If you like this, please support my work.
To understand what I about how the broad left operates, please read this, “Who’s Left: A Taxonomy of Sorts.”
I’ve been planning a large essay for a long while, one that looked at all the reasons we, on the left, ended up here. I realised that it might make more sense for me to write a series of short works, each one titled, “X Is the Reason We Have Trump,” where “X” is a single factor, such as the left’s abject failure on immigration, or its refusal to engage abortion in any meaningful way. I’ll publish these every now and then over the next few months. Meanwhile, here is an introduciton to all of them, to explain the basic question that will drive the series.
How did we get here?
For the last few years, I’ve been using an app to cut off my access to social media sites, in order to concentrate on my work. I would time it to let me back in only at 9 in the morning, and this forced me to check the news, eat breakfast, and read something other than my feeds before I began my day.
And then came the election, and January 20. I am no longer comfortable staying off Twitter, Facebookand Instagram for longer than two hours at a time. I don’t even use the app overnight and, instead, nearly every morning, wake up with a sense of dread and anxiety, wondering, with a quick secular prayer, “What might have happened now?” Everything is breaking apart, it seems, and every hour brings us news of yet another scheme, a new way to extract labour, profits, and life itself from people and nature.
How did we get here?
If you were to believe liberals and their sanctimonious newspapers and media outlets like the New York Times and the New Yorker, everything is Donald Trump’s fault. Life was perfect before his return. Sure, tens of thousands of people were being killed in various parts of the world, and, sure, there were those “border skirmishes” we heard about, and, sure, the pandemic still affected millions, and the poor or uninsured could no longer access free Covid vaccines after Biden ended the Bridge program, and, maybe, sure, maybe there were rumblings about rising poverty—but, on the whole, things were just fine, fine, fine, and we were a prosperous nation. Everything was normal, until the Big Bad Trumpies showed up.
But “normal” was always broken. We are here today because of the failure of the broad left—that spectrum ranging from liberals to progressives and the hard left— and not because of the machinations of the right.
There have been many protests since Trump began his second term, starting on January 20, the day of his inauguration. Democracy Now spoke to a participant in the “People’s March” in DC about why she was there. “There are just too many things to say that are going wrong,” she responded, and continued, “And we thought we had hopefully corrected them in 2020, and then we had an insurrection, and then we never had any peace.” There is a universe of amnesia reflected in that sentence. Four years, between 2016 and 2020, magically disappear and the January 6 insurrection just, apparently, came out of nowhere. A popular sign at several of the rallies then and since is one with the words, “If you’d voted for Kamala, we’d all be at brunch.”
But who had the privilege of brunching while the world burned? What was “normal” and why are we trying to return to it? What are we defending?
Consider this example of the indefensible having become “normal”:
When lockdowns began in early March 2020, school-going children from low-income households were among those hit the hardest because they immediately lost access to free lunch programs. Trying to find out exactly how many children benefit from these is like trying to count droplets of water in a swimming pool, but the data indicates that a shockingly large number need them: According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 43% of US public school students attend schools where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. (The NCES points out that “the percentage of students in a school who are eligible for FRPL can provide a substitute measure for the concentration of low-income students in the school.”) No matter which way we look at it, the richest country in the world is home to millions of children whose most significant and nutritional meals are eaten at school.
The neighbourhood of Hyde Park is home to the University of Chicago, a wealthy private university whose faculty and staff live in beautifully restored and appointed nineteenth-century homes or lush, expensive condominiums. It is also home to some of the poorest on the city’s South Side, and rents have been spiraling. In 2019, The Chicago Maroon, the university’s newspaper, reported on “food insecurity” in the area: a third of Hyde Park residents are “eligible for some federal nutrition programs.”
So, when the lockdowns began, many HP families and individuals entered crisis mode in both their housing and food needs. The neighbourhood sprang into action, and food drives were organised to make sure that households that needed them received meals and groceries. Leftists were aware that this was not a great solution, and that it reflected a larger problem. But for many in the neighbourhood, it was a point of pride that they had managed to help families. This was the story everywhere in the country: neighbourhoods and cities chipping in to help the less fortunate, with more than a little smugness at having lent a helping hand.
And here we are.
It is now 2025, and child poverty has been steadily on the rise. 43 million, or 12.9% of all Americans, live in poverty, and 10 million of those are children, according to this 2024 report. No country reaches these levels of poverty overnight: the point at which this many children are left hungry is a long, slow and sometimes glacial process that takes years. While the broad left likes to point to Ronald Reagan and both the Bushes (who certainly bear a great deal of the blame), it would rather forget that the Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency criminalised both immigrants and welfare recipients. Childhood poverty has long-term effects on all aspects of a person’s development: a hungry and poor child is less likely to do well, less likely to contest a brutal system that forces submission to those who control food and access to benefits, less likely to transition into a well-paying occupation, and, in the U.S, much less likely to be able to access adequate healthcare beyond life-gutting emergency visits. Over the long term, child poverty becomes the leading determinant of the extent to which any country becomes comfortable with vast inequality. In the U.S, we are fine with the idea that children might go hungry. Their existence allows us to weep and wring our hands, and to contribute to the gigantic, ever-growing Food Pantry Industrial Complex.
