Democrats Are Conservatives Too
American Liberals mostly fear the growing radicalism of the Left and the Right not because it is dangerous, but because it is radical.
I was subject to a great deal of vitriol this week after a video I posted explaining why it was an effective political strategy for Gen Z voters to keep threatening to break with Biden and the Democrats over Gaza made the rounds on #Resistance Twitter. Some Obama strategist–formerly of the phenomenal success story that is WeWork–had quote tweeted my video and implied that my generation was grossly unrealistic and dangerous to democracy by threatening to withhold votes from Democrats in November. Thousands of GenX haircuts piled into my comments section across Twitter, Threads, and Instagram (they don’t use TikTok) to ruthlessly question my intelligence, my allegiance, and my hairstyle. It was a sad performance that reminded me of an unfortunate political truth in 2024: Democrats are conservatives too.
This type of Liberal is ubiquitous in American university faculties, Washington think tanks, publishing houses, magazines, consulting firms, and film studios.
The Private Life of Power
In making a controversial statement like this, I do not mean to insinuate that Democrats are in lockstep with the Trumpist agenda of the party that claims that they and their political platform are “conservative.” I am making a commentary on the nature of power. For my statement “Democrats are conservatives too” to make sense, you must understand what a “conservative” actually is.
Professor Corey Robin details the history of conservatism in his phenomenal book The Reactionary Mind, in which he distils the definition of conservatism as a stubbornly non-ideological defense of what he terms the “private life of power.” Robin asserts that conservatism is fundamentally about defending established hierarchies and power structures against the challenges posed by progressive forces. In the book, Robin demonstrates how conservative thought has adapted over time but consistently and essentially serves to preserve privilege and authority, wherever it resides. Where power currently resides is within the cultural and political enclosure of the Democratic Party.
Anatomy of the Clinton Liberal
For at least thirty years, the prevailing economic and cultural hegemony of American life has been that of the Clinton Liberal. Even when they are out of power, this political class maintains a stifling grip on most of the country’s elite institutions, organs of media and philanthropy, and the culture of its largest companies. This is a class dominated by articulate, well-educated, socially progressive “New Democrats,” who by and large believe in doing well first so that they can do good later.
This type of Liberal is ubiquitous in American university faculties, Washington think tanks, publishing houses, magazines, consulting firms, and film studios. Its old guard looks like Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden. Its more youthful face includes figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Pete Buttigieg, and Sheryl Sandberg. The prophets of this dominant political class are philosophers like Stephen Pinker, philanthropists like Bill Gates, and politicians like Barack Obama.
The members of this political class loathe Trump, and would have voted for Obama a third time if they could have. They dominate American culture, and yet they are a dying breed.
These people listen to The Daily and Pod Save America, read the Wall Street Journal, buy their groceries from farmers markets, and shop conscientiously. They experiment with sustainable diets, sit on the boards of foundations for children, endangered animals, and brown people from countries plundered by their employers. They generally consider themselves better informed than the majority of their countrymen, and importantly, more realistic. This “realistic” outlook is perhaps their most treasured quality.
Their children attend the best private schools, or public schools in the best neighborhoods. They matriculate through Ivy and Ivy-adjacent schools (often as legacy admissions), intern for the Peace Corps or the Clinton Foundation, put in a year at McKinsey or BCG, then join an early stage Silicon Valley startup. They hail from Palo Alto and Palos Verdes, and will probably settle down in Brentwood, Buckhead, or Bethesda. They have never really worried about missing rent.
The economic radicalism of the Right Wing is not a threat, but actually a boon for the Liberal elite, who benefit greatly from things like economic deregulation, lower taxes, and the ability to garner political influence through lobbying.
The cultural influence of this political class is felt through institutions like the Obama Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Universities like Stanford, UCLA, Duke, and MIT have popped out fresh-faced adherents of this monoculture for nearly three decades. Every field from fashion to philanthropy to filmmaking feels the cultural influence of this dominant political class.
They loathe Trump, and would have voted for Obama a third time if they could have. They dominate American culture, and yet they are a dying breed.
They reached their high water mark in 2015 with the overwhelming cultural victory that was the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling on gay marriage and the apparently inevitable march of progress that seemed bound to usher the first female President into the White House. Then disaster struck, and for eight long years, they have been asking “what happened,” and pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.
Facing the Uncomfortable Truth
The Liberal political class is still hyperdominant in American life, but increasingly, they fear that they are losing the monopoly on the Right Side of History. For more than thirty years, they had their cake and ate it too, thinking their golden years would be full of satisfied reflection on their material comfort and progressive bona fides, rather than anxiety over a growing fascist reaction.
But things fall apart. The partial social revolution that they ushered in has produced an unprecedented reactionary backlash from the Right, and what is more alarming is that now they are beset by a increasingly menacing Leftist insurgency from within their own base.
In the face of these twin radicalisms, this political class has rallied to protect that which they value more than their professed ideals; their own privileged position of cultural hegemony, and their right to enjoy it in peace. Or, put another way, they are desperately trying to preserve the private life of power.
For eight long years, Clinton Liberals have been asking “what happened,” and pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.
Gay Daughters and Black Friends
Since the late 1980’s, the posture of the American Liberal has been economically regressive and socially progressive. This class firmly believes that life is generally better for more people than it ever has been and laud themselves for making that possible. They believe that economic growth and globalism can “invest” the world into a distant utopia that will always remain, helpfully, just out of reach.
They are opposed to the radicalism both of the Left and the Right, the former because it threatens their economic program, and the latter because it threatens their social program. They primarily oppose this radicalism not because it is wrong or dangerous but simply because it is radical.
