The liberal crackup

Longstanding orthodoxies of the Democratic Party are crumbling and large swathes of its base have had enough. Have the chickens of so-called Resistance liberalism finally come home to roost?

For the first time in my life a nascent revolt of sorts appears to be underway within the Democratic base against the party’s leadership and some parts of its establishment.

The most immediate and obvious catalyst is Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s recent capitulation to the Republicans on a short-term funding bill despite widespread opposition and dissent from within his own caucus (Schumer’s absurd triangulation has, among other things, compelled him to abandon a planned book tour and get humiliated on liberal TV shows instead). Democratic Congressional Reps have also faced serious pressure from angry constituents — one reportedly phoning a colleague after a local town hall and saying, through tears: "They hate us. They hate us."

A year ago, 75 percent of registered Democrats approved of the job Congressional Democrats were doing. Today, one Quinnipiac poll puts the number at just 40 percent, though even this far exceeds the party’s popularity overall, which has reached its lowest level in at least thirty years.

All this comes as none other than Sanders, alongside Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is touring the country and mobilizing record crowds throughout both blue and red districts. The scale of these rallies has been legitimately incredible, with tens of thousands coming out in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada alone and millions more watching them on YouTube (for comparison, the official Democratic response to Trump’s recent State of the Union on the party’s YouTube channel has just over 5,000 views in total. That’s it.)

But what’s in many ways more incredible is that attendance at these rallies — contrary to what the usual suspects have insinuated — genuinely seems to be reaching beyond Sanders’ existing base of dedicated supporters. At a recent one in Colorado, for example, half the RSVPs came from outside his existing list and, while it’s difficult to find hard numbers this is a pattern that seems to be recurring elsewhere.

In terms of scale, these rallies are bigger than those held by most presidential candidates, even fairly successful ones. At 34,000 strong, the recent Sanders/AOC rally in Denver was bigger than any held throughout the former’s two presidential campaigns. In a non-election year, this is remarkable in and of itself. But it’s in some ways still more remarkable they are so successfully mobilizing constituencies outside the usual ones, especially without the institutional support of the Democratic Party behind them.

Having lived through both the highs and disappointments of Sanders 2016 and Sanders 2020, I am primed for maximum skepticism about the possibility of a successful insurgency beginning within the bosom of America’s liberal mainstream. What feels unique about the present moment, however, is how much animus there now seems to be towards the Democratic establishment from fairly normie, run-of-the-mill liberals. At the grassroots level, the sentiment has become so strong that even reliably partisan outlets like MSNBC are now giving voice to it.

One of the major factors that frustrated Sanders’ two runs for the presidency was the relative lack of serious hostility among Democratic electors to their party’s leadership. Indeed, I think the main reason Donald Trump’s parallel insurgency succeeded in 2016 where Sanders’ failed was that rank and file Democrats are more congenitally prone to like and trust liberal elites and power brokers than their Republican counterparts.¹ A version of the same thing happened in 2020, when primary voters were instructed by the hive mind of establishment liberalism to rally behind Joe Biden and most dutifully complied. There has long been a culture of deference in the Democratic Party, wherein ideology takes a back seat and leaders are presumed to be using whatever power they currently wield to advance a liberal agenda as best they can (even if that means directly working against said agenda, abandoning essential causes, campaigning with Republicans etc.)

Even if this now seems to be changing, it’s still far too early in Trump’s second term to offer any definitive conclusions about where things are heading.

What can be said is that since November 2024 something very real has snapped. Having been told for years by the leaders of Resistance Liberalism that Trump’s GOP represents a threat so singular and existential that all other concerns are secondary to defeating it, rank-and-file Democrats are now seeing those same leaders feign powerlessness, lay down arms, and quite literally embrace doing nothing as their chosen strategy.

