What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party, Senator? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every one of those programs. Every one. So when you try to hurl the word liberal at my feet as if it were something dirty, something to run away from, something that I should be ashamed of, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and wear it as a badge of honor.
—MATT SANTOS, THE WEST WING
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
—ANTON CHIGURH, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Prick a liberal, do they not bleed? Of course—they’ll bleed all over you like a Romanov’s second cousin. Do they not, like us, prefer things be good, rather than bad? In some very general sense, yes. And, as the first epigraph above lays out, do they not have a record of popular legislation to their name? To be sure, and boy, do they love to bring it up.
Why, then, do we hate the lib?
The essential problem is not that liberals are “as bad” as conservatives but rather that there is a giant sucking void at the core of their being. In place of real beliefs, liberals have guilty consciences; in place of politics, they have a Democratic Process to assuage those consciences. This process pits tepid reforms against a deranged and revanchist right wing with no such inclination toward consensus or incrementalism. Despite its claim to the mantle of American Progress, the liberal algorithm produces positive social change or legislation only when pressured—sometimes terrorized—by militant and/or popular left-wing movements. Without an organized and popular Left, liberals end up negotiating themselves into oblivion, moving the country, inevitably, to the right.
If you’re of the millennial generation and even slightly left of center, liberals and the Democratic Party have been the only game in town as long as you’ve been alive. Your parents most likely protested the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movement, and have been patting themselves on the back ever since. But the litany of bold, progressive legislation liberals always point to is at least thirty years old, and it’s been eroded by both Republican and Democratic governments since. All those great liberal achievements have been systematically dismantled both by the Right—who’ve made such destruction their mission—and Democrats and liberals themselves, who believe they have to “innovate” their ideas and move to the center to win elections.
(Yes, yes, we know that liberal and Democrat are not actual synonyms. But by the time of FDR, the party’s central leadership was liberal. And with LBJ, it had generally become the liberal party, while the Republican Party shed all its John Lindsays and Ed Brookes and fully blossomed into a pulsating, Jesse Helms–shaped blob.)
Your parents likely considered themselves pretty radical when they were your age. They were known to enjoy “good vibrations,” solid wages backed by union power, a college education that cost a nickel, and the ability to go to the doctor without selling their car to pay for it. But since those days, America has jerked to the right, and so liberals had to do the same in order to win elections and keep the country from moving further right!
This is the basic liberal mantra, and it’s fitting that it takes the form of an excuse. Its end result is a political system irrevocably weighted toward the forces of reaction. Coincidentally, by almost every metric, you are poorer and your life is more precarious than your parents’ were at a similar age. Get over it, snowflake; this book is your participation trophy.
Unfortunately, the eternal wimp-out shows no signs of slowing down. These days, there are two kinds of liberals: those who vote for Democrats because the alternative is worse, and those who get teary-eyed at the thought of supporting Cory Booker or some similarly phony slug. The latter are just moderate Republicans and should be written off completely. The former deserve better but probably have some misplaced attachment to the political tradition of “standing up” to the right wing. These poor souls can be spared the Chapo Reeducation Center (with our patented Lib-ovico Treatment), but only if they have imbibed the lessons and history laid out in this chapter and inform on their parents to the Chapo Central Committee.
Much of the American history you learned in your ACLU-funded madrassa would have you believe that America was founded by a mix of religious zealots, genocidal frontiersmen, and slave owners. That history is correct. However, it ignores the fact that for every ten rugged, conservative types you read about, there was at least one dainty tattletale willing to make a stand for peace, justice, and compromise. We don’t know much about these men and women because they utterly failed to achieve either peace or justice in the blood-dimmed tide of American history.
But this tradition lives on today—for example, in the words of Uncle Joe Biden, who in fall 2017 laid down this wisdom: “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
People like Biden have been present all through history. Despite not always having a word for their beliefs, these brave souls were early ancestors of the modern American liberal. Let us now take a brief trip through time and shed light on some history even Howard “Big Dick” Zinn probably didn’t tell you about.
In colonial New England, most people’s lives were defined by hard work, NoFap, and an austere Puritanical religion that offered scant opportunity for undoing the belt on your hat and having a good time. Perhaps the only moment a good Pilgrim could get a bit loose was during one of the periodic outbreaks of mass hysteria that would crop up whenever a dairy cow’s milk went sour, a goat looked weird, or a widow stood to inherit any amount of property. Agents of the devil were afoot. In the sweep of witch fever across seventeenth-century Massachusetts, one can see the stirrings of an early form of American liberalism: those who sought to reform the badly outdated witch-identifying standards and practices of their communities. Towns like Salem, Ipswich, and others were unfortunately stuck in Calvinism 1.0, badly in need of better data on women seeking congress with the devil.
Social reformers emerged from these dark, narrow New England glens to champion “reality-based” witch trials: Men like Abstinence True-Facts and Josias Goodmen-Project pushed back against the pervasive ignorance and prejudice of their time, fighting for higher standards of evidence, as well as more humane punishments for those convicted of consorting with the dark side, such as the right to be burned at the stake by a mob of your peers. They engaged in spirited and respectful debate with the social conservatives of their day, men like Joseph Glanvill and Cotton Mather. Indeed, True-Facts and Goodmen-Project defended famous witch trial defendant Sarah Good on the grounds that the spectral evidence introduced against her was procured illegitimately. They issued scathing takedowns of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World for being improperly footnoted.
