In a blistering new essay, The Federalist takes aim at what it calls the left’s fundamental incapacity for self-reflection or apology, arguing that progressives will never acknowledge the harms they have inflicted—from child sterilization to the decimation of education—and that conservatives who expect a mass awakening are engaged in a dangerous fantasy.
The piece, published Friday and written in response to a recent article by author Michael Shellenberger, cites Shellenberger’s prediction that “Progressives Will Be Horrified When They Wake Up To What They’ve Done.” The Federalist counters that this expectation is misguided: leftists, the outlet argues, are not going to wake up, and there will be no collective conversion moment.
According to The Federalist, the leftist mindset simply does not include concepts like remorse or atonement, at least not for themselves. Instead, the piece claims, such emotions are reserved for what it calls “the real oppressors”—straight white men and the capitalist system.
Tactics of Avoidance
The essay outlines what it sees as the primary methods leftists use to dodge any reckoning. First, they downplay past abuses, insisting they only want “health care” or arguing that “real socialism has never been tried”—a tactic attributed to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Second, they simply forget, or aggressively gaslight the public into believing that certain events never happened, leveraging their influence over media and academia to memory-hole scandals such as Russiagate and the worst excesses of the Covid era.
Finally, the piece argues, leftists convince themselves that their actions were not necessary evils but positive goods, ushering in a utopian age and liberating America from what they see as conservative oppression.
Historical Precedents
The Federalist draws parallels to the former Soviet Union, noting that Soviet citizens did not “wake up” to the horrors of their regime upon its fall. Instead, they turned against the system only when its incompetence and intrusiveness became too inconvenient in daily life, with no grand self-reflection. The same pattern, the essay asserts, applies to every communist, socialist, or democratic socialist regime of the last century.
The author contends that even if some leftists eventually turn against their ideology—when it begins to negatively affect them personally—they will never grapple with the historic horrors their movement has wrought, because “the horror is the point.”
Righteous Punishment
According to The Federalist, leftists view the pain and misery they inflict as righteous punishment for a decadent and corrupt capitalist system. Collateral damage to ordinary people is either excused as necessary to bring down the system, or blamed on the system itself. For instance, the piece suggests, leftists would argue that junkies become more addicted to drugs not because of loosened drug laws and free needles, but because the oppressive capitalist hierarchy causes such psychological trauma that they turn to hard drugs just to cope—and that in the utopian future, such drugs would be used only responsibly, for fun.
Power and Rewards
The essay also argues that many leftists simply cannot or will not abandon their ideology because it brings too many rewards—whether it allows them to inflict their neuroses on others, fill their bank accounts, or, most fundamentally, gives them power over others. It dismisses the possibility that figures like Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, or Anthony Fauci would ever sincerely recant their dogmas on television or in congressional hearings, warning that believing otherwise means their lies are working all too well.
Electoral Consequences and a Hard Truth
While acknowledging that leftist misdeeds may haunt them at the ballot box for a few election cycles, The Federalist notes that political memories run short, especially when one party is “filling the country with foreigners” who don’t know or care about past crimes, and when that party uses government largesse to hand out money and favors to supporters. The piece points to current midterm polling as evidence that large portions of the electorate have not woken up to the left’s misdeeds, asking why we should expect true believers to do so.
The hard truth, the essay concludes, is that many leftists are too far gone and will never emerge from the madness that has possessed them. They will lie, equivocate, and ignore relevant facts rather than own up to their disastrous mistakes. The Federalist calls for these leftists to be “crushed and driven out of public life” and for their ideology to be “quarantined from the general populace,” describing leftism as “a disease, of the mind and the heart.”
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/08/28/leftists-will-never-self-reflect-and-they-will-never-apologize-for-the-horrors-they-inflict/