Scratch a Liberal, A Fascist Bleeds - Part I, The Symptom: The 2024 Election and Liberal's Adoption of Fascism

From liberal abolitionists to Kamala-loving liberals, reactions to Kamala's loss were the same: minorities need to die. Was it a slip of the tongue or a long-awaited fascist solidarity?

This two-part essay is a critique of liberalism. This first part is being published on January 20th, 2025, the day of the inauguration of now President of the United States, Donald Trump. Many people in the United States who actively voted against Trump in the 2024 election may feel as though everything was done to keep him from office and that his election was merely the outcome of his brilliant political acumen. That Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, as the leaders of the Democratic Party and now previous administration, did everything in their power to stop Trump from coming back into office and they did absolutely nothing that could have helped him.

This is a liberal delusion. And if we wish to actually combat the new fascism,¹ we must be able to deal with liberal fantasies that stop us from understanding and confronting it with fresh strategies. We need to be armed with a critique of liberalism, the liberal’s pivotal role in bringing about this new era, as well as a concise understanding of this new fascism itself. This two-part essay is a contribution to the two former necessities, a critique of liberalism and the liberal’s role in ushering in this new fascism in the United States with global consequences.

This first part of the two-part essay is meant to orient the reader towards this critique. Understanding that the following information may be a radical departure from what you may be used to consuming, we start with an event that every reader from the United States had participated in - or abstained from - last year: the 2024 presidential election of the United States of America.

I will be using the 2024 election to frame my argument against liberalism. By liberalism, I do not speak of liberal governance - branches of government, constitutions, judicial system - but of a historically contingent political phenomenon. Rather than defining this political phenomenon outright, however, I will continue with the essay and give a final, concluding definition of liberals and their political stance at the end. The second part of this two-part essay will lay out a general critique of liberalism as a historically contingent political phenomena so you may have something handy next time you come face to face with its deceit.

In the first part of this essay, I will argue that:

1. The Democratic Party, as the political representatives of liberals in the United States, lost the 2024 election due largely to leftist voter abstention (Section I and II).

2. There was mass leftist abstention because the Democratic Party ran the most conservative campaign in its recent history and facilitated Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people (Section II).

3. The liberal media pundit class and broader liberal masses have adopted fascist logics while the Democratic Party’s right-wing-centered political strategy helped legitimate the illiberal tendencies of Trump (Section III - V)

4. The above is symptomatic of liberals’ role in protecting neoliberal capitalism by helping usher in and give credence to a new fascism (Section VI - VII).

In sum, as I show in the following sections and conclusively write, “2024 was the year liberals in the United States shed, once and for all, their illusions of liberality that had been withering and torn asunder as their political representatives presided over genocide and their pundits adopted fascist reasoning.”

I will approach liberalism from a root-cause thought process. First, I will discuss in this essay a symptom of the ineptitude and falsehoods of liberalism, the 2024 election, and then I will discuss, in a second essay soon to come, the cause: liberalism itself. The case study will be the 2024 election.

I. The Symptom: The 2024 Election

In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris, then Vice President to President Joe Biden, faced now newly elected President Donald Trump, who was running for a second term in office. Trump won by a popular vote margin of around 3 million votes.

Why did Kamala Harris lose? is the 1-million-dollar question.

Credit to Adam Shultz

The Lost 19 Million Voters

Simple View: Calculating the Popular Vote

The real reason is simple: many key-demographic Democrats abstained from voting. Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 with over 81 million votes against Trump’s 74 million votes², a 7 million vote difference. While Trump did better than his own 2020 run, receiving over 3 million more votes, Harris faired worse than Biden’s 2020 run, receiving a little less than 75 million votes³. Harris fell well over 6 million votes short from Biden’s 2020 run.

Did those 6 million voters that previously voted for Biden simply not vote for Harris because she is a Black woman and voted for Biden in 2020 because he is a white man? Let us assume, for a second, that is the reason. Surely, these 6 million voters would have gone ahead and voted for Trump, if their elected leader being a man or a woman was the sole justification for their voting persuasions. Seeing as Trump is the complete antithesis to Harris, a white (albeit a little orange) man, he should have been seen as more competent on matters such as national security and foreign policy, as Danielle Vinson, a professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University in South Carolina, suggested⁴. Thus, he, being a white man, should have absorbed these 6 million voters.

Yet Trump, despite fitting the characteristics of most U.S. presidents, did not gain 6 million more voters in 2024 by comparison to his 2020 run. He gained 3 million more votes. Assuming that these 3 million came from the Biden 2020-to-Harris 2024 difference of 3 million voters, doing some very unconvincing math, that would leave some 3 million voters for Harris, putting her on par with Trump as far as the popular vote is concerned. These 3 million or the 6 million that voted for Biden but did not vote for Harris clearly were very influential and could have determined the election.

Did these 6 million vote third-party? Decisively not. These 6 million voters did not stumble over each other to vote third-party. All in all, third-party candidates received a total of 2.4 million votes. Jill Stein from the Green Party received over 700,000 votes, a total of 0.5% of the overall popular vote⁵. This means that the 6 million voters that voted for Biden but not for Harris did not turn and vote third-party, although some might have. They also did not then turn to vote for Trump, although some might have. So, what did the majority of these 6 million lost voters do?

Maybe Shifts in Demographics? I Mean, What Does Race Say?

Is a conservative shift amongst minorities responsible? Noticeable demographic shifts, for example in race, occurred in the 2024 election. 16 percent of Black voters voted for Trump in 2024, a double jump from 8 percent in 2020, while 83 percent of Black voters voted for Harris, an 8-point decline from Biden’s 91 percent in 2020⁶. Polls prior to the 2024 election painted an even more disastrous picture, Democrats receiving only 78% support from Black voters, a 12-point drop from 2020⁷. Latinos saw a 7-point shift on both sides as well. 56 percent voted for Harris compared to 63 percent for Biden in 2020 and Trump’s support grew from 35 percent in 2020 to 42 percent in 2024⁸.

Did previous Black and Latino Democrat voters back Trump instead of Harris? That would be hard to imagine. Polls prior to the election showed that Harris led Trump quite comfortably in both demographics. Among Latino voters, for example, Pew Research Center showed in late September 2024 that Harris led Trump among Latino registered voters 57 to 39 respectively, an arguably comfortable margin⁹. In fact, Harris outperformed Biden when he was the likely Democratic nominee¹⁰. Harris led Trump among both Latina women and Latino men¹¹. The biggest group of Latinos in the United States are Mexican Americans (38.5 million), then Puerto Ricans (5.5 million) and then Cubans (2.6 million). On November 4, 2024, Harris led Trump in every single Latin place of origin, with the all too important exception of Cubans¹². Even up until the very end, an NBC News exit poll showed that 52% of eligible Latinos and 85% of eligible Black American voters would vote for Harris¹³.

Were Polls Just Wrong?

Were these polls wrong? Not out of the realm of possibility, but to be wrong by such a large margin, even up until the very last minute is quite unimaginable. Pollsters, up until the very end, stated that it would be a close race and many stated that only one of the two candidates would win all swing states. Both occurred¹⁴. Although undercounting also happened as it often does, the Political Editor of NPR, Dominico Montenaro, explained that Trump won late decider voters by double digits, accounting for the margin of error from polling¹⁵.

Non-Voters Potential Role in the 2024 Election

If late-decided voters leaned Trump, then what of the nonvoters? While we do not have the current 2024 numbers on nonvoters as the Pew Research Center will most likely release their election analysis much later in 2025, we can conclude some potential trends from their 2020 nonvoter data and polling. While Biden had a 4-percentage point lead over Trump among voters in the 2020 election, Biden had a 15-percentage point lead over Trump among the nonvoting electorate¹⁶. In both 2016 and 2020, the nonvoting electorate leaned quite ostensibly Democratic¹⁷. On nearly every single demographic, age, race and gender, the nonvoting electorate is more liberal and more Democratic. I assert that the nonvoting electorate for the 2024 election nearly followed the same trend, and its numbers most likely grew larger due to widespread liberal abstention.

White voters are the only demographic of voters that had a higher share of voters than nonvoters. In other words, in 2020, more eligible-to-vote white people voted than refused to vote. In every other demographic, the share of nonvoters was higher. And in the 2024 election, if this trend is indicative of something ongoing, that may have won Trump the election, as Montenaro pointed out that it was the first election that saw an uptick of a previously declining share of white voters.¹⁸ Given that Republicans hold a wide historical advantage over evangelical Protestants, non-degree holding voters, rural voters and white men¹⁹ and the nonvoting electorate is overwhelming liberal and Democrat-leaning, an increase in the abstention of liberal voters and an uptick of Republican-leaning voters would account for Harris’s loss in the 2024 election.

Pew Research Center

Into the Weeds: Abstention as Part of Demographic Shifts

Importantly, due to such a left-of-center abstention, several political analysts are making the incorrect assumption that there has been a more conservative shift among the demos. A New York Times article titled “Early Results Show A Red Shift Across the U.S.” states, “Mr. Trump appeared to improve his performance on election night among many types of counties, including ones that had supported him in past elections as well as ones that have historically leaned Democratic”²⁰. A CNN article titled, “America’s red shift: See the counties where Trump boosted his share of the vote” calls this conservative takeover “a red rebound”²¹. However one cuts it, those that voted, voted majority Republican.

Anti-MAGA but not Pro-Democrat

This would be an accurate picture of voting demographics and a potential hypothesis of certain demographic shifts, if we are taking a “Flatland perspective”, as Michael Podhozer, former director of AFL-CIO and political analyst, called it in a Substack article titled, “How Trump ‘Won’”.²² In a Flatland view, the election looks like a Trump sweep, a “MAGA win”, a mass desire for illiberal politics and pseudo-dictatorship. In reality, in a “3-D view” of the 2024 election, the truth becomes far clearer: the 2024 election was more a Democrat loss than it was a MAGA gain. For one, Trump’s share of eligible voters remained relatively the same. Even though, as I have discussed, he gained 3 million more votes, his share of eligible voters (a pool that has outgoing voters and new incoming voters every election cycle) remained the same as it had been in 2020, at 32 percent. For Harris, however, she lost 3.5 percent of the eligible voter share by comparison to Biden’s 2020 election, sitting at 31.1 percent.

