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The trajectory of the left can, historically, be plotted along two axes. Temporally, the left tries to push society toward greater justice and equality, hastening the work of progress. Socially, it champions the interests of workers and ordinary people as opposed to elites. Most of the time, these axes harmonize: Political, social and cultural progress often advances the interests of society’s lower ranks. In the past, this has meant that political movements seeking to further the interests of ordinary people have tended to be liberal or progressive.
Yet in recent years, a very different situation has emerged. Ordinary people are less and less convinced that the progress progressives are offering is working in their favor. They worry not only about economic forces threatening their way of life—such as globalization, deindustrialization and automation—but also about ideologies hailing from universities and urban centers that classify their beliefs as old-fashioned and even abhorrent. Consequently, many nonelites have gravitated from the left to the right, particularly toward populist parties that, over the past decade, have flourished in many countries. In these circumstances, a space has emerged, almost by default, for an unusual political stance: a conservative left.
To understand the conservative left, three contemporary figures deserve consideration. In Germany, this tendency is embodied by Sahra Wagenknecht, whose brand-new political party made a mark on recent state elections (winning [ [link removed] ] 15.8% of the vote in Thuringia and almost 12% in Saxony on September 1 and 13.5% [ [link removed] ] of the vote in Brandenburg on September 22). In France, it is represented by Fabien Roussel, the current leader of the French Communist Party. In the United States, the leading example of this phenomenon is John Fetterman, the “anti-woke” Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.
Despite their differences, all three of these political figures contend that the left has, by embracing progressive social ideologies and (in some cases) capitalist economics, abandoned its historic ties to the working class. All three believe that the left must reclaim this constituency and that doing so will require embracing more culturally conservative values. Their political prospects are uneven, and none is yet in a position to prevail in national elections. But, taken together, they may be a symptom of a broader political shift in which the traditional “left” and “right” distinctions are breaking down and the left has begun to prioritize progressive cultural values over the economic interests of the working class.
Sahra Wagenknecht: The Marxist as Conservative
Counterintuitively, it is Sahra Wagenknecht’s consistent pursuit of a hard-left position—and often a Marxist one—that has brought her into the conservative orbit. She was born in 1969 in the German Democratic Republic—that is, in communist East Germany. Growing up under socialism shaped her outlook and politics; from her youth she was a true believer. In her first book [ [link removed] ], “From Head to Foot? On the Young Marx’s Criticism of Hegel,” she criticized the writings of the young Marx for not being radical enough.
Similarly, the aim of her political career has been to carve out a political space for socialism in post-reunification Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she officially joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which had ruled the German Democratic Republic since 1946, and followed the most far-left elements of that party as it transformed over the years, eventually becoming the Left Party (Die Linke) in 2007.
By the mid-2010s, however, Wagenknecht’s relationship with the Left Party had become increasingly frayed as she began to distance herself from some of its more progressive positions. She viewed favorably and took inspiration from developments in other countries, including Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, Jeremy Corbyn’s stint as the U.K.’s Labour Party leader and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left populist movement in France. In October 2023 she founded the Sahra Wagenknecht Movement (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW), which officially broke with the Left Party in January 2024.
The first electoral competitions in which the BSW presented candidates were the elections for the European Parliament this past June, in which the party won 6.2% of the vote (surpassing the Left Party’s performance), and the previously mentioned state elections in September.
Wagenknecht bolted from the Left Party because, in her view, it had become indifferent to the electorate she believed it should be serving. In a statement [ [link removed] ] explaining her departure, she and other “splitters” declared, “We have repeatedly pointed out that the focus on urban, young and activist communities is driving away our traditional voters. We have repeatedly tried to halt the decline of the Party by changing its political orientation. We haven’t been able to do that—and in the end, the party has become less and less popular with voters.”
The left drifted away from its historic constituencies, Wagenknecht maintains [ [link removed] ], owing to the onset of neoliberalism and globalization in the 1970s. Because of these trends, society split between (1) a working class that, instead of working in factories, earns low salaries from service-sector jobs and (2) university-educated “knowledge” professionals who have little contact with ordinary people. In Germany, the plight of the new working classes is particularly pronounced in the states that used to be part of the German Democratic Republic.
Wagenknecht argues that, as a result of the left’s new demographics, its ideology has ceased to reflect the outlook of poorer Germans. Though the Left Party is anti-capitalist, it also defines itself as ecological, feminist and pro-immigrant. Without criticizing any of these stances individually, Wagenknecht is disdainful of the “lifestyle left” embraced by the urban educated classes that dominate academia, the media and the culture more broadly. She denounces “wokeness” and “cancel culture” as intolerant and distant from ordinary people’s concerns.
