In July 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summoned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a private meeting. The rising progressive star had Washington’s old guard nervous, having crushed incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in a primary the previous year. Now her staff was making waves in the caucus, threatening to primary moderate Democrats and publicly accusing them of racism.
“[Blue Dog Democrats] certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s,” tweeted Saikat Chakrabarti. In her new book Nothing Left, former Democratic consultant Evan Barker recalls the flap. Days before the meeting, she was hanging out with AOC communications director Corbin Trent when he “spilled the tea” about it.
“So are you worried about the meeting?” Barker asked.
Trent shrugged and sipped his whiskey, she writes, “but I could tell he was nervous.” He was right to be. Five days after the meeting, AOC announced that “Saikat has decided to leave” her staff. Days later, Trent also “resigned.”
“While Corbin wanted a revolution, AOC wanted power,” Barker writes.
Power’s Price
Power and money are central themes in Barker’s book. The idea that power-lust and money drive politics is nothing new, of course. What makes Nothing Left such a delicious read is the exquisite detail with which Barker rips the veneer off politics.
Barker, 35, began her political career as an intern for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in high school. She later did field work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign before pivoting to “hard left” political organizations. Barker admits there’s a seductive intoxication to being in “the bubble” — her term for being in the presence of power — but it comes with a price. Few things demonstrate this more than Call Time, “the period each day a politician dials for dollars, soliciting donations from rich people.”
Barker depicts this “soul-sucking process” with a comical air. Some politicians literally sweat through it. Others avoid it at all costs. Barker’s first congressional campaign ended when the candidate she was working for decided to take a safari to Africa instead of raising money during the campaign’s last leg.
“You are a hideous human being!” Barker yells at her.
Screaming something like this at your boss is a good way to get fired, and Barker was. Yet at the time, Barker was mourning the loss of her brother, who had been killed while serving on a Navy destroyer after it collided with an oil tanker.
The reaction also reveals something about Barker: she was passionate about her job and good at it. Barker’s ability to secure large donations from donors made her a rising star in progressive circles. Working for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Left Rising, Barker helped elect several “Squad” members, including Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamal Bowman.
Money, readers see, drives the political world. Ronald Reagan once quipped that politics bears a striking resemblance to the world’s oldest profession: prostitution. Nothing Left shows there’s more than a little truth to this, but living in such a transactional world comes at a cost. Early in her career, Barker received some advice from Ari Rabin-Havt, a progressive political operative who served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid.
“Don’t destroy your whole life by working on campaigns,” he said.
Barker wasn’t sure what to make of the warning, but readers see what Rabin-Havt meant. The world of power politics is ugly. In Nothing Left, it’s easy to see how someone could lose their soul. Barker depicts a certain joylessness in the impersonal political world, and it afflicts not just politicians and staff but also a listless donor class.
One wealthy check-writer whom Barker calls “Benjamin Allen” (a pseudonym) seems to have little life beyond cutting checks to powerful people. Barker recounts staying with him in his ritzy apartment overlooking Central Park. They go to a Broadway play and eat gelato afterward. Some would be impressed, but Barker pities the lonely older man — “no children, no wives, and no pets” — and sees him as “just a vessel for the world of movers and shakers to flow through, use, and take from.”
At a fundraiser graced by Alec Baldwin, readers get a glimpse of the actor’s wife, Hilaria, who sits “apathetically on the couch in her yoga pants, not speaking to anyone, even ignoring the donors.”
Are You in ‘The Book’?
Nothing Left is filled with such anecdotes, which is likely one reason it has already achieved bestseller status. Another reason is that progressive operatives can’t stop talking about it.
“Whenever Democratic political operatives gather to drink these days, they talk about three things,” New York magazine writes, “their chances in the midterms, who will be the nominee in 2028, and if they have read — or are in — ‘the book.’”
One appeal of “the book” is its often brutal honesty.
“In my opinion, politicians are often high-functioning psychopaths,” Barker writes, “which I am sure is true across party lines.”
