Last October, the 80-year-old Democratic strategist James Carville confidently declared in the New York Times that Kamala Harris would win the White House. Last month he made another proclamation in the same paper: the most effective strategy for opposing Trump, he opined, was to let him self-destruct. This struck many as the exact wrong advice given Trump’s super-accelerated process of vastly expanding executive power, overwhelming the legislative branch and working towards openly defying and breaking the judiciary. America is becoming another country. If the Republicans lose the House in 18 months and refuse to acknowledge the validity of the election, America will be another country.
Virtually allowing Trump to hurtle forward unimpeded is also producing the unanticipated effect of exposing the vapid, venal obsequiousness at the core of present-day liberalism. Recall the Black Lives Matter movement and the ensuing waves of policed speech and cancelled careers amid scarce material change to actual black lives. Then flash forward to Al Green, a black Democratic congressman from Texas, who rose in defiance during Trump’s joint address to Congress, shouting at Trump and waving his cane in protest. Scores of Green’s fellow Democrats condemned his behaviour. Later, after Green was censured by the House, a small group of Democrats gathered around him on the House floor and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”. Yet Green’s daring had nothing to do with the civil rights movement of six decades ago. He had intervened in the urgent present, representing the conscience of all Americans, as black figures have often done. But his fellow liberals admonished him, and then patronised him.
Last week, Tim Walz, recently Kamala Harris’s running mate, spoke like a populist, in the manner of a real person rather than a politician – Trump’s irresistible power – when he called Elon Musk “a South African nepo baby” and a “dipshit”. The left denounced Walz for, as the New York Times priggishly put it, “attack[ing] Musk with language from the Trump playbook”. (They have a “playbook”. We have a “strategy”.) Democrats appear to favour Bernie Sanders’ thrilling slogan: “Fight the Oligarchy!” Most Americans recoil at ten-dollar words. Many have no idea of what an oligarchy is.
At the same time, liberals expressed outrage at desperate presidential aspirant Gavin Newsom, an echt-progressive who has cosied up to far-right agitators like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk on Newsom’s new podcast. Empty outrage seems to be the only consistent liberal response to anything. Behind all the moral indignation, though, is what usually animates the vehement public display of moral indignation: a secret, fatal attraction to the amoral status quo of wealth and social standing.
The liberal media reported endlessly on how Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic minority leader, cancelled his book tour (supposedly fearing for his safety) after voting for the Republican-drafted budget. What didn’t bother the liberal media was Schumer planning a book tour during the worst political crisis in America’s modern history. Weeks before, during Senate hearings on the cabinet nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the Democrat Ron Wyden, the powerful ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, paused in the middle of a CNN interview to promote his own book. It’s called It Takes Chutzpah. Chutzpah is Yiddish for fearless defiance.
Queens-born, Manhattan-formed Trump knows chutzpah when he doesn’t see it. He watched with utter lack of surprise as yesterday’s liberal exemplars raced to press their lips to his posterior: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the LA Times, the Washington Post, law firms and universities, most recently Columbia. The last particularly rankles. The university had been an early adopter of hyperactive DEI practices, but Trump threatens to withhold $400m in funding and he’s granted concessions including hiring “special officers” to arrest students, and putting the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department into what amounts to receivership. Columbia’s nearly $14bn endowment should empower it to defy Trump. Its capitulation seems to have helped open the door to Netanyahu’s resumption of the campaign to raze Gaza. Trump’s advisers know the heart of American protest, from Vietnam to today, has been Columbia – but no longer.
Liberal righteousness seeks group affirmation. Yet the solitude of the true dissident “hath no flatterers”, as Byron wrote. It was easy to “resist” Trump for eight years starting in 2016. The wealthy and socially elevated all did so. Now they support Trump in ever greater numbers.
The left drones on about the importance of “speaking to working-class concerns”, but plenty of Trump’s supporters are not working class. These concerns are conceived of as economic. But working-class people rarely define themselves in economic terms. Few do, except the very poor and very rich. If there is such a thing in America as a common idiom that includes the working class, it’s this: blunt, colourful, irreverent, sometimes unsettling speech. Terrified of saying the wrong, unsocialised thing, liberals cannot, for the life of them, speak plainly. Having played and profited by the rules all their lives, they simply have no idea what to do when the rules disappear.
[See also: Trump’s Golden Age]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame