who are we on the left?

it's crucial we decide who we want to be

When Yascha Mounk started Persuasion several years ago and warned about left-illiberalism, I thought he had been duped by right-wingers. I listened to his podcast and I was like: this guy doesn’t get it, he’s exaggerating a few isolated incidents.

Just to recap, Mounk’s basic diagnosis is that the academic and online elite left does not think in terms of traditional liberal values like “all people deserve freedom and economic security” or “all people deserve the ability to express themselves freely.” Rather, he argues there is a major current of thought which divides people up by demographic groups, orders them by perceived historical oppression, and wants to confer advantages to historically oppressed groups at the expense of historically advantaged groups. At its worst, this view treats people as their sociological categories (cis gay white man, cis straight black woman, etc) instead of as individuals.

Over the past several years, I have come to reluctantly agree that Mounk was ahead of the curve on identifying real issues we have in leftworld, and I now mostly agree with Mounk’s diagnosis. I was wrong about Mounk—I thought his diagnosis was hyperbole. But what he warned about literally just happened to me last week on BlueSky.

So I’m going to talk about my experiences, what I think are some common but wrong habits of mind on the left, and present my hope for how we can renew our core values on the left.

My goal here is not to dunk on anyone, or to even make anyone feel bad. It’s rather to share my experiences in the hope that readers will understand my perspective better. My hope is that we can move toward a more harmonious world where we all understand each other a little bit better.

the tweet that started it all

So, last week I tweeted this.

As if to confirm my point, some of the responses to me *literally* said “yes, it’s all men.”

Nevermind that I literally worked to stop Project 2025, I’m apparently a Trumpist now because I’m a white dude. Of course there will be some morons in any space online, and we don’t want to generalize from a single bad instance—but I’ll argue below that I don’t think it’s confined to the absolute fringes.

To make my case affirmatively—the point of my post (and this post) was that I do think we have a problem on the left where we tell boys and men too much about what they as a group are doing wrong, and not enough about what they are doing right—or what a positive vision of masculinity is or could be. You often hear abstract calls for positive versions of masculinity, but few specifics. You also hear stories about the “good ones” that mirror some of the worst ways of speaking about minority racial groups.

You may agree or disagree with that—but this is my personal experience, and I have heard similar concerns from men I am close with. Even if you disagree, I hope you’d take seriously the fact that some guys really do feel this way.

So I think we in left-of-center spaces like universities, BlueSky, etc. need to make sure we’re not tolerating guy-bashing. This makes these spaces unwelcome for some people, and if we really do believe in including everybody, we can’t start by shit talking entire groups of people. In a deeper sense, I really do believe we need to commit ourselves to the idea that all people have dignity, deserve respect, and have something positive to contribute to the world. And if we’re negging entire groups of people—even in a casual way—we’re not sending that message.

I want to be really clear what I am not saying:

• I am not saying men as a group face bias relative to women

• I am not saying it’s harder to be a man than a woman

• I am not saying phrases like “men suck” or “kill all men” are more harmful than the variety of harmful stereotypes that exist about women, Black people, Asian people, and so on

• I am not saying that making men feel more included on the left is the most important issue in the world

But what I am saying is that I do think we have a tone and vision problem for men on the left. We tolerate highly negative tones, and we don’t have a robust positive vision for making men feel included and welcome. And those are major issues for us practically and politically.

You can see all over the world that men—particularly young men—are turning away from left wing parties. This is true even for Black and Hispanic men in the United States, where the right wing party has very little to offer them materially. That should really make us pause.

And you can kind of understand it structurally/sociologically—young women outperform young men by a lot in school in the US, and in some areas young women earn more than young men. And if you combine lower achievement for men combined with a message that tells men that they suck, you will get a negative reaction from a lot of boys and young men. You can check out Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves for this argument, which I think is worth taking seriously.

the responses i got

I want to go through the responses to my tweet and categorize them by habits of mind I think we would do well to leave behind. My big takeaway from the responses is that nobody actually responded to what I was saying, even when I clarified.

It’s fine to disagree and be like “no, I do not think we have a problem tolerating negative language about men in left-of-center spaces,” but nobody actually said that. A few people, as the one I quoted above, think negative language about men (and white people) is a feature, not a bug, of left wing spaces. I guess that’s a response, but it’s a pretty bad one.

the responses i got, part 1: sane but a little too sociological

Let’s start with those from professionals, first off with Professor Kim Weeden at Cornell University. I have a great deal of respect for Prof Weeden—she was in my department when I was in graduate school and I’m familiar with some of her work on classes. It’s good stuff. I owe Prof Weeden and the entire Cornell sociology department a huge debt of gratitude for accepting and training me, and I would highly recommend the department and Prof Weeden’s classes to anyone.

But I do think Prof Weeden missed the point in her response to me.

As you can see, she asks me for concrete evidence that broadly negative language about men is not deserved by the men. I have heard broadly negative language about men in my presence hundreds of times, and zero times have people said it is about me (I have gotten the “but not you” kind of thing). But who knows—maybe I deserved it!

