The Leaderless Left
Inside the political roil
For the last few months, I’ve been mulling a trend that’s difficult to pin down. Defined leaders, so crucial to left politicking and activism over the last 60 years, seem to be melting away. Today’s activist class has few heroes, and the concept of the famed civil rights leader, feminist icon, or public intellectual organizer is fading. For the New York Times Magazine, I had the privilege of exploring this idea in an essay, which will appear in the Sunday print magazine.
Here’s a bit of what I ruminated upon, taking in the pro-Palestinian protests, the Bernie years, Occupy Wall Street, and many other movements of the 2010s and 2020s.
Today’s left does not have leaders to dominate the discourse — or even its own movements.
In 1968, the protest movements that challenged Humphrey had names, faces, figureheads. Today there are no Tom Haydens, Abbie Hoffmans or Jerry Rubins headed to Chicago. There are no activists gaining fame via organizing, the way DeRay Mckesson did during Black Lives Matter demonstrations or Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour did before the 2017 Women’s March. The two most celebrated political leaders of the progressive left, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fully supported Biden; they did not, as Eugene McCarthy did in 1968, try to wage a primary challenge. Dissent will come in Chicago, but it is challenging to find a single widely known figure, inside the convention or out in the streets, who will be leading any protests.
The new left is largely leaderless. This is not to say that it is bereft of organizational talent or influential ideas — just that it has no one of any great fame or notoriety speaking directly for it, or to it. And for that alone, this is a singular moment in American history.
And here’s a piece on “personality exhaustion,” a fascinating concept coined by the cultural critic Mo Diggs.
We may be sliding into a new age — one of “personality exhaustion,” in the words of the culture writer Mo Diggs. For much of the 2010s, online life was defined by parasocial bonds with individuals. These were boom times for megalithic influencers, from political candidates to social media personalities. Many liberals seemed personality-obsessed, enamored of assorted pundits and Trump nemeses like Robert Mueller, James Comey and Alexander Vindman. Mainstream Democrats still flock to cable television and prestige media that, in the 2020s, still revolve around such figures, with Jen Psaki cultivating a large fan base on MSNBC; even online, anti-Trump social media heavyweights like Ron Filipkowski and BrooklynDad_Defiant have racked up significant followings. But elsewhere, algorithms have come to change that.
Some pro-Israel commentators have blamed TikTok for fomenting anti-Zionism on its platform, but the platform’s real upheaval was to upend this parasocial arrangement: Its algorithmic “For You” page shifted attention away from memorable, followable individuals and into a sea of short videos and memes. As the culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick observed last year, TikTok is increasingly a platform of free-floating ideas and images, not personalities. And this year, on TikTok and especially on TikTok Live, brutal images from Gaza have streamed night and day, unmediated; arguments about rocket attacks and genocide have supplanted the specific people making them. When individuals were featured, they were often Gazans themselves, documenting what was happening around them. It seemed not to matter who was uttering any sort of soaring rhetoric. Speechifying itself, so fame-making in the 1960s, was growing irrelevant.
I hope you get a chance to read the full essay. I may have further thoughts, especially as I head to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week. There are many parallels between 1968 and today. And just as many ways these eras diverge, with 2024 offering its own peculiarities. It’s hard to know what’s coming next.
I'm looking forward to reading the full piece, have some thoughts on the topic as well, but will hold them until I see where you're headed.
Very confused. Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Deray McKeeson, Linda Sassour and Tamika Mallory were none of them leaders, although Hayden was leader of SDS back around 1962. They were all people who came to prominence through movements, sometimes had good things to say, others not so much, but you can't identify any sort of strategic "and then and then" to their decisions about movements (maybe about their own trajectories). You can do so with actual leaders, like MLK or Ho Chi Minh. Leaderless movement was already something of an idea back around the feminist movement in 1970, and most scholarship on that movement people are fairly proud of this aspect of it, although people also struggle with its limitations. Since then, there have been a bunch of leaderless movements, such as Nicaragua solidarity, global justice, occupy. AOC and Bernie are both elected officials. They both kind of try to be leaders, but when they encourage those they would lead to work with them through the system, usually some large portion of their followers get pissed. I don't think they made a bad decision to sit 2024 out (is AOC even old enough to run yet?) but in any case, I don't see what that has to do with being a leader--do you mean the movement could've used an advocate in the primary? I think a more mainstream figure like Chris van Hollen might've worked better, but nobody bit. I think in some circumstances many people want to act in a disciplined manner and are willing to follow a leader, but in many social movements this isn't the case. So you have currents that emerge, some flourish, others crash, you have personalities, some of whom endure (I remember hearing from Hayden up til his death about seven years ago; McKeeson seems pretty much forgotten at this point) but you don't really have leaders. Is this whole thing about how the Palestine movement, which is basically less than a year old in its current form, hasn't yet generated prominent personalities? It probably will.