To me, this is the great unanswered question of our age: how is that American liberalism managed to fuck up so utterly definitively despite having ample opportunities to shore up American social and political institutions?
There's the hard Marxist answer about liberalism and capitalism which is almost certainly right, but even then I think we still need more nuanced and granular analysis of what went wrong and why.
I guess what I'm gesturing towards is that the failure of American liberalism in the 2020s is both structural *and* a product of liberal agency and political culture.
The structural explanations are clear and compelling. But what, then, were the fuckups?
May 5, 2025 13:57A fuckup, by definition, is an unnecessary or self-inflicted mistake that is a consequence of one's own agency.
Trump's tariffs are *fuckups* in a way that the COVID lockdown and subsequent economic crises were not.
So what were the Democrats' fuckups from 2020-2025?
There's the Gaza genocide, obviously. Also add not actually prosecuting Trump until it was too late to the list. What are the others? And what lessons can we learn from them?
