The last year has been one hell of an eye-opener. One party is openly fascist; the other is the habitual party of war and corporatism, now tripping over itself to play ball with an incoming swarm of fascists.
For all the siloed activist groups fighting America’s many ills, there is still no major political party that faithfully represents working people, with principles that oppose (among other things) the American foreign policy and imperialism that have driven the genocide in Gaza.
And for all the letter-writing, stand-outs, polite calls to Congressmen and Senators, online petitions, Zoom meetings, teach-ins, and donations to “lesser evil” politicians, there is very little to show for it. By now most of us must know, at least at some level, that we are working at cross-purposes by supporting two parties of billionaires while fighting them on every injustice they create — thanks to the mandates we stupidly hand them at the polls, year after year, election after election.
We are well beyond reform of a system that, for my entire adult life, has waged war and regime change on the rest of the world and shows no sign of letting up. We are well beyond reforming a system that shows no interest in improving the lives of average people. And we are well beyond trusting any existing political party to fix it — especially the one that sells itself as the Lesser Evil. They’ve had their chance. Thousands of chances, actually.
The Democratic Party — the party of segregationists in the Sixties, of Viet Nam into the Seventies, Big Business in the Eighties, and Clintonism and wars in the Middle East from the Nineties until now — was never actually liberal, although many Americans (myself included) once held out hope that it could be.
In recent memory we’ve seen the Manchins, Sinemas, Kennedys, Fettermans and Gabbards abandon it outright or unabashedly prostrate themselves before the fascists. In recent weeks we have seen the supposedly “liberal” media make a beeline to Mar-a-Lago to suck up to the new Führer, and we’ve watched “liberal” tech bros suddenly go full MAGA. That one-time “liberals” can so easily flip an ideological switch is a sign of the inherent poverty and unreliability of liberalism.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. If you read history, capitulations by liberals occur at almost every time of economic or political crisis. But it’s not really a capitulation when they’re simply revealing what they actually stand for.
Predatory liberalism — not just the American variety, but in virtually every Western nation — is fundamentally illiberal — or it would not perpetually wage war on non-Western nations and the global South, both militarily and economically. If liberalism were not fundamentally lacking it might show some appetite for fighting fascism rather than continually making nice with it.
As Trump and his scavenging oligarchs begin to pick at and chow down on what is left of American democracy, it’s clearer to me than ever that the root cause of all this insanity is Capitalism. And the loss of the 2024 election was in many ways the rejection of the half-hearted, dual-faced liberalism of an important segment of the American middle class that still embraces it.
Middle class liberals — centrist Democrats for the most part, union bosses, professional and academic gatekeepers, corporate America’s upper layer of management, the MBAs, tax lawyers, financial advisors, well-remunerated technologists, inventors, developers, entrepreneurs, health executives, and opinion-shapers — for all their lawn signs and donations, they’re not really willing to risk privilege, status or employment by fighting the hand that feeds them.
As a politically ambiguous class they’re confused about which side they’re on. And for all their half-hearted activism, that side has never been squarely or decisively the side of justice for the poor and oppressed. Both Gaza and liberalism’s new accommodation with fascism bear this out. The reluctance to abandon the Democratic Party is another symptom.
In 1931, after being terrorized by Harlan County mining company thugs who invaded her house looking for her union organizer husband, Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On?”
Regardless of where we are in this society, or where we came from, this is the central question facing America right now. And it’s a serious question that has to be answered honestly after considering what such a commitment really means.
Which side are you on?
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