“No, not everyone on the Left supported these tyrannies, yet what progressives cannot escape is that much of the Left lent political legitimacy to regimes that destroyed and damaged tens of millions of lives, leaving festering wounds that still bleed today.”
Ever since President Donald Trump’s re-election in November, autopsies of the Left have become every pundit’s pastime. Democrats lost because they ignored the working class. They forgot the kitchen-table issues. They ignored differences between men and women. They brushed aside fears about illegal immigration. They preached too much about race and ethnicity.
There is some merit to these diagnoses, but they leave the impression that the problem was simply about tweaking the message. If progressives had cared as much about working-class whites in factories as about trans women on soccer fields, then-Vice President Kamala Harris—as the logic goes—would have sailed to the White House, and Democrats would be controlling Congress right now. Of course, few believe this. In fact, leading up to the election, Democrats talked constantly about the working class and very little about trans women.
So, what went wrong? Let us return to an age-old concern of those on the Left. If a democratic system is worth having, this is largely because it allows citizens to expose past injustices. A worthwhile democracy takes history seriously, and progressives have rightly highlighted injustices going back centuries, including socio-economic disadvantage based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. To do this, they have connected politics to history through a two-step process I call “memory politics.” Step one consists of documenting atrocities committed by the West over several centuries. Step two consists of spreading this knowledge to the widest possible public.
We have seen this since the 1960s, when universities increasingly taught histories of Western wrongdoing—and swiftly became hotbeds of rebellion. In the following decades, workplaces implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and democracies across the globe embraced educational and social spending measures to even out past inequalities. More recently, these initiatives have been carpet-bombed from the Right, largely because they originally sprang from the Left.
In the United States, progressives often disagree with each other about whom to vote for or which policies to prioritize. Yet on one point they agree: Americans will overcome histories of mass injustice only after they have engaged in open and public scrutiny of the nation’s past. Progressives are correct to make this demand, yet the problem is that they have directed it toward everyone but themselves. They rightly demand a relentless memory politics of the West, but they shun any memory politics of the Left.
Modern history sears with the violence and repression committed for over a century by dictatorships in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere. No, not everyone on the Left supported these tyrannies, yet what progressives cannot escape is that much of the Left lent political legitimacy to regimes that destroyed and damaged tens of millions of lives, leaving festering wounds that still bleed today.
Western progressives often feel outraged by any hint that they have failed to acknowledge atrocities committed in the name of Leftism. They insist that they openly acknowledge these pasts (though discovering how and where they do this can take some real effort). They claim they have always revisited and revised their politics in light of past mistakes. Yet even if some are willing enough to go along with step one of a memory politics of the Left, they have shown no appetite for step two: What we never see is the Left mounting campaigns to teach people about leftist atrocities in the way that people must learn about other historical atrocities.
“Well, of course they don’t,” one might respond. “We always stress the injustices buried in our rivals’ pasts while soft pedalling the evils haunting our own. It would be hypocrisy to hold the Left to a higher standard!” Yet progressives never sold Leftism as acting just like the rest of the political spectrum. To the contrary, reaching back to the origins of modern politics, progressives always brandished “autocritique” as a badge of honor, elevating the Left above the world of power politics.
Indeed, if those on the Left truly practiced the kind of open and frank self-scrutiny they demand of others, their claim to political superiority would carry great weight. Sure, some on the Left have acknowledged shortcomings when it was in their interest to do so. But that is not the sober introspection of autocritique. It is merely the same run-of-the-mill maneuvering that spans the entire political spectrum.
Someday, genuine autocritique, which means practicing public self-criticism on a par with the public and candid self-scrutiny demanded of others, may indeed be what will set the Left apart. But that will happen only through a thorough rethinking of how the Left has thus far pursued its memory politics: shaming the rest of us for our omissions while calling little attention to its own.
Eric Heinze, a professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, is the author of the forthcoming book Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.
