{"id":13569,"date":"2025-01-02T00:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-01-02T05:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=13569"},"modified":"2025-01-14T03:00:25","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T08:00:25","slug":"for-an-end-to-last-gasp-liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/01\/for-an-end-to-last-gasp-liberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"For an end to last-gasp liberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cScratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

T<\/span>his leftist credo has gained additional currency in the wake of Donald Trump\u2019s victory in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Numerous liberals have plastered social media with poisonous rhetoric<\/span><\/a> directed at various oppressed populations they hold responsible for Kamala Harris\u2019 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 \u201cfascistic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014<\/span>a prime architect<\/span><\/a> of the modern carceral U.S. state\u2014that same fall. It similarly explains why so many self-described progressives and a fair few leftists grudgingly voted for Harris in this year\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>individualist demagoguery<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>highly aestheticized diversification<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>liberal fictions like \u201cthe rules-based order.\u201d<\/span><\/a> This reversion reaffirms liberalism\u2019s 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\u2014to the point of constituting a structural absence\u2014of 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

A living history of subjugation, reanimated by neoliberalism<\/span><\/h4>\n

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\u2019s largely unacknowledged roots in the consolidation of the Euroamerican colonial capitalist world-system. Euroamerican liberalism\u2019s conception of the human\u2014the foundation on which its much-touted but ultimately shallow and conditional brand of humanism is built\u2014developed through the emergent capitalist project\u2019s propagation of Indigenous genocide, Black slavery, and coercive migrant labor. The enlightened European male liberal subject became the antithesis of<\/span> capitalism\u2019s victims both at home and abroad: supposedly \u201clazy\u201d and \u201cundeserving\u201d working-class and colonized people. Furthermore, Euroamerican liberalism\u2019s bloody underside is by no means restricted to its formative years in the crucible of incipient capitalist modernity. Gabriel Rockhill has shown<\/span> how liberalism enabled fascism<\/span><\/a> throughout the twentieth century, from the German Social Democrats\u2019 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.\u00a0 Cold War infrastructure through Operation Paperclip. In light of this history, the profound disregard for Palestinian life shown by U.S.\u00a0 liberals before, during, and after the 2024 Presidential Election<\/span> is far less surprising<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Liberalism\u2019s commitment to capitalism underlies its complicity with some of modern history\u2019s 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<\/span> 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 \u201ckeep \u2018em fed and they won\u2019t turn red,\u201d 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.\u00a0 (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 \u201cthe rules-based order\u201d while shredding international law to support Zionist ethnic cleansing and expansionism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Late capitalist liberalism<\/span><\/h4>\n

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 \u201caccountability\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Liberals in the U.S. imperial core have banked on being \u201cthe lesser evil\u201d 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.\u00a0 (neo)liberal power-brokers do the same things over and over again\u2014in service of the same nefarious private economic interests\u2014while 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n