A Hollow Faith

The Moral Crisis of the American Left

This is an anxious moment in American history. The eyes of the world are on the US, waiting to witness the next humiliation we inflict upon ourselves and by extension, upon them. The outcome of the ongoing political struggle will determine the course of American politics for the rest of this century. And it should not have been this contested. This is a choice between organization and chaos, between leadership and strongarm bullying, between truth and deception. The choice should have be easy and yet, for a shockingly large segment of the American populace, it wasn’t. Why? Because the 2024 election did not merely represent a political defeat, but a moral and philosophical failure. The error was not that the Democrats were too progressive, too leftist nor too centrist, but because the underlying assumptions embedded in their worldview have spawned narratives that defeat themselves.

This essay does not concern itself with the American right, but not because the right is beyond reproach. On the contrary, it is because it is beyond relevance as an object of good faith critique. To offer insight into a movement that has revived 19^th century-style trade wars, openly contemplated abandoning NATO, annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, destabilized the economy, and proposed the deportation of 11 million people is to only bolster the legitimacy of such absurd positions. There is no serious conversation to be had with people who treat fascist spectacle as real governance. This essay is concerned only with the political coalition that still purports to stand for liberal democracy and why they, intentionally or not, are on the path to allow liberal democracy to fail.

The concerns expressed here are not abstract nor is the danger. When democratic institutions are hollowed out, when grievance becomes political currency, and when those who should resist are too fractured or self-righteous to act, the outcome is predictable. In the early 1930s, Germany was not the unrecognizable dystopia that the popular myth suggests. It was a modern democracy—arguably the most intellectually advanced and culturally rich society existent anywhere. Its political climate featured a fragmented left, a rising authoritarian right, and a population conditioned by humiliation and economic trauma. The scariest part about the conclusion of that chapter is how easy it was for the Nazis to normalize their crimes. How readily German society became complicit in actions so heinous they had once unthinkable.

The descent was not sudden. It was contingent upon slow erosion—of norms, of faith in institutions, of the belief that anyone could or should hold power responsibly. Fascism arrived dressed as strength in a moment of great weakness. If that could happen there, it could happen here, in the most militarized, influential, and globally entangled nation in human history. The consequences of such a shift would be planetary. And yet the American left, in its current form, is repeating the mistakes of the German left. It is paralyzed by moral purity, fractured by internal contradictions, engaged in outright complicity, and—most damning of all—allergic to power itself. The left has become structurally incapable of confronting a right that now comprises open authoritarians. If the left were to lose this fight, it would not be because it lacked ideals. But rather because it refused to wield power in defense of them.

The popular myth around Nazi Germany is that it was a moral cliff: that one day, Hitler rose to power and the world fell off the edge. That the Holocaust became possible overnight. But this is an example of how history has been so distilled as to be digestible. A version more concerned with our own psychological discomfort than it is with truth. Because that is not what happened. The road to atrocity was paved over time through a culture of grievance, through unchecked rhetoric, through a media apparatus that could not unify against it, and through a political class that believed they could tame or co-opt the forces it had helped unleash. The warning signs were visible for years before Hitler became chancellor: in the normalization of antisemitism, in the erosion of institutional trust, in the fantasy that chaos could be harnessed for good. Fascism did not emerge out of nothing, suddenly and inevitably. It emerged when the opposition became too fractured, too distracted, too self-righteous, too weak to defend the system itself.

The leftist criticism of the liberal social and economic order is well taken. The privileges enjoyed by the burgher class were never intended to extend to everyone. And it’s undeniably true that the idea of infinite consumption has inflicted devastating harm across the world. This system has failed the global south, sustained immense privilege, and propped up power in velvet gloves. This isn’t a utopia worth saving for its own sake. It is a sobering recognition that power, including the power of existent structures, must be harnessed if any meaningful change is to occur. Change necessitates power. And in today’s America, the only viable alternative on the table to liberal democracy is fascism.

