Abdul El-Sayed speaks at an election night event after victory in his race for US Senate, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

My Bluesky feed is inundated with Americans “libbing out” after Tuesday’s midterm election results. The Democrats overwhelmingly won in races from governorships and the Senate all the way down to councils of tiny cities and offices like “comptroller,” whatever that is. (Ed. note: do not comment or email me telling me what a comptroller is. It’s a joke. Actually, feel free to comment because it boosts me in the algorithm.)

Tuesday’s win for the Democrats feels like a rebuke of Trumpism and the entire openly-neofascist zeitgeist that has increasingly dominated American politics and society for the last decade. From tearful victory laps to memes about “put the pronouns back in the email bio,” liberals are hailing this as a watershed moment, the moment that the right has been routed and what they consider “sanity” or “normalcy” can return to America (pending 2028, of course).

And I’m here to tell you, it’s not that simple.

Whose Victory?

Over on Facebook, the second-worst social media site (but unfortunately the one that I have the most actual friends on), the tenor of my feed is noticeably different. There’s still excitement, don’t get me wrong, mainly coming from my normie coworkers or acquaintances. But the communists and anarchists who make up my little corner of “Leftbook” are more reserved, pessimistic, even. And this is especially true for the “older” among us (millennials and up).

Next to celebratory posts and gleeful dunking on losers like Greg Abbott and Vivek Ramaswamy (who, to be clear, are among the most evil people to have ever slithered the face of the Earth) is a familiar (to me) chorus: the Democrats are not our friends. Their victory is not our victory. They’ve let us down before and will do so again.

Who is the “us” here? Leftists, certainly, but the Democrats don’t really even claim to represent the Left. Certainly the party establishment doesn’t, and even those who could loosely fall under the umbrella, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have moved steadily rightward the longer they’ve been in elected office.

When the New YorKKK Times starts writing glowing profiles of you, you should probably stop and consider where you’ve gone wrong in your life. If you don’t agree with me that every single person working at that paper should be imprisoned for life, read Adam H. Johnson’s recent book “How to Sell a Genocide.“

Take the meteoric rise of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. His victory actually is a powerful rebuke to the entire apparatus of American Zionism, and yet that must come with the caveat that he is an avowed capitalist. And despite that, his ascent to the Senate required him to fight through a staggering amount of racism, Islamophobia, and sabotage from his own party. Haley Stevens is likely out of the Democratic Party forever, but the racism and sabotage didn’t come from her alone–the centrist, Zionist Democrats that did their damnedest to stop El-Sayed are still in power, both in Michigan and nationally.

Nancy Pelosi has already emerged from her crypt to tout dyed-in-the-wool coward Hakeem Jeffries as the next House Speaker. This will almost certainly come to pass, and when it does, Jeffries has already made it clear that he has no interest in actually fighting back against the still-in-power-let’s-remember Trump administration.

While communists and anarchists (you know, actual leftists) make the same arguments every election, and we always turn out to be right, I’m not interested in just hashing all of that out here. We’ll get into it, but I need you reading this to understand why, amidst all of the joy and celebrations surrounding me last night, my stomach ached with a nagging, growing pit of despair.

See, I’ve been here before.

One Flag Was Taken Down to Raise Another in its Place

On November 5, 2008, I walked to the bus to go to school. I was sixteen and had “voted” in my first presidential election the previous day.

No, I hadn’t committed voter fraud–my grandfather had sat me down about a week beforehand and told me, “You’re going to have to live in this world a lot longer than I will. I’m giving you my vote. Tell me who you want me to vote for, and I’ll do it.” (My grandpa was awesome, by the way. And this conversation took on a sad tenor in retrospect, as he had less than a year left to live.)

Of course, I “voted” for Barack Obama. I’d been a George W. Bush hater since watching the bombing of Iraq in 2003, live on T.V. I remember watching buildings collapse, hearing explosions and the drum-beat of the warmongers in both parties, and thinking to myself this cannot be right. This is what evil looks like in the real world.

I was a sixteen-year-old smart-aleck who thought I knew everything. I watched Real Time with Bill Maher (I’m not ashamed of this because it’s proof you have to have the politics of a moronic teenager to think Bill Maher is worth listening to) and brought up politics at every family function. While my peers were Cranking That (Soulja Boy), I was still bumping American Idiot. While other kids my age obsessed with Britney and Beyonce, the names on my tongue were Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al.

Yes, I was obnoxious and ignorant. (Just writing about this point in my life makes me cringe.) But I was far from alone, and for the millions of us who’d had enough, who’d weathered 8 years of Bush and his neoconservative regime waiting for the break of daylight, Barack Obama might as well have been Jesus and Superman rolled into one.