And, of course, we blame Trump. In late April, he announced cuts to Head Start, causing outrage and threats of lawsuits and this was the opportunity for liberal media to decry the cruelty of it all. He has since “reversed course” on the cuts, according to USA Today, but other initiatives might still disappear—like the grant system that supports child-care services for low-income parents in college. If the funds disappear, it will be yet another way to keep people in low-pay jobs with no prospect of upward mobility. Poor parents, poor children: the cycle continues. How might we prevent such a broken system from replicating itself over generations? Free college is a start—as is wiping out college debt, a matter that weighs over the lives and imaginations of countless people well into their retirement years. In April, the Trump administration announced that it would resume student loan collections, a cruel measure that will throw lives into disarray.
Who could have acted swiftly and surely to help millions of people? I will leave you to answer that question, but here’s a hint.
By now, a reader might be wondering: what is the point of dredging up old sins? Can’t we all just move on?
What is the point of moving on if we don’t carry the memory of why we failed? Recall the participant in the People’s March, and understand that millions like her echo her sentiments: they shrugged and stopped paying attention as long as the good guy—the one who refused to cancel student debt, the one who refused to step down despite barely being able to shuffle across a stage, the one who knew that he was helping to keep a genocide going, the one who insisted that he would be even stricter than Trump on border issues—was in power.
It’s not just these historical facts that we have to remember, but the apparatus of memory and politics that we bring to bear upon this current moment. While I am encouraged by the fact that, this time around, there seems to be far more real and abiding (and deeply deserved) anger at the Democrats, there is still the tendency to return to old tropes, long-cherished narratives about the deserving and the undeserving.
Consider, for instance, the case of the 238 men kidnapped and whisked away to a black hole of a prison in El Salvador. At first, there was shock and even rage at what had happened—to all of them. This, as I’ve written here, in “First They Came for the Criminals,” is the way to respond: to demand justice for all, no matter who they were or what they did. But, over the last few weeks, an invisible public relations apparatus seems to have sprung up around the mass kidnapping, and the emphasis is slowly shifting back to individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in order to create narratives about them as men who deserve to be brought back. What are we fighting for if we decide that even something as utterly heinous as what happened to these men must now be fought against on a case by case basis? The issue is not whether or not some or many of these men are innocent of crimes, but that they received no due process at all. Already, Marco Rubio is shopping around for countries that might take even U.S citizens. It’s both a slow creep and a fast incline towards exporting criminals the way we send our trash off to other countries. (I’ve written about this in “On Space, Joyrides, and Prisons.”) As with so much else, liberals in particular are (correctly) decrying the immense cruelty of all this. But guess who passed indefinite detention into law? I’ll leave you to answer that as well, but here is a hint.
What are we defending? Recent announcements about cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have left thousands of people unemployed and entire countries on the brink of economic devastation. But even those who depend on USAID for their livelihood have been critical of American expansion disguised as “aid.” Aída Chávez, in The Nation, writes that “it has been an essential arm of American imperialism that often serves as a tool for regime change, election interference, and the destabilization of countries around the world.”
I could go down a lengthy list here, of sectors and issues that, with their terrible flaws, became calcified in their broken states, and I could describe how that affects the most marginalised: immigration, abortion, arts funding, education, and on and on. But I will reserve each topic for separate essays in the coming months. We are faced with catastrophic loss in every area, and it is likely that threats of absolute erasure are designed to drive us into a panic so that any minimal return of funds will be accepted gratefully and without question (that seems to be the case with the Head Start issue).
Do we have a strategy for simultaneously defending a broken world and creating a new, dazzling, infinitely better one in the future? Can we demand structural changes that erase child hunger and poverty instead of creating a gigantic, monstrous system of food distribution systems that reduce humans and their children to the indignity of queuing up for food served by smug do-gooders? Are we so addicted to the idea of artists spending more time on begging for money than actually making art (it’s good for their morale, or something!) that we cannot envision a world where someone can just make art as and when they please? Imagine a world where people have what they need, without having to prove that they are worthy of the basics like food, shelter, and healthcare.
What are we defending?
In the months and years to come, it will seem like everything around us is shattering into thousands of pieces. Our impulse will always be to prop up the status quo, but there is no better time to let things fall and break. This may seem callous in the matter of something like global aid, where actual lives might be lost to starvation. Or in the case of the arts, where small, independent entities like Chicago’s beloved Chicago Underground Film Festival and events like Open House Chicago and the Black Harvest Film Festival face cuts. But in all this, we should ask, what are we defending, and how did we get here? Jeff Jenkins, the founder of the group Midnight Circus, worries that possible cuts will mean that “communities who otherwise wouldn’t be able to host us” might no longer access the programming. Can we find a way to make sure the arts are widely available to all communities, not just the wealthy ones where parents can take their children to circuses or places like the Art Institute to see and experience art and perhaps imagine themselves as artists? (I’m not criticising Jenkins here, but pointing out that he, like us all, is working within a faulty system.)
Again, I could go on. But I will stop here, for now, and only offer a warning: the left has increasingly been lulled into the comfort of constant panic. We are addicted to crisis, and have forgotten how to dream of better, more stable futures. Instead, we carry the same placards every eight years, forgetting to march when the good guys are elected, foaming at the mouth with righteous anger when the baddies show up. If we want to move forward, we have to stop marching in place and ask, over and over, “What are we defending?” What is the future we imagine for ourselves and for everyone decades from now?
If you like this, please support my work.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Master of Catherine of Cleves, The Mouth of Hell, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, c. 1440