For an end to last-gasp liberalism

“Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.”

This leftist credo has gained additional currency in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Numerous liberals have plastered social media with poisonous rhetoric directed at various oppressed populations they hold responsible for Kamala Harris’ defeat, echoing or outright reproducing the kind of bigotry for which they condemn their conservative and right-wing counterparts. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is preparing for a peaceful handover of power to a figurehead and nascent regime that they previously (and justifiably) decried for being “fascistic.”

The bitterness and anger behind this vicious tendency belies a desperation that extends beyond the hardened centrist camp, spanning a significant section of the liberal-to-left political spectrum. Having navigated numerous academic and activist spaces over the past decade, I have heard this desperation in the voices of numerous students, friends, colleagues, and comrades. It has perhaps been most pronounced in the wake of elections, Supreme Court decisions, and other major liberal-democratic spectacles, but it has also been audible in the wake of rallies, marches, and even occasionally forms of mutual aid and direct action.

More than anything, this pervasive desperation showcases a lingering faith in liberal-democratic institutions, processes, and figureheads, in spite of ample evidence of the latter’s ever-shrinking capacities for even meager reforms and evermore shrill and unconvincing defenses of the neoliberal status quo. This residual loyalty can prove quite decisive in moments of crisis: it partly explains how millions of Americans went from taking to the streets during the George Floyd Rebellion in the summer of 2020 to voting for Joe Biden—a prime architect of the modern carceral U.S. state—that same fall. It similarly explains why so many self-described progressives and a fair few leftists grudgingly voted for Harris in this year’s election, despite their proclaimed opposition to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. This grudging support in the second instance is particularly illustrative, insofar as it shows how liberalism can ultimately recapture not only the votes but the imagination and political energy of insubordinate subjects who might otherwise adopt far more critical political perspectives, especially in the absence of a persuasive, well-organized, and visible leftist alternative. 

Awareness of the cataclysmic consequences of U.S. settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism and even lived experiences with grassroots mobilization featuring more revolutionary elements have proven insufficient, in and of themselves, to overcome this trend of defeatist deference to liberal capitalist non-solutions. Critical consciousness and grassroots organizing experience stem, to some extent, from the inevitable contradictions of capitalism, and both are essential to producing decisive ruptures in the capitalist system, but they cannot compensate for an inadequate  political strategy couched within the fundamentally counterrevolutionary terms of liberal capitalist democracy. (Neo)liberal figureheads such as Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons actively manufacture this desperation as part of co-manufacturing consent to the U.S. capitalist order, in no small part by offering feminist, anti-racist, and otherwise progressive aesthetics as wholesale substitutes for concrete progressivism. However, this desperation also takes on a life of its own within much of U.S. civil society, which is far more worrying. 

This is what I term last-gasp liberalism in action: the left-of-liberal popular reversion, especially in mounting moments of late capitalist crisis, to individualist demagoguery, highly aestheticized diversification, and liberal fictions like “the rules-based order.” This reversion reaffirms liberalism’s historical role as the ideological backbone of Euroamerican capitalism by reinforcing its key tenets of bourgeois individualism, free enterprise, and ahistorical universalism. It further reflects the historical failure and contemporary weakness—to the point of constituting a structural absence—of the organized Left in the United States. As long as last-gasp liberalism remains unaddressed, it poses a potentially fatal threat to the construction of a left alternative capable of waging and winning anti-systemic struggles within the imperial core.

A living history of subjugation, reanimated by neoliberalism

Leftists have long critiqued liberalism for upholding capitalism and diffusing revolutionary momentum; in fact, these critiques form part of the foundations of the Marxist and anarchist traditions. When these critiques adopt a longer historical view, they tend to highlight liberalism’s largely unacknowledged roots in the consolidation of the Euroamerican colonial capitalist world-system. Euroamerican liberalism’s conception of the human—the foundation on which its much-touted but ultimately shallow and conditional brand of humanism is built—developed through the emergent capitalist project’s propagation of Indigenous genocide, Black slavery, and coercive migrant labor. The enlightened European male liberal subject became the antithesis of capitalism’s victims both at home and abroad: supposedly “lazy” and “undeserving” working-class and colonized people. Furthermore, Euroamerican liberalism’s bloody underside is by no means restricted to its formative years in the crucible of incipient capitalist modernity. Gabriel Rockhill has shown how liberalism enabled fascism throughout the twentieth century, from the German Social Democrats’ lethal betrayal of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the fledgling German Revolution to the integration of hundreds of top-level Nazi officials and scientists into the U.S.  Cold War infrastructure through Operation Paperclip. In light of this history, the profound disregard for Palestinian life shown by U.S.  liberals before, during, and after the 2024 Presidential Election is far less surprising.

