How Liberal Tolerance Replaced Politics

What tolerance covered up—and why it’s falling apart.

Politics, at its core, is about power—who has it, how it’s distributed, and what’s done with it. It’s about material demands: wages, housing, healthcare, climate, labor rights, public goods. The things that structure our lives. But somewhere along the way—particularly in the post-Obama era—liberalism stopped fighting for those things. And in their place, it offered something easier.

What we got instead was tolerance: a moral language of inclusion, empathy, and civility. A politics that asked little of those in power, and even less of those it claimed to protect. Tolerance became the virtue that papered over structural inequality. It became the thing you could perform instead of redistributing anything.

The result was a kind of emotional branding campaign—where politics wasn’t about change, but about how good you felt while believing in the right things.

Tolerance wasn’t just a substitute for politics—it became a shield. For many well-off liberals, it offered a way to feel righteous without having to confront the systems they benefited from. If you voted blue, used the right language, and “supported diversity,” you were doing your part. There was no need to talk about ownership, exploitation, or redistribution. No need to change anything fundamental.

This wasn’t a glitch. It was a design choice.

As liberalism abandoned its material ambitions—Medicare for All, organized labor, public housing—it began to present itself not as a force for transformation, but as a system to be managed. What had once been a vehicle for big demands became a bureaucratic language of stability, moderation, and credentials. The role of the liberal elite wasn’t to fight for a better future. It was to enforce the belief that no better future was possible—and to make that tolerable through the aesthetics of empathy.

Tolerance, in this framework, became a way to neutralize critique. It allowed corporate politicians and their comms teams to present themselves as morally superior—even while protecting a status quo defined by inequality and precarity. You could run a campaign on diversity language and corporate allyship, so long as you didn’t threaten capital.

You could see this strategy most clearly in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—two politicians who mastered the aesthetics of empowerment while offering little in the way of structural change.

Clinton’s 2016 campaign leaned hard on identity, asking voters to feel history moving through her candidacy. There was “I’m With Her,” the glass ceiling symbolism, the pastel pantsuits. Her platform preserved the economic status quo (one she and her husband helped create), but with better manners and more inclusive optics.

Harris’s 2020 run followed the same playbook, updated for the Instagram age. The memes—coconuts, her chuck taylors, “Madam Vice President energy”—became a substitute for anything resembling a political project. Instead of articulating a vision for how to redistribute power, Harris was marketed as a vibe: relatable, sassy, historic.

In both cases, identity was not used to mobilize a collective politics of solidarity—it was used to discipline criticism. If you didn’t support Clinton, you were sexist. If you questioned Harris, you were ignoring the significance of representation. This weaponization of tolerance made real debate almost impossible. It turned politics into a personality test.

If you had concerns about policy, you were told to check your privilege. If you wanted more, you were told to be grateful.

This framework didn’t just protect the liberal elite from critique from the left—it also gave them cover to dismiss and pathologize anyone who rejected their politics from the right. Rather than reckon with the economic and social devastation wrought by decades of bipartisan neoliberalism—NAFTA, mass incarceration, financial deregulation—the Clinton-Harris wing of the Democratic Party chose a simpler explanation: the voters were bigots.

Trump voters weren’t just wrong; they were irredeemable. Racist. Sexist. Uneducated. Deplorable. There was no attempt to understand what had collapsed in their lives—only a demand that they be ashamed for not buying into the system liberalism had built. This was the flip side of elite tolerance: a performance of moral superiority that doubled as a refusal to engage in class politics.

The people who had gutted the social contract now blamed the public for not cheering them on.

By elevating tolerance over transformation, Democrats created a worldview where their own failures were off-limits—and any backlash was proof not of systemic decay, but of voter ignorance. It was a politics of deflection. The moral clarity was always pointed outward.

Elites mistake disillusionment for apathy—but it’s actually grief, alienation, and hunger for something real.

This is the part they never understood. The people who once believed in liberalism—who canvassed for Obama, who paid attention, who internalized the moral language of “hope” and “progress”—didn’t become disengaged because they stopped caring. They became disengaged because they did care, and they watched that care get crushed under the weight of broken promises and empty performance.

They watched a housing crisis become permanent. They watched their student debt balloon while billionaires got richer. They watched the Democrats run campaigns full of historic firsts and inspirational hashtags—and then govern with the same timidity, the same consultants, the same refusal to name who holds power and what should be done about it.

They were told politics was about showing up. But when they did, no one showed up for them.

So they turned to memes. To irony. To silence. Not because they believed Kamala Harris was a vibe, but because it was the only way to feel anything in a politics that had stopped offering meaning. The memes weren’t enthusiasm. They were coping. Grief, repressed and aestheticized.

This is what elite liberalism misses: people aren’t withdrawing because they’re indifferent. They’re withdrawing because they’re mourning. And what they’re mourning isn’t just the broken system—it’s the loss of the belief that it could be anything else.

Liberalism didn’t collapse overnight. It collapsed slowly, through trade deals and budget cuts, through technocratic drift and political cowardice. And as it did, the people who built and defended it needed something to cover the wreckage. So they chose tolerance.

They told us that politics was about decency. That if we just spoke kindly, celebrated diversity, and kept voting blue, we were doing enough. But none of that stopped the foreclosure notices. None of it stopped the debt. None of it rebuilt the trust that decades of bipartisan failure had eroded.

What they offered wasn’t a future. It was a mood.

And now the mood is wearing off.

People aren’t disengaged because they stopped caring. They’re disengaged because they’ve seen how little this version of politics actually delivers. Because the slogans and symbols no longer hide the fact that no one is coming to save them. And they’re starting to ask: what if we stopped performing tolerance—and started building power?

---

Note to readers: I’ll be resuming my Weekend Reading & Recommendations posts this weekend after taking last week off for the holiday. If you’re a paid subscriber, keep an eye out Saturday morning. This week, I’ll be sharing reflections on fiction and critiques of late liberalism—pulling from what I’ve been reading, thinking about, and connecting to the larger political moment. As always, thank you for reading and supporting this work.