With no ‘rational’ left wing to speak of, US politics has become a parody
Ken Craycraft• April 15, 2025
The political left in the United States, and more particularly the Democratic Party, seems to be in a process of self-immolation. Analogously to historical Protestantism, it is not defined by any coherent, substantive policy or body of doctrine. Instead, it is constituted by assertions of what it is not. And the left is increasingly defined by resentment, fury, and irrational hatred of all things that are not left-wing. Thus, when the left urgently needs to articulate coherent policy in order to answer its opponents, it has no intelligible theory. Rather, it is reduced to screaming at its opponents, stomping its feet, and calling everybody Nazis. Disagreement is genocide.
This is not a problem merely for those on the left, but for American political discourse more generally. The political right in the US has elements that are not merely odious, but also dangerous for both domestic policy and international relations. There’s more than a whiff of racist, xenophobic and nationalist sentiment on the far right; extreme crackpots spew hatred and animus that is no less odious than its counterparts from the left. A rational, intellectually compelling critique from the left could both answer the right-wing extremists and have a rational conversation with mainstream conservatives. Unfortunately, there is no rational left in the United States.
On the political right in the US, the nutcases are generally confined to the lunatic fringe. They exist in the dark corners of YouTube and TikTok, fomenting their own brands of antisemitism, for example, and crackpot conspiracy theories. While, unfortunately, more prominent conservatives might be reticent for political reasons to condemn the fringe players, one can still distinguish them from the mainstream figures. But the reluctance of the mainstream right categorically to condemn the fringe right is also a moral and political crisis. It is a crisis that could be countered by a rational, thoughtful and deliberately conciliatory left.
But there is no such left in American politics. On the left, the crackpots are running the show. They hold all the leadership positions in the Democratic Party and maintain hegemony in the mainstream, legacy media. There’s no identifiable fringe on the left because it has all become fringe. “Rational” and “left” have become mutually exclusive terms in US political discourse. The fringe is the mainstream.
The political left in the US is mainly composed of octogenarian hippies or thirty-something race-baiters and moral nihilists. With orange and purple hair, transgender flags and tired chants, they make cringe videos and stage juvenile protests. Everything is an outrage, and no expression of opposition is too outrageous. They scream, belittle, whine, threaten, bully, cajole and pound the table. What they don’t do is offer a coherent alternative to any policy they dislike. Instead, the left is reduced to mantras, without a hint of intellectual probity or self-awareness. “From the river to the sea”; “Trans women are women”; “My body, my choice”; “If you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one”. This is as elevated as it gets.
But the political right is in only slightly less of a crisis. Yes, in contrast to the left, one can identify the irrational from the rational. But for purposes of seeking political hegemony, the rational right either cannot or will not univocally condemn the odious voices on the irrational fringe. This is illustrated by the recent return of the Tate brothers from Romania to Florida. To his credit, Governor Ron DeSantis said they were not welcome in Florida; but too many other prominent conservatives either refused to condemn them or, even worse, tried to defend them. Similarly, some conservatives try to “mainstream” antisemitic and xenophobic internet “influencers”. This includes women who dismiss the Holocaust as a conspiratorial myth, and men who spew misogynist rhetoric in the name of “masculinity”.
A chief founding myth of the US is a commitment to freedom of speech and expression; it might be considered by some to be the foundation of American politics, upon which law and policy are built. The current state of American discourse betrays what an inadequately thin foundation that is. I am not suggesting that free political discourse is not a political good. But it cannot be the intellectual foundation of a polity. A state raised on the idea that speech is the ultimate good soon finds itself incapable of articulating actual good toward which politics, law and policy ought to be ordered. Speech is a means to finding truth and probing boundaries. But it cannot be the foundation of a healthy politics.
This malady is not limited to the US. European nations are in the throes of their own crises. To the extent they have imitated the shallowness of American political discourse, the more they have descended toward the same political and social cacophony of the United States. The left is lost. The right is stumbling in the dark. The sum of it all is a parody of politics. That’s the world we live in on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ken Craycraft is Professor of Moral Theology at Mount St Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, Ohio. This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of the Catholic Herald