The End of the Materialist Left?

Is the Left on a path to reclaiming moral language?

In his 2025 New York Times essay “Pay Attention to How You Pay Attention,” Ezra Klein, arguably the most important voice of the centre-left, argues that the real danger of modern digital platforms is not simply their monopoly power, but their control over our attention— over what we see, what we care about, and ultimately who we become. In making this case, he moves beyond the relatively safe terrain of political economy into a more explicitly normative one. His diagnosis implies a judgment about the shape of a good life, and suggests that a life dominated by platforms is, in some important sense, a diminished one.

Yet when he turns to solutions, this normative clarity fades. The remedies he proposes remain largely technocratic: better regulation, stronger antitrust enforcement, and design reforms. And still, one senses in the essay a certain unease, as though Klein himself is not entirely persuaded that these measures are equal to the problem he identifies.

At several points, he hints at a deeper tension within modern liberalism itself. Liberalism is built on a reluctance to judge how individuals choose to live, so long as they do not harm others. But algorithmic platforms exploit precisely this restraint. By claiming to simply give people what they want, they turn liberal neutrality into a kind of vulnerability. A framework that avoids substantive judgments about the good and about what it means to be virtuous struggles to respond when individuals freely choose things that erode their attention, agency, or character—especially when those harms are gradual, diffuse, and difficult to measure.

But in the end, he hesitates. To speak plainly about the good would mean moving beyond liberal neutrality into moral judgment – a terrain shaped by a history of coercion and exclusion. Conscious of the risk of no longer being a “good” liberal, Klein retreats.

The grip that algorithms exert over our attention is not the only problem in American life. Another is the rapid expansion of legalized sports gambling. Far from being a harmless form of entertainment, it has disproportionately harmed low-income men, contributing to financial instability, addiction, and broader social breakdown. Studies show that legalized betting is associated with rising debt, increased bankruptcy rates, and reduced household savings, with the heaviest burdens falling on those already economically precarious. What appears, at the surface, as a matter of individual choice reveals itself, in practice, as a system that extracts value from vulnerability.

Derek Thompson —a center-left commentator and collaborator of Klein’s —writes in 2026 in “We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America” with greater directness. Where Klein hesitates, Thompson suggests that the crisis cannot be resolved through technocratic fixes alone, but requires recovering a shared moral language and the willingness to make substantive normative commitments.

Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, he argues that modernity has eroded the shared moral language once provided by tradition and religion, leaving us with little more than the language of individual preference. With such a thin moral vocabulary, we are poorly equipped to judge or resist forms of life that may be freely chosen yet ultimately degrading—whether that means profiting from catastrophe, rooting for destruction, or reducing public life to a series of wagers.

What appears in Klein as a hesitant recognition becomes, in Thompson, a more explicit diagnosis. And taken together, these essays suggest the early stages of a broader shift within the American Left away from Materialism. For decades, the liberal project has rested on the assumption that if the “plumbing” of society were properly arranged—if fairness were secured and resources more justly distributed—the good life would more or less follow on its own. Questions of value could remain implicit or left to individual choice.

That assumption now seems less secure. We may be witnessing the beginning of a transition: from a largely materialist Left, focused on the distribution of goods, toward a political project more attentive to the conditions of human flourishing—and more willing to articulate substantive normative commitments. This shift may be especially important because the degradation of moral and social life tends to fall most heavily on those already disadvantaged.

To say the Left has been materialist doesn’t mean it lacks moral commitments; rather, its moral compass has been recalibrated toward largely "thin" or managerial aims. In another essay I argued that three dominant moral ends—Safety, Utility, and Equality— now function as the guardrails of modern life. Out of these, the centre Right tends to be more focused on Utility, while the Left emphasizes Safety and Equality. Notably, these moral ends do not guide us towards a substantive vision of what a "good" or "virtuous" life actually looks like.

A transition away from a Materialist Left would thus require a proper definition of the virtuous life and doing something it is deeply uncomfortable with: being “judgmental.” Articulating a substantive conception of the good inevitably means evaluating ways of life — something that appears to conflict with a core commitment of contemporary liberal egalitarianism: the desire to avoid stigmatizing or excluding others. As Matthew Yglesias, another centre-left pundit said in another essay largely decrying the poverty of modern moral life: Being “judgemental” is stigmatized.”