United States | News & Politics

Kimmel is back on air, and the American liberal establishment has heaved a collective sigh of relief. Not because liberals and their Democratic Party have learned from the incident and used it as an opportunity to galvanise meaningful opposition to Trump’s authoritarian surge, but precisely the opposite – because it allows them to go back to their blissful slumber, ignore reality, cling to cognitive dissonance, denial, ahistorical wishful thinking, and the complicity that is integral to white privilege within a white supremacist order.

In fact, liberals do not even substantially disagree with the core of Trump’s policies. After all, both right-wing and liberal elites are loyal servants of empire, the latter just give it a veneer of humanitarianism.

Both support policies that sustain the oppression of poor and marginalised people: the corporatisation of healthcare and education, labour exploitation, mass incarceration, militarised policing, censorship, corruption through corporate donations, and extractivism and militarism abroad. The liberals have put their spin on all these with talk about human rights, rule of law, and diversity.

Other than the semantics of "liberal" (substitute for Centrist or Democrat to taste), this is very well conceived. These are the same people who tone police and chastise the victims of being too angry, and will through as under the bus to appeal to "the middle of the tent".

This piece is really a breath of fresh air. If Democrats were so precious about other topics as they are about their late night comedians, we would have not descended that far into fascism. And this is why they are actually complicit.