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Editors’ Note: The title of this excellent essay seems paradoxical. What victory? Well, the radical progressive ‘New Left’ really did capture the Democrat party in recent decades and their hold on the party led to a solid rejection of the woke, absurd and destructive ideology detached from reality by American voters with a strong mandate for Donald Trump to return to common sense, civil society and governance by We the People. Political clowns like Kamala Harris and AOC and their ilk indeed represent the New Left’s Total Victory in 2024. We should celebrate loudly the rejection of their victory by decent and liberty-loving Americans in a stunning defeat of the radical Left’s ideology.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

—George Orwell

According to exit polling from Blueprint, a firm built to assist Democrats, the Trump campaign’s decision this fall to hit Kamala Harris on her transgender agenda provided Trump a 25-percentage-point advantage with swing voters. And for the swing voters who ended up swinging to Trump, the gap was a thunderous 28 points.

Few issues swung voters harder against Harris. While Trump was the primary beneficiary, the triumph also belonged to the New Left.

In 2019 the American Civil Liberties Union sent volunteers to public forums to ask difficult questions of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. This was augmented by an ACLU candidate survey covering several woke concerns. Without this, Harris might never have so publicly pinned herself to such extreme positions as supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for federal inmates.

Race vs. Class

Like most of the supposedly left-leaning nonprofits, the ACLU has clearly been captured by New Left identity politics. But it wasn’t always so. In 1969, as the name implies, the public interest law firm was more likely to promote the civil liberties of Americans, including criminal defendants, labor union members, and communists. Instead of New Left, the ACLU was once decidedly old left, prioritizing the interests of workers, not the woke.

The New Left was still pretty “new” when the annual (and, as it transpired, final) convention of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occurred in June 1969. A direct ideological/historical line connects that long ago dispute with the defeat of Kamala Harris in 2024.

The victorious faction in the 1969 SDS battlespace would soon morph into the domestic terrorist sect known as the Weather Underground. The Weather faction was New Left, aligned with what we now call “identity politics” or “woke-ism.” Their founding document, the “Weatherman Manifesto,” promoted an alliance with black communist revolutionaries, such as the Black Panthers, as the proper path to ousting capitalism and imperialism. They were militantly opposed to police, the Vietnam War, and the military. One of their role models was John Brown, the violent abolitionist and insurrectionist.

Race trumped class as the animating force of the Weather Underground, and—if they were white—even Marx’s “workers of the world” could be the enemy. According to the Manifesto, “virtually all of the white working class also has short-range privileges from imperialism . . . which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the imperialists.”

The Weather agenda was opposed within SDS by the Progressive Labor (PL) Party, which considered the white working class as the natural allies of the revolutionary left.

The PL faction in 1969 was a communist revolutionary sect that was old left, committed to the “workers of the world, unite!” message. They were highly critical of the Weather faction’s fixation on race-based disputes. Then as now, the class-based Marxists believed identity politics was—at best—a distraction from the working-class issues and—at worst—an obsession that would actively alienate the white working class.

Remnants of the dispute still exist within the communist left today. In 2019, the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) was one of the most strident and effective critics of the New York Times’1619 Project, a historically inept portrayal of the American founding as a triumph for slavery.

In one essay about the 1619 Project a pair of WSWS writers noted that the “historical slogan of the socialist movement is ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ not ‘Races of the World, Divide!’” “The racial narrative is intended to replace one that is based on the analysis of objectively existing social and class interests,” they wrote. “The New York Times . . . has a very real political agenda, which is closely coordinated with the Democratic Party.”

Warnings

Not communist, but no less concerned with the Democratic Party’s discounting of the working class is Ruy Teixeira. A former staffer at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, he is the co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?—a book that profiles the Democrats’ abandonment of the working class. At his Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, he spent most of the last two years before the election warning Democrats to turn from the woke identity politics brainworm.

In 2022, he posted an analysis urging the Democrats to distance themselves from radical climate groups such as the Sierra Club, promoters of “defund the police,” and nonprofit advocates of other woke obsessions.

“Moreover, to the extent Democratic politicians want to move in a more moderate direction and get closer to the sweet spot of American public opinion, progressive organizations, as currently constituted stand in the way,” he wrote. “From cracking down on criminals and putting public safety first and foremost to securing the border and containing illegal immigration to pursuing a clean energy transition that includes an “all of the above” approach to meeting America’s current energy needs to keeping abortion safe, legal and rare but accepting some restrictions, particularly past the first trimester, progressive organizations persistently pressure Democratic politicians not to move in these directions that are clearly called for by public opinion and common sense.”

Democrats didn’t listen.

Political Autopsy

“Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters,” wrote Teixeira, in a political autopsy following the 2024 vote. “How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.”

That Teixeira had to write these obvious sentences even once, let alone over the course of years and in a whole book, demonstrates just how total the New Left victory has been. The Weather Underground once had to hide from the law, let alone respectable Democrats. Today, the woke New Left tells Democrats what the laws should be.

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This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.