The Democrat Intellectual Complex

In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, the best article I read on Donald Trump was written by the New-York-based Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez. Published in the leading Spanish daily newspaper El País on October 30, Álvarez’s article took aim at the mainstream US media’s approach to covering the former president and Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election cycle. “I haven’t encountered a single…opinion about Trump on television or in the magazines representing the conscience of the Democratic Party that isn’t dismissive of him or that doesn’t seek to… expose him as an impostor from a certain vantage point of moral superiority,” Álvarez wrote. “American liberalism continues to believe that Trump is an error or anomaly, rather than admit the obvious: Trump is the system.” Although Álvarez did not deny the dangers of a second Trump administration, and readily acknowledged that Trump was “racist, megalomaniacal, and xenophobic,” he insisted that the liberal obsession with differentiating itself from Trump on primarily ethical grounds merely “catapulted him into the limelight over and over again.” His article concluded with an analogy that has stuck with me through the transition period of late 2024 and into these first seven months of 2025: “To see half of the nation trying to annihilate Trump is like watching a body attempting to get rid of its shadow.”

Over the past decade, the US liberal establishment has largely converged upon a single overarching objective: getting rid of Donald Trump. From the Not My President rallies of early 2017 to the actual presidency of Joe Biden, which was launched with the promise to “restore the soul of America,” mainstream liberals have depicted Trump as an existential threat to democracy who can only be stopped by…the Democratic Party. Whatever we might say about the moral rationale for this argument, as an electoral strategy, it has proven utterly disastrous. In 2024, Trump not only won the popular vote; he also increased his voting share over his 2016 victory across every single demographic except for white men and white women. Even as he spent the first months of his presidency DOGE-ing the federal government, assaulting the US higher education system, arresting and deporting immigrants en masse, and continuing to support the genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party’s favorability plunged to the lowest it has been since partisan polling began in the early 1990s.

In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory over establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary, and the ongoing revelations about the party’s cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, the mainstream media has finally woken up to the reality of the party’s decline. In recent months, the New York Times published an op-ed with the headline, “Biden Is a Scapegoat. The Democrats Are the Problem,” the Washington Post mockingly (and thus revealingly) proposed to rack up a list of “the 3,515 ways in which Democrats are lame,” and The New Yorker asked, “Do Democrats Have a Plan?” As usual, independent media have provided the most pointed critiques of the party’s structural problems, which range from the “elite deference politics” of its leadership to the corrosive role of “policy clientele groups" at the heart of its coalitional project. At the same time, in Lit Hub, Viet Than Nguyen has criticized the complicity of cultural institutions in the bipartisan support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and, in Harper’s Magazine, Pankaj Mishra has spoken of the total capitulation of a “politically neutered literary-intellectual elite.” However, I have yet to see an account that fully connects the decline of the Democratic Party with the overall decline of intellectual life in the US public sphere since Trump’s election in 2016.

Even though many of us recognize that Trump emerged as the wrong answer to some of the right questions about bipartisan decay in the United States, my sense is that we have yet to fully come to terms with Álvarez’s bracing observation that “Trump is the system”. The case I’ll make here is that those who inhabit the liberal cultural institutions that currently dominate US intellectual life (the news media, publishing, and the academy) have engaged for the past decade in a form of shadow-boxing, relentlessly attacking Trump and the Republicans while weakly and selectively pushing back on an ever more indefensible Democratic Party structure. One of the most important takeaways will be that many putatively progressive journalists, writers, and academics have played an essentially conservative role in reinforcing that ossified structure, especially insofar as they have used what Álvarez describes as the “moral superiority” of the anti-Trump movement to provide cover for a Democratic leadership that has lost whatever credibility it once had.

The dangers of the Trump administration are real, and journalists, writers, and scholars enumerate them every chance they get. Nevertheless, it is my belief that the most urgent task for progressives right now is to analyze how the nexus between the Democratic Party and the liberal information system in the United States has conspired to thwart the flourishing of a genuine progressive movement. A true revitalization of the intellectual sphere will not just require us to move further to the left. It will require a definitive break with a party apparatus that ultimately acts on behalf of a tiny sliver of the liberal oligarchy. That will necessitate a direct confrontation with the logic of a Democrat intellectual complex that, since the beginning of the general election campaign in 2016, has treated systemic critique of its partisan structures as a form of distraction, if not outright betrayal.

Let’s begin by assessing the role of journalists in this complex. The mainstream media coverage of Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden serves well for this purpose, in part because it allows us to compare the assertions made in US legacy outlets to Álvarez’s far more trenchant analysis in El País. The rally first gained mainstream attention because it represented Trump’s boldest campaign foray into deep blue territory: he wasn’t just returning to his hometown, but to a city that he had lost by 53 points in 2020. The pre-event coverage, which largely appeared in conservative outlets, focused on the fact that Trump had sold out the 19,000 seat Manhattan arena within minutes, and seemed to be generating enormous enthusiasm in a place where he was not expected to do well. In the wake of the rally, however, the majority of the coverage was on the liberal side, with much of it focusing on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s tasteless joke in an opening set referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” In the days that followed, a steady stream of denunciatory pieces appeared in legacy media outlets: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism” (The New York Times); “Trump loyalists spew racist, vulgar attacks at Harris and Democrats at New York City rally” (CNN); “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage’” (The Washington Post). As the headlines make clear, these articles described the rally almost entirely in moral terms, leaving to the side the fact that, as Fox News emphasized in its own account of the day, both the stadium and the surrounding area were “packed” with Trump supporters. Although I’m far more sympathetic to the legacy media framing of the content of the event’s speeches, which in my eyes were vulgar, misogynist, and racist, there’s no question that Fox News better captured their political significance. In the election held two weeks later, Trump improved on his 2020 result in New York City by nearly 20 points.

