A Progressive’s Doubts About Progressivism in the Age of Trump

Before progressives can win elections again they need to reexamine some core beliefs and attitudes

Discomfort and unease. Image Credit: Kenny Eliason/Upslash

Although I am a political liberal who has voted for Democratic party candidates for nearly 40 years, the word that best describes how I felt about Donald Trump’s victory last November is “uncanny.” Plenty of people who share my political outlook would use other, more visceral words: “disbelief,” “despair,” “fear” or “outrage.” But for me, Trump’s return combined a sense of foreboding and an unsettling familiarity—in other words, precisely the feeling captured by the term “uncanny.”

In his famous essay entitled “The ‘Uncanny,’” Sigmund Freud considered the paradoxical nature of the term and the emotions it expresses. While the uncanny refers to “all that arouses dread and creeping horror,” it also evokes, according to Freud, something that is “hidden” yet “familiar.” The uncanny terrifies us because it is close to the bone. It belongs to our world and may even be part of us, yet it arouses terror. Classic examples of uncanny objects include dead bodies, lifelike dolls and ghosts. To this list, I would add Donald Trump.

Because it is concerned with the familiar, the uncanny is always in the eye of the beholder. Whatever one thinks of Trump, it takes a progressive to find him uncanny. For those on the so-called left, the president’s strangeness is familiar and his familiarity strange. Not too long ago, the Democrats were the “party of the people,” championing the economic interests of common folk against well-heeled, white-collar elites. The Democrats were also the party that assembled a broad, multiracial coalition. Yet in 2024, building on trends established in recent elections, Trump won an overwhelming majority of working-class voters while significantly increasing support among young people and minorities, particularly Hispanics and Black men.

Since Trump famously went down the elevator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president, progressives have relentlessly denounced the man for being racist, sexist and antisemitic. But during the same period, the Democratic electorate has grown increasingly wealthy and ever whiter. Meanwhile, many see those on the left as promoting extreme views on race, while the Israel-Hamas war has demonstrated that progressives have a comfort level with anti-Zionist discourse that many view as antisemitism by another name. When it came to issues of racism and bigotry, the last thing that progressives expected in the Trump era was to find themselves on the defensive. Yet here we are.

For progressives, Trump is indeed an uncanny figure. He is the ghost of their own populist past, a zombie-like incarnation of the working classes that gentry liberals have left behind yet that isn’t prepared to die just yet; an Edgar Allen Poe-like raven, constantly hectoring liberals with reminders of their hypocrisy. In his essay, Freud concluded that the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and [long-]established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.” Considered in psychoanalytic terms, liberals’ disgust at Trump may well reflect their ambivalence or even a discomfort toward a politics they have abandoned—and whose uncanny return in the peculiar figure of Trump stirs in them feelings of resentment and unease.

Before Democrats can win elections again, or even reform their party, they need “intellectual and moral reform”—to steal a phrase from philosopher and historian Ernest Renan to describe a France that he believed had lost its way in the wake of that nation’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The left finds itself in a similar situation at present, particularly in the habits of mind to which it has unfortunately become accustomed. Perhaps this crisis for American progressives will turn out to be a moment of renewal—but only if they have the courage to see themselves as part of the problem.

The Deconstructors Deconstructed

Over the past three or four decades, liberals have been committed to the belief that when it comes to thinking about politics, culture and society, things are not what they seem. The word that best describes this way of thinking is “deconstruction.” The term was coined in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, for whom it was a way of thinking which showed that, beneath the apparent solidity of the West’s key philosophical ideas (truth, meaning, identity), lurked a messy swamp of ambiguity. Over time, a watered-down conception of deconstruction mainlined into the cultural bloodstream, implying that the overt meanings of many words or ideas prove, on closer inspection, to harbor a secret meaning or sinister intent.

Deconstruction has merged seamlessly with other, related academic attitudes, in the sense that it takes as its starting point the idea that seemingly objective institutions and ways of thinking are in fact vehicles for advancing particular interests on the sly. Thus Marxists detect economic self-interest beneath political positions and cultural attitudes. Adherents of certain forms of postmodernism claim that social and scientific institutions are imposing discreet but insidious forms of power relations. And postcolonialists argue that many of modern politics’ core premises continue to be surreptitiously informed by the assumption that Western societies are destined to rule the world and that non-Western societies are congenitally condemned to subordination.

