Liberalism Will Cost Us the Earth

As usual, pundits will apportion causality and culpability to particular demographics. There is a lot of bad faith and faulty thinking in this reflex. While marked trends in voting patterns across categories of gender, race, class, income or education are certainly deserving of careful study — say, Trump’s success among lower-income voters and Harris’ among the affluent — it’s dismaying how quickly we are asked to fixate on two-dimensional caricatures of agency: Latino men, Black men, white college-aged women, and so on. The electoral process is an inherently atomizing one. Unlike in other forms of political practice— demonstrating, legislating, rioting, even campaigning — we do not vote as groups. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted, the act of voting itself is not an instance of collective praxis but what he termed a kind of ​“seriality” — a set of individuals bundled together without anything truly in common — hence the electoral process’ deep affinity with statistics and marketing. 

No doubt, forms of collective action and group formation do develop around voting. MAGA is a form of passive fandom and spectatorship, but it is also an organized and complex movement comprising a range of institutions from the parish and the podcast to the foundation and the boardroom. As the implosion of Democratic support among Arab American and Palestinian American voters suggests, in the shadow of a U.S.-sustained genocide in Gaza, these are not just census categories but also political identities and their electoral defection is also a kind of praxis. 

The same can be surmised for young voters politicized by the pro-Palestine encampment movement on U.S. campuses. From the shunning of the Uncommitted Movement at the Democratic National Convention to the reprehensible dispatching of Bill Clinton to Michigan to peddle lies about ​“human shields” and ramble about Israel’s ancient roots in ​“Judea and Samaria,” it’s fair to say that these were collective political identities and concerns that the Democrats wanted nothing to do with, even when studies indicated it could lose them swing states. 

Hannah Arendt once quipped that ​“those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” For many today, the forgetting is not so easy, rendering it much harder to make that choice. 

But as damning as Democrats’ unshakable complicity with Israeli aggression has been, the comprehensiveness of the defeat speaks to a broader failure, which is not just a matter of strategy — who really thought there were enough suburban white women voters for whom a Cheney endorsement sealed the deal? — but of the meager political vision Harris represents. 

It is especially symptomatic that, as The Intercept reported, ​“abortion measures outperformed Harris in every state with bodily autonomy on the ballot,” even as the Harris campaign made reproductive rights a key campaign plank. A similar pattern obtains for labor rights. Despite Democrats showcasing UAW support in the first weeks of the campaign, there was little sense that this was part of a project to secure and expand union membership and workers’ rights as bold as the nightmarish counter-revolution of Project 2025 — nor even a repeat of Biden’s more progressive 2020 campaign, which had to adopt some of Bernie Sanders’ campaign agenda after blocking his path to the presidency. When Harris responded to questions about Gaza by pivoting to voters’ concern about food prices, her answer wasn’t just morally obscene but also a complete failure to assuage the very real economic anxieties that have played such a salient role in Democrats’ rout. Given she’d already declared her administration would differ little from Biden’s — save for adding a Republican cabinet member — it was hard to imagine her charting a more promising path when it came to either groceries or genocide. 

Of course, to succeed Trump doesn’t even need ​“concepts of a plan.” It’s no surprise that he repudiated Project 2025. Not because swathes of it won’t be implemented; they will. But because a kind of structured incoherence (a fascist ​“weave”?) is his strength. Just like the border wall’s incompletion didn’t dent the efficacy of that xenophobic rallying cry, there’s no reason to believe that Trump failing to carry out ​“the largest deportation operation in American history” will alienate his supporters. Which isn’t to say they won’t try, or that the ghoulish Stephen Miller won’t be at its helm. We can be certain in any case that the everyday terror that stalks the lives of the undocumented, the unhoused, the racialized and the precarious will be ratcheted up.

In a deeply unequal society in which most peoples’ everyday life is wracked by precariousness, anxiety, debt or inflation, the forces of authoritarian populism always have an advantage. Making the vulnerable responsible for the hardships of the many or stigmatizing some elites to enshrine ever greater inequality is an old game, to which Trump has added his own twist — part wrestling kayfabe, part grifting infomercial, part reality show. 

In the United States and elsewhere (think of French President Emmanuel Macron’s disastrous electoral machinations), the liberal centrism or ​“progressive neoliberalism” that casts itself as the bulwark against fascism is proving to be anything but. Not only has it contributed to the social miseries upon which reactionary politics feeds — mass incarceration, predatory finance, imperialist war and the rollback of social welfare have all been bipartisan projects in the past half-century — but it stands revealed as a failed brand, kept alive primarily by the investments of party elites and donors, but also by what historian Adam Tooze calls its profound narcissism. This delusional conviction that it is a historical force for progress, sanity and the good makes elite liberal politicians slip easily into paternalism and condescension—something many voters find more offensive than direct insults. 

While presenting itself as the antidote to a rising fascist tide, establishment liberalism is in denial about the many ways it has been the cause or enabler of that tide. Its role in seeding the conditions for far-right ascendancies is an old tale, but it is playing out yet again, as ​“talking tough” on the border or catering to war hawks erodes the Democratic electorate while utterly failing to win over Republicans or independents, who are far more at ease wielding weaponized inconsistency. As Mussolini declaimed shortly before seizing power, fascists had ​“the courage of breaking into smithereens all the traditional political categories and calling ourselves, depending on the moment, aristocrats and democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarian and anti-proletarian, pacifists and anti-pacifists.” 

Trump — as the anti-war/pro-genocide candidate, who can praise Musk’s layoffs while posturing as a friend of the worker — is happy to revive that ​“relativism” which the Italian dictator claimed as one of fascism’s hallmarks.

An anti-fascist politics does not require constantly decrying the fascism of your opponent (which may prove numbing or alienating) but it certainly has to cleave to a different logic than that which ​“depends on the moment” or on electoral calculus alone. It needs to discover ways to not just make emancipatory ideas popular — fortunately, many of them already are — but to weave them into a project rooted in everyday needs. To this end, liberal centrism is not just useless, it is an obstacle. It demands endless moral and political sacrifices from leftists and progressives, while not even serving as a decent vehicle for the kind of reformist compromises we might expect from representative politics. When existential issues are on the agenda, from genocide to the mounting climate catastrophe and the manifold crises it will bring, betting on liberalism is a fool’s errand.