I find the request to provide evidence about my personal experiences kind of odd, but there’s also I think an unfortunate assumption here that a lot of guys do deserve it, which I do think contributes to the overall problem. If you say to someone “you personally may not deserve it but a lot of people like you do deserve it,” that still sends a bad message.

We can have a bigger and more sociologically informed conversation about like, how many men actually deserve to be called out, etc. But if our default assumption that a phrase like “kill all men” or “men suck” is generally deserved, we’re starting off with such a hostile set of assumptions that we’re never going to create an inclusive and welcoming space for men.

You could say that every time I have heard a phrase like “men suck”, I personally deserved it. And if that is your position, well I think you’re wrong but I accept I won’t be able to convince you of much.

Prof Weeden followed up with this, which again, even though I have a lot of respect for her, I do think is not a super great response.

So it’s great to hear that she agrees that the world would be better if we stopped using broadly negative language about men. This is really my whole point. But then we get a comparison of the harms I have suffered (or men have suffered) to hers, and then tying these “men suck” statements to broader sociological outcomes like those in the job market.

No doubt that Prof Weeden has faced more negative language about her gender than me, and no doubt that on average women face more harmful stereotypes in getting jobs than men.

But I do think this all is still sort of missing the point. I’m talking less about sociological outcomes like getting a job and more about effectively building a political movement and online spaces. My big point is that if we on the left are broadly tolerant of anti-guy language, or default to an assumption that guys deserve it, then we will alienate guys and make the very valid causes of increasing gender equality harder to achieve. We will also undermine our own highest ideals of equality and inclusion.

I appreciate Prof Weeden’s engagement. As I said to her, I think the one area that men actually do face bias in is exactly this—when a guy speaks up being like “hey I don’t feel welcome here because we’re using language that on its face targets me,” you get responses like

• Other people have it worse

• You shouldn’t feel that way (man up)

• Get out of the group you misogynist

In progressive and left wing spaces, these responses really are only valid towards men, and white men in particular. If you told a Black person to stop complaining about broadly anti-Black language, you’d be fired from a lot of companies immediately—and deservedly so.

Now, it is true that broadly anti-Black language is much worse than broadly anti-man language for a variety of reasons. But if you want to create a space where guys feel welcome and feel good about fighting for all kinds of other people, you do need to signal to them that yes, the thing you are fighting for for other people also applies to them. This is a pretty basic social contract idea—I fight for you and I also expect that the rights I am fighting for you to have extend to me. In some sense, I am fighting for you and I also know you would fight for me if the roles were reversed.

Ultimately, even if other people do have worse experiences, it is still an unpleasant thing to hear someone say you suck, and someone else having suffered more does not erase your dignity or make it appropriate that you too must suffer.

The goal here should be a world that treats everyone with dignity and respect. That includes guys.

the responses i got, part 2: i’m not a person, i’m a sociological category

The tweet threading here is a little complex, so basically what happened is a friend agreed with me, and said language online does sometimes feel “invalidating”. He quote-tweeted this tweet by Prof Tressie McMillan Cottom as evidence, which I do think is an instance of broadly negative language about men.

Prof Tressie McMillan Cottom quote-tweeted him, saying “have a nap.” And then I quote tweeted her.

But basically, as you can see here, the message from Prof Cottom is that talking about how I feel isn’t OK, presumably because I’m a (white?) guy.

And you can see the rest of the exchange:

I find this kind of response incredibly worrisome for us on the left side of the aisle. It’s patronizing and rude, sure. But in a deeper sense, if this is how a sociology professor who says they want socialism (which is undoubtedly on the left side of the aisle) is speaking to fellow people with a PhD in sociology, we have big issues. Like, if your message to people in your own discipline is “have a nap,” it’s gonna be tough to convince people more broadly.

The language is genuinely universal here—men need socialism and a nap. Prof Cottom doubled down on this generalization several times. As you can see from my responses, I really think this attitude is bad for us on the intellectual left.

This is where in the tweets that I got the feeling that—huh—maybe I’m not really welcome in some parts of the contemporary left. And if I’m feeling this way as a guy who’s got a PhD in sociology, a deep interest in progressive public policy, and worked for 5 years trying to elect Democrats—then we probably have some issues.

Like, can I tell you a story that puts Prof Cottom’s words in the long sweep of history and makes them appear less bad? Sure. But you shouldn’t need a PhD to contextualize words from prominent public intellectuals—we should be using language that is broadly inclusive and whose plain meaning makes sense to people.

the responses i got, part 3: crazytown

So, those are the two responses I got from professionals. Then, there was a long tail of wacky stuff which I would describe as script-reading. Just like, see a tweet, assume the worst, respond. Let’s break these as habits of mind we should seek to avoid.

“how dare you speak”

Perhaps the most common crazy response I got had the flavor of “you are so self-evidently wrong, how dare you even say anything? how dare you?”

