchist right-wing project, whether plutocracy or social conservatism, took decades to come to its current fruition.) I still think a solidaristic economic project is theoretically possible, even if it is more difficult than we imagined. If the upshot of Gabe’s post-election analysis you cited is that the results of the past few years were mostly due to forces beyond the left’s control, I agree with him—though I am perhaps less convinced that the Democratic Party behaving differently would have changed the outcome, either. The results of the last few elections mostly confirmed the obvious: that the left was as politically weak as, in our most realistic moments, we feared.

If you’re looking for me to concede something about “what the left got wrong,” I’ll speak for myself: I had an overly economistic analysis of the class forces in play, say, the economic rapprochement of downwardly mobile white-collar workers with the “actual” working class. Maybe I also had a Marxist strategic faith that those two somehow inherently want to come together, like magnets sliding toward each other, as they align in economic sociology. That’s something Marxists have been predicting since the “new working class” debates of the 1960s-1970s, which figured centrally in my dissertation. (I heard at least one academic socialist say, “Maybe they were right, just not at the time.”) In my world, there were at least tentative indications that might be happening: all kinds of people with fairly high-paying white-collar jobs were doing side gigs to raise families and overcoming their skepticism of socialism in genuine desperation.

But I also wrote about sociologists who pioneered the study of white-collar workers, and the “cultural” differences between white- and blue-collar workers were attested as early as the 1950s; education, the setting in which one works and the perceptions of cultural status that are attached to it, are all real. “Perceived” class positions matter as much as “actual” ones. All across the Western world, education is now a divide that cuts awkwardly across classes as understood in a more traditional Marxist sociology; education strongly correlates with voting for left parties, even though lots of those voters are actually pretty centrist—say, wealthy suburbanites who are culturally progressive but also hate taxes or oppose Medicare for All. That creates some sticky issues or double binds—wokeism or a certain way of talking about identity that is now de rigueur in the white-collar world, or the EU in Europe—where educated people, including many educated socialists, are on the opposite cultural “side” from the traditional working classes. Ever since the decline of unions and Communist and socialist parties, left coalitions have had to triangulate between remnants of the working class and new white-collar strata; America has its particular structural difficulties with its two amalgam parties that are subservient to two different parts of capital. That creates difficult issues of both strategy and principle: socialists may not like neoliberal identity politics or the EU in its current form, but we need voters who do and, in principle, we are rightly hesitant to make concessions to racism and nationalism. But I don’t think the 2010s socialist left in the U.S. was blind to any of that; I think it was a serious attempt to navigate conditions that proved to be just as difficult as we had down on paper, even if for a moment it felt like maybe a miracle was happening.

Read the next part of this conversation here.