With the rise of a new political movement comes the rise of a new intellectual movement—or maybe the intellectuals came first, and helped inspire the movement? It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario, but either way, influential scholars always have a role to play in the formation and execution of any movement’s political vision. The New Deal had Keynesianism, the Reagan Revolution had the neocons, and the Clintonians had the “third way.”
America’s new left movement, now a loose association of socialists, racial justice activists and other grassroots organizers, has a similarly loose affiliation of scholars and public intellectuals pushing new ideas about American society.
Many of these intellectuals toiled in obscurity for years, honing their theories before they were written up in the New York Times and shared in nugget form on the Instagram stories of college students. Michelle Alexander is perhaps the best example of this type of scholar, a former Bay Area civil rights attorney turned law professor whose theories on prisons, police and race in America are now mainstream. Alexander’s bestselling book, “The New Jim Crow,” is required reading for aspiring racial justice advocates, while her commentary in outlets like The Nation and the New York Times has expanded to discuss class, protest and electoral politics.
Another scholar to move from leftwing niche to mainstream success is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton. Taylor gained cache on the left for her extensive writings on racial justice movements, including books on Black Lives Matter and the black feminist Combahee River Collective, as well as her incisive descriptions of the links between capitalism and racism. In the last two years, Taylor has become a frequent commentator in mainstream publications, and is now a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Taylor’s third book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership” was a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer prize.
As evidenced by Taylor and Alexander, the general movement of the Democratic Party has led to a run on credentialed lefty pundits. The New Republic has made two of the best pickups in this regard, bringing on Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as contributing editors. Reed, a professor at UPenn, has become one of the socialist left’s favorite scholars in recent years. His criticism of identity politics is gospel to many leftists, who are annoyed by what they see as the cynical deployment of race and gender representation to obscure broader class divides. Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia who served on Anita Hill’s legal team, gained prominence for coining the term intersectionality in 1989 and continues to write about race, gender and power.
In the economic sphere, the new left has found intellectual champions in both longtime scholars and new voices. Richard Wolff has been teaching economics for more than 30 years and is one of the few true Marxist economists left in western academia. In the last decade, Wolff has focused on spreading socialist economic theory in easily digestible forms, both through short books (“Understanding Marxism” and “Understanding Socialism”) and his radio show, Economic Update.
Stephanie Kelton is the former chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee, a professor at Stony Brook, and now the country’s most prominent preacher of modern monetary theory, or MMT. Kelton’s recent book on the subject, “The Deficit Myth,” explains her view that a government that creates its own currency should take a more active role in powering the economy, and that deficits created by high spending are less important than even most liberals think.
Fighting back against liberalism is a common theme among both left-wing activists and scholars, and one of the major forms this fight has taken is the creation of new left publications. Vivek Chibber, an NYU sociology professor, launched the peer-reviewed left-wing journal Catalyst in 2017, a project of Jacobin magazine. Chibber has also written extensively on development and colonialism, and authored the pamphlet series “The ABCs of Capitalism.”
Two other Jacobin-connected scholars, both rising stars in left academia, are Matt Karp and Daniel Bessner. Karp, a historian at Princeton whose first book “This Vast Southern Empire,” explores the power of slaveholders in directing early U.S. foreign policy, has written extensively for the socialist magazine about history and the 2016 and 2020 elections. Bessner, a professor at the University of Washington, studies issues in foreign policy. He’s a fellow at the Quincy Institute, a progressive foreign policy think tank, and he recently released his book “Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual.” His writings for Jacobin have critiqued U.S. foreign policy and militarism.
Anand Gopal is another left critic of American interventionism, whose journalism has often highlighted the failures of U.S. policy, primarily in the Middle East. After gaining prominence for his reporting, Gopal earned his Ph.D. and now teaches at Arizona State, while still reporting and writing on conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes,” he has written about anti-Assad forces in Syria and exposed America’s killing of civilians in the war on ISIS.
While many leftist writers these days have devoted their time to the failures of liberalism, one scholar who has focused especially on the right — while still managing to anger liberals — is Brooklyn College professor Corey Robin. In 2012, Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin,” unleashed a tidal wave of online debate, with even many liberals dissenting from his view that conservatism is less a philosophical ideology than a series of ever-evolving defensive measures meant to enforce hierarchy. Robin’s book has helped shape leftist strategy in fighting the right, while his other writing critiques the Democratic party and other misunderstandings of conservatism.