Liberalism’s commitment to capitalism underlies its complicity with some of modern history’s most devastating social, political, economic, and ecological developments. This commitment has reached a fever pitch under the conditions of neoliberalism over the past four to five decades, so much so that, like the economic system it props up, U.S. liberalism has started to consume its own tail with a kind of deranged gusto. Previously, Euroamerican liberalism had a modicum of substance to show for its promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while masking its true intentions: in keeping with the Cold War principle of “keep ‘em fed and they won’t turn red,” it tried to offer public goods and services to enough of its domestic constituencies to absorb, diffuse, and marginalize popular revolt, with not insignificant success. However, neoliberalization has evaporated most of this substance, reducing liberalism to a caricature of an idealist philosophy. Perhaps even more nakedly than their conservative and right-wing counterparts, modern U.S.  (neo)liberals epitomize the hypocrisies of late capitalism: they promise abundance while practicing austerity; promote diversity while pouring billions into police, prisons, and borders; and appeal to “the rules-based order” while shredding international law to support Zionist ethnic cleansing and expansionism.

Late capitalist liberalism

Liberalism is not just an ideology: it is also a structure of knowledge and knowledge generation in which power is delegated to designated individual representatives rather than collectively held. Because of this, political inaction is typically attributed to a lack of awareness, and “accountability” comes down to relentless petitioning. Needless to say, this structure combines with the structural weakness of the organized U.S. Left to regenerate and reaffirm the U.S.-led neoliberal world order, making reform the ultimate political horizon as revolution perennially recedes into the distance. On numerous occasions, liberalism has claimed the real gains made by struggles from below, such as the establishment of the eight-hour working day, as its own victories. In the absence of credible leftist challenges to its hegemony, liberalism has coasted along on false promises more so than concrete concessions: in many instances, even reform might prove an ultimately unreachable political horizon under the conditions of late capitalism.

Liberals in the U.S. imperial core have banked on being “the lesser evil” in comparison to their conservative and right-wing counterparts while predominantly shaping their politics around the domestic and international economic agenda they have in common with their reviled opponents. As a result of its innate inability to provide a substantive material alternative, late capitalist U.S. liberalism articulates with more openly reactionary capitalist ideologies to not only reproduce the neoliberal status quo but to push it ever closer to neo-authoritarianism. Last-gasp liberalism names not only the kind of popular reversion to the political status quo I analyze above, but also the ongoing and, in our historical moment, ever intensifying exposure of late capitalist liberalism by moments of structural and systemic crisis: in the face of soaring living costs, crumbling infrastructure, intensifying ecological disasters, and deeply unpopular wars, U.S.  (neo)liberal power-brokers do the same things over and over again—in service of the same nefarious private economic interests—while encouraging their supporters to expect different results. They diversify the administration of neoliberalism and neo-imperialism without ever challenging the fundamental logics driving these systems, prioritizing corporate interests over poor, working-class, and colonized people at every turn. 

The desperation that many last-gasp liberals exhibit stems from the jarring dissonance between high-minded liberal ideals and the chastening material reality of elite betrayal. And this desperation is bound to elicit fury from so many poor and working-class people within the imperial core who are punished by this reality on a daily basis while lacking strong pre-existing ideological proclivities and functional leftist infrastructures of dissent. The right is more than happy to fill the vacuum at the heart of last-gasp liberalism with its own false promises of returning to a glorious past through counterrevolutionary violence and corporatist governance.

Appeals to demagoguery, diversification, and due process

In critiquing last-gasp liberalism, I am taking up a provocative question posed by anti-imperialist journalist Vincent Bevins in his recent book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest and the Missing Revolution: “how is it possible that so many mass protests apparently led to the opposite of what they asked for?” Bevins attributes these regressive outcomes to deliberate or inadvertent structurelessness and a lack of ideological unity within the protests in question. Last-gasp liberalism supplements but also complicates Bevins’ diagnosis by revealing that this apparent structurelessness can actually camouflage the deeply ingrained but unacknowledged principles and protocols of liberalism.

