At least since Trump's second election, liberalism has mutated into what we might term “meta-liberalism.” Liberals used to advocate free speech, free markets, the welfare state, meritocracy, world peace and reasonable compromise about everything. But now liberalism is concerned to the exclusion of all other matters with one question: how can we sell liberalism? Where has our PR strategy gone so terribly wrong? And while the rise of right-wing populism around the world is a bad problem for liberals, it's perhaps not quite as bad as the rise of the socialist left, which really sends them spiraling.
Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Jonathan Chait, and the like: these are the top mainstream or establishment pundits. They've abandoned all other questions for the time being and are only asking after sales strategies. Nothing else matters if we don't win, they point out. So no other questions matter as much as how we can win. So, let's talk about that for the next few years, as though it were a substantive matter of policy, or as though anyone outside their little stan or “tocracy” has any reason to worry about it. The columnists and podcasters have heftier intellectual versions in figures like Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre.
Liberalism's demographic has contracted. It's lost the young people, especially in cities and on campus. Its mildness and reasonableness appear disabling against the moral fervor or patriotic passions of its opponents. The bland niceness of liberals, the tidy whitey bourgeois feel, the suburban mom essence, are really barriers to it catching on again.
The prescription, hence, is passion, or the simulation thereof: liberals have gotten out-emoted, out-moralized, out-bolded, out-franked, out-expressed. While they were hemming and hawing or gybing and tacking, their opponents were getting all worked up. While they looked for reasonable policies, their opponents looked for memes and hooks. While liberals were reasoning, their opponents were dramatizing. While they mustered statistics, their opponents narrated. While they were trying to compromise, their opponents grew ever-more extreme.
Predictably, the prescriptions to save liberalism often insist that liberals have or should have or could have passionate moral beliefs (this piece by Jen Szalai is a good summary of the approach). Liberals need urgency, passion, and so on to match that of their opponents, not just Ivy League-degrees and the touching belief that science is real. Tolerance is a very nice liberal value, these figures argue, but tolerance isn’t enough. Tolerance for intolerance got us into this mess. Raphael Warnock and Chris Van Hollen might be too polite to say it straight out, but the time for liberal intolerance is here.
Liberals are done tolerating Trumpies, I guess. But right at the moment, they’re more concerned with not tolerating socialists. Chait, for example, in The Atlantic, just eliminates "democratic socialists" from the Democratic Party a priori: "It’s true that the DSA has areas of ideological overlap with the Democratic Party," he says, but it "seems to despise the Democratic Party." He, among others, is particularly disturbed by the victory in a NY congressional primary of Darializa Avila Chevalier. He portrays her ilk, including mayor Zohran Mamdani, as an alien force engaged in a hostile takeover that threatens the whole leftish side of the political spectrum. For exactly one reason: despite racking up a series of blue-state and blue-city electoral victories over the last year, democratic socialism isn’t going to sell.
Chait's articles, more than Klein's or Yglesias's, have a purge them! kind of flavor, portraying democratic socialism as a threat to civilization as we know it. Klein and Yglesias are still trying to find common ground, though getting more and more upset. But I can't see whether the disagreements are principled or strategic, and I can't see how to care. Do Klein and Yglesias, with all the passion of their great souls, oppose single-payer health insurance, for example? Do they oppose rent controls? I don't mean, do they think that won't sell, or won't end up being effective. I mean, do they think aggressive welfare or housing programs or spending much more on education or something is wrong, or just that we're "not ready" for it right now?
The liberal-to-socialist thing is a spectrum and I think you basically agree with each other about everything except pacing and rhetorical strategies. Or maybe these generations just look weird to one another, with the way they dress and the way they talk. The Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Party profess the same beliefs in slightly milder or less-milder forms. In a two-party system, they are obvious allies. Also, if you liberals really go to war right here, you’ll simply lose every generation after X. "Purge them," here, is demographic suicide.
"The American people will never buy the word 'socialism'": if you think that's some sort of substantive political point, or that it provides any guidance for what policies would be effective or right, you need to tear down and start again. Find something real to worry about, if you can. Nudge me awake if you do.
When you get down to it, the disagreements between liberals and socialists on education, housing and taxation are pretty negligible. The crisis, distractions aside, is almost entirely based on the question of American support for Israel's actions in Gaza and Lebanon. Democratic socialist types call it “genocide.” And with regard to this matter, they have just the sort of moral urgency that liberals are concerned that they themselves lack about anything. Biden and Harris blanked or tolerated their way to supplying all the weapons Israel wanted. Younger leftists tend to be extremely clear on this: support for Israel, or failure unequivocally to condemn its actions, are unconscionable and completely, permanently disqualifying.
This is what the debate between liberals and progressives is about now. It’s what disgusts Jonathan Chait about Darializa Avila Chevalier. It's the one area in which these sides are incompatible. And it's liable to be the issue that breaks the Democratic Party. But, if it does, it's not my problem. I don't understand why I have to read a hundred columns about how liberalism's communications strategies can by improved. The only reason liberal Dems seem to regret nominating alleged rapists, etc., is that they might lose (to Susan Collins, someone they don't disagree with at all). That’s not any goal or issue.
Worrying about communication strategies all day is what has gone wrong with liberalism. Your solution, I fear, will consist of yet more mirroring of more of polls and focus groups: just the worst sort of blank, meaningless Clinton or Bidenism. It's just the question of what manipulative bullshit is most effective. I don't give a shit. I think there should be at least four major political parties, so if the Ds and Rs start to disintegrate, that’s okay.
Meanwhile, while your opponents express themselves passionately, you’re spending years wondering about what your best sales strategies might be next time around. All this maundering about how to resell liberalism is a symptom of what’s wrong with liberalism: there's no emotional center, no need that drives it, not even any singular or clear point to it, only manipulative communications. Manipulation of this sort is morally disgusting.
More to the point, it’s completely ineffective. My advice: try to figure out what you passionately and sincerely believe. If not, retire.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell