“Only dangerous fanatics refuse to compromise,” my mother used to tell me. And so, several decades later, I entered government ready to compromise; a small price to pay, I thought, for delivering a modicum of relief to the suffering majority who had voted us in. Yet the hardest, and the most pertinent, question kept torturing me: how does one compromise without ending up compromised? Which single compromise would catapult me into the land of the co-opted? For months, I struggled to find the answer, until one revealed itself unexpectedly.
It is an enigma that begets a paradox. On the one hand, trying to pinpoint the pivotal compromise is as futile as trying to seek the single hair that, once lost, admits one into the brotherhood of the bald. On the other hand, just as one glance at me confirms I lack enough hair to count as bald, one glance at Andy Burnham and the vast majority of Europe’s centre-left leaders confirms they are compromised. It is a question that remains pertinent.
But at what point does compromise turn into defection? At what point does practicing the art of conceding judiciously lead one to betray one’s constituency — even to embrace villainy? Indeed, do the villains even know they are villains? Were they aware of a moment when their cascade of compromises finally pushed them beyond the moral pale? I doubt it. The human soul’s capacity for rationalising the vilest of choices is boundless. There is almost no horror perpetrated by one human against another that has not been justified with the principle of the lesser evil.
Interrogate the ghosts of Vidkun Quisling, or his Greek counterpart Georgios Tsolakoglou, and ask them why they agreed to become the Nazis’ puppet premiers in Norway and Greece. They would surely answer that “someone was going to do it”, so it might as well have been them: their complicity was worth the price if it enabled them to shield even a handful of their countrymen from the Nazi menace. That these rationalisations seem laughable in retrospect returns us to the original question: at what point does a sequence of compromises render one compromised?
It was February 2015 when I encountered the sheer banality of Europe’s compromised centre-left leaders. What brought it into sharp focus was the contrast between these hollow men and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s conservative finance minister and Europe’s high priest of stringent austerity. He was ruthless yet cogent; analytically weak yet intellectually honest; coarse yet comfortingly self-assured. He would say outrageous things, such as “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy in Europe”. But there was a candour in his delivery and the sense that he was describing the world as he truly saw it. Then came the drudgery of the centre-leftists.
First up was Michel Sapin, France’s finance minister and long-time Socialist Party hack. After embracing me like a brother-in-arms, waxing lyrical about my anti-austerity stance and promising that we would “walk together” to return Europe to the “path of growth”, he led me to the nearby press conference. There, in front of the gathered media, he underwent an instant metamorphosis. Gone was the bonhomie, the common purpose, the condemnation of austerity. Instead, wagging an accusatory finger at me, he out-Schäubled Schäuble with a paean to “discipline” and belt-tightening. Once we were alone, he turned all sweet and comradely again. I stopped him in his tracks, looked him in the eye and demanded to know: “Who are you and what have you done to the Michel I met an hour ago?”
A series of depressingly similar meetings followed only days later, in Berlin. First with Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then with a delegation of parliamentarians representing the German Greens. The worst part of those meetings was not what was said; it was that it was clear they did not mean a word they uttered. And along with the lack of conviction, their banal musings betrayed a complete absence of intellectual backbone — there was no real proposition to disagree with or argument to logically refute.
Leaving those meetings, I wondered how it had come to this. How had the SPD, a party with a history of transforming Germany into a functioning social democracy, ended up with a leader so banal and vacuous and ready to defer to someone like Schäuble? How had the Greens, who in the Seventies had shaken us out of our complicity with the ongoing ecocide, ended up parroting lines that were as boring as they were toxic?
My theory of the centre-left’s long suicide begins in 1971, when Bretton Woods was killed off by the Nixon shock. Back then, Europe’s and Britain’s social democrats used to play the role of go-betweens. Once in government, they would gather the captains of industry and the trades-union leaders around a table where a deal would be struck: a chunk of industrial profits would fund the welfare state and another would be returned to workers in the form of better wages and conditions. However, when Bretton Woods died, money and power shifted from industry to finance.
