The Sinking Ship
Why Tying Yourself to Liberalism Is a Choice to Drown
What Is a Liberal?
In the post-Reagan era, the term “liberal” carried a recognizable, if loosely defined, set of commitments. To be a liberal was to be broadly anti-racist, ostensibly pro-worker, and supportive of “progressive” policies. It meant not being diametrically opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy. It was, in the American two-party context, the alternative to conservatism — the team you rooted for if you believed government could occasionally do some good.
Today, that definition has curdled into something unrecognizable. The contemporary liberal offers a platform of contradictions: the strongest military in human history, a foreign policy indistinguishable from neoconservatism, and a domestic agenda that amounts to managing the decline of the social safety net with marginally more dignity than the other side. The Democratic Party has functionally become a spoiler party for the pro-bourgeoisie consensus, maintaining the illusion of choice while ensuring that the fundamental arrangement of power remains undisturbed. A rotating cast of villainous Republicans takes the blame while a sufficient number of Democratic senators vote “no” to attract negative attention, and then the cycle resets.
The thesis is simple: to be a liberal in today’s climate is to tie yourself to a sinking ship. The question is whether enough passengers will abandon the vessel before it drags them under.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Nobody Likes Liberals Anymore
There was a time when Americans conceived of “liberal” and “conservative” as simple opposing poles. One could assume, with reasonable confidence, that each would take the opposite position of the other on most major questions. This binary, however crude, provided a functional map of the political landscape.
That map is now obsolete. A growing progressive and leftist faction of the American electorate has emerged — voters who might logically fall under the Democratic tent, yet find themselves consistently sabotaged and denigrated by the party’s corporatist arm. These are voters who believe in a fundamental rebalancing of power between the billionaire class and the working class. They are broadly anti-racist but do not tie their identity to their politics. They form a coalition spanning highly educated professionals and working-class families. They are the future of any viable left-of-center coalition.
The polling industry has yet to catch up. Survey questions still frame choices between “liberal” and “conservative,” interpreting “Democrats are too liberal” as a rejection of progressive policies rather than what it often means: “Democrats do not cater to their actual leftist base.” The distinction is critical, and its elision has produced catastrophic strategic errors.
Liberals perform a peculiar rhetorical dance. With one breath, they scold leftists as too extreme, too demanding, too willing to let perfect be the enemy of good. With the next, they desperately court the fabled “moderate voter” — that mythical creature who isn’t sure whether January 6 was a coup attempt, who believes Israel is merely “defending itself,” who thinks the only problem with masked federal agents assassinating citizens in the street is that the videos look bad. Chuck Schumer famously consults a fictional liberal couple in his head, treating his own imagination as a focus group.
Here is the honest position: if we are recruiting people who need to be persuaded that genocide is wrong, who think state-sanctioned murder is acceptable as long as the victims are inconvenient, then frankly, I do not want their vote. I do not want to belong to a party so ideologically malleable that it seeks common ground with genocidal fascists. A coalition that requires compromising with evil to achieve “electability” is a coalition already defeated.
The Changing Base: What the Polls Actually Show
The political landscape beneath the Democratic Party is shifting, and the party leadership refuses to look down. Figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and now candidates like Zohran Mamdani reflect what the data actually shows: more self-identifying Democrats identify as leftist, and this trend rises sharply as voters get younger. The base is moving left. The leadership is anchored to a donor class that has not moved at all.
The party must bend to the will of its people. Instead, it preemptively smears anyone who supports a leftist candidate as a spoiler for the Republican opponent. The pressure to coronate Gavin Newsom as the 2028 nominee is already underway — and woe to anyone who refuses to fall in line.
