The Mooresie

What’s Left of the Left

Even then, these economists recognized what a paltry, bowdlerized proxy for the left they were: six academics, and by any broad ideological standard a pretty moderate group, comfortable with markets and free trade. But liberals had long ago ceased to rally around class. “In the United States,” Blinder told me weeks later, a little bleakly, a little apologetically, “there is no left left.” Krugman, looking back, diagnoses two problems. First, the progressive economists had been too disorganized. And then they had been too late.