Unfortunately, Good was executed anyway, and for their brave stand for the rule of law, science, and human rights, both men were prosecuted and covered with stones until their bodies were crushed. It’s rumored that Goodmen-Project’s last words to the Court of Oyer and Terminer were, “Thou art not aware of how most foule thou appeareth at this moment.”
For these early American libs, being crushed to death by stones was a small price to pay for being on the right side of history. By insisting that more than one eyewitness was needed to confirm a sighting of an apparition, these bleeding-heart Puritans helped save the lives of countless women who would have otherwise been lost to shoddy or, at times, completely unfounded accusations of getting head from Beelzebub.
In the lead-up to the American Revolution, relations between the thirteen colonies and Britain were strained by the issue of the Crown’s aggressive taxation. With the passage of the Stamp Act, enraged patriot groups, such as the Sons of Anarchy, took up “No taxation without representation” as a rallying cry. At the same time, lesser-known nationalist groups like the Project for an Independent America (PIA) also organized around the issue of taxation, but unlike the scruffier roving patriot gangs, the PIA actually wanted more taxation to pay for charter apprenticeships and programs to teach children to tie complicated sailor’s knots, the eighteenth-century equivalent of coding.
The greatest liberal icon of the first half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Henry Clay, fittingly known as the “Great Compromiser” for his preternatural ability to bring both sides together. Clay understood that at the end of the day, everyone—Whig or Democrat, slave owner or abolitionist, Irishman or human—was a white male landowner and ought to put their differences aside and come together over a cup of switchel to hash out pragmatic policies that would work for every member of the ruling class. To that end, Clay designed the Compromise of 1850, a package of reforms he helped pass by telling Southerners, “If you like your slaves, you can keep them.” Clay’s Compromise stands as a towering achievement for radical moderation and centrism that managed to postpone a bloody Civil War for just under decade.
During the prelude to the Civil War, proto-liberals began to solidify their identity and soundly supported the cause of abolition. However, they were still wary of opposing the evil institution too vociferously, lest they become the very thing they hated. Ever vigilant for ways to demonstrate their moral superiority, Civil War libs sent around a collection plate to raise funds for the damage done to Harpers Ferry by the radical extremist John Brown, preaching, “This is not who we are.” In a last-ditch effort to bring the Southern states back into the Union, libs put forth the Crittenden Compromise, a bold piece of bipartisan legislation mandating that the Constitution could never be amended to end slavery, and in exchange slaves would receive tariff credits they could use to buy their freedom after sixty years of labor.
After the war, Southern whites protested Reconstruction by requesting taverns and general stores take their orders for corn pone and gingham skirts under the names “General Lee” and “Nathan Bedford.” Reconstruction-era libs responded by buying more cornpone and gingham. The Compromise of 1877 was another landmark of civil moderation: on the one hand, it prevented Democrat Samuel J. Tilden from winning the presidency, and on the other hand, the antebellum slave-owning aristocracy regained total political control of the South, engaged in violent repression of freedmen, reinstalled the institution of slavery in all but name, and perpetuated a racial crisis that would last for the next 141 years and counting—so, win-win. One can picture the ancestors of today’s libs standing by, hands over hearts.
The rapid consolidation of capital that followed the Civil War put American industrialization into overdrive, spraying mechanized jets of diarrhea into the faces of average Americans. For some reason, very few people—be they former yeoman farmers driven from their land by collapsing commodity prices or immigrants seeking new lives in the New World—were thrilled with the deal offered by the rising robber-baron class: short, miserable lives spent toiling in mills, factories, and mines in exchange for twice-weekly ice deliveries to their hovels. Riots and strikes exploded in the last decades of the nineteenth century as laborers sought to reduce the danger and drudgery of their work and increase their wages, or at least to jack those ice deliveries up to three times a week.
Liberals of a rising middle class responded by forming the Progressive movement, which ushered in the uncreatively named Progressive Era.
The Progressives sought to soothe the anger and militancy of the restive working class by placing government restrictions on industry. Sure, they took up the demands for eight-hour workdays, safety regulations, and the end of child labor that workers had been making for years and brought them to the seat of power. But they added their own uniquely liberal policy prescriptions as well. After all, what good would it be to lighten the workload of common laborers if their culture of victimhood and laziness persisted? In order to take advantage of the many exciting new job tracks in the fast-changing industrial economy (powder monkey, gear gibbon, axle ape, coal eater), workers would have to cultivate the bourgeois values of thrift and diligence.
Thankfully, Progressives conceived of a smart policy that would nudge the teeming urban hordes into lives of rewarding employment: eugenics. By pairing up the most intelligent and physically robust of the laboring classes and using nimble public-private partnerships to permanently dissuade the less competitive from procreating, desirable cultural traits and skull shapes would be passed along to future generations as less-desirable ones perished. It was a win for taxpayers, who wouldn’t have to foot the bill for jugs of liquor and frayed overalls; a win for employers, who could count on a ready supply of well-bred workers; and especially a win for the congenitally undesirable workers themselves, who could bust nuts without fear of consequence.