When political streamer Hasan Piker recently said he would “probably vote third party” rather than support Newsom in a general election, the backlash was swift and telling. His comments went viral, drawing three million views and fierce condemnation from Democratic strategists and party loyalists. Writer Ari Drennen accused Piker of not caring about trans people. A Chamber of Progress director called his stance “insanely irresponsible.” Democratic strategist Tré Easton dismissed him with three bullet points: “1. He’s neither hot nor cool. 2. His politics are just ‘hate the Democrats.’ 3. We should all stop listening to him”. The message was unmistakable: fall in line behind the establishment candidate, or be cast out. Piker’s response cut to the heart of the matter: “S***libs who don’t care about losing to trump now want you to obey in advance to their hypothetical establishment candidate”. He’s right. The party isn’t trying to win votes; it’s demanding fealty.
Step backwards in time to the summer of 2024 — the momentum generated when Joe Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris was nominated, and Tim Walz was announced was real and palpable. It was taken out back and shot in the head during Harris’s convention speech, where Harris’s promise to be the ‘most lethal military’ was funded by $4.4 million from Google’s parent company and millions more from Amazon and Microsoft — corporations with no interest in ending wars. The message was unmistakable: we will not fight for you; we will only manage your expectations.
The Democrats’ refusal to release the full autopsy of the 2024 election is itself an admission. The analysis reportedly showed that Harris’s failure to address voters’ concerns about Israel and Gaza was a significant factor in her inability to turn out voters where it mattered. One analysis estimates Democrats lost 422,000 votes in swing states due to voter demobilization, with up to 29% of that loss going to third-party candidates.
The numbers are stark. In Dearborn, Michigan — home to the nation’s largest Arab American population — Joe Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020. In 2024, Donald Trump led with 46.8 percent to Kamala Harris’s 27.8 percent, with Jill Stein pulling 22 percent. This was not a drift; it was a defection. Polling showed that 24 percent of swing-state Democrats and independents ranked Palestine among their top four voting issues. The party had every warning.
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Rather than learn from this, the party sent Bill Clinton to Michigan. There, he told a Muslim-majority district that Jews were living in “Judea and Samaria” before Islam existed, and suggested that Palestinians upset about the death toll should consider what they’d do if their family was attacked . The question writes itself: Why would any campaign think this was outreach?
The Alternative: A Party Worth Voting For
The changing base dictates a new strategy. No more corporatist spoiler energy. No more preemptive concessions to an opposition that offers none in return. The candidate’s job is to give voters a reason to vote for them, not merely a reason to vote against the other guy.
America’s appetite for a genuinely leftist and progressive party is not hypothetical. It is measured in the enthusiastic public reception to candidates like Mamdani, in the crowds at Sanders rallies, in the polling of young voters who have never known a functional social safety net and want to know why. The question is whether the party will listen, or whether it will continue to mistake its donors for its constituents.
A Democratic Party worthy of the name must adopt a platform that includes, at minimum:
- Boots on the ground in Israel to stop the genocide, backed by a credible threat to suspend military aid.
- Immediate drawdown of all troops in the Middle East, ending the forever wars.
- A Nuremberg-style commission to hold the Trump administration and its enablers accountable for deaths caused by ICE violence, with full audits of the newly constructed concentration camps and every person deported under unlawful orders.
- Packing the Supreme Court to neutralize a stolen majority.
- Medicare for All, removing healthcare from the profit motive.
- Free college and universal free meals in schools, investing in human capacity.
- Government-provided housing for all who need it, treating shelter as a right.
- Massive public infrastructure investment: rail, bridges, parks, and public power.
- And yes: political reeducation for those radicalized into fascism, treating the MAGA movement not as a legitimate political faction but as a domestic insurgency requiring deradicalization.
The Only Question That Matters
Failure to adopt this agenda will produce a repeat of 2024. Voters will not turn out for a platform that offers them nothing. They will not sacrifice their time, hope, or bodies for a party that treats their concerns as bargaining chips.
The liberals who insist we must defeat fascism at the ballot box face a brutal logic: if the only way to win is to compromise with fascism by running candidates who split the difference between “deport the illegal immigrants” and “denaturalize and deport dissident citizens,” then the game is already lost. You cannot defeat an authoritarian movement by adopting its premises and hoping voters won’t notice.
The ship is sinking. The only choice is whether you go down with it, or swim for shore.