The op-ed that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie penned two days after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, “Trump Is Less Confident Than He Says. His Rally at Madison Square Garden Proves It,” epitomizes several of the basic interpretive errors that progressive journalists commit in their capacity as mainstream political analysts. Although Bouie acknowledges at various points that Trump had the “crowds he wanted” and is not necessarily “headed for defeat,” he nevertheless asks, with the signature smugness of the NYT op-ed crowd, whether Trump’s “message” is ultimately that of an “undisciplined candidate who believes that his days in the spotlight are coming to an end and wants to make the most of them before he can no longer claim this kind of attention.” In the final paragraph of the op-ed, Bouie goes so far as to say, “watching a lackluster rally headlined by the rambling patter of a tired candidate struggling to capture the attention of his audience, it is clear that neither he nor his movement has the juice. I know what failure looks like. At Madison Square Garden, I saw it on display.” The confidence with which Bouie refers to Trump’s campaign rally as a “failure” just weeks before Trump won a decisive victory continues to amaze me. More symptomatic than anything else is Bouie’s thoroughgoing refusal to distinguish between his own reaction to the day’s speeches (which were indeed “dark” and “disturbing”) and his assessment of their political ramifications.

From the moment that Trump shocked the liberal establishment with his victory in 2016, this rhetorical bait-and-switch has been the dominant approach of “progressive” New York Times columnists, who have repeatedly entertained the idea that x move by Trump or y decision by the Democrats will be enough to finally banish MAGA from the national scene. Rather than engage in honest assessments of on-the-ground political reality, these journalists resort to endless exercises in ideological wish-fulfillment. Álvarez’s article demonstrates that mainstream American journalists could draw vastly different conclusions about events like Trump’s rally in New York. They simply exist in an information economy that incentivizes them not to do so. That Álvarez wrote the piece for the leading legacy outlet in Spain merely underscores how narrow the range of acceptable analysis is in the legacy media in the United States, such that insulated American liberals can now look back at the tendentious logic of their intellectual elites and act as if their interpretations were the only ones on offer.

Even now, the mainstream liberal media has yet to come to terms with the glaring fact that Donald Trump built his electoral coalition in 2024 by strategically incorporating renegade Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents (Robert F Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk) alongside Republicans who owed their national platforms to the legacy media’s earlier efforts to position them as palatable alternatives to Trump (we should recall that a 2016 New York Times review of Hillbilly Elegy called JD Vance a “fiercely astute social critic of the sort we desperately need right now”). Trump is a singular figure in recent US political history precisely because he was able to navigate the impossible path from the New York elite to the heart of the heartland-dominated Republic Party. Trump is Trump not because he rejected coastal American liberalism but because he took up its most toxic elements (the Ivy-bred faux populism, the superiority complex, the belief that politics is performance) and merged them with the most toxic elements of the modern Republican party (Reaganomics, Christian nationalism, anti-minority policies, etc.). The legacy media’s continual outrage over Trump’s escalating “authoritarianism” speaks to real actions he’s taken, but it also serves to distract from how much he owes to their own brand of performance politics. One of the many shortcomings of Ali Abassi and Gabriel Sherman’s 2024 biopic about Trump was that, in constructing Trump’s origin story almost entirely around notorious conservative bad-boy Roy Cohn, it evaded any serious consideration of how the New York media and entertainment industry turned Trump into one of the most recognizable people in the United States.

---

As novelists from James Joyce to James Baldwin have taught us, fiction can challenge the organizing logic of the societies within which we live. Yet it can also serve to reify the status quo. Although the US publishing industry has sought for the past decade to portray itself as a righteous defender of truth in an age of manipulation, the reality is that most acclaimed US novelists in the age of Trump have adopted the same liberal apologism that has captured mainstream legacy journalism. In recent years, critics and scholars have skillfully identified various aspects of this problem, from the rise of the “trauma plot” and the “representation trap” in the contemporary novel to the broader turn toward “sanctimony literature” in the literary field. On Substack, the editors of The Metropolitan Review have criticized an American culture machine “serially devoid of risk-taking,” and Naomi Kanakia has rightly observed that most literary works praised by the “hype machine” seem “predigested.” It is rarely pointed out, however, that the feature that most clearly aligns the celebrated novels of the Trump era, regardless of the race, age, or gender of their authors, is that they have fully internalized—and therefore relentlessly narrativized—the principal talking points of the Democratic Party. One of the many virtues of Nicholas Gaskill’s recent scholarly essay on “Trump Panic Fiction” is the emphasis he places on the sheer number of American novels of the late 2010s and early 2020s that directly incorporate Trump into their fictional universes, from Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (2020) to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This (2021) and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021). While I agree with Gaskill that the ostensible goal of these novelists has been to combat a figure who composes his own reality through fiction, I will maintain that they have simultaneously used the rhetoric of anti-Trumpism to shore the Democratic establishment against its ruin.

