A rather worrying sentiment has pervaded America in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election.
It has arisen as disheartened Americans, confounded by the abrupt rightward turn the nation took and by nine onerous months of living under the second Trump Administration, grapple with the nation’s political predicament by asking the curious question, “How did we get here?”
Indeed, how have we as a people allowed Trump to triumph and his destructive ideology to take unabated federal power? Among the various reactions, newsrooms of CNN, pages of Kamala Harris’s recent memoir, and the opinion column of the New York Times, each source seems to have come to the same, disconcerting answer: that America has lost sight of the noble truth of liberalism.
It has been said that in our collective failure to uphold the liberal cause, rooted in the principles that birthed the American experiment, the nation failed liberalism– but, in truth, liberalism failed the nation. It is liberalism that Trump and the general MAGA movement have taken advantage of, and it is liberalism’s inability to effectively address our late-stage capitalist economic anxieties that makes it fundamentally incapable of saving us from the political plight we frantically seek refuge from. Liberalism is not our savior or solution, but the root cause of our seriously disconcerting national problem.
A Retrospective
“Liberalism” as a term has come to be synonymous with the expansion of the social safety net, with the reduction of economic inequality, and the priority of social justice. Such an ideology, you may think, hardly seems unfit to improve the living conditions of Americans, to increase the working man’s paycheck, or to lower the price of groceries. Yet these are exactly the grounds on which voters last year scathingly rejected the Democratic Party.
In 2024, voters were presented with the liberal candidate Kamala Harris and a staunchly right-wing alternative, Donald Trump. It was the third instance in less than a decade of an election where a moderate Democrat was pitted against the charismatic head of a populist MAGA movement, one that aggressively preys upon Americans’ concerns surrounding the job market and affordability in particular. It was additionally the most recent instance of a protracted pattern of failing liberal efforts to stomp this predatory populist movement out of American politics.
Despite wide analytical discordance, the reasons for the Harris campaign’s failure are by no means ambiguous. Last year, voters saw the crises of affordability, rising inflation, and wealth inequality run rampant, all while the band of incumbent liberal leaders sat either unwilling or unable to solve them. They regarded Kamala Harris as an extension of President Biden and the then-ruling Democratic congressional leadership, and therefore of a political stance that failed to live up to the promises it made in 2020 of bringing the country greater social and economic equality. The Democrats’ poor standing in voters’ minds created an opportunity for MAGA to seize, leveraging Americans’ economic anxieties to offer an alternative, and a promise of their own: to steer America towards low inflation, plentiful jobs, public safety, and far away from liberalism.
These poignant issues of affordability may explain how liberals’ shortcomings lost them the 2024 election. But, I believe the reasons for this failure run deeper, as nuanced as the label “liberal” itself. After all, it remains to be asked, why did voters think the country’s problems are ones liberalism can’t solve? Is this a deluded sentiment, or one grounded in the truth?
An attempt at an answer came from Senator Bernie Sanders last year, as he issued an obituary to last year’s Democratic Party, claiming, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Though an enticing alternative to the deluded sentiment that the Democrats weren’t liberal enough, this too is not a valid diagnosis, for the failure of the Democratic Party was not that it abandoned the working class. The Democrats, as the liberal corner of the election, simply did what they had always done: propose restrained reform and uphold the status quo. Faced with the unprecedented politics of MAGA, this stale modus operandi renders liberals unequipped to respond.
A Diagnosis
See, there is a sense in which Kamala Harris, as a Democratic candidate, was defined by the over two-century-long liberal status quo that came before her. She was the epitome of a storied legacy of liberalism, not merely in the sense in which your red-cap donning uncle might disparagingly call you a “liberal,” but in the sense that liberalism is the historical American ideology. It has evolved throughout the many years for which it has dominated the nation; however, an ideological lineage can be traced from Kamala Harris all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. She is thus not a candidate in a vacuum, but the consequent result of nearly 250 years of liberal succession and evolution.
It is because of this evolution that different variations of liberalism can be identified throughout the nation’s history, successively arising through a gradual process that is itself an essential feature of liberalism. This process does not allow modern liberalism — or any iteration for that matter — to stray from the purposes for which liberalism was conceived, these being to rationalize capitalism and provide for a rational system of democratic government.
As presently used, liberalism refers to the governing tradition and political philosophy of individual rights, the consent of the governed, political equality, free expression, and above all, the right to property and the free market. It is the emergent thought of a society with a democratic political structure and capitalist economy, at all turns seeking to obsessively preserve these things. In America, it is the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that has since 1776 been upheld by the restraining power of democratic institutions, just as it is insistence that the US possess “the strength to regain and maintain a free world” as put forth by FDR, just as it is the political handbook of Kamala Harris.
Herein lies the anchor that tugged at the Harris campaign’s ankle, the flaring sun that scorched the wings of her presidential ambitions mid-flight. Harris was the perfect liberal, but this should be understood as an ideology with the central aim of preserving the status quo, meaning resisting change rather than utilizing it to further the nation’s progression. Her campaign, then, could not put forth policy meaningfully addressing the pertinent issues of affordability, social equality, and geopolitical violence, as these are issues for which liberalism was the principal cause, and that would require substantial distancing from the status quo. Harris, nor the similar leaders amongst the Democratic ranks, could not go toe-to-toe with a Trump campaign that thrust these financial fears and anxieties to the forefront, nor respond to national cravings for a populist rather than elitist or establishment orientation. Given these limitations, the liberal campaign of Clinton in 2016, Harris in 2024, and god forbid Harris in 2028, will always fail.
