The afterworld haunts the latest print issue of Jacobin magazine. The theme is “The Left in Purgatory,” and the cover illustration shows Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a couch in some sort of waiting room. Jacobin back issues are laid out on a table before them. In the background, a TV weatherman forecasts clouds—day after day after day of overcast skies; it is not a bright springtime for the Brooklyn left.
The issue is devoted to figuring out why leftists are undergoing a process of “dealignment” from the workers they speak for, as publisher Bhaskar Sunkara puts it in an opening column. To anyone willing to look out the window and honestly describe what he sees, the answer is obvious: Aggressive cultural liberalism doesn’t answer—but exacerbates—the crises facing wage earners. Leftists’ boutique identitarian concerns don’t concern the underclass. And the culture clashes between the two camps reflect material conflicts.
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