Lerner is arguably the most famous of these writers, and also the best-known representative of what we might describe as literature’s Occupy generation. Slightly too old to be a part of the millennial left (he was born in 1979), he nevertheless belongs to the influential group of poets, writers, and intellectuals politicized by the emergence of Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011. Having already established himself in his mid-twenties as a poet working in the line of John Ashbery and the New York School, and fresh off the success of his irreverent autobiographical novel Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner published a long article in Harper’s magazine in 2012 that ended with an allusion to the “people’s mic,” a practice of collective speech invented in Zuccotti Park in the early days of the original Occupy encampment. The article, which details Lerner’s experiences in high school competitive debate, provides a snapshot of the arguments that literary progressives were making at the end of Obama’s first term, when belief in the possibilities of what n+1 dubbed a “left populism” remained alive and well. The article contrasts the “slow speech” of the Occupy movement with “the rhetorical and intellectual poverty of the presidential debates [between Obama and Mitt Romney], of the national discourse, of both parties,” and clearly outlines the “disastrous effects” of the neoliberal consensus politics embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans: "the lightning-fast trades of bundled debt, the remotely controlled drone strikes, the oil flowing into the Gulf.” In 2012, Lerner plainly understood that, while the nation’s ills could partially be blamed on the “new right” of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and the “passionless nihilism of midwestern white boys,” responsibility for its economic and political decline also needed to be apportioned to the “supposedly communist president” who “oversaw the greatest consolidation of capitalist class power in the country’s history.” The problem, to borrow again from Álvarez, was the system.

A very different national allegory appears in Lerner’s most recent novel, The Topeka School, published in 2019. This work follows Lerner’s autofictional avatar Adam Gordon through his adolescence in Kansas and into his late teenage years, before jumping in the last section to the “present” of the first Trump presidency, where we find Adam living with his spouse and two young daughters in New York City. Yet in this version of the story, high school debate tactics do not mirror the public speech that conceals the financial chicanery and imperial overreach of the US state but rather a “crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes.” The early parts of the novel contain some of Lerner’s best writing to date (I’m particularly partial to the scenes narrated by his mother Jane), and they do delve into the difficulties that white working-class Midwesterners faced during the neoliberalizing years of the 1980s and early 1990s. But The Topeka School eventually resolves into a relatively straightforward moralizing tale about the need for white men of Lerner’s generation to reject the temptation of MAGA conservatism, represented by Adam’s debate coach, Will Evanson, who would go on to become a “key architect of the most right-wing governorships Kansas has known…an important model for the Trump administration,” and by Darren, Adam’s troubled, white working class classmate who appears at a protest at the end of the novel wearing the signature “red baseball cap.”

It is not until the final chapter of The Topeka School, however, that the novel reveals how deeply it has resolved Lerner’s 2012 critique of bipartisan political discourse into a problem of “angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization.” The novel’s concluding scenes find us at an ICE office in New York, where Adam—along with his bilingual spouse and daughter—engage in a protest against Trump’s child-separation policy with other immigration-rights activists. At the end of a novel replete with the rhetorical and physical violence of white men, Lerner repurposes the lines that conclude his 2012 essay as a rallying cry for the emerging anti-Trump resistance:

One of the organizers stood on a stone bench and yelled, “Mic check,” and we all yelled it back. The ‘human microphone,’ the ‘people’s mic,’ wherein those gathered around a speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify a voice without permit-requiring equipment. It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.

This final scene does not simply represent Lerner’s symbolic abandonment of the message that he took from the imaginary of Occupy Wall Street, namely, that its grassroots attempts to enfranchise a disempowered citizenry should target the “corporate sponsors” of the entire political machine. It also enacts a sharp pivot away from the kind of progressive framing that would allow him to see Trump’s victory not as an either/or proposition but as the combined result of white backlash and the decimation of the country by the bipartisan embrace of neoliberal governance. From this perspective, the novel’s formal decision to skip over the Bush and Obama administrations doubles as a political refusal to engage seriously with the actual historical process that led to Trump. In retrospect, it is hard to see the social diagnosis of these last scenes of The Topeka School as anything other than misguided. Both Adam and Lerner lead us to believe that the answer to Trump and his MAGA movement will be to reform white male subjectivity from the inside out. As reality would have it, though, Trump’s return to power in 2024 was fueled by his ability to attract non-white, non-college-educated voters to the Republican presidential ticket.

If Lerner’s The Topeka School offers us a portrait of how white male writers could play their part in joining the liberal anti-Trump resistance, Valeria Luiselli’s career demonstrates how immigrant writers from elite backgrounds could leverage their personal histories to shift blame for the nation’s anti-immigration practices from Obama to Trump. Born in Mexico City in 1983, Luiselli began her career as a Hispanophone writer, publishing three literary works in Spanish before switching to English, the language in which she wrote the nonfiction book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Twenty Questions and the critically acclaimed novel Lost Children Archive. The former was released in 2017, just a few months after Trump’s inauguration, and its main plotline tracks Luiselli’s experiences as a volunteer interpreter for Central American migrant children facing deportation in New York City during the so-called refugee crisis of 2014. It is a true story about the injustices perpetrated against these migrant children by ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the US judicial system under the president (Obama) often referred to by immigration activists as the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Astonishingly, however, while Tell Me How It Ends recounts events that take place during the middle years of Obama’s second term in office, his name is mentioned in the book only three times, while the five-page coda, written in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, mentions Trump’s name seven times. In a clear exhibition of the logic of the Democrat intellectual complex, Luiselli somehow converts an essay that is entirely about the appalling immigration policies of Obama into an invective against Trump. History itself would demonstrate the fallacies of this argument: according to all reputable sources on US immigration, Obama deported more people in his first term in office than Trump did during his.

