When you read, as you often do, of an extremely wealthy person doing something of questionable legality — an Elon Musk, perhaps, appearing to bribe voters on a wide scale, or a Harlan Crow seeming to buy favorable court decisions by showering a justice with money and benefits — you might ask yourself: Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? Why does there seem to be no effort to make these people answer to the law? This is the world trying to teach you a lesson.
When you hear, as you also often do, that the Republican candidate for president has said something shockingly racist, or announced a plan to do something that could reasonably be described as fascist, or has simply remained a candidate for president despite a number of criminal convictions and open endorsements of the violent overthrow of our current system of government, you might ask yourself: How is this man still a popular and viable choice to lead the nation? Why has he seemingly faced no consequences for his many misdeeds? This, too, is the world trying to teach you a lesson. In fact, it is the same lesson.
When you learn, as you do on a daily basis, that the party that purports to stand in opposition to this sort of thing not only supports doing many of the same things as the opposition party favors, and not only does not take an oppositional position to the bad things their enemies do, but also actively courts the votes of the very party they oppose, you might ask yourself: What does political opposition even mean? Why do we so often find ourselves rooting for the lesser of two evils, accepting the bad in hopes to prevent the worst? This, once more, is the world trying to teach you a lesson.
When corporations do as they please regardless of the will of their ‘customers’; when the international law-based order seems to fall apart more and more every year; when the rich get richer beyond any previous conception of wealth; when the press treats our political class as if they were delicate boy kings instead of adults engaging in acts of political corruption and in defiance of their constituencies’ wishes, when deep and profound problems with education, health care, the environment, infrastructure, and human rights just keep getting worse and worse and no one seems to want to even talk about it, let alone do anything about it, this is the world trying to teach you a lesson. It is long past time that we understand what that lesson is.
Our current economic model is one in which the wealthiest may, more or less, do whatever they like. Everyone with sense knows that cryptocurrency is a pipe dream at best and a swindle at worst, but we not only allow it to continue, we actually encourage it, with the Republicans considering just another avenue to feed the god of profit and the Democrats offering it as a possible solution to poverty and racism. Everyone can see that AI is a huge boondoggle, a massive tool to commit digital theft and little more — and one that, like crypto and the colossal waste of resources by the ultra-wealthy, is contributing to the wide-scale destruction of the planet; but it not only continues at a pace that outstrips its value by leagues, but is actually talked about as a solution to the very problems it is helping to create.
This is, properly termed ‘liberalism’ (or, if you prefer, ‘neo-liberalism’). It is the principle that most problems can — and should — be solved by the free action of markets; that intervention by the state should be a last resort, or even a non-resort; that all people are free and independent social and economic actors; and that if one finds oneself at the bottom of the pyramid, it is one’s personal responsibility to climb to the top, not the responsibility of the state to help lift one out of poverty and misery. It believes in free trade, laissez-faire political policy, and the sacred principle that one ought to be able to get as rich as possible without any interference from the government or the people.
In America, we have distorted this meaning, and have decided that the more rapacious, authoritarian, reactionary flavor of liberalism should be called “conservativism”, while the kinder, gentler, nicer flavor of liberalism, despite believing in more or less the exact same general principles, should be called ‘liberalism’. The Republican Party, one of only two political parties that are allowed to stand for and win elections in what is purportedly a free democracy, is felt to embody the former flavor, while the Democrats are believed to embody the latter. The lesson that life is forever trying to teach us is that liberalism, in either sense you choose, is not capable of handling the threat of incipient fascism.
Because most Americans, by design, lack a historical material analysis of the world, they tend to believe that crises arise in our country more or less by accident, the result of a combination of bad luck and bad actors. Liberalism has no real theory of change, and teaches only that we must defeat the bad actors through electoralism, the only tool that is made freely available to the people. It insists that the only way to fix all our social and economic problems is to ensure that Democrats (the good liberals) win every election. Not only is this a statistical impossibility, it doesn’t even work; time and time again, we see Democrats triumph, only to fail to fix any of the fundamental problems facing the country, until things get so bad that the right-wing reactionary formations menace us all again.