While Wagenknecht embraces racial diversity—a prominent figure in her new party is Amira Mohamed Ali, a Muslim member of the German parliament—she rejects multiculturalism and says that integrating racial minorities into German society is the best way to ensure social cohesion.
The ambition of Wagenknecht and the BSW is to win back the working class for the left, particularly voters who are tempted by the far right. Fabio De Masi, a BSW member of the European Parliament, said [ [link removed] ], “You could say Main Street doesn’t associate with the left anymore.” Particularly in the old East German states, populations suffering from higher levels of poverty and unemployment increasingly favor the nationalist program of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD). In fact, AfD received the second-highest share of the vote (29.2% [ [link removed] ]) in the September 22 Brandenburg election, coming in just behind the center-left Social Democratic Party, which received 30.9%. The BSW came in third, but it will likely be part of any multiparty coalition government [ [link removed] ] that’s ultimately formed to govern the state.
The BSW’s program has emphasized a redistributionist economic program and policies favoring the economic interests of the working classes while it adopts more conservative stances on cultural issues. Its manifesto [ [link removed] ] states, “Immigration and the coexistence of different cultures can be enriching. ... But this is only true if immigration remains limited to an order of magnitude that does not exceed the capacities of our country and its infrastructure, and if integration is actively encouraged and successful.”
Rather than promoting the knowledge economy, Wagenknecht cultivates a nostalgia for the golden age of German industry. “German industry is the backbone of our prosperity and must be preserved,” the manifesto asserts. And, while the BSW claims to be concerned about the environment, it also emphasizes that this industry-heavy economy depends, at least for now, on traditional fuels: “Germany’s energy supply cannot be secured solely through renewable energies.”
In the party’s Ukraine policy, several of its principles converge. Wagenknecht opposes military support for Ukraine. While calling for peace, she condemns the West’s “war on Russia.” Her reasons are tied, in part, to her economic populism and the need for cheap Russian energy to keep the lights on and German factories running. In 2022, she denounced sanctions on Russia, declaring [ [link removed] ] that “punishing Putin by plunging millions of families into poverty and destroying our industry while Gazprom makes record profits—yes, that’s stupid.”
In this way, her opposition to the Ukraine war and her sympathy for Putin align closely with the positions of far-right politicians in other European countries, including Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. She also sympathizes [ [link removed] ] with Putin’s promotion of nation-states over internationalism, and she seeks the backing of the Russlanddeutsche [ [link removed] ]—Germans of Russian background—who often support AfD.
Fabien Roussel: The Communist as Patriot
In France, too, communist nostalgia has been a breeding ground for left-conservative tendencies. The key figure here is Fabien Roussel, the current leader of the French Communist Party (PCF). In American discourse, the word “communism” still suggests “ultra-liberal,” even “super-woke.” In France, while “communism” is certainly associated with the left, the word also has retro and even traditionalist connotations. The PCF, founded in 1920, is the oldest existing party in a country where political parties come and go. While its members still sing the global socialist anthem “The Internationale,” communists have long touted their patriotism, pointing to their active role in the Resistance during the German occupation.
While the party regularly won a quarter of the votes in national elections in the postwar years, by the late 20th century its share of the votes had dwindled to the single digits. By the time Roussel was elected the PCF’s leader in 2018, the party was a shadow of its former self. Roussel’s goal as party leader was to make communism relevant again. Yet to do so, he had to compete in a crowded field. What’s more, after Emmanuel Macron’s election as president in 2017 as a “neither-right-nor-left” candidate, the French left found itself fragmented and disoriented.
A major theme of Roussel’s politics is to bring the concept of “the nation” back to the center of leftist politics. From the French Revolution through the mid-19th century, the left was the primary champion of the nation, which it saw as a vehicle for democracy and popular sovereignty, not a means for promoting ethnonationalism and militarism (as later became the case).
For Roussel, the key turning point in recent history was the 2005 referendum [ [link removed] ] on the European Constitutional Treaty, which would have enacted a single constitution for all EU member states. French voters rejected the treaty by 55%, but they didn’t vote along party lines: Both left- and right-wing voters approved the treaty, and both left- and right-wing voters opposed it.