And thus, this is not a defense of the system out of adoration for it, nor does it stem from the misguided belief that it represents the best humanity can achieve. It is a defense born from realism; the understanding that to not defend the system means to cede it to the actors with the worst possible intentions. Plato said it best, “The price of indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

That said, there is a deep, foundational issue in left wing politics that must be reconciled if the American left hopes to achieve political victory. It must address that it operates within a moral framework that is ultimately self-defeating: one defined by the resentment of power and the exaltation of the powerless.

The left is not powerless, it is simply ashamed of its power. Or rather, it prefers to wield power obliquely: through moral leverage, institutional capture, and symbolic politics—all while maintaining the posture of the outsider. This is not a rejection of power outright, but a deeply Christian, life-denying version of it. Power becomes guilt, achievement becomes complicity, strength becomes oppression. The result is a political culture that resents success, mistrusts agency, and sees any meaningful exercise of power as betrayal. That is not moral seriousness. That is cowardice masquerading as principle. The left need not abandon its claim on morality, but it must stop using it as an alibi for inaction. It must wield power and claim the moral high ground at once.

There are some on the left that believe collapse is the path to clarity. That if things get bad enough, if society sinks low enough, the people will rise, the contradictions will sharpen, and the revolution will finally come. This is magical thinking. Collapses don’t radicalize people, they disorient them. People do not blame complex systems for their immediate problems, they blame something immediate and tangible. History offers no evidence to the contrary. If the American left is counting on the collapse of liberal democracy, that is not just a naïve position. That is fantastical.

The fantasy is fueled, in part, by a warped understanding of history—one that is ingrained into Americans from an early age. The mythology of the American Revolution states that tyranny sparked resistance, and that resistance spontaneously birthed justice. But the truth is less romantic. The American Revolution was not an act of sudden outrage—it was a coordinated, elite-led, political rebellion supported by networks of influence, a clear plan for governance, and a coherent vision of the future. It offered a viable power structure that could usurp imperial rule. The standard narrative—that tyranny provokes outrage, the people rise, justice prevails—is a comforting lie. And what it offers is not revolution, but abandonment. It is the surrender of existing institutions without any viable alternative, under the delusion that something better will be born from of the rubble, reviving itself like a cultural phoenix. But collapses leave vacuums, and someone will always be waiting to fill them. Someone with fewer reservations and worse intentions.

Even on their own terms, the accelerationists misread history. The Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions didn’t succeed because the oppressed underclass had simply had enough of their oppression. They succeeded because they were strategically organized, ideologically disciplined, and relentless in their pursuit of replacing existing power structures. The Bolsheviks didn’t wait for the czarist regime to implode, they built a vanguard party. They were professional revolutionaries that infiltrated and flipped existent institutions, created their own parallel structures, and seized Russia by force. The Chinese Communist Party didn’t rise from impulsive rebellion, they fought in a protracted civil war with a clear political program. They built a parallel state alongside the Guomindang until they were strong enough to replace it too. Whatever horrors followed, those movements didn’t succeed by abandoning power, but by claiming it. Today’s leftist accelerationists seek collapse without blueprint, revolution without organization. And so, they will get neither.

While this criticism may seem confined to the fringes of the left, it reflects an attitude toward power that reaches the heart of the establishment. The far-left retreats into fantasy and accelerationist mythos as the institutional Democrats cling to a dead language of civility and proceduralism even as the political landscape burns. They speak of resisting fascism, but when handed the reins of power, they do not crack them. The Republican Party tears up norms, and the Democrats rush to tape them back together—to preserve the illusion of normalcy. A budget resolution is passed without the consultation of a single Democrat, and Chuck Schumer folds to maintain decorum, to protect a sense of institutional legitimacy that no longer exists. As if rules still matter to those intent on breaking them. When the Democrats sit in the House Chamber in silence as they listen to Trump say, “We will get Greenland, one way or another,” that is complicity—even if they hold up little protest signs. It is the treatment of the absurd as if it is mundane. When Representative Al Green became so disgusted that he disrupted the speech, somehow it is he was cast as the transgressor. This isn't strategy. It’s cowardice and capitulation.