The timing of the publication of Tell Me How It Ends helps explain this jarring break in the essay’s rhetorical structure. While the main portion of the essay acknowledges the bipartisan origins of the discriminatory twenty-first-century US immigration system, including the long history of US intervention in Central America that has acted as a “push” factor driving its peoples to seek asylum in the United States, the election of Donald Trump evidently lessened the demand for that type of critique. Although it doesn’t seem unreasonable for Luiselli to have recalibrated her depiction of the Obama administration with Trump and his xenophobic policy plans looming on the horizon, the form that recalibration took exemplifies the conceptual incoherence of much anti-Trump literature. Early on in Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli criticizes the mainstream media for characterizing the refugee crisis as an “institutional hindrance” rather than seeking to understand it “from the point of view of the children involved.” By the time we arrive at the coda, however, Luiselli’s focus has shifted from the migrant children to a group of pro-immigrant college students in a class she is teaching the semester Trump wins. In the book’s final pages, she claims, “If we all manage to pull through in these next years, it’ll be thanks to young people who are willing to give their minds and hearts and bodies to make changes.” The elision here is subtle but decisive. Having spent most of the book proposing an experiment in imaginative empathy with undocumented migrants, she ends by elevating a “we” that consists of US citizens and green-card holders like Luiselli herself. We might say that in order to offload responsibility for the migrant situation from Obama’s Democratic administration to Trump’s Republican one, Luiselli must figuratively forsake the very children on behalf of whom she claims to be speaking. In a bitter irony, many of those undocumented children had likely been deported by the time she wrote the coda in early 2017; they were never subject to Trump’s administration system because they were no longer in the United States.

Luiselli’s own status as a cosmopolitan member of Mexico’s elite is crucial to our understanding of her rhetorical strategy here. Luiselli’s father is a well-known former Mexican ambassador, and she spent much of her childhood in privileged global Anglophone spaces, including South Africa and India. In a sense, Luiselli’s ability to speak on behalf of the migrant children derives from their shared identity position. In the language of the US liberal establishment, both poor Central American migrants and wealthy Mexican elites are “Latinos,” despite the enormous chasm in class, privilege, and immigration opportunities that separate them. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli bridges that chasm in part by weaving into her narrative about the migrant children a side plot involving a bureaucratic snafu that prevents her from receiving her green card on time. Midway through the essay, she turns this temporary loss of status into a narrative motive for writing about the children: “It was thanks to my lost green card, and thanks to my lawyer abandoning my case, that I became involved with a much more urgent problem. My more trivial pursuits as an ‘alien writer’ or ‘pending Mexican’ took me into the heart of something larger and more important.” In a textbook case of what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has dubbed “elite capture,” Luiselli converts her situational precarity into a justification for her speaking on behalf of a group of far more precarious others. What is crucial to recognize here is how deftly this identitarian sleight-of-hand feeds into the Democrat intellectual complex. Just as Tell Me How It Ends concludes by shifting the focus of the narrative from the undocumented migrants to the author’s students, and the responsibility of the migrant crisis from Obama’s Democratic administration to the incoming Republican one, so too does it convert Luiselli herself into a figure of resistance, whose arrogation of the suffering of the migrant children achieves symbolic closure through her call upon citizenship-bearing Americans and green-card-holding permanent residents to “pull together” in opposing Trump.

Luiselli’s next book, the 2019 autofictional novel Lost Children Archive, ratches up this disavowal of Democratic culpability with remarkable efficiency. Retreading much of the nonfictional ground covered by Tell Me How It Ends (including Luiselli’s experiences as a volunteer translator and the road trip she took with her then-husband to an immigrant detention center in the US Southwest), the novel further elaborates this material from the Obama era into an allegory of life under Trump. As with Lerner, her recycling of her early essay proves revelatory of that ideological work. In one scene of the novel, Luiselli directly repurposes her main charge against Obama from Tell Me How It Ends, namely that, at the height of the refugee crisis in 2014, his administration had created a “priority juvenile docket” that allowed it to expedite the deportation of undocumented minors. The main difference between the essay and Lost Children Archive is that, while the former identifies the culprit as the “Obama administration,” the novel removes the reference to “Obama,” so that the sentence reads: “The administration, backed by the courts, has just announced the creation of a priority docket for undocumented minors, which means that the children who are arriving at the border will get priority in being deported.” One might grant Luiselli the benefit of the doubt here, arguing that the effacement of the proper name speaks to a novelistic desire to abstract a general condition from a specific situation—and indeed, literary critic Alexander Manshel has read Luiselli’s intentions in Lost Children Archive in just that way (“Though Lost Children Archive resembles recent historical fiction,” he writes, “here the aim is to ground the novel is a deliberately ambiguous and ongoing present”). Yet that interpretation just doesn’t hold up in my eyes, in part because virtually every other aspect of the novel speaks to Luiselli’s attempts to transpose the Obama-era events of the novel onto the age of Trump.

