Liberalism's Exhaustion
with Daniel Bessner
For years, I and many others have been warning liberals and progressives who defined themselves by embracing identity politics over material economic concerns, by touting America and Americans as the root of all evil, by portraying themselves as the occupiers of “the right side of history,” and who smeared those who didn’t buy into their program as ignorant, racist wretches.
We’ve been warning them: Keep at it, and your political base is going to shift out from under your feet. The “wretches”—some of whom used to be Democrats—are going to take their votes and their campaign contributions elsewhere. The “people of color” who you run to with your hand out every two years are going to realize you have nothing to offer in return except the hollow claim that “the other guys are worse.” We said, if you don’t rethink your political program, it will be the end of you.
This election may not mark the end for the Democratic Party, but I don’t think anyone can look at the results and say I was wrong. To be sure, there are many factors contributing to Trump’s win. Alienation from the Democratic Party can’t account for all of his success. But it may account for the narrow difference between a win and a loss.
And yet, what do we see in the aftermath? We see Nancy Pelosi, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, refusing to admit that her party had any hand in its own defeat. We see angry progressives blaming the wretches for rejecting the party that has done nothing but mock them. We see very little of the soul-searching that one would expect among party leaders after losing two branches of the government in one election. In this clip, Daniel Bessner argues that the Democrats’ failure is a sign of liberalism’s exhaustion. It has, he says, nothing left to offer. I don’t know if he’s right about that. But if Kamala Harris is the best the Democrats can do, he’s not wrong.
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DANIEL BESSNER: So you basically have one party, the Republican Party, essentially being like a fuck you to the system. To me, Trump does not represent an ideology so much as an anti-systemic candidate. And a Democratic Party—and I'm curious what you think about this. I think it's mostly because of professionalization. Literally the people who staff the party all come from basically the same class, same series of institutions. So they have no sense of what's actually going on in the world. Their lives are pretty good, and they were pretty good under Trump as well. So all they can offer is a negative program, because they don't actually want to do things like redistribute wealth. They don't actually want to promote equity and equality. So you have the voters essentially rejecting the negative program of the Democratic Party for, again, just an anti-systemic candidate who, in my opinion at least, doesn't have much to offer.
And not only that—and I very much respect John McWhorter, as I know a lot of people on my side don't. But I think John is a real thinker. John doesn't get the appeal of Trump. He just doesn't get it. It's because there's a particular class, there's a particular way of living, it's a particular social space. I think a lot of the people who staffed the Democratic Party come from a similar position. They're not able to actually offer a genuine program. And when a genuine program was offered by Bernie, Obama knifed him in the back.
Glenn, I know you hate Obama. Me too. This really destroys his legacy. It destroys it. It's just done. The fancy Disney adult vision of America that was presented by Barack Obama has been repudiated significantly twice. I would say three times, not only by Trump's first victory, but also by the desiccated corpse of Joe Biden becoming president. And then Trump becoming president again? This is a repudiation of the entire neoliberal, technocratic, institutionalist vision of Obama.
I think that's really the most important story of today. Liberalism is in crisis because it doesn't have anything to offer. If the Democratic Party doesn't address that—which it won't, because of the process of professionalization—it's going to be fucked into the future. We're not going to do things that we need to do, like address climate change. I'm very black-pilled right now. I'm very cynical about the future of this country and this world.
GLENN LOURY: I don't really have anything to add to that.
What would the commenters say? The commenters who are going to be mad, like what is the other side of this? Actually, it's fine?
One line of argument—and I think in our pre-conversation this came up—will be “this is a racist country.” It's misogynistic. Two women have run for president. They've been defeated by a pussy-grabber, rapist felon. It's a manifestation of the underlying moral indecency of the American political culture. They've reverted to form here, to a certain extent. And their views about immigration, their views about crime and punishment, their views about transgender rights, and so on are, these are deplorables and these are despicables.
I watched Jonathan Capehart during the election returns. I happened to be on PBS looking at the roundtable with David Brooks. And no offense to Jonathan Capehart, who's a capable guy at what he does. He expresses himself well. He is a Washington Post associate editor, regular on the PBS News Hour. As it was becoming clear, as one commentator put it, you don't have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. It was pretty clear what was going on. He was like, “I can't believe this country. I can't believe Hollywood, embraces this guy, this fascist,” whatever. So it'll be that.
But that's nonsense. This is not empirically true. As our friend Tyler Austin Harper says, that's just new age self-expiation, that this sort of “teach me about race” thing has happened. You would then have to explain the Obama-Trump voters. You would then have to explain the Latino voters. You would then have to explain the actual change in US race relations over the past 70 years, 60 years, since the Civil Rights Act. It's obviously different.
I do agree that race remains a structuring condition of American society. And I also agree that so does xenophobia. We should maybe talk about immigration, because I think we have very different views on that, so we could argue about that. But it just seems to be like it's so obvious, this is a material basis. It's so obviously linked to how Americans feel about their material future and the fact that things have become more expensive.
Billionaires have become just way more rich. Have you seen those statistics since like 2012? They have exploded in wealth and people are just rejecting a Democratic Party that has basically made no moves to do anything about that. Then people would say Lina Kahn. If you look at the problem of monopolization in this country, what the FTC did does not nearly approach what would need to be done to do things like deconglomerate or prevent private equity from coming in and destroying entire industries.
It's never going to happen. Never going to happen because capitalism. So then we're just going to go sink further and further into, as our friend Karl Marx said, “the mutual ruin of the contending classes.” I don't know the last time you read the [Communist] Manifesto, but on the first page, that's what he says. You're either gonna have the dialectical transcendence of the conflict of the age or you're just gonna lead into destruction. And I think all of our ruling elites, from the left to the right—and by “left,” I really mean liberals. I wish we could blame the left, because that would have mean they would have governed. They just have never governed in this country.
