Grudgingly, inch by inch, mainstream politicians and pundits are beginning to distance themselves from the Israeli death machine. Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that “thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border” and urged “the full flow of humanitarian assistance” to be allowed in. It’s a striking change of tune from her statements last year, when she said campus protesters making similar demands “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East” and shouldn’t be listened to. Similarly, Representative Ritchie Torres—who spent the last two years scaremongering about “antisemitic incidents on college campuses” and telling everyone within earshot that he “stands with Israel”—has noticed the ground shifting beneath his feet. Like Clinton, he now says the U.S. has an “obligation to do everything in our power to ease the hardship and hunger that’s taken hold in the Gaza Strip.” In the U.K., Sir Keir Starmer says that “the level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable” and calls the rhetoric of Israeli leaders “abhorrent.” In the media, Piers Morgan is now telling Israelis not to “let your Govt continue to commit these indefensible atrocities in your name.” Even conservative British tabloids are running photos of starving Palestinian children on their covers: “FOR PITY’S SAKE STOP THIS NOW.”

The change is welcome, but it’s also 21 months too late. It was always apparent that Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks was going to be a horrifying massacre. The Israeli leaders told us so themselves, from Benjamin Netanyahu’s fanatical rhetoric about “Amalek” to Israel Katz’s “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” None of it was ever secret, and people on the Left were trying to ring the alarm bells from the start. Norman Finkelstein warned on October 17, 2023 that “One million children in Gaza are trapped in an inferno.” In January 2024, Current Affairs ran a long article entitled “Israel Has No Defense,” laying out the evidence for a charge of genocide. Most notably, the nation of South Africa brought the actual charge before the International Court of Justice in December 2023. But at the time, mainstream politicians and media figures wouldn’t admit the obvious truth. The official line, repeated in endless op-eds and speeches, was that Israel had a “right to defend itself” (by attacking and starving others), and that so-called antisemitism among college students was the real problem. Now, after nearly two years, more than 100,000 Palestinians likely dead, and more photographs of headless children than any sane person can bear, the mainstream is finally beginning to admit that the Left was right all along. They’re also hoping nobody remembers how they aided and abetted the killing at every turn. It’s the same phenomenon Omar El Akkad predicted in the title of his recent memoir: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 

But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this pattern, is it? No. In fact, as many people online have observed, it’s a consistent theme across history: where the political mainstream is concerned, “the left’s crime is being correct too early.” In case after case, whether the issue is war, labor, feminism, the rights of minorities, or basic electoral politics, the people who accurately observe the situation and propose the correct solution are socialists, anarchists, and other varieties of committed leftist. At first, they’re loudly condemned for it. Then, after a period of years or decades, it finally becomes permissible for centrists and liberals to admit what the leftists had concluded. They attempt to appropriate the left-wing position for themselves, with the serial numbers filed off and the content watered down. Today’s radical fringe becomes tomorrow’s common sense, just in time for the cycle to start up again.

For another recent example, just look at the hubbub about Joe Biden and his amazing melting brain. When Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson released their book Original Sin this May, it served as the green flag for respectable liberals to admit that Biden had been struggling with his cognition and memory for years, and that there was a concerted attempt to cover up this crucial fact. As readers, we were supposed to treat the book as a huge, Woodward-and-Bernstein style revelation. (You mean he was impaired this whole time? Whoa!) But the Left knew it five years ago, and the liberals did everything in their power to stay ignorant. In a 2019 primary debate, Julian Castro questioned why Biden was “forgetting what you said two minutes ago,” which he obviously was. In response, people like Beto O’Rourke criticized Castro for making “that kind of personal attack,” and Castro’s career has been in limbo ever since. Left-wing podcasts like Chapo Trap House joked about Biden’s incoherent public statements constantly, but in the mainstream press, we got op-eds about “Ageist Attacks Against President Biden” or “The Weaponization of Joe Biden’s Age.” It was not permitted to acknowledge the obvious reality—not if you wanted to keep your job, your connections, and your book deal. At one point, the White House itself tried to claim any video clip showing the president babbling nonsense or staring blankly into the distance was a deceptive “cheapfake.” As it turns out, the scurrilous left-wing podcasters were right, and the respectable mainstream press was lying through its teeth. But Tapper and Thompson only released their book after the 2024 election, when it was too late to make a difference. If everyone had just listened to the Left to begin with, and put Biden out to pasture in 2023—which the majority of Democratic voters wanted!—we might not have a President Trump right now. 

