Welcome to Post-Left Theory. My goal with this introduction is to explain what that means without telling you the book. As a primer, we’ll go into how the term “Post-Left” tends to get used vs. how we use it, what changes when “Theory” is affixed onto the end of it, and how what we are both doing is complementary but also in a productive tension regarding audiences and the question of politics.
Let’s start with “Post-Left.” Tony and I have been back and forth on this term for a long time. We have each, at various points, rejected it. Tony, because he still considers himself to be “of the Left,” just not a “leftist.” I rejected “Post-Left” three years after exiting from the Left, in my “Lefter Than Thou.” That 2023 piece, published in Underground Theory, argues that “Post-Left” is an orientation necessarily determined by a relation to the master signifier “Left,” one that repeats the error of giving in to an enjoyment structured by being “lefter than thou.”1 In other words, naming yourself as what comes after the Left keeps the Left at the center: you are still facing it, still keeping score on its board, still getting off on being more correct than the people you used to stand with.
But like any term that has serious social power, that gets used as a weapon by those who are condemning those they wish to steer their audiences away from, “Post-Left” continued to get assigned to us. There’s a kind of power to this term that, though vague and vibesy, nonetheless gets at something. I think it’s this: we tend to think that the Left bears disproportionate responsibility for wasting the time and energy of people who want social change. Another reason people affixing “post” to us makes sense: we both used to be “left influencers” of some sort or another, and now we’re not. So it makes sense that the term gets assigned to us. The question was only ever going to be whether either of us were going to own it.
With that said, one major divergence in style that any attentive reader is likely to pick up on throughout this book: Tony critiques the Left in a way that still tries to speak to and persuade it, whereas I talk about it in absentia.
The Post-Left has already been buried twice, by Oliver Bateman Does the Work and Geoff Shullenberger, in the same magazine within a year of each other. In July of 2025, Bateman published “The Death of the Post-Left” in Compact.2 Almost exactly a year later, Shullenberger published “The Obsolescence of the Post-Left” in the same venue, announcing that the anti-PMC critique is past its sell-by date.3 Two funerals, one magazine, twelve months apart, for a thing that supposedly amounted to some people talking on Twitter for a couple of years during the pandemic. That is a lot of ceremony for something so apparently irrelevant.
What they buried was real, and it is really gone. After the second Bernie campaign died, a scene formed online: Red Scare, What’s Left?, and […]
The real mistake is in what the obituarists think they are lowering into the ground. One distinction exposes their error: the distinction between a frontier and a wagon train. The post-left is not a clique and not a scene; it is a frontier.
The post-left is the frontier that opens at the very moment the Left stops functioning for you as a master signifier. “Master signifier” is theory-speak for the one word your whole political identity is anchored to, the fixed point everything else gets referred back to, the thing without which the rest of it stops making sense. The post-left as frontier also opens the moment you stop treating the Left as your big Other, meaning the imagined authority whose approval you are unconsciously working to win, the audience in your head that quietly sets the outer limit of what you are permitted to think. So long as “Left” holds those two offices, the horizon stays closed. When its hold breaks, a space opens.
A space is not a single definite position. A space affords a plurality of directions. Some people ride into it, yap for a while, and ride back out to being Democrats. Some go from the DSA to Tucker Carlson. Some, as Bateman said, drift right and get absorbed into a bigger, friendlier media ecosystem. Those are all real paths across the territory. Not one of them is the territory, nor do they exhaust its possibilities.
The obituarists can only see their caravan. Every name in Bateman’s genealogy is a realignment project that failed, and he is right that they failed: no labor base, no institutions, no path to power. But a realignment project is one of the things you might attempt out on a frontier; it is not the frontier itself. When Shullenberger offers “I was among them” as his credential, he is telling you which wagon train he rode with. He is not telling you anything about the territory. Bob Black alone proves the term outran their scene by thirty years.4 A caravan disbanded, and the obituary announced that the continent was closed.
Why “Theory”
The scene the obituarists buried produced commentary: fast, reactive, positioned, and then gone in a week. The people hooked on this kind of commentary reveal themselves when they say, “Didn’t we already do this?” They believe they are a part of a progress that “did something” and had it settled by some given date. Any discussion of it after that date is revealing itself as behind the times.
Commentary is what a scene constituted by take-making affords. Theory is what you get when someone goes down into the deep end on one thing, stays there long enough to miss the discourse, and comes back up with something useful. From Tony’s side: the theory of the two lefts, contained opposition, the leftist industrial complex, the myth of the movement, the phantom of patriarchy, the sociology of the rootless cosmopolitan. From mine: vicious retrojection and the theory-looping effect, the socioanalysis of scapegoat slurs, the post-class fractured mass, dispositional gerrymandering, the rebel priest class, the steward’s standpoint, natality and the pro-civ test. None of our theory requires you to join a movement or sign anything. That is the point of affixing “Theory” to “Post-Left” instead of “movement” or “manifesto”: post-left is not an organizing principle, and every time it has been treated as one it has decayed into a commentariat weaving cheap PMC critique on podcasts. The frontier was never a platform. It is the ground a platform might one day get built on. Our work may be of some service while the ground is still open. Our goal is not that you agree with us, but that you leave holding tools you can use in your own life.
Most of what has been “post-left” was only ever Post-Left as an identity. Insofar as it got theoretical, it was what I call […]
Post-left theory, as a genre of work, can be something that never bothers with the Left as its big Other or master signifier, horizon of possibility, audience or anything, ever again. But the word “again” there is essential: the point of the word “post” is that the thing itself (“Left”) was lived through and one has, in whatever ways, now gone beyond it. I would like to think that sometimes I am capable of doing this kind of theory, and some of that work is my most promising. With that said, it’s an agonizing process, extracting oneself from reference to the Left. I think most people on the Right still have not succeeded in doing so. Who has actually succeeded at it?
Tony may still be “of the Left” but he is not a leftist. I certainly was one and am no longer. To say I am “of the Left” would only be true in a much broader sense, wherein it also becomes true that I am “of America,” and “of liberalism” and “of conservatism.” […] Do any of them get the last word? Or do the things that I care about go above and beyond, if not often against, those things from which I was formed?
Tony and I answer that differently, and the difference is the tension I mentioned at the start. Tony still writes to the Left. His chapters say “we” a lot; his pieces document, with more patience than I have, what the Left would have to understand to become a majoritarian force again. He addresses readers for whom that still matters.
I am a lot less interested in reforming the Left. I write about it the way you write about a country you’ve emigrated from. My chapters are addressed to whoever is neither left nor right, just as much as they are meant for the curious person “of the Left.” This tension could be read as the co-authors disagreeing about what the book is, but I argue it is the opposite: it is the book’s engine. Tony shows you, from inside the address, why the thing cannot hear. I report from a territory it cannot fathom, where the only real question is, what are you going to do?
None of this adds up to a single worldview, and it is not supposed to. Tony and I do not always agree, our pieces do not always agree with each other, and some of them do not agree with who we were when we wrote them. If everything here cohered, you could build a movement, or a cult… but thankfully this book won’t work for such purposes. What we are handing you is closer to a grenade for the coordinates.
So: post-left theory is not anarchism, not Marxism, and not vibes. It is a working through of all three and, beyond them, out onto the frontier. We’ll take turns back and forth. Read them in order or wander—the territory allows it.
Welcome.