By the late Seventies, it was pointless to sit the failing industrialists and the leaders of the dwindling trade unions’ around that table. In a world beholden to bankers and traders, the only meaningful bargain that could be struck was one between ministers and financiers. It was a Faustian bargain. Tony Blair in London, Jacques Delors in Paris and then Brussels, Gerhard Schröder in Berlin… all of them offered the bankers permission to go berserk in exchange for sizeable crumbs from their table with which to fund the welfare state — and, lest we forget, their election campaigns. That’s how social democracy limped on until the crash of 2008.
When, in the autumn of that year, the banks went under, those social democrats in power didn’t know what had hit them. Lacking both the analytical capacity to understand the crash and a moral spine to stand up to the financiers, they bailed out not just the banks but the bankers too. The result was austerity for the masses and “socialism” for the bankers, a collapse in investment and a never-ending slump. From that moment onwards, social democracy was on a slippery slope to electoral, ethical and political oblivion.
I wrote about it all in my 2011 book, The Global Minotaur. But it was one thing to have formulated a theory, and quite another to see it written across the centre-leftists’ faces in 2015: the defeat, the compromise, the banality. I remember the feeling as my aeroplane lifted off from Berlin, carrying me back to Athens and to a parliament in which a Nazi party was the third largest: the result of discontent engendered by years of mindless centrist austerity. And I remember how, suddenly, I thought of Fiona.
My first memory of her was when she heckled me, in 1980, during a boisterous students’ union meeting at Essex University. A graduate anthropology student, she believed that everyone, Left and Right, were at it: coveting unfettered power wherever we could get it. Fiona feared that Leftists, like her and me, folks who could not wield power in the City or in Whitehall, sought it instead in students’ unions, socialist groupings, feminist organisations even. Her intense disapproval of me was systemic, not personal. Which is why we became friends.
About a year after our first encounter, I found myself at one of the countless anti-Thatcher gatherings taking place around that time. By coincidence, Fiona was there too, billed to speak. After enduring two hours of tiresome speakers denouncing Thatcher’s social and industrial vandalism, Fiona rose to speak. She was magnificent:
“While listening to the previous speakers, I was thinking to myself: ‘Give me Maggie Thatcher any time! Unlike you, Maggie gets it. We live in a revolutionary moment. The postwar class-war armistice is over. If we want to defend the weak, we can’t be defensive. We need to advocate as she does: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopic system, but a brand new one nevertheless. You lot are bandaging corpses while she is digging graves. If I had to choose between you and her, I would choose her every time. Monstrous as she is, Thatcher can at least be subverted. You wouldn’t recognise subversion if it came at you with a barge pole.’”
Her words resounded in my head on that flight in 2015, reminding me why I found my meetings with Schäuble so much more rewarding than encounters with the centre-leftists who were “bandaging corpses” while Schäuble was “digging graves”. Besides the relative joy of conversing with people who mean what they say, there are both short- and long-term reasons why I, as a proud Leftist, prefer self-confident Right-wingers in government to a band of defeated centre-leftists.
Rather than a bunch of compromised pseudo-progressives bandaging some of the walking wounded, I would far prefer to have a Norman Tebbit in power, callously instructing them to “get on your bike”. An unbowed, self-respecting Left would respond by telling the bankers, the spivs and the oligarchs to get on their bike. Alas, the compromised Left does not do this. Instead, it fans a false hope in the hearts of the suffering majority with their empty promises to look after them. That hope is bound to crash on the shoals of reality. And then? Having lost trust in both the centre-right and the centre-left, the electorate has nowhere to turn but the demagogues promising to make them “great again”, to weaponise the border fences, to prepare for war against non-existent enemies, to target the “other”; the Muslim, the Jew, the disabled, the brown people who “pollute” the gene pool.
Andy Burnham’s new government is a case in point. Having ridden into No. 10 on a wave of hopeful vibes, his unwillingness to clash with the fat cats responsible for Britain’s stagnation will deliver another Budget that taxes the overtaxed and punishes the weak. Thus, the road will have been paved for the fascists to further infect the majority’s broken hearts. Whether this will be Reform, Restore or some even more radicalised Tory party, only time will tell.
Naturally, centre-leftists chastise my unwillingness to support them, painting me as a handmaiden of the Right. I would reply that the Left has a duty to remain in opposition until we get our act together; until we have a plan and a mandate for unseating the oligarchy and implementing a workable, progressive agenda. It is better to be in opposition keeping genuine hope alive, while the establishment Right rampages in government, than for the compromised Left to win power on false promises that are bound to extinguish hope and usher in postmodern varieties of fascism.