The policy received a seal of approval from the US Supreme Court in 1927 when liberal lion Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled in Buck v. Bell that state eugenics programs were constitutionally permissible. Holmes famously said, “Three generations of morons is enough,” in his decision, a statement that would go on to be the slogan for ABC’s TGIF lineup in the 1990s. The ruling coincidentally came just a month before Justice Holmes announced the opening of his own chain of “Uncle Ollie’s Snip ’n’ Clip” mandatory vasectomy clinics.
The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began at the height of a major crisis of capitalism. During his historic inauguration speech, FDR famously declared “Fear ain’t for me” and that he wasn’t “into that foo-foo lame shit.” The Roosevelt years smashed the record for consecutive presidential administrations and drove the pace car for twentieth-century American liberalism.
At a time when democracy was looking a bit worn-out compared to hot new trends like fascism and Communism, FDR’s “Art of the Deal” set up a new, centralized state to not only manage the excesses of capitalism but also to project American power across the globe. It was an ambitious undertaking that sought to stave off a more radical politics creeping into society from the left: the president and his minions saw Communists unionizing black sharecroppers in the South and organizing sit-down strikes in the heart of Fordism and nervously proposed, “Hey, how about some, uh, public works projects and murals showing superjacked workers popping their biceps?”
The good things that came out of the New Deal: unions, regulation of capital, massive investment in infrastructure, Social Security, seizing people’s dumbass gold, dams, street art, and two-for-one happy hours. The bad thing: black people were excluded from pretty much all of it. FDR’s administration systematically upheld white supremacy and segregation as a way to get the votes it needed from Southern Democratic politicians. (Also bad: Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, Japanese Americans were sent to Camp Grenada, during World War II.)
And so, New Deal reforms ameliorated the worst of the Great Depression, but it took the completely top-down, centrally planned economy necessitated by waging total war against the Axis powers to fully end the Depression.
The Kennedys’ Camelot is considered by many libs to be the high-water mark of postwar American liberalism. It’s the administration every subsequent Democratic presidency is consciously and unconsciously compared to: a matinee-idol president with charisma, a pinch of exotic ethnicity (in 1960, many Americans still thought Catholics were a type of bipedal goat), and a cabinet full of Ivy League smarty-pantses. These were the people who would drag Eisenhower’s stodgy, mothballed America across the New Frontier.
The Kennedy regime was in fact so bold and so beautiful that they bungled and equivocated on civil rights, steered America directly into the future bloodbath of Vietnam, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stood ready to nuke the earth to a crisp if one Russian submarine commander hadn’t slept in that morning. For all liberalism’s bragging about “getting things done,” the only person who really got anything done during the Kennedy years was a young Marxist go-getter named Lee Harvey Oswald.
With that distraction out of the way, the rest of the sixties blew up all the contradictions of capitalism just as our country was finally gearing up to become a gay, latte-sipping social democracy. This was a time when America, fat and rich after World War II, took on huge deficits and propped up European and Japanese markets to lock down a global order of liberal capitalism. America was spraying gasoline everywhere, shouting, “My money’s real good.”
At the height of its power, America got a leader with a massive hog to match our massive empire: his name was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he called his penis “Jumbo.” I
Despite being an egomaniacal, racist, Foghorn Leghorn man from Texas, Johnson was also a onetime schoolteacher who cared deeply about solving poverty. Through his dialectical synthesis of both tough guy and carelord, LBJ was shaping up to be the most powerful liberal politician who ever lived, eclipsing even Roosevelt (who was a bro, after all). Swept into office after a national tragedy, Johnson used his first inaugural address to call for a bold progressive agenda—not just a good society, mind you, but a Great Society. In an epic stem-winder brimming with biblical allusions and rich barnyard analogies, Johnson rallied his Congress and his country behind civil rights, a war on poverty, health care reform, robust public education, and the inalienable right of every human being, regardless of race, color, or creed, to say the n-word.
But the contradictions of liberalism forced Johnson to trip over his mighty wang just as things were getting started, in a turn that would cannibalize the Democratic Party and end America’s long liberal epoch: namely, the gory vortex of Vietnam. Technically, it was Eisenhower who initiated our presence there, but JFK deepened it, and LBJ positively juiced it. It wasn’t conservatives who gave us full-blown slaughter in Vietnam—it was a cabinet of educated, elite, enlightened white liberals. And despite all the obvious signs of doomsday, the lamentations from the Left, and the daily horror show on the ground, they got their war. They dumped Agent Orange on farmers defending their land; they ran genocidal search-and-destroy missions, of which My Lai was merely the most famous example; they propped up a series of corrupt military dictatorships; they took a shit on the 1956 Geneva agreement that would have unified the country peacefully; their soldiers raped; their officers tortured; and they dropped more bombs on Vietnam than they did on the entirety of Europe and Japan during World War II. This, as ever, was the liberal compromise position, as most of the American Right wanted to use nukes. In any case, we effectively wiped a whole country off the map.
The liberal brain trust of America had carried out an Indochinese holocaust—but for most libs, crazy as it sounds, Vietnam wasn’t some horrible, pointless, bloody deviation. The sections of LBJ’s speeches about alleviating poverty and creating a more just, egalitarian society at home weren’t contradicted by the sections about “honoring our commitments” abroad (i.e., murdering people in Asia). They were part of the same mission. To this day, liberals view things like no-fly zones in Syria or microloans in Africa as extensions of their oh-so-enlightened social project at home. You see this kind of thought process when people react to the latest US mass shooting by saying something to the effect of, “These guns don’t belong in American streets, they belong in their proper place: in the faces of Afghans and Iraqis.”
