What’s Left (Quinn's Version)
An egalitarian liberal stops gripping a word that no longer earns it
In 2007, Nick Cohen published a book called What’s Left? — How Liberals Lost Their Way. It was a diagnosis of a movement that had, in his telling, betrayed and perverted itself. The left knew what it was against, sure enough: conservatives, corporations, cultural or continental chauvinism. But the left no longer knew, Cohen argued, who or what it was actually for. The left had become a politics of opposition without a politics of principle, and the gap between those two things had quietly swallowed its integrity.
Cohen was largely right then. He’s largely still right now. He was talking about Bush, Blair, and Islamism then. But that’s not quite the essay I’m here to write.
Record Reset
I’ve called myself a leftist for years. Not loudly, not as a tribal badge, but as what I took to be a simple, accurate descriptor. My views on social policy, individual rights, secularism, and the architecture of a free society all landed, I thought, on the left side of the ledger. So: leftist. Not as a membership card. Not as a good-guy jersey. Just as a reading of where I stood on the continuum.
I no longer think the word can carry that weight. My views haven’t changed—and that’s part of the irony at the center of this—but the left itself has been colonized so thoroughly that invoking it now means spending most of my energy correcting what people think I mean rather than actually saying what I actually mean. It’s a discursive taxation in place of clear communication. It’s political apologetics. And I’m done with it. I’m done paying the cost for little benefit.
Suffering Semantic Subjectivism?
Here’s the thing about “leftist” as a signifier in 2026: most people don’t hear it as an umbrella. They hear it as a subset. A more arch, rarified, specifically coded thing. They hear: far left; progressive; or even, if they’re particularly uncharitable or myopic, Marxist. They don’t hear what I’ve always meant, which is something closer to the original content of left-liberal thought: individual rights, formal equality, universalist rules, secularism as a governing principle rather than a debatable lifestyle option.
The left I believed in was a big tent. The left that exists online, and increasingly in institutional life, is a fiefdom for warring extremists who’ve convinced themselves that shrinking the circle is a sign of rigor rather than a symptom of decline. I say all this as descriptive fact, and not as the prelude to a cliched “I left the left” style lament.
You see, I thought of leftists—or lefties, a semantic sleight of hand that does entirely too much work because it connotes something softer and more expansive despite effectively meaning something synonymous—as people who had a variety of principled stances beyond merely opposing the right. People who thought the goal was to extend the protections of liberal civilization rather than to carve out special exemptions from it based on group membership. People who debated each other internally, yes, but to make the whole stronger, not just to exile dissidents.
What I find instead, more and more, is that collectivism beats out individualism for most people who’d claim the label; that particularism is too alluring to resist on all sides; that sacralization of ideas or people(s) is inevitable. Especially when the things being sanctified aren’t technically religious, because people love their particularisms and those two tend to go hand in hand. Principles be damned.
Individualism has, somehow, become right-coded. Secularism only counts if it’s applied exclusively to Christianity. And capitalism—the original left-liberal revolution in economics, the system that is simply the absence of a ban on free exchange, private property, and voluntary association—gets treated as a right-wing value because enough people on the left confused “being notable” with “having a point” or even “being correct” when it came to Karl Marx and his ideology. Such confusion has never fully resolved itself for many who identify with the port-side of power or society.
These are not my people. Or rather: they are not my politics. And the word that was supposed to describe my politics keeps describing, in minds of the average person, a concoction of absurdities and abherrations I will never cosign. What’s a boy to do?
Labels, Lifetimes, and Letting Go
There’s a metaphor I keep returning to. Being a goth in the 1990s meant something specific—a subculture organized around particular music, aesthetics, sensibilities, a certain relationship to alienation and art. Being a goth in the 2020s means something very different. The signifier persisted. The content mutated. At some point, continuing to claim the word isn’t loyalty to the thing; it’s nostalgia for a version of the thing that no longer exists in the same form, or performance of an identity that’s been taken over by people who have a different project.
I held onto “leftist” past the point of conviction. I’ll admit that. There was a period—call it 2024 through early 2026—where it was stubbornness more than anything else. A refusal to let the people who’d captured the word and the community win. To avoid the feeling of capitulation or of being forced out.
