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Liberal elites have always pledged allegiance to capital over people. They pretend to be pro-working class but quietly usher in fascism for fear of the evil S-word: socialism. Today, we’re seeing militarized police and the National Guard being called in to crush protests against US-funded genocide and racist anti-immigration policies. A century ago, Italy’s liberal elite watched Mussolini’s Blackshirts brutalize leftists in the streets because those elites fully bought into the idea that fascist violence was better than socialist governance. Time and again, liberals only pretend to fight against rising authoritarianism because actually winning that fight would threaten the capitalist order that benefits them. 

The stark reality we’re up against is that capital needs to keep all its consumption units (us!) isolated, desperate, and afraid of each other. It’s the time-tested recipe for waging war on the working class. 

Italy’s liberal government in the 1920s maintained the fantasy that they could remain “neutral” between socialist workers and fascist paramilitaries. When factory occupations spread across Turin and Milan, and peasants seized unused estates, the liberals didn’t know what to do. They feared empowering the left more than they feared the fascist reaction. Their courts bent a knee to Mussolini’s squadristi while they violently suppressed communist organizers. Their police stood aside as Blackshirts burned union halls, but then cracked skulls of striking workers who were blocking scabs.

“Liberal elites tolerated fascist lawlessness because it destroyed what they feared most: the factories and fields humming with workers’ councils.” – Clara Mattei, The Capital Order 

US Democrats’ refusal to wield state power isn’t incompetence, it’s class discipline. Every feigned helplessness (“the Senate parliamentarian said no,” or “we need Republican votes”) reveals the truth: liberal governance exists to enforce capital’s boundaries. With a few pen strokes, the Biden administration could have erased all student debt, as they did for $143 billion of it. They could have ordered Medicare to negotiate drug prices down to $0 tomorrow, as the VA already does. They could have abolished the debt ceiling farce, as Treasury’s Platinum Coin option demonstrates. 

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re deliberately unused weapons in the state’s arsenal. Why? Because each would disempower creditors, disrupt insurance &  Big Pharma profiteering, and expose the debt ceiling as yet another class war tactic.  

Look at the recent Democratic mayoral primary election in New York City. The Democratic Party doesn’t fear left primary challengers, it manages them. It allows just enough dissent to let off steam, just enough “progress” to keep up the supply of hopium, but never enough to actually shift power. AOC’s victory was absorbed into the machine. Sanders’ movement was neutralized. Mamdani’s win will either be crushed outright or, if he somehow makes it past the general election, immediately shackled by the party’s real power brokers. That’s the function of the Democratic Party: not to represent voters, but to discipline them.   

The left keeps falling for the same trick, election after election. We pour energy into primary battles, celebrate narrow victories, and then act shocked when the party’s backroom operators step in to void the results. We shouldn’t be shocked though – the DNC already told us (in court, under oath!) that it doesn’t owe voters a damn thing.  

The “political will” deficit is a power surplus for capital. When liberals plead procedural constraints while rubber-stamping $900 billion military budgets, expanding ICE detention camps, bailing out Silicon Valley Bank in 48 hours, they’re not failing. They’re succeeding spectacularly at their real mission, which is protecting capital’s veto over human needs. This is what class rule looks like with a government that can instantly mobilize trillions for banks and bombs while imposing devastating austerity.  

It’s a government that claims ‘no money’ exists to house the homeless while 16 million homes sit vacant. It’s a government that claims spending is out of control and we can’t possibly feed children, while farmers are paid to destroy crops. It’s a government that claims nationalized healthcare would bring about long wait times and death panels while underfunded hospitals are already closing in rural areas and corporate consolidation is driving small medical practices out of business. 

The “neutral” state is a myth. Every inaction is a choice to preserve the hierarchy where capital commands and people are forced to beg. Every inaction by those in power is deliberate. 

Waiting for establishment politicians to act has always been a losing strategy. Civil rights victories followed decades of illegal sit-ins and economic boycotts. Even the New Deal didn’t happen because politicians suddenly grew hearts – it came from worker uprisings that shook the system. The specter of communism, still lingering from Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik revolution, haunted America’s elites. Terrified of labor’s ultimate victory here, they granted concessions only after strikes and boycotts began to make business as usual impossible.  

Half-measures and performative platitudes have made 21^st century liberals functionally indistinguishable from their supposed opponents. We’ve seen this before. The Italian liberals handed power to Mussolini rather than risk socialist victory. Social Democrat leaders in 1930s Germany refused to form a coalition with the communists against Nazism.    

“As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” – Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds 

We have the power to break the cycle by acknowledging what earlier movements let slide: that state power under capitalism cannot be reformed, only replaced. Every community fridge, every eviction blockade, and every wildcat strike builds muscle memory for the revolutionary change of hearts & minds we need. The fascists already have their playbook. Their police, military, and private militias are already on duty to suppress any & all dissent while liberals waste time debating procedural rules. 

Our task is to build dual power structures that make the capitalist state unnecessary for survival. Mutual aid networks must evolve beyond temporary crisis response and one-off GoFundMe drives into permanent alternative infrastructure. Let’s replace broken promises with community land trusts that evict BlackRock, worker councils that redirect production to meet our needs, and neighborhood assemblies that redistribute resources without waiting for permission from the oligarchy’s crumbling institutions. 

These are the logical next steps beyond existing tenant unions, food distribution projects, and strike funds. The more we can meet people’s material needs through collective action, the less hold the decaying system has over us. We need to get into a position where our communities are already practicing self-governance. 

The Democratic Party will never be a vehicle for liberation. It will occasionally let a leftist through the gates, either to co-opt them or to make an example of them – but it will never, ever surrender control. Our way out is to stop begging for scraps and start building real power elsewhere: in our own communities, in our workplaces, in organizations that answer to the working class and nobody else. Otherwise, we’re just playing a rigged game – and we all know Lucy always pulls away the football. 

Only organized people power can stop what’s coming. Not petitions. Not voting drives. Not appeals to decency. The networks of community & working class solidarity we build today will determine whether we bow to fascism with weak individualism or stand as an unbreakable collective. 

The time for accepting incrementalism is over. Bipartisan compromise is a fairy tale. We need to become the crisis that capital cannot contain. 

This post was originally published on Real Progressives.