Like any responsible communist, it’s my personal opinion that Democrats are even more responsible for the rise of fascism in the USA than Republicans. I agree with Malcom X’s example of the wolf vs the fox; while the wolf makes clear its intention to bite you, the fox will disguise its teeth with a smile but will bite you nonetheless.
After the 2024 election I was listening to a post-mortem from Chapo Trap House, my little baby bottle comfort podcast that grounds me during this slide into national psychosis, and I heard a striking analogy (or metaphor?) from Amber A’Lee Frost:
“[A friend of mine who’s a social worker and works with kids from abusive households] was explaining to me that there’s this phenomenon where when the kid grows up, they hate the parent who abused them, but they hate the parent who stood by and let it happen even more. And that’s the Democratic Party.”
Sometimes you hear something that just sticks, and that statement—whether because I could relate it to my own childhood, or just because it’s just a fucking bar and Amber is Her—has been replaying in my mind since. It cuts to the core of the utter contempt I feel for the Dems.
Considering that our country is ranked 13th to 28th in education depending on who’s asking and our entire 20th century was an internal communist witch hunt, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of Americans lack even a basic amount of political literacy. And this is why Democrats are shocked and bewildered, year after year, election after election, by their Party’s unilateral inability to contest this Republican juggernaut of reactionary politics. But when you look a little deeper—and I mean a little, barely at all—it makes perfect sense. I’m not going to tirade about class consciousness but I will do a quick overview of the basics:
The USA operates under a political system and an economic system: liberalism and capitalism, respectively. Liberalism grew somewhat organically from feudalism, when groups of private land owners amassed such great personal control of land & resources that they began to hold more functional political power than the monarchs themselves, and that separation of private ownership from government is fundamental to its doctrine. Capitalism is our beloved economic system, where the free market ostensibly creates natural competition to keep a vibrant economy serving its people, with little government oversight necessary and white picket fences all around.
Of course, we know that this isn’t the reality. Where the government’s role was to at least nominally serve its people under traditional liberalism, it’s now to explicitly serve the market instead (insert Reaganomics tirade here). And capitalism is a cancer in both our society and the world around us. Competition is a game of winners and losers, so it stands to reason that no business can thrive without others being crushed, and the winners aren’t the most virtuous; they’re the ones most effectively able to exploit the global south for cheap raw materials to keep profit margins high; and most effectively able to crush worker organization to keep wages down. This is to say nothing of its interest in settler colonialism or war profiteering, or the fact that in the richest country on earth 6 out of 10 people can’t afford a $400 emergency. It’s not going very well for most people, but I digress.
Democratic politicians are just as obedient to capitalism as their right wing counterparts. That obedience comes with many personal spoils: very comfortable networths funded by lobby & taxpayer money, and private ownership of multibillion dollar industries like healthcare and weapons manufacturing, to name a couple. But that obedience to the machine, and not their constituents, fundamentally kneecaps their ability to ever achieve the reforms they seem to fight so hard for. It’s the equivalent to driving a car without wheels.
Here I often reference The Iron Law of Institutions, first written about by Jonathan Schwartz. In so many words, the Law is this:
“…the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
The Democratic Party will always sacrifice our safety for their money. They understand, like you should, that these crusades of theirs—socialized healthcare, education and public transportation—would by definition move those services out of private ownership and cost them a ton of money, which is their power within the institution of capitalism.
If you have liberal voters in your life, you know their entire worldview is centered around the idea that Republicans are big meanies who won’t argue in good faith, and we tried to get literally anything done but they won’t let us! And setting aside that spectacular institutional victim complex, I often ask “so what do we need you for if that’s what you’re offering?” and conversations end quickly. But I do have some empathy for how stupid these people are, because their political view simply isn’t grounded in reality. Matt Christmann (of Chapo fame) refers to this as the schizophrenia of liberalism, where we steadfastly hold hope for an outcome that is fundamentally impossible to achieve.
I could go on for days about liberal betrayals—from the Clinton crime bill, to Obama’s competition-based approach to public school funding, to the Hillary campaign’s naked contempt for working class voters, to Harris’s prosecutorial record upholding prison slave labor in California—but what’s at the front of my mind is this last year. The Democratic Party, who hasn’t won the white vote since Lyndon B. Johnson, turned on its majority BIPOC constituency in one of the most stunning “fuck you” moments I’ve seen in my lifetime. Where they used to quietly betray them, now it was on television: Harris called the border wall a good idea, cosigning all of the demonstrably false narratives about “the migrant crime crisis;” Biden sent police to brutalize anti-genocide campus protesters in the courtyards of Columbia University, right outside the school halls that proudly display gushing murals of the Vietnam War protesters in their halls; Bill Clinton went to Michigan to lecture Arab families on why their dead families in Gaza & the Middle East don’t matter because of King Solomon. When the dust cleared, they’d burned a billion dollars in front of us, said “we’ll get em next time” and went straight to the auctions for cabinet positions in DC.
The Democratic Party does not care about you. They can’t. It’s not a matter of ethics or attitude or having the fight in them. Fighting for your interests is simply against the rules of the job that they do. But they will continue to act like that’s not the case, and as their excuses for why they can’t get shit done become more and more convoluted, you have the choice of letting your own brain rot enough to believe it, or waking up.
Returning to Amber A’Lee “Based God” Frost’s cutting metaphor: things only got this bad because the Democrats have enabled it. I grew up watching my brother get thrown down the stairs by my stepfather, I was too small to stop it, and our mother never stepped in. That’s what voting in this country has been reduced to. We watch Republicans threaten to terrorize and slaughter millions of Americans & see their constituents enforce the threats, and hear an ocean of excuses from the Dems about why they couldn’t stop them, why they had to capitulate again, why they are completely blameless despite being the only meaningful opposition. They are truly the wolf and the fox.
Somehow stumbled across your content (TikTok) and it smacked me in the face. Appreciate your thought pieces and looking forward to reading more.
fuck yes. thank you