In the first place, Luiselli characterizes the mistreatment of the migrant children not as a structural feature of a rent-seeking, imperial state that degrades the humanity of migrants and poor Americans alike, but as the expression of an ineradicably white supremacist country that dislikes those migrants because of the color of their skin. In line with the depiction of Trump voters in the liberal media, the novel traffics in the most pedestrian stereotypes about people who inhabit the so-called “flyover states.” During a passage describing Front Royale, Virginia, for instance, the narrator remarks, presumably in reference to a country song, that “white supremacist something is playing full blast in the gas station.” The line is supposed to be funny, but the humor doesn’t land, mostly because one gets the sense that Luiselli does in fact believe that the term “white supremacist” should be applied to anything about the US South that her narrator does not understand. Of course, this is by no means to imply that white supremacy or systemic racism have ceased to be endemic features of US political, cultural, and social life. It is to assert, however, that novelists such as Luiselli and Lerner have exploited their topicality in the Trump era to efface the marked continuities in the practices of the Obama and Trump administrations on issues that affected minoritized populations in the United States. It should come as no surprise that Obama himself rewarded Lerner and Luiselli for their energies on this front; both The Topeka School and Lost Children Archive appeared on his list of the best books of 2019.

To a degree, my analysis of Lerner’s The Topeka School and Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends and Lost Children Archive dovetails with that of Viet Than Nguyen’s aforementioned Lit Hub piece, which argues that most contemporary American writers are at once “vigorously anti-Trump” and compliant with the liberal imperialism embodied by the administrations of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. I fully agree with Nguyen that contemporary American literature is plagued by a kind of “low-level dissent that can be promoted by President Obama in his annual list of recommended books, which flatters writers and provides a literary sheen that obscures Obama’s extensive use of drone assassinations and deportation of undocumented migrants.” Yet Nguyen’s piece also makes a curious carve-out for American “minority writers,” whom he claims speak and are “expected to speak” in terms that highlight the contradictions of the status quo. That seems more convenient than compelling to me, as we can see from even a brief consideration of the career of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Nguyen singles out as a notably “anti-imperialist” writer of color in our current moment.

Coates’s long essay on Palestine and Israel in his 2024 book The Message does indeed present a deep and courageous challenge to the bipartisan consensus, but it took Coates a long time to get there. His 2017 book, We Were Eight Years in Power, ends with a sympathetic portrait of Obama on his way out of office, and its title embodies the tendency among progressives (including, of course, many African American progressives) during the first Trump presidency to make peace with an administration of which they had often been critical. In 2016, Coates himself was harshly criticized by Adolph Reed and other black figures on the left, who argued that the former’s objections to the Bernie Sanders platform in the run-up to the 2016 election had helped the centrist Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party consolidate their power. In his earlier writings, Coates had spoken of Reed as one of the few public intellectuals he truly admired, and it is to his credit that he took the left criticisms of his work to heart rather than rejecting them. In a 2024 interview with Ezra Klein (one of the few NYT columnists who shows interest in some version of the truth), Coates spoke with admirable honesty about his shifting relationship to the liberal establishment, saying that, after he wrote his major pieces for The Atlantic during the Obama presidency, he realized that “the kind of person that was going to be in the kind of journalism that I wanted to practice was probably going to have a certain set of politics. Not just around Israel and Palestine, but in general.” He points in particular to the favorable view he expressed about German reparations to the state of Israel in “The Case for Reparations,” the essay that put him on the map. He arrived at the anti-Zionist views for which Nguyen commends him not because he’s a “minority” writer but because he made a conscious decision to change his position on a controversial issue that he knew would put him at odds with the dominant bipartisan view.

I increasingly feel that the moment has come to push back on claims like Nguyen’s that “minority writers” are inherently more progressive than white writers, in part because (as theorists of race have never ceased to tell us) whiteness itself is a historical construction. Although Nguyen mentions Kafka and claims that Kafkaesque is an “apt description of the minority experience,” it is impossible to figure out where Jewish writers fit in his binary schema. Anti-Zionist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace have been among the most committed activists in the pro-Palestinian movement of the past year, and Jewish writers have been at the forefront of public efforts to disavow the longstanding link between Jewishness and the state of Israel. Are Jews “minority” writers when they adopt an anti-imperial position and “white” writers when they adopt a Zionist position? Obviously, it’s easier to adjudicate claims about minority status when Jews and other white-adjacent groups are not at the center of the cultural conversation, as was the case before October 7^th. But it is a liberal fantasy that the right-wing weaponization of Jewish identity politics we’ve seen these past two years can be defeated without directly confronting the forms of identity essentialism that currently dominate our cultural institutions. The notion that one’s racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or sexual identity determines one’s ideological perspective was always false, and the cynicism with which pro-Israeli Jews have demanded the sole right to determine what constitutes anti-Semitism only serves to highlight the flaws of a discourse embraced with increased fervor by progressives in the age of Trump.