It was this thinking that led me, six months after being sworn in as Greece’s finance minister, to resign — knowing full well I would be demonised and confined to the margins of the political system. It was a no-brainer. Remember the question that was torturing me from the first day in office? Would I be able to recognise the lethal compromise that led me to the land of the co-opted?
In the end, it was not hard to recognise. It came when I was told I had a choice: my political career in exchange for signing on the dotted line of an application for a huge credit card (from which the Greek state would draw, to pretend it was repaying its debts); a credit card that would be issued on condition of another austerity package condemning 80% of our people to long-term debt-bondage. I did not sign. But most of my colleagues in that Leftist government did. The result? That party, Syriza, no longer exists, the recalcitrant Right is dominant, and the fascist Right is surging.
Ultimately, the compromised Left anesthetises hope, paving the way for reactionaries of the worst kind. Better be an honest opposition to a Rightist government than a compromised Leftist whose policies breed monsters. This is not a resignation from the aspiration to govern. It is simply a clarification of one thought: the only compromise worth making is the willingness to give up power rather than sign away a people’s future.
“You may not be interested in war,” Leon Trotsky is supposed to have said, “but war is interested in you.” On the eve of his first Labour conference as leader, Andy Burnham is learning this maxim’s grim truth. Facing a deteriorating set of public finances, which threaten to leave his radical domestic agenda stillborn, this is in no small part due to conflict in the Middle East. Just as LBJ’s Great Society was knocked off course by the tactical genius of Ho Chi Minh, “Manchesterism” might be tempered by the Houthis, to say nothing of multilateralism’s fading potency in our increasingly unstable world.
There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army. Blair and Starmer, alas, achieved high office only to strengthen Britain’s nightmare political economy of bloated arms-length regulatory regimes, rampant rentierism, privatised national assets, and tragicomic levels of state incapacity, leaving us doubly vulnerable to today’s global shocks.
Labour’s latest prime minister claims to be different, promising a rupture in this peculiarly British mode of governance. But these kinds of epochal shifts, revolutionary premierships on the level of Gladstone or Attlee, are rare indeed. Burnham’s own Trotskyist fling was experienced via the contemporary protestations of the Eighties political celebrity Derek “Degsy” Hatton — a sharp-suited Scouse firebrand (and fellow Evertonian) with a predilection for gold watches, expensive tailors, personalised number plates and “vulgar Marxism”. Hatton was the larger-than-life de facto leader of Liverpool City Council when it thrust itself daringly into the national spotlight, setting illegal budgets and implementing mass housebuilding initiatives even as its Whitehall grant was slashed. Hatton offered a New Deal-style, localised and limited Keynesian stimulus effort dressed in revolutionary garb.
Yet that garb was important, as Degsy basked in a kind of belligerent, workerist anti-intellectualism, poking fun at the academic, London-based New Left scene. The Scouse Trot was quick to differentiate the kind of Liverpool socialism he was enacting with what he himself called the “Loony Left” — “more concerned,” Hatton said, “about black mayors and gay rights than… about building new homes.”
A teenaged Andy, fresh-faced and idealistic, would have seen Hatton on TV every night, fighting his birth city’s corner against Thatcherism. And it’s hard not to compare it to Burnham’s own stint as a righteously indignant mayor of Greater Manchester, railing against Covid lockdowns. But where Burnham’s anti-London combativity earned him the moniker “King in the North”, his former hero Degsy eventually became known as “King Rat”. After Hatton and his posse almost bankrupted Liverpool, expelled from Labour, and removed from office, he used his newfound infamy to launch a career in low-rent TV appearances and Christmas pantomimes. Now 78, he’s a successful property developer, albeit one awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bribery and intimidate witnesses. There’s another instructive lesson for the prime minister: revolutions do have consequences, and often they are not especially positive.
