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The left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s. The energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the George Floyd protests is a distant memory. Some members of the Squad have moved toward the Democratic mainstream, while others lost primaries. Several of the progressive prosecutors elected in recent years have been ousted from office (by voters or due to scandals) or appear headed that way.  In Democrat-dominated spaces — like cities and mainstream media outlets — there’s been growing pushback against the left. Ambitious progressive rallying cries of just a few years ago, such as defunding the police and Medicare-for-all, are now absent from the discourse. Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center — most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary.  Altogether, it’s seemed that progressives have moved from being on the offensive to being on the defensive — in both politics and the nation’s culture. Of course, it’s not as if progressives’ gains over the past 20 years or so have been entirely wiped away. The Democratic Party remains significantly further to the left than it was a decade ago and certainly two decades ago (see, for instance, my recent article about the rise of the New Progressive Economics).  Yet, as bloggers Noah Smith and Tyler Cowen have argued, there are growing indications that the leftward drift of the party and of the country’s culture broadly has stopped. On some fronts, there has indeed been a reversal. “No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right,” Semafor’s David Weigel argued last week, citing “immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform” as issues where progressives are on the defensive. Being on the defensive is not new for the left — it’s the historical norm. Bursts of activist energy and successful reform are typically followed by long stretches where either the new status quo persists or a backlash reverses at least some recent change.  Still, it’s certainly a shift from how politics has looked for most of the 21st century. So how and why did this change happen? Why did the progressive advance happen in the first place, and why did it stop? The era of rising progressive ambitions lasted from about 2005 to 2020 Historical periodization is a tricky thing, but here’s a rough attempt at it. From about 1980 to 2005, the left was mostly irrelevant to national politics. The Cold War was over, and capitalism reigned ascendant. The Republican Party moved right, while the Democratic Party moved to the center. The country cracked down on criminals, unauthorized immigrants, and non-working welfare recipients. 9/11 made patriotism mandatory. Same-sex marriage was viewed as politically toxic. But 2005 to 2020 was, broadly, a period where progressives and the left became increasingly influential inside the Democratic Party, in Democrat-dominated spaces, and in the larger culture. Call it the era of rising progressive ambitions. The disasters of George W. Bush’s second term kicked off the shift, discrediting Republican governance. This enabled the election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whose agenda was strikingly ambitious and progressive when compared to the Clinton years. Democrats’ leftward shift accelerated in the 2010s, which saw: The increased cultural influence of the social justice left, which transformed how much of the country thought and spoke about racial and gender issues (“the Great Awokening”) The launch of viral protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too The nationwide spread and Supreme Court’s protection of same-sex marriage rights, followed by increased advocacy for trans rights The rise of more economically progressive and even democratic socialist politicians, as seen in the support for Sanders’s campaigns, the Squad’s arrival in Congress, and party leaders’ embrace of some of Elizabeth Warren’s ideas A leftward move of mainstream Democrats on issues like immigration and criminal justice, where activists had made the case that status quo policies were cruel and harmful Increased public discussion about causes like Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness Basically, on a host of issues, the “Overton window” — the boundaries of which political and policy ideas are deemed fit for mainstream discussion, rather than fringe or self-evidently absurd — opened far further left. Trump’s election didn’t stop the left’s rising influence. Indeed, it intensified it, raising the stakes of politics and heightening passions. (Trump’s rise simultaneously opened the Overton window further right on some issues, as leading Republicans increasingly embraced bigotry and flouted democratic norms.) The assumption spread among Democrats that the establishment’s approach had failed and that bold new progressive ideas were necessary. During the party’s 2020 presidential primary, most candidates — including Harris — scrambled to the left, wooing activist groups. Joe Biden, the most old-school major contender, won, but rather than a full-on pivot to the center for the general election, he embraced much of the progressive agenda. It was a political necessity for helming the Democratic Party of 2020. That year then brought further chaos as the country battled over the pandemic and the election, while the George Floyd protests led to a racial reckoning that played out in communities, companies, and institutions in intense and often controversial fashion. The backlash and disillusionment of the 2020s Things feel different in the Biden years. In part that’s due to the constraints and disappointments that always exist when a party tries to turn a bold campaign agenda into governing reality. Narrow