A Legacy of Liberalism
The liberal obsession with the status quo dates back to its American inception. Verily, this can be seen as liberalism’s undoing as early as 1776, through the nation’s first liberal document, the Declaration of Independence.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Incontrovertibly the most radical assertion of egalitarian values and democratic governance up to that point in history, it simultaneously stands true that this iconic stanza of Enlightenment philosophy illustrates the persistent harm caused by the liberal insistence on the status quo. See, at the same moment Thomas Jefferson referenced the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle all, he was served by over 600 enslaved Africans, human beings whose humanity was reduced to servantile property. The enduring promise of the free world was made by a man who held that “the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” This constitutes a supreme contradiction to egalitarian values that cannot be overlooked, yet was necessary to stand true lest the social and governmental structure the Founders were establishing stray too far from the colonial status quo.
This poor habit of liberalism was on no account exclusively one of the colonial or Revolutionary era. Rather, in each successive year, liberalism maintained the status quo and consequently continued to perpetuate a fundamentally inegalitarian social structure throughout the 20th century. We can see then a brutal dichotomy that developed between the liberal promise of the free world and the liberal priority of the free market, one quite relevant to the modern liberal failure to address the crisis of affordability.
In 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the American people, marking the end of his tenure as the leader of the free world and the world’s greatest liberal institution. In his remarks, Eisenhower stated, “Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people.” Holding to the status quo, Eisenhower produced a perfect statement of liberal rhetoric, but it is the liberal action of his administration that we are concerned with.
On August 19th, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower — in collaboration with the United Kingdom — overthrew Iran’s democratic and constitutional government. Plainly put, the USA’s CIA and the UK’s MI6 orchestrated a coup d’etat against Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh, replacing him and his democratically elected government with an absolute monarch. You’d be hard-pressed to identify what in the world the restriction of the authority of the state, government legitimacy tied to the consent of the governed, and natural rights have to do with toppling a Middle Eastern nation’s democratic and constitutional government. Elaborating that this government sought to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, of which the UK owned 51%, may make the overlap between liberalism and foreign intervention clearer. It takes little deliberation to conclude that to Eisenhower, it was less important to expand the free world than to protect the “free” market.
The consistent status quo of liberalism should be clearly understood as one maintaining a profitable yet inegalitarian structure in the US and beyond. To ask of modern liberals, then, a nation that is widely affordable and invests in the well-being of its people is a bit like asking of a horse a glue factory. A system predicated on economic and global inequality, resistant to abrupt change, with the central priority of preserving capital, will incessantly forsake its people and the free world for the free market. It can keep inequality at bay, yet cannot be expected to produce a largely consequential housing, wage, or affordability policy.
A Refusal to Move On
Unable to confront the nation’s current challenges, liberalism now sits in the tepid pool of its resistance to change.
Our country has arrived at a point in its history where liberalism’s priorities are fundamentally at odds with the needs of struggling Americans, with the stakes being not simply the economic well-being of Americans, but the continued rule of a startling, destructive Trump administration. Yet, the liberal party is fundamentally unable to meet the moment, to engage in self-evaluation, and to respond. Such was the flagrant foul of the Harris campaign. Clinging to a denial of the effects of inflation Americans themselves witnessed, Harris placed such an emphasis on the liberal method of incremental change that she scrapped economic policy that was overly “bold” and ambiguous. Her campaign put forth such policies as child tax credits and a slightly increased corporate tax, all the while the front-facing affordability of homes and groceries stood as the voters’ principal concerns. Lacking a far-reaching policy addressing the minimum wage, housing, or healthcare, the Harris campaign did little to prove that meaningful economic solutions could come from the liberal lens. Thus, while voters’ financial fears were at the center of the election, liberal leaders were unable to rise to the occasion. They simply could not abandon the status quo, could not respond.
But what might be achieved if a Democratic campaign is willing to prioritize responsive solutions to the nation’s anxieties over the status quo? Allow me to juxtapose the floundering of the Harris campaign with the victorious campaign of this year’s leading progressive, New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani. In their stark contrast, we may see what exactly the liberal response lacks in its (in)ability to confront the economic challenges of late-stage capitalism and the political threat of MAGA. Donald Trump is a symptom of the destabilization of affordable American life, and at least as self-described, a solution. Mamdani is another one. While the mere nomination of Harris as the Democratic candidate was an active decision not to veer far from the active direction and leadership of the Democratic party, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was explicitly a progressive alternative to the tried-and-tested liberal leadership of incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. The Mamdani campaign was rooted in his principal economic policies of rent freezing, city-run grocery stores, and free buses, whereas Harris articulated (in verbal remarks and speeches, not expansive documents of the party platform) little more of her economic policy than that it was consistent with that of Joe Biden. Above all, Mamdani offered a radically different option for frustrated New Yorkers and employed a strategy not of preying on their fears, but of addressing their needs. He put forth a policy that prioritizes affordability and empowers the struggling middle and working class, and in the face of the screeching opposition of MAGA, did what Harris could not: he won.
In an interview she gave with the BBC in October this year, Kamala Harris was asked about her future in politics, and whether or not she’d run for president again in 2028. The former Democratic presidential candidate said, “I am not done.” When asked if America’s first female president could be her, she briefly answered, “Possibly.” Rather than identify any structural flaws in the Biden-Harris administration or her campaign, Harris attributed her loss last year to the notion that she didn’t have “enough time.”
Though objectionable and probably disastrous, the prospect of another Harris candidacy is not unlikely, because in the face of unprecedented issues in America, this is the liberal response. It should, however, be abundantly clear that our current moment in history does not warrant a liberal response. We will only see continued frustration within the electorate at this insistence on a narrow array of liberal options. Liberalism is not a noble principle we’ve left behind, nor are liberal candidates equipped to try to fend off right-wing populism for the 4th time in barely a decade. If you sincerely believe our nation is experiencing a new and dangerous problem in Donald Trump, you should stop looking to the same tired idea to solve it.
Featured Image Source: ABC News