Indeed, although the literary establishment often defends its embrace of diversity against MAGA attacks on the grounds of equity, the reality is that its criteria for inclusion are far more ideological than identity-based. There’s no question that Kristen Roupenian’s viral 2017 story “Cat Person” rode the wave of #MeToo, and Susan Choi’s National-Book-Award-winning 2019 novel Trust Exercise, which revolves around older men exploiting young women in an arts school in Texas, also clearly derived momentum from the debates about institutionalized gender violence that arose in the context of the movement. But what about Hernán Díaz’s Trust, which took the Pulitzer in 2023? Or Justin Torres’s Blackouts, which won the National Book Award in 2024? Are these also #MeToo novels? One could certainly make that case. At the end of Díaz’s novel, we learn that the true genius behind the tyrannical financier Andrew Bevel is his wife Mildred, while Torres’s novel concludes with a reflection on the real-life story of how the homophobic early-twentieth-century psychiatrist George Henry cribbed his influential study of nonnormative sexual practices from the lesbian researcher Helen Reitman.

Nevertheless, to group these novels together as narrative responses to the #MeToo moment would be to miss the complex interplay between the movement’s cultural politics and the determined anti-Trump logic of the liberal establishment. Although the concrete detonator for #MeToo was undoubtedly the Harvey Weinstein scandal, from the very beginning it was also metonymically associated with Trump, who entered the presidential race in 2015 with multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault and whose Access Hollywood comments condoning sexual misconduct ignited a firestorm in 2016. One does not have to make light of the real concerns raised by #MeToo to suggest that those concerns were often mobilized toward partisan ends: witness, for instance, the extraordinary difference between Time’s Up’s overwhelming support of Christine Blasey Ford when she accused conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and the group’s staunch refusal to fund Tara Reade when she made similar accusations against Joe Biden two years later. In truth, the discourse surrounding #MeToo was always intertwined with liberal arguments about the role that gender played in the outcome of the 2016 election between Trump and Clinton, most specifically the claim, voiced over and over again in the liberal sphere, that the internalized misogyny of the American public was the only way to explain how a man without any political experience could have defeated a politician whom Obama and other Democratic Party leaders described as the “most qualified person” ever to run for president. However one feels about the validity of that hypothesis, it is impossible to dispute the liberal establishment’s zealous commitment to it, as the endless circulation of the image of Donald Trump looming over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential debate in mainstream media outlets attests. In this context, what unites Roupenian, Choi, Díaz, and Torres is not their gender, race, or female-bodied-experience of male dominance. It is their adoption of a certain view of male power that dominated the legacy media in the age of Trump and came to function, along with white supremacy and Russian interference, as the Democratic establishment’s primary mechanism for explaining Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.

To call attention to this family resemblance is not to dispute the quality of these prize-winning writers’ work: I consider Díaz, Choi, and Torres to be among the most talented American writers publishing today. It is to claim, however, that their narrative rehearsals of this crucial Democratic Party talking point about male power contributed to the extraordinary success of Trust, Trust Exercise, and Blackouts in the contemporary literary field. It’s not an accident that the most explicit displays of gender aggression in these works come in their final chapters, where they serve to dissipate any lingering ambiguities over character motives. Choi’s Trust Exercise and Torres’s Blackouts are virtuosic in reconstructing the complex dynamics that govern romantic relationships with significant age and power gaps, and they are supremely alert to the role that interpretation, perspective, and storytelling play in one’s understanding of such dynamics. In my reading, however, they both achieve narrative resolution by symbolically rupturing this textured relationality in favor of a univocal ending. In the case of Trust Exercise (spoiler alert), we definitively learn that the male headmaster of the arts school is an abuser; in Blackouts (another spoiler alert) we find out that one of the earliest histories of queer sociality has been distorted by a misogynistic monster. The post-2016 locus classicus for this device is undoubtedly “Cat Person,” where the one-word text message “Whore” that is sent to the young woman protagonist definitively dispels the ambivalence the reader feels toward a male character who has been treated somewhat sympathetically up to that point. Of course, one could cite several counterexamples to these sensationalist denouements in fictional works of the past ten years: the conclusion to Mary Gaitskill’s extraordinary 2019 novella, “This Is Pleasure,” is perhaps my favorite fictional expression of the labyrinthine complexity of the #MeToo moment. Yet it is undeniable that the more recognizably anti-Trumpian iterations of the narrative have achieved greater visibility in the literary field in terms of coverage, prizes, and praise.

---

The Democrat intellectual complex has arguably taken root most deeply in the academy, and this is not surprising. Although public funding for higher education has declined for decades, Republican assaults on the university have accelerated rapidly over the past few years, and the humanities have increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration. As anyone who works in the university knows, assertions of the “radical Marxism” of the humanities are greatly exaggerated, not because those who endorse “radicalism” or Marx are in short supply, but because the gaps between discourse and action are substantial. Indeed, the major professional organizations in the humanities largely align with the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and faculty unions, including my own, often openly endorse Democratic politicians in primary and general elections. There are obvious benefits to this practice: it gives university and union leaders access to the halls of power, and a certain amount of leverage in influencing local, state, and national policy. However, it also runs the risk of vitiating the agency of faculty, staff, and students, as well as college administrators, who have established an ever more dependent relationship to the Democratic Party apparatus.

