What’s Behind the Centrists’ Resistance to the “Resistance Liberals”?

For over a decade, many centrist pundits have reflexively dismissed resistance liberals. We were considered, if we were considered at all, through ugly dismissive stereotypes. Talked to, when talked to at all, with a self-satisfied condescension. It was core to the centrists’ identity that they were the smart, sophisticated, savvy ones.  

However, following a steady drumbeat of events—most recently the federal occupation of Minneapolis—it’s becoming undeniable that America’s Dear Leader is indeed a threat to liberal democracy. And, for that matter, that “fascist” is a reasonable term for him and many in the MAGA movement.

The columnists have slowly updated their language. But in doing so, they have, as a Marxist would say, become involved in a contradiction: What they were saying for a decade was wrong, yet they cannot be wrong. Liberals were right, yet we cannot be right.

Jonathan Rauch, in a recent Atlantic article, conceded that Trump was a fascist. He nonetheless started with a swipe at the people who he was admitting had been correct about this. They had overused the term “to the point of meaninglessness,” he insisted. Especially guilty were “left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.” The whole argument was strange. “Trump has revealed himself,” Rauch concluded, implying that the information had only just come to light. Yet the evidence he drew on spanned the era, much of it dating back to 2015–16. Were those who used the same evidence to draw the same conclusion a decade earlier wrong to do so? Rauch doesn’t say, but he seems to think so.

For others, it’s simply axiomatic. Economics blogger Noah Smith noted that recounting the horrific actions of ICE sounds like “the kind of thing crazy Resistance Libs would rant about on Bluesky.” Anti-Trump liberals are, it seems, just crazy. Even being utterly and obviously right doesn’t change that.

Nate Silver, in a long conversation with Matt Yglesias, talked around the claim that resist libs were right. The whole thing just seemed to annoy him. He ultimately bypassed the question altogether. It was difficult for him to even understand us as he was “taking a more detached and analytical method”; whereas the liberal “approach might feel more emotionally right,” that didn’t make it correct.

And there it is. Female-coded resistance liberalism is too emotional—Nate is riffing off a tweet calling us “hysterical pussy hats”—men like him and Matt are rational. I talk about this symbolic sexism a lot, but then it’s hard not to—it really is gender all the way down.

What’s an example of our hysterical irrationality? Well, “the Resistance Libs are sometimes spectacularly unfocused,” and there’s often “a mismatch between what stories are ‘objectively’ most important” and those we pay attention to. Nate’s first, and only, example of this is Jeffrey Epstein. Apparently caring that the president was implicated in an international pedophile ring is emotional and unfocused. 

The point of stressing Epstein isn’t merely the immediate harms to his victims (though these are not trivial). Many who feared the worst about Trump pointed to the fact that he was an abuser because, to them, it showed how he thought about power. This was the correct inference. It is not incidental to Trump’s political project how many of its key figures—including the president himself, Elon Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Robert F Kennedy Jr.—have had serious assault allegations made against them. It informs how they behave and how they justify themselves. Of course, in the eyes of “rationalist” commentators, that analysis becomes an emotional and unfocused overreaction. 

I’m increasingly noticing how little that is written about resistance liberals cites one of us directly. This “libs were right” piece by Anne Lultz Fernandez is infinitely better than anything thus far surveyed, because it was written by a liberal who has held these views all along—it discusses the gendered aspect of how fears were dismissed and links this to the logic of abuse, and the fact that this is an administration staffed by abusers. With some honorable exceptions like Jamelle Bouie, such voices are absent from the most significant national publications. Perhaps those publications should be more interested in them. 

Or, for that matter, perhaps the press could engage with the ordinary voters they so casually dismiss with unpleasant stereotypes. They were, after all, right. Those who feared the worst from the start are a minority, to be sure, but not a vanishingly small one. As far as I’m aware, this feature by me is the first piece of reporting attempting to profile such voters—Cassandras, as I called them. The resistance to listening to them seems basically pathological. 

Resistance liberals might have been right about Trump, but they’re wrong about how to combat him, is a common retort. Smith makes this point, as did Nate Silver and Megan McArdle. Yelling about democracy is counterproductive; it’s more effective to focus on regular political issues. 

Once again, these writers show they have not engaged at all with what resistance liberals are saying. They imagine there are two paths to the same goal (winning an election) and their messaging is a better strategy for getting there. But the argument on our side is that things have deteriorated so much that an election victory is not enough—we must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again. 

Without ICE abolition, criminal trials for rights violations, court reform, and reform of electoral institutions, the country will remain a competitive authoritarian state and will be vulnerable to descending into full fascism. To do all those things, we will need to sell the Democratic Party and at least half the electorate on this notion. Which, in turn, will require them accepting that things are as bad as we say they are. Hence, we have to talk about it. Another Democratic presidency that attempts to return to normalcy by power of example alone will doom us. 

In terms of regular policy, in the world of online resistance liberalism, a lot of interesting work is being done. Off the top of my head, I’d recommend Samantha Hancox-Li on the intersection of feminism and housing policy or state-level governance, myself (if I may) on new narratives on immigration or how liberalism thinks of itself, Ned Resnikoff on housing, Alan Elrod on American virtue, and Sam Deutsch on congestion pricing.

Compare the media’s interest in work like this to their interest in the latest pseudo intellectual skull measuring to come out of the right. For a long time now, they’ve had severe gender hang-ups about listening to resistance liberals (and, for the same reasons, been fascinated with “real” red-state Americans). Now reality is very, very obviously validating us, and it’s breaking their brains. The hour is getting very late for the loudest megaphones on our side to be in the hands of people so crippled by gender insecurity. Being called a “soy boy” is preferable to dying in a concentration camp, and we resist libs have lost all patience with those who seem to find this a hard choice. 

Am I, perhaps, being too harsh? I am, after all, talking about people who are coming round to my view somewhat. Should I not welcome them into the movement?

I think this sort of argument can conflate two things: welcoming their support and welcoming their leadership. I think we should welcome anyone’s support; I’d never throw a vote back. The question I’m asking is, are these people best placed to lead? To be the most significant voices and define the strategy for the anti-Trump coalition? 

Centrist columnists want the power of leading the coalition without any responsibility. They assign to liberals and the left responsibility without power. We are blamed for election losses, but we may not set election strategy. We are responsible for liberalism’s image, but we are not given its loudest megaphones. And now, even talking about us seems to send them spiraling into unprocessed feelings of masculine inadequacy. 

Resistance liberals have stopped accepting this. Our numbers have grown. We are now the majority of votes on our side, and I suspect the majority of those protesting in No Kings, or heroically resisting ICE. Contrary to stereotypes, we are a cross-class coalition from every corner of America, representing tens of millions of people. 

This is what we mean when we say we “got it right.” It’s not patting ourselves on the back or being mean for the sake of it. Resistance liberalism is asserting that it should be listened to. That our strategy is the correct one. And that we are ready to lead the antifascist coalition.