The American Left is Useless, and the Far-Right is Approaching

In its description of flailing and helpless bureaucrats, calmly watching their city be thrown into chaos while doing nothing about it, Fyodor Dostoevsky's 19th-century novel Demons builds on a historic and familiar complaint of liberal pacifism. For the aristocracy centered in the narrative, no political ideal is felt to be objective, held to with any dogmatism, or defended with any passion. Instead, there seems to be a consistent focus on performance and appearance, along with a primary concern for that month's “grande fête.” Political leaders politely have tea with the chief conspirator out of naive curiosity for his political ideology, while others attend pretentious literary readings across the river from their actively burning houses. The novel reads in these descriptions as an uncanny parallel to the American “left” of today, similarly concerned with their own vapid performance, meaningless slogans, and toothless rhetoric; all typical action amounting to nothing more than a coming end.

Throughout time, liberals have treated “true north” as whichever direction you're facing, with the real purpose of politics being some endless battle of gestures, virtue signals, and pedantic culture war issues that obfuscate material progress. Nothing is concrete, true, and defended, no policy whose bearer will claim it to be superior. It’s this timidness, this spineless political relativism that not only enables the far right today, but continuously fuels it.

Trump's 75.6 million (as of editing night, Wednesday, November 13) votes isn’t some inescapable reality of this country, but instead the direct result of this behavior, of a useless American left incapable of defending its ground and doomed to continue losing it. The passive inaction, useless civility, and cowardly subjectivity of all things common to our representation is an eternal and prophetically compromising fact for already fledgling progressive economic values. They would prefer politely moving around the furniture on our sinking ship, than patching the holes cut into it by the increasingly popular fascist demagogues.

It has taken years, an attempted coup, a legacy of the most intense and vile scapegoating, rhetoric that rejects progress while promoting some mythological “return to tradition,” unending paranoid conspiracies of the most ridiculous and absurd character, and a disgusting contempt for their own social conservative values, before the Democrats decided they could maybe lightly call the fascist by his name. Previous Democrat action consisted of a few committees that went nowhere, some painfully liberal girl boss quips, a fucking Hamilton screening on the anniversary of January 6 (thanks, Nancy), and Merrick Garlands two-year late appointment of Jack Smith, who then didn’t even pursue sedition charges.

Missing can be counted at the bare minimum: an immediate and militant weaponization of the DOJ against the candidate who tried to overturn the core foundational principle of our country, and the multiple house representatives, senators, lawyers, county election officials, media personalities, and regular civilians who were aiding and abetting this conspiracy, clear, unambiguous and meaningful rhetoric pushed through every possible medium about the specifics of Trump's fake elector scheme in particular, and a focus on the adverse material effects of Trump tax, spending and labor policy in particular. Not to mention from a defensive side: any real policy prescriptions focused on reducing wealth and income inequality, promoting labor organization, and guaranteeing positive and stable economic realities for Americans (rhetoric the Democrats are allergic to in numerous ways).

The failure to realize a single of these actions suggests an incompetent and unserious left, more concerned with the virtue of their inaction than the sustainability of their country. You hear and will continue to hear nothing about Trump tax cuts lowering every progressive tax bracket save the lowest one, placing an astoundingly small 21% flat corporate tax, while simultaneously pursuing the highest deficit spending ever, and presiding over an unprecedentedly anti-labor NLRB. Instead, you may get “Trump’s a racist,” “Trump’s a sexist,” or its variant buzzwords. 

It’s no surprise the weak stave off of the far-right through empty action and an obsession with useless Culture War issues did not hold. Every left denomination needs to internalize the facts suggested by this incompetence: Democrats in their current form will not save us. To think the strength of the right is some natural fact is to fall into their empty liberal apologetic meant to cover their political ineptitude. This popularity is not inevitable, and we need attitudes of objectivity, of aggressive and decisive action to thwart it. This isn't an era of civil disagreement, where the party duopoly argues between 95 or 90 percent highest marginal tax rates. Submitting false elector slates to be certified, scapegoating the most vulnerable of the population, and advancing the interests of the most powerful and privileged isn’t some difference of opinion we can passively allow. Those who treat it as such, having tea with the wannabe autocrats literally destroying our country, are not our friends.

As historic stereotypes crossing centuries and continents suggest, current representatives will not protect us. Democracy, equality and the freedom upheld through these values are not being defended by liberals of today, just as they weren't by the liberals of the 19th century; and currently, we’ve lost too much ground on these ideals to passively concede even more. But more than a pretentious Quest article about some Russian political fiction's connection to modern-day politics, this piece serves a substantive purpose: to ask those complacently accepting the left's representatives to uphold objectivity. The future of this country depends on a rejection of this carelessness and an embrace of real and material action in favor of core principles we cannot compromise on. Similar to Trump's popularity, Demons doesn't act as some prophetic unchallenged law, but a serious and actionable warning we must all move on now.