This is how we arrived at the era of Lockheed Martin Pride parades and black, female police chiefs.
Neither the economic radicalism of the Right nor the social radicalism of the Left truly alarm the American Liberal. Or at least, they did not until quite recently. The economic radicalism of the Right Wing is not a threat, but actually a boon for the Liberal elite, who benefit greatly from things like economic deregulation, lower taxes, and the ability to garner political influence through lobbying.
In the same way, the social radicalism of the Left is easy for them to co-opt through identity politics, raising chosen representatives from underprivileged identity groups to the status of equals and offering them a window into the private life of power. This has the effect of defanging movements for the authentic liberation of workers, women, and racial minorities by rewarding their leaders, on the condition that they keep the rest of the movement on a tight leash.
Liberals fetishize nonviolence as the only righteous manifestation of identity politics because it dovetails with their devotion to a system that allows for incremental change while never truly threatening the private life of power. Democrats racked up victory after victory in the Culture War between 1995 and 2015 because they focused on liberatory causes that did not, in and of themselves, challenge the hegemony of American global dominance nor the neoliberal economic consensus.
Liberals fetishize nonviolence as the only righteous manifestation of identity politics because it dovetails with their devotion to a system that allows for incremental change while never truly threatening the private life of power.
This is how we arrived at the era of Lockheed Martin Pride parades and black, female police chiefs. This is how a generation of activists abandoned black liberation for black capitalism, and were offered a gilded seat at the table as a reward. In the same way, queer rights were stripped of their transgressive origins and character and repackaged as a novel marketing opportunity. Democrats could fight for gay, black, and feminist representation in the workplace without truly challenging the economic inequities undergirding that very workplace.
This is how the Democratic Party became the party of hedge fund managers who had gay daughters and black friends.
“The Left Has Gone Too Far”
Clintonite Liberals push social radicalism only as far, as it allows them to feel like they are on the right side of the modern moral ledger, but when that ledger threatens the private life of power, they tend to lurch dramatically backwards to court mainstay factions of traditional conservatism like big business and the police and swap their appeals to justice for the rhetoric of “law and order.” This is a reactionary tendency, and one that perfectly aligns with how Corey Robin defines conservatism as a mentality, rather than an ideology.
When pushed from the Left, and they are being pushed, the American Liberal is more likely to denounce the Left as having “gone too far” and begin publicly voicing sentiments that align with the economic policies of the Right, and at times, their social policies. Look no further than the political trajectories of Bill Maher, Elon Musk, and Jerry Seinfeld for a glimpse at how this life cycle progresses.
Trump’s Right Wing insurgency offers Democrats their greatest fundraising opportunity in history, and while it might threaten their values, it does not yet threaten their pocketbooks.
As mentioned, Clinton Liberals are not personally threatened by the radical economic policies of the right. What Right Wing radicals threaten is the treasured notion that Democrats have secured a lasting synthesis between an economic system that preserves their power and a socio-cultural system that allows for incremental progress for traditionally vulnerable and underprivileged populations.
In short, Liberals desperately need to believe that they are still the good guys. They need this fragile vantage point from which they can publicly denounce fascism while privately enjoying its benefits. Trump can serve as the ultimate boogeyman while his children attend the same schools as their own.
Enter, Palestine
The last decade has proved that this Liberal consensus is a house of cards, and perhaps nothing on earth could have made it collapse faster than the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide of Gaza.
This movement is young, queer, brown, and in open revolt against the party’s current line on Israel. They are also the future of the Democratic voting base, and they are being ignored at the Democrats’ own peril. This exact subset of voters narrowly handed Biden the win in 2020. If he wins again in 2024, it will be because of them.
And yet, instead of courting this demographic and offering political concessions for their essential votes, the Democratic establishment has doubled double down on its support for Israel, pandering to wealthy centrist donors who largely maintain support for the state and express apathy in the face of its genocide. That is not because some of those donors are Jews–as the antisemites would gleefully point out–but because all of them are capitalists, and the economic relationship between the United States and Israel is an immensely profitable one.
This is no accident. The truth is that the wealthy and powerful are much quicker to awaken to class consciousness than the poor and the desperate. The Clintonite Liberal establishment is finally starting to recognize that the social radicalism it helped foster years ago now poses perhaps an even greater threat to their private life of power than the Right Wing insurgency led by Trump. In fact, this fascist insurgency offers them their greatest fundraising opportunity in history, and while it might threaten their values, it does not yet threaten their pocketbooks.
The Threat of the Progressive Insurgency
On the other hand, the growing Leftist insurgency in the Democratic Party’s own voting base is educated, engaged, angry, and has firmly placed in its sights the self-satisfied privilege of the Clintonite Liberal. The reaction of the centrist Democrats has been to condemn such radicalism, resurrect the rhetoric of law and order, and take steps to secure the private life of power which, for now, still belongs to them.
Clintonite Liberals want young, black, and brown people to pull the lever for Biden not because they genuinely believe that he offers a much needed social and economic program, but because he culturally represents the safe, neoliberal status quo within which they were weaned.
Democrats have shown a consistent tendency to react quite harshly to a radically progressive insurgency within their own party that threatens to unseat their cultural and economic power. More harshly, in fact, than to the erosion of worker rights, environmental protections, and civil liberties that Democrats have largely overseen with their erstwhile Republican foes for three decades in an unrivaled feat of bipartisanship.
What could be a more conservative tendency than this?
Every Clintonite Liberal needs to read this.
Damn good article.