A Time for Monsters: David Masciotra Looks Back in Anger at the First Six Months of 2026 in America

The leftist cultural critic David Masciotra isn’t happy with the state of America in the first half of 2026. His dislike of the MAGA crowd goes without saying. But his anger at the state of progressive politics is more noteworthy. So far, he says, 2026 has been — to borrow from Antonio Gramsci — a time for monsters both on the left and right. With its “Epstein class” vocabulary, knee-jerk Luddism and AIPAC litmus tests, the left, Masciotra argues, is mimicking MAGA in its paranoid bigotry. The year’s most disturbing story so far is Graham Platner, the erstwhile Maine Senate candidate who, Masciotra suggests, is either an idiot or a Nazi. Equally disturbing were the “progressives” who blindly defended Platner until the most recent rape accusations. So how to slay these monsters on the left? What’s missing, Masciotra argues, is the kind of positively benevolent Jacksonian (Jesse) vision which seizes the moral high ground of American politics. We are still waiting for the next Bill Clinton, Obama, or even Bernie able to imagine a new dawn for the left in America. Maybe we’ll see the early shoots of a more optimistic progressivism in the second half of the year. In the manner of a football (soccer) match, let’s hope 2026 turns out to be a year of two halves. Five Takeaways •       The Old Gods Return. Masciotra's answer to the what-time-is-it question is that 2026 has seen the old gods stumble back onto the landscape: nationalism, male chauvinism, paranoia and conspiracism. Borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman, he argues that we have moved from a solid age to a liquid one, in which nothing feels stable — and instability inculcates a nostalgia that is usually irrational and ill-informed. People are reaching for the resurrection of manufacturing, the male-headed nuclear family, even a return to religion, with young Americans reportedly turning to Catholicism. Quality of life is objectively better than in our grandparents' era, and yet we live in an age of doom-scrolling and pessimism. •       The Epstein Class and the Left's New Litmus Tests. The criticism of Israeli conduct after October 7 has morphed, for many on the left, into an all-encompassing paranoia in which AIPAC, Zionists, and “the Epstein class” control everything. Graham Platner coupled those terms constantly in his stump speeches — antisemitic conspiracy-mongering 101, in Masciotra's phrase — and declaring Israel genocidal has become a litmus test in Democratic primaries from Maine to Denver to California. Masciotra, who saw Jesse Jackson spend decades atoning for Hymietown, calls this the most important story of 2026 to monitor: the collapse of parts of the progressive left into bigotry, misogyny tolerance, and purity tests. •       Luxury Beliefs and Streamer Politics. Voter turnout used to be organized bottom-up — black churches, the NAACP, Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition — around the issues of actual neighborhoods. Now streamers like Hasan Piker mobilize thousands of calls into districts they know nothing about, amplifying what Masciotra calls luxury beliefs: positions whose consequences never touch the people who hold them, from making every race about Israel to defunding police in neighborhoods the believers don't live in. Whether it's Piker on the left or Nick Fuentes on the right, national streamers will always champion luxury beliefs, because they lack the knowledge to champion local ones. •       Working-Class Drag Doesn't Work. Platner looked like he had just changed a tire and talked like a pro wrestler cutting a promo on Susan Collins — and the polls showed Collins beating him even before he dropped out over credible accusations of rape and domestic violence. White working-class voters, Masciotra argues, are not looking for someone in the right costume with the right gravelly voice; they have real beliefs, and they respond to people who speak directly to their concerns rather than in the nomenclature of consultant firms. Nobody in Maine piecing together a living as a farmer or a home-health aide has AIPAC first and foremost on their mind. •       Waiting for the Benevolent Vision. What the half-year lacks, from Washington to Westminster, is what Jesse Jackson had even for his critics: a benevolent vision. Masciotra finds it today in Bryan Stevenson and the civil rights tradition he calls the moral center of American politics, and in Senator Raphael Warnock, who preaches from King's old church. His policy candidate for the next Clinton-or-Obama moment is a self-employment manifesto — politics for the millions piecing together gig work who appear in nobody's rhetoric, not the manufacturing nostalgia of the right nor the union nostalgia of the left. And on AI, he sees an opening: oppose the secretly-dealt data centers, as presidential hopeful J.B. Pritzker has, but harness the technology for the precariat rather than the moguls. About the Guest David Masciotra is a cultural critic, journalist, and lecturer. He is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy (Melville House, 2024) and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020), drawn from his many years working alongside the late Reverend Jackson. His writing appears in UnHerd, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, The Progressive, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he teaches literature and political science in Indiana. He is a longtime friend of the show. References: •       Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra (Melville House, 2024). Booklist, starred review: “Insight and a fresh perspective on the culture wars.” •       I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020) — Masciotra's biography of the Reverend, discussed here for Jackson's decades of recompense after the 1984 Hymietown remark. •       Zygmunt Bauman — the Polish sociologist of liquid modernity, quoted in Exurbia Now, whose move from solidity to liquidity frames the episode's diagnosis of nostalgia. •       Antonio Gramsci — the Prison Notebooks passage on the interregnum, in both its translations: morbid symptoms and monsters. •       Masciotra's recent UnHerd essays — on why Democrats gave Graham Platner a free pass, on the party's luxury belief agenda, and on Stephen Colbert as the emblem of detached establishment liberalism. •       Bryan Stevenson — founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the legacy sites memorializing slavery and lynching; the subject of Masciotra's forthcoming piece and, in his view, the closest thing 2026 has to a benevolent vision. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brin...