It was also, in some ways, an inside-game logic: there’s an ease and built-in credibility that comes from being a critic of the left from inside it rather than from outside it. As well as a mild fear that dropping the label meant picking up another one I didn’t want: the dreaded right-winger, or worse, the centrist.
I’ve let go of my longstanding fear about the first. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being right-wing, and claiming otherwise is the kind of lazy tribal thinking I’ve spent considerable time arguing against. I remain, however, firmly opposed to the second. Political centrism in its current form is so fart-sniffing, so performatively above-it-all, so committed to the pose of balance as a substitute for doing the work of knowing what you believe and defending it as correct (even within a larger binary context), that I’d sooner take the populist label than split the difference between positions for aesthetics. I abhor the appearance of enlightenment or moderation sans serious thought and rigor. It’s like political stolen valor.
What I’m claiming now instead isn’t a new label. If you want the analytical framework, that’s what my upcoming piece on the Three Dichotomies is for. Don’t worry, it runs this week, and you’ll understand why I call myself an individualist, universalist, and secularist before most other descriptors now. What today’s piece is about, however, is something simpler and much more personal: I’m done performing a word or an identity that no longer signals what I believe, to audiences who have no particular reason to know it used to mean something different.
Say the Line — “The Left Went Too Far”
Cohen’s diagnosis was that the left had abandoned solidarity with the common man, that it had talked itself into excusing theocrats, ethnic cleansers, and antisemites in the name of anti-imperialism. And that this was a betrayal of the movement’s own best traditions. He was asking: what are you actually for? Who are we, really? And what becomes of us if we do this and stay like this?
My diagnosis is adjacent but distinct. The left hasn’t just abandoned solidarity—it’s abandoned the universalism that made its solidarity coherent in the first place. You can’t have a politics of solidarity that carves out exceptions for which groups deserve it and which don’t. You can’t base their position on someone’s oppression taxonomy or a historic narrative that amounts to Original Sin for politicos. You can’t be for women’s rights while being tactically flexible about their subordination to a cause or deference to exotic religions. You can’t oppose bigotry while practicing it against men, or white people (even tho race is fake), or Jews, or Asians, or anyone else who falls on the wrong side of a constantly shifting hierarchy of grievance. You can’t call yourself a secularist and only apply the principle when it’s convenient.
These aren’t novel or bespoke positions. They’re the original ones. The people who’ve drifted are not me. But again, I won’t say I’m leaving the left, nor that the left has left me. I merely refuse to care about the label or the tribe anymore. I won’t flatter those who shrunk the circle or tightened the tent by pretending they’re a coherent coalition any longer.
My position is that the left, as an identity or organizing principle, is mostly an anachronism. A hazy signifier. A mirage. To quote Mark Hanna in Wolf of Wall Street: “Fugayzi, fugazi, it’s a whazy, it’s a woozy, it’s… Fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real. Right?“
So, really, what’s left?
My commitments. Intact, unrevised, unrepentant. Formal equality. Individual liberty. Universalist rights, applied without exception for tribe or coalition. Secularism as a governing principle. Capitalism as a liberal achievement rather than a social failure. The belief that ideas are either true or they aren’t, and that the identity or political allegiance of the person holding them is not the relevant variable in that determination. Because we judge things on principle.
These used to be left-wing positions. Some of them still are, depending on who you ask and what version of the left you’re asking about. Some of them have drifted right-ward in the public imagination through no fault of their own, carried there by a left that decided universalism was a euphemism for erasure and individual rights were a right-wing talking point. I’m not following them. I’m staying where I am.
Here’s the honest reframe away from abandoning leftism so much as just not fixating on it as a label: A hipster is still a hipster even after the music changes and the craft bars close. I know what I believe. I know why I believe it. I’ve just stopped lending my credibility to a word that no longer earns it. The rest, as always, is noise.
I agree. Especially about centrism.
Can't wait to read the upcoming piece. I like where this is going and it's nice to hear someone put words to an issue everyone knows yet can’t define.