Why the 2020 Social Justice Revolutions Failed

Fredrik deBoer is an unabashed Marxist, long-time grassroots activist, popular Substacker, and occasional Daily Beast contributor. And despite my disagreements with him on a host of issues (the virtues of Marxism not least among them) he’s also one of my favorite writers, a prolific scribe whose pugnacious and often very funny prose is armed with a thoughtfulness that’s rarely seen in modern political commentary.

And yet, in his recently released second book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, his tone is far more empathic and analytical—an impressive feat given the fact he’s plainly frustrated with well-to-do elements of leftist political movements that, in his view, have played to an audience of highly educated activists, academics, and journalists to the detriment of poor and marginalized groups, particularly people of color.

“In 2020, a year that was sold at the time as a moment of unique political foment—as a ‘reckoning’—we saw the American progressive movement drift from the essential to the inconsequential, from the material to the illusory, in much the same way,” deBoer writes in the first chapter of his new book.

Read more at The Daily Beast.