Political apostasy is as old as American politics itself. James Madison helped build the Federalist case for the Constitution, then spent the 1790s organizing the opposition to the party that grew out of it. Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party in 1912 to run against President William Howard Taft, his own chosen successor. Ronald Reagan, once an ardent New Deal Democrat, moved right and popularized the genre’s catchphrase: “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me.” Norman Podhoretz took Commentary to the right with him, a conversion he chronicled in Breaking Ranks. While right to left apostasy among prominent writers and intellectuals was relatively rare in the 20th century, in the Trump era it is a dime a dozen (see the mastheads of The Bulwark and The Atlantic).
Apostates are usually onto something. Their intimacy with their former comrades gives them a feel for hypocrisies and failures that outsiders often miss. Whitaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy turned TIME magazine editor, knew from the inside that communism was not merely an egalitarian ideal gone astray but a totalitarian system sustained by espionage, terror, and disciplined lying. Reagan had a plausible case that punishing marginal tax rates and an overgrown regulatory state were constraining economic growth. Podhoretz saw that parts of the New Left had moved beyond opposing the Vietnam War to condemning the United States itself, romanticizing Castro and revolutionary violence, and conflating liberal democracy and middle-class life with racism, imperialism, and repression.
The trouble comes when a valid criticism hardens into an ideology of its own. Chambers turned his disillusionment with communism into an indictment of liberalism; Reagan elevated hostility toward government into a governing philosophy; Podhoretz’s fury at the far left’s affection for Hanoi led him to believe that America could reshape the world through military intervention. Often trenchant critics of their old friends, apostates don’t always apply the same discernment to their new ones.
In the Donald Trump era, apostasy is more likely to play itself out on social media than in intellectual magazines. In August 2024, Evan Barker, who had spent much of the previous decade raising money for insurgent progressive candidates—some $50 million, by her own count—walked out of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago during Oprah Winfrey’s speech. The 33-year-old recorded a video denouncing her party as out of touch with the working class and posted it on TikTok. It got millions of views.
Nothing Left is the book-length version of her TikTok heresy. It’s meant to be part exposé of the political money machine she helped operate, part chronicle of progressive campaign culture at its post-2020 “woke” peak, and part explanation of how a young woman with a congenital medical condition whose life was saved by Obamacare came to support the Republican Party that has spent 15 years trying to repeal it. Her critique of Democrats is often persuasive. The defense of her political pirouettes is not, and her book fails to reconcile the two.
I spoke with Barker recently to try to make sense of the gap and of her ricocheting from left to right and perhaps back again. (More on that in a minute.) Afterward, I found her more likable. But I also better understood why her book was so unsatisfying. As with so many left-to-right converts, what animates her isn’t a new worldview. It’s class and cultural resentment—a feeling that despite views that placed her on the left, she no longer belonged in what the Democratic Party had become.
Barker grew up near Kansas City, bouncing between the Kansas-side suburbs, where her father, who never finished high school, ran a small business selling candy to convenience stores, and a Missouri mobile home park where much of her mother’s family lived. They divorced before Evan’s first birthday. Her mother’s people, construction workers and retail clerks anchored by a union-official grandfather, “floated between poor and working class,” and their politics were union-hall Democratic. Barker was diagnosed as a teenager with primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare genetic disorder that leaves her exceedingly vulnerable to respiratory infections. Before the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, insurers could deny her coverage because of her preexisting condition. (“I’m still sick all the time,” she told me; she has been hospitalized three times this year.) Her foray into politics at 17 was interning for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and the story of her medical woes proved compelling enough that Michelle Obama recounted it in a 2012 campaign speech. “The Affordable Care Act saved my life,” Barker writes. “I thought it would bind me to the Democratic Party forever.”
But she quickly came to loathe the Democrats who passed that law without a single Republican vote. Her first professional campaign gig was for an “establishment” congressional candidate in New Jersey—a wealthy former banker’s wife who, in Barker’s telling, could barely articulate why she was running and did not want to stump on health care. Impulsively, Barker quit and went to work for progressive insurgents instead. Soon she was raising money for candidates backed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Justice Democrats, and the constellation of organizations that produced “the Squad.”