congressional majorities limited Democrats’ legislative possibilities (and then they lost the House). The conservative Supreme Court, meanwhile, blocked some Biden actions like student loan forgiveness and rolled back abortion rights protections. But the trend was broader. Democrats in cities disavowed police cuts as they struggled with rising crime and complained they couldn’t handle a migrant influx. Corporations have laid off DEI workers. Mainstream media companies, increasingly influenced by progressive causes (and sensitive to left criticism) in the 2010s, are now more forthrightly asserting their journalistic independence and challenging progressive ideas. Activism in protest of Israel was met with fierce pushback at universities. Commentators started declaring that “wokeness” had peaked as social justice controversies grew less intense and frequent. The common thread is that the Democratic Party, corporations, and the media have all become less deferential to the progressives who’d been trying to push them left. And the main reason for that, I’d argue, is a spreading sense among many who are in the center, center-left, or politically neutral that the left has overreached or screwed up. Indeed, one reason for the left’s 21st-century resurgence was that, at that point, they’d been irrelevant for so long that it was difficult to blame any of the country’s current problems on them. The flaws of centrism, neoliberalism, and conservatism seemed glaring and obvious, while left and progressive ideas simply hadn’t really been tried for some time.  But by 2020 the left’s influence on our politics and culture had become quite significant. And though Trump’s critics had been united around the common cause of ousting him when he was in power, once he left office, those with misgivings about recent trends felt freed up to focus more on them. The right got more effective at stoking these misgivings. Conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target helped send a message that it was risky for corporations to get too political. Elon Musk bought Twitter — which had been so central to the social justice trends of the 2010s — and turned it into the right-wing-friendly X. Christopher Rufo helped stoke a nationwide war on DEI. Yet Democrats and progressives also simply had a hard time dealing with various challenging governance problems. The post-pandemic years have been a tough time to be in power: Incumbent parties have been struggling around the world. But in the US, progressive ideas were blamed, fairly or unfairly, for causing or worsening problems like inflation, border chaos, and crime.  Some commentators who’d previously been aligned with progressives now had second thoughts. “I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years,” Smith wrote in his Substack newsletter last week. He said he now believed some of those policies were bad ideas, others suffered from “botched implementation,” and yet others simply had no path to broader political popularity.  (Smith is just one of many commentators who have become increasingly critical of the left in recent years.) To what extent has the broader public turned against the left? I’m hesitant to generalize about public opinion, which contains many conflicting strains. Immigration is the issue where the clearest backlash to progressive ideas is seen in polling; on other issues (like the economy), dissatisfaction is harder to disentangle from Biden’s record. Though some stalwart progressives have lost primaries, others have held on without difficulty. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did quite well in swing states. But the GOP gained ground in blue states like New York, which could suggest a frustration with governance in deep blue areas.  Overall, though, Harris’s positioning clearly reflects a belief that many of her left positions of four years ago would be electorally detrimental in 2024. All of this has happened before Meanwhile, there’s also been a conspicuous decline of energy and intensity among progressive activists. While many certainly remain committed to their longtime causes, others have disengaged or shifted their focus to opposing Israel’s war in Gaza (an issue that bitterly divides the Democratic Party and where Democratic leaders are disinclined to embrace the left). Perhaps if Trump wins, progressive energy would surge again in opposing him — but perhaps too many people are now burned out and apathetic, and the mobilization won’t match the bygone days of Trump’s first term. And a backlash against Trump’s governance would not necessarily spur the Democrats to resume their leftward march. Activists naturally get disappointed and disengaged when major change proves elusive.  “Every major social movement of the past 20 years has undergone a significant collapse,” the activist Bill Moyer wrote in 1987, “in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile.” Fatigue, burnout, and organizational crisis then ensue; some move on to new causes. But Moyer argued that that is not, necessarily, the end of the story for such movements. The next step, he wrote, was for activists to pivot and to focus on the long, slow slog of changing public opinion in their favor. So one possibility is that we’re headed for a political situation resembling the late 20th century, where the left is weakened and politically irrelevant for years if not decades. That’s no sure thing, though. The challenge for the progressives now is regrouping around ideas and causes that can both energize activists and win popular support — while addressing doubts that have arisen about their competence.  If they can pull that off, this period of left decline may prove to be just a blip. If not, their stay in the political wilderness could be a long one.

