Debugging the Confusion: Liberalism vs Leftism

I. The Confusion

They will tell you: “That is not leftism. What you describe is liberalism.”

They will tell you: “That is not liberalism. What you describe is leftism.”

They will tell you anything to avoid the question: what is it?

The confusion is not accidental. A disease that cannot be named cannot be treated. A tyranny that cannot be identified cannot be resisted. The proliferation of terms—left, liberal, progressive, woke—serves the thing itself, which thrives in ambiguity as a virus thrives in a weakened host.

Let us cut through.

II. What Liberalism Was

Liberalism—classical liberalism—was a doctrine of limits.

It said: the individual possesses rights the state may not transgress. It said: let men compete in markets of goods and ideas, and truth and prosperity will emerge. It said: government is a necessary evil, to be constrained, checked, divided against itself.

Locke, Mill, Madison. Procedural neutrality. The night-watchman state. Freedom from—from coercion, from interference, from the heavy hand of church and king.

This liberalism was not a philosophy of guilt. It did not rank men by their wounds. It did not demand confession. It asked only that you leave others alone and expected the same in return.

This liberalism is largely dead. It survives in pockets—among libertarians, economists, certain contrarians. But it does not rule. It does not hold the institutions. When your employer summons you to confess your privilege, it is not John Stuart Mill who sends the summons.

III. What the Left Was

The Left—original leftism—was a doctrine of class war.

Marx saw clearly: society is divided between those who own and those who labor. The owners extract surplus value. The laborers are exploited. History is the story of this struggle, and it will end when the workers seize the means of production.

This was materialism. It concerned itself with factories, wages, working conditions, the distribution of economic power. It was brutal in application—the gulags attest—but it was legible. You knew what it wanted. You knew who it named as enemy. You could resist or comply with full knowledge of the stakes.

And it failed. The proletariat did not revolt. The workers bought cars and televisions and became, in their modest way, bourgeois. The prediction did not come true. History did not end as promised.

What does a faith do when prophecy fails?

It mutates.

IV. The Mutation

The Frankfurt School asked: why did the revolution not come? Answer: the workers have been deceived. Not merely in their economic interests, but in their consciousness itself. Capitalism has colonized their minds. They want their chains.

Gramsci named it: cultural hegemony. The ruling class rules not primarily through force but through ideas, through captured institutions—schools, churches, media—that make the existing order seem natural, inevitable, good.

The New Left drew the conclusion: the revolution must be cultural before it can be economic. The site of struggle is not the factory but the mind. The enemy is not merely the capitalist but the entire system of values that makes capitalism possible.

And then—the final transformation—the discovery of new proletariats.

If the working class will not serve as revolutionary subject, others will. Women. Racial minorities. Sexual minorities. The colonized. Anyone who can be framed as oppressed—not economically, but existentially, in their very being.

Class analysis became identity analysis. Economic exploitation became systemic oppression. False consciousness became internalized oppression. The bourgeoisie became whiteness, maleness, heteronormativity.

The structure remained. Only the content changed.

V. The Structure That Persists

Observe the bones beneath the new flesh:

Hidden truth about reality. Marx: material relations of production. Today: invisible systems of power and privilege.

False consciousness. Marx: the worker who believes capitalism serves him. Today: the minority who has internalized the oppressor’s values, the woman with “internalized misogyny.”

The oppressor/oppressed binary. Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat. Today: an intersectional matrix of dominant and marginalized identities.

Consciousness-raising. Marx: educating the worker to see his true interests. Today: diversity training, sensitivity workshops, the therapeutic uncovering of one’s position in the hierarchy.

Positional epistemology. Marx: class location determines what you can see. Today: “lived experience,” standpoint theory, the claim that privileged groups cannot understand oppression.

Inherited guilt. Marx: bourgeois origins taint even the sympathetic intellectual. Today: whiteness, maleness, straightness as conditions requiring perpetual confession and atonement.

No redemption. Marx: class traitors are never fully trusted. Today: allyship is permanent work, privilege can never be fully “checked,” the debt cannot be paid.

This is not liberalism. Liberalism does not rank men by birth. Liberalism does not demand confession. Liberalism does not install guilt as a permanent condition.

This is Marx, transformed. Marx adapted for an age when economic revolution proved impossible but cultural revolution remained open. Marx fused with Freud—the unconscious, repression, the talking cure. Marx fused with American Protestantism—original sin, public confession, the elect and the damned.

VI. The Fusion with Therapy

Here is what the critics miss when they say “that is not leftism”:

The contemporary phenomenon is not merely political. It is political and therapeutic, and this fusion is its distinctive character.

The old left wanted to change society. The new formation wants to change souls.

It pathologizes dissent. The one who disagrees is not wrong but sick—suffering from fragility, from defensiveness, from unconscious bias. He does not need to be argued with; he needs to be treated.

It makes safety sacred. Not physical safety—that robust thing the old left fought for in mines and factories—but psychological safety. The safety of never encountering disagreement, never feeling discomfort, never having one’s identity “invalidated.”

It produces patients, not citizens. People who understand themselves as traumatized, triggered, in need of institutional care. People who demand not rights but accommodations. People for whom health means agreement with the orthodoxy and sickness means any deviation from it.

Philip Rieff prophesied this: the triumph of the therapeutic. The transformation of political and moral questions into psychological ones. The rise of a new priesthood—therapists, counselors, DEI administrators—who minister to souls while denying they are doing anything of the kind.

VII. What to Call It

Names considered and rejected:

Leftism. They will say: “We are the true left. What you describe is liberal deviation.” The word has been fought over so long it illuminates nothing.

Liberalism. It confuses the thing with its opposite. Classical liberalism is the victim of this formation, not its source.

Progressivism. Too anodyne. It sounds like believing in science and voting for parks.

Wokeness. Dismissed as right-wing slur, though it was their own term first. Poisoned by overuse.

Names that may serve:

Therapeutic leftism. Captures the fusion. Identifies both the political genealogy and the psychological method.

The successor ideology. Wesley Yang’s term. Emphasizes that it replaced liberalism while wearing its skin.

Guilt theology. Emphasizes the religious structure—original sin, confession, the elect—while noting the absence of grace.

Safetyism. Haidt’s term. Captures the practical consequence: the elevation of psychological comfort above all other values, including truth, freedom, and growth.

Or perhaps simply: the soft tyranny. The tyranny that does not know itself as tyranny. The power that operates through helping, healing, educating. The cage whose bars are invisible because they are installed inside the mind.

VIII. Why the Name Matters

A disease you cannot name, you cannot fight.

The genius of this formation is its shapelessness. Attack it as leftism and it says: “We are merely liberals who care about justice.” Attack it as liberalism and it says: “We are the true left, fighting corporate power.” Attack it at all and it says: “Why are you so defensive? Perhaps you should examine that reaction.”

It has no center to strike, no flag to tear down, no führer to assassinate. It is distributed, emergent, self-organizing. It lives in a million HR departments, a million classrooms, a million therapy sessions. It is procedure, policy, best practice. It is the way things are done.

To name it precisely is the first act of resistance. Not “leftism”—too contested. Not “liberalism”—too confusing. But: the therapeutic management of souls under the sign of justice. The soft totalitarianism. The guilt machine. The invisible church.

Once named, it can be seen. Once seen, it can be refused. Not argued with—it does not argue; it diagnoses. But refused: I will not confess. I will not be healed. I will not accept your help.

The naming is everything.

For how can you escape a prison you have been taught is the world itself?

First, give it a name. Then, refuse.