An Open Letter to the Democratic Left

So, what now

To everyone on the ‘left’ of the Democratic Party,

I do not want this to come across as gloating. I have just about as much to gloat about as you do, because although I was right, I haven’t achieved anything either, so we’re all on the same page and can afford to look at this from square one.

I do not want to run a sadistic victory lap around a dejected group of people who largely campaigned in good faith to prevent an outcome they legitimately saw as akin to the apocalypse. Some of these people were utterly horrified by some of the actions of the Biden administration, and the language of the Harris campaign, but knuckled down to work in favour of both anyway, because the incoming Trump-shaped meteor just seemed that large. They worked thanklessly, copping flak from all angles: from liberals, from leftists, from conservatives… it must’ve been legitimately agonising to know you’re on the same team as Matthew Yglesias, and even more so to know he was who your masters listened to over you (despite him being wrong about literally everything).

And of course, Matthew Yglesias and people like him won’t be the one to cop the blame for the disaster that was the 2024 election, even though the Biden (and then Harris) campaign team read his newsletter like the fucking bible. No, he’s already turning around and pointing fingers at the campaign that basically conformed to all of his criteria at the time, and loudly declaring woke to be the problem. Not alienation from minorities and working class people. Not betraying longtime parts of your voter coalition by supporting the utter annihilation of Gaza. Not deciding to chase after the support of Dick Cheney over shoring up a steadily eroding lead. The problem, in the eyes of these people, is you.

And they are not wrong. You are trying to turn the Democratic Party into something it simply cannot be. The Democratic Party serves its donors, its super PACs, its MIC contacts, the incomprehensibly massive web of corporate loyalties that are weaved into the DNA of the party itself. You have a single axe and you are trying to cut down the entire Amazon Rainforest.

The Democratic Right will continue to punch left. They will win. You will continue to be marginalised, as you have been since forever. Your presence only provides the democrats with a scapegoat, and your demands for meaningful policy promises will continue to go unanswered, because if they have to choose between the lobbyists and you, the Democratic leadership will choose the lobbyists.

Remember when Bernie nearly won the 2016 nomination with incredibly conciliatory social democratic pledges like universal healthcare? Remember when the DNC screwed him over for something as basic as that? Remember when they instead nominated a grotesquely unpopular state department apparatchik who managed to lose the election to the deeply uncharismatic orange lump who has since been your Public Enemy Number One?

And remember when their response was to nominate another centrist, who won, but then proceeded to create the exact conditions that led to the re-election of said orange lump? And the democratic response is to punch left again, demand that your obedience wasn’t enough, your grueling subservience wasn’t enough, your weeks, no months, spent canvassing for the Harris campaign wasn’t enough, your legitimate blood sweat and tears fighting for something you hated wasn’t enough—and for what? They blame you now they’ve lost, and all your labours to prevent a Trump victory have been for fucking nothing.

Do you have no fucking dignity? Heck, not even dignity, do you even want to win? Is this what you see as praxis? This isn’t praxis, it’s ritual humiliation. You aren’t achieving anything. Please get that into your heads, for your own sake. Since 2016, you have achieved nothing. You are exactly in the same place you started, nearly a decade onwards.

There are movements out there who are opposing the police state no matter who helms it, like Stop Cop City, and they desperately need the help of people like you. People who care about the world and want it to be better. And if you do care about the world, and it isn’t just a feelgood hobby, then you shouldn’t be despairing right now. You should understand, without triumph or depression, that there is nothing left for you in the Democratic Party. And that this is a liberty, not a burden. Leave the liberals behind. Let them fail again and again—as that is what they will do now—and move on to build something better.

The Trump years will be bad, no doubt about that. People have faced worse at the barrel-end of the U.S. military and won. People will face worse at the barrel-end of the U.S. military and win, perhaps even as Trump steers the ship of state. And if your doom-saying is true, if Trump is destined to establish a dictatorship in the heart of North America and turn the guns of the police state inward with a ferocity not seen for generations, then what the fuck have you got to lose? I’ve seen a lot of liberals despair to no end over the results of the election. They legitimately believe it’s all over, and if that’s true, why the fuck aren’t you learning self-defense and organising with your community? Reading up on the lessons made by guerrillas past?

By all means, you can answer with the simple fact you don’t want to. That’s fine. Most people won’t, and indeed it may not even help all that much. But it is the logical consequence of what you’re suggesting. Heck, it’s the logical consequence of accepting any capitalist society for what it is, if you’re actually a radical and not someone bound to liberal ways of seeing the world. I accept if you don’t want to do this, because I haven’t, and I probably won’t for quite a while. This is for much the same reasons as you. I am scared like you, and have a frighteningly little amount of impact on the world like you. But I do aspire to a time where this is possible—where we can take rather than beg—and I think it’s coming sooner than you might think, if the right things are done at the right times. And in any case, it’s a perfectly normal, if imperfect impulse to want to sit back and stew for a while.

But don’t frame your inability to commit to militancy as any raw or calculative way of seeing the world, and reject revolutionary socialism as an impossibility. Unlike you, revolutionary socialism has jumped the first hurdle of seizing power before. Unlike you, history has been moved by revolutionary socialists before. Unlike you, revolutionary socialists have worked and fought and died for their beliefs before. And unlike you, the tradition established by their legacy will continue to inform radicals hereon after.

I understand where you’re coming from. I really do. It’s a really seductive prospect: that history doesn’t have to be unkind, unfair, or brutal. That you don’t have to make any difficult decisions, and have already discerned the Perfect Route to victory, on its winding twisting turns through an infinitely malleable liberal status quo. You just need to implement the right policy, make the right reforms, and, occasionally, maybe go on a protest or two.

The alternative would be chaos, after all. Chaos, bloodshed, and confusion. Because seismic changes aren’t a natural part of World-History, are they? They are artefacts of the before times, or the third world, where revolutions are bloody and violence is common. Now, in the enlightened places and the enlightened times, we can do things peacefully. Diplomatically. Without any of the nasty things.

Do you not see that you’re buying into the myth of liberal universalism, where change is incremental and history is just an exponential trend? Do you not see that this is making you ally with the most powerful and evil people on Earth, just for the frankly nonexistent chance you manage to outmanoeuvre them on their own turf?

Come on. Look around you. Do you really think this is how it ought to go? Do you really think you can win like this?

Yours,
A Disconcerted Observer of American Politics