To see these effects in action, let’s consider Rutgers University, the flagship institution of the state of New Jersey, where I am employed in the English Department. In recent years, despite having a Democratic governor in office (Phil Murphy), whom our union endorsed in the general elections of 2017 and 2021, the university has witnessed one of the most troubling periods in its history. In April 2023, in the face of unprecedented intransigence by the administration of Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway, our faculty and graduate unions went on strike for the first time in the university’s 257-year history. Not only did President Holloway repeatedly disparage the union’s efforts in direct communications to the students; he also threatened to seek an injunction in New Jersey courts to have the strike declared illegal—two actions that formed the core of a no confidence resolution passed by the Rutgers Senate later that year. In response to the strike, governor Murphy took the unprecedented step of inviting the administration and the union to the state capitol of Trenton, where closed-door negotiations took place over five days before an agreement was reached. Both President Holloway and union leadership praised the intervention of the Democratic governor, and as an active member of the union at the time (though I wasn’t then nor am I now authorized to speak on its behalf), I believed it was the right decision to accept the invitation at that stage of negotiations. But the larger question remains: Should it be the norm for universities to either accede or appeal to Democratic Party officials to resolve their institution’s own internal issues? What kind of expectations does that create for university administrators and what leverage does it create for Democratic politicians? How does it play optically to the general public?

The issues with Rutgers’s finances that led to the 2023 strike have by no means been resolved by the successful resolution of contract negotiations. Earlier this year, Governor Murphy, who is in the last year of his second term, abruptly announced in his proposed 2025–26 budget a cut of $65 million dollars to the Rutgers university system. Once again, intense pressure from the university—this time a combined effort by administrators, faculty, staff, and union leadership—thwarted the proposal. But with a tough election looming in New Jersey in 2025, and the best bet for Rutgers being the centrist Democrat Mikie Sherrill, the outlook for the future is anything but certain. At what point will it make sense to transition to a more adversarial politics toward the coming administration, regardless of its partisan affiliation? More broadly, at what point should faculty, staff, and graduate students in US academic institutions demand real autonomy from the Democratic Party apparatus and the university administrators who so often capitulate to it? These are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones. It is a truth of our current moment that the Democratic Party often represents the only electoral alternative to the Republican Party. But it is no less of a truth that, without enormous outside pressure, Democratic leadership continually undermines the very cultural institutions they claim to be defending. What is to be done?

I have three ideas that follow directly from my analysis above. These are neither demands nor prescriptions—they are conclusions I have reached as an individual after inhabiting these liberal cultural institutions for nearly two decades. The first and most obvious idea is that progressives must start seeing the current Democratic Party leadership as an enemy rather than as an ally. The extraordinary cynicism that mainstream Democrats and the liberal media have exhibited in their attacks on Zohran Mamdani is merely the tip of the iceberg. As has become clear from the actions of Kirsten Gillibrand and other party leaders who endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor after demanding his resignation as governor, the Democratic establishment of 2025 adopts the tenets of progressive movements such as #MeToo and BLM only to the extent that these movements further their interests. They have no problem turning against those principles when power is at stake, and they will directly oppose protest movements such as the one against the genocide in Gaza if it touches any kind of ideological third rail or proposes any real structural change.

I am not saying that progressives must abandon the Democratic Party altogether. As someone who voted for a write-in third-party candidate in the 2024 election, but nevertheless plans to vote for Mamdani in the fall, I don’t think a dogmatic approach to electoral politics will yield the results I’d like to see. That said, I do believe that progressives should work toward the creation and maintenance of autonomous cultural and political institutions and push back decisively against cynical attacks on non-aligned institutions by Democratic politicians. We must be aware that the Democratic Party has been the main culprit in eliminating third-party participation in blue states over the past few decades—the Green Party was not on the presidential ballot in New York in 2024 because of a Cuomo-backed 2020 bill to raise the voting threshold for small parties in statewide elections. If we are unable to see the analogies between the Democratic Party’s efforts to maintain the two-party system in its current duopolistic form and its efforts to disqualify thought that defies the bipartisan consensus, we will condemn ourselves to supporting the very structures that are slowly bringing about our demise.

The corollary to moving away from unqualified support for the Democratic Party is to wean ourselves off of the legacy media in favor of independent journalists and information outlets. In navigating the worlds of academia and New York literary culture over the past decade, I have been surprised how many progressive writers, scholars, and journalists limit their consumption of political information to (hate-)reading mainstream liberal outlets. Thus, although they are fully up-to-date on issues that have divided the Democratic Party, the most notable being Israel-Palestine, they have little knowledge of the other issues that drive independents, leftists, or conservatives. The lack of outrage among writers and academics over the mainstream cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the refusal to confront the Biden administration’s deliberate efforts to undermine negotiations in the war in Ukraine are only the two most glaring examples of how wedded most US progressives are to the liberal news channels associated with the Democratic Party. And just to be clear, the mere fact that one does not get one’s news directly from a mainstream liberal outlet does not mean that one is not beholden to their framings, since the algorithmic logic of social media largely replicates the partisan structures of the rest of US society. As progressive intellectuals, we must make a sustained effort to seek out a range of alternative media sources and to evaluate their ideological frameworks.