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The story of Alexei Navalny is not funny. How could it be? We know how it ends. The Russian dissident died under mysterious circumstances in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle last February, alone, still fighting. He had already spent three years in brutal incarceration following a poisoning that had nearly killed him.And yet, humor is key to understanding Navalny and his appeal. He stood up to Vladimir Putin, exposing corruption, but he also mocked and scoffed: a jester pointing and guffawing at the naked czar, excited by the chance to deflate men whose chests were puffed with power into tiny hypocrites and liars, asking how it was that these servants of the people were able to acquire half-million-dollar watches and secret waterfront palaces.Humor also seems to be what buttressed Navalny as he faced the consequences of this courage, sitting in one bleak prison cell after another.When the Russian state began accumulating criminal cases against him while he was already locked away, even charging him with somehow having “rehabilitated Nazism,” he had to laugh. “Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life,” he wrote in his diary. When he undertook a hunger strike that dropped his weight to what it had been in eighth grade, he sadly reported, “I still don’t have a six-pack.” The small absurdities made him laugh, too. He managed early in his detention to order a large shipment of tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, and was exhilarated at the chance to make a salad, but then realized that after all that, he’d forgotten to order salt. Arriving after an arduous two-week journey at what would be his last prison, in the far north, a land of frost and reindeer, he smuggled out an Instagram message for his millions of worried followers that began, “I am your new Santa Claus.”This charm and good nature will be familiar to those who have seen the documentary Navalny. But now, with the publication of Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, the chance to hear his own written voice, to spend serious time with him (nearly 500 pages), only reinforces this impression, along with the pain of having lost him. He worked on this book fully aware that it could be his “memorial,” he wrote. And even about this he had a sense of humor: “If they whack me,” he explained, at least his family might profit from the proceeds. “Let’s face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a tragic demise in prison, can’t move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?”Funny, though not really anymore.The memoir is a chance to commune with the mind of a dissident. It’s not always a pretty or comfortable place. I even wondered if it takes a kind of mental illness to put the pursuit of freedom above your own physical safety and your family’s well-being. This single-mindedness is shocking to confront in such raw form. His example seems impossible to emulate, but the qualities he had in abundance and that gave him his superhuman willpower—the humor, yes, but also an unimaginable degree of faith—are important to identify, because they are what true dissidence demands. As I read, I grieved, not just for Navalny the man, but for the idea of a person like him.Navalny first set out to write a memoir in 2020, while he was recuperating in Germany from being poisoned with a nerve agent in a nearly successful assassination attempt—Russia had reluctantly agreed to let him get medical treatment there. At first he was in a coma; then he had to learn to walk and speak again. He also began this book, opening it with his noirish account of being felled by the poison while on a flight from Siberia to Moscow.In January 2021, after half a year of recovery, he decided to return to Russia despite knowing that he was certain to face Putin’s wrath. He was arrested at the airport, and his odyssey through the justice and penal systems began. He kept writing, but at some point his chronological narrative became a prison diary. As Putin kept stacking charges, the conditions of his imprisonment deteriorated. He spent 295 days in the solitary confinement of a punishment cell. He was allowed to use pen and paper for only an hour and a half each day, and then only half an hour.[Anne Applebaum: Why Russia killed Navalny]Because his circumstances changed, the book did as well. The first half is a classic autobiography, describing Navalny’s Soviet youth and his political awakening and fight against corruption, while the second half combines his diaries with the Instagram posts that his lawyers posted for him up until the final one, on January 17 of this year.The most revealing question to ask about Navalny—the one he was annoyed that people, even his whispering prison guards, asked him constantly—was why he’d returned. Why, when he knew only arrest and very possibly death awaited him? The answer was “straightforward” and “simple,” he wrote. He had his country, and he had his convictions. He could not turn his back on either. “If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary,” he wrote. “And if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.”The account of Navalny’s childhood in the dying days of the Soviet Union has the same slicing clarity. He describes how his parents used to put a cushion over their telephone whenever they wanted to have conversations about topics that seemed even remotely sensitive, “like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o’clock in the morning.” He