A simplified version of these ideas plays a major role in how day-to-day progressives think and talk about politics. It can be found in the way progressives critique specific policies in terms of their underlying motives (seeing market-oriented solutions as benefiting the wealthy or abortion restrictions as the will of the patriarchy), as well as in the doubt that progressives sometimes cast on the motivations of ordinary language and social interactions, as seen in the popularization of terms such as “gaslighting,” “mansplaining” and “bothsidesing.” The point is not that such suspicion is never warranted—it often is—or that it makes no meaningful contributions to political discourse—it frequently does—but rather that it has become a major hallmark of progressive thought. If you aren’t suspicious, according to this mindset, you aren’t thinking; if you don’t deconstruct an idea down to its most troubling components, you aren’t a true progressive.

One of the things that makes Trump’s recent victory uncanny is the way it turns the tables on these and other deconstructors. This has happened in part because progressives have proved unwilling to subject their own views to the same degree of deconstructive scrutiny that they apply to other phenomena. For instance, in recent years, liberals have honed the practice of viewing a wide range of issues through the prism of race. They have excelled at calling attention to the way in which institutions or practices either benefit whites or marginalize people of color. Yet consider the current state of the Democratic Party itself, particularly its most ideological constituencies. As Patrick Ruffini shows, in 2020, for instance, the only demographic group in which a substantial percentage identified as “ideological liberals” were college-educated whites (at 34%, compared to 20% for Asians and 15% for Blacks). Yet while progressives excel at denouncing the whiteness of so many American institutions, few are prepared to state overtly that the same can be said of their party of choice. Recognizing this trend is important because liberal whites play a crucial role in shaping the Democrats’ agenda. Liberals’ positions on such issues as language policing, DEI, immigration and crime (to name just a few) might well be explained by the party’s racial identity.

Indeed, such arguments are already being made, albeit by voices that are still too marginal. Musa al-Gharbi, for instance, has proposed a powerful critique of wokeness, which he sees primarily as an ideology of white professionals. The “symbolic professions,” as he calls them—“doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, tech workers”—often function as “sinecures for WASPs” that are “legitimized by appealing to social justice discourse” and “altruism.” He wonders what good is achieved by DEI and “the ever-expanding constellation of social-justice sinecures beyond providing their practitioners with gainful employment.” Yet these are the kinds of critiques that few liberals are willing to entertain. It is far easier just to keep calling Trump a racist—even though the Republican Party, at least for the time being, is trending multiracial.

A similar blindness characterizes how many liberals think about what has become the Democrats’ most unifying trait: the fact that it has become the party of the college educated. In fact, in 2024, the only demographic group that voted for Kamala Harris at a higher rate than for Joe Biden four years earlier was college-educated whites, which she won by 52% to 45% (she even lost ground with voters of color who have college degrees). As recently as 2012, Republicans still won most categories of college-educated voters. The Democrats’ shift to more and more progressive on a range of cultural issues is often explained by the fact that these positions reflect the outlook of the college educated.

Yet the sophisticated frameworks that liberals use to analyze such issues as race and gender became embarrassingly simplistic when it comes to explaining Trump’s appeal. Liberals assume that Trump supporters vote the way they do because they are uneducated—that were they enlightened (read: college-educated) they would abandon their benighted positions—and become Democrats. Liberals believe that being educated means nothing more than having a better mind. They refuse to consider that education is also a process of socialization, of developing tastes and preferences and learning how to compete for status and recognition with other educated people. Being educated, in short, means acquiring a worldview and a distinct set of interests. Many Democrats think in practice like 19th-century European conservatives, who took for granted that they belonged to the “better class of men” and worried about the consequences of political institutions being overrun by uncultured working-class barbarians motivated by the baser passions. The idea that Trump voters might be motivated by what they perceived to be their interests (often tied to their membership in the working class), and not simply by ignorance and racism, seems lost on most liberals. Only other people’s views, it would seem, require deconstruction.

