Progressivism is at a crossroads.

I n his recent speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Argentine President Javier Milei delivered an urgent plea against the postmodern Left. He did so not in his usual punk rock tone but with calm aplomb: “Woke ideology is the cancer that must be removed.” And he celebrated Donald Trump’s determination to be America’s surgeon. Many attendees lowered their heads because they have been the promoters of these ideas for years. Milei had gone to the woke temple to humiliate them. What does it all mean for the future of the Left?

Already, in the last year, big corporations have been among the most significant entities to have disavowed wokeism and DEI. The thousand genders, the new masculinity, and the medical establishment’s readiness to mainstream the amputation of functioning body parts are in the throes of a popularity crisis, whereas the popularity of Trump and Milei and the new European Right has grown thanks to a discourse that, more than anti-woke, is just plainly commonsense. The Left has to choose: Embrace wokeism to the last, or maneuver toward a new cause and ideological framework. To guess the Left’s next move, it is worth taking a look back.

The pre–Frankfurt School Left was that of the workers’ struggle, the Second International, and classical Marxism. Leftists during the first quarter of the 20th century were concerned about the oppressed and the poor. With Frankfurt and post-Marxism, in the interwar period, leftists began to feel more comfortable in the universities than in the coal mines (which are very dirty), and they dedicated themselves to critical theory. Theorists such as Herbert Marcuse promoted the alliance between student, feminist, and racial movements, whose members looked much better in photos than did workers in greasy blue overalls. In the second half of the 20th century, European socialists embraced a third way, a highway to nowhere. They moderated their positions toward a bland centrism, to broaden their appeal, and failed to galvanize anyone. American Democrats who had partied for civil rights in the 1960s suffered the economic hangover of the 1970s, and flirting with socialism no longer seemed quite as attractive. Bill Clinton, at times, seemed more in love with the free market than with Monica.

With the turn of the century, the Left dredged up the theories of the Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to shape its strategy of cultural hegemony. Leftists began by denouncing the elites, who controlled ideology through education and the media, and ended up becoming the elites themselves. Despite their control of loudspeakers from Hollywood to CNN, and after a long process of blurring the Christian identity of the West, undermining the family, tradition, and the right to life, their disaffection set in for socialism’s third way, too. Rather than look to real life to fill their ideological reservoir, they looked to the unicorn factory of academic research and fell in love with Judith Butler and her queer theories, and Simone de Beauvoir and her broken feminism. With control of the media and culture, they needed only a decade or two to raise their army for a war of identity.

But, judging by the results of the last U.S. election and accelerating political trends in Europe and elsewhere (such as Argentina), the public is souring on this cause too. Unless something extraordinary happens (a war, a major attack, a pandemic), my prediction is that wokeism will fall into oblivion almost as deeply as did the Malthusian panic of the 20th century. The question remains: Which way will the Left move next?

Maybe it will decide to bet on the idea of a postcapitalist economy by banging on about universal basic income or digital cooperativism. The problem is that, in light of recent history, a Left that idolizes former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the failed futurist, might not be the most dependable voice on economic issues.

Perhaps the Left will establish a new discourse against inequalities to defend citizens against the power of Big Tech, now that these companies seem to have let go of the Democrats’ hand. However, this struggle would have a short future because the power that Gramsci once envisioned for the Left is now largely in the hands of these tech companies, which won’t tolerate some politician who proposes new regulations or radical ideas such as the creation of publicly owned algorithms or the decentralization of digital information.

In neo-communist ideological hotbeds, there’s already talk about the need for state-owned social networks and AI systems. Perhaps leftists have seen that private networks and AI work too well and are now thinking about how they can make more expensive and less efficient versions of their own. Otherwise, there might be a small chance that the Left goes back to the labor union model and tries to win back the workers’ vote by whipping up a new Luddism against AI. But now that leftist leaders are more elitist, dogmatic, and arrogant than ever, they would find it difficult to relate to the working class over disruptions in blue-collar jobs.

As for the pro-Palestinian drift, as long as university campuses are not ideologically fumigated, I suspect that Jewish Americans will mostly find reliable allies in Republicans. I doubt the Left will gain much traction clinging to environmentalism, either. People seem quite fed up with politicians making Western citizens pay for what Chinese Communists refuse to pay for — though the Right has been unable to form a strong, alternative conservationist discourse. (This is the Chestertonian paradox of the 21st century: Conservatives do not know how to sell their conservationism.)

This leaves the Left with few options. If it intends to remain committed to the gender ideology path, the drift could lead it to ever-stranger places — equating human rights with those of nature and all that dwells within it, for example. They will look for ways to definitively dehumanize man. Unfortunately, that is something that could work up European social democrats and popular democrats, who are otherwise ready to go back to being anti-American and wokeist for at least another four years — after all, they are experts at arriving late to progressive parties and being the last ones to leave.