The Left is Being Greatly Underestimated

How the center has gotten its opponents wrong, and what it is costing them.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

— Not Charles Darwin

If you look closely, you will notice something peculiar with the way that the political press has covered the American left.

To see it, you first need to look at how commentators write about every other political faction in this country. This could be moderate Democrats, MAGA Republicans, even the last remnants of the old Republican establishment—just any faction besides those to the left of Joe Biden. In every case, the group being discussed will be written about as fundamentally rational. They will be shown to have specific goals and plans to accomplish them. They will be understood as entities capable of changing their tactics and strategies; indeed, much of their political coverage will simply consist of analysis of what they should and should not do on this front.

The left is not afforded this level of respect. To commentators across the political spectrum, it is regarded as a fundamentally static force, incapable and/or uninterested in thinking and acting strategically. Where other factions respond to changing circumstances, the left is assumed to always stay the same, immaturely and thoughtlessly pushing a maximalist agenda with no considerations other than how to be the most radical. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in mainstream political coverage that some writers have spent a significant amount of time constructing elaborate theories purporting to explain why the faction is so utterly irrational.

One leading proposition is that it’s because its supporters and leaders are literally too mentally ill to act normally.

It is for this reason that the left has been all but written off by the media in the great political contest to succeed the Trump era. Since it is allegedly incapable of adapting to changes in circumstances, it is treated as if it does not control its own destiny. The only way in which writers can imagine it succeeding is if the world changes around it in a way that suits them. The inverse, where the left changes itself to better suit the world around it, is not considered a realistic possibility.

These assumptions are lazy, and they are wrong. They are based on a deeply flawed and incurious view of recent history, one that fundamentally misunderstands why the left behaved the way that it did in the past and completely misses what its motives were and are. The result of this over the past six months has been a Great Underestimation: a consistent pattern of centrist politicians and journalists being unexpectedly overtaken by opponents they had written off and assumed to have figured out.

The most relevant case here—both in how it shows how the left has successfully adapted to changing circumstances and its opponents failed to recognize it—is the ongoing mayoral race in New York City, which I will go over in detail. To begin, however, I will rebut the allegations of an “irrational left” at their source: how the faction behaved in 2019 and 2020.

A Revisionist History of “The Great Awokening” of 2019, or: Matt Yglesias is a Lazy Moron