the liberal theory of change breaks
Since 2024, I’ve seen socialists and liberals change in unexpected ways. Socialists are becoming more mainstream, and with that, more image-conscious. Liberals, furious in nearly equal amount at the Trump administration and their own Democratic leadership’s inability or unwillingness to fight back, are sounding more radical than they ever have. Socialists took off their hammer and sickle pins in order to canvass for Mamdani and talk about affordability; liberal grandparents are at No Kings marches with signs calling for the death of Trump.
What’s happened to liberals is that they’ve seen their own theory of change fail. They believed that if they colored within the lines, voted every two years and used their time and energy to get others to do the same, they’d be able to improve the world. What they ran into was an opponent in the Trump administration and the broader right-wing ecosystem that has gone from covertly opposing democracy to being more open about it. With the Trump administration taking executive actions that no midterm election can change, and the Supreme Court stopping anything liberals do accomplish through the legislature, liberals have had to confront their lack of agency. A recent example is the Virginia Supreme Court ruling on voter-approved redistricting. Even when liberals do everything “right” and seem to win, a Deus Ex Machina appears to tell them, nope, you still lose.
There are two ways forward from this: despair, or non-electoral action. (Pretending like nothing is fundamentally wrong, and continuing as though liberal change is still possible, could be a third one, but I think of it as a subcategory of despair.)
When some people see that nothing in their political imagination works, they give up. They either disengage from politics entirely, finding it too depressing, or they occupy their time and energy with social media about politics instead of being politically involved. Social media gives them the feeling like they’re connected to politics, the same exhaustion of people who do spend their time involved in political activity, but without anything to show for it, not even the satisfaction of the small-scale successes of politics (like hosting a productive meeting or cleaning up a community-cooked dinner).
Fortunately, not all liberals have fallen completely into that trap. I’ve been tracking the rise of what I think of as anarcho-liberalism: liberals so mad at the Democratic party that they create an anarchist theory of change from first principles. When I was working with local groups to protest outside Tesla stores (including direct action that shut down stores entirely), it wasn’t the young black bloc crew it would’ve been in years past; it was boomers who were fed up with seeing DOGE on TV and wanted to show up in person and do something about it. Other liberals were asking: “if egg prices are so high, why isn’t the Democratic Party handing them out for free to people who can’t afford them?” Or more fundamentally, “why do we need a ‘leadership’ when they’re a bunch of lazy morons, and we can make these decisions much better ourselves?”
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An analogy I’ve thought of for our political system: imagine a series of basketball games between two teams, played endlessly. After every game, the winning team gets a permanent bonus point to start in all their future games. Thus, after one team wins a few more games than the other, they’re favored more and more in future games. How long can the series go on before it’s not just technically “unfair,” but laughably so? If you were a player in one of these games, and your coach said, “they only have two more bonus points than us, if we play really well, we can win,” sure, you’d probably accept that. How much would your opponent have to be favored before you just gave up? Ten? Twenty?
Anyone left of center has accepted for decades that the system is fundamentally skewed against us, through the electoral college, the Senate, and other such things. Gerrymandering being allowed for Republican states, but not Democratic ones, is making it even worse. Republicans have demonstrated that they prioritize using their victories to make their future victories easier.
The hopeful part is, unlike the above analogy, there are other games we can choose to play other than the one that they’re rigging; there are other areas of politics that we can fight them on. Doing so on a larger scale, bigger than the fractions of a percentage of Americans that are members of a socialist group, would require people not to give in to despair, but to re-evaluate their theory of change. To accept, “we can no longer make meaningful change on a national level through the electoral system,” but not accepting that means there’s no political action we can take. What else is included in politics? What even is politics?
For my liberal friends, don’t give into despair. Reject the pundit brain of “what should the Democratic party be saying?” and start organizing to say those things yourself. Reframe “what else could we do?” not as a rhetorical cry of anguish, but a legitimate question to be answered. Can you organize your workplace and build a fighting union? What about your building, your neighborhood? There are too many ways to change things to give up because one of them didn’t work.
