The vibes have been a flat and stark contrast from this time eight years ago. The liberal platitudes and yard signs are gone and replaced with the smug resignation of “America got what it paid for,” and “fuck around and find out, I’ll bring the popcorn,” as we’ve spent the past three months watching the Titanic convene into tomorrow’s mass deportation raids.
During and ahead of Trump’s first administration, it felt like just about everyone could be on the same page about the atrocities. Liberals who wouldn’t usually give a shit about business as usual imperialism in the White House could condemn it, and even though we could all feel the hypocrisy in the background, there was still an opposition coalition with a unifying message of sorts. The result was mainstream Dems even calling for abolishing ICE and defunding the police. That’s the context that brought Democrats back into power, and yet is also what media says lost them the next generation by going “too far,” (mostly because of relentless manufacturing of consent around crime panic).
Since Trump was re-elected, all the tech and media companies swapped the color of their virtue signaling overnight. Culture itself is being set to completely normalize the new regime, and it feels like the response is apathy across broad swaths of both the left and liberals.
The way broad coalition solidarity ended at Palestinian rights exposed corporate equity for what it was: a cold-hearted calculation that the PR points and ability to attract talent made it more profitable for companies to capitalize on inclusivity than ignore it. That’s not to say it didn’t have meaningful impacts–preventing social media users of marginalized groups from facing a daily onslaught of harassment, ensuring workers had access to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, intentional efforts to hire women in leadership roles–all efforts that were rapidly stripped away in favor of “masculine energy” and “freedom of speech.”
For the median liberal there’s resentment against the left for morally equating Trump and Harris, for the marginal number of 3rd party voters, feeling like they were selfish for choosing a clear conscience over the thin fabric of American liberal democracy.
For the leftist, Biden spent a year unapologetically arming a genocide in broad daylight, and they spent the entire time trying to warn Democrats that this would lose them the election. Democrats didn’t move on inch on it but to scold the suggestion, while Trump made pit stops for Arab Americans. Whether or not it made the difference, the top reason Biden voters didn’t show up for Harris was Palestine. A vocal minority on the left even stood by the sentiment that regardless of what Trump will do, the Democrats must be punished by losing at the ballot box for being the ones currently doing a genocide (I think Biden will be just fine until he passes while a whole lot of others will not, fwiw).
I damn the Democrats for being complicit in the most heinous of warcrimes. For slow walking Trump’s return to power in this regard, as well as in their inept prosecution of his crimes, in their failure to articulate a defense of the handful of bright spots of their administration, in their allowing of the right to center every conversation. The cultural needle seems to be definitively pushed to the right as Harris refused to make a case to the people for the humanity of immigrants, for climate action, for trans rights, for healthcare. It’s a fractured party that can’t even stop their senator from voting to deport his own wife. They handed Trump a silver plate of wins that will cement his support with young voters; a “Mission Accomplished” moment (à la Reagan’s Iran hostages) of a ceasefire that could have been accomplished a hundred thousand lives ago with a single phone call to Bibi, failure to decriminalize cannabis, a hilariously convenient TikTok ban deadline.
I don’t know what’s next, but we can’t be apathetic.