Twilight of the Liberal Left

An era decisively ends

I was struggling to remember what Barack Obama had done since he left the White House. To challenge myself, I decided not to look anything up and truly disgorge whatever images and ideas had been lodged in my memory. There was the jetting around with Richard Branson. There was a podcast of some sort, a Netflix documentary (or documentaries), a chat with Bruce Springsteen. There’s the summer reading list. His wife published a book that outsold even his own. He campaigned, of course, for other Democrats, whether it was candidates in the midterms or Joe Biden, his successor. This year, he and Michelle delivered speeches at the Democratic National Convention that were extraordinarily well-received. I was there, and I was impressed. I did think, and still do, that if either had run in this race against Donald Trump, they could have won.

None of that matters because the Constitution bars Barack from serving again and Michelle has no interest. They both stumped for Kamala Harris and had nothing to show for it. As Black men bled out of the Democratic coalition, Obama hectored them on the campaign trail for making “excuses” about not wanting a female president. It was professorial Obama at his finest; no hope, no change, merely condemnation for not doing what better-educated elders expected of you. Not surprisingly, few listened to him, and Trump proceeded to annihilate the multiracial Democratic coalition that Obama had assembled in two stunningly successful presidential runs. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was able to cling on to bits of what Obama had left behind—she was still running up the score in Miami-Dade County and dominating along the Rio Grande—and Biden grasped at less of it, benefiting more from an anti-Trump turnout boom that sent him to the White House. Politically and culturally, the Obamas found themselves in a transformed nation, the zeitgeist hurrying past them. The youngest generations, veering rightward, have little regard for them, and aging Democrats are beginning to think of Obama, as the writer Ethan Strauss pointed out, as a Michael Jordan-like presence: the greatest there ever was, but mostly disconnected to the present day. Barack Obama is a symbol, a monument. Like all ex-presidents, this is his fate, and when he’s trundling about doing his surrogate work in 2028, it will be as a specter of what was, and will probably not be again. There will be other Democratic presidents, but there won’t be another Obama.

The dismantling of the Obama coalition—the great surge of new, nonwhite voters into the Republican Party—doesn’t have to be permanent. Trump’s victory resembles George W. Bush’s in 2004, when he also won the popular vote and was supported by more than 40 percent of Latinos. Two years later, a backlash midterm made Nancy Pelosi speaker, and two years after that, America elected its first Black president. American politics is fickle and fluid; coalitions are made to be broken, and loyalty to party is barely skin-deep. What has grown apparent is that, with this Trump restoration, there will be no second Resistance. The social justice left, the so-called woke, is mostly somnolent. The marches are spare. The talk of anti-fascist uprisings is muted. There is no screaming in the streets, no days of mourning, no promises to decolonize any bookshelves. The women’s march may or may not be on, Black Lives Matter is nowhere to be found, and ICE is not getting abolished. The liberal media has not minted any new star journalists, pundits, or talking heads. Few are railing against Jill Stein or the Russians. The CIA and FBI are not getting sanctified. The untethering of culture and politics, indeed, has begun.

These are dark times for the liberal-left—for its media organs, politicians, writers, and thought leaders. Eight years ago, Trump could be dismissed as an aberration. The anti-fascist industry boomed. It was easy, since Trump did not win the popular vote, to call him illegitimate. Autocrats do not stay in power by winning free and fair elections, and the Electoral College is plainly an antiquated mechanism for picking leaders. There was great bile and rage over an election being, in the view of some, stolen—stolen by institutions that allegedly enabled a racist, rural right-wing—and it helped that a foreign power was possible involved. An inverse Cold War dynamic bloomed, with liberals emerging as neo-Cold Warriors against a Russian incursion and Trump Republicans defending the Vladimir Putin regime. There were marches, so many marches, and endless calls to action that radiated with self-satisfaction. This was the era of hyperpolitics, of performing woe as publicly as possible and aligning yourself, as desperately as you could, with the de rigueur causes. There was a season for everything: MeToo, Defund, saving the immigrants. New celebrities were minted overnight. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have been a democratic socialist, but she was a triumph, stylistically, of the liberal-left, and she made it clear it was identity that would be centered first and always. When Bernie Sanders, her quondam idol, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast during his second presidential campaign, Ocasio-Cortez threatened to revoke her endorsement. The progressive left cheered. How dare Bernie sully himself and yak with the racists. There was a future to be won!