Roussel believes that, in the wake of this referendum, the left recognized the electoral benefits of opposing free trade and neoliberalism (which is what many believed the treaty was promoting). But they failed to reach the more obvious conclusion: Many ordinary French people are attached to their country and its history and sovereignty. In his book “Ma France [ [link removed] ],” Roussel explains that the referendum showed a “demand for the respect of sovereignty, or the nation.” Yet these words “had been banished from our speeches”—because they were used by the far right. The nation, he believes, is the only practical way to exercise democracy and oppose the antidemocratic tendencies inherent in various forms of internationalism (the European Union, trade deals, etc.). He also realizes that patriotism is a value that matters to common people.
Like Wagenknecht, Roussel claims that the left in recent years has abandoned its working-class roots and prioritized urban, educated populations. In 2021, he noted [ [link removed] ] that “the left is weak because it has let go of the working-class electorate [and] the world of labor.” Roussel implies that there is something authentically French about physical labor—as opposed to work in the “knowledge economy” associated with cities—that the left must prioritize. In a similar vein, André Chassaigne, another communist, lamented [ [link removed] ] that the left has succumbed to “intellectual boboization.” “Bobo” is a term that contracts the words “bourgeois” and “bohemian,” and it has roughly the same connotation as “hipster” in English: that is, it refers to educated urbanites, often working in cultural professions. In the context of Chassaigne’s comment, it has a strong connotation of inauthenticity.
Roussel seeks to reject “bobo” tendencies by promoting working-class values—with the aim of reclaiming the working class from the far right. Like Wagenknecht, Roussel has emphasized the importance of keeping energy affordable to working people. Like Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist party, Rassemblement National, he is an enthusiastic supporter of France’s nuclear energy program (while maintaining this program is compatible with environmentalism). At a time when concerns about crime are growing, Roussel has demonstrated alongside police unions, describing the police as “security workers” who provide protection to ordinary people.
And perhaps most importantly, for Roussel, communism is not about setting up an all-powerful welfare state that would free people from the obligation to work. On the contrary, he maintains that communism is precisely about the dignity of labor. In 2022, he stirred controversy by claiming that the PCF represented the “working left” rather than the “handout left.” Implicit in these positions is the idea that France can choose a fate different from the one promised by globalization: It can reindustrialize; it can have a vibrant and productive working class; it can have a society with less crime because fewer people are unemployed or limited to low-wage service-sector jobs. Communists can make France great again.
Unlike Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, Roussel’s efforts have yielded little electoral fruit. In the 2022 French presidential election, Roussel received only 2.6% of the vote. In 2024, his party did not do much better, and Roussel even lost his seat in parliament. Yet he is unquestionably the most popular communist leader in years, and he is frequently seen in the media. Many right-wing politicians have expressed admiration [ [link removed] ] for him.
This is, in part, because Roussel is fond of expressing his appreciation of Frenchness. In 2022, for instance, when asked to comment on Macron’s promotion of French wine, Roussel responded [ [link removed] ], “A good wine, good meat, good cheese, for me, that’s French gastronomy.” Many on the left criticized the comment, seeing it as evidence that Roussel had waded too far into conservative territory. He was accused of being franchoullard—that is, embarrassingly pro-French.
Others claimed that Roussel was being racially insensitive because he overlooked the tastes of the country’s minorities. And some pointed out that, when asked to name their favorite food, many French people answer couscous, which is from North Africa. Yet for Roussel, nationalism is ultimately more about prioritizing the economic needs of common people than about some kind of jingoism or chauvinism. In the same interview in which he made the comment about French wine and meat, Roussel concluded his remarks by stating, “To access ... good gastronomy, you must have the means to do so. So the best way to defend good wine and good gastronomy is to allow French people to have access to it.”
John Fetterman: The Populist as Anti-Progressive
Completing this triptych is an American example of the conservative left: John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania. While Fetterman shares some of Wagenknecht’s and Roussel’s outlook, at first blush he seems quite different from the two European politicians, at least in his upbringing. Fetterman was not born into a communist culture, nor was he exposed to leftist politics early on. He was born in 1969 and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. Though he was born poor, his parents later became affluent, and he enjoyed a comfortable childhood.
Fetterman’s social conscience was not stirred until his early 20s, when he joined the Big Brother program and was particularly moved [ [link removed] ] by a young boy who had lost both his parents to AIDS within a month. As a result, Fetterman decided to devote his life to helping the old Pennsylvania factory towns that dot his state. He moved to Braddock, a once-thriving steel mill town near Pittsburgh, to help young people get their GED diplomas, and he was eventually elected mayor. He was later elected lieutenant governor before winning his Senate seat.
