Liberals Never Cared
Liberals are silent now because they’re always silent when marginalized people are imperiled
They said they were tired of illegal wars that kill millions of innocent people. They said they were fighting to save democratic norms.
They said that they were voting because kids are in cages. Liberals said all this and promised us that if we only voted for Joe Biden and he won the U.S. Presidency they’d be right there with us to hold him accountable, afterwards.
They lied.
Liberals never cared. Most of them think they do, of course.
They don’t. At least, not enough to follow-through, pay sustained attention, or show any philosophical consistency.
Liberals never cared about kids being placed in cages. If they did, they would’ve spoken up when President Obama and Vice President Biden built cages…and then placed immigrant and refugee children in them.
If liberals cared about kids in cages, they’d be screaming bloody murder this week after reading how President-Elect Biden plans to keep outgoing President Trump’s kidnapping program in place, because he doesn’t want to rock the boat, as that “would be the last thing we want” right now.
Liberals never cared about executive branch violations of democratic norms and the federal constitution. If they did, they’d be outraged this week and protesting Biden nominating recently retired general and war-profiteer Lloyd Austin to head The Pentagon, in violation of federal law and the democratic principle of maintaining civilian control of the military the way they were scandalized when Donald Trump did it just four years ago.
Liberals never cared about us waging illegal, genocidal wars. If they did, they wouldn’t have gone so quiet when President Obama, who campaigned against President Bush’s war on Iraq, took us from two wars to seven during his terms.
They claimed outrage when Bush tortured people, but liberals never cared about U.S. government torture programs. If they did, they would have been aghast when Obama continued systematically torturing, and then lied about it. They’d also be pretty upset right now as Biden has nominated several people to his war cabinet with ties to our torture programs and who have praised others who headed them.
Liberals never cared about joining the rest of the world in providing universal healthcare to Americans. If they did, they wouldn’t have endorsed a candidate for president in Biden who promised that, even should a Medicare for All bill pass congress and make it to his desk after elected, that he’d veto it.
Liberals promised that they’d help “push Biden Left” with us if we helped elect him. They lied.
Liberals are silent now like they were silent on Biden’s multiple sexual assault allegations as well as the years of his publicly molesting children and women on television. Liberals are silent now, after getting the Biden election they wanted, just like they were silent when he and Obama waged an historic assault and the very planet when they opened up the arctic oil drilling and oversaw a doubling of coal exports.
Liberals are silent now as congressional Democrats once again this week increased funding for Trump’s racist border wall. They’re just as silent, now, as they were when Democrats gave Trump increased domestic spying and war powers.
Liberals are silent, now, just as they were when Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders approved Trump’s plan and facilitated the largest single upward transfer of wealth in the nation’s history. If only liberals admonished the most powerful people in the world as much as they did unsatisfied voters who realize we need radical change and that voting for the same corporate, authoritarian Democrats we always have won’t bring change, they might have let out a peep when Obama used mercenaries to brutalize indigenous people trying to protect their water in South Dakota.
If liberals cared as much about the poor and working classes as they feign to, they might have spoken out when Obama left the same people who collapsed our economy in charge of it, after he took more money from their Wall Street colleagues than any presidential candidate before him ever had. If liberals were truly concerned about authoritarianism, they would have protested when Obama and Biden illegally used military forces on U.S. soil, paving the way for Trump to subsequently do the same.
If liberals cared about innocent Brown lives, they would have spoken out when the Clinton administration killed a half million innocent Iraqi children, women, and men with murderous sanctions, and then claimed it was “worth it.” If liberals cared about those less fortunate than them, they would have spoken up when Clinton literally starved millions of American children by cutting food assistance programs.
If liberals cared, they might have reflected on how they once giddily supported the creation of a new Jim Crow apartheid system through our carceral state in the mid-90’s, led by Democrats like Clinton and Biden, and then not went ahead and voted in Biden a quarter century later while he yet defended that atrocity.
If liberals cared, they would have repudiated Clinton when he had a monumentally inappropriate sexual relationship with a workplace subordinate young enough to be his daughter, in about as monstrous an example of disproportionate power dynamics between a man and a woman as one can imagine in modern times, and then lied about it under oath.
If liberals cared about sexual assault and harassment, they would have listened to and elevated the voices of Monica Lewinsky, and Lucy Flores, and Amy Lappos, and Caitlyn Caruso, and D.J. Hill, and Sofie Karasek, and Ally Coll, and Vail Kohnert-Yount, and Tara Reade, instead of hiding and smearing and threatening them.
Liberals lied. They were never going to join us to “push Biden Left,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Things as they are serve most liberals quite nicely.
Liberals are silent now because they’re always silent when marginalized people are imperiled. Liberal virtue is a performative, moralistic one.
Liberal virtue never looks to fundamentally improve the material conditions of marginalized people because that would mean dismantling a system that has worked well for their own interests and that would mean less for them. Liberals aren’t allies, they just like taking on the temporary affect of allyship.
That is fine, actually, so long as we come to terms with it. When we realize that liberals never actually cared, we’re then free to never care what liberals tell us to do, what tactics to take, or how to vote.
Great piece, thanks for writing.