As I wrote in a 2020 essay for The Atlantic, Resistance liberalism paired a maximalist rhetoric (Trump is fascist and we’re in a permanent state of exception) with a politically minimalist approach than often ran quite directly against it (Trump is a fascist but we’re not going to seriously obstruct his agenda, cabinet appointments, etc etc). At the time, I was surprised by how warm the reaction was from older, middle of the road liberal readers was. But I think it spoke to something comparable — albeit on a lesser scale — to what we’re seeing now. Since 2016, many earnest and well-meaning liberals have taken establishment Democrats at their word when it comes to Donald Trump. Which is to say: they’ve heard their leaders warning about a looming Fourth Reich in America and have expected them to behave like they actually believe it.

From 2017-2020 the contradictions in this style of liberalism could often be papered over with rhetoric, or obscured by scam causes like Russiagate or the Mueller Report. Today, having torched much of their remaining credibility by lying about Joe Biden and losing to Trump a second time, establishment Democrats have mostly exhausted those kinds of things and are today left to flail about while their base increasingly looks elsewhere.

Consider the following recent exchange between Schumer and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

HAYES: All of those things you enumerated which al sound like good politics to me, are the kinds of things you’d be doing if Mitt Romney were president. There’s this weird asymmetry right now which is that…

SCHUMER: No, because…

HAYES:…They are acting in this totally new way…

SCHUMER: Yes…

HAYES: …in which they are ambitiously trying to seize all power and create a presidential dictatorship in the USA…

SCHUMER: Yes…

HAYES:…and the Democratic opposition is acting like if [they] can just get [the administration’s] approval rating a few points…then what happens?

SCHUMER: What happens is, look, first we get it way down. He’s going to have much less…This worked in 2017. Now it’s a different government, it is different. But healthcare: we beat ‘em. Taxes: we beat ‘em. And guess what we did Chris? We took back the House and won in the Senate, and then we were allowed to do all those good things.

Putting aside a few of Schumer’s specific claims (in what sense did the Democrats “beat” first term Trump on taxes?) I think Schumer’s posture here is one even quite dyed-in-the-wool partisans will, by this point, struggle to take seriously. If Trump is really seeking to create a presidential dictatorship, in what world does it make any conceivable sense not to obstruct his agenda? If democracy itself is under threat, how is chipping a few points off the president’s approval rating going to save it? And if the plan is simply to repeat what “worked” in 2017, what is the plan going to be when a right wing president similarly comes roaring back with an even more dangerous agenda after a few years of failed Democratic governance?

Again, it’s still up in the air where any of this goes. As Carl Beijer argues, the Sanders/AOC rallies clearly demonstrate that the left is well-positioned to organize in a moment like the current one. Elsewhere, labour scholar Eric Blanc has offered some useful thoughts on how they might be translated into a more lasting kind of mobilization (this, by the way, is clearly essential: after Trump’s first victory there were several waves of protest that unfortunately dissipated quickly).

When it comes to the Democratic Party itself, it’s essential that the momentum currently being marshalled to resist Trump among mainstream liberals also be directed quite explicitly against establishment Democrats. Even on their own terms, these people have repeatedly failed and no one should entrust them with power or leadership ever again. This applies to specific figures like Schumer, but it also applies more broadly to the dishonest and duplicitous political tendency they represent.

You cannot, in fact, defend democracy with legalism and stale process. You cannot simultaneously call yourselves the “Democratic Party” and let billionaires and Wall Street donors shape and direct your policy agenda. You cannot win elections, even against an historically unpopular former reality TV host, by running McCain-era GOP style campaigns and thumbing your nose at the base. People like Chuck Schumer have been allowed to enjoy their sinecures for far too long, and should have been angrily ousted back in 2016 when their entire political strategy and worldview was proven to be a fraud.

What more even needs to be said? Liberalism’s cult of deference should have died years ago. At this point killing it off for good is the very least anyone can do.

1. To say this, of course, is not to in any way idealize the Republican right. Republicans do tend to be more guided by ideology than Democrats, broadly speaking. But what allows this more than anything else is that right wing ideologically aligns much more neatly with the priorities of big Republican donors than even centre left liberalism does with many big Democratic ones.