The left’s illiberal problem isn’t over

The Democratic Party remains tethered to divisive identity politics.

By Cathy Young

Streamer Hasan Piker, center, waited to speak at a campaign event in Ann Arbor, Mich., for Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. (Credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press)

The recent debates about whether Democrats running for Congress should embrace left-wing live streamer Hasan Piker have focused attention on a thorny dilemma facing centrists, liberals, and moderate conservatives today: Should opponents of President Trump and of the illiberal right-wing populism that has powered his rise also criticize the illiberal left?

To many, punching left when the left is politically powerless and beleaguered, while a corrupt right-wing administration threatens American liberties — from the free press to an independent judiciary — seems not only misguided but downright perverse. And yet restoring the health of liberal democracy also requires confronting left-wing illiberalism, both because it’s toxic by itself and because it helps the toxic right.

Piker, a prominent figure on the militant socialist left, is overtly hostile to Western democracies and friendly to their enemies. Aside from his assertion that “America deserved 9/11,” he has expressed regret about the Soviet Union’s Cold War defeat and praised the mass-murdering communist dictators Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin. He is not simply a critic of Israel but someone who says that Hamas is “a thousand times better” and praises Hezbollah. His “anti-imperialism” includes only the mildest criticism of Vladimir Putin.

A different brand of left-wing illiberalism, with much more currency in the Democratic mainstream, eschews communism and stresses race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality far more than class. “Wokeness” is a tired right-wing buzzword, but it refers to a real phenomenon: a progressivism obsessed with uncovering and dismantling hidden, identity-based oppressions and much less interested in elevating the disadvantaged than in browbeating the privileged.

This is toxic stuff: Workplace trainings in some liberal cities have required white public employees to explore their racism and confess a recent incident in which they “caused harm to a person of color.” In a 2020 incident, a white male education council member in New York City was chastised for “harmful,” racially insensitive behavior because he was briefly seen holding a Black toddler (a friend’s nephew) during a council Zoom meeting.

In 2026, revisiting what centrist liberal pundit Matt Yglesias dubbed “the Great Awokening” — roughly 2013 to 2021 — feels like fighting yesterday’s culture wars. But we’re still living with the legacy of those wars, and it’s important to acknowledge that the “woke” excesses were real and often destructive: rising polarization; politicized scholarship and journalism that compromised their own credibility; “cancellations” for offenses against shifting racial and gender norms. People lost jobs for mild pro-law enforcement comments, saying that “all lives matter,” or making anti-riot comments in response to Black Lives Matter protests.

A justified backlash against these trends undoubtedly helped the Trumpian right, giving factual ammunition to dramatically exaggerated claims about “fake news,” anti-white racism, and “political correctness gone mad.” It’s not hard to convince people that progressive race and gender politics have gone off the rails when a female-identifying person with intact male anatomy is allowed to use women’s showers, or when a white kid is forced out of school over a goofy photo of himself in a dark green acne mask mistaken for blackface. To all this, add the skittishness of many Democratic politicians about condemning violence and looting in the summer 2020 protests — and support for “defund the police” activism.

A year and a half after the 2024 election, most of America is rejecting the Trumpian brand of polarizing identity politics, grievance, and wannabe authoritarianism. Yet the Democratic Party is still unpopular, at least in part because 58 percent of Americans think it is too far left. Even among Democratic voters, one recent poll found, nearly 40 percent want the party to move to the center while only 22 percent want it to move to the left.

Yet Democratic politicians still struggle to moderate on “woke” culture-war issues such as race-based affirmative action or transgender medical interventions for minors — partly because too many activists brook no dissent. Bluesky, the left-leaning social media alternative to Elon Musk’s right-slanted and often bigotry-riddled X, has been bleeding users partly because of its well-deserved reputation for echo-chamber militancy. Even staunch progressives have been battered by vicious pile-ons.

Is this as bad as Trump’s use of bogus lawsuits and federal regulatory powers to bully the media? Of course not. But social coercion can also be pernicious if pervasive enough, and such a climate in left-wing spaces reinforces the image of the speech-policing left. Nor have Democrats moved past identity obsessions: A California gubernatorial debate was recently canceled because only white candidates had qualified.

The answer to right-wing populism is to rediscover the liberal values shared by most Republicans and Democrats as recently as two decades ago: respect for the individual; rejection of bigotry and collective blame; commitment to free expression and intellectual openness; economic freedom with a social safety net; and love for America as a country built on those values. The left — socialist, “woke,” or some amalgam of the two — will not get us there.

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.

This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on May 11, 2026.