Perhaps that history explains the caution Burnham has shown towards governing so far. To be sure, “resilience” has become the centre-left’s economic watchword, overtaking the “efficiency” of the high neoliberal era. And why not? As the economist Wolfgang Streeck has noted, that hyper-global age entailed a “dictatorship of the lowest marginal cost” — all just-in-time supply chains, outsourced production, and highly mobile capital in search of the cheapest possible inputs. Yet if Burnham has imbibed the critique, and talks about a return to public control, reindustrialisation, and economic security, his fine words have yet to translate into action. Yes, Burnham seems to have learnt from Degsy, be a rebel — but not too much. Yes, embrace socialism — but not yet.
The problem, here, is that Burnham’s party doesn’t necessarily have time for moderation. The era demands a radical rupture because the old order has so palpably failed. As one MP tells me, the prime minister represents Labour’s “last roll of the dice”, to see if there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s a sentiment you can hear elsewhere too. A thoughtful essay by one of Starmer’s former speechwriters recently pondered whether the party would “go gently into the sociological night”, abandon a diminished working class, and lean into its minoritarian status as an institution for progressive public sector workers and professional urban graduates. The nadir of British social democracy experienced under Starmer required a forceful internal response. Yet if MPs acted to remove one serially unpopular leader and install the man that polls and focus groups deemed most acceptable, it’s unclear, as Burnham prepares to take the podium in an airless glass-and-steel convention centre, whether that’ll be enough.
There are reasons to think it won’t be, not least given the looming geopolitical storm clouds. “We’ve all become accustomed to shit economic news over the past 18 years,” says one backbencher. “It’s baked in at this point.” Still, there’s an aching dissonance emerging between the inchoate Burnhamite message of hope and change, and the slow realisation that the light at the end of the tunnel may turn out to be an oncoming train. Certainly, most of the public have not registered the implications of Iranian-backed insurgents holding the global economy hostage. The number of people who think they will be worse off next year has decreased from 40% to 33% since April, with 20% now thinking they’ll be doing better. Yet Britain is more exposed than most, especially since successive prime ministers — Hayekian free-marketeers and former Trotskyists alike — have created a service-based, import-dependent economy, one reliant on foreign capital inflows and buoyant international trade.
The irony, of course, is that Burnham always wanted to be a domestic leader, with cost-of-living salves held up as the great unifying totem of his new regime. But as Trotsky also learnt — when, for instance, his plans for world revolution were stymied by the Poles in 1920 — exogenous events have a way of intruding on even the best-laid plans. With the Bab al-Mandab blocked, inflation expectations are likely to be adjusted upwards. From there, gilt yields will spike accordingly. John Healey’s first Budget anyway seems unlikely to be cheerful.
Perhaps the best Burnham can hope for in the short term is to borrow from Starmer’s book and act the statesman on the world stage. And, to be sure, sanctioning West Bank settlement goods will play well with sections of Labour’s base, just as action on AI safety does to wavering Lib Dems. But that hardly equals a revised settlement on Britain’s place in the new multipolar order. Nor does it solve the problem of our impotence in the face of a Washington hegemon seemingly intent on causing chaos. Burnham is no Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron, progressive leaders with their own grand projets on “strategic autonomy” and the future of “middle powers”.
More than any particular policy, though, Burnham should probably take a more general lesson from Degsy and his Trotskyist forebears: if you’re backed into a corner, then fight. Thatcher may have beaten Degsy in the end, but the struggle was just and necessary. As Leon said, revolutions have a way of calcifying, recommending as an antidote a “permanent revolution” more than the settled “socialism in one country” backed by Stalin.
And there are plenty of candidates that a radicalised Burnham could choose to take on: the OBR and Treasury, which together treat investment as a liability rather than an asset; the Bank of England, which raises the cost of government borrowing by engaging in successive rounds of quantitative tightening; the ECHR, which would launch legal challenges against any moves to bring utilities back into public ownership without eye-watering sums being paid to foreign hedge-fund shareholders. “I think he’s doing well,” as one prominent backbencher puts it, but he “needs to grow in confidence… and generally speak and act with more clout and urgency.”
So rather than backing down against the legalistic instincts of the civil service, the orthodoxies of the Treasury, or the apoplexy of the business pages, perhaps Burnham should return to his roots, embody the tribune-of-the-people persona that served him well in the North West, and declare war against Britain’s established interests. An icepick to the head killed Trotsky’s revolution. Thatcher’s revolution killed Degsy’s in Liverpool. A ballot-box verdict, delivered with rather less drama, is what finishes leaders whose revolutions never even start.