Public disgust over Vietnam shot up year after year, but even that might not have been such a problem for Johnson if it weren’t for the disintegration of America’s supposed “consensus” on race. Riots in Watts, Newark, and Harlem exploded in the mid-sixties as black people struck back at round-the-clock police brutality, discrimination, and impoverishment. This was not a good turn of events for the touchy-feely Johnson administration’s plan to “unite” and improve the country.
You don’t need to study history to see how America reacts to uprisings of nonwhites on TV; you remember it from Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. The same things happened in the Johnson era: respectable liberals tut-tutted, responsible conservatives blamed the victims, and CHUDs bayed for race war. And, as with Ferguson and Baltimore, the Democrats in charge during the riots of the 1960s responded with vague bromides and tepid reforms rather than radical plans to end the deep-rooted racist systems that produced the unrest. (They also had the FBI mail every radical black leader a letter saying they were gay and should kill themselves—one of the last examples of liberals knowing how to troll people.) Meanwhile, the right wing, from John Birchers to Nixon’s mafia—branded weirdos and squares only a couple of years before—tapped into the well of hopelessness, chaos, and white rage and prepared a tough-on-crime pitch to win back the country.
Liberalism was on the ropes. But instead of handling the challenges to his Great Society, LBJ stomped his feet, yelled, “I say, I say, I do believe I have the vapors,” and shipped thousands more Americans off to Vietnam.
Here’s the potted history that usually follows: as the Right consolidated power, Vietnam cracked the Democratic Party, pitting pro-war union grunts against Black Panthers and college-educated hippies, which allowed the Republicans to co-opt the working class, a mass of lizard-brained lumpenproles. For the Right, this narrative proves conservatism was always the real answer for the American worker. For some socialists, it proves that well-intentioned 1960s radicals fucked up by alienating union power, the last bit of muscle on the left. And for liberals, it’s completely obscured by their vivid memories of going to see psychedelic bands like Captain Freakout and the Stillwater Jamboree. In every case, this story is another Cold War myth.
It’s true that cigar-chomping union kingmakers like George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, were a bunch of pro-war mummies. And it’s true that Team Nixon exploited working-class resentment of rich-kid protesters amid “hard hat” rallies supporting the massacres in Vietnam. But the whole idea that the working class was uniformly pro-war and middle-class hippies were all against it is bullshit: polls and surveys at the time showed that proles were more antiwar than smug, college-educated elites.II This was the birth of a fake debate still raging today, with upper- and middle-class liberals slamming the dumb slugs of the working class as stupid, racist rubes—which is true to a point, but also covers up the enormous complicity of America’s bourgeoisie in supporting awful wars, draconian conservative economics, and reactionary presidents like Nixon and Trump.
You can’t just blame the baying hordes of plumbers and construction workers for Vietnam or the end of liberalism or the rise of Nixon. You certainly can’t blame the counterculture or people of color. You can’t even solely blame individual politicians like Johnson. So who can we blame, and why?
Truth is, the downfall of the liberal era was contained in its original triumph, the New Deal. That was a massive reshaping of government in response to outcry from the masses, a groundswell of popular rage over the failures of capitalism. But it was still a compromise, one meant to alleviate the pain of the Depression while retaining the basic structure of capitalism—its racial caste system included. Lyndon Johnson inherited that arrangement. The problem was, the compromise wasn’t tenable. It demanded we use “growth” and redistribution to alleviate the contradictions of capital instead of radically changing (that is, equalizing) race and class relations altogether.
The liberal plan was to manage capitalism in a way that would reduce material injustice or want just enough to drain everyone’s energy to build an alternative. And those alternatives were growing. On the race front, you had not only general unrest among black people and other minorities but also bona fide Marxist organizations like the Black Panthers. However well-meaning, Head Start and civil rights legislation weren’t enough; African Americans were trapped in economically deprived areas, and there was no real plan to change that, since it would mean uprooting the hardwired racial caste system that FDR made and LBJ—for all his desire to legally improve the social order—was not interested in changing.
So, liberalism from FDR to Johnson was about accommodating white racism in its most quotidian form while eventually trying to tamp down its more old-fashioned form—i.e., de jure segregation and Jim Crow. But they did nothing to treat the disease, nothing radical that would have been necessary to actually solve the problem, which would have looked something like reparations and the wholesale rebuilding of urban neighborhoods. When that untenable situation devolved into riots, white flight—and therefore money flight—exacerbated the problem.
But it didn’t stop there: since liberal capitalism was an imperial project, you had to enact this futile balance everywhere else as well. You had to be anti-Communist, with a whole anti-Communist foreign policy. So in the sixties, the generals and the wonks faced not only the Soviet menace but also third-world Marxists that needed to be put down. This necessitated destroying socialism as an alternative while also maintaining the military Keynesianism we utilized to get out of the Depression. After World War II, even though the size of the Army was reduced, its function as a subsidized industrial economy continued throughout the Cold War. And the thing is, when you spend years building all those weapons, eventually you gotta use ’em. And that South Asian people’s movement is starting to look pretty dang uppity . . .
And so ended Big Dick Lyndon’s reign, giving way to the equally maniacal, paranoid politics of Richard Nixon. Nixon’s downfall came when enterprising journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sexted with FBI agent Mark Felt to uncover the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Incidentally, the authentic journalism of Woodward and Bernstein unleashed a brain bug into the skulls of American liberals, convincing them that all journalists were brave heroes and that one merely had to ask those in power, “Sir, how dare you, sir?” until they stepped down.
