US liberalism offers nothing for workers or the left
In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page made what seemed like a bold claim: “If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened”. In 2024, that became clearer as billionaires flaunted their influence in the US electoral circus.
It wasn’t just that one corrupt and noxious billionaire, Donald Trump, won the presidential election or that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, used his social media platform and wealth to land a spot as a “virtual” co-president. Billionaire Democratic donors for months propped up President Joe Biden, before driving him from the presidential race, having been assured that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, would run a business-friendly, centre-right campaign.
In 2024, the American oligarchy emerged from behind the curtain. More accurately, 2024 marked the year when oligarchic tendencies that had been gathering force for decades came into full bloom. Months before Trump narrowly won the election, the Supreme Court, whose unpopularity rivalled Biden’s, granted Trump and future US presidents expansive impunity even to commit crimes while in office.
The liberals—the leaders of the Democratic Party and its associated non-governmental organisations, intellectuals, media and fundraisers—said the 2024 election was a referendum on US democracy, maybe even the last-ditch effort to stop “fascism” riding in on Trump’s coattails. Yet despite the heated rhetoric, they ran an uninspired campaign in defence of a status quo that most Americans had already rejected. They showed themselves (once again) to be a party more interested in touting support from “never-Trump” Republicans than in campaigning for real change for working people.
In the process, they showed their contempt for the main source of activist energy in 2024, the movement opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their support for Israel wasn’t a surprise. But the degree to which the liberal establishment—from university presidents to the president of the US—reached to criminalise supposedly First Amendment-protected political activism reminded us of earlier periods of liberal capitulation, such as the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2025, when the Trump administration is trying to outlaw pro-Palestinian activism, or is implementing mass deportations, we will need to remember that the liberals paved the way. When the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that supporting the most restrictive immigration bill in a generation was a clever piece of political jujitsu against Trump, we should tell the inconvenient truth. If you’re competing to show how “tough on the border” you are, you’ve already ceded the ground to the right. And when the voters are presented with the original (Trump) or the copy (the Democrats), they almost always choose the original.
For all their attempts to disqualify Trump and to make their stand “in the most important election of our lifetimes”, it’s revealing to see the liberals and Democrat leaders revert to “business as usual”. The hosts of the liberal MSNBC’s Morning Joe visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, to “kiss the ring”. Biden, who, earlier in 2024, cast his presidency as no less than a Second World War fight against totalitarianism, welcomed Trump—whose own vice president once called him “America’s Hitler”—for a cordial White House photo op. Even the 2017-era liberal “resistance” is deflated.
So, what is the alternative? One path that 2024 should have closed is the electoral road to change that supporters of Bernie Sanders/AOC (New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) reformist politics represent. Since Sanders’ failed 2016 Democratic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, we’ve heard many social democrats say that reforming the Democratic Party is the only meaningful way for the left to impact US politics.
And yet, in 2024, with Sanders and AOC being “all in” for Joe Biden and then “all in” for Harris, that strategy has run aground. And Sanders’ post-election chastising of the Democrats for “abandoning” the working class is much less credible after he and AOC touted Biden as the most pro-working-class president in our lifetimes.
The next few years under the Trump administration will be exceedingly difficult, with many defeats to come. But there will also be unanticipated and heroic struggles that push back what is, despite the election results, an unpopular agenda of social regression. It’s in those struggles, not in the multibillion-dollar electoral circus we just witnessed, that working-class people can win the change we deserve.
