When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a galaxy of left-wing, even socialist, intellectual stars like Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault and Gore Vidal, whose works were like an inkwell for politicians and commentators to draw from. Judging from the Munich Security Conference this weekend, that inkwell has dried.
Take this gem of a commentary on the global order from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, queen of the democratic socialists: “What we seek is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates hypocrisy while we in the West too often look the other way to inconvenient populations to carry out these paradoxes.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will participate in the Munich Security Conference on February 13, 2026. (Sven Hoppe/photo alliance via Getty Images)
Allow me to translate this into English: “The West is evil and treats the marginalized rest of the world poorly.”
The use of 25 cent words and the stilted sentence structure cannot hide the banality of what AOC is saying. Even the comforting appeal of assonance wouldn’t help, given the ridiculous simplicity of her word salad.
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Not to be outdone, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, after apologizing for being less knowledgeable about foreign policy than AOC, offered this take on the war in Ukraine: “The independence of Ukraine, keeping their landmass, I mean, um, the support of all allies, I think, is the goal, from my point of view.”
There are nothing here but empty words that paint a picture of the easy-going progressive worldview, which is completely divorced not only from the reality on the ground, but from any sound intellectual framework.
The American right has a core of intellectuals, from Christopher Rufo to Victor Davis Hanson to Mark Dubowitz and so on, who can be referenced or appealed to in policy debates, both abroad and at home.
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About a decade ago we had the Intellectual Dark Web phenomenon, with figures like Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss, who are widely, if not as conservatively, seen as right-wing. Who are their counterparts on the far left?
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani reads a newspaper on the subway on the way to City Hall in New York, January 2, 2026. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo)
Who is the contemporary socialist intellectual to whom AOC could have pointed to to support her claim that what is needed is a massive global redistribution of wealth?
I would argue that such far-left public intellectuals outside the very narrow boundaries of race and gender no longer exist, for two very important reasons.
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The most obvious cause for the current shortage of far-left, socialist intellectuals is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. For at least the next twenty years, the game was over, the experiment had failed, and no one wanted to be called a socialist.
The second reason is what has replaced outright socialism, namely cultural Marxism, especially in the form of critical race theory.
In their brilliant 2013 Harvard Education Review study, “McIntosh as Synecdoche: How Teacher Education’s Focus on White Privilege Undermines Antiracism,” the Midwestern Whiteness Collective, a left-wing group of teachers, argued that placing race and identity at the center of everything stifled intellectual discourse.
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This was clearly true, because the shibboleths of race and identity, what could and could not be expressed, went completely unchallenged. In fact, challenging it was punished.
So once race and identity became part of everything, nothing could be legitimately questioned. It was equality, not sameness, above all else.
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We saw this in action this month at Sarah Lawrence College, where non-socialist liberal intellectual Ezra Klein was shouted down during a discussion about Israel. The protesters’ position was not that Klein should disagree, but that he should be silenced, that his ideas are too dangerous to express.
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at the Munich Security Conference at the Bayerischer Hof conference hotel in Munich, Germany, February 13. (Matthias Balk/photo alliance via Getty Images)
Why do AOC and Whitmer sound like babbling idiots when they try to defend their positions against even the slightest criticism? Because they never had to do that. In every room and meeting they have attended, their nonsense is greeted with grins and approving finger snaps.
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The danger here is paramount because we may be electing socialists who literally don’t know how to make things work. Zany Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for just over a month. He can’t handle the snow, he can’t clean up the trash and people are freezing to death in the streets.
The sad result is that the American left, which has taken over the Democratic Party, has no real intellectual base. Like Seinfeld, it is ultimately a political ideology about nothing and the clearest danger to American values that exists today.
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