The New Left Is Largely Leaderless

Those “uncommitted” delegates represent less than 1 percent of those who will go to the convention in Chicago. (Sanders, in 2016, brought nearly 2,000.) Activists on the Palestine Left seem unconcerned. “The fact that people were voting for an idea, and not an inherently flawed individual, as a candidate contributed to how we had such a strong showing in Michigan,” Abbas Alawieh, a strategist for the Uncommitted National Movement, told me. “That’s one of the real sources of power of this movement: We convinced people to vote for the idea that our Democratic Party should be antiwar.”

As long as the left eschews defined leadership, it is difficult to imagine it increasing its influence in the party, even when it focuses on ideas popular with the Democratic base. Sanders has receded. Ocasio-Cortez, still just 34, is gradually accumulating seniority. Many in the more centrist wing of the party seem to view the left as either marginal or actively destructive, like the late-1960s radicals who were willing to torpedo Humphrey’s candidacy even if it meant that Nixon was elected president.

It is true that leftist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats are still winning some down-ballot elections. It is true that Biden, as president, has partnered with progressive policy minds on infrastructure, green-energy legislation and health care; his Federal Trade Commission, skeptical of corporate consolidations, carries Warren’s imprint. But it is also true that the left has played no particular role in Biden’s departure or in Harris’s rise.

It has taken heart from Harris’s selection of the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, instead of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, who is staunchly supportive of Israel. (When he was in Congress, Walz spoke at an AIPAC policy conference, but earlier this year he was receptive to the Uncommitted National Movement in Minnesota, saying that “they are asking to be heard.”) What this ultimately means for foreign policy is unclear. But on the domestic front, Obama alumni more tolerant of corporate power, like David Plouffe and Eric Holder, are gravitating to Harris’s campaign, and well-heeled donors appear thrilled for what’s to come. The Uncommitted National Movement carries too few delegates to win any meaningful floor flights and has no candidate to hold sway at the convention. Dissent and protest will be confined to the streets of Chicago, far away from Harris’s coronation.

Even when the incumbent candidate was widely viewed as too old and inept to govern, no segment of the left could position itself to take advantage of the teetering standard-bearer. At the time, Sanders was out stumping for Biden, urging his base to give the president one more chance. When I asked him, upon his arrival in New York to support the doomed Bowman candidacy, if he had any opinions on the growing Israel skepticism on the left, Sanders didn’t want to engage at all: “It’s not an issue I hear a whole lot,” he said. “What I hear, overwhelmingly, with maybe very, very few exceptions, is that Hamas is a terrorist organization pledged to destroy Israel and committed an atrocious war crime on Oct. 7.” He added that “Netanyahu’s right-wing, racist, extremist government has gone to war against the Palestinian people.”