Liberal Pretenses

Back in 2018, the late Henry Kissinger observed that Trump was “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” This is perhaps the greatest unintended gift that Trump offers liberals. In recent years, progressivism has waded so deep into the quagmire of pretense that it can barely tell the difference between illusion and reality. The reasons have to do with the long-term trajectory of liberal politics. Perhaps even more than the right, the left has evolved in the direction of what political scientists have called “postmaterialist” politics: a shift away from the focus on the economic plight of the working class and the poor and toward the concerns of the relatively affluent and educated groups that now make up its base. Particularly in recent years, “social justice” has become the meta-theme of almost every liberal political priority, from immigration and gender to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. To be a liberal is to glide above material concerns. Consider the bewilderment that liberals express on social media about how people can worry about the “price of eggs” when “democracy” is at stake. At times, this postmaterialist orientation is genuinely valuable. But it can also result in uncomfortable contortions when one’s speech and beliefs find themselves in a very different place from where one plants one’s feet. Trump’s politics shine a withering light on these liberal contortions.

Take the example of liberal views on free trade. Thirty years ago, free trade was one of the cornerstones of Clintonian centrism. By the early 2010s, in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy movement, many liberals began to express misgivings about trade in particular and capitalism in general. Sensing this evolution, formerly gung-ho free-traders began to change their tune. For instance, while running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, despite having championed it as President Obama’s Secretary of State. By 2022, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center, only 46% of Democrats viewed capitalism positively, down from 55% three years earlier. Bernie Sanders led the charge against the trade deals that harmed American workers. Yet as soon as Trump began imposing tariffs on the United States’ trade partners, liberals suddenly went full Hayek: Socialist sympathizers and scourges of the “1%” suddenly began praising the virtues of globalization and free trade with such enthusiasm that they would make a Reagan Republican blush. Without a hint of self-awareness, they had suddenly started expressing alarm at the inflationary consequences of protectionism—unconsciously admitting, by the same token, their de facto acceptance of the theoretical foundations of free market economics. The irony is rich: It took the populism of the Queens real estate developer for Democrats to admit their de facto acceptance of Wall Street’s worldview.

Even more pretense is on display in the liberal reaction to Trump’s attack on universities. Though hardly surprising, the new administration’s evident hatred for higher education is chilling, as manifested in the arbitrary suspension of billions of dollars of grant money (on which many university programs depend) and the targeting for deportation of foreign students who have engaged in radical activism, notably Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University. The latter in particular inspired a recent New York Times editorial, which warned that the “weakening of higher education tends to be an important part” of authoritarian strategies pursued by the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.

And yet an obvious question remains: Why have liberals—especially at elite institutions and in establishment media outlets like the New York Times—started getting all gloom-and-doom about higher education now? Are they remotely aware of the situation in which most universities find themselves? In recent decades, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “the US academic workforce has shifted from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty,” with estimates now placing about 68% of professors off the tenure track. AAUP has also found that real (i.e., after inflation) salaries of faculty fell by 7.5% from 2019 to 2022. Meanwhile, university administrations have expanded like a pandemic, with “deanlets,” associate vice provosts and student affairs staff (among others) taking hold of the new ivory tower. These trends occurred even with Democrats in the White House for most of the past 17 years. Indeed, these conditions explain why faculty at public universities have gone on strike in recent years. They did not occur in MAGA strongholds like Florida or Texas, but in Gavin Newsom’s liberal haven of California (the University of California struck in 2022, as did the California State University system in 2024).

Meanwhile, many campuses have been faced with closures or mergers, even as public confidence in higher education has plummeted. A recent poll found that only one in four adults think a college degree is important to financial well-being, and wage gaps between employees with and without college degrees have decreased. These trends, as well as anxieties about a new cold war, have made universities downplay their traditional focus on liberal arts in favor of a hard-nosed focus on “job-ready skills.” In many ways, higher education finds itself in a situation comparable to the automobile industry in the 1980s: a crisis-ridden industry that is simultaneously essential yet unsustainable in its current form, and whose future is anyone’s guess.

In response to Trump’s recent actions, Robert Reich wrote an essay claiming that Trump’s goal is to chill campuses into submission, asserting that once a tyrant has taken over the military, political institutions and the media, “the universities are next.” Next? This reminds me of Denis Leary’s reaction to Keith Richards’ anti-drug advocacy: We can’t do drugs anymore because Keith did them all. “There’s none left!” As terrible as Khalil’s treatment has been, most universities can’t be beaten down because they’ve already had their lifeblood drained out of them for decades (though some of these wounds are admittedly self-inflicted). Many are in a lot worse shape than Columbia. It is unfortunately completely predictable that what gets the liberal establishment bemoaning the state of higher education is when something bad happens at an elite institution.