Even the Squad—elected to shake up political discourse—have become part of the performance. They denounce the establishment while they participate in it: as national political figures entrenched in some of the highest offices in Congress, seated on the most powerful committees. They blocked their own party’s infrastructure bill because Build Back Better could not be passed, and in doing so, delivered nothing to the people. They channel populist grievance while rejecting the label, railing against systems that they help to sustain, and retreating from real confrontation (read: not on social media) that might risk their moral branding. They are not revolutionaries. And to compromise would be to muddy their hands with the real exercise of power in the form of governance—a betrayal of the grievance politics that elevated them. Their failure is not legislative, it’s philosophical. They want power without ownership, change without compromise, and moral purity without the burden of outcomes. They have thrived on a movement that functions as the left’s reverse image of Trumpism: built on catharsis, fueled by emotional urgency, convinced of its own righteousness, and unfit to wield power.

This is a critique of the selective symbolism rampant in left wing discourse, the symbolism that elevates identity over outcomes. The left does not openly hate minorities as the right often does. If anything, the problem is far more subtle and in some ways, more corrosive: it does not trust them. It welcomes them insofar as they remain powerless. To wield power, implicitly, is to side with the machinations of oppression. Minorities are expected to serve as symbolic, morally legible, and safely powerless representations of their communities. So, the left does not hate them, but uses them. Their voices are elevated when they function as symbols, when their suffering reaffirms the narratives of systemic injustice. But when those same figures gain real institutional power and fail to deliver outcomes, they are abandoned or excused in ways that mask a deeper resentment of strength.

This dynamic—symbolic elevation without real accountability—is not limited to the Squad. It reflects a broader discomfort the left has with minority success, especially when that success occurs outside the prescribed narrative. Such achievements are resented, not celebrated. And so, the gatekeepers of left-wing thought ensure that their own halls of power remain populated in most part by White, culturally Christian men. The left claims to champion minority advancement, but only as long as they remain moral props. The moment they gain real agency or inconvenient opinions, they are pushed out of the story. That is not empowerment, but conditional solidarity in service of an inherited Christian moral framework.

Nowhere is the left’s discomfort with minority power more charged than in its treatment of Jews and Israel. It goes without saying that Israeli policy is not beyond critique. As author Dara Horn noted, the very fact that saying this has become the “price of admission” into the conversation reveals something deeper. Israel is not treated as a state among others, but as a symbol—a mirror for Western guilt, a stage for the reenactment of moral clarity. Its existence ruptures the Christian moral tradition, even in this secular form. In that tradition, the Jew has long served the role of the suffering outsider, the witness to sin, the reminder of humanity’s fallen state. Zionism, and the power it confers, defies that role. It transforms the Jew from symbol to sovereign, from object of pity to political actor. And this transformation is intolerable to a left that has not fully exorcised the theological assumptions it inherited.

The moral outrage directed at Israel is not symmetrical to the facts on the ground. Its disproportionate, ritualized, and strangely essential to the moral performance. It is where the contradictions of Christian ethics and modern political identity converge. Israel becomes the most convenient vessel to carry the sin of power: ambiguous, armed, successful, unrepentant. It does not fit the binary of oppressed and oppressor, of precarious and powerful, of Western and non-Western. It breaks the myth. To break the myth, to step outside of one’s assigned role, is to be guilty of a greater sin—the ultimate sin: the rejection of the moral order. This is the same crime Jews have historically been accused of: the rejection of God.

This is not about Israel’s policies. It’s about the need for Israel to play a role in the moral imagination of the left. One of the last few places where the Jew can still be safely assigned symbolic blame—not as a collective, “Jews”, but now as a state in substitution of the collective. Because the left cannot see Jews as political actors without guilt, it cannot tolerate the Jew with agency. That is the true scandal of Zionism. Not the checkpoints, the settlements, or the wars, but the refusal to remain within the moral category where Jews were once safely confined.