The phrase didn’t exist then, but there’s no better term to describe the celebratory output of artists like U2 and will.i.am in 2008 than “libbing out.” The exuberance was infectious, certainly playing a decisive role in why Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency, while waging two wars, one of which continued all the way through and for many years past his administration.

I walked to the bus and listened to my favorite Foo Fighters song, “Long Road to Ruin.” A lyric in that song, “One flag was taken down to raise another in its place” seemed to speak to what I and millions of others were feeling that morning.

Change was coming. The criminals on Wall Street who’d crashed the economy were going to face justice, and major economic and financial reforms would ensure that it never happened again. The war criminals who’d tortured and slaughtered their way through the Middle East would be held to account. American white supremacy and Islamophobia were on their last legs. “Relief was on the way,” to retroject a quote Chuck Schumer said today.

I hope the dramatic irony is oozing out of whatever screen you’re reading this on.

The Song Remains the Same

There’s no way around this. Barack Obama and his administration bear much of the responsibility for everything that has gone wrong in America since 2008–not just between 2008 and 2016.

If you line them up piece-by-piece, the actual policies and actions of the U.S. government under Bush and Obama are not particularly different. I’ve made this point for a decade at this point, and I’m not the only one. As I said in 2017:

“…you cannot have continuity between 43 and 45 without taking a look at what came between. It is there, at the presidency of Barack Obama, that you see clearly why liberals are so keen to re-evaluate Dubya...

If we’re speaking of continuity, there is perhaps no greater degree of continuity between administrations of different parties than between Bush and Obama. It is not liberal journalists, or Ellen DeGeneres, or hipsters, that have normalized George W. Bush: Obama has been doing it for eight years.

Obama continued and in many cases expanded the mass surveillance and spying programs of the Bush administration, becoming the first president to prosecute journalists under the Espionage Act (but at least he neglected to prosecute a single person in the Bush administration for war crimes!) He also reneged on his campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay…

Obama also expanded Bush’s drone program to a whopping eight countries. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient dropped so many bombs on Syria that at one point, they literally ran out.  He also became the first Peace Prize winner to bomb another Peace Prize winner.  He kept his campaign promise to end the war in Iraq by leaving over 5,000 troops there, a number which he then increased once everyone stopped talking about it.

Bush’s No Child Left Behind was terrible, sure, and Betsey DeVos scares liberals even more. But it was Obama’s administration, led by Arne Duncan, who put NCLB on steroids with the Race to the Top initiative, and Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who has destroyed public education in Chicago.

Healthcare? Obamacare is a right wing health plan that has its genesis among the Nixon administration and the Heritage foundation.  No wonder it has been an abject failure.

I could go on, and there’s more in the article, but you get the point. Obama’s presidency was a failure if you look at it as I did on that morning in November 2008, as an opportunity to chart a different path forward for America after the darkness of the Bush years. This isn’t even an opinion; anyone who can look at the Trump era and say that Obama left America in a better state than it’d been in before is deluded.

But Obama’s presidency was a staggering success from the vantage point of a ruling class that, as Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden would say when it was his turn to hold the Fisher-Price steering wheel, wanted “nothing to fundamentally change.” It was a promise he made good on, leading directly to Trump taking the White House back in 2024 and our current predicament, but he was just following in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor, whose popularity he rode into the White House. (More on Biden’s 2020 victory in a moment.)

In 2016, the Democrats ran a centrist white woman who, despite throwing all kinds of racist mud at him in the 2008 primaries (sound familiar?), tried to ride Obama’s coattails into the White House too. Her message of “everything is great, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing!” didn’t resonate with enough swing-state voters and we got Trump instead.

But This Time Will Be Different! (And Other Lies Deluded or Bad-Faith Actors Tell Themselves and Us)

I am not here to relitigate the 2016 or 2020 Democratic primaries or Bernie Sanders. I got excited for Bernie like I had for Obama in 2008, and when the 2016 primary happened I finally accepted that the Democratic Party was not, had never been, and never would be who I thought they were. Studying both communist theory and American history (by the way I have two Master’s degrees, do not step to me about U.S. history) only reaffirmed this knowledge. By the time 2020 rolled around, I was so far over Bernie Sanders and the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party that I got in more fights with other “leftists” that year than I did with right-wingers.

