Liberal to Left Pipeline PT2
Strategies and Stakes
Populist candidates who do engage their voter base’s interests, like Zohran Mamdani in New York City, and first-term Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum, have strong approval ratings. Populism is good strategy. Trump won on a populist strategy.
Too often, liberals confuse the left’s moral arguments with an infantile political strategy. Liberals present stale options, refusing to craft a thoughtful path to victory, as long as they remain coddled by lobbyist money. Just as a cynic sits atop a hill, smugly throwing useless facts at imaginative builders, liberals refuse to do the work, expending energy in the wrong directions while calling that strategy.
The Democratic Party Has Bad Strategy
If we examine swing states, we would find that the Harris campaign ignored key issues for many of them. She was lenient on fracking, which was important for Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes). She was warned she would lose Michigan (15 electoral votes) because of her pro-genocide stance on Gaza, even as the Uncommitted Movement gave her opportunities to win that voter base. The economy was critical for other swing states, but she never mentioned Medicare for all or free college to appeal to millions of people’s financial burdens. With basic pivots in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia alone, she could have won.
Instead, she went off base to pander to conservatives on harsher border policies than previous Republican presidents, even campaigning with Liz Cheney. If winning conservatives was key, they could have easily captured previous election years’ Bernie conservatives in the working class, who were concerned about the cost of living. But the strategy completely ignored that language to indulge the Democratic Party’s corporate donors, who want to believe that everything is wonderful for everyone, despite inflation, because their portfolios are doing well. American voters crave substantial change, not incrementalism, but only the Republican party delivers on their plans. Unfortunately, those plans include rescinding constitutional rights.
The Culmination of Lesser Evil Voting as a Strategy
The “lesser evil” candidate must adapt to bad strategy call outs from voters in order to stand a chance at the polls. A smart campaign can make messaging adjustments to actually appeal to the majority of voters. Even if insincere, they can lie better - weak policy, not substantial enough, move to incrementalism section). It is much harder to get millions of voters to fall in line with neglectful platforms and dismissive candidates who dictate what’s important to citizens.
The lazy optics of “lesser evil” rhetoric is also bad strategy. A party base that joyfully celebrates a “lesser evil” candidate to convince others to vote for them does not truly believe their option is the lesser evil. Either it is deploying a half-baked manipulation tactic, or it does not grasp the gravity of the era we are in, and comes off as delusional and ill-equipped to lead. Voters who have begrudgingly supported out of touch Democrats under the weight of cruel options know what collaborating with “lesser evil” feels like. It doesn’t lend itself to “brat summer” meme energy.
The bad “lesser evil” strategy with voters reinforces skepticism about how much a candidate can be pushed toward any good policies once in office. Time and again, voters have learned that once the “lesser evil” candidate is elected, liberals abandon the work, leaving citizens to feel that their one vote and singular leverage was yet again swindled away from them. That kind of game can only be played a limited number of times before people start using their vote to be heard in other ways. One phrase often heard in leftist circles suggests that lesser evil voting kicks the can down the road, and we’ve run out of road.
Longitudinal, Broad Strategy Neglect
With all the talk of strategy, Blue MAGA liberals never seem to bother about strategy outside of election years. One will never hear them urgently working to reform systems that disadvantage the democratic base such as gerrymandering, the electoral college, campaign finance laws, and voter disenfranchisement. But they are absolutely experts of strategy when it comes to bludgeoning anyone to the left during an election to fall in line, missing the authoritarian nature of that inclination entirely. Once their civic duty to vote is done, they go back to sleep feeling secure in their daily routine. They go back to “brunch”. Everyone else who remains aware puts out the fires that continue under their negligence.
Liberals often accept the two party system as a given, and have rarely moved to create a fairer playing field. Ranked choice voting was only implemented as an elections system in New York City in 2019. Meanwhile, a number of European countries have coalition governments that are not winner takes all, first past the post election models. Reactionary American liberals who have never pushed to make their local and national elections fair, inevitably call for pragmatism at the eleventh hour from everyone else. As if everyone should accept the current conditions they have no interest in changing, which sounds awfully conservative.
Some liberals lecture leftists that “voting has consequences,” when they protest Trump, as if it is some grand FAFO realization to the left that MAGA policies are horrific. Liberals remain oblivious to the horrific, Democrat-enacted policies that the left has consistently protested.
Neglect has consequences. The looting of America accelerated (link) long before Trump. The protections of citizenship eroded under Democrats, as corporations brought home exploitative practices from abroad with greater deregulation. Militarized police and lack of accountability for their brutality went unchecked under liberal leadership, not to mention the normalization of ICE long before the imperial boomerang era. Now that it is blatant under Trump, and unavoidable for people who were previously comfortable, it is suddenly treated as a problem. Just like climate activists counting the degrees to irreversible damage, leftists have watched the ratchet effect for a long time, and are in a different place mentally, emotionally and politically than their liberal counterparts, who tend to be very quiet between elections.