Her explanation for her lurch leftward is straightforward enough. She saw the Democratic establishment as filled with rich people who talked about working families but didn’t know any. Its campaign committees protected incumbents and undermined insurgents. Bernie Sanders, by contrast, talked constantly about health care, wages, unions, and concentrated wealth. Barker admits she “didn’t give much thought to the nuances of policy” that distinguished Sanders-style progressives from mainstream Democrats like the president who signed the law that saved her life.
What animates her, on nearly every page, is class. She broke with the Democratic establishment because she was convinced it was a club for rich people. But what she found among the progressives was, if anything, worse—the same snobbishness more hypocritically rendered by self-styled heroes of the working class. A progressive coworker asks whether she “does Barry’s”—a $500-a-month gym, she eventually figures out.
Before she balked at the progressive left, she adopted their woke rituals, offering up her pronouns and discarding the résumés of white men that came across her desk. There was no home for her on the left, Bernie’s or Barack’s.
Sort through the growing resentments, and you can see the book’s argument coming apart and why it’s less compelling than other conversion memoirs. This is unfortunate because Barker’s class resentments about fancy gyms are grounded in real-world grievances that delivered two Trump terms. Her swath of Missouri and Kansas was hollowed out by trade deals her senators (all Republican) supported; she talks about her mother being unable to make rent while the DNC convention floor chants about “joy.”
Barker’s reflections on woke culture of progressive campaign shops during the most fevered stretch of American racial politics in half a century, is a catalog of small absurdities. For instance, a candidate once rebuked her for asking why his website said “pregnant people” rather than “pregnant women.” Donors, meanwhile, were radicalizing too. One donor’s voicemail greeting, Barker writes, instructed: “If you are not a woman of color, please do not bother leaving a voicemail. I won’t donate to you.”
The freshest material in her book is about how political fundraising really works. Barker managed “Call Time,” the daily ritual in which candidates spend hours in a chair, phoning rich strangers while a staffer listens on speakerphone, holding up whiteboards with instructions like “MAKE THE HARD ASK.” She walks the reader through the choreographed “handoffs” by which super PACs technically avoid illegal coordination with campaigns, and through the trade’s grimmest open secret: Much of the money comes from lonely, elderly donors who have no idea they are funding doomed primary candidates.
What Barker’s sordid tales of Democratic fundraising lack, however, is perspective. She depicts the left’s money machine as proof of the movement’s phoniness, more AstroTurf than authentic grassroots support. Fine. But she ignores the right’s far larger, far phonier operation that often crosses legal lines rather than dances around them. (See Steve Bannon’s work for a charity that was supposedly helping to complete the border wall—the one Mexico was supposed to pay for.) As she promotes the book, AIPAC and its allies are pouring close to $30 million—the largest single-race investment in the group’s history—into stopping Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, where outside spending is running roughly ten-to-one against him. A reader relying on Barker’s telling will assume plutocrats lean far left, that George Soros dominates the donor landscape, never mind the Koch family, the Mercer family, Miriam Adelson, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel. And for whatever hypocrisy the left is guilty of for playing the campaign finance game, they are at least trying to rein in money in politics. In the Citizens United/Trump era, the GOP is simply backing up the truck and loading it with campaign lucre.
When we spoke, Barker offered a telling explanation for her book’s strangest omission: January 6. Surely, that would have been on her mind when she jettisoned the Democrats in 2024 to embrace Trump. When I asked why, she said that she “literally forgot,” promising to include it in a future edition. She then told me the story she wished she had included. On January 6, 2021, she texted with a friend hiding inside the Capitol. Afterward, Barker joined a progressive campaign Zoom call, expecting colleagues to console one another. Instead, they immediately lamented how brutally the rioters would have been treated had they not been overwhelmingly white. In Barker’s memory, Trump’s attempt to overturn an election becomes another story about her coworkers’ wokeness.
That was the “push.” The “pull” was the conservative media ecosystem that flourished during peak wokeness and the pandemic. Red Scare, a podcast on which the former leftists Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan trade edgy anti-woke provocation, became her “personal samizdat.” She watched Tucker Carlson in secret as a “release valve.” These clownish media figures, as much as any grievance, prompted Barker’s rightward turn.