could not see, he writes, “what there was to be afraid of.” As for Russians’ lingering popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union, he swats it away in a sentence: “A state incapable of producing enough milk for its citizens does not deserve my nostalgia.”It’s fair to ask how much of this projection of a lack of fear or wavering is an invention for his followers. Even in his diary entries, he knows he has an audience. I found only one moment, in the depths of a 24-day hunger strike, when Navalny admits to feeling “crushed,” for the first time “emotionally and morally down.” Otherwise he maintains, again and again, a face both smiling and resolute.If his state of mind remains obscured behind a mask of constant courage and surety, he reveals much more about his battered body. The diaries are a catalog of his physical well-being. They do not mention politics at all, except in the vaguest terms. This omission may well have been necessitated by surveillance—his prisons had cameras everywhere, even on the bodies of the guards who dealt with him.What we encounter mostly in this writing are his physical trials. Navalny has terrible back problems, at one point losing feeling in his legs. His pain is constant, and the wooden planks and metal beds he sleeps on don’t help. The food and temperature are daily preoccupations. He struggles to keep himself nourished. It is either freezing or sweltering (“It is so hot in my cell you can hardly breathe. You feel like a fish tossed onto a shore, yearning for fresh air”). He details the degradation of the strip searches every time he enters or leaves the prison, the constant checks by guards who wake him up at night or make him empty his cell at random intervals so that they can rifle through his belongings.This suffering has a Christlike quality—and Navalny knows it. “Are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins?” he asks, laying down a challenge for the reader and himself. “If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about?” And once all of his books except the Bible are taken away, he even sets out to memorize the Sermon on the Mount—in three languages. By returning to Russia, he has presented himself willingly as a sacrifice, and by the sad logic we see unfolding in the diaries, every torment serves as further proof that he’s getting under Putin’s skin. His death, he also accepts, would be the ultimate evidence of the power of his truth—and maybe provide his followers with the martyr they need. When his wife, Yulia, comes to visit him in prison, he manages to convey one unsurveilled message to her, whispered in a hallway, and it is this: Let’s assume that I am going to die here, that I am never getting out. She agrees, and he is overjoyed that she, too, has accepted his fate; they embrace.This faith helps him. For most of his incarceration, the other prisoners are forbidden from speaking to him. But he recounts a story about one man, Nikitin, afflicted with “religious mania,” who seems annoyed by the presence of the celebrity prisoner. One day, out of nowhere, Nikitin quietly hands over a laminated card to Navalny with the words A Prayer to the Archangel and an illustration of an angel. “Alexei, here take this and keep it with you,” Nikitin tells him. Navalny puts the card in his breast pocket and has a moment of his own religious ecstasy. The authorities want him to feel alone, forgotten. Nikitin has given him a sign that he is not: “the proof of that is fluttering its little wings in my breast pocket.”[Read: Alexei Navalny’s last laugh]The scene could have been written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, like much of the passion of Navalny, except that there are jarring reminders on nearly every page that this is happening in our world. Two prisoners watch Billie Eilish on television and argue about how old she is; Harry Potter is frequently mentioned; Navalny gets letters from young women letting him know that he’s been designated a “crush” on TikTok. Remembering his poisoning, he also writes about how much he loves the cartoon Rick and Morty, which he was watching on his laptop when the toxin took effect. At one point, he fantasizes about going with Yulia to New York City and eating oysters and drinking Bloody Marys at their favorite bistro, Balthazar.Navalny doesn’t mention Dostoyevsky, but he does refer to Leo Tolstoy, writing that his favorite novel is War and Peace—with one caveat. He doesn’t agree with Tolstoy’s view of history, in which, as Navalny summarizes it, “the role of the individual” is “zilch.” Tolstoy used his novel to illustrate the idea that history is shaped by large, unpredictable forces and events, not by great men—not even Napoleon. But Navalny has seen the way that Gorbachev and Yeltsin and, finally, Putin have imprinted their flawed personalities on the country, how their proclivities have altered its direction, and he doesn’t buy the notion that a leader’s character doesn’t matter.Navalny himself, his life and death, might be the best counterexample to Tolstoy’s theory. Who else but someone with such reserves of fortitude, with such a sense of self, with such an ability to laugh but also believe, would be able to withstand such indignity, such mental torture? He allowed himself, his actual body, to represent another kind of Russia, a freer country. And he did so knowing that he might never actually ever see it with his own eyes.

It's unbearable.

I wouldn't even know what to say.

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