Like Jews, Native Americans are often viewed through the lens of historical tragedy rather than present-tense reality. They are romanticized, memorialized, and mythologized but rarely treated as fully modern actors with agency and complexity. They are revered for their suffering but resented the moment they assert real power. This warped relationship is all too clear in the reaction to the Indigenous gaming industry. Tribal casinos are one of the most successful exercises of Native economic autonomy in modern America, built through decades of legal battles, sovereignty claims, and sheer strategic persistence. But rather than being celebrated, they are met with disdain—seen as morally compromised or inauthentic. Why? Because they disrupt the myth. They reveal that Native success is possible and under a framework that idolizes weakness, the reaction to strength is resentment. It is the need for tragedy over triumph, a demand that people remain fixed in the roles history assigned them.

The reaction to the Native American-run gaming industry is not just discomfort—it’s racism. When corporate casinos in Las Vegas exploit addiction and desperation, it is entertainment. When Native American tribes do the same—often as a form of economic survival after centuries of dispossession—its corrupt, unethical, even shameful. The left, which claims to stand with Indigenous sovereignty, suddenly feels entitled to moralize and scold. Tribal success is reframed as selling out, as collusion with capitalism, as moral compromise. But this criticism isn’t about casinos. It’s about power. It’s about resentment of a group that was not supposed to win. Native Americans were meant to remain symbols of tragedy, of environmental purity, of historical loss. They were supposed to remind us of our own guilt, not be business owners, not sovereign entities that manage wealth and legal leverage. When they succeed, they violate the narrative and the backlash reveals the conditional nature of that so-called solidarity.

The list goes on. Asian Americans are uplifted when they are victims of hate-crimes, but when they raise concerns about how affirmative action disproportionately disadvantages them, they are accused of siding with Whiteness. Indian Americans are praised for enduring the Byzantine immigration system and post-9/11 Islamophobia, but when they succeed in medicine, in business, in tech; their achievements are reframed as upper-caste privilege, as complicity in capitalist power structures. Arab moderates who advocate for institutional reform—women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, secular governance—are rarely centered in left-wing discourse. Their voices are replaced with others who better conform to the narrative that people in this region are defined by reaction to western imperialism, rather than by agency and historical contexts of their own. It’s a more tasteful White Man’s Burden for a more tasteful century. And it is conditional. Voices are elevated only insofar as they serve the narrative that casts weakness as virtue and power as sin.

For the Black community, this dynamic manifests in a unique, grotesquely American form. Unlike the other minority groups, whose success is often framed as betrayal, Black success is more commonly recast as exceptionalism. Collective achievement is reframed as individual triumph—proof of one’s grit, intelligence, talent, charisma. This narrative is understood implicitly: Black excellence is permitted because it poses no threat to the broader social structure. It is seen as a one-off, a personal victory against overwhelming odds, and because of this lens, it can even be paternalistically celebrated. It is not seen as a sign of agency or strategic advancement. This too is part of the inherited moral logic the left has failed to confront. It allows for celebration without reevaluation. It keeps Black identity safely confined to the register of suffering. Black power is tolerated only when it does not challenge the deeper myth: that Black Americans may serve as the moral conscience of the nation, but never as its political architects.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Rather than inaugurating a new era of Black political leadership, his presidency was reframed as a singular anomaly—an extraordinary individual who transcended his identity, rather than a harbinger of systemic change. His rise was interpreted not as a sign of transformation, but as the exception that proves the rule. In doing so, the dominant narrative remained intact: Black excellence can be celebrated, so long as it remains detached from broader power structures.

In recent years, and this past election in particular, there has been a growing discomfort on the left with Latino, Arab, Muslim, and even segments of Black voters who express conservative social values or shift their political allegiance toward the right. The response is rarely introspective. Instead, it often veers into the patronizing accusations, of “voting against their own interests,” of being manipulated, of betraying their communities. This is not a politics of persuasion, but a politics of possession. The left does not ask why these groups might diverge; it asserts that their natural home must be the left, and any deviation is a sign of false consciousness. But that framing is itself a projection. It assumes that these communities exist primarily as moral allies in a progressive narrative, rather than as full political agents with their own priorities, conflicts, and evolving identities. Support from marginalized groups is not something that must be continually earned, it is expected as a moral entitlement. And when that loyalty wavers, it is not taken as evidence that the left has failed, but that these communities have.