Podhozer then turns to something quite crucial. Biden was able to win in 2020 thanks to an “anti-MAGA majority”. These are, he describes in a separate but equally illuminating Substack article²³, voters that cannot be typically described as swing voters. They do not sit between Democrat and Republican. These are voters that are “undecided about whether to vote at all.” More specifically, “they are profoundly disillusioned with our political system, and with the idea that their vote matters”²⁴. In 2020, Biden was able to win with their help. In fact, Biden could not have flipped important battleground states without them, Podhozer shows.

Importantly, just because they are ani-MAGA does not necessarily mean they are pro-Democrat. A deeper dive into the “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” group of impactful voters shows a far steeper cut into the Democratic Party’s loss than merely counting the popular count difference shows. Losing the popular vote is one thing, but losing a key, pivotal demographic is another and often undergirds shifts and changes in the popular vote turnout.

What does the 3-D view say about Democrats that defected and voted conservative this time around? The number of Democrats that voted Republican and the number of Republicans that voted Democrat in 2024 remained essentially the same, around 4 percent or 5 million votes, as the table below indicates. In other words, out of the share of ballots cast in the 2024 election (156.3 million votes in total), 40 percent voted for Biden in 2020 that voted in the 2024 election. Out of those returning Biden voters, 94 percent voted for Harris and 4 percent voted for Trump. The returning Trump voters, 40 percent of total 2024 voters, saw a similar exchange which negates the party-switching hypothesis: 95 percent voted for Trump and 4 percent went to Harris.

VoteCast

To calculate the number of 2020 Biden voters that abstained from or voted third-party in the 2024 election, we merely apply that 40 percent share of the 2024 election of Biden voters that overwhelmingly voted for Harris and compare it to the total number of votes cast for Biden in 2020²⁵. Remember that 158.4 million people voted in the 2020 election while in the 2024 election, 156.3 million people voted. Although there is a 2 million overall voter difference, this gives us a Flatland-view of where exactly the losses occurred and how substantial they may have been. 40 percent of Biden-return voters (voters that voted for Biden in 2020) that voted overwhelming Harris in the 2024 election is 62.5 million votes. We then take this number and compare it to Biden’s 2020 election results, a total of 81.2 million votes, the first presidential candidate to gain over 80 million votes in United States history²⁶. 81.2 million votes, Biden’s 2020 election total, minus 62.5 million votes, Biden-returning voters that voted for Harris, is 18.7 million votes or an estimated 19 million votes.

This means that 19 million voters that voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024.

Who exactly makes up these 19 million voters? It may be composed of Biden-voters that voted down-ballot Democrat but did not vote for anyone for president in the 2024 election, Biden-voters that passed away, Biden-voters with post-2020 election felony convictions that did not allow them to vote, Biden-voters that did not cast their vote in 2024 quickly enough, Biden-voters that changed their registration to Independent or Republican and a plethora of other groups of Biden-voters turned Harris-nonvoters. But a much larger portion of them are would-be voters that abstained or voted third-party. Exit polls showed that 18 percent of 2020 Biden-voters said they were either abstaining or supporting a third-party candidate in the 2024 election²⁷. 18 percent of 81.2 million, Biden’s 2020 election result, is 14 million Biden-voters that abstained or voted third-party. 14 million voters from 19 million voters is 73 percent. A whopping 73 percent (14 million votes) of 2020 Biden voters that did not vote for Harris in 2024 either abstained or voted third-party. The other 5 million of the 19 million remains undescribed and may fall under the previously mentioned groups.

How many of those 14 million Biden-voters but Harris nonvoters voted third-party and how many of them abstained? Even if we assume that all third-party votes, 2.3 million in total, came from this 2020 Biden-voter but Harris nonvoter block, that would leave us with around 11.7 million 2020 Biden-voters that abstained and remained unconvinced by Harris in the 2024 election. If we add up all the left-leaning third-party popular vote totals²⁸, we get 1,120,757. Assuming Biden-voters made up all left-leaning third-party votes in 2024, that would leave us with around 12,879,243 or roughly 13 million Biden-voters that abstained. If we assume no one from this block voted for third-party, then all 14 million abstained. The true number of 2020 Biden-voter abstentions, then, lies reliably between 11.7 million and 14 million. The other 5 million of the 19 million 2020 Biden-voters that rejected Harris in 2024 did something other than abstain or vote third-party.

We can safely ascertain that there were a concrete 14 million Biden-voters or 73 percent of 2020 Biden-voters that Harris failed to sway in the 2024 election.

For Podhozer, the geographical make up of all 19 million also points us in a certain direction. Geographically, much of this loss was in historically Democrat-voting states and counties and Trump’s gain were marginal. In analyzing the top 20 Democrat urban counties in the bluest states across the United States, Podhozer finds that “[2024] Harris trailed [2020] Biden’s vote total by 2.9 million – more than her entire popular vote loss nationwide – while Trump improved his vote total by just 150,000 votes, out of 25.6 million registered voters”²⁹, confirming that this election had to do more with liberal loss than conservative inroads. All in all, “70 percent of Harris’s losses were suffered in the most reliably Blue parts of the country.”³⁰ This means that these are people that are quite reliably and consistently liberal. Harris had to keep Biden’s gains and she was unable to do so.

Credit to Podhozer for creating this chart.

But were the 2020 Biden gains temporary? Biden could not have won without this upsurge of anti-MAGA support in 2020 and as is being shown, Harris desperately needed them to win in 2024. They are anti-MAGA because these voters were not voting for Biden as much as they were voting against Trump. As the graph above shows and Podhozer elucidates, these “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters made up a sizable percentage of Biden’s electorate. While the Trump-voters that voted for Trump against Biden and Harris in 2020 and 2024 respectively stayed the same, there is a staggering difference between 2020 Biden-voter reasoning and 2024 Harris-voter reasoning. 41 million of Biden’s 2020 voters said they were voting for Biden against Trump, but only 26 million 2024 Harris-voters said they were voting for Harris against Trump, a gaping 15 million voter difference. This suggests, as Podhozer masterfully concludes, “there were a lot of missing ‘anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat’ voters” in the 2024 election³¹.

Even a majority of Republicans in the 2024 election, Podhozer adds, believed that Republicans won because, really, Democrats lost rather than the other way around. In fact, an amazing “72 percent of Harris voters said they ‘would have preferred other options’”³². We can comfortably conclude that the overwhelming majority of 2024 Harris-voters were composed of voters not eager to vote for Harris while many of the 2020 Biden-voters motivated by anti-Trump sentiments did not show up to vote for Harris. The result for Harris, with the outcome being a win for Trump, was a yawning electorate that was devoid of any semblance of a protest vote against Trump or excitement for Harris.

The inability for the 2024 Harris campaign to mobilize these 19 million voters to vote for her is what led to her demise. A very clear majority of these 19 million voters opted not to vote at all. Because this large abstention and the liberal-pundit interpretation of it being merely a crushing conservative wave, many are “confusing shifts in the two parties’ electoral fortunes with changes in voters’ basic values or priorities,”³³ as Podhozer wrote in a Substack article in January 2025. In truth, he wrote, “A collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that most Americans, especially in Blue America, are suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy.”³⁴

Celebrities Support for Harris

It is worth mentioning that celebrities were on Harris’s side. After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, vote.gov saw close to 500,000 visitors. Over 30,000 people turned out to Harris’s rally in Houston where Beyonce proudly stood by her side. After a right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating pile of garbage” at a Trump rally on October 27, 2024, Bad Bunny got nearly 2 million likes on a post dedicated to his homeland. This occurred after he had already endorsed Harris. Trump was the butt end of many jokes in popular late-night shows like Saturday Night Live. There has been a total of 10 actors that portrayed Trump, compared to only 1 that has portrayed Harris.³⁵

So why did these 14 million voters not vote for Harris?

II. Leftists: Another Word for “Anti-MAGA but Not Pro-Democratic Party”

These 14 million liberal absentees, as part of the bigger 19 million total Biden-voters that did not vote for Harris, are as diverse in demographic and issues that they care about as the registered voters that did vote. Exit polls showed Democrats and Republicans alike expressing that they found the economy, immigration, abortion and healthcare all important³⁶. Did these 2024 non-voting 2020 Biden-voters think that none of that was important? Highly unlikely. Yet they abstained.

Since Trump’s stance did not convince those 14 million to vote for him, as he did not receive 14 million more votes than his 2020 run, many of these 14 million, we can assume, are not right-wing apologists. Given that much of the loss of Democratic voters occurred in overwhelmingly blue states, as Podhozer notes, we can empirically conclude that they are not. But if Harris’s platform did not convince them to vote for the Democratic Party either, as they had done in 2020, then what of Harris and her campaign alienated them?

We do not necessarily have to guess. We get a better picture of these 2020 Biden-voters the more data we have. A new survey by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project (IMEU) through YouGov found that 20 percent of 2020 Biden-voters in all six battleground states viewed “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as a top issue, behind only the economy³⁷ . Among the 2020 Biden-voters that decided not to vote for Harris in 2024, 36 percent said that would have been “more likely to have voted for Harris if she ‘pledged to break from Biden's policy toward Gaza by promising to withhold additional weapons to Israel’ rather than less likely.”³⁸ Palestine was clearly a key and relevant issue.

While Palestine was one massive issue in the minds of 2020 Biden-voters, so too was the economy. Harris was quite explicit in her abandonment of a historically liberal and left-leaning block of voters: trade unionists and blue-collar workers. This is the last group that any liberal candidate would want to abandon. Sean O’Brien, president of Teamsters, one of the largest unions in the country, told right-wing commentator Tucker Carleson on his podcast that Harris answered only a quarter of 16 questions during a roundtable discussion with Teamsters members. On her way out, Harris said to O’Brien and Teamsters members, “I am going to win with or without you”.³⁹ For the first time in the union’s history, they declined to support any presidential candidate.⁴⁰ Considering that 1 in every 5 voters in swing states is a union worker,⁴¹ you must win them. In abandoning them, she lost.