It worked on Nixon, after all. He did step down, and we ended up with Jimmy Carter, a man who did sweaters and offbeat farming long before horny Instagram poetry guys.
For some reason, Carter is remembered as wildly left-wing, immortalized by conservatives as Satan incarnate and by liberals as proof that governing to your left is a losing ticket. They’re right, too: Carter’s pie-in-the-sky Marxist policies of deregulating trucking, airlines, and the credit industry while sending arms and cash to the proto-Taliban alongside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s ISI—this stuff was just too idealistic. And so President Peanut-Lookin’-Ass-Boy lost to Ronald “I Smell Toast” Reagan in a triumph against ableism, causing liberals to hurl themselves back into the darkness until another weird centrist governor emerged from the South a decade later.
It’s worth noting in the annals of Democratic/liberal fecklessness that, in the 1980s, they did keep bona fide lunatic Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, which was a win. Still, despite controlling both houses of Congress during the second Reagan administration, they let a brain-dead right-wing president get away with carrying out an HBO miniseries’s worth of Iran-Contra crimes, which was pathetic.
And here’s a dose of irony to sweeten the pill: Reagan selling arms to Iran in order to fund rape squads in Central America really did make Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.” So if libs want to keep holding up Watergate as a historic triumph for the forces of good, they’ll have to admit that letting Reagan off the hook represents a far greater historic triumph for the forces of evil. At least Nixon approved the EPA while he was blowing up the world; Reagan’s run was an unabashed looting of the public sector. But at the time, in lib minds, the country simply couldn’t go through another Watergate that would further erode Americans’ respect for the institution of the presidency.
After all, it would still be a few more years until a leader would come along and jizz all over the Oval Office.
If fake friend Jimmy Carter cleared the path for Reagan’s assault on workers, poor people, and minorities, Bill Clinton picked up Ronnie’s gun and put the dying New Deal out of its misery.
Clinton ran for president as a cerebral, charismatic figure who harnessed Boomer coolness to play the sax while sticking to the playbook of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. This was a new club of losers who pushed an ideology frozen in time from the moment Reagan beat Walter Mondale, blaming every subsequent Democrat’s loss on the party being too left-wing, too beholden to the Big Labor tax-and-spend policies that voters had supposedly rejected. Conceding most issues to the Right, Clinton perfected the “Third Way” politics that splits the difference between what the people you represent want and what the people who despise you want. (His counterpart in the UK, Tony Blair, carried out a similar revolution inside the Labour Party and, unsurprisingly, went on to chip away at the NHS and team up with George W. Bush on the Iraq War.)
This right turn would be one thing as a campaign strategy, but Clinton, the new and improved liberal, took this shit to heart. Once in office, he declared the era of big government over, “reformed” welfare by kicking a bunch of poor mothers off the dole, ballooned the prison population, vastly expanded the war on drugs, smashed a handful of small countries with bombs lest anyone call him a pussy, and made sure any gay people at the tip of the imperial spear could get killed but not married. The telecom act he signed into law is also the reason why you fucking hate your Internet service provider. Oh, and he demolished the firewall between commercial and investment banking, which set the stage for the greatest financial crash since that big Depression liberals are supposedly so proud of FDR for fixing.
For all his noble triangulating and compromising, Clinton was rewarded with a once-in-a-generation loss of Congress and his own impeachment and prosecution by a half dozen men actively receiving under-the-desk blow jobs from their mistresses during the Senate trial itself.
All the while, Clinton pushed liberals’ dedication to compromise to the breaking point, testing their basic values by forcing them to back a man of obvious moral turpitude. Believe women? Not Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, or Paula “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find” III Jones. Respect the Process? Not before you shunt your wife to a state she’s never lived in to become senator because there just wasn’t anyone else in the fourth-most-populous state who was better qualified for the job. Opposing, uh, eugenics? Clinton’s welfare reform bill paid a $20 million prize to states willing to cut down on out-of-wedlock births. Opposing, uhhhhhh, slavery? In the Arkansas governor’s mansion, Bill and Hillary enjoyed the services of unpaid black prisoners, a situation detailed in a passage of a book by Hilldawg that Bernie Sanders’s oppo team should be liquidated for not having circulated:
When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a long-standing tradition, which kept down costs, and I was assured the inmates were carefully screened. . . . I saw and learned a lot as I got to know them better. We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.IV
Why did liberals stand by their man? After they’d spent twelve years out of the White House, was their despair so profound that they clung to a guy who kinda, sorta won two presidential elections? Were they simply so afraid of the resurgent Right that they felt they needed to triangulate just to stay relevant? Did he just remind them of John F. Kennedy because he was young and fucked around on his wife? Did they agree with what he did?
Beats us. Probably some combination of all of the above. But for as smart and as Process-respecting as liberals think Clintonism was, in practice it was a cascading series of desperate improvisations that diluted any ideological potency the Democratic Party had left. Executing a mentally disabled black man doesn’t placate the Right?V Let’s sign their flatly racist, eugenic welfare bill into law. That doesn’t work? Let’s legitimize their dehumanizing rhetoric and flatter their tribal instincts by calling young black men “superpredators” and signing an anti–gay marriage bill into law. No dice? How about deregulating Wall Street banks—that ought to make suburban moderates like us, right? Oh fuck, why are we losing so many working-class voters???