Speaking of the events that gave us President Trump, how about Kamala Harris? Up until her humiliating defeat in the last election, the liberal press was fully in the tank for her. “The Race Is Close Because Harris Is Running a Brilliant Campaign,” wrote Jonathan Chait in an October 2024 article for New York magazine. “Stop complaining; the centrism is working.” But it wasn’t true. The campaign was not brilliant, the centrism was not working, and the race wasn’t particularly close; in the end, Harris lost every swing state. Current Affairs contributing editor Yasmin Nair told everyone as much in August 2024, when she warned that “Kamala Harris Will Lose” because she offered hollow platitudes like the phrase “opportunity economy” but little substance. So did Current Affairs itself, in articles like “It's a Bad Idea for Harris to Abandon Progressive Policies” (August 2024), “An Endorsement from Dick Cheney is Nothing to be Proud Of” (September 2024), and “Is Kamala Blowing It?” (October 2024). Once again, the Left’s analysis was the correct one. It was just too early, and too inconvenient for the Democratic Party and its loyal partisans to acknowledge. 

Some examples are especially dramatic. Consider our old pal David Brooks at the New York Times, who wrote in February 2020: “No, Not Sanders, Not Ever.” With his belief in “remorseless class war” and his belief that “the whole system is irredeemably corrupt,” Brooks argued, Bernie Sanders was “what replaces liberal democrats,” and was reminiscent of the former Soviet Union in some vague but scary way. But more recently, Brooks has done an about-face. Now, he writes that “Maybe Bernie Sanders is Right” about inequality in America, and says that “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” Well, better late than never, Dave. But some of us realized “Bernie Sanders is Right” when it was actually relevant, and voted for the man, so maybe it should be those people with the syndicated column and not you. 

Walk a little further back in the corridors of time, and we arrive at the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This was the worst crime of the 21st century, although the Gaza genocide now rivals it for that bleak title—and the Left was against it from Day One, fielding protest marches of millions of people around the world. In the press, Noam Chomsky warned anyone who would listen that invading Iraq would “increase the threat of terror” worldwide, not decrease it, and that any prospect of a truly democratic Iraq emerging from the invasion was “a poor joke.” He was exactly right. In the years that followed, we saw the emergence of ISIS in Iraq (primarily armed with Iraqi military hardware that was left unsecured after Saddam Hussein fell). The U.S.-backed governments that replaced Hussein’s were massively corrupt, and even the Council on Foreign Relations euphemistically admits that Iraq is “not quite a democracy” more than 20 years later. But, like with today’s Gaza protests, opposing the invasion was not considered respectable or mainstream. Instead, virtually all of today’s liberal heroes—from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff—voted to attack Iraq, and the press carried water for them, with Joe Scarborough slamming what he called “leftist stooges for anti-American causes” on MSNBC. Only now do these people pretend they were anti-war all along, and publications like Foreign Policy run the headline “Noam Chomsky Has Been Proven Right.” 

The record goes back centuries, and in every case, the pattern is the same. As recently as 2010, Barack Obama was “unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage,” considering it a bridge too far. Only when it became politically safe did he side with the LGBTQ activists who had been fighting for their rights all along. Before that, it was leftists who led the charge to end apartheid in South Africa through a boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, similar to the one they propose against Israel today, while everyone from Ronald Reagan to the editors of the National Review opposed them and defended the apartheid. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was considered far too radical by the American mainstream, with 61 percent of Gallup poll respondents saying they disapproved of the Freedom Riders. Today, despite Republican attempts to rewrite history, we know the protesters were in the right. So were the supporters of women’s suffrage, who were condemned for breaking windows and chaining themselves to things using language strikingly similar to what’s currently used to condemn Black Lives Matter or Palestine Action. 

It’s the same with the protests against invading Vietnam. Even earlier, the abolition of slavery was the territory of wild-eyed radicals like John Brown, who warned America that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood”—and of Karl Marx, who wrote that “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” The Civil War that followed bore that prophecy out. Even the most obvious propositions in the world, like ending child labor in factories, had to be dragged into the mainstream by socialists and trade unionists. 