A major part of the problem, as I’ve discussed in another post, is that the small magazines that came to prominence in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street have gradually been absorbed into the Democrat intellectual complex. The editors of n+1 have almost entirely adopted the “resistance” framework of the party’s progressive wing, and the expansion of the Jacobin network into more mainstream media (founder editor Bhaskar Sunkara is now the president of The Nation) has coincided with the magazine adopting the practice of taking shot after shot at Democratic Party politicians without seriously positing any alternative to it (the tried-and-true Jacobin formula: “if only the Democrats were to do x”). Catalyst magazine, published under the auspices of the Jacobin foundation, remains one of the most consistently thoughtful source of leftist critique in the small magazine sphere. Yet, as editor-in-chief Vivek Chibber has made clear in interviews, he is skeptical of the possibility that the left can produce political organs independent of the Democratic Party at this moment, and for better or worse, the magazine’s editorial politics continue to be defined by the logic of lesser-evilism. Ultimately, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with reading any media source, including mainstream liberal or conservative ones (the only reason I continue to subscribe to the New York Times is because I want to know what the establishment liberals are thinking). The problem of the Democratic intellectual complex, as I see it, is precisely that it has winnowed the possible avenues of thought about contemporary politics and culture to the tiniest of elite-determined lanes. We should be honest about the fact that nobody has the answer to our political predicament, and that disciplining intellectuals according to existing formulas will impede rather than encourage the possibilities for change.

Fortunately, the rise of a heterodox left podcast sphere over the past decade has made it easier to hear from those who seriously contemplate the idea that new political formations may arise to meet the current moment’s needs. The podcast I have found most helpful in framing such possibilities is Bad Faith, hosted by Bernie Sanders’ former National Press Secretary Brianha Joy Gray. The podcast is notable for the range of perspectives it offers on contemporary politics, from left of the Democratic Party to its ideological center (until 2024 Gray also co-hosted the Hill’s news program Rising, where conservative and populist right-wing guests regularly appeared). Just in the past few months, Gray has engaged in revealing debates with Chibber, with former US congressional representative Jamaal Bowman, and with socialist politician Kshama Sawant on third party voting, not to mention exchanges with Francesca Fiorentini and Dave Sirota on media coverage of the Democrats and with Craig Mokhaiber and Assal Rad on the geopolitical roots and consequences of the genocide in Gaza.

I’ll admit that I listen to Gray’s podcast in part because I agree with her basic stance on the Democrats, which is, as she put it in a recent conversation with Sirota, that the party leadership’s “greatest talent, the thing they’re most efficient at, is putting down any kind of left insurgency…[T]hey’d rather lose than offer even the smallest of compromises to the left.” However, it doesn’t seem to me that one has to agree with that assertion to appreciate the urgency of widening political debate beyond its mainstream ideological parameters (including the now familiar shibboleths of Jacobin). During a heated debate over the limits of the bipartisan system between Gray and Bowman, a key member of the “squad” who was primaried in 2024 over his criticisms of Israel, the information gap between the two was striking. While Gray was extremely versed in the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party, Bowman seemed unfamiliar with the basics of any third-party organization besides Working Families, whose organizing efforts have largely been reduced to endorsing progressive Democrats (including Bowman himself). Honest conversations about the viability of our institutions should not be seen as a threat to political progressivism but as the sine qua non for its continued existence. Even those who “vote blue no matter who” should be able to articulate why they continue to make that decision.

At the broadest level, overcoming the Democrat intellectual complex will also necessitate a greater openness among US-based scholars, writers, and journalists to collaborating with the left in other places across the globe. For far too long, American progressives have acted like they were at the vanguard of the international left, conveniently forgetting that they can take that view in part because they are at the center of a global hegemon. Given the current administration’s disposition, US universities, publishers, and media organizations will likely cease to operate as hubs for scholars, writers, and journalists from around the world to the extent they have over the past several decades. As painful as that decline may be, the silver lining is that American intellectuals may finally wake up to the reality that they inhabit a multilingual and multipolar world. Alongside the right-wing movements that are currently sweeping across the globe, there are glimmers of a new kind of left politics on the horizon. Time will tell whether Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party can break through Britain’s own duopolistic oligarchy, but its extraordinary rise in the past few weeks serves as a potent reminder of the overwhelming discontent that voters have expressed with establishment liberalism again and again in Europe and the Global South. Increasingly, we seem to be witnessing the last gasp of a liberal political, economic, and cultural paradigm that will either cede its place to authoritarian right populism or to a still-to-be-articulated left coalition prepared to actually fight for the 99%. However things shake out, there will be no return to the welfare-state liberalism that defined the American Century.

---

Midway through his account of Trump’s October 27, 2024 rally, Álvarez paused to observe: “One could say that the United States—assuming that the United States is its institutions—has not understood Trump, or has understood him too well and is not in a position to stop him, because doing so would mean stopping themselves, perhaps through a political reform that is beyond the historical possibilities of this country, whose very existence is close to a miracle.” There is no room in mainstream US discourse on either side of the political aisle for a vision as clear-eyed or sobering as Álvarez’s, one that takes seriously the idea that in order to move beyond Trump, Americans would need to fundamentally change their attitudes toward themselves and toward the rest of the world. Honestly, I’m not sure what the future of US cultural institutions will be. But I do believe that unless we recognize that we all bear some responsibility for their decline—that, in a meaningful way, Trump c’est nous—we will continue to fight the enemy outside while ignoring the enemy within.