But it’s worth mentioning that Joe Biden won in 2020 largely by running to the left of where he’d been for his entire political career. To be absolutely clear: you were an idiot if you believed him, but hey, America is full of idiots of all political persuasions. Biden ran on affordability, queer and other minority rights, consumer protection and supporting unions, breaking up monopolies, etc. Occasionally he made overtures towards actually accomplishing these things, such as appointing Lina Khan to head the FTC. For years I was assured by smug liberals that Biden was “the most left-wing president of our lifetime” or “the most pro-union president of our lifetime,” as if either of those are difficult bars to clear (the only Democratic presidents in my lifetime, by the way, have been Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Not a ton of competition).

So how did the “most left-wing administration of my lifetime” turn out? That’s right, another colossal failure!

This is recent memory so I’m not going to give you a history lesson. But Biden, like all politicians, moved steadily to the right on most issues throughout his presidency. He busted a railroad strike, failed to reign in big tech in any way, oh, and, yeah, also committed genocide.

Let’s not dwell on the elephant in the room. I have been actively pro-Palestine ever since I first seriously studied the so-called “Israel-Palestine conflict,” so nothing that happened before or after October 7th, 2023 surprised me. It was just another reminder of the monstrous face that lies beneath the Democratic Party’s mask of being humanistic, enlightened liberals who care about things like “human rights.” There is no difference whatsoever between the mainstream of the Democratic Party and the Republicans on the ongoing systemic genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Kick rocks about it.

The right-wing backlash to all of the “woke” social issues of the Obama years (and the first Trump admin) steadily bubbled beneath Biden’s America until boiling over in 2024. The Democratic Party could have stood strong on trans rights, on Black Lives Matter, on defunding the police after 2020, on real healthcare reform (which Luigi Mangione should be proof is necessary and popular), on literally anything. Instead they either capitulated or ignored these and other problems, maintaining their sacred status quo and hoping that people’s anger would just go away at some point. Kamala Harris campaigned with the Cheneys and laughed at anti-Zionists and accepted a completely-undemocratic coronation that handed the White House back to Trump.

America’s oligarchs, whose companies had proudly changed their logos to rainbow versions in June just a year or two before, fell over themselves to lick Trump’s boots, take the pronouns out of their email bios, cancel “DEI” initiatives, and embrace Trump’s move towards open (rather than covert) fascism. Democratic leadership across the country refused to consider abolishing ICE, or hedging with weasel words like “Trump’s ICE,” even after ICE began straight-up murdering people in cold blood on camera. Democrats, many of whom were elected this week, began ceding more and more ground on trans rights even as trans people became the target of increasingly virulent and dangerous attacks by the Trump regime.

I’d like to believe that the Democratic Party has learned from the past decade, but as we’ve already seen, they’re not interested in real change. This time will be no different. Some individual Democrats may fight, and may win some of those fights, and may even win some marginal, incremental victories that improve people’s lives.

But none of the root causes of the problems we face (white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy) nor the impending catastrophes (climate change, a growing fascist movement, a tech oligarchy bent on world domination) will be addressed. They will continue to simmer, to bubble, to lick their wounds and gather their strength and prepare to make another run at destroying the world.

The Democrats will not save us.

Respite, Not Revolution

None of this should be construed as me saying that nothing good will come of this week’s elections, or even that I don’t enjoy watching Republicans eat shit. (I very, very much do.) I don’t even think, as some leftists do, that the Trump administration will just shrug this off and continue their fascist onslaught unabated. They are clearly weak and floundering, having overextended their mandate and being too incompetent to consolidate their hold over the electoral system or even to recognize how disastrous declaring war on Iran would be. America and the world are lucky that our fascist movement is utterly incompetent, held together by the cult of personality around a senile pedophilic dipshit who would be dead before he could install himself as a dictator even if his brain hadn’t turned to slop.

So this is a setback for them. But that’s just it: it’s a setback, not a defeat. A true defeat would mean real change, would mean identifying and solving the root causes that brought us here in the first place.

It would mean, at a bare minimum, arresting and prosecuting every single member of the Trump administration. They have blood on their hands, they are nakedly corrupt, they have broken so many laws you would need an army of lawyers just to tally them up. And if there are no laws on the books to prosecute them for some of the things they’ve done, then write new laws and make them apply retroactively.

It would mean punishing the tech oligarchs who spent vast sums to install and support the Trump regime. Break their companies up, seize as many assets as you can, nationalize them if at all possible. Deport Elon Musk and bar him from ever entering or doing business in the country again (this is actually a moderate solution; if I wrote what I actually think should happen to him I’m afraid it would be legally actionable).

It would mean ending the genocide in Palestine. If the “norms” and “rules” that liberals claim to believe so strongly in are actually so important, then actually apply them evenly. Israel has no right to exist as a “Jewish” state. The only tenable solution is a one-state solution–a single, secular country called Palestine, with equal rights for all. If Zionists don’t want to live in that country, that’s on them. By extension, this means America has to stop bombing and massacring people in other countries, or arming and funding those who do–you cannot have a strong democracy if you support tyranny outside your borders.

