Back in the summer of 2020, amid a pandemic and widespread closures, tens of millions of Americans protested police violence and racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. The demonstrations for racial justice that year under the banner of Black Lives Matter became arguably the largest social protest movement in U.S. history.

Three years later though, little has changed, at least according to Fredrik deBoer, better known as Freddie deBoer, the leftist lightning rod, once-academic, always-writer who has re-made a name for himself on Substack with over 46,000 subscribers. As deBoer sees it in his new book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, elites of all races mishandled that historic moment as the protesters’ demands either became immaterial (like representation in the arts) or unpopular with the working class (like defunding the police). Not only was defunding either never achieved or quickly reversed — perhaps because working-class Black people did not want it to happen — no material change to Black people’s misfortunes was achieved.

As deBoer, who is white, puts it in his book: “If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.” Rather than making gains in a fight for economic and racial justice, the 2020 racial reckoning was led unsuccessfully by “a Black professional class whose interests and biases are not the same as that of the median Black voter.” They were joined, he writes, by “strivers who question the value of striving, affluent critics of affluence whose behaviors deepen economic inequality, and white people who are arch critics of whiteness.”

DeBoer is endlessly critical of left-wing movements including 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests precisely because, as he says in the book, he is “relentlessly sympathetic” to them. Raised by communists and hardened by the failures of his activism against the Iraq War, deBoer’s Marxism is pessimistic, prickly and somehow still relevant in a country and world that is post-Marxist in every real sense.

DeBoer argues that the failures of left-wing movements are not inevitable, and a class-focused politics that can win is not just possible, but imperative. As deBoer explained it to me, “Basic economic anxieties are understood by the large majority of the American people” and any good — morally and politically — left-of-center politics would start there.

“If it’s true that the left is not appealing to the working class,” he said, “then that is a failure of the left and not of the working class. We have to do a better job.”

“The people who are powering the conservative movement in this country are guys who own John Deere dealerships, you know what I’m saying?” Fredrik deBoer said.

Simon & Schuster

Novicoff: The conclusion of the book is that class must be the primary basis upon which the left organizes. Given the fact that the base for America’s leftmost major party is increasingly college-educated people with means, is this feasible, and how would it work?

DeBoer: This is going take a lot of arguing and persuading and careful discussion, but one of the things that people have to understand is you can’t build the kind of society we want to build if you’re defining rich people as only people who make more than like $400,000 a year, ok? You need to start taxing the upper middle class and even the middle class more than you’re taxing them right now. The problem is, as you suggested, that the Democratic Party has a ton of people in what’s considered their base who are making $100,000 to $200,000 who are therefore making dramatically more than the American median household income, but who don’t see themselves as wealthy or affluent, who will tell you that they’re struggling to make ends meet, etc. And they’re all for taxing the rich as long as the rich doesn’t include them.

But if you just look at it structurally, we can’t continue to define the rich so narrowly and expect to be able to tax just them and build the kind of social state that we want. That being said, look, eventually, all of these Park Slope liberals — I say that as someone who lived in Park Slope — bougie, hyper-educated, meritocratic, urbanite, enculturated, left-leaning, white Democrats, they’re going to have to put up or shut up, right?

At some point, you have to actually demonstrate that you care enough to open up your pocketbook and give a little bit more money to the tax man. And one of the really unfortunate things about the current state of liberal identity politics is it never puts them in that position, right? Twenty-first century identity politics are so relentlessly focused on these absurd cultural trivialities, like racial diversity at the Oscars, that you’re not actually putting well-to-do liberals and leftists in a position where they actually have to decide, “Am I secretly a Republican when it comes time to tax me?”