The Shitlibs

Both the right and the left are not happy with liberals these days, the former claiming liberalism has gone too far (culturally) and the latter not far enough (economically), but the kind of critique the exalted term “shitLib” expresses is quite specific. For the person using the term, the “shitlib” is a specific kind of adversary. It is first and foremost a class enemy with whom one finds oneself affiliated politically. The one who screams “shitLib” is typically working class: drives a delivery truck or guides tourism tours, has been politicized by the Bernie Sanders campaign, to whom he had given preciously earned dollars as campaign donations hoping to get Medicare For All, only to find himself shepherded by the man he trusted the most, Sanders, into the fold of the Democratic Party with nothing to show for his donation dollars. While many middle and upper middle class Democrats had joined the Bernie Sanders campaign and advocated for Medicare for All, the loss of the promise of that campaign cost them nothing in real life as they worked in institutions that offered them subsidized health care. Those simply rejoined the ranks of the party in quietude and without much resentment. Having baptized themselves in the moral campaign of Sanders, in support of their working class compatriots, they rejoined the ranks of the Democratic Party as loyal partisans. They could return to their old selves and become “shitLibs” again.

“ShitLibs” then is a cri de political resentment. It is resentment of a particular form of liberal “ontology”- a way of being a liberal partisan- that is driven more by awareness of and argument for the limit of what one can do-”Those awful republicans would win”-than by questioning the boundaries of this status quo through base mobilization and political experimentation. Implicit in this political resentment is a resentment based on class as it is hard not to notice that the “shitlib” is invariably a member of the professional managerial class (PMC) and that the status quo that is being defended is an economic one. This is not to say that “shitlibs” are incapable of or lack the desire to effect a cultural revolution that disrupts or ruptures the status quo. In fact, “shitlibs” have pushed exactly that confronted with the dual pressure coming from the populism of Sanders from the left and the populism of Trump from the right. Instead of “Medicare for All”, they offered, “Femaleness for all”, instead of minimum wage, they offered “Anti racism and criminal reforms”. It was a killer move, if ever there was one. The “shitlib” might be “shitty” but no idiot. The move was particularly brilliant as the cultural revolution of the “shitlibs” brought forth the cultural and social power of the social progressives, mostly college educated, and directed it at both the left wing populists and the right wing ones in equal measure. It was you might say, a move to defend the status quo by revolutionizing it.

While right wing populism has the tools, drawn from the history of conservatism, to defend itself from the attack, the move was like a noose thrown at the neck of the left wing populism. This is so because the latter saw itself as socially progressive too and did not want to antagonize the base of social progressive politics which it saw as an ally. Economic populists struggle to distinguish themselves and their agenda from the “shitlib” cultural revolution which they had instinctively understood as a defense of the economic status quo even as it appears on its face to be highly disruptive. Left wing populists were left to separate the wheat from the chaff of what the “shitlibs” were throwing at them relentlessly and to hold their own in the midst of merciless attacks whenever they wanted to make a nuanced point on gender ideology, defend free speech, or propose a different way to do anti-racism. The “shitlib” revolution proved an all time consuming event continuously dragging the left wing populists down to the hysterical outbursts and meltdowns of the socially progressive children of the PMC, struggling to make nuanced arguments to keep an alliance with those they disagreed with. The “shitlib” persisted, rejecting all nuance, branding every modification as being “right wing.”

Of the three, left wing populism, right wing populism and the “shitlib” progressive social revolution, the third proved the most successful and most far reaching. The reason is quite simple: “shitlibs” control professional organizations, cultural and mass mediated organizations, NGO sector, universities and schools, and it turns out, the deep state. That corporations, followed suit, was the cherry on the cake. Like domino pieces falling one after the other, those entities followed each other’s suit, rushing to enact the dictates of the “shitlib” cultural revolution. You could not resist, because the new app you need to use at work according to your boss already embodies the “shitlib” diktats (gender pronouns). Before you could even understand the new decrees, it was already fait accompli. Go home, resistance to resistance liberalism is futile. The quickness with which those entities dropped moderate liberalism and exchanged it for social progressivism as their nominal ideology was something to behold. All of a sudden, intelligent, highly educated people, donned a look of befuddlement when asked: “What is a woman?” With equal speed, sex difference became an “unscientific’ statement defended by scientists, scientific journals, doctors, and government public health agencies. “Shitlib” reporters and civil rights organizations rushed to hate free speech. The quickness of the change was as radical as the substance that was advocated. Every dumb, indefensible, out there idea that one heard on the university campus in the 90s, and that one could debunk in two minutes, became the official ideology of the state, “shitlib” administered, defended, and if you disagreed, you were a “fascist”.

With all that, the financial economic status quo remained the same. And that is the brilliance of the “shitlibs”.

As fast as the “shitlibs” moved to contain the populisms that encircled them from the left and the right, as slow the populisms were to meet each other. On the one hand, the wall that “shitlibs” erected between them, with the threat, “fascist!” made it hard for one to see the other. A lot of “shitlib” types still populate economic populism and keep dragging the left wing populists into fights over “party” rather than “people”. Take AOC. The fear they would be branded “right wing” haunts a great many left wing populists so that on many issues they care about they would rather the “right” takes them on as “right” rather than they themselves adopting it as cause: “Let the right clean the mess the shitlibs are leaving behind”- example, rise in crime, sterilization of children, open borders. Many left wing populists have biased ideas about right wing populism that are part of left tradition that are hard to eschew.

For right wing populists, left wing populism, and for all the reasons stated above, seems hostage to the Democrats unable to break free. They see left wing populists deriding them in the way they are accustomed to by the “shitlibs”-they are “traditional” (ik), they are “stupid”, they don’t have real intellectuals, etc. Right wing populism is new to economic populist ideas and its intellectuals are trying hard to develop their own version of it to represent the white working class that votes for the Republican party. It is not as embedded in union organizing as the left wing activists are and it has no tradition to draw on. It too can find itself hostage to and dragged down to the Republican party and its causes of fiscal conservatism, free trade, and little taxation.

With all that, left wing populists envy the right wing populists one thing: Trump. Trump to Sanders, is fighter to wuss.