How Far Left Should a Millennial Be?

Liberals have never quite known what to make of those who are far to their left. Conservatives tend to conflate liberals and leftists so often that many who fit under the broad Democratic umbrella have fallen into the habit of doing likewise. This is why Democratic operative Peter Daou can write that “Clinton and Sanders supporters … largely have the same goals,” and an NPR reporter can claim that the 2020 Democratic candidates “all basically want to do a lot of the same things.” The difference between liberals and leftists isn’t really a matter of policy, this view goes; the two just differ on tactics and purity and willingness to compromise.

But such a conflation elides actual, significant policy differences and does a disservice to both factions. Liberals—from Nancy Pelosi to Elizabeth Warren—see capitalism as flawed but fundamentally salvageable if managed correctly, with just the right balance of government regulation and free enterprise; leftists—including Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn—see capitalism as definitionally unfair, responsible for much of the world’s misery, and thus “irredeemable,” in the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As the avowed leftist Nathan Robinson put it in an excellent piece from 2017, “Liberals believe that the economic and political system is a machine that has broken down and needs fixing. Leftists believe that the machine is not ‘broken.’ Rather, it is working perfectly well; the problem is that it is a death machine designed to chew up human lives. You don’t fix the death machine, you smash it to bits.”