Zohran Mamdani raised eyebrows at a gathering of global mayors this week with remarks that sharply broke with recent trends in progressive urban governance. The Left, Gotham’s socialist mayor warned, shouldn’t concede watchwords such as “quality of life” and “efficiency” to the Right: “If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the Left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the Right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’”
Tackling disorder and making streets welcoming for families should be a no-brainer — the very foundation of good government at the local level. Yet over the past decade, many blue jurisdictions abandoned these basics in the name of racial justice and “equity.” This had the predictable result of associating such places, in the public mind, with open drug use, needle-strewn sidewalks, tent cities, and rampant antisocial behavior.
Conservatives made political hay of these failures, and who could blame them? Now, however, Mamdani — one of the most popular Democratic politicians in America — is reclaiming social order for the Left and implicitly questioning the ultra-libertarian social ethos that earlier captured the movement. If he succeeds, it could mark a sea change in progressive thinking. But where is Mamdani getting these ideas?
The answer is, in part, a person: Bhaskar Sunkara. The founder of Jacobin magazine, the president of The Nation, and a contributor to these pages, Sunkara counts Mamdani as a friend and ally. Sunkara has also been quietly but steadily injecting a healthy dose of social realism — some might even say conservatism — into a progressive movement that has been besotted with ideas like defunding the police, legalizing all drugs, and abolishing the family.
“It’s about making sure that these citizens, regularly using hard drugs, living in tents, who are even gambling on their phones, are able to reach their potential and contribute to society,” Sunkara tells me recently, as we sit down for an interview at Jacobin’s downtown-Brooklyn offices.
Sunkara, who rails against vices from porn to sports betting to even alcohol, strenuously avoids coming across as a Right-wing culture warrior. One senses in his tone that he doesn’t want his more culturally conservative positions to come across too strongly or, as he puts it, in “authoritarian” fashion: “As a society, [we] should have a normative vision of a good life, but also leave room for minority preferences.”
But even that is an astonishing statement for a figure who used to be the vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and who remains arguably the single biggest intellectual force behind it. As the DSA makes dramatic gains among young voters nationwide, it’s notable that one of its most important theorists believes that we “should have a normative vision of a good life.”
On the core economic issues, he’s in broad alignment with many of his DSA comrades: Medicare for All and, on a grander scale, a “constitutional socialism” that would work within America’s existing framework to infuse socialism into the republic and its market economy. Crucially, Sunkara’s vision of socialism wouldn’t get rid of the market, but rely on market mechanisms to price and allocate goods efficiently. (He lays out this vision in his new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-authored with fellow Leftist intellectuals Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs.)
When it comes to culture, though, Sunkara in some ways easily meets the definition of “conservative” as it’s understood by most in 21st-century America. This, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for his being a “man of the Right.” There is a long tradition of Leftists — George Orwell, Dorothy Day, and Christopher Lasch among them — who opposed the excesses of capitalism not only when it came to market activity, but also in the social and private realms. Moreover, “actually existing socialism” from China to Cuba has often been socially conservative in many respects — and in the “authoritarian” fashion from which, to be clear, Sunkara shrinks.
But ask your average DSAer today on an American college campus about how, or even whether, to address crises like porn addiction or cannabis-use disorder, and you will be mistaken for a Republican and simply brushed aside. I would know. I attend the uber-activistic Columbia University, and this has happened to me too many times to count. Sunkara acknowledges this, as well, but he doesn’t place the blame on socialism or Leftism. Instead, per Sunkara, this way of thinking is “more common just among young people in general,” whereas you’ll find less of it among the Bernie bros and old-school socialists.
In acknowledging this reality, Sunkara puts it charitably: “I think the common response on the Left is, like, ‘Let’s just focus on Medicare for All’” and put the cultural debates to the side. There is also, he suggests, a class dimension to Left tolerance for social vice and disorder. “I think you often find this thing — upper-middle-class people will have lifestyles for their own children and themselves that are quite conventional, low tech, etc., but kind of not want it for other kids.”