Sometimes the Left’s prescience gets downright spooky. In a preface to a pamphlet that’s been forgotten by everyone except the most obsessive socialist history nerds (Bien sûr que je le connais; c'est moi), Friedrich Engels predicted the First World War all the way back in 1887: 

[F]inally, the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent [and] violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of’ trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be around to pick them up.

For anyone keeping score, that’s a gap of 26 years between Engels’ analysis and the events he predicted playing out. He was only wrong on details: it was just several crowns that “rolled in the gutter,” like those of Imperial Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, not literally dozens. And there didn’t have to be a First World War. It was a pointless bloodbath where everyone lost, except the weapons dealers. If socialists had been in power in the various European capitals, it could have been prevented, and untold millions of lives saved. But unfortunately, the world was run by a noxious mixture of monarchists, conservatives, and capitalist bankers, and they had their own ideas, so we got unspeakable tragedy. The price of not listening to the Left is often high. 

At this point, a conservative reader might say: aha, but what about the cases where conservatives have been right, like when they said the Soviet Union was full of horrible gulags? Weren’t leftists reluctant to admit the truth then? Well, not exactly. Some of the more hardcore Marxist-Leninists stuck by Stalin long after it was sensible to do so, it’s true. But in this case it’s the anarchist left that was incredibly prescient. All the way back in the 1870s, Bakunin was writing that a revolutionary government ran the risk of becoming oppressive, as “the so-called people’s state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of the genuine or supposedly educated… a fine liberation!” Chomsky calls it “one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true.” Later, it would be Trotskyists like Victor Serge who wrote the most incisive critiques of Stalin and Stalinism. Meanwhile, conservatives have never had any trouble supporting dictatorships of their own (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, et cetera ad infinitum), so long as they were anti-communist. They’re still doing it right now with Bukele in El Salvador. So any cases where the Right has been “right” in this way are purely incidental, compared to what the Left is capable of. 

Now, why are leftists correct so consistently? It’s not because we have crystal balls tucked away in our cupboards. Just the opposite. It’s because, by and large, socialists and anarchists don’t have the inch-thick layer of bullshit covering our eyes that liberals and conservatives do. In Engels’ case, he didn’t buy into any of the narratives about national pride or martial honor and bravery that were dominant at the time. He understood that war is simply a way of gaining or losing resources, and that the economic position of “Prussia-Germany” meant it needed to gain them by force. Back in the abolitionist era, people like John Brown didn’t accept the idea that slavery was just the natural order of things. In the case of Iraq, leftists didn’t buy the Bush administration’s fearmongering about WMDs and Islamic terrorists hiding behind every tree. Today, they don’t buy into the repeated narrative about Israel’s “right to defend itself” by attacking Gaza.

There are countless examples like this. Leftists don’t believe in “personal responsibility” for society-wide problems like homelessness. We do not believe that “job creators” bring “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” to the “free market,” and thus ought to have billions while everyone else has pennies. We do not believe, as Joe Biden did, in some nebulous and ineffable thing called the “soul of the nation” which can be redeemed through “decency.” Instead, leftists understand that politics is primarily a struggle for control over wealth and resources. It consists of labor, money, land, power, and violence, not abstract ideals, slogans, and mythologies. The technical term is historical materialism, but it really just means facing material reality without a lot of ideological junk in the way. And if you don’t have that, you wind up running down all kinds of blind alleys. 

The stakes here are high, because it’s not just the past we have to consider. It’s the future, too. To recap: the Left was right about slavery, about child labor, about women’s right to vote, about World War One, about Civil Rights, about LGBTQ rights, about Vietnam, about apartheid South Africa, about the invasion of Iraq, about Joe Biden’s mental health, about Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign, and about Gaza. In each case, conservatives and liberals have been categorically wrong, and by insisting on their wrong view of the situation, they only got in the way of progress being made and lives saved. Now, with that in mind, it stands to reason there’s a good chance the Left is also correct about the controversies of the present day. So when leftists say that military support for Israel needs to be immediately withdrawn and Benjamin Netanyahu put on trial, or that private ownership of the healthcare industry is a historic horror that needs to be abolished, or that we’ve got to end the production and use of fossil fuels as soon as possible, people ought to pay attention. Those are also the correct conclusions, just as “don’t enslave people” was in the 1850s. This many centuries in, maybe the world will listen to the people who’ve been right all along, while there’s still time to make a difference.