The Death of Liberal Optimism?

Has the reactionary right stolen optimism from us?

This piece by Justin Ling has me pondering new angles, since before, and especially since Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential Election.

It’s hard to process just what happened in that election, Chuck Wendig summarized it all for us in “This is a Doom Post”

People looked at [Donald Trump’s] first four years, at COVID, at January 6th, at all his promises, his crimes, at all his people, at all the ones who told us he was a fascist, a dictator, an anti-democratic nightmare, and they said, “Yeah, him again, let’s fucking go.” And they pressed the self-destruct button, using the system of democracy to attempt to undo the system of democracy.

People chose this. In considerable number. This, grotesquely, is democracy in action. Though a democracy mauled into a cruder shape by disinformation.

I agree with that entirely. Many place blame for this Trump victory on Harris and the Democrats failing to convince voters to their side. I put absolutely no stock in that. The voters looked at both, chose not to listen to the Democrats, looked at the flailing madman that is Donald Trump and chose that on purpose. The voters made a conscious choice to vote in a malignant personality that is a racist, rapist, convicted felon and fascist, and that choice is on them. They wear their choice. I do not accept any excuses for their choice, as the evidence to the character of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was as clear as it could be.

So how does this result tie into “optimism?” Back to Justin Ling

The kind of optimism that Donald Trump offers is regressive, cruel, and destructive. It is not libertarian, but instead believes in using the state to settle scores and destroy social movements. It will not bring about happiness and culture anymore than Mussolini’s reign did. Trump will use Andreessen and the futurists to smash the state and remake it in his own image. Weaponizing state power never achieves freedom.

What stuck with me about this is how this version of optimism sells. It doesn’t require anything from us to accept it. We just have to trust that Donald Trump and the techno-oligarchs will deliver this new future to us.

“We” don’t have to do anything to bring it about. We just have to trust them to bring it to us.

Trust carries a heavy load in that sentence. But if you are hungry for easy answers, that don’t require you to do any of the work yourself, the trust required becomes that much easier to give.

An optimistic future as delivered by Liberalism requires our participation. It requires empathy and selflessness from political leaders, but also from each of us. This must be reflected in the laws that are passed, and protected. The concept that all of us have equality of opportunity in all aspects of life regardless of race, creed or sexual identity. We each have to make room for each other.

The techno-oligarchs and the fascist enablers are selling a future where we can be selfish. Just wait, and what we deserve will be delivered to us. That what we deserve is taken from others, is not supposed to bother us. We deserve it, it is our due.

I truly believe this is the fulcrum that society is being weighed on. The selfless against the selfish. And the selfish appear to be winning as the appeals to the selfish are built on very seductive lies.

This is the point that I fear is why Progressive Liberalism is currently failing. To appeal to the selfish part of our nature is antithesis of Liberalism. Progressive politics can only proceed so far appealing to the purely selfish natures. The easy wins of basic freedoms and rights have already been won. The hard stuff is convincing everyone that those basic freedoms and rights truly belong to all. And thus we see the backlash against minorities, LGBTQ+, women and other marginalized groups.

Too many people are too tired of “giving away” rights even though they had to give up nothing at all to do it.

Even when people say they voted for Donald Trump for economic reasons, the lie is quickly exposed. The ‘economic reason’ is that those voters want their due, and to hell with everyone else. The actual reality of the economy is irrelevant, because they want to be on top somehow, in some way. As many experts have tried to point out, Donald Trump’s economic policies will lead to ruin, but that doesn’t matter, Donald Trump promises the primacy of the self. He will punch those foreigners “in the nose” and that’s what’s important. He’s throwing punches.

How can Progressives fight selfishness when so many people are angry and selfish? How does the left sell the Optimism that requires all of us to give of ourselves when the right is selling Optimism that requires nothing at all?

Voters are falling for snake-oil charmers, but they are doing it willingly. They reject reason, analysis and compassion because it means they have to give something they are unwilling to. And to hold on to that, they will believe any lie that tells them they don’t have to.

They are optimistic they won’t be one of the victims. And the final victory for progressives might only come through the experience of becoming a victim.

Only through the fires of hell will society be made whole. How’s that for optimism?