Why does this happen? It happens because if you are playing a game, and one side resolutely refuses to play by the rules, the other side must either meet this refusal head-on, or cede the victory. Liberalism (in the American political sense) has no natural constituency. It is not built around any national, ethnic, class, or even ideological framework. Both parties in this country are capitalist and liberal (in the broader socioeconomic sense), and both parties, by design, wish to maintain the two-party duopoly, because it guarantees that they will either be in power or the only alternative to the party that is in power. The Neither Democrats nor Republicans are a democracy (that is, they do not have any internal mechanisms by which their membership may force the leadership to act in any given way, because they are not a membership organization in any meaningful sense); they depend for support purely on money and votes, and votes are creditable only to the general good will of those who are well-disposed to their proposals of the moment.
As a result, Democrats — the ‘better’ of the two parties (defined largely as an unwillingness to act in an overtly authoritarian, bigoted, or undemocratic manner) — are reluctant to the point of paralysis to take a firm stance on anything. They rely wholly on being viewed favorably and they avoid polarizing positions. They eschew their own left wing for fear that its positions are too inflexible or unpopular, even if they are morally correct or would result in the solution to a real problem. They drift ever more rightward, chasing the bourgeoisie who are easily swayed by reactionary propaganda, and they are afraid to issue propaganda of their own out of this terror at causing offense. But they gain no ground and develop no momentum, because reactionary voters can always get the real thing from the Republicans. And so they weaken and fade with every new crisis.
This is in opposition to, for example, a worker’s party that is based on membership (and thus gives its members an actual and measurable stake in its operations), class alignment (which guarantees a largely universal set of goals and outcomes), internal democracy (giving its members a vote in the direction the party takes and a weapon with which to punish divergence from that direction), ideology (lending the whole practice a common belief system and endgame), and a structure that relies on mass action and unity of purpose rather than on the whims of professional party operatives.
Capitalism depends on constant access to new markets, continual and perpetual growth, and smooth operation across geographical, political, and ideological lines. Genuine political organizing is an obstacle to its functioning in support of these goals, and because they are naturally impossible to realize, they must always be achieved by force. Workers must be paid less; resources must be more ruthlessly and destructively extracted; and any opposition to capital operations by unions, states, nationalist or ethnic groups, or any other cohorts must be destroyed. Capital cannot rest on its victories; eternal expansion is its unchanging priority. For this reason, the crises it creates will never end.
American liberalism, because it has no weapons other than good intentions, cannot stop capital’s predations, or the forceful defiance of its norms by those who refuse to respect them. It literally cannot stop fascism, because it feeds its opposition and has no tools with which to ward them off. Faced with no real constituency, no ideological framework, no understanding of power or coercion, no capacity to fix anything, and no coherent method of operation outside of its own complicity in the machine of international capitalism that neither wants nor needs it, it is helpless to solve the very problems it depends on solving to remain in power.
In such situations, there are two options remaining. People will flock, as they so often have, to the arms of fascists, who at least promise them a share in the loot they intend to plunder from the public wealth; or they can organize, as they so often have, around socialist, communist, and other leftist workers’ parties, who understand that they are seen as prey for reactionaries and fascists, and who alone can make ideological formations to combat them, overthrow them, and rid themselves of the capitalist mode of production, the insatiable profit-drive of which creates the constant crises that alienate people from their labor and their lives.
This is the lesson that the world is forever teaching us. It is that we have to abandon the idea that liberalism is a way out, or anything other than a decorative bandage over a festering wound. It is that there will be socialism or there will be barbarism, and that this, not Republican or Democrat, not liberal or fascist, not evil or lesser evil, is the real binary we must operate within. “What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing,” Maya Angelou told us, “is change it.”