Is there ever going to be a liberal, Democratic response to fascism or is it all just performance art?

What Atrios says:

Every couple of years, some on the Dem side realize that not investing in various forms of media outlets is causing them some problems. A reason they don't is that even Pod Save America is borderline too spicy for them. Pod Tommy occasionally makes everyone very uncomfortable by bringing up Gaza.

I'll freely admit that some large percentage of my current cynicism may be due to the persistence of my current Covid-19 bout—truly, the gift that keeps on giving,—but over the course of the presidential campaign what I found most striking was the disconnect between the existential nature of "a sedition-attempting felon surrounded not by 'conservatives' or 'Republicans' but by openly fascist voices who demand the destruction of nonpartisan government, the imposition of an autocratic state, and a laundry list of human rights violations that would match the Holocaust in scope and intent" and ...

... whatever the hell we were getting from left-of-center institutions, donors, "media" outlets, and everyone else whose ostensible role was to oppose all of those things? You might think that the construction of an explicitly fascist governing agenda, in the ashes of whatever cheap thing once passed for "conservative" thought before Donald Trump proved to every Republican, everywhere, that nobody would do a damn thing about it if you were crooked, or bribe-seeking, or intentionally fomented violence for the sake of power—you might think that to be an existential crisis for the nation's democracy, and you'd assuredly be right.

So what did we get, then, from the partisans and ideologues who we've funneled unimaginable gobs of money to so that they could oppose those things?

Not a lot! Certainly, we got nothing that matched the nature of the crisis. From the Democratic Party, we primarily got the same incessant, spam-like fundraising asks that we're now inundated with every election. We got, from the Joe Biden wing of the party, a sluggish campaign that tried its damn best to dodge the existential stakes in favor of a by-the-numbers, technocratic bid assuring Americans that everything was going great, just great, and there was no need to even discuss the great shuddering Crook and his anti-democratic, usually felony-adjacent malevolents. The Harris campaign broke from that doldrum with a campaign that poked at the inherent weird of The Criminal and his circus, but still intentionally ignored the inherent criminality of a fascism-peddling seditionist (and, at this point, probably traitorous) felon.

Left-leaning media was all over the map. There were outlets that focused on Project 2025, on the fascist threat, on the fascist staffing, on the shocking cruelty of it all.

And then there were other ostensibly liberal outlets that ignored all of it and used their millions of hard-earned fundraising dollars to fill their pages with vapid, trashy, meaningless not-coverage that not only failed to meet the moment, but failed to offer a good justification for even existing at all.

What's that you say? We're on the cusp of a fascist dismantling of democracy, something none of us have ever seen in this nation in any of our lifetimes, a true horror show of neo-Nazi premised, white supremacy backing, coup-attempting kleptocracy that rivals Russia's Putinism in the scope of its corruption? Oh, well here's a cheap little post about some Fox News head saying a thing. Tee-hee, everybody titter. What—you wanted more from us? Sorry, that's not what "liberal media" is about these days. We've got a new audience to win, and it's made up of people who don't particularly give a shit about fighting fascism. Here's a copypasted post from the Associated Press, a post about some Republican doing A Thing, and a post that's just a ripped-off rewrite of a mainstream media scoop. Eat it and shut up.

What, you thought the rise of fascism would be met with emotion? With fervor? With anything more than the phone-it-in trashiness of a New York Post headline? Pfft.

As I said, I am probably a bit surlier than usual due to the whole Covid thing, but only a bit. All those liberal billionaires who flooded the election season with money—where did it go? What did it go to? Was it even real?

All those left-of-center media outlets we propped up with our money: Will there be an accounting? Which were the outlets that redeemed themselves, and which ratcheted up their own apparent uselessness as if to ignore the newly existential stakes?

The American Prospect: Feels like it redeemed itself.

The Atlantic: Continued its merry devolution into contrarian shitposting that spends as much time mocking its supposedly liberal readership as it does informing it.

Where are the fights being waged now? Are there any?

What Atrios was referring to in his post—and it's a common theme, as we watch Democrats pretend an intentional genocide in Gaza isn't happening, after we previously watched them pretend Donald Trump was not a threat anyone had to take too seriously, after we previously watched etc, etc, etc, is that except for a group of nonprofit entities and purely donor-funded ones the premise of left-of-center media is largely a mirage. The reason conservative media exists and can freely pipe up to recommend atrocities is because there are a large number of conservative billionaires who are explicitly pro-atrocity and who fund the things to the tune of millions or billions (hi, Elon!) in intentional attempts to corrupt the public's knowledge of events and replace it with "and here's why we should do atrocities."

There are no such donors on the left. None. No, not the one you're thinking of, or the other one, or the others. The appetite for left-of-center media does not exist among anyone close enough to Democratic Party or media power to actually create such a thing, because an objective analysis of the threats to democracy cannot ignore one of the biggest reasons we've come to the point we're at:

Billionaire-ism is an inherently corrupt and kleptocratic social structure. The mere existence of the fabulously wealthy has always been a poison to democracy; in the age of Musk and Bezos, it has elevated itself into deadly cancer. Nine tenths of what ails the nation could be remedied by taxing wealth exorbitantly and often, using the income to rebuild all the parts of government that wealth itself has effectively dismantled.

Want to broadcast that as your central left-of-center message? You won't find a single "Democratic" donor who will put up with it.

Do you demand a reckoning for all of the Democratic Party consultants, strategists, pundits and hangers-on who have flushed away untold wealth in the last three decades to aggressively pursue policies of "nobody talk too loudly, please," or "what if we allowed a bit of kleptocracy, as a treat," or "it is true that fascist thinking is an existential threat, but if you're not willing to preserve The Norms then surely you are equally extreme?"

Good luck with that. That's the entire "professional Democrat" establishment you're taking on, and about 90% of it is dedicated to defending itself rather than doing any other thing of value.

I can't for the life of me think of more than a handful of media outlets, nonprofits, or other professional left-of-center entities that have acquitted themselves well as fascism bubbled up all around us, often to no consequential pushback from any of the others.

All the rest of it? Vehicles for self-continuation, and only self-continuation. There's a very strong institutional feeling that f--k it, if we're doing fascism now then we're doing fascism, maybe it'll at least boost fundraising or something.

Perhaps this is the Covid talking. Perhaps. But it feels like we were all very, very patient as we watched Our Great Institutions respond to Trumpism by licking his boots, whether it be the supposed "mainstream" media or our already comically corrupted court systems or legal systems that appear to exist primarily to convince the public that seeking justice against the politically or financially powerful is hard, so hard, far too hard for you common rabble to understand, you cannot believe how hard we have fought to make sure all of this looks normal and decent and under control and not something any of you need to ask too many questions about.

We were all very patient, throughout the whole campaign, and it feels like it's about time to put the patience aside and ask all of those institutions for a rundown of what they actually did, as the fascist tide rose higher and higher and higher. An accounting. An explanation.

Because from here it looks like a lot of the opposition to fascism consisted in large part of spending about a billion dollars or so to pretend none of it was happening and absolutely nothing, not even one damn thing, needed to change.