Despite harassment from the vaguely left-wing Bradley Buds, Clinton’s VP, Al Gore, won the Democratic nomination in 2000. Gore attempted to chart a course between Clintonian triangulation and Naderite progressivism, inveighing against “Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs” while promising to pragmatically maintain the economic prosperity of the 1990s. He chose as his running mate hawkish center-right senator Joe Lieberman (who would later become an independent and endorse John McCain in 2008). And as a sop to social conservatives, Gore dry-humped his wife onstage at the DNC to prove he was horny only for Tipper (who would later separate from Al in 2010).
Gore, of course, went on to shit the bed against an indigo child from Texas. His populist notes sounded insincere, coming as they did from the second banana of the DC establishment who famously went on Larry King Live to defend NAFTA. He hemorrhaged a few million lefty votes to Ralph Nader and, tied to his boss’s policies while lacking his boss’s charisma, lost eleven of the states Bill won in 1996.
But throughout it all, Gore respected the Process. While Bush traveled the country dissembling without a care, Gore prostrated himself before the judgment of Maureen Dowd and the New York Times op-ed page. When one of his advisors received a package containing Bush’s debate prep materials, the advisor recused himself in the interest of fairness and reported the event to the FBI. (Superfun fact: In 1980, Reagan was leaked papers from Carter’s debate prep. He, of course, did the right thing and used them, because he wasn’t nearly as much of a fucking sucker as institutional liberals.) In overtime, the GOP organized street mobs of Young Republican sociopaths—who would all later be rewarded with cushy jobs—to shut down the Florida recount while Lieberman went on TV to say late-postmarked absentee ballots (which favored Bush) should definitely be counted. The Bush campaign succeeded in sowing enough chaos and confusion that the Supreme Court stepped in to shut down the statewide recount, citing the legal doctrine of “Whatever.”
Gore lost Florida—and thus the presidency—by 537 votes.
Bush’s first term, quite frankly, broke liberals’ brains. Deeply fearful of being smeared as unpatriotic, prominent liberal commentators, politicians, and publications fell over themselves to back the White House’s Iraq War and wholesale evisceration of civil liberties. Funnily enough, this compromise didn’t work. Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, was rewarded for his pro–Iraq War vote by getting called an Al Qaeda lover and losing his next election. Spooked by unexpected midterm losses in 2002, every establishment Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004 also endorsed toppling Saddam. Howard Dean, a centrist triangulator from Vermont who likened himself to a moderate Republican in his own campaign book, emerged as the radical leftist candidate, because that’s how awful things were.
It took a “quagmire” in Iraq, the failure of Bush’s second-term agenda, the Old Testament–caliber destruction of a major American city, and a congressman sending horny instant messages to underage pages for the Dems to just barely retake Congress in 2006. But ask around and you won’t hear the Democrats’ midterm victory credited to the public’s natural desire for change from a ruling party that had fucked up so immensely and been so thoroughly discredited.
You might hear it was because of foulmouthed (read: asshole) campaign chair Rahm Emanuel’s strategy of pushing out weaker (read: leftier) candidates in favor of moderate (read: not gay) veterans and sheriffs to fight the perception that Democrats were weak on national security (read: not warmongers). Or you might hear it was because of the Democrats’ “New Direction for America,” a six-point platform featuring such revolutionary proposals as a tax deduction for college tuition.VI You might even hear it was because of the goddamned Netroots.
In any event, liberals were ascendant. A card-carrying latte-swiller from San Francisco held the speaker’s gavel, and if President Shrub wanted money for his war in Iraq or his trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout, by gum, he would have to ask nicely before receiving absolutely everything he requested. In the next cycle, Dems won historic supermajorities in both houses of Congress and, oh yeah, elected a black guy president.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his hilarious choice of running mate, John McCain was actually leading the polls until global capitalism totally collapsed, at which point voters decided to pick the constitutional law professor who talked real good instead of the drooling sundowner constantly babbling about bombing Iran.
Barack Hussein Ahmadinejad bin Laden Obama came into office with a 68 percent to 12 percent approval rating, the biggest Democratic House majority since the early nineties, and, by the middle of 2009, a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Since the financial crisis began, the Dow Jones had shed half its value, unemployment had climbed to a staggering 10 percent and rising, and the global economy had entered a profound recession. Millions of young activists—part of a generation loaded with debt and facing an unforgiving job market—stood ready to take marching orders from the man they helped put in the White House. Republicans were on the back foot, and society was primed for Obama to launch a generational transformation on par with the New Deal.
The young and ready president threw off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and declared, “Let’s find some fucking consensus!”
