Liberals Were Never Going to Save You

And if they even knew how to save you, they wouldn’t do it

Another nauseating spectacle come and gone. The American Democrats, in all their self-satisfied glory, patted each other on the bum all the way to their inevitable defeat by a billionaire supervillain from the evil clown dimension, reenacting 2016 like they were stuck in a time loop. Kamala is brat, they recited to themselves, and orange man bad; did you hear what he said? You’re not allowed to say that. There is only one party you can vote for and it’s us. If you don’t vote for us, the one party you’re allowed to vote for, you won’t live in a democracy anymore.

I’m not American but I did grow up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the midst of the Iraq War, and a kind of background loyalty to the Democrats was instilled in me from a young age, at least in relation to Republicans, the party of warmongering, free trade and xenophobia. Then came Obama, of course, and his multi-fronted imperialist wars, neoliberal free trade agreements and record-setting deportations, shattering the illusion pretty thoroughly; and then came Trump, with his literally unprecedented albeit possibly accidental policy of not starting any wars whatsoever, and his somewhat incoherent but apparently sincere opposition to free trade, two policy points which used to be literally the core of the American progressive movement. In the meantime we all watched the Democrats nuke Bernie Sanders from orbit, twice, their palpable terror at the idea of leftish policies made clear for all to see, and then we saw the Biden-Harris administration falling over itself to support Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza while establishment Republicans applauded and endorsed them.

The point is that it became impossible quite a while ago for any reasonable person to imagine that the Democrats were in any way a left-wing party. And if they’re not a left-wing party in any way, the Left shouldn’t support them. And if the Left shouldn’t support them all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to see the whole rotting charade for what it is. Rather than being the bulwark that stands between the American people and fascism, the Democrats are the major impediment to the existence of a real Left in the US. And rather than defending democracy from an authoritarian foe, the Democrat-Republican axis is the authoritarian foe and the stranglehold that this axis holds over American institutions precludes real democracy. The Democrats are the enemy party of the enemy class. The fact that the American enemy class has two parties, and our class has none really, doesn’t make the Democrats any less the enemy party of the enemy class.

Americans often hear shit like this and think it’s just being edgy. And to be fair there are people who talk like this who are just being edgy. But in the end I think it’s more about being realistic than anything else. Hoping and hoping and hoping that Democrats are going to stop being evil for some reason isn’t living in reality. The Democrats will not stop being evil. Why would they? They literally do not have to. As an institution it doesn’t particularly matter to them if Republicans win. They reliably have around half the seats, they fund-raise, they campaign, internally people jockey for status and power, and in four years they’re likely to get the Presidency again, worst case in eight years. Ideologically they have no reason to stop being evil either. The class they represent is not going to suddenly decide it doesn’t need to infinitely accumulate capital in the context of a well-managed American empire. On the contrary, more than ever the class they represent is interested in having at least one of its parties dedicated to defending the stability of the status quo at any cost.

Fascinatingly I think the Republicans, by virtue of the fact that the party is the home of open fascists and also insane Christians, in some ways encompasses more hostility to the interests of capital right now than the Democrats do. Their hostility to capital comes from the right and is not in and of itself a good or useful thing because it’s extremely reactionary in character. But there’s a reason why huge swathes of the American establishment loathe Trump and his MAGA followers. Fascists and insane Christians are animated by convictions that go beyond simply maintaining the status quo no matter what, which at this point is the main platform of the Democrats. They’re certainly pro-capitalist but they can be very hostile to parts of the capitalist class that stand in their way. In general capital is quite conservative, in the sense of not wanting circumstances to change much, because their ability to accumulate endlessly is based on the status quo; and in that sense the prospect of spittle-flecked mobs of red-hatted zealots trying to overturn the way things run can be frightening.

By contrast Democrats are so beholden to the status quo they can’t even murmur the words ‘public healthcare’. They’re so locked into “Republicans are scary” as their main selling point that they refuse to codify the right to an abortion. They’re so loyal to capital that they will never, ever rock the boat. In general they have no convictions whatsoever beyond their own self-importance as the rightful mandarins of American power. They don’t even really care about winning elections. In ‘the most important election in American history’ they first tried to run a demented corpse, then swapped him out for an evil cop no one ever voted for, then just tried the Hillary Clinton campaign again even though it lost resoundingly last time, all while relying on messaging that basically consisted of making smug expressions and threatening people with fascism if they didn’t vote for genocide and the continued power of the mainstream political establishment. Truly a disgusting display which, if you were someone who’d had some residual faith in the Democrats left, I’m sure would also have been very demoralizing.

In any case if there is anything I want the Left in both the US and elsewhere to take away from this ‘election’, it’s that liberals absolutely will not save you. Liberals don’t even care about saving you. If they even knew how to save you, they wouldn’t do it. They’re fundamentally opposed to saving you. And that’s because the way to defeat right-wing populism is to run a working-class candidate for a working-class party who focuses relentlessly on economic issues affecting working-class people while constantly calling the opponent a hopelessly compromised member of the ruling elite; and Democrats will never do that, and never could. The Left must break with the liberals completely and build parties of our own for our own class, and by any means necessary grow these parties into functional forces. Where such parties sort of exist but have been stolen, as with the NDP in Canada, we need to expel members of the enemy class and retake them. This business of allowing the vampires to run everything and acting dismayed when they act like vampires must end, and now is a perfect time for Americans to realize it. We all need to start beating fascism ourselves instead of begging our ideological and class enemies to do it for us.