He doesn’t see why socialism should necessarily equate to American-style socially liberal policy prescriptions. Though he warns of the dangers of going too far in the other direction. He tells me he would have “probably” supported gay marriage back when that debate was happening, as opposed to civil unions, but he explains that “even in socialist countries, on the gay and lesbian question, it was considered kind of a bourgeois decadence in places like Cuba, until Cuba opened up, I guess, really, in the ’90s on this issue.”
The degree to which such speech is wholly verboten on the Left — including among the somewhat-less-woke new crop of DSA politicians — can’t be overstated. And yet Sunkara doesn’t blink in saying so, speaking to me in a calm and elevated cadence, matter-of-factly. He may well be one of the minds behind Zohran Mamdani, but one could simply not imagine the same sentence issuing from the mouth of the New York mayor.
I ask Sunkara about Taylor Lorenz, the Leftist tech blogger, who mocks “‘Leftists’ arguing that porn addiction and social media addiction is real.” Sunkara would be one such Leftist. Indeed, one of a very few. “You get the dopamine hits. It just seems fairly obvious,” Sunkara replies. “I’m one of the few people [who] doesn’t have a beef with Taylor in part because I just have muted her.”
“Prohibition [of alcohol] was, in fact, a success,” he adds later, unprompted by me. “Prohibition actually led to a decrease in crime, a decrease in domestic violence, a decrease in certain fights and other sorts of public disturbances. Yes, there was an increase in organized crime. That increase, I think, pales in comparison to other advantages.” Though “it’s too late now” to have Prohibition policies reinstated, he laments, Sunkara has previously spoken in support of Utah liquor laws, which limit the sale of high alcohol-by-volume drinks to state stores, impose drink limits at bars, deploy state-mandated devices for measuring the volume of alcohol in a single drink, and proscribe happy hour. What, then, does Sunkara have in mind when he urges resistance against the “authoritarian” impulse in fortifying restraints against vice?
He wouldn’t jail people for marijuana use but would get rid of omnipresent dispensaries (there’s one right outside the Jacobin office). While “porn is very difficult to regulate,” he concedes, he maintains that age-verification is a good “barrier to entry,” particularly for those most vulnerable to its dark and addictive side: “You’re just creating a little bit more friction for like a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old. But by the time someone’s 16 or 17, they can navigate around it and access porn if they want, which I don’t think is a huge problem.” Sunkara believes it’s possible for a man who regularly consumes porn to have positive relationships with women, but that it’s just “common sense” that younger exposure will lead to “pathological outcomes.” We “really need to hold the line” on things like sports betting and, in general, “see how we could regulate and roll back elsewhere.”
Put another way: Sunkara may not be rushing to absolutely prevent everyone from consuming booze, ingesting marijuana, watching porn, and gambling. Yet he sees all of these things as inherently bad — stuff we would be much better off without — and instead seeks maximum moderation within our current societal constraints. That, needless to say, is a far cry from the “porn-good” and “marijuana-good” libertarian orthodoxy on much of the Left.
Unlike many DSA comrades, Sunkara is also unapologetically patriotic. “America was the most racist country in the history of the world, and I think the Left actually does a great discredit to its own history when it pretends like it still is,” he said, to much subsequent internet virality, on what would turn out to be one of Ross Douthat’s last podcast episodes for The New York Times. Sunkara elaborates this point in our interview: “We live in communities, and we have to draw where the level of fellowship [is]. I’m a New Yorker. I’m an American. I also am broadly a man of the Northeast, so I feel fellowship with Ontario, a greater fellowship than I do with Alberta.” This, he cautions me, does not take away from his universalism, but is the reality of how our political organization works.
It’s an outlook in stark opposition to the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, the pro-Palestine hard-liner who delivered a June upset to the five-term, establishment incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District. Chevalier’s X history includes tweets such as: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On the case of Chevalier, Sunkara says, “I think Darializa came out of a campus radical background,” and that we should wait and “see what she does in office,” because “you could find equal examples of people coming out of the religious Right and having certain rhetoric before they’re in public office.”