Why didn’t they listen? This is the anguished cry of the liberal media critic who was sure the New York Times, despite its anti-Trump alignment, had perniciously normalized Orange Man. This is the cry, too, of the Times opinion page, of elite academia, of the Atlantic set, of the staffers at the Washington Post who longed for a Kamala Harris endorsement, and the many ponderous New Yorker writers with their grayish, interchangeable prose. This is the cry of a Democratic National Committee so sure, after the 2022 midterms, there was nothing more to do than call Trump a fascist ten thousand additional times—if only then, those dolts in Bucks County would listen. And it was Harris herself, feinting toward Obama, who would somehow deliver a mandate absent a single primary vote. There is a style here that might have to be left in 2024: that of the professionalized, practiced, technocratic politician in possession of two selves, one affixed like a plastic shell over the viscous guts where the truth lies. This is showbusiness. Trump is a showman, but he does not do showbusiness. He is raw, crude, hilarious, and disgusting, utterly unchanged by his settings. The lesson of Trump is not necessarily to be Trump. The lesson, simply, is to be as you are, and if you’ve got a raw charisma, flaunt it. Or, like Bernie Sanders, find a set of principles and keep them. Sanders, on the stump, was unequivocally himself.

The liberal-left’s obsession with Trump’s strongman impulses masked, for the most part, the actual policy implications of his victory. The liberals did not talk about his desire to strip regulations from the financial markets and let the crypto-volk run wild, perhaps setting up the nation for another speculative bubble or something far worse. They failed to remind voters that Trump did not care whether they drank clean water because he would, inevitably, gut the EPA anew. More importantly, though, they had no vision for what came next because anti-fascism, on its own, lacks any kind of affirmative argument for tomorrow. Americans believe in democracy enough that they are betting Trump won’t smash it apart. They want easier lives: cheaper housing, cheaper food, and cheaper healthcare. Culture matters too, and the social justice left never understood that either. Cosmopolitan demands don’t work outside of college campuses and corporate boardrooms. The NGOs were never serious enough about the practice of politics in the streets of an inherently heterodox nation.

For those intrigued by newness, the second half of the 2020s might prove a tad more invigorating than the first. Trump is a retread, but the Democrats cannot be. All of their icons are vanquished. Obama single-handedly resuscitated two major political careers and his country suffered for it; there is some Shakespeare in that. Biden was a failed presidential candidate until Obama made him his running mate in 2008. It was Biden’s obstinance that yielded the great Democratic disaster of 2024. Hillary Clinton was a failed presidential candidate who Obama appointed his secretary of state and then decided, for reasons never entirely clear, to anoint as his successor. He bypassed Biden, his own vice president, who back then displayed no signs of senility. Biden might have beaten Trump in 2016. Instead, Biden backed away, using the death of his son as an excuse for what actually happened: Obama whipping elite donors and endorsers behind Clinton. This experience stuck with Biden and likely convinced him, during his first term, he could not give ground again.

Consider that run: Clinton, Biden, Harris. Three politicians who were inextricably bound to predecessor regimes. Three politicians who were not terribly talented. None had triumphed in swing states. None had won, with any consistency, competitive statewide elections. None, most importantly, resembled Obama, who had no great dynasty or institution behind him, no legacy to be shackled by. Obama, like some cautionary Greek myth, could not the learn lessons that his own career should have taught him. A meteor burns bright, and Obama was blinded by his own light. Only he knows why he foisted Clinton on America. Now, like the rest of us, he will be forced to drink in another Trump term. The fading reality TV star he once mocked at that Washington dinner will be, barring a health crisis, a two term American president. Whereas Obama, eight years on, has plainly left little to the Democratic Party, Trump has thoroughly immolated and rebuilt the Republicans in his image. He is as consequential as Reagan and Nixon, and he might loom in American life just as long. The Trump era began when he descended the golden escalator in the middle of 2015 and it might not end until 2028. The next Republican to run for president will not be able to do it without Trump’s firm endorsement. His is a cult that is now far too large to be called one.

Now, for the Democrats, it is all wide open. There will be no one anointed in 2028. Instead, there will be a long, bloody fight for the nomination, and that is democracy. The liberal-left resistance, meanwhile, will have to stagger into a future they failed, over and over again, to head off. No movement, perhaps, has accomplished less. No movement has done so little to reach what was supposed to be an existential goal. Trump, eight years into the resistance, is at his apogee. The editorial boards and NGO bosses and magazine writers and braying congressmen and MSNBC panelists must contend with this bare, inarguable fact. The electoral map ran blood-red. How? Why? It was the racism of an Arab majority city voting for Trump, the white supremacy of the Bronx, New York’s poorest borough, deciding Trump needed more of its vote than ever before. Pundits prattle about misinformation, as if all the voters were toddlers who needed to be bolted down and told why Brat Summer was so vital for the future of the republic. There are calls now for a feminist Joe Rogan, as if the actual Rogan did not already endorse a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The liberal-left reaps what it sows. It was not merely Trump that was chosen. It was the not-Democrat, the option that wasn’t in power. A vote is a middle finger aimed to the sky. In the heat of all this, the liberal-left will have to recalibrate or dissolve. Radical chic is fading. The Hitler analogies are played out. So are the speech wars. They will have to, somehow, consider material conditions. This is never easy if you’ve never lived anything close to a precarious life. Harder, still, if you’ve allowed condescension and indignation to become the pillars of a worldview. The smug never inherit the Earth. If only the Bible printed this, or someone took it to cable television in time. Much grief could have been saved.