So from the liberal “center” to the right, they've just showed no willingness to deal with any of the problems. Instead, they just try to blame it on a basically ineffable American evil, which is to me an anti-political position. If you're writing off whatever the popular vote that Trump won—is it going to be 51-ish percent? You're just saying 51 percent of the country is just not reachable, they're evil, fascist, blah, blah, blah. That's not politics.
So you can't see a working class coalition of any real political weight emerging in the fullness of time? It would be decades. We have to take the long view. What's going on right now, it's a populist upsurging. It's a rejection of the elites, in some sense. He's getting a lot more minority votes than Republicans have been getting. That can't be the harbinger of a shift in the sensibility of the working-class electorate?
"Daniel Bessner argues that the Democrats’ failure is a sign of liberalism’s exhaustion. It has, he says, nothing left to offer."
This is not accurate. First, what the left has been offering is not "liberalism" in any traditional sense. Maybe we can call it progressivism. In any case, it still has a lot "left to offer," chiefly what it has been offering for at least 15 years now: an emotional support system that gives adherents a nearly religious sense of righteousness and superiority. But this appeal has beccome self-defeating; in exploiting these emotional needs the Democrats have lost control of the faithful, and the emotionally-needy fanatics who now dominate are repelling not just nonbelievers but also many former disciples.
The Democrats lost because they let the far left determine policy for them. Trans rights are important, but the government and hospitals imposing gender affirming care on children who are too young to make what is now the second (Right to die), or third (Right to abortion), most important decision they will have to make. They decided to do this without allowing them to thoroughly explore their decision and get the full facts of transitioning. There is a high correspondence between autism and gender dysphoria. As somebody who was born hard of hearing and legally blind, and whose doctors refused to diagnose him with hearing loss until two months after high school graduation, and legal blindness when he was 52, after being hit six times while walking across the street, let me state that the medical establishment has nobody's best interest at heart. They work in 10x12 offices, and have no clue what the social situation is for people with disabilities. The Democrats ran with a candidate whom the electorate did not vote, who did not declare any policy, and listened to the Ivy League know nothings. For 60 years we have let your class creates policy that has destroyed the lower classes.
The CDC refuses to acknowledge that we have a crisis in our country; 10% of all children are born preterm. Of those, 49% are born to women on Medicaid. The highest rate according to the CDC Wonder database, is 14% of Black babies born premature; 65% of their mothers are on Medicaid. This rate has remained steady since 1996.
What does preterm birth mean? As I mentioned before, I am hard of hearing and legally blind since birth. If the women who give birth to preterm babies are on Medicaid, they most likely live in low income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are where Title I schools are located; impoverished schools that are not funded enough to afford quality education, updated classrooms, or even provide teachers with materials to teach their students.
The medical establishment has not re-evaluated hearing loss since 1984; they are stuck on 15 decibel hearing loss in one ear for children as the definition. They have examined binaural hearing loss, which is possibly 10 decibel or 5 decibel loss that can cause sensory deprivation and social isolation. The Educational system has done little to explore disability as a reason for educational failure in Title I schools and systems; instead, they assume stupidity.
The problem with education is the philosophy is now garbage. Dialects should be respected outside of the classroom; Standard Spoken English is the only form of English taught in the classroom. African-American Vernacular English is only one of at least 35 American English dialects, but probably the most famous one. "The" is pronouced "De" at the beginning of the word, and "V" at word medial and word final; "Th" as in thought, is pronounced "T" at word initial, and "F" word final. There are numerous contractions that are used in dialect that do not have parallels in SSE. With consonants, some consonants do not appear at the start of a word, and others do appear at the end of the word. The school district I attended went from 20% Black in 1968 to 70% Black in 1978; I could not understand AAVE because it is not mutually intelligible for somebody who lipreads SSE.
Even with minimal hearing loss, children cannot understand spoken English without lipreading. Much of television and radio is voiceover; whether its cartoons or puppets, or any other format other than a person's face appearing forward in clear light, they are not going to pick up vocabulary. (Only 40% of sounds in English appear on human lips, and 50% are dentals (t,d,s,sh,...))
The question of who is acting up in school and why needs to be explored keeping hearing loss, central auditory processing disorder, and reading disorders in mind. The research does not explore this enough. If a child cannot understand the teacher, I give the child five minutes before they act up in class. (The CDC only provides insurance coverage as a search term; we need socio-economic status, complete with number of members of the family, and the determination by upper, middle, lower-middle, and lower status to determine just who these children are born to, and the CDC needs to restore mapping status, so that we can target those neighborhoods for more intensive outreach for well-baby care.) By emphasizing Standard Spoken English (SSE), the students are more easily identifiable for remedial education and speech therapy. (We need to allow speech language pathologists the right to diagnose hearing loss in a classroom setting.)
Finally, under project 2025, and even without it, the Republican Party is targeting Title I funds, with a reduction of a quarter of its funds; this amounts to 4.5 billion dollars. This affects 63% of schools. Meanwhile, Columbia University's federal funding is 3.5 billion dollars, and will only be cut off if they refuse to correct their classicist, elitist, ableist, racist environment. I think all Ivies should be cut off from federal funding. Given the crisis in research, where data is falsifiable, or plagiarized, there is no reason to subsidize research.
Title I schools need to be updated, their students deserve quality materials, the students do not have access to the same level of cultural enrichment as their peers in well-funded schools. I believe the upper class elite virtue signalers can stop the Equity of Outcome brigade, and truly fund, and support, true equality of access. These communities need education available to all citizens.
I was lucky; my parents knew I was smart, and encouraged education. These students who have disabilities are not given the opportunity to shine. Teachers need to demand excellence on all levels.