The second task would be to ensure economic security for all. This would involve raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, providing universal basic income and having the federal government provide a paying job to all who want one.

I would disagree with this agenda on pragmatic policy grounds, but at least it would be humane. It’s a positive, universalist agenda that aims at social solidarity and national cohesion — we’re all in this together. It would be, as Sheri Berman writes in Dissent, enchanted with a radical idealism.

Nonetheless, I don’t think this is the leftism we will wind up with. Tribalism is in the air, on the left as well as on the right. It is based on a scarcity mentality, the idea that life is a zero-sum war between us and them. It emphasizes division and conflict, not solidarity and cohesion. It draws out the authoritarian tendencies in any movement. On the right, tribalism brings us the ethnic authoritarianism of Donald Trump. On the left, it seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.

You can see authoritarianism entering the left through two avenues. The first is nationalism. Not long ago, most of the American left tended to think transnationally — partly because problems like climate change are global, partly because it’s hard to regulate a global economy nation by nation, partly because progressives used to be psychologically averse to nationalism.

But national sovereignty is not withering away. Left-wing hostility toward European Union-type multilateral organizations is at record highs. Now a lot of progressive economic thinking is nakedly nationalistic. Bernie Sanders in 2015 derided a more open immigration policy as a “Koch brothers proposal.” It’s the old xenophobia — us or them, screw or be screwed. On trade, the left-wing populists sound like Trump.

The second stream fueling economic authoritarianism is identity politics. It used to be that big political divides were defined by economic interests; now, the cultural dog wags the economic tail. Identity politics defines the core political divides. When many progressives talk about economics these days, they take the habits of mind they developed when talking about identity groups and apply them to economic groups.