On Liberals

The first in a series on the tendencies of our political moment

What is liberalism?

As in all things, we must first start with the word, with the definition of that word, and with how that definition reflects what exists in the world. In this regard, liberalism is particularly thorny. ‘Liberal’ has always meant something different in America than it has in Europe (where it is more often applied in its classical sense, to mean, more or less, a free-market ideologue – hence ‘neoliberal’, the word that everyone unconvincingly claims not to understand). And even in America, the meaning of ‘liberal’ has shifted over time, from trying to reflect a sort of labor-left incarnation of Scandinavian-style social democracy to today’s manifestation of a more center-right capitalism individualized by a strong emphasis on what are commonly called identity politics.

Through all those incarnations, liberalism has always (or, at least, since the post-war period, which is as far back as the American institutional memory cares to stretch) been associated with the Democratic Party. As with all the ideological tendencies we’ll examine in this series, the practices of liberalism in American politics does not have many consistent through-lines; people come to it from all angles, and its practitioners have all kinds of different motivations and perspectives. There is as much difference between a Justice Democrat in 2018 and a Rainbow Coalition Democrat in 1984 as there is between a Joe Biden liberal in 2021 and a Franklin Delano Roosevelt liberal in 1936. And despite the attempts of the party to make all of these tendencies part of the same unbroken line, they are in fact a largely incoherent bundle of beliefs, approaches, and ideas, bound together only by the fact that this country has never managed to produce an actual left-labor party of any size or strength.

So, what do we mean by ‘liberal’, if it is not merely a switch-out for ‘Democrat’? It’s a question we must grapple with if we mean to extend the reach and scope of socialism to the degree that it will truly become the movement with mass support, and capable of mass action, that is needed to make revolutionary change. The bulk of America’s intellectual class, such as it is, identifies itself as liberal, and the working class—or at least that segment of it that still engages in politics and has not completely withdrawn out of apathy or disgust—likely still sympathizes with what it sees as liberal Democratic values.

The first thing we need to understand, then, is that liberalism in America is not primarily, or even secondarily, motivated by economic factors, class struggle, or any kind of recognizable socialist ideology. Its economics are entirely capitalist, and insofar as liberals believe in any kind of political action around material conditions, it is usually decorative and reformist: diversifying the ownership class, creating new carve-outs and tax exemptions for ‘innovation’, extremely minor fiddling with the tax code, the preservation of the bourgeoisie in its most comfortable environment, and so on. Few liberals today take seriously non-reformist reforms, and almost none are truly seeking a re-introduction of the welfare state, choosing instead to bristle at the cost of such things as universal health care or free college education. The liberal of today is the conservative of 30 years ago: fretting over budget deficits, shying away from new entitlements, and blocking every path to direct government aid with impenetrable layers of means-testing. The American liberal was never a cradle-to-grave state welfare advocate, but today, he is an open advocate of austerity.

The second thing, related to the first, is that because it lacks a material analysis (and, increasingly, even a discernible ideological component), American liberalism is primarily not a political philosophy or position, but rather a moral pose. We have seen endlessly over the last several decades that the Democrats see themselves less as an opposition party and more as a sort of job placement service, a networking operation for various types of professionals whose reluctance to stake out bold or distinct ideological positions is rooted in a desire to not become unemployable in the various think tanks, lobbying operations, policy shops, and media outlets that keep them financially comfortable. Their preference for bipartisanship and compromise is not a signal that they no longer believe that their team is better, but that they don’t want to get kicked out of the league. We should not think that they have no beliefs; they are not cynical, or at least not in the same way their Republican opposition is cynical. They believe, more or less sincerely, that what distinguishes them from conservatives and reactionaries is their degree of moral attainment, and this is almost always expressed through statements of ‘equality’.