The Democrats have never proposed a serious plan for addressing the crisis faced by higher education; in many ways, Democrats have presided over higher ed’s decline. Given how decisive college education is to the identity of the current Democratic Party, this is extraordinarily ironic. If Trump’s actions can reveal the hollowness of the Democrats’ commitment to higher education and inspire them to take its challenges seriously, so much the better.

A final pretense that Trump has brought to light concerns liberal attitudes toward nationhood and national history. The left—and particularly leftist intellectuals—has often struggled with the concept of the nation. In Europe, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, nationalism was a left-wing idea, a vehicle for advancing the idea of citizenship and equality before the law vis-a-vis aristocratic society. For much of the 20th century in Europe—and, in the United States, since the Vietnam War—nationalism has been largely monopolized by the right. The left’s main objection to nationalism often boils down to its preference for universalism over particularism: that the values that are worth defending—democracy, human rights, the right to a basic standard of living—should be available to all people, not just members of a particular nation. Yet in recent years, many liberals seem to have gone far beyond universalism, embracing a negative form of American exceptionalism: the view that the United States has been exceptional in its practice of injustice. For instance, a 2023 Gallup poll found, for instance, that only 29% of Democrats felt “extreme pride” in their country, compared to 60% of Republicans.

Yet all it took for Democrats to be reminded of their love for America and its institutions was Trump’s reelection. Democrats who chafe at patriotism suddenly described all kinds of actions taken by Trump as “un-American.” Liberals who denounced the racist foundations of American democracy are now accusing Trump of acting in ways that are contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law. Critics of American imperialism have become de facto champions of NATO. Strictly speaking, of course, these views are not incoherent. It is possible to evaluate a nation’s history critically while embracing its core political principles, and to support some of its foreign policy choices but not others. Even so, there is no question that Trump’s simplistic but effective nationalism has exposed the hollowness of the Democrats’ conception of national belonging. It consists of an awkward mix of historical revisionism, liberal internationalism and a tepid appropriation of what Germans call “constitutional patriotism” (that is, supporting a nation’s democratic principles without the problematic elements of its past and identity). What Trump brings to light is less that the Democrats are unpatriotic than that their views rest on no cogent conception whatsoever. As the world enters a new era of great power rivalry, this deficiency is likely to become ever more problematic.

A New Realism?

Barney Frank, the former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, once observed: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.” Amen.

Beyond the problem of what the Democrats represent politically in the wake of the 2024 election, liberals need to revisit how they think. Liberalism has always claimed a kind of greater insight. Conservatism has—often, at least—been content to hunker down on common sense. Liberalism has frequently claimed to adopt an “advanced” or “enlightened” (dare we say “woke”?) perspective.

In recent years, the left has adopted a deconstructive approach, focused on shedding light on an array of injustices to which they think everyone else is blind. In particular, it has, as it moves away from a primary focus on redistributing resources to particular constituencies to postmaterialistic concerns, adopted social justice as the primary meta-principle of its politics.

These habits of thought, whatever their occasional usefulness, have proved detrimental to liberals’ role in democratic politics. Liberals need to stop believing they are exceptional and learn to subject themselves to the same critiques they make of Trump and Republicans. If they do not do so, they will never understand how Republicans have been so successful at caricaturing them with ordinary people, nor will they be able to get beyond these caricatures. This self-critique is, moreover, essential to the credibility of the ideas that liberals claim to champion. You can’t keep critiquing inequality if, to most people, you look like the embodiment of it. If Democrats can’t learn this lesson, it is they, and not the Republicans, who will become the new “stupid party.”

Democrats also need to reacquaint themselves with reality. At its best, what the left brings to contemporary politics is the argument that reality is too narrow a perspective—that reality needs to be considered in terms of potentialities, not just actualities. Yet contemporary liberals have taken this too far, embracing the dream and the idea that strong opinions are all that is required. But how one brings values to bear on reality—and acquires the support of a critical mass of people—is where the hard work of politics is done. How do you uphold the human rights of immigrants without decreasing the living standards of your citizens? How do you support the Ukrainians in their existential war against Russia while preparing to meet the upending of the international system resulting from China’s rise? These types of questions have been largely unaddressed by liberals in recent years, often in favor of simplistic sloganeering. Perhaps Trump’s uncanny return will precipitate a new appreciation for these hard choices and ultimately lead to liberalism’s intellectual and moral reform.