His comfort with patriotism also allows him to reach audiences that would otherwise never hear a socialist message. “I would speak to anyone as long as they also have an audience that’s worth my time,” he says. “So Fox News, you know, three out of four times that Fox News reaches out to me, I’ll say yes.” The only exceptions are when outlets are “openly fascist, openly nativist in the sense that they don’t respect my right to be a part of the American polity, even though I was born here.”
Would he go on Tucker Carlson? “I could never beat Tucker Carlson in a debate,” he says, “and I don’t necessarily want to agree with him because I do think there [are] undertones to his work that are not only nativist, but I also think that his criticism of Israel is something we should be very wary of.” He adds: “I don’t think a Leftist should necessarily go on Tucker because also then you’re blurring the line between your critique of Israel as a Leftist and his critique of Israel, or your critique of Trump and his critique of Trump.”
Some of Sunkara’s social prescriptions may seem excessive, and not only to socialists. But he’s trending in the right direction at a time when America is racked by deleterious forms of antisociality that line corporate pockets, whether Big Weed’s or Big Porn’s. To be sure, it’s hard to imagine the DSA embracing Sunkara’s practical, socially moderate, pro-American model of democratic socialism. Then again, a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Zohran Mamdani, a onetime champion of defunding the NYPD, urging the Left to stop coddling disorder.
This week Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Left-wing Mayor, astonished his conservative critics by doing something they wish they’d thought of. He announced that the city is paying for 70,000 tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, to be given away in a lottery. “Every New Yorker should have the opportunity to sit in these seats, hear these voices and experience this stage, no matter what’s in their bank account,” he said.
Some Right-wingers complained about a waste of public money, but, really, it should be a source of embarrassment for conservatives that a self-proclaimed socialist thought up this scheme before they did. For decades, public bodies on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to make classical music “accessible” by moving the goalposts. The BBC parachutes Sam Smith into the Proms while turning Radio 3 presenters into gormless disc jockeys. Meanwhile, the musical establishment desperately tries to insert modestly talented female and ethnic-minority composers into the pantheon of the greats.
It hasn’t worked — and let’s not pretend that Mamdani’s lottery will achieve spectacular results. We won’t suddenly start hearing the Triumphal Chorus from Aida drowning out hip-hop on the streets of the Bronx. Realistically, Mamdani and his colleagues may convert a few thousand New Yorkers who would otherwise never have set foot in the Met, or heard anything more than a burst of “Nessun dorma” on a playlist. Even so, they will have achieved more than armies of arts administrators and music teachers, not to mention the conservative guardians of culture who deplore musical wokery.
Opera is one of the least accessible art forms for modern audiences and always will be; we should stop worrying about that fact of life and concentrate instead on introducing it to those people who would fall in love with it if they had the chance. The same is true of the more challenging classical symphonic repertoire.
This isn’t to say that the most popular operas or symphony concerts with tried-and-trusted programmes fail to sell tickets. But the whole ecosystem relies on snob appeal, corporate hospitality and public funds whose beneficiaries occupy the same narrow social stratum as the civil servants who allocate them.
The composition and performance of large-scale “art music”, for want of a better term, has required bucketloads of subsidy since the 16th century. Gradually, the burden has shifted from princely patrons to taxpayers, and that trend can’t be reversed. What the New York experiment does is open the turnstiles to taxpayers, bypassing bien-pensant gatekeepers. Although its effect may be limited, anything is preferable to the useless fantasies of progressive social engineers.
While conservatives should be embarrassed, we also need to ask why Mamdani was able to outsmart them. The answer is that they belong to a Western political class that is increasingly deaf to classical music, for a combination of reasons. Recent generations have, for the most part, received a musical education that is perfunctory, politicised or non-existent. Also, compared to previous generations of conservatives, they tend to be myopic policy wonks or self-obsessed mediocrities for whom Mahler’s Second Symphony doesn’t represent Resurrection so much as 80 wasted minutes that could have been spent pressing the flesh at a drinks party.
Am I exaggerating? Consider this: the last Conservative British prime minister who took a serious interest in music left office in 1975. That is, five years before the birth of the current leader of the party. Now, you may think that Kemi Badenoch is preferable to Edward Heath in almost every respect, but her eight musical choices on Desert Island Discs did not include a single piece of classical music. Perhaps Mamdani should offer her a free ticket to the Met.
