Can 'the left' survive having been a set of interest groups?

Contemporary American-style identity politics is based on pseudo-collectivities. For example, the idea that women are a group, like a set or class, an idea that can only make sense theoretically. They do exist as distinct social subjects, to be sure, female persons being distinguished from male persons by biological differences that are variously taken up, interpreted, 'coded', socially (and that can be coded and rewritten differently), but what they are not is a group. In the modern period, capitalists and educated professionals grouped themselves often in voluntary associations, which roughly align with our corporate enterprises and our churches and other houses of worship. Modern workers were grouped together in ways that were fundamentally not voluntary, in factories, often in cities, certainly in school classrooms, and earlier peasants (and slaves) were grouped together in collectivities of laborers. No such grouping exists, of course, in a 'state of nature'. Though contemporary political movements after speak as if they do. Pseudo-collectivities function politically to make claims on the government and public based on a logic of representation. This is a feature of the modern capitalist state. As are labor unions, which many of us believe do more good than harm. Some feminists have been sad that women never became a collective social subject represented as such by social institutions as a kind of union. Many black radicals are happy that their political movements and leadership did achieve that. Where a political process able to contest the given order of things is needed, such things are far better than nothing, though it is easy, in fact, to see how easily their existential, moral, and ideological claims can become wildly exaggerated.

The right has owed much of its recent success to its ability to attack left-liberals where they are most vulnerable. I wish the left was less stupid, which may be wishing left-liberals where less 'liberal', or centrist. Identity politics is irremediably bourgeois. As it was constituted by alliances between intellectuals and the poor, the left properly so called has always aimed to be more than that. That is a hope.

That a politics could be the pure, "organic" expression of the general will of a collective subject is surely little more than a charming idea. (And that makes politics expressive, which presupposes that expression and effectivity are identical, a Spinozist as distinct from Kantian one perhaps, Kantianism, more in line with society of property-owning subjects whose behavior is regulated by law and the sanctions embedded in enterprises defined by market success/failure, being more concerned with limitations on subjectivity (and law as such), and separating desire and duty, as well as causes (which motivate and explain) and reasons (which justify and aim at justice, not subjective realization).

The left is not dead, but weak, and has been in that condition for more than 50 years. Theoretically, it is stronger than it was then, but practically it is very weak. What power we have attaches to the professional class more generally, destining us for better and worse to alliances with centrist "progressives." For my part, I caucus with them, sometimes supporting the same candidates and possible laws, but I do not very much trust them and will not drink with them.