Racism, for example, is a bad moral quality, possessed and expressed by bad people; they are, therefore, not racist (or, at least, they are not-racist in a way that can be easily distinguished by its condemnation of less subtle kinds of racism that involve saying slurs and openly rooting for the continued dominance of white people in America, as differentiated from the kinds that manifest through the normal daily operation of capitalism and imperialism and can thus be hidden away or shrugged off as part of the ‘ordinary’ functioning of the system). Homophobia and transphobia are bad moral qualities, so they are, therefore, not homophobes or transphobes, as long as the well-being of a queer or trans person is attained through some variety of self-earned economic success; if they are made to be miserable, that misery must be attributed to deep-rooted social prejudices against them and not to the everyday functioning of capitalism. Xenophobia and religious bigotry are bad moral qualities, so they are, therefore, not bigots, provided that their opposition to discrimination against foreigners or Muslims can be placed in the context of making serious faces while condemning it, or in the use of police power against hate crimes rather than in the aid of same. It cannot be placed in the context of opposing the kind of hard foreign policy power that, say, kills hundreds of thousands of foreigners in a war, or causes mass death thanks to sanctions and blockades against nations that have chosen a leader not approved of by the U.S. State Department.

The third is that, despite an increasingly radical pose and tone of voice from many of its younger devotees, liberals are, in the final analysis, believers in the system. They are reformists, not radicals; they are progressives, not revolutionaries. They have a sense of how power works, but it is rooted in the notion that the system itself is the source of power and that the main problem is who sits at its controls. Few of them will engage in serious discussion of the inherent rot in the system, especially when it comes to the source of that rot (capitalism) and what must replace it. Even the most extreme latter-day liberals, the ones who dress in radical raiment and loudly condemn their own preferred definitions of ‘colonialism’ or ‘imperialism’, tend to believe that the solutions lie largely in definitional shifts, reorientation of the levers of power towards newer and more enlightened operators. Systemic racism, opposition to which they have adopted as their animating spirit of late, even gets off the hook when it comes to cases: most liberals seem to think that the operant word in that phrase is ‘racism’, and that it will wither and fade once people like them – who, after all, are not racist – are behind the wheel. The idea that the problem is actually the word ‘systemic’, and that a system designed to produce oppression through exploitation will continue to do so no matter who is in charge of it, does not seem to trouble them.

Perhaps the most resonant example of this attitude from recent history is Hillary Clinton’s famous – or infamous – question during the 2016 presidential campaign. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” she asked, “would that end racism?” The question is as easy to answer (no) as it is irrelevant. If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, we would still have racism, but what we would not have is the big banks, which impose more misery and deprivation on people of color than the Klan could ever accomplish. And, of course, “break up the big banks” is a policy goal, with a clear definition, a practical path to attainment, and a definitive victory condition. “End racism” is more of a metaphysical goal, one that is hard to define, difficult to enforce, and nearly impossible to realize. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing, but anyone more interested in actually exercising political power than in making grand shows of moral superiority would choose ‘break up the big banks’ as an actionable platform over something as nebulous and personal as ‘end racism’.

The question, in fact, demands the opposite answer from what Clinton intended. After the uprisings of summer 2020, when millions of Americans were mobilized to protest the widespread racism and brutality of police forces all over the country, an inherent misreading of Marxist analysis began to creep even into genuine leftist spaces, albeit by people who mistakenly believe themselves to be something other than liberals: the idea that, because America is a nation founded on a system of race-based chattel slavery, there is something called ‘racial capitalism’, and that even our material analyses must subordinate class consciousness for race consciousness, because ‘anti-Blackness’ is at the heart of this country’s imperial and socioeconomic hegemony. We must, therefore, place the political actions they have identified as being most effectively anti-racist (usually defunding the police, reparations, the diversification of organizational leadership, and a largely human-resources-based approach to ‘resisting’ white supremacy) ahead of any universal programs centered on class analysis.

It is not wrong to say that this country was founded in a cauldron of racism, or that Black Americans have always been at the bottom of the pyramid of power. It is not wrong to say that because of this, capitalism in America has always had a very specific and racially-driven character. It is not wrong to say that racism is an ongoing and destructive problem even on the left, that the police are a direct instrument of white supremacy and should be dismantled, that Black Americans are due reparations for the historical theft of their labor and annihilation of their persons, or that racial bias is baked into almost every system of oppression in America today and that doing something about that must be a major part of all socialist programs, led by and with the full participation of comrades of color who comprise a vast swath of the working class.