While Podhozer avoids, justifiably, putting all of 2020 Biden-voters Harris-rejecting constituency either in the conservative or liberal camp of the political landscape, I argue that the Democratic Party ran one of the most conservative campaigns in the 2024 election as liberal media pundits adopted fascist logics (Sections III and IV) and liberals writ large internalized fascistic sentiments (Sections V - VII). Coupled with Harris’s unwillingness to part with Biden on the genocide in Palestine, we get a very explicit picture: this was not just any type of abstention. It was the mass abstention by and the institutional abandonment of a specific left-leaning voting block that showed up in 2020 but could not principally do so in 2024.

The 2024 election took place in the context of the genocide and occupation by Israel of Palestine that was and continues to be materially supported by the Democratic Party while the fascist-latent logic in the media discourse adopted by liberal pundits manufactured consent for a liberal right-wing voting strategy. All in all, the Democratic Party’s general right-wing move during the 2024 election abandoned center-left liberals and, per the very words of Harris’s campaign managers which will be discussed in Section IV, catered to right-wing voters. All of this together alienated an overwhelmingly liberal block that came out in droves to vote against Trump in 2020 but could not principally vote for Harris in 2024.

What is another way of describing someone that is anti-MAGA (anti-fascist) as well as anti-Democratic Party? Absent the lone and improbable right-wing libertarian vote for Biden in 2020, these “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democratic Party” folks that came out en masse to vote for Biden in 2020 are leftists. The description of “Anti-MAGA but not pro-Democratic Party” is describing a “leftist” but with extra words. Those that were alienated in 2024 were leftists. Being neither historic Democrats, who are centrists at best, moving right-ward at lightning speed, who voted for both Biden and Harris in 2020 and 2024 respectively; nor Republicans, who are expeditiously adopting fascism, and voted for Trump 2020 and 2024, these voters should be called leftists, who knew very little about third parties and are not represented in the two-party system.

This is in line with the overwhelming amount of them (14 million or 73 percent) having abstained because they do not see themselves in the two-party system and the amount of them that voted third party, which was a tiny part of that 14 million. These third-party voters were small because third parties remain, in all sides of the political landscape including left-wing, nearly irrelevant, thanks to both the Electoral System and the two-party system. Beyond the Electoral System and two-party system, however, many leftists would agree that the United States’ left-wing political infrastructure remains stuck in infant form at best and, in the times that it has sought to be built, perpetually demonized and attacked by both liberals and the Democratic Party (Bernie Sanders is an excellent example⁴²) and/or by fascists and the Republican Party. When leftists become militant, as the Black Panther Party exemplifies, they are hunted and killed.

The idea that these alienated voters are leftists is supported even under Podhozer’s definition of the anti-MAGA surge of voters:

“They are profoundly disillusioned with our political system, and with the idea that their vote matters. Whether they cast a ballot depends on whether they believe their freedoms are legitimately at risk if they don’t.

Confidence in America’s institutions, its economic system, and its political leaders has been consistently underwater in the 21st Century.

This is especially true among Millennial and Gen Z voters, who came of age in the shadow of, and since, the Great Recession – and who have been especially sour on Biden lately.”⁴³

Without minding the apathetic aside describing an anti-genocide position as “sour” towards the one committing it, this describes a person who, in 2020, voted, perhaps and often for the first time, for a candidate who was not Trump, as he gathered just how detrimental another Trump presidency would be, having lived or come-of-age during Trump’s first 4 years. But this person was perhaps not imagining that 4 years later, by November 5 2024, the liberals would be overseeing a genocide of a people,⁴⁴ the ongoing state-sanctioned destruction of the environment,⁴⁵ fall short in student debt forgiveness,⁴⁶ active collaboration with Trump to create immigration policy,⁴⁷ the attempted shut-down of one of the most popular social media apps,⁴⁸ watch them campaign with Liz Cheney,⁴⁹ take an incredibly war hawk stance,⁵⁰ and be swallowed by a slow or in some parts halted economy.⁵¹

This means that this abstention in 2024 that led to the heavy collapse of liberal politics and liberal governance for the foreseeable future was a protest abstention by disillusioned, often new, leftists who had helped liberals beat Trump in 2020 through the institution known as “voting” and who expected a radical departure from what had been 4 years of right-wing rule. But that departure never occurred and in the ways that it did, it was not, even for Harris-voters who said they preferred another candidate, nearly enough to warrant more trust and support at the polls.

The story that the 2024 election tells, however, is not a sole story about leftists’ abstention, nor is it a story of fascists winning in an incredible way. It is a story of liberalism promising to keep fascism back and leftists that had, previously no and/or recently gained, trust in voting putting expectations on centrists in 2020, only for these centrists by 2024 to have laid down a red carpet and usher in a new fascism, all while groveling for, collaborating with and acquiescing to a man liberals compared to Hitler and Harris called a “fascist”.⁵² By 2024, this leftist voting block was, as they historically are, betrayed by liberals.

While trusting liberals is always a mistake, liberals, over the course of the Biden-Harris administration, did something even more nefarious than just abandon a pivotal portion of the absorbed political constituency that lacks political representation. They themselves have 1. adopted fascist reasoning (Section III) while 2. avoiding accountability for their right-wing centered political strategy (Section IV) and 3. double-down on imperialist and fascist logics (Section V - VII).

But in what ways did all of this unfold?

III. Liberal Media Pundits Adopt Fascist Reasoning

The Harris campaign ran one of the most conservative, right-wing pandering campaigns in Democratic history. Jon Stewart in a segment titled, “Jon Stewart on What Went Wrong For Democrats”, summed it up quite nicely. The pundit class at MSNBC, CNN and others criticized the Democratic Party incessantly from one right-wing perspective: Democrats were too woke.⁵³

The pundit class in liberal media adopted this point quite strongly. Anti-immigrant sentiments, for example, has comfortably become a liberal talking point, synthesized with anti-woke rhetoric handed to them from the right. Brian Williams, former NBC anchor, stated in an interview on November 21, 2024, with Seth Meyers that, to tell working class people that the border is not important is “insulting”. He doubled down, saying, without any evidence, that, “for the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards and motel rooms is probably insulting as well”.⁵⁴ Propelled by right-wing talking points, he explains that the Democratic Party must stop engaging in solidarity with minority groups, calling such solidarity “suicidal empathy”.⁵⁵ In order to “reach out to Americans again”, they need to stop worrying “so much about minority groups in society”.⁵⁶ Such commentary would fit neatly in Fox News but now seems mainstream in liberal media spaces. For Brian and the pundit class, minority groups are disposable and should be treated as such by catering to center-right and right-wing forces to win elections.

Fareed Zakaria, a longtime liberal pundit for CNN, chiefly represents the belief among liberals that the Democratic Party was too woke and not right-wing enough. In his segment, titled “Fareed’s take: Democrats Blew It by Making Three Big Mistakes”, he speaks of three errors. The first one was that Harris often repeated Biden’s talking points around immigration. In order to win, Zakaria argues, she should have stated flatly and simply, “I would have shut down the border early and hard.”⁵⁷ The second one was “an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump.”⁵⁸ Zakaria believed that pursuing justice against Trump made him into a victim of the state, something his followers already believed, but his persecution made him more likeable. Finally, and most nefarious of Zakaria’s positions, he speaks of the “dominance of identity politics on the left”,⁵⁹ confusing, as he often does, Democratic liberal centrists with leftists. Zakaria engages in a type of dishonest liberal colorblind and gender-blind critique in this segment. Using right-wing dog whistles, he argues that the Democrat’s inclusion of identity politics led to a “push of all kinds of DEI policies”.⁶⁰ “The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal. Judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character”,⁶¹ he states proudly. Zakaria’s position presents a colorblind and genderblind analysis of inequality. His statement that the Democratic Party should not focus on identity but rather the content of one’s character assumes that inequality derives from one’s character. Things like hard work and ethical stances is what leads to inequality, not race, class or gender stratification due to capitalism. Thus, the Democratic Party should abandon any semblance of identity politics for a colorblind and genderblind position, akin to right-wing organizations and the Republican Party.

This final analysis seeks to attack any leftist remains, however performative and opportunistic, in the Democratic Party’s approach to elections. Leftists understand that the unequal material conditions that capitalism creates in the United States make it impossible to only focus on the content of any one’s character. There is a plethora of issues that affect and target specifically trans folks, women and Black and brown people because racial capitalism and patriarchy targets them specifically. This is so not because “academic bubbles”⁶² say so, as Zakaria blithely states. It is because capitalism as an economic system shapes our social world. It shapes it in such a way that necessitates a divided and oppressed working class along race and gendered lines to ensure their ongoing exploitation and early death for the benefit of the capital-owning few. To say that the Democratic Party must abandon a fraction of such a view in favor of one more open to collaborating with capital, patriarchy and white supremacy, is to push the Democratic Party further right rather than left.

Aside from Zakaria’s obvious right-wing allegiances, his caricature of the Democratic Party as too left or too woke is not only wrong, but is also misleading. Zakaria ends with his most fascistic and revisionist statement in the segment, saying “Similarly, university speech codes and cancel culture have become ways that the left censors or restricts that most cherished of liberal ideas: freedom of speech.”⁶³ The left, he says, is suppressing freedom of speech and he uses right-wing rhetoric, such as “cancel culture”.⁶⁴ This, of course, renders the right-wing fantasy of cancel culture legitimate in the eyes of liberals and, by conflating leftists and liberals, obscures the very real liberal violence against leftists. Zakaria is able to say this with a straight face while completely ignoring the last year of country-wide censorship, violent repression and mass arrest faced by pro-Palestinian leftists overseen by liberal and Democratic administrators, city councils, mayors and governors, all happening under the liberal federal governance of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In this way, liberals like Zakaria are far more comfortable promoting and entertaining right-wing views and sentiments than left-wing positions while obscuring liberal repression against leftists.

