Our Best Stuff on the State of the Left

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. Welcome to the dog days of summer: Congress is on recess, sports fans are itching for the start of football season, and parents are maybe not entirely sad that the school year is about to start. With the relative lull in the news, many eyes were on the Midwest on Tuesday, and not just because of the major thunderstorms that rolled through and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of people (including the Ohio bureau!). The real attention was on Wisconsin, where democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley despite a double-digit lead in polling. The divisions between the progressive/socialist camp and the mainstream/establishment have been on full display throughout the primaries, from the Maine Senate debacle with Graham Platner to a handful of democratic socialists winning congressional primaries in New York, to the emergence of uber-progressive candidates in the Midwest. A week ago, I wrote about Abdul El-Sayed winning the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Michigan over four-term U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate. The Michigan Senate and Wisconsin governor primaries are interesting to compare and contrast—both races were close, but Michigan voters elevated a far-left candidate who is trailing in the first general-election poll conducted after the primary, whereas Wisconsinites made a safer choice for November. It seems like at least some progressives are aware that their more extreme views aren’t popular with the broader population. U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist but declined to endorse Hong, tried to laugh off some of the progressive culture war stances that drove working-class voters to the GOP in 2024, telling an interviewer, “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio noticed a couple of funny things about that phrasing. First off, doesn’t “Woke 1” imply that “Woke 2” is coming? “If the original was crazy by their own admission, why are progressives planning a sequel?” he asked. And, looking at the agenda that some progressives and socialists are pushing—Medicare for All, ending deportations, defunding the Pentagon—he suspects it will be worse: It will be crazy, for the same reason Woke 1 was crazy and the same reason right-wing postliberalism is crazy crazy crazy. They’re all expressions of populism, and populism is almost unfailingly paranoid, demagogic, mobbish, and stupidly reductionist in how it tries to solve problems. As one of my editors said this morning, whatever you think of Woke 1 bugaboos like Drag Queen Story Hour, they surely did less damage to America than having actual Marxists in Congress setting policy will. In a very philosophical G-File, Jonah Goldbeg wrote that he doesn’t entirely trust AOC’s newfound pragmatism, but he noted that the Democrats aren’t the only ones plagued by extremist nonsense. It’s fine—nay, necessary—to mock the “defund the police” nonsense of Woke 1 (which I did, often). It’s absolutely correct to reject a chuckle and shrug as a sufficient mea culpa for your own participation in a puritanical, hysterical jihad against reason and sound argument. If I can’t trust a leader to be sane in crazy times, I can’t trust you at all. It’s easy to be sane when it’s in your political self-interest. But an enormous number of leaders on the right have failed the exact same test. Focusing on Woke 1 doesn’t absolve the fanatics and hysterics of the right nor the people who surrendered to the fanaticism and hysteria of the Trump era—and continue to this day as enablers and peddlers of it. One other issue that has emerged is that pollsters are having a hard time reading the divisions among Democrats. In Michigan, Stevens led El-Sayed going into the primary but he eked out a 1-point victory, whereas in Wisconsin, Hong led by double digits before losing by a half-point. John McCormack spoke to some pollsters, who explained the challenge: Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of State Navigate, told The Dispatch in an interview that nonresponse bias was a problem in State Navigate’s surveys—Hong supporters were just more willing to respond to a poll. “In order for us to have a very accurate poll in these states, something that we need to know is what percentage are democratic socialists or moderate,” Nuttycombe told The Dispatch. “And we don’t know.” While pollsters can weight their polling sample by demographic characteristics like race and education, it’s much more difficult—if not impossible—to weight for ideology. On that note, thank you for reading and have a great weekend. If you’re an American who thinks of World War II as the comprehensive defeat of totalitarian regimes and the emergence of your own country as the world’s regnant superpower, or a Brit who sees the war as a nearly miraculous triumph of the plucky underdog, or even a German or Japanese person who sees the end of the war as Stunde Null (Zero Hour), an opportunity to start over and build your country anew, then World War II might seem to you an event of unique meaning—an event upon which to build a society-governing story. But perhaps you see the war as a scene, in Matthew Arnold’s famous lines, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Perhaps for you the war meant the collapse of Western society into militarism or rudderless liberalism or whatever your most-hated -ism is. Perhaps it’s something you observe only in order to deem it cool or uncool. And perhaps you just don’t know what you think about any of it. … It is no longer an event you interpret in order to anchor your sense of social meaning and purpose. Instead, it’s just something that happened, like the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act or the War of 1812. Is that where we are now? Throughout last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to have free rein to pursue his own anti-vaccine agenda, and at times, Donald Trump joined in the effort, including last September when the president went even further than Kennedy in misrepresenting the science around possible associations between Tylenol taken during pregnancy and autism. The president also endorsed Kennedy’s effort in January to unilaterally rewrite the childhood vaccine schedule under the guise of mirroring other peer nations’ recommendations. The resulting cuts to routine vaccine recommendations did not, in fact, approximate other peer countries. But by the beginning of this year, senior advisers in the White House had reportedly put the brakes on Kennedy’s efforts, worried about polling showing that vaccine skepticism would hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. … Throughout the spring, Kennedy largely stopped talking about vaccine issues in public and emphasized less controversial aspects of his MAHA agenda like healthy eating, even launching his own cooking show. Trump’s reengagement on issues related to vaccines suggests that attempts to restrain Kennedy came from White House staff but not the president. Will your home still be standing in a century? Will most new homes in America today? This matters for far more than your personal real estate future or mine. Disposable construction has far-reaching consequences for how we live, how we work, and what kind of country we pass on to our children. Modern housing and infrastructure are rarely durable or beautiful, and it’s not nostalgia to recognize that we once built better. Neither is it naive to want to build that way again. Ugly, shoddy construction is unfair to future generations, and it’s bad for homeowners and entrepreneurs now. This is why I wanted to talk to Clay Chapman, whose work I’ve long admired from afar. An Oklahoma builder known for gorgeous and hardy structural masonry—the “1,000-year house,” as his Instagram handle puts it—Chapman sees durable construction as a moral responsibility to future generations. And most of what we’re building in America right now, he told me, amounts to a dereliction of duty. Best of the Rest Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.