The Wrong Side of History

The Left is a religious movement. Its manic enthusiasms are fueled by the conviction that it can and will save the world. But what happens if the world does not want to be saved by the Left?

That is the dilemma of the 2024 election for believers in the ‘right side of history’.

In 2000 and 2016 leftists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain not only to us but to themselves why they did not really lose, but the 2024 election was a landslide in which not only the electoral college, but the popular vote, not only straight white men, but the entire spectrum of the electorate rejected not just Joe Biden, but his black female girl power ringer

When the Left lost the working class, it blamed the loss on racism. The factory workers and coal miners, the proletariat on whom generations of leftists had pinned their hopes for a national regeneration, were cast out for their whiteness. Henceforth, minorities would be the standard bearers for transforming the national culture and inheriting power at the dawn of the new age.

Now that virtually every minority group except black women has turned on them, what’s left?

Apart from the essays explaining why black women and ‘trans kids’ are the only virtuous minorities still out there (often written by straight white men) there isn’t a backup plan.

The problem was built into the leftist paradigm which seeks to identify and elevate oppressed groups, but the more those groups are elevated, the less need they have for the Left, and the more likely they are to object when their former patrons start wrecking all their achievements.

Everyone has something to lose and those with the most to lose are not the children of the rich trashing the system, but those near the bottom who are the most vulnerable to social chaos.

Unleashing BLM made black voters much more concerned about crime and opening the borders got former generations of California illegal aliens to wave Trump flags. The divisiveness of identity politics sounds good when it means cutting ahead in line for college admissions, job placement and other special privileges, but everyone except Ivy League grads sours on it when it means criminals and migrants overrunning their neighborhoods.

The Left campaigns on social change, but what it’s really after is revolutionary change. Social change alters the rules while revolutionary change destroys the whole system. There are a lot of takers when social change under names such as ‘equity’ is rigging the system to favor designated ‘oppressed’ groups, but far fewer of them want to stay around to watch it all burn.

But if the ‘oppressed’ groups just cash in their social change chips for a house in a nice neighborhood with two cars in the garage, how is the revolution ever going to happen?

The Left is a long way from actually losing the minority vote, but 2024 was the most urgent in a series of warnings, especially from Latinos and Asians, that they want stability and a prosperous economy a whole lot more than they want woke nonsense like ‘Latinx’ or ‘StopAsianHate’.

That’s the same message the white working class delivered during the era of the counterculture.

The working classes, of whatever race, rejecting the culture war is small surprise. The average black or Latino family has as much sympathy for drag queen story hour as the white steelworkers of another era did for hippies. A rainbow coalition encompassing racial and ethnic minorities, and the alphabet alliance of upper class fetishes, was a fantasy anywhere outside the activist echo chambers where ‘Fags for Hamas’ is an actual movement not a Gutfeld joke.

Decadent culture wars were a means to an end (much like the elevation of minorities) and were quickly stamped out in the aftermath of every successful Communist revolution. After the 2024 election, a ‘reconsideration’ of transgenderism is already underway in the movement.

The same media that spent a decade stomping on the dreams of thousands of female athletes is now willing to consider throwing transgenders overboard if they hold back the cause. As quickly as women were erased, transgenders can be erased and women brought back.

The Left can sideline the culture war, but it can’t sideline the revolution.

After replacing the white working class with minority groups, what is it going to replace minorities with? The Left is running out of potential bases to deploy into battle.

Leftist revolutions always depend on lies until the moment of turnaround occurs, but the evolution of the counterculture into the culture, the radicals working within the system to effect gradual social change while escalating the crises, put the moment of turnaround farther away.

And how can the moment of turnaround be reached if the base defects halfway into the crisis?

That is the core of the post-election crisis that has divided and consumed the Democrats. The party that emerged from the compromises that integrated the counterculture into it is unfit for either the purposes of the radicals or the liberals. The radicals have managed to alienate every base the Democrats ever had except for those elites that have already been radicalized.

The remaining moderates and liberals have kept the party from functioning as a purely revolutionary party even as its ideological culture becomes more radical from year to year. If this goes on, the Democrats would simply become the DSA, the party of Bernie, Warren and AOC, but 2024 is a warning that it would have a limited time to rule before the public turned on it.

The conflict between the gradualists and the revolutionaries played out in the Biden-Harris administration with revolutionaries out to break the country in control of policy and pragmatists in control of the campaign so that it was at odds with itself from the very beginning. Revolutionaries would wreck the economy to seize power, not to win an election, and pragmatists would bolster the economy to win elections while expanding the welfare state.

Instead a radical agenda and a pragmatic campaign led to a historic defeat for the Democrats.

The best American leftists could hope for was not the USSR or Communist China, but a shaky Latin American banana republic, and more likely would have to settle for a mediocre European social democracy spiraling into further decline every year. But Americans aren’t Russians, Chinese, Latin Americans (yet) or Europeans (anymore) and have different expectations.

To get to the USSR or China, leftists would have to show more ability to execute a violent revolution after a major crisis. Once upon a time liberals had persuaded their leftist offspring that this was unnecessary because America would willingly be transformed.

Americans would willingly bow to the right side of history. Didn’t Obama’s victory prove it?

Much as the myth of the fall of Camelot justified leftist radicalism and violence, Trump’s first victory undid the myth of Obamalot and ushered in a new wave of radicalism and terror. But if Trump’s first victory was Nixon, his second victory is Reagan: a growing national consensus that is immune to the old tools of the counterculture because it is not a reaction, but a realignment.

After the 2024 election, the idea that America was redeemable seems far fetched to leftists. Didn’t nearly every group choose Trump? What is there about America to be redeemed? And if Americans are innately on the wrong side of history, then a violent takeover is the only way.

And yet even revolutionary leftists don’t appear especially emboldened after the 2024 election. The violent riots have been mostly notable by their absence. Even revolutionaries need a base to work with and the election outcome hammered home to them that they don’t have one.

The Left has rejected America before only to come crawling back. Moving to Canada, or touring the third world to incite revolutions, are not realistic options. But to come back, the Left must once again delude itself about what Americans want. And about what they don’t want.

Politics is the art of illusion and delusion. Activists and officials lie to the people, but they also lie to themselves. Defeats come out of nowhere because they refuse to recognize that what most people want is not ideology, but a better life, and the politicians are usually standing in the way.

The right side of history is Marxist nonsense filtered through unitarianism: a messianic vision of ideological inevitability that is ever doomed to crash into the realities of human nature.

The Left wants to rule, but it also wants to be wanted by the people and by some larger immanent force that it does not quite dare to recognize as a higher power, that is on its side and advancing its righteous aims. After Election Day, its faith is shaken, not in its own theories, but in the American public and in the idea that a right side of history will ever come to America.

And yet it must believe. So it will find a way to believe in transforming America once again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading. 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America And readers love it.