In the 2016 election, it was common for centrist conservatives and liberals to treat the populist fervor animating the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as two sides of the same coin. Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post went as far as to claim that Sanders and Trump share the “same DNA.” Post-election, conservative organizations like Fox News picked up the thread, using the term “alt-left” to frame the Democratic wing led by Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as extreme. At the dawn of the Trump era, this trend has shown no signs of flagging. In the past week, we have seen prominent liberals once again demonizing the left and even appropriating the language of the talk radio right—a tactic that is as misguided as it is unhelpful.

In a piece published on Vanity Fair’s website on Friday, the critic James Wolcott argued that the “alt-left” is a “mirror image distortion” of the alt-right. Wolcott wrote that the two movements are “not kissin’ cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.” He argued that the alt-left’s “dude-bros and ‘purity progressives’ exert a powerful reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left.” In a less bombastic yet more insidious op-ed column in The New York Times, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that the populist left has adopted many traits of the populist right:



One element has aligned with the right in revolt against globalization, but with business taking the place of migrants as the chief evil. They agree with the right-wing populists about elites, though for the left the elites are the wealthy, while for the right they’re the liberals.

According to Blair, this populist leftism is “a profound error” that has “no chance of matching the populist appeal of the right” and “dangerously validates some of the right’s arguments.”



These columns, in their different ways, expose the fallacies of a liberalism that still is very uncomfortable sharing a tent with what is viewed as the leftist rabble. Wolcott seems primarily concerned with a strain of illiberalism—e.g., an intolerance for certain kinds of speech, an antipathy toward the compromises inherent in government—that is prevalent in isolated quarters of the left. Blair is positing a more dangerous idea: that liberalism should essentially reorient itself as a globalized technocracy, in opposition to anti-elite populism.

The first problem with these kinds of arguments is that the “alt-left” doesn’t actually exist, at least not in the way that the left’s opponents would have it. As The New Republic’s Sarah Jones pointed out, the alt-right’s goal, shared by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and the White House’s infamous Steves (Bannon and Miller), is to implement a white supremacist state. In contrast, the goals of the “alt-left” are not too different from that of a New Deal Democrat. Universal health care and a $15 minimum wage are not the left’s version of a Muslim ban, even if the rhetoric of the left is combative, uncompromising, and, yes, sometimes obnoxious.