Many would nod in agreement at this line, even if they hadn’t read F.A. Hayek’s thesis explaining why the worst people tend to rise in powerful political systems. Though Barker is likely correct that the phenomenon is bipartisan, her experience also shows that ideology has made progressive circles particularly nasty. One reason is the left’s obsession with identity.
Nothing Left shows that race and identity are weapons in progressive politics. Exploiting race to gin up votes is nothing new, of course, but the book shows the extent to which identity seeped into office politics during the Great Awokening. She writes that the pressure to hire BIPOC employees was intense, as was the pressure to signal support for “diverse” groups. Barker admits she often signaled her virtue by criticizing white women (“the worst!”), but acknowledging her “privilege” was more difficult.
A Kansan from a broken family who grew up in a blue-collar community, Barker clearly resented constant reminders of her “white privilege”—especially from people who attended Ivy League schools or owned multiple homes. By mid-2021, Barker was so anxious she found it difficult to appear on Zoom calls with colleagues. But because she feared being labeled a “fragile white woman,” Barker told only her Trump-hating therapist.
The final straw for Barker was being recommended for DEI training after a rival political consultant filed a complaint.
From Progressive to Populist
Nothing Left is a valuable, entertaining book, but it has a glaring flaw. Barker shines when she writes about her family and experiences. Her arc from hard-nosed progressive operative to a straight-shooting wife, mother, and writer is enjoyable and heartwarming. Readers will find themselves rooting for this young woman, who is intelligent, hard-working, and, in many ways, wise beyond her years.
The book is weakest when Barker tries to prescribe fixes for America’s myriad problems.
By the end of Nothing Left, it’s clear that Barker has pivoted from hard-left progressive to right-leaning economic populist. In her narrative, Democrats lost because they focused on culture instead of Americans’ economic pain.
“Democrats should take the best parts of MAGA and the best parts of Bernie and marry them,” she writes. “The way forward is genuine economic populism, coupled with cultural moderation — the magic winning recipe for both parties.”
She also offers advice to Republicans: The GOP should use tariffs to “reshore” American jobs and “steal” the healthcare issue from Democrats by offering a “universal” option.
“If Republicans ran in 2028 on Trump’s MAGA populist platform but then added in a plan for a universal public option,” she writes, “it will massively increase their chances of holding together a populist coalition.”
The passage explains why Barker’s transition to Trumpism was so easy. She wants “progressivism,” just without the race essentialism, transsexual politics, and elitism that have seeped into the hard left. Barker, who grew up with a health condition and was terrified of being uninsured, sees programs like Medicare for All and economic protectionism as the tickets to GOP success.
Perhaps economic populism is a winning political formula — I have doubts — but the matter of how to pay for all this never comes up in the 268 pages of Barker’s book. Considering her background, this makes sense. Thomas Sowell once noted that the first lesson of economics is scarcity: there’s simply not enough to satisfy everyone’s wants. He added that the first lesson of politics “is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
By ignoring basic economic realities — scarcity, tradeoffs, and fiscal constraints — Barker can confidently argue that the GOP needs to ditch “fiscal conservatism that favors trickle-down economics.” (Like many on the New Right, she sees government not as the problem but as the solution.)
“Fiscal conservatism,” however, has been conspicuously absent in Washington. That helps explain why the federal government owes more than $40 trillion and why annual deficits are exploding, with interest on the debt now consuming more than $1 trillion annually. Meanwhile, Social Security is on the path toward insolvency, and the US bond market is teetering, suggesting that the market’s appetite for US debt may have limits.
A reader could finish Nothing Left without knowing any of this. Barker spends not a single word discussing the federal government’s actual finances.
Barker comes from the world of politics, so perhaps she can be forgiven for viewing policy primarily through a political lens rather than an economic one. Yet there is also a certain irony in her prescription: After exposing the venal, dysfunctional world of politics, she wants to give more power to the “high-functioning psychopaths” in Washington, D.C.
Anyone who wants to understand the risks of that approach should read Nothing Left.
Jonathan Miltimore is Senior Editor at AIER. He is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and has had bylines in Fox News, Newsweek, National Review, the Epoch Times, Real Clear Politics, the Washington Times, and other media.
