What is the Alt-Left?

What is the Alt Left?

Both mainstream Left and Right are wedded to the notion of eternal Progress–the idea that things are perpetually getting better and better for everyone. They love to deploy statistics compiled by, for example, the late Dr. Hans Rosling and Stephen Pinker, demonstrating how much richer and safer the world has gotten over the past hundred years under their “enlightened leadership,” and how much wealthier the “poor” nations of the world have become. This is their justification for moving forward with the Neoliberal project. To that end, any dissent from the status quo amounts to a return to barbarism! The “sacrifice zones” of the industrial heartlands of America and Europe are simply the price to pay for global progress. I call it “omelette ethics”—the idea that “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs…”

Neither side deals with the idea that there are fundamental limits to growth, or that we have lost a great deal in our relentless push to modernize. None of them deal with the crises of unemployment, obesity, mental illness, or pollution, for example. To them, every problem we face can be solved with either more education, more economic growth, more markets, more migration, more regulations, or more technology, full stop.

Expanding and growing the economy is imperative for both the mainstream Right and Left; on this issue, there is no difference. Neither of them question the basic assumptions of our current society on a deeper level. I summarized them last time: productivism (growthism); top-down technocratic management; centralization of power; educational meritocracy; multiculturalism; cosmopolitanism; globalism; corporatism; consumerism; financialization; technological progress, laissez-faire capitalism; natalism, meliorism, scientific rationalism, materialism, the belief in “progress,” and so forth.

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"Ah, yes, the mainstream Left’s think tanks are all about “Progress,” aren’t they, while the Right’s are all about “Freedom.” Neither offers much in the way of progress or freedom to anyone besides a small technocratic elite.

Techno-optimism, perpetual economic growth, multiculturalism, globalism, more education, “just desserts” meritocracy—there is really not much difference between the mainstream Left and Right anymore, is there? No wonder people are increasingly flocking to alternatives, including some very toxic ones."