“Protests” is the operative term in Bevins’ question, insofar as it frames a fundamentally liberal strategy of petitioning that is, by itself, inadequate for building power from below. Mobilizations across the world over the past decade have frequently encompassed a diversity of tactics, but mass appeals to elected representatives and governmental regimes have occupied an outsized place. These appeals have failed to fill the political vacuum created by brutal counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist leaders, movements, organizations, and spaces—as exemplified by COINTELPRO and the Jakarta Method—as well as debilitating Left compromises with capital, as exemplified by North American business unionism. They have also fallen on unsympathetic ears in the contemporary neoliberal era, as centrist politicians have rallied around the neoliberal project for considerable personal and political gain. For all of these reasons, appeals unaccompanied by direct, organized challenges to business-as-usual—such as work stoppages, infrastructural disruption, and, when necessary and possible, armed resistance—are bound to be toothless. The corporate capture of political institutions, actors, and processes in the United States in particular makes a mockery of the very notion of civic accountability in its vaunted liberal interpretation.

The (neo)liberal politics of petitioning sets the stage for cynical saviors to announce themselves, increasingly to nervous and half-hearted applause (but applause nonetheless). Barack Obama’s administration arguably perfected neoliberal multiculturalism and multiracial neoliberalism as diversionary spectacles, and various left-of-liberal political actors continue to labor under the long shadows of both. The appointment of diverse faces in high places, solicitation of celebrity endorsements, glamorization of public outreach and civic engagement, and meme-ification of political figureheads—all carefully orchestrated by marketing experts at considerable expense—provide dazzling circuses to mask the categorical denial of bread and suppression of demands for it. The cult of hyper-individualism at the heart of U.S. settler capitalism couches these spectacles within the longer trajectory of U.S. exceptionalist nationalism, lending them even more weight. Self-anointed centrist saviors in the imperial core thus unsurprisingly draw deeply upon these wellsprings of false consciousness to capitalize on very real fears of right-wing takeover. Their supporters frequently lay the groundwork for these maneuvers, often without prompting: Harris’ widely touted claim to the Presidency by virtue of being a “competent” and professional Black woman reflects at least fifteen years of indoctrination into the aesthetics of neoliberal diversity. The well-documented real-world implications of this brand of “competence”—framed by Harris’ track record as a prosecutor in California and a butcher in Gaza—are nothing short of horrifying.

Last-gasp liberals count on diverse demagogues to showcase their “competence” by upholding due process—that is, by playing by the rules of the rigged neoliberal and neo-imperial game. Of all the defining characteristics of last-gasp liberalism, this fetishization of due process is perhaps the most obviously dangerous to progressive and revolutionary movements and actors. It blatantly ignores state and capitalist violence committed under and, in many instances, by past and present (neo)liberal administrations. Ruthless crackdowns on both houseless encampments and Palestinian solidarity encampments on college campuses, including in liberal strongholds such as California and New York, beg the question of where the dividing lines between “lesser” and greater evils truly lie—and how they can be quickly and decisively shifted by bourgeois political expediency. The flattening of these uneven landscapes of violence is even more insidious and callous beyond the U.S. domestic sphere, in that it projects a moralistic adherence to “due process” and a “rules-based order” onto a geopolitical sphere where it is nakedly conspicuous by its absence, as starkly illustrated by the indiscriminate U.S.-backed Zionist attacks on Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and Syria. The descendants of liberalism’s enlightened philosopher kings truly have no clothes as of now, and they stand before the world dripping from head to toe in blood and dirt.

The Uncommitted Movement’s inability to move the Democratic Party’s needle on the Gazan genocide highlights how the key components of last-gasp liberalism work in concert with each other, if at times indirectly. Several uncommitted delegates complained that the movement’s leadership “focused on appeasing the Democratic National Convention instead of fighting for [tangible policy] results… replacing the fight for justice and liberation with symbolic gestures that serve party insiders more than the Palestinian cause.” An overemphasis on garnering media attention as an end in itself and a silent protest staged when the DNC was already ignoring the movement drove home this uncritical delegation of power to a foundationally hostile (neo)liberal forum, with “due process” serving as little more than a vehicle for self-policing respectability politics. While the movement’s refusal to endorse Harris might indicate a deviation from diversified demagoguery at first glance, its call for anti-Trump votes and non-endorsement of any third party candidates calling for a ceasefire suggest otherwise. This tepid pseudo-defiance shows how demagogues win even when they appear to lose within the last-gasp liberal schema, which is to say nothing of how demagogues from both major U.S. bourgeois parties simply take turns in the hot seat in the absence of an organized Left alternative. Delegate Ruba Ayub summed up the movement’s last-gasp liberal capitulation in not so many words when she remarked that its goal was to “join the system to make change in the system” rather than fundamentally challenge it. Here, I recall an old Haitian proverb: “the unity of the chicken and the cockroach is realized in the belly of the chicken.”