Of course, Zakaria was not the only liberal to take up right-wing positions by abandoning left(ish) views. Maureen Dowd in a New York Times op-ed piece titled “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics” argued that the “party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC’ (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)”. The adoption of identity politics is, in reality, to blame, as Dowd writes, “This alienated half the country, or more.” She, like Zakaria, seems to also be adopting the right-wing critique of the use of identity politics as cancel culture rather than the leftist critique of identity politics being devoid of class analysis. She then sneaks in a Zionist talking point by adding, “And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.”⁶⁵ It is quite clear what both Zakaria and Dowd are arguing. In adopting a right-wing, pro-Zionist stance, they both argue that liberals are too leftist and must abandon these “extreme policies”, such as abortion and trans rights, in favor of catering to right-wing voters.

The fact that Zakaria and Dowd’s positions sound like one that Tucker Carlson would peddle is not a coincidence. They both argue, in order to make the point that identity politics is divisive, that the Democratic Party has become more leftist. However, Jon Stewart’s segment shows that this is not a true depiction of the party and is, in fact, an adoption of fascist logic rather than liberal self-reflection. “I just have one problem with the woke theory”, he says. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit”.⁶⁶ He is correct. He then continues to show Democratic Party candidate ads that were, by and large, fascistic in nature.

“Sherrod Brown is working to fix our border crisis”, one ad narrates. Another has a retired NYPD officer stating, “Mondaire Jones is working to secure our border”. Laura Gillen, a Democrat that beat a Republican incumbent in Long Island, ran an ad where she says, “We’re 2,000 miles from Mexico, but we’re feeling the migrant crisis almost every day.” Jon Stewart slams his paper on his desk. “I gave the police even more money than they even wanted, I gave them planes and tanks”, he says jokingly. Although he says it to a laughing audience, this is also a correct understanding of the Democratic Party. In Georgia, where Harris lost to Trump, the Democratic mayor and left-leaning city council of Atlanta, alongside state Republicans, were all in lockstep back in 2023, providing nearly $109 million to build a massive police training facility called Cop City.⁶⁷ Cop City was equally an important of an issue in the 2024 election in the all-too-important state.

“They didn’t talk about pronouns. They didn’t say ‘Latinx’. It was the opposite”, Jon Stewart yelled. A new wave of ads that show Democratic Party candidates committed to right-wing positions was played (click the video to see the right-wing ads by Democrats):

Finally, Jon Stewart delivers the beginnings of the real analysis. “They didn’t do the woke thing…They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions”. Of course, because Jon Stewart is himself a liberal, he will not push such a conclusion to its logical ends.

The Harris campaign ran a highly conservative campaign that alienated its most left leaning or center-left voters. Many working-class voters, people of color and immigrants that had previously voted Democrat in important counties and states simply abstained. Why did they abstain? Because the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party adopted right-wing positions to cater to right-wing voters.

This had an impact on specific swing states. For example, the Harris campaign sent Bill Clinton to the swing state of Michigan, that had a large number of Arab-American voters, to tell them that Israel is forced to kill civilians, and that Israel is the rightful owner of Palestinian land⁶⁸. Harris lost Michigan by over 80,000 votes in 2024 while Biden in 2020 had won it with a much bigger 150,000 vote margin.⁶⁹ Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, a certified war criminal, in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party.⁷⁰ Trump won Ripon and Wisconsin. Rather than catering to left-leaning voters, the Democratic Party hoped to cut into Trump’s voting base the way Biden had, yet failed miserably. In 2020, 14 percent of self-identified conservatives say they voted for Biden while in 2024, 9 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Harris. Her pandering did not work and in turn, made her lose more center-left votes.⁷¹

In an array of ways, Harris ran a center-right, if not an explicit right-wing campaign by abandoning past leftish stances. When asked about trans rights, Harris simply stated “I will follow the law” rather than changing the law that criminalizes trans folks.⁷² She filled out a questionnaire by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2020 supporting “taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners”, a stance that stood in contrast to the lukewarm answer of “I will follow the law”.⁷³ On climate, her campaign announced she would not ban fracking if elected, a position she held during her 2019 primary run.⁷⁴ On healthcare, she switched tunes, abandoning support for a single-payer health care system, despite having co-sponsored the “Medicare For All” bill with Bernie Sanders in 2019 and the plan being a longstanding proposal from the Democratic Party.⁷⁵ It quickly became clear, as CBS News wrote, that “then-Sen. Kamala Harris was running for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president with one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate…But now, less than five years later, as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris [was] moderating some of her more controversial policy positions.”⁷⁶ By controversial, CBS News means center-leftish. To argue that this did not impact voter turnout is to confidently ignore a dangerous trend.

Harris was not satisfied with merely flipping her political positions. She wanted to rule with right-wingers and embrace their views. In the View, she stated that she would have had a republican in her cabinet, leaving many people who wanted a Democrat-led country unsure for who they should vote for if Harris was going to have Republicans in her inner circle anyways.⁷⁷ When pressed in the same interview about what she would do different than Biden, she said, “not a thing comes to mind”, despite many ways she could have distanced herself from Biden.⁷⁸ She stated, amidst a genocide that her administration was adamant in supporting, that she would ensure the United States would have the most lethal army in the world, a particularly right-wing war hawk stance.⁷⁹ Beyond pandering and embracing, the Democratic Party adopted right-wing positions in general. For example, in the 2024 Democratic Platform, they silently removed their stances against torture and capital punishment.⁸⁰ The Harris campaign and the Democratic Party abandoned any leftish pretense.

It was not just Harris that made this possible. Biden too clearly adopted many pages from Trump’s playbook. It was Trump that sought a TikTok ban back in 2020, signing an executive order to do just that.⁸¹ But by 2024, seeing how much pro-Palestinian content was generated on the app,⁸² Biden signed a law to ban TikTok.⁸³ And in a whiplash of sorts, it is now Trump that may be set up to keep it running.⁸⁴ Immigration has followed a similar path. As CNN reported in mid-2024:

“Unveiled at the White House on Tuesday, Biden’s new plan to all but shut down the US border to asylum-seekers who cross the border illegally uses executive authority Trump once used to bar people from mostly-Muslim countries from entering the US in 2017 and also to bar most asylum-seekers in 2018 – days after Republicans suffered huge setbacks in midterm elections that year.”⁸⁵

Merely months away from the 2024 election, Biden sought right-wing approval and pushed right-wing immigration policy after having collaborated with Trump to put together a draconian immigration bill. Of course, for liberal pundits, what is important is that, even if he was “adopting the authority behind Trump’s policy, he promised not to adopt Trump’s rhetoric.”⁸⁶ Indeed, liberals welcome nationalist and fascistic policy so long as its truth is hidden under flowery liberal prose.

In this way, it is not just the pundit class that has legitimized right-wing criticism of identity politics and liberal policies, but the Democratic Party, as political representatives of liberalism, that too have shed any semblance of leftish positions in favor of conservative pandering. This was not merely exhibited in the upper echelons of liberal media and politicians. Much like their media and political elites, liberals en masse weaponized identity politics in a fascist and right-wing manner rather than adopt a class analysis to supplement identity politics following their 2024 election defeat. Even though Harris herself said that, “I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race…instead, that leader needs to earn the vote based on substance”,⁸⁷ many liberals stated that she indeed lost because of her gender or race or both or because it was somehow the voter’s fault. Liberal masses had specific answers informed by their political fantasies that have grown (and considerably always been) comfortable with right-wing positions, a phenomenon which will be explored in Sections V through VII.

The types of excuses given by came from both the Democratic Party itself, which will be summed up from Pod Save America’s interview with top Harris campaign staff (Section IV), and from the general liberal masses (Section V).

IV. The Democratic Party Takes No Accountability for Right-Wing Pandering

On November 26, 2024, an hour and a half interview with Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter, all top Harris campaign staffers, sat down with Pod Save America’s host and former Obama aid Dan Pfeiffer. The title of the interview is, “EXCLUSIVE: Top Harris Campaign Staff Tell Us What Went Wrong In 2024 Election”. David Plouffe explained that they were “hopeful”, but not necessarily “optimistic” about beating Trump. Harris’s campaign was, towards election day, leaning their hopes on people being reminded how awful of a person Trump is and that this alone would “give them what they needed”⁸⁸. Considering that David Plouffe is best known for being Barack Obama’s campaign manager in the infamous 2008 campaign, such a hope seems beneath him. Yet the entire interview is a tired pat on the back by all the staffers.

According to Stephanie Cutter, there were three imperatives that they had to move through in only 107 days: defining Harris, as “the electorate did not know who she was”, remind people of how bad times were under Trump, due to “Trumpnasia”, and creating contrast between Trump and Harris. Although such imperatives are normal in campaigns, Plouffe emphasized that such a short period of time created a “cost to be paid”.⁸⁹ But in a self-aggrandizing conclusion, he says that they “did a good job” of communicating negatively about Trump and positively about Harris as evidenced by her approval ratings rising by 15 points, but they just had to “stay on that”. “To win a race like this given the political atmosphere which were quite challenging”, he continued without specifying the challenges, “we had to raise the risk of a Trump second term”. For Pleuffe, the problem was that such a danger was not emphasized enough.

For Jen O’Malley Dillon, the issue was not the risk of a Trump second term, but instead that people did not know who Harris was. “I think we were able to, anywhere we campaigned…we made real progress against these national headwinds” by emphasizing the contrast between Harris and Trump. In sum, she concludes, “When people learn more about her, understood what she stood for, where she came from and what her vision was, they responded well”.⁹⁰ Stephenie Cutter chimes in with quite an illuminating response to the question, “Should Harris have tried to separate herself from Biden more?” She says that Harris did not want to part, as Vice President, with President Biden, even as, paradoxically, the campaign sought to create a vision for the future and avoid “rehashing the past”. Harris did what she was “comfortable with”, despite the data showing differently.