Instead of Progressives, he packed his cabinet with retrograde Clintonites like Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and, for some fucking reason, Hillary. Instead of a massive jobs program like the Civilian Conservation Corps, he passed a “stimulus” bill that included a greater number of dumbass tax cuts for businesses and mandatory social safety-net expenditures than countercyclical spending measures (about one-seventh of the bill contained actual infrastructure spending). Instead of nationalizing failed banks and frog-marching crooked Wall Streeters down lower Manhattan (like a young go-getter prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani did in the 1980s), Obama administered bailouts and begged creditors to start lending again. Instead of strengthening the right to organize unions like the National Industrial Recovery and Wagner Acts did, he refused to make card check—a system by which employees are allowed to unionize if they collect enough Yu-Gi-Oh! cards—a priority. Instead of cultivating his massive base of grassroots Obama for America volunteers to form a genuine movement, he folded them into the DNC out of the fear that—horror of horrors!—they might criticize him from the left. Instead of ensuring durable Democratic majorities by making Election Day a federal holiday, dismantling Citizens United, and admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states, he and the Democrats in charge of Congress refused to tamper with the filibuster (Process!). Obama himself only endorsed DC statehood well after his congressional majority had been squandered.
Instead of the transformation that was promised, we got the internalization of every wretched cop-out liberals had had beaten into them over the preceding four decades. Afraid of being called nanny staters? Hire libertarian dipshit Cass Sunstein to “nudge” workers into saving for retirement. Afraid of being called partisan? Water down your own legislation in a vain attempt at compromise, then watch it get passed on party lines anyway. Afraid of being called socialist? Pass an inscrutable market-based health care bill cribbed from the Heritage Foundation. Afraid of being called a spendthrift? Put an arbitrary limit on the stimulus bill that’s supposed to save the fucking economy. Afraid of being called weak? Compile an extrajudicial kill list and order your fleet of murderbots to bump off an American citizen and his son.
A funny thing happened on the way to throwing Chelsea Manning into horrendous solitary confinement: despite his deliberate, Rahm-managed gestures intended to show voters that he’s a rational moderate (such as killing Osama bin Laden, the guy literally everyone agreed was bad), Obama was nevertheless attacked as a dog-eating, pork-barrel-spending, troop-murdering, Moon God–worshipping Communist. His cautious approach to governance and respect for the Process were rewarded with a historic loss of not only the House but state legislatures and governors’ mansions across the country. Back from the dead, newly empowered Republicans promptly went about gerrymandering the shit out of the country, crushing labor unions, and passing even more onerous voting restrictions.
Because Democrats gave up on transformational policies that would have galvanized their voting base and the legion of young volunteers who had sweat and bled to put Obama in office, barely anyone came out to stop the onslaught of sociopathic puppy-mill owners and drunk-driving stepdads that made up the freshman GOP class of 2011. The obstructionist House shut down the government, leading to an unprecedented downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. Voters rewarded Republicans’ inveterate disrespect of the Process by giving them control of the Senate.
Thanks to the GOP’s lock on the House, the once-transformative Obama spent his last six years in office as a technocratic dud. He was still capable of some (transient) good deeds: he mandated vital protections for immigrants and LGBT individuals and instituted a moratorium on the deportation of the most telegenic undocumented immigrants via executive order. At the same time, he vastly increased the scope and brutality of our security state and mass-surveillance apparatus, putting the Democratic imprimatur on the most depraved excesses of the Bush administration. In the liberal mind, this was okay. Sure, setting a precedent for extrajudicial murder of American citizens is a little wild; committing to drone warfare in a dozen or so countries after running on a peace platform is a touch much; funding Al Qaeda in Syria and Libya is a stretch; and expanding mass surveillance and imprisoning whistleblowers is not, as the kids say, a good look. But there were editorials lightly criticizing the president in the New Republic (purchased in 2012 by a Facebook oligarch whose husband used it as a springboard to buying a congressional seat), so surely this was an improvement over the stifling groupthink of the Bush years. Score one for liberal democracy.
In any event, making the civil rights of millions contingent on a guarantee from the White House, expanding the imperial presidency, and presiding over a tentacular surveillance state so high-key thicc it would have made Ceauşescu cum made a lot of sense so long as there would always be a Democratic hand at the till. Yes, they lost Congress and over a thousand seats in state legislatures, but thanks to demographic shifts and a booming stock market, Democrats had a 100 percent ironclad lock on the presidency, as evinced by Obama’s convincing back-to-back victories. There was absolutely, categorically, utterly no chance a Republican could ever, ever, ever possibly take control of the White House ever again, insofar as doing so would require winning such solidly Democratic states as Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all of which would remain in the Democratic column for eternity. Now let’s all take a big sip of coffee at the Javits Center and read the 2016 election results . . .
Ah, jeez. Oh boy. Yikes. It seems the human culmination of American liberalism lost to a senile (alleged!) rapist game show host. Welp. Pobody’s nerfect, as the old saying goes.
Dear reader, we will not be so disingenuous as to say we predicted Donald Trump’s victory. To be perfectly honest, we, too, assumed the Democrats’ obviously patronizing bullshit would outweigh the clear and present danger to everyone’s life. And, in fact, it was not a surge of blood-and-soil nationalism that made everyone look like assholes after they posted their prediction maps but merely the same people who always show up for Republicans doing what they always do against a discouraged, disinterested, and disenfranchised Democratic coalition. Republican voters were offered everything they had ever wanted—a new era of brutality and the repudiation of the symbol of Obama—while Democrats were served up four more years of morally incoherent and procedurally feckless liberalism. It was the logical conclusion, and the facts sure as shit didn’t care about anyone’s feelings.
The meanest thing you can say about liberalism (to a liberal, anyway) is that it’s not really a set of beliefs. The values liberals think they own were always historically borrowed from the Left—e.g., racial equality, which American Communists agitated for way before mainstream libs, or women’s and LGBT rights, which the Bolsheviks legalized while US liberals were still coming up with new sodomy laws and barring women from voting.