Baker pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 but has given conflicting accounts about how and why. Four days after the election, Baker discussed her vote in Bari Weiss’s Free Press. In that version, she portrayed it as a considered decision, prompted by the Democrats’ abandonment of working-class folk like her and her family. In her book, the same ballot gets filled out “in a moment of impulsive rage.” When we spoke, Barker traced her decision to her “really impulsive” personality, one that “can also be kind of dangerous.”
Like a good number of 2024 Trump voters, if polls are to be believed, buyer’s remorse has since set in. Trump, she writes, “cut social safety net programs, defunded health care, and started new wars. Ultimately, Trump is not the answer I wanted.” This is a weak response since Trump promised in 2024 as in 2016 to eliminate Obamacare. The new war and entitlement cuts weren’t what he campaigned on in his third presidential bid, but his hypervengence at enemies from the Obamas (who saved her life) to James Comey and Mike Pence certainly were. In this year’s Democratic primary, she voted for a Democratic congressional candidate in her Bay Area district. (Yes, she lives in blue land.) “I’m mad about Medicaid cuts,” she told me, shocked—shocked—that Trump and the GOP would cut the health care program for the poor and working class. Health care, she said, is “the reason I can’t become a Republican,” and the GOP is “straight up wrong” about corporate tax cuts. To her credit, she hasn’t fallen for the bromide that tariffs and no-taxes-on-tips add up to a workers’ agenda. But that makes her 2024 vote for Trump harder to explain, not easier. So was the vote a mistake? “I wouldn’t change it,” she told me—admitting, in nearly the same breath, that she would not cast it again. All of this makes Barker less of an apostate and just … confused.
Barker now styles herself a “conscientious objector.” But a conscientious objector refuses to fight, and Barker sprinted to the enlistment office and filmed it, to boot. The first editor to give her a national platform was Batya Ungar-Sargon, then running Newsweek’s opinion section and herself one of the era’s most successful Democratic defectors, a UC Berkeley-educated former leftist reinvented on cable news as a self-styled “MAGA lefty,” as I chronicled in a Washington Monthly profile last year.
Getting love bombed by the right has surely made Barker’s Democratic defection less lonely. She sat for a friendly interview on her DNC experience with Lara Trump, appeared on Fox News and Glenn Greenwald’s show, and wrote this book for Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint, Threshold Editions. There was a practical element, too. She had nowhere else to go: the DCCC blacklists consultants who work for primary challengers. Barker had spent years working for them, so no moderate Democrat would hire her once she soured on the progressive left. I asked whether that dead end helped push her out of the party altogether. She allowed that it “was part of it.”
If her neck-snapping political swings are hard to keep up with, Barker’s criticism of the Democratic Party’s leftward drift has some merit. The Squad’s victories in 2018 helped pull nearly every major Democratic presidential candidate toward Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in 2020. But the causes have changed, she told me. The new litmus tests are abolishing ICE, which she calls “almost as stupid as saying defund the police,” and hostility toward Israel, which she’s, in part, okay with allowing that Benjamin Netanyahu is “terrible,” and that she is “all for criticizing Israel.” Though in a rare moment of lucidity, she cannot fathom why a party that lost the working class has made a foreign war its defining fight when her mother, struggling to pay rent in Missouri, “never thinks about it.”
Of course, the same question applies to the president. Barker now casts herself as one of his critics, but she remains a useful mouthpiece for his party. Heading into the midterms, Republicans have one message: Every Democrat would abolish the police and erase the border. Nothing serves that demagoguery like an ex-Democrat testifying that the radicals run the party. When Barker writes in the Free Press that “this far-left earthquake is only the beginning,” she is not addressing readers who want the party rescued from the Democratic Socialists of America. She’s comforting those who cynically or naively conflate the DSA with the party’s mainstream and the reason it can’t be trusted with power.
“I don’t want to be used,” she told me. But even if, as she described to me, she considers herself an FDR Democrat, she is a poster child for those who want to repeal the health care expansion that saved her life. Perhaps it should be obvious why. Barker is not working class anymore. She lives in deep-blue Northern California, in a house her husband bought on a tech salary, and she has a contract with one of the country’s premier publishers. The financial security she spent 15 years chasing through politics she reached by other means entirely. In that sense, Nothing Left—an intriguing account of class in America, and a muddled one about a series of abortive conversions—has a happy ending, at least for its author.