Take, for example, land back initiatives or reparations—policies that the left often claims to support, in theory. In practice, these ideas are treated as gestures, stripped of their seriousness. There is no coherent strategy, no roadmap, no political will. Real proposals, many of them, have been crafted, but institutional action does not pursue them with real rigor. They are floated as proof of moral alignment and it need not progress further. And this is not because the goals are impossible. It is because the left fears the responsibility that comes with delivering them. To turn ideals into policy would mean confronting backlash, owning power, and maybe making decisions that cannot easily be cloaked in virtue. And so, these policies remain suspended in abstraction—in some cases for hundreds of years.

As much criticism as the American left’s political leaders deserve for perpetuating this moral framework, they cannot be held fully responsible. After all, they are merely executors, not the architects of the movement. The greater share of the blame belongs to the thought leaders: the intellectual class. The writers, artists, academics, poets, and philosophers who had the will to create a better world, but who lacked the imagination to envision its existence as something beyond their inherited moral prescriptions. It is their belief in the fatalism of existing power structures that have let the left off the hook. They have preached that these systems: unfettered capitalism, White supremacy, neoliberalism, etc., are eternal, immovable forces. They cannot be dismantled, only survived and, at best, mitigated. Somewhere deep beneath that lies a hope that if we suffer enough under them, then perhaps someday, a new world will emerge. A world always on the verge of becoming, but never arriving. Not in this life. It is not coincidence that this is the very same idea at the heart of Christian theology.

This is the Vatican that the architects of leftist thought have built: a clergy that rewards the performance of moral clarity, even when it offers no vision for the world as it is. This is not to say they are wrong about the systems they criticize, but they are wrong to believe that there is nothing to be done. When these forces are eternal and immutable, then dissecting them, studying them, publishing research about them becomes little more than performance. If the system cannot be fixed then it cannot be overcome. And so, resistance becomes aesthetic. Power, toxic. And politics, a ritual of naming injustices while being absolved of correcting them. Social media has only accelerated this trend; rewarding those who can package despair in compelling, emotionally resonant language, and punishing complexity or strategic thought. The moral narratives of the left are saturated with suffering, trauma, and grievance—all grounded in real experience—but these have become the focus of the story, with little space leftover for agency or aspiration. The left can describe the pain of the world in perfect detail, but it cannot promise anything beyond endurance. This is not a failure of messaging. This is the logical conclusion of a politics that resents politicking. It represents a failure of faith in the future, in people, and in the value of its own principles.

The most damning feature of the left-wing intellectual class, of course, is not that all its thinkers are fatalists, but that the posture of powerlessness is what the system consistently rewards—especially in elite, liberal circles—and amplifies through the very institutions they are critiquing. This takes the form of book deals, speaking engagements, university appointments, grants, and accolades. The aesthetics of hopelessness become a commodity that can be sold and something that can elevate one’s status. The success of this intellectual class does not come despite the fatalism they preach, but because of it. Those who articulate the deepest despair, who recognize the most suffering, are elevated as high priests and prophets. They offer their audience a catharsis, but absolve them of responsibility. It is not through this ritual of self-flagellation that the system will ever be forced to change. On the contrary, the only prescription is that it continue in more or less the same form so long as it feels sufficiently bad about doing so. The critiques are structurally closed, and so, they are safe. And because they are safe, the same, compromised institutions they condemn can partake in the critique. They challenge the status quo, but never in a way that truly threatens it. It is not an accident that this intellectual space remains dominated by culturally Christian Whites. An American burgher caste.

