“On liberalism’s crisis and its nationalist solution.” From Sophia Burns

Trump and Putin gave a joint press conference last month. The #resistance is up in arms.

Supposedly, Trump’s conciliatory language makes him a traitor, “simpering and submissive” before Putin. Doesn’t he care that Putin hacked the election – an “act of war” comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11?

Now, Russian bots didn’t put Trump in office. Rather, Hillary Clinton focused her get-out-the-vote efforts on Republicans, misguidedly expecting them to vote for her (whom they’ve hated for decades) rather than their own candidate. That miscalculation narrowed her majority enough to make her vulnerable to a fluke of Electoral College math.

Even so, since the election anti-Trump progressives have become more and more bellicose, with a growing homophobic and anti-communist edge. Where is that coming from? Aren’t liberals supposed to oppose war and support gay rights?

What changed?

Liberalism is in crisis.

It started under Obama. Despite opening his administration with broad popularity and the only congressional super-majority in recent memory, Obama’s tenure saw the emergence of mass movements to the Democratic Party’s left, most prominently Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Combined with the lingering echo of the 2008 financial meltdown, that laid the conditions for a Democratic crisis of legitimacy. In 2016, it crystallized through Bernie Sanders challenging Clinton and Trump winning the presidency. The unthinkable had happened. Progressives couldn’t deliver what they promised. So, their credibility vanished.

How did they respond? There’s a logic to the accusations of treason, the saber-rattling, and the conspiracy theories. If you’ve lost your legitimacy, how better to get it back than to set yourself up as the defender of the homeland against a looming foreign menace?

That’s why liberals are also going after the Left. Supposedly, Russian hackers are behind not only right-wing fake news, but also oil pipeline protests and the Jill Stein campaign. Democrats are throwing accusations of disloyalty and collusion at all of their opponents, left as well as right.

So, it’s no surprise to see the kind of outright homophobia that they mostly avoided under Obama. Homophobia is a powerful weapon in the nationalist arsenal. Insinuations of “deviant” sexuality bring a visceral punch to the image of sinister, un-American outsiders, strengthening nationalists’ appeal. Joe McCarthy persecuted gays as well as Communists in the 50s, and Democrats are exploiting those same attitudes today. Will they officially recant their pro-gay rights platform? They don’t need to. They’re feeding an embryonic anti-LGBT backlash in spite of it.

Liberals are fighting a war on two fronts.

On one side, they’re trying to beat down and discredit the Left. On the other, they’re competing against the Right on its own nationalistic turf.

Working in coalition with liberals is common sense for most leftists. But, the Democrats’ hard-nationalist turn means they’re starting to view radicals as enemies on par with Trump supporters. Government socialists and other activist leftists will doubtless keep trying to form progressive coalitions anyway. They’re donating volunteer hours to the political forces that will destroy them.

Progressives tolerate radicals when they can afford to. Right now, their crisis means they can’t. Working with Democrats, within their subculture, is no longer viable. So, without an infrastructure of independent revolutionary institutions, how will the Left survive? Revolutionaries can drop conventional activism and embrace the institution-building dual power strategy, or they can find themselves helpless as the liberal allies they depend on turn against them. The crisis of liberalism won’t be ending soon. Unless revolutionaries adapt, how can they withstand it?

Sophia Burns

is a Communist and polytheist in the US Pacific Northwest. Support her on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/marxism_lesbianism

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