In many ways, Fetterman seems to embody the “bobo” left that arouses the suspicion of figures like Wagenknecht and Roussel. He’s a rich boy who wanted to help poor people. As mayor, he tried to promote the arts and preserve Braddock’s historic character. Yet he too believes that the essence of leftist politics is about identifying with the working class. Indeed, Fetterman’s signature look—his decision to eschew the senatorial business suit in favor of cargo shorts and a hoodie—is a 21st-century version of the worker’s cap once favored by socialists: a way of signaling support for the working class. As mayor, he once said [ [link removed] ], “I don’t own a suit or a tie and that’s not a statement of rebellion or anything like that. … It’s out of deference to my community, it’s out of deference to what’s across the street, in terms of the mill.”
Fetterman long described himself as a progressive. When he first joined the Senate, he was frequently seen as an ally in the upper chamber of the far-left Squad of House members: representatives such as Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yet, more recently, Fetterman has made a point of emphasizing his blue-collar affinities over his progressivism. “I am not woke,” he recently told [ [link removed] ] the New York Post. In 2022, he told [ [link removed] ] the Jewish Insider, “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive. ... Our campaign is based on core Democratic values and principles, and always has been.”
Fetterman’s guiding principle, at least in this latest political incarnation, is to bring the Democratic Party back to its blue-collar roots and win back working-class voters—including working-class whites—who have deserted the party for Donald Trump. Eschewing concepts such as “intersectionality,” “structural racism” and other academic ideas that have come to dominate progressive discourse, Fetterman has emphasized issues that appeal to the people he got to know in Braddock. He supports immigration while also saying that the border must be secured—and that it’s in the interest of ordinary people to do so. He has said [ [link removed] ], “You can be very supportive of immigration, but we also need to have a secure border. We want to provide the American Dream for any migrant, but it seems very difficult when you have 300,000 people showing up ... at our border to do that.”
He is pro-police and, far from wishing to defund them, he wants to increase their funding. As mayor [ [link removed] ], he “worked closely with the police and found ways to help them get the funding that they needed to do their jobs effectively.” He respects property rights and thinks squatters don’t have a leg to stand on, telling [ [link removed] ] the New York Post, “Squatters have no rights. How can you even pretend that this is anything other than you’re just breaking the law?” Most dramatically, he has publicly supported Israel [ [link removed] ] after it was attacked last October by Hamas. In so doing, he has adhered to a long-standing Democratic Party position but also signaled his distance from the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian positions associated with the campus protests and much of the far left.
The Cultural Contradictions of the Left
While Wagenknecht, Roussel and Fetterman do not always align on questions of policy, they have some intriguing similarities. All three come from old industrial regions (Thuringia, Northern France and Pennsylvania) that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. They were all born in 1969—one wonders if, too young to have witnessed socialism and labor politics in their heyday and too old to identify with millennial wokeness, they have been led to identify nostalgically with older leftist traditions that they never experienced firsthand. Though all three have, at times, identified with the far left, in recent years they have been more appreciated by the right than by their own side.
Above all, all three politicians are symptoms of the left’s recent evolution. Their “conservative left” positions are a reflection of the transformation of left and left-leaning parties in their respective countries: specifically, the shift away from the kind of working-class politics associated with an industrial economy and toward a blend of identity politics and issues reflecting the priorities of the educated professionals who now form the core of support for many, if not most, left-wing political movements in the West.
Further, all three reject the far right—AfD, Rassemblement National and Trump—while opposing the “basket of deplorables” style of condescension with which many on the left view far-right voters. In 2021, Roussel asserted [ [link removed] ] that the Rassemblement National electorate is “neither racist, nor fascist, nor sexist, nor homophobe.” Within their respective contexts, Wagenknecht and Fetterman agree.
In “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” published in 1976, sociologist Daniel Bell analyzed the growing disjunction between American culture and capitalism. Capitalism, he maintained, had been founded on the Protestant work ethic, but its very success gave rise to an anarchic culture that privileged free expression and liberal attitudes that were increasingly at odds with the nose-to-the-grindstone principles that made capitalism successful. Cultural change had outpaced the economy.
At present, the opposite phenomenon seems to be occurring: Economic change via globalization, financialization, technological innovation and other trends is outpacing the culture. This context may be inherently conducive to a political stance that denounces economic inequalities while seeking to slow down cultural change. Whether or not the conservative left becomes a potent political force, it is likely to function as a political gadfly—a useful irritant to left-of-center parties that, by prioritizing cultural progressivism, have lost the support of working people.

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