There is another view: it is not the Left which has taken over the ruling institutions but it is these institutions which have co-opted and destroyed the Left.

These days, when people speak of “the Left” they are referring to what is essentially a cultural movement espousing “progressive” (woke) values and the membership of which is largely co-extensive with the college-educated managerial and professional middle class.

WELFARE

This “Left” is a long way from the traditional union-based Left which organised for better wages and working conditions and whose political Parties advocated for a more just wealth distribution and welfare State.

Not only does the contemporary “Left” despise the working class but it takes as its primary political objective the defeat of those populist movements which have become the political expression of worker discontent.

This “Left” has not only abandoned its previous opposition to neo-liberal globalism but has aligned itself with those same forces in an attempt to crush this working-class revolt.

It could be said, in partial defence of the contemporary Left, that populism is mainly “Right-wing” populism, a movement in defence of conservative values and national sovereignty and whose leaders endorse the prevailing neo-liberal “let the market rule” economic order.

But this defence collapses when it is remembered that it is this same progressive woke Left which destroyed the Left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and others.

These Left-wing populisms had in common with Right-wing populisms the aspiration to restore national sovereignty but with the very different objective of instituting a more just economic order.

Rather than addressing the huge dissatisfactions of the working class, the contemporary Left has left it to (once) smaller Right-wing forces to harness this discontent, a betrayal made worse by the fact that surveys reveal that supporters of these populist movements largely diverge from their leaders in supporting traditional Left demands to increase social security and to rein in the corporations.

So, what happened to the Left?

Right-wing commentators are correct that there is an historical continuity connecting the university Left of the late 60s and the contemporary Left.

Christopher Rufo is particularly effective in tracing the evolution of the contemporary Left beginning with the desertion of the working class in the late 60s and 70s by those intellectuals who had previously supported it.

Influenced by the writings of Herbert Marcuse and using the language of revolutionary Marxism, these theorists decided that the working class had become slaves to consumerism and unable to bring about the socialist revolution.

MARGINALISED

Their new revolutionary “vanguard” was to consist of the intellectuals themselves, together with marginalised racial and bohemian groups.

Over the ensuing decades, this intellectual Left focused on race and transgressive sexuality, watering down their revolutionary project until it became the “Left” we know today – a “revolution” consisting of racial reparations, DEI initiatives and rainbow sexuality, a revolution fit for culture wars but which sits comfortably with the aspirations of the would-be global world order which proceeded to endorse it.

The proponents of this long march thesis, however, overlook two crucial facts.

First, intellectual followers of Marcuse et al did not constitute the Left but only a grouping which, until then, had been sympathetic to it.

The bulk of the Left did not speak the language of revolution, and it did not abandon the working class when intellectuals did.

The 60s and 70s were still years of post-war settlement, part of which was recognition of the political power of trade unions. That Left was still strong.

The weakening and corruption of this traditional Left had a different trajectory from that of the academic Left, one which went through its political Parties.

Here, too, academics had an important role, but the second fact overlooked by Rufo et al is that there was another “long march” through universities.

In the late 1970s, neo-liberalism which, for decades, had been developed and propagated by Right-wing think tanks, was impacting universities and by the 90s neo-liberal ideas dominated the economics and politics faculties.