Comments Elsewhere

Matt,

If your dividing line between “liberals” and the “left” wouldn’t count (just to pick a couple examples) Pierre Joseph Proudhon or Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky or Ellen Willis or Noam Chomsky as a leftist, then maybe your attempt at a definition is ill considered, and ought to be revised. That is, if you mean for “left” to be a term of analysis and criticism that applies to real people over the past several decades, rather than a merely polemical term for whoever you find distastefully envious at the moment.