Here’s one instance of this, where a few people jumped in and said we weren’t at a professional conference so Prof Cottom doesn’t owe me conversation. Fair enough—and I even said as much by saying that we all have to make our own decisions on how to communicate.

Even after I said one time that it was my hope but not my demand that engagement in a collegial manner would be good, another person jumped in and basically said I’m a guy on an elevator demanding a woman speak to him. OK then.

We’ve abstracted away from any specifics here, and we’ve just pivoted to a script where since I’m a guy and Prof Cottom is a woman, and I’m expressing my feeling that I wish we could engage in a more productive manner, I’m 1) demanding engagement and 2) acting out terrible sexist behavior.

Again, if you were trying to prove my point that currently on the left we treat men as a sociological category rather than seeking to treat them as individuals, you could not really do a better job than this.

In response to the final question that Dr. Ew asks, I made zero posts requesting that Dr Cottom engage with me. I did make one post expressing my wish that the engagement were more collegial.

You can see another instance of this here—assuming I am trolling, mischaracterizing my words, and then Dr Cottom jumps in to agree.

I feel a little bit like this is crazytown stuff? We do need to make a decision on the left about whether we believe all people have dignity and a right to speak up for themselves. I believe the answer to this is yes. This does not mean that people speaking up will always be right, but it does mean that we should not tell people to stop talking because of the demographic group they are in.

“men and white people are bad”

I mentioned this one already but it’s worth meditating on for a second. I worked professionally to stop Project 2025. I did literally everything I could.

And this person says that because I am a white guy and I “haven’t done the work,” I’m a project 2025 supporter or something.

Like, this is really the message that some people get from the left. It’s not great. And even though it’s a rather extreme version of it, it’s not that far from Prof Cottom’s statements.

This attitude of “you are starting at a deficit because of your race/gender and need to prove yourself as one of the good ones through ~some process~” is just terrible, IMHO. In practice it just defaults to the assumption that people in the disfavored group are bad.

Instead, we should start from a point that all people have dignity and have something positive to contribute. I firmly believe this is true, and I think it’s much easier to build a just world when we start by trying to include rather than start by demanding people prove themselves from a deficit. If you have some Christianity in your background, you’ll notice this is remarkably similar to the original sin doctrine, except instead of baptism and Jesus, you have to like self-flagellate on BlueSky. At least in the case of Christianity, you get baptized once and the original sin is wiped away. For us on the left, it seems like you need to continually self-flagellate.

It’s worth thinking about how few people will willingly do this. But some people will. Which brings me to my next point.

“i’m one of the good ones, let me educate you”

One guy decided to try and bring me the Torch of Understanding after saying “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” twice. Again, I genuinely appreciate the engagement, but the response is like reading from a script that doesn’t even a little bit apply to what I was saying or what happened.

This guy rode in on his white horse saying “look, I have self-flagellated and you must too!”

This is like, incredible stuff. By responding to something someone said in my replies, I’m lashing out, demanding explanations, and involving myself in a conversation that doesn’t concern me. Truly incredible. Again, how dare I speak.

I’m so sorry, I should have just said “yes all men suck and they do indeed need a nap, thank you wise mentor!” I definitely need to contextualize myself through some uncertain process.

Note the incredible lack of specifics about what I’ve done wrong. It’s a lot of flowery language but it basically it comes down to: “it doesn’t matter what happened, you are wrong and you should say so.”

If our demand on the left is for Soviet show trials like this, we’re gonna get cooked by the right. They’re just gonna say “hey, you don’t suck!” and win people over. Again, we have to take people seriously, make them feel included, etc.

<REEEEEEEE>

The final and most hilarious type of response I got was just indiscriminate yelling.

I got some of these the previous week as well in response to defending message testing (gasp!) on BlueSky.

Twitter has way more Nazis per capita than BlueSky, but the average asshole level on BlueSky is somehow higher than Twitter. A good rule in life is you should seek to be more polite than actual Nazis. I had a guy tell me “fuck you” because I said that we needed to not give into our anger irrationally on the left. Lol.

Tone actually matters for persuading people, it turns out.

some big think

We on the left, which broadly goes from moderate Democrats to actual socialists, really do need to think about who we want to be, who we want to include, and what our values are. I think on the further left side of the spectrum, there is a real danger of losing sight of good values.

I’ll tell you what mine are. I want to create a space where people from every background feel welcome. I want to default to the stance that we can make the world better and everyone has important work to contribute towards that. I want to address historical injustices such as racism and sexism. I also want to have a robust and positive vision members of non-minority groups both because those people have dignity and so that it’s easier to correct historical injustices and make the world better. I want us to feel like we’re in it together, like we have each other’s backs even when we don’t agree on everything.

I want us to understand that people mess up, that people can get better, and I want us to welcome that improvement. I want us to treat people as individuals, keeping in mind our demographic groups are important but not completely determinative parts of our identity. I want us to try and meet people where they are, I want us to assume it is our job to explain, convince, and persuade. I want us to grow the tent.

I want us to know that there is a lot of work to do but feel like: because we’re in it together and we have support, we can do it and we can do it joyfully.