Remember the Post Left? If you didn’t live on Twitter between 2019 and 2022 then the answer is almost certainly “no.” But if you did, then you probably have vague memories of an extremely online faction of conservatives that centered around struggling academics like Angela Nagle, aspiring pundits like Aimee Terese, and rising podcasters like Anna Khachiyan. You might even remember some of its satellite podcasts and publications like The Good Ol Boyz and The Bellows. Even if you knew who they were, however, you probably found them confusing: who are all of these Republicans, why are they pretending to be Marxists, and why are they specifically obsessed with crushing American socialism?
As it turns out, none of these questions really matter. The Post Left never really expanded beyond its niche Twitter presence, and even that collapsed by 2022. It never developed a coherent or influential politics, and all of its major figures have either receded from view or been wholly absorbed by Republican media.
You wouldn’t know that, however, by reading The Death of the Post Left — its embarrassingly self-aggrandizing eulogy published today in Compact. To hear it from author Oliver Bateman, his glorified groupchat was actually a “subculture” that held the “promise of forging a class-driven populism.” It even inspired “post-left-flavored overtures” from Donald Trump himself, who “tried to co-opt some themes associated with the post-left”. Online has a long and hilarious tradition of publishing overblow profiles and memoirs about media microcliques like Shakesville and The Intellectual Dark Web; few imagine themselves on the cusp of uniting the left and right in a working class revolution.
For most who remember it, the real story of the Post Left is fairly unambiguous. Because of the brutal campaign Hillary Clinton had waged against socialists in the 2016 Democratic primaries — revolving as it did around cynical accusations of bigotry — socialist media at the time was understandably focused on defanging those attacks. This meant revisiting the old Marxist critiques of identitarianism, which one can find back then in the writing of pundits like Matt Bruenig, Conor Kilpatrick, and yours truly, or in the polemic of media personalities like the Chapo Trap House crew or Katie Halper. At first, most of the people who would come to be associated with the Post Left were on board with this project, and if you look back you can still find figures like Terese and Khachiyan glowingly recommending the work of socialists.
But then came an episode that Bateman touches on as well: the infamous Cancellation of Angela Nagle. As he recalls it, she was “exiled from mainstream progressive circles” and “bitterly attacked by leftists” for writing her “Left Case Against Open Borders.” The truth, as I’ve noted in the past, was far more mundane: liberal denounced her, some leftists did too, and others defended her. Far from representing some profound moment of ideological crisis for the ideological left, Nagle’s cancellation was really just the sort of internet flamewar dogpile that most socialists experience on a regular basis. But as we’ve seen from thin-skinned media figures ranging from Lee Fang to Matt Taibbi, a dogpile is never just a dogpile when a media figure is at the bottom. It has to be a world-historical catastrophe and a moment of soul-searching and moral reckoning for the nation, an inflection point where one’s former principles and values have to be completely abandoned, inevitably followed by a breathlessly circulated essay on Why I Left The Left.
Nagle’s spiral was typical. Bateman concedes that she “wound up being invited onto more and more right-wing spaces” as if by happenstance, but that’s not how it worked at all: Nagle was feted by the right because she was willing to roll out increasingly demented attacks on socialists. On Tucker Carlson’s show she took cheap shots at DSA convention nerds; in The Lamp she repeated sleazy lies about Black Lives Matter organizers from Breitbart. The notion that she was being goaded into all of this is hard to reconcile with the fact that she had closed down her Twitter account, which for 90% of her critics meant that she ceased to exist. What really happened is that Nagle found one of the easiest and most lucrative media niches there is: left apostate.
Bateman seems to be vaguely aware that something like this happened — he admits that the Post Left “drifted steadily rightward under the gravitational pull of higher-profile conservative media” with “its own media platforms and big donors.” What he can’t seem to admit is that this is precisely what the left said was happening all along. Neither can he admit that “the core post-left critique of identity politics,” insofar as it was actually defensible, was really just the same thing Bernie Bros had been saying since 2016. The only innovation on this pundits like Terese and Khachiyan ever came up with was to betray class-first politics for a pathetic indulgence in cartoonish performative bigotry.
It is fitting that Compact published a Post Leftist’s memoir of the Post Left written entirely in the third person. From Bateman to managing editor Geoff Shullenberger to founder Sohrab Ahmari to a good half of its past contributors, Compact is overrun with Very Respectable Right Populists who want you to forget their own role in the Post Left. They might, but socialists will not.
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