The folly of waiting for liberalism’s last gasps

Liberalism, like capitalism, is an exceptionally resilient parasite. The dominance of last-gasp liberalism does not signify liberalism’s last gasps: on the contrary, its persistence in the face of evermore hostile material and ideological conditions is precisely its strength. The Democratic Party was shaken by Harris’ loss but by no means stirred to reassess its strategy or implement safeguards against forthcoming Trumpist backlash. If anything, the Biden administration’s withdrawn proposals for trans athlete protections and student loan forgiveness—not to mention its continuing support for a Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign—reflect a resounding neoliberal recalcitrance. As was the case after Trump’s first victory in 2016, nevertheless, liberalism could assume a far more subversive hue than it merits over the next four years. This could prove disastrous to potentially transformative mobilizations already fighting uphill battles against an administration that, by all initial appearances, is set to dramatically suppress dissent. 

Progressives and radicals will inevitably have to engage liberal institutions at several points in these mobilizations—not least of all because of how they might be appropriated and weaponized by right-wing actors—but doing so under the sway of liberal ideology would be gravely unwise. Above all, the construction of an organized Left alternative in the United States necessitates a mass disavowal of the Democratic Party as the only feasible vehicle for progressive change: the latter is now less of a graveyard for potentially transformative social movements than a killing field for them. This exodus should encompass a significantly reduced reliance on liberal civil society organizations that essentially serve as counterrevolutionary conduits for the Democratic Party machine. It must further problematize the neoliberal substitution of diversionary cultural spectacles—whereby the “representation” of oppressed communities and their struggles, often mediated by celebrities, is regarded as a liberatory end unto itself—for actionable political and economic critique.

Antonio Gramsci once remarked that, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” Somewhat paradoxically, a particular form of disillusionment might be integral to meeting this challenge: people of conscience in the belly of the U.S. imperial beast must allow their (neo)liberal illusions to die or, better yet, kill them. This may well mean killing significant parts of their conditioned psychosocial selves, a painful, stop-start process that calls upon leftists to exercise as much compassion as possible towards disaffected liberals. As Joshua Briond stipulates in a stinging critique of Black neoliberal co-optation, 

An understanding of the capitalist political economy—and whose interests it operates in service of—could . . .  pave the way for a reality where political struggle is governed by the interests and demands from below as opposed to being disciplined by fear or arguably more importantly, false promises of liberal enlightenment narrations of hope, freedom, and possibility. 

Cultivating a consensus around this understanding necessitates confronting the anti-communism that serves as a bedrock of U.S. politics as well as triangulating the inextricably intertwined socio-political imperatives of anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. But political education must go hand-in-hand with collective action to ensure that the latter does not occur in an ideological vacuum that can be reoccupied by liberalism and the former is not disconnected from empowering alternative modalities of political engagement.

Leftists of all persuasions in the imperial core should work to consolidate a united popular coalition against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism that brings together resurgent labor organizations; ongoing anti-war campaigns; emergent community defense initiatives; and grassroots movements for racial, gender, and environmental justice as well as Native and Indigenous self-determination. Widespread public support for the execution of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson demonstrates the value—in fact, the necessity—of building this coalition around a critical class analysis. Learning from the mistakes of far too many past leftist organizing efforts, this guiding analysis must reckon with key differences between different sections of the poor, working-class, and colonized U.S. masses as well as their relationships with peoples, movements, and organizations outside the imperial core. At the same time, leftists would do well to map the susceptibility of their own preferred frameworks to last-gasp liberal co-optation: from decoloniality to intersectionality to degrowth, no theory or praxis is innately invulnerable to late capitalist liberalism, particularly in moments of crisis.

Confronting the liberal in your head is as important as confronting the cop, boss, and colonizer in your head. All of these forms of critical reflexivity can only truly be honed through confrontation on the ground, for which many progressive people of conscience in the imperial core seem ready, at least in principle. However, confrontation alone, in word and deed, will not suffice as long as it does not facilitate the (re)construction of movements, organizations, and spaces that definitively break from last-gasp liberalism, rediscovering the beating revolutionary heart of leftist politics beneath the rotting floorboards of late capitalism.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured Image Credits: Cartoon by Clifford Berryman, in the public domain.