What is wrong is to prioritize this analysis to the extent that we abandon Marxist analysis and its clear-headed and simple understanding of class conflict, what drives it, and how it is resolved. We cannot, for example, pretend that there has never been a situation in which other people of color have been treated poorly, as this places us in an ‘oppression Olympics’, pitting one abused demographic against another for the meaningless reward of being uniquely put upon; this only serves the needs of the white bosses and their lackeys, whose entire project is threatened by true cross-category solidarity. We cannot toss our understanding of international politics in the trash bin by pretending that capitalism, when largely freed of its American character by export to nonwhite nation-states, has not simply chosen new or different minorities to exploit, suppress, and scapegoat; nor can we act as if the history of the white working class in America and in Europe has not also been one of despair, suffering, and death.  And most of all, we cannot simply replicate the form of existing oppressive and hierarchical structures with different people in charge and expect different results.

What, then, is the path forward for socialists when it comes to liberals? We need them to win, or at least we need enough of them who are not hopelessly corrupted by complicity with the system of profit that they can help us form a massive movement that can tip the scales of power. They are often the first to defect from bourgeois liberalism to fascism when things start to get ugly, and things are getting ugly; we need to starve the right of their sympathies. We need their skills and money, and we need their access to such levers of power as they are still able to control. Despite my personal discomfort with making a moral position the basis of one’s politics, I don’t think it’s desirable, or even possible, to eliminate or suppress that tendency in liberals; it is too much the animating spirit of their ideology, such as it is, to be lightly dismissed or tossed aside, even if that were possible. (If we eliminate bourgeois sentimentality tomorrow, one might ask, would that eliminate capitalism?) What we must do, then, is twofold.

First, we must not reduce their moral commitments; we must expand them. We must, through means of political education and an unsparingly thorough analysis of material conditions and power dynamics, convince them of what they do not yet believe: that there is a moral rightness beyond what they already possess, that it is possible to understand oppression at an even deeper level than that which we currently do. We must help them to comprehend that capitalism is a greater force for exploitation, for cruelty, for racism, for police brutality, for environmental destruction and institutional bigotry, for war and hate and death, than any of the standard and individual attitudes of white supremacy and its affiliated biases they are used to opposing, and that it is the war on the working classes by the owning classes that subsumes and perpetuates these evils for its own power and not the other way around. Capitalism is the greatest force for evil in our world, and socialism is its only serious enemy; we cannot compromise the latter and expect to defeat the former.

Second, we must make them understand that the usual targets they struggle against — racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ablism, agism, anti-Semitism, and the like – are inextricably woven into the fabric of capitalism and can never be effectively extracted. A crucial error of category has occurred as liberals have come to believe that ‘intersectionality’ refers not to this inherent intertwining of class, race, gender, and other factors in ways that reverberate throughout structures of oppression while creating new ones within those structures, but to the creation (through reversal or artful rearrangement of existing hierarchies) of new systems of oppression based on cultural and racial class categories rather than economic or material ones. Again, this does not mean that the struggle of Black and Brown comrades should be ignored or de-prioritized, or that we should not alter our tactics in order to serve the awakening consciousness of the working class of color that constitutes a new and powerful wing of the struggle. It does not mean the exclusion of radical identities from leadership, or the dismissal of perspectives that question traditional strategies of leftist organizing, or the forsaking of kyriarchical analysis from our material understanding of the world.

But it means that, however we arrive at it, solidarity must take the place of individualism; mass action must take the place of in-group activism; and creating a dictatorship of the proletariat must supersede the creation of atomized, balkanized affinity groups without a common thread binding them together. With an expanded appreciation of their moral commitments and the replacement of revolutionary power dynamics for in-system tinkering, liberals can shift their historical role as handmaidens of bourgeoning fascism for a new place as a crucial component of a left that goes beyond their conceptions of partisanship and professional attainment.

A hand with five fingers, with nothing to connect them, can only point at problems or pick away ineffectively at them. Bound into a fist, it can deliver a killing blow to the enemy. Liberals can be made part of the fist, or they can become its target.  It’s time for them to choose.

NEXT WEEK: on anarchism.