Liberal Misconceptions of the American Left Continued
5. Leftists are Dangerous, Violent and Unreasonable
As mentioned earlier, the solutions to our major problems have scientific and financial solutions. Our obstacles are entirely political. Once Greta Thunberg connected the climate crisis to the problem of relentless growth and exploitation, she realized the root problem is capitalism. Subsequently, many of her darling liberal fans no longer wanted to platform her, because it threatened their paychecks and their lifestyle. Suddenly, she wasn't endearing and courageous, she was dangerous and ill-informed.
If the left cannot be discredited as hippies with no sense of strategy, then they are stigmatized as dangerous, violent and unreasonable. It is closer to the truth that the left wins globally. Take, for example, popular communist revolutions around the world, not to mention successful socialist governments among allies. The entire might of the US military fought a Cold War to defeat this major threat to the economic interests of our elites. We deployed cultural and political institutions to propagandize about the Red Scare and promote McCarthyism. We executed American communists. We killed American trade unionists. We made general strikes illegal.
The propaganda runs deep. Capitalism is rarely held to a standard, yet socialism’s failures are, even though the military might of capitalism has sabotaged socialism’s rise from the beginning. In America, we are so conditioned to fear caring for a collective that we cannot even manage a pragmatic conversation about the social programs capitalist European countries have.
Tactics to undermine the left are intentional. It is a threat to the ruling class exactly because it is capable of sizable political and ideological gains. The seismic protests against segregation, patriarchy, and the Vietnam War of the 60s and 70s led to a backlash to contain future generations.
Since the Reagan era, Republicans, with little resistance from Democrats, defanged our populace. They minimized knowledge of historical protests that successfully enacted change, while promoting civil, (i.e. manageable, containable) methods. They gutted civics education, higher education and journalism (links). We aren't taught about the activists in the trenches like the Black Panthers and AIM (American Indian Movement). We barely know about the Stonewall riots or protests in Japanese American internment camps.
The effects on our culture became evident over time. Anti-intellectualism movements made caring about one’s community "uncool." American exceptionalism gave the able-bodied and privileged the mindset that if they just "focused on themselves" and dismissed anyone who needed help, they'd be fine. Anything to keep the focus away from elites extracting finite public wealth with no end in sight.
Rather than address the root causes of exploitation, liberals act as lapdogs against those who do. In liberal circles, ANTIFA is regarded as dangerous, unruly hooligans. Quite literally antifascists who do not give an inch to fascism, ANTIFA does what liberals believe they do. Liberals capitulate to creeping fascism to protect their social status and bank accounts at every turn. They delude themselves that there is no problem until it is too late, only to turn around and blame antifascists. Historically, liberals have played this role over and over again.
Civility politics to suppress dissent is not new. We should always be asking, “What is the range of change that is acceptable, and who defines the methods?” The Suffragettes’ tactics, and the tactics of union organizers who won the 40 hour workweek and ban on child labor were not orderly or civil. We have suppressed the tactics that work by making them culturally unpalatable, and propagandized people to deem irrational the reasonable responses to institutionalized looting and murder.
Normalization of Corporate and State Violence vs. Demonization of Protest
It is a common cultural practice to demonize people who visibly react to systemic violence and neglect. Take, for example, the condemnation around destroying corporate property during protests versus the silence around the destruction of human lives those companies require for their business model. Look at how looters are portrayed as criminals during a natural disaster versus the common sense to let people who may die have goods in an emergency instead of hoarding them, price gouging, and letting them rot. Look at how corporate profits in health insurance depend on killing people with paperwork, but that is regarded as legitimate because it is sanitized and legal. If it looks clean and civil, it is good. If it looks rowdy, it is bad. The concern for optics and order allows horrors to continue. Notice how narrow the Overton Window has become.
We are allowed to talk about the issues vaguely, to feel morally satisfied, but never to fight for real change. And just as women are taught to police each other in the patriarchy, working class people are taught to police each other in defense of people who would write off our deaths as the cost of doing business.
6. Leftists Don’t Know the Stakes
Many liberals decry the voices of leftists during elections because unity of the democratic base is necessary in an imperfect elections system. For liberals, elections are The Work. The stakes in elections are THE stakes. The worst thing that could happen to us is in the future: Trump & Project 2025. But leftists understand that for many segments of American society, the worst has already happened: the government abandoned or vilified many of us long ago. Leftists took their learnings and now act accordingly.