Quentin Fulks added that the campaign, with little remorse, “with the kind of resources that we raised, we should have been able to do everything but…we had to choose, and we chose to focus more of our attention on…driving down Trump.” What resources is Quentin alluding to? According to the New York Times, the Harris campaign burnt through $1.5 billion dollars in 15 weeks.⁹¹ The ledger is massive:

“Between July 21 and Oct. 16, financial records show that the Harris campaign spent $494 million on producing and buying media, a category that includes both television and digital ads. The total sum through the election is said to be closer to $600 million…The ads were just one piece of a campaign that had enough cash to spend on seemingly everything. There was $2.5 million directed toward three digital agencies that work with online influencers, records show. The campaign spent around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas in the last week of the race, two officials said. There were drone shows in the sky before the debate in Philadelphia in September and at a Pittsburgh Steelers game in October.”⁹²

The campaign is now allegedly $20 million in debt.⁹³ The Harris campaign was found pushing and prodding “small-dollar donors - those whose contributions are measured in the hundreds of dollars or less”, well beyond the election.⁹⁴

When asked whether or not campaigning with Liz Cheney hurt them, Pleuffe rebutted and said that, in reality, “Liz Cheney…supporting Kamala Harris was not an issue raised” by voters they talked to in Milwaukee and Detroit, cities in battleground states. They were in a “challenging political environment”, he finally elaborates, “where, to get 50% of the vote in enough states to win 270 electoral votes, we needed some percentage of Republicans”. Thus, it was merely strategic electoral politics to campaign with Liz Cheney. Quentin is again far more honest than his colleagues: “if you look at 2022 and 2020, that’s how Democrats won these races, I mean 9% of Republican voters voted for Raphael Warnock in Georgia in 2022…there is no Democratic majority without the state of Georgia…North Carolina Sher Beasley almost got there in 2022, she didn't but if she had gotten a little bit more of those Republican voters”, the rest would have been history. He continues, saying that one of the first times this trend was detected, these Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee, occurred in Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. It happened again in 2022, and they ran successful strategies to ensure it would happen again in 2024 (though they fell incredibly short) while failing to appease left-leaning voters that abstained writ large.

For these top Harris campaign staffers, it was a zero-sum game: “You could either have a Democrat trying to give that message or you can have generals and people who work for Trump”, Quentin concluded. Perhaps unknowingly, Quentin sheds light in the reality of the two-party system and the Democratic Party’s role in maintaining it. Rather than liberals differentiating themselves from their alleged mortal enemies, as they proclaim, they seem to admit that they are singing quite a similar song. Even though Dillon follows up and says that the Democrats do “not have the luxury of choosing one group of voters or another”, that is quite literally what they did considering the strategies they outline in the podcast itself. As the results of the election also show, such a mass abstention of millions of voters should have pointed these brilliant minds towards more substantive trains of thought, about who was left out in their political messaging and why.

Self-reflection is yet again absent when Pleuffe reiterates, correctly stating that center-right voters are vital to winning on battleground states yet denies that such campaigning does not alienate the all-too-important left-leaning base. For Pleuffe, not emphasizing the dangers of a second Trump presidency, coupled with the amount of moderate voters that favored Trump, is what cost Harris the election. If they are at fault, for anything, is that they did not cater enough to the moderate, center-right voter and emphasize how bad a second Trump presidential term would be.

In conclusion, to put it much more harshly, as Nathan J. Robinson wrote for Current Affairs, “The Harris campaign squandered a colossal sum of money, much of which appears to have been pocketed by strategists and consultants who gave Harris terrible advice and now refuse to admit error.”⁹⁵ While the Democratic Party and Harris campaign staffers admit that they ran a center-right campaign and pumped through an incredible amounts of cash to do it, they, alongside their pundit class, cannot yet admit that they abandoned progressive notions and seem to be convinced that they must push for even more right-wing policies to remain competitors in electoral politics rather than less.

If that is what the Democratic Party and Harris’s campaign staffers were thinking, then how did the liberal masses react? Surely, one would think, they held their party leaders accountable.

They did not.

V. Liberal Masses Engage in Identity Politics and Third-Party Hatred

The day after the election was called, liberal masses too, like their politicians and media personnel, engaged in avoidant rhetoric but in a much more flagrant manner. The one’s at fault, of course, was not the liberal pundit media who had now adopted fascist stances or the Democratic Party who believes they did not move rightward fast enough, but it was, in fact, minorities and third-party voters. This is the conclusion of years’ worth of capitulation to fascism, undercutting left-of-center potentials without shame and the gleeful embrace of neoliberalism. This will be expanded upon on in the next section.

First, let us categorize liberal’s reactionary stances into two different types: identity politics and third-party hatred. Identity politics reduces all people to their individual identities, often revolving around race or gender. Third-party hatred is an anti-democratizing impulse that seeks to keep a liberal hegemony on all things leftist. Let us refute them one by one as they appear in claims made.

“She Lost Because She Is Black”

Obama is black. There is a precedent. It was not impossible. Therefore, she did not lose because she is Black.

A record number of Black people were elected in the 2024 election. For its 119th session, Congress will have the highest number of Black elected officials in its ranks, with 67 Black members of congress in total. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) now boasts 62 members, the most it has ever had (5 of them are Republicans and refuse to be a part of the CBC).⁹⁶

Additionally, there were other Black candidates that won their positions in the 2024 election. Most famously, Ilhan Omar, a Black Somali-American woman and one of the first Muslim congresswomen (alongside her colleague of Palestinian descent Rashida Tlaib), was re-elected in the 2024 election⁹⁷. These candidates received cross-racial support and so did Harris. 66% of Harris’s voters were white, 17% were Black and 11% were Latino, compared to Trump’s 84% white, 3% Black and 8% Latino voters.⁹⁸ As such, one cannot say with confidence that she lost overwhelmingly because she is Black.

“She Lost Because She Is A Woman”

In the 2024 election, there were 10 states that were voting on pro-abortion constitutional amendments. Those were Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Florida, Maryland and New York.

Courtesy of Al Jazeera’s article titled, “Beyond abortion rights: Why did Kamala Harris lose women’s votes?”

The pro-abortion constitutional amendments failed in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, three states that Harris lost. But in Montana, a constitutional amendment that actually upheld the status quo set “by a 1999 Montana Supreme Court precedent that found the state’s right to privacy protects the right to terminate a pregnancy”⁹⁹, was passed. Yet, a liberal would think, because the state voted for Trump, such an amendment should not have passed. If Montana actually cared about women, they would have voted for Kamala! a liberal might exclaim.

In Nevada, Trump won the state by more than 50,000 votes, yet they voted in favor of their pro-abortion amendment. As NPR writes, “abortion is already protected under Nevada law until viability under a 1990 ballot measure legalizing abortions under state law”, but nonetheless “abortion is one step closer to being constitutionally protected after voters approved a statewide ballot question”.¹⁰⁰ If Harris truly lost because she is a woman, then the states that she lost should not have voted in favor of pro-abortion amendments, seeing as they do not care about women because they did not vote overwhelmingly for Harris.

Finally, in Missouri, “which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation”, Trump beat Harris by nearly 600,000 votes, yet “voters approved an amendment that will guarantee abortion access up to the point of fetal viability, generally the 24th week of pregnancy”.¹⁰¹ Said in another way, if Harris lost because she is a woman, then in no state she lost should have passed their pro-abortion amendments. But they did. Why? Because Kamala Harris did not lose due to her being a woman but because she ran a conservative campaign filled with fascistic pretenses.

Votes for Harris, as has been shown, did not and do not represent a vote for women. It was a vote for a woman, but it was not a vote for women. In states where she lost, there were many who found no contradiction between voting for a pro-abortion amendment and not voting for Harris. This was because there is no contradiction, since Harris, most clearly through her very own campaigning, did not represent women or women’s rights.

“She Lost Because She Is A Black Woman”

In reality, the 2024 election was a high for Black women. For the first time in the history of the United States, two Democratic black women - Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester and Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks - were elected in the same election to the United States Senate. This brought the number of Black women serving in the Senate as of the 2024 election from two to four. Although “their victories raise the number of Black members of the Senate to five, the most to serve together in history”, an AP News article reads, “the Senate’s 100 members have historically been, and continue to be, mostly white men”.¹⁰²

More broadly speaking, this election had many diverse firsts. The first Korean-American was elected to the Senate, a Democrat by the name of Andy Kim. The first Iranian-American, Democrat Yassamin Ansari of Arizona’s 3rd congressional district, was elected to Congress. Democrat Josh Stein was the first Jewish person to be elected governor in North Carolina while Sarah McBride of Delaware was the first openly trans woman to be elected to the US House of Representatives.¹⁰³ By many accounts, those with diverse identities were not hindered by their identities. If anything, diversity won this election. It was Harris that lost.

A case in point is a Pew Research Center poll that asked registered voters if they think the candidates age, race and ethnicity will help or harm their election results. As the results show, many say, prior to November, that “the fact that Harris is Asian and Black will help her candidacy (41%) than hurt it (19%), though 39% expect it will not make much of a difference”. Additionally, “more also say Harris’ gender will be an asset (40%) rather than a liability (30%) with voters in November, while 30% say it will make little difference”.¹⁰⁴ In other words, to say that being a woman, Black or a Black woman hurt her is not only inaccurate, but serves to impede accountability for the things her campaign and the Democratic Party did do that certainly hurt her in the 2024 election.

“She Lost Because Third-Party Voters Took Votes Away from Her”

There were several leftist third-party candidates in the 2024 election. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) ran a presidential candidate named Claudia De La Cruz and Karina Garcia.¹⁰⁵ The Green Party was represented by Dr. Jill Stein and Butch Ware.¹⁰⁶ Finally, as independent candidates, Dr. Cornell West and Melina Abdullah ran together.¹⁰⁷

The most popular among them was the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware. It is no surprise, then, that liberals turned their faux anger and third-party animosity towards Dr. Stein, claiming that her campaign undermined Harris to an influential and defeating extent. Yet, in no state did third party candidates win and in no swing states was the margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris equal to third-party votes.¹⁰⁸ In fact, the opposite was true. A poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights suggested that Dr. Stein was taking away votes from Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris.¹⁰⁹

Of note concerning the above absurd claim is the fact that most Americans across the political spectrum support the democratization of the two-party system. 69% of Independents, 53% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans, according to a recent Gallup Poll, wish to see a third-party rise up through the ranks. With support reaching new highs last year and growing dissatisfaction with the current two-party system, a third party that can challenge both Republicans and Democrats is not too wild of a possibility.¹¹⁰

VI. Scratching a Liberal: Patronizing Conditionality, Assumptions of Entitlement and the Job of the Liberal

This tendency to abandon their most liberal pretenses, to employ identity politics and blame everyone without taking accountability, all while legitimizing fascists is what composes a liberal. A (albeit captured)¹¹¹ identity politics was boldly used in liberal’s response to their dumbfounding loss because identity politics is part and parcel, if not the core of, their political approach. But in its current manifestation, these identity politics have taken on a particular fascistic slant. Before exploring the dark side of identity politics with examples, let us step back to historicize and theorize these dynamics.

