The “Good Liberal” Assassin
I’d started working on a novel during Trump 1.0 called The Good Liberal. The story followed the despair of an idealistic but politically naive teacher confronting the rise of authoritarianism at home in the stupidest way possible.
As the institutions he reveres buckle, civic norms erode, state repression escalates, and the greatness of American democracy proves to be a sham, our protagonist reaches what he feels to be an inescapable conclusion: the leading politicians of the opposition party are a cancer that must be removed to restore the republic of his imagination. I never finished writing the book,1 but the crescendo was supposed to involve the protagonist crashing out and going on an American Psycho-esque assassination spree. A tragicomic parable about the perils of failing to develop class consciousness.
The idea at the core of the book sprang from countless conversations I’d had in 2017 with #NeverTrump liberals. The righteous rage toward Trump that the lanyard class—mortgage-having, culturally bourgeois, well-intentioned white-collar workers—harbored at that time rarely spilled out into full public view except in the odd Twitter screed. But over weekend brunches and happy-hour conversations, what these people expressed in private felt emotionally volatile; an aneurysm at the flagrant betrayal of their preferred image of America.
I commiserated for sure but was wired differently.
I loathed Trump, just like them, and vocally so! But I came of age understanding the United States as a place with a dark origin story, uneven rights, and a rigged economic system. I spent most of my professional life suppressing that knowledge while climbing the foreign policy ladder and into academia. So when Trump became a political reality, I understood him not as an anomaly but rather a symptom of structural problems—the price paid for Americans (and me) ignoring what I once knew to be true about the country.
But that view clashed with many of the “good liberal” elites I had befriended in Washington.2 As far as they were concerned, Trump was a boil to be lanced on an otherwise great nation. No deeper reckoning necessary.
I’ve since tended to think that, as the democracy myth decays, good liberals who refuse class consciousness would fracture in one of two directions: Become the thing they hate and support fascists, or else crash out as they reckon with the discovery that reality is far from what they’d always believed. It’s the latter camp that seemed ripe for lone-wolf political violence.
Why? Because liberalism is capacious, but one of its defining features for most of my life has been its unfamiliarity with the grammar of solidarity, mutual aid, or comradely worldmaking; a highly individualized, even lonely, way of existing that interpolates political action through nothing more than voting, opinion-having, and a personal relationship to state institutions. If the state betrays your fealty and crushes your belief system while you remain closed off to alternative ways of making sense of the world (eg, the class-based analyses of left-wing thought), your habit of processing reality through a lens of personal action and personal responsibility could go in some twisted directions.
This is why I thought that, other than military veterans, “good liberals” with the wrong mix of personal circumstances were among the most at-risk of taking “justice” into their own hands. The mere idea that justice is something you can realize through vigilantism wreaked of liberal desperation.
My vocation requires me to think, talk, and write about “political violence” a lot, but I never fully developed this theory of the good-liberal assassin. I only bring it up now because it seems to be becoming more salient: Trump’s war on “the left” has so far been primarily a war on the lanyard class—the class with the greatest concentration of “good liberals.”3 They are under assault, symbolically and materially.
Enter that Cole Allen guy, a name practically lifted from the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. A Bluesky obsessive. A critic of pro-Palestinian protestors. A never-Trumper. A Noah Smith fan. A left-puncher and Hasan Piker hater. A one-time Act Blue donor. This is like every person who lives in Washington, DC! Put differently, the guy who tried to shoot up the White House Correspondents Dinner had all the markers of a “good liberal.” A bland fanatic who mistook the problem as one of lancing a boil.
It reminds me of the Nihilists. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, there had been a movement of nihilists in Tsarist Russia who committed a wave of assassinations. Revolutionaries in sentiment, but ideologically incoherent and lacking class consciousness, a theory of power, or even much of a plan. They were not a power bloc; they were desperate and isolated individuals. They were who Trotsky had in mind when he famously mocked terrorists as “liberals with bombs” in 1938.
We don’t know why precisely this Cole Allen guy crashed out, but he has thrown away his life with a single ineffectual act of self-indulgent lone-wolf nonsense. Noah Smith fans might be shocked, but Trotsky would have been unsurprised.
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In the intervening period I’ve written three non-fiction books—I’ve been busy!
Many, but not all, of the people I’m referring to here ended up working in the Biden administration.
It’s not just that Trump has turned DEI into a dirty word, defunded university research, laid off hundreds of thousands of federal workers, shredded the social safety net, and stripped civil servants of their right to organized bargaining. It’s also that the economy is transforming into something that doesn’t need most of us. Just in the past three months alone, the US has experienced massive layoffs (217,362!) of white-collar workers from large corporations like Nike, Oracle, UPS, Meta, and even Morgan Stanley and Amazon. The economy has been fucked ever since the global financial crisis in ’08—the working class never actually recovered from the recession that followed. But Trump is an accelerant of this shift toward most of us being made into surplus labor in an economy that resembles an opium-filled gambling den.