There have been many interesting books and articles recently about the demise of the millennial left. Here are just a few. I like this material–I think we could do with some more reflection about everything that’s gone wrong over the past ten years. I do, however, think there’s something that has been under-emphasized in these stories. This something is the internet. The millennial left existed at a distinctive moment in internet history. When that moment ended, the millennial left ended with it.
For the longest time, it was difficult to get people to take the internet seriously. In 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul was popular on the internet, but this didn’t matter politically. Ron Paul won less than 6% of the vote in the 2008 Republican primaries. He did better in 2012, but still managed only 11%, winning just 4 states that year. There were a few other signs of the internet’s emergence–you could point to Kony 2012, to Barack Obama’s email lists, or the role Facebook played in the Arab Spring–but in the early 10s the internet remained a marginal thing.
This changed in 2015. In 2015, we had competitive insurgent candidates in both parties creating political movements on the internet. At that time, Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms were favorable to political content, and you could absolutely swamp your family members and friends with political memes and blog posts. Through social media, obscure blogs like this one were able to get enormous numbers of views. Believe it or not, one of my posts from 2015 was viewed a million times. This is when the millennial left properly began, at the moment when the internet finally mattered.
This was the first time in human history that the internet was truly politically relevant. Its relevance could no longer be denied. It mattered. But how much did it matter? Was the internet a replacement for a vibrant public sphere? Could it take the place of 19th and 20th century civil society organizations? In retrospect, it is clear that it could not. But in 2016, we didn’t have a vibrant public sphere or functional civil society organizations. So why not give it a go?
Older people told us the internet couldn’t play the role we hoped it could play, but we didn’t listen. We didn’t listen because the older people didn’t have an alternative strategy. The 90s anti-globalization movement and the 00s anti-war movement did not bequeath to us any structures we felt we could use. We also thought we knew better, because we felt older people did not understand the internet. This was both true and untrue. Older people didn’t understand the substance of internet culture or the technical aspects of content creation, but they did understand the internet as a new form of media. Any form of media can be regulated, and a political movement that is based principally on media is going to be pretty flimsy.
And that was, ultimately, what the millennial left became–a series of media outlets. These media outlets then tried to direct millennials to support or oppose particular candidates in elections. They got the word out through Facebook and Twitter. But soon after 2016, congress began calling tech CEOs in for tongue-lashings, demanding that these CEOs do something about “fake news.” The tech companies started changing the algorithms and the funding mechanisms, making it harder for independent political content to be distributed and for it to make money.
As resources became scarcer, millennial media outlets had to pursue clicks and views more aggressively, and that meant producing content that generates strong emotions–principally fear and outrage. Many outlets started seeking funding from smaller audiences of hardcore patrons. These patrons weren’t interested in “normie” content for a mass audience. They were interested in ever more bespoke, niche content driven by their special interests and obsessions.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that in the late teens the millennial left found that it could only speak to narrow slices of the electorate in bright blue, heavily gerrymandered Democratic safe seats. The structure of the internet changed in a way that pushed content creators in this direction. I spent much of 2018, 2019, and 2020 trying to stop the millennial left from following the incentives where they lead. But an argument can only do so much against a structural economic imperative. And, importantly, my tools for making my argument were those of the millennial left–the blog and the podcast. I made the same mistake these other people were making. I mistook a moment in internet history for a new world of limitless possibility. The only difference is that I gave away my work for free here, and so I was never under any pressure to monetize, to generate ad revenue or build up a subscriber base. That gave me a freedom to say some things other people were not saying, but it did not make me immune to the fundamental millennial conceit–the idea that the internet itself could be revolutionary.
It is now very obviously impossible to make a living by producing millennial left content that is meaningfully political in character. The remaining outlets survive by catering to a niche audience that is too small to form the base of anything.
For me, the best evidence of this is the total failure of the remaining millennial left organizations to get the broader American public to care about either the signature issues of the 10s (Medicare for All, tuition-free college, a jobs guarantee) or the issues they have focused on in recent years (Gaza, Ukraine, COVID, and identity politics). Gallup runs a poll series that tracks the issues Americans consider highest priority. As of early 2024, the top five issues are “Poor Leadership” (21%), “Immigration” (20%), “Cost of living,” (13%), “Economy in General,” (12%) and “Unifying the Country,” (6%). The issues of the millennial left barely register by comparison. “Gap between rich and poor” and “Racism” each get 3%. “Healthcare,” “Education,” “War,” “Climate Change,” and “Abortion,” each get 2%. “Wars in the Middle East,” “Situation with Russia,” and “COVID” each get just 1%.
In 2006, the Iraq War got over 25% in this poll. Healthcare got 11%. Education got 9%. As ineffectual as Gen-X leftism was, the millennial left is now only a quarter or a fifth as influential. Relative to 20 years ago, there has been a total collapse in the political meaningfulness of left-wing interventions in the United States.
The millennial left talks only to itself now, and it has become incredibly small and insular. This is one reason why I no longer write blog posts trying to convince people to take specific positions on particular issues. It has become painfully obvious that this doesn’t work, not just in my own case, but for the millennial left in general.
It is not just a problem for the millennial left. The internet has not been able to reunite society for the purposes of confronting the state and the market. Instead, society is riven with division. This creates coordination problems for every political movement. The television networks increasingly speak only to an aging niche audience of centrist boomers. The new right is also increasingly mediatized. Only Donald Trump retains the ability to speak to broad swathes of it, and he’s 77 years old. When he’s gone, what will become of them?
It has been said many times that we are losing the 20th century monoculture, the “pop culture” against which countercultures and subcultures were defined. The American political system relies on the possibility of consensus and compromise. It contains too many different offices, elected through too many conflicting mechanisms, for it to function well in the absence of consensus.
But what I don’t think people realize is that we are still very much at the beginning of this process. There is still enough of a monoculture in the United States for more than 70% of the American people to watch the Super Bowl. We can get much more divided than we are without fundamental breakdown. The cracks in our society are highly visible and easy to talk about, but they are not yet ruptures of the kind that would make it impossible for the system to carry on. We are frozen in place. The system cannot do anything for us, but it isn’t going anywhere, either.
And so, I have become much less interested in electoral politics and in writing up argumentative essays about various public policy issues. The question now is whether these cracks will develop into rifts that enable something new to develop and, if so, what form that something new might take.
The millennial left cannot participate in this, because it is now fully assimilated into the culture industry. It exists to generate ad revenue and subscriptions, and so it must follow the news cycle and the tastes and preferences of its diminishing niche audience.
To find a new politics, we have to abandon our old politics. But we cannot abandon our old politics if our old politics still pays our bills. The millennial left is a declining business model rather than a political movement. It was a fluke of a particular moment in the political economy of the internet. That moment has ended. No one in their right mind would try to start a new left media enterprise in 2024. But those that still exist will carry on until they run out of money. This zombie millennial left will be with us for years to come, compelled by the business model to pretend it is still engaged in political activity. But it has been years since this activity could even plausibly appear meaningfully political. The appearance died with the form of internet that generated it.
All told, the millennial left existed in a plausibly political form for just five years. It began in 2015 and it ended in 2020. It peaked the year it was born, and it declined continuously throughout its lifespan, becoming less and less plausible every year. Death finally came for it over the span of four months, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in December of 2019 and Bernie Sanders’ defeat on Super Tuesday in March of 2020. Consign it to the abyss:
Benjamin Studebaker 