The following article stub for, “Are There Green Shoots of a ‘Post-Woke’ Left?” by Justin Vassallo, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

In the year since Trump’s reelection, there has been an outpouring of commentary on the confused state of the Democrats but also the disarray of the political left more broadly. One could make the case, as Ruy Teixeira has for TLP, that the modern left, after a brief resurgence in the 2010s following the Great Recession, has hit its nadir due to an excess of cultural radicalism. Another perspective, offered variously by John B. Judis and Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara, counters that despite recent setbacks, the left enjoys more relevance and soft support than it has in several decades.

There is a good case to be made that the bleak prognosis for the American left is overstated. Public trust in political institutions is in free fall in America and across the West, to the presumed benefit of MAGA and “anti-establishment” right-wing populists elsewhere. Yet nearly forty percent of Americans hold a favorable view of socialism—a number that was, ironically, hardly conceivable sixty years ago when Cold War America, though in the birth pangs of its “Second Reconstruction,” was otherwise much more social democratic than it is today. Evidently, more than festering consumer angst over high prices for groceries, concerts, and sporting events is at play here.

In fact, there are indications that the green shoots of a “post-woke” left are already emerging, sometimes far from where the left typically predominates. How this left is construed in the public mind, and whether we can truly deem it as properly of the left in a macro-historical sense, will depend in large part on the ability of insurgents to draw on America’s egalitarian political traditions, in speech and gestures unimpeded by a progressive intelligentsia consumed with America’s sins. Indeed, its ability to flourish will require a studied independence from the repertoire and sectarianism that has characterized the left in the last decade. The central problem for the left as it is presently constituted—or at least the one recognized by friend and foe alike as defining the alternative to right-populism and “zombie neoliberalism”—is that it has heretofore fettered the growth of a flexible oppositional politics, predicated on restoring positive government and the associative power of common people, in the regions the Democrats have abandoned, thus precluding the very realignment in the party system the left professes to seek.

Before addressing the left’s prospects and challenges, it is worth elaborating on what the left as a force engaged in electoral politics means in the present context. Granting that there is no monolithic left in America (or anywhere really), there are two main factions with considerable overlap that have defined what it means to be on the democratic left and which, when push comes to shove, duly back the Democrats in most elections. To some, these strands might be self-evident or not wholly distinct. People’s beliefs and judgments of effective politics change over time, even when they don’t adopt an entirely different outlook on power, rights, and responsibilities. Still, the fact that these strands have contributed profoundly to how we interpret the possibilities for American politics, while fundamentally failing to prevent the return of what they abhor, merits review.

More here.