I’ve hit a flurry of interest in George Orwell in the last 6 months. My partner and I read a book of essays on Orwell by Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses – and then we watched a film on him at a local film festival.

In that spirit, I bought a book of short Orwell essays. In those essays, his criticisms of the left – written in the early 1940s, during World War II! – sparked my interest. I found the criticisms still relevant today, but relevant to a different group.

Let’s take a moment to look into this.

First, here’s Orwell’s quote about the Left:

The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality…And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country.

The context of the quote was Orwell complaining about the slowness of the left to support efforts to defeat Hitler. But we’ll set that aside. I think Orwell clearly intended the quote to also apply more broadly.

But how might it apply today?

The 2016 Line

First, Orwell lands a direct hit on the US Left before Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.

Of course, it’s now 2026, and many of our younger leftists are simply too young to truly get this point. But, before OWS and Bernie, the US left…sucked. A lot. It was mostly a wasteland of irrelevant academics, Marxist sects, and ‘anarchist’ subculture movements. No one got anywhere near power, and few, if any, made meaningful attempts to build a working-class movement.

However, even all that wasn’t the core issue. Much of the left simply looked on working-class people with disdain. In short, Orwell nailed it. Even writing multiple generations beforehand, he nailed it. The left was tiny, wrapped up in its own trivial pursuits, and disconnected from the culture and lives of most Americans.

Those were dark times.

But OWS re-ignited the idea that we might welcome ordinary people into our movements. And the Sanders campaign brought this to a larger audience, sparking the rise of DSA as the key site for the building of a new, more potent leftist movement and politics.

However much the Orwell quote describes the pre-2016 US Left, it no longer applies in quite the same way.

The Post-2020 Turn

And so, Orwell’s quote missed the US Left in 2026. But it hits a different group. In the last 5-7 years, we’ve seen the rise of political segments that meet Orwell’s condemnation.

It’s not easy to describe this group. Indeed, it’s not really a ‘group’ at all – at least not in a way Orwell would recognize. It also isn’t ‘leftist’ in a serious way, though many people involved with it think they’re leftists.

So, what is it? It’s a movement that combines ultra-progressive and anarcho-liberal politics with petty bourgeois radlib tendencies. Its members also form yet another odd subculture.

Quasi-Political Tendencies

I’ve defined ‘ultra-progressive,’ ‘anarcho-liberal,’ and ‘radlib’ elsewhere. And I’ve linked those posts above.

But here’s the quick version. Ultra-progressives are people who push progressive politics as far as they possibly can without actually getting around to challenging capitalism. They constantly berate liberal and progressive Democrats for not being ‘true progressives.’ But they fail to actually advocate for anything resembling a movement of workers to, well…build worker power and seize the means of production. Their anarcho-liberalism acts to prevent them from building real movements.

How does that work? These folks typically use catchy labels and slogans to feel radical without actually being radical. In that sense, they slide into radlib politics. The ‘abolition‘ label is a favorite, and it’s a particularly common one in Iowa City.

Some modern abolitionists practice socialist politics, though often in a strange or misguided way. But the folks I’m talking about don’t. Even when they use the ‘socialist’ label, their politics clearly show up as non-socialist after kicking the tires a bit.

Some of these folks practice politics by, say, yelling at local government without offering any ideas or trying to build a real working-class movement. Others just retreat into their subculture movements, that, naturally, define themselves in part by their disdain for working people.

‘Abolition’ and Abolition

Here’s what I find most disappointing about this development. Underneath the ‘abolition’ label sits a cluster of issues that could become part of an actual working-class movement. Working people have known for decades that the prison and police systems are their enemy. It’s long been an intuitive part of working-class life.

But while working people often see prison and policing as the enemy, if even only intuitively and tacitly, they’re not interested in burning it all down now. The reason, of course, is that working people don’t want to live in unsafe communities that fail to protect them from harm. And for all the problems with the policing system (and there are many), it does protect people from harm (in many cases, and in a very imperfect way).

However, even that doesn’t say it all. Beyond issues with the police, working people are deeply uninterested in the aesthetic and subculture this group brings to the table. The modern folks Orwell condemns, at heart, don’t want working people in their movement. Working people, of course, smell this coming from a mile away.

Orwell and 2026

At times, I feel like Orwell died in 1950 and left us with a new world. He can no longer guide us. But then I read quotes like the one above. And it reminds me that politics often move in cycles. A great author can provide us with lessons to apply again and again.

With the quote above, Orwell adds his name to that list of authors.

Image Source