Beyond those values—which liberals tend to commercialize and monetize anyway—the rest of liberalism is just a system for managing capitalism. It’s a collection of political and social norms that safely discharge the chaos generated by capital through gradual reform.
In good times—say, the postwar heyday of American manufacturing—this system gives the approximation of functionality (if you weren’t a black, nonunion worker). But hit a profit squeeze like we did in the 1970s and liberalism will just as quickly dump the working class, press “start” on a bipartisan algorithm to break union power, and ctrl+alt+delete half a century’s worth of wealth redistribution. The predictable result is a disillusioned and depoliticized populace plucking through the wreckage—people who either check out of electoral politics completely or turn toward the siren call of thuggish reaction.
A generation after the neoliberal turn, the Democratic Party, headed and staffed by self-professed liberals, is arguably to the right of Nixon on most economic issues and committed to a largely symbolic (and almost always negotiable) progressive cultural agenda to mask it. All that can really be expected of a Democratic government at this point is that it won’t appoint another member of Opus Dei to the Supreme Court. Democrats’ lack of vision suggests a historical descent into an also-ran party, one whose best shot at the White House is to stumble through the door after whatever grotesque catastrophe befalls the country thanks to Republican governance. But this party will never—and can never—fundamentally change American politics.
Many liberals hold out some vestigial loyalty to the Democratic Party because they’re the only thing protecting us from something even worse. But guess what? They’re not even doing that anymore.
This is where we are now: American liberals have spent their entire lives focusing on norms, rules, and processes. They’ve chortled at the wacky radicals to their left and conducted the science of the possible, operating on what is “realistic,” the only meaningful political value. In so doing, the Carter and Clinton administrations jettisoned a fair share of liberal principles: Yikes, did we shaft unions and sign health care over to insurance companies? Sorry, we were busy “getting things done,” like deregulating the financial sector and ballooning the war on drugs.
The twenty-first century hasn’t changed libs. Once the infamous third-world Marxist Obama got into office (thanks to a campaign that denounced war, racism, and the superrich), liberals didn’t balk at his betrayals as president. They embraced his realistic positions, like protecting Wall Street after an epochal public looting and massively expanding a War on Terror that will now last 150 years. And then, in 2016, came über-realistic candidate Hillary, who had the best résumé—the most qualified candidate ever!—while mayo boy Bernie Sanders promised things he couldn’t deliver, which were too left-wing to win a general election anyway.
And what happened? Fact-checked, focus-grouped, data-driven Clinton lost to the most deranged presidential candidate ever: a clown, a fraud, a sexual predator, an inveterate liar who has faked every single thing he’s ever done—a giant cube of flesh who embodies all our vilest instincts and our ludicrous celebrity culture. She lost—the Democrats lost, the liberals lost—to him.
And then what did the liberals do? They all went insane, turned away from reality, denied the results of their poisoned politics. They bought every James Bond movie on Amazon, streamed them all at once, jumped into the bathtub, and emerged with epileptic visions of Putin chasing Hillary in an Aston Martin through Mexico City.
No one has divorced him- or herself from reality more swiftly than the post–2016 election American liberal. The levelheaded purveyors of reason, facts, and data have all become the inmates of the Magic Mountain. The Trump presidency invalidates their entire worldview. They’re humiliated and discredited. They’ve been left wandering the hallways of an institution in a dirty bathrobe, zonked on Haldol and muttering about “active measures” and “dezinformatsiya.”
Over fifty years after shit-lib par excellence Richard Hofstadter wrote the foundational text of American liberalism, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the essay needs a big fucking footnote: for decades, this country’s liberal thinkers, politicians, and columnists have coasted on the basic truth of Hofstadter’s writing—that American conservatism is a slapstick crew of loopy, bug-eyed, toxic conspiracy theorists, a carnival of souls either grasping for some glorious bygone era or living in a completely alternate universe out of a bad spy novel, with Russians and Communists hiding behind every corner.
The proudest liberals have now checked into that same asylum. Log on to Twitter or turn on MSNBC or read the New York Times; you’ll get Infowars-level theories about how Trump, Sanders, left-wing podcasts, and even fucking mass shootings are all likely the work of the Kremlin. The libs have gazed into the abyss and punctured the membrane of their psyches. Now they spend their days barking into the void, punching out a Möbius strip of tweets and blog posts, safe inside their own heads, safe from the world that their dull, smug, dead-end politics have wrought. It’s a long way from Roosevelt overseeing a vast new empire of enlightenment. After almost a century of tut-tutting the Left and the Right, the paranoid style has flipped: liberals are the cranks now.
And to them, we’ll quote once more from the wisdom of No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, delivered in his final moments with a cornered, deluded victim: “You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.”
I. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 121.
II. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 135, and Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001), 242.
III. James Carville, quoted in Mike Royko, “Ok, So ‘Trailer Trash’ and ‘Democrat’ Not Always the Same,” South Florida SunSentinel, January 29, 1997.
IV. Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51–55.
V. Peter Applebome, “Death Penalty; Arkansas Execution Raises Questions on Governor’s Politics,” New York Times, January 25, 1992.
VI. Chris Weigant, “A New Direction for America?” Huffington Post, June 23, 2006, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/a-new-direction-for-ameri_b_23684.html.