Genocide brutalized Native Americans and they are living in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Slavery, lynchings, and domestic bombing of citizens, not to mention the pervasive hell of police brutality and the prison-industrial complex. Assassinating Americans and minors for political dissent already happened. Police brutality against students already happened to stifle free speech (60s, 2023). Concentration camps for Japanese Americans already happened. Environmental destruction of local townships’ water supplies by mega corporations already happened. Chemical dumps causing birth defects already happened. School shootings that traumatized a generation already happened. In all of these events, the perpetrators went largely unpunished. Our national narratives barely acknowledge them.
The left is aware of the stakes in and outside of election season, and their work continues regardless of who is in office. If they are employed in professions not in the activist sphere, they often cannot talk about the activism they do outside of the workplace, whether conservative or liberal. In liberal workplaces, it makes people uncomfortable to point out that things are deeply wrong and need rectifying on a hands-on, continual basis (by design since Reagan, as mentioned earlier). That’s the job of the government, and to do so would admit that it isn’t working as it should. That would break the delusion of the American dream, and disturb the hopeful narrative that keeps everyone paying their mortgages in the neoliberal capitalist machine. If acknowledged at all, liberals may box in leftists as having “pet issues” in order to dismiss them, and to not entertain the possibility that something more may be needed from them in society.
Liberals self-identify as people protecting everyone’s best interests with the expert analysis of the intellectual class and the levers of government. They like to quote that first they came for fascism poem but ignore communities when they sound the alarm, tell them to act less desperate for civility’s sake, wait their turn, and above all, respect their elected officials’ negligence.
One could argue that it is actually liberals who do not know the stakes, since they do not confront uncomfortable realities. They believe everything is going to work out, because it has for them, generally. It’s the end of history, and incremental change by people vaguely in charge will fix issues that remain.
Stakes: An Empire in Collapse
For some leftists, the choice is casualties from incremental change that are ignored or casualties from collapse that are recognized and mourned. Collapse also means the next system will have room to breathe and grow without the restrictions of liberal gaslighting. They know the collapse of empire is already underway. Many Liberals do not. Leftists think locally, internationally, and historically, while liberals think in domestic elections, news, and stock market cycles.
Democrats are Not the Fighters We’re Looking For. It is Us.
Liberals see themselves as the vanguard against conservatives, yet they are ideologically and materially invested in the military industrial complex just like their supposed opposition. The contradictions between their human rights values and their capitalist values renders them impotent. To reiterate the sentiment from Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned earlier, “People who can’t draw the line at genocide can’t save democracy.”
Take, for example, the impotence of Hakeem Jeffries’ stance in Congress regarding a Trump takeover vs. the South Korean MPs fight during their coup. Or Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster that changed nothing. Or Biden’s inertia in the face of a genocide that he funded and armed, and had all the power to stop. Liberals cry “leave him alone, they’re trying their best” at no- effort Democrats, expending tremendous energy with excuses for people who do not take a stand where the line is obvious. Yet, Democrats have plenty of fight when it comes to suppressing the left. The question is not whether they are incompetent, but whether Democrats are also intentionally controlled opposition by the donor class.
Final Considerations
Currently, many groups in the US are fighting elites alone. Unions, environmental organizations, pro-choice advocates, teachers, and DOGE-fired scientists are siloed. In their own professional circles, they face the stigma of being troublemakers due to cultural inertia. They can’t organize broadly, because, as mentioned earlier, the government made general strikes illegal to prevent actual people power. The indoctrination for civility politics and against substantive change (and the disorder required to achieve it) runs deep. There have been many “grumpy parades” and single day boycotts to no avail. Meanwhile, respectable professionals in suits kill with impunity with no cultural shame to check them, because they look like the grown-ups in the room. It’s long overdue that people modified their tactics, and played to each other’s strengths.
Leftists who were once liberals know that we need the left to fight fascism. We always have. They do not enable and compromise with supremacists. They put their bodies on the line, and see the writing on the wall long before other segments of society. The most helpful act liberals can offer is to stop enabling fascists. The next most helpful act is to withdraw their skillsets from operating within the gears of increasingly fascist institutions and redirect them to the building of new ones.
Liberals are often very capable, bring expertise, and build infrastructure and institutions. The privilege of remaining oblivious to many harsh realities provides liberals with opportunities to develop professional skillsets that some leftist groups lack, due to their opting out of the system.
Leftists, with their bold confrontation of abuse and societal failures, are unaccustomed to the levers of power. When a leftist manages to slip through the barriers into a position of power, they may be unprepared due to inexperience. Liberals, who express many of the same human rights values as leftists, could accomplish greater good by supporting and banding with the left than by tearing it down.
We need resistance in many forms. Liberals only isolate themselves and deplete their credibility when they undermine and blame people who care about human rights regardless of the party in power. It is necessary to pay attention to a multitude of communities in the U.S. who have long organized outside of party politics. Whether the Democratic Party reforms itself to include the interests of a leftist base in the event we still have elections, or whether we unite to get ahead of societal collapse, we need all hands on deck.