Likewise, it is also of no coincidence that the most successful figures in contemporary anti-racist discourse often fails to challenge White supremacy in ways that might actually dismantle it. Their work does not change the existing racial hierarchy, it preserves it under a new moral language. White people remain at the center, only now as confessors instead of oppressors. The task is not to share power, but to perform guilt. The agency of Black Americans in particular, but also other minorities, is incidental—what matters is that White people feel something. And for making them feel something, these thought leaders are rewarded materially and socially. Their popularity reflects a deep compatibility between the aesthetics of guilt and the incentives of liberal institutions. An entire economy of anti-racist thought has emerged to reassure elites that recognition is progress, that apology is action. It is a ritual of guilt, not a redistribution of power. It is safe, consumable, and structurally inert. It is aesthetic.

It is also of no surprise that the most radical segments of the left are dominated by this same class of White burghers, because their politics, too, is aesthetic. The people most crushed by these systems are not the majority of those who fantasize about fighting the revolution. It is more commonly the materially comfortable, culturally educated, Whites: those who are vested in the very system that they claim to loathe (perhaps because they are not as entrenched in it as they would like to be). This is another manifestation of bourgeois catharsis—symbolic radicalism without the risks of being a radical. It gives them a story in which they are the heroes, while they can still enjoy the benefits of stability. It is possible precisely because it is safe. It does not challenge power seriously. It resents the messiness of real politics. It cannot imagine building anything, only ripping the system apart and being there to tell the story afterward.

It is worth noting that the right, too, cloaks its ambitions in the language of victimhood. Its leadership understands power, but its base is fed a steady diet of grievance and cultural resentment. This is also a politics of symbolic persecution, just from another angle. It is designed to not challenge power, but to justify its consolidation. The difference is the right’s thought leaders know they are being duplicitous. The left, by contrast, has deified the myth. It doesn’t just perform virtue through weakness, it believes that weakness is virtue. And that belief is what makes it toothless. It turns a moral vision into a moral trap—a framework that punishes the very thing it claims to champion: empowerment. If the left cannot resolve this contradiction, if it cannot reconcile that governance necessitates the exercise of power, then it will not only fail to defend the republic, but help usher in the forces that are already prepared to destroy it.

Some might argue that the left struggles because the right has already shaped the terrain—through gerrymandering, media ecosystems, culture war grievance, and judicial capture. And while that is true, it also misses the deeper point: the left’s inability to contest this very terrain is not incidental. It’s symptomatic of the psychological malaise within the moral framework outlined here. Challenging the fortress of right-wing power would mean stepping out of the cathedral; engaging in real power politics—ruthless, strategic, unsentimental—and that would violate the left’s moral image of itself. It is better to lose the game with honor intact than to descend into the world by playing it. Only the game is already in motion. And to not play is to concede it to those who do.

Not every person on the left subscribes to this worldview in full, nor do these dynamics apply evenly across all corners of progressive politics. But the system—the institutions, the discourse, the incentives—is built to foster a politics of symbolic virtue and discomfort with power. It rewards grievance over governance, aesthetics over outcomes. And unless those patterns are broken, individual good intentions will remain ineffective against a structure built to reward performance over responsibility.

The left does not need to abandon its moral commitments, but it must redefine them. Power must no longer be seen as betrayal, but as an obligation. If the left truly believes in its vision of justice, then it must wield power to achieve it. Refusing to engage is not virtue, its abdication; cowardice cloaked in compassion. And the greater tragedy is that the left resents those who might use power to actualize its ideals. Marginalized communities with the most at stake are not permitted to be agents of transformation, they are expected to remain symbols of suffering. But these very communities, if entrusted with the power they have fought to seize, could be the creators of the world the left claims to want. That world will forever remain a dream if the left cannot tolerate the people who might actually lead it.

And yes, these words too are part of the same discourse. They are symbols, sentences, critiques. But they are not meant to soothe nor to absolve. They are meant to demand something: that the left stop narrating injustice and start confronting it. That it stop aestheticizing powerlessness and start moralizing responsibility. That it understand, at last, that the republic will not be saved by those who simply describe its decline more eloquently and accurately than their opponents, but by those willing to wield power in service of the world they claim to believe in. Governance is not a fall from grace. It is the terrain where values become reality.