We can best theorize liberal’s cowardly existence as birthed from capital’s unequal social stratification. While I will not unpack the following fully, I will provide what is relevant. The rest and more will be unpacked in part two. The necessary citations for these a priori historical assumptions will be explored in-depth in part two.

Under the age of neoliberal capitalism since the 1970s, a new Gilded Age has been unleashed.¹¹² As political economists have well established, the accumulation of astronomical amounts of wealth cannot occur without inequality¹¹³ - many who own nothing working for a small capital-owning few - and, as has been theorized, to avoid the many from realizing class consciousness, the ruling class readily divides its laboring forces along race, gender, ability and class by employing racism, sexism, ableism and so on and so forth. It necessitates oppression in social, political and economic ways to secure cheap labor, unrestricted profit and scant collective resistance to inequality (recall my statement about leftist infrastructure being in infant form).

The job of conservatives in maintaining capitalism’s oppressive dominance through private property¹¹⁴ is in their name - to conserve. The job of liberals, however, is a little trickier. Their job is to provide the illusion of equality while not disturbing the accumulation of wealth. Liberals must say that something just is being done while they do nothing at best, collaborate with fascists to maintain capitalism at worst.

This is a far more important job for capitalism than the job of conservatives. Liberals keep the wretched masses who want to abolish their unequal condition at bay by promising things that they never fulfill and the things they do fulfill are reforms that do not scare the rich.¹¹⁵ Biden’s farewell address is par excellence. In mid-January 2025, as Biden left office, he told the American public, with a straight face, that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead”.¹¹⁶ But under his administration, the rich got infinitely richer:

“The richest 100 Americans saw their collective net worth surge 63 per cent under Biden, according an analysis that covers the four years between his 2020 win and Trump’s re-election last November, and excludes another eight-per-cent jump since then.

The 100 largest fortunes combined now exceed US$4 trillion — more than the collective net worth of the poorest half of Americans, spread over 66.5 million households. The share of U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.1 per cent, at nearly 14 per cent, is now at its highest point in Fed estimates dating back to the 1980s.”¹¹⁷

Indeed, liberals throw the stone and hide their hand.

Conservatives and liberals are two sides of a capitalist democracy. They seek to defend and reproduce this unequal society that works for the wealthy few and not the subjugated many, but they do so in distinct and ever adapting ways. Both conservatives and liberals innovate their political strategies as much as their capitalist handlers innovate the means of production.

For their part, liberals live in a bifurcated way: speak of equality but secure that it never occurs. Speak, for example, of a ceasefire but ensure it never occurs. The Biden-Harris administration has treated Palestine with this duality - we are concerned but we’ll continue killing you - which is illustrative of liberal’s deceiving and conniving nature. This dichotomized liberalism which speaks of democracy but is sustained by death is on full display at the foreign policy level and at the domestic level.

Liberal oppressors seek to reform but not abolish the systems of inequality and oppression they have been vested to defend. This is the job of the liberal: to reform but never to abolish. To change but never revolutionize, to engage in the politics of representation but not in the politics of redistribution.¹¹⁸ In other words, as mentioned prior, provide the illusion of equality while not disturbing the accumulation of wealth.

The liberal oppressor is both liberal and an oppressor. Liberal in their lofty sentiments of equality and an oppressor in their defense of what creates inequality. This is a contradiction. The capitalist system that liberals are birthed from creates this contradiction and tasks the liberal with maintaining it.

To reform - but not abolish - the varied means of subjugation and oppression from which they benefit, liberals approach the oppressed - who, in the eyes of the liberal oppressor, never stop being inferior and wretched - with patronizing attitudes of help. I can help you become like me so you can be better off, the liberal oppressor sings to the oppressed. The liberal oppressor, filled with good intentions, believes that they know better than the oppressed and, if anything, the oppressed should be thankful to them and all they have done. Biden saying that no one has done more for the Palestinians than he has while dropping 2,000-pound bombs on them is an example of this sentiment.¹¹⁹

Such attitudes can be defined as patronizing conditionality. This is the liberal support granted to minority groups in an unequal society on the condition they continue to support liberal politicians and policies, characterized by condescension and an air of supremacy. Liberal support is conditioned on reciprocity - I help your marginalized community so long as you vote for and donate to us - but it is characterized by underlying tones of better-than-thou - I help your marginalized community because I know you better than you know yourself.

Over time, this creates assumptions of entitlement in the political arena and beyond. Assumptions of entitlement are assumptions that view liberal politicians and policies as entitled to minority support, due to liberal support extended to minority groups in a capitalist democracy whose systems of oppression were only ever reformed and never abolished. These assumptions can range from assuming that minority groups must vote for liberal politicians, minority groups must donate to liberal politicians, minority groups must canvass for liberal politicians, minority groups must advertise liberal policies, minority groups must run under liberal parties and so on and so forth. Whatever it is, they must do it. This is aptly caricatured by liberals who blame voters, whether they abstained or voted third-party, for their electoral defeat rather than the Democratic Party itself. Liberals believe that they are entitled to votes, not that they have to earn the votes. Thus, they understand these unmet entitlements as a trespass against them. Here are a few examples:

What happens when these assumptions are not met? What happens when the condition of reciprocity that patronizing support asks for does not occur? As the 2024 election shows, liberals will happily unleash their fascistic tendencies and lend credence to their fascist counterparts, more often than not promoting them. Those they call their mortal enemies become brother in arms against the “woke” and minorities. In this way, liberal’s bifurcated political approach of lending you a hand and killing you when expedient is a historical process driven primarily by their required allegiance to capital under capitalist democracy.

If you are a liberal and you reject this allegiance, you stop being a liberal. If you are a liberal and resolve the contradiction by rejecting capitalism, you stop being a liberal. You become a leftist.

The 2024 election was nothing but a result of all the above. It was the result of the adoption of fascist logics and right-wing pandering that took a depended-upon leftist voting block out of the picture. It was a combination of all the above that scratched the liberal.

And once the liberal was scratched, a fascist bled.

VII. A Bleeding Fascist: Liberal’s Humanitarian Deception, Zionist Democrats and Thirst for Fascist Violence

We now know how the liberal was scratched but what did the fascist bleeding look like?

Because the Democrats and liberals in general feel entitled to minority and worker support (i.e. ostensibly liberal and leftist support), reciprocity (in this case, voting) was not substantial enough to win (in this case, win the election) so they turn to these oppressed peoples and peel back the liberal facade. They call upon their most basic instincts that work to obfuscate the dominance and hegemony of capital and blame all of their ails on oppressed peoples. Instead of approaching the oppressed with faux support for their interests as they so often do when they need something from them, they turn to them to victimize them as they have lost their right to even fake expressions of liberal compassion. These true thoughts and intentions are filled with imperialist and fascist fantasies that always take their shape from the relevant discourse, borrowing from their right-wing counterparts and often reinventing it in their liberal image. Today, this means their true intentions took the shape of calls for mass deportations and genocidal bombing.

Since identity politics is a foundational part of liberal’s political approach, it is also a foundational part of their reproach. If they are dependent on identities, they will then also take out their anger on said identities when these minorities do not fall in line the way they want. The two main identities targeted by liberals after their loss in the 2024 elections were immigrants in general and Palestinians in specific. The following are examples of what such haughty projection towards Palestinians looked like:

In these tweets, liberals show their true feelings towards Palestinians. Having lost the 2024 election, they turn to fascist and imperial logics, fantasizing and wishing for the eradication of Palestinians. This comes while the Democratic Party, the political manifestation of liberals, pursue and support such policies of eradication. Then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris stated on multiple occasions that they would support Israel no matter what.¹²⁰ Some liberals say that they cannot wait for Trump to turn Gaza into rubble. But pictures, such as those posted on December 2024 by Motaz Azaiza, a well-known Palestinian photographer, show that the Biden-Harris administration has already helped do just that:

Even more damning and exemplifying is the ceasefire of January 2025. While many liberals were excited to watch Trump continue the genocide of Palestinians, as evidenced above, when a ceasefire was reached in January 2025, it was not by Biden’s hand, but by Trump’s. By March of 2024, the American public largely disapproved of Israel’s genocide.¹²¹ To ease the pressure radiating from the American populace, the Biden-Harris administration began to put on public shows of strain, a political smokescreen, between Biden-Harris and Netanyahu. In April 2024, after Israel hunted and killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, Biden was alleged to have given Netanyahu “a stark warning”, saying “that future U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza war depends on the swift implementation of new steps to protect civilians and aid workers”.¹²² A month later, in May 2024, Biden spoke of a ‘red line’ for Israel for the first time.¹²³ Biden said if Israel invades Rafah, he would stop sending weapons. Yet Israel invaded Rafah and continued to kill aid workers¹²⁴ and Biden could not restrict himself the pleasure of sending weapons, signing off another $8 billion worth of military weaponry merely two weeks prior to the latest January 2025 ceasfire.¹²⁵

Liberals, from the individual to the media pundit along up and across their political party, the Democratic Party, and their party leadership, embodied by then-President and then-Vice President Kamala Harris, all knew quite well that they supported genocide for 1 year and 3 months and 13 days.