It would mean actually waging the “culture war.” Democrats do nothing but sway with the wind on social issues; when queer rights were in vogue in the 2010s they were good allies, and when the anti-woke backlash ascended in the 2020s they caved, as they are doing now. When the wind was behind Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd, Nancy Pelosi knelt in a kente cloth (something which in a sane world would have gotten her and every other Democrat who did it laughed out of politics forever); when the fires had died down, every single elected Democrat disavowed the concept of defunding the police and said nothing as “DEI” became the Republican racist dogwhistle of the moment. Good leaders, good politicians, understand that they can influence public opinion, that by taking a principled stand and fighting for ideas or minority groups, you not only normalize those positions, but also make them more popular.

It would mean acting decisively on climate change. Cutting fossil fuels, nationalizing and expanding use of renewals (including nuclear!), holding allies accountable, admitting that the Paris Agreement has been an abject failure. Mobilizing the entire country, and the entire world, to pull together and use our collective might to solve the most existential threat we have ever faced as a species.

It would mean seriously reconsidering capitalism. Capitalism underpins everything. I’m not writing an essay about political economy here, but one fundamental truth of capitalist society is, “No problem gets solved unless someone can profit from solving it.” Society is fundamentally a calculus of allocating labor and resources, and capitalism is a system where that is done through the profit motive. Fascism is not a problem to be solved unless and until it threatens the bottom line of the capitalist class, which it will never truly do, because fascism emerges from capitalism.

And here’s the kicker–the Democratic Party is not interested in doing any of the things I just named.

The Democrats don’t want to punish or go after the criminals in the Trump administration. That might set a precedent of politicians being held accountable for the consequences of their actions on regular people in ways other than “the ballot box.” They don’t want that, because they also engage in corruption, they also oversee mass death.

The Democrats have no interest in punishing the oligarchs. Many of them are the oligarchs, and the ones who aren’t still need those sweet, sweet campaign contributions. And let’s be clear–it’s not that good politicians are corrupted by campaign contributions (although I’m sure there are a few that’s happened to)–it’s that campaign contributions find their ways to the “right” people. Politicians aren’t blank slates or honest people who get “ruined” by the system–the system attracts, rewards, and uplifts the types of people who will serve the oligarchs’ interests. The purpose of a system is what it does. Nine out of ten times, if a person has the platform, money, experience, and temperament to be a major American politician, it’s because they are already serving the interests of the wealthy.

Free Palestine? Perish the thought. The tide is turning against the Zionist occupation, but only slowly, and the histrionic opposition to outlier politicians like Abdul El-Sayed from the Democratic Party is indicative of their dominant attitude. As the winds shift, they will absorb and make a few token concessions to the antizionist movement, but only in the way they always do–to neutralize, to subsume, to put a leash on it. The genocide will continue, just under liberal Zionists rather than Netanyahu and Likud.

The “Culture War” is where Democrats are the most malleable. They will put the pronouns back in their bios, take the rainbow flags out of the linen closets, put the “Everyone is Welcome Here” signs back on their lawns. But actual, material change? Don’t count on it. Any victories won will be hard-fought by queer and trans and Black and brown people, fighting against the Democratic Party as much as with it. And as soon as America’s currents turn reactionary again, they will fold again, as we’ve seen them do for the past half-decade. They’ve shown us that they are fair-weather friends. Believe them.

Climate change? Capitalism? Please, let us not kid ourselves. The Biden administration’s much-touted Inflation Reduction Act did exactly nothing for the climate. Capitalism is possibly the only thing more sacred to your average Democrat than Israel.

And when the Democrats use their new mandate to accomplish nothing, how will Americans react? Well, the same way they’ve always done. They’ll swing back the other way, and put Republicans back in power. On and on it goes.

This isn’t just a leftist wish-list of all the things I personally want to happen in America. It’s what the Democrats would need to do to ensure that this never happens again. The worst aspects of the Trump regime may be curbed, for a time. Some things may even get better. I don’t begrudge anyone recognizing or even celebrating that.

But you celebrate at your own peril. This is a moment of respite, not revolution. Business as usual led us to this point, and the Democrats have no plan other than to return to business as usual. “Win every single election forever” is not a strategy to keep fascism at bay.

Much more is needed. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into complacency yet again, then within our lifetimes–whether in 2028, 2032, 2036, or later–we will find ourselves right back here again.

Only the next time, the figurehead leading the fascists may not be as elderly, as buffoonish, or as lacking in convictions as Donald Trump.