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?
A 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?
May 5, 2025 13:57There'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?
Gerontocracy basically. Any normal Democrat beats Trump. What went wrong is they forfeited the public trust by blatantly lying about the state of Joe Biden's brain
A recent big fuck-up by Dems, & I think it’s telling, the story that Biden staffers, advisors, & handlers in 2022-23 did way too little to warn Biden off another run. This made a proper Primary campaign impossible & put Harris at a disadvantage. Lesson? A self-interest over party & country bug.