More than knew: they went out of their way to ensure it. The ceasefire deal reached in mid-January 2025 looks identical to one that Netanyahu and the Israelis had rejected in early 2024.¹²⁶ The only difference? This time, it was incoming-President elect Trump who made the call, not then-President Biden. As the Guardian wrote:

“What happened,” a senior Israeli government official told Channel 14, regarded as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, “is that Witkoff [Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East] delivered a stern message from the incoming president of the United States, who unequivocally demanded the deal’s conclusion.”¹²⁷

Israeli media was far more honest about this pivotal interaction. A Haaretz article titled “Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected” partially reads:

“In fact, Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year. Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages' freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one). Netanyahu rejected this condition and thus was born the partial deal proposed by Egypt.”¹²⁸

Indeed, Trump did what Biden did not want to do. ProPublica published a report shortly after the ceasefire was publicly agreed to, quoting a researcher as saying:

“‘Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,’ said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. ‘Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.’”¹²⁹

But with Trump in the mix, things seemed to be different. The Times of Israel, another Israeli media organization, reported:

“A “tense” weekend meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and incoming Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff led to a breakthrough in the hostage negotiations, with the top aide to US President-elect Donald Trump doing more to sway the premier in a single sit-down than outgoing President Joe Biden did all year, two Arab officials told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.”¹³⁰

A ceasefire reached by pressure from the incoming Trump administration is not a sign of Trump’s strength nor a sign of Biden’s weakness. Rather, this should only be understood as a sign of Biden’s willingness to aid and abet Israel’s genocide. A ceasefire was not impossible over the last year. It was merely improbable, both under Biden’s leadership and most likely would have been under a Harris administration. Not because they could not do it themselves. They simply did not want to.

This was exhibited by their reluctance to use more explicit measures of pressure on Netanyahu while at the same time conjuring meaningless humanitarian apparitions. On the backend, the liberal Biden-Harris administration decided to let Israel have their way with full American support. “Time and again”, the aforementioned ProPublica report surmises, “Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way…Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war.”¹³¹ Publicly, they were “concerned”. “Over the past year”, Tariq Kenney-Shawa, US Policy Fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, wrote, “have seen Biden and Harris weaponize these endearing traits of liberalism, leveraging them to distract from the reality that they are helping Israel carry out a genocide. In doing so, they have effectively deterred wider resistance to these policies at home, as well as international efforts to intervene.”¹³² Genocide has never been incompatible with liberalism. If anything, modern mass killing, like capitalism, need it. Mass killing today is far more effective under liberal platitudes.¹³³

We should not be too quick to believe the January 2025 ceasefire permanent nor take this as a sign of the new fascisms’ incompatibility with Zionist’s bloodlust. Whether or not this ceasefire is an enduring ceasefire, unlike that between Israel and Hezbollah which Israel violated 100 times in less than a week,¹³⁴ is going to be seen in upcoming weeks. Given Trump’s own imperial regard, this may very well be a continuation of a smokescreen for worse to come. Trump is not a friend of Palestinians.

In the above way, one comes to better understand the complacency both liberals and their politicians in the Democratic Party have exhibited when it comes to aiding and abetting the genocide of the Palestinians. Overtly fascist and imperialist attitudes towards Black and brown bodies are disguised under liberal platitudes of “concern” and certain humanitarian pretenses. As a matter of fact, liberal’s humanistic attitudes were perfect cover for Israel’s genocide. This duplicity of disguise for crimes against humanity propelled by public theater of a “rule-based order” allowed the Biden administration to go “above and beyond to ensure that Israel not only could sustain its unprecedented assault on Gaza, but that it wouldn’t have to bear the full cost of war.”¹³⁵ Once the liberal cloth is unveiled, they show their true feelings towards the oppressed.

In a particularly fascist thread of tweets, liberals sought financial compensation for aiding and abetting in the deportation of undocumented peoples:

In response to that tweet, there were several responses by equally willing and excited liberal participants in such a depraved act:

Finally, some outright combined both their hatred for Palestinians and the desire for deportation of both documented and undocumented peoples:

This attitude was also expressed in video. Watch as this liberal - accurately described as “genocidal granny” by one Twitter/X user - happily performed her imperialist inclinations:

¹³⁶

In another example of liberals turning towards minorities and seeking to punish them for not giving them what they feel they are entitled to, one TikToker provides the number for ICE one can call if they know Latinos that voted for Trump with undocumented family members. This liberal feels as though, in a patronizing fashion, that he is teaching other Latinos a lesson, “poetic justice” he calls it. He acknowledges that he is harming innocent people but justifies it by arguing that minorities - Latinos in this case - who do not behave the way liberals want - voting for Trump instead of Harris in this case - must be punished. Indeed, the full weight of state-sanctioned violence should weigh on them:

¹³⁷

Numerous liberal TikTok creators videoed themselves, quite gleefully, buying Starbucks after having boycotted them for a year since the beginning of the genocide of Palestinians or even earlier in solidarity with striking Starbucks workers. These creators also videoed themselves depicting hypothetical situations in which they ignore Latinos getting deported or ignore a conservative neighbor while they went through a miscarriage. The scratched liberal/bleeding fascist loves to fantasize about violence against the oppressed. Here are a few of such videos:

¹³⁸

One might feel compelled to frame this all as merely a grief-filled happenstance, due to electoral obliteration. Yet this apathetic and imperial callousness, couched in patronizing conditionality and assumptions of entitlement, was on display before liberalism’s humiliation kink was completed on November 2024. Outside of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on August 2024, pro-Palestinians staged a protest. They were announcing the names of killed Palestinians. The majority of them were kids. These are liberals, in all their splendor, reacting childishly and condescendingly to the names of the victims of a genocide that their political party was carrying out being read aloud:

¹³⁹

The above logics and behaviors of liberals were in explicit display under the Biden-Harris administration and it furthered alienated a core constituency that was far more left-leaning than Zionist Democrats. Amidst the college campus protests that engulfed many universities early in 2024, Democrat rejection of its most liberal voter base became abundantly clear. The consequences were felt strongly by Zionist Democrats, Biden and Harris among them. The College Democrats of America gave Biden and his fellow Zionist, fascistic Democrats a prophetic warning in April 2024:

“Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party.”¹⁴⁰

Taking into account leftists and left-leaning liberals being comfortably sidelined since and throughout the Palestinian genocide, the Biden-Harris administration falling far short from their 2020 liberal promises, their liberal pundits adopting fascist reasoning and outright imperial regard, the 2024 election result was the logical concluding collapse of the entire liberal infrastructure under the weight of its own contradictions.

Conclusion: Moving Towards the Cause

On every single one of the previous occasions, we saw liberal individuals do the same thing their liberal pundits and their political representatives (the Democratic Party and company) did and continue doing: accept fascist logics, communicate these logics, manufacture legitimacy for fascism, and fantasize and wish for imperial violence. In this last example, we saw them physically do what they have done when confronted with accountability for losing an election, committing genocide and supporting the rise of a new fascism: cover their ears from their atrocities on their way to opening their mouth about peace. One may say that all of this does not reflect liberalism’s best. Yet these dynamics have colored liberalism’s anti-Palestinian rhetoric and genocidal policies since October 7th, 2024, and, as will be explored in part two of the essay, long before October 7th towards Black Americans. If this is not liberalism’s best, then we have been drowning in liberalism’s worst for quite some time.

In the beginning, I said I would hold off on defining the liberal until the end. Given the above, the liberal can be defined as the individual or group that protects capitalism through convincing the oppressed that capital-friendly reform and performative politics change materially unequal societies. Liberalism, defined here as the politics of the liberal, adheres to theatrics of equality and peace while protecting what creates inequality and feeds machines of destruction. When capitalism feels threatened in any way, it calls forth its most ardent defender, fascism, and liberals aid and abet in its introduction and legitimacy as a solution to an unequal society’s ails.

This essay is a snapshot of this above definition at play in real time.

For all of the reasons covered in this essay (their inability to self-reflect and take accountability, their willingness to adopt fascist logics when it serves them, their patronizing conditionalities and entitlements and their expeditious abandonment of their most liberal impulses), liberals lost and will continue losing. The question for leftists, those abandoned and those that continue to abstain from their capitalist-favored two-party system, becomes: do we want liberals to lose to the fascists or do we want them to lose to us? Considering my previous assertion about leftist political infrastructure being stuck in its infancy in the United States, it is most likely that fascism will take (and is taking) advantage of liberalism’s current weakness and centrists and left-leaning people of all kinds will be (and are) alienated. We must then construct the necessary leftist infrastructure and take advantage of liberalism’s withering form, but from another perspective, a leftist perspective, a just perspective, a principled perspective, an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist and anti-patriarchal perspective.

In order to do so, however, we must have a definitive understanding of liberalism’s function in modern day societies.

For the second part of this two-part essay, I will be putting the 2024 election, adoption of fascist reasoning and liberal contradiction into a wider socio-historical context: a history of liberal’s long adoption of, acquiescence to and working on behalf of fascist logics to preserve capitalism.

Many thanks to Meghan Watts and Hassan Sora for proofreading and providing feedback for this essay. I am indebted to the two of you.

1. This new fascism is not described here in-depth. For an in-depth assessment, see Toscano, Alberto. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London New York, NY: Verso. and Bratich, Jack. 2022. On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death. Common Notions. If you do not believe that the incoming Trump administration is fascist, please watch this 8 second video of Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, doing the Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration:

2. 2020 United States presidential election - Wikipedia

3. 2024 United States presidential election - Wikipedia

4. Palmer, Ewan. 2024. “Where Did the Millions of Joe Biden Votes Go?” Newsweek. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/where-did-the-millions-of-joe-biden-votes-go/ar-AA1tGoMU?ocid=socialshare

5. 2024 Election Results in The Green Papers show that Jill Stein received 714,454 votes while AP News Results on Bing.com show that she received 720,248 votes as of this writing. The Bing.com results show the total of votes third-party candidates without Jill Stein received as being 1,671,723. Adding Jill Stein’s 720,248 vote count amounts to around 2.4 million total.

