The Obsolescence of the Post-Left

During the plague years of 2020 and 2021, I was a participant in a sub-realm of Twitter, made up of a mix of “facephag” and anon accounts and spread out over any number of overlapping group chats, that came to be known as the “post-left.” Fellow veteran Oliver Bateman has chronicled this tendency’s rapid rise and equally abrupt crack-up in the pages of Compact. The term “post-left” rarely functioned as a self-ascription and soon came to function mostly as a term of derision. What it captured, broadly, was a sense of disillusionment with the course of left-wing politics from the first Trump term through the failure of the second Bernie Sanders campaign, the pandemic, and George Floyd summer. What set the post-left apart from other anti-woke currents was its participants’ use of Marx-ish class analysis (and in my case, ideas drawn from post-structuralist critical theory) to frame its critical commentaries on the actually existing progressive left.