6. PBS. November 7, 2024. “Interactive: How key groups of Americans voted in 2024”. PBS. URL Link

7. Black Voters Drift From Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid, Poll Shows - The New York Times

8. PBS. November 7, 2024. “Interactive: How key groups of Americans voted in 2024”. PBS. URL Link

9. Latino Voters' Views of the 2024 Election - Pew Research Center

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Poll Tracker: The Latino Vote in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election - AS/COA

13. National Exit Polls: Election 2024 Results - NBC News

14. Did Election Polls Get It Wrong Again? - USNews

15. What the Polling Got Wrong and Right in the 2024 Election - PBS

16. List of numbers ahead of election day on U.S. News. - USNews

17. Ibid.

18. Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory - Pew Research Center

19. Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation - Pew Research Center

20. Bloch, Matthew, Keith Collins, Robert Gebeloff, Marco Hernandez, Malika Khurana and Zach Levitt. November 6, 2024. “Early Results Show A Red Shift Across the U.S.”. The New York Times. URL Link

21. Pettersson, Henrik, Byron Manley, Zachary B. Wolf, Matt Stiles. November 7, 2024. “America’s red shift: See the counties where Trump boosted his share of the vote”. CNN. URL Link

22. Podhozer, Michael. 2025. “How Trump ‘Won’”. Substack.

23. Podhozer, Michael. 2024. “Election 2024: The Path Forward”. Substack.

24. Ibid.

25. This calculation was made and is explained in further detailed by Podhozer in his Substack article “How Trump ‘Won’” which you can find here: Podhozer, Michael. 2025. “How Trump ‘Won’”. Substack. I am indebted to his work.

26. 2020 Election Numbers - Council on Foreign Relations

27. Section of Podhozer, Michael. 2024. “Election 2024: The Path Forward”. Substack: https://www.weekendreading.net/i/146877086/ii-the-anti-maga-majority-is-still-anti-maga-even-if-theyre-not-democrats

28. Left-leaning in this categorization includes the popular vote total of the Green Party, the PSL and independent candidate Cornel West (Wikipedia Total Third-Party Counts)

29. Podhozer, Michael. 2024. “How Trump ‘Won’”. Substack - Quote

30. Ibid. - Quote

31. Ibid. - Quote

32. Ibid. - Quote

33. Ibid. - Quote

34. Podhozer, Michael. 2025. “How Trump ‘Won’”. Substack.

35. Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory - Pew Research Center

36. Issues and the 2024 election | Pew Research Center

37. IMEU X/Twitter post explaining their results: https://x.com/imeupolicy/status/1879576523377975352 ; link to actual survey: IMEU Policy Project Post-Election Polling Shows Gaza Cost Harris Votes — IMEU Policy Project

38. Ibid. - Quote

39. “I’ll Win With or Without You,” Teamsters Union President Reveals Kamala Harris’s Famous Last Words - YouTube

40. Teamsters decline to endorse any presidential candidate for first time in almost 30 years: Why their support is so influential - Yahoo News

41. Ibid.

42. The Democratic Party’s Real War in 2020 Was Against Bernie Sanders - Jacobin

43. Podhozer, Michael. 2025. “How Trump ‘Won’”. Substack - Quote

44. Why the Democrats were Israel’s perfect partners in genocide - +972 Magazine

45. President Biden: Climate champion or fossil fuel friend? - NPR

46. The total student debt in the United States is $1.74 trillion. The Biden administration forgave up to $184 billion in student loan debt. This accounts to a total of around 10 percent of the whole of student debt forgiven. While this is impressive, there was backpedaling and legal challenges that plagued this effort.

47. Biden invites Trump to work together to lobby Congress on an immigration bill as both candidates visit border - CNN

48. Biden just signed a potential TikTok ban into law. Here’s what happens next | CNN Business

49. Liz Cheney campaigns with Kamala Harris for first time, as campaign continues GOP outreach - CBS News

50. What Kamala Harris Meant by “Most Lethal Fighting Force” in Her DNC Speech - The Intercept

51. Is US economy better or worse now than under Trump? - BBC

52. Harris says Trump ‘is a fascist’ after John Kelly says the former president wanted generals like Hitler’s - AP News

53. The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart On What Went Wrong For Democrats”. Youtube. URL Link

54. Brian Williams Addresses the Insulting Errors of the Biden Administration - YouTube

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. CNN. November 10, 2024. “Fareed’s Take: Democrats Blew it by making three big mistakes”. Youtube. URL Link.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. MAUREEN DOWD: Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics - WRAL

66. The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart On What Went Wrong For Democrats”. Youtube. URL Link

67. Atlanta Democrats Vote to Fund Controversial Police Center | TIME ; Atlanta Democrats Blocked the Cop City Referendum, Alienating Voter Turnout

68. Bill Clinton criticised for saying Israel ‘forced’ to kill Gaza civilians | Gaza News | Al Jazeera

69. Kamala Harris' Michigan loss highlights Democrats' weak spots | Reuters

70. Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris | The Nation

71. Ibid.

72. Harris pressed on trans rights, potentially pardoning Trump: Takeaways

73. KFILE: Harris pledged support in 2019 to cut ICE funding and provide transgender surgery to detained migrants | CNN Politics

74. Harris campaign pledges she won't ban fracking - POLITICO

75. The evolution of Kamala Harris' stances on single-payer health care, fracking and the Supreme Court - CBS News

76. Ibid.

77. Harris Says 'Not a Thing Comes to Mind' That She'd Do Differently Than Biden - Newsweek

78. Ibid.

79. What Kamala Harris Meant by “Most Lethal Fighting Force” in Her DNC Speech - The Intercept

80. X/Twitter post: https://x.com/PushBidenLeft/status/1827375313111679183

81. Trump Signs Executive Order That Will Effectively Ban Use Of TikTok In the U.S. - NPR

82. The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves. - The Intercept

83. President Biden signs law to ban TikTok nationwide unless it is sold - NPR

84. Trump considers executive order hoping to ‘save TikTok’ from ban or sale in U.S. law - Washington Post

85. Biden pulls from Trump’s immigration playbook in election-year twist - CNN

86. Ibid.

87. Harris pressed on trans rights, potentially pardoning Trump: Takeaways - USAToday

88. Exclusive:" Top Harris Campaign Staff Tell Us What Went Wrong in the 2024 Elections - Youtube

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks - The New York Times

92. Ibid.

93. Harris campaign still asking for donations weeks after massive loss to Trump - MSN

94. Harris raised $1 billion-plus in defeat. She's still sending appeals to donors - AP News

95. Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything - Current Affairs

96. Congress will have a record-setting number of Black members in its ranks next year - Yahoo News

97. Re-election for Tlaib and Omar - Al-Jazeera

98. PBS. November 7, 2024. “Interactive: How key groups of Americans voted in 2024”. PBS. URL Link

99. Most states that considered abortion rights amendments approved them - NPR

100. Ibid.

101. Ibid.

102. Black women notch historic Senate wins in an election year defined by potential firsts - AP News

103. Black women, transgender, Korean-American: Tracking historic wins of US Election 2024 - Liveminst

104. 4. How Harris’ and Trump’s race and ethnicity, gender and age matter in the 2024 election - Pew Research Center

105. Claudia & Karina

106. Jill Stein & Butch Ware

107. Cornell West and Melina Abdullah

108. Did Jill Stein Help Donald Trump Edge Kamala Harris? - Times of India

109. Jill Stein Hurts Donald Trump More Than Kamala Harris, new poll suggests - Green Party US

110. Support for a Third Political Party in the U.S. Dips to 58% - Gallup

111. Identity politics was not always used in the way it is used today. See Táíwò, Olúfẹmi O. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books. This book and its insights will be heavily depended upon in part two.

112. For some thoughts about neoliberalism and the New Gilded Age, see Giroux, H. A. (2008). Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: Rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age. Social Identities, 14(5), 587–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630802343432.

113. See Piketty, Thomas. 2017. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ; Marx, Karl, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach. 1981. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. You can read the whole of Capital: Vol 1 here: Capital Volume I

114. The discussion concerning private, public and personal property in Marx is discussed, in an approachable fashion, here: https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/karl-marxs-private-property-and-communism-e844c90b022b. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the primary text that is discussed.

115. This will be explored more in-depth in part-two using Selfa, L. (2012). The Democrats: A critical history (Updated ed). Haymarket Books.

116. American billionaires decried by Biden gained US$1.5 trillion during his term - Financial Post

117. Ibid.

118. Nancy Fraser is one of the leading scholars in this distinction. See Nancy Fraser on Recognition and Redistribution - Ethical Politics for a brief summary.

119. Biden’s claim he’s done ‘more for Palestinian community than anybody’ prompts backlash - The Guardian

120. Harris stands by Israel's right to defend itself while saying Gaza situation is 'heartbreaking' - NBC News ; Biden says Israel has right to defend itself, must protect civilians - Reuters ; the failure of adopting such a position is discussed here: Israel-Hamas War: Biden's Unwavering Support Has Resulted in Failure - Foreign Policy

121. Majority of U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in Gaza - Gallup

122. Biden tells Israel’s Netanyahu future US support for war depends on new steps to protect civilians - AP News

123. Biden says he will stop sending bombs and artillery shells to Israel if it launches major invasion of Rafah - CNN

124. War on Gaza: Aid workers killed in Israeli strike on humanitarian convoy - Middle East Eye

125. US Plans 8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel - Reuters

126. Middle East Crisis Updates: Gaza Cease-Fire to Start on Sunday, Mediator Says - New York Times

127. ‘A stern message’: how return of Trump loomed over Gaza ceasefire negotiations - The Guardian

128. Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected - Haaretz

129. A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza - ProPublica

130. Arab officials: Trump envoy swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year - The Times of Israel

131. A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza - ProPublica

132. Why the Democrats were Israel’s perfect partners in genocide - +972 Magazine

133. This will be explored more in depth in part-two using Moses, A. D. (2021). The problems of genocide: Permanent security and the language of transgression. Cambridge University Press.

134. Israel breached Lebanon ceasefire 100 times, UNIFIL source says - Middle East Monitor

135. Why the Democrats were Israel’s perfect partners in genocide - +972 Magazine

136. If the video glitches, you can see the whole video in this X/Twitter post: https://x.com/whoizthisdiva/status/1854652550496370836

137. You can find the video of the Latino liberal here, X/Twitter post: https://x.com/HumanistReport/status/1855446082874175698

138. You can find all of these videos of liberals in a thread here, X/Twitter post: https://x.com/AchmatX/status/1854944522783916472

139. You can find the video here, X/Twitter post: https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1